The Cairo Affair

3

With a cup of scorched Maxwell House beside him, John sat at the terminal and wrote up his report on Ricky’s meet. Since the fiasco in Pakistan with Raymond Davis, Harry had been demanding multiple-perspective reports on everything, including simple meets, and as he wrote he continually noticed movement in his periphery. The office was restless, uncomfortable and itchy, which he supposed was what diplomatic murders did to people.

Stan spent much of the afternoon on the computer, and when John checked in to find out what was needed, or if he could glean something to pass on to Harry, Stan told him to relax a little. “Go get some lunch. Take it easy.” Was he trying to get him out of the office? Or was it simply that Stan could sense that John was still working at about fifty percent?

When he returned from lunch, Stan’s office was empty, though after a while he emerged from Harry’s, looking distracted. Stan sat at his desk and made a couple of calls, and as he talked Harry passed by, heading for the elevator, and gave John a knowing nod. Soon, though, Stan was grabbing his coat and heading out as well. Maribeth sent an SMS asking if he was coming to Derek’s show. He texted back, “Gotta teach English,” and she didn’t bother replying.

It occurred to him, as he stared at the blank screen of his phone, that Maribeth Winter was the only person in Cairo he really felt comfortable with. It was her directness—unlike his co-workers, she never misled. To her, facts were facts, and they were there to be shared. She welcomed him into her bed, but that didn’t stop her from telling him exactly what she thought of his self-destructive behavior. She was, he realized, the best thing about Cairo, and his stomach ached when he considered the ways in which he would surely ruin what they had.

Mrs. Abusir arrived late, leaving John to spend twenty minutes feeling less and less comfortable at Steaks, inside the Nile Plaza Four Seasons. The restaurant was overpriced, decorated with black-and-white photos of luxurious city scenes, and the Tuesday night crowd was choked with foreigners. Tonight was the steak-and-sushi buffet, and its aroma was making his stomach groan loudly enough that he feared others could hear it. His discomfort was useful for distracting him from other things, like Jibril Aziz, Stan Bertolli, and Harry Wolcott. Maribeth sent him a message: “These paintings are dreadful.”

Then Mrs. Abusir arrived. She was a large woman in the sense that she was as tall as John, and a few years older. She was heavy as well, but given her height the weight gave her real presence when she walked into the restaurant, unaware of her tardiness. She wore a lavender hijab on her head, but her ankle-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse were entirely Western. She smiled and shook his hand with both of hers and said that she was excited by “the prospect of my English to sound American.”

“That’s wonderful,” he said, “but here’s a first lesson: It’s ‘the prospect of my English sounding American.’ In this case, you don’t use the ‘to’ form of the verb—it’s called the infinitive—to say that. Usually, you use the infinitive only after another verb. ‘I want it to sound American’—that sort of thing.”

Her smile faded, and he wondered how she had imagined they would do this if he didn’t correct her. She said, “Mr. Calhoun … thank you,” as if the thanks were being ripped out of her.

Once this initial awkwardness was out of the way, things moved more smoothly. For the last decade she had been the wife of Samir Hanafi, who had recently been tapped as a possible presidential candidate for the National Progressive Unionist Party in the planned November elections. He asked why she was interested in learning American-tinted English, and she had an answer ready: “I am wanting to stand proudly beside my husband.”

“I want to stand proudly beside my husband.”

“Yes, exactly.”

She would go on to do that throughout their two-hour session, brushing off his corrections with “Yes, exactly,” as if approving of his version of the English language without endorsing it enough to speak it herself.

Before marriage, Mrs. Abusir had been a cardiac surgeon at Dar Al Fouad—“the House of the Heart,” she translated proudly—and met her husband when he came in for treatment for pericarditis, “when the pericardium—that is the sac around the heart—it is inflamed. I repair his heart and we fall in love.”

She said all this with a smile, knowing that it was self-evidently romantic, and then explained that while her husband was fifteen years her senior, the divide had been bridged by their families, which had been friendly since the sixties. Samir Hanafi had been in politics for a long time, at first joining Mubarak’s party, the National Democrats, in the mid-eighties. But that hadn’t gone well—she avoided mentioning why—and soon he cast his lot with one of the marginalized opposition parties that, while they were technically legal, had no resources to assure any significant gains in the People’s Assembly. Then, in 2004, he joined with Kefaya, a coalition of opposition groups that pressed hard against the regime. “Kefaya, it mean ‘enough.’” Though the coalition had lost its way after 2005 due to internal conflicts, it had made its mark, and its members had quickly joined with the young Twitter generation that had taken to the streets. “Now,” she said, “the National Democrats will be wash into the gutter, and real Egyptians will have a voice.”

“It sounds very exciting,” he said.

“It is.” She leaned forward and clasped the hand he’d left beside his teacup. “A new year, a new world.”

He withdrew his hand. “Is it really so important to have perfect English for the elections?”

She rocked her head from side to side, considering this. “We think about the future, Mr. Calhoun. That is what we all think about. We think about how a politician can take care of his country internally, but we know that how he looks to the outside world is of equal importance. If he has a wife who speaks gutter English, he will be judged a man who picks his women from the gutter. I am wanting no one think of me that way.”

“Not a chance,” he told her.

She seemed to like that.

“And it’s I don’t want anyone to think of me that way, or I want no one to think of me that way. Not I am wanting. The rest was terrific.”

“Yes, exactly.”

At nine o’clock a Mercedes pulled up in front of the restaurant to take Mrs. Abusir home. She thanked John for his help, and they made another date for Wednesday. As they headed for the door, a big man in a fitted suit emerged from the crowded tables and smoothly inserted himself between them without a word. He opened the door for Mrs. Abusir and walked her to the Mercedes. John followed from a distance; then the man came back to him and, without ceremony, handed over 350 Egyptian pounds, about sixty dollars, then returned to join her in the car. They were finished with him.