Shooting the Sphinx

by Avram Noble Ludwig

  “I hear you’re flying tomorrow.”

  “That’s right,” said Ari, proud he could tell Frank himself. “Inshallah, as they say around here.”

  “Good work, be safe.” They had both seen men get hurt and even die filming. “If anything seems out of whack, don’t fly.”

  “Don’t worry Frank, we’ll get a great shot for you.” Ari was touched that in all the maelstrom of trying to finish the filming in New York, Frank had found time to call him. “I’m told that the Air Force is giving me the best pilot in the best squadron.”

  “Right.” Frank didn’t speak for a moment. Their private conversations were short, but often had long pauses. They had known each other since they both were kids just starting out in the business. They had developed some tacit way of communicating. “Ari, why’d you think I was Beth? Were you expecting her to call you?”

  “She’s waiting on a budget and … we haven’t sent it yet.”

  “Are you two uh…?” Frank let the question peter out. He already seemed to know the answer.

  Ari was evasive. “Why do you ask?” Then an idea dawned on him. Could it be that Frank wanted her? “Frank, look I didn’t know that you…”

  “That I what…? Me and Beth? Are you nuts?”

  “If I knew, I mean if I had the slightest idea that you and Beth were … then I wouldn’t be … You do know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course, of course. Don’t worry about it.” Frank reassured Ari, then added, “Be careful. She’s never going to leave Glenn. He gives her exactly what she wants.”

  “Which is?”

  “Masochism. Be safe tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  They hung up.

  Ari flopped around in bed a few times, then kicked off the sheets and turned on the light. He paced the huge suite like a caged animal.

  “What am I doing?” he said to his reflection in the polished bronze headboard with Arabic etchings all over it. Sleep was impossible. He stepped on a shirt on the floor and noticed that he had amassed quite a bit of dirty laundry. Time to clean house. He grabbed the Mena Hotel laundry bag from the closet and violently snatched up his pile of discarded clothes, stuffing them into the bag, committing a kind of reverse purge.

  As he hung the fat bag on the doorknob to his suite, he noticed the laundry price list clipped on to it.

  “Four dollars a shirt!” he said to himself.

  Outrageous, he decided, and grabbed up the bag. He walked out of the hotel and down into the dark streets of Giza. He knew he had to leave the tourist quarter, so he put the pyramids to his back and kept walking.

  Every woman he passed wore the hijab. At every corner, he asked another woman: “Laundry?” He pantomimed washing clothes. They pointed him further into Giza on the big street until he saw the laundry, with steamy windows. A man was ironing at incredible speed with a big heavy metal iron, which had a gas flame inside of it. The man had a big powerful right arm holding the iron and a scrawny little left arm moving the clothes around.

  Ari liked this. It was real. He wanted to vote with his money, to spend it, give it to someone who did the work, not the hotel chain owned by some giant corporation somewhere else. He liked the laundry man, who was happy to see him and take his clothes. Armed with his ticket and a sense of satisfaction, Ari strolled out on the street and meandered his way back toward the hotel. He had found what he was looking for, a simple pleasant human interaction with an ordinary Egyptian.

  It was past midnight and the street was teeming. He strolled in front of a storefront mosque packed with thin men who had long beards and very short hair. An imam was making a passionate speech. Ari stopped to watch, and thought, he’s a true believer. Ari found himself nodding along with the group, entranced by the imam’s intensity and hypnotic rhythm. Even though Ari knew nothing of what was said, he felt a sense of agreement.

  The imam spotted him and stopped talking instantly. All the men turned to look at him. Ari nodded to them, smiled, and waved. All of them wore dishdashas and sandals. They stared at him, their eyes unfriendly.

  Ari smiled harder, but it didn’t work. They hate me, he realized, because I’m an American.

  Chapter 30

  Ari, Samir, Don, Charley, and the location scout all stood outside the guardhouse at the entrance to the Air Force base, which coincidentally was on the far side of Cairo International Airport. They had been standing there for over an hour.

  Ari was pacing and muttering to himself, looking at his watch, holding his model Sphinx, pyramids, and helicopter. Everyone gave him a wide berth. His eyes were bloodshot. He had not slept. He had the distinct look of urgency that had reached the point of pain like that of a child forbidden to go to the bathroom. He had contained himself, repressing the urge to start yelling. He needed to get that helicopter off the ground before Beth called to stop it.

  Samir was arguing with a tall, wiry sergeant of the guard, who smirked at anyone without a uniform, then looked past them as if they didn’t matter. Samir’s sheer volume of Arabic increased, driving the sergeant backward. The angry outburst calmed Ari a bit. He walked over to Don and Charley, who leaned against the airforce base wall.

  “What’s he saying?” asked Ari. The sergeant of the guard retreated from Samir’s wrath all the way inside the guard booth, and he was now yelling back, gesticulating defensively.

  “The sergeant is pointing at the fax machine,” said Don.

  “Fax machine? Don’t tell me a written order has to get here from some other place.” Ari started to hyperventilate. There goes the day, he thought. He wanted to punch the brick wall with his fist.

  “Looks like the camera just arrived.” Charley pointed out toward the road.

  The dilapidated white truck pulled up on the road with the camera cases in the back. The driver jumped down out of the cab and walked over, all smiles, his sandals slapping on the road.

  “Finally,” said Ari, and he walked over to the guardhouse. “Samir, what’s going on? We’re losing the morning light.”

  “Just one second.” Samir held up his hand and continued his Arabic rant.

  Ari was pissed off by the gesture, but he said as calmly as he could, “The camera’s here.”

  A jeep pulled up inside the wall and a lanky young lieutenant stepped out. He had a face pocked from acne scars. He walked directly up to Ari. This must be a good sign, thought Ari. Someone’s expecting us.

  “I am the military censor,” said the lieutenant.

  “Can you help us?” Ari changed in his anger for supplication. “We can’t seem to get permission to go inside.”

  “No, I am the military censor. I must see every shot.”

  “Do you know how to reach the base commander?”

  “No base. No aircraft,” insisted the censor.

  “Right.” Ari looked at his team with mock seriousness. “Don, Charley, no base. No aircraft. Only Sphinx. Only pyramids.”

  Don and Charley both said “Yes, sir!” simultaneously, with the same tone of mock seriousness.

  The military censor looked at them, suspicious that he was the butt of a joke, which he was. Ari turned his back on the censor and walked over to the guard booth.

  “Samir, what is taking so long? At this rate, it’ll be dark before we get the camera mounted.”

  Samir looked down. Ari knew he would get angry at what Samir was about to say. “The authorization for us to enter must be faxed to the guard.”

  “Faxed? Really? So?”

  “The fax is out of paper.”

  “Oh my god!” Ari couldn’t believe that a country could run this way. “Send someone to get some paper.”

  “That is already happening,” said Samir.

  “Who uses a fax anymore?” lamented Ari. “Samir, I need a word with you.” Ari took him aside. “What do we have to do if we don’t get the shot today? Apply again?”

  Before Samir could answer, Hamed’s car zoomed up and screeched to a halt on the road surrounding the base. Hame
d held a roll of thermal fax paper out the window like a runner’s baton. The truck driver grabbed it and ran it over to the sergeant in the guardhouse.

  “Okay.” Ari turned around to face his crew. “Let’s get that camera in here.”

  Beyond them, Ari saw something that he simply couldn’t comprehend. The camera truck was driving away. Ari looked at the truck driver beside him, then back at the truck. The cab was empty. No one was in the driver’s seat.

  “Not possible,” said Ari. “That’s impossible.”

  Slowly, but picking up speed, the truck rolled straight along the road, which dipped down to a long hill.

  Ari started to jog. As the truck accelerated, so did he. Everyone else watched for a moment in disbelief, then ran after Ari, who was now sprinting as fast as he could. He sprinted alongside, then in front of the truck, put his hand on the grille and planted his feet like Superman stopping a train. The truck would have easily run him over, but on that stretch of road was a fine, sandy dust, a slight incursion of the desert into the city, and Ari’s sneakers skated along the surface of the asphalt gaining no traction at all. Samir ran up next to him.

  “Ari, get out of the way!” he yelled.

  “No!” Ari would not let go.

  “Please, you will be crushed!” begged Samir.

  Ari looked down at his white sneakers skimming over the black gray asphalt, the tiny tan rivulets of a dust cloud sweeping behind them. “I didn’t come all the way here just to have the camera roll down a hill and crash!” yelled Ari.

  Samir grabbed hold of the truck and tried to slow it, to no avail. Don, Charley, Hamed, the guards, and the censor all ran up and grabbed hold of the truck while yelling at Ari.

  “Ari…! Let go…! You will be killed…! Mr. Ari, stop…! There is no way!” they all shouted.

  The truck driver ran up last. His sandals prevented him from closing the gap. They broke or flew off as he put on one final burst of speed. He reached the cab in his bare feet, jumped up on the running board, and opened the door just as the truck was about to go through the intersection of the busy road that wrapped around the base to the airport.

  “Stop! Damn you, stop!” Ari commanded the truck with every last shred of his will.

  The driver hit the brakes. The truck screeched to a halt, stopping at the stop sign. Everyone doubled over exhausted, sweating, red faced, smiling, gasping down great gulps of air, relieved. All of them except for Ari, whose face had a maniacal wrath. He had skated on the dust under his sneakers most of the way.

  “Why didn’t you put on the emergency brake?” Ari demanded from the relieved truck driver.

  “I did, Mr. Ari! I swear it! I swear I put it on!” the truck driver protested innocently as he reached in and pulled on the brake handle. With a metallic clicking, grinding sound the whole emergency brake came off in his hand. He held up the useless lever out the truck window to Ari as proof.

  Chapter 31

  “That’s not a chopper.” Ari shook his head as they drove across the tarmac to the old Soviet Mi-17. “That’s a bus with a rotor on top.”

  “An old bus,” added Don.

  The crew chief and ground crew stood by, milling around as if they’d been waiting there for hours. The camera truck, the censor’s jeep, Samir and Hamed’s cars all pulled up. Then Ari, Don, and Charley jumped out and went into overdrive pulling the cases off the back of the truck, laying them out and opening them up, their frustrated energy exploding into a frenzy of work.

  The Egyptian crew stood by watching, ready to lend a hand. The crew chief and Charley seemed to recognize each other instantly as the men who made things work. In a minute they had developed their own sign language.

  “Oh my god.” Ari opened the last case and slid it next to the cargo bay door. “This helicopter has got to be fifty years old!”

  “At least.” Charley strapped on a tool belt.

  “I hope it doesn’t fall apart on us. Charley? How long do you think before we’re ready to fly?”

  Charley pulled out a tape measure and checked the distance from the short wing with rocket launchers on it to the ground.

  “We’re in luck. See this hole in the wing? This is a military camera mount.” Charley pointed at what looked like a big aluminum grommet through the wing close to the fuselage. “We can just screw in the ball right here underneath.”

  “Is there enough clearance for it under there?”

  Charley looked at the tape measure. “Three feet, one inch. Just barely.”

  Samir’s phone rang. Ari flinched.

  Samir looked at the number. “It’s from the United States.”

  “Don’t answer it,” commanded Ari with a tinge of panic.

  “But … did you look at the new budget?” Samir drew a sheaf of papers out of a plastic folder. “I finished it at dawn. Here.”

  Samir handed Ari the spreadsheet with every line item in it. Ari flipped straight to the last page for the total.

  “Oh no, Samir. This is double the bid. This is a quarter of a million dollars?” Ari imagined Beth’s face seeing the number on her computer, probably just a minute before she placed that call.

  “Yes, it is very thorough.” Samir showed Ari the level of detail on the other pages.

  “She’ll freak out.” Ari closed up the pages and handed them back. “How am I going to justify this?”

  “Everything has taken twice as long,” protested Samir. “Everything costs double.”

  “Not really, Samir. It’s not twice the work. They won’t pay this. They’ll say you’re cheating us.”

  “Look at it line by line. You will see.”

  “It can’t be double. Beth will punish us for this.”

  “Punish us? How?”

  A jeep pulled up next to them on the tarmac to take them to the squadron commander’s office.

  “We’ve got to get airborne before anyone in LA wakes up,” Ari said emphatically, half to himself. “Where’d I put my Sphinx and pyramids?” Ari gathered his props from off of one of the cases. As he stepped into the jeep, he barked out a question. “How long, Charley?”

  Charley emerged from the ground crew hovering around him waiting for some little piece of the equipment puzzle to carry into place. “Ninety minutes,” said Charley.

  “You’ve got one hour.”

  Ari and Samir clambered into the jeep, which drove away from the ramp along taxiways through the sand. The Air Force base was one vast rectangle of desert with runways in the middle. Off in the distance behind a long low dune was a plane graveyard with commercial airliners that looked like they would never fly again. Some were missing engines. Their paint had been sandblasted off the sides from years of desert sandstorms. They had faded names on the side of coup-ridden nations like Air Mozambique or Libya Air. Beyond them was the civilian half of the airport that Ari knew so well.

  The jeep pulled up in front of a low long building of simple military construction. The jeep driver, a corporal, led them into the squadron commander’s office.

  There was the big desk, and in front of it, the customary two lines of chairs facing inward filled with the pilots of the entire squadron in a staff meeting. Ari looked at the Egyptian pilots, and like pilots in every air force, he knew they were not really military men. In fact, the urge to fly is such an act of freedom that military discipline is diametrically opposed to it. Most infantry don’t even consider pilots soldiers at all.

  The squadron commander, a compact, slightly bald major, was smoking. He rose to shake their hands, introduced them to two lanky pilots, both captains in flight suits, and invited them all to sit. Mint tea was served.

  After a respectful three sips, Ari held up his pyramids and gestured for permission to set them up. The major nodded, and Ari set out his mini Necropolis on the desk.

  Ari “flew” his toy helicopter very low around the Sphinx. The two pilots nodded. The squadron commander shook his head.

  “What’s the problem now?” asked Ari.

  “Ma
jor Horus says that the pattern is too low,” translated Samir.

  Major Horus raised Ari’s hand with the helicopter.

  Ari turned to Samir. “That won’t work. It’s too high.”

  Major Horus and Samir exchanged a few words in Arabic. “He says it will frighten the tourists.”

  “The Sphinx will be open?” Ari couldn’t believe that. The statue could be easily cordoned off as it actually had a wall around it and a gate. Ari and Samir had been there. They had been locked inside it for their private audience with the creature.

  Samir gave a look of warning to Ari to let the matter drop and said, “The Sphinx never closes.”

  Chapter 32

  The three-foot-round SpaceCam ball hung under the wing with barely an inch to spare off the tarmac. Charley gave the ball a hard tug. It seemed solidly mounted, so he grabbed his fist, giving the ready sign to Don. The lens in the ball turned left, right, then up and down.

  “Good to go,” said Charley.

  One of the ground crew offered the military censor a cigarette, then held out a lighter. At the exact moment the censor was distracted by lighting it, the crew chief put his arm around Charley’s shoulder, and another ground crew member pulled out a digital camera and snapped a picture of them both next to the SpaceCam. The censor spun around suspiciously, but the crew chief had already relaxed his pose and nothing looked amiss.

  Then in an almost choreographed ballet of picture taking, half a dozen cameras appeared in the hands of the ground crew, Samir, and even Charley. Every time the censor spun around, another camera appeared behind his back, snapping away. This game delighted everyone. Ari had to admire the skill with which these men could run circles around their own censor.

  Ari enjoyed a good practical joke as much as anyone, but he distrusted too much horsing around on set. That’s when things go wrong, he thought. Fights erupt, things get broken, or people get hurt. He made a spinning motion with his finger to the pilots. Once the jet engines started to spool up, all the cameras disappeared into pockets.

  “Don?” asked Ari.