African Library: Dogstar rising by Parker Bilal

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The African Library: Entry no 141
Parker Bilal: Dogstar rising

Parker Bilal is the pseudonym of Sudanese-British novelist Jamal Mahjoub, a geologist by training, and Dogstar rising (2013) is the second in a series of six novels featuring a Sudanese, formerly a detective inspector in Khartoum (the city in which Mahjoub was raised). He is named Makana and – having had to flee Sudan – works as a private investigator in Cairo, where he lives in a rented, dilapidated awama (houseboat) on the Nile. In the flight from Sudan, where rising extremism of the Islamic ruling class had brought the quietly agnostic Makana into disfavour, he lost both his wife and little daughter when their car crashed off a bridge as the family fled. Business is slow for him as he takes on a new job at the novel’s beginning. A young family friend, Talal (son of Makana’s late dear friend, a lawyer executed by the regime for oppositional practices), who works as a tour guide, has recommended him as an investigator to his part-time employer, who owns a decrepit travel agency but has run into a problem requiring discreet investigation. This is the opening of a fascinating narrative which exposes the ugly underbelly of Egyptian and regional politics and a web of ruthless thugs who operate at various levels of society. Bilal’s vignettes of crooks, ordinary working people in an array of occupations, intellectuals, religious officials and society’s wretched, as well as his snippets of scenes in various areas of Cairo and beyond, are vividly evoked in this at once brilliantly textured, intricately but satisfyingly plotted, and deeply thoughtful novel. It is a nail-bitingly satisfying detective novel, but evidently the work of a major author.

The “Dogstar” of Bilal’s title is, of course, the “nickname” (from Egyptian, Greek and Latin) of Sirius, the brightest star in our sky, which in Egyptian mythology is associated with Isis and Osiris, with the rise of the Nile in the New Year and with the god Anubis, sometimes given a dog’s head. The Greeks called it the Scorcher, because it appears in the hottest days of the northern summer. As the terrible heat bears down on the squalid streets of the vast, congested city, nerves are on edge and a scary urban legend arises: sightings of an “angel” (a Christian icon being a disturbing sight in this predominantly Muslim environment) coincide with the disappearances and deaths of a series of street children, whose corpses show the marks of awful torture. This is the broader context (seemingly quite unconnected to Makana) as he sits in rising irritation in the reception area of Blue Ibis Tours, in whose offices the only person at work (for over an hour) is the secretary – a neatly but simply dressed woman who is unable to alert her boss to Makana’s arrival for their meeting. She offers him coffee, and Makana begins to like the unobtrusively efficient Meera, as he eventually discovers she is called. Then the other staff members arrive, the dominant presence among them being an unpleasant-seeming man called Yousef; the owner arrives late, and at last Makana can find out why he needs his services. Mr Faragalla is initially maddeningly cagey, but at length reveals that he fears he is being blackmailed – on the very flimsy evidence of an unsigned, printed “letter” containing only an obscure quotation from the sura “The star” in the Quran, stating: “Have you considered him who turns his back upon the Faith, giving little at first and nothing at all? Does he know, and can he see, what is hidden?” (14). Makana muses:

It was always something of a miracle … that anyone hired him at all. A good deal of his job often involved working out why it was he had been chosen in the first place. Of course, nobody had much faith in the police, which didn’t hurt his cause. You don’t involve officialdom in any of your business because there was always a risk it might attract the wrong kind of attention. It was a system that was true only to itself, faithful to maintaining its own existence, to feeding its needs, its appetite for power. It wasn’t a place you went to for justice. On the other hand, it was also true that in most cases the kind of people who needed his services usually had something of their own to hide: a weakness, a character flaw, a crime – sometimes serious, usually minor. Enough, in any case, for them to turn to somebody who was outside the circle of influence. Someone who could be relied upon to be quiet. Someone like Makana. (13)

It helps, of course, that he is a non-Egyptian; being a member of the tiny, generally powerless Sudanese exile community, he is therefore, like them, unlikely to want to attract the authorities’ attention – even if Makana has, over the years of his exile, made a few trusted local friends. One of the most endearing of these friends (as he becomes) is called Sindbad: “the size of a small gorilla”, he drives a taxi – “a battered and somewhat lopsided 1970s Datsun”, “career[ing]” across traffic lanes to other drivers’ infuriation; he gives Makana his card, which reads: “Sindbad Car & Limoseen Servise – 24hrs anytime” (30–1). It turns out that Makana knows him from an earlier time when he dressed smartly as a rich man’s chauffeur; before that, he had been a heavyweight boxer.

At home, Makana watches the sunset from an old armchair on his deck, snatching a spell of peace before he starts examining Faragalla’s letter and looking up the context of the quote in the Quran and in his stack of second-hand reference books and encyclopaedias, but it does not leave him much the wiser. The next day, hauled along on some obscure errand by the sinister Yousef, Faragalla’s employee, Makana (supposedly hired by the owner as efficiency expert to improve business at the Blue Ibis agency) spots a report by his old friend Sami Barakat – one of the few local journalists who risks writing openly critically about the Egyptian government. In the report, Sami suggests that the murders and mutilations of the street children are executed thus, horribly “to spread irresponsible talk of rituals and stir the flames of sectarian hatred” (43) between the Muslim majority and the Coptic minority – Christians who ironically are the only present-day Egyptians who claim their ancestry in the pharaohs of pre-Arab Egypt. Sami also writes that, because the victims are mere “street kids”, the powerful see no point in “wasting” resources on investigating, despite the brewing social tension. Makana engineers a chat with Meera; she is evidently a highly intelligent woman who, he thinks, may throw light on the case. Asking her why she works at the seedy travel agency, Makana finds out that she is a former academic; she taught English literature at Cairo University, but lost her job. She is a Copt and her husband a Muslim, and a Coptic-Islamic marriage is considered scandalous by the highly conservative majority. Pressure on them intensified when her husband was refused the promotion due to him, under the influence (principally) of a fiery cleric, Sheikh Waheed, on whose ideological support the government relies to protect them from critics of their failures and corruption. Her husband, Ridwan Hilal, had published a book (outside Egypt) arguing that contemporary Muslim interpretations of the Quran rely on those based on its earlier social contexts, and should instead be adapted to contemporary times. Makana knows the story. He now learns from Meera that there were actually three of the mysterious letters sent to Blue Ibis and that, while she believes them to be intended as a warning, she thinks they were meant for her and not aimed at Faragalla. Meera has hidden her Coptic identity from him so as to (get and) keep the job, she says.

On a visit of lively conversation between Makana and his friends Sami and Rania (also a journalist), he learns how anxious and despondent they are becoming about the rise of a fanatic form of Islam in Egypt – a society that used to pride itself on its secular political rule and religious tolerance. Not only are state officials playing up to the clerics, but “ordinary” society members are becoming threatening and suspicious towards non-Muslims, as well as towards fellow Muslims whom they think of as inadequately zealous. Especially worrying, they aver, is Sheikh Waheed – “a controversial imam with the following of a pop star”, “loved” by the media for his “provocative declarations” (61). When Sheikh Waheed denounced Meera’s husband, “no one dared stand up for Hilal,” they tell Makana (62). Raising the topic of his report on the street boy murders, Makana hears from Sami that he intends visiting the Coptic Church, where a Father Macarius officiates, as he runs a sports club and gym for street children – both Christian and Muslim – which the victims seem to have frequented; Makana is welcome to join him there. Makana also wants to learn more about Sheikh Waheed, so the two resolve to meet and go listen to the Sheikh’s massively popular Friday sermon at a local mosque. In the end, they miss each other in the massive, angry crowd, whose anti-Christian feelings are whipped up by the cleric. They subsequently find each other at Father Macarius’s church, where the nervous priest lets them in through a side door. Like almost any other Friday, the crowd from the mosque surges to the church in order to attack it with rotten fruit and other missiles, attempting to break in until they grow hungry and drift off. There are police on duty, but they are half-hearted in their protective and peace-keeping duties in the overwhelming presence of the angry, shouting Muslim crowd, who have been told by Sheikh Waheed that the “unbelievers” are under the influence of “devils”, but that “their days are numbered” (75).

In contrast with the fiery but small-bodied sheikh, Father Macarius (the Coptic priest) is a big man, clearly strong and fit (with an old photograph showing him in boxing gear), but quite mild-mannered, even though he attempts to persuade the agnostic Makana to believe in God. Hanging from the ceiling in the sports club section are wooden sculptures of angels representing the murdered boys. They were sculpted by a nervous, shy young man of 19, Antun, who lives at the church. Makana, for his part, “wondered what the implications were of murdered Muslim children [as the dead boys’ names reveal them to have been] being turned into Christian angels. His old distaste for religious belief rose in him. Angels and demons seemed a perfect excuse to keep people on their knees with their eyes shut,” is his cynical (if probably politically astute) thought. The big priest tells Makana that he does “understand” his position; “the only question that matters” is: “[W]hat kind of man are you?” But it is a nerve-wracking time; Macarius is well aware of the tension: “[T]his whole area could explode at any moment,” engulfing Christian and Muslim alike (85–6). For, as much as he tries to keep the peace, the young Coptic men associated with the church are determined that they would fight back, were the church to come seriously under threat.

Makana is invited to a restaurant for supper with his young Sudanese tour guide/translator friend, Talal, who has been eager for the older man to meet the young woman of his dreams, known as “Bunny” – who happens to be the daughter of Faragalla of the Blue Ibis. Unimpressed by the highly pretentious restaurant, Makana is dismayed when a Sudanese of his own age, whom he knows but detests, shows up to join the meal. He has been invited by Talal, whose patron this man is posturing to be, while Makana has good reason to suspect him of having “shopped” Talal’s father to the rotten Sudanese regime. “Mo” (as he is known) is a flamboyant “artist” and international art entrepreneur – a cover, as Makana well knows, for his work as arms smuggler, acting for the ruthless Sudanese regime, which he formerly pretended to oppose – whereas Makana and Talal’s father did so sincerely, only to pay the price for their principles. Makana is dismayed that Talal is bedazzled by this thug – politically corrupt, a dangerous informer on exiled Sudanese compatriots and also associated with two of the most dreadful Egyptian criminals, whose syndicate carries their surname: the Zafrani brothers. “Now that [Mo] was friends with the [Sudanese] regime” and living high on the hog from “fat commissions on contracts supplying the military with trucks”, he spends his time with “unsavoury types who [meet] in shabby hotels” (93). The inordinately thick-skinned Mo urges Makana to work with him, bragging of “great opportunities”, since “the boom has just begun” (93). When a disgusted Makana wants to walk off while Talal and Bunny are away getting food, Mo makes the mistake of trying to block his way, so Makana (who was taught self-defence by an expert) instinctively twists his arm, causing Mo to fall onto a nearby table in a fracas.

Walking away from Mo (whose surname is Damazeen), Makana finds more congenial company and a favourite setting in Aswani’s restaurant, where he and Sami are regulars. He questions Sami about Meera’s husband Hilal’s book: he learns that Hilal exposed the corrupt practices of Islamic banking – specifically the Eastern Star Investment Bank, in which the directors (according to Hilal) took huge profits “while paying investors a pittance” (99). Sami’s theory is that, because the Egyptian economy is doing badly, with rich people’s wealth growing while ordinary employees need two jobs to survive, there is an actual plan to deflect criticism from the government by stirring up religious enmities and sowing fear and hatred; he even thinks the state’s agents – the feared Merkezi – might be involved in the actual street child killings. A man at a neighbouring table is giving them suspicious stares; the urbane Aswani comes over to tell them, “Keep your voices down. I don’t want to be closed down for running a hotbed of dissent” (101). When Sami asks Makana to lend him money, he says he’ll do so in exchange for some information about the Islamic banking matter. As it happens, Sami’s friend and fellow investigative journalist, Nasser Hikmet, has been digging into the very Eastern Star Investment Bank, so it’s a fair exchange. But, says the cheerfully insouciant Sami, he assumes Makana is paying for their meal!

The next morning, as he sits contemplating ordering a second cup of coffee at the small and very run-down cafe in the arcade downstairs from the Blue Ibis offices (in the charge of a mere boy peddling suspiciously cheap cigarettes), he notices Meera strolling slowly down the arcade, presumably if reluctantly on her way to work. She is passed closely by Yousef, on his way out. Meera looks after Yousef with a puzzled expression on her face; the next moment, a somehow odd, slight male figure “wearing an old army fatigue jacket” and with a woollen cap pulled low and his collar turned up has entered the arcade, closely passing by Yousef. Makana feels a strange uneasiness and wants to dash out of the cafe, but at this moment several men are entering, blocking his exit. As if in a nightmare, Makana sees the strange man “fumbling inside his jacket … holding something so big it looked like a toy in his hand” (103). But before he can get to Meera, she is gunned down. As Makana leaps onto the shooter, who seems to weigh hardly anything, he pulls the gun on Makana, but it misfires; even so, the moment’s interlude allows the assailant to rush off and jump onto the back of a motorcycle that has just arrived, evidently by prior arrangement, and he is borne off. Dazed, Makana establishes that Meera is still, though barely, alive, and assures her that help is on the way. An unknown man in a brown shirt, holding a walkie-talkie, tells a groggy Makana that he was brave, although foolish, in trying to save Meera – who has now died, even though an ambulance is on the way. “There was blood and glass everywhere. [Makana] looked down at Meera’s broken body” (105). The next moment, policemen in uniform now swarming all over, Makana is arrested on an officer’s order, handcuffed and forcibly held up against a wall. The police ignore his own protestations that they have got things wrong, as well as the testimony of the kindly old caretaker of the building telling them that Makana had tried to save Meera. Abu Salem, the old man, finds a sheet and covers Meera’s body. Makana is thrust to the floor in the back of a car. The man in the brown shirt is talking to Yousef; a bald-headed man who works for military intelligence tells the police (after finding out from Makana who the victim was) that the case is no “mere” homicide, but “political” (108). Still, once Inspector Okasha (head of homicide and an inspector in the police force, an old acquaintance of Makana’s who knows him to be trustworthy) arrives on the scene, uniformed police are in charge. Nevertheless, as Okasha tells Makana in the arcade cafe, the military police (led by Lieutenant Sharqi, the bald man who spoke with such authority to Makana and the lower-ranked uniformed cops) will soon take over after pulling strings. Okasha wants to glean as much information from Makana as possible before that happens, in order to proceed, as it were, “under cover” with his own investigations, being convinced that the military police – Lieutenant “Sharqi’s boys” – will not solve the case, will grow tired of it and will throw it back into his (Okasha’s) lap to deal with. “A political crime, or whatever they wanted to call it, was still a homicide” (113), Okasha sensibly observes.

Makana tells Okasha that the murdered Meera was married to Ridwan Hilal, and that she took the Blue Ibis job because they needed income after losing their academic posts. When Okasha asks (as Makana did, previously) why they did not go into political exile, Makana tells him that “they believed in this country”, and Okasha decently responds: “May Allah bestow His blessings upon them” (116). Okasha, having learned from Makana about the three letters meant for Meera, asks him not to tell Sharqi about them, predicting (correctly) that the lieutenant won’t even bother to question Makana, who is told – soon after the military police have taken over (and Sharqi has conveyed that he needs to speak to Okasha) – that he is free to leave. Returning to the Blue Ibis the next day, Makana discovers Meera’s desk covered in flowers sent by people who were fond of her – from all over Cairo, it seems. The only other female employee, a staunch hijab-wearing Muslim, airs her suspicion that Rocky has something to do with Meera’s murder: “[H]e’s the one who runs the ’ahwa [small cafe] downstairs,” she tells Makana, and “he’s up to all kinds of mischief, that one” (133). She mentions hashish and the fact that another employee, Faragalla’s supposed nephew, Ramy (now stationed in the Blue Ibis’s Luxor office, following a scandal), was supplied by this Rocky, and heavily addicted. The woman does not have a convincing theory of how the addiction, Rocky’s presence, Ramy’s supposed scandalous flirtations with female tourists and Faragalla’s “exiling” him might tie into the killing.

The other distinctly suspicious Blue Ibis presence, Yousef, again wishes to make use of Makana – this time, to take a message and an envelope with a wad of cash to an old man, a former forger, whom Makana happens to know. He hints that there’s money for him, too, if Makana proves reliable. Not batting an eyelid, Makana, on his way out, stops at the cafe, asking the boy in charge about getting him more cigarettes, clearly testing his suspicion that the place is a front for selling stolen goods – a business run (he surmises) by Rocky. A fascinating description ensues, taking us to the heart of the old city of Cairo, as Makana goes to make the delivery required by the shady Yousef:

The square with arches round three sides looked much the same except the colonnades were now filled with deep shadows. A rat squeaked somewhere underfoot. In the centre of the square a stone pedestal housed a circular well that had long since been filled in. The square was so perfectly sealed it appeared as if the walls had closed in behind [Makana], obscuring the way in and out. He reached the wooden door decorated with iron birds. An old Ottoman-style house that had once been a caravanserai, a resting place for merchants who had travelled for weeks at a time, carrying ivory and gold from the interior of the continent, incense and silk from Syria and Baghdad. In the Middle Ages, Cairo was larger than Venice, a vast city of legend, and anyone with an interest in trade had to come here. The door had a heavy iron grille in the middle. A handle was set into the stone wall beside it. On pulling this Makana was rewarded with the tinkle of a bell somewhere far off. After a time footsteps approached and the door creaked open to reveal a young boy of around fourteen wearing a blue galabeya and a red tarboosh. “Is the master of the house in?” [Makana asks, and] without a word, the boy stepped aside, bowing …. (138)

The interior of the establishment is no less impressive, as Makana follows the boy up the stairs “which wound about a stone pillar scarred by centuries, rubbed smooth by countless hands”, into a gallery with a screen-covered window where “dozens of birdcages were hanging on long chains from the rafters high above” – cages of various sizes made of different materials, some even of silver and gold, containing “an astonishing array of colours and types” of birds. “The overall effect was like looking at a wall of living flame going from orange to green, to red and yellow, through every brilliant shade of the spectrum.” That is why this is the House of Birds. From the gallery, Makana enters “a circular room lined with books” where, “perched high on a ladder”, sits “an old knot of a man wearing dark glasses” (139). This is Yunis, who ruefully tells Makana that, while he has yearned all his life to own a collection of birds, the glorious sight is now hardly discernible to him, his sight having deteriorated with age. He also tells Makana that he has “ignored [his] old friends for far too long”, which “secretly touche[s]” Makana, who got to know Yunis, the formerly skilled forger, two years previously when working on a case (140). Yunis tells Makana he is surprised to find him working for “such lowlife” as “the elusive Mr Yousef” (141). The old man reveals that, since his sight is now too weak, he is merely a middleman (for Yousef and those employing him) in a passport scam that steals “desirable” passports from tourists, exchanging these surreptitiously for forgeries made by men to whom Yunis sends them; they know the legitimate owners’ documents are not given the kind of scrupulous scrutiny to which Egyptian travellers’ passports are subjected, and now they only change the photographs for the customers’ on the genuine passports. Yunis warns Makana: “Watch yourself with Yousef. He’s small time, but … can be dangerous.” Yousef “earned a bad reputation in the army”, which is saying quite something. Additionally, he, too, works for the notorious Zafrani brothers, Yunis suspects. Makana shows him one of the letters Meera received; the old man can help him identify the press where it was printed, as he undertakes to do.

Following up other hunches, Makana returns to the church. One of the young men there helps Makana by confirming that a man he spots on a photo is indeed the notorious Rocky, who “used to work with Father Macarius” before he “disappeared”. He is still in Cairo, but evidently a man to be feared, Makana’s informant conveys. The priest confirms that Meera (after losing her academic job) used to give lessons in English and mathematics to the street boys housed there. Even as they stand talking, the young man Antun (who carves the wooden angels) comes running with the awful news that yet another street boy’s corpse has been found. The priest and Makana rush to the crime scene, where Makana establishes that this was an older boy of around 13, his face unrecognisably battered. But Makana spots a wound on his leg, under a tear in his trousers, before the two adults rush off to escape both the suspicious police and a restive, furious crowd convinced of the rumour that “Christians” are ritually sacrificing Muslim street boys for murky, nefarious purposes.

In an interlude, Makana gets an unwelcome visit from his unpleasant compatriot Damazeen, who out of the blue requires Makana’s assistance or protection, it seems, in a top-level arms smuggling deal to be finalised in a local hotel – a deal in which Damazeen is convinced Makana would be willing to assist him, since it involves double-crossing Mo’s Sudanese funder and employer, Mek Nimr. He is a ghastly but extremely dangerous and powerful man who, in Khartoum in a previous life, was Manaka’s lower-ranking detective colleague, but viciously jealous of him. This ruthless man ruined Makana’s life; an increasingly fanatic Muslim, at the time this trend was mirrored in the government itself, Mek Nimr ingratiated himself with the powerful and threw suspicion on the more secular-minded Makana, costing him his job, his wife and daughter (who died in their panic-stricken flight across the border) and his country. Now, Damazeen adds stronger bait to tempt Makana into a very risky role he is extremely reluctant to play, by adding the bombshell (if this information can be considered reliable!) that Makana’s daughter was rescued from his car (the accident in which his wife died). As a final sadistic twist of punishment by the superior officer he so hates, the six-year-old girl was then (so Damazeen claims) taken by Mek Nimr into his family and brought up as his adoptive daughter. Leaving this bombshell to work on Makana, Damazeen walks off. The next day, Makana goes to see a dear and trusted Sudanese friend who is (like himself) working in Cairo, in his case as a human rights lawyer advising (mostly) refugees; he is Amir Medani. Amir is extremely suspicious of Damazeen and suspects that a trap (possibly with Mek Nimr’s assistance) is being set for Makana. In international arms deals, Amir tells Makana, it is very easy to obtain what is called “an end-user’s certificate” (179); he also reminds Makana that, with the civil war in Sudan continuing, 70 percent of their country’s budget is spent on buying military equipment.

Makana goes back to Meera’s widower’s house; he has formerly visited to convey his condolences to Ridwan Hilal. The man is a wreck, incessantly drinking spirits to dull his anguish. But, ever the scholar, he gives Makana a long lecture on his own theories concerning Islamic practices and the Quran, beginning by insisting that the Holy Book does not forbid consumption of alcohol; what it does say (he says) is that believers should not pray while under the influence. When Makana asks Hilal whether he has had “further thoughts on what appears in those letters” (they all cite from the Quran) sent to Meera, he extends the lecture to explain Islamic scholars’ distinction between such verses in it “which are precise in meaning and those which are ambiguous”, also providing the Arabic terms. He confirms that “the Sura of the Star” cited in the third and last letter falls into the ambiguous group, and that he is therefore certain that the letters were meant as warnings, not threats – and that they were intended for him, not for Meera. Probing further, Makana tells Hilal that in his view, the long hours Meera spent working at Blue Ibis indicates that she was investigating something she had found in the travel agency’s records of transactions. Hilal tells Makana: “I wish you would leave this alone. For the dignity of her memory.” But, as Makana points out, “other lives may be at stake”. Regarding the economic and social context of the religious debates, Hilal tells him (thinly disguising his scorn) that “these new Islamic banks look for figures to endorse them” – alluding to the firebrand Sheikh Waheed, as a man with, inter alia, a “high profile” and “numerous followers”, who by these means has become “a rich man”. When Makana brings up Hilal’s former colleague and rival Professor Serhan, Hilal’s sheer contempt is blatant (183–7).

Makana asks Hilal’s permission to look through Meera’s papers in her (much smaller) office, where the evidence of her academic dedication and scholarly productivity is abundant, as Makana sadly sees. “He was aware that he had barely glimpsed the surface of who or what Meera had been, and [was sure] that the key to her death lay in somehow managing to see through her eyes” (190). Stuck away in hiding at the back of a desk drawer is a photograph, he discovers, taken in a desert setting of “three men in military uniforms” – one of them Ramy, Faragalla’s nephew, another Rocky, with his unmistakable drooping left eye, the third unknown (191). He pockets this as he takes his leave. It is late, but Makana next pays another visit to Yunis. Although he has the uneasy impression that he is being followed, nothing happens; he safely enters the old man’s house. Yunis asks (clearly out of concern for Makana) whether he thinks Yousef suspects him, but Makana, though conceding that “there’s more to him than I thought”, waves away the implicit warning. Yunis has made Makana a list of printers from whose presses Meera’s letters may have come. Then the old man narrows it down conclusively. Pulling down a book that was equally carelessly printed, he shows Makana the name: “Mereek Academic Printers” – known to do a lot of work for Cairo University. As Makana makes ready to leave after thanking him, Yunis tells him: “You can leave by the rear entrance. Mind how you go [and, after a pause] … I’m sorry” (194–5). The strange apology becomes explicable when Makana exits through cobwebs and the heavy old back door, for he is violently set upon by two men, one a muscular giant and the other a small man wielding a knife – with which he cuts Makana’s ear, giving the warning: “Keep your nose out of Zafrani business” (197), as they leave him slumped in the alley.

When Makana next meets up with his journalist friend, Sami, in order to find out what information he has for him about the Eastern Star [Investment] Bank backed by Sheikh Waheed, Sami tells him that even though the government had previously set up their own committee of investigation regarding rumours of the bank’s “siphoning funds through small companies with a lot of turnover, particularly of foreign currency”, predictably the bank was cleared of all charges. More disquieting is the information that Sami’s friend who was investigating the bank, “journalist Nasser Hikmet”, “[has] fall[en]” to his death from a “hotel room window” in what is suspiciously described as a suicide. “It struck Makana that he was surrounded by people who had made great sacrifice, who had laid down their lives on a battlefield in a war that was undeclared: Meera, Nasser Hikmet, the tortured boy” (the most recent street child victim) and “Talal’s father” (his late Sudanese lawyer friend), as well as his late wife and daughter (Muna and Nasra) – who also died in Sudan, as he still at bottom believes or knows. “What cause did their deaths serve?” Makana asks himself. Sami is oblivious to his gloom. He has (daringly) been drinking many beers and, when Makana ends their meeting and puts the half-drunk Sami into a taxi, Makana watches as he, “oblivious, … hung his head out of the window, curly hair blowing in the slipstream, and waved back at Makana like a wild child, delighted with his own bad behaviour” (201–2) – a bubbly, invigorating presence in a gloomy atmosphere. Makana returns to the church to find out more about Rocky. Antun is said to be away, but one of the other (hostile) young Copts tells Makana that Rocky “used to turn up here to box”, and confirms that he was in the army, adding the disturbing detail that he “likes young boys” and “now runs a group of beggar kids”, whom he “picks … up off the street and uses … like dogs” – but this horrifying man has “protection” (207). Another piece of the mosaic of information Makana is accumulating is added when an anonymous phone caller turns out to be Professor Serhan, the former colleague whom Hilal so despises. Meeting Makana discreetly in a park at dusk, he divulges that when they were all much younger, he had been in love with Meera and had been a fellow “radical” poet along with Hilal; they had called themselves the “Dogstar Poets” (214). Aware of the fanatic hatred building up against the couple, he sent the three letters to Meera as warnings, hoping that Hilal would notice the hints of his identity and realise the urgency of the warning. But this rather pathetically timid man is terrified of exposure, and soon dashes away.

It was late when Makana finally arrived home. The river road was silent and empty. The big eucalyptus tree hung down over the riverbank like an unanswered question mark … [while Makana’s “landlady”] Umm Ali’s precarious little shack was dark and silent. … It was only when he reached the end of the narrow path that he began to feel uneasy. (219)

Makana retrieves his Beretta from its hiding place. Proceeding cautiously up the stairs, he hears an odd “mewling” sound. On the deck, he finds his friend Sami, splayed in a crucifixion position, nailed to the deck, barely alive and covered in blood. There is a “message” stuck to his hand confirming the suspicion that the intended victim of the ghastly attack was Makana. Struggling to get the nails out of Sami’s hands and feet so that he can be rushed to hospital, Makana summons Sindbad, the taxi driver, and with his powerful help they free Sami. They surmise that the assault was meant to send out a wider warning and intended to further inflame anti-Christian sentiments, with word soon spreading. Okasha, the decent police chief, comes to the hospital to speak to Makana, agreeing that he is the one the thugs were sent to harm. He advises Makana to lie low, even to get out of Cairo for a bit.

This is presumably why Makana decides it is a good time to track down Faragalla’s nephew, Ramy, not only because he was friends with Meera, but to ask him about the mysterious photograph she had hidden in her desk. But first he visits the Blue Ibis offices, establishing that the Islamic bank is, in fact, laundering money through Blue Ibis and that Yousef is their “plant”. He concludes his employment contract with Faragalla by telling him that the “blackmail” letter was nothing of the sort and was not meant for him; he also arranges to travel to the Luxor office to speak to Ramy on a Blue Ibis ship. As he awaits the train from the Giza station to where he can embark on the Nile voyage, Makana muses:

Whenever he left this city a part of him wondered if he would ever return, as if it was not real at all, but simply a figment of his imagination. Perhaps he would find a new life for himself in Upper Egypt – land of his forefathers. Nubia, the fabled kingdom, straddled the borderline [with Sudan]. Not that he was sentimental about such things. (242)

He also wonders, half asleep, about his daughter, and the unlikely possibility of her having survived. Ramy’s “girlfriend”, the tour guide, initially attempts to block his access to the troubled young man, whose sad story involves being badly damaged by both Faragalla and the psychopathic pervert Rocky – whose childhood history Makana begins to uncover in a visit to the crumbling, isolated, all but deserted monastery Wadi Nikeiba. While he himself (an older and stronger boy), Ramy and Antun (now still with Father Macarius at the Cairo church) were among the orphans given shelter and education in the monastery, strange killings involving torture – at first of animals, and later of two boys and one of the priests – terrified this desert community. Suspicion fell on Antun, but Macarius defended him. As news of the murders leaked, the ensuing scandal caused internal dissension and Wadi Nikeiba’s end. Ramy confirms that Rocky is the man with him in Meera’s photo; the third man was killed by Rocky.

Makana arranged for Sindbad to pick him up at the train station on his return; he also paid the big man to keep a close eye on Damazeen in his absence. He has hardly set foot on the awama when three cars arrive; the swaggering (CIA-trained) Lieutenant Sharqi has sent his “boys”, since he wants to interrogate and intimidate Makana. The main topic is gun smuggling; Sharqi knows about his “connection” with Damazeen, and sets the context as follows:

“Mek Nimr, remember him? A high-ranking officer in the National Intelligence and State Security in your home country. Now, we have something of a complex relationship with our southern neighbours, but this man is a direct source of trouble. For years now he has been sowing the seeds of discontent. Weapons are smuggled across the border to militants in this country. There are others … and they are working with Mek Nimr to supply weapons to radical jihadist forces in this country. … We know there is a deal being brokered by Damazeen. We think he is working with the Zafrani brothers. Have you heard of them? Fanatics, determined to overthrow the government, but good at keeping their hands clean. I think we can help each other. I need someone inside, someone who can let me know where and when it is going to happen. [In return, he tells Makana, he will have a] friend who can bail him out of awkward situations, such as can arise with a transient figure such as yourself.” (307)

Makana goes to check on Sami’s recovery, which is slow, but his friend’s quirky naughtiness has revived (always a good sign!) as he declares that he never wants to leave the expensive, foreign-staffed clinic (his treatment funded by Rania’s relatively well-off father), where such good care is provided. Sami tells Makana that he and Rania got talking about their friend the journalist Nasser Hikmet’s “suicide”, deciding that such a meticulous yet cautious researcher, who always kept copies of his work in the safest place he knew – his widowed mother’s flat – would have done so with what he discovered about the Eastern Star Investment Bank – even though his “obvious” documents were taken. Rania, he tells a dismayed Makana, left several hours ago to go and speak to Mrs Hikmet, not realising the extreme danger of the mission, since it seems that both Meera (who probably got evidence of very powerful people benefiting from the bank’s corrupt use of Blue Ibis) and Nasser (for what he found) have been murdered on the orders of the beneficiaries. At Mrs Hikmet’s flat, Makana sees that a large, gleaming, brand-new washing machine has just been delivered to her. It arrived after a horde of cops visited the flat, searched it and took away everything Nasser had written, as well as his larger computer. The shrewd old woman kept the existence of the smaller one a secret, not trusting the authorities or the suicide story, and determined to get the work her son died for published. So, she showed Rania where Nasser had hidden his smaller computer, and shows the place to Makana, where he spots a business card with a phone number he recognises – pointing to the Zafrani brothers. Rania, he is now convinced, has been kidnapped with the small computer in her possession.

Using the address on the card he has found, Makana takes a taxi to the gigantic emporium, Beit Zafrani. He knows that after their supposed “religious conversion” and release from prison, the notorious twosome were determined to make it big; the younger, “clean-living” Zayed plays the “straight” role, while the older, thickset and thuggish Ayad “[takes] care of the less palatable” aspects of the Zafrani dealings. When Makana gets to see the brothers upstairs, he questions them, but is persuaded that they neither ordered Meera’s murder, nor hold Rania. What does emerge is that it was they who originally set up the Eastern Star Bank, but that they are disgusted because Sheikh Waheed, on whom they relied to lend the enterprise the legitimacy they wished to earn to improve their image, without their knowledge brought in corrupt army men who profited massively. What they are really after, the Zafranis proclaim, is promoting a revolution that will topple the government and establish Muslim rule. Makana tells them he has figured out their position on the bank: they need information which first Meera and then Nasser Hikmet uncovered, to cause a scandal for both the military and political rulers, but a person (he does not name him) they employed has double-crossed them by organising Meera’s murder and now kidnapping Rania for Nasser’s information. They know about Lieutenant Sharqi’s “recruitment” of Makana. He says the officer may soon be on to them; in return for his “taking care” of the man who has double-crossed them, Makana requires their divulging to him their information on their connection with Damazeen. This agreement earns him further protection before he joins the flamboyant crook at the hotel meeting with his customers.

These turn out to comprise a suave character from a Central African country with a briefcase (with a bag of uncut diamonds) for which Damazeen will exchange a massive amount of military equipment, which Mek Nimr intends for other ends. After fruitless attempts to locate Rania, Makana joins Damazeen in the hotel lobby – secretly making two phone calls before following him to the suite high up, where the customer is waiting – protected mainly by a hard South African bodyguard. Once the transaction is over, the customer about to depart and Damazeen drooling over “his” diamonds, the man turns coolly around, shoots Damazeen and tosses his gun towards Makana. He is forced to catch it, and this has (he knows) put his fingerprints on the weapon, leaving him with a murder victim behind a locked door on which Sharqi is already battering. Fortunately, an ostensible high-rise window cleaner despatched by the Zafranis arrives at the window in time, allowing Makana to escape without a trace.

While this may seem to have brought the intricate, spellbinding narrative to a satisfactory end, there are plenty of further vitally significant twists and turns involving other characters’ roles and their fates, and numerous other events in Bilal’s masterfully controlled, eventful saga. Readers need not fear, therefore, that the present profile has already revealed the marrow in the bones of the plot; these aspects and details are left as reward for readers to discover for themselves. It needs to be added that several earlier encounters and events were also omitted from this account, because a superb writer’s work deserves every moment spent on savouring the unique way s/he tells the story. Makana, the imperturbable, wounded detective, is a memorable figure: taciturn, subtle of intellect, profoundly caring, a man of unbudgeable integrity and compassion. His old and trusted friends, and the new ones he keeps on making, are gathered with him in the novel’s final scene for a feast of a meal served (where else?) at Aswani’s. Makana worries whether even his generous servings will suffice to fill Sindbad’s capacious belly. A (fast recovering) Sami is sadly unable to join the convivial gathering, but even Okasha, the head detective of the uniformed police, is there, while Rania attends to represent Sami, who is learning how to write again after his grievous injuries. It is to Rania that Bilal assigns the text’s final sentence, bringing the even to perfect closure.

An engrossing reading experience awaits readers, who will find in Dogstar rising an enlightening, bracing and gripping way of spending the leisure time that lockdown restrictions on social gatherings have made available. Readers can also follow it up by getting hold of the five other texts in this series.

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