Drummer In the Dark

by T. Davis Bunn

  “All right, Sybel. I get the picture.”

  “You shut up and listen. Graham claims it was Father Libretto who suggested a way to make our two causes one. Father Libretto says all he did was listen and let Graham hear God speak. All I know is, suddenly there is a link. Something so totally enticing Graham can take this new idea of his to friends in Congress. They sat up and said, yes, here is something that just might work. So Father Libretto and his movement brought in allies from other countries. Very quiet, just laying the groundwork. But the idea caught fire. It turns out there are a lot of people very worried about the dragon of international finance.”

  “So you bring me to Egypt, thinking I’ll find something that rocks my boat enough to make me take on Graham’s work. Is that it?” He watched his dark and distorted reflection in the lenses of Sybel’s sunglasses. “Only you didn’t figure Grant into the equation, did you. How he’d find the leverage to turn this to his advantage.”

  “I don’t know what I thought, only what I hoped.” She waved to someone behind him. “Here comes Nabil and his father.”

  The Egyptian was groomed as always, every hair in place, suit immaculate, no sign of feeling the heat. Wynn stared at the old man leaning on Nabil’s arm but felt no flicker of recognition. For the old man it was an entirely different story. He left the safety of his son’s arm and tottered forward, leaking Arabic and tears. First to Sybel, kissing her hand, then both cheeks, switching to English, saying merely, “So good. So good.”

  “You are looking fine, Uncle.”

  “Yes. On this day, of course. Fine.” He then moved to Wynn, bowed and salaamed with the regal gestures of one long denied this moment. “My heart soars. The son stands and casts the father’s shadow.”

  Nabil spoke. “Abu, this is Congressman Wynn—”

  “I am not knowing this man? From so high I am knowing him.” He lowered a trembling hand to the ground. “Your father was a great man. A friend to all Egypt, your father. And now you are here.”

  Wynn endured the words and the embrace, relieved when Sybel glanced at her watch and said, “We need to be going.”

  They set their pace to match the old man’s, rounded the far corner, then waited for a funeral to pass. Wynn watched as men bunched about the coffin, jostling in ill-mannered grief for the chance to help carry the body. The women paraded more sedately behind, a long flowing line of black and gray, piercing the heat with their wails. Wynn followed them through high peaked gates, and only then did he understand. But the old man had him in an iron grip, Sybel was at his other side, and they were already moving forward. Into the city of the dead.

  They walked the dusty lane and through the gates with the Islamic quarter-moon on one side, a Coptic cross on the other. It had to come, he knew. He was here and this was Egypt. It had to come. Wynn felt Sybel cast darting glances his way, knew she was trying to gauge how close he was to the edge. So he asked the old man, as casually as he could, “My parents’ funeral was like the one we just saw?”

  “Oh no, sir. Nothing like. Bigger. A funeral for royals. But not together. First your mother. Then your father nine days later.”

  Sybel tried to interrupt, “We don’t need—”

  “We’re here,” Wynn cut her off. “Let him speak.”

  “Your mother went fast. Very fast. Three days in the hospital, then gone. The day you leave for America, that night she goes. And why to stay? Her children are safe, she can leave. Your father, he sleeps for eight days, he wakes, he asks for his wife. He hears. He asks for his children. He hears this, then he sleeps again. And does not wake any more.” The arms raised theatrically. “The crowds, sir. Twice they come, for wife and husband both. Miles and miles of people. All the old city was shut down.”

  “Thank you.” It was all a vast exaggeration, of course, an old man’s gift of a memory born out of respect and not reality. “I am most grateful.”

  IT WAS NOT Wynn who was affected by the visit to his parents’ tomb, but Sybel. He stood before the dusty waist-high structure, already tilted by roots growing from two sheltering olive trees, and felt nothing. There were names, but in Arabic, and two crosses, one upon each door. He stood with Nabil and the old man as Sybel knelt in the dust. All the way back to the car and during the drive to the American University, her shoulders trembled under the impact of suppressed sobs.

  They used the university’s back entrance, on the Kasr El Dobra. As soon as they entered the administrative building, Sybel excused herself and vanished. Nabil led them down a long hall and out into a side square. Before them powered a domed Ottoman villa whose second floor was flanked by the broadest mashrabiya Wynn had ever seen. The old man wheezed himself down into a leaf-strewn chair. The sounds of traffic rose from beyond the cover of trees and high stone fencing. Wynn moved closer to where Nabil stood and said, “Tell me what I see.”

  The Egyptian nodded toward the residence with its striped facade of white-and-black marble. “This was the university’s original building, a palace built in the 1870s for one of Sultan Ismail’s ministers. The man was apparently very busy with things other than affairs of state, for he soon moved the ministry out to make room for his expanding harem. Forty years later it was purchased by Dr. Watson, a Presbyterian missionary.”

  Vague recollections of flying paper airplanes out an upstairs window came and went. “Where was my father’s office?”

  “On the second floor, there on the corner. Your mother’s was around the back, overlooking the inner courtyard.”

  “You knew me?”

  Nabil looked at him for the first time. “I do not expect you to remember, Congressman. I was ten years older, and a nobody. Just the son of the college gatekeeper. You were the son of the great Doctors Bryant.”

  “My parents helped you gain a place at the college?”

  “First at the English school, then here. Your parents were known for their habit of enriching everyone they met. This was the name they made for themselves, why you are made so welcome here today. Your mother, she was known by the staff as the Saleh, the one who offers comfort.”

  “And my father?”

  “Upon my return from America this week, my father asked what I thought of you. I said, you are your father, only asleep.” Nabil’s gaze was flat and oblique as rain-washed obsidian. “Your father was the most awake man I have ever met.”

  Another wave of exhaustion struck Wynn, and suddenly he was no longer able to accept more memories, his or anyone else’s. “Our hotel is that way?”

  “Two blocks over, by the river.”

  “Tell Sybel I’ve gone back to get some sleep. It’s either that or fall on my face at the conference.”

  WYNN AWOKE TO utter dark and the softest tapping. He crossed the room, and opened the door to admit both light and his sister. “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight.”

  “You let me sleep through the conference?”

  “Does it matter?” Sybel swept past him, turning on the overhead light as she did. She opened the balcony doors, filling the room with noise from the street below. “I came by earlier. You might as well have been in a coma. I thought it best to let you rest up for tomorrow.”

  “Just a minute.” He stepped into the bathroom, washed his face, and tucked his shirttails into his wrinkled trousers. He reentered the room to find Sybel seated behind his desk. That had always signaled a serious confrontation, preparing the ground, setting up her defenses behind the safety of a desk or table or something. Her back to the wall, her words carefully prepared.

  Strangely enough, his traditional responses did not kick in. Wynn walked over, seated himself directly before her, and waited.

  “There is a second conference,” Sybel began. “A secret one. It takes place tomorrow in the Baramous Monastery at Wadi Natrum.” She waited, steeled for all the reasons he might have for not going.

  “This was why you brought me, wasn’t it.”

  “The conference that started here tonight is on third-wo
rld debt. Important, but ultimately its most vital function is to act as a cover for tomorrow’s gathering.”

  “People coming here are under threat of attack?”

  “This idea of Graham’s has galvanized a lot of interest. But international financial reform is a dangerous topic these days.”

  He repeated the words. Spaced them out. As though saying them more slowly would help him understand. “International financial reform.”

  “The only way financial reform will work is if a majority of nations act together. Up to now, this has been the political out. If America got serious about financial regulations, the big money would simply go somewhere else. Graham found a way of making this matter to everybody. Rich and poor nations alike.”

  “That sounds impossible.” The instant he spoke, he regretted the words. So before she could erupt, he said, “All right.”

  “You’ll go?”

  “I’ve come this far. I might as well.”

  “But you won’t commit.” Bitter. Still looking for an argument.

  Normally that needling aggressive tone was enough to have him ranting. Their pitched battles were the stuff of legends. But not this night. Wynn leaned his arms upon the desk, closing the gap, entering her space. Asked softly, “Tell me what you remember.”

  “What?”

  “You knew an entirely different world here than me. You were, what, eleven when we arrived?”

  “Twelve. You’d just had your first birthday.” She worked that over, the mental gears shifting reluctantly. “It had such an impact on me, coming here. I hardly spoke at all that first year. And never smiled. The sofragi thought I was partly mute. You remember that word?”

  “The servants,” Wynn recalled, words rising from dim recesses. “Khadema and Dahdah, I remember those too.”

  “Dahdah was your nanny. She adored you. Everybody doted on you, the son our parents never thought they’d have.” It disarmed her, this unexpected change, his sudden willingness to speak of their shared beginnings. Her mind was locked now on her own internal vista. “I remember how shocked I was by the ugliness of everything. The buildings were just thrown up, many didn’t even have plaster, just raw bricks with straw hanging from the mortar. And of course the traffic was so frightening. Father was busy with . . . everything. Mother took me under her wing. Never pressing, just bringing me along. Letting me sit in her classroom or her office, talking if I wanted to speak, letting me be silent when I wanted. Which was most of the time.”

  “So what happened to change things for you?”

  She looked at him then, really looked. And smiled for the first time since their arrival. “Om Kalthoum.”

  He searched his memory. “She was a singer, right?”

  “They called her Qal-Kab Al Sharq. The Planet of the East. Life was very hard back then, not just for the poor. There was so little of anything, rationing and lines everywhere. Mother and I used to spend hours preparing lists of things for people to bring from the States—toothpaste, Kleenex, medicines. Our second Christmas someone brought over a canned ham. I remember Daddy made Momma let him open it; she was crying so hard he was afraid she’d cut herself.”

  She stopped then. Staring out beyond him. Softly he reminded her, “The singer.”

  “She gave a concert every Thursday night. The entire city stopped. There was no traffic. No people. Cairo was completely dead. People who didn’t have radios gathered with family or friends.” The smile was still there. “One of Daddy’s students was Nasser’s youngest daughter, Mona. She heard that I liked the music and gave us two tickets. They were like fairy dust, those tickets. Impossible to find. I remember how Momma spent hours getting ready, dressing me and then making me sit without moving while she got herself ready. And the servants were all racing about, beside themselves with excitement. Not that we would be sitting with Nasser’s family. That meant nothing. That we would be in the box closest to the stage and Om Kalthoum.”

  “I don’t get it,” Wynn said. “You grew to like it here because of a concert?”

  “Of course not.” Sybel was a striking woman in a knife-edged way. Intensity ran through her as naturally as blood. “That was the first time I began to see the beauty of this place. I learned that to be happy here, I had to look beyond all the grit and the grime and the sadness. To see the wonder of these people, their resilience in the face of crushing hardships. To accept that life here was hard and often dangerous, but still could be very precious, full of joy and beauty. Daddy always called Egypt the land of thyme. It was a quote from Plato. ’Just as bees make honey from thyme, the strongest and driest of herbs, so do the wise profit from the most difficult of experiences.’ ”

  He sat across from this woman whom he had never understood, the rock of his early years. He wondered if it would have been possible to have grown up more like her, had he been older when they came, or known his parents longer. The threat that he might have failed to meet her standards left him so hollow the night breeze off the balcony wafted straight through him. “I don’t remember any of that.”

  “No.” She rose to her feet, scarcely looking his way as she crossed the room. As though she finally recognized just how little there was to her brother. “We leave for Wadi Natrum at dawn.”

  28

  Thursday

  THREE COBBLESTONE LANES descended away from the Hassler and the Spanish Steps, and at the juncture of two stood Jackie’s café. Thursday morning it was full of light and old men enjoying the springtime freshness. They murmured greetings as she entered, and eyed her appreciatively. The young waiter was already busy preparing her cappuccino. He remained standing there, polishing the bar’s gleaming surface, calling the day bella. Finally she opened her Herald Tribune in defense, and the waiter retreated.

  There were no other English speakers in the café at that hour, so when the voice came from behind it was more startling than the hand on her arm. “Don’t turn around, Ms. Havilland.”

  She watched a second hand slip about her other side and set a file upon the counter. Instantly she flattened down her paper, covering the folder. “Who—”

  “You wanted information.” The voice whispered an uncertain tenor. “Now you have it. Good-bye.”

  All Jackie saw of him was the back of a brilliantined head, a jacket, then nothing. She reached beneath her newspaper and drew out an old-fashioned cardboard folder of forest green. She unwound the string catch and flipped through the documents. She felt another hand then, this one imagined but still capable of gripping her throat and squeezing fiercely.

  She glanced around. The café was now filled with Roman statues, men well trained in the art of seeing nothing untoward. Even if she had spoken their tongue, she knew they would not have told her a thing. Jackie scanned the pages again, struggling to fit the answers around the tumult of questions and mysteries.

  She flung down a bill, bundled up the folder and paper both, and hurried back into the hotel. Back in her room, she first tried to call Cairo. But what telephone lines there might have been did not open for her. She checked her watch. Three o’clock in the morning, Washington time. Even so, she had to wake Esther Hutchings. But the phone rang and rang.

  Jackie booted up her computer, waited impatiently for the internet connection, went straight to the Trastevere site. This time the screen was not blank. As soon as she came on-line, the message shone Incoming direct coded signal. Will you accept? Go/NoGo.

  Go.

  A message drifted out of the white nothingness. Did your requested data arrive?

  She hammered the keys instead of screaming out loud. WHO ARE YOU?

  She watched the message fade, wondering how long she would have to sit and wait this time. Days, she decided, if need be. But the response was as swift as it was strange. No words. Just a cartoon figure of a gondolier paddling a boat.

  Jackie watched as over and over the clumsy stick figure came to the brink of falling overboard. And whispered, “Boatman.”

  She typed back, I need more.
Can you help?

  Every time we connect, it puts us both at risk.

  I was told this site was safe.

  Lesson one: Nothing is totally secure. Witness this conversation. I tapped into the detective’s request for funds. Others might have done the same. Contact me only in dire emergency.

  Like now, she wanted to write, but could not.

  When she did not respond, another message appeared. Have you come across the code name Tsunami?

  Negative, she replied.

  Then you are looking in the wrong place. A momentary fade-out, then the final words bloomed like a poisonous monochrome rose.

  Welcome to the war zone.

  WHEN THE CAIRO phone lines remained blocked, Jackie wrote a fax to Wynn, left it at the front desk, then exited the hotel. Across from the Monti church rose a waist-high concrete balustrade carved in Roman arches and curves. She leaned over the barrier and stared down at all the carefree people thronging the Spanish Steps and the Via Condotti. She was utterly alone among lovers exchanging wet kisses and musical endearments. Jackie wished their ardor did not mock her so, or speak of a man she did not know well enough to miss as she did. She felt separated by a lifetime’s distance from all the easy laughter. She raised her face to the sky and whispered the single word “Hayek.”