“Spoken like a good white male,” Abe said, popping the last half of a dry pastry into his mouth. “If I don’t see it, it don’t exist. The problem is, you’ve never been a minority. You’d think your time in prison….”
“I wasn’t in prison.”
“You’d think your time in prison,” Abe repeated, his voice rising to cut off Doug’s interruption, “would have changed you. How’d it feel to be ignored and powerless? God gives you this great chance to learn….”
“Oh shit, back to God again.”
“Everything comes back to God, my foolish little friend,” Abe said, and drained the rest of Doug’s now warm 7-Up into his coffee cup. “And, speaking of God—Oh my God, look at the rack on that chick.”
Doug followed Abe’s stare out the window and down the street. It was easy to spot Aisha, she was the one every guy was looking at. She wore a white tee shirt knotted at the side, loose-cut men’s jeans that slung low, exposing her flat stomach, thick gold navel ring and her bikini line. Other women wore something similar, no one wore it like Aisha. Doug smiled, both because it was Aisha and because he got to say, “That is the woman I slept with in Morocco.”
“That’s the Moroccan Tart? My God, Doug, I have grossly underestimated you.”
Doug couldn’t get the smile off his face, even when he remembered that she probably hid the drugs in his bag as he recuperated in her huge bed. “I still need to talk things over with her. Can you manage to convince her to get to the shop? Without stepping on your tongue?”
“I guess it all comes down to me. Cover me boys, I’m going in,” Abe said in a flat, mid-American voice. “That was my Audie Murphy, by the way.”
“I’ll have to take your word on it,” Doug said as he stood up, “I’ve got no idea what Audie Murphy sounded like.”
“Me either. Meet you at the shop.” Abe brushed the crumbs off his shirt and headed out the door.
Doug went out the back exit, through the maze of streets and was surprised to find he made it back to the shop, and the black cloth filled storeroom, without a problem. He sat on one of the firmer boxes and listened to his heart pounding in his chest. It dawned on him then that Abe was right, he had no idea what he would say. He thought through a few opening lines and settled on “Hello, Aisha. We need to talk.” He chose a half-sitting-on-the-box-half-leaning-against-the-wall-arms-crossed-tough-guy pose to go with his hard talk. He hoped that she’d take one look at him, break down, confess everything, and beg his forgiveness. He hoped that it would turn out this way since he didn’t have another plan.
As he was testing whether or not crossing his ankles made him look relaxed or just put him off balance, he heard Aisha’s unmistakable laugh coming up the stairs. Abe stepped up to the landing first, then into the room. He extended his arm out as if guiding Aisha into the place. She came up looking at the swaths of cloth on the ground and had surveyed half the room before she saw Doug.
“Oh my God,” she yelled and came at him with her arms outstretched. Before he could uncross his ankles, she had her arms wrapped around Doug’s neck, knocking them both backwards into a pile of black cloth that reached halfway to the ceiling. And it seemed she was trying to kill him by sticking her tongue so far down his throat he couldn’t breathe.
“I believe you know my friend, Douglas Pearce,” Doug heard Abe say as Aisha rolled him around in the pile. When she stopped to catch her breath, Doug managed to pry himself partially free and sit up as best as he could. “Aisha,” he said, “we need to….”
“Oh my God, Doug, what a great surprise, I thought you were avoiding me, you shit-head, my uncle told me you were still in town, but you never checked in at the Shepheard and I’ve been here doing nothing, waiting for you to call, and then I figure, fuck him, I mean, no offense, but I was hurt, you stupid ass,” a quick kiss and a breath, “and so I decided to come on down to his shop, my uncle that is, and then this guy, oh my God, he is so funny, says he has something for my uncle and like an idiot I believe him and he brings me—me—to an abaya shop, and I’m thinking, what’s going on here? and then I see you, you are so romantic,” she said and, refreshed, renewed her assault.
“And Doug, I believe you know Aisha.”
“Oh I’m sorry,” Aisha said as she spun off the top of Doug to sit on the pile. “I’m just rather fond of Doug and I’m really surprised.”
“Oh I understand,” Abe said. “I get the same way around him myself.”
Doug was trying to pull black strings out of his mouth. The dust cloud they raised in the room gave the few shafts of light a defined shape. He tried to figure out how to get his plan back on track. “Aisha, uh, I wanted to get you up here because I wanted….”
“Oh I can guess what you wanted,” she said, punching him on the arm, her inflection indicating something lewd, something erotic, and something she was all in favor of.
“My work here is done,” Abe said in a superhero voice. “I’ll leave you two kids alone to get reacquainted. I’ll catch up with the boys downstairs. Play nice, now.” He went out onto the landing and pulled a black curtain from the shadows across the doorway.
Doug tried just once to stop her, but gave up when she unzipped his pants. The unusual location seemed to inspire Aisha as her tongue mauled other parts of his body. Doug bit down hard on a fistful of dusty cloth, not fully trusting the soundproofing. The heat, the dust, holding his breath—ten minutes of this, he was sure, and he’d pass out. Fortunately, his survival instincts kicked in and hurried him along.
There was a lot more dust in the air, and the shafts of light looked like columns of white marble. They lay on the pile, breathing so hard Doug was certain that they could be heard down the street. Black threads like spiderwebs clung to every surface, and small pieces of black fabric, held in place by sweat, dotted his face. He could feel the damp cotton on the back of his neck, but couldn’t feel anything below his chest. His breathing was settling down to a rhythm of puffs and sighs.
“Comfy?” Aisha asked, looking at the centuries-old wooden beam of the ceiling.
“I feel like I’ve just been mugged,” Doug said.
“Oh, thanks a lot,” she said, trying to get a hair or a string off her tongue. “I’ve never had a guy equate sex with a mugging.”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
“Hmmm,” she said, and then they said nothing for another five minutes. Doug had the time to figure out what to say, the time to come up with a way to turn the situation around, the time to get back to his master plan and Aisha’s confession….
“So where have you been hiding?” Aisha asked, startling Doug who, completely spent, had started to drift off to sleep.
“I’m staying over at the Sheraton. Been there a few days. Before that I was in prison.”
Aisha turned her head but still couldn’t see Doug from where she was lying. “Really? Or you just saying that?”
“Are you impressed? I’m sure it’ll look good on my résumé.”
“What were you doing in prison?” she asked. Doug was alert now, listening for hints of clues in her voice.
“The airport police found a bag of cocaine in my carry-on bag.”
“How could you be so fucking stupid?”
“I didn’t put the drugs there, someone planted them on me,” he said.
“Did the police buy that story? I wouldn’t.”
“No, they did not buy it. I sat in jail for two weeks because of it.” Doug told her what happened. He tried to read her face, or what he could see of it, but he couldn’t tell if she was acting, if she already knew what happened, or if she even cared. And if she was faking it, Doug decided, she was good. She laughed at his attempts at jokes and told him it was a really exciting story, unlike anything she’d heard before. Now that was a lie, he knew, but it was a good lie. He didn’t want to think that she might have faked everything.
“So your dad bailed you out, did he? How sweet. Now this Sergei, he’s not some sort of sugar daddy looking for a cut
e little boy-toy, is he?” She reached down and patted his thigh as she said it.
“No, it’s not like that. He’s just a nice guy. If you met him you’d know what I mean.” He tried to sit up but the pile of cloth kept him reclined. Twenty years, worth of dust was settling back around him.
“I’d like to meet the guy that put the coke in your bag,” Aisha said, which made Doug smile. “Wouldn’t you have seen somebody messing with your bag?”
“I was asleep most of the flight.”
“On Egyptian Air? You’re kidding.”
“If you recall,” he said, turning to see her face, “I didn’t get much sleep the night before.”
“Hey, I was up. I packed your bags, remember?”
He didn’t bite his tongue, but that was because there was still enough lint in his mouth to chew on instead. “Maybe Sergei put it in when he came to visit us peasants in steerage.”
“Oh that makes sense,” Aisha said as she stood up, brushing off her wrinkled shirt. “He plants five hundred bucks’ worth of coke on you so he can then later spend hundreds more just to get you out. You’d make a shrewd drug dealer, Doug.”
There were the awkward looks when they came down the stairs, but Aisha seemed immune to shame. She asked something in Arabic and was directed to a small, but filthy bathroom at the rear of the building. Abe waited until she had shut the door before he spoke.
“Boy, you sure showed her.”
“Cut it out, okay?” Doug tried not to look embarrassed but the room suddenly felt much warmer. “She didn’t say anything.”
“Oh, we heard some things pretty clearly down here,” Abe said, and then said something in Arabic to the men in the shop, who found whatever it was quite funny. The more they talked in Arabic, the more they laughed and the more Doug was sure it was all at his expense.
“Gentlemen, save something for the locker room,” Aisha said, sweeping back into the room. Abe said something to her in Arabic and her response, whatever it was, brought howls of laughter from the old men. Abe was as red as Doug now, and he could only force a slight smile as Aisha strode past him, waving over her shoulder to the old men, and taking Doug by the arm and out into the always crowded souk.
Chapter 19
Aisha knew her way around the dead ends and dark alleys, which was good since Doug had already forgotten the route back to the coffee shop. With Aisha leading the way, he could focus on the shops and the tourists and the locals who tolerated the tourists as they attempted to get the weekly shopping done. The bazaar was different from the one in Morocco—older, more intimidating in a dark, gothic way. It was mid-afternoon, the sun should have been almost overhead, but the narrow streets and the layer after layer of striped awnings and smog-soaked laundry gave the streets a menacing feel.
Everything was for sale. Pots big enough to boil a missionary? You want two or four handles? Laptops with bootleg Windows in Arabic? Hey, free modem if you buy today. Got a goat head? So fresh the goat don’t know it yet. Need a cheap gold bracelet? Need a thousand of them? And everything that could be hauled out of the shop and stuck on a peg or tied to a wire was hung around the wall-sized doorways like parts of an over-decorated Baroque gilt frame, which could also be had, complete with a black velvet painting of the moon over the pyramids. Red and white Coca-Cola signs that advertised Pepsi, Leevye Jeans, Ralf Lauren toilet seat covers, video cassettes of movies that were due to premiere next month. And everything at a special price.
Aisha ignored the touts, ignored the special offers, and ignored the hard stares from the old women and another type of stare from the young men. “Anyway,” she continued, Doug having missed much of what she had already said, “after he didn’t show at the party and he didn’t call, I said the hell with it and decided to head to Cairo a few days early. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Same old bunch of nothing. There’s my uncle’s shop. You didn’t tell him anything about us, did you?”
“Why? Is he supposed to think you’re all innocent?”
“No,” she said, with a look that said both “he’s not ignorant” and “what do you think I am?” “I just don’t want him to start lecturing me about settling down and how all I ever bring home are losers and what a disappointment I am to the family, that’s all.”
It was Doug’s turn to look offended but Aisha ignored that, too, and adjusted her hair in an “antique” plastic framed mirror hung outside a shop, pulling a few black strings from her shiny black hair. “That’s strange,” she said as she tried to shake a string off her finger, “the gate’s down.”
“Maybe he closed up early, taking some time off.”
“Time off?” she said, her tone making it clear that he had just said something blasphemous. They reached the front of the shop and, despite the two industrial-sized double-key padlocks and quarter-inch steel hasps, Aisha pulled on the doorknob. They tried to peer inside but the roll-down gate and the closed blinds made it impossible to see a thing.
“This is not good,” Aisha said as she surveyed the neighborhood. She walked across the narrow alley to a shop that specialized in brightly colored enamelled souvenir plates, the kind that Eastern Europeans bought by the gross. Doug watched from the street as she spoke to the owner in rapid fire, full volume Arabic, the only type of Arabic that seemed to be spoken here. After a few minutes of pointing and yelling and plate slamming Aisha stepped back to the alley, hands on her hips, searching for her next victim.
“He didn’t see a thing. Bastard.” She stood biting her lip and breathing through her nose. This was a side of Aisha he had not expected. Oh, she was still stunning, he had just not expected it.
“Nasser Ashkanani closes his shop up early and you didn’t fucking notice?” She yelled something in Arabic back at the shop, which seemed to calm her down. “Better odds of the Sphinx walking off.”
“Can we call him?” Doug asked. “I mean, just to see if everything’s okay….”
“Everything’s not okay. His shop is fucking closed, understand? Something is wrong.”
“Alright, so call him and….”
“Somebody had to see something,” she said, ignoring him. She did that a lot, he noticed. “Come on, let’s try the other shops.”
Aisha pushed her way into a couple of shops and bullied the staff until she was sure they had seen nothing. Doug was tempted to suggest that she might find the salespeople a bit more helpful if she wasn’t so insulting, but changed his mind when she swung at a one-legged shop owner with a souvenir bamboo back-scratcher. Doug backed out of that shop like a startled tourist who had come upon some of that Middle Eastern violence he’d read so much about, and took up position across the alleyway, leaning against a bare spot on the wall. From here he could observe her inquiring technique. She’d start out with her most polite demanding tone, the same kind used by secret police wielding rubber hoses in half-lit interrogation rooms. At the first hint of an “I didn’t see a thing” answer, she’d adopt a more focused demeanor, sounding much like a professional wrestler calling for a folding chair to use in the ring. Then, just before she’d throw something, her voice would drop to a low growl and she’d let her narrowed eyes do the talking.
Doug was certain that the people in the area had no idea why Nasser Ashkanani would close his shop early. As distracting as he found Aisha’s approach, most of the people in the Khan walked on as if this kind of ear-splitting, stock-tossing tirade was an everyday occurrence, which, of course, it probably was. Doug watched as the other shop owners continued to wave in backpackers, watched as the tea guy continued to weave in and out of every doorway, and watched the locals standing around, watching him. Like the guy standing in front of the Ashkanani shop, the tough guy with the hairy mustache, hairy eyebrows, and hairy ears.
Doug stared at the man for a full minute. He watched as the man looked down the alleyway, across from where Doug stood, to where Aisha was currently at level two of her questioning of a postcard and bootleg video vendor. When Doug first saw him in the coffee shop,
he thought he was a large man, maybe as tall as himself, with a bulky build, like an out-of-shape former Marine. Seeing him now, in the daylight, Doug realized that his first impression had been wrong; the man was not built like that at all. He was huge, freakishly unbelievably huge. Huge like biker-strip-club-bouncer huge. And the black shirt, black pants, and black boots provided no slimming effect. His arms, which Doug was comparing favorably with his own legs, were crossed in front of his steroid enhanced chest. There was no room for a neck.
When the man turned to look at him, Doug felt his own eyes lock onto the white parts visible just under the heap of black hair that on a normal-sized person would have been eyebrows. He stared at Doug—the white parts did, anyway—long enough for Doug to feel his heart beat double. Then he turned his hairy gaze back down the street, just under the Bab al-Badistan. He raised his hand to get the attention of someone in the crowd, then, moving his hand a few inches, pointed at Doug.
“Aisha, we gotta go,” he shouted into the phone booth sized shop.
“Look, pharaoh, my uncle’s had a shop here before your family wandered in out of the desert….”
“Aisha, we gotta go.”
“Just a second, Doug,” she said without turning around, “so don’t you go telling me that you don’t have no….”
“Aisha!” Doug could see the hairy man working his way down the street.
“I said just a second,” she said, glancing backwards while she reached for a copy of Titanic to throw. “If my uncle hears that….”
“Now!” Doug said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her out of the shop and dragging her behind as he started to run down the street.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she said, pulling her wrist free. Doug turned to explain, stepping back just in time to avoid a pretty decent left hook. “Don’t ever do that to me,” she said, and got ready to swing again, this time a right. Just over her shoulder, Doug could make out the yard-wide shoulders of the black suit cutting around a tall blue backpack with a Canadian flag patch.
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