Countdown in Cairo

by Noel Hynd

  Momentarily, the men were taken aback, not used to a strong, articulate opinion from a female.

  “Jews do things like that,” the second man was quick to say. His tone suggested that he was willing to explain the world to a female who didn’t understand as well as he did. “They are loyal only to other Jews and their financial interests.”

  “And to Israel!” said the younger man. “American Jews will do anything to protect Israel!”

  Alex felt herself losing her patience very quickly. The monstrosity of all this from apparently otherwise rational people left her momentarily speechless. But the fuse of indignation was burning down.

  “I don’t agree with you,” she said.

  “That’s because in America where you are from, the government controls the press.”

  “I’m from Canada,” she said.

  “Canada is part of the United States,” said the younger Arab.

  “The Canadian government controls the press too,” said the first man.

  Emboldened, she was about to respond with a barnyard epithet, something not far from bolshoi. But Voltaire, highly amused, picked up on the feeling. He tapped her hand quickly, a reminder to stay under control. He had brought her there to listen and to observe, after all, not to make sparks fly.

  “What is important is that this was an attack against the world of Arabs,” the third man said. “Why is it that the Americans never caught him, Bin Laden, if they say he was responsible?”

  “How can they not know where he is?” muttered another man.

  “Because he launched the attacks and then disappeared,” Alex said. “That or he’s dead.” And burning in hell, she might have added, but didn’t.

  Her audience was having none of it. With no malice whatsoever, they ignored her.

  Voltaire gave her hand another tap and threw a sharp frown at her. She knew he was reminding her to stay cool.

  “Americans know everything,” the man who was speaking maintained, dismissing Alex. “They didn’t catch him because he hasn’t done anything. What happened in Iraq confirms this. The Americans attacked against Arabs and against Islam. They did it to serve Israel.”

  “How true it is!” Voltaire said. “Zionist conspirators, all of them.” He turned to Alex and guided the conversation. “Comment va ta fumée?” he asked. “How’s your smoke?”

  “Better than I thought it would be,” she answered in French, “unless you’re talking about the smoke coming out of my ears.”

  “Better smoke coming out of your ears than intemperate remarks coming out of your mouth,” he said succinctly. “No point offending my friends when there’s no chance to change their minds now, is there?”

  Alex retreated into another drag from the hookah.

  “The problem is that Americans are brainwashed by their leaders,” the first man said. “It makes no sense that Mr. Bin Laden could have carried out such an attack from Afghanistan.”

  “There are a lot of Arabs who hate America, but this is too much,” the younger man said. He was more passionate than the older men. “And look at what happened after the September eleventh attacks! The Americans invaded two Muslim countries! They used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Afghanistan. Then they went to Iraq. They killed Saddam, they killed his sons. They killed tens of thousands of civilians and claimed they were ‘liberating’ them. They tortured ordinary Arabs in their prisons. They sent hostages to Cuba. How can you trust the Americans?”

  “You can’t!” Voltaire said sharply. “Never! Filthy infidels!”

  Alex felt like launching into them. But she retreated again into the smoke from the hookah and eased back. Voltaire was right and she was learning from him. She wasn’t going to change their minds, and they weren’t going to change hers.

  She finished her drink.

  She thought of many things to say and silently swallowed every one of them. Within minutes, the fuel in the hookah had burned down and the conversation had drifted to soccer and Egypt’s chances against Cameroon in the upcoming World Cup.

  Her temper was easing down too.

  “Do you know anything about sports?” one of the Arabs asked her.

  “I know that Egypt’s national footballers are the best in Africa,” she said generously, playing her audience. Football here, of course, meant soccer. The men cheered and applauded. Alex had ended the conversation on an up note and had made friends. She didn’t chip in her further opinion that the glorious giants of world soccer—Brazil, Italy, Spain, and Argentina—would, if given the chance, annihilate the hapless Egyptians.

  Instead, she turned to Voltaire. “I’d like to go back to the hotel now,” she said. “May we go?”

  “It’s late. I’ll see that you get there safely,” he said. “Let’s find a taxi.” He rose to leave. “Come on along.”

  Voltaire slipped back into Arabic and thanked his friends for their conversation. The men at the table returned his smile. They stood and bid Alex a warm farewell.

  FORTY

  Incredible,” Alex muttered to Voltaire when they were back out on the street. She took his arm as they navigated crowded pedestrian traffic toward a cab stand. It was almost 1:00 a.m. now, and the street was overpopulated with beggars, some ambulatory and others passed out on the sidewalk. “What they were saying was complete rubbish! I could barely control myself.”

  “I know,” he said. “I was watching you. But what they think, what they say, all that is completely predictable.”

  Then, for security on the street, he switched into Italian. He spoke close to her ear as they looked for a taxi. Alex spotted a couple of taxis and pointed them out.

  “No,” Voltaire said. “I use a certain cab stand. It’s two minutes from here. You think I’d get into any Cairo taxi? Certainly not. I value my life more than that.”

  They walked a few blocks. One or two beggars accosted them aggressively. Voltaire rudely ignored them and at one point physically shoved away a man who had drawn too close to Alex.

  “By the way, where’s Abdul?” she asked.

  “Why? Do you miss him?”

  “Just asking,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll get you back to the hotel safely.”

  In Cairo, the newer cabs were yellow. The older ones were painted black and white, often with mismatched doors and panels, the result of the Demolition Derby aspect of Cairo traffic. They found one of the older cabs parked by itself at a cab stand. The cab was black with one green door and a white trunk. The sign on the top said OFF DUTY. Voltaire opened the door and told Alex to climb in. She did.

  The driver turned up a moment later. He looked like a punk, about twenty-five years old with attitude. He wore a Western-style windbreaker and a white baseball-style cap that carried the blue and white logo of a French soccer team, Olympique de Marseille. He had black hair slicked back.

  There was no meter in the cab. Fees were always negotiable.

  At first, as was his habit, Voltaire sought to negotiate the cost of the ride in English. A noisy, contentious argument ensued in Arabic between Voltaire and the driver as Voltaire insisted on being taken to the Metropole Hotel and the driver loudly refused.

  Other drivers, also off-duty and sharing smokes, looked and laughed. The driver massacred his English, and then switched into Arabic. Voltaire followed into Arabic, apparently much to the driver’s surprise.

  Voltaire seemed experienced at this, however. He knew how to strike the proper deal. He flashed some extra money and the driver acquiesced.

  Then they were off. The cab was not air-conditioned and it rattled. The driver smoked, against the recent law, and held his cigarette—another Eastern European stinker—out the window.

  “These old cabs are rolling death traps,” Voltaire muttered cheerfully to Alex, returning to English. “But they’re extremely reasonable in price, even if the drivers are complete idiots like this one—and sometimes can’t find the ocean from the end of a pier. One can rattle one’s way clear acro
ss Cairo for little more than it would cost simply to step into a cab in London or New York. And, of course, there’s also the fear factor and the thrill of taking one’s life in one’s hands. Take this complete imbecile of a driver, for example. Eventually he’ll get someone killed. Let’s just hope it’s not us tonight.”

  No response from the driver, who seemed intent only on getting this trip done.

  Alex nodded. The taxi jockeyed through traffic. Nighttime Cairo fascinated her, in its wealth and its sleaze, the latter even more visible now in the early morning hours. They passed a row of nightclubs. Local wise guys were piling into Mercedes limos and Rolls-Royces, accompanied by an armada of sleek women in short party dresses and the latest fashions from Europe. The driver spotted someone he knew, a chauffeur, and shouted a greeting at him in Arabic.

  “I’m still recovering from the conversation at the café,” Alex said to Voltaire. “It’s one thing to know how people feel. Another to hear it spoken to your own face.”

  “You’ll hear worse than that if you stay here long enough,” Voltaire said. “Was that the worst anti-Americanism you’ve experienced firsthand?”

  “Far from it,” she said. “I may look young but I’ve been in the field for a few years. I’ve heard things. The conversation this evening just stands out as among the most warped.”

  “That is the problem the United States has in this region,” he said. “In order to fight the really bad people, you have to convince people that there really is a real evil. They have to believe it in order to help you. That’s a battle we’re losing.”

  “We?” she asked.

  “I’m on your side,” he said. “I serve America and I root for America. And I deal with the dangers and the misunderstandings here every day. That’s why I brought you here. You saw it for yourself.”

  The driver turned the corner abruptly. Alex watched him.

  Alex looked around. “Do they have seat belts here?” she asked.

  “Seat belts in the Third World?” Voltaire asked. “Got to be kidding. Why don’t you ask for a diet soda, while you’re at it?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “This driver is a complete moron, one of the worst I’ve ever encountered. Probably doesn’t even have a license,” Voltaire said. “Do you know the difference between a chimpanzee and a Cairo cabbie?” he asked. “The chimp can be taught to drive a car.”

  The driver’s glowering eyes kept alternating between the road and the rearview mirror. She wished he would just watch the road.

  “You know why people think the way they do here?” Voltaire asked a few seconds later as their cab jockeyed through the streets of Old Cairo in the direction of Alex’s hotel. “Above and beyond the sorry details of 9/11, this is how many Arabs view their governments. Not just in Cairo, but throughout the Middle East. The people hate their leaders, and they have learned not to believe them. The state-owned media are also hated and distrusted. Therefore, they think that if the government is insisting that Bin Laden was behind the attacks on Washington and New York, he must not have been.”

  “A Catch—22 sort of thing?”

  “More like Pirandello,” said Voltaire. “ ‘It is so if you think so.’ Perverse, is it not? But it’s what we have to deal with, you and I who do the work that we do. The average Egyptian thinks President Mubarak says whatever the Americans want him to say, and that he’s lying for them because the Americans keep him in power. There’s even an element of truth to this. Mubarak wouldn’t last a day without US support.”

  “I’ve forgotten,” Alex said. “Is he elected?”

  “Not really. A referendum is held every few years. Mubarak runs and those who vote can vote yes or no. The election is fixed, of course, so the man in power always wins the referendum. Government employees take care of the results. If free elections were held, someone far worse for American and Western interests would be elected. So the United States government doesn’t allow it to happen.”

  “So it’s like Saudi Arabia?” Alex said.

  “Very similar,” said Voltaire.

  They stopped at a light. On the street, eighties-style disco music boomed out of another nightclub for Westerners. In this small part of the globe, Donna Summer was still the queen of the night.

  “It’s the same story all across North Africa and up through the western Mediterranean,” Voltaire continued. “Every single country is governed by a bad guy or a really bad guy, so pick your poison and pick it carefully. And I include Israel in my assessment, unless you think Moishe Dayan, Ben Netanyahu, or Ariel Sharon are charm-school alumni. A couple of these guys were almost as crude and lethal as Stalin or Putin. If you want my opinion, and you’re going to get it even if you don’t since we’re riding in the same cab, the whole region is a stink hole, and it’s going to blow up the world one of these days if the Western powers misplay their hand. And you know what? They have a long history of misplaying their hands. Look at two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Somalia—the list goes on and on.”

  The driver turned another corner with a jerk, skidding tires, and a spewing a florid exchange of profanity with another driver.

  Alex watched him. The driver’s censorious eyes kept alternating between the road and the rearview mirror. Several times, his eyes focused on hers. She kept her hand near her Beretta. Alex sensed something more than a little wrong with him, maybe something a little psycho. But she couldn’t place it.

  “Americans might do better to try to understand the Middle East,” Voltaire said, easing back. He fished into his pocket, found a pack of Marlboros, and joined the driver in an illegal smoke.

  “I’m not even talking about the average Joe driving a truck down the interstate in Iowa. I don’t expect those people to understand. I’m talking about the people in Washington, the ones who make the decisions and whose decisions are going to get us all blown up if they make the wrong ones. If only those people listened to what people in the streets and in the cafés in Cairo are saying. I’m the first person to admit that it’s an abomination. But the general view here is that even before September 11, the United States was not a fair broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Then it capitalized on the attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab world. And you know what? There remains just enough historical truth to that to fuel every insane conspiratorial theory you hear in Cairo.”

  The cab stopped for another light, then it came out of it like a jackrabbit on steroids, reeling across three lanes, cutting off the cab behind it.

  Accelerator, brake, accelerator, brake.

  Cab rides I have survived in the Third World, thought Alex.

  Thought, but didn’t say. This driver was a piece of work.

  There was a long blast of a horn from the rear and the sound of someone screaming. Alex’s driver made some sort of gesture over the roof of the car.

  “Just get us there in one piece, would you, you idiot!” Voltaire barked at the driver. The driver glowered back and said nothing.

  “The greatest proof in the eyes of the average Arab was the invasion of Iraq. Just try to convince people here that it was not a quest for oil or a war on Muslims. Just try! It’s like trying to convince many Americans that it was, and that the 9/11 attacks were the first step. It’s the result of widespread mistrust, the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States has a prejudice against them. So they never think the United States is well intentioned, and they always feel that whatever it does has some other motive behind it.”

  Alex had no answer. Her hotel lay up ahead. Voltaire finished his smoke, flicked the butt out the window, and changed the subject, sort of.

  “Anyway, I’ll phone Fitzgerald tonight after I drop you off. I’ll have him send you the merchandise we discussed. Don’t worry about it tonight. But start your day with it tomorrow.”

  The taxi stopped in front of the hotel.

  “Uplifting, isn’t it, all this?” Voltaire said. “It shows you what the West is up against in this part of the world
. You know, it’s easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre and something that goes on far from their Pennsylvania barbeques and their Wyoming rodeos. But that misses the point. Washington needs to understand. That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism, the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.”

  The driver waited, scanning the street, looking bored, watching a few well-dressed European and America women on the front promenade of the hotel.

  Voltaire leaned to Alex and held her arm. He leaned to her and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “Want to invite me up to your room?” he asked. “There’s still time.”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “I’ll let you in on a secret,” he said. “I’m the most experienced lover that you would ever have.”

  “Is that right?” she asked.

  “It is.”

  “Then actually you’d be the most experienced lover that I might never have,” she said. “The answer is still no.”

  “I didn’t think I’d be successful. But I thought I’d ask.”

  The driver seemed intent on ignoring Voltaire and his advance.

  “Good night,” she said. “Three p.m. tomorrow, correct?”

  “Correct,” he said. She opened the cab door and pushed one leg out. Voltaire grabbed her arm to stop her. She turned back to him.

  “One other thing, Josephine,” he said.

  She waited.

  “Keep your guard up at all times here. Don’t ever assume anything. Always question everything you see. Want me to give you another example, how things aren’t always how they seem?”

  “Go for it,” she said.

  He released her arm and turned back to address the driver.

  “How you doing tonight, Tony?” he asked in English.

  “I’m fine, Mr. Lamara, sir,” the driver answered in English with a broad smile. “How’s it going for you, aside from getting turned down by the lady?”