Arab

by Jim Ingraham

He fed bullets to his pistol, held the pistol at his side, swung it behind him when he reached the door.

  Two house cops were holding Bashir.

  “It’s okay,” Nick said, beckoning Bashir toward him, acknowledging the apologies.

  “We caught him coming up the stairs….”

  “It’s okay. He’s a friend,” Nick said, noticing the alarm in Bashir’s eyes when, after Nick had closed the door, he saw Nick’s pistol. Nick brought it into his bedroom, came back. “So what’s going on?” pointing Bashir to a chair.

  “There’s no one else,” Bashir said. “No one I can trust.”

  “Here, sit down. It’s okay.” Nick could hardly believe his luck. He had despaired of ever finding Bashir again. There was so much more to learn from this man.

  *

  “Yes, I know about the flight. I know nothing about the woman,” he said, sitting across from Bashir who was gripping his raised knee as though to cope with tension. He was trembling.

  “You’re safe here,” Nick told him.

  “Could you find my car? Before, your man said….”

  “If the police picked it up, he might be able to. But a lot of people are looking for you. He would be followed.”

  “Why? I don’t understand! What have I done?”

  “They think you’re mixed up in some kind of subversive activity.”

  “Why? I worked for Faisal Ibrahim because I wanted to learn.”

  “I don’t think it’s that.”

  “Because I went to England? They sent me there! I told you that.”

  “Bindari.”

  “I thought he was my friend! I don’t know what to do!”

  “Hey, come on, man,” reaching out. “You’re safe here.”

  He didn’t want Bashir to collapse. Nick couldn’t know what was in Bashir’s mind, but the man wasn’t faking. He was lost. He was frightened.

  “Did anyone ask you to hurt Aziz al-Khalid?” Nick said.

  “No!”

  “Is there a plot out there to kill him?”

  “I don’t know. Diab said it. That’s why they killed him. That’s…. I thought they were there to help me.”

  “Who were they?”

  “They brought me to an airstrip in the eastern desert. They had a jet there and a man to fly with me. I thought it was okay. I had made that flight before. The people over there knew me. I thought that’s why they picked me.”

  “Bindari?”

  “Yes!” apparently pleased that Nick remembered the name. “I thought he was my friend. But he was at the airport when those men locked me in that room. He saw it happen. I know they were going to kill me. Anwar….”

  “Who’s Anwar?”

  “Bindari’s … I don’t know … maybe related to him. I could tell the way they talked they wanted to hurt me.”

  “And you escaped from them and came here.”

  Bashir gave that a weak shrug. “They let me get away. I think they didn’t want those men to recognize them. I don’t know. I don’t care anymore. Everyone I go to gets arrested. You want to arrest me? I don’t care.”

  A childhood memory entered Nick’s mind: his boyhood friend Froggie Begin falling through the ice at Parson’s Pond. His eyes, as he drifted under the transparent ice, looking up, pleading for help, losing focus while Nick watched him. Even now, after thirty years, Nick remembered the feelings of helplessness. Even now he believed he could have done something.

  Bashir was waiting, obviously hoping Nick would say something reassuring.

  Nick looked away, wondering what Froggie had thought, staring up from under the ice, sliding by in that brief moment before he died.

  Chapter Twenty

  They were side by side at the urinals in the Ramses Hilton off the Corniche. “I don’t think Aziz knew about the woman,” Nick said. “He knew of the flight—”

  “Then he knew about the woman,” Isaac said, stepping back, adjusting his fly.

  “I don’t think so. He thinks it’ll show up in Yousef’s report.”

  “Well, that’s what he’d tell you, Nick.”

  “I believe him.”

  “Don’t be beguiled by friendship. He’s a high-ranking Egyptian official, not just some nice guy you used to know.”

  After rinsing their hands in tap water, they went back to the elevators, rode in silence to the fourth floor, entered a suite that smelled of room freshener.

  “Let me tell you what I think,” Isaac said, dropping into a soft chair in front of a TV cabinet, crossing his legs at the knee.

  Nick sat across from him, watching him fit a cigarette into his ivory holder, noticing how long his fingers were—piano-player’s fingers.

  “What he told you about the delay is probably true. They’re keeping a close eye on you but they won’t act until word comes down from the president. I don’t think they have Bashir. The guy who’s following you would be called off if they did. They want him, of course, and maybe for the same reasons we do.

  “Bashir has got to know where the woman is. He flew her in. He disappeared when she did. They’re a couple of Jack and Jills up to their necks in something. Partners, no question about it.

  “I’ll tell you who I think she is. I think she’s Rio Rita. I talked to our guys in Brazil. They’ve traced the woman to a port city in the south. They think maybe she came here with a guy named Nelson. Both she and this Nelson work for a Saudi prince. Her real name, by the way—if it’s who we think it is—is Helene Bryce. She’s a one-time booking agent for some music groups. Went to work for Fahd years ago, handles his business affairs. She’s on our A-list. We have a direct connect between her and some friends of bin Laden in the Sudan. I think this Fahd was once a drinking buddy of bin Laden’s. They used to hang out together in Beirut before bin Laden went religious.”

  “You said General Saraaj made phone calls to Brazil. To this woman?”

  “Speculation, but it makes a nice package, doesn’t it.”

  If you leave Bashir Yassin out, it does, Nick thought, convinced that Bashir knew nothing about any intrigue. He said, “Because there were only two men on the plane, the co-pilot must have been Nelson?”

  “It’s possible. We don’t know. It’s not important.”

  “But this other thing is important?”

  “And getting our hands on Bashir Yassin is very important. What he knows could break this thing wide open.”

  “What do you have on Saraaj?”

  “Nothing much. Until he started rebuilding that airstrip, we weren’t interested in him—a career officer, kept out of trouble.”

  Nick sat with bowed head picking at a fingernail, trying to imagine Bashir Yassin an active member of a big-time subversive group involving generals and international financiers. He shook his head. An image flashed across his mind of Bashir being water-boarded, like a scene in a Charley Chaplin movie.

  *

  Waiting for Shkaki to come back from the kitchen where he had been making a phone call, Uthman al-Ajami walked to the window and noticed again the man on the bicycle riding past the gate at his driveway, a man he had seen many times.

  “Let’s take this outside,” he said, urging Shkaki toward a doorway that led down a long hall to a walled garden. He didn’t believe his house was bugged, but why take chances?

  “You can call Khartoum on that?” he asked, watching Shkaki tuck the phone into his breast pocket.

  Shkaki didn’t say.

  “We must be careful,” Uthman said, sweeping both hands down the skirts of his dishdasher as he sat on a sheltered bench watching small birds fly off the lip of his fountain, a gift from a European effendi from the old days. There was a sweetness in the air out here, a breeze playing with the palm fronds.

  “Does someone know you’re here?” Uthman said.

  “You. You know I’m here.”

  “You know you have nothing to fear from me,” Uthman said, intimidated by the gruff tone of this barbarian. “It’s the Americans. They can intercept phone call
s. They would torture you. They are ruthless.”

  “No more than your government.”

  “And yours,” Uthman said. “Yours is worse. Yours have slaughtered whole tribes of people.”

  As though impatient with this, Shkaki paced the tiles in front of the fountain. “So I can stay here another night?”

  “Of course. But you can go out only after dark, and you must use the gate down there,” pointing at the end of the garden. “You can’t be seen coming out my front gate.”

  “If they find me, they find me,” Shkaki said with impressive indifference.

  Uthman gathered that in: I was thinking of me, not you, you stupid fellah, again impressed by how haggard Shkaki looked—sagging gray flesh under his eyes, deep lines in his bulging forehead. Maybe he wanted to retire. Maybe he was weary of the struggle. Maybe he was calling his people in the north to come rescue him. Uthman wished he knew. Who, besides me, would he call?

  He tapped his cane on the tiles, pleased with himself for enticing this old warrior back into Egypt.

  “Are my people in the same place?’ Shkaki asked. “That villa outside Abu-Awekila.”

  So it wasn’t his own people he had called. “They’re waiting to hear from you. But first there’s this little chore to be taken care of.”

  “And who is ordering that?”

  “I have no idea,” Uthman said, chasing an ant across a tile with the tip of his cane. “These things come to me in a voice. I never know who is calling.”

  “You use a code or something? How can you trust a voice? How do you know it’s not the police setting a trap?”

  “We have our ways,” Uthman said, complacently. “You have nothing to fear.”

  “But you do, if I fail,” Shkaki said, his eyes and his voice loaded with malice. “How do I know you’re not setting me up? How do I know the police aren’t down there waiting for me?”

  “Why would I do that? That would be too risky. It would be foolish of me, and I’m not foolish,” Uthman said. To get away from the threats, he said, “I’ve been instructed to tell you your target was seen going into the hotel where the American is staying. He was brought upstairs to the American’s suite. When the American leaves, he’s alone. It’s how he was found once before.”

  “And I just walk in and kill him? How? I don’t have a gun.”

  “I’m told you have a knife. A knife doesn’t make noise,” Uthman said. “A big strong man like you….”

  Shkaki growled that off.

  The arrangement was an exchange of favors, a quid pro quo. “How you handle it is not my concern,” Uthman said. “I’ve told you where he is. You have the key card to the colonel’s suite. Just remember, they won’t drive you north until you do this.”

  “How did you get the key card?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Only the police could get an extra card. Hotels don’t give them away.”

  “My source is confidential. He has access to everything.”

  “And the police don’t know Bashir Yassin is there?”

  “If they did, they’d have raided the suite. You have nothing to be afraid of.”

  Shkaki seemed to doubt that, but he asked, “And how do I recognize this airplane pilot?”

  “He’ll be alone in the suite. He’s of average size, slight build, quite handsome I’ve been told. You needn’t worry about walking across the lobby. They’ll pay no attention to you. When your phone rings, that’s the signal.”

  “How about the American’s partner?”

  “He won’t be there. It’s night. He goes home.”

  “How many people you got up there watching the American? He knows me, you know. He knows what I look like.”

  “Just stay out of his way,” Uthman said, tired of this man, tired of this assignment. He had become too deeply involved. Too many people knew about him. He had let ambition override his discretion. It’s what his friend Rashad Sabri had warned him of.

  “Be careful not to outreach yourself, Uthman. That can be dangerous.”

  *

  Esmat Bindari leaned across the leather seat. He was furious. “Why did you let him go?”

  Anwar pulled back, striking his elbow on the arm rest. “They know me!” rubbing his elbow. “They know I have nothing to do with Security. I was protecting you. Who knows what he was telling them?” his voice swallowed by the confined space of the limousine.

  “So he went out through the garage?”

  “There were hundreds of people out there. He blended in. We think he got a ride. I searched everywhere. I’m sorry.”

  Esmat sighed, sat back and snapped on the intercom. “Tell my driver where your car is. This is serious, Anwar. He knows too much. This is very serious.”

  “I know. I’ll find him.”

  He was scared. He knew the importance of finding Bashir and he had no idea where to look. That mechanic Takfeer might know. They were friends. He could say it was about the new planes coming in.

  *

  “Stay away from the windows,” Nick said to Bashir. “I’ll be right back.” He stepped into the corridor, made sure the door was locked. The elevator stopped on the mezzanine floor and a woman got into the car. He had seen her before. She smiled, possibly a plant. He didn’t know, didn’t care. He had become used to being watched.

  “Expecting rain?’ he said.

  She laughed. “Maybe next year.”

  “You from around here?”

  “A native Cairene,” she said. “And you?”

  “A native American.” She didn’t seem surprised.

  “I can tell by the accent,” she said. “I knew an American, an Israeli actually, an ex-patriot. Do they lose their American citizenship when they migrate to Israel?”

  “I have no idea.”

  As he followed her to the desk, he threw a peak at Habib sitting in a lounge chair across the room. He tilted his head toward the woman, whom Habib had previously pointed out to him. Habib rolled his eyes.

  Learning that he had no messages, Nick left the woman and walked to the entrance, assured that Habib would see whether anyone followed him. So far he was confident that the police did not know that Bashir was upstairs in his suite.

  He was in the back seat of a cab when he noticed a man leave a shadowed doorway across the street and dart through traffic toward the hotel entrance. Although in the confusing light of the street lamps and moving headlights, he couldn’t be sure, he felt a stirring of recognition: something about the face … the protruding dome, the beard.

  Nick laughed at himself. The woman had made him jittery. He was seeing things, like after his jeep had been knocked off the road by that explosion, banging his head on the concrete wall. For weeks he was haunted by the memory of a woman running through the rubble with a child in her arms, wondering whether the child was alive, the image making him feel wretched, hating the war, hating how it destroyed the lives of innocent people.

  And now he tried to dismiss the image of the man on the street in the traffic. But he couldn’t.

  “Go back.” he said to the driver. “Take me back.”

  The driver threw both hands in the air. “I’m in the wrong lane!”

  “Just do it,” Nick said. “Get me back there!” He reached money across the man’s shoulder, dropping it into his lap. “Please hurry.”

  *

  Just as Habib emerged from the men’s room patting his hands, he saw Shkaki come through the revolving door across the lobby. Shkaki stopped, alarmed, turned and pushed his way back through the moving door. He was dancing through headlights on the street when Habib hit the sidewalk, reaching for his pistol, remembering he had lost it, cursing and watching helplessly as speeding cars kept him from the man he saw running down the opposite sidewalk.

  He was in shadows at the entrance of a small garden when the cab pulled up and Nick got out, running toward him. Habib pointed into the garden.

  “It’s him?”

  “And probably armed,” Habib said.r />
  “He came inside?”

  “And saw me,” Habib said, “and ran out here.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure….”

  “I am,” Habib said, watching Nick remove his cell phone from his pocket. “One Two Two,” he said, “if you’re calling emergency.”

  Nick’s finger barely touched a button when a frantic chorus of yapping dogs drove Shkaki crashing through bushes onto the sidewalk a hundred feet from them, three excited dogs chasing him.

  Nick handed his phone to Habib and drew his pistol. The two of them chased Shkaki to an alley where the dogs stopped, stopped barking, waited a few seconds, then turned back and trotted past them to the garden and disappeared.

  “I doubt this alley goes all the way to the river,” Habib said. “You could smell it.”

  “Over this putrid stink?”

  “Probably a dead animal. That means nobody goes in here. Nothing but closed doors. No windows on the ground floor. He’s trapped in there.”

  “Funny the dogs didn’t go in.”

  “They drove him off. That’s what they’re trained for.”

  Without warning, Shkaki burst out of the shadows, driving a shoulder into Habib, knocking him down, giving Nick an opportunity to grab his collar and ram him against the building.

  “He’s got a knife!” Habib yelled from his knees, struggling to get up.

  The blade burned into Nick’s side. He flattened his hand on Shkaki’s face and, as he had been trained to do, drove fingers into Shkaki’s eyes, pushing upward, feeling something wet slip from a socket.

  He pulled his hand back, deafened by Shkaki’s howling rage. He drove an uppercut into Shkaki’s chin. As the big man staggered backward against the building, Habib raised the knife and plunged it into Shkaki’s heart.

  Lying supine on the sidewalk, his face grotesque, blood seeping from his jibbering lips, Shkaki uttered what Nick thought was, “….set up…. they knew…,waiting…,” the voice fading into an Islamic prayer, the muscles of the bearded face going slack.

  “And may you rot in hell,” Habib said, dropping the knife to the sidewalk as he watched the man die.

  “Call it in,” Nick said, pressing his palm into sticky cloth at his side, his face knotted in pain.