Following Hilts’s advice about local customs, Finn had dressed carefully, wearing loose linen pants and an equally unrevealing green silk top. She’d tied her hair back in a scarf, hiding everything, including her bangs. She wore a plain pair of North Face hiking boots and her favorite drugstore sunglasses. She’d left her passport with the front desk, had nothing but her international driver’s license for ID, and carried only five hundred Egyptian pounds, less than a hundred dollars. She’d left her digital camera locked in her suitcase under the bed and picked up a disposable Fuji in the hotel gift shop. According to Hilts, the trick about a trip to the City of the Dead was to make sure you didn’t appear to be worth mugging, raping, or killing.
A thundering roar broke into the relative peace of the morning and Finn saw a huge black motorcycle turn into the square from the Nile side and rumble toward the hotel entrance. The rider stopped directly in front of her and pulled off his dark, full-visor helmet. It was Hilts. He was wearing motorcycle boots, jeans, and a T-shirt that read “Harley-Davidson Egypt” on the front. The name on the side of the motorcycle spelled out Norton. He reached back and handed Finn a helmet.
“Hop on.”
“I thought we were supposed to be keeping a low profile.”
“Sometimes fun takes precedence over good sense. I don’t get to ride bikes much anymore.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, slipping on the helmet and buttoning the chin strap. Suddenly the world was the amber color of the visor.
“That too,” he said and grinned. She climbed on the bike behind him, put her arms around his waist, and they were off.
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.”