Whiplash River

by Lou Berney

  The signs on the buildings didn’t help his jet lag, everything written in Arabic. Shake was in a dream where words had melted and gone squiggly.

  Gina looked crisp and alert—in sunglasses, her hair pulled back, fresh lipstick—not fogged in the slightest.

  Yeah, Shake thought, like she needed the extra edge on him.

  “It’s a beautiful city, isn’t it?” Quinn said, turning around in his seat again.

  It was dirty and hazy and chaotic, stack after stack of buildings the color of dirty sand, dirty bone, dirty butter. Though Shake did like all the mosques, the skyline bristling with minarets. He liked the donkeys in the street. He was prepared to admit that Cairo did have a certain exotic appeal.

  “You know you’re not in Kansas anymore,” Gina said. “For sure.”

  “So my buddy with the security firm,” Quinn said. “When I called him this morning, he says the clock’s ticking. He says his client, the rich expat asshole, put it on the market a couple of days ago. Opened the bidding, already has an offer. Not a great offer, my buddy doesn’t think, but these things move fast. We’ve got to make hay while the sun shines or we’ll lose it.”

  “What is it?” Gina said. “The it?”

  Quinn winked at her. “Just wait. I’m going to tell you.”

  The cab turned a corner, squeezed down a narrow street crowded with giant tour buses parked up on the curb, and then turned another corner. Suddenly Shake found himself staring straight at the pyramids, right there, practically on top of him. “Holy shit,” he said. If he’d felt like he was in a dream before, he really felt like it now. The pyramids looked exactly the way you’d expect the pyramids to look. But even bigger, even more impressive.

  There were a lot of people moving around at the base of the biggest pyramid, but you didn’t notice them at first, they were so puny in comparison. The blocks at the base of the pyramid were taller than the tallest person.

  “Sheesh,” Gina said. “Somebody had a teeny pecker, didn’t he, whoever built these?”

  “You know who stood right here and gazed in awe at those pyramids, same way we’re doing right now?” Quinn said. “Herodotus. Julius Caesar. Napoleon. Mark Twain. Among others. If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will. Come on.”

  He paid the cabdriver and the three of them walked down another street lined with tour buses. That street led them to an enormous sandstone lion with the head of a pharaoh. The Sphinx. The pyramids were lined up perfectly in the background.

  “Holy shit,” Shake said again.

  Gina hooked her arm through his. “It’s sort of romantic, isn’t it?”

  He looked at her. “I know what you’re doing,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “I have a general idea of what you might be doing and possibly why,” he said.

  “Come over here,” Quinn said. “Take a look at this.”

  Shake and Gina walked over. A tourist was taking a photo of her husband with the Sphinx in the background, a forced perspective that made it look like the husband was holding the Sphinx in the palm of his hand.

  Quinn found a spot with an unobstructed view. “What do you think of that?” he said. “See the nose?”

  “The nose?” Shake said. He must have been missing something, because the Sphinx was missing its nose. There was just a flat slab of stone between the eyes and the lips.

  “Speaking of teeny peckers,” Quinn said. “Napoleon. The story is, 1773, his troops are screwing around, taking target practice with their cannons, they blast the Sphinx’s nose off. What really happened, though, the nose was already off by the time Napoleon ever showed up in Egypt. The Muslims, some Muslims or other, they’re the ones knocked it off in the fourteenth century. Religious issues, I don’t know.”

  Shake and Gina were quiet for a minute. Shake finally got it.

  “The nose,” he said. “We’re gonna boost the nose?”

  “It was in a museum, wasn’t it?” Gina said, nodding. “And then it got stolen during the revolution. The rich asshole ended up with it.”

  Quinn looked at them both. “Have you been listening? The Muslims knocked the nose off seven hundred years ago. It’s dust. It’s long gone.”

  Shake was glad Gina looked confused too. “Why are we here, then?” he asked Quinn.

  “Because we’re in Cairo! I thought you should see the pyramids, the Sphinx. When’s the next time you’re going to be in Cairo?”

  “Harry, sweetie,” Gina said.

  “Okay,” Quinn said. “You’re right.” He paused for effect, turning his vintage-movie-star profile to them and lifting his chin. “The speech that saved Teddy Roosevelt’s life.”

  Wonderful, Shake thought. Quinn didn’t have enough material of his own, now he was gonna start delivering other people’s speeches too.

  Shake and Gina waited. Quinn didn’t say anything else.

  “The speech that saved Teddy Roosevelt’s life!” he said. “That’s what we’re going to boost!”

  THEY FOUND A TABLE IN the shade. A café with a view of the Sphinx.

  Shake had never heard about a speech that saved Teddy Roosevelt’s life. Shake had been forced to talk his way out of several hairy situations, and Gina had too. Gina probably couldn’t even count all the times. But Shake couldn’t imagine how a president of the United States ended up in the hair like that.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Quinn said. “It wasn’t Teddy giving a speech that saved his life, it was the speech itself.”

  Calling him Teddy, like they’d been buddies. Maybe they had been.

  The waiter who brought their coffee could have been Quinn’s twin brother, Shake noticed when he poured Quinn’s coffee. Tall, tan, the same waves of white hair. The main difference, the waiter had dark eyes and a big dark mustache, and he walked with a bit of a stoop.

  Shake watched Quinn frown at the ghost of his Christmas future.

  “I’m not following,” Shake said.

  “Shocker,” Gina said. But she wasn’t following either.

  “Teddy could give a speech,” Quinn said. “I mean it. Two hours long, three hours. A fascinating historical figure, but long-winded as hell. Don’t say it, I know what you’re thinking. Anyway.

  “Teddy’s in Milwaukee, October of 1912, running for president again. He’s on his way to give a campaign speech. He steps out of his hotel in Milwaukee and some whack job pulls a gun. Takes a shot at Teddy. But guess what? The bullet hits the speech Teddy has in the pocket of his overcoat. Fifty pages long, folded in half. The speech stopped the bullet. Slowed it down, at least. And I think there was a metal eyeglass case involved.

  “Anyway, Teddy survived. The bullet only went in him about three inches, it didn’t get past the chest muscle. It didn’t hit the heart. That speech saved his life. And get this. Teddy went ahead and gave the speech, on schedule, before he let them take him to the hospital. He told the people in the audience about the bullet. His exact words: ‘It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!’ ”

  It was a good story, if it was true. But Shake didn’t know what any of it had to do with Egypt or some guy selling conflict antiquities on the black market.

  “It’s a good story,” he said. “Is it true?”

  “Of course it is,” Quinn said. “Teddy didn’t win the election, though. It’s a better story if he had. He never won another election, sad to say.”

  “What does Teddy Roosevelt have to do with Egypt?” Gina said.

  According to Quinn, the king of Egypt, back when there was still a king of Egypt, right after the Second World War, was a nut for American historical memorabilia. He bought everything he could get his hands on. An oar from the boat George Washington used to cross the Delaware. Grant’s last cigar, the stub of it. The bloodstained cards that Wild Bill Hickok was holding—the original dead man’s hand—when he got shot.

  When the king was forced to abdicate in the fifties, the new government didn’t know what to do with his collection.


  “We’re talking a lot of valuable items,” Quinn said. “The Smithsonian would have killed Wild Bill Hickok all over again to get their hands on those aces and eights. Not to mention the Bull Moose speech with the bullet hole through the middle of it. But the Egyptians were pissed, they’re still pissed, as a matter of fact, because half of ancient Egypt is in museums somewhere else. The archaeologists who dug it all up, you know this, they were foreigners. They took the best pickings home. London, Berlin, Rome. You know where the Rosetta stone is right now? The most important Egyptian antiquity in existence? It’s in London. The British Museum.”

  “So the Egyptians started their own museum,” Gina said. “A museum of American historical artifacts.”

  “The lady gets a prize. Hardly anyone even knew about it. It was famous for a minute in the sixties. But who comes to Egypt to see Harry Houdini’s handcuffs? They come to see the Sphinx.”

  He swept a hand across the view.

  “And then the revolution happened,” Shake said.

  “That’s right. Nobody paid any attention to some forgotten little museum. Well, somebody did. Somebody knew Teddy’s speech was worth money on the open market and they nabbed it. Our rich expat probably picked it up for pennies on the dollar, and now he’ll auction it off to the highest bidder.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Shake said. “The conflict antiquity we came to Egypt to boost is a speech Teddy Roosevelt gave in Milwaukee.”

  Shake glanced at Gina. She’d lifted her eyebrows up above her sunglasses.

  “I know,” Quinn said. “Not your usual everyday score.”

  “Well,” Gina said. “That’s our specialty.”

  She gave Shake a little bump with her knee and Shake couldn’t help it—he caught himself wondering, for a second, if maybe she’d told the truth after all. If maybe she’d come to Egypt because there might still be something left between them.

  She caught him wondering, and smiled.

  “There’s not a huge market for this sort of thing,” Quinn said, “from what I understand. But the players have serious money. The kind of people who can have anything they want, so they want what they can’t have.”

  Gina gave Shake another smile, another little bump with her knee.

  Quinn stood up. “There he is!” he said.

  A scrawny Egyptian guy, about Shake’s age, hustled toward them, grinning. He had a big black mustache, a world-class mustache, and was wearing a dark gray suit two sizes too big for him. One of his teeth was missing.

  “Mr. Quinn!”

  “Mahmoud!”

  Quinn stood up and they hugged. “How long has it been, you old son of a bitch?”

  “Very long, Mr. Quinn, you old son of a bitch.”

  “Now, hold on one second. I am in fact an old son of a bitch. So you may call me a crazy bastard, not an old son of a bitch.”

  “Okay, you crazy bastard.”

  They laughed and grinned and stared at each other. Quinn eyeballed Mahmoud’s suit, two sizes too big and shiny at the elbows. Mahmoud eyeballed Quinn and then eyeballed Shake and Gina.

  “And where are the remainder of your associates?” Mahmoud said finally. “That you mentioned?”

  Of course, Shake thought.

  “Mahmoud here runs his own private security firm,” Quinn said, pointing, watching for Mahmoud’s reaction as he said it. “That’s what he’s been telling me.”

  “Oh,” Mahmoud said. “Well. I should clarify, I think, perhaps.”

  Of course.

  THE WHITE-HAIRED OLD WAITER, QUINN’S twin brother, brought tea for Mahmoud. Mahmoud sipped the tea and explained that no, he didn’t technically own the private security firm, and technically the private security firm wasn’t one. It was a catering company. Mahmoud was a bartender. Well, to clarify, he was an apprentice bartender.

  Shake was not surprised to learn that the bullshit had been flowing both ways. Mahmoud, apparently, had been led to believe that Quinn worked for the CIA and would show up in Cairo with Ocean’s Eleven.

  “So, yes, I see,” Mahmoud said when he finally had to accept the reality that this was the sum of Quinn’s associates, just Shake and Gina, and no martial-arts expert back at the hotel unpacking his high-tech fiber-optic heist gear. “Ah. I see.”

  He was grinning still, but starting to falter under the strain of it.

  Quinn was faltering under the strain of his grin too.

  Serves the old son of a bitch right, Shake thought.

  “Let me get this straight,” Quinn said. “Mahmoud, my friend. A bartender? So the man you told me about, the black-market dealer with the item in question. Do we need to clarify any details there too?”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Quinn!” Mahmoud said. “Those details are precisely accurate! It is since September I have been working for Mr. Devane. Exclusively so! At his house and his nightclub, both. I hear things, you see, as bartender. As apprentice bartender, the distinction is meaningless. I see things. I have seen, with my own eyes, the item in question. I have verified the value of the item. And it can be ours, Mr. Quinn, inshallah.”

  “Inshallah,” Quinn said.

  Shake didn’t know what that meant. Judging by their current situation, he thought it probably meant something like “What the fuck, you never know.”

  “What’s that mean?” Shake said. “Inshallah?”

  “God willing,” Quinn said.

  Shake hadn’t been far off.

  “He’s got a nightclub?” Gina said. “This Devane fella? I thought he worked the black market.”

  “He does, yes,” Mahmoud said, turning his grin, with the missing tooth, on her. “But the club, you see, is one of the most exclusive in Cairo. You can guess its purpose, I think? I do not know how to say it in English.”

  “To launder his money,” Shake said. Mahmoud looked blank. “Wash it. Make it clean.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Let’s talk turkey,” Quinn said. “Okay?”

  Mahmoud nodded uncertainly.

  “Where’s he got it?” Quinn said. “The item. At his house?”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “He’s got a safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Security? Cameras?”

  “Yes. Cameras. And men who watch the house. Two, I think.”

  “Just like Ocean’s Eleven,” Shake said.

  “Exactly!” Mahmoud said. And then frowned, because Shake, it was tragically apparent, was no George Clooney or Brad Pitt. He was not even one of the lesser Eleven.

  “Inshallah!” Gina said cheerfully.

  GINA WAS ABOUT TO DIE she was so jet-lagged. She was about to die she was working so hard to pretend she wasn’t. Because she wanted Shake to know she had the edge in every possible way.

  He was onto her. He’d figured out that she’d come to Egypt just to torment him. And it hadn’t taken him long. Which annoyed her—she thought she’d played it just about perfectly back in San Francisco.

  Though probably, she admitted to herself, she would have been more annoyed if Shake hadn’t caught on so quickly. This was a guy, after all, she’d been in love with. Think how poorly it would have reflected on her if she’d fallen in love with a total idiot.

  It wasn’t the end of the world that Shake was onto her. So what if he was? He still, Gina could tell, clung to a sliver of hope that she really would fall back in love with him. A sliver of hope that she’d forgive, forget, leap into his arms, pop the buttons off his shirt, et cetera.

  Gina could work with that sliver of hope. It was shiny and very sharp. It could be very dangerous in the right hands.

  “Well,” she said in the cab back to the hotel. “That went well, didn’t it?”

  “He told me his firm handled security for the guy with the speech,” Quinn said. “He told me explicitly.”

  “What did you tell him?” Shake said. He had his head propped against the window, his eyes barely open. “Explicitly? You told him you were bringing Ocean’s Eleven, didn’t you?”


  Gina tried to keep her own eyes open. It was taking forever to get back to the hotel. Traffic was even worse coming than going. How was that possible? She noticed that a lot of the women on the street wore burkas and had their faces covered. Gina was cool with that—if that was what the woman wanted, and not what the woman’s husband or father or preacher told her she wanted. In that case she was not cool with it whatsoever.

  “It’s a wrinkle,” Quinn decided. “That’s all.” And, boom, he brightened right up again, just like that. Gina was impressed. She didn’t think it was an act. “We iron it out, we move on. Let’s not get our knickers in a twist.”

  “Move on?” Shake said.

  “Sure.”

  “A safe, security cameras, at least two security guys watching the house. Our guy on the inside’s a bartender. Apprentice bartender, though of course the distinction is meaningless.”

  “His knickers are twisted, Harry,” Gina said.

  “I know it.”

  “And a break-and-take to begin with,” Shake said. “I’m a wheelman. I was a wheelman. The only thing I know about a break-and-take is how to drive away from one.”

  “Whoever said anything about a break-and-take? Show me the transcript.”

  “Then what?”

  Quinn didn’t answer. Gina wanted to lend a hand, she liked the old fella’s upbeat attitude, but really her knickers were just as twisted as Shake’s.

  “I loved the first one,” she said.

  After a beat Shake said, “The one with Sinatra, you mean?”

  “No. The first new one.”

  “I didn’t see the other new ones.”

  “The other new ones weren’t as good. They used a different writer, I think.”

  “Let’s put our heads together,” Quinn said. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  “Who’s the cat in this scenario?” Shake said.