But this was different. The children were murdered, their bodies mutilated in the most awful way. Now if the child had been rich, it would have been another matter.
The weather was unusually hot for this time of year. The nights brought little relief since the temperature barely cooled down at all. People behaved like dogs, barking at the moon, going mad in the sun. Fights broke out between brothers, between people who had been friends for years. The neighbourhood was like a tinderbox, ready to explode at any minute. Over all of this the angel seemed to float, as if biding its time, waiting for what was to come.
i
Dog Days
Chapter One
The offices of Blue Ibis Tours were perched on a concrete ledge that constituted the third floor of a crumbling building downtown, a stone’s throw from Al-Ubra Square, named after the old opera house that once stood on that spot until it was burned down in the riots of January 1952 and eventually replaced by a multi-storey car park. Blue Ibis flew tourists down to the Valley of the Kings on whirlwind tours of the hot and dusty resting places of long-dead pharaohs. They took them on camel treks into the Sinai Desert in the footsteps of Moses, before depositing them on a beach by the Red Sea where they could roast nicely for a few days and feed themselves on lavish buffets or dive in clear blue water among the coral reefs. The nights shook to the uninhibited pulse of dance music that provided them with the hedonistic lifestyles they associated with being on holiday. They ran them up and down the Nile in luxury boats with belly dancers and live folklore shows every evening. The food was all prepared to European standards so that nothing as inconvenient as indigestion might come between them and their once in a lifetime experience.
Makana learned most of this from a stack of brochures resting on the table next to the chair by the door, while he waited for Mr Farouk Faragalla to turn up for their appointment. He had plenty of time to study them because Mr Faragalla kept him waiting for over an hour. Makana was not in the best of moods to begin with, suspecting that he was wasting his time. He might even have left but for the fact that work had been slow, and that he was doing a favour for the son of an old friend.
Having gleaned a lifetime of information about the travel business, Makana tossed the brochure aside and kicked himself for being so soft-headed. Talal’s father had been a highly respected lawyer in the old days in Sudan, one of the few who dared to challenge the regime on a legal front, for which he paid a price. When his father died in prison, Talal and his mother fled to Cairo, where Makana had taken it upon himself to provide whatever help he could. Talal was a bright young man trying to make a life for himself in his adopted home. He wasn’t doing too badly and had turned himself into a respectable tourist guide and interpreter. He now unravelled the arcane mysteries of the pharaohs for eager visitors in Chinese and Spanish. Others did the same in Japanese, Russian and German. Curiosity about the Ancient Egyptians was unlimited. People came from all over the world. They saw the same mess that Makana saw, but they paid a lot more for it. Talal’s real problem was that he was a hopeless romantic. To begin with he secretly ached to be, of all things, a composer of classical music. It was an ambition Makana had not quite managed to grasp but he put it down to the boy having an Egyptian mother of a certain social class and no particular talents, channelling all her failed ambitions into her only son from an early age. His father’s death had brought mother and child closer together than was probably healthy, and so Talal was struggling. Being a tour guide was, as far as he was concerned, just a temporary station along the way to composing and conducting his own orchestra. Becoming an African Mozart seemed like an odd kind of ambition to Makana, but then again everyone needed a dream to hold on to.
Talal’s ambitions had become further entangled by his romantic involvement with Butheyna, commonly known to her friends as Bunny. Talal, being the muddle-headed and soft-hearted kid that he was, had convinced himself that his