by J. S. Cook
I felt sick. Sam would come looking for his wife, and when he did, Mukbar and Aaltonen would be waiting for him. Yeah, there was still plenty of room in here for one more. They’d wall us up in here together and let us bide our time until the air ran out. They were a nice bunch, Octavian’s guys, real loyal to one another.
There was a commotion outside, and then the sound of something scraping against the stone. The thin beam of a flashlight stabbed the darkness, and I instinctively covered my eyes. “Mr. Stoyles, how fortunate that you are still alive. We were worried you would not be able to receive your visitor.” Mukbar: I’d recognize that voice anywhere. “In you go, Captain Halim. Mr. Stoyles is waiting for you. I am sure the two of you have plenty to talk about.”
“Sam—” I reached for him, caught him as he fell. “Sam, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened but I wish to God I could have stopped it.”
The door was closed, and I heard the grating noise as the key was turned in the lock. We were plunged into absolute darkness. Sam felt for my hand and held on. “Well, if we wanted a quiet place where we could be alone, our wish has certainly been granted, don’t you think?” His voice was calm and faintly amused; this was the Sam I knew.
“Sam, there’s something you should know.” How in God’s name could I tell him something like this? “We aren’t alone in here.”
“Not alone.” There was a long pause, and when Sam spoke again, some of the vigor had gone out of his voice. “They have brought my—Tareenah is here, isn’t she?”
I guided his hand to where the body lay supine against the wall. “Yeah, Sam. She’s here.”
He was silent then, and for a long time afterward, we sat there in the dark, not saying anything. Maybe an hour passed before he spoke. “The first time I ever saw her was in a graduate seminar on Semitic languages. She sat to one side of the room, taking copious notes, writing very rapidly.”
“Sam, you don’t have to….”
“I wondered what she could have been writing, that she wrote so quickly. I began to suspect what she was writing had nothing to do with the seminar.” He was smiling, I was sure of it. “When the professor invited the students to expound upon the material presented, Tareenah raised her hand. She recited a summary in perfect Aramaic.”
An invisible hand closed around my heart, squeezing painfully. “Octavian’s boys did this to her, Sam. They probably snatched her from the police station.” I told him how I’d woken up to find Mukbar in my room. “Now that Octavian’s dead, they’re doing a little tidying up. I guess the three of us are just loose ends to them.”
“Yes. That is all we are, Jack: loose ends.” His voice broke, and I pulled him into my arms and held on to him while he cried, his body heaving with a grief I could not hope to reach or mediate.
I guess I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, there was a light in my face and somebody was shaking me by the arm.
“Lieutenant Stoyles.” Kevin MacBride leaned down and looked into my face. “It’s all right. You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
I blinked at him. My head was aching and everything felt wrong, like the world had shifted on its axis. “What time is it? How long have I been here?” I watched two men lift a shrouded bundle up into the light: Tareenah Halim.
“It’s morning.” MacBride’s voice was very gentle. “One of our operatives advised us when Captain Halim was abducted from his office. We’ve been following you ever since.”
“How long—” I cleared my throat and tried again. “How long have we been here?”
MacBride glanced across at Sam. “You’ve been here for a day.”
HER BODY was conveyed through the streets of Cairo on a flower-strewn funerary bier, Sam on one side and his oldest son on the other. I kept a respectable pace behind, walking with Ibrahim Samir. The midday sun beat down cruelly on my uncovered head, and I was sweating ferociously. Sam was in full uniform, standing erect under the weight of his grief. He walked slowly, with measured steps, one hand on the bier, his gaze fixed straight ahead. I don’t know what he was thinking—we hadn’t had a chance to speak since Kevin MacBride’s men had taken us out of that hole in the desert—but I was betting it had nothing to do with me. Watching him, standing straight and tall beside his wife’s dead body, I felt like more of an outsider than ever. I didn’t belong here. I would never belong here. I had come here to find Sam, and now that I had found him, that part of it was over. The best thing for me to do—the only thing for me to do—was to go home, back to Newfoundland, to Chris and my Heartache Cafe. I’d already spoken to MacBride about travel arrangements, and he’d gotten me a seat on a military transport heading for Newfoundland the day after tomorrow. All that was left was to pack my things and say my good-byes to Egypt.
The procession stopped at a pretty little cemetery not far from the Muski bazaar, and Sam and the other mourners moved to lift Tareenah’s body from the bier. Islamic custom dictated that three balls of earth be placed under the corpse by the next of kin: one under the head, one under the chin, and one under the shoulder. Before Tareenah was buried Sam, Ibrahim Samir, and a man I knew only as Sam’s cousin Iqbal, stood together and poured three handfuls of dirt into the open grave, reciting a verse from the Koran. Sam looked stricken and physically sick, and I saw Ibrahim Samir lay a hand on his shoulder as they moved to lower the corpse into the grave. There was no loud wailing, no rending of people’s clothes—in fact, nobody uttered a sound—but it felt like something had been drained away, something that could never be regained.
My face felt hot and my eyes were burning, and I tried to hold myself together but I couldn’t do it, and before I knew what was happening, I was crying, bending forward from the waist, my hands over my eyes. I thought about Judy’s death, ages ago in Philadelphia, lying on a bloodied operating table with her legs in stirrups, staring at the ceiling. I thought about my father, killed when I was just a kid, crushed under a runaway locomotive at the navy yard in south Philly, and the guys who came to our house that afternoon to tell my mother. Yeah, I thought about Tareenah Halim, out there in the desert, dead and waiting to be buried, and I hated that I was being so goddamn selfish, and I hated that I couldn’t stop crying, and I hated that she had to be dead. None of it made any sense, and what was the point of trying to make things better anyway, if it all just came to this, to dust and ashes?
Someone’s arm went around my shoulders, and I was crushed against a hard, lean body wearing a police uniform. Ibrahim Samir pressed his cheek to mine, and his face was wet with tears. “Your grief is most acceptable, Jack. It honors the deceased to weep for her. It honors us all.” He drew me toward the grave, where he bent and gathered up a handful of earth, which he pressed into my palm. “We finish the grave together, taking care as we work that we are ever mindful of our own mortality.” He knelt and drew me down beside him. “Come. We will work together, you and I.”
It took under an hour to fill the hole, to mound up the dirt and pat it smooth. The mourners were returning to Sam’s house where his mother-in-law was waiting with the younger children; I understood various distant relatives and members of the community would arrive to offer their condolences. I started back toward the cemetery gate, my hands still grimy with grave dust, but once again Ibrahim Samir came to me. “Please accompany me to Captain Halim’s house. You are most welcome.”
“I don’t want to intrude.” I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Ibrahim, the best thing for me to do is to go back to the hotel. I’ll be leaving for home in a day or so. I should probably start packing.”
His dark eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue and sorrow. Samir was Sam’s friend as well as his subordinate; he loved Sam as much as I did. “Please. Captain Halim would want you to be there.”
I tried to demur but he was relentless. In the end, I agreed to share a cab with Samir. We sat together in the back seat, and he held my hand between both of his. I watched the Cairo landmarks slip by for what would probably be the last time. “I never
did tell you about Pasha Nubar.” Samir’s hand tightened on mine. “He was killed by a local who had been hired for that purpose, the son of a jeweler in the native quarter.”
“Who hired him? And why Pasha Nubar?”
“We are reasonably certain he was hired by the man who calls himself Mukbar—a career blackmailer we have had our eyes upon for some time. Pasha Nubar was killed because he was about to give you information.” He smiled. “You have probably already learned that information is a valuable commodity in Cairo.”
“You arrested him?”
“Yes. The same day I arrested you, as a matter of fact. Sadly, he did not survive.”
My skin prickled. “What do you mean, he didn’t survive?”
Samir turned to look out the side window of the cab. “He killed himself in jail. He has been buried in the police cemetery.”
“His father didn’t claim the body?”
“No. No one wanted him. It is usually the way.” Samir shrugged. “Mukbar and his associate, the Finn, are in custody. We expect a swift… resolution to the case.”
“Mm.” I knew what he meant. Mukbar and Errki Aaltonen would be kicking their heels at the end of a rope before too long. I didn’t have it in me to care too much. As far as I was concerned, the world could rotate quite nicely without guys like Aaltonen and Mukbar. “So that’s the end of it.”
Samir shrugged. “A little police work, a few piasters dropped into the right palms, and we found them. Mukbar was already known to us. He has rather an illustrious reputation as a blackmailer of some note.”
“Sam was right about one thing, Ibrahim.”
“Oh?”
I squeezed his hand gently. “You’re a good cop.”
Sam’s house was full of people, all of them strangers to me. His mother-in-law—an older version of Tareenah—came bustling toward Samir and me, offering the traditional greeting and herding us toward the food. I suppose you could say death is a hungry business or maybe it was my body’s way of reaffirming that I was alive, because I was starving. I excused myself and went to the bathroom to wash up. I should have knocked because when I opened the door Sam was in there, sitting on the edge of the bath with his head in his hands. It didn’t take too much imagination to figure out he’d been crying. He looked up, and I turned to go, mumbling an apology.
“Jack.” He stood up and straightened his uniform tunic, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “I wanted to say—”
“Sam, you don’t have to say anything.” There were so many things I wanted to tell him, and it was all pressing against the back of my throat like unshed tears. “I should tell you….” Goddammit, I wanted to rush to him and fold him in my arms and hold on to him until the pain stopped, until we could both breathe again—but I didn’t have that right and I didn’t know if I ever would.
He nodded. “You are leaving.”
“Yeah.” It was me saying the words, but I wasn’t really hearing myself, and I didn’t quite understand what was going on. My mind was full of a roaring pain that sounded like the sea does when a cold nor’easter is blowing full onshore.
“I suppose that is for the best.” He made no move to touch me. I couldn’t blame him.
“Yeah, I suppose so.” I was going to bawl; I could feel it. “Sam, you once said—”
“Thank you.” He took my hand. “For everything.” The expression in his eyes, the sorrow he wore like a mask, these things told me what he could not say in words. It was over. Whatever we’d had, whatever we’d figured we were doing, was done. He didn’t have to tell me; I already knew.
“I guess maybe we should… what I mean is, uh—” My throat closed, and I turned away. “Good-bye, Sam.” By the time I got to the front door, I couldn’t see a goddamn thing.
I SPENT the next day packing up my stuff, what was left of it after the hotel room exploded, and getting my affairs in order. I sent a wire to Chris, advising him I’d be home. My flight didn’t leave right away, so I lay down on the bed for a while and tried to nap, but all I could think about was the time Sam and I had made love in this room and held each other, and spent the night sleeping in each other’s arms. I thought about going downstairs to the bar, but tried to put it off as long as I could. Crawling inside a bottle wouldn’t solve a goddamn thing. This just hurt so much, a pain so deep I hardly knew what to do with it. I found myself wondering if maybe I’d have been better off if Sam and I had never met. Would that have made a difference? What if Sam, looking for directions, had walked into some other cafe that day on Water Street, or what if his map had shown exactly where he needed to be? Would I be happier? Would he? Sam. I’m so glad. You know, I didn’t think… I didn’t think we’d ever get here. Like this. But we had, and it was obviously over. I couldn’t honestly expect Sam to be with me in the way I wanted, not after everything that had happened. Tareenah’s betrayal and her death had taken something out of him, and he would never be the same. Maybe we could be together later on, once the pain had lessened and he could imagine himself living in the world again.
Yeah. Maybe that would happen.
The telephone by my bed rang, and I reached out automatically to pick it up. It was the desk clerk, advising me I had a visitor. I wasn’t in the mood to see anybody, but a tiny part of my mind—the part that still held out hope, regardless—said it might be Sam, so I told them to send him up.
“Lieutenant Stoyles?” Kevin MacBride’s tall form filled the doorway; the big Greek, Andros Scala, was just behind him. I invited them both in. “I wonder if you’ve given any further thought to our proposition.” MacBride looked tired, as though he hadn’t been getting enough sleep lately. Scala looked the same as always: composed and steady, a human colossus with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen.
“Look, Captain, I’m leaving tomorrow morning, as you know. I’d prefer to put this whole thing behind me.”
“The news about Captain Halim’s wife is tragic.” Scala inclined his head. “I offer my condolences.”
“Why?” Something in me snapped, something I’d been holding in check for a long time. “You said yourselves you didn’t trust her, and now that it’s all come out, why should you care? What’s it to you?”
“Our sympathies are with Captain Halim.” MacBride nodded toward my suitcase, lying open on the floor. “And with you. I understand Captain Halim is your special friend. I’m truly sorry all this has happened.”
I sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette. “Yeah. War is hell.”
MacBride and Scala exchanged a look. Scala came to sit beside me. “You could be of immeasurable help to us when you return to your island.”
“I’m not in the market for whatever it is you’re selling—heroism, martyrdom—you can keep it.” He had some nerve, asking me this. What the hell were they playing at? “I’m not interested.”
Scala nodded. “This is a particular pain you are feeling. Doubtless some would tell you it will fade in time. I do not believe such usual wisdom.”
MacBride pretended to gaze out the window, his hands in the pockets of his olive-drab trousers. There was something painful and set in his profile; he seemed to be keeping himself forcibly in check.
“Yeah?” I drew savagely on my cigarette. “You’re the only one.”
Scala turned so he was looking directly at me. “Early in the war, before the Germans invaded and ravaged my country, I was a happy married man. I had a lovely wife, three beautiful young daughters, and the keeping of my father’s olive plantation.”
MacBride made a tiny sound and turned away from the window.
“The day the Germans marched into my village, I was away, selling our oil in the city. They went up to where my house was on the side of the mountain, killed my parents and butchered their bodies, and hung them from the rafters of their home by the ankles. They raped and killed my three sisters and set fire to the bodies—”
Jesus Christ.
“My wife, they also raped, and my three daughters, who were three, five and seven years old.�
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MacBride sat at the table in my hotel room, as unmoving as a statue. His clenched hands lay on the tabletop, knuckles showing white against the skin. I didn’t understand how Scala could speak of this and stay so calm, as if it had happened to someone else, someone he didn’t even know.
“The Germans hung my children on the front of my house for me to see when I returned from the market that day.”
MacBride finally spoke. “When it got dark, Andros, his brother-in-law, and several men went down into the village to find the Germans who had done this.” He wasn’t looking at Scala or at me; his gaze remained fixed on the table and on his own clenched fists. “It took thirty minutes to kill them all. When it was over, the restaurant where they had been eating and drinking was awash with their blood.”
My stomach contracted, and I thought I was going to be sick. “Look, I understand… and I’m sorry. But Captain Halim and I, we—”
“Captain Halim is your special friend… your very best friend in all the world, yes?” Scala’s huge hand rested on my shoulder like the paw of a friendly bear.
He could see inside me, I thought, and he knew everything. There was no point hiding from a man like this. “I… Captain Halim and I… it isn’t merely friendship, it’s not like that. You wouldn’t understand.”