by kc dyer
According to a handsome young man I meet who claims to be the harbor master, the canal sees an average of more than forty ships pass along its 120-mile length every day. Of course, this same handsome young man insists he is in search of an American wife, so I’m inclined to take anything he says with a pinch of salty canal water.
You’d think that with that kind of traffic, hitching a ride would be a piece of cake. Yet, over the course of the day, I’m refused passage on an oil tanker and two smaller passenger vessels. The single travel agency I find that has an employee who speaks English is baffled by my request and keeps trying to book me onto cruise ships. When I suggest traveling across the Arabian Peninsula, the woman laughs, and apparently Yemen is even worse.
Sometime in the afternoon, exhausted by the heat and the discouragement, I buy a lamb shawarma from a street vendor. It is greasy and delicious in the moment, but leaves me with a kind of sinking sensation in my gut afterwards. So about on par with the rest of my day. By nine that night, I’ve managed to find exactly zero ways to move forward.
The only success I experience the entire day, apart from being sprung from custody, is finding a tiny villa to spend the night. I can’t even take credit for finding it, as the English-speaking clerk at the travel agency slid a card for the place across her desk to me, when it became obvious that I was going to be stuck here for life.
The card, luckily, has a tiny fragment of map on the back. It doesn’t look too far from the main street, so I follow the directions, and circle into the marketplace, which is where I find the Resta Ramal. It’s an old sand-colored building laden with intricate cast-iron balconies, and is tucked around the corner from what looks—and smells—like a hookah bar. As I walk in the front door, I’m greeted by the proprietress, who introduces herself as Madame Nephthys.
She is dressed in a red, high-necked tunic and brown trousers, and her hair is covered with a scarf in matching colors of red and brown. Both wrists are loaded with jingling bangles, and she is wearing several gold necklaces of varying lengths, each bearing heavy medallions. Even with what are clearly at least three-inch wedges, she still tops out under five feet tall.
I show her the card from the travel agent. “She called,” Madame says kindly. “I expect you. Tell me what you need, yes?”
I manage to give her the short version of my story without crying. An accomplishment I’m proud of, I have to say.
Within minutes, Madame has me seated at a tiny table outside a beaded curtain that leads, I think, to a kitchen. At the sight of my ExLibris credit card, she winks both eyes at me, and reappears with a steaming bowl of couscous, and an uncorked and unlabeled bottle of what is clearly red wine.
“You eat this,” Madame Nephthys says, tucking a long-tined fork into the bowl. “Is good. You feel better. Tomorrow another day, yes?”
“Is this wine?” I hiss at her. “Isn’t that illegal?”
“No wine here,” she says loudly, in the direction of the door. She turns to me, making a slashing motion across her throat with one hand. “Keep voice down. You want get me arrested?”
She reaches for the bottle, but I manage to grab it before she can snatch it away.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Thank you.”
She sighs loudly and then, glancing at the door, reaches across what is clearly a bar, and snags a long-stemmed glass. She slides it across the table at me. “You drink quiet,” she commands, and I meekly proceed to do just that.
chapter twenty-six
IMAGE DETAIL: Guesthouse
IG: Romy_K [Port Said, Egypt, April 1]
#NoRoadsOutofEgypt #TravelersTummy
105
Madame Nephthys is right—her couscous is the best thing I’ve ever tasted. It’s loaded with roasted onions and pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes. I’ve never been a huge fan of olives, but the ones in this dish are finely sliced and briny and perfect. Before I know it, the bowl she’s set before me is almost empty. As for the wine, there’s about a half a glass left in the bottle, and I’ve drunk enough to feel a little reckless. Not reckless enough to show my face on the streets, but enough to consider drunk-Googling. I’m not actually sure if drunk-Googling is even a thing, but if it isn’t? It should be.
My daypack is leaning against the legs of my stool, and I reach down and pull out my laptop. There’s got to be some way for me to get out of this mess. So far, even Madame Nephthys, who gives off the aura of being able to solve any problem life throws at her, has been no help when it comes to getting me out of Egypt.
Let alone the rest of the way around the world.
In desperation, I type Help Romy into the search bar, and scan the results. For the most part, what comes up are crowdfunding pages for other women named Romy who are struggling in one way or another. There’s also a site for a transgender woman looking to legally change her name.
Of course, that Romy needs support too, when it comes right down to it.
This gives me a thought, and I wonder what Teresa Cipher’s name was before she changed it. Before she legally became Teresa, that is. I have no doubt that she’s always been Teresa, no matter what her birth name was. It’s an interesting thought, but of course it does nothing to help me with my current problem, and Google doesn’t help me there either. I cross my arms on the bar, and drop my head down onto them.
A worried voice immediately barks out from behind the bead curtain.
“Missy not feeling well?”
Madame Nephthys bustles out, hands dripping and holding a dish towel. “Missy need to go to room?”
“It’s okay,” I say, lifting my head to stare at her blearily. “I’m not sick. Only . . .”
Worried? Depressed? Completely stymied? And maybe . . . okay, maybe a little sick too. My stomach gives an ominous gurgle.
As my thoughts turn inward, the door to the street swings open, and Dominic Madison walks in.
Of course he’s here. He’s here because only bad things are happening to me here. And really? He’s the ultimate bad thing.
“Hey,” he says, as if he hadn’t disappeared on me earlier.
As if we were in some bar in New York, and not in a little guesthouse on the other side of the world.
“How did you know where I was?” I ask, eyeing him narrowly. “And what are you doing here, anyway?”
“I’m staying here, of course,” he says, and slaps a fresh bottle onto the table beside the remains of my couscous. “I think we need an exchange of information.”
I stare at him, feeling defeated on every level.
“Okay,” I say, at last.
But Madame Nephthys has thoughts. “Afraid not. No alcohol in this house. We could lose our good rating.”
I look from the bottle of wine she provided with my dinner to her face, and back.
She flicks her towel along the bar and sniffs. “I don’t know where his bottle come from. You could be agents, try to shut me down. Try to make me lose hospitality license.”
Dominic slips the bottle into his pack. “Nothing to see here,” he says to her, and slides a handful of Egyptian pounds across the table. “For the couscous,” he adds, though what he’s offered is about triple the actual price on the menu.
The bills vanish into Madame’s apron before I can blink. “Thank you, Mr. Dominic. But no funny business, eh?”
He assures her that he has exactly zero funny business in mind, and then scoops up my suitcase from the floor. “Let’s go talk in my room,” he mutters, but Madame’s eyes widen.
“Talking only, Madame,” he promises. “No funny business. You have my word.”
She smiles at him, but turns slowly to me. “Your word too?” she says, reaching her hand toward me, palm upward.
I jam my hand in my pocket, grab all the rest of my remaining coins, and carefully pile them into her cupped palm. “My word too,” I say.
&
nbsp; She sniffs dismissively at my meager offering, but drops the jingling handful into the pocket of her apron all the same, and vanishes back through the beaded curtain.
Dominic’s room turns out to be far more spacious than my own, with a window onto a tiny, enclosed garden nestled at the center of the inn. In addition to his bed, he has a small table with two chairs, decorated with a bowl of colored fruit made from, on closer inspection, papier-mâché. From a shelf over the sink, he produces two shot glasses, which he slaps down on the table beside the bottle. He yanks out a chair for me, points at it, and then folds his lanky frame around the other one.
“Who goes first?” he asks.
“You do,” I say flatly. “This was your idea, after all.”
And so, over the course of the next hour, Dominic Madison’s story comes out.
He is, as he’s repeatedly stated, not Frank Venal’s nephew. In his regular life, he trained first as a cook, and then as a pastry chef, at the International Culinary Center over on Broadway—less than a mile from Two Old Queens. At some point, he pulls out his phone, taps the screen, and then slides it across the table at me. His Instagram feed is loaded with a dizzying assortment of cakes and pastries. I have to bite back my admiration as I swipe through the pictures. It’s an impressive variety, and his number of followers is even higher than Teresa quoted, but I’m not going to tell him that. Mostly I’m embarrassed that I never thought to look him up on Instagram.
Instead, I lean back in my chair and remember Teresa Cipher’s description of my competition for the ExLibris position. So, this is her New York photographer? Not quite one of the glamorous, smug-faced girls I’d been worried about.
I give him the side-eye as he pours clear liquid from his bottle into the two shot glasses. His smooth, amber skin is tinged with sunburn, and his eyes are tired, but—I have to admit, he’s better looking than any of the girls I’d been worried about. I remember back to the 8.5 I’d given him on the HOT Reader Scale. A rating like that would firmly place him into Jersey’s “gorgeous, and therefore flirt-worthy” category.
All the same. Gorgeous is as gorgeous does, right? His HOT Reader score came before I knew who he really was. His association with Frank Venal negates it all. Besides, there’s something more important to take from this than what this dude—my sworn enemy—looks like. I’m missing something important. I just need to wrap my foggy brain around it.
Closing my eyes, I force my thoughts back to the last night at ExLibris. So much has happened since that night, it feels like it could be two years ago, rather than two weeks. One thing about this adventure—it has slowed time right down.
I’m a gambler, Teresa had said. At the time, I thought she meant she was taking a gamble by hiring me. Maybe she was. And maybe? There was more to it.
“So,” I say, enunciating carefully. “The night before I left, Teresa told me she’d planned to give the job to some Instagram influencer. Obviously that was you, right?”
He grins. “She called me an influencer? I must be more persuasive than I thought.”
“Okay, whatever. That’s not the point. The point is, at the time, I thought she’d given the job to me. But obviously, she’s clearly promised the job to both of us.”
He leans back in his chair. “She never told me about you either. But I began to suspect it, when you crashed into me in the travel agency.”
“You crashed into me,” I say with as much dignity as I can manage. My lips have begun to feel numb. “So, it is a race, then, and not just against the clock.”
His smile broadens. “I guess it is.”
For courage, I shoot the clear liquid in my glass down in a single burning gulp. As my eyes begin to water, I point at the photo page still up on his phone.
“You’re an influencer,” I say, putting as much venom into the word as I can muster. “You don’t need this job. Why are you even here?”
He drains his own glass and, for the first time, looks me square in the face.
“My mom’s Samoan, born in Hawaii,” he says quietly. “She met my dad in Honolulu, when he was there on vacation one summer. When they learned I was going to show up on the scene, she married him and moved back to his family in Connecticut. They tried, I guess, but they couldn’t make it work, and my dad’s never really been in the picture. My mom wanted to go back to Hawaii, but she ended up in New York, and she took a job as a housekeeper for Venal. She’s worked for him ever since. I grew up in a little coach house on his property.”
“So, do you work for him—for Venal—too?”
Dom shakes his head. “No. Not really. But it’s—complicated. And I need this job to help untangle things a little for my mom. Last year, Venal found out she’s been helping some of the local immigrant families with childcare during the day. Since then, he’s literally been blackmailing her, threatening her with exposure, and the families she helps with deportation.”
He looks moodily at the bottle, and refills both our glasses.
I slide mine away. “I’m already having trouble concentrating,” I mutter. My stomach gives another ominous gurgle.
The truth is, between my upset stomach and the unaccustomed alcohol, forget concentrating—I’m having trouble staying upright.
But I’m not about to say that.
Instead, I crack the bottle of water that Madame Nephthys has left on the table by the door, and take a big swig.
It helps, a little.
“Look, complicated or not—you know what my situation is. Your guardian or whatever he is, is about to ruin my uncles’ lives. Merv and Tommy have run Two Old Queens since before I was born. That bookstore is their whole life—they live there, they work there. And your—and Frank Venal is going to take all that away, pretty much on a whim.”
Dom sighs. “I know. He’s a total asshole, there’s no denying it. And, honestly, if he wasn’t holding my mom’s life to ransom, I would not be here. But she’s got no one else, and I need to find a way to get her away from him. I didn’t know it was you, I swear. Not for sure, anyway, until I saw you on the train in France. And now—well, it’s too late.”
I slam my fist on the tabletop. “It’s not too late,” I say, filled with a sudden fury. “You said it yourself. You have a little problem to untangle. But for me, it’s my family’s whole livelihood that’s at stake.”
“Take a breath,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. He grabs my glass and drains it too. “The situation’s bad for both of us, obviously. That’s why I came in here to talk to you.”
He leans back in his chair, his face flushed. “That day we all met at the bookstore? He left an article about how to report people to ICE on her kitchen counter. It made her cry, Romy. I knew right then that I had to find some way to get enough money to pay for a decent lawyer, and fast. After we left your bookstore, I spotted the ExLibris flyer on a telephone pole up the street. That night I applied for the job.”
His eyes suddenly look more tired than ever, and he leans back in his chair, and rubs them. Outside the window, it’s full dark, and some kind of sweet, exotic scent begins to waft in from the garden. Suddenly, it’s all I can smell—pervasive and foreign and strange.
“I’m the foreigner here,” I mutter.
“What?” Dominic asks. He tucks a strand of hair behind his ears and leans forward.
“Nothing. I should probably go,” I say, but he holds up a hand.
“Just a minute, here. I’ve basically bared my soul to you and you haven’t told me anything. What about your parents? Why do you live with your gay uncles? What’s the story there?”
“What does being gay have to do with anything?” I snap, my earlier animosity returning.
“It doesn’t, it doesn’t,” he says soothingly. “Only—your parents . . . ?”
My eyes fill with sudden hot tears, which makes me even angrier. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”<
br />
“Okay.”
He’s quiet a minute. “But if you ever do . . .” he begins.
I shoot him a glare, and he subsides into silence again. Grabbing the bottle, I pour two more shots. When he picks up his glass, I clink it with my own. “To not talking about the shitty stuff,” I say, and he drinks.
I manage to swallow the whole thing without gasping this time.
“Did you have any luck finding a way out of here?” I ask as he sets down his glass.
He shakes his head. “I found a dive ship, but it’s local. I thought about getting a bus or something across the desert to Dubai, but there’s a travel advisory for pretty much all of Saudi Arabia right now. Not great for Americans.”
“Yeah, I tried that too,” I say. “One guy I spoke to just laughed. He still tried to take my money, though.”
I lapse into silence and concentrate on drinking as much water as I can choke down. Strangely enough, it doesn’t taste nearly as good as whatever is in Dom’s bottle.
“Listen,” he says after the silence stretches on endlessly. “I don’t know what Teresa’s up to, but—what do you say we make an agreement?”
“What kind of agreement?”
He shrugs. “We could try—for now—to work together. Put our heads together to get out of here, at least.”
I stare at that handsome face. It’s a face I want to believe. A face that I would—under almost any other circumstances—want to learn more about. Would follow anywhere, truth be told.
But now? I’m not sure I can trust Dominic Madison as far as I can throw him, which would not be at all far, considering the amount of alcohol I’ve put away in this teetotal country.
Still. I decide I’m drunk enough to agree to at least give it a shot.
“An agreement,” I say, reaching across the table.