The Lucifer Gospel

5

They rode through the smoky fog of pollution along the Corniche El Nil, then turned away from the river and the Island of Rhoda along the wide and almost empty Salah Salim highway. To the right was vacant waste ground and abandoned building sites; to the left was Telal Zenhom, a district ravaged by the massive earthquake in 1992. It was all like some sort of arid Blade Runner. Heavy electrical cables ran like thick black snakes across rooftops and TV antennas drooped from minarets.

They turned off Salah Salim at the Al-Qadiraya exit and slowed as they moved steadily deeper into the intricate web of roads and alleys that made up the crumbling, foul-smelling necropolis. Within seconds Finn was completely disoriented, lost in a sea of tombs and tombstones.

They stopped. Ahead of them was a broad circular mosque, teardrop-shaped windows exquisitely carved into the old white stone. To one side of the mosque, built on the roof of a large, thick-walled death house, was a ramshackle assembly of crates and boxes, looking more like a chicken coop than a place suitable for human habitation. Finn climbed off the motorcycle and slid her helmet off. Instantly her eyes began to sting. Here the pollution was even heavier, made worse by a thick, clinging fog of gray-white dust that began to clog her nose and mouth. Hilts reached into the pouch at his waist, took out a surgical mask and handed it to her. She slipped it on gratefully.

Hilts dug out a second mask and put it on. “Living in Cairo is the equivalent of smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day.”

“Camels?” Finn responded.

“Very funny. Keep the mask on.” He clipped his helmet onto the rear carrier rack and did the same with Finn’s. A crowd of children, all boys of varying sizes and ages, had gathered around them. They stared silently at the two Americans.

“What do they want?” Finn asked.

“Anything you’ve got,” Hilts replied. “They’re beggars.”

But these kids weren’t the jostling innocent ragamuffins she had seen in movies, hands outstretched for a few coins. This was a feral pack of young wolves, eyes dark and full of hate for anyone who had more than them, which was virtually anyone else in the world. One of them, the tallest, wore a soiled skullcap, a torn pair of shorts, and a faded pink “Feelin’ Lucky” Care Bears T-shirt. Like everything else he was covered with a layer of thin, streaked gray dust. He had one hand thrust deeply into the pocket of his shorts. In the other hand he carried a fist-sized chunk of rubble.

“Shu ismaq?” asked Hilts, taking a step forward.

“Baqir,” the boy replied, hefting the rock.

“Lovely,” muttered Hilts.

“What?”

“Baqir is his name. It means ‘to rip open’ in Arabic.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“I could always let them kidnap you, then run like hell.”

“I’m serious,” said Finn.

“So am I,” said Hilts, but she could see him smiling behind the mask. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and flipped two coins at the boy, one after the other. He caught them both, but he had to drop the rock to manage it. Hilts spoke to him again in Arabic and the boy nodded. “Shukran,” Hilts said, bowing slightly. “That’s thank you,” he added for Finn’s benefit. “A good word to remember. That and saadni!”

“What does sadnii mean?” Finn asked, struggling with the pronunciation.

“Help me!”

Hilts opened the saddlebag slung across the rear baggage rack and took out an identical pair of old and well-used Nikon F3s. He slung the cameras over his shoulder, then took Finn by the elbow and led her away from the crowd of boys, who now surrounded the motorcycle.

“You’re just leaving the bike there?” Finn asked, startled.

“I gave him fifty piastre. That’s about a dime. I promised him five pounds if he watched it until we got back. That’s about a buck. More than he earns in a whole day on the streets unless he’s a tourist sariq-a pickpocket.”

“You trust him?”

“I put the fear of god into him. He knows who the bike belongs to.”

“And that would be who?”

“A friend of mine who operates a dealership on Zamalek, that’s the big island in the middle of the Nile you can see from your hotel balcony. She has six brothers.”

“Who are they?” Finn asked, already seeing where the conversation was going.

“Boukoloi,” said Hilts. “Bandits. The most powerful gang of bandits in Cairo.”

“Bandits. Sounds romantic.”

“Depends on how you look at it. There’s not a lot of violent crime in Egypt if you don’t count traffic accidents, but Cairo is a major transit point for heroin from Southeast Asia on its way to Europe and the States. Conflict diamonds come through here out of Sierra Leone to Antwerp. The Nigerians use Cairo as a money laundry on a huge scale. The software piracy rate is almost seventy percent. On top of that there’s a billion-dollar-a-year industry in the smuggling of stolen artifacts, not to mention the fifty thousand pickpockets and the hundred thousand petty thieves.”

“So our friend Baqir back there knows who these boukoloi are?”

“He’s probably on the payroll. His parents are most likely funeral merchants, if he has parents.”

“What’s a funeral merchant?”

“A new age grave robber. Somebody, a door-man, a cop, a neighbor hears about someone dying and they get in touch with a funeral merchant. A gang of kids like Baqir go to wherever the person lived and strip the place clean, sometimes before the next of kin has been notified. Most of the clothes for sale in the suqs, the markets here, have come off dead bodies.”

“Gross.”

“The Muslims have a closer relationship with their dead than Christians do. They revere their ancestors, even love them. They don’t try to bury them and forget them. Not to mention the fact that it’s practical.” They stopped at a rough stall made by hanging a piece of ragged cloth between two granite crypts. A veiled woman squatted in the dust, a selection of clothes in front of her. Hilts spoke to her briefly, then used one of the Nikons to take her photograph. He knelt down and picked up a fleece-lined shirt that looked almost brand-new. He asked the veiled woman the price and she told him. “A pound,” he said to Finn. “Twenty cents. I could barter with her and get it for half that.”

Finn sniffed the shirt. It had a sickly sweet odor. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Sometimes they don’t get to the dead people for a day or two. He was probably wearing it when he died.”

“Not your size,” said Finn. Hilts put the shirt down and they moved on, making their way deeper and deeper into the labyrinth. The crowds got denser and denser as they continued, the swirling dust half-blinding and the continuous babbling crush of noise assaulting their ears.

There were piles of broken toys, smashed remote controls, old plastic containers, typewriters, VCRs, and dented hubcaps. The larger used clothing vendors had their goods piled into mountains laid out on sheets of grimy plastic. Almost everything looked American, and people pored over the heaps of clothing like flies holding up blouses, underwear, pants, ties, shorts, T-shirts, and socks, haggling for price, sometimes buying, most often moving on.

“You know those big bins of used clothes you see in some city neighborhoods, usually at a strip mall?” Hilts asked. Finn nodded. “This is where they wind up. The so-called charities you think you’re giving stuff to sell it by the ton to third world brokers, and they sell it to people like this.”

A ragged man sitting on a stool in front of a display of shoes called out in surprisingly good English, yelling to make himself heard over the never-ending din, “American lady! Julia Roberts! I have shoes for you.”

Finn paused. The shoes were all men’s. The vendor held one up. It looked like a size-twelve side-zipped suede boot from the sixties. There was only one. “There’s only one,” she pointed out.

The vendor held up another shoe. A much smaller loafer. “They are both black.” The man smiled. His teeth were the color of wet cigarette butts.

“But they don’t match.”

“I give you deal. Half price for one,” the would-be shoe salesman cackled. “I love you, Miss Julia Roberts!” he called after them.

They turned a corner and went down a short alley to another main pathway between the plaster tombs and rows of raised sarcophagi.

“The animal market,” said Hilts. “It can get pretty ugly here.”

There was a sudden gust of wind and Finn squinted into the small hurricane of blowing dust. She blinked and cleared her throat and blinked again, her eyes watering. She smelled the market before she saw it, a rank sweet scent of death and offal that cut through the ever-present stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage that flowed along the narrow gutters. She heard the market as well, a mad mixture of sheep and goats and snuffling pigs and crowing roosters. Dogs barked and monkeys chattered.

A woman brushed by her carrying a large blue crate that read “Wal-Mart” on the side. Finn glanced at the woman’s wares and gagged. The bin was filled with animal organs and intestines swimming in a soup of blood and other fluids. Off to the side she saw a huge cage of desert tortoises piled one on top of the other, hundreds of them, the ones on the bottom crushed by the weight of those above.

Beside that was an old glass-sided display cabinet full of snakes, some as thick as an infant’s arm, motionless, stunned by the heat and haze and noise, far from their natural habitats far down the Nile. A little farther on Finn looked down a narrow alley and saw children playing some sort of jumping game around a scarecrow figure standing rooted to a patch of weeds. The scarecrow was dressed in a dark blue velvet smoking jacket and the striped pants from an old morning suit. On its head was a dreadlock wig, and on the wig an old tweed cap. Looking closer Finn saw that the clothes were hanging on a desiccated corpse wired to a metal pole, the dirt-brown creature’s skeleton still held together by dried ropes of leathery tendon and muscle. The face of the scarecrow was black and rotted. Finn looked away.

“You okay?” Hilts asked.

Finn swallowed the taste of bile in the back of her throat then nodded. “I’m fine,” she answered.

Beyond the meat market, in a courtyard bounded by three plain crypts, was a taxidermy display with stuffed versions of some of the same animals they’d seen a few yards away, diabolical with glass eyes stripped from dolls, evil grins filled with bared teeth and fangs, strange hybrids, geese with fox ears, dogs with grafted monkey heads, bright parrots with outstretched eagles’ wings.

“Who buys this stuff?”

“In a city as large as this there’s a buyer for everything,” Hilts said and shrugged. He grinned. “New York with pyramids.” The crowd was pressing them forward like pieces of driftwood on the tide, but Hilts steadily moved them off to one side.

“Where to now?” Finn asked.

“There,” he answered, pointing. Down an alley she could see yet another opening and more piles of merchandise. Most of it appeared to be military-gas masks, empty mortar shells, ancient range finders, at least a hundred pair of World War Two desert boots, gasoline cans, even a small cannon, its muzzle shattered, a relic of some long-forgotten battle.

Hilts slipped into the narrow alley ahead of Finn, separated from her for a moment. A gray-haired beggar, burnt brown by the sun, hopped in front of her, staggering on a bright pink artificial leg, his hand outstretched, screaming into her face in unintelligible Arabic, his face twisted into a furious mask. She backed away, but there was no place to move, the crowd behind shoving her out of the way, forcing her down an even narrower side passage. Suddenly Hilts was gone and she was alone.