The Masks of Nyarlathotep: Egypt part 4

The Private Diary of John Jamil Zwaiter

Wednesday 8th October 2008 – mid-morning

After Abdullah had walked away, Samir took us on a tour of the Ibn Tulun mosque. It was a very big mosque and he was determined to give us an opportunity to be awed by every single part of it, so the tour took over an hour. We even had a quick look inside the khizanah at their treasury of mouldering manuscripts. Finally he ran out of things to show us, and Stephanie’s phone went off. It was the cat-obsessed member of the team, who wanted an attaché case and a document conservator brought to him in the Street of the Tanners in the old city. I’d hardly met him so far, but the others took his odd request very seriously.

We eventually got there by taxi, and the immediate obvious thing was all the cats hanging around the building, followed by the angry attitude of the tailor who evidently owned it. To calm him down, I began to negotiate for half a dozen shirts. The ones around his shop looked perfectly serviceable and after running around tombs, graves and bizarre dimensions I needed to restock with clothes of reasonable quality. Therefore I also let the tailor persuade me to be measured for a suit and discussed cloth and style.

As he talked and measured, I could hear people moving in the room overhead as the others went up the narrow staircase, the yowl of some cats, and then thuds and human yells. These brought the tailor out of his daydreams of a profitable afternoon, and he started to complain about his tenant rather than praise the quality of his work and fabrics.

Finally, after more running up and down the stairs and loud noises from above, Syed and Sandy brought a man downstairs, semi conscious with blood still oozing from deep scratches on his face and Dr McQueen in close attendance. This was obviously the tenant that the tailor deplored, and also the man who needed an attaché case and document conservator. Fatima appeared carrying a case and boxes as carefully as if they were her sick child. I gave the tailor a deposit, agreeing that the shirts and a suit should be ready for a final fitting next week, and followed them out.

There were too many of us to fit into the landcruiser. After a short discussion, centring on the fact that we had to take the injured man (Jan) from the house and needed somewhere safe to put him that was inaccessible to cats, I flagged down a taxi so Edward and I could go back to the Embassy and then rejoin the others at the Museum.

At the Embassy I reported to Brian Wherhan, the Ambassador’s aide and my line manager who had assigned me as liaison to the UK team. He was in his office, which was useful because I wanted to speak to him in confidence. I was now sure that he must have known these people were not routine ‘spooks’, and I hoped he’d solve the current problem. I explained that the people to whom he’d assigned me needed accommodation that was secure and quiet but discreet for a few days. We looked at each other, and I continued with the idea of a boat on the Nile. His expression changed, and he reached for the desk phone. I could hear that he was asking about the Isis. Then Brian told me,

“You can have the Isis for a week, then the Ambassador needs her. She’s a 7-berth cruiser on the Nile. You can collect the keys and access card from my secretary, and she’ll also give you a letter of authority. You won’t want the usual crew, I imagine, but that squaddie attached to the group is SBS. The Isis had better stay immaculate, so don’t let him get carried away. I need you to report to me each day how things are going.”

He’d agreed! I was so relieved that I almost missed what he said next. He had reached under his desk to bring out a stout box.

“These dispatches have arrived for Dr McQueen, Mr Thorne and Mr Wiltshire. Please take them with you.”

I thanked him, lifted the box, which was surprisingly heavy, and left, collecting the authorisation documents on my way out. A taxi took me to the museum and I was directed to Dr Ali Khafour’s office, where they were immersed in documents and scrolls. I told them that we had the use of the Isis and gave them the parcels. These turned out to contain old books. They looked at the covers but showed no interest in reading them.

We discussed what to do next and, much against my better judgement, I agreed to stay in Cairo with Sandy and look for Omar Shafik, the corrupt policeman who worked for Najir to supply ancient artefacts to the Carlyle expedition. I gave them the documents for the Isis so they could take Jan to the boat and sail up the Nile, imploring them not to damage the boat. They would be gone for 2 days.

Thursday 9^th October

We started in the Street of the Jackals, where Najir had had his shop, and asked in cafés and shops whether anyone knew Omar Shafik. No-one knew him, or had ever heard of him. He had been active in the area in 2002-3, so they could be telling us the truth. Hitting this dead end, we went back to the Embassy, and contacted the Interior police. I was rapidly told that the Omar Shafik we wanted had retired from the Interior police in 2006 to be a private detective and I was given his current address and phone number. His office was in a moderately seedy part of Cairo.

Friday 10^th October

We headed there by taxi. Omar Shafik had a corner office and no secretary. He was wearing a rumpled cream suit, but with sweat-stains under the arms like a Hollywood bad guy. He rapidly assessed us and his situation, and demanded £E2000 for his memories of Farad Najir. For the sake of appearance I tried to haggle his price down, but he would not budge. I guessed he knew too much about UK ways and was a good judge of expensive suits.

He had indeed known the petty criminal Farad Najir who dealt in illicit sales of antiquities. Shafik implied that they had had a low-key but mutually profitable relationship through work put each other’s way. He had also known about Rifaat Abaza, who lived alone in a villa in an exclusive area in the south of Cairo. It surprised me that a wealthy Egyptian man would not have family or servants to look after the house for him. Shafik said that the only servants were ones hired on occasions when Abaza entertained wealthy and influential people, including President Mubarak and the British Ambassador, at his home. Najir had had an interest in Abaza, wanting to know when he was definitely away from home. Shafik observed that he was always away at the dark of the moon.

Shafik explained that Najir wanted him to follow Abaza, and he tried but lost him at the Sphinx where he had met some disreputable looking men after the light show finished about 1 am, but he had lost them in the dark as they walked between the paws of the statue. For an additional £E500 fee he told us that he went back to the Sphinx weeks later, after Najir was dead. He’d seen the perfunctory autopsy report and was sorry the man had died. He had looked carefully around the paws, but could not see how the men had vanished from his sight; there were no doors, pits or any other places for concealment. Shafik informed us that in recent photos Abaza had darker hair and was still following the same life-style. At the next dark of the moon (28^th October) Shafik presumed that Abaza would go away from his home as usual. I gave him a final £E500 - to make a point about the money to him - and we left.

We took a taxi to the Sphinx and bought tickets to visit like any tourists and joined the queue that wound slowly along the route to this iconic monument. I was struck yet again by how hotels and houses had been allowed so close to the site, but never appeared in carefully angled photographs.

Once the paws of the Sphinx came into view we immediately saw a stele between them. We learnt from the guide that the stele was called the Dream Stele, erected at this site by Pharaoh Thutmosis IV of the 18th Dynasty, the great-great grandfather of Tutankhamun from a 6th Dynasty stone taken from a nearby massaba. He did this after he dreamt that the Sphinx told him that she would make him Pharaoh if he removed the sand covering her. We soon wondered whether the stele would, in the right conditions, give us access to a weird extradimensional space - and if that was how Abaza and his ruffians had vanished.

After this visit I phoned the boat to check all was OK, and it was. Sandy and I therefore decided to reconnoitre Abaza’s mansion by taxi. It was definitely a very nice house in a very nice part of Cairo. The architecture was more restrained, and therefore to our eyes more tasteful and impressive, than the showy styles often adopted by the rich in the Arab world. We had agreed that it would not be prudent to do anything else on this visit to the house, so we ended up going back to my flat and playing video games. For an older man, Sandy was surprisingly good.