Countdown in Cairo

FIFTY-FIVE

In the lobby of the hotel, she spotted Gian Antonio Rizzo not far from where she had left him. But she did not go to him, not immediately. She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone.

She spotted a small chapel in the hospital lobby and slipped into it. Like the doors to the hospital room upstairs, the chapel portals closed quietly. She wanted time to meditate and calm down. The chapel of the hospital was as good a place as any.

Her emotions were all over the place. Her spirit was exhausted. Taken as a whole, Federov’s confession contained the most monstrous words she had ever heard in her life.

Robert’s death… I was responsible… Do you forgive me?

It was too much to bear. For the first time since the dark days after Robert’s death, she put her head in her hands and cried. Long, hard, deep tears, tears she had fought back every lonely day for the past several months.

Several minutes passed, her mind awash in confusion, her entire soul lost in thoughts and prayer and spiraling images, all the way from the death of her grandmother and her funeral in Mexico, up through Kiev, and into the present. She tried to replay events and determine what she could have done differently, what might have put her in a different place today. But she was unable. She tried to push it all aside and tell herself that what was done was done and that it was God’s path for her, but she was unable to do that either. She wondered if she was on the right path or if she was a miserable failure.

And once again she felt very alone. Even in the chapel, she felt very alone.

At length, she realized that she wasn’t.

It was a sensation at first, a rallying of the spirit, perhaps, as she continued to lean forward, her face in her hands, her eyes closed. Then a small amount of additional time went by and she felt a spiritual presence, and then a physical presence to complement it.

It wasn’t something she heard or saw. It was something she could sense.

Moments after that, she felt the weight of another person settling onto the pew next to her. For a mad hallucinatory moment, she thought that it was Robert back beside her and that she had imagined all the horrid events of the last year. Then she thought it was Federov, that he had somehow managed to resurrect his energies, came down here, and found her. And then with an equally surreal jolt images came back to her, and she remembered how she and Robert had shared pews together in DC, back when she was several decades younger than she was now, just a year and a half ago. All of that seemed like a previous lifetime-and in a way it was, and in a way it wasn’t.

An arm wrapped itself around her shoulders. She didn’t resist. She knew who it was. She lifted her head and turned.

“You must have had quite a conversation,” Gian Antonio Rizzo said. “Quite a confession.”

“It was,” she said.

“Deathbeds will have that effect.”

She nodded.

“Life’s funny,” he said. “No matter where you are, there you are. So here you are.”

“Yeah. Thanks for being here with me,” she said.

Rizzo kept his arm wrapped around her. It was warm, comforting, and supportive. So were his eyes. She leaned to him and allowed herself to luxuriate in his embrace.

“You were wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“I did manage to turn down the request of a dying man.”

“Oh. I see,” he said. At length, he asked, “Would it be vulgar of me to ask what the request was?”

“Marriage.”

“Marriage!” He seemed as stunned as she had been. “You and him?”

Alex nodded.

“You’ll excuse me, but, ha! ” he said. “The man was more of a deluded dreamer than I thought.”

“And that wasn’t even the worst of it,” she said.

“What was the worst of it?”

She told him. All of it. From Kiev through to the jungle of Venezuela, to Paris, back through recent days in Geneva, New York, and Cairo.

“Wow,” he said, blowing out a long breath.

“I’m wondering,” she said after a long, heavy silence, “if I had known along the way, if I had known for a fact what he just confessed to, that he was responsible for Robert’s death, for the slayings in Barranco Lajoya, for every single venal, hateful thing he’s done, I wonder if at some moment I might have just killed him myself.”

“But you didn’t,” Rizzo said. “You didn’t know and you didn’t kill him.”

“But should I have?”

“Killed him?”

“Yes.”

“Probably not.” He paused. “Did you ever suspect?” he asked.

There was a long silence.

“And would you have?” she finally asked. “If you knew that he’d taken the person you most loved away from you? Would you have just shot him?”

Rizzo’s gaze went far away and came back, much as Federov’s had several minutes earlier.

“I’m a religious man,” he said, “and maybe a little bit superstitious as well. So I’d prefer not to answer that in a place of worship.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said.

“Take it instead as a maybe,” he said. “A definite maybe.”

She nodded. He took his arm away.

“And you?” he asked.

“What about me?”

“If you’d known, would you have killed him?”

She looked away from him and maintained another silence. When he looked back again, her eyes were moist, but something in them had changed-the compassion had changed to anger, or maybe something deeper.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

He stood. He offered a hand.

“Come along,” he said. “I think it’s my duty right now to get you out of here.”

“Thank you,” she said, accepting his hand and standing.

By then, they had both had enough, so Alex and Rizzo slipped out of the Clinique Perrault without a further word to anyone.

They went for dinner at a small French place on the Place St. François. Alex was still in a mode of deep decompression after the visit with Federov, but Rizzo knew how to guide the events.

They split a bottle of wine and talked about life. Gian Antonio rose to the occasion as a gentleman par excellence and talked her out of her anger and depression and fury. The staff of the restaurant sensed that the two needed space and time and, for that matter, a second bottle of wine, so they provided one, a good Swiss one from the Rhône Valley.

She got back to the hotel shortly after midnight, moderately drunk, which was probably a good thing this evening. She crashed into bed and slept fitfully, unable to come down completely, unwilling to pop an Ambien or any other sleeping aide on top of the wine. She was victimized not by nightmares but by bad feelings about all the events of the last year and a half.

The stint in Madrid, the pursuit of the Pietà of Malta, was a small vacation in terms of the larger picture. But looking back on it, she could see the hand of Federov once again making the first moves toward forgiveness and contrition.

She wondered again: If she had known earlier, might she have killed him? Out of pure whim one day, might she have just drawn a weapon and shot him? She pictured herself doing it, probably when she was one-on-one with him in his magnificent study in Geneva.

But in truth, she would never know. It was the road not taken.

She fell into what passed for sleep around 5:00 a.m.

The phone woke her less than three hours later, exploding rudely at her bedside like a fire bell in the night. In a fog, she answered.

It was Rizzo. He asked if she had heard, and if not, he had news.

“Heard what?” she asked.

Federov, Rizzo explained, had slipped into a coma late the previous evening about the time that Alex had tipsily lurched from the restaurant while hanging on Rizzo’s strong arm. In the early morning hours, Federov’s heart had fluttered and then failed. Efforts by the Clinique to move him onto life support had also failed.

There had been no relatives listed with the Clinique. No friends, either. Aside from a solicitor, Rizzo was his only contact. So it had been Rizzo’s cell phone that the Clinique had called at six minutes past seven that morning when Yuri Federov had been pronounced dead at age forty-nine.