Arab

by Jim Ingraham

  “You’re lying!” Yousef yelled, back-handing the man’s face, knocking him against the wall. “I said hold him, not kill him!”

  “You said ‘soften….’”

  “That’s a lie!” Yousef yelled, including Hafiz’s partner in the sweep of his glance.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean….”

  “Get him out of here. Take him out the back way, bury him in the desert, and speak to no one of this.”

  Upstairs he told the woman to say, if anyone inquired, that Habib Rahal had been released, unharmed. “You have no idea where he went. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No one must ever know what happened here,” Yousef said to the man at the door who looked as though he had no idea what Yousef was talking about.

  Yousef climbed behind the wheel of his limo and reached into the glove compartment for a sedative, praying it would ease the headache.

  How will I explain this to Aziz?

  *

  Later that evening, on the terrace high up in the residence hotel overlooking the Nile, Captain Huzayfi watched the several men clustered near the French doors, most of them in dress whites, each holding a wine glass, all of them laughing at jokes they had heard a thousand times. He wondered how many were as bored as he was, whether, like him, they came to these events only because it was expected of them.

  Just as his wife tugged at his sleeve to draw his attention to something across the room, he received another call. She made a face as he used himself and wandered to an empty corner.

  “You’re sure?” he said.

  “I worked with him, Captain. I couldn’t be mistaken.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “It looks like the trunk lid sprang open when the car struck the tree. They think he was already dead, maybe a heart attack. They weren’t sure. It’s like these two guys were transporting him to the desert.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure it’s Habib Rahal?”

  “Like I said, I worked with him. You may remember I almost became his partner. I couldn’t mistake him for someone else … the missing eye….”

  With a saddened heart, he tried to make another call to Nick. No one answered. He decided against leaving a message. Wouldn’t be wise to create evidence that he was providing information to the American CIA.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Anwar Bindari—burdened by fear of his uncle, who had threatened to eliminate his job at the airport—cautioned Boutros, the man on the passenger seat, to stay in the car. He didn’t want a second man standing outside Aleyya’s doorway. If she gave him trouble, he’d deal with it alone.

  A woman on the steps smoking a cigarette watched him come down the alley, watched him step around a sleeping dog, watched him scrape something off his foot on a raised stone. He brushed past her into the darkened building and mounted creaking wooden stairs, avoiding the rail he knew was polished by a century of germ-laden hands, the air in this old building thick with feculent odors.

  Upstairs he stood under a ceiling bulb, staring at a lighted crack in the door panel. He knocked.

  “It’s open!” A woman’s voice.

  He turned the knob, opened the door onto a woman striding toward him, dark hair dangling on the shoulder straps of a blue dress, barefoot, better-looking than most, taller than average, in her thirties.

  “Aleyya?”

  She laughed. “Sorry to disappoint you. I’m her friend, Sakeena from upstairs.”

  “Oh, I was looking….”

  “It’s all right. She’s visiting her aunt in Suez with Umm Sayid.”

  “Suez? You wouldn’t happen to have an address?”

  Sakeena’s smile faltered. She probably realized that if he thought she might be Aleyya, he didn’t know Aleyya. “Maybe it’s not Suez. It was a long time…. I don’t know.”

  He laughed. “Oh, that’s all right. I think I met her aunt, Umm Sayid’s sister, isn’t she?”

  Sakeena nodded.

  “She isn’t married now, is she—the aunt, I mean?”

  “Divorced,” Sakeena said, puzzled.

  “Well, sorry to have disturbed you.”

  He left the apartment and hurried down the stairs, stopping just outside where the woman, still smoking, looked up at him, annoyed.

  “Looking for Bashir Yassin,” Anwar said. “You wouldn’t happen to….”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Well if he is, he’s with Umm Sayid. He clings to her skirts like a baby. Find her, you find him.” She dragged on her cigarette and looked away, dismissing him.

  Behind the wheel of his car with Boutros, he said, “How many Sayids do you suppose live in Suez?”

  “I think we’re going to find out,” Boutros said.

  “Not until I’ve cleared this with Uncle Esmat. He knows people there. He’ll get an address for us. In the meantime, let’s look for some women.”

  “I’m a Christian, you know,” Boutros said. “I don’t go for that.”

  “Then you can watch,” Anwar said, laughing.

  *

  As Nick walked back to his lounge chair, he wondered why he rated a personal visit from this guy who always wanted to meet on his own turf.

  “Why the limp?” Isaac said.

  “Favoring the busted rib. What’s up?”

  “I guess you haven’t been watching the news.”

  “Rarely in the daytime, especially in this crazy place,” Nick said, cautioned by Isaac’s expression—unusually serious.

  Pain jabbed Nick’s wound as he inserted his foot behind the leg of a footstool and dragged the stool in front of him, embraced it with his ankles, then raised both feet to it’s soft cushion, his rib killing him but convinced the exercise was beneficial. “So what was on the news?”

  “Not good,” Isaac said. “Not good.” And he waited a moment to let that sink in. “It’s Habib, Nick.” He waited another few seconds. “I hate to tell you this, but he’s gone. They killed him.”

  Nick sat bolt upright. “Habib?”

  “I’m sorry, Nick. It’s been on the news. I thought you knew.”

  “Habib?” the name leaping in anguish from his throat. With fists clenched, his heart on his face, he again asked, “Habib?”

  “I’m sorry, Nick.”

  “What happened?”

  “They said he was found in the trunk of a car that went off the road near the eastern desert. Witnesses saw two men run toward what I guess is a used-car graveyard. Nothing else out there. Maybe caught by now.”

  “He was already dead?”

  “Apparently. Jesus, I’m sorry, Nick.”

  “They’re sure it’s Habib?”

  “Positive ID. One of the cops knew him.”

  “Aw, shit!” Nick yelled. “This fucking war! This goddamned madness!”

  “Apparently he was hit several times with a stun gun. It’s possible he had a heart attack.”

  Nick was at the window, his back turned. “Tortured?”

  “Apparently.”

  “It’s my fault. I should’ve let him go,” and stood with head bowed, a steadying hand raised to the window frame, body gently heaving as he settled into the realization that his friend was gone. “Goddamn it, I should’ve let him go.”

  “Not your fault,” Isaac said.

  Nick came back to his chair. He raised his feet onto the stool, anger crowding his mind—anger at himself, at the war, at the people who killed Habib. “Why? It doesn’t make any fucking sense!”

  “I know,” Isaac said, and gave that a few seconds. “Want to talk?”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” Nick said.

  “About something else.”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” impatiently.

  “My office received an anonymous tip. Helene Bryce was brought to the Meridien Hotel on Rawdah.”

  “You checked?”

  “She’s not there now. Whether she’s gone for the evening…?” He shrugged. “I have a man there. Sh
e’s in the country illegally and she’s American. We know who brought her in. The embassy’s on it. We’ll find her.”

  “Bashir? You know where he is?”

  “No. Thought you might.”

  “No idea,” Nick said.

  Isaac searched Nick’s face for signs of deception. He probably knew Nick was holding something back. Nick didn’t give a shit. “That man we spoke about, the official at Cairo airport, Bindari….”

  “I remember,” Nick said, cautioning himself not to say things about Bindari that Bashir had told him, feeling a protectiveness he couldn’t explain.

  “His name has cropped up. We’ve learned from one of the muccabarat’s assets, who also spies for us, that this airport official, Bindari, was in regular contact with General Saraaj, right up to the day Saraaj was killed. And we’ve linked his name to Uthman al-Ajami, from a few phone calls. This Ajami is a pretty busy guy.”

  “And there’s the connection to Jaradat,” Nick said.

  “May not be relevant.”

  “It’s easy to believe that Jaradat was reaching for Bashir through Faisal Ibrahim….”

  “Well, apparently we have only a woman’s word for that,” Isaac said. “Apparently a vindictive woman lashing out. But let’s leave Jaradat out of the equation. We’d have no chance to legally implicate him. For political reasons we wouldn’t even be able to mention his name. It’s this Bindari I’m interested in. Who else could have obtained clearance for Bashir Yassin to land in Cairo in an unscheduled flight? Bashir took off from an airstrip that General Saraaj resurrected. Saraaj is killed, the landing is switched to Bindari’s airport…. So, we can easily connect Saraaj, Bindari, Yassin, and this woman Bryce, put them together in a conspiracy. Our people scared her out of Brazil. She makes a phone call to Bindari or Uthman Ajami and they bring her to Cairo. Only a corrupt pilot would take that job—one of their own.”

  Isaac reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarette holder. Nick raised a hand. “Please don’t.”

  Isaac shrugged, lowered his hand to his lap.

  Nick said, “You think Bindari had Saraaj killed?”

  “Let’s just say it appears he’s benefited from the general’s death. Who else could have arranged to slip her through customs and spirit her off to Rawdah? It looks like she’s the prize that’s been snatched away from the dead general.”

  “How do you know she’s on Rawdah?”

  “Your Captain Huzayfi found the elusive cab driver. Ten minutes after the Captain dismissed him, we learned where she was and sent a man there who learned—and this will please you—that she left the Meridien Hotel with two women from the American embassy.”

  That was a surprise. “She’s Rio Rita.”

  “Helene Bryce.”

  “So they don’t need Bashir Yassin any more … unless they expect him to doctor the president’s plane, which sounds—”

  “With all the publicity about this, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell he’ll ever get near that plane.”

  “So he’s become expendable?”

  “Yes. And that means we’d better find him before Bindari does. And before Yousef Qantara does. We can’t learn anything from a corpse.”

  “And once you have him, then what?”

  “Come on, Nick. You know I can’t arrest anyone in this country. There’re laws against it. Langley would have my ass. We’re at war, man.”

  Then why do it, Nick thought, but didn’t say, didn’t want to get involved in too deep a discussion of Bashir’s destiny. Instead he asked, “You think the muccabarat’s looking into this?”

  “Why else would Yousef Qantara go rough on Habib except to find out the real reason you’re in Egypt? Whether it’s this or something else, who knows?”

  “You think Shkaki was looking for me?”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you…. They found a card key to your suite in his pocket.”

  Nick didn’t believe Isaac had forgotten anything. His moves were always calculated.

  “Think it was planted?”

  Isaac laughed. “I don’t know about that. But somebody had to have given it to him, somebody who’s gunning for you.”

  “How would he know where to find me?”

  “I believe your Captain Huzayfi is looking into that. The muccabarat could get a key and silence whoever gave it to them. Lots of ways to get keys.”

  “You talk with him?”

  “Never met the man,” Isaac said. “My question, Nick, is why did Habib kill him.”

  “To protect me is what I heard him say, and I believe him.”

  “Not to eliminate a witness. I can’t imagine the muccabarat hiring Shkaki as a hit man.”

  “You seem to be dancing around the idea that Habib was working for Yousef Qantara.”

  Isaac smiled. “They wouldn’t have tortured him to death if he was one of them. No, I’m wondering whether it might not have been you Shkaki was looking for.”

  “In my suite? You think Bashir Yassin was hiding in these rooms?”

  Isaac laughed. “What gave you that idea?”

  And that’s why you paid me this visit, you prick. “Want to check the bathroom?”

  “Come on, Nick. I’m just doing my job.”

  *

  Around eight that evening, Nick was sitting with Aziz Al-Khalid at a table in a restaurant on Gezira glancing idly over rooftops at lighted windows in high buildings on the opposite bank of the Nile, lights that reflected like wobbling tiles on the moving river.

  “I really seem to be burdening you with apologies, Nick. But Sana truly wanted to come….”

  “No problem,” Nick said. “Tell her I miss her. Been a while.”

  “She gets tied up in these charity things….”

  Nick gave that a nod. He was only half listening, couldn’t get thoughts about Habib out of his mind. Nor, apparently, could Aziz.

  “I wish I had known him better,” he said. “He seemed like a good man.”

  Nick gave that a few seconds, glancing past Aziz at a wide expanse of glass through fronds of a potted palm, tall buildings out there on this crowded half of the island. The endless expanse of the growing city beyond them, a city that seemed so hateful to him now.

  The brown hand and white sleeve of a waiter slipped in front of his face and lifted the plate he had finished using, the sweet taste of Aysh es-Saray lingering pleasantly in his mouth.

  He looked up. “Thanks,” he said.

  The waiter smiled, probably only guessing what Nick had said. They were speaking English—Aziz’s choice for privacy reasons.

  “It wasn’t to talk about Habib that I invited you here,” Aziz said, “and again I apologize for not coming to you sooner.”

  “You’re a busy man,” Nick said. “I understand.” Aziz had told him he was out of town and hadn’t heard about the incident until this afternoon.

  “There’s something else.” Aziz raised a linen napkin to his lips, patted them, replaced the napkin to his lap, glanced across the several tables at two security guards standing near the door. “Very disturbing,” Aziz said. “painfully disturbing.”

  Nick waited. Aziz wasn’t talking about the security guards.

  “We’ve been running a parallel investigation of our friend Bashir Yassin, ongoing even before you arrived, Nick, as I think you know—a routine check on what Yousef was doing. It seems that records at Immigration indicate that a Bashir Yassin—or Yessan, as it was spelled on some of the papers, transcripts in English for the United Nation’s crew—thirteen years old, was admitted to this country in what was called the ‘Jibril Deal.’ Heard of it? More than a thousand prisoners exchanged for an Israeli….”

  “Nineteen eighty-four, eighty-five, something like that?”

  “One of the many prisoner exchange things.”

  “From Gaza.”

  “Yes. How a young boy would be thought an insurgent…. Anyway, the important thing is that Bashir Yassin is in this country legally. And Yousef should know that. It’s
right there in the record, along with a United Nations sponsorship, a dossier containing school grades, his work record at the airport, his friends and close associates. It’s all there, everything but his recent training in England—not a word about that.”

  “Why would he hold out on you?”

  “I expect to find out,” Aziz said.

  “That’s serious stuff.”

  “Yes. And suddenly nobody seems to know where Esmat Bindari is. We think he knows we’ve confiscated his records.”

  This elicited a subdued “Wow!”

  “I only wish we’d learned this earlier,” Aziz said.

  “Isaac thinks it may have been Bindari who hired Shkaki to kill Bashir. He thinks he was looking for Bashir, not me.”

  Aziz smiled. “In your hotel?”

  Nick gave it a passive shrug, knowing that Aziz wouldn’t press him.

  “As to Yousef,” Aziz said, “I’ll be receiving a report from Security in a day or so, and no matter what excuses he gives, he’ll be reassigned. So you won’t have him looking over your shoulder any more. All of this, by the way, is what has occupied me these past two days.”

  “Can you prove that Bindari made arrangements at the airport to bring Bashir’s plane in?”

  “I’m sure we can, and I’m reasonably sure that Esmat Bindari knows we’re looking into it.”

  “So he has good reason to flee.”

  Aziz again raised the napkin to his lips. “By the way,” quickly changing the subject, “I was flown to Aswan in the president’s new plane. An improvement over the old one, but an unnecessary indulgence in ‘conspicuous consumption,’ as your Thorstein Veblen might have characterized it.”

  “But ‘too much of a good thing is wonderful,’ right? as another American said.”

  “Indeed.” And he smiled and turned his attention to what remained on his plate.

  “The woman, Helene Bryce,” Nick ventured.

  “Yes, I heard. She turned herself in.”

  “Will your people question her?”

  “We’ll see what develops,” Aziz said. “She’ll doubtless be brought to the States and scared into telling your people what they want to know. She won’t be put on trial, I’m sure of that. Your so-called ‘discovery laws’ would bring too much information to the surface. She’ll be held for a while and maybe prohibited from leaving the country. Nothing more. I doubt she was ever charged with treason. Under your law, and ours, a charge of that magnitude would have to be adjudicated. She’ll be drained of what information she has, then put out to pasture.”