The Cairo Affair (24 page)

2

In the morning Maribeth wandered in, sipping at a coffee, as he was brushing his teeth. She’d found one of his long shirts; she wore it well. “Want some culture tonight? Derek’s showing some of his abstract messes.”

Derek was a hippie acquaintance from New Jersey. “Not sure,” John said as he rinsed off his toothbrush.

“Afraid of making this regular?”

He watched her in the hazy mirror, watched how she pulled back the corner of her lip in a sly smile. What was there
not
to like about Maribeth Winter, really? Attractive and intelligent, with a biting sense of humor. And while she’d been through enough troubled relationships to know better, for some inexplicable reason she liked
him
. But was all this enough to sustain something more than the occasional one-night fling?

Before the marriage and divorce he wouldn’t have asked himself such questions: He would have allowed the pleasure of her company to dictate his actions. But he was older now, old enough to know better than to trust his romantic instincts.
God sure didn’t make me very wise.
The idea of taking responsibility for yet another person was terrifying. “I’m here for another month,” he said. “Then I’m gone. Starting something now just seems self-defeating.”

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but her easy smile surprised him. She took another sip of coffee. “Relationship? Don’t be silly, John.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

She came closer, poking the nail of an index finger into his bare back. “When I want a relationship, you’ll
know
it.”

“And you don’t.”

“I like you, John. Don’t get me wrong. But you’re not really my type.”

He thought about that as he washed toothpaste off his lips, then ran a brush through his short-cropped hair. “No?”

Again, she shook her head.

“What’s your type?”

“Someone I think will survive the year,” she said, her smile sliding away.

He put down the brush and turned to her, frowning. She was a full head shorter, but he had the sense that if she wanted to she could take him.

She said, “You’ve got to admit it, John. You’re a little self-destructive. People who want to go on living don’t drink like that.”

Yes, he thought. She could take him easily.

“You’ve got some nasty nightmares, too. You woke me up five times last night.”

“Sorry.” He had no memory of any dreams. “Did I say anything?”

“
Yih-bill.
Something like that.”

Jibril.

When they left, he took her around to the corner to Mohammed Thakeb and, like a gentleman, opened the passenger door to the dirty old Subaru he hadn’t used for nearly a week. It coughed a few times before starting, and then they were following the traffic off the island and back into Garden City. On the way his phone rang—it was Ricky, one of Stan’s agents. He wanted John to meet him at a café on Talaat Harb Square, not far from Maribeth’s apartment. She had to get to work, though, so he dropped her off at the embassy. Before getting out, she paused a moment, then leaned over and kissed him firmly on the lips. “Gallery show tonight. Think about it.” He said he would, then watched her walk down the sidewalk.

He drove farther inland, parked off the square, and found Ricky sitting at an outdoor table, hunched over some hot tea. When John began to sit down Ricky shook his head. “Give the place across from the Cosmopolitan a look-over, will you? I’ve got a meet there in half an hour.”

John wandered two blocks up Kasr Al Nile, then turned right into the narrow streets that had been falling into disrepair since the 1950s. Across from the rounded corner of the Cosmopolitan Hotel was a café with cheap plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk. It was relatively empty for nine in the morning. He sat just inside, where the accordion wall had been pulled back, and ordered coffee and a roll in his meager Arabic. As he waited for it three workmen wandered up, already powdery from a construction site, and sat outside with their legs stretched out in front of them as they smoked. Almost at the road, two young women with covered heads placed their cell phones on a table before sitting down. His roll came first, followed by the coffee, and as he nibbled he scanned the opposite side of the street—vendors hawking jewelry, the hotel entrance, and cars in all conditions. Eventually, a white box truck painted with an assortment of vegetables pulled up on the curb, almost hitting the women, and blocked his entire view. The driver got out and jogged down the street, into (John saw as he got up to look) a carpet store.

Watching, John had been told numerous times, is a kind of art. There are plenty of tells—eye movements, bulges in pockets, nervousness—but the truth he’d discovered on his own was that the world is like that; it’s filled to overflowing with tells because that’s what people are: collections of tells. Watchers pretend that they can spot the difference between the nervousness of a man down to his last penny and that of a man gearing up to shoot a state leader, but this is a pretense for the people who pay them. Were there a real, scientific method to watching, assassinations would never occur. John called Ricky to tell him that everything looked fine.

He left the restaurant briefly to check the other side of the truck, and when he returned Ricky was already sitting a couple of tables from the young women, one of whom was talking on her phone while the other laughed in amusement. The construction workers were drinking glasses of something clear—perhaps water, perhaps not. John avoided Ricky’s eyes as he headed back to his seat inside. As he sat down, his phone rang. It was Geert. “Date number one,” he said.

“So soon?”

“
Mistress
Abusir would like to give you a whirl tonight. Seven o’clock at Steaks?”

A restaurant in the Four Seasons. “Are you advertising me as a gigolo, Geert?”

High, forced laughter. “Feels like it, doesn’t it? Just relax and enjoy it. Thirty dollars an hour, and she buys the tasties.”

As he hung up, the anxiety scratched at him. A teacher now—more responsibility. The feeling was not unlike the anxiety he felt at the prospect of a short-lived relationship with Maribeth, the fear that he wasn’t up to taking on so much, and that he would inevitably break—either break and run, or break the people who were depending on him.

Cut it out.

He rubbed his face and returned to the job at hand. One thing at a time.

Ricky, it turned out, was meeting with SLEDGEHAMMER, an informant John had watched over before. Though he knew little about the Egyptian, he’d noticed that at the end of every meeting he received an envelope under the table. Not all informers worked for pay, but SLEDGEHAMMER always did.

It was only a twenty-minute meeting, without incident, and before it ended the vegetable truck drove off, giving him a view of jewelry vendors, taxis pulling up to the hotel, and the height and breadth of one of the residential buildings. Two windows were open, and in one an old woman was gazing out at the street, and at them.

After a handshake, SLEDGEHAMMER left first. Ricky laid some coins on the table and walked off in the opposite direction while John finished his second coffee. It was only then that he noticed something glint in the old woman’s right hand: a small digital camera. As far as he could recall, she hadn’t raised it to her face, though of course there was no need for her to do so if she wanted to take a picture.

This detail troubled him, but like most tells it could be explained away with a little imagination. A son’s gift that she took to the window, trying to learn how to use. Better that than a government employee asked to sit inconspicuously in her window and take shots of a suspected traitor.

When he reached the embassy, he found Harry hovering outside the gates, smoking and waiting for him. “Let’s take a walk, John.”

He followed Harry slowly toward the high rise of the Hotel Semiramis, which blocked their view of the Nile. Harry said, “Any visits from those friends on the street?”

“No, sir. I think they followed me Friday night, but I can’t be sure. Haven’t seen them since.”

“Good,” Harry said, nodding. “Anyone asking about Libya?”

“Well, Stan seems pretty curious.”

“Yes?”

“But I haven’t said anything.”

“Good.”

They had reached the corner, but instead of heading west toward the river, Harry turned right, deeper inland. Locals passed them, thin men puffing on their own cigarettes. John said, “Is there a problem?”

“Problem?” Harry considered that. “Well, Langley’s man is dead, and I’m not allowed to tell anyone about it. I don’t like keeping secrets from my staff.”

“Why can’t you tell?”

“Ask Langley. No, forget it.
Don’t.
Look.” Harry stopped suddenly, and John nearly ran into him. He turned to peer into John’s eyes, looking up slightly, as if measuring him. “You’re a pretty solid guy, aren’t you?”

“I like to think so.”

“Can you keep an eye on Stan for me?”

John didn’t like these little bubbles of secrecy that floated through the station, and he didn’t like having to keep his immediate superior at arm’s length. This wasn’t the kind of thing they’d trained for in Tuscaloosa. “You mean follow him?”

Harry considered that. “Don’t go out of your way. Not yet. In the course of the day, just be aware of what he’s up to.”

“What am I supposed to be watching for?”

“Anything,” Harry said. “He’s fishing around the Aziz situation like a hunting dog. I’ve got a pretty good idea he’s hiding someone away from me. And I’m starting to worry that he smeared someone’s name last year in order to cover up his own crimes.”

John rubbed at his sore temples. “That sounds heavy.”

“It is,” Harry said, “but it’s just speculation. His other boys are too loyal to do this for me. But you…”

“I don’t know the meaning of the word ‘loyal’?”

A grin passed over Harry’s features; he waved it away. “You’re not blinded by loyalty, John. That’s your strength.”

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.”