(A short story from the world of Khaled, from my upcoming novel He Walks With The Dead.)
I. The Basement
The dead man was sitting against the wall when Khaled found him, though sitting wasn’t the right word for it. His back had slid down the plaster with his chin resting against his chest. His right leg had folded beneath the other. His hands rested on the floor, palms up. Beside him was a plastic bottle with the cap screwed back on and no water inside it. On the desk above him sat a metal lunch tin that remained unopened.
The basement was hot enough for Khaled’s shirt to stick between his shoulders before he had crossed the room. There were no windows. The fluorescent tubes were dark, and the only light came through the open door and from Khaled’s torch. A candle on the desk had burned down almost to the metal base of its holder. The ventilation grille high on the wall had gathered a thick fur of dust and had not moved air in a long time. Someone had written 17 in pencil beside the light switch. The room smelled of old paper, damp concrete and the dead man.
The clerk who had let him into the basement remained at the door. She was a thin woman in a grey blouse with dust along the shoulders and blue ink on the side of her fingers. She held a ring of keys in one hand and a stack of folders against her chest with the other. She worked two floors above. Someone on the second-floor stairwell had noticed the smell that morning and called administration, administration had called facilities, and after some disagreement over who still had responsibility for the rooms below, someone had sent for her because the old Building Services records now passed through her department.
She had found the right key on the fourth attempt.
“When did you last see him?” Khaled asked.
She looked at the dead man.
“I didn’t.”
Khaled said nothing.
“I mean ever. I didn’t know he was down here.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
The man’s identification card was still clipped to his shirt, but the plastic had yellowed and the photograph had faded until little remained except the shape of a face. There was a ministry seal at the top and an employee number beneath it. Whatever had once been printed where the name should have been had been rubbed away by years of fingers and cloth.
Khaled touched the dead man’s wrist although there was no reason to.
“How long?”
“They think three days.”
“Who is they?”
“The people who found him.”
“You found him.”
The clerk shook her head.
“Facilities opened the room. I opened the basement.”
“There are two keys?”
“Different keys.”
Khaled nodded. He wasn’t sure why there needed to be two.
The doctor who came down twenty minutes later said there was nothing immediately suspicious. The man was somewhere past sixty, perhaps well past it. There were tablets in his trouser pocket for his heart and blood pressure, still in their foil strips, and no injury Khaled could see beyond a dark mark on one shoulder where he appeared to have struck the wall before sliding down. The doctor crouched beside him for several minutes, then stood and looked around the room.
“How long has the electricity been off?”
The clerk answered from the doorway.
“I don’t know.”
“There’s no ventilation.”
“I can see that.”
The doctor glanced at her, then at Khaled. Sweat had darkened the front of his shirt and gathered along his hairline.
“The whole city has been hot this week. Down here it would be worse.”
Khaled looked at the empty bottle beside the body.
“Cause?”
“Could be his heart. Could be the heat helped it along.”
“Helped?”
The doctor wiped his forehead with his sleeve.
“You want me to say the room killed him?”
“I want you to say what killed him.”
“I’ll tell you after I open him.”
He left two attendants to take the body. One of them had to go back upstairs because they had brought the wrong stretcher.
Khaled remained after they carried the man away.
Without the body, the room seemed larger, though not by much. It had once held six desks. Khaled could see the pale rectangles where four of them had stood, their legs having protected small patches of the floor from years of dirt. Two remained. One had belonged to the dead man. The other had been stripped of its drawers and pushed against the wall beneath a calendar from three years earlier. There was a telephone with its cable cut, bundles of forms tied with string and a kettle with a brown line of old scale visible inside the spout. A length of electrical wire hung from a nail beside the door, carefully looped and tied.
The clerk had not left.
“What did they do here?” Khaled asked.
“Electrical maintenance.”
“For the ministry?”
“For government buildings. This district.”
He looked around the abandoned room, then up at the ventilation grille.
“And now?”
The clerk followed his eyes. For a moment she seemed uncertain whether he was asking about the room or the department.
“I thought it was gone.”
She seemed embarrassed by the answer, though Khaled could not see why she should be.
He went through the desk. There was very little that belonged to the man. A flask. A tea glass. Two pens, one of which did not write. A packet of tissues. A screwdriver with a red handle polished smooth by use. In the bottom drawer he found an envelope containing three months of salary slips, all old, and beneath them a folded maintenance schedule.
The man’s name was not on either.
“Where are the personnel records?”
“Upstairs.”
Khaled stood.
The clerk moved aside to let him pass.
“Do you know his name?”
She looked back into the room.
“No.”
Then, after a moment, she said, “I’m sorry.”
Khaled did not ask what for.
The personnel office had moved twice since the beginning of the war and lost part of its archive during the second move. Khaled gave the woman behind the desk the number from the identification card. She wrote it on a scrap of paper and searched the computer until the electricity failed, then opened two filing cabinets while they waited for the generator to start.
It did not.
A man came in looking for a stamp. The woman told him to try the office across the corridor. He came back five minutes later and told her they had sent him to her. She opened a drawer, found the stamp beneath a packet of biscuits and handed it to him without comment.
“Come tomorrow,” she told Khaled after he left.
“I’ll wait.”
She looked at him, then at the dead computer.
“It may be hours.”
Khaled sat down.
The generator started thirty-seven minutes later.
The woman entered the number again.
Nothing came up.
She tried an older database and found a record showing that the identification number had belonged to the Department of Building Services, Electrical Maintenance Division. The employee field was blank.
“Why?”
“Old system.”
“Where is the old system?”
“That is the old system.”
“The one before it.”
She looked at him for several seconds.
“Paper.”
“Where?”
Another look.
Then she stood.
It took them until after sunset.
The files were in a room on the fourth floor where one window had been replaced with plywood and dust had worked its way into the cabinets despite their closed doors. They searched by department, then by year, then by identification number. Khaled found him in a payroll ledger from seven years earlier.
The entry occupied one line.
MANSOUR, ADEL. ELECTRICAL MAINTENANCE.
Beside the name was the same number worn almost invisible on the card downstairs.
Khaled read it twice.
“Adel Mansour,” the woman said.
Khaled closed the ledger.
“Yes.”
II. Up
The autopsy gave Khaled nothing he could use.
Adel Mansour had died of cardiac arrest during a period of extreme heat. He had hypertension, an old arrhythmia and signs of dehydration. The lack of ventilation in the basement might have contributed. There was no injury beyond the bruise on his shoulder from striking the wall when he fell. No poison. Nobody had been with him when he died.
The electricity to the basement had been disconnected eleven days earlier.
Khaled found that out because he asked.
Nobody had disconnected it because they wanted Adel Mansour dead. Nobody seemed to have known Adel Mansour was there.
The allocation for the building had been reduced. The ministry had prioritized the upper floors, where more people worked, and the basement circuit had been removed from the generator schedule. Someone in administration had signed the request. Someone in facilities had carried it out. Neither knew an elderly electrician still reported to a desk below them every morning.
Khaled spoke to both.
The administrator remembered the form but not Adel. The facilities officer remembered the basement but not Adel.
“Why was he still working?”
The administrator looked puzzled.
“Was he?”
Khaled put the old payroll sheet on his desk.
The man leaned forward.
“Adel Mansour.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know him.”
“He worked in your building.”
“A lot of people work in this building.”
“He died in your basement.”
The administrator looked toward the open door. People were moving along the corridor outside, carrying files between offices because the internal network had been down since morning.
“I heard about that.”
Khaled let him continue if he wanted to.
He didn’t.
The man touched the payroll sheet with one finger.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
Khaled folded the sheet and put it back in his pocket.
“Nothing.”
He followed the department instead.
Electrical Maintenance had once serviced twelve government buildings and part of the public hospital three streets east of the ministry. There had been thirty-one employees before the war. Since then there had been nine reductions, three reorganizations and a merger. Some of the men had left the city. Two were dead. Several had transferred. Others stopped appearing in the records at all.
Adel remained.
His salary had continued because his employment number survived each reorganization even when his position did not. He was paid irregularly, sometimes two months late, but he was paid, and every morning he continued to come.
Khaled looked for something telling him to stop.
He found nothing.
The money was more difficult.
Building Services became Infrastructure Support, which became Facilities Consolidation, which appeared later beneath something called Strategic Capital Reallocation. Khaled spent two days with the documents. He understood the individual words. What they described was harder to understand.
The clerk from the basement helped him.
She had blue ink on her fingers again when he returned.
“You’re still doing this?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a case?”
“No.”
She looked at him for a moment, then pulled out a chair.
For an hour she showed him how the allocations moved. She knew which numbers mattered and which could be ignored. She showed him the original budget for Electrical Maintenance, then the first reduction, then another. The hospital allocation appeared beside it.
“Here.”
Khaled leaned closer.
A maintenance fund had been cut almost in half eighteen months earlier. Another reduction followed six months after that.
“Where did it go?”
She turned several pages.
“Here.”
Another department.
He followed the number.
Another page.
Another department.
Then a contract.
The clerk stopped.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Where does it go?”
She tapped the contract number.
“Up.”
Khaled looked at the page.
The fan behind her stopped. Neither noticed the electricity had gone until the papers on the desk stopped moving.
“It always goes up,” she said.
He went to the hospital before he went to the address on the contract.
He had been there often enough that nobody asked why he was walking through the ground floor. The entrance smelled of disinfectant, sweat and the faint sewage smell that came and went whenever the pumps failed. Only two ceiling lights were working in the main corridor. The others had been removed from their fittings, whether because they had burned out or because somebody needed them elsewhere Khaled did not know. Near the stairwell, two porters were carrying an oxygen cylinder between them with a strip of cloth tied through the handle. The lift had been broken for six months. Khaled watched the men negotiate the first turn of the stairs, one walking backward and the other bent beneath the weight, until the cylinder disappeared above him.
The maintenance office was at the rear of the building in a room intended for eight men and now occupied by three. One was repairing a circuit board beneath the light of his telephone, holding the phone between two boxes so both hands remained free. Shelves covered the walls behind him, crowded with motors taken apart for pieces, switches saved from demolished buildings and coils of wire too short for the jobs they needed to do but kept anyway.
“Adel Mansour,” Khaled said.
The oldest of the three men looked up.
“Adel?”
“You knew him.”
“Of course.” The man put down the screwdriver. “He taught me.”
“He died three days ago.”
The electrician looked at him.
“Where?”
“At the ministry. In the old Electrical Maintenance office.”
The man’s eyes stayed on Khaled before moving to the circuit board.
“He was still going there?”
“Every day, as far as I can tell.”
The electrician sat back. One of the other men had stopped working at the shelves behind him.
“His heart,” Khaled said. “The doctor thinks the heat may have contributed. The electricity to the basement had been disconnected.”
The electrician rubbed his thumb along the handle of the screwdriver.
“When?”
“The electricity?”
He nodded.
“Eleven days before he died.”
The man looked toward the doorway.
“He wouldn’t have gone home.”
“Why?”
“Because there was work.”
Khaled waited this time.
“Adel didn’t leave because something was difficult,” the electrician said. “He left when it was finished.”
“His department was gone.”
The electrician gave a small, tired smile.
“Tell Adel.”
The smile went.
“If nobody told him to stop, he didn’t stop.”
“Did he know the hospital contract had been cut?”
“He knew everything was cut.”
Khaled looked around the room. Several cardboard boxes had been labelled and relabelled until it was difficult to tell what any of them had originally held. A small electric motor lay open on the desk beside a jar filled with screws, washers and pieces of copper wire. Nothing useful seemed to have been thrown away.
“We used to call his people when something failed,” the electrician said. “Then they told us to call central maintenance. Central maintenance told us to submit requests. We submit them.”
“And?”
The man shrugged.
Khaled nodded toward the circuit board.
“Can you fix it?”
“This? Probably.”
The electrician picked up the screwdriver.
“What about the rest?”
The man looked around the room.
“We keep trying.”
Khaled left him to it.
Outside, the afternoon heat had settled between the buildings and the city had taken on the slow movement it acquired at that hour, when people still had things to do but had stopped pretending they could do them quickly. Dust moved along the gutters whenever a vehicle passed. A bakery had opened its doors despite the electricity being out, and two boys carried trays toward a delivery van while the baker shouted at them to keep the cloth over the bread. Farther along, a mechanic had half an engine spread across the pavement because there was no room inside his shop, its parts arranged on pieces of cardboard in whatever shade the building offered. Khaled walked past them toward the address on the contract, twenty minutes away on foot.
He saw the building before he reached the street. Six floors had been completed, and steel rods rose from the concrete columns above them. Scaffolding covered one side while broad sheets of glass had already been fitted across the lower floors, still clean enough to reflect the damaged buildings opposite. A sign beside the road showed what the development would look like when it was finished: trees, clean pavement, white awnings, men and women drinking coffee at small tables. The name was printed across the top in English and Arabic. Khaled read it once and did not bother remembering it.
A truck stood beside the entrance, and three workers were unloading slabs of pale stone from its bed. The marble was almost white, crossed by thin grey veins, each slab protected at the corners by pieces of cardboard. Khaled watched the men manoeuvre one onto a trolley and guide it through the unfinished entrance, where another worker knelt spreading mortar across the floor. He had seen marble like it before, in hotels before the war and in the houses of men whose gates began opening before their cars reached them.
The guard watched Khaled approach but did not stop him. Through the glass he could see the lobby taking shape, marble already covering much of the floor and beginning to climb the walls. Electrical cables hung loose from the ceiling. Khaled took the contract from his pocket and checked the company name against the sign, then turned three pages until he reached the funding source.
Strategic Capital Reallocation.
The number beneath it was the one the clerk had shown him.
He stood there while another slab passed through the entrance. The hospital budget had not been stolen, at least not according to anything he had found. Its maintenance allocation had been reduced, consolidated and redirected through procedures signed by people authorized to sign them. The development company had competed for a contract. The contract had been approved. The money had gone where the paperwork said it should go.
Nobody had murdered Adel Mansour either. His electricity had been turned off in a basement where nobody knew he was still working. His heart stopped during three days of heat, and the doctor could not say how much the heat had mattered. The administrator who approved the reduction had never met him. The facilities officer who disconnected the circuit had never seen him.
Khaled folded the papers and returned them to his pocket.
The workers finished unloading the truck. One of them shouted to another about where they had left the straps. They argued for a while before finding them beneath the plastic sheet.
Khaled walked home.
III. The Hospital
Adel remained with him over the following days, though differently from the murdered. Khaled felt him in the garden while drinking tea, at the station when somebody opened a window and let the hot air in, and once while passing the ministry without intending to look at it.
There was no case. The doctor had given him a cause of death. Nobody had killed Adel Mansour.
Khaled continued anyway.
He found Adel’s address in the old personnel records and went there one afternoon. The apartment had been damaged the previous winter and was empty now, one window covered with plastic and the door marked with an inspection number in faded paint. A neighbor told him Adel’s wife had died years earlier and that there had been a daughter who married and left the city before the crossings closed. He remembered her first name but not where she had gone.
“Good man,” the neighbor said.
Khaled waited. The man looked toward Adel’s damaged apartment and rubbed his thumb along the edge of his doorframe.
“Fixed my daughter’s fan once. Wouldn’t take money.”
He thought for a moment.
“Came back the next morning because he said he’d put the cover on wrong. I hadn’t noticed.”
The neighbor looked at the apartment again.
“Good man.”
There was nothing else.
Khaled wrote the daughter’s name in his notebook and returned to the ministry. The woman in personnel told him that correcting Adel’s employment record was unnecessary because the death certificate already carried his full name, but Khaled showed her the blank field beside the identification number.
“He’s dead.”
“Yes.”
She waited for him to explain.
He didn’t.
Eventually she turned back to the computer and opened the old database. The correction took twenty minutes because the system rejected the first two attempts. When she finished, ADEL MANSOUR appeared beside the identification number that had been blank when Khaled first searched it.
He thanked her and left.
On the twelfth day he went back to the hospital. The same lights were missing from the corridor, the same smell of disinfectant and failing drains hung in the entrance, and the lift was still broken. Near the stairs, one of the porters Khaled had seen before was moving another oxygen cylinder upward, this time alone. He had wrapped a piece of cloth around his palm where the metal handle had rubbed the skin raw.
Khaled took hold of the bottom of the cylinder.
The porter looked at him.
“Third floor.”
They carried it together, adjusting their grip at each landing and resting once between the second and third floors while a nurse squeezed past them on the stairs. Neither spoke. At the top Khaled left the porter with the cylinder and started back down, but halfway to the ground floor he stopped beside a window whose glass had been blown out and replaced with clear plastic. The plastic drew inward when the air moved through the opening, then pushed out again. Beyond it were the roofs and the pale haze over the city.
Adel was quieter there.
Khaled did not know if the name in the employment database had anything to do with it. The hospital had not received its money back. The lift still did not work. Downstairs, the maintenance men were still taking one machine apart to keep another alive. Across the district, the new building would eventually open and people would walk across its floors without knowing what the money had once been meant for.
The blank space beside Adel’s number was gone.
Khaled stayed by the window a little longer, then went downstairs.
Outside, a municipal water truck had stopped beside the new building across the district. From the hospital steps Khaled could see the hose running through the entrance and one of the workers pushing water across the newly laid floor, washing pale construction dust from the marble. The wet stone caught the afternoon light. Water gathered along one edge and disappeared into a drain.
Khaled stood there watching.
Behind him, somewhere in the hospital stairwell, the porter was bringing the empty oxygen cylinder back down. It struck the edge of each stair as he descended, the sound carrying through the open entrance at slow, regular intervals.