2
The City of Garbage, Cairo
The first thing that he saw as he passed under the gate was quite unexpected: two beautiful, unveiled young Coptic women walking past in embroidered robes, laughing as they made their way through the mud and the stench. He glanced at them, warily, but they ignored him. Just another stooped old man.
Victor sighed stoically, and walked on. A plastic Christian icon, suspended above the road, swung in the chilly breeze.
The main street was lined on both sides by enormous sacks of rubbish. Faces gazed, perplexed and blank, from dark windows and doorways. These stares certainly werent friendly. Yet neither were they necessarily hostile. They possessed a kind of desperate inertness.
Victor advanced. He knew from his research that the Monastery of the Cave was somewhere at the other end of the suburb, right under Moqqatam Hill, carved out of the cliffs. He could be there in ten minutes. If he wasnt stopped.
To quell his anxiety, he went over what he knew.
The name Zabaleen meant, literally, the rubbish collectors. But fifty years ago they were called the Zarraba, or the pig people, because thats what they had once been: peasant swineherds dwelling in the region of Assyut and Sohag, two hundred miles south of Cairo. In essence, they were just another tribe from Egypts ancient Coptic communities Christians who had been living in the Middle East since the second century AD, long before the Muslims arrived.
No one knew why the Zabaleen had suddenly decided to migrate to Cairo. Their lives in Middle Egypt had certainly been poor, and Assyut was a dusty and sometimes violent region: home to many Islamists, who had grown in power and audacity and hostility to Christians in the last fifty years. Yet, still, why did they move here? Victor Sassoon found it difficult to imagine that any peasant life in the sticks could be worse than that now endured by the Zabaleen in Cairo.
Hed reached the main street of the City of Garbage. Looming beyond the lofty and toppling houses of the township were the limestone cliffs that delimited Cairos eastern suburbs. Directly behind him was the vastness of the City of the Dead and the urban motorways.
The whole neighbourhood was cut off and excluded. It was also situated in a hollow a great and disused quarry which made it invisible to the rest of Cairo.
A young man stepped across the road towards Victor. He had a cheeky, Artful Dodger-ish grin.
Hey. Hello? Mister? You tourist? Take photo of us? Fuck you. The lad laughed, flicking his chin with his hand, and then sauntered away down a darkening alley.
Victor walked on. He was nearly there. He was trying not to look left or right but he couldnt help it. The scene was so extraordinarily medieval. No, worse than medieval.
Groups of women were sitting on stinking heaps of rubbish inside their own homes. The women spent their days herein, picking over the rubbish brought into Moqqatam by the men with their donkey carts. The women were looking for rags, paper, glass and metal: anything that could be recycled. Because this was what the Zabaleen did, this was their daily toil, and the sum of their existence: they sifted and recycled the garbage of Cairo, in the City of Garbage.
Pigs and goats scuttled between the tenements. Children played among bales of hospital waste; a toddler had been placed on sacks of refuse. Her smiling face was covered with flies.
Compassion pounded in Victors heart. He wanted to help these people, shut away in their claustrophobic ghetto. Yet what could he do? Hed heard that some brave charity had opened a clinic here a few years ago, dispensing rudimentary medicine to deal with the wounds and infections the Zabaleen contracted from their repellent environment.
Yet some also said the Zabaleen mistrusted modern medicine and refused help, preferring their traditional solace: religion. It was God that made the lives of these people bearable. If the Zabaleen were notorious for their bellicosity, for their sad or drunken desperation, they were also famous for their religious fidelity and devotion. The churches around here were thronged every Saturday, the Coptic Sabbath.
Even now Victor could see two women on a street corner kneeling to kiss the fat gold ring of a lavishly bearded Coptic priest. The black-cloaked priest smiled serenely at the purpling sky, while the women kneeled and kissed his jewellery, like supplicants in front of a Mafia godfather.
A priest? A priest meant a church. He needed to find the Monastery of the Cave.
Ahead, the main road, such as it was, forked left and right. On the left a man was butchering a pig in the gutter. The other lane led to a wall of distant rock. That was surely the route. And yes, through the dust and the bustle of Moqqatam, Victor could make out the arch of a monastic gate: probably the only noble piece of architecture for miles.
Victor Sassoon approached a wooden kiosk erected beside the gate. Inside, a badly shaven man sat scowling on a stool. The interior of the kiosk was decorated with lurid pictures of the Virgin Mary, with farcically huge eyes. Like a seal-pup.
Salaam, Victor said, as he leaned to the open window of the kiosk. Ah. Salaam aleikum, ah ah
I speak English. The middle-aged man spat the words. What do you want?
This was less than friendly.
I am a visiting scholar from London. I am keen to meet Brother Wasef Qulta, in the monastery.
A definite sneer lifted the gatekeepers face.
Many peoples want to see Brother Qulta. You need permission.
I have emailed and telephoned but I have been unable to get a response from the Coptic episcopate. Please. I only need a few minutes of his time. I have come a very long way.
The gatekeeper shrugged. No.
Victor had expected this; and he had a plan.
Perhaps I can explain better. I am happy to make a very considerable donation to the monastery. I will entrust it with you?
This was the entirety of Victors plan: bribe his way in, bribe his way through every problem. It was crude but it was effective in a poor country like Egypt especially in one of the poorest parts of Cairo. And Victor had plenty of money to spare.
Yet the gatekeeper was unmoved. He gazed at the dollar bills that Victor was discreetly flourishing and this time the sneer was angry. La! No! Ila jahaim malik!
But his anger was interrupted: by shouting. Victor turned. A slender, white-robed adolescent, perhaps a novice monk, was yelling from the steps of the monastery, yelling at no one and everyone. The shouting was loud and wild. Victor could not translate the words, but the meaning was clear something terrible had happened. Some kind of crime?
The gatekeeper was already out of the tatty little kiosk, running towards the porch of the monastery; others pursued. Victor took his chance and joined the anxious people. He strained to see over the shoulders and arms. What was going on?
The crowds were too thick. Shameless now, Victor used his stick to lever himself between the onlookers. There! The monastery door was open and Victor brazenly stepped inside.
It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the darkness within. There was a knot of people in the shadowy hallway: they were pointing at the stone stairs beyond. Victor caught the word police shurta and then the word qalita.
The gatekeeper was already out of the tatty little kiosk, running towards the porch of the monastery; others pursued. Victor took his chance and joined the anxious people. He strained to see over the shoulders and arms. What was going on?
The crowds were too thick. Shameless now, Victor used his stick to lever himself between the onlookers. There! The monastery door was open and Victor brazenly stepped inside.
It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the darkness within. There was a knot of people in the shadowy hallway: they were pointing at the stone stairs beyond. Victor caught the word police shurta and then the word qalita.
Murder?
A noise came from the stairs, where a makeshift stretcher was being hauled along by sweating hands. The agitated Zabaleen stretcher-bearers lowered their burden, as they pressed towards the door. And then Victor gazed, quite appalled.
The man on the stretcher was pale and stiff. His robes had been wrenched open, revealing his white chest, where he had been stabbed brutally in the heart. The pools of blood were lurid. The crossguard of the dagger, still lodged between the ribs, gave the impression the monk had been stabbed with a crucifix.
Victor recognized the silent face of the victim. It was Brother Wasef Qulta. Maybe the only man who knew the truth about the Sokar Hoard. And now he was dead.
3
Zennor, Cornwall
The year was gone; the party was over. Malcolm Harding wandered, unsteadily, through the detritus of their New Years Eve merrymaking. He marvelled at how much booze ten people could manage to drink in seven hours.
The vodka bottles clinked at his feet; an entire army of empty beer cans stood to attention in the corner of the sitting room. Jojo was fast asleep on the sofa, cradling a wine bottle in her delicate hands.
He resisted the urge to look up her miniskirt.
She was so beautiful though. Even now, with her make-up mussed, sprawled dissolutely on the leather sofa, she was just lyrically pretty: perfect and blonde and twenty-one years old. Oh yes, he adored Jojo. Ever since they had arrived here on Christmas Eve in this grand and spooky old house, perched between enormous rocks in the wild west of Celtic Cornwall which was itself the wild west of England he had tried to hook up with her, in as subtle a fashion as he could manage.
And he had failed. Maybe he hadnt been subtle enough? Maybe he had been too subtle? Maybe he could try again when they were all back at university. The holidays were nearly over. It was January the first, and it was what? three a.m.
Three a.m.!
Malcolm sat on a table and swigged from his bottle of beer. Amy Winehouse was still lamenting all the drugs that would kill her from the stereo. The music was so boomingly loud it was probably annoying the dead in Zennor churchyard, half a mile away.
Beer finished, Malcolm wondered vaguely, and groggily, where everyone else had gone. Rufus was presumably in one of the many bedrooms, with their amazing views of the sea, sleeping with Ally, as they had been doing ever since they had shared a bottle of vintage port on Boxing Day. Andrei had crashed with his girlfriend immediately after midnight. Josh and Paul were probably smoking upstairs, or chopping out a line. Or flaked out in their clothes.
Jojo turned over on the sofa, half-stirring, but still asleep. Her little denim skirt rode up as she did. Manfully, Malcolm resisted the temptation to linger; instead, he stood up, walked across the room, then wandered through the enormous mess that was the kitchen (they would have to hire some kids from the village to clear this up) and opened the kitchen door to the large gardens that surrounded this great old house, Eagles Nest.
The night was cold. The garden seemed empty. Then a dark and sudden figure loomed into view.
Jesus!
Freddy laughed, and casually dropped his glowing cigarette onto the grass, not bothering to crush it underfoot.
Sorry, old boy. Did I frighten you?
Malcolm was half-angry, yet half-relieved.
Yes you did. What the fuck are you doing, skulking out here?
Well I came out to chuck up into the bushes, as is traditional on New Years Eve. Freddy smirked. That last joint was a bit of a serial killer. But the air revived me.
Now the two of them stood together in the cold, looking out to the distant waves. The house, Malcolm recalled, had once been owned by artists. You could see that its position might inspire.
So? Do tell. Did you manage to ravish Jojo yet?
Malcolm sighed.
Not exactly.
Ten days and not even a kiss? This is potentially worse than the Holocaust.
Maybe. Ill survive. Malcolm gazed down, once more taking in the magnificent view, the vast granite rocks and the moonlit fields below, which led down to the Atlantic. Anyway, Freddy, mate, why are you still out here? Youve been gone hours. Its freezing.
Freddy put a finger to his lips.
I wanted to sober up, as I said and then
Then what?
Even in the semi-darkness he could see the sly frown on Freddy Saundersons face.
Then I heard something.
Duh?
Something weird. And I keep hearing it.
Thats Amy Winehouse. Shes dead.
No. Not the music. Something else.
But
There it is again! Listen.
Freddy Saunderson was, for once, not joking. From way up on the moors there came a wild and very loud scream. No, not a scream a feral chorus of screams; yet distorted and shrieking, mingling with the howl of the wind.
Malcolm felt an urge to step back: to physically retreat.
Jesus Christ. What is that?
For a moment the noise abated, but then it returned. A distant choir, infantile and hideous. What the hell would make a sound like that?
At last, the noise ceased. The relative silence that followed seemed all the more oppressive. The thudding music in the house; the waves on the rocks below. Silence otherwise. Malcolm felt himself sobering up very fast.
Freddy pointed.
Up there.
He was surely right. The noise appeared to be coming from the moors above them: from Zennor Hill, with its great granite carns and its brace of ruined cottages.
Theyd walked around that forbidding landscape the day before, in the driving rain and blustering wind. The hilltop was druidic and malignant, even by day.
Freddys eyes flashed in the dark.
Shall we go and have a look?
What? Are you nuts?
No. Are you gay? Freddy laughed. Oh come on. Lets investigate. Itll be fun.
Malcolm hesitated: quite paralysed. He was seriously unkeen on investigating that noise, but he also didnt want to appear a wuss in front of Freddy; he was wary of Freddys cruel sense of humour, his lacerating jokes. If he didnt show he was up for this, Freddy might just humiliate him the next time he was feeling a little bored at the union bar.