The Golden Scales Read Online Free Page B

allowed to stay on and pay when they could. Children never went hungry to bed. If you went to him for a favour, he would always help. If you had a sick child in need of medicine or the services of a doctor, he would take care of that for you as well. Everyone was in debt to Saad Hanafi, even the authorities. Police inspectors would arrive home to find a fat sheep tethered to their front door for the Eid el-Adha sacrifice. And since police inspectors never made enough money anyway, it was natural that soon he had many loyal friends on that side of the law too. By the time he was in his twenties he was running a protection racket, using muscle to buy any property he was interested in. There were nasty stories about how he’d dealt with those who refused to sell at the price he offered. Tales of stubborn tenants falling off rooftops, or under the wheels of trains.
    In the 1970 s when Sadat was in power and busy liberalising the economy, making his friends rich in the process, Hanafi was getting into his stride as a semi-respectable businessman. Pretty soon he owned large chunks of the city, knocking down ageing villas and throwing up apartment blocks with alarming rapidity. Most of Heliopolis was his, if you believed the stories. He used the same hard-headed tactics as in his early days. Newly acquired political leverage allowed him to bulldoze through any laws that got in his way.
    Hanafi had worked hard to distance himself from his shady beginnings, but those old rumours still lingered like the early-morning shabour that hung over the city. The DreemTeem was part of his PR makeover. His face was everywhere, smiling down from billboards like a venerable old patriarch, offering up bowls of steaming ful medamas and taamiya as an offering. The father of the nation, as he liked to see himself, putting food on the tables of the people. Hanafi was an institution, as much a part of the national panorama as the pyramids – as one sycophantic journalist after another kept repeating, thinking flattery would get them everywhere, which it often did. Hanafi had the newspapers in his pocket; without his sponsorship entire television programmes would disappear. If he decided to run for president tomorrow, people said, he would win hands down . . . assuming the current President approved, of course. Saad Hanafi sold dreams, or rather one dream in particular: the dream that anyone could wake up one morning and find themself living on top of the world in a fine palace . . . even though there was as much chance of that actually happening as there was of the sun sailing across the sky in a boat.
    ‘You are rather an unconventional man, Mr Makana.’
    He turned his attention to the upright figure sitting beside him. The man in the fancy suit carried himself with style. He wore expensive cologne that made Makana wonder if he himself should have devoted a little more time to his preparations for this meeting.
    ‘How exactly did you come by my name?’
    ‘Oh, you come highly recommended, by an old acquaintance.’ The slim man smiled reassuringly in a way that made Makana dislike him all over again.
    They drove quickly south alongside the river, the gorilla using the horn the way he might have cracked a whip, sending other road users scattering to left and right. The centre of Hanafi’s empire overlooked the Orman botanical gardens – fittingly, perhaps, as they had once been part of the Khedive Ismail’s private grounds. The building itself was a blunt pinnacle of concrete and glass that seemed to hang in the air in defiance of gravity. Vines and fronds draped the many tiered balconies, stacked up like verdant steps leading to the sky. They called to mind the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or some other such ancient wonder. It wasn’t hard to believe that the people living in a place like this eventually started to think of themselves as gods. The other apartments in the building were occupied by ageing divas and film stars, directors and