Clay was halfway down the alley behind the building when he realised his mistake.
No more than a few hours ago, someone had gone into the man’s apartment and murdered him. As far as he could tell, no one had yet discovered the body. But it was only a matter of time. Soon the police would be all over the place, looking for evidence. He’d touched the door handles, inside and out. If they dusted for fingerprints, they might be able to link him to the murder, even accuse him of it. Worse, if they found the note the dead guy had scribbled during their telephone conversation – where and when Rania should meet him, his decidedly Western alias – and if Rania had received his message, she could be going straight to them.
This was no coincidence. None of it was. Clay knew that now. The world didn’t work that way – not with these things. But the causality behind it he could not see. One thing was sure: whatever Rania was mixed up in, whatever she was here trying to uncover, was worth killing for. Her husband and son were already dead, the police were after her for those murders. And now the one person she’d trusted enough for him to contact was dead.
Clay stopped in the strip of shadow against the mud-brick wall and looked down the alley. To the east, the Giza market, busy now. To the west, an empty lot choked with smoking rubbish, boys playing football in the dust. Even dressed in Mahmoud’s Upper Egypt clothes, his beard now long and full but fair, he felt like a lighthouse beacon. He knew he needed to go back, and do it now, before the cops arrived – scour the flat for anything that he, or the police, could use to find Rania. He pulled the end of his turban down around his face, hunched low, leaned on his walking stick to disguise his height, kept his eyes and face directed groundwards, and started back towards the building.
Clay pushed the steel door open and stepped into the gloom of the rear stairwell. He waited a moment, listened then started up the stairs. As he neared the sixth floor, that same smell smothered him, stronger now: blood and death and decomposition pushing through the background of shit and urine and yesterday’s dinner. He stood outside apartment sixty-one. The corridor was empty. He pushed open the door, stepped inside, closed the door behind him and bolted it closed.
He stood a moment, scanning the room. The place looked more like a shrine than a place for living. Against one wall was a man-sized statue of Horus, its hawk head perched on the body of a chiselled athlete. All around were offerings, garlands of dead, browned flowers, burned-down candles, smaller sculptures of ancient Egyptian deities and demigods that Clay could neither recognise nor name. He continued through the flat, scanning the piles of books ranged up along the outside wall.
A high-pitched scream cut the silence.
It had come from outside, down in the street.
Clay nudged the shutter lever with his stump, looked out through the louvres. Two boys were running away, down the lane. He took a deep breath, closed the shutters, continued his search.
In the middle of the room: some pillows scattered over a carpet, a small, low table, a couple of rolled-up scrolls. More candleholders with charred wicks and cascading with rivulets of wax. And there, on the floor next to the one of the cushions, a glint of metal. It was small, about half the size of his small fingernail. He turned it over in his fingers. It was a button of some kind, a half-sphere of faux mother of pearl with a small hook on the back. A clutch of torn thread and a flap of cloth hung from the hook. It was a pretty thing, delicate, not something the big brute lying on the bed in the other room would wear. It had been ripped away from whatever it had adorned. Clay raised the button to his lips. The faintest odour came to him, a distant chemistry. Then it was gone.
Clay pocketed the button and walked into the bedroom. The corpse lay as it had before, eyes open, arms splayed at its sides. The telephone was set on an old wooden dresser. Beside it was a journal of some sort, spiral bound, and nearby, a pencil, its wooden end crushed and marked with the imprints of teeth. Clay flicked through the pad, scanning the impenetrable Arabic scratchings, the scattered hieroglyphs, the cursive hieratic. He pushed the journal into the deep pocket of his robe. Then he moved to the bed and surveyed the knife wounds again. On the bed, half-hidden under a fold of the sheet, was a small pocket camera – one of the new digital models with a small screen on the back. Clay picked it up and turned it on. As the screen lit up, a picture came into view. He stood, silent, staring at the image.
It was a woman. She was standing in the shower, naked. Her hands were under her breasts. Her hair flowed over her shoulders and across the pale skin of her chest in dark tresses. Her head was lowered, the face obscured. He scrolled back. Another photo: the same woman, turned away from the lens, her back and buttocks glistening and wet. Another photo, and another. The woman undressing, opening her brassiere, letting her breasts spill out, bending over to step out of her dress, undoing the shiny pearl-white buttons down the front, the tear and the missing second button clearly visible – the one in Clay’s pocket. Dozens of photographs. In many of them, the face was clear, and utterly, devastatingly recognisable. That stratospheric fusion of Berber and Breton. The date stamp glowed digital orange in the lower right corner. Yesterday.
Clay exhaled long, steadied himself. It was Rania. Beautiful, powerful, delicate, tragic Rania. He turned off the camera and dropped it into his pocket, realisation thudding though his brain. He pushed through it, walked to the bathroom, searched the floor, the toilet, the shower stall. It didn’t take him long to find the opening, given the single perspective of all the photographs. One of the tiles had been replaced with a mirror-like panel, about the size of a postage stamp. Clay went back into the bedroom, opened the closet on the wall facing the bathroom. He pushed aside a rack of hanging clothes. The back panelling of the closet had been cut away and a layer of brick removed, creating a small, darkened space. A hole had been hurriedly hacked through the brick. Crumbled masonry and powdered mortar still covered the floor. A half-empty tube of lubricant lay shrivelled and leaking on a makeshift shelf cut into the wall. The air was dense with dust and the smell of musk and sweat. Clay recoiled, stepped back out into the dead man’s room, breathing hard. Jesus Christ. What the hell had she got herself mixed up in? And how had she come to trust this guy?
That was as far into contemplation as he got.
A loud bang burst through his wondering. Someone was hammering on the door. A male voice shouting in Arabic: ‘Open the door.’ And then: ‘Sort’ah.’ Police.
Clay froze, held his breath.
A pause, voices outside, some sort of conversation in Arabic. Then more hammering, the edge of a fist pounding the wood. The same voice, raised higher now: ‘Open the door. This is the police.’
Clay moved towards the bedroom window and pulled aside the curtains. The wood casement was old, the varnish peeled and faded. He swung back the latch, pulled the window open, looked outside. The building’s outer wall was rendered cinderblock, with a six-storey fall to the alleyway. The flat, brick-strewn roof of the facing building was a couple of stories lower. There was no way to get across. It was too far to jump, even with a running start. Clay closed the window, wiped the latch with his sleeve.
More hammering now, the voice telling the resident of flat sixty-one that this was his last warning. Clay moved into the hallway, turned left, away from the front door, and entered some kind of office. Stacks of books and papers covered every surface, tottered in dusty piles against the walls. In the middle of the room a large desk, with what appeared to be the carved stone legs of a lion, hulked under a mountain of journals. Clay moved toward the outside wall, pushed aside the heavy curtain and opened the window. Behind him, a crash, the splintering of wood as the doorframe gave way, the sound of footsteps heavy on the hardwood floor. Clay’s heart stilled. He breathed, looked outside. He was on the other side of the building now, around the corner from the bedroom. The outside wall here, at the back of the building, was unrendered, the brickwork bare, the mortar weeping between the bricks in hardened cornices, in some places absent. Just to the right was some kind of utility conduit, a pair of vertical bricked-in columns about a metre square that ran from ground level to the roof. If he could make his way across, he could wedge himself in the channel between the uprights and chimney his way either down to the street, or up to the roof.
The sound of footsteps now, the low murmur of voices. For the thousandth time since waking up in the hospital in Oman, he cursed his missing hand, then levered himself up and out.
He waited, tucked behind a water tank. From where he crouched, he could see through the skirting of perforated brickwork down to the street. He watched as the crowds outside the building grew. At any moment he expected the police to emerge from the stairway onto the roof. They would surely have seen the open window, surmised that the killer had escaped that way.
There was only one way out. There were no adjoining buildings and no rear stairs. The Glock was cradled in his lap, ready. He was prepared to fight if he had to. Soon, another police car arrived, and not long after, an ambulance. Time crept by, thick and viscous, tomorrow’s appointed meeting with Rania decades distant.
He’d been on the roof just under half an hour when he saw the paramedics emerge onto the street carrying a stretcher. They loaded the body into the back of the ambulance, closed the rear door and stood chatting to a pair of cops. The crowd was packed in close, and as the ambulance moved away the people parted and reformed behind it like water in a river.
Perhaps because of what the police saw, the condition of the body, or the time since death, which was obviously considerable, no one appeared on the roof. After a time, the last police car left. Slowly, the crowds on the street dispersed. Dusk came. The sun sank red into the edge of the city, lit the brume that smothered the buildings. After a while even the great pyramids were only faint rumours of evening.
Finally, gone seven, Clay emerged from his hide, wrapped his keffiyeh around his face so that he too was veiled, and started down the stairwell.
He walked slowly, bent at the waist and using his stick, as an old man would, drifting through the streets as if in a morphine-induced coma.
What had happened at the flat? Rania had been there while the pervert was still alive. The photographs proved that. But then something had gone wrong. There had been a struggle. Rania’s dress had been torn. Had she been there when the Egyptian was killed? Or had she witnessed the whole thing, been taken hostage by the killers – the Consortium perhaps, the AB, or those acting for them? Or maybe she had left before the killer or killers arrived. And if she had, had the pervert conveyed Clay’s message to her before he was killed? Would she be there, tomorrow, waiting on the square outside Groppi’s? There were a thousand possibilities, each more opaque than the last.
Soon he was pushing through the evening crowds in the Giza market, through streets runneling blood and sewage. He kept walking and at last found himself on the west bank of the Nile. He turned north, followed the river walkway towards Zamalek, where he looked out across the dark water at the smog-blurred lights of the big towers, the red-and-white streams of traffic across Cairo University Bridge. She was out there, somewhere in this city of twenty million souls. Somewhere. Perhaps hers was the spirit to guide him, now that everything and everyone that had defined his life was gone.
Maybe. But first, he had to find her. And then they had to get out.
It was at that point in his philosophising that he realised he was being followed. A dark figure, fifty metres back on the other side of the road, was matching his movements, stopping when he stopped, accelerating when he did. Clay came to a place where the river walk was well lit. He stopped, leaned back against the railing, faced the road, glanced at the figure then looked way. The figure had stopped also, was standing under a tree, behind a parked car, in the shadows, face obscured. Clay reached into his pocket, checked the Glock, put his stick under his left arm and started towards the figure.
Clay didn’t run. But the old-man guise was gone. His pace was determined, quick. At first the figure held its ground. Clay crossed the road on the oblique, closing straight on the target. He was to the median when the figure took a couple of steps backwards, stumbled over a loose paver and moved momentarily out of the shadows. Clay jumped back as a car blared past. Egyptian invective spun in the slipstream. The figure turned and ran. By the time Clay reached the other side of the road, the figure had disappeared into the Cairo night.