LITMIR.BIZ

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there, their numbers never rising or falling; they seemed distracted in a way quite at odds with my assumptions about childhood. I’ve no experience with children, but generally speaking, shouldn’t they seem joyous and uninhibited? These ones weren’t like that. They played with a busy discipline that made it appear as though they’d been drilled. One would come down the high slide, then turn and pad back to its ladder, waiting his turn like an adult who has learned that the system is the way to get what he wants. No shouting. No fighting over toys. I memorized their faces. No names. I never got to know them, because the mothers on the wooden benches never called them. Not one ever shouted for her child to take care, or dashed wildly toward their fallen offspring. They sat there contentedly, in their faces the placidity that comes from certainty. Women in their thirties and forties, elegant in the beauty-free way of wealthy women from Medinat Nasr, immersed in hobbies from their mothers’ era: three or four crocheting, a similar number flipping through fashion mags, while a lone blonde, younger than the rest, sang outside the flock and read books with old covers. Most likely their husbands worked behind the dull gray wall, pursuing mysterious callings in nameless buildings, or else were colleagues of mine I hadn’t met.

      The ground floor of the Palace comprised a reception room where an ancient functionary passed his time solving crossword puzzles. My relationship with him lasted the seconds it took for my bag to pass through the scanner. I’d greet him and he’d pay me no mind. He couldn’t even see those passing him by. He’d been programmed along with the machine—and provided the row of lights on top didn’t turn red and its tiresome siren didn’t sound, he had no cause to lift his gaze. I was tempted to put a knife in the bag so his scanner would scream and he’d be forced to notice me.

      The old man was the lobby’s center, surrounded by four flights of stairs, each running up to a different department, and behind his desk a flight down to the basement where the guilty were housed: comfortable little cells, tidied and searched each morning while their occupants took breakfast in the small cafeteria next to the games room. They were free to move between their cells, the games room, and the café. There was no fixed schedule and no locked doors, but the basement was their world until the interrogation was over.

      *

      Mustafa brought us a fearsome list of his victims: ministers, diplomats, artists, religious leaders, businessmen; people and crimes for which he provided the proof, the individuals concerned having preferred to make no report out of embarrassment or the desire to avoid scandal. Who would welcome detailed discussion of what went on in his bedroom? Who could ignore the many warnings designed to stop him telling? Documents vanished, and it was best not to bring it up. Private pictures of husband or wife, carefully concealed from the spouse, now laid out before sensitive eyes; the hidden revealed. Threats whose attendant instructions it was impossible not to obey. Nabil al-Adl himself had gone against his own creeds and convictions in order to keep hidden the photograph of his sister-in-law, Sawsan al-Kashef—near-naked and sprawled in her lover’s arms—which had confronted him one day, and written beneath it in fiery red ink, a warning: Don’t squeal.

      What frightened the authorities, and got Mustafa’s file referred to the highest levels, was not simply that his victims included names whose homes were fiercely guarded around the clock. More pertinently, one of these names, the major general whose apartment Mustafa had been robbing when apprehended, headed a team responsible for updating strategic plans for guarding the president himself—a fact itself outmatched by Mustafa’s confession that he’d been planning to rob the president’s residence, and that he’d intended it to be his final job in this country. If brought off successfully, he explained, it would have meant there were no challenges left for him here, and the time would have come to test his skills in other, more stimulating climes.

      More surprisingly, however, his statements transcended mere confession to reach the level of theory:

      The heavier the guard, the easier it is to get through. The higher the wall, the easier you feel on the other side of it, no matter how poor a climber you might be.

      *

      Why? If the question could be asked of any man and remain unanswered, it meant that he would be referred to us, for us to eradicate and remake it—innocent and free of question marks—as ‘Because.’ His coming to us was an admission that he was the best and most skillful in his field, a special breed of man who belonged with his ilk: unseemly geniuses, outcasts from the paradise of lawfulness.

      The purpose of our research was to uncover the aims of Mustafa’s organization and find any followers that he had not identified. There was concern that his ideas might spread and though his most senior assistants had been detained and had given detailed confessions, the suspicion that even one individual with the same mental powers might be lurking out there compelled our attention. Those who had been arrested were dangerous criminals. That was something we could accept. They were not particularly convinced by his views and credos, but had gone along with him in the pursuit of gain. It was quite possible, they said, that their criminal operations might have continued undiscovered, because the plans he laid adhered to a principle of absolute caution and were based on what he termed The Book of Safety, a volume containing hundreds of observations on the most propitious times to commit a crime, the risks that must be avoided, lists of addresses, the names of occupants and their professions, the phone numbers of state officials, escape routes and hideouts, instructions for issuing threats, and blackmail. It was a book he had fashioned with patience and love out of his experience and the experiences of others. He loathed error, seeking an ideal state in which he might attain absolute self-possession and control circumstances around him—a dream of perfection. En route to this state, he had managed to convert ordinary citizens into partners, some unwitting and others sympathetic to his ideas and dreams. What he hadn’t realized was that error occurs precisely when we are taking care to avoid it.

      Even so, he would never have allowed his ideas to disappear, hence the fundamental question: to whom had they been passed on?

      “We concluded you were trying to revive the legend of Robin Hood.”

      “What do you mean by that? You’ve been unable to deal with us using the standard methods, so you’re taking refuge in myth? Or is this an honor reserved for me?”

      For all his intelligence, Mustafa didn’t know what to make of the place in which he found himself. He attempted to conceal his nerves behind insouciance and grit, but there is no strength of will too tough for taming. The system grinds on, and has all the patience and all the time it needs to reach its goal—while Mustafa was a romantic who didn’t understand that it wasn’t the Sixties any more. He lived according to that era’s vision of the world, trying to assume the guise of a god. And the upshot? He had fallen into an elementary mortal trap. And like they say, you only need to fall the once to go on falling forever thereafter. I observed his bafflement in sneaked glances; skillful forays slipped into the flow of his words to keep his secret burnished. One day, al-Adl had gone out of his office, leaving us together. Dropping his impersonal air, Mustafa asked me directly, “Where are we?”

      I was flustered by his boldness. We had never exchanged words before. I attempted an answer, filled with pride that he had noticed me, but most likely he knew that I was no less confused than he. For his part, Nabil al-Adl was intent on intensifying the mystery surrounding our location—his way of meeting Mustafa’s challenge to his authority:

      “My job is not to condemn or exonerate. When it comes to our concerns, your guesses are wide of the mark. You cannot imagine the sheer number of unusual situations that we come up against and that oblige us to update our research techniques. Which is why, when I say that you are trying to revive the legend of Robin Hood, this isn’t some whim of mine, but a statement based on a report on you which has been specially prepared by an educated and experienced operative.”

      I was the educated and experienced operative Nabil al-Adl referred to, and his kind words were not meant as a deft little summation of my person, but rather as the shot from the starting gun at which I must spring forward, must bite to inject the poison, the victim anesthetized so as not to cry out when he was skinned. Neither pain nor blood held any pleasure for us.

      “We

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