Authors: Parker Bilal
As he turned into the main square and puttered along through the town Makana spotted a light burning out off to his left through the trees. Doctor Medina was working late. He had also, as it turned out, been drinking. He stood swaying in the doorway just long enough for Makana to confirm the fact.
‘You’ve had an accident? How is the Norton? Don’t tell me you’ve damaged her?’
‘Don’t worry about it. Your precious machine is fine.’
There were candles burning in the window sills and an old jazz record was playing on the ancient gramophone set on a table in the corner. The scratchy record made it sound as though the clarinet was being played in the middle of a rainstorm. Doctor Medina stared bleary-eyed at Makana. He looked haggard and exhausted.
‘Don’t you ever sleep, Doctor?’
‘I should try it some time. I hear it works wonders. What happened to you anyway?’ Doctor Medina waved his glass in the general direction of Makana’s injuries.
‘I must be making progress. Somebody grew tired of my questions it seems,’ said Makana, lifting a hand gingerly to touch his ear. ‘Would you mind taking a look?’
‘Not at all. Come right in.’
‘I need to make a phone call first.’ The telephone was on the window sill. Makana walked over and lifted the receiver to dial Sergeant Hamama’s number. It took a while for him to answer and when he came on he was clearly half asleep. Makana told him quickly about Rashida. The sergeant said he would get out there straight away. Makana hung up. When he turned around he found Doctor Medina staring at him.
‘Sounds like you had a lucky escape,’ he said. ‘Sure you don’t want a drink to steady your nerves?’
‘Maybe later.’
‘Rashida. I can’t believe it. That poor girl! What could she possibly have done to deserve such a fate? Sit down,’ he said. Makana reeled from the whiff of alcohol as the doctor leaned over him. Still, it seemed that when called upon to perform a professional service, Doctor Medina was capable of sobering up in an instant. He set his glass down on the table and went to fetch his bag. While he was rummaging around, Makana told him about the trap that had awaited him on the road.
‘It’s possible that she walked straight into it. They may have promised her something, money, enough for her to leave and go to Cairo with her boyfriend.’
‘You mean she set the meeting up with you knowing they were going to kill you?’
Makana was not convinced. Rashida had seemed genuinely upset by Ayman’s death.
‘She wanted to tell me something. The problem is I don’t think she trusted me.’
Doctor Medina nodded. ‘That’s possible. You’re an outsider. On the one hand you’re the only person she can trust, and on the other she doesn’t really know you well enough. This is going to hurt.’
Makana winced as the needle of the anaesthetic went into his hand.
‘Who do you think did it? Her father?’ Doctor Medina asked.
‘Nagy? He’s the obvious choice, but no, killing his own daughter? I don’t think so.’
‘Then who?’
‘It’s too early to say.’ Makana didn’t want to speculate or encourage the doctor to do so.
‘Hold still.’ Makana felt the cold sting of the disinfectant against his ear. ‘You’re going to need a couple of stitches. You’re lucky you didn’t lose it.’
‘One thing is for certain, with Luqman still in prison, he couldn’t have been the one who set the trap and killed Nasra.’
‘Nasra?’ Doctor Medina was looking at him strangely. ‘Don’t you mean Rashida?’
‘Isn’t that what I said?’ Makana searched the doctor’s face.
‘No,’ said the doctor thoughtfully. ‘You said Nasra.’
‘I meant Rashida.’
Makana stared at the table. It was made of mahogany, and like the doctor himself, implied a history that was once more promising and respectable than its present state. He couldn’t feel his right hand but managed to light a cigarette using only his left.
‘Perhaps you are working too hard. I can prescribe a mild sedative, or one of these . . .’ Doctor Medina lifted his glass. ‘Works miracles for the nervous system.’
‘Why do you drink so much, Doctor?’
Doctor Medina looked up from the needle he was trying to thread.
‘That’s a personal question.’
‘I mean, is there a specific reason?’
‘We all have our reasons, and usually they are too complex and too petty to make sense to other people. You should take it easy, is what I am trying to say. The body reacts in strange ways when it experiences shock.’ The doctor finished threading the needle with a remarkably steady hand. Either his powers of resistance to the effects of alcohol were remarkable, or he was a better actor than most. ‘Have you experienced a loss of a personal nature recently?’
‘Not recently.’
‘Then who, may I ask, is Nasra?’
‘My daughter.’
‘Ah, and how old is she?’
The needle went into the back of Makana’s ear and he managed to suppress a cry. Still, the pain left him gasping for breath.
‘She died, or rather, I thought so until a few months ago.’
‘Interesting.’ Doctor Medina dragged the thread through and stuck the curved needle into Makana’s skin again. ‘When was this?’
‘About ten years ago.’
‘Don’t talk while I do this.’
‘You asked me a question.’
‘That was just to keep your mind occupied.’
‘My mind is plenty occupied, I don’t need distraction.’
‘I’m sure.’ Doctor Medina carried on, finished sewing, tied off the thread and clipped it with a pair of scissors. After that he turned to the cut on Makana’s right hand. The wire had sliced in at an awkward angle between middle and index fingers. It was deeper than he had realised.
‘You are a troubled man,’ murmured the doctor while he worked. ‘Every society is filled with dread or hope when an outsider enters a little community. Dread that he might bring change, and hope that he will do just that. You brought murder. You can’t expect people to love you.’
‘It’s not as if this place was the Garden of Eden before I arrived.’
‘What do you think Rashida wanted to tell you?’
‘She said Ayman had seen a ghost.’
‘A ghost?’ The doctor looked amused.
‘The ghost of someone he had known a long time ago.’
‘I’m going to give you something to prevent infection.’ Makana gasped as the syringe was inserted into the raw wound. It felt as though a hot needle were being pushed into his bone. Makana felt his head swim with the pain. ‘Sure you don’t want that drink now?’
‘Perhaps a small one,’ confessed Makana.
‘Excellent.’
Delighted, the doctor got up and went over to the refrigerator from which he produced a tray of ice from the freezer compartment and a bottle of clear liquid. He poured himself a good three fingers into his glass, dropped some ice and half a lime in and tasted it before preparing a more moderate version of the same which he set in front of Makana. ‘Try it. It’s very special. Only a special kind of date is used to make it.’
The dates may well have been special, but it was hard to tell why anyone would go to the trouble of turning them into alcohol. People went blind drinking this stuff. They lost the feeling in their limbs. Makana sipped cautiously at the icy spirit. It burned its way down his throat and lit a flame under his heart so that it started beating twice as fast.
‘I think the ghost Ayman thought he saw was Musab Khayr,’ Makana said, realising that the alcohol had induced a certain recklessness.
‘I thought he was abroad.’
Makana bit his lip as the doctor pushed the curved needle into his hand. His skin felt numb but some of the nerve endings must still have been awake. A sense of invincibility had come over him, tempered by a touch of indifference so that it was almost like watching somebody else being stabbed repeatedly with a needle. As he watched the thread being pulled through he felt like a dead man watching his own carcass being sewn up from a great distance. Makana drained his glass.
‘You may be right about this stuff, Doctor, it does help.’
‘What did I tell you?’ Doctor Medina held up his glass to the light in an admiring fashion.
When the doctor went back to work, however, he seemed distracted, operating with more impatience than caution. His hands were trembling. Perhaps there was a limit to the benefits of his potent wonder. When he had finished he tied off the thread and tossed the needle into the metal dish. Makana looked at the jagged line running along the palm of his hand. He managed to get hold of another cigarette and light it one handed. He looked over at the doctor who had moved around the table to the open window where he too was smoking.
‘There is something that ties all of these deaths together. Ayman, the Qadi, Captain Mustafa and now Rashida. And it’s all connected to what happened around the time Musab left here.’
‘That was twenty years ago.’ Beyond where Doctor Medina stood, glass in hand, the graceful fronds of the palm trees were visible as dark, slick waves, undulating slowly in the night air. ‘What makes you think Musab would come back here?’
‘So, tell me. What was he like?’
‘He was a nobody, a small-time thug with big ambitions. He left here in disgrace. He couldn’t come back even if he wanted to.’
‘What happened?’ Makana peered into the bloodshot eyes.
‘A falling out between thieves. Musab had no choice but to leave.’
‘Do you know why exactly, or who he fought with?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’ Doctor Medina gulped his drink.
‘And Nagat, why did she go with him?’
‘I suppose there was nothing left for her here.’ The doctor shrugged. ‘She had nothing to lose, and like so many young girls she dreamed only of the big city lights.’
Makana left the Norton parked in the doctor’s driveway and walked back to the main square and the Desert Fox Hotel in about ten minutes. He had taken the key with him when he went out, a precaution that in the first instance had been pointless as someone obviously knew he was not in his room. The front door was locked. Was that the usual procedure, or was Nagy not expecting him back? As he stepped into the silent interior Makana was reminded of Rashida. The vision of her enshrouded body in the dark water floated before him. The lobby was already illuminated by the faint slivers of light that had begun to break open the sky outside. Exhausted, Makana climbed the stairs to his room where he dropped onto the bed fully clothed and fell instantly into a deep sleep which seemed to last all of five minutes.
Someone was knocking at the door. Insistently. A pause, followed by another urgent rap.
‘Makana, open up! I know you’re in there.’ Sadig was standing in the hallway. ‘Let’s go. The sergeant wants to see you.’
Without waiting for an answer he started off towards the staircase. Makana assumed they were going to the police station but when he got downstairs he found Sergeant Hamama outside, leaning against the side of his Chevrolet pickup with his arms folded and a matchstick in the corner of his mouth.
‘Did I wake you? I apologise. No, actually, I don’t.’
‘What is this all about?’ Makana asked.
‘It’s about time for you to be leaving us.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Makana said. ‘Did you find the girl?’
‘Ah, yes, the girl. The reason you woke me and my wife up in the early hours of the morning and got me to drive out to Cleopatra’s Eye?’ Sergeant Hamama held Makana’s gaze. ‘Sadig, tell Mr Makana what we found out there.’
‘Nothing,’ sneered Sadig. ‘There was nothing out there.’
‘Nothing,’ repeated Sergeant Hamama. ‘We looked. We were very careful about that. I had people inside the water, dragging it with chains.’
‘Someone must have moved her,’ said Makana.
‘Naturally. They left the body there for you to see and then waited until you were gone to move her again.’
‘It must be something like that. What does Nagy say?’
‘Mr Nagy says his daughter is not missing.’
‘Then where is she?’
‘According to her father she is staying with her cousin in Mersa Matruh.’
‘He’s lying,’ Makana said, turning to go back inside the hotel. Sadig put a hand out to restrain him. Makana shook him off. ‘I haven’t finished my work here.’
‘Oh, yes. Believe me, your work here is done.’ Sergeant Hamama straightened himself up from the side of the car. ‘I gave you twenty-four hours and you came up with nothing except a lame story about a missing girl. I have guests coming from Mersa Matruh to see this case closed. I can’t afford to have you running about like a mad man screaming about dead girls.’ He tilted his head to one side. ‘You can see that, can’t you?’
‘Whoever killed Ayman and the Qadi is still out there. Rashida is proof of that.’
‘So you say,’ Sergeant Hamama shrugged, reaching for his snuff pouch. ‘But according to your own theory, the killer was putting his victims on display. Now, all of a sudden, he is hiding them. Does that make any sense?’ He tucked a large pinch of tobacco under his lip. It gave him a dull, bovine look, but Makana was beginning to see that underneath those heavy-lidded eyes Hamama was anything but stupid.