The Cairo Affair

2

Her first thought upon arriving at Chez Daniel on the evening of March 2, 2011, was that her husband was looking very good. She didn’t have this thought often, but it was less an insult to Emmett than an indictment against herself, and the ways in which twenty years of marriage can blind you to your partner’s virtues. She suspected that he saw her the same way, but she hoped he at least had moments like this, where warmth and pleasure filled her at the sight of his eternally youthful face and the thought that, Yes, this one’s mine. It didn’t matter how brief they were, or how they might be followed by something terrible—those bursts of attraction could sustain her for months.

Chez Daniel, like most decent French restaurants—even French restaurants in Hungary—was cramped, casual, and a bit frantic. Simple tablecloths, excellent food. She joined him at a table by the beige wall beneath framed sepia scenes of the dirty and cracked Budapest streets that made for hard walking but wonderfully moody pictures. As they waited for the wine, Emmett straightened the utensils on either side of his plate and asked how her day had been.

“Glenda,” she said. “Four hours with Glenda at the Gellért Baths. Steam, massages, and too many Cosmopolitans. What do you think?”

He’d heard often enough about the Wednesday routine she’d been roped into by the wife of his boss, Consul General Raymond Bennett. Always the Gellért Hotel, where Sophie and Emmett had spent part of their honeymoon, back when even students could afford its Habsburg elegance. Emmett said, “Anything exciting in her life?”

“Problems with Hungarians, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“I tell her to ask Ray to put in for a transfer, but she pretends it’s beyond her means.”

“How about you?” he asked.

“Am I anti-Hungarian, too?”

“How are you doing here?”

Sophie leaned closer, as if she hadn’t heard. It wasn’t a question she posed to herself often, so she had to take a moment. They’d lived for six months in Budapest, where Emmett was a deputy consul. Last year, their home had been Cairo—Hosni Mubarak’s Cairo. Two years before that, it had been Paris. In some ways, the cities blended in her memory—each was a blur of social functions and brief friendships and obscure rituals to be learned and then forgotten, each accompanied by its own menagerie of problems. Paris had been fun, but Cairo had not.

In Cairo, Emmett had been irritable and on edge—a backfiring car would make him stumble—and he would return from the office itching for a fight. Sophie—maybe in reaction, maybe not—had built a new life for herself, constructed of lies.

The good news was that Cairo had turned out to be a phase, for once they arrived in Hungary the air cleared. Emmett reverted to the man she had decided to spend her life with twenty years ago, and she let go of the puerile intoxication of deceit, her secrets still safely kept. In Budapest, they were adults again.

Emmett was waiting for an answer. She shrugged. “How can I not be happy? A lady of leisure. I’m living the dream.”

He nodded, as if it were the answer he’d expected—as if he’d known she would lie. Because the irony was that, of the three cities they had called home, Cairo was the only one she would have returned to in a second, if given the chance. There, she had found something liberating in the streets, the noise and traffic jams and odors. She had learned how to move with a little more grace, to find joy in decorating the apartment with star clusters and flowers of the blue Egyptian water lily; she took delight in the particular melody of Arabic, the predictability of daily prayers, and the investigation of strange, new foods. She also discovered an unexpected pleasure in the act of betrayal itself.

But was it really a lie? Was she unhappy in Budapest?

No. She was forty-two years old, which was old enough to know good fortune when it looked her in the eye. With the help of L’Oréal, she’d held on to her looks, and a bout of high blood pressure a few years ago had been tempered by a remarkable French diet. They were not poor; they traveled extensively. While there were moments when she regretted the path her life had taken—at Harvard, she had aspired to academia or policy planning, and one winter day in Paris a French doctor had explained after her second miscarriage that children would not be part of her future—she always stepped back to scold herself. She might be sometimes bored, but adulthood, when well maintained, was supposed to be dull. Regretting a life of leisure was childishness.

Yet at nights she still lay awake in the gloom of their bedroom, wondering if anyone would notice if she hopped a plane back to Egypt and just disappeared, before remembering that her Cairo, the one she loved, no longer existed.

She and Emmett had been in Hungary five months when, in January, Egyptian activists had called for protests against poverty, unemployment, and corruption, and by the end of the month, on January 25, they’d had a “day of rage” that grew until the whole city had become one enormous demonstration with its epicenter in Tahrir Square, where Sophie would once go to drink tea.

On February 11, less than a month before their dinner at Chez Daniel, Hosni Mubarak had stepped down after thirty years in power. He wasn’t alone. A month before that, Tunisia’s autocrat had fled, and as Sophie and Emmett waited for their wine a full-scale civil war was spreading through Libya, westward from Benghazi toward Tripoli. The pundits were calling it the Arab Spring. She had health, wealth, and a measure of beauty, as well as interesting times to live in.

“Any fresh news from Libya?” she asked.

He leaned back, hands opening, for this was their perpetual subject. Emmett had spent an enormous amount of time watching CNN and shouting at the screen for the Libyan revolutionaries to advance on Tripoli, as if he were watching a football game, as if he were a much younger man who hadn’t already witnessed civil war. “Well, we’re expecting word soon from the Libyan Transitional Council—they’ll be declaring themselves Libya’s official representative. We’ve had a few days of EU sanctions against Gadhafi, but it’ll be a while before they have any effect. The rebels are doing well—they’re holding onto Zawiyah, just west of the capital.” He shrugged. “The question is, when are we going to get off our asses and drop a few bombs on Tripoli?”

“Soon,” she said hopefully. He had brought her over to the opinion that with a few bombs Muammar Gadhafi and his legions would fold within days, and that there would be no need for foreign troops to step in and, as Emmett put it, soil their revolution. “Is that it?” she asked.

“All we’ve heard.”

“I mean you. How was your day?”

The wine arrived, and the waiter poured a little into Emmett’s glass for approval. Sophie ordered fresh tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms, while Emmett asked for a steak, well done. Once the waiter was gone, she said, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Your day.”

“Right,” he said, as if he’d forgotten. “Not as exciting as yours. Work-wise, at least.”

“And otherwise?”

“I got a call from Cairo.”

It was a significant statement—at least, Emmett had meant it to be—but Sophie felt lost. “Someone we know?”

“Stan Bertolli.”

She heard herself inhale through her nose and wondered if he had heard it, too. “How’s Stan?”

“Not well, apparently.”

“What’s wrong?”

Emmett took his glass by the stem and regarded the wine carefully. “He tells me he’s in love.”

“Good for him.”

“Apparently not. Apparently, the woman he’s in love with is married.”

“You’re right,” she said, forcing her voice to flatline. The air seemed to go out of the room. Was this really happening? She’d imagined it before, of course, but never in a French restaurant. She said, “That’s not good.”

He took a breath, sipped his wine, then set it on the table. The whole time, his eyes remained fixed on the deep red inside the glass. Finally, quietly, he said, “Were you ever going to tell me?”

This, too, was not how she’d imagined it. She floundered for an answer, and her first thought was a lie: Of course I was. Before transforming the thought into speech, though, she realized that she wouldn’t have told him, not ever.

She considered going on the defensive and reminding him of how he had been in Cairo, how he had treated her as if she had been a perpetual obstacle. How he had pushed her away until, looking for something, anything, to complement her feelings of liberation she finally gave in to Stan’s approaches. Only partly true, but it might have been enough to satisfy him.

She said, “Of course I was going to tell you.”

“When?”

“When I got up the courage. When enough time had passed.”

“So we’re talking about years.”

“Probably.”

Chewing the inside of his cheek, Emmett looked past her at other tables, perhaps worried that they all knew he was a cuckold, and the corners of his eyes crinkled in thought.

What was there to think about? He’d had all day, but he still hadn’t decided, for this wasn’t only about an affair—it was about Emmett Kohl, and what kind of man he wanted to be. She knew him all too well.

One kind of man would kick her out of his life, would rage and throw his glass at her. But that wasn’t him. He would have had his “little shit” moment as soon as he hung up the telephone; his day of rage was over. He needed something that could show off his anger without forcing him to break character or descend into cliché—it was a tricky assignment.

She said, “It’s over. If that helps.”

“Not really.”

“Do you remember how you were in Cairo?”

His damp eyes were back on her, brow twitching. “You’re not going to twist this into my fault, are you?”

She looked down at her glass, which she still hadn’t touched. He knew very well how he had been in Cairo, but he wasn’t interested in drawing a connection between that and her infidelity. Were she him, she would have felt the same way.

He said, “Do you love him?”

“No.”

“Did you love him?”

“For a week I thought I might, but I was wrong.”

“Were you thinking about a divorce?”

She frowned, almost shocked by the use of a word that she had never considered. “God. No. Never. You’re …” She hesitated, then lowered her voice, pushing a hand across the table in his direction. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Emmett.”

He didn’t even acknowledge her hand. “Then … why?”

Anyone who’s committed adultery envisions this moment, plots it out and works up a rough draft of a speech that, she imagined, will cut through the fog with some ironclad defense of the indefensible. Sitting there, though, staring at his wounded face, she couldn’t remember any of it, and she found herself grasping for words. Yet all that came to her was hackneyed lines, as if she were reading from a script. But they were both doing that, weren’t they? “I was lonely, Emmett. Simple as that.”

“Who else knew?”

“What?”

“Who else knew about this?”

She pulled back her untouched hand. He was being petty now, as if it truly mattered whether or not someone knew of his bruised pride. But she could give him that. “No one,” she lied.

He nodded, but didn’t look relieved.

The food came, giving them time to regroup, and as she ate, cheeks hot and hand trembling, she reflected on how betrayed he had to feel. Hadn’t she known from the beginning that she would do this to him? Hadn’t she seen all this coming? Not really, for in Cairo she’d gone with the moment. In Cairo she’d been stupid.

Daniel had done an excellent job with her tagliatelle, perfectly tender, and there was a pepper sauce on Emmett’s steak that smelled divine. Emmett began to stab halfheartedly at his meat. The sight made her want to cry. She said, “What was it? In Cairo.”

He looked up—no exasperation, just simple confusion.

“You were a mess there. Me, too, I know, but you … well, you were impossible to live with. Paris was fine, and here. But in Cairo you were a different man.”

“So you are trying to blame me,” he said. Coldly.

“I just want to know what was on your back in Cairo.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said as he lifted a bite to his mouth. He delivered it. It was like a punctuation mark, that move.

“Cairo was bad from the start,” she went on, forcing the words out. “Not for me. No—I loved it. But you changed there, and you never told me anything.”

“So you fucked Stan.”

“Yes, I fucked Stan. But that doesn’t change the fact that you became someone else there, and once we left Cairo you returned to your old self.”

He chewed, staring through her.

“I’m not trying to start a fight, Emmett. I like the man you are now. I love him. I didn’t like the man you were there. So let’s get it out in the open. What was going on in Cairo?”

As he took another bite, still staring, something occurred to her.

“Were you having an affair?”

He sighed, disappointed by her stupidity.

“Then what was it?”

He still watched so coldly, but she could see his barriers breaking down. It was in the rhythm of his chewing, the way it slowed.

“Come on, Emmett. You can’t keep it a secret forever.”

He swallowed, his wrist on the edge of the table, his fork holding a fresh triangle of beef a few inches above his plate. He said, “Remember Novi Sad?”

There it was. Yugoslavia, twenty years ago. I saved you, Sophie. This is how you pay me back? She nodded.

“Zora?” he asked.

“Zora Balašević,” she said, her throat now dry.

“Zora was in Cairo.”

She knew this, of course, but said, “Cairo?”

“Working at the Serbian embassy. BIA—one of their spies. Not long after we arrived, she got in touch. Ran into me on the street.” He paused, finally putting down his fork. “I was pleased to see her. You remember—despite everything, we got along well in the end. We went to a café, reminiscing about the good stuff, careful to avoid the rest, and then it came. She wanted me to give her information.”

To breathe properly, Sophie had to leave her mouth open. This wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. Her sinuses were closing up. She said, “Well, that’s forward.”

“Isn’t it?” he said, smiling, not noticing anything. Briefly, he was in his story, looking just like her old husband. “I said no, so she put her cards on the table. She blackmailed me.”

She didn’t have to ask what Zora had blackmailed him with, and at that moment she had a flash of it: A filthy leg in a black army boot, spastic, kicking at the dirt of a basement. “The bitch,” she snapped, but she could feel herself reddening. It was so hot.

“You know what would happen if that came out. I’d never work in the diplomatic corps again. Ever. But I still said no.”

She was burning up. She grabbed the collar of her blouse and fanned it, drawing cool air down her shoulders. “Good for you,” she managed.

He shrugged, modest. “My mistake was that I didn’t report it.”

She tried to empty herself of all the heat in a long exhale. “You could have. You could’ve told Harry, or even Stan.”

“Sure, but I didn’t know that then. I’d been at the embassy less than a week. I didn’t know anything about those guys. Neither of us did. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. It would’ve looked like I’d been covering it up.”

He wanted affirmation, so she said, “I suppose you’re right.”

“Living under that cloud certainly didn’t help my mood. But that didn’t compare to later, when the whole thing came back to bite me.”

She waited.

“About a year ago, last March, Stan started asking questions. Not very subtle, your Stan.” A faint smile. “It turned out that loose information had been floating around, intel that originated in Cairo—intel I’d had access to. I was under investigation for most of last year.”

She moved back in time, remembering the fights, the moods, the drinking, the anger. It all played differently now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

That faint smile returned. “I didn’t want to burden you,” he said. “You were having such a good time. Of course, I didn’t know why you were so happy, but …” A shrug.

She didn’t know how he could have said that without hatred, but he had. She felt a hard knot in her chest.

He said, “It turned out that Stan already knew about Zora. His guys had been watching me when we first got there—normal vetting procedure. He’d seen me with her, and when the compromised intel came to his attention he followed up on it. So I told him what happened. I told him what she tried to do, and I told him that I refused.”

“Did you tell him about … ?”

“I left the blackmail a mystery, and he finally let that go. He never asked you?”

She shook her head, but she wasn’t sure. Maybe he had.

“Anyway, I told him that Zora hadn’t tried again. I never even saw her after that. But he didn’t believe me. He sat me down for more talks, trying to trip me up on my story. Eventually, he brought Harry into it. Stan showed him his evidence, but no one ever showed it to me. I was lucky—Harry wanted to believe me. Still, he couldn’t afford to have me around anymore, so he suggested I put in for a transfer. Make me someone else’s problem, I suppose.”

“Stan never told me any of this,” she said, but it was getting harder to find air, and the last word barely made it out.

“Secrets are his game, aren’t they?”

Silence fell between them, and Emmett returned to his steak.

People talk of conflicting emotions as if they’re a daily occurrence, but at that moment Sophie felt as if it were the first time she’d experienced them. Honesty pulled from one side, while the other side, the one that was motivated by self-preservation, held a tighter grip. She stared at her pasta, knowing she wouldn’t be able to taste it anymore, maybe not even be able to keep it down, and it occurred to her that maybe her husband deserved to know. To really know. Exactly what kind of a woman he was married to. It would be the end, of course. The end of everything. Yet when she thought back to their honeymoon, it was obvious that he was the one person on the planet who deserved to know it all. He was probably the only person who could understand.

She was still trying to decide when the restaurant was filled with a woman’s scream. It came from the table behind her. She began to turn to get a look at the woman, but instead saw what the scream had been about. It was at their table, where their waiter should have been standing, a large man—bald, sweating, in a long, cheap overcoat. Upon looking at him, she understood why their neighbor had screamed, for she had the same impulse herself. He was all muscle—not tall but wide—with muddy blue prison tattoos creeping out from under his collar. A man of absolute violence, like those tracksuited Balkan mafiosi she occasionally saw in overpriced bars. He wasn’t looking at her, though, but at Emmett, and he was holding a pistol in his hairy hand.

It was the first time she’d ever seen a gun in a restaurant. She’d seen hunting rifles disassembled in her childhood living room, then put to use outdoors when her father went hunting for red stag deer in West Virginia. She once saw a pistol hanging from inside a jacket in their Cairo kitchen when an agent of one of the security services had come to have a talk with Emmett. In Yugoslavia, they had been on soldiers and militiamen and in one grimy kitchen that still sometimes appeared in her dreams, but she had never seen one in a restaurant. Now she had, and the pistol—a modern-looking one, slide-action—was pointed directly at her husband.

“Emmett Kohl,” the man said with a strong accent, but it wasn’t a Hungarian accent. It was something Sophie couldn’t place.

Emmett just stared at him, hands flat on either side of his plate. She couldn’t tell if he recognized the man, so before she had a chance to think through the stupidity of her actions she said, “Who are you?”

The man turned to her, though his pistol remained on Emmett. He frowned, as if she were an unexpected variable in an equation he’d spent weeks calculating. Then he turned back to Emmett and said, “I here for you.”

Mute, Emmett shook his head.

Behind the man, the restaurant was clearing out. It was surprising how quietly so many people could retreat, the only sound a low rhubarb-rhubarb rumbling through the place. Men were snatching phones from their tables and holding women by the elbows, heading toward the door. They crouched as they walked. She hoped that at least one of them was calling the police. A waitress stood by the wall, tray against her hip, confused.

Sophie said, “Why are you here?”

Again, the look, and this time she could read irritation in his features. Instead of answering, he glanced at the gold wristwatch on his free hand and muttered something in a language she didn’t recognize. Something sharp, like a curse. He looked back at Emmett and, his arm stiffening, pulled the trigger.

Later, she would hate herself for staring at the gunman rather than at her husband. She should have been looking at Emmett, giving him a final moment of commiseration, of tenderness, of love. But she hadn’t been, because she hadn’t expected this. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, she hadn’t actually expected the man to shoot Emmett twice, once in the chest and, after a step forward, once through the nose, the explosion of each shot cracking her ears. She supposed it was because she was still dealing with the shock of Zora Balašević, of Stan, and the novelty of a gun in a restaurant. It was so much to deal with that she couldn’t have expected more novelty to come so quickly. Not that night.

Yet there it was. She turned to see Emmett leaned back against the wall, his hazel, bloodshot eyes open but unfocused, sliding out of his chair, his face unrecognizable, blood and organic matter splashed across the wall and a sepia city scene. Screams made the restaurant noisy again, but she didn’t look around. She just stared at Emmett as his body slid down, disappearing gradually behind the table and his plate of half-eaten steak. She didn’t even notice that the gunman had jogged out of the restaurant, pushing past the remaining witnesses—this was something she would be told later.

For the moment, it was just Sophie, the table with their wine and blood-spattered food, and Emmett slipping away. His chest disappeared, then his shoulders, his chin pressed down against the knot of his tie, then his face. The gory face that was missing the short, almost pug nose that, more than his hair or his clothes, always defined her husband’s look. The table rocked as he fell off the chair, leaving a mess on the wall. She didn’t hear him hit because her ears were ringing from the gunshots, and she felt as if she were going to vomit. There was more screaming and the distant sound of weeping, but she soon learned that all of it was coming from herself.