Yesterday evening, after dark, I slipped out through the back garden and walked to the metro. I knew immediately I was being followed. It was the two policemen – if that is what they are – who came to my flat earlier that day. They were hanging back, moving on opposite sides of the street. I walked on, stayed calm. As I neared the station, the crowds built. I went inside, bought a ticket, walked to the platform. I had to push my way between the waiting passengers. The policemen had followed me in. I could see them approaching the ticket barrier. I turned, sank deeper into the crowd.
The train arrived. I got on. I saw them push onto a carriage three or four back. The tall one gazed out over the bobbing heads of the passengers, searching for me. They were moving up the carriages, checking each as they went. At each station, Moonface, the shorter one, jumped off and stood by the open doors, scanning the platform. I moved forwards, trying to keep some distance between us. A group of tall young men in blue track suits were standing at the far end of the carriage. I went and stood among them. Shielded from view, I pulled off my burqa, shook out my hair. A couple of the boys looked at me in my black tracksuit and training shoes and smiled to each other, then at me. I smiled back.
The two policemen had by now moved up and were in the next carriage back. At the next stop, the boys started out the door. I went with them, stayed close as they moved along the platform towards the exit tunnel. By now, the boys were glancing at me and at each other as they walked. One of them said something that I could not make out and a few of them laughed. I kept with them. By the time we reached the ticket hall, I was reasonably sure that I was no longer being followed.
I peeled away from the boys and started back towards the southbound platform. As I moved away I heard one of the boys say: Where are you going, sister?
I kept going, jumped on the next train, doubled back. Finally I emerged into the night outside Al-Zahraa station. The streets were full of evening shoppers. I lost myself in the crowd, sure now that I was no longer being followed. Back in my burqa, I hailed a taxi and told the driver to take me to the Hadayek-el-Koba district.
The traffic churned. We crossed the Nile, the lights of the big hotels dulled by a fog of exhaust. The streets were choked with cars, the air thick with diesel and the smoke from burning rubbish. I could see the taxi driver glancing at me in the rear-view mirror. I flashed a scowl at him. He held my gaze a moment and looked away.
Hadayek-el-Koba is an industrial area, ventured the driver after a time.
I ignored him, remained silent. He drove on.
As we neared the district, the air grew thicker. You could see it, a brown miasma, skulking through the backstreets like a thief. The lights of the city dimmed behind us. The driver looked back at me again, but I silenced him with my gaze before he could say a word. He shrugged, kept going.
After a while, he found the address that was on the card – a gated entranceway attended by two armed guards. I told the taxi driver not to stop. He looked back at me again, questioning. Drive, I snapped. He kept going.
At the far end of the fenceline I told him to turn right and follow the perimeter road. It was a factory of some sort, one of many in the area: a series of windowless brick buildings set in a floodlit compound surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Yellow-lit smoke belched from two big chimney stacks, merged with the plumes from dozens of others and settled into the valley like a well-fed cat curling into its sleeping basket. Equipment, crates and used pallets choked the fenceline, spread along the walls of the buildings. Huge piles of what looked like black stone covered the back part of the compound. The smell was overwhelming. It reminded me oddly of the garage in Algiers where my father would take our Citroën for service when I was a little girl. My memories, my girlhood fantasies and nightmares, are of big, hairy men with blackened faces and oil-stained clothes, blank, staring eyes, and these same odours: carbon and abrasives and hot metal.
After we had gone three-quarters of the way around – the complex must have covered at least ten hectares – I told the driver to stop. I had seen no other entrances or guards. I paid the driver and made to get out.
He asked me if I wanted him to wait. I said no.
Are you sure? he said. You should not be here alone, after dark, he said. Where is your husband?
I got out and slammed the door. He shrugged his shoulders and drove away, the red tail lights dematerialising in the smoke.
The streets were dark and deserted. In my black burqa, I felt almost invisible. I moved quickly along the rough ground outside the fence, keeping to the darkness between the streetlights.
It did not take me long to find the place I had noticed from the car: a crumbling mud-brick building – once a dwelling of some sort – that defied the fenceline like a protester refusing to retreat as the police cordon bends around her. As I entered the structure, I could see that the fenceline had been notched inward to detour around the house. I imagined some resolute family matriarch refusing to be moved from her home as the factory was built around her, succumbing eventually to age and poor health, alone and with no one to continue her fight.
I moved under a fallen archway, clambered over a pile of slumped brick, a few stars showing through the bare roof timbers. The fence skirted a small, overgrown garden, a wilderness of untended vines and collapsing trellises. Beyond, the back lot of the factory, dominated by a huge pile of the black stone and two big pits filled with dark liquid. The smell here was even stronger, and it was difficult to breathe.
The garden afforded me complete cover. I watched the factory for a while, and seeing no one, and no evidence of cameras, I set to work on the fence. Using the wire cutters on the multi-tool I always carry in my purse, I cut a flap in the fence, wrapped my scarf closer around my nose and mouth and was soon inside, moving quickly between the two ponds.
I had no idea what I might find.
I gained the rear wall of the main building and followed it along to a loading area of some kind. Crates were stacked along the wall, four, five high in some places. I clambered up and pried open the wooden lid of one of the crates with my multi-tool. It was too dark to see what was inside, but I did not want to use my torch. I reached in. My fingers brushed rough-cut wooden slats, then slippery metal. Ingots, ranked side-by side, a dozen perhaps on this layer. I pushed my thumbnail into the metal, felt it sink in. Lead.
I replaced the lid, slid to the ground. I continued along the wall until I found a doorway. It was unlocked. I pushed it open, looked inside. A blast of hot air nearly pushed me over. It was a stairwell, dimly lit. I went inside. My heart was beating so hard that I could barely hear my own footsteps. I climbed two flights, three. Another doorway, again unlocked. I pushed it open. A piercing yellow light blinded me, and for a moment I stood there, immobilised. As my vision returned I looked out across a broad factory floor. I saw first the big crucibles, giant ladles pouring bright orange streams of molten metal into hissing ingots. And then the creaking conveyers, the towering belching furnaces tended by dark, helmeted servants, the whites of their eyes staring out from blackened, industrial faces.
I scanned the elevated walkway left and right. It appeared to be empty. I stepped out onto the grated platform and started moving towards what appeared to be the quenching area. Clouds of steam billowed among vessels and pipework. For a moment I was engulfed. I kept walking. When I emerged, I found myself standing face to face with a uniformed worker. I do not know who was more surprised.
We stood a moment looking at each other, he soot-faced, stubble-jawed, with a fall of greying hair pushing from under his ill-fitting hard hat; me encased in my burqa, only my eyes showing, sexual dimorphism at its most extreme.
I turned and ran. I was already out the back door and across the open ground between the pits and to the back fence by the time he opened the door. I found the flap in the wire and was back inside the garden when a second man appeared in the doorway. Alarm bells were ringing now and I could hear dogs barking in the distance. The second man switched on a torch, swung the beam across the silvery surface of the pits. I crouched low, watched as more men arrived, guards with dogs on leashes, some brandishing weapons. They were coming towards me.
I fled across the perimeter road and into the warren of run-down apartment blocks and crumbling houses that abutted the industrial district – the dwellings of workers and their families. I moved quickly, keeping to the darkness whenever I could, heading east, back towards the centre of Cairo. My heart was pounding. Inside the burqa I was covered in sweat. Police sirens blared in the distance. I kept going.
After a while the sounds of the chase subsided. In the darkened recess of an old foyer, I peeled off my burqa and threw it into a rubbish container. An hour later I was stepping out of a taxi, back at my apartment in Ma’adi.
It had seemed the most ordinary of industrial operations, indistinguishable from the others in the area and like so many I have seen over my career. A lead smelter. Why had Al-Gambal directed me there?
This morning I telephoned the number on the back of the card. The conversation went something like this:
Isis be blessed.
Ezeykh’a. (My Egyptian slang: ‘hello’.)
And to you, good lady.
May I speak to Mehmet, please?
You are, good lady.
Yusuf Al-Gambal gave me your number.
I see. (Silence.)
He said you might be able to help me.
If your soul is willing and pure, I can.
I do not know about the latter. (I cannot believe I said this.)
Lady.
Please.
It is the work of Set.
Pardon me?
Set. The fallen one, the god of nothingness, the one who murdered his brother.
Please. What can you tell me about Yusuf’s trial? What was he accused of?
He was accused of telling the truth.
Pardon me?
The Ma’at has long since departed from the Two Kingdoms. Corruption rules here now.
I am sorry, I do not understand. What is the Ma’at?
The Ma’at, good lady, is truth, justice, order. It is that which is right.
What was the truth he told?
Osiris walks the Earth! (He shouted so loud I had to move the phone away from my ear). Many know this. But Yusuf had the courage to speak of it openly. This was his crime. Good lady, the children of Isis are being sacrificed to ugliness, cruelty and greed.
I am sorry. Mehmet, I do not understand.
Please, call me Amenhotep.
Amenhotep, then. (I was shaking my head by this stage. Had Yusuf played a nice little trick on me, sending me traipsing around nondescript industrial sites, putting me in touch with a Kemetist quack?) Why would Yusuf send me to a smelter in the Hadayek-el Koba district?
The Two Kingdoms are being destroyed, good lady.
Please, call me Veronique.
Of course, thank you, Madame Veronique. As I said, the ancient birthplaces of the greatest civilisation the world has ever known are being laid waste.
By whom?
By the consortium.
What is that? Is it an organisation? A company? Is it connected to the smelter? I do not understand.
I cannot tell you more. Not now.
Can we meet?
You must understand, Madame Veronique, that you must be very careful. Call me in two days. From a different phone.
And that was it. He hung up.