The Cairo Affair

by Olen Steinhauer

  Jibril smiled. “Good man.” Then, despite the apology, he opened up further, but not about the mystery of his trek into the desert. He asked about John’s family, and once he’d heard a few sketchy details that did not include the divorce, Jibril talked mistily about his wife, Inaya, whom he’d met in Baltimore. Her family had been Berbers, he told John, “a hard people.” She was seven months pregnant with their first child, a boy.

  This really was too much. Jibril Aziz was throwing security to the wind, as if preparing to die.

  By then, the sun was flickering on and off against the horizon, and when it disappeared they saw a yellow Toyota pickup stopped up ahead on the opposite lane. Around it stood five men, all of them toting rifles, with green bandannas around their skulls. Green. As John slowed the Peugeot, the men wandered into their lane, raising rifles high. John stopped less than a hundred yards away.

  “What do you think?” Jibril asked.

  “I told you not to take this road.”

  “Shit.”

  Two of the men stepped forward, waving them closer, smiling to show how friendly they were. One was shouting something. “What’s he saying?” John asked.

  “Oil for Libyans.”

  “Can’t they see our Egyptian plates?”

  “Yeah. I think they can.”

  John scanned the desert, not liking what he saw. The patch of sand around them wasn’t solid enough to trust with the car, and if they got stuck they were finished. It was an ideal spot to corner someone. “We have to go forward, or back.”

  “Can we plow through them?”

  It was a shockingly naive thing for an Agency man to say, but John controlled his surprise as, up ahead, the man who’d been shouting placed his rifle on the road and started walking toward them. “We can’t risk it,” John explained slowly. “If they blow a tire, we’re dead.”

  “Don’t tell me we have to go back.”

  “You’ve got the Kalashnikov.”

  Jibril raised it from between his legs.

  “Can you shoot well?” John asked.

  “Well enough.”

  “I trained as a sniper,” he said, letting his own security slip. But Jibril did nothing—he simply held on to the Kalashnikov. “Well, then,” said John. “Go to it.”

  The man in the green bandanna was close enough that they could read his eyes, which were full of smiles and welcome. His skin was tough and prune-dark. Jibril got out of the car and stood behind the open door for protection and translated for John: “He says they ran out of gas.”

  “Tell him we don’t have enough. Tell him we’ll send someone for them.”

  “He’ll just ask for a lift.”

  “Then kill him.”

  The man raised his hands to show how empty they were, then continued talking. Jibril spoke briefly, and the man smiled, pointing at their car as he talked. John understood enough—he wanted a ride.

  “What I said, Jibril. Shoot him now.”

  Jibril lifted the rifle to his hip, pointing it around the side of the door at the stranger, and said something John could barely hear over the rising wind whistling through the car. The man stopped, his smile faltering. A little more conversation, then the man shrugged elaborately, turned around, and walked back to his friends. Jibril got back into the car and closed the door.

  “Well?”

  “He says he understands. Lawless roads and all that. He thanks us for sending someone back to help them.”

  “And you believe him?”

  Jibril hesitated. “If I’d shot him, we’d be in a war. We’ve only got one gun.”

  Just before reaching his friends, the man turned toward them again and raised a fist in the air, shouting proudly.

  “Tell me,” John said, though he recognized the slogan.

  “He says, God, Muammar, Libya—nothing but!”

  “Give me that rifle, will you?”

  Jibril stared a moment, then shifted his knees to pass over the Kalashnikov. John took it and got out, the chill wind buffeting him. One of the other men shouted something, waving his own rifle like an old Hollywood Comanche. Again, John didn’t need a translation. He walked around the back of the car and climbed onto the hot, filthy trunk. He lay so that his stomach was pressed against the rear windshield and his elbows were on the roof. As he took aim, trying to gauge wind resistance, he saw how fast the darkness was falling, which didn’t make him feel any better.

  Someone shouted something, and the men scattered. Two to the right, two to the left, jumping behind their truck. John fired once, knocking down the man who had come to talk to them as he bent to retrieve his gun. The man rolled into the sandy road and didn’t get up again.

  Bursts of automatic gunfire filled the whistling air, and he took aim at the Toyota and waited. Two bullets pinged off the Peugeot. One of the men stood up from behind the truck to fire. Though John aimed for the head, the shot entered the man’s chest before he disappeared behind the truck.

  John saw sparks of muzzle-flash beneath the truck, then heard the Peugeot’s windshield crack, but couldn’t get a bead on the shooter. So he swiveled his sight to the other side of the road, where a gunman had settled in a ditch. He waited. This time he hit the head he aimed for, a flash of red and pink.

  He took a moment to refocus in the fading light. There were only two of them now. One under the truck, the other hiding behind a lump in the sand. “Jibril,” he called as calmly as he could manage, for his nerves were shot through, and he had to hold back screaming everything that came out of him. “Jibril, tell them to walk out into the desert and we won’t kill them.” Jibril didn’t answer. “Hey!” John called. “You hear me?”

  There was a flash in the desert, then another ping against the car. He aimed at the spot. One more muzzle-flash, but the man didn’t rise to aim. He was just there to distract. John turned back to the truck where, beside the rear wheel, there was movement in the shadows—a rifle, then a body snaking out to get a better shot. A head wrapped in green fabric appeared, and he shot twice. The movement ceased. John turned back to the lump of sand and shouted, “Do you speak English?”

  He got two shots in reply.

  “English?”

  “Fuck you English!”

  “Everyone is dead!” John shouted, trying to enunciate clearly. “If you want to live, drop your gun and walk away! Do you understand?”

  The man made no sign that he understood a thing, but he didn’t fire, either. John slid off the car on the passenger’s side, opened the door for protection, and saw that Jibril was still in his seat, eyes open above a black pit where his nose should have been. His shirt was soaked through and his lap was full of blood. He was staring at the blood-speckled windshield, directly at the small hole in the glass that had materialized an instant before his death.

  John closed the passenger door, walked around the rear of the car to his door, then sat behind the wheel. Despite a couple of holes in the hood, the car started without trouble. He put it in reverse and backed away until the Toyota was only a twinkle in the darkness, then turned the car around. He lugged Jibril’s body to the trunk, wrapped in some old blankets. Settling him in that small space, folding his knees to his chin, John wasn’t sure he was going to be able to do it. He thought he might be sick. But he managed the chore, aching arms trembling, slammed the trunk, then drove back to where they had come from.

  He got no phone signal in Al `Adam, so he continued north toward the coast, the only lights coming from drivers heading back out into the desert. It was well after ten when he reached the low, dry outskirts of Tubruq, and he pulled onto the cracked earth on the side of the road and called Washington. While his direct superiors, Stan and Harry, were in Cairo, Cy Gallagher in the D.C. headquarters of Global Security outranked everyone because he had hired John, he signed his checks, and he was the only person John could assume was looking out for his interests. “You let him go through the desert?” Cy asked.

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  �
��Jesus, we don’t need these kinds of fuckups. Do you know how many contracts are up for review?”

  “Just tell me what to do with the body.”

  “You’ve still got it?”

  “Won’t they want it?”

  Cy paused. “Let me ask. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, get yourself back to Cairo.”

  “With a corpse.”

  “Right. Okay. I’ll call you back.”

  John closed his eyes, and as the cold quickly seeped into the car he tried to put the afternoon out of his mind, but that was impossible. He’d known people who could do that, could silence their heads and zero out, find Zen in the middle of war zones, but he was stuck with the endless internal chatter, most of it not worth listening to, and from the jumble of words came lines of verse half-forgotten:

  In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,

  To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

  Among whispers

  He pressed his dirty fingers into his eye sockets, but couldn’t remember what that was from. So familiar, yet his mind had gone blank. Some long-dead poet.

  After ten minutes, Cy called to ask his coordinates and told him to wait. John waited for a while, then got out and walked to the trunk. He held his breath as he searched Jibril’s pockets, coming up with a passport, phone, and wallet, but no keys. His clothes, John noticed, had no tags on them. He brought the items back to the front and switched on the interior lamp. The wallet was filled with cash in a variety of denominations, but empty of credit cards or anything that used a name. The passport, as he had seen at the border, was Libyan, and the name inside it was Akram Haddad. It was full of stamps and visas, a long record of travels through North Africa and the Middle East up to 2005, and then one more stamp from today. John pocketed the cash, took the battery out of the cell phone, then placed the wallet and passport and phone in the glove compartment. That was when he noticed the leather book that Jibril had picked up in Al `Adam.

  He took it out and opened it. Names, just as Jibril had said, but they were all in Arabic script, handwritten. Names with addresses and phone numbers and notations that he couldn’t decipher, many of the pages X’d over—these, perhaps, were contacts who hadn’t survived Jibril’s mistake six years ago. He extinguished the interior lamp and gazed off to the right, where the nighttime desert lay. Just a matter of walking out there and setting it on fire, and a part of him wanted to do this for the dead man. Another part didn’t want to, and this was the part that said, How are you going to light a fire? For he didn’t smoke, and he had stupidly brought no lighter with him into the desert.

  So he put it back and closed the glove compartment, thinking that he would burn it in Cairo, while the disloyal part of him knew that he wouldn’t.

  Nearly an hour later, a filthy, tarp-covered truck parked in front of his Peugeot, and a small man with a fat mustache got out, asking in English after Akram Haddad. “Well, you can see for yourself,” John told him as he walked to the trunk and opened it. The man sighed loudly. Together, they moved the body to the truck, where a large Persian rug was waiting. They rolled him up. Then the man smiled and opened his hand. John reached to shake it, but the man waved an index finger. “Payment, yes?”

  “No one told me about that.”

  “They tell me you pay three hundred euros.”

  That came to about five hundred Libyan dinar, and he paid in a mix of currencies from Jibril’s stash—dinar, dollar, and euro. Only after the payment was completed did the man shake his hand.

  “Congratulations on the new Libya,” John told him, but the man was already walking away.

  3

  It was a little before ten on Friday morning when he parked in Heliopolis, in the northeast of the city. He considered himself lucky to have gotten the car, with its holes and the bloodstains he’d wiped at and covered with a towel, all the way to Cairo, but he didn’t imagine his luck would hold out forever, so he found a spot free of police on a narrow side street northwest of Othman Ibn Afan. He took a photo of the Arabic street sign with his phone and brought Jibril’s things on the epic bus trip down to the Nile Road, a hot ride that grew more cramped and rancid as the buildings closed in, a weary urban claustrophobia taking hold. Cities the world over share a tendency toward chaos, and Cairo was no different, the bus surprised at every turn by traffic jams and collisions and surly street vendors who didn’t want to push their carts out of the way. The bus driver spent half his time hanging out of the window, waving and shouting at people who wouldn’t conform to his rules of the road.

  A boy standing too close to his hip stared up at him, smiling. A pair of women, one in a hijab, the other’s face hidden in a niqab, sat behind two men loudly arguing with hands and flexed fingers. He knew he smelled bad, and whenever women passed, glancing his way, he averted his eyes, ashamed.

  Finally, they made it to the Nile Road, and John walked the rest of the way, muscles stiff and brain preparing to shut down from fatigue. From the arid desert he’d returned to the land of smells: roasting meats, car exhaust, spices, and sweat. He finally reached the quay, where the claustrophobia evaporated along the banks of the great river. He hurried past the stone lions, speckled with graffiti, that flanked the entrance to the low Qasr Al Nile Bridge that stretched across the Nile to Gezira Island. This had been one of the flash points of the revolution—black-uniformed Central Security conscripts had gradually lost a battle against the press of thousands trying to reach Tahrir Square, and, once the protesters had broken through, the security forces had scattered, running for their lives. While there were still burn marks on the sidewalk from flaming vehicles, the bridge was calm, lined with old men propped against the green steel railings with fishing poles. Once he reached Gezira Island he caught a bus north, deeper into Zamalek. It was nearly one o’clock by the time he made it to his third-story walkup on Ismail Mohamed, a leafy street of terraced apartments, cafés, and small hotels. Climbing the stairs, he felt as if he, too, had been killed in the desert.

  It was a small apartment, partly because he lived alone and partly because he couldn’t afford anything bigger in upscale Zamalek. And he was in Zamalek because, beyond a few phrases for waiters and taxi drivers, his Arabic was a joke, and Zamalek was where the illiterate expats could hide safely away from the realities of North Africa.

  The first thing he did was put away Jibril’s things. The passport and wallet went into a large Saiidi tea tin in his awkwardly narrow kitchen. The leather-bound book wouldn’t fit, but he managed to squeeze it into an unused cookie jar on top of the refrigerator. He was too exhausted to brew up coffee, so instead he opened a bottle of Glenlivet and poured three fingers into a dusty glass. He brought it to the couch, took a sip, then dialed the familiar number on his cell. After two rings, Nancy, the pool secretary, told him that Harry Wolcott was unavailable. “But Stan’s around,” she said.

  “Please.”

  Stan Bertolli picked up with a “John, you back already?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll see you today?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re just checking in?”

  “That’s right,” he said, then gulped down more whisky.

  “Everything okay?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’ll need to sleep it off. Just tell Harry that it didn’t work. Please.”

  “It,” Stan said with a touch of mystery. Harry had assured John that all Stan knew was that he would be out of town for a few days.

  “I’ll file my report for him Monday. If he wants it sooner, I can come in tomorrow.”

  “I’ll let him know,” Stan said, “but he’s a little backed up today. We got some shit news from Budapest.”

  “Budapest?”

  “Emmett Kohl was shot dead in a restaurant. He used to work out of here, from the consul’s office. We’re all looking into it.”

  “My condolences.”

  After hanging up, he refilled his glass. He considered checking the news for this Ko
hl character, but couldn’t quite manage it. What he needed was a shower, but that felt so unlikely that he brought the bottle back to the sofa and kept drinking, then woke six hours later to darkness and the sound of banging.

  Before waking, he was in Alexandria, climbing out of a car that he’d pulled to the side of El Geish Road, running alongside the Mediterranean. The car, a twenty-year-old Toyota Tercel, was painted black, and in the trunk, he knew, was Jibril. Parked in front of him was a white Egyptian police van with flashing lights. Two cops were getting out, holding their batons in front of themselves, smiling at John. To his right, the water was choppy from heavy wind, and the air was wet with surf. The police spoke to him in Arabic, and when he answered in English one of them struck his shoulder with a baton; it hurt. “Okay,” he told them, gripping the shoulder, “I’ll show you.” He walked ahead of them to the trunk and opened it, but instead of Jibril he found Ray and Kelli, aged six and eight, folded tight into the small space. This wasn’t right. He slammed the trunk shut as the policemen arrived, then waved them away. “Not here,” he said. The one who’d struck him pushed John back so that he nearly stumbled into the road as a car sped past, while the other opened the trunk and shouted angrily. He thought that he should run, then realized he’d never make it across the busy road, so he approached their hunched backs as they reached inside and took a long, manicured hand that was connected to his ex-wife, Danisha. She was smiling as she climbed out, looking much like she had when Ray and Kelli had been babies; she looked stunning. She said, “John, I’m so tired,” but she said it as if it meant something wonderful.

  “Come on,” said another voice, and John turned to find a clean and still-breathing Jibril behind him, reaching for his hand, beckoning him into the traffic. “First one across gets to go.”

  “Go where?”

  Jibril, with a smile on his face, was already running.

  He sat up, trying to orient himself in the stuffy darkness. It was evening. His cheek and the arm of the sofa were wet from saliva. His stomach cramped, gushing acid into his throat. When the banging started again, he heard a voice, too: “Wake the fuck up, John.”