death of many suspects, which led to some embarrassing situations. A detective would then have one of two options: either to obtain a medical report indicating that the suspect had died as a result of a sudden drop in blood circulation, then order him to be buried secretly after threatening his family with detention and torture if they opened their mouths, or to order the plainclothesmen to throw the suspect’s body from the police station balcony, then write a report afterward indicating that he had committed suicide.
The young officer Safwat Shakir, after obtaining his supervisor’s permission, introduced a new protocol: instead of beatings and electric shocks, he would arrest the suspect’s wife (his mother or sister if he was a bachelor); then he would order his men to take off the woman’s clothes, one item at a time until she was naked, then they would begin to fondle her body in front of her husband, who would soon collapse and confess to whatever he was asked to confess. The new protocol led to brilliant results, and bringing cases to closure took half the customary time, so much so that the head of the Azbakiya precinct, for several years in a row, received letters of thanks from the minister of the interior, commending the precinct for its productivity and precision. Only one time was there a problem: one of the suspects couldn’t stand seeing his old mother naked, with the policemen fondling her private parts. He let loose a loud, rasping scream, as if he were on fire. Then he lost consciousness and later it turned out he had become a hemiplegic as a result. Safwat Shakir, as usual, did not lose his composure and dealt with the situation wisely. He ordered the suspect moved to the hospital and obtained a medical report stating that the detainee had hypertension and had suffered a clot in the brain. Apart from that fleeting incident, the new protocol achieved such brilliant success that other precincts adopted it. News of Safwat Shakir’s genius reverberated so strongly throughout the halls of the ministry that he was transferred to the State Secret Security detective division. There he used his method with political dissidents, achieving the same rate of success, which made his supervisors rotate him to different governorates. With repetition and experience Safwat Shakir finessed his method and added to it a theatrical dimension that made it more effective. So when a suspect’s wife or mother was stripped naked, he would scrutinize her in a leisurely fashion and tell the suspect in a neutral tone, “Look at that! Your wife is very beautiful. Isn’t it a shame that you leave her starved for sex, while you worry about politics?” Or he would say, “True, your mother is old, but when we took off her clothes and saw her naked, we discovered that she’d still be good in bed!”
The detainee might then cry or scream, cursing or begging for mercy. Safwat, like veteran stage actors, had learned how to remain silent until the suspect was through with his reaction. He would wait a moment then say in a soft voice that would reverberate in the detainee’s ears like evil suggestions hissed by Satan, “That’s my last offer. You either agree to talk or I’ll let the policemen violate your wife before your eyes. You should thank me — I’ll be offering you the chance to watch a pornographic movie for free.”
For many years, not a single detainee stood his ground vis-a-vis Safwat Shakir. Many detainees confessed to belonging to several organizations at the same time or signed blank sheets of paper that Safwat Bey later filled in to his heart’s content with any confession he wanted.
In addition to his rare efficiency, Safwat Shakir was also well known for encouraging younger officers. He taught them patiently, and he sincerely tried to make them benefit from his experience. He would pick up a pen and a sheet of paper and draw a sloping graph that began from a high point and stayed in a straight horizontal line for some distance then plummeted fast to zero. He would explain to his students, the young officers, “This graph represents the resistance of the detainees: you’ll notice from the drawing that the resistance always starts at a high point and remains constant for a while then suddenly collapses at a certain point. The efficient officer will bring about that point of collapse quickly. Don’t rely on beating only: after a certain point of physical pain, the detainee might lose sensation. As for electric shocks, they might kill the detainee, creating an unnecessary problem. Try my way and you’ll appreciate it. The most hardened and most vicious detainee cannot bear to see his wife or mother violated in front of his own eyes.”
Safwat Shakir stayed in State Security until he made the rank of colonel, and then the state wanted to utilize his genius in a new field. So he was transferred to General Intelligence, where the modus operandi was different, of course. His new job consisted of keeping spy rings under surveillance, following and documenting public opinions, and controlling and coordinating agents of the service — university professors, media personalities and executives, party and government officials — and assigning them specific tasks.
General Intelligence in its long and eventful history would, however, remember one of Safwat Shakir’s greatest feats. Back at the time of strong opposition to the Egyptian regime by Egyptian intellectuals living in Paris, led by a well-known writer who enjoyed respect in French circles, Safwat Shakir asked the head of General Intelligence to give him a free hand in the operation to deal with the situation. Permission was granted and Shakir went to Paris. After getting permission from French intelligence, he hired a prostitute for a quarter million francs. He trained her and she started a relationship with the Egyptian author. She slipped him a sleeping pill in his whiskey then called Safwat and his men, who injected him with a strong drug and shipped him in a box that they had carefully prepared. The author regained consciousness a few hours later and found himself in intelligence headquarters in Heliopolis. It was a brilliant coup; French investigations led nowhere, so the incident was attributed to person or persons unknown. As for Egyptian dissidents, their voices were muffled for a long time afterward for fear of a similar fate.
In fact, recording all of General Safwat Shakir’s professional achievements would require another lengthy book. He kept going from one success to the next until he was appointed counselor (the official and publicly announced title of the head intelligence officer in Egyptian embassies) in Accra, Tokyo, and finally in the most important capital for the Egyptian regime: Washington. He knew quite well that that post was the last stepping- stone to glory, and he worked extraordinarily hard and proved quite successful at it. He saw the forthcoming visit by the president as the chance of a lifetime: if the president saw him and liked him he would appoint him in the next cabinet as minister of the interior or foreign minister or even minister of international cooperation. But if he made a single mistake in preparing for the visit, he would be pensioned off in the next round of appointments and promotions.
Have we learned everything about Safwat Shakir? There are still two aspects of his life that we have not touched upon: power and women. After many years in which he had absolute power over and control of the destiny of thousands upon thousands of detainees, he acquired a mysterious, well-established, instinctive power that would be hard to explain fully. The nature of his job enabled him to see people at their weakest, made it possible for him to penetrate the most private secrets between a man and his wife, and taught him to crush the manhood of the strongest fighters, to make them prostrate themselves in tears, begging him, kissing his feet so he wouldn’t order their wives to be violated before their very eyes. That deep-rooted, perverse human experience gave him an extraordinary power over those around him. It was as if he had broken the bounds of that invisible domain where all humans moved, acquiring a superhuman authority that no one could withstand. He no longer needed to speak much, and there was nothing that surprised him or made him hesitate anymore. To that should be added his stonelike features, hard chiseled as if they represent implacable fate; his strong, terrifying look that penetrates the heart; his dignified, always unhurried movements that are controlled by a rhythm all their own and which make light of any tension around him; his few words, which he delivers slowly and distinctly; and his very presence, which in itself creates a state of impenetrable anxiety around him. All of those elements magnify his power to the utmost, to godlike dimensions. When he makes a decision, it is irreversible, carrying out the dictates of fate without being subject to them. He decides, with one word or gesture, the destiny of a whole family for several generations to come. The stupendous power that he has would impel one to wonder: Can our wishes change the course of events? If we really and strongly wish for something, can we make it happen somehow? If that were true, then Safwat Shakir’s power is caused primarily by his very strong awareness of it, as evidenced by the fact that he instantly imposes his will on those who do not know his position.
That power took a different mode with women, the love of whom Shakir inherited from his grandfathers. (Most men in his family had two or more women at the same time as either wives or mistresses.) He remembered from his childhood many quarrels between his mother and father because of his relations with other women. He even remembered that, as a student at the police academy, he had had a relationship with a servant in their house. When he slept with her every Thursday upon his return from spending the evening with his friends, he felt that her body was already fulfilled and content, which created in his mind a strong suspicion, supported by other indications, that she was sleeping with both him and his father. The wild sexual vigor, in both desire and performance, that Safwat Shakir maintained despite being fifty-five, was not due only to heredity but also to the nature of his work. For those who live on the edge of danger — such as soldiers in combat, bullfighters, and gangsters on the run — have burning, insatiable sexual desires, as if they voraciously partake of that pleasure because they might lose it
