The Cairo Affair

4

It took an hour to walk home. The streets were quiet, most Egyptians exhausted by the changes and the postchange protesting, but he couldn’t help thinking of those shadows from Friday night. He continued past his building, eyeballing his living room window, which was dark, then the Longchamps Hotel across the street, which wasn’t busy. He checked other windows and doorways before, at the end of the block, turning around, heading back, and climbing his stairs. He got to his door, the keys held tight in his hand, and that was when he noticed the door was cracked open. Without a word, he used a finger to push. It gently opened to reveal …

A mess.

All the work he’d put into cleaning the place, he saw, had been pointless. The cushions on the sofa were sliced open; the floor lamp had been smashed; the television was disassembled. Rugs had been tossed into corners, and the ceiling lamp had been ripped out. He stepped over refuse to the kitchen, where everything had been thrown from the cabinets—cups, glasses, plates, and bowls, as well as pots and pans. The nougat tin where he’d kept his gun lay on the floor, open and empty. Not far away, beneath the kitchen table, were the two broken halves of the cookie jar that had held Jibril’s book of contacts. He didn’t bother investigating further. There was no point.

That he soon found himself heading back to Deals was de rigueur. What else was there to do? Clean up? Try to figure out who had turned the place over and stolen what he should have burned in the Libyan desert? He hated himself enough—no need to bother with more self-recrimination.

Besides, this was not his fight. This had to do with Jibril and Harry and maybe Stan, but not him. You’re not blinded by loyalty, Harry had told him, and only now, as he opened the door to the bar, hands shaking, did he realize that the old man really had his number. But Harry was wrong about one thing—it wasn’t strength. It was fear.

He found Geert and Shoshan by the bar. Shoshan was a thin, large-featured Egyptian woman who’d lived with Geert for nearly a year. Though she didn’t touch alcohol, she for some reason tolerated her boyfriend’s excesses. That night he was drinking margaritas, one after the other, and he bought one for John. “You are making the women of Cairo very happy, my friend,” he said.

“What?”

Shoshan rolled her eyes.

“Mrs. Abusir is delighted with you.”

“I only left her a couple hours ago.”

“As your manager, I of course checked on your performance.”

A woman’s voice said, “Just the brute I was looking for,” and he turned to find Maribeth smiling at him.

“Hey, pretty lady.”

“Beauty and the beast,” Geert proclaimed.

John looked past Maribeth—everyone, it seemed, was there, even the painter Derek, passed out in a corner.

He wasn’t interested in conversation, but that was how his life had become. He hadn’t wanted to break his promise to the late Jibril Aziz, but he had. Given the sudden wash of paranoia, he wasn’t feeling a strong desire to sleep with Maribeth—not tonight, at least—but he was gearing up to do precisely that, if only to stay out of his apartment. Sometimes, John believed, you have to go with the flow. Fighting only ties you up in knots and gives you too many opportunities to discover your own limitations. Fighting can be the quickest route to despair.

So he drank and he smiled. As the glasses were replaced with new ones, he listened to Geert expound on his hopes and dreams for his career and his life in the new Cairo, and John tried not to smash those dreams too much. He encouraged Maribeth, too. He tried to be agreeable for everyone, which, like most things in life, is just a matter of showing up.

The next morning, when the alarm on his phone woke him at six, he got up and made coffee, and Maribeth finally asked what had been bothering him.

“What makes you think something’s bothering me?”

“You were nice to me last night.”

“I’m not usually nice?”

“Not that nice. I like you, John, but I know the limits of my power.”

He handed her a cup and kissed her hair where it met her forehead. “Maybe I’m nicer than you think.”

She seemed to like that, then she raised an eyebrow. “I hope you’re going to change before you go in. You reek of Deals.”

He sniffed the sleeve of his shirt—cigarette smoke—then called a taxi. Before he left, Maribeth straightened his lapels and said, “Are you really gone at the end of the month?”

“That’s what my contract says,” he told her, then hesitated as a new thought came to him. “But I suppose I could apply for an extension.”

“Don’t worry,” she said as she patted his arms. “Just curiosity.”

He wasn’t sure how to take that, nor how it made him feel, and as he rode in the taxi back to Zamalek he tried to picture it: another six months in Cairo, another six months of these streets he didn’t understand, another six months of the underlying contempt on the fifth floor. It could also mean another six months of Maribeth Winter. Did that balance the scale? Enough?

Yes, actually. It did.

That realization was enough to keep him in a state of mild shock until he reached his door at a quarter to seven. There, he paused. Again, it was cracked, though he had locked it last night. He felt naked without his gun.

With a finger, he pushed open the door. The same trashed home faced him. He paused, listening, then stepped inside. “Hello?” No answer. He closed the door, then slowly toured the house. Everything was the same—living room, kitchen, bathroom. In the bedroom, though, he found a man sitting on his bed with a Glock on his lap, staring hard at him. The shock of his feelings for Maribeth were overcome completely by the sight of this man. It was David Malek, her novelist friend. He was fingering his pistol, frowning at John.

“Where is she, John?”

“Maribeth?”

“No, you idiot. Sophie Kohl.”

“Who’s Sophie Kohl?”

Malek looked as if he’d been up for weeks. Was this how John had looked when he’d returned from the desert? If Malek had come to shoot him, John supposed, he would already be dead. That thought kept him from bolting. At the same time, though, it occurred to him that in this part of the world people usually carried guns with the intention of using them. It took effort, but he held himself still.

Malek scratched his jawline with his free hand, making a rasping sound. “The wife of Emmett Kohl.”

The dead consul. Christ, this really did have nothing to do with him.

Malek said, “Did you kill Jibril Aziz?”

Or maybe not. John resisted the urge to take a step back. “No.”

“You took him into the desert, though.”

John nodded.

“Is he dead?”

John hesitated. “Do you mind telling me who you really are?”

“Answer my question first.”

“Yes, he’s dead. There were bandits. Why would I want to kill him?”

Malek considered this a moment, then nodded at the torn-apart room. “Who’s your decorator?”

“Not you?”

Malek shook his head.

“It was like this when I came home last night.”

Malek climbed to his feet, the pistol hanging heavy by his side. He reached into his jeans and handed over a badge wallet. John took it and opened it up to find an FBI badge, Malek’s face, and the name Michael Khalil. Surprised, he handed it back. “What’s your angle?”

Malek—no, Khalil—shrugged as he pocketed the badge. “Well, when an American citizen gets killed in Libya, we’re interested. I don’t care what agency he worked for.” He waved the Glock. “Let’s move to the living room, John. We’ve got some thinking to do.”

Reluctantly, John did so. Thinking with this man was the last thing he wanted to do. What he wanted was to take a taxi back to Maribeth’s, lie in her bed, and pull the sheets up over his head.

John rearranged the destroyed sofa cushions and settled down as Khalil righted an overturned chair. As he sat, he said, “Let me explain a few things to you.”

“It’s not necessary.”

Khalil frowned. “You don’t want to know?”

“Whatever’s going on, it’s not my problem. I like it that way.”

“A contractor, right?”

“Right.”

Khalil finally laid his pistol against one knee, fingers barely touching it. “Well, I need your help,” he said, “so you’ve got no choice in the matter.”

“I seldom do.”

A brief smile, then Khalil told a story about a CIA operation called Stumbler, which had been concocted by Jibril Aziz. A plan to overthrow Muammar Gadhafi. He described Aziz’s shock and anger when he realized, only a couple of weeks ago, that the CIA was preparing to use his plan to undermine the Libyan revolution.

“How do you mean, undermine?”

“I mean, send in its own people to turn a popular revolution into a CIA-backed coup. To give America complete control over the development of the country. Understand?”

John did, though he wished he didn’t. He remembered Jibril: What Langley thinks is a drop in the ocean of history.

“So Jibril went into Libya, with your help, to make sure the Libyan people kept the fruits of their sacrifices,” he said. “Now, I’ve been on this case a while. I’ve got nearly everything figured out. But there’s one thing I’m missing.”

This flood of information made his temples pound, but he managed a whisper: “What’s that?”

“Did Aziz give you anything before he died? A list of names, perhaps?”

John nodded.

“I’d like to have it, please.”

John shook his head. Khalil’s eye twitched, the pistol shifting from one knee to the other. “It’s not here anymore,” John clarified. “My decorator took it.”

Khalil leaned back and, with his free hand, pulled at the hair on his scalp. “Well, that’s some bad news.”

Silence followed, until John said in a hesitant voice, “He told me to burn it.”

“Who?”

“Aziz. He told me the people on the list would end up dead.”

“Maybe they will,” Khalil said. “Which is why we need to get it back. Can I depend on your help?”

“As long as you’re holding that gun.”

Khalil looked down at it, smiled, and pulled open his jacket to reveal a shoulder holster. He slipped the pistol into it, latched it shut, and said, “How about now?”

John was ready to answer in the negative when a chirp-chirp birdcall filled the room. Eyes still on John, Khalil removed a cheap-looking phone from his pocket, checked the screen, and raised his brows. He answered with the word “Salaam,” then went silent, his expression tightening. He spoke a sentence in Arabic and, briefly, John was impressed by how good his accent was. America was a land of immigrants, but he seldom met American civil servants who could speak Arabic like a native. Malek’s long face was animated, tightening and then loosening—whatever he was listening to was troublesome. He didn’t say anything beyond the occasional tayib, which John knew meant “okay.”

When Khalil was finished he didn’t bother with good-bye; he just hung up, pocketed the phone, and stared at John—through him, really, for whatever he’d listened to had had little to do with John. Finally, he focused back on John’s features and stood up. “Change in plans. We’re going for a ride.”

John didn’t move. He looked up at Khalil. “You don’t need me, do you?”

“I think I do, buddy. Come on.” Then, to make himself clear, he opened his jacket and touched the butt of his Glock.