The Cairo Puzzle Read online

  “Welcome to Cairo,” said the smiling young man, as he took my passport. “I hope your journey from the airport was easy. Our traffic can be a shock.” He handed me a card to sign. My name had already been filled in.

  I headed for my room. I needed a shower, badly.

  4

  “It works, I can assure you, excellency.” The old man leaned forward. He pushed his gold rimmed glasses back up his nose. His smile was wide. His eyes gleamed as he placed the glass beaker on the polished mahogany table.

  The older man in the tight fitting pin striped suit stared at the beaker. He swept his improbably black hair back over his head with a thin hand mottled by age.

  “If you have succeeded, doctor, this will be the breakthrough that will have every pharmaceutical company in the world asking you to work for them.” His gaze locked on the doctor’s face.

  “Have no fear, excellency. I would never leave your service. You have been more than generous to me and my family.” The doctor glanced down at the beaker.

  “The name Ahmed Yacoub is inscribed in our hearts.” He held his right hand to his left breast, clutched it through his white cotton shirt. His head bowed.

  Ahmed Yacoub stood. He picked up the beaker and walked to the high windows overlooking the Nile. Dark latticework shutters blocked the sunlight, but if you stood close enough you could see across the jumble of rooftops and minarets all the way from old Cairo to the Great Pyramid. It stood out against a skyline lit by a red sun descending into a bank of yellow cloud.

  “There is a sandstorm approaching.” He sipped at the beaker.

  “Three days it has waited out there,” said the doctor. “We have shuttered our villa in Giza.”

  Yacoub sipped again. “It tastes like apple tea.”

  The doctor smiled. “It works a lot better than apple tea.” He licked his lips.

  “And you have given the formula to the production team?”

  “Yes. All the safety tests are done. We will help millions. Manufacturing costs are low. Rich and poor will benefit from this.”

  Yacoub sniffed at the liquid. “Our distribution strategy will be decided by our Swiss partners, doctor.”

  The doctor closed his eyes for a moment, then bowed. “Is your wife in the city?”

  Yacoub looked away. “She is in Paris, shopping. Our summer party is coming up in two weeks.”

  “You may want her to hurry back.” The doctor grinned.

  Yacoub drained the rest of the liquid, placed the beaker down in front of him. “All donors have been compensated?”

  “Every one.” The doctor stood. “I will return tomorrow. The effects will last much longer, but I want to be the first to congratulate you on how well you look.”

  “I can assure you, you will receive more than words if you have achieved what you promised.”

  The doctor held the high back of the ebony chair. His fingers moved over the bird’s head carving, as if caressing it. “The formula does not fail, excellency. The health of your guest proves that. You have seen his recovery, have you not?”

  Yacoub shrugged. “I have not seen him, but I’ve been told he watches Netflix the way you pursue your secretaries, doctor.” He swept his hair back.

  “I will take my leave, excellency. Enjoy your evening.”

  As he walked down the wide stairs towards the front door of the mansion he saw two young women sitting on the Persian carpet under the glittering chandelier, which dominated the entrance hall. They were sitting cross legged, their faces covered to their eyes by red scarves thrown back. They were talking to each other in whispers. They turned, glanced at the doctor. Then their laughter filled the hall.

  As he left the building behind he hurried towards the multistory car park at the end of the street. He’d parked his Toyota on the top level, as he’d been instructed to always do, to avoid being seen. As he rode up in the elevator he thought about his own wife. Perhaps she too could benefit, as he had done, from a daily dose of the elixir. He smiled as he crossed the concrete of the car park and weaved between the parked cars to find his own.

  He clicked on the fob and the car’s lights flashed. It would be good to turn on the air conditioning and listen to Mozart on his way to his home in the exclusive suburb of Zamalek, Cairo's wealthiest neighborhood, on the island of Gazirah.

  He closed the door behind him and reached for the stereo system controls.

  A soft clunk made him turn his head. Something flashed across his vision. The first he knew about the thin wire that had been dropped over his head was when it bit into the flesh of his neck.

  He reached for it, but it was already too late. It had cut his windpipe and was progressing fast towards his spine. Blood poured like a waterfall across his white shirt and pooled on his trousers. The only sound was the noise of air escaping from his windpipe, like a burst bicycle tire.

  Then a tinkle of laughter filled the car and the two sets of hands, which had held the wire, released the ivory handles that had allowed them to pull it tight, leaving the wire dangling down the doctor’s back.

  They adjusted their niqabs as they went down the concrete stairs. The slit for their eyes was less than an inch wide as they walked out into the street. They followed two other niqab wearing women and mingled at the end of the traffic lights with a dozen others.

  5

  I turned on the TV, switching the channel to CNN as I unpacked. The room had two double beds, and was at the end of a long corridor.

  The news at the top of the hour started. A suicide bomber had detonated himself in a market in Damascus. One hundred and twenty people had been torn to shreds, mostly women buying food for their families. The item closed with a shaky video a passerby shot of shattered buildings with dust drifting in the air. The buildings looked like the broken teeth in some long defeated giant’s skull.

  The next item came up on the screen, a view of the White House, and a discussion about the American president’s health.

  I switched the TV off, went to my bag and took out the printouts of Sean’s picture I had made before I left London. He was smiling. The picture had been taken during his last visit to his family home in upstate New York. His cousin had taken it.

  I breathed deep. The pain in my heart had been continuous since he’d disappeared. Some days it lessened, if I was busy, but always it was there, like a hot stone pressing into my heart. Now I was in a strange city it had grown again. I still couldn’t believe he was gone. It couldn’t be true.

  I’d been told I was in denial. But I didn’t care. If I saw his body, I’d accept his death. I’d told myself that over and over, but another part of me knew I was fooling myself.

  I looked away, a rush of sadness welling in my eyes. I went to the window, gripped the curtain. Just once more, please. Let me see him once more. I pulled the white net curtain with the barely visible pattern of pyramids to the side and looked out.

  The buildings visible from my fourth floor window were offices and apartment buildings with advertising signs in Arabic at street level. On one, on each floor, there were hoardings for some cola drink, with a symbol on the giant red bottle I’d never seen before. There was also a man at a window opposite. He was wearing a white shirt and staring at me. He had a phone to his ear.

  I dropped the net curtain. His gaze had been intense. The tightness in my chest grew. I gripped my arms around myself, sat on the bed, took out my phone and went to the guide app for Cairo I’d found.

  The hospital I’d read about which had taken a medical emergency victim from Nuremberg was in Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo. The Dar al'amal hospital was near the Faisal station, the stop before Giza on the Cairo Metro. I had to decide whether to take the metro in the morning and use one of the women only carriages, marked with a red sticker, or take a taxi.

  The travel advice I’d read said tourists should avoid rush hours on the metro. Apparently the volume of people using the system meant that some of the stairways became packed and you could barely move at times,
especially where the metro lines intersected.

  What I needed was a driver who could help me at the hospital too.

  When I woke the rumble from outside the window and the honking of horns made me wonder where I was. A sliver of sunlight on the pale green carpet told me the sun was long up. Breakfast in the restaurant was bread, cheese, sliced meats, fruit and strong coffee. The waiters were all young men who smiled deferentially as they served. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I spotted two of them looking my way.

  I asked at reception about taxis to the hospital and a driver who spoke English. He arranged one for ten-thirty.

  Before we left the hotel I asked the driver, Mahmood, would he come in to the hospital and translate for me and point me in the right direction. And drive me back to the hotel.

  “I will do all of that, but the charge will be forty dollars,” he said, as he held the door of his yellow cab open for me.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “What is it you need to find at the hospital, madam?” He started the car and pushed out into the traffic, staring at me for most of the time in the rear view mirror.

  “I need to know if my husband, Sean Ryan, has been treated there in the past month.”

  “Hospital records are not always easy to see. You may have to pay.” He rubbed his fingers together.

  “Whatever it takes.” I thought for a second about what I’d just said, then added. “Within reason.”

  “Of course, madam.”

  After a few minutes he turned to me. “Did your husband go missing from the hotel?” His tone was kind.

  “No. I read there was an American being treated at the hospital.”

  His eyes widened. “Your husband, he is an American?”

  I nodded. The rest of the drive was in silence, except for the constant bleat of car horns outside.

  The drive took forty minutes. We spent half of it sitting in a traffic jam on a wide boulevard with dirty looking palm trees down the middle. Most of the women on the street had their hair covered, some with the full black sack that made them look like walking shadows, others wore western clothes. A few wore white face veils. Most women were in groups.

  The men had a beaten down look and wore dusty t-shirts, ill-fitting suits or long Arabic shirts, galabeya, reaching to their ankles. Some had small white turbans on. The streets hummed with activity and there was a dusty smell in the air, as if we were passing a cement factory.

  The hospital was behind a high iron steel fence. Two security guards with black machine guns hung over their shoulders guarded it. Another sat in a security box with dirty sandbags piled up to window level. We had to weave past concrete barriers to get to the gate, where the car was examined, and a guard with a mirror on a long stick checked the underside for explosives.

  The driver turned to me. “This is not a good day to visit a hospital in Cairo, madam.” He pointed beyond the security barriers.

  Three ambulances were pulled up to the side of the building. Medics surrounded the back doors of one of the ambulances. Green suited hospital staff were carrying a stretcher out of it. As the security gate opened the stretcher was rushed towards a set of glass double doors to the right of the main entrance. It had EMERGENCY and a string of Arab letters above the entrance in white lettering on a red sign. To the left of the entrance were gold luggage carriers, like you might find at a top hotel.

  “I have to find my husband.”

  He shrugged, drove towards the entrance to an underground car park. The hospital towered above us, at least six stories and as we entered the car park I heard the clatter of a helicopter approaching. As we disappeared underground I saw the flash of helicopter blades descending to the roof of the hospital.

  The clatter of the blades could still be heard as I got out. The driver, shaking his head, motioned for me to follow him. His galabeya was cream and below it he wore new looking blue Nike runners. They looked wrong. I hurried after him.

  The anxiety I’d been feeling at being in Cairo was overlaid now by a sense that I was coming to some crossroads, an expectation that I might find answers here. In my brown leather handbag I had pictures of Sean. I held it tight to my side, as if by keeping it close to me I was holding onto him in some way, and that if I lost it, I would be saying a final goodbye to him.

  As we walked up the stairs I remembered the email from the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford, where Sean worked. It had asked me when I was planning to have his memorial. It was the third such email I’d received. I hadn’t answered any of them. But I’d have to when I got back to London. If the trip was an absurd wild goose chase, which a part of me knew it could be, I couldn’t deny the truth of Sean’s death any longer.

  I stopped as the glass doors opened to the reception area of the emergency department. Someone was screaming. Whether it was a woman, a man or a child I couldn’t tell. The screeching, like an animal in pain, filled my head and sent tingles of fear creeping up from my stomach.

  The driver, standing to my side, shook his head. “I told you this is a bad time, madam.”

  Two armed guards, like the ones at the entrance, stood in front of us. Their machine guns were slightly raised, as if they were expecting an attack at any moment.

  An urge to leave, to turn, to walk away, came over me. I resisted. My hand became a fist. If this was what was needed to make sure I had followed up every possibility of finding Sean, so be it. I’d spent days in Nuremberg searching for him. I’d even visited the local government office, which looked after the rivers, the Staatsamt für Flüsse, in Nuremberg, and I’d spent two hours with them going over where bodies were found after people fell into the Pegnitz.

  Then I’d spent a day walking the areas they showed me on a map, getting shouted at by Germans who didn’t like trespassers, and jumping fences to get closer to the river at every opportunity.

  A local police vehicle had eventually stopped me, as I came out of a pathway beside a warehouse. After checking out my story they’d dropped me back at my hotel, where I’d sat on my bed and cried, until the tears wouldn’t come any more.

  But I hadn’t given up. I wouldn’t now.

  The guards waved metal detecting wands over us. The screaming had changed. It was more a keen now, a wail of suffering. Eyes darted to the doors the wail was coming from. A line of people were waiting near a glass window. Yellow chairs to the left, bolted to the floor, were filled with people, mothers, children, men with prayer beads and small books they were reading from, a young couple in western clothes whispering to each other.

  The wail filled me with dread deep down inside, every time I breathed in.

  “Not there,” said the driver, as I went to join the line. He pointed at a door, marked ADMINISTRATION and with a series of Arabic squiggles above it. He pressed a buzzer by the door and we waited. I forced myself to breathe deep.

  “Is this security normal?” I said to the driver.

  “These days there is high security everywhere that deals with foreigners or members of the government.” He glanced towards the people waiting.

  I followed his gaze. Only then did I notice that some of the men waiting were standing stiffly, as if the families they were near weren’t their own. That they were guarding them.

  The door opened. A man in a loose cream suit looked at us, then beckoned us in. The room was tiny and had another door at the back. He pointed at two chairs, started speaking in Arabic. My driver answered, pointed at me, but didn’t sit.

  “Tell me your husband’s name,” said the administrator.

  “Sean Ryan.”

  “Please spell this name.”

  I did. He typed it slowly into a computer in front of him. Then he peered at the screen.

  “I am sorry. We have no record of such a patient. We cannot help you. Perhaps another hospital?” He smiled solicitously. There was a pause. He looked at the door, as if expecting me to leave.

  “But he was brought here by airplane a month ago, from Nuremberg. Please check agai
n. Perhaps he was registered under a different spelling.”

  He glanced at the computer screen. “We have no similar names on our registry. I checked the two private wards for foreigners and the general admissions.”

  I should have guessed. If anyone had brought him here, they wouldn’t have registered him in his own name.

  “May I know the name of the patient who came here from Germany by air ambulance a month ago?”

  His smile disappeared. “We do not give out patient information. I am sorry for your loss. But you must look somewhere else.” His hand waved fast between us in a dismissive gesture. He looked at my driver and started speaking fast in Arabic, glancing at me.

  Eventually the driver touched my shoulder. “We must go, madam.”

  I felt like brushing his hand away, but instead, I stood and walked out the door. In the reception area a group had just entered. Three women were carrying a girl of eight or nine towards the line of people at the glass window. They were shouting in Arabic and waving at the people to get out of their way, while holding the girl up by her armpits.

  The girl was dressed in a long black tunic, similar to what the women were wearing, but without the tight hair cover, just a thin black veil on top of her head. She also had nose piercings and a white band around her middle. She was slumped and behind her a trail of blood stood out against the cream marble floor.

  The women behind the glass window shouted back at them, then turned and screamed at someone behind her, who I couldn’t see.

  The driver was beside me. “This is a family matter, madam. Nothing to concern yourself with.”

  Inside my stomach the anxiety was turning to anger. I looked the driver in the eye, clenched my jaw.

  “I understand. Wait for me at the car. I will be there in a few minutes.” I nodded towards a door, which had a picture of a small black woman in a long dress on it. He took the hint.