The Cairo Affair

1

She had been in America, beyond passport control, for thirty minutes, still wearing Fouada Halawi’s dress, and she was overcome by the feeling that she’d entered a world of pale, oversized children. Pudgy white-haired men in T-shirts and padded, primary-color jackets wandered around poking at cell phones; wives and mothers in practical shoes and sneakers lounged at café tables, curbing their well-dressed children. The airport stores shone so brightly, drunk with colors, each storefront flashy and bold, something shiny to attract attention. Compared to Budapest and Cairo, Logan Airport felt like a candy-colored land of enterprise, the filtered air clean and smoke-free. How, she wondered, can anyone be afraid of us?

Then she stiffened inside as one of the children—a boy of seven, maybe, or eight—leaned back against a huge window overlooking the parked airplanes and watched her pass. His face looked so old, his expression so intense, that she hurried her pace, wanting to run from his accusing stare, but at the same time telling herself to calm down. That boy was American, not Czech.

She’d had enough of thinking about herself and what she’d done. She had dreamed about a gun and a wailing man who was at one moment Egyptian and the next Croatian, and when she woke up ten hours later in John Calhoun’s wrecked apartment she had seen it all again in the twilight as yet another call to prayer filled the city. She’d been alone when she woke, and in that quiet time leafed through modernist poets until Calhoun returned from some errand and tried, once or twice, to speak to her, but she hadn’t been up for it. He’d looked so uncomfortable. She told him she liked his books, and he seemed to blush. He answered a phone call and spoke quietly for a moment, then told her Harry was coming over. “Okay,” she’d said, before going back to the mess of his bedroom.

Harry had been confused. “Look, I don’t have it straight yet, but John has filled in some details, and tomorrow I’m meeting with the Egyptians to sort out the rest. Maybe you want to help me out in the meantime?”

“Is Stan really dead?”

He hesitated, then nodded.

“Are you meeting with Omar Halawi?”

Again, he nodded.

“He’ll explain it,” she said, for she didn’t want to explain anything to anyone anymore. She was sick of the act of conversation, but primarily she was terrified that, were she to start speaking she would tell him everything, and he would not let her leave.

On the second plane, which left from Amsterdam, she’d sat beside a nervous woman who, twice during the flight, took out a prescription bottle and dry-swallowed a little blue pill with a K-shaped hole in the center. The second time, the woman—Irish, by her accent—self-consciously explained. “Klonopin. Modern pharmaceuticals are a godsend.”

Now, as she lifted her shoulder bag higher and wandered through the crowd, following signs toward the exit, Sophie thought that she could use a godsend. Prayer had never been her bag, as Zora put it. A blue pill might do the trick. To go. To see. To experience. Enough of that. Get thee to a nunnery, she thought. To a cathedral of pharmaceutical revelation.

John Calhoun had driven her in silence to Cairo International at three that morning. He’d been quite the gentleman, carrying her bag for her and talking for her at the check-in desk, gathering the boarding pass and walking her all the way to security, where she was scanned. Appropriately, she set off an alarm, but it turned out to be only a hair clip left in a hidden pocket of Fouada Halawi’s dress.

On the other side, she looked back to see John Calhoun, massive in the crowd, still watching, a phone to his ear, reporting her successful exit. Then, as she wandered to the gate, she saw Omar’s young man, Sayyid, waiting at her gate, hanging up his phone. He smiled at her but didn’t kiss her cheeks as he’d done with Fouada. After what they’d been through, this was a disappointment.

He asked how she was feeling and told her what her gates would be in Amsterdam. When she asked after Fouada, he shrugged. “She is good. She says you can keep the dress.”

“Thank her for me.”

“You must be looking forward to getting home,” he said.

This confused her, though it shouldn’t have, and she ended up using a cliché to express herself: “I don’t know where home is anymore.”

“It’s with your family,” Sayyid said matter-of-factly. It was so obvious. He frowned at her stupidity.

As she broke through the Boston crowd, it occurred to her that she might have dreamed the boy who had been watching her. That didn’t seem out of order. She turned, scanning the crowd, but he wasn’t there. Had he been, she might have marched over to him and told him that he wasn’t real. No, he wasn’t, but she was. She wanted to tell someone. Someone should know that Sophie Kohl was real now.

When she continued forward, though, she spotted three men in suits walking briskly in her direction. One still wore his sunglasses, while the other two—one young, one old, all three so white that they were pink—homed in on her. “Mrs. Kohl,” said the older one. “I’m sorry—we were running late.”

She stopped, the three men forming an arc around her, just in case she made a run for it. Were they real?

The one who spoke took out an FBI badge. It looked just like the one Michael Khalil had shown her. His name was Wallace Stevens, just like the poet. “When you’re rested, we’d like to ask you some questions. Is that all right?”

Questions. They had questions for her, but standing in the desert, only yesterday morning, she hadn’t had any at all. When she’d looked down at the heavy, sweating man tied to the chair, shaking his head yet smiling, so many questions had been blazing through her, but she’d only asked one: This is him? Omar said yes. Then, like Emmett twenty years ago, resolve took over, and she knew precisely what was required of her. Lips pressed tight together, she raised the gun and fired once. Her ears rang as the man screamed and shivered. She shot him once more and then let the pistol drop into the sand just before she dropped as well, weeping, all control gone. Sayyid helped carry her back to the car.

“Okay,” she said to Wallace Stevens, no more than a whisper.

“We’ve got you a room at the Hyatt. I hope that’s all right.”

It occurred to her that she hadn’t thought to reserve a room. Just getting back had felt like enough.

The one with the sunglasses offered to take her bag, and she let him. As she left the airport with her full contingent and they headed toward a Ford Explorer—black, of course—Wallace Stevens said, “I don’t know if you’ve made plans, but tomorrow, after the interview, we can set you up with a lawyer.”

“Lawyer?” she said. Christ, they already knew how real she was, and she’d just given herself to them! “Why do I need a lawyer?”

“Oh!” Wallace Stevens said, embarrassed. “Not that kind. I mean, an estate lawyer, to discuss your husband’s finances, offer advice. That sort of thing.”

She relaxed, but only a little, for he had to have noticed her panic, and the cop part of his brain must have gleaned that she was covering up something. By morning, she was suddenly sure, she would be in a jail cell.

Yet in the back of the Explorer, he only said, “I forget myself sometimes. You’ve been through a lot. I should have been clearer. I’m just trying to help.”

He reminded her of Gerry Davis. Forward-looking, all about the future. All she wanted was to listen to his soothing voice tell her what tomorrow was going to be like.

Then they were riding down the highway and through busy streets. It was overcast and beautiful in a way that Cairo never could be. It was Emmett’s city, and in this town they had met at a keg party more than twenty years ago, him slender and intense and, almost from the start, completely in love with her. Then they saw the world together.

What else could anyone ask for?

Wallace Stevens noticed her smile. “Something funny?” He asked it in a way that suggested he could use a good joke.

She shook her head, but the smile wouldn’t go away. “Just thinking about my husband.”

“I heard he was a good man.”

“Yes,” she said. “No worse than most good men.”

He rocked his head from side to side, and there was something childlike in that movement, something that made her realize that she could do this. She had murdered a man in the desert, but no one here knew about that. Or if they knew, they didn’t care. They were taking care of a woman who had never stepped foot in America before, and her name was Sofia.

What would Emmett think of this new woman? Would he find her alluring? Would Stan still find her so appetizing? Her poor dead lovers.

She relaxed. Her back and shoulders tingled. Then she began to laugh involuntarily.

“Are you okay?” asked Wallace Stevens. “You need something to drink?”

She shook her head, covering her mouth, the full, sudden release of years of anxiety nearly gutting her, for what was left? Was anything left now that she had followed her life to its inevitable climax?

She looked at Wallace Stevens. He seemed very kind, but what did she know? She said, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”

He cracked a smile, bashful, but pleased by the recognition of his namesake.

What was left once it all ended?

Everything.