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remains scraps shouts bones forgotten honored anonymous or decried in the great roll-call of history cheap glossy stock vainly imitating marble that looks like the two-penny magazine my neighbor folded carefully so as to be able to read it without effort, the drug overdose of the Italian businessman, the scandals of actresses and call girls that aren’t very scandalous, the deeds and gestures of unknown people, actually quite close to the contents of the suitcase, secrets I’ll resell to their legitimate owners, fruits of a long investigation in the course of my activities as an international informer: in 1998 between two meetings I was walking through the city in the still-clear winter of Cairo, when the dust is possibly less abundant than in summer and above all the heat is bearable, when the Egyptians say it’s cold, a strange idea in a city where the temperature never goes below 70 degrees, on the Avenue Qasr el-Ayni at the edge of the decadence of Garden City the eminently British, crumbling neighborhood where my hotel was there stood a liquor store run by Greeks, I went there from time to time to stock up on Ricardo the real pastis of Alexandria, in the window so as not to shock Muslims one saw only mountains of boxes of tissues, blue, pink, or green whereas inside old wooden shelves were bent beneath the Metaxa, the Bordon’s gin and Whack Daniels made in the Arab Republic of Egypt probably all made from the same source alcohol the immense majority of which was then used as additives in cleaning products, to polish metals or clean windows, the Egyptians didn’t risk it, my military men drank only imported drinks bought in duty-free shops, the Greek poisoners must not have made much, in fact they sold mostly beer to people in the neighborhood and a little anis to adventurers either idiotic or amused by the labels, they wrapped the bottles up in the pages of an old issue of Ta Nea from Athens, then in a pink plastic bag taking care to explain to you in flowery French that it was better not to use the handles , always without a smile, which instantly reminded me of the Balkans and the old joke according to which you needed a knife to make a Serb smile, Hellenes are without a doubt Balkan, if only for the stinginess of their smile—among the Greeks of Qasr el-Ayni there was always an oldish man sitting there in a corner of the store on a wooden chair bearing the effigy of Cleopatra, he spoke French to the shopkeepers with a strange accent, he held a quarter liter of Metaxa or “Ami Martin” cognac wrapped up in newspaper and thus discreetly and methodically got drunk while making conversation with his hosts, the first time I heard him he was copiously insulting Nasser and the Arabists, as he said, twenty-five years late, Nasser had died a long time ago and pan-Arabism with him or mostly, it was quite surprising to hear that old drunkard with his face marked by the sun of Cairo, thin in a dark-grey suit that was too big for him, seeming like a local, to have such vindictiveness against the father of the nation, he reminded me of the grandfather of my wartime comrade Vlaho, an old Dalmatian wine-grower who spent his time bad-mouthing Tuđman and calling him a fascist bigot, because he had been a partisan, the grandfather, and had fought on the Neretva with Tito, he insulted us freely, calling us little Nazis and other nice things, he must have been part of the seven or nine percent of the population who called themselves “Yugoslavs,” and was probably the only peasant in that fraction, the only peasant and the only Dalmatian, and in that Greek liquor store in Cairo I remembered the old man this strange guy calling Nasser a thief and a pimp without pulling his punches as he knocked back his firewater that had apparently not managed to make him blind, but maybe mad, he was Dutch, his name was Harmen Gerbens, he was seventy-seven years old and had lived in Egypt since 1947, a force of nature, as they say, to have so