Arab

by Jim Ingraham

  Nick had asked about Helene only to stall for time. Now for the tough one.

  *

  “Does this mean you’re no longer interested in finding Bashir Yassin?”

  “Oh, no,” Aziz said. “I’m sure he has a lot to tell us. But you want to return to Afghanistan? Thought you hated the war.”

  “I do, all aspects of it. But I want to get back to my men. Protecting their lives … at least helping to.”

  “That’s what you’re fighting for?”

  “It’s all I care about. I don’t think anyone knows what anyone’s fighting for. Resistance to change, I guess.”

  “On both sides,” Aziz said. “My great hope—in fact, what sustains me through all of this—is that this war will ultimately prove beneficial, that it will serve to dissolve the barriers that have kept our worlds apart for a thousand years.”

  “It’s not the crusades all over again?”

  “That kind of imperialism is in the past, Nick. Look what happened between the United States and Japan after the agony of World War Two. They’re building Toyotas in Tennessee, and playing baseball in Tokyo. They call it ‘basuboro,’ I’m told.”

  Nick smiled and went back to what he had come here to discuss. “Bashir’s not involved in anything, Aziz. You may think I’m naïve, but I’ve spent several hours with him. He’s just an ordinary guy with no idea what’s going on, let alone being involved in anything subversive. Right now I don’t know where he is, but it’s possible that Shkaki was looking for him, not for me. Somehow he could have found out he was in my suite.”

  A glint of amusement touched Aziz’s expression, sitting there, self-contained and inscrutable, maybe a bit patronizing, like Isaac Roach.

  “I wanted to be sure there was no plot against you. It’s why I didn’t turn him over to Isaac. It’s why I’ve stayed.”

  Nick thought he heard an “um hum,” but maybe not.

  “If Shkaki was brought back into Egypt as an assassin, it had to be by an ‘underground railroad,’ and that means a well established organization—the guy, after all, was an insurgent, doing his dirty work here and able to break loose from that army jail.”

  “And it wouldn’t be Faisal Ibrahim’s Soldiers of Allah,” Aziz said. “Or the Egyptian Jihad. They wouldn’t bring in a foreigner to handle their dirty work.”

  “The one person Bashir knows to be behind this whole change in his life—piloting and whatever else they’ve wanted him to do—is Esmat Bindari.”

  “Training for what?”

  “Possibly to doctor the president’s new jet, the one you just flew in.”

  “Doctor it how?”

  “Rig the air-conditioner to malfunction in mid flight is what the FBI suggested. I don’t think they have any evidence for that, just a guess. But it was electronics, or avionics, I think he said….”

  “He was told to do that?”

  “No. It’s that he was assigned to work on the president’s jet—plucked out of a crew of ordinary mechanics for that special training in England. He was thrilled by the promotion but not entirely convinced it was merited. He wasn’t told to do anything. It’s just the FBI brought up something that had happened a few years ago in the States. Just speculating.”

  “And it was Esmat Bindari who plucked him out of the crowd, as you say?”

  “Apparently, and guided his movements from start to finish. And that could explain the torturing in Mokattam. It would be the only criminal act he was destined for. They wouldn’t have tortured him just to transport a woman out of Brazil.”

  Aziz nodded, went on eating. “Well, we know, and I assume your CIA knows, that Bindari was in regular contact with General Saraaj, right up to the General’s death, which we have ruled a homicide.”

  “And that, you think, links him to Bashir’s flight to Brazil?”

  “We know Bindari was in contact with the people who helped Helene Bryce escape. Not hard to pin that on him.”

  “You’ll arrest him?”

  “If we can find him. A lot of flights take off from Cairo airport, and he could be on any one of them under an assumed name.”

  “You were that close to him?”

  “It’s why I tolerated Yousef for so long,” Aziz said, and raised his napkin and held it at his lips as though to end the conversation.

  And all this time you led me to believe that you trusted him. Nick shook his head. “I wouldn’t want your job for all the money in the world,” he said.

  Aziz seemed to wonder where that came from.

  *

  Aleyya lowered the phone and went back to the kitchen. Umm Sayid and her sister watched expectantly.

  “It was my friend Sakeena,” she said. “A man came to the apartment and asked for me.”

  “Did she say where you were?”

  “Oh no,” Aleyya said. “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “If only we knew where Bashir is. We could warn him.”

  “Maybe he’s still in Cairo with the American,” Aleyya said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want the police to follow him here.”

  “He’s such a good boy,” Umm Sayid said.

  “The ‘good boy’ is thirty years old, Mama,” Aleyya said. “Don’t baby him.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “You slept late this evening,” Boutros said, settling into the passenger seat, slapping palms on his knees, noticing a dog down the street perched under a tree looking up. Boutros craned his neck but saw only tree limbs and gray clouds and rooftops.

  “Not exactly sleeping,” Anwar said. “I stayed to get my money’s worth.”

  “If you don’t care about these women, how do you…?”

  “Alcohol,” Anwar said, coughing into his hand. “You ought to try it, loosen you up.”

  “And you need it for this?”

  “Don’t start on me,” Anwar said. “My head’s killing me.”

  “Want me to drive?”

  “Just sit over there and be quiet.”

  “It’s getting dark.”

  “As planned,” Anwar said. “Let’s hope he’s alone.”

  He started the engine and pulled away from the curb. The traffic on narrow city streets was moderate. Within an hour they entered the alley and stopped just short of Uthman’s garden wall.

  “This will endear you to your uncle?”

  “It’s what he wants,” Anwar said, reaching across Boutros’s knees to take a gun from the glove compartment. “Should’ve seen him. White as a skinned fish. Never saw him scared before.”

  “He knows we’re doing this?”

  “I told him.”

  “But why do you need that?” Boutros said, staring at the gun.

  “What’d you think I came here for?”

  “Not to shoot him. I thought you just wanted to scare him.”

  “This’ll scare him,” Anwar said. He opened his door and stepped onto something soft. Kicked it aside, maybe a dead rat.

  Boutros caught up with him down the wall near the gate he had been told would be unlocked. Inside they could barely see the house across the garden, one window lighted.

  “Sometimes dogs don’t bark,” Boutros whispered. “They let you in but won’t let you out.”

  “No dogs,” Anwar said. “Be quiet.”

  “Want me to come in with you?”

  “I want you to shut up,” tripping over something on the walk as he approached the window.

  The white-haired man was in a robe in an overstuffed chair watching television. Anwar stepped back, pushed Boutros aside, strode past foundation shrubbery to a door. It was locked.

  “Fuck this,” he muttered to himself.

  He went back to the window, shattered the glass with the grip of his pistol. When the man twisted around in alarm, rising half out of the chair, Anwar shot him three times. The man sagged from the chair and slid to the floor, his neck making a loud cracking sound, twisted to an impossible angle. His eyes were open in that death look, blood drooling out his mouth.

 
; Boutros beat Anwar to the gate, got inside the car. Anwar climbed in behind the wheel and dropped the pistol onto Boutros’s lap, laughing, pounding both hands on the steering wheel in triumph.

  “Did it!” he said. “I fucking did it!”

  Boutros watched him suck something off the heel of his hand. “You’re bleeding!”

  “It’s nothing,” Anwar said. “I killed him! He’ll never tell anybody anything again!”

  *

  Esmat waited impatiently for the servant to close the door. He had served the colonel for many years, but Esmat didn’t trust him—something in his manner, something disrespectful.

  “Aside from Helene Bryce,” he said, “a woman wanted for treason, there are only Bashir Yassin and Uthman al-Ajami who actually know anything. We know where they both are, Mustapha. Once they’re eliminated….”

  As though barely listening, Jaradat sipped at his sweetened coffee, lowered the cup to the white saucer, patted his lips with a linen napkin. “The Council has decided to meet in Alexandria. This will be discussed.”

  “I will tell them—”

  “No.” Jaradat raised his hand. “It’s best you not attend.”

  “But I—”

  “No!” Jaradat said with shocking finality. “Until Uthman and Yassin are disposed of….”

  “My nephew—”

  “But they’re still alive! The police may know what you know. Until they’re gone, Esmat. Gone! Their heads on a platter—”

  “At this moment, Anwar is—”

  “But it hasn’t happened! There’s nothing we can do about Helene Bryce. She will talk.”

  “I never mentioned you. I never mentioned the Legion. She has no proof of anything.”

  “She knows who you are. She can describe you. The police are already suspicious of you. They know you are connected to me. Who else could have handled the switch to Cairo airport? They’ve already seized your records!”

  “They’ll expect her to lie. She can’t prove anything against us. It’s Saraaj who brought her here. It’s Saraaj who—”

  “But you brought her to Cairo! And you arranged all these things with Bashir Yassin.”

  While Jaradat silently sipped his coffee, his face impassive, Esmat’s mouth grew dry, pain corroded his belly. He saw defeat before the thought was formulated. He had seen others treated like this, shut out, dropped from favor. He couldn’t believe it was happening to him.

  With a weakness he rarely experienced, the words “Don’t do this,” came limping from his mouth.

  Jaradat frowned, annoyed, no longer interested. He lowered his gaze as though waiting for Esmat to leave.

  He doesn’t believe me. I’m a stranger to him now. I can’t believe it! Am I a witness, no different from Bashir Yassin and Helene Bryce?

  “I will kill him, Mustapha! They’ll never prove anything!”

  “You are certain she knows nothing about the Legion?”

  “Nothing! Yes. Who would have mentioned us? Not Yassin. He doesn’t know…. Nelson? Your name has never come up…. Bryce? She wanted to know who I represent. I wouldn’t tell her. I didn’t. In all the conversations I had with General Saraaj, I never told him I represented the Legion. I pretended to be on my own!” Whimpering lies spilling from his mouth like vomit.

  The brown cornea of Jaradat’s eyes seemed to flatten. He looked out the window.

  Esmat pushed back his chair. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have them,” he said. “I swear, Mustapha, nothing will go wrong. My nephew….”

  Colonel Jaradat wasn’t listening.

  *

  “Bring the light over here,” Captain Huzayfi said, nodding as Nick came in from the garden. “Right there,” he said, his finger almost touching the jagged edge of glass. “That’s blood. I want it … the glass and the blood kept intact. Get it to serology,” he told the tech. “And be careful.”

  He turned to Nick. “Looks like he was shot from outside. We have footprints and now blood on the window.”

  “Suspects?”

  “Too soon for that,” the Captain said. “Here, let’s get out of the way,” urging Nick aside for a woman with a camera. “Get a close-up,” the captain told her, “and a wide-angled shot to put it in context.”

  “I know my job, Captain.”

  “Of course, of course,” Huzayfi said, muttering a kind of apology as he urged Nick across the room. “Right there,” he said, pointing at a blood streak on the floor. “Twice in the chest, once in the shoulder.”

  “Uthman al-Ajami,” Nick said.

  “A man probably with a thousand enemies, the kind of work he did. The DNA off that blood might not be worth a damn. Who do we compare it to?”

  Later, outside in the garden, watching crime-scene techs at work at the broken window in the glare of portable lights, Nick said, “If this is connected to what I’m interested in—”

  “I know I called you here with that possibility in mind, but we can’t make that assumption.”

  “But if it is, I can believe that Esmat Bindari could have ordered the hit.”

  “A lot of people could have, Nick. Bashir could have. But don’t waste your time. This may have nothing whatever to do with Bashir.” He paused, searching for something in his pocket. He came up with a piece of notebook paper, handed it to Nick. “Got this out of the records, something Habib asked me for a couple of days ago.”

  It was the home address of Aleyya Sayid.

  “It’s the woman we picked up for questioning,” the captain said.

  Nick nearly said he knew about her, remembering Bashir in the fisherman’s shack by the river pleading for information about her, Diab taunting him. He held his tongue, thanked the captain, and put the paper into his pocket, surprised by a twinge of guilt. Now what? he thought.

  *

  Next morning, across town in a mirrored coffee stall, Nick sat with Isaac Roach who had come downstairs from the rooms above the quay—his apartment or maybe his girlfriend’s.

  “Bashir would be my guess,” Isaac said, smoke curling from his mouth, hands on the table toying with a large coin, a worn silver dollar.

  “You know where he is?”

  “No idea,” Isaac said, watching people strolling past the open doorway, cars moving on the busy street past store windows.

  “The truth?” Nick said.

  Isaac raised a hand. “If I knew where he was, Nick, I’d have him in chains. I don’t question he did this. Everyone’s gunning for him. He’s desperate. Uthman was the one man who could locate him. Bashir probably figured out that Uthman wanted Shkaki to kill him. There was something going on between them. Remember it was Shkaki trying to reach Bashir on the telephone. What did he want him for? Don’t kid yourself, Nick. He’s one of them. He’s an insurgent. Maybe he didn’t kill three Israeli rabbis, but the Israelis knew him. They lined him up with all those others for that Jibril exchange. Believe me. Nick. I’ve been at this a long time. People like Bashir Yassin are masters of deception. He’s been very clever, you’ve got to hand it to him. But he’s now made a fatal mistake. Now we’ve got him. Before they put the rope around his neck, he’ll spill. I know his kind, sniveling cowards and liars, all of them. And they all say they’re innocent. I’ve just got to get him before the muccabarat does.”

  “If the blood on that broken glass is not his?” Nick said, confident that it wasn’t.

  “It’s his. Believe me. It’s his.” He flipped the coin straight up, caught it and slapped it onto the table. “Your work is done, Nick. Now he’s a wanted criminal. We can search openly for him. You can hop a plane in the morning and go back to Afghanistan.”

  Something about Isaac’s comment that Bashir knew that Shkaki wanted to kill him troubled Nick as he drove off, something implied. He let it stroll around his mind for a while, then shrugged it off.

  He knew it was possible that Bashir, at the age of thirteen, had fooled the Egyptian security forces, the UN team, the schools he had attended, every authority in Egypt.
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br />   It’s possible, but I don’t believe it. I’m no authority on spies or Arab insurgents, but I’m not an imbecile. Bashir is who he says he is. And he’s alone, and he’s running. He’s under that sheet of ice looking up at me.

  How different is the CIA from the muccabarat?

  The CIA is on my side. They’re protecting my society. The muccabarat is protecting theirs.

  I like mine better: my values. And I’m sworn to protect them.

  So where does Bashir Yassin fit into it?

  *

  The bearded man and the one called il-Gazzaar opened the small gate beneath the banyan tree and crossed the stubbled grass to the patio.

  “We wait here,” the bearded one said.

  “Why doesn’t he just call us? Why’d he give us the phone if he don’t use it.”

  “How would I know? It’s what he wants.”

  “This place gives me the creeps,” lowering himself to a stone bench still warm from the heat of the day.

  “I find it very tranquil,” the bearded one said, gazing at the ancient statue of the boy near the bed of flowers.

  “Yeah, you would,” il-Gazzaar said.

  They waited twenty minutes before Colonel Jaradat appeared and beckoned them toward him. They stood just outside his door while the colonel talked and the bearded one nodded repeatedly like a bobble head. The colonel handed the bearded one an envelope and patted his shoulder and watched the two men cross the stretch of grass and go out the gate.

  *

  Sadness lingered in the colonel’s eyes for a few seconds. He shrugged. Inside his office he gazed at the framed pictures on the wall of himself with Abdel Nasser, with Anwar Sadat, with Hosni Mubarak. He imagined a fourth frame with only one man in it, the Legion banner on flagpoles behind him. When he reminded himself that President Mubarak was an elderly man, a flame of ambition warmed his chest. The uprising in Tunisia crawled through his mind. But Libya lay between them like a wall, and Gadhafi was a rock.