The Deceit

2

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 weren’t 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 wasn’t 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 that’s 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 Egypt’s 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.

He’d 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 Cairo’s 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 couldn’t 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 Victor’s heart. He wanted to help these people, shut away in their claustrophobic ghetto. Yet what could he do? He’d 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 gatekeeper’s 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 Victor’s 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.

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.