Chicago

Chapter 25

Ever since General Safwat Shakir was a student at the police academy, his instructors predicted that he would have a brilliant future because of the strength of his personality, his precision, and his mental and physical capabilities. After graduation he worked as an assistant in the Azbakiya secret detective division and was able, despite his young age, to greatly optimize the way the system there worked. Back then, the work of a detective simply consisted of arresting suspects and torturing them until they confessed. Methods of torture were conventional: suspects were beaten, bastinadoed, or flogged with oversize whips. If a suspect insisted on denying the charges, he would be violated by the insertion of a thick stick up his anus, the putting out of cigarettes on his penis, or the administering of electric shocks to his naked body. Torture continued until the suspect gave in and confessed to what he was accused of. Those conventional methods were useful, of course, but they resulted in the death of many suspects, which led to some embarrassing situations. A detective would then have one of two options: either to obtain a medical report indicating that the suspect had died as a result of a sudden drop in blood circulation, then order him to be buried secretly after threatening his family with detention and torture if they opened their mouths, or to order the plainclothesmen to throw the suspect’s body from the police station balcony, then write a report afterward indicating that he had committed suicide.

The young officer Safwat Shakir, after obtaining his supervisor’s permission, introduced a new protocol: instead of beatings and electric shocks, he would arrest the suspect’s wife (his mother or sister if he was a bachelor); then he would order his men to take off the woman’s clothes, one item at a time until she was naked, then they would begin to fondle her body in front of her husband, who would soon collapse and confess to whatever he was asked to confess. The new protocol led to brilliant results, and bringing cases to closure took half the customary time, so much so that the head of the Azbakiya precinct, for several years in a row, received letters of thanks from the minister of the interior, commending the precinct for its productivity and precision. Only one time was there a problem: one of the suspects couldn’t stand seeing his old mother naked, with the policemen fondling her private parts. He let loose a loud, rasping scream, as if he were on fire. Then he lost consciousness and later it turned out he had become a hemiplegic as a result. Safwat Shakir, as usual, did not lose his composure and dealt with the situation wisely. He ordered the suspect moved to the hospital and obtained a medical report stating that the detainee had hypertension and had suffered a clot in the brain. Apart from that fleeting incident, the new protocol achieved such brilliant success that other precincts adopted it. News of Safwat Shakir’s genius reverberated so strongly throughout the halls of the ministry that he was transferred to the State Secret Security detective division. There he used his method with political dissidents, achieving the same rate of success, which made his supervisors rotate him to different governorates. With repetition and experience Safwat Shakir finessed his method and added to it a theatrical dimension that made it more effective. So when a suspect’s wife or mother was stripped naked, he would scrutinize her in a leisurely fashion and tell the suspect in a neutral tone, “Look at that! Your wife is very beautiful. Isn’t it a shame that you leave her starved for sex, while you worry about politics?” Or he would say, “True, your mother is old, but when we took off her clothes and saw her naked, we discovered that she’d still be good in bed!”

The detainee might then cry or scream, cursing or begging for mercy. Safwat, like veteran stage actors, had learned how to remain silent until the suspect was through with his reaction. He would wait a moment then say in a soft voice that would reverberate in the detainee’s ears like evil suggestions hissed by Satan, “That’s my last offer. You either agree to talk or I’ll let the policemen violate your wife before your eyes. You should thank me — I’ll be offering you the chance to watch a pornographic movie for free.”

For many years, not a single detainee stood his ground vis-a-vis Safwat Shakir. Many detainees confessed to belonging to several organizations at the same time or signed blank sheets of paper that Safwat Bey later filled in to his heart’s content with any confession he wanted.

In addition to his rare efficiency, Safwat Shakir was also well known for encouraging younger officers. He taught them patiently, and he sincerely tried to make them benefit from his experience. He would pick up a pen and a sheet of paper and draw a sloping graph that began from a high point and stayed in a straight horizontal line for some distance then plummeted fast to zero. He would explain to his students, the young officers, “This graph represents the resistance of the detainees: you’ll notice from the drawing that the resistance always starts at a high point and remains constant for a while then suddenly collapses at a certain point. The efficient officer will bring about that point of collapse quickly. Don’t rely on beating only: after a certain point of physical pain, the detainee might lose sensation. As for electric shocks, they might kill the detainee, creating an unnecessary problem. Try my way and you’ll appreciate it. The most hardened and most vicious detainee cannot bear to see his wife or mother violated in front of his own eyes.”

Safwat Shakir stayed in State Security until he made the rank of colonel, and then the state wanted to utilize his genius in a new field. So he was transferred to General Intelligence, where the modus operandi was different, of course. His new job consisted of keeping spy rings under surveillance, following and documenting public opinions, and controlling and coordinating agents of the service — university professors, media personalities and executives, party and government officials — and assigning them specific tasks.

General Intelligence in its long and eventful history would, however, remember one of Safwat Shakir’s greatest feats. Back at the time of strong opposition to the Egyptian regime by Egyptian intellectuals living in Paris, led by a well-known writer who enjoyed respect in French circles, Safwat Shakir asked the head of General Intelligence to give him a free hand in the operation to deal with the situation. Permission was granted and Shakir went to Paris. After getting permission from French intelligence, he hired a prostitute for a quarter million francs. He trained her and she started a relationship with the Egyptian author. She slipped him a sleeping pill in his whiskey then called Safwat and his men, who injected him with a strong drug and shipped him in a box that they had carefully prepared. The author regained consciousness a few hours later and found himself in intelligence headquarters in Heliopolis. It was a brilliant coup; French investigations led nowhere, so the incident was attributed to person or persons unknown. As for Egyptian dissidents, their voices were muffled for a long time afterward for fear of a similar fate.

In fact, recording all of General Safwat Shakir’s professional achievements would require another lengthy book. He kept going from one success to the next until he was appointed counselor (the official and publicly announced title of the head intelligence officer in Egyptian embassies) in Accra, Tokyo, and finally in the most important capital for the Egyptian regime: Washington. He knew quite well that that post was the last stepping-stone to glory, and he worked extraordinarily hard and proved quite successful at it. He saw the forthcoming visit by the president as the chance of a lifetime: if the president saw him and liked him he would appoint him in the next cabinet as minister of the interior or foreign minister or even minister of international cooperation. But if he made a single mistake in preparing for the visit, he would be pensioned off in the next round of appointments and promotions.

Have we learned everything about Safwat Shakir? There are still two aspects of his life that we have not touched upon: power and women. After many years in which he had absolute power over and control of the destiny of thousands upon thousands of detainees, he acquired a mysterious, well-established, instinctive power that would be hard to explain fully. The nature of his job enabled him to see people at their weakest, made it possible for him to penetrate the most private secrets between a man and his wife, and taught him to crush the manhood of the strongest fighters, to make them prostrate themselves in tears, begging him, kissing his feet so he wouldn’t order their wives to be violated before their very eyes. That deep-rooted, perverse human experience gave him an extraordinary power over those around him. It was as if he had broken the bounds of that invisible domain where all humans moved, acquiring a superhuman authority that no one could withstand. He no longer needed to speak much, and there was nothing that surprised him or made him hesitate anymore. To that should be added his stonelike features, hard chiseled as if they represent implacable fate; his strong, terrifying look that penetrates the heart; his dignified, always unhurried movements that are controlled by a rhythm all their own and which make light of any tension around him; his few words, which he delivers slowly and distinctly; and his very presence, which in itself creates a state of impenetrable anxiety around him. All of those elements magnify his power to the utmost, to godlike dimensions. When he makes a decision, it is irreversible, carrying out the dictates of fate without being subject to them. He decides, with one word or gesture, the destiny of a whole family for several generations to come. The stupendous power that he has would impel one to wonder: Can our wishes change the course of events? If we really and strongly wish for something, can we make it happen somehow? If that were true, then Safwat Shakir’s power is caused primarily by his very strong awareness of it, as evidenced by the fact that he instantly imposes his will on those who do not know his position.

That power took a different mode with women, the love of whom Shakir inherited from his grandfathers. (Most men in his family had two or more women at the same time as either wives or mistresses.) He remembered from his childhood many quarrels between his mother and father because of his relations with other women. He even remembered that, as a student at the police academy, he had had a relationship with a servant in their house. When he slept with her every Thursday upon his return from spending the evening with his friends, he felt that her body was already fulfilled and content, which created in his mind a strong suspicion, supported by other indications, that she was sleeping with both him and his father. The wild sexual vigor, in both desire and performance, that Safwat Shakir maintained despite being fifty-five, was not due only to heredity but also to the nature of his work. For those who live on the edge of danger — such as soldiers in combat, bullfighters, and gangsters on the run — have burning, insatiable sexual desires, as if they voraciously partake of that pleasure because they might lose it (together with their lives) at any moment, or as if by sexual activity they intensify their awareness of every moment of their threatened lives.

One of Safwat Shakir’s major peculiarities was the way he went about pursuing and having his way with women. After years of detention without trial, the wife of a detained man would lose hope that her husband would be freed and would devote all her efforts to improving his conditions as much as possible, or getting him transferred to a nearby detention center, or getting medications to him regularly. Under such circumstances, a detainee’s wife would have no choice but to beg the State Security officers, who alone would be able to make the lives of their husbands less miserable. Thus one of the familiar scenes in front of State Security headquarters would be that of a crowd of women, clad in black, standing since the early morning in front of the gate, waiting for hours in silence or chatting in low voices or crying, until finally they would be let in. When that happened, they’d begin passionate supplications accompanied by crying and begging the officers to agree to their modest requests for their husbands’ well-being. The officers usually looked upon these requests coldly and in a bored, almost exasperated manner. Most of the time they rejected them and threatened the women with being detained and tortured themselves if they didn’t leave. Only if the detainee’s wife was beautiful would the treatment be different: they would tell her to meet Safwat Bey Shakir. When they said that, their eyes would gleam with a hidden sarcastic meaning. They knew that their boss loved women and they made jokes about it secretly among themselves, but they still sent him the beautiful ones to curry favor with him. Thus a detainee’s beautiful wife would enter Safwat Shakir’s office, stumbling over her fear and misery. From the first glance he would be able to tell what kind of woman she was and whether she would accept or refuse. He would evaluate her response with one long, unhurried look, scrutinizing her body with obvious lust and at the same time measuring her reaction. The woman would stand in front of him in anguish, complaining, crying, and begging him to grant her requests. If Safwat Shakir realized from his experience that she would say no, he would send her papers back to his underlings to take the necessary measures. But if he felt she was available, he would grant her requests immediately. In the midst of the thanks and prayers on the woman’s part, Safwat Shakir would once again feast his eyes on her charms and say slowly, “You’re a gorgeous girl. How can you do without?”

That sudden and open transition would be necessary to rule out the last possibility of a wrong inference. If the woman smiled or resorted to embarrassed silence without anger or even whispered in a soft but animated voice, he would be sure that the coast was clear, so he would talk explicitly about sex. At the end of the conversation he would take a piece of paper and write the address of his apartment on Shawarbi Street, then mutter in a businesslike manner, “Tomorrow, at five o’clock, I’ll wait for you at this address.”

It never happened that the woman didn’t keep the appointment. There were numerous reasons for that: a detainee’s wife, ultimately, was a human being with her desires preying on her nerves with no hope of satisfying them in the near future. It might satisfy her to know, deep down, that a high-ranking officer like Safwat Shakir would want her, which meant that he had preferred her, the poor woman, to women of high society available to him. Besides, by accepting the relationship with Safwat Shakir she would be securing for her husband better conditions in detention. The acquiescence of detainees’ wives, however, could be attributed to a more profound cause, related to the graph that Shakir drew to teach his young officer students. A woman, broken by poverty and different ordeals, exhausted by fighting on more than one front, one who had given up on resuming a normal life, one who was ganged up on by deprivation, men’s lust, and her miserable daily struggle to feed her children, would be like a besieged, exhausted soldier just a few moments before surrender. Such a woman would be driven by a deep desire to fall. Yes, falling would almost bring her relief because it would suppress forever the inner conflict that had often tormented her. Now she would be indeed a fallen woman; there was no longer any room for hesitation, thinking, or resistance. As soon as she entered the apartment, Safwat Shakir would take her to bed, and every time he would discover that, from the way she had taken care of her intimate details, she had expected and prepared for it. Strangely enough, he never kissed them and often had intercourse with them without a single word. He would fondle their bodies, already burning with desire to begin with, igniting them further to insane degrees, then at a moment that he knew by intuition, like a bullfighter brandishing his sword to finish off his animal opponent, Safwat Shakir would penetrate the women with extreme violence, devoid of any tenderness or kindness, mercilessly. He would penetrate her over and over again as if he were whipping her, as he had done to her husband earlier. She would scream as if crying for help, and in her screams her pleasure would be mixed with pain, or maybe the pleasure resulted from the pain. Roughing her up like that brought her a profound pleasure arising not from the sex but from her being liberated for good from her dignity. Humiliating her by sleeping with her, while despising her, took his contempt to the lowest depths because she deserved it: she was now a fallen woman who did not deserve to be treated tenderly or with respect; he took her as fallen women were usually taken. Once such a woman climaxed, she would cling to Shakir; she never dared to kiss him (for a kiss implied parity), but she would embrace him, cleave to his body, feeling it, smelling and sometimes licking it with her tongue. She’d often bend and kiss his hand as he remained stretched out, relaxed, smoking, his mind far away as if he were a god indifferently receiving offerings from his worshippers.

GENERAL SAFWAT SHAKIR WAS NOW sitting in his office in the Egyptian embassy in Washington, busily reading security reports that he had just received from Cairo. The office was quiet until the silence was broken by the voice of his secretary, Hasan, over the intercom. “Sorry to disturb you, sir.”

“I said I didn’t want any calls.”

“It’s Dr. Ahmad Danana, who came from Chicago to see you, sir. He assures me it’s urgent and important.” Safwat Shakir was silent for a moment then said in a gruff voice, “Let him in.”

After a moment, Danana rushed into the room, panting and sweating profusely, as if he had run all the way from Chicago. He threw himself onto the sofa facing the desk and said in a hoarse voice, as if crying for help, “Sorry to bother Your Excellency, but there’s a catastrophe, sir. A catastrophe.”

Safwat Shakir kept watching him in silence as Danana continued in a shaking voice, “Dr. Dennis Baker, my doctoral dissertation advisor, has accused me of forging the results of my research and has sent me up for investigation.”

Safwat Shakir remained silent. He took out a cigarette from the golden cigarette case open in front of him, lit it slowly, then took a drag and kept staring at Danana, who pleaded in a prayerful voice, “If the investigation finds me guilty, they will expel me.”

Safwat answered slowly, piercing him with a glance like a bullet, “And what do you want me to do?”

“My future will be ruined, sir. They’ll kick me out of the university.”

“And who told you to make up the results of the research?”

“I didn’t make them up, sir. I had been late doing my research as a result of the assignments Your Excellency gave me. Dr. Baker kept pressuring me to give him results. So I told myself I’d give him the results and then I’d take my time doing the experiments.”

“You fool! Didn’t it occur to you that he would review the results?”

“In other dissertations he frequently just reviewed the numbers. And he was satisfied with the numbers I submitted to him,” Danana mumbled. He then went on talking in a soft voice as if to himself, “It almost passed, but, unfortunately for me, he wanted to apply a new idea to the research, so he examined my slides and discovered what I had done.”

Safwat Shakir remained silent and Danana began to beg again, “I beseech you, Safwat Bey, I’ve been serving the state since I was a college student. I have never been lazy and I’ve never hesitated to carry out what you’ve ordered me to do. Don’t I deserve that you stand by me during this ordeal?”

“We don’t stand by forgers.”

“I implore you, sir.”

“If the university doesn’t expel you, we will. You cannot keep your position when you’re a forger.”

Danana opened his mouth to say something, but his face trembled and he started to weep. “All this hard work for nothing! All those nights I burned the midnight oil, for what? For a scandal and expulsion?”

“Shut up,” Safwat, visibly annoyed, shouted at him. Danana took that as a slight glimmer of hope, so he persisted anew. “I beseech you for the memory of your parents, may God have mercy on their souls. Please, Safwat Bey, you are my boss and my professor and I am your disciple. You have every right to punish me when I make a mistake. Do anything you want to me, Your Excellency, but don’t abandon me.”

Perhaps that was what Safwat had been waiting for. He sat back in his comfortable chair, raised his head, and kept staring at the ceiling in silence until he said, “I’ll help you. Not for your own sake, but for the sake of your unfortunate wife.”

“May God give you long life, sir.”

“When is the investigation?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Go to them.”

“I could get a letter from a doctor and postpone it for a week.”

“No. Go tomorrow as they want you to.”

“Sir, Dr. Baker is well respected in the department and they will definitely expel me.”

“Let them expel you. They have to send us your expulsion decision. We can bury the decision here and the educational bureau will not know about it.”

“May God give you long life, sir, but I’d no longer be enrolled.”

“Once things calm down, I’ll try to get you enrolled in another university.”

That was more than Danana had hoped for. He kept staring at his master’s face then said in a hesitant voice, “I’ll consider that a promise from you, sir.”

Safwat shot him a disapproving look that almost transfixed him in his place, and then said in a bored tone of voice, “Go back now to Chicago and finish the tasks I assigned to you. Our revered president’s visit is drawing near and we don’t have much time.”

Danana tried to start a spiel, however short, of thanks and gratitude, but Safwat Shakir once again started reading the reports scattered on the desk in front of him and said, “Don’t take up my time. I have a lot of work to do.”

Danana sighed and his features relaxed. He turned to leave, but before he reached the door, Safwat’s voice, in a different tone, stopped him. “By the way, I have a request for you.”

“I am at your disposal, sir, upon my life.”