The Hidden Oasis (32 page)

‘Hey guys, what have you got planned?’ he called across at them.

No reply.

‘I guess it must be a surprise,’ he said, hunching forward and rubbing his temples.

They were on the top storey of what appeared to be a partially completed building – a large, shadowy space illuminated by a single fluorescent strip light lying flat on the ground close to the guards. Although the floor, ceiling, staircase and load-bearing pillars were all in place – bare concrete, with rusted iron reinforcing rods protruding here and there like fossilized branches – there were only three walls. The room’s fourth side was open to the night, a gaping void staring out over the twinkling lights of Cairo like a cave mouth set high up in a cliff. Flin and Freya were at this end of the space, sitting on a pair of upturned crates. Behind them the floor came to an abrupt end and there was a long, sheer drop down to the street below. Their captors were in the centre of the room, beside the staircase. Even without the wall, the westerners were to all intents and purposes imprisoned.

‘What the hell is this place?’ Freya had asked when they were first brought here.

‘Manshiet Nasser,’ Flin had informed her. ‘It’s where the Zabbaleen live.’

‘Zabbaleen?’

‘Cairo’s rubbish collectors.’

‘We’ve been kidnapped by trash men?’

‘I suspect we’re just being held here,’ said Flin. ‘In my experience the Zabbaleen are decent people, if not the most hygienic.’

That had been almost an hour ago, and still they were waiting – for what exactly, neither of them could say. It had been light when they arrived, but the evening had closed in swiftly. Now everything was sunk in darkness, the strip lamp’s sterile glow doing little to dispel the shadows
bunched in the corners of the room. Moths and other bugs fluttered around the lamp’s fluorescent tube; the air was heavy with heat and dust and hanging over everything – permeating everything, suffusing everything – was the dense, sweet-sour stench of rotting garbage.

Freya sighed and glanced at her watch: 6.11 p.m. Flin stood and turned, thrusting his hands into his pockets and gazing out into the night. They were at the back of the building, which sat on a steep slope. Below a jumbled mass of roofs cascaded away like a freeze-framed landslide, everything merging in a dim chaos of dirt and brick and concrete and trash-heaps. While the rest of Cairo was ablaze with light – a glittering carpet of white and orange spreading off into the far distance – this corner of it was swamped in gloom. There were a few dimly illuminated windows, meagre smudges of colour in the enveloping murk, and the street below glowed a sickly orange in the light of half a dozen sodium lamps. Otherwise all was dark, as if the buildings and alleyways and side streets and rubbish tips were submerged in black ink. There were occasional shouts, the clank of pans, a distant grinding of machinery, but no actual people, or none that Flin could see. The quarter possessed a curiously ghost-like feel – a village of phantoms tacked onto the edge of a city of the living.

Shuffling closer to the edge of the floor, Flin looked down at the street far below. A truck was creeping up the hill to his left, the low rumble of its engine counterpointed by a soft tinkle of glass from the mound of bottles it was transporting. It passed directly beneath where he was standing and lumbered on up the slope, disappearing round a corner as the street looped back on itself in front of the
building. A minute went by, and then another truck appeared, this one piled with a spaghetti of old electrical wiring. Following behind it, distinctly out of place in the dilapidated surroundings, was a sleek black limousine. Flin watched as it manoeuvred its way around the corner and out of sight, then turned to Freya.

‘Looks like we’ve got company,’ he said. As he spoke a horn sounded outside and the guards rose to their feet. From down the stairs came an echo of footsteps, faint at first, but growing steadily louder as the newcomers – there seemed to be more than one – climbed up through the building towards them. Instinctively Freya’s hand grasped Flin’s. The footsteps came nearer and nearer until eventually two men emerged into the room. One was short and plump, dishevelled, with a pudding-bowl haircut and an A4 manila envelope clasped in his hand. The other was older and slighter, immaculately dressed, his grey hair slicked back across his scalp, his face sharp and sallow-skinned, the lips so narrow as to be almost non-existent. He seemed to be in overall charge: the other Egyptians moved respectfully aside to make room for him, the strip light on the floor enveloping the group in a cold bubble of light. There was a brief, tense silence, then:

‘Romani Girgis,’ murmured Flin underneath his breath.

‘You know this man?’ Freya released Flin’s hand and turned to him.

‘I know of him,’ replied the Englishman, glaring across the room. ‘Everyone in Cairo knows Romani Girgis.’

Another brief pause, then Flin raised his voice:

‘A more grotesque piece of shit it would be hard to imagine.’

If he was angered by the insult, or even understood what it meant, Girgis didn’t show it. Instead he motioned to his companion, who scuttled across the room and handed Flin the manila envelope.

‘Not like you to do your own dirty work, Girgis,’ said the Englishman, pulling a wad of photographs from the envelope and leafing through them. ‘Where’s Tweedledee and Tweedledum?’

It took Girgis a moment to get the reference. When he did he smiled, a thin, unpleasant expression, chilling, like a reptile about to bite at something.

‘They are visiting their mother,’ he said, his English fluent if heavily accented. ‘Very dutiful sons, very softhearted. Much more so than me. As you will soon discover.’

His smile began to broaden only to morph into a grimace of disgust as a cockroach scuttled across the floor directly in front of him. He took a step back, muttering. One of his henchmen came forward and stamped on the insect, grinding it into the concrete. Only when he was sure it had been completely obliterated did Girgis seem to recover himself. Brushing at his sleeves, he again addressed Flin, his tone now cold and scalpel sharp. The other Egyptians stood silently beside him, their faces hard, their shadows bulging on the ceiling above.

‘You will look at the photographs,’ said Girgis, eyes gleaming malevolently. ‘You will look at them, and then you will tell me where they were taken. Where
exactly
they were taken.’

Flin glanced down at the prints.

‘Well this one’s Timbuktu,’ he said. ‘This one’s Shanghai, this looks like El Paso and this one …’

He held up a photo.

‘… blow me if it’s not my aunty Ethel in Torremolinos.’

Girgis stared at him, nodding as if he had been expecting such an answer. Removing a pack of wet wipes from his jacket pocket, he pulled one out and slowly rubbed it over his hands. For a moment he was silent, the only sounds the soft pop of moths hitting the strip light and, from outside, the clatter of a cart and the distant beeping of car horns. Then, throwing the wipe to the floor, the Egyptian spoke to his colleagues. One of the guards lifted the strip lamp and propped it against a chair, angling it towards the far corner of the room where a mound of giant polypropylene sacks were stacked from floor to ceiling. Beside them stood a machine resembling a large wood-chipper, with an opening at the top and various buttons and levers on the side. Girgis walked across to it, the plump man trotting along beside him like an obedient dog. Two of the guards hustled Flin and Freya over as well, jabbing at them with their guns. The third one, the man who had moved the light, disappeared downstairs, shouting at someone below.

‘Do you know what this is?’ asked Girgis as Flin and Freya came up beside him, patting the machine.

They didn’t respond. Both of them stood stony-faced and defiant.

‘It is called a granulator,’ said the Egyptian, answering his own question. ‘A common piece of equipment in this part of the city. Normally they are kept on the ground floor, but this one we have brought up here for … special occasions.’

He gave a grunt of amusement, his mouth again curling into a chilling reptilian smile.

‘Let me show you how it works.’

He motioned to one of his men, who produced a flick-knife and snapped it open. Flin tensed and moved in front of Freya, ready to protect her. It seemed the knife was not intended for them. Instead the man went to the pile of sacks and slashed the blade across one of them. A rush of empty plastic bottles spilled out onto the floor.

‘There’s no great skill or science involved,’ continued Girgis, removing another wipe from his pocket and again swabbing at his hands. ‘It is child’s play. Literally, since more often than not it is the Zabbaleen children who actually operate these machines. As my little helper will demonstrate.’

There was movement behind them and the man who had descended the staircase reappeared, accompanied by a young boy. Dirty-faced and malnourished, he could have been no more than seven or eight years old, his hands lost within the sleeves of an oversized
djellaba.
Girgis whispered to him and the boy stepped up to the machine. Reaching out with his left hand he pressed a mushroom-shaped red button. There was a rumble and a sputter, and the room filled with a deafening mechanical roar.

‘We didn’t have such things when I was young,’ called Girgis, raising his voice to be heard above the clatter. ‘But then it is only in the last few decades that they have really become necessary. So much plastic around these days. As always, the Zabbaleen have adapted to changing times.’

The boy had moved across to the pile of bottles and with his left hand collected a dozen of them in the hem of his
djellaba.
Returning to the granulator, he began feeding the bottles one by one into the mouth on top of it. There was a hissing, cracking sound and a spew of coin-sized plastic flakes rained down, spattering the floor like hail.

‘As you can see, the bottles go in whole and are shredded by the blades inside,’ explained Girgis, still shouting. ‘They then re-emerge as a raw material that can be sold on to the city’s plastic merchants. Very simple. And very efficient.’

The boy had now fed all the bottles into the machine and, at a signal from Girgis, hit the red button again, turning it off.

‘Very simple and very efficient,’ repeated the Egyptian, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silence that had now descended on the room. ‘Although sadly not always very safe.’

He nudged the boy, who held up his right arm. The sleeve of his
djellaba
slipped back to reveal a bony stump where the hand should have been, scar tissue extending all the way up to the elbow as though the arm had been dipped in livid pink paint. Freya winced; Flin shook his head, both out of pity for the boy, and disgust that he should be paraded in this way.

‘Their sleeves get caught in the blades, you see,’ said Girgis, beaming. ‘Their arms are dragged in, little hands all torn and chopped. Many can’t get to hospital in time and bleed to death. A blessing in many ways. It’s not as if they have especially bright futures ahead of them.’

He let this hang for a moment, still rubbing at his hands with the wipe. Then he turned to Freya.

‘I understand you are a rock climber, Miss Hannen.’

Freya just stared at him, wondering where this was leading.

‘I’m afraid I know little about such things,’ continued Girgis. ‘There is not much call for them in my line of
business. I’d be interested to find out more. For instance, would I be right in thinking that it would be very hard to climb with only one arm?’

Flin took half a step forward.

‘You leave her out of this. Whatever the hell it is you want you leave her out of this.’

Girgis tutted.

‘But she is
in
this,’ he said. ‘She’s very much in this. Which is why it is her hand that will go into the granulator if you don’t tell me where those photographs were taken.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ spat Flin, holding up the photos, waving them at Girgis. ‘It’s just ruins. Trees and ruins. How the hell am I supposed to tell you where they were taken? It could be anywhere. Anywhere!’

‘Well let’s just hope, for Miss Hannen’s sake, that you can tell me the precise location of anywhere. You have twenty minutes to look at the photographs and to come up with some information. After that …’

He banged his hand against the granulator’s red starter button, allowing the machine to run for a moment before again turning it off.

‘Twenty minutes,’ he repeated as the echo of grinding blades slowly faded. ‘I shall be waiting downstairs.’

He threw the wipe aside and, accompanied by his dishevelled companion, walked back across the room, veering around something on the floor – a cockroach, Freya guessed – before starting back down the stairs.

‘You killed my sister,’ she shouted after him.

He slowed and turned, eyes narrowed slightly as if he wasn’t quite sure if he’d heard her right.

‘You killed my sister,’ she repeated. ‘And I’m going to kill you.’

A pause, then Girgis smiled.

‘Well let’s just hope Professor Brodie can tell me where those pictures were taken or you’ll be doing it one-handed.’

He nodded and disappeared down the stairs.

It was their mother who had taught the twins how to make lamb
torly,
a recipe that was, in the unanimous opinion of those who were lucky enough to have tasted it, the very best in Cairo, if not the whole of Egypt. The secret, she had told them, was to soak the lamb in
karkaday,
the longer the better, for an entire day if possible, the rich red juice not only helping to tenderize the meat, but also infusing it with a subtle, mouth-watering sweetness that both complemented and enhanced the casserole’s other ingredients, the onions, potatoes, peas and beans.

‘First we sit the lamb in its bath,’ their mother used to sing when they were young, swirling the meat around in its hibiscus marinade, ‘then we put it to sleep in the oven, and then it goes …’

‘Into our mouths!’ the twins would chorus, making a chomping sound and patting their bellies, their mother roaring with laughter, pulling her sons into her bosom, enveloping them in her arms.