The Cairo Affair

5

Thursday was full of visitors. Fiona was ready with coffee and eggs when Sophie rose around noon, and soon afterward Mary Saunders, the ambassador, called to tell her that everything was being done to track down the cretin who had shot Emmett. “Like what?” Sophie asked.

Perhaps noting the tone in her voice, the ambassador hesitated. Or maybe this was just Sophie’s imagination, for she felt as if she’d woken a different woman from the night before. The grief and guilt remained, but she’d woken angry—angry that some thick-necked bastard had been able to walk into a restaurant and end life as she’d known it. She was angry for Emmett, because he hadn’t had the chance for his “little shit” moment, and that was something he had deserved. She was angry with Stan, because she wasn’t sure she believed him, and she was livid with Zora Balašević, who had destroyed her marriage long before that gunman had destroyed Emmett. Most of all, she was angry with herself for being so much less than she could have been.

Mary Saunders listed the law enforcement and security agencies who were “on top of this” and told her that she should expect to have to answer some questions for them. “Of course,” Sophie said, “but is this a two-way street?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are they going to answer my questions?”

“I’m sure they’ll be as helpful as they can be, Sophie.”

Afterward, she received a call from Harry Wolcott—a colleague of Emmett’s in Cairo, and Stan’s Agency boss. He offered breathy, muddled condolences. Sophie appreciated that the man was emotional and confused, but that wasn’t much use to her now. She wanted answers—and if not answers, then at least the feeling that people she trusted knew what was going on. She’d lived in the diplomatic corps long enough to know that just because people act as if they understand the world, it doesn’t mean they know it any better than you do.

After she hung up, Glenda appeared at the front door, her dark, wiry hair out of sorts, claiming to have been accosted by a journalist, though when they looked out the window there was no sign of paparazzi. “But it has made the news,” she told them as she crouched in her short skirt, long-legged on insecure heels, and turned on CNN, where they saw a picture of Emmett from when he first arrived in Budapest. A newscaster mentioned “sketchy details” and a “Hungarian restaurant” and an “unknown assailant.” A talking head gave some noncommittal words on what this could mean for American-Hungarian relations (“Nothing,” he finally admitted). There was no mention of Sophie, just the banner headline MURDER IN BUDAPEST. The embassy, Fiona Vale guessed aloud, was working overtime to keep her out of the news cycle.

Glenda held her hand and whispered lovingly that she was going to take care of her. Fiona disappeared to make calls—babysitting, Sophie suspected, wasn’t her actual job, and her work was probably piling up. Then Gerry Davis, pink and clean in a perfectly pressed greatcoat, arrived to take her through more of his vision of the future. She couldn’t help but admire the way he was able to act as tragedy’s soothsayer.

There were funeral arrangements to be made, but she wasn’t to worry—the embassy was taking care of the details. After an inquest (“Sorry, this is required, but we’ll deal with it”), Emmett’s body would be sent back to Massachusetts and the family plot near Amherst. Would she like to fly back with him? “Of course,” she answered without even considering the question. Twenty minutes later, Gerry Davis told her that there was a first-class reservation for tomorrow, Air France to Boston via Paris, with her name on it.

The Hungarian police were scheduled to visit at four, but beforehand, Gerry Davis said, some folks from the embassy wanted to have a word with her. It turned out they were already in the apartment, drinking coffee in the kitchen with Fiona. Two tall men wandered in, smiling stiffly, and asked Glenda if she would please step out for a little while. (Glenda’s Hell no caught in her throat once she realized they were spies.) They introduced themselves, but their given names passed Sophie by. She referred to them by their surnames: Reardon and Strauss.

Reardon took the lead. He was bald on top, cropped short on the sides, and blushed whenever the subject made a turn toward the personal. Strauss was younger, early thirties, and more dark than his name would have suggested. He used both thumbs to type notes into his BlackBerry.

Reardon said, “Did your husband share information about his work?”

“Not usually, no.”

“But you know what he did?”

“He was a deputy consul,” she said. “He worked under Ray—Raymond Bennett, the consul—sometimes taking over his schedule, meeting with Hungarian officials and businessmen. That sort of thing.”

Reardon nodded—he knew this already. Of course he knew this. “We’re looking into it now—whether some part of his job led to this incident. If, however, the cause is rooted in something else, something more personal, then perhaps you would know about it.” He was already blushing.

Yugoslavia, 1991.

Zora Balašević.

A disloyal wife.

But all she said was “I have no idea.”

There were more questions—Emmett’s friends, his extracurricular activities, his business interests—but they were softball compared to the lie she’d begun the conversation with: She had plenty of ideas, too many ideas.

Reardon and Strauss were attentive, but not suspicious, and as they talked Sophie began to relax, describing her and Emmett’s shared life to them. It was almost comforting speaking these things aloud, and by the time they stood and handed her their cards she was feeling a warm wave of nostalgia. The anger had slipped away, and she only wanted Emmett back. She gave them thankful smiles, but Glenda gave them another face, for she was in hysterics again, furious that they’d kept her away from Sophie for a full forty minutes.

Fiona was manning the phone in the kitchen, which was by then ringing off the hook. Journalists. Each time, Sophie heard a single ring, then Fiona’s cold voice saying, “Kohl residence,” and then lowering to a whisper as she got rid of them. Around two, though, she came in and announced that Emmett’s parents were on the line.

Why hadn’t she thought to call them?

Though his mother cried nonstop, neither of them blamed her. They believed that they understood what Sophie was going through, and they simply wanted to know how she was holding up. They were good people, she realized, as if she had never truly known it before. Once she was finished with them, she called her own parents. They were at the cabin in West Virginia and had no access to the news. After the shock, they were much the same as Emmett’s parents, but without so many tears. They were just happy that she was the one still breathing. “Come home,” her father told her, and she said that she would see them soon.

As she hung up, it occurred to her that her father had been suggesting this ever since she was a child: Come home. He’d treated her scholarship to Harvard as an inconvenience that would likely damage his frail daughter, and when she thrived in Boston he tried to lure her back to Virginia with health problems—he was suddenly diagnosed with arteriosclerosis, celiac disease, and depression. She’d resisted the pull, but during much of her college career she’d lived with the fear that her mother would call with the news that he was dead. Over time, of course, he’d emerged from his ailments stronger than ever, finally aiming his daggers at Emmett: What kind of life is all this moving around? It’s no good for Sophie—can’t you see that? What about roots? Emmett had shrugged it off better than she, cruelly referring to her father as “euthanasia’s poster child.”

She found Glenda napping on the sofa, television off. Fiona pointed at the Jim Beam; apparently, Glenda had been sipping at it from the moment she showed up. Gerry Davis reappeared—from where?—and announced that the Hungarian police had arrived.

To avoid waking Glenda, she met with them in the dining room, but it was only one man—the same older man from the night before, Andras Something. Andras Kiraly—key-rye, with a rolled r—which she knew meant King. He had the slow-moving, depressive presence of popular television detectives, and she realized that she was more comfortable with him than with any of the people she’d met that day. He smiled only now and then, always in embarrassment, and she found this charming. Gerry Davis hovered protectively behind her, occasionally asking if she was too tired to do this, but she locked eyes with Andras Kiraly and said that she was happy to help the Hungarian police with their investigation.

“I should be up-front, Mrs. Kohl,” Kiraly told her softly. “I’m not actually police—I’m from the Alkotmányvédelmi Hivatal, the Constitution Protection Office.”

She knew of this office—until the previous year, it had been called the Office of National Security, the Nemzetbiztonsági Hivatal. He, like Reardon and Strauss, and like Stan, was a spy. When they came out, they came out like hives.

He asked the same questions as her CIA visitors, but she found herself elaborating a bit more, perhaps from practice. This time, she didn’t dwell on her infidelity. He said, “Do you mind if I show you a few photographs?”

Behind her, Gerry Davis cleared his throat. Kiraly looked up, but Sophie couldn’t see what Gerry Davis was trying to communicate to him. Whatever it was, the Hungarian didn’t seem interested in playing ball. “It’s up to Mrs. Kohl,” he said.

She said, “Please. Show me your photographs.”

Gerry Davis pulled out the chair beside her and sat close. Despite how scrubbed he looked, he smelled of sweat. “There may be security issues here, Sophie. That’s my only concern.” To Kiraly, he said, “May I see the pictures first?”

A laconic shrug, and the Hungarian reached into his jacket and took out some passport-sized snapshots that he passed on to Gerry Davis, who held them up like a hand of tiny cards to examine. There were four in all, she saw, and on one he paused. He took it out and placed it facedown on the table. He pushed it over to Kiraly. “The rest are fine, just not that one.”

Kiraly lifted the photo, glanced at it, and slipped it into his pocket. “Please,” he said. “Let Mrs. Kohl see the others.”

Reluctantly, Gerry Davis gave her the three remaining photos, and she saw two men in their late thirties or early forties and a much older man, nearly sixty. She didn’t recognize any of the faces, but what struck her was the color of their skin. “I don’t understand,” she said aloud.

“Yes?” asked Kiraly.

“These men—they’re not Hungarian, are they? I mean, unless they’re Roma.”

He shook his head. “No, they are not.”

“Where are they from?”

“Do you recognize them?”

She gave them another look. Not only different ages, but different forms of dark-skinned masculinity. Middle Eastern or North African. The overweight one who looked addicted to smiles. The thick-necked thug—a darker model of the one who killed Emmett. The older one in glasses, maybe their leader, or maybe just nearsighted. “No,” she said. “I’ve never seen them before. What about the other?”

“They’re from different places,” Kiraly said, ignoring her question by answering her previous one. “Turkey, Egypt, Bosnia.”

“And what do they have to do with Emmett?”

Kiraly pursed his lips, then reached out to accept the photographs. “Nothing, perhaps. But we sometimes follow many different cases, and if incidents occur around the same time, then it’s a good idea to see if they are connected.”

“These aren’t?”

More of the lips, then he shrugged.

“I think Mrs. Kohl has answered enough. She’s tired.”

“I’m not tired,” she said, tired only of Gerry Davis’s shepherding. “And I’d like to know who you’re hiding in your jacket pocket.”

Kiraly looked as if he might bow to her demand, but instead he deferred to Gerry Davis, who just gave back a cool stare. Sophie turned on him.

“Why not, Gerry?”

He inhaled, finally giving her his full attention. “National security, Sophie. And if those other men aren’t connected to Emmett, then this one won’t be, either.”

“But I’d like to see the picture.”

Kiraly said in a tired voice, “Gerry, it’s just a face.”

Gerry Davis turned to the Hungarian, maybe angry, and after a full four seconds dredged up a smile. “Well, okay. If it’ll make you feel better. Go ahead, Andras.”

Kiraly reached into his jacket and handed over the final photograph. It wasn’t, despite what she was beginning to suspect, the gunman, nor was it Zora Balašević. Instead, it was another swarthy man in his thirties, a shadow of a smile on his face. Clean cheeks, dark eyes. He seemed different from the others, though she couldn’t place how. Healthier, maybe. Less a victim of a hard life.

She looked up at Kiraly. “Egyptian?”

He shook his head and began to speak, but Gerry Davis cut him off: “You don’t recognize him?”

She didn’t, and she admitted as much.

Like the CIA men, Kiraly gave her his business card and asked her to call if anything occurred to her. Perhaps sensing that Sophie was angry with him, Gerry Davis left with Kiraly, promising to remain in touch.

Then it was a home of women. Glenda had recovered and was in the kitchen cooking something with an entire chicken and a bottle of wine in a large pot. Fiona was flitting between CNN and her cell phone. She smiled when Sophie came in, then patted the sofa cushion next to her. “How you doin’?” she asked as Sophie sat.

“What’s the deal with Gerry Davis?”

“Gerry?” Fiona considered the question. “He’s very good at his job.”

“What’s his job?”

“Some kind of liaison. Quite fluent in Hungarian.”

“Is he a spook, too?”

A high-pitched laugh. “Gerry? He’s more of an errand boy.”

“What does that mean?”

She shrugged. “It’s how he was described to me.”

Together, they watched footage from Libya, young rebels in need of razors looking sweaty but optimistic on the desert roads, carrying rifles they sometimes waved over their heads. She could imagine the men from Kiraly’s photographs in these newsreels.

Smelling something burning, Sophie went to check on Glenda, who shooed her from the kitchen and told her to take a rest, but then opened a bottle of Emmett’s Chilean red and insisted she take a glass. Sophie lingered, and as they drank Glenda asked about Kiraly, whom she had seen leaving. “He didn’t look like a cop to me.”

“He isn’t. He’s a spy.”

She grinned. “Well. Isn’t that something?”

Sophie took her wine upstairs and sat on the bed but didn’t lie down. She was unsure what to do with herself. The food was being taken care of, and Fiona had spent much of her time tidying up the place. She remembered that there was a load of shirts in the dryer, but it seemed ridiculous to deal with that.

Yet as the minutes of her doing nothing ebbed past, she began to feel the pressure in her intestines, the discomfort, the hole.

She took the business cards out of the pocket of her slacks and looked at them. It was as if she’d been to one of Emmett’s parties, where each handshake came with one of these, everyone ready to hand out their personal details to anyone who might do their career some good. But she couldn’t do any of these people any good, not really. Not if she wanted to remain a free woman.

Is that what I am now?

The truth was that, even taking her own crimes into account, she knew nothing about what had happened to Emmett; she knew less than nothing. And if she had shared everything with the people behind these business cards, would it really have accomplished anything?

Like Gerry Davis, she was suddenly able to see the future. Rather, she saw multiple futures, and they all began with a simple decision—whether or not she would choose ignorance. All she had to do was stop asking why Emmett’s life had ended like that. Of course, she wanted to know, but how strongly did she want to know? Did she want to know so badly that she would be willing to give up everything else? Or was it better to keep her eyes closed, to let it go and return to Boston with her husband’s corpse? Let the machine of law enforcement take over. After the funeral she could change her life, maybe even for the better. Go back to school—teaching wasn’t out of the question. They had a sizable savings account, and there was another, very private account in Zurich, which she had never touched. There wasn’t much she couldn’t do. Or—and this thought came quickly—she could eventually return to Cairo and try to rekindle that joy she once felt. Not with Stan—no—but with the city itself.

Was that even possible now?

The cheapest of the business cards, laser-printed on low-quality stock, was Andras Kiraly’s. King. She wiped her eyes dry and picked up the bedroom extension and dialed. He answered after two rings like Stan—“Kiraly Andras”—reversed because Hungarians begin with their surnames.

“Mr. Kiraly, it’s Sophie Kohl.”

“Mrs. Kohl. Hello. How may I help you?”

How could he help her? It was an excellent question. But of all her visitors, she thought that he was probably her favorite. “I got the feeling,” she began, then, “I sensed during our talk that you wanted to tell me something more, and so I’m calling.”

She waited for him to speak. She didn’t know exactly how he had felt about Gerry Davis’s meddling, but she couldn’t imagine that he had liked it. Finally, he said, “Perhaps you would be interested in asking a precise question, so that I may better help you.”

There was a difference, in his mind at least, between answering questions and offering unsolicited information. So she gave it a try. “That last photograph, the one Mr. Davis didn’t want me to see. Who is he?”

By his longer pause, she guessed—and this filled her with a tingle of pleasure, her first of the day—that she’d asked something crucial. Then the silence went on, and she wondered if he’d walked away from the phone.

“Mr. Kiraly?”

“I’m here.”

“Maybe you can just tell me what his nationality is.”

“He’s American, Mrs. Kohl. I’m just looking through my papers for his information.”

American?

“Here it is. Jibril Aziz. Would you like me to spell it?”

“Please,” she said. American?

He spelled it, and she wrote in clear block capitals on the Post-it pad Emmett had always kept beside the phone.

“What does he have to do with my husband?”

“That’s unclear. Mr. Aziz was in Budapest last week, and he met twice with your husband. He came in without any diplomatic visa, or any official standing. But we were curious.”

“Why?”

“He’s an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“He’s …” There was no point repeating it. Later, she would think that this was not so strange—as deputy consul Emmett met with CIA now and then; Sophie herself had gone to bed with CIA—but at that moment it floored her. “How about the other men?”

He sighed loudly into the phone. “I could tell you their names, but none of those names are real. Their nationalities are also suspect. In fact, we know nothing about them, only that they came to Budapest around the same time as Mr. Aziz and, early last week, met with him in a bar. Your husband was not in attendance. We do not know what they talked about, or why.”

“But you have suspicions.”

An amused grunt. “Mrs. Kohl, when a group of Arab-looking men, most with false passports, meet in secret, I think you know what we suspect. But we’ve found nothing to connect them to terroristic activities.”

“Does the embassy know about this?”

“I don’t know,” he said, which Sophie took to mean that he hadn’t been sharing his information with the American embassy. He was telling her, though.

She tried to take all this in, not even sure what she was ingesting. These were not the answers she’d been looking for. In fact, they didn’t look like answers at all. She had a name, though, and that was more than she’d had before. She said, “Where is he now? Where is Jibril Aziz?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Kohl. The last we heard was that he flew to Cairo from here, but that was nearly a week ago. He could be anywhere.”

Cairo. “Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?”

“I was hoping you might have something to share,” he said, quite reasonably.

But he didn’t know who he was dealing with. “I wish I did,” she said. “Emmett was very quiet about his work.”

“If you do think of something …”

“Of course, Mr. Kiraly. I won’t hesitate to call you. I appreciate what you’ve already done.”

“I’ve done nothing, Mrs. Kohl.”

“But you—”

“I have done nothing for you. You understand?”

The slow-witted widow suddenly understood. “I’m sorry you couldn’t help me.”

“As am I, Mrs. Kohl. Have a pleasant evening.”