Whiplash River

by Lou Berney

  “Ziegler’s a fit,” Gina told Shake. “You totally nailed him last night. You’re already playing the part.”

  “Ziegler’s in the federal pen. Small problem, don’t you think? When Devane starts digging and—oh.”

  “Good boy. Keep going and you’ll get a big hug at the finish line.”

  “Shut up. I get it.”

  “The way we play it,” Gina said, “Ziegler was in the federal pen. Past tense. Until, let’s see, a few months ago?”

  “We say he cut a deal with the feds so they let him walk. He’s done it before.”

  “He promised to rat out a few of his old Wall Street buddies.”

  “All of it very hush-hush,” Quinn said, catching on. “They kept it out of the papers.”

  “I’ll still have my IT guy do some hacking. You know? Drop a hint here, a hint there.”

  “Maybe,” Shake said. “I don’t know. What if Devane knows Ziegler? What if he knows the feds would never cut another deal with him after he screwed them the first time?”

  “Bad for us,” Gina said.

  “And the case Devane carries Teddy’s speech in. What if it’s custom? What if we can’t find a look-alike for it?”

  Teddy’s speech. Christ. Shake was doing it himself now.

  “Shake.” Quinn set his cup of tea down. “You got a better hand on the table, I’d love to see it. I mean that sincerely. But from where I sit, my perspective, your other hand on the table looks like dead broke and Sticky Jimmy trying to pop you.”

  “Sticky Jimmy?” Gina said.

  “Logan James.”

  Gina laughed. “Oh, Harry, I’d want to kill you too, you gave me a nickname like that.”

  “I didn’t give him the nickname. Well. Let’s just say he earned the nickname.”

  “I bet he did.”

  “We have to play our hand, Shake,” Quinn said. “Another opportunity like this, it won’t drop down from the sky.”

  Quinn meant the money. Or maybe he meant Gina. Both. Either way, Shake knew he didn’t have a better hand to play.

  “The case he carries the speech in,” Shake said. “We have to find one that’s identical.”

  “Go ahead,” Quinn said. “Tell me one more time so I don’t forget.”

  Chapter 34

  Shake and Quinn waited outside the hotel while a bellhop called them a cab.

  At the lobby entrance was a metal detector manned by two Egyptian soldiers holding machine guns. Down at the end of the drive were two more soldiers, poking mirrors beneath the chassis of every car that wanted to come closer.

  “So the military runs the show now?” Shake said.

  “They always ran the show,” Quinn said. “They own half the country. They own construction companies, factories, resorts. The hotel we’re staying in, I wouldn’t be surprised the military has a piece of that. They build roads, they make bread. I mean the kind of bread you eat.”

  “The military does?”

  “They were always independent, more or less. Mubarak had his security forces, separate from the military. The SSI, remember? The guys work for Devane? During the revolution, the military sided with the people, not Mubarak. It’s more complicated than that, you know what I mean. The honeymoon’s over now, between the people and the military. Hell, the honeymoon’s over between the people and the people, the liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Noor. Don’t even mention the Christians.”

  Shake had to give Quinn credit. The old guy knew a lot about Egyptian politics. Or seemed to.

  “That’s the problem with honeymoons,” Quinn said. “Sooner or later, they’re over.”

  “Yeah,” Shake said. That was something he knew about.

  The soldiers down at the end of the drive finished checking over the cab. It pulled up. Shake and Quinn got in.

  “Sabah el kheir,” Quinn told the cabdriver.

  “Sabah el kheir,” the cabdriver said. “Where you go?”

  “Qarafa. You know?”

  The cabdriver looked at Quinn. Then the cabdriver waved over the bellhop and said a lot of things to him, fast, in Arabic. Shake hadn’t made up his mind about Arabic. It was harsh but also at times musical, a lot of hacking up phlegm but also some sweet surprising lilts. It was like listening to a hard-core metal band do a cover of “Hey Jude.”

  The call to prayer, this morning, warbling and scratchy through the amplified speakers of the mosques nearby, had sounded a little to Shake like mournful mountain bluegrass.

  When the cabdriver finished talking to the bellhop, the bellhop looked at Quinn.

  “Please, sir,” the bellhop said. “Am I mistaken? You wish to visit the City of the Dead?”

  Shake looked at Quinn too.

  “It’s not what you think,” Quinn told Shake.

  Shake hoped not.

  “Yes,” Quinn told the bellhop and the cabdriver. “That’s exactly what I wish. How far is it? Half an hour?”

  “Inshallah,” the cabdriver said, and pulled away from the curb.

  Shake tried not to think about Gina and Devane. Gina with Devane. Shake didn’t think she’d really sleep with a douche bag like Devane just to get back at him. The odds were about a million to one against. But they were still odds—that was the problem. Not to mention that Gina was such an expert liar. Even if she didn’t sleep with Devane, she could convince Shake that she had.

  Or the other way around. Shit. Shake came up a loser on this one no matter how fine you chopped. Gina knew it.

  “Keep your head in the game,” Quinn said.

  “My head’s in the game.”

  “What did I tell you? About letting your emotions get in the way because of some girl.”

  “Some girl.”

  “She is some girl,” Quinn admitted. “Why in God’s name did you dump her?”

  “What about you?” Shake said. Anything to change the fucking subject.

  “Me?”

  “Were you ever married?”

  “Yes,” Quinn said, and nothing else.

  Shake looked around for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “That’s it?” he said. “No story it takes you an hour just to get started?”

  “Keep your head in the game,” Quinn said, and then nothing else again.

  GINA USED HER BURNER CELL to call the number Devane had given her. The call went straight through to him. He sounded like he was in the shower. He sounded like he was in the shower with a couple of the girls from the night before.

  Ick, Gina thought. You’d need a shower after showering with that kind of girl.

  Devane said he’d send a car for her but Gina told him she’d make her own way over. She didn’t want him to know where they were staying yet, and she didn’t want to be trapped at his place.

  Gina had no intention of banging Devane. No way. She’d only told Shake that to make him suffer. Devane could not have been more unappealing to her. There was something cold about him, both stiff and limp at the same time, like frozen fish you left in the fridge overnight and had only partway thawed by morning.

  Ick. But she might get some fresh ideas, during her private visit with Devane, for teaching Shake a lesson. The interesting thing about being her, Gina had discovered over the years, was that she never quite knew what she was going to do, not until she actually did it.

  The old Gina, that is. The new Gina, who always ordered the same poached salmon for lunch and listened to pitches all day, who attended charity fund-raisers and went out with perfectly nice guys, that Gina hardly ever surprised this Gina.

  This Gina? Did that mean that the real Gina was the old Gina?

  As mad as she still was at Shake, Gina had to admit that she was having more fun now than she’d had in a while. She felt—happier. Was that because of Shake, or was it because she loved wheels and deals and that tingle she always got when she stood on the end of a diving board, no idea how deep or how cold the water was far below?

  Fuck. She didn’t know.

  And, okay, she had to admi
t that teaching Shake a lesson wasn’t the only only only reason she’d come to Cairo with him.

  She realized she was biting at her thumbnail again.

  “So give me your address,” Gina told Devane. “I’ll grab a cab.”

  “Meet me on the river,” he said. “There’s a private dehabeah docked across from the Cairo tower. That’s a boat, like a yacht. You can’t miss it.”

  “That’s where you live?”

  “Yeah right,” he said. “Like I’m going to tell you where I live.”

  “Really?” Gina said. “You’re that paranoid?”

  “Ha. I’m a lot more paranoid than that.”

  Good, Gina thought. She was counting on it.

  THE CAB DROPPED SHAKE AND Quinn off at the edge of a slum that sprawled for miles. Most of the houses were small, almost miniature, crowded close together. Baking in the sun, crumbling, chunks of plaster dropped away to reveal the ragged gray brick beneath.

  “Why do they call it City of the Dead?” Shake asked Quinn.

  “You’ll figure it out,” Quinn said. “I have complete faith in you.”

  Shake guessed it was because a lot of the buildings looked like tombs. The place reminded him of the cemeteries in New Orleans, where they couldn’t put people in the ground because the city was below sea level.

  And then Shake realized that a lot of the buildings didn’t just look like tombs, they were in fact tombs.

  “It’s an actual cemetery?” Shake said.

  “Gold star.”

  But there were people everywhere, moving up and down the narrow dusty lanes between the tombs, kids kicking around a soccer ball, a guy selling fruit from a cart.

  “People live here? In the tombs?”

  “Twenty million people in Cairo, that’s what they say. More than that, probably. Everybody needs a place to lay their head.”

  “In a tomb?”

  “Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Free rent and you don’t have to worry about your roommates making a lot of noise. Come on.”

  They passed through a crumbling stone arch and entered the cemetery. Nobody paid much attention to them. Quinn called over one of the kids playing soccer. He gave the kid an Egyptian pound coin, fifteen cents or so, and the kid led them toward Mahmoud’s house. His tomb.

  “It doesn’t bother you,” Shake said. “Our inside guy on the score, the guy everything hangs on, he lives in a tomb?”

  “It bothers me. Did I say it didn’t? He told me he had a fancy office, he told me he was Devane’s right-hand man. But if he can get us the specs on the case, if he helps us take off Devane, does it matter where our inside guy lives or which hand he wipes his ass with?”

  Mahmoud came out of the tomb, grinning, that big hole where an eyetooth should have been. He shook Quinn’s hand. “You crazy bastard!”

  “You old son of a bitch!”

  “Come in, my friends! Come in, please. These are only temporary lodgings, of course.”

  They went inside. The tomb was clean and cool. There was a mattress in one corner, a TV in another. Mahmoud put three teacups on the table in the center of the room, an old green stone slab that had faint Arabic markings carved on it.

  “Why don’t we do this outside?” Shake said.

  Mahmoud looked confused, but Quinn didn’t seem too thrilled about drinking tea off a gravestone either.

  “Let’s just cut to the chase,” Quinn said. He asked Mahmoud if he knew what Devane used to transport Roosevelt’s speech when he took it out of the house to show potential buyers.

  “Oh, yes,” Mahmoud said. “Of course. The attaché.”

  “The attaché?”

  “Yes. Such as a businessman might carry? Leather, black. Many of the items that Mr. Devane sells, if the item is of a certain size and no larger, he prefers the attaché.”

  “Can you get us the exact specs?” Shake said.

  “Specs.”

  “Dimensions. Size.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “We need to know the exact color of the leather. We need a photo. Okay? We need to find a case exactly like it. Devane can’t spot the difference.”

  “But I will bring you the exact match!” Mahmoud said. “Leave this to me. I will bring you the very twin of Mr. Devane’s attaché! My cousin Sayed, you must understand that this is his business. Do you understand me? Leather and luggage and such. Leave this to me.”

  Shake glanced at Quinn. Quinn cleared his throat.

  “Mahmoud,” Quinn said. “This is important. A little bullshit now and then, two old friends, what does it matter? But bullshit in a situation like this one, we blow a serious payday. Maybe worse than that. Do you understand me?”

  Mahmoud assumed a grave expression. Shake waited.

  “My old friend,” Mahmoud told Quinn. “I need this money. If I do not get out of this shithole soon, I am going to die. That is no bullshit.”

  DEVANE’S YACHT WAS BIG, NO surprise. But it also had a British colonial charm that Gina hadn’t expected, with teak decks and wrought-iron railings, and fat old-fashioned life preservers along the hull. Gina could picture Agatha Christie on the deck of a boat like this, chatting with a man in a white tuxedo. Katharine Hepburn playing Agatha Christie in a movie.

  There was a guy at the gate to the dock. Another guy at the walkway to the boat. Different guys from the ones who had been with Devane at the club, but they wore the same dark suits, they had the same dead eyes, they held their hands the same way. The guy at the gate opened the door of the cab for her. He had a pale knotted scar that ran the entire length of his face.

  Gina told the cabdriver to wait for her. He didn’t look too thrilled about that, what with Scarface dead-eyeing him, but he nodded. Scarface led her onto the yacht and through it. The interior was surprisingly tasteful too, British desert colonial, but not obnoxiously so. Gina saw a Picasso she thought might be real.

  Devane was lounging on the top deck, by the pool. A very tan naked girl was lounging next to him, her hand down the front of Devane’s silk pajama pants. The naked girl was working away at Devane in a sort of vacant, absentminded way, like she was petting a dog while watching TV.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” Devane said. “I got antsy and I knew you weren’t gonna fuck me. You weren’t ever gonna fuck me, were you? But you were gonna try to make me think you might. That’s your game.”

  “Nailed it.”

  “Part of your game, I should say. I’m not stupid.”

  To illustrate “stupid” he used his hands to make a dunce cap. At least that’s what Gina thought he was doing.

  He was wearing a different straw porkpie today. Really? Was this still 2008?

  The naked girl kept petting away. She looked like she was trying not to yawn.

  “She’ll go down on you if I tell her to,” Devane said.

  “I prefer my sex with a consenting partner. Crazy me.”

  “She’ll consent if I tell her to.”

  “I think you’re foggy on the concept. Hey,” Gina said to the girl. “Whatever he’s paying you, it’s not enough.”

  The girl said something back to Gina in a Slavic language, not friendly.

  Devane smiled. “You know what she called you?”

  “I can guess.”

  Devane said something Slavic to the girl. The girl glared at Gina, fished her hand out of Devane’s pajama pants, and stood up. She took her time shrugging on a red silk kimono. Hervé Léger, Gina guessed. What was it with Russian girls and Hervé Léger? The girl walked into the cabin, taking her time.

  “She called you what you think she called you,” Devane said, “but an even nastier version of it. Leave it to the Russians, how many different versions of it they have.”

  “So who are you, anyway?” Gina said. She was genuinely curious, how a douche bag like Devane had ended up dealing stolen antiquities.

  He smiled again. “You’re thinking I look like a spoiled rich kid.”

  “Educate me.”

  �
�I was a spoiled rich kid. You should have seen me in high school. I got kicked out of three different high schools. Drugs and girls and—other things. The last time, senior year, Dear Old Dad thought a change of scenery would behoove me. So he sent me to live with a college chum of his in Paris. A professor at the Sorbonne who, interestingly, had a town house in the Marais that no professor should have been able to afford. Imagine that.”

  “Dad’s college chum was a dealer in black-market antiquities. You learned the business from him.”

  “Learned it? I took it. Tout le kit. The old fart didn’t know what he had, the potential. He didn’t have the stomach to make real money. He did look the part, you would have liked that. The tweed jacket, the pipe. But not my style.”

  Gina didn’t need to ask what had happened to the old fart. She suddenly wanted this conversation to be over.

  “Mr. Ziegler would like to examine the merchandise you have for sale,” she said.

  Devane’s smile shifted just a little. “Ziegler? That’s the mute’s name you work for?”

  “He loves it when you call him that.”

  “Roland Ziegler?”

  “Does tomorrow work?”

  “Roland Ziegler.”

  “At a time and place of your choosing, of course.”

  “I heard Ziegler got locked up again.”

  “He did.” She smiled. He studied her. “You’ve got the number I called you from,” Gina said. “If you want to pursue this opportunity, let me know.”

  She turned to go.

  “Wait,” Devane said.

  “What?”

  “You better not play with me,” Devane said. “I know all the plays.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Gina said.

  SHAKE TRIED CALLING GINA BUT she didn’t answer. He and Quinn ate lunch at a little restaurant on a hill overlooking the city. Shake counted two dozen minarets before he stopped.

  Hummus, two different kinds of kebabs, french fries. Some kind of glop made from beans, onions, tomatoes, and chickpeas. Not bad, but come on. Shake promised himself that the next time he got tangled up in a hopelessly tangled scheme, he would do it in Italy, or maybe Thailand.