ARAB (19 page)

Earlier, when Yousef had arrived at Nick’s apartment, Nick had expected handcuffs. But Yousef was friendly. He had apparently not yet heard about Nick’s deception.

“I want you to witness the capture,” he had said when Nick met him on the sidewalk.

Nick’s heart sank. “Bashir Yassin?”

“Not this time. A much bigger prize! Faisal Ibrahim.”

“How’d you find him?” Nick said, relieved. He noticed cops in a van behind Yousef’s SUV.

“A visiting nurse. He’s going by the name ‘Marfouz.’”

“Who’s with him?”

“Only a nurse, as far as we know. We haven’t seen the one they call Diab. Would you recognize him?”

“Big is all I know,” Nick said.

When Yousef sprinted for the door, Nick ran to the wall of the building, and inched sideways to the corner. Two men leaped off the front steps, both with rifles. Nick pulled back, looked down at his empty hands, cursed himself for not having brought at least his pistol: hadn’t had time to go back upstairs for it.

A bearded face with startled eyes appeared at the corner. Nick grabbed a shirt and rammed the man into the building, knocking the rifle from his hand. The man’s rough palm hit Nick’s face. Nick clipped him behind the knee, dropping him to the gravel and slammed his head into the building foundation. The man sagged to the ground.

The other one, chased by a noisy dog, was running up the street toward a distant mosque.

Nick stepped over the fallen man and picked up the rifle. It was old, heavier than Kalashnikovs he had handled in Afghanistan, still with a wooden stock and grip, maybe a ‘49 model but more likely an old knockoff. He checked the clip. It was empty, checked the chamber. It was empty. He tossed the weapon.

What to do? Stay here? Join Yousef? Go inside by the front? Not helping anyone staying here.

He made it across gravel and climbed onto the front stoop, yanked the door open. Inside an empty hallway he heard footsteps coming down stairs. He found a door, opened it and stepped into a dark closet and looked squarely into the face of a man cringing against mop handles.

Nick grabbed the man’s shirt and pulled him into his face.

“Please!”

“Shut up!” Nick said in Arabic. “I’m the police.”

“I don’t belong here. I’m not with them!”

“Keep your voice down.”

The man was trembling. Nick released him. “How many are there?”

“I don’t know. I just came when you…. I don’t know.”

Enough light came from cracks around the door to allow Nick to see the contours of the face—an Arab around thirty, not the face of a hoodlum.

“Don’t shoot me!”

Nick covered the man’s mouth. Men’s voices erupted just outside the door. One said, “Where are they?”

“He told us to go! We can’t help him! Come on, let’s get out of here!”

“Where are the men I stationed here?” a gruff demand.

“I don’t know, Diab! We have to leave! He doesn’t want us caught.”

The closet door came open.

“Hey! What’s this?”

A huge man pulled Nick into the hall. Staring at the second man, who was cowering in the shadows, he laughed. “Bashir! Come out of there! What you hiding in there for?”

Nick shoved both hands into the man’s chest. Diab bent him to his knees and stunned him with a chop to the neck. Nick fell to the floor, the large hall whirling around him, sadness enveloping him.

“Take this outside, Farouk. Throw it in the car.”

“It’s him!” Farouk said. “It’s the guy came to Lamine’s!”

“Just get him out to the car. And hurry.”

A hand at his back pushed Nick stumbling down the hall.

*

“Well, well, well,” Diab said, squeezed into the back seat of the green Pontiac between Nick and Bashir. The rancid odor of him was overwhelming.

Nick, still trying to clear his head, drew back from the body wedged against him. Nausea prowled through his bowels. He had been in many fights, but never had been hit with such force.

“Bashir Yassin. Been looking for you, Bashir.” Diab said.

“I came to see you!”

“And brought this cop? This the American I heard about? Came looking for me?”

“I don’t know! I never saw him before! I don’t know him!”

“If he’s the American, half the city knows him, Bashir! Everyone knows he’s been looking for you.”

Obviously Diab didn’t think Nick could understand what they were saying.

“Honest to god, Diab. I don’t know him.”

“You hide in closets with people you don’t know?”

“He came in!”

“He’s CIA!”

“I’m not with him!”

“And you think I believe you? You just happened to be in a closet with the CIA when the cops raided us? Just bad luck, right?”

He clamped strong fingers around Bashir’s knee. Bashir howled in pain. Nick was only half listening, struggling to clear his head, trying to figure out what to do. He couldn’t handle this giant physically and he had no weapon.

“Where to?” Farouk asked.

“The fruit stand. If Faisal has a friend where they take him, he’ll get word to me. I’ll tell the women where we’ll be.”

*

Yousef stood in the second-floor hallway outside a green door decorated with a crude painting of a palm tree, two men behind him with riot guns. As Yousef hit the door with the butt of his pistol, he became aware of a previously unnoticed odor of urine. The filth in this place disgusted him—crumpled beer cans on the floor, a torn undershirt, curls of dust and cigarette butts.

“Break it down,” Yousef said, stepping aside. A policeman aimed his riot gun at the doorknob and blew the door open. He rushed in ahead of Yousef and fell to his elbows, legs spread as on a rifle range, his gun aimed at an open doorway.

A woman burst from a small bedroom, hands in the air. “Don’t shoot! My god, don’t shoot!”

Yousef brushed past her and found Faisal Ibrahim in a rumpled bed under a sheet on his back, a wet towel on his forehead, pale arms at his sides. His flesh was gray and lifeless as though his heart no longer had the strength or the will to push blood to his skin.

“So this,” Yousef said, “is the notorious Faisal Ibrahim, this sad bag of aging flesh. Get him off the bed,” he told the nurse.

As though talking to himself, maybe wishing Nick were there to share this, he said to the man who stared up at him with cold indifference, “I should be elated to have ended the search. This should be a moment of triumph, but it’s not. On the record this may go as the greatest achievement of my career. But it’s an empty victory. Why am I not elated?”

The man looked up at him with silent contempt.

“No one else in here,” one of the policemen said, looking at Faisal almost with pity, struck no doubt by the contrast between this wasted old man and heroic images pasted on walls throughout the Arab world—a hero because he had successfully mocked and cheated the West.

Yousef told the man to wait outside in the hallway with two men who had come down from the roof. The fourth man he sent to fetch an ambulance.

“I can understand that you are saving your strength,” Yousef said. “But there are things….”

It was impossible to tell whether Faisal was listening. His strength seemed devoted to breathing, and each mouth-feeding breath seemed an agony.

“Sir?” The nurse had moved to the edge of the bed. “May I put this on his lips?” She was holding a dish and a bloom of cotton.

“What is it?”

“Just lubrication. His mouth is very dry.”

“Put some on your own lips first.”

The woman sighed but did as she was told. With mild sarcasm, she said, “Now may I?”

When the police medic from the van came into the room, he immediately took Faisal’s wrist and looked with concern at the woman. “How long has he had this arythmia?”

“More than a week,” she said.

“Medication?”

“A doctor gave him something. It hasn’t helped.”

Yousef asked, “Is this condition life-threatening?”

“His heart is very weak.”

Yousef decided not to try questioning Faisal. It would bring stress and might not provide anything useful. Let him first get to a hospital.

He took the woman into the hall and told one of the uniformed men to wait inside near the bed. “Allow no one except the nurse to touch him,” he said. The other two men he stationed outside the door. “When the nurse says he’s ready, carry him downstairs.”

On the sidewalk the nurse admitted it was Diab who had brought Faisal to this house, but she denied overhearing any of their conversations. They always made her leave the room when they talked, she said. And she had no idea where Diab might be. “He was here just before you came.”

“Where would he go?”

“I heard them speak of Zagazig. Believe me, sir, I am more sick of this than you can imagine. I’m sick of spending my life tending to ignorant people. I am cooperating. I just don’t know anything about his business or his personal life.”

“You are his nurse?”

“I’m from an agency.”

“But you know who he is?”

“I hear the men talking.”

Yousef allowed the woman to accompany Faisal to the hospital. He signaled the driver to leave.

There’s no way this will remain a secret, Yousef thought. They will hold him in isolation at a hospital ward at the army base. But word will get out. There’ll be television cameras and newspaper people like vultures crowding the gate. And news of his capture will circle the earth. Diab will learn of it and hide. But if Faisal knows where Bashir is….

“Where’s the American?” he asked his driver.

“I was across the street and saw him enter the front door. I followed him but couldn’t find him. I thought he went upstairs.” The man was nervous, maybe afraid he would say something wrong.

“It’s all right,” Yousef said. “He’ll show up.”

While he waited for his men to come out of the building, the image of the man on the stretcher nagged at him. He didn’t like the look on Faisal’s face when they loaded him into the ambulance.

“He thinks he put one over on us,” he said aloud.

The driver gave him a funny look but said nothing.

*

Down by the Nile in a fisherman’s shack, Nick listened to the cry of a gull and, in the distance, men’s voices. He was on a rough floor of sand, bound at the ankle to Bashir Yassin. The giant Diab was behind a wooden table in front of him.

Nick watched orange peelings drop off the blade of Diab’s knife. He was telling Farouk to aim his pistol at Nick’s head. “He thinks he’s tough. We hurt his pride, Farouk.” Laughing, he added, “When you shoot him, the bullet will circle around inside his skull like a roulette pebble.”

“Now?”

“No, no. Not till I tell you. We have much to learn from him.”

Nick was six feet from the man’s legs. He had been thrown to the sand in this fishing shack where for twenty minutes he had listened to this oaf trying to get Bashir Yassin to “tell the truth!” Breathing odors of decaying fish and creosote, he cursed himself for having allowed this thug to get the better of him.

But he had found Bashir!

“You want to go back to Mokattam? You liked it up there with those pigs?”

“You’re talking crazy,” Bashir said. “I’m not with him. I don’t know him! Untie me, for god’s sake.”

“I am not a fool!” Diab shouted.

“But I….”

“Jaradat sent you to that house?”

“Jaradat? Colonel Jaradat? Are you crazy?”

“Don’t pull that shit. I know all about it, Bashir. I know exactly who you’re working for and why.”

“That’s crazy! How would I know Colonel Jaradat? Where’re you getting these ideas? Let me up.”

“Not so crazy, Bashir. Think about it. You just got a big new assignment to work on the president’s jet. Think I didn’t know about that? I know. I know what’s going on. I have people out there. It takes influence to get a job like that.” He glanced at Nick.

“You know what we’re saying, American? You speak Arabic, don’t you.” I see it in your eyes.” Glancing at Bashir he said, “He knows what we’ve been talking about.

“Tell him, American. Tell him Jaradat got him the job. Tell him why. And tell him why you want to kill him.”

Nick watched the tongue in the unshaven face lap juice off the blade of the knife. The blade was maybe four inches long. Nick could reach the knife if Diab put it on the table, but trying to snatch it might be foolhardy.

In Arabic, Nick said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not with him. He’s not with me.”

“You see that river out there?” Diab said. “I’ll hold your face in the mud until you stop kicking. Don’t take me for a fool, American. I know exactly what’s going on.” He looked at Bashir. “I saved your life, Bashir! He wouldn’t keep those promises he made you. After you led him to Faisal, he would kill you. He’s an old friend of Aziz al-Khalid! Everyone knows that. The Americans sent him here to protect Aziz. Protect him from you, Bashir!” Why you think he’s been looking for you?” He leaned his face at Bashir. “To kill you! He wants to kill you!”

Diab slid his chair back and got to his feet, folded and pocketed the knife and looked down at the two of them with indignant contempt. He bit into the raw flesh of the orange and let seeds and pulp dribble off his lips. He ran a forefinger across his mouth and wiped the finger on his leg, took another bite of the orange and threw the remnants into grass near the river.

“I’ll be back,” he said to Farouk. “Don’t feed them. If they beg for water, give them water from that canal. It’s got those little worms. You hear about those worms, American? They feed on your brain. They make you crazy.”

“Aleyya!” Bashir shouted. “I came to get help for Aleyya!”

Diab, half way out of the shack, stopped, looked back at Nick. “You didn’t tell him the police let her go?” To Bashir he said, “See how much they think of you? She’s free! They didn’t hold her. This man is with the police! If he was your friend, he’d’ve told you. Wake up! He’s not your friend! He knows you’ve been ordered to kill Aziz al-Khalid! He’s here to stop you. Wake up, Bashir!”

“No,” Nick said when the big man was gone. “I don’t intend to kill you, or anyone else for that matter.”