He joined Nahed, who was waiting for him in front of Saint Barbara’s. The young woman was elegantly dressed in fine pleated garments of pastel tones, apparently linen. Her eyes seemed heavily made up, and a touch of very lightweight fabric spilled over her shoulders like a cape. Sharko walked up, motioning to the church.
“Is this the heart of your city that you mentioned in Lebrun’s car?”
“Do you like it?”
“I’m surprised by it.”
Nahed unveiled her magnificently even teeth. Sharko had to admit that any man would have loved to get lost with her in the maze of the capital. And this evening, he was one of them.
“Every neighborhood of Cairo is a quiet little town. A space with its own codes and traditions. I wanted you to discover this.”
She joined her hands in front of her, shyly.
“My car is a bit farther on. I have what you asked for.”
“Abd el-Aal’s address?”
“Mahmoud lived alone, right next door to his brother, at the other end of Talaat Harb Street. The brother’s name is Atef Abd el-Aal and he still lives at the same address.”
“Talaat Harb… Wasn’t that where Lebrun said we should meet?”
“Indeed. Talaat Harb is a street from the Belle Époque, full of history and nostalgia. Your counterpart surely wanted to make an occasion of it. I ran into him, after our session at the police station. He took your declination rather well.”
“All the better. Thank you again.”
They talked while walking past the Coptic cemetery. Nahed explained that her father, a journalist for Le Caire, had been crippled in one leg following a clash between Copts and Muslims in 1981. Her mother, a Frenchwoman, had lived in Paris before leaving everything behind to come on a mission for the city’s Dominicans. Her parents met; Nahed was born in a modest quarter and had never been outside her homeland. She’d been in French immersion programs to study the language at the university, taught by incompetent professors who spoke it even less than she did. She’d ended up at the French embassy, with the support of the newspaper’s owner, a powerful Egyptian. Good position but small salary; she wasn’t complaining. Here, a job—an honest job, she specified, stressing the word—didn’t allow you to escape the deep-seated, tenacious poverty of Egypt, but it attenuated it and gave you the illusion.
She invited him to sit in an authentic old Peugeot 504, parked at the edge of Coptic Cairo, near the Amr mosque. They drove up the right bank of the Nile along the Corniche. Daylight was dwindling. The minarets of the distant mosques, the houseboats and awamas lit up. People were walking in family groups and buying yellow beans with lemon. Sharko could feel the power of the river, and the people’s need to honor it.
They talked some more. When Nahed asked him about his wife, Sharko leaned the arch of his eyebrow against the window, his gaze fixed on the peaceful currents, and confided simply that he missed his wife and daughter and that he’d never see them again, except in his dreams. He didn’t open his mouth after that. What for? What could he tell her? That there wasn’t a single night when their absence didn’t grip him so hard it woke him from his sleep, barely able to breathe? That his job had destroyed the lives of those he held dearest and was dragging him slowly but surely toward the abyss of a joyless old age? No, he had nothing to tell. Not here, and not now. Not with her.
After about ten minutes, they reached Talaat Harb. Clothing stores as far as you could see, bars, movie houses with French names, old buildings with Haussmannian facades and columns, windows decorated with Grecian-style statues—a reminder that the Egyptian elite, at the turn of the twentieth century, wanted to make the center of Cairo a European district. It almost worked. Pedestrians strolled about in scattered hordes—Americans, French, Italians. Nahed found a parking spot in a neighboring street, and a moment later she was giving the building’s concierge some baksheesh, just because he’d opened the door for her. The baou ab with the henna-dyed beard, miserable in his tattered espadrilles, acted as porter, car washer, and errand runner, in stark contrast with the classy interior of the place. A rich person’s building, apparently, radiating grandeur.
Once alone with Sharko in the elevator, the young woman covered her head and veiled her face. She transformed herself: enigmatic and suddenly full of secrets. All he could see were her eyes, magnificent jewel cases, while her mouth, divined through the transparency of the fabric, said in a pure voice:
“It would be silly if Atef Abd el-Aal refused to talk because of some religious scruple.”
Sharko was charmed, almost entranced.
“How do you know he’s Muslim?”
“It’s more likely he is than not.”
“What do you know about him?”
“The embassy files didn’t reveal much. He was a vendor, and today he owns two factories that make custom shirts, a successful business that started taking off one year after his brother’s death. He sells the clothes wholesale to the shops in Alexandria. He and his late brother were originally from Upper Egypt. Poor family, from the country. They came to Cairo when they were teenagers, with their uncle.”
She knocked on a door; another door opened onto the wizened face of an old woman. Nahed began talking with her before turning to the inspector.
“His neighbor says he’s on the terrace; he always has tea up there at this hour, before evening prayer. We’ll recognize him because he’ll be reading al-Ahram, the independent newspaper.”
When Sharko arrived on the terrace, he couldn’t believe his eyes. People lived on the roof of the building, inside and out of minuscule tin bungalows. Multicolored lamps hanging from cables bobbed like felucca sails. People were sitting in armchairs or lying on mattresses, at sky level. Lit televisions pierced the falling night on all sides. It was like being in a kind of luminous anthill in open air, teeming and precarious. Nahed leaned in toward his ear.
“Before, the top echelons of society lived in these buildings—landowners, pashas, ministers. These bungalows were used for storing foodstuffs, doing laundry, or housing the dogs. After the revolution of 1952, everything changed. Today, the sufragi, the former domestics of that time, have taken over the lodgings in the main building and rent out these bungalows to the poor.”
It was hard to believe, but these people really lived in sheds of less than five square yards, in the middle of the busiest shopping street in Cairo. Poverty wasn’t in the gutter or the subway like in Paris, but up in the air, on the rooftops. Nahed pointed a finger toward the back of the terrace.
“There he is.”
Suspicious gazes turned in their direction. Reclining men with bloodshot eyes prepared “coal,” a pebble of opium that they heated before slipping it under their tongue, while others smoked their mu‘assel mixed with hashish in old chichas. Children played dominos, others studied, women cooked. Sharko and Nahed approached Atef Abd el-Aal, who sat on a straw chair looking out over Talaat Harb. He was wearing a nicely cut suit and shined shoes. Slicked-down hair, about forty-five. His steaming cup of tea sat on the white stone parapet. He did not get up to greet them and uttered two abrupt words, which Sharko didn’t understand. At that, Nahed replied with a long tirade in Arabic, explaining the situation. She said that the man with her was an inspector with the French police, who wanted to ask him questions regarding his brother and an old criminal case that had similarities with an ongoing investigation.