Arab

by Jim Ingraham

  “And you don’t have the personality to fight that kind of war,” Nick remembered hearing Sana, Aziz’s wife, say. “It’s tiring you all out. You’re just too close to it, Aziz. We should get away. You would be so much happier viewing all this from a distance. Cairo is a metaphor for everything that upsets you—the poverty, the indebtedness, the bulging population, the extremism. You should go back to the university. We were so happy in London, Aziz.”

  “I wish I could go back. But I can’t.”

  “Cairo is Cairo, Aziz. It’s never been anything else. It never will be anything else. It’s a cemetery waiting for the funerals of people who try to change it. You’ve done more than he’s asked you to do, more than he has a right to expect of you.”

  “I’ve done very little.”

  Remembering these bits of conversations, Nick followed Aziz down a long hallway under soft lights imbedded in the ceiling. Aziz held a finger to his lips as they passed Sana’s room. In the kitchen, Aziz brewed two cups of coffee. They sat at a table near a window overlooking a small enclosed roof garden protected from the street by a high wall. Nick had sat out there many times with Amina.

  “When does she move from Maine to Cambridge?”

  “When classes start … sometime the first of next month, I believe.”

  “You must miss her.”

  “As I would the sun if it stopped shining. But her aunt will take good care of her. She’ll do all right over there.”

  They reminisced for a while about their days in London, where Nick had first met the family. He had been a young Marine officer attached to the American embassy. Now he was a lieutenant colonel, temporarily on leave from his combat assignment in Afghanistan.

  “So she wants to be a doctor.”

  “So she says.” Aziz smiled. “But let’s talk about this Shkaki. Exactly where did you leave him?”

  “In a holding cell at the army camp in Helwan. We said the police would pick him up.”

  “What do they know about him?”

  “There was only the duty officer. I’m sure he’d never heard of him, and I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “But you’ve notified Yousef?”

  “Not yet. I wanted to ask you….”

  “It’s perfectly all right, Nick. We can trust Yousef. He may be an ardent Islamist, but he’s loyal to his oath. The president trusts him.” He paused, changed the subject. “Have you finished with this Shkaki?”

  “He’s all yours,” Nick said.

  “And he doesn’t know where this Bashir Yassin can be found?”

  “Claimed he never heard of him.”

  Aziz pondered that for a moment. “I wonder why this Yassin is proving to be so elusive. Could he know you’re looking for him?”

  “I hope not.”

  Aziz sighed. He caressed the cup with his thumb. “If my fingerprints are found on any part of this, I’m in trouble. But you know that.”

  “With the president?”

  “Oh, no. He enjoys doing favors for Americans. He just doesn’t want to be caught doing a favor for the Israelis….”

  “Everything is politics.”

  “I live on a tightrope of politics. But let’s not dwell on that.”

  “Have the Israelis ever made a formal request for extradition?”

  “They probably don’t know Bashir Yassin is in this country. As far as I know, they have no idea we’re looking for him. It’s your CIA and your embassy that asked permission to hunt for him. I think they were alerted by Yousef’s inquiries. We didn’t know he was here or who he was or anything about him. I’m surprised he got out of Israel. A man who has murdered three rabbis…. How did he escape?”

  “I don’t know,” Nick said.

  Aziz sipped at his coffee, lowered the cup. “Is Habib all right with delivering him to the Israelis? Does he know that’s what your people intend? Exactly what has he been told?”

  “Only that Bashir is a wanted criminal who came into this country illegally. And that he’s to be deported secretly through American channels.”

  “He knows who we’re giving him to?”

  “He’s a good soldier, Aziz. Above all, he’s loyal to you and to the government. He would never betray us.”

  “But he knows we’re doing America a favor by capturing Bashir for people who are perceived by many as our enemy.”

  “It’s how my presence here has been explained.”

  Nick gazed into the eyes of this good, dear, trusting friend and prayed that guilt did not show on his face although it hung like a stone from his heart. True, he intended to turn this murderer over to the Israelis. True, he had been honest about that. But the CIA, who had sent him on this mission, had other reasons for capturing Bashir, reasons Aziz was not to be told about, reasons Nick knew very little about and had experienced stabs of guilt when the CIA field officer had given him his orders.

  *

  “You’re not even to hint to Aziz that there’s another reason for tracking down this man,” Nick clearly remembered the field officer saying a few days ago while they sat at lunch in the coffee shop on the roof of the Fontana Hotel in Cairo. The man was pounding the table with a stiff forefinger intended apparently to scare Nick into taking his words seriously. The finger stabbing, in fact the man’s entire demeanor, suggested to Nick that the man thought he was dealing with a fool. Nick was a combat Marine, and he intended to be treated like one.

  “Let’s cut out the fucking histrionics,” Nick said. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Okay,” the man said, a patronizing smile lingering in his eyes, not at all disturbed by this challenge to his authority. “When you have gained control of this Bashir, you are to turn him over to your assistant to hold, and then you are to call me.”

  “And ask for Richard.”

  “It’s not my name, of course. It’s a code. It tells my people who’s calling. You will join me here, and I will give you further instructions.”

  “Why not tell me now?”

  An air of disappointment touched the man’s expression. “As I’ve told you, Colonel, I’m not entirely convinced that this Yousef of the muccabarrat is sympathetic to our needs. I’m sure he intends to question you. It’s easier to say you don’t know when you don’t, than to say you don’t know when you do. Leave it at that.” He pondered the surface of the table for a moment, then looked up. “I don’t expect anyone to get rough with you. You have a powerful ally in Mr. Khalid. But you never know. This is a strange world.” He smiled and changed the subject. “Nick. That’s for Nicholas? You’re of Greek ancestry?”

  “It’s from Dominic. My parents are Italian.”

  “And Palermo. That’s where they’re from?”

  “It’s my father’s name.”

  The man smiled. “I would guess this is your first assignment of this kind. You seem uneasy with the subterfuge.”

  Nick was but didn’t want to discuss it. “Are we done here?”

  The man laughed and sat back. “Make it soon, Colonel.”

  Nick strode past the cashier to the elevator, wondering how many spies were watching him. At the moment he didn’t give a damn. He hated this kind of work. He longed to get back to the mountains of Afghanistan, not to the killing of civilians or to the poverty, which sickened him, but to the suppression of the Taliban, to the actual fighting. Images strayed into his mind of wounds on women’s bodies from beatings inflicted because hair had shown on their foreheads. On the wall above his bunk in the officers’ quarters in Kartum, he had pinned a snapshot of a woman being whipped by a Taliban presumably for “failure to show him respect.”

  *

  “So how are your accommodations?’ Aziz asked, lifting Nick out of his reverie.

  “Acceptable,” Nick said.

  “I want you to know I’m grateful to you for capturing this man Shkaki. Having him out of the way makes Egypt more secure, and he should be a valuable source of intelligence.”

  “You’ll have to pry it out of him with
a crowbar,” Nick said. “He’s tough.”

  “He’ll need to be, unfortunately for him. Unfortunately for all of us. I hate this war and what it’s done to us.”

  Apologetic for having lost his composure, he said, “I find myself quoting your President Roosevelt, a great man.”

  Chapter Two

  The plaintive call to prayer of the muezzin had faded in the distance outside the curtained doorway of the large cemetery chamber as Faisal Ibrahim sucked a mouthful of roasted kufte off the pointed end of a skewer and grinned at the woman who emerged from behind a curtain and lowered herself onto a stool against the cement wall, her old body hidden under a shapeless black robe.

  The heat was nearly unbearable. Sweat trickled down the rolls of fat under Faisal’s arms. Later, when it was dark and the street outside was empty, he would have the woman pour water over him. Besides cooling him, it would reduce the smell.

  And five of his lieutenants right now were lounging in the air-conditioned rooms of his villa in a suburb of Cairo, drinking his wine, eating his food, and no doubt plotting a conspiracy against him.

  He sucked loudly on the spicy meat.

  “Ah, this is good,” he said, wiping grease off his lips. “I tried to tell those English how to make this. They wouldn’t listen. ‘You can’t have meat,’ they said. ‘Meat and eggs and greasy food clog your arteries. That’s what brought you here. No more cigarettes, no more alcohol, Mr. Marfouz.’ They called me Marfouz over there. ‘You go back to your old ways and you’ll be dead in a year,’ they said. In a year?” He laughed. “A year is a gift. My enemies give me days! Sometimes hours! What do the English know about life in the real world?”

  The woman said nothing as she stared at him from the corner of the room—a gray withered face, sunken shadows under watery eyes, a relic of the paid companion whose warm flesh had enflamed him in the old days.

  “Why do you just sit there looking at me, Afaf?”

  “What would you have me do, Master?”

  “Anything! Dance! Laugh! Sing! Be what you used to be!”

  “None of us can be that, Master.”

  “Look at you in those old-fashioned clothes! What’s happened to you? It’s like you’re waiting to die!”

  Her thick gray hair flattened against the cement wall as she threw her head back and laughed.

  “You expected to find me saucy and proud? It’s been thirty years, Master!”

  “Don’t remind me,” Faisal said, edging his thumbnail into a cavity in a back tooth, pulling out a thread of gristle. “Were you in love with this bawab, this caretaker?”

  “He preferred me to the other women. He offered me marriage.”

  “He was a religious man?”

  “He showed me the way.”

  “And now that he’s dead, you’re content to take his place, to be housemaid to a graveyard?”

  “Where else can I go? Back to al-Husayn? I’m lucky to have this. I will stay here until I die, God willing.”

  Faisal got up from the cenotaph that served as a table. He went to the curtained doorway and looked out at the enclosure—broken orange crates against a whitewashed wall, a clothesline dangling off a Mamluk tomb. Against the evening glow of the city he could see minarettes like spears stabbing the sky above the Muhammad ‘Ali Mosque.

  It was quiet here. The air was fouled by odors of decaying garbage like much of Cairo, but the crowds came here only on the holy days. Tourists and police rarely wandered into these narrow empty streets. It had been wise to come to this cemetery.

  He ran a finger across his forehead, wiped sweat into the moist fabric of his shirt. He cursed the heat.

  Maybe Afaf was right. Maybe God had led him to her. Maybe God had brought her to his mind while he sneaked across the desert on that wretched camel, wrapped to the eyes in Bedouin clothes. Maybe it was God who had told him she was the one person he could trust in all of Egypt whom the police would never think to check on. Who would believe that Faisal Ibrahim, leader of the Soldiers of Allah, would be a friend of this old woman?

  He ambled barefoot over sandy cobblestones to the narrow opening in the wall. The guard was outside, a rifle resting on the wall next to him. He was smoking a cigarette.

  “Sazga! You stupid fellah! Put out the cigarette! Pick up the rifle! Stay awake!” He muttered curses to himself as he went back inside.

  “Tomorrow,” he said to Afaf, “go to the fruit stall and tell Diab to send another team down here. Tell him I want a seasoned man. That one outside is an imbecile! You told Diab to stay where I can find him?”

  “I gave him your orders in your own words, Master.”

  Faisal settled onto the narrow bed behind the hanging blanket, dragging the fragrance of a woman into his large nose. It was the other woman. She had been gone more than a week. The mattress still smelled of her, the stupid and disrespectful Salima, but young, with a resilient body. In the old days he would have kept Salima on this bed and thrown Afaf into the street.

  Now he was a different man. Old, like Afaf, but not defeated. Maybe God brought him here to show him what happens to people who die before they are dead. His gaze wandered from the formless shape of Afaf at the porcelain sink to the opening in the wall across the room where crumbled stones had dropped into the bottom of the staircase that led down to the ancient tomb.

  An image of Abdullah, his beloved son, slammed into his mind—the pale body in a white sheet with rope burns on the slender neck. Although it was eighteen years since the boy had been hanged, the memory was fresh and blistering with hate. They had said that revenge would end the hatred and give him peace. But how could he exact revenge on a high government official who was guarded every moment of his life?

  He wrenched the image from his mind.

  “Salima,” he said. “How long did she live here?”

  “A few months, maybe seven or eight.”

  “You needed companionship?”

  “God is my companion. She needed a place to live.”

  “What does she pay you?”

  “She has no money.”

  “Why take the risk? She’s a bitch. She’d cut your throat for a bariza.”

  “Ten piastres is a lot of money to a woman like her, Master. You drove her out. Who can blame her for getting angry? All she has now is that pile of cardboard down the street. How will she face the cold nights of winter?”

  “I’ll be gone by then. You should let her freeze. She’s not to be trusted, Afaf. I know the kind. They’re loyal only when you’re good to them. I’m surrounded by people like that.”

  “I’ll bring her back when you leave.”

  “Then you are a fool.” Faisal pushed the pillows aside so that he could stretch out. “Tell her if she betrays me, I’ll cut her throat.”

  “I pray God did not hear that.”

  *

  He was snoring when the men came in. He was on his back with hands folded over his genitals when the tall bearded one in the army shirt entered the room, followed by one in a university T-shirt who stayed in the doorway, holding the curtain aside.

  “What?” Faisal cried out, bewildered, head rising off the pillow. “What is this?”

  The tall one had rattled the bed, awakening him and causing the German pistol Faisal had hidden under the mattress to fall to the floor. The bearded one picked it up, admired it, stuffed it into the satchel pocket of his army pants.

  More angry than frightened, Faisal sat up.

  “Who are you?”

  They weren’t army or police. Israeli commandoes would have murdered him in his sleep. They were soldiers. Whose?

  “You will come with us,” the bearded one said.

  Questions thundered in his mind: Where is my bodyguard? Why were there no shots? How did you find me?

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “Get up,” the bearded one said, putting a hand on Faisal’s shoulder as though to lift him if he resisted.

  “Who are you?”

  “Come
with us willingly or we’ll drag you.”

  “Who sent you here?”

  The man at the door, flashing disgust and impatience at the tall one, came over and grabbed Faisal by the shirt, lifting him to his feet. “We don’t have time to argue,” he said, a heavy odor of cigarettes on his breath. “Move!” He put his hand in the center of Faisal’s back and pushed him toward the curtained doorway.

  “You know who I am?” Faisal yelled. “You treat me like this?”

  “We don’t have time to coddle you.”

  “I am to be respected, you son of a bitch! My shoes! Let me get my shoes!”

  “Get his shoes,” the man said to Afaf.

  She was cowering at the sink, hands trembling at her face. She scurried to the bed, dropped to her knees and fetched sandals from under the springs. She handed them to the bearded one, cringing from him.

  “Diab!” Faisal shouted at her. “Diab!” hoping she would understand what he meant. He was scared now, not of the men; they obviously did not intend to kill him. He was scared because his heart was racing.

  Did she hear me? Does she know what I want her to do?

  “Don’t push me!” he yelled, pressing fingers into the incision scar over his sternum, deep breathing, frightened by the rapid heartbeats. “I’ll do what you say!”

  A black French sedan was parked on the street outside the gate. As Faisal was pushed toward it, he saw his bodyguard slumped against the wall, his head nodding over his knees. There was blood on his face.

  “Kus amok!” he screamed at the man. ‘Cunt of your mother!’ being the foulest curse he could think of. “You better be dead!”

  He made a desperate kick toward the man as he was lifted off his feet and shoved into the back seat of the car. A woman sat near the window, her face veiled with a scarf. She moved to give him room. When his leg pressed her thigh she wedged her hand between them.