Anatomy of a Disappearance (12 page)

For some reason, I had imagined Monsieur Hass to be a short man with a round, bespectacled face. Instead, when the train pulled into the station at Geneva, Mona pointed out a tall, wiry figure standing on the platform.

“There he is.”

I watched him from the window of the train carriage. He had not spotted us yet. His features hinted at austerity. He had a head of straight black hair that was fixed back with the use of some sort of wax. He kissed Mona’s cheeks.

“I am so sorry,” he said.

When he shook my hand, his eyes remained on me a second too long.

His suit was black, his raincoat was black, and his tie was a matte slate gray with tiny white dots.

“This way,” he said, and we followed him.

He walked quickly, the split tail of his coat lifting. When we were inside his car, he spoke.

“I saw him the night before. Everything was all right.”

“When did you hear?”

“The night it happened.”

“Then why didn’t you call?”

“I did.”

“You called the following evening.”

After a long pause, he said, “I was waiting for something good to report.”

He booked a twin room at a three-star hotel, the sort of place where I could never imagine Father staying. After we checked in he drove us to the police station. A man behind the counter listened to Hass, then handed him a form to fill out. The inspector would contact us, Hass said.

“I will leave you to rest,” he said when he dropped us off at the hotel.

Mona and I spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel room, by the telephone. Around sunset Mona called the police station. She was handed from one official to the next until her French failed her. Then I tried, and the same thing happened. After a short while the telephone rang. It was Hass. Mona spoke to him so softly I could barely make out what she was saying.

“He will stop by first thing in the morning,” she said.

By nightfall she and I pulled ourselves out of the room. We walked slowly, aimlessly and a few steps apart. We
passed the Café du Soleil and neither of us said a word. Eventually we walked into a fast-food restaurant and sat down under the indifferent lighting and ate in silence.

The following morning we walked behind Hass, who walked faster than anyone I had ever met, to the police station. We stood facing the same attendant. This time he nodded and pointed to the chairs lined against one wall. Mona and I sat down, but Hass stood in his long coat. The attendant whispered down the telephone, and after a few minutes another man, dressed in a suit, appeared through a door on the other side of the counter. He stood beside the attendant, looking through some pages. Mona was already making her way to the counter. The man extended his hand.

“Inspector Martin Durand,” he said.

Hass then introduced himself as “the family lawyer.”

The inspector unfastened an invisible latch and lifted up the counter. Mona, Hass and I passed through. He led us into a room that had nothing in it but a table and four chairs. He apologized for not seeing us sooner. He asked us to tell him what we knew. We told him we did not know anything, that we only knew what we had read in the paper.

“What were you doing in Switzerland?”

Mona spoke, he wrote and only occasionally did he look up from his pad. Whenever he asked a question his head would begin nodding even before Mona answered. Every
time she mentioned a place he would repeat the name out loud: “Cairo,” “Daleswick College,” “Montreux Palace,” until it began to seem as if these places were somehow guilty or at least partly to blame. Perhaps this was why Hass felt obliged to clarify:

“They are here on holiday.”

“I see,” the inspector said.

“Can we see the woman?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Which woman?”

“Béatrice Benameur.”

Mona said nothing. Her eyes were on the edge of the table.

“Do you know Béatrice Benameur?”

The inspector’s question was aimed at Mona, but she did not answer.

“Then I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said toward Hass, whose face remained as still as a wall.

Suddenly, Mona began to object. Her voice rose in fury. But Durand silenced her with a move of his hand and firmly repeated, “It would not be a good idea.”

Hass did not speak.

After a short silence the inspector spoke again.

“We are doing all we can in difficult circumstances. This is a complicated case, not helped by the fact that the journalist was on the scene before us, therefore compromising the evidence. But I assure you we are treating it as a priority. Now, if you would like to follow me to the front desk, you can collect your husband’s personal items.”

We were handed a small sealed plastic bag that contained Father’s wristwatch, cigarettes, silver lighter and wedding ring.

“We found these on his bedside table,” he said.

Mona looked at the inspector. I knew what she was thinking: Father’s “bedside table” was not in Geneva, but with her in Cairo.

Back at the hotel Mona sat at the edge of the bed with her small address book open beside her. She turned the pages slowly.

“Do you need the bathroom?” she said.

I waited until I heard the shower, then located Hass’s number and dialed it.

“Why won’t the police let us see Béatrice Benameur?”

“She doesn’t know any more than what you know,” he said. The silence that followed seemed to trouble him too. “She just happened to be there,” he added.

A little while later, he called back. Mona answered.

She fell silent for a while, listening to him. I wondered what he was telling her.

“You spoke to her?” she said. “I see. And what did she say? … What, right now? OK, give me half an hour,” she said, and hung up. “He’s on his way.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That she’s willing to see us.” Then, to herself, she repeated, “ ‘Willing to see us.’ ”

After a few seconds I could no longer stand the boom of her hair dryer. I waited in the lobby, occasionally going out onto the street, walking back and forth in front of the entrance to the hotel.

In the car I watched the back of Monsieur Hass’s head as he drove. I wondered what he knew, what he was thinking at that moment. The slicked-back black hair looked part of the effort to keep what he knew silent. There was something unrelenting about the strong neck too. And from this proximity I could detect the familiar musky fragrance of Father’s aftershave cream. Mona sat beside him, facing ahead, her eyes hidden behind the sunglasses. Her neck, rigid and slim, seemed in danger of snapping.

“Have you met Béatrice Benameur?” I asked.

All I could see of Hass’s face in the rearview mirror were his eyes, which he kept on the road. Separated from the rest of his face, they looked almost feminine.

“Yes,” he said, a few seconds after turning in to a quieter, smaller street.

I expected Mona to react, but she said nothing.

I spotted the street name: Rue Monnier—strangely similar to Monir, Mona’s father’s name.

“Why was she there?” I asked.

He did not respond, and no one spoke until he parked and turned off the engine.

“Is this it?” Mona asked in a barely audible voice.

“Yes,” he said.

Neither of them moved. Perhaps Hass was hoping Mona or I would change our mind, ask to be driven back to the hotel.

“Nuri, can you wait outside the car for a minute?” Mona said.

I stepped out of the car. Hass rolled up his window. I could hear absolutely nothing of what they said. A few anxious minutes later they emerged. We crossed the street to a building with an arched entrance flanked by plaster moldings of babies with bloated bellies. He pressed the buzzer, and it echoed loudly in the empty street.

“Is this where she lives?” Mona asked—which even she must have known was a pointless question.

Hass continued facing the door.

I felt all moisture leave my mouth. Standing in front of the building from where my father had been taken presented what seemed to be a real and rational danger of being kidnapped or shot in the back or crushed under a large object falling soundlessly from one of the windows. I wanted to say to both of them, “This is dangerous,” or pull them back by their sleeves, but I remained fixed to my place, and only after I noticed Mona’s eyes on me did I realize that I was shivering. She came close, her shoulder touching mine, and then I felt the burn of her hand on my back.

“I called. I don’t know where she’s gone,” Hass said.

He pressed the buzzer again, and this time the street seemed to amplify the horrible ring even more loudly. No sound came from inside the building. Mona’s breath changed; I thought she was about to say something, but she just stared intently at the door in front of us.

Driving us back to the hotel, Hass, unprovoked, began to speak:

“She left the city, went somewhere in the mountains when it happened. But she said she would come down today to meet you. I don’t know what happened. I will keep ringing the number I have.”

“Give me the number,” Mona said suddenly.

This seemed to fluster Hass. “Well,” he said. “I think it’s best if I call. She’s very frightened. And it’s not that simple; every time I have to go through several people to get to her. Like I said, she’s very frightened.”

He dropped us off and left. As soon as we were in the room, Mona became more agitated.

“None of this makes sense,” she said, lighting a cigarette and smacking the lighter onto the glass-topped bedside
table. “Who is this woman, anyway? And how did the newspaper get the news before we did?”

I reminded her of what the police inspector had said, that the journalist from
La Tribune
was the first on the scene.

“Yes, but who called him?”

She spent the next few hours telephoning Father’s friends. Taleb was not home, but Hydar answered. They spoke for a long time. As soon as she hung up, before I had a chance to ask what he had told her, the telephone rang. It was Taleb. They spoke late into the night. I slept on the sound of her voice telling him what happened, what Hass said, what the police said. And late into the night the telephone rang again. It must have been someone else, because she had to repeat the whole story.