Dogstar Rising

Chapter Twenty-Two




Makana woke up in pain the next day. His body ached and his neck felt as though it had been stretched on a rack. The bedsheet was stained with blood. A quick glance in the cracked mirror confirmed that he had a bruise the size of an egg swelling on his left cheek and a nasty gash on his ear. By the time he reached the Hourriya Café, Sami was already there drinking beer, which seemed a reckless proposal at any time of the day. Makana stuck with tea. An old man at the next table licked his lips like a cat as he watched Sami pouring foaming Stella into his glass. A shoeshine boy went from table to table looking for anyone who still cared about the state of their shoes. Around the sides of the bare, unkempt room sat ageing men in various states of decrepitude. They played chess, read newspapers and smoked their cigarettes. Most of all they just stared into space, remembering times gone by, glory days, as distant as the pharaohs. Sami liked to make out they were poets or literary critics, but to Makana they just looked like sad old men whose lives had been played out.

‘You look a lot worse than I feel, which actually makes me feel better,’ said Sami.

The atmosphere in here, the sense of resignation, all added to Makana’s melancholy mood. ‘Does Rania know you drink in the middle of the day?’

‘Oh, don’t start that.’ Sami raised both hands in protest. ‘Don’t you ever feel that the whole thing is just so hopeless?’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything. The despair. Don’t you feel that sometimes? What happened to you by the way? It’s getting to the point where I’m not sure I want to be seen with you in public.’

‘Always nice to know you can count on your friends.’

‘I hear you and Macarius were out finding bodies the other night.’

‘Another homeless boy. Do you know if they have identified him yet?’

‘What do you think? Do you know how many homeless kids live in this city? Conservative estimates put the figure at fifty thousand. Boys and girls trying to escape a life of abuse. Most of them disappear, melting into cracks in the pavement. They are the symptom of serious social breakdown. Families that are under such pressure, no money, no jobs, no food, that they start to tear one another apart, like wild animals.’ Sami slapped the side of the table, causing an old man snoozing nearby to jump. Sami apologised. ‘Maalish, ya ammu.’

‘Can’t you go and solve the world’s problems somewhere else?’ the man grumbled.

‘There is some connection here that I can’t really see,’ said Makana, leaning his elbows on the table. He pushed the photograph across. Sami looked at it.

‘Three soldiers. Who are they?’

‘This is Ramy, Faragalla’s nephew, and the one with the eye is Ahmed Rakuba, Rocky. The third one I don’t know.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Meera’s study.’

‘And you think this means . . . what?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Makana looked vague.

‘You seem distracted. Has something happened?’

Makana looked at him and decided he wasn’t ready yet to start talking about Nasra.

‘Perhaps I should go to Luxor and have a talk with Ramy.’

Sami watched him as he took a long swallow of beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a man trying to drown himself. He finally came up for air and began to top up the glass.

‘Have you had any more thoughts on what Father Macarius might be hiding?’

‘Only the obvious.’ Makana recalled the wooden angels floating over the boxing ring and the strange mute who had carved them.

‘Which is?’

‘That the killer might actually turn out to be connected to the church or the gym. They would shut him down if that was the case.’

‘They would burn him to the ground, more like.’

‘Yallah ya shabab,’ muttered the man dozing at the next table. In the middle of the floor, a cat arched its back, stretching itself along a pillar of sunlight that fell across the broken black-and-white tiles. The sandwiches arrived and the cat stepped up, twirling its tail in the air. Makana dropped a slice of chicken on the floor and instantly five other cats darted out of the shadows.

Sami poured the last dregs into his glass and raised the bottle of Stella to call for another one. Makana knew his friend would go back to the paper and put his head down on his desk and sleep for an hour or so until the day cooled off and night fell. Then he would order coffee and start his rounds of the city’s receptions and parties. He did most of his work at home and only showed up at the paper every day, he said, because otherwise someone else would steal his desk.

‘How did you get on with the Eastern Star bank?’

‘I read Ridwan Hilal’s book on the subject. He talks about some of the crooked schemes the banks get up to. One of them involves siphoning funds through small companies with a lot of turnover, particularly of foreign currency.’

‘You mean, like travel agents?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Sami. ‘It seems the government set up their own committee of investigation. They published a report.’

‘Clearing the bank of all charges.’

‘You should be reading fortunes. You’d make a good living. I had an aunt who read coffee grounds. She never made a milliem, always giving it away. Generosity is a flaw in my family.’

‘So that’s it, the bank was cleared?’

‘It gets worse. Remember I told you I had a friend who was working on the story?’ Sami slid a folded newspaper across the table and tapped his finger on a small item that appeared at the bottom of an inside page and Makana read: Journalist Nasser Hikmet falls from hotel room window in Ismailia. ‘They’re calling it suicide.’

‘Falling out of windows is an occupational hazard for journalists.’

‘Nasser was a good man. He deserved better.’ Sami gave a long sigh. ‘You know what our problem is? We can’t decide what we want. Do we want West or East, Islam or the joys of secularism? We think we can have it all.’

It struck Makana that he was surrounded by people who had made great sacrifice, who had laid down their lives on a battlefield in a war that was undeclared. Meera, Nasser Hikmet, the tortured boy lying in the ruins of a house in Imbaba. Further back, there were people like Talal’s father, and of course Muna and Nasra. What was it all for? What cause did their deaths serve? His thoughts seemed to follow an eccentric orbit that kept leading him round, circling what he had managed to keep at bay all these years. What would he do if she was alive?

‘Rania is the best thing that ever happened to me.’ The beer had made Sami sentimental. ‘Was it like that with you and Muna? I never met her, but I feel I have been around her for a few years now. Not that you ever talk about her all that much.’

‘We should get moving,’ said Makana, glancing at his watch.

‘Sure, sure.’ Sami got to his feet and grabbed for his jacket which caught, tipping over the chair. It hit the floor with a loud crash, waking everyone from their quiet slumber.

‘Okay, khalas, it’s all right. You can go back to writing your reports now. I’m leaving,’ Sami called out as he backed out of the door. He glanced about the room, lowering his voice. ‘You ever wonder how many people in here are in the pay of the government?’

‘Married life is making you paranoid,’ said Makana as he led the way out into the street. He hailed a taxi and pushed Sami inside. He saw the driver flinch and mutter ‘Astaghfirullah’ under his breath, his face screwing up in disapproval as he caught the smell of booze.

Oblivious, Sami hung his head out of the window, curly hair blowing in the slipstream, and waved back at Makana like a wild child, delighted with his own bad behaviour.