The Golden Scales by Parker Bilal Read Free Book Online

every manner of tool and implement imaginable. A bottomless emporium with no end to it. The shopkeeper or one of his sons would disappear into the shadows and remain out of sight for several minutes before emerging with the heating element or the set of dental forceps requested by a customer.
    Makana wanted nothing so complicated, although he had spent many an hour observing as they extracted more and more bizarre instruments from that tiny crack in the rock. Now he leaned against the high counter and reached for the telephone. The circular dial was fixed with a padlock which Goumri kindly removed. As he did so, Makana spotted a poster of Adil Romario stuck on the grubby wall behind him. He wondered why he had never noticed it before. It was an advertisement for some kind of green-coloured drink. Adil Romario smiled his beaming smile and held up his thumb while a girl in tight jeans sprayed water over him from a hosepipe.
    ‘People say he will lend his name to anything,’ Goumri muttered, following Makana’s gaze. ‘If I were in his shoes and they wanted to pay me to stand next to that donkey of a President, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment.’
    Makana spent an hour calling anyone and everyone who might be able to shed some light on the matter of Hanafi’s current situation. Firstly there was Nabil, a contact at Al Ahram newspaper. ‘I want you to dig up what you can about Saad Hanafi and Adil Romario.’
    ‘You’re moving up in the world.’
    ‘Keep it to yourself.’
    ‘Does that mean I get paid this time?’
    ‘What’s happened to your sense of civic responsibility?’
    ‘It’s like everything else with today’s inflation – it has shrunk.’
    Amir Medani, a human rights lawyer he knew, talked at length of Hanafi’s political connections: ‘He practically has the government in his back pocket. If he needs a law changed for one of his building projects, all he needs to do is make one phone call.’
    Others said Hanafi was good at making enemies. If a journalist wrote something bad about him, he could expect to find himself out of work in a matter of days, sometimes hours. A contact in Bank Misr said Hanafi Enterprises was one of the strongest names on the Egyptian Stock Exchange. ‘If you want some shares . . .’ Makana declined the offer.
    After that he felt hungry and decided that the sudden improvement in his financial situation, along with the comforting bundle of ready cash tucked into his pocket, ought to be celebrated in style. He had a few debts to settle, but his first priority was to treat himself to a decent meal. It took him ten minutes to walk to Aswani’s restaurant.
    As usual, an air of weary desolation hung over the place. A fan turned lazily over the deserted metal tables, and the buzz of white strip lighting competed with the urgent frenzy of flies trying to get into or out of the cooling cabinets where all manner of raw meat rested on steel trays. A small fat man waddled across the floor towards him. Ali Aswani bore a distinct resemblance to an oversized duck, apart from his big Turkish moustache whose bushy handlebars stood out stiffly to left and right like rabbit’s ears. Makana chose a table in a corner at the back, where he could be undisturbed and keep an eye on the door at the same time.
    As he went he swept up a well-creased copy of the day’s newspaper. Ignoring the usual front-page stories glorifying the actions of various government ministers, the President’s wife, etcetera, he turned to the sports pages. There he read that the DreemTeem was currently slipping down the league table. A columnist speculated on the reasons behind this; were the rumours of discontent within the team true? And where was their most famous player in this hour of need? After that Makana settled down to read carefully through the folder Gaber had given him. It contained photographs of Adil taken in a studio. They were the kind of official pictures you might see on a club wall. Makana had looked