The Hidden (46 page)

“You murdered my husband, didn’t you, Monsieur Farouk.”

Farouk shook his head, his face screwed up in agony. He gripped his bloody handkerchief, stepped back from her, found the stone bench, and sat down with his face in his hands. “You don’t understand, Aimee. You don’t know.”

She closed her eyes and reached for her revolver, wanting to withdraw it from her trouser pocket but knowing she had to wait for exactly the right moment. The broken man in front of her had once been so handsome. She saw him now as her maman had seen him, his black hair sweeping a smooth forehead, his black eyes flashing
with passion, his bearing upright, almost soldierly, his mouth full, his love for her maman, for his country, driving him on. He had wanted to destroy every evil he had witnessed throughout his young life, and this determination to right the wrongs of his ancestors had pushed him forward, possessing him entirely. Maman had written about Alexandre Anton’s hatred of his French father and his love of his Egyptian mother. He had become a revolutionary fighter for Egypt. He had loved the women in his life—Hezba, his half sister, and his own mother—for their inner fire and their determination not to let centuries of tradition repress them.

For that Aimee should have loved him, but as she stood before him watching him curled up in agony, she felt no love at all. He was a murderer. He had killed her husband, and for that she had a bullet reserved for him.

“Why did you do it?” Silence followed. “Why did you murder my husband?”

He looked up at her, to where she was standing over him. He was unable to wrench his eyes away from hers, unable to answer her. His breath became laboured.

“Come with me,” he said, uncurling his body and grabbing her hand. He pulled her into the house towards the central staircase, squeezing her hand so tightly that she was afraid.

“You’re hurting me,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Farouk pulled her along, her body jolting against his.

“I want you to understand. I want to show you something.” They reached the little sitting room on the first floor. Farouk pushed open the door and pulled Aimee in. There was a mashrabiyya on the far side of the room that cast dappled light onto a chaise longue. Farouk held Aimee’s hand firmly. He would not let her go.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

The sitting room had been closed up, and the atmosphere felt stuffy. In the low light, Aimee studied the layout of the room. Maman, she sobbed inwardly. This had been her mother’s room, the place Aimee had been born, a royal daughter with a scandalous heritage. Maman had described the room so vividly in her journal that she knew it straight away. Aimee’s identity had been hidden from her. The sins of our ancestors, Aimee thought bitterly.

She managed to wrench herself from Farouk’s grasp and pulled the revolver from her pocket. She slammed it hard against his temple. It was fully loaded. She would kill him. He was her father, but she hated him. She hated him for murdering the only man she’d ever loved. He had brought her to the place she had been born. He had brought about the death of her mother and deprived her of a normal life. Her maman had loved him above all else. Hezba had given her life for this man. Hezba had died for him, yet he had lived. He had walked free from prison and gone on to murder the man she had loved too.

With the gun against his temple, Farouk relaxed. He focused on the feeling of the hard metal against his skin. He heard doves cooing in the soft morning air. He did not look at Aimee, but he could feel the stiffness of her arm as she held the gun against his face. Inwardly he was smiling. It was time to die, time to see his
loved one again. The scent of jasmine from the garden filled his nostrils, and he heard a voice, Hezba’s voice, singing a little song.

Hezba Sultan
her name whispered behind closed doors
in the garden
in the misty vapours of the hammam
her name dances with the sounds of harem laughter until it
disappears forever.

Farouk brought his hand up slowly and covered her fingers with his hand. He felt her soften and yield. He gently peeled her hand away from his face, but she clung to the pistol like a child to its favourite soft toy. He wanted to die—he was practically a dead man—but he had to explain himself to her, tell her everything.

“Your husband was passing information about me to various departments in the ministries,” he said. “My men found out that your husband was going to the village near Ismailia to pass on detailed maps of all of the sector addresses and hideouts. My men and I went there. They held him down and I slit his throat.” He didn’t dare look at her.

“I am so sorry, Aimee. Please—please understand. There was a woman, you see, whose murder I needed to avenge, a woman I loved, who was assassinated by this man Issawi.”

He swallowed bitterly as he watched her. “Your husband was moonlighting as a spy, a double agent for the British and Germans, but he was also working for the king and his chief advisor, Haran Issawi. I knew I would be arrested soon enough. It was only a matter of time before the Group of the X was caught. I knew I didn’t have long. If I was arrested, if the Group of the X was rounded up,
I would die never having been able to see Haran Issawi murdered. I knew I had to finish him off before the tumour grew too big.”

Aimee felt weak. She held the revolver in her hand with difficulty. Her body was about to give way. She pumped her hand to hold the revolver tight.

He continued. “Issawi’s Intelligence forces were subpar, swept along by baksheesh and corruption, but then they signed up a young university professor, Azi Ibrahim, and everything changed. We found out that your husband had several special skills. He was an expert code-cracker. He worked invisibly, using his job as professor as a front. He had contacts everywhere. Nobody knew how to say no to Azi Ibrahim. All of a sudden, after years of being impenetrable, the X was being undermined. Your husband had to be eliminated.”

Farouk felt the force of the revolver slam harder against his temple. He wanted to tell her he’d even planned to give himself up after he’d assassinated Issawi, to tell Security Operations what Littoni was planning, the exact location of the proposed bomb detonation site, and the entire plot, but it had all gone wrong. He’d been double-crossed by Jewel. In the end, all he could do in the hour before the bomb exploded was to send a wire anonymously to Security Operations HQ with the address of Littoni’s basement lair, where Farouk knew he often held meetings with some of the sectors.

“And Fatima?” she said.

“Fatima works for me. She’s an X agent.”

“She seduced my husband.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I paid her to. If she could seduce Abdullah Ibrahim, she would get to know all his secrets, who he was passing information to and when. She was my spy on the ground.”

“Is that why you befriended me? For information? So you could get Azi’s information?”

“Yes, but then I fell in love with you. I initially thought you were working with your husband, and I wanted to find out more. I thought you’d denounce me to the authorities if it all came out. I thought you were lying to me about being so innocent, but very soon, none of that mattered. I loved you, Aimee. I still love you.”

She closed her eyes.

“And Zaky Achmed, the professor who held the literary evening, does he work for the X?”

Farouk nodded. “I love you, Aimee,” he said again with more force this time. “From the moment I first met you, I loved you.”

Aimee drew herself up and slammed her revolver back against his face.

“You want to kill me, don’t you?” he said. “Understand, Aimee, Ibrahim, your husband, was stopping me from getting to Issawi. I had to eliminate him because of her, because of Hezba.”

“Hezba,” she said. “My mother.”

He jolted, and his sad eyes widened in disbelief.

“Hezba?”

She bit back a sob and stiffened against the revolver. “Do you know a baby was born in this house twenty years ago?”

His body spasmed and his eyes flashed. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“Your sister had a friend, didn’t she? A great friend, one of her students, in fact.”

“Yes.”

“And that girl, that friend was your lover, wasn’t she?”

He squeezed his eyes shut.

“The girl had a baby in this house, in the bedroom upstairs.”

His eyes grew wider. His voice was strangled in his throat.

“Yes, there was a child. How do you know all this?”

Farouk’s face had turned to stone.

Aimee went on. “A very distant cousin of my aunt’s, Gad Mahmoud, knew Alexandre Anton, apparently. I have just come from this man’s house. Mahmoud told me he had been a friend of Anton’s. He rang a colleague to check where Anton might be because he hadn’t seen him for quite a few years.”

Aimee was shaking, but she continued. “He told me Anton was working with a terrorist group called the Group of the X. He told me your alias, told me Anton had become Taha Farouk.”

Aimee stiffened against the revolver. “Where did you go when Hezba Nur al-Shezira died?”

Farouk’s eyes snapped shut. Hezba. Her name. Aimee was saying her name.

He closed his eyes and, shaking violently, fell to his knees in front of her. He wrapped his arms around her shins. He was sunken and beaten at her feet. In his agony, he mumbled and sobbed.

“It’s not true. It can’t be true.”

She felt stronger, harder. She would finish him. She had the pistol. All she had to do was pull the trigger.

“My aunt Saiza was Hezba’s half sister. My birth name is Nur al-Shezira. I was given my father’s name, or at least the name of the man I always believed to be my father.”

She pulled him up by the hair so she could look at him one last time. “I grew up believing my father was the kind, respected Khalil al-Shezira. Then, when Azi was murdered, I was given a journal, Hezba’s journal. You murdered my husband, and my mother died because of you. I’m going to kill you,” she said bitterly. “I’m going to kill you.”

“Aimee, you are my daughter?” He looked up at her, trying to see Hezba in her face.

“Yes.”

“Hezba’s baby girl?”

She heard a strange sound from outside, like army trucks lining up along the street, then the sound of men’s voices, shouting military orders. She heard Farouk’s name being called and the sound of gunfire.

Farouk raised his head in alarm.

“They’re here,” he said.

EPILOGUE

Madame Aimee Rigaud

75 Rue Victoire

Versailles

France

February 5, 1946

Madame,

It is with great pleasure but also with sadness that I write this letter to you.

I hope with all my heart this communication reaches you at the above address and finds you well.

Recently I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman at the Oxford club in Cairo, a Mr. Tony Sedgewick. In our conversations we discovered that we had a mutual association. His former ward, Mrs. Sophie Brennan, née Mersault, gave me your address when I wrote to her in London on the advice of Mr. Sedgewick. She very kindly gave me your address so that I can relay some information that will, hopefully, be of interest to you.

You might not remember me, but I hope you do. We met once when you came to my house in Shubra, that awful night in August 1940, the night of that devastating bomb at the Abdin Palace.

On that terrible night, you were very distressed and wanted to know the whereabouts of your father. I wanted so much to help you then.

Please believe me when I say that it is with great sadness that I write to tell you of the passing of your father, a month ago, at a prison sanatorium near the Sinai. After our meeting, I spent many months wondering whether you ever managed to get in contact with your father. Not long after our meeting, the news came out that Monsieur Alexandre Anton had been arrested by the head of the Secret Police, Mehmed Abbas, at Zamalek, and placed in a detention centre on the outskirts of Cairo to await trial.

The people of Cairo wanted to see him get life imprisonment. It was only then that they would feel vindicated. The newspapers reported that he was dying. Eventually your father was tried and convicted of terrorist activity and was incarcerated for life.

I am not sure if you are aware of the court case that brought the Group of the X to justice. A young woman, a brothel owner, called Fatima Said, was tried and convicted of the murder of Haran Issawi. She will never be released. It was reported that she was in fact an agent working for your father, the key mastermind, Farouk-Anton-Lorenzo-Carpet Seller, all aliases or sector names, as they called them.

Three hundred other members of the Group of the X—some of whom were surprisingly well-known members of the Cairene intelligentsia—were arrested over the course of the next two years.

I believe the authorities decided long ago to make an example of your father. I’m sure Mehmed Abbas had some influence in seeing that he received the harshest sentence. Your father was sent to live out his years in a high-security jail at el-Tor in the Sinai, a horrible, inhumane place. I’m sure your father hoped for a quick ending to his suffering, but as is sometimes the case, the cancer lingered on, for years.

Your father passed away on the fourth of January, this year, in his sleep. He was in solitary confinement after bouts of psychotic behaviour. It is with deep regret that I write to you with this news.

You are wise, Madame Rigaud, to have left Cairo for France. The situation here grows worse every day. Under King Farouk, our beloved country remains in the stranglehold of corruption and suffering. There are no jobs for the young. Taxes have risen. The landowners are struggling under chronic poverty, and rents are rising. It is only a matter of time now before the armed forces will bring matters to a head and force the government to take action. It reminds me so horribly of the days after the First World War when the Nationalists took to the streets in protest and anger, seeing like-for-like violence against British rule as the only option. I fear Egypt has not progressed much. The Muslim Brotherhood now actively seeks to bring its vision of independence to the fore. The newspapers report daily on the violence between the fundamentalist factions and the last of the British soldiers stationed here. I am convinced no man or woman ever really sees violence as a solution. Mrs. Brennan informed me of your marriage four years ago to Dr. Rigaud of Paris and of the birth of your two children, Alexandre and Virginie. You remain forever in my thoughts, and I wish you and your family good health and happiness both now and for many years to come.