The Cairo Affair

4

As he toweled off after his shower they were marching, demonstrating for or against something. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them farther down Gezira Island, perhaps by the stadium, chanting something that rose over the rooftops and filtered down through the trees as he ate a dinner of scrambled eggs and toast, finishing it beside the terrace doors, watching his shadow (one of them remained) waiting indifferently for orders, or for him.

With a corpse—no, five—on his conscience and a shadow waiting on the street, he wondered how he’d ended up here, but he knew the answer well enough to know the question was pointless. You cruise through life, knocking against obstacles and decisions along the way until, eventually, you’ve got blood on your pants and paranoia digging into your shoulders.

As he washed the dishes he remembered a young John Calhoun growing up in Jackson Ward—single mother, hardscrabble friends—with an interest in verse. Though he enjoyed the flow and beat his friends would break out on the sidewalk, listening to Melle Mel and Run-D.M.C., he found himself more entranced by the words cobbled together in the distant past: Cummings, Pound, Yeats. Once he even tried, with disastrous results, to put some of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson poems to hip-hop. Humiliation grew into withdrawal, and those long-dead white men became his private vice. He’d loved the caress of the words and how they could make him feel, if for only a moment, that something important hid just behind the flat facade of his black-and-white world.

He’d brought those sometimes puzzling yet inspiring verses with him to the army, and to the ranges at the Fort Benning sniper school. He’d even brought them across the ocean to the Hohenfels Combat Maneuver Training Center in Germany, but their cryptic wisdom hadn’t been enough to make him wise: In 1995, late into a whisky-soaked evening, he beat a Bavarian to a pulp. He still barely remembered the fight, which had put the fat, virulently racist Bavarian into the hospital for nearly a month, one arm broken, four ribs cracked, and one lung punctured. He was lucky to be sent home with a dishonorable discharge, his CO told him, for the locals wanted his “black ass taken to the butcher’s.”

As he toweled off his hands he remembered the Langston Hughes his mother used to recite like a mantra:

God in His infinite wisdom

Did not make me very wise—

So when my actions are stupid

They hardly take God by surprise

Lines like that could help a man through his day.

By the time he dressed it was nearly eleven. The headache he’d brought with him from Libya still lingered, but it had cleared enough to convince him that he could handle whatever the man downstairs wanted to give him. Or perhaps this was a sign that he hadn’t recovered, and he was still crippled by Danisha’s prognosis. Did he really not have the sense to flee from danger? Maybe, but the army had taught him a thing or two about preparedness, so he returned to the kitchen and dug through the pots in the low cabinets until he’d unearthed another tin box, one that had once been used to hold nougat bars and now held an old Glock, filled to capacity with seventeen rounds. It was, as had been explained to him his first day in Cairo, against Agency rules to keep firearms in one’s own house—to do so would have required permits from the Egyptian Interior Ministry, helping it to ID Agency employees—but once they were outside the confines of the embassy Stan had given him the name of a supplier in New Cairo who continued a long tradition of supplying nervous embassy employees with peace of mind. He slipped the pistol into a beaten shoulder holster, stretched into his jacket, and headed downstairs.

At Global Security’s training facility, a decommissioned army base about thirty miles north of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he’d been told, They’re going to watch, so let them watch. During their trips into town to spend an afternoon trailing random locals through their daily routines, it had seemed possible to live without anxiety while under surveillance. But that had been a game; Tuscaloosa was not the rest of the world.

He’d been followed before. During a six-month stretch in Nairobi, thin young men with bashful smiles used to circulate through crowds as he made his way through the markets. In Lisbon they’d been lazy, sitting whenever possible in café chairs, on the rims of stone fountains, on front stoops. During a brief tour in Afghanistan, children had kept tabs on him and other Global Security grunts as they made their rounds through villages. The kids would shout up and down the streets to the next checkpoint, and though this steady procession of underaged surveillance operatives frayed their nerves, the fact that it was out in the open and so obvious had helped them. It made things predictable; it taught them when to keep their eyes open for IEDs and irregular roadblocks.

In Cairo, things were different. It was a crowded city, the most populous in the Arab world, and it defied predictability in the best of times. Before the revolution, John had gotten used to the constant intrusion of security personnel hanging around, whatever path he took. During the revolution, though, they’d had bigger things to deal with than a low-level embassy hand, and now, with sections of the hated security apparatus in disarray, when a shadow came he was one of the awkward, fumbling rookies who knew the neighborhood but wouldn’t know tradecraft if it slapped him in the face. So when John headed out and almost immediately lost track of his shadow, he was worried. The man tracked him for one block before fading into the crowd, and when John took a couple of detours between apartment buildings he wondered if he’d lost him. But no—a block short of Deals he spotted the mustached one again, which suggested he wasn’t alone. What had John done to deserve these man-hours? He hoped that it had to do with something innocuous, like one of the numerous meets he’d observed, but with the headache still scratching at him he knew it was not.

Yet he moved on. Though a part of him wanted to, he didn’t take evasive maneuvers and double back to find out how many there were. Nor did he sit in wait to snatch one off the street, because there was the other part of him, the stronger part, the same part that told him not to burn Jibril’s secret list, and now it was telling him that his shadows could be taken care of tomorrow. It told him that tonight all that mattered was to get everything out of his aching head as quickly as possible.

So he walked ahead, feeling their breaths on his collar, and reached Said el-Bakri Street without any taps on the shoulder or throat clearings or excuse-me-Mr.-Calhouns. He trotted down the stairs and opened the door to the bar and didn’t even look back as he lowered his head to avoid hitting the overhang.

It was eighties night at Deals, and “Tainted Love” was playing to a full, smoky house—so smoky that he had to squint to see the far walls of the pub, checkered with framed pictures. With watery-eyed effort, he spotted a familiar face. Maribeth, who worked in the visa section, was at a table by the wall, drinking with a tall Egyptian man he didn’t know. She was wearing a shorter hairstyle and a new sleeveless dress that showed off her admirable biceps.

He stared for too long, and she met his eyes, smiling, waving him over. He skirted through the crowd, nodding at faces he knew, shaking the hand of someone he didn’t remember at all, and when he reached the table Maribeth kissed his cheeks. She was from Tennessee, and cheek-kisses were her favorite part of living outside the United States. They had also slept together twice in the last month, so the kisses lingered a little longer. Then she pushed him away and motioned at her friend. “Meet David Malek.”

John shook his hand. The Egyptian was maybe forty, weary eyes but youthful cheeks, and had a strong grip. He worked out.

Maribeth said, “David is a novelist.”

“Really? You don’t look like one.”

David grinned with overt modesty, as if being a novelist were something to be proud of. “First one comes out in the fall.” John had been wrong—that accent was All-American.

He sat next to Maribeth. “What kind?”

David cupped his ear.

“Genre?” John said.

“Thriller. Called Desperate Intentions.” When he saw the look on John’s face, he added, “Publisher’s idea. That wasn’t my title.”

“What was your title?”

David hesitated, a faint smile flickering around his lips, and said, “Stumbler.”

“I’m not sure I like that one any better.”

Maribeth poked him in the ribs. “Don’t be an ass.” To David: “John’s an anachronism. He reads poetry.”

“You must be the last one,” said David, smiling, unconcerned by John’s assessment of his title, maybe even pleased by it.

“You researching a new one?” John asked.

“About the revolution,” David said.

As John offered good luck, Maribeth’s hand settled on his thigh. He leaned back and stretched an arm across the back of her chair. Was that a flash of disappointment in David Malek’s face? John said, “What’s your main character going to be? Egyptian?”

David scratched at his ear, grimacing. “Don’t know if I could pull that off. An American, probably.”

“A novelist?”

“Ha!” David said, slapping the table, fully recovered now. “No, that’s best avoided, too. Maybe someone at the embassy? Maribeth tells me you work there, too.”

John wondered what else Maribeth had told him. He’d never admitted to his real function, but she’d certainly noticed, the last time he slept over, the work-related call he’d received in the middle of the night before rushing off. “I hope it’s someone more interesting than me,” John told him. “I just schedule travel for the important people.”

“Know any CIA?”

Maribeth turned to listen to this.

John opened his free hand to the ceiling. “Never one that would admit to it.”

Instead of deflating him, David seemed to take this as a challenge. He leaned closer. “But you know people who don’t admit to it.”

“Tell it from an Egyptian’s perspective,” John said. “Much more interesting.”

Maribeth let out a disagreeable grunt. “He wants to sell the book.”

John got up and ordered a round of drinks from the bar. He wasn’t particularly interested in the conversation, nor was he all that interested in Maribeth’s hand sliding along his upper thigh once he’d returned with three beers. Yet here he was, trying to forget about blood in the desert as he drank his beer in great gulps and nodded at David Malek’s unself-conscious praise of the revolutions trembling through this part of the world. His optimism, John realized, wasn’t naive. Like Jibril’s, it was merely American, the belief that all anyone in the world wanted was to live in their own little America. Finally, John cut in. “You know, don’t you, that they’re going to vote in Islamist parties who have no time for the United States. Look at the history here: Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak. Failed wars, failed culture, and failed social policies enforced by a secret police. The Muslim Brotherhood has been taking care of the people for decades, far better than their governments ever have, and now it’s time for their reward.”

Innocently, David said, “And why not? It’s called democracy. You sound like Gadhafi.”

John frowned. “What?”

“The first volume of his magnum opus, The Green Book, is called ‘The Solution of the Problem of Democracy.’”

Green, thought John.

David said, “You think democracy is problematic. It is, of course, but that’s the way it goes. Either they’re democratic or they’re not.”

“Yeah,” said Maribeth. “We can’t give them only half democracy.”

“We’re not giving them anything,” said John, leaning forward. He was a big man, and he knew it. He also knew that a little physical intimidation tended to help his arguments. “If we’ve given them anything, we’ve given them thirty-odd years of authoritarianism by supporting their oppressors. Now, we act as if we’ve given them a new world because they’re using Twitter to talk to each other.”

“Look who’s the wet blanket,” Maribeth said. David was grinning wildly at his outburst. No one here was intimidated by him.

He looked away, scanning the crowd again, but his shadows hadn’t bothered following him inside. As he took another drink he had a flashback to his dream, opening up the trunk of that Tercel and finding his son and daughter inside. Danisha climbing out and telling him how tired she was. Jibril beckoning him into the street.

He knew, of course. A man who knows poetry knows how to read his own dreams. He had populated this one with people he’d let down, just as he knew he would eventually let down Maribeth, who was now squeezing his inner thigh. God sure didn’t make me very wise. He’d let down a lot of people during his time on earth—women, friends, and employers—and as Maribeth’s nails dug through his jeans he hoped that no one would be too surprised the next time he failed.

She squeezed harder, nails pinching. He nearly yelped.