“Democracy is like love: a lie invented so that we stay in our place, satisfied with our lot.
“Some would say the same of religion. »
These incisive replies, thrown like tennis smashes by the protagonists of Parker Bilal’s novel The Scales of Gold, give a nice glimpse of the general backdrop of the book: Egypt and its turpid political, religious and social. However, it is necessary to have reached the 441st page (out of 480) to see these remarks very explicitly arise because it is the plot which, more than anything, is put forward by the author.
Its main character, Makana, an ex-policeman and political refugee from Sudan, has been living sparsely in Cairo since misfortune befell his family. Renter of an old awama, a barge moored on the Nile, he spends his days rehashing memories of a happier past. Until Hanafi, a business tycoon eager to find a missing protege, brings him back into service.
“Investigate discreetly,” insisted the sponsor. But how can one stick to such instructions when the absentee is none other than Adil Romario, the darling of the football team that Hanafi owns, and when the tabloid media, immediately on the lookout, mount the case in pin by pouring a scent of scandal and suspicion? Makana begins to pull the thread of a thick ball of facts and both business and family relationships between the characters, which makes him unearth, behind the smooth branding of the powerful Hanafi, his initial links with the underworld. He also discovers the power struggle between the latter and a certain Vronski, a figure in the Russian mafia.
“A species of cerberus with a cold gaze”
Alongside the detective, we dive into a universe as international as it is underworld: “There was a mixed crowd there: a majority of foreigners, hotel guests, people from outside. A few Westerners and many Arabs, Malaysians, Chinese, who chatted at the bar or wandered around the room to see what was happening at the other tables. The door was guarded by some sort of cerberus with cold, emotionless eyes—a hardened criminal’s eyes—wearing a tuxedo so lustrous with wear it looked like it was painted on with varnish. »
We go from the alleys of the souk to the deck of a yacht, from a luxury car to a dark dungeon where henchmen torture the detective to death. The plot is savored with all the more delight as, while responding to the expected codes, it constantly creates surprise. For Makana, the hunt becomes more complex with each step, the murders multiplying in his path until he in turn is personally worried. “A harsh laugh sounded from the darkness. “You have a dangerous tongue, Makana. You should be careful, we might just cut it off,” he is threatened.
In parallel with his investigations, the assassination of a wealthy English drug addict, in search of her daughter who has been missing for seventeen years, constitutes a vertiginous echo of her own mourning and puts her nerves on edge. This is how behind the irony of the seemingly detachment detective gradually appears an irreparably wounded man who has no other resource but to cling to his sense of justice in order to continue living. He investigates without having any illusions about the ethics of his sponsors, but persists in a way for the beauty of the gesture.
A Sudanese detective with a shattered past
“He wanted to believe in the system, in justice that triumphs in the end – because for him it was all there. He had served justice, had fought for it, had defended it at the risk of his life. And now he should step aside and let them do as they please? We understand all the better then the vision given by the author of Egypt and its capital, a vision which at no time offers the reader the possibility of getting drunk on tourist images. There is no pyramid here, only the financial interests at stake are colossal and all you see of the capital is its underground side and where each piece of information given is sold. We are all the more attached to Makana, a Sudanese detective with a shattered past who, for a few days of parentheses, offers himself the pleasure of playing the vigilante.
Parker Bilal is actually the mixed signature of the Anglo-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub who, since 2012, has been developing a vein of detective writing alongside his other novels (published by Actes Sud). Makana, on the border between his two countries of heart, has undoubtedly inherited the multiple paths of its author who lived in turn in Cairo, Sudan, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands.