The Cairo Affair

3

It was a little before ten on Friday morning when he parked in Heliopolis, in the northeast of the city. He considered himself lucky to have gotten the car, with its holes and the bloodstains he’d wiped at and covered with a towel, all the way to Cairo, but he didn’t imagine his luck would hold out forever, so he found a spot free of police on a narrow side street northwest of Othman Ibn Afan. He took a photo of the Arabic street sign with his phone and brought Jibril’s things on the epic bus trip down to the Nile Road, a hot ride that grew more cramped and rancid as the buildings closed in, a weary urban claustrophobia taking hold. Cities the world over share a tendency toward chaos, and Cairo was no different, the bus surprised at every turn by traffic jams and collisions and surly street vendors who didn’t want to push their carts out of the way. The bus driver spent half his time hanging out of the window, waving and shouting at people who wouldn’t conform to his rules of the road.

A boy standing too close to his hip stared up at him, smiling. A pair of women, one in a hijab, the other’s face hidden in a niqab, sat behind two men loudly arguing with hands and flexed fingers. He knew he smelled bad, and whenever women passed, glancing his way, he averted his eyes, ashamed.

Finally, they made it to the Nile Road, and John walked the rest of the way, muscles stiff and brain preparing to shut down from fatigue. From the arid desert he’d returned to the land of smells: roasting meats, car exhaust, spices, and sweat. He finally reached the quay, where the claustrophobia evaporated along the banks of the great river. He hurried past the stone lions, speckled with graffiti, that flanked the entrance to the low Qasr Al Nile Bridge that stretched across the Nile to Gezira Island. This had been one of the flash points of the revolution—black-uniformed Central Security conscripts had gradually lost a battle against the press of thousands trying to reach Tahrir Square, and, once the protesters had broken through, the security forces had scattered, running for their lives. While there were still burn marks on the sidewalk from flaming vehicles, the bridge was calm, lined with old men propped against the green steel railings with fishing poles. Once he reached Gezira Island he caught a bus north, deeper into Zamalek. It was nearly one o’clock by the time he made it to his third-story walkup on Ismail Mohamed, a leafy street of terraced apartments, cafés, and small hotels. Climbing the stairs, he felt as if he, too, had been killed in the desert.

It was a small apartment, partly because he lived alone and partly because he couldn’t afford anything bigger in upscale Zamalek. And he was in Zamalek because, beyond a few phrases for waiters and taxi drivers, his Arabic was a joke, and Zamalek was where the illiterate expats could hide safely away from the realities of North Africa.

The first thing he did was put away Jibril’s things. The passport and wallet went into a large Saiidi tea tin in his awkwardly narrow kitchen. The leather-bound book wouldn’t fit, but he managed to squeeze it into an unused cookie jar on top of the refrigerator. He was too exhausted to brew up coffee, so instead he opened a bottle of Glenlivet and poured three fingers into a dusty glass. He brought it to the couch, took a sip, then dialed the familiar number on his cell. After two rings, Nancy, the pool secretary, told him that Harry Wolcott was unavailable. “But Stan’s around,” she said.

“Please.”

Stan Bertolli picked up with a “John, you back already?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll see you today?”

“No.”

“So you’re just checking in?”

“That’s right,” he said, then gulped down more whisky.

“Everything okay?”

“No,” he said. “But I’ll need to sleep it off. Just tell Harry that it didn’t work. Please.”

“It,” Stan said with a touch of mystery. Harry had assured John that all Stan knew was that he would be out of town for a few days.

“I’ll file my report for him Monday. If he wants it sooner, I can come in tomorrow.”

“I’ll let him know,” Stan said, “but he’s a little backed up today. We got some shit news from Budapest.”

“Budapest?”

“Emmett Kohl was shot dead in a restaurant. He used to work out of here, from the consul’s office. We’re all looking into it.”

“My condolences.”

After hanging up, he refilled his glass. He considered checking the news for this Kohl character, but couldn’t quite manage it. What he needed was a shower, but that felt so unlikely that he brought the bottle back to the sofa and kept drinking, then woke six hours later to darkness and the sound of banging.

Before waking, he was in Alexandria, climbing out of a car that he’d pulled to the side of El Geish Road, running alongside the Mediterranean. The car, a twenty-year-old Toyota Tercel, was painted black, and in the trunk, he knew, was Jibril. Parked in front of him was a white Egyptian police van with flashing lights. Two cops were getting out, holding their batons in front of themselves, smiling at John. To his right, the water was choppy from heavy wind, and the air was wet with surf. The police spoke to him in Arabic, and when he answered in English one of them struck his shoulder with a baton; it hurt. “Okay,” he told them, gripping the shoulder, “I’ll show you.” He walked ahead of them to the trunk and opened it, but instead of Jibril he found Ray and Kelli, aged six and eight, folded tight into the small space. This wasn’t right. He slammed the trunk shut as the policemen arrived, then waved them away. “Not here,” he said. The one who’d struck him pushed John back so that he nearly stumbled into the road as a car sped past, while the other opened the trunk and shouted angrily. He thought that he should run, then realized he’d never make it across the busy road, so he approached their hunched backs as they reached inside and took a long, manicured hand that was connected to his ex-wife, Danisha. She was smiling as she climbed out, looking much like she had when Ray and Kelli had been babies; she looked stunning. She said, “John, I’m so tired,” but she said it as if it meant something wonderful.

“Come on,” said another voice, and John turned to find a clean and still-breathing Jibril behind him, reaching for his hand, beckoning him into the traffic. “First one across gets to go.”

“Go where?”

Jibril, with a smile on his face, was already running.

He sat up, trying to orient himself in the stuffy darkness. It was evening. His cheek and the arm of the sofa were wet from saliva. His stomach cramped, gushing acid into his throat. When the banging started again, he heard a voice, too: “Wake the fuck up, John.”

He got to his feet and with his first step kicked the whisky bottle across the room. It clattered against the legs of the TV stand but didn’t break. He reached the far wall and slapped until he found the switch, filling the room with light.

“Hurry up, John.” Three more sharp bangs against the door.

He wiped at his face, then wiped his hands on his jeans, wishing he had at least changed clothes. He could now see that there was a dark streak of blood down the side of his thigh, though it wasn’t his blood. He unlocked the door and stepped back, calling, “Come in,” as he continued to the bathroom, where he sat on the toilet and urinated, watching Harold Wolcott walk in warily, look around, and finally catch sight of him.

“Is this smell coming from you?”

“Maybe.”

“Can’t you take a shower?”

“I wasn’t expecting guests.”

Harry spotted the Glenlivet on the floor. He stooped to pick it up, then placed it on the coffee table. John flushed and washed his hands and face and neck in the cracked mirror. He looked as bad as he smelled. Harry’s voice: “You’re going to talk to me?”

“In a minute.”

He toweled off and went to the kitchen, where he found a large bottle of water in the fridge. He gulped at it, took a breath, then drank more with a handful of aspirin. Glancing through the doorway, he saw Harry standing at the low bookshelves, reading spines—Stevens, Pound, Moore, Cummings, Eliot, and a translation of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. John lowered the bottle. “I hope you’re not going to express your surprise,” he said.

Harry looked over his shoulder, frowning. “That a mercenary reads poetry? Never even crossed my mind.”

“It gets old, people being shocked by your literacy.”

Harry grunted, turning back to the books.

Food, John thought as he returned to the kitchen shelves. He hadn’t eaten since Marsa Matrouh, a day and a half before. He grabbed some old bread and stuffed slices into his mouth.

Harry wandered into the kitchen, holding a collected Cummings. He was a tall, very white man, early fifties, with a permanently sunburned neck. He was known for his addiction to mint-flavored gums that snapped when he chewed in the embassy, since smoking was not allowed. He was also the Cairo station chief, and he had never visited John at home before. Unlike some Agency employees, he was too professional to broadcast his disdain for contractors, but John could smell it on him in the way he could catch the whiff of bigotry or religious intolerance in others.

Harry said, “I hear from Stan that it didn’t work.”

“No, sir, it didn’t,” John answered through a mouthful of bread, then opened a cabinet and pulled out the Saiidi tea tin.

Harry set the Cummings on the refrigerator, right next to the cookie jar, before accepting the items. He flipped absently through the passport and glanced into the wallet. “Empty?”

“Right.” John took out his own wallet and handed over what was left of Jibril’s money. “It’s about three hundred euros shy.”

He looked at John, but not worried about the cash. He was just waiting for more. “Well?”

John raised a finger, swallowed, and said, “To the bathroom?”

Harry sighed. Despite his position, he’d never made a secret of his impatience with security procedures. Harry Wolcott was an oxymoron.

John went first, squeezing past him and turning on the bathroom fan, then the shower. He sat on the edge of the tub, a fresh slice of bread in his hand, and kept to a whisper: “We took the desert road from Tubruq. He met someone in Al `Adam.”

“Who?”

John shrugged. “Dressed like a Bedouin. Acted like an old friend,” he said, careful to avoid mention of the hand-off—for while he still wasn’t sure he would burn it, he couldn’t shake Jibril’s conviction that no one should get the names of his contacts. “We headed across the desert and after about an hour ran into a crew of five Gadhafi supporters who wanted our fuel. They may have just been bandits, I don’t know. It became a firefight. Aziz was shot in the face. So I turned around and called Cy. He checked with Langley, and they, I assume, sent the guy who showed up to collect the body. He has those three hundred euros. I crossed back into Egypt alone and left the car in Heliopolis. Might want to send someone to pick it up. I’ve got the street on my phone.”

Harry rubbed his eyes and looked, briefly, as if he were going to slap John. Then the look was gone. “What about those bandits?”

“I think I killed four of them.”

Harry inhaled loudly. “Sounds like a mess.”

“It was, sir.”

“Why that road?”

“Aziz claimed the coastal road was gridlocked, and maybe it was, but he obviously wanted to make his meet in Al `Adam.”

“What did they talk about?”

“Well, they didn’t talk in front of me.”

“And you say we took the body?”

“The undertaker and I didn’t discuss our employers. Langley didn’t call you about this?”

If Langley wasn’t telling him things, John was the last person Harry would share this with. “How are you feeling?”

“Some more sleep would help, and some food.”

“And a bath?”

“And a bath. But if you’d like, I’ll write up the report tomorrow.”

Harry considered that, finally nodding. “Direct to me. I don’t want Stan seeing this—he wasn’t part of the operation.”

“Of course.”

Harry seemed pleased by his acquiescence. He said, “How long have you been with us, John?”

“Three months, give or take. Got a month left.”

“You took over from Amir Najafi. Finishing his contract.”

“Yes.”

“How’s it working for you?”

Were he an honest man, John would have admitted that he didn’t know. The pros and cons of his job seemed nearly balanced. But he had little interest in being honest at the moment, so he said, “It works for me. Just don’t keep sending me into the desert.”

Harry nodded. “You’re from Virginia, right?”

“Richmond.”

“My son’s studying at William and Mary. Loves it.”

John wasn’t sure what to say.

“Must’ve been hard,” said Harry.

“Excuse me?”

“Libya.”

“Well, I think it was harder for Jibril Aziz.”

Harry raised an eyebrow.

“Where was he coming from?” John asked.

The question seemed to confuse the station chief.

“Look, he hadn’t been in Libya for six years. He told me that. He wasn’t even sure who would still be around. Was he retired? Based somewhere else?”

“Sounds like he told you a lot.”

Harry said that with an edge, perhaps irritated that Jibril had shared anything with a contractor. He had shared a lot, but John wasn’t going to admit it. “Other than telling me he hadn’t been back in six years, he was a cypher.”

“Truth is,” Harry said after a moment, “I don’t know anything about him. All I know is that Langley trusted us to send him over, and it didn’t work out. The other thing I know is that it doesn’t matter who he was.”

“Of course it doesn’t. But I was supposed to take care of him. I’d just like to know a little more about the man I let down.”

Harry sniffed, then rubbed at his nose. “John, once you’ve been in the business a while the number of people you’ve let down will add up to something terrible. It’s not a sign of your incompetence, or even your agency’s incompetence, but a sign of how slipshod the entire business is. Intelligence is a pseudoscience, like astrology. Sometimes the outcome seems to prove that your methods and techniques are infallible. Other times, it proves the exact opposite. Don’t beat yourself up over it. And trust me: The last thing you want is to get to know the corpses you’ve left behind.”

Again, John didn’t know what to say, or if any words were required of him. If Harry had meant to make him feel better, he had failed, and if he thought he was teaching John something he didn’t already know, then he was wrong. There wasn’t much John didn’t know about letting people down.

Finally, he motioned at the shower. When John turned it off they could hear the hypnotic call to Isha prayers broadcasting from the nearby Al Zamalek Mosque, which meant it was after seven. He followed Harry into the living room and handed over the keys to the Peugeot. Rather than head for the door, though, Harry walked to the far wall and pulled back a bit of curtain that covered the glass doors to the terrace. With his other hand he crooked his finger to beckon John over, then pointed through the trees down to Ismail Mohamed, its cobbled sidewalk lit by the Hotel Longchamps across the street, where occasional pedestrians passed. But Harry was pointing at two Egyptian men standing beside a newspaper kiosk, one smoking; the other, who was mustached, had nothing in his hands. Unlike everyone else on the street, they weren’t going anywhere; unlike many Egyptians, they weren’t supplicating themselves in prayer.

“Who?” John asked.

Harry shrugged and said, “Watch your back,” then patted his shoulder and left.