The Labyrinth of Osiris (21 page)

Ben-Roi pushed and pushed, went all round the subject trying to get a handle on it. The editor could add nothing to what he’d already told him and in the end Ben-Roi was forced to let the matter drop. It was important, he could sense it, another crucial element in cracking the Enigma code of Rivka Kleinberg’s murder. Unfortunately, like all the other crucial elements he’d turned up so far, it took him no nearer to understanding, let alone solving the case. On the contrary, it only seemed to add an extra layer of complexity to an already fiendishly difficult algorithm. Three years ago Rivka Kleinberg had been interested in the Nemesis Agenda. Then, a few days before her murder, the group had suddenly popped up on her radar again. That was about as much as he could say. Which wasn’t really much at all.

The two of them talked for another thirty minutes, but nothing else of obvious use emerged and eventually Ben-Roi called it a day and brought the interview to a close. Yaron went back on the internet and tracked down a number for the Hofesh Shelter. Then, sliding half a dozen copies of his magazine into a plastic bag and presenting the bag to Ben-Roi, he escorted the detective downstairs to the street.

‘It’s funny,’ he said as they descended, ‘but talking to you has made me realize how little I actually knew Rivka. Forty years we were friends and yet there are whole swathes of her life that are a complete blank to me. She very much kept things compart mentalized. Broke her world down into different boxes, kept all the boxes separate. I was in the journalism and politics box. You want to know what she thought about the Oslo Accords, Kadima, Peres, Netanyahu – that I can tell you. But there was a whole other side of her that I was never privy to. You know, in all the time I knew her I never once saw the inside of her home.’ He shook his head.‘Maybe I wasn’t as close a friend as I thought I was.’

They reached the ground floor and Yaron opened the front door.

‘If you’re interested in a subscription I’ll do you a good deal,’ he said.

‘I’ll get back to you,’ said Ben-Roi. ‘Right at the moment I’ve got other things . . .’

‘Of course, of course. I’m not trying to convert you. Just to get you to engage. No one in this country seems to engage any more. It’s like we’ve lost the will to think.’

They shook hands and Ben-Roi stepped out on to the street.

He was about to walk away when Yaron reached out and took his arm.

‘Rivka was a good person, Detective. She could be appalling when the mood took her, but at heart she was a good person. Justice meant a lot to her, sticking up for the underdog, helping people in trouble. She’d call you every name under the sun for changing a single word of her copy, and then empty her purse for some crack-addicted beggar she’d found on the street. She had an instinctive empathy for people who were in pain. Probably because she was in so much of it herself. She cared. She really cared. Please, do everything you can for her.’

He held Ben-Roi’s eyes a moment, then, with a nod, released his arm and disappeared back into the building. Ben-Roi started walking. He gave it a hundred metres, then dumped the magazines in a bin. Engagement was going to have to wait. He had a murder to solve.

L
UXOR

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Khalifa, spare me another of your crackpot conspiracy theories! You’re a dreamer – always have been, always will be! A bloody dreamer!’

That’s what Chief Inspector Abdul ibn-Hassani would have said not so long ago if Khalifa had come to him with news of a plot to drive Copts out of the Eastern Desert.

The two of them had never got on, not since Khalifa had first been posted to Luxor. A fractious, bullying, unimaginative man, the chief had never trusted his subordinate’s more freeform approach to police work, his preparedness to go with gut instinct over the strict letter of the rule book. For his part, Khalifa had always been irked by his boss’s assumption that the way to get the best out of his men was to intimidate and shout at them, by his obsession with procedure, above all by the fact that his priorities seemed to lie less with the actual solving of cases than with ensuring they were solved in a manner that conformed unerringly to the manual of Egyptian policing.

It wasn’t an entirely fair assessment – for all his narrow-mindedness, Hassani knew a good detective when he saw one, and had, albeit reluctantly, cut Khalifa a fair degree of slack over the years. Despite that, their relationship had never been comfortable, and if anything was guaranteed to get the chief’s back up, it was having to listen to his underling’s far-fetched tales of conspiracy and intrigue. A stern dressing-down and a homily on the need to stick to the facts and keep your imagination in check was his usual reaction, progressing to a full-on explosion if Khalifa refused to let the matter drop.

That had been then. These days, since his return from extended leave, Khalifa had noticed a distinct mellowing in Hassani’s manner. He had reined in his temper, cut right back on his use of expletives – always a major part of any verbal encounter between the two of them – and even taken to calling him Yusuf, an un characteristically informal mode of address traditionally reserved for the chief’s small coterie of toadies and favourites.

All of which, well meant as it doubtless was, only served to increase Khalifa’s sense of dislocation. Of things not being as they ought to be. Like his old apartment, like his beloved Luxor before they’d driven a three-kilometre trench through the middle of it, like his wife Zenab’s laughter, Chief Hassani’s foul-tempered belligerence had been one of the constants of his existence. And now, just when he needed their settling effect the most, those constants seemed to have evaporated, leaving him exposed and floundering.

Sitting in Hassani’s office this afternoon, going through the story of the poisoned wells, part of him yearned for his boss to revert to type and launch into one of his extended you’re-a-fucking-dreamer-Khalifa rants. Instead he listened patiently, if a little twitchily, as Khalifa outlined the situation. Then, rather than hammering his fist on the table and telling him what a clueless idiot he was, he sat back, drummed his meaty fingers on the edge of the desk and jutted out his lower jaw, something he always did when he was trying to convey an impression of deep thought.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Very interesting.’

‘I know the incidents are a long way apart,’ said Khalifa. ‘Or at least the monastery is a long way from the two farms.’

‘Forty kilometres, wasn’t it?’

‘Probably closer to thirty.’

‘And the olive trees died . . . ?’

‘Three or four years ago. I know it all seems a bit tenuous, but even so . . .Three Coptic wells all poisoned, all
roughly
in the same vicinity. It would seem to suggest . . . there does seem to be some . . .’

He trailed off, waiting for Hassani to interject a comment. He didn’t, just sat there in silence, fingers drumming, jaw pushed out, eyebrows – thick, bushy eyebrows that ran into one another like a pair of colliding trains – crunched up into an expectant frown. In the past, the chief’s habit of shooting down his opinions the moment he expressed them had only served to reassure Khalifa those opinions were probably correct. In an unsettling reversal of normal practice, Hassani’s silence now left him wondering if maybe he was reading too much into the situation.

‘It just seemed strange,’ he said, a hint of doubt creeping into his voice. ‘More than a coincidence. The water supply at Bir Hashfa, the village near the Attia farm, that hasn’t been affected. Just the three Coptic wells.’

Hassani clasped his hands and leant his head slightly to one side, his face framed by a rectangular shadow on the wall behind where a picture of Hosni Mubarak had once hung. He’d had it taken down the moment it was clear the president was a busted flush. Despite his hulking frame, the chief always blew with the prevailing wind.

‘Of course, strictly speaking, none of these places falls within our direct jurisdiction,’ he said after a silence. ‘Certainly not Deir el-Limoon.’

‘Zeitun,’ corrected Khalifa.

‘Exactly. But let’s leave that for the moment.’ He gave a theatrical push of the hand, as if moving something out of the way. ‘And let’s also leave aside the fact that wells do sometimes go bad of their own accord. They do, don’t they? Go bad of their own accord?’

Khalifa acknowledged that it had been known to happen.

‘What you’re suggesting is that someone’s going around the Eastern Desert deliberately poisoning Coptic waterholes.’

Khalifa nodded.

‘Or rather, four years ago they poisoned one waterhole, and now over the last couple of months they’ve poisoned another two.’

Khalifa nodded again, with rather less conviction. ‘I know it all seems a bit tenuous,’ he repeated.

Hassani smiled and shook his head as if to say, ‘Not at all.’ The expression was forced, and his eyes gave him away. The eyes said:
You’re damned right it’s tenuous
.

‘So who do you think these mysterious well-poisoners might be?’ he asked, his voice sliding half a notch higher as he struggled to keep his tone reasonable.

Khalifa pulled out his cigarettes. He didn’t open the packet, just turned it over in his hands.

‘At first I thought it must be someone from Bir Hashfa,’ he said. ‘That’s certainly who Mr Attia seems to think is responsible. But with the monastery being so far away –’ he rotated the pack a couple of times – ‘Muslim Brotherhood, maybe.’

‘In the middle of the Eastern Desert!’ Hassani’s voice rose, then fell again as he brought it back under control. ‘Come on, Khalifa . . . Yusuf . . . The Brothers are city-boys. Slum rats.’

‘Salafists, then. They’re out-of-towners.’

Hassani looked far from convinced.

‘Well
someone
’s got a religious axe to grind,’ said Khalifa. ‘I can’t see any other possible explanation. If it was just Mr Attia and his cousin who were affected, that might be a local grudge, or a family vendetta. But when you factor in the monastery – why else would someone travel a hundred kilometres into the middle of nowhere to foul a water source that’s only used by a couple of monks? It’s fanaticism, it has to be. Either that or there’s some oddball out there who gets his kicks creeping around the desert poisoning random wells just for the hell of it.’

‘Or the wells went bad of their own accord and it’s just a coincidence they’re all owned by Copts.’

Khalifa flicked the pack round another few times, then returned it to his pocket without removing a cigarette. He felt muddled suddenly. Wasn’t sure what he thought any more. ‘I’ve just got a feeling there’s something wrong,’ he mumbled lamely. ‘That there’s something going on and we ought to look into it.’

Few things irked Hassani more than being told someone had a feeling about something – ‘Women and poofs have feelings; policemen have evidence,’ was one of his most frequently deployed put-downs. To his credit, he didn’t use it now, although the tautness of his mouth suggested he would dearly have loved to. Instead he heaved himself up and walked across to the window.

His office – the penthouse, as they called it – was on the top floor of the station, a palatial, marble-floored space that seemed to dwarf everyone and everything inside it. When they’d moved here six months ago, its windows had offered spectacular views across town to the Nile and the Theban massif beyond. That was before the Interior Ministry building behind had decided to go up an extra two storeys. Now when he looked out, Chief Hassani was confronted with a blank wall of concrete peppered with air-conditioning units. The more aesthetically minded would probably have been disappointed. Hassani barely noticed. Pretty scenery had never been of much interest to him.

He stared out at the non-view, his back to Khalifa, the stitching of his jacket seeming to strain under the pressure of his broad fighter’s shoulders. Then, cracking his knuckles, he turned.

‘I’ll be honest, Khalifa . . . Yusuf . . . this isn’t a great time to be bringing me something like this. I’m not saying you were wrong to bring it, or that your concerns aren’t valid. It’s just that we’ve got a lot on our plate at the moment without stirring the possibility of some marauding religious nut-job into the soup.’

For a fleeting moment his eyes crunched up and his head dropped as he tried to work out whether the soup metaphor worked or not. He gave it the benefit of the doubt and came forward a step, jerking a thumb over his shoulder towards the window behind him.

‘This new museum visitor centre thing in the Valley of the Kings – the inauguration ceremony’s less than a fortnight away and, let me tell you, it’s using up a lot of resources. A
lot
of resources. The minister’s coming down, the American ambassador, the head of the company who funded the bloody place. I’ve got forty-nine separate dignitaries to move from the airport to the West Bank and then I’ve got to guarantee protection once they’re there. Do you know how many men it’s going to take to shut down and ring-fence the entire valley? Hundreds! Sharp-shooters, special forces, police, army . . .’

A small green vein had started to pulsate beneath his right eye, a sure sign he was getting worked up. With a considerable effort of will he reined himself in, raising his hands and lowering them as if to push down a rising tide of panic and ire.

‘What I’m saying is that we’re under a lot of pressure here and it’s perhaps not the best time to be launching a full-scale investigation into the possibility that a couple of wells that may or may not be within our jurisdiction may or may not have been poisoned by someone who may or may not be a fundamentalist head-banger. Do you see what I’m getting at? Any other time I’d be happy to accommodate you, but right now . . .’

He broke off, bringing up his hand and gently massaging the pulsing vein. Khalifa stared down at the floor. In the old days, if he’d had a suspicion about something he’d have stood his ground, argued the point with Hassani till he’d got what he wanted. Today he could summon neither the energy nor the conviction that he actually
had
a point. Maybe the chief was right. Maybe the wells
had
gone bad for natural reasons and the fact that they were all Coptic-owned was just a coincidence. Maybe he’d allowed his pity for Mr Attia to cloud his judgement. He used to be so sure of his instincts. Now he wasn’t sure of anything any more. Not for the first time these last few months, the thought struck him that he wasn’t half the detective he used to be. Not even a quarter of the detective.