Syndrome E

28

Michael Lebrun’s voice in Sharko’s phone sounded cold and high-handed.

“Where are you?”

“In a taxi. I’m going to buy some Egyptian whiskey for my boss and a few presents. Tell Nahed not to bother waiting for me at the hotel. I’ll meet her at the police station early this afternoon.”

“No, I’ll meet you there. Noureddine called me. He’s fit to be tied. You’d be well-advised to return the stolen photos to him as quickly as possible. And don’t expect him to open any more doors for you—that’s over.”

“Not a problem. Nothing more to be gained from that file anyway.”

“You can be certain I’ll be informing your superior about this.”

“Please do. He gets off on this kind of thing.”

A pause. Sharko leaned his head against the window. Far to the north, the colors of Cairo grew duller as the taxi approached the trash collectors’ quarter.

“Head feeling better?” asked Lebrun.

“What?”

“You had a headache yesterday.”

“Much better, thanks.”

“No more slipups before your flight this evening, Inspector.”

Sharko thought about the charred face of Atef Abd el-Aal, who was rotting pathetically in the sun.

“There won’t be any slipups. You can trust me.”

“Trust you? I’d sooner trust a rattlesnake.”

Lebrun hung up sharply. Those embassy guys were a sensitive bunch to say the least, attached to their protocols like good little do-bees. No relation to Sharko’s concept of how a cop’s job should be done.

The black taxicab halted in the middle of the road, simply because the road itself had stopped dead. No more pavement, just earth and loose rocks that only a pickup truck or tok-tok could make it through. The osta bil-fitra explained in approximate English that to get to the Salaam Center, you just had to hold your nose and walk straight ahead.

So Sharko started walking—and discovered the unimaginable. He plunged into the beating heart of Cairo’s trash cities. Blue and black garbage bags, swollen with heat and rot, rose so far that they hid the sky. Flocks of kites with dirty feathers flew overhead in precise circles. Heaps of rusted tins and metal drums agglutinated into makeshift shelters. Pigs and goats roamed freely, the way cars might circulate elsewhere. His nose buried in his shirt, Sharko creased his eyes. At the top of the heap, the trash bags began shimmying.

People. People lived in those mountains of refuse.

As he advanced through these entrails of despair, Sharko discovered the garbage people, the ones who picked through all this trash to squeeze out the last droplets of juice, the bit of cloth or paper that might earn them the slightest piastre. How many were living in this slum alone? A thousand? Two? Sharko thought of carrion insects, which took turns on corpses during the decomposition phase. The city’s trash arrived by the cartload; people ripped open the plastic bags like wild dogs, sorted out the paper, the metal, even the cotton from disposable diapers.

Swarms of children came running up to Sharko, clung to him, smiled at him despite everything, and made him understand, with hand gestures, that he should take their photo with his phone. They weren’t even asking for money, just a little attention. Moved, Sharko joined in the game. With every shot, the sooty urchins came over to see, then burst out laughing. A little girl, dirty as charcoal, took the inspector’s hand and stroked it gently. Even filth and poverty could not eliminate beauty. She wore clothes stitched together from old Portland cement sacks. Sharko knelt down and ran his hands through her greasy hair.

“You look like my daughter… You all look like her…”

He dug into his pockets, pulled out three-quarters of his change, and handed it out to the children. Hundreds of pounds—nothing for him, but masses and masses of sorted cloth for them. They disappeared down the variegated streets, fighting over the coins.

The cop was suffocating. He took off at a run straight ahead. Egypt had him by the throat. He thought of Paris, of the hectic lives people led, with their phones, their cars, their Ray-Bans pushed up on their scalps. People who pissed and moaned when their train arrived five minutes late.

A semblance of humanity seemed to reappear past the last towers of refuse. Sharko discovered buildings that resembled bottom-rung housing projects. Farther on stretched little stalls, actual dwellings, if one could call them that, with laundry hanging from the windows like the multicolored hordes of misery, and goats on the rooftops. Sharko even discovered a convent of nuns, the Coptic Orthodox Community of Sisters. Children clad in uniforms walked in groups through a courtyard, praying and singing. Here, too, despite everything, life asserted its right to exist.

He finally reached the Salaam Center hospital, a long, low grayish building that looked like a dispensary. Inside, one could feel the lack of resources, the struggle these shadow-people led against impossible odds. A cursory waiting room with basic furniture, secondhand chairs, small tables, and swinging doors with round portholes that looked like something out of Egyptian films from the forties. Boxes containing first aid kits, stenciled with the symbol of the French Red Cross, were stacked in the corners.

In English, Sharko spoke to a nun sitting in the waiting room. She was with a child, whose every breath produced a long wheeze. Going from person to person, the cop managed to reach the office of the hospital’s director, Taha Abou Zeid. The man’s features bespoke his Nubian ancestry: dark skin, thick lips, pencil mustache trimmed straight as a ruler, broad nose. He was typing on an old hand-me-down computer that wouldn’t have fetched ten euros in France. Sharko knocked on the open door.

“Excuse me?”

The man raised his eyes and answered in English.

“Yes?”

Sharko introduced himself. Chief inspector with the French police, on an investigation in Cairo. The doctor explained his own role. A devout Christian, he and the sisters of the Coptic convent managed to support a day care center, a hospital, a rehab center, and a maternity ward. The hospital’s main mission was to care for and teach hygiene to the Zabbaleen, the “garbage people,” who crammed by more than fifteen thousand into the buildings around the site, plus five thousand who ate and slept directly in the piles of trash.

Five thousand… Sharko thought of the little girl who had hugged him. For a moment he forgot his case, and asked instead:

“I saw those poor people in the streets of Cairo. Kids not even ten years old, who were scavenging for trash and putting it on donkey carts… Garbage collectors?”

“Yes. There are more than ten thousand of them, spread over the capital’s eight major slums. Early every morning, the men and the kids who are old enough head into Cairo in their carts to collect refuse. Their wives and the smaller children sort it out. Then the trash is sold to merchants, who themselves sell it to local recycling centers. Pigs eat the organic waste, and in this way ninety percent of the city’s garbage is either recycled or reused… A very ecological model, if it weren’t based on such poverty. Our mission, here at the center, is to remind these people that they’re still human.”

Sharko nodded toward a photo behind him.

“That looks like Sister Emmanuelle.”

“It is. The Salaam Center was founded in the 1970s. Salaam means ‘peace’ in Arabic.”

“Peace…”

Sharko finally took out a photo of one of the victims and showed it to the doctor.

“This photo is over fifteen years old. The girl, Boussaina Abderrahmane, came to this hospital.”

The doctor took the photo; his face darkened.

“Boussaina Abderrahmane. I’ve never forgotten her. Her body was discovered about three miles from here, in some sugarcane fields to the north. It was in…”

“March 1994.”

“March 1994… I remember now. It was such a shock. Boussaina Abderrahmane lived with her parents on the outskirts of Ezbet el-Nakhl, near the subway stop, on the other side of the shantytown. She went to Saint Mary’s, the Christian school, during the day, and earned a little money at night working in a jeweler’s studio. But tell me something—a policeman was already here, a long time ago. His name was…”

“Mahmoud Abd el-Aal.”

“That’s right. A policeman who was, how shall I put it… different from the others. How is he?”

“He died, also a long time ago. An accident.”

Sharko let him absorb the news, then continued:

“Can you tell me about her? Why had she come to your hospital?”

The doctor ran a hand over his wizened face. Sharko saw in him a worn-out man who nonetheless gave off an indefinable aura, the aura of goodness and courage.

“I’m going to try to explain this, assuming one can comprehend the incomprehensible.”

He stood up and began rummaging through thick files stacked up on old shelves.

“Nineteen ninety-three, ninety-four… Here, this is it.”

Everything had its place in this chaos. The doctor looked through the sheets of paper and handed the inspector a newspaper clipping. Sharko handed it back.

“I’m sorry, but I—”

“Oh, of course. Stupid of me. It’s an article from the newspaper al-Ahaly, dated April 1993. I’ll summarize it for you.”

Sharko’s brain was already ticking. April 1993, one year before the murders. The article took up the entire page, dotted with school class photos.

“Starting on March 31, 1993, and lasting several days, our country experienced a very strange occurrence. Around five thousand people, mostly young girls, underwent a curious phenomenon. For most of them, it took the form of a fainting spell in class that lasted a minute or two, preceded by a severe headache that came on without warning. They were immediately brought to the nearest hospital and given a thorough checkup. But since the hospital couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary, the girls were sent home.”

The doctor indicated a map of Egypt behind him, pointing out different regions with his finger.

“Some of the girls in the same classroom did not faint, but instead started exhibiting aggressive behavior. Screams, banging on the wall, unprovoked violence toward their schoolmates. The phenomenon started in the Beheira governorate, then in the blink of an eye reached fifteen of the nineteen governorates in Egypt. It struck quickly in cities like Sharkia, Kafr el-Sheikh, and Cairo. You could compare it to an earthquake, with the epicenter in Beheira and shockwaves that reached all the way to the capital.”

Sharko leaned both hands against the desk, his entire weight on his wrists.

“But what exactly are you talking about? Some kind of virus?”

“No, not a virus. Specialists tried to study the phenomenon. All sorts of rumors began circulating. Nationwide food poisoning, eating unripe beans, gas seepages from basements. A virus would have explained a lot, but the way it had spread didn’t correspond, and again the medical tests turned up nothing. So they soon shifted to something else. They started suspecting the Israelis of poisoning the water in the schools or of secret biological warfare. They even considered ‘aftereffects’ of the Iran-Iraq War. Nothing was too irrational. And still the medical tests revealed absolutely nothing. And nothing could explain why the phenomenon mainly affected girls.”

“So then what?”

“A group of psychiatrists suggested it was some kind of mass hysteria.”

“Mass hysteria?”

The doctor pointed to a book with an English title.

“I had a bit of an interest in such phenomena. They’ve been around for a long time. In most cases, a few dozen people in the same place would suddenly come down with feelings of unease, pain, nausea, pruritus, or skin eruptions. Such things were already being recorded a thousand years ago. In 1999, in a school in Belgium—not that far from you—some forty students were hospitalized after drinking lemonade, though there was no evidence of intoxication. In 2006, a hundred students in the Vietnamese province of Tien Giang came down with digestive illnesses. I could cite tons of cases. Gulf War Syndrome, which affected American GIs in 1991. A few weeks after they returned home, these soldiers began experiencing memory lapses, nausea, and fatigue. At first they suspected contamination by neurotoxins, but in that case, why would their wives and children, who had remained on American soil, have come down with the same symptoms, at the same time, and throughout the country? It was a veritable collective hysteria that cut across the United States.”

“Was Boussaina Abderrahmane affected by the thing that happened in Egypt?”

“Yes, along with six other girls in her class. In their case, it was the aggressive form of the hysteria that got them. Vulgar language, thrown chairs—according to their teacher, they had become like wild animals. They even attacked another girl, with whom they usually got along fine. Why should this hysteria sometimes unleash such violence? Unfortunately, we don’t know. Could it have been stress caused by overly strict teachers? The students’ poor living conditions? Their lack of education? Whatever the case, it happened. Truly happened.”

Sharko was seething. What he was hearing went beyond all understanding. Collective hysteria… He showed the photos of the other victims.

“And what about them? Did you know them too? Did Mahmoud Abd el-Aal ever mention them?”

“No. Don’t tell me that—”

“They were also killed, at the same time. Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

Sharko put the photos back in his pocket. It was likely the police had done everything possible to keep the news from getting into the press and causing widespread panic. For his part, Inspector Abd el-Aal had been professional and prudent, safeguarding his information and avoiding leaks. Taha Abou Zeid stared in front of him for a moment, then shook his head.

“The incident itself lasted only a short time, but Boussaina bore its traces forever. It was as if there had been a permanent change in her behavior. She experienced regular episodes of aggression. Her parents kept bringing her in, because she was pulling away from her schoolmates emotionally, growing more solitary, and clearly wasn’t happy. They chalked it up to adolescence, or her difficult environment. But… it was something else.”

“What?”

“Something psychological, which affected her deep down. But I didn’t really have the psychiatric skills to get to the bottom of it, and then she was murdered.”

“And what about her classmates?”

“The violent episodes stopped, and there were no particular problems afterward.”

Sharko let out a prolonged sigh. The farther he went, the more walls he ran up against. Could the killer have specifically targeted those girls affected by that mass hysteria? Could he have concentrated on the most extreme cases, the ones who’d remained symptomatic? And if so, why?

“Was this incident generally known?”

“Of course. It was taken up by every scientific community that had anything to do with social or psychiatric phenomena. It would have been hard for the Egyptian government to keep a lid on something that huge. There were even articles in the Washington Post and New York Times. Look in any archive—you’ll find them.”

So the killer could have found out about this from anywhere in the world. And by digging a little, reaching out to the right people, he could easily have gotten the addresses of the affected schools. Here, in Ezbet el-Nakhl. Then in the Shubra quarter, and Tora.

Little by little, the puzzle was taking shape. The killer had struck in areas far enough apart so that no pattern would emerge, and yet patterns were exactly what he was looking for. Why wait a year? So that the episodes wouldn’t be quite so present in people’s minds, and neither the police nor anyone else would make the connection. He had been careful to separate his crimes from the wave of mass folly, and when Mahmoud Abd el-Aal had finally established the link, they’d done away with him.

This case defied all logic. Sharko thought of the film Henebelle had found in Belgium, and also of the mysterious Canadian contact. Ramifications extended around the world like the tentacles of an octopus. Had foreigners come here to learn about the phenomenon and find the girls touched by the wave? The inspector decided to try his luck.

“I suppose Abd el-Aal must have already asked you, but… do you recall anyone coming to ask you about the mass hysteria or about Boussaina before she was killed?”

“It’s all so long ago.”

“I saw boxes of medicine when I came in, stamped with the symbol of the French Red Cross. Do you work with them? Do you come into contact with a lot of foreigners? Have any Frenchmen been here?”

“It’s funny… I can recall the Egyptian policeman so well now. I think he was like you. The same questions, the same persistence.”

“Just someone trying to do his job.”

The doctor gave a sad smile. He must not have smiled very often here.

“Those medicines come from all over, not just the French Red Cross. We’re an Egyptian aid organization dedicated to promoting communities, personal wellness, social justice, and health. We get support from all over, including the Red Crescent, the Red Cross, and many other humanitarian agencies. Thousands of people have been through here—volunteers, visitors, politicians, and curiosity-seekers. And if I remember correctly, 1994 was also the year of a major conference of the SIGN alliance, the Safe Injection Global Network. Thousands of researchers and scientists were pouring through the streets of Cairo.”

Sharko noted the information. Possibly the beginning of a lead. One could easily imagine a volunteer or humanitarian organization staff member on a trip to Cairo at the time of the murders. Easy for him to gain access to the hospitals and patients’ addresses. It might turn up something, but going back fifteen years through the morass of administrative red tape promised to be no cakewalk.

Everything was starting to fall into place. Back then, an Egyptian cop had sensed the involvement of a foreign killer, who had come to Egypt under cover of an association or conference. That explained the telegram to Interpol—Abd el-Aal was trying to find out if the killer had struck somewhere else in the world. The telegram must have triggered his execution. Which suggested that someone on the inside with access to the information—a policeman, soldier, or upper-level functionary—had been involved.

“I have one last request, Doctor. I have the names of the two other girls. I’d be very grateful if you could look up the hospitals that serve their neighborhoods, call them, and let me know if those two had been affected by the hysteria as well.”

“That will take all afternoon. I’m very busy, and—”

“Wouldn’t you like to be able to give the parents of those children an answer someday?”

After a pause, the doctor agreed, lips pressed tight. Sharko gave him his cell number.

“Your book about collective hysteria—can I borrow it? I’ll send it back from France very soon.”

The Nubian nodded. Sharko thanked him warmly.

Then he left him there, in the middle of that poverty that no one gave a damn about.