Arab

by Jim Ingraham

  “So why are the police asking questions about you?”

  “It’s nothing to worry about. I’m not in any kind of trouble. They investigate everyone who comes into contact with the children of high officials.”

  “But you take chances, Bashir. You are too ambitious. You must be careful. I worry about you.”

  Somewhere in the depths of his mind, he suspected that he loved Umm Sayid. If so, she was the only woman except Aleyya he felt that way about. She had taken him in when Aleyya had asked her to, and she had never asked for money.

  “So what brings you here?”

  “Just in the neighborhood,” Bashir said.

  “No, really. Why are you here? I can tell. There’s something wrong, something on your mind.” She slatted water off her hands, turned and confronted him. “What is it, Bashir?”

  “Just something I wanted Aleyya to do for me.”

  Umm Sayid looked concerned. “What is this about?”

  “Nothing,” Bashir said. “I have a friend. It’s her birthday. I wanted Aleyya to recommend something.”

  “And you came here? You didn’t try her shop? She’s never home this time of day. You know that.”

  It stopped him. Why had he come here? Why hadn’t he gone to the store? She could be there. She probably was there. “I forgot,” he said.

  She visually questioned him. “Then it’s nothing,” she said angrily. “If this is one of your jokes—”

  “I’m sorry,” Bashir said. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s this new opportunity. It’s making me jumpy.”

  She pushed him aside, still annoyed. “You’re crazy,” she said, crossing the room.

  “I’m sorry, really.”

  “Get out of here,” she said, angry because he had frightened her and was not being honest with her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll find her at the store.”

  He smiled and threw her a kiss and went downstairs checking his watch. It was nearing noon. The presence of Umm Sayid had helped him. Although he had lived in her apartment for only a few months, she had become more a mother to him than the woman who had abandoned him in Gaza.

  Walking past heaps of rubble, smelling the sour odors of sewage, Bashir felt a sympathy for Umm Sayid’s wish to stay in this neighborhood. Her friends were here. She had status among them. She read tea leaves for them. They respected her.

  But why had he come here? It wasn’t to see Aleyya. Was it to see Umm Sayid? He didn’t know what it was. He was tired. He needed sleep. Despite the poverty and the clutter, he always felt safe in this apartment. No other place on earth seemed more like home to him.

  As he walked toward his car, he noticed Aleyya’s friend Sakeena Mahfouz waving from an upstairs window. She was nice. He liked her. She would probably make a good wife. But he wasn’t ready for that.

  He didn’t know what to do. He got into his car and started the engine and drove toward the heart of the city. He parked on the sidewalk of a narrow street near Maydan at-Tahrir. He stepped out of his car and worked his way through a crowd of women in front of a clothing store. Way up the sidewalk he saw Aleyya being forced into a police car by two uniformed women. He flattened his back against the doorframe of the shop and watched Aleyya struggle with the women and finally duck into the police car. He watched the car move slowly down the street toward the square.

  He ran to the shop where she worked. The white-haired gnomish Ismat Haqqi looked up at him from a box he was picking through.

  “She’s not here,” he said.

  “What happened? Why the police…?”

  His small shoulders twitched in a shrug. “Who knows?”

  “What did they say?”

  “‘Come with us’ is all I heard.”

  Long gray hairs from the edges of his bald scalp swung across his mouth as he shook his head and lowered his face over what he was working on. He picked at his lips. “Two women, police, I suppose—brought her into that corner,” pointing a bony finger. “They talked and then they left.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Nothing to me.”

  Bashir returned to the sidewalk, stared down the street, then walked slowly to his car. It had to be about him. There could be no other reason for the police to question her. Someone must have told them she was his friend. Umm Sayid? Would they come for her? Had someone told them he had just visited her?

  He was sickened by the thought of Umm Sayid and Aleyya getting into trouble because of him.

  He drove to the alley and walked cautiously toward Umm Sayid’s building. He found her upstairs washing clothes.

  “The police have taken Aleyya,” he said. “I don’t know why, but it’s because of me and they’ll come after you.”

  “What are you talking about?” She read his expression and apparently believed he was serious, but, as usual, she questioned his judgment.

  “Your sister in Suez” Bashir said. “I can take you there. Please. Please. I am not joking.”

  “Why would they come for me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what they want, but they’ll come. Please! Please!” and he tugged at her arm, water dripping off the small towel onto the floor.

  “I can’t just go like this?”

  “She’s your sister! She won’t care. Please!”

  “But I’ve done nothing wrong! Why would they want me?”

  “They took Aleyya. Why would they want her? I watched them force her into their car. They’ll come after you. They know you’re my friend. Please, we have to go!”

  She could find nothing in his expression to confirm or confute what he was saying. But he scared her. Still protesting, she allowed him to tug her out of her apartment. “I haven’t seen Aida for weeks!” she complained, rushing past a woman who was dumping water from a pail into a street drain.

  Working their way through heavy traffic, they found the road to Suez, and entered the polluted air of that industrialized city in late afternoon. They found Aida sitting on a barrel in her yard smoking a cigarette. She was smaller than Umm Sayid, eyeing her sister with surprised laughter.

  “Hey! Hey!” she said, leaping off the barrel, embracing her sister, holding her at arm’s length to look at her. She glanced over Umm Sayid’s shoulder and smiled at Bashir.

  *

  “I don’t know,” Umm Sayid said. “Is it an inconvenience?”

  “Only if he comes around,” and Aida laughed. “But I haven’t received my check yet, so not to worry. Of course you’re welcome!” She glanced at Bashir. “Can you at least stay for dinner?”

  “I have to get back. I have to find Aleyya.”

  “I have room,” she said, waving her arm at the long wall of her house.

  “I appreciate that. You’re a generous woman.”

  “You’re family, Bashir!”

  He smiled, kissed both women on the cheek and went to his car. Back in Cairo, he visited Umm Sayid’s house. Alleya was not there. A woman sweeping the hallway downstairs, said Aleyya had not been home. “But sometimes she stays with friends,” the woman said.

  “If she shows, tell her Umm Sayid is visiting her sister Aida.”

  “And where does her sister live?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bashir said.

  As he drove over long shadows on the highway north, Bashir suffered for his friend Foad and now Aleyya, both held by the police because of him. They were no longer routinely checking on a friend of Amina al-Khalid. They were looking for a man who worked for Faisal Ibrahim. If he turned himself in, they would imprison him. They would not release Foad and Aleyya. They would accuse them of aiding a criminal.

  Bile rose to his throat and he stopped the car and leaned out the opened door and threw up. A car whipped by with girls at open windows laughing and yelling “party, party!”

  He drove to a park on the river, got out of his car and sat on a wooden bench with his face in his hands, elbows digging into his thighs, breathing the fetid odors of the nearby river
.

  From early childhood he had avoided problems by devoting himself to work, to his studies, free in the belief that he would build a future that would make him immune to everyday problems. He would establish himself in a secure position and look after his family. Problems would slide into the past and the future would lie before him like a garden.

  But that had been a childish indulgence. Dreams would no longer carry him past these problems. Now there was no one to help him—not Foad, not Esmat Bindari. There was only Faisal Ibrahim, a man who didn’t play games, didn’t issue empty threats. He had no choice. He would find out what Faisal wanted. He would do whatever it was. Surely Faisal didn’t expect him to kill anyone! Faisal had friends in the police. Maybe they could help free Aleyya. What would he think of himself if he didn’t look after the only people in the world he thought of as family? It was his obligation.

  What have I done? I don’t deserve any of this. What has happened to the world? Why can’t I live my life the way I want to? What did I do wrong?

  I have to find Faisal!

  That nurse! Ailo! She will know! If Faisal’s in the city, the agency will know! Why didn’t I think of it before!

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Is it Diab?” Nick asked, crouched behind a trashcan next to Yousef in an alley outside a Nasser-era tenement on the west side of Cairo. A man had just fired a burst from a second-story window that blasted a hole in the wall behind them, leaving a stink of broken cement clouding around them.

  “I don’t know,” Yousef said, more angry than scared, his pride wounded. He hadn’t expected resistance. He had wanted to show off an easy capture.

  “You’ve never seen him?” Nick said.

  “I think I told you that,” Yousef snapped. He brushed dust off his sleeve, drew his head back from something foul-smelling in the trashcan. “I’ll go to that doorway down there. You stay here. I don’t want you hurt.” All around them sounds of the city—children yelling, dogs barking, squealing brakes, big trucks grunting.

  Earlier, when Yousef had arrived at Nick’s apartment, Nick had expected handcuffs. But Yousef was friendly. He had apparently not yet heard about Nick’s deception.

  “I want you to witness the capture,” he had said when Nick met him on the sidewalk.

  Nick’s heart sank. “Bashir Yassin?”

  “Not this time. A much bigger prize! Faisal Ibrahim.”

  “How’d you find him?” Nick said, relieved. He noticed cops in a van behind Yousef’s SUV.

  “A visiting nurse. He’s going by the name ‘Marfouz.’”

  “Who’s with him?”

  “Only a nurse, as far as we know. We haven’t seen the one they call Diab. Would you recognize him?”

  “Big is all I know,” Nick said.

  When Yousef sprinted for the door, Nick ran to the wall of the building, and inched sideways to the corner. Two men leaped off the front steps, both with rifles. Nick pulled back, looked down at his empty hands, cursed himself for not having brought at least his pistol: hadn’t had time to go back upstairs for it.

  A bearded face with startled eyes appeared at the corner. Nick grabbed a shirt and rammed the man into the building, knocking the rifle from his hand. The man’s rough palm hit Nick’s face. Nick clipped him behind the knee, dropping him to the gravel and slammed his head into the building foundation. The man sagged to the ground.

  The other one, chased by a noisy dog, was running up the street toward a distant mosque.

  Nick stepped over the fallen man and picked up the rifle. It was old, heavier than Kalashnikovs he had handled in Afghanistan, still with a wooden stock and grip, maybe a ‘49 model but more likely an old knockoff. He checked the clip. It was empty, checked the chamber. It was empty. He tossed the weapon.

  What to do? Stay here? Join Yousef? Go inside by the front? Not helping anyone staying here.

  He made it across gravel and climbed onto the front stoop, yanked the door open. Inside an empty hallway he heard footsteps coming down stairs. He found a door, opened it and stepped into a dark closet and looked squarely into the face of a man cringing against mop handles.

  Nick grabbed the man’s shirt and pulled him into his face.

  “Please!”

  “Shut up!” Nick said in Arabic. “I’m the police.”

  “I don’t belong here. I’m not with them!”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  The man was trembling. Nick released him. “How many are there?”

  “I don’t know. I just came when you…. I don’t know.”

  Enough light came from cracks around the door to allow Nick to see the contours of the face—an Arab around thirty, not the face of a hoodlum.

  “Don’t shoot me!”

  Nick covered the man’s mouth. Men’s voices erupted just outside the door. One said, “Where are they?”

  “He told us to go! We can’t help him! Come on, let’s get out of here!”

  “Where are the men I stationed here?” a gruff demand.

  “I don’t know, Diab! We have to leave! He doesn’t want us caught.”

  The closet door came open.

  “Hey! What’s this?”

  A huge man pulled Nick into the hall. Staring at the second man, who was cowering in the shadows, he laughed. “Bashir! Come out of there! What you hiding in there for?”

  Nick shoved both hands into the man’s chest. Diab bent him to his knees and stunned him with a chop to the neck. Nick fell to the floor, the large hall whirling around him, sadness enveloping him.

  “Take this outside, Farouk. Throw it in the car.”

  “It’s him!” Farouk said. “It’s the guy came to Lamine’s!”

  “Just get him out to the car. And hurry.”

  A hand at his back pushed Nick stumbling down the hall.

  *

  “Well, well, well,” Diab said, squeezed into the back seat of the green Pontiac between Nick and Bashir. The rancid odor of him was overwhelming.

  Nick, still trying to clear his head, drew back from the body wedged against him. Nausea prowled through his bowels. He had been in many fights, but never had been hit with such force.

  “Bashir Yassin. Been looking for you, Bashir.” Diab said.

  “I came to see you!”

  “And brought this cop? This the American I heard about? Came looking for me?”

  “I don’t know! I never saw him before! I don’t know him!”

  “If he’s the American, half the city knows him, Bashir! Everyone knows he’s been looking for you.”

  Obviously Diab didn’t think Nick could understand what they were saying.

  “Honest to god, Diab. I don’t know him.”

  “You hide in closets with people you don’t know?”

  “He came in!”

  “He’s CIA!”

  “I’m not with him!”

  “And you think I believe you? You just happened to be in a closet with the CIA when the cops raided us? Just bad luck, right?”

  He clamped strong fingers around Bashir’s knee. Bashir howled in pain. Nick was only half listening, struggling to clear his head, trying to figure out what to do. He couldn’t handle this giant physically and he had no weapon.

  “Where to?” Farouk asked.

  “The fruit stand. If Faisal has a friend where they take him, he’ll get word to me. I’ll tell the women where we’ll be.”

  *

  Yousef stood in the second-floor hallway outside a green door decorated with a crude painting of a palm tree, two men behind him with riot guns. As Yousef hit the door with the butt of his pistol, he became aware of a previously unnoticed odor of urine. The filth in this place disgusted him—crumpled beer cans on the floor, a torn undershirt, curls of dust and cigarette butts.

  “Break it down,” Yousef said, stepping aside. A policeman aimed his riot gun at the doorknob and blew the door open. He rushed in ahead of Yousef and fell to his elbows, legs spread as on a rifle range, his gun aimed at an open doorway. />
  A woman burst from a small bedroom, hands in the air. “Don’t shoot! My god, don’t shoot!”

  Yousef brushed past her and found Faisal Ibrahim in a rumpled bed under a sheet on his back, a wet towel on his forehead, pale arms at his sides. His flesh was gray and lifeless as though his heart no longer had the strength or the will to push blood to his skin.

  “So this,” Yousef said, “is the notorious Faisal Ibrahim, this sad bag of aging flesh. Get him off the bed,” he told the nurse.

  As though talking to himself, maybe wishing Nick were there to share this, he said to the man who stared up at him with cold indifference, “I should be elated to have ended the search. This should be a moment of triumph, but it’s not. On the record this may go as the greatest achievement of my career. But it’s an empty victory. Why am I not elated?”

  The man looked up at him with silent contempt.

  “No one else in here,” one of the policemen said, looking at Faisal almost with pity, struck no doubt by the contrast between this wasted old man and heroic images pasted on walls throughout the Arab world—a hero because he had successfully mocked and cheated the West.

  Yousef told the man to wait outside in the hallway with two men who had come down from the roof. The fourth man he sent to fetch an ambulance.

  “I can understand that you are saving your strength,” Yousef said. “But there are things….”

  It was impossible to tell whether Faisal was listening. His strength seemed devoted to breathing, and each mouth-feeding breath seemed an agony.

  “Sir?” The nurse had moved to the edge of the bed. “May I put this on his lips?” She was holding a dish and a bloom of cotton.

  “What is it?”

  “Just lubrication. His mouth is very dry.”

  “Put some on your own lips first.”

  The woman sighed but did as she was told. With mild sarcasm, she said, “Now may I?”

  When the police medic from the van came into the room, he immediately took Faisal’s wrist and looked with concern at the woman. “How long has he had this arythmia?”

  “More than a week,” she said.

  “Medication?”

  “A doctor gave him something. It hasn’t helped.”