As he advanced through these entrails of despair, Sharko discovered the garbage people, the ones who picked through all this trash to squeeze out the last droplets of juice, the bit of cloth or paper that might earn them the slightest piastre. How many were living in this slum alone? A thousand? Two? Sharko thought of carrion insects, which took turns on corpses during the decomposition phase. The city’s trash arrived by the cartload; people ripped open the plastic bags like wild dogs, sorted out the paper, the metal, even the cotton from disposable diapers.
Swarms of children came running up to Sharko, clung to him, smiled at him despite everything, and made him understand, with hand gestures, that he should take their photo with his phone. They weren’t even asking for money, just a little attention. Moved, Sharko joined in the game. With every shot, the sooty urchins came over to see, then burst out laughing. A little girl, dirty as charcoal, took the inspector’s hand and stroked it gently. Even filth and poverty could not eliminate beauty. She wore clothes stitched together from old Portland cement sacks. Sharko knelt down and ran his hands through her greasy hair.
“You look like my daughter… You all look like her…”
He dug into his pockets, pulled out three-quarters of his change, and handed it out to the children. Hundreds of pounds—nothing for him, but masses and masses of sorted cloth for them. They disappeared down the variegated streets, fighting over the coins.
The cop was suffocating. He took off at a run straight ahead. Egypt had him by the throat. He thought of Paris, of the hectic lives people led, with their phones, their cars, their Ray-Bans pushed up on their scalps. People who pissed and moaned when their train arrived five minutes late.
A semblance of humanity seemed to reappear past the last towers of refuse. Sharko discovered buildings that resembled bottom-rung housing projects. Farther on stretched little stalls, actual dwellings, if one could call them that, with laundry hanging from the windows like the multicolored hordes of misery, and goats on the rooftops. Sharko even discovered a convent of nuns, the Coptic Orthodox Community of Sisters. Children clad in uniforms walked in groups through a courtyard, praying and singing. Here, too, despite everything, life asserted its right to exist.
He finally reached the Salaam Center hospital, a long, low grayish building that looked like a dispensary. Inside, one could feel the lack of resources, the struggle these shadow-people led against impossible odds. A cursory waiting room with basic furniture, secondhand chairs, small tables, and swinging doors with round portholes that looked like something out of Egyptian films from the forties. Boxes containing first aid kits, stenciled with the symbol of the French Red Cross, were stacked in the corners.
In English, Sharko spoke to a nun sitting in the waiting room. She was with a child, whose every breath produced a long wheeze. Going from person to person, the cop managed to reach the office of the hospital’s director, Taha Abou Zeid. The man’s features bespoke his Nubian ancestry: dark skin, thick lips, pencil mustache trimmed straight as a ruler, broad nose. He was typing on an old hand-me-down computer that wouldn’t have fetched ten euros in France. Sharko knocked on the open door.
“Excuse me?”
The man raised his eyes and answered in English.
“Yes?”
Sharko introduced himself. Chief inspector with the French police, on an investigation in Cairo. The doctor explained his own role. A devout Christian, he and the sisters of the Coptic convent managed to support a day care center, a hospital, a rehab center, and a maternity ward. The hospital’s main mission was to care for and teach hygiene to the Zabbaleen, the “garbage people,” who crammed by more than fifteen thousand into the buildings around the site, plus five thousand who ate and slept directly in the piles of trash.
Five thousand… Sharko thought of the little girl who had hugged him. For a moment he forgot his case, and asked instead:
“I saw those poor people in the streets of Cairo. Kids not even ten years old, who were scavenging for trash and putting it on donkey carts… Garbage collectors?”
“Yes. There are more than ten thousand of them, spread over the capital’s eight major slums. Early every morning, the men and the kids who are old enough head into Cairo in their carts to collect refuse. Their wives and the smaller children sort it out. Then the trash is sold to merchants, who themselves sell it to local recycling centers. Pigs eat the organic waste, and in this way ninety percent of the city’s garbage is either recycled or reused… A very ecological model, if it weren’t based on such poverty. Our mission, here at the center, is to remind these people that they’re still human.”
Sharko nodded toward a photo behind him.
“That looks like Sister Emmanuelle.”
“It is. The Salaam Center was founded in the 1970s. Salaam means ‘peace’ in Arabic.”
“Peace…”
Sharko finally took out a photo of one of the victims and showed it to the doctor.
“This photo is over fifteen years old. The girl, Boussaina Abderrahmane, came to this hospital.”
The doctor took the photo; his face darkened.
“Boussaina Abderrahmane. I’ve never forgotten her. Her body was discovered about three miles from here, in some sugarcane fields to the north. It was in…”
“March 1994.”
“March 1994… I remember now. It was such a shock. Boussaina Abderrahmane lived with her parents on the outskirts of Ezbet el-Nakhl, near the subway stop, on the other side of the shantytown. She went to Saint Mary’s, the Christian school, during the day, and earned a little money at night working in a jeweler’s studio. But tell me something—a policeman was already here, a long time ago. His name was…”
“Mahmoud Abd el-Aal.”
“That’s right. A policeman who was, how shall I put it… different from the others. How is he?”
“He died, also a long time ago. An accident.”
Sharko let him absorb the news, then continued:
“Can you tell me about her? Why had she come to your hospital?”
The doctor ran a hand over his wizened face. Sharko saw in him a worn-out man who nonetheless gave off an indefinable aura, the aura of goodness and courage.
“I’m going to try to explain this, assuming one can comprehend the incomprehensible.”
He stood up and began rummaging through thick files stacked up on old shelves.
“Nineteen ninety-three, ninety-four… Here, this is it.”
Everything had its place in this chaos. The doctor looked through the sheets of paper and handed the inspector a newspaper clipping. Sharko handed it back.
“I’m sorry, but I—”
“Oh, of course. Stupid of me. It’s an article from the newspaper al-Ahaly, dated April 1993. I’ll summarize it for you.”
Sharko’s brain was already ticking. April 1993, one year before the murders. The article took up the entire page, dotted with school class photos.
“Starting on March 31, 1993, and lasting several days, our country experienced a very strange occurrence. Around five thousand people, mostly young girls, underwent a curious phenomenon. For most of them, it took the form of a fainting spell in class that lasted a minute or two, preceded by a severe headache that came on without warning. They were immediately brought to the nearest hospital and given a thorough checkup. But since the hospital couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary, the girls were sent home.”
The doctor indicated a map of Egypt behind him, pointing out different regions with his finger.
“Some of the girls in the same classroom did not faint, but instead started exhibiting aggressive behavior. Screams, banging on the wall, unprovoked violence toward their schoolmates. The phenomenon started in the Beheira governorate, then in the blink of an eye reached fifteen of the nineteen governorates in Egypt. It struck quickly in cities like Sharkia, Kafr el-Sheikh, and Cairo. You could compare it to an earthquake, with the epicenter in Beheira and shockwaves that reached all the way to the capital.”