“They’re after us. Let’s go. Now.” The words came out sharp and hard, and Aisha was as surprised as Doug. Her expression changed and she only half turned around to look before extending her hand out to Doug, who grabbed it as he started to run.
They ran down the alley, cutting onto a smaller side walkway which twisted back and forth a half dozen times before emerging back onto the alley, just four shops down from the now running hairy black mass. “Oh shit!” Aisha said when she saw the man coming, “he’s huge.”
“Come on,” Doug said, darting across the alley and down another side street. Overhanging awnings slung way too low and burlap bags filled with empty burlap bags turned the cross street into a maze. It didn’t help that all the old women had picked that moment to step out of their doorways with large, empty baskets on their heads. “Excuse me, excuse me,” Doug said, trying to get by the short little grandmother types, busy adjusting their headscarves. “Get the fuck out of the way,” yelled Aisha, knocking baskets and short little grandmother types to the ground. This led to a lot more people stepping out of their homes, but fortunately for Doug, a good forty feet behind them and right in front of the rapidly gaining black suit. When Doug slowed down to let a donkey cart squeeze past, Aisha cut in front and started pulling him along. She made a quick turn down one alleyway and then down another and another until Doug was certain that even she was lost. She made a few more quick turns and then pulled him in through a large wooden doorway. A tarnished brass placard identified the building as the Mosque of Hossam Bin Ahmed Al-Shaloub, dating from 1698, but it was hidden behind the open door and written in Arabic.
“Aisha, this is a mosque,” Doug said, noticing the minrahb and minbar—Sergei would be so proud. “Aren’t we supposed to take off our shoes?”
“Whatever,” Aisha said, cutting across the threadbare carpets to a narrow doorway in a shadowy iwan. An old man in a light blue galabiyya shuffled across the mosque, a turban balanced on his head like a week’s worth of laundry. His pointing and waving let Doug know that yes, they should have taken off their shoes. Before he could catch up with them—long before, really—Doug and Aisha were climbing a tiny spiral staircase made of the same stone as the entire mosque. The twist of the stairs was so tight it seemed as if they weren’t climbing at all but merely going around in circles. Narrow slits in the walls provided the only light. The steps were close together and never more than four inches wide and every five steps produced a stumble with Doug’s face slamming against Aisha’s ass.
Over the rhythmic shuffle of their steps, and his own breath, which was loud and panting, Doug heard the sound of someone else climbing the steps below them. At first he thought it was an echo but the pattern of the steps was different and then he heard the voices, deep voices that didn’t sound out of breath. It was impossible to tell how far behind they were, the stone steps offering not the slightest view down, and there was no way to tell they had reached the top until they spilled out a half-sized doorway and onto the small platform from which, for centuries, the call to prayer was made. If they had stopped to read the tarnished brass placard by the entrance, they would have known that the minaret of the Mosque of Hossam Bin Ahmed Al-Shaloub, dating from 1698, was twenty-one meters tall. As they both grabbed for the low handrail, heads and shoulders sailing under the bar and off the platform, it looked a hell of a lot farther.
“Go, go, go,” Aisha was yelling as they climbed back onto the platform and edged their way to the far side of the minaret. The sounds of the men on the stairs were much clearer now and much closer.
The minaret was built into the side wall of the mosque and, while the door side of the platform dropped straight to the street, the back side of the minaret dropped to the roof of the mosque, no more than ten feet below. They ducked under the handrail, hung on to the base and swung down.
“You okay?” Doug asked.
“Shit,” Aisha said as the black suit stepped onto the platform. “This way.” She grabbed his arm and led him across the roof, not a flat, level roof that would allow an easy getaway, but a roof that, due to seventeenth-century Islamic building methods, was set with knee-high walls, sudden horizontal shifts, and half-hidden ventilation shafts. The satellite TV dishes and the randomly strung cables were of more recent origin. A rare flat, wireless area allowed Doug a look behind. There were two men, the hairy giant and a shorter, lighter man in a green tracksuit, and they were only half a roof away now. When he looked forward again, he saw the open space.
“We’re outta roof?” he yelled. “We’re outta fucking roof?” A sound like a small firecracker went off behind them and they both looked back in time to see the man in the black suit level the pistol again. Instinct should have made him duck, like it did Aisha, but Doug stood there and stared as he heard something zip over his head, the sound of the shot a fraction of a second behind the muzzle flash and puff of smoke. He looked over at Aisha, and they both looked across the next roof. It was lower than this roof, there was no wall by the edge to clear, and it connected to every other roof in the neighborhood. But it was definitely not jumpable.
“Ready?” Aisha asked, stepping backwards from the edge and scraping the toe of her shoe on the roof, trying to build up some traction. Doug was about to say never when two more somethings zipped much closer to his head and two more firecrackers went off behind him. He was running before he knew it and, for what he thought was an amazingly long time, he hung in the air, one arm flapping like a wing-shot duck, the other holding onto Aisha’s hand. They hit the roof of the next building with almost four feet to spare. Small stones and dust sprayed up like a fountain a few yards away and more firecrackers went off on the roof of the mosque. Doug pulled Aisha to her feet and they ran, clearing the low walls with uncoordinated grace.
Aisha looked back to the mosque. “I think they’re gonna jump it,” she said.
“Don’t stop now, look for a way down, a stairway or something,” Doug said, but Aisha grabbed Doug’s shoulder and froze.
“Oh my God,” she said as she drew in a deep breath.
Doug turned, expecting the hairy man an arm’s length away, but there was no one. He looked back and saw the man in the green tracksuit leaning forward, standing at the edge of the mosque roof. He was looking down to the street.
“Oh God, Doug, I saw him fall.” Aisha’s voice sounded tiny and far away. “He wasn’t even close. I watched him fall.”
Doug hadn’t seen or heard a thing, but he wasn’t about to go to the edge and look. He swallowed—his throat was quite dry and burning—and reached for Aisha’s hand. “Let’s go.” She stood fixed to the spot for a moment, then slowly allowed Doug to get her walking again. She turned back twice and both times said “Oh my God.”
“Aisha, what could we do?” Doug asked. “It was a long jump and nobody told him to try it.”
“Besides,” he said after they climbed over a series of pipes and wires and were heading for what looked like a fire escape a few rooftops away, “he was trying to kill us. I mean, sure I feel bad for him, but he was shooting at us.”
She glanced over at Doug as if he had suddenly appeared. “Fuck him,” Aisha said. “I’m thinking about me. I mean, that could have been me falling there.”
“Us,” Doug reminded her. “It could have been us.”
“I could be dead right now. Flat on the side of a street like some…some dog. Me. Dead. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers for effect but it looked more like she was calling an inattentive waiter.
“Who do you think he was, and why was he chasing us? Or does this stuff happen all the time around here?” The ladder was a fire escape and only two families had expanded out from bedroom windows to turn their section of the rusted iron stairs into an open-air closet. And no one, not even the old man whose reclining chair they had to climb over to get around, seemed at all inconvenienced by their passing.
“How would I know who they were?” Aisha asked as she ducked under a row of birdcages and stepped ar
ound a kettle of tea on a hotplate. “You’re the one that pointed them out to me. I thought you knew who they were.”
Doug tried to figure out a way to grab a hold of the last handrail without touching the line of bras drying in the non-existent breeze. In the end he just hoped the stairway wouldn’t collapse and risked not holding on. “I just saw them in the crowd. I thought they might have something to do with your uncle’s shop. I guess you’ll have to jump,” he said noticing that the last five steps had been removed and were being used nearby to prop up air conditioning units in the ground floor windows.
“I’ll kill them if they did anything to Uncle Nasser,” Aisha said. “Well, the guy in the tracksuit, anyway.”
Back on the ground, Aisha got her bearings and a three-minute walk took them to an open square filled with more shops and street vendors. That was the number one industry in Cairo, Doug decided, selling things—selling the same thing the guy next to you sold, the same packet of socks, the same alarm clocks, the same knock-off Barbie dolls, the same basket of rotting vegetables. You bought it, then you sold it. The same handful of goods could keep a neighborhood employed for months.
“I want to call my uncle,” Aisha announced, “I don’t have my phone with me. Wait here while I find a phone.” Before Doug could ask if she thought it was smart that they split up like this, she dove into the crowd. He could tell where she was for a few seconds by watching for the men whose heads were turned one way while they walked another. Doug found a lamp pole to lean against and tried not to look conspicuous. This proved difficult since everyone who passed by, even the man leading the camel—the only one in downtown Cairo—stopped to stare. At least the touts left him alone, tourists being so rare in this area that they didn’t know what to do with him. Other than stare, that is. Doug stared back, not directly, of course, but in a casual, friendly way, smiling as he scanned the crowd for other homicidal maniacs who might be stalking him.
And why him? It’s not like he had the diamond—he didn’t even have a clue. And who would know where he was or anything about the Ashkanani connection? Maybe it was Aisha they were after, God knows she must have enemies all over the world. But why today, and why was the hairy guy following him? Something Sergei said rolled in from the back of his mind. “I’m not suggesting that the original killers are out there….” But maybe they were. And maybe they had assumed he knew something.
And now some guy was dead, Doug thought, and how do you think that makes me feel? So he thought about it for a moment and realized he didn’t feel anything at all. No guilt, no remorse, no regrets. Then he thought about that, since not feeling anything didn’t feel right, but after ten minutes he realized his thoughts had drifted to trying to figure out how the woman with the four-foot-tall basket on her head managed to maneuver through the shopping area without once reaching up to steady the load. He took a deep breath and tried again to focus on the diamond and all the trouble it had caused.
Back in Morocco he had written up a list of things he knew and now, weeks later, he had little more to add to that list. The diamond left Casablanca and came to Cairo, and left Cairo for Singapore and no one seemed to know what happened to it there. This was the easy stuff and if it was so easy for him to find out, why didn’t Edna already know? Oh boy, Edna. He called when he got out of jail but he was vague about what he was doing. It didn’t seem to matter what he told her though, she was happy with anything he did, even when it was obvious to anybody he wasn’t doing anything. He thought about feeling guilty and then remembered the gray meat in the jail and decided to follow Aisha’s advice—take the money and keep her happy.
And where was Aisha? It couldn’t be that hard to find a phone around here, especially for someone as pushy as her. Doug bought a cold bottle of Coke from a passing vendor, overpaying again since he had still not figured out the exchange rate or buying power of the Egyptian pound notes. Other than a few professional level gawkers who still found him fascinating to watch, the locals ignored Doug, which gave him more time to watch them. It was mostly men in the crowd and all of them, perhaps by some harshly enforced law, sported the same thick, black mustache that hung down over their top lip. A few wore the traditional galabiyya, but most wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned to the top, despite oven-like heat. Doug was roasting in his khakis and polo shirt, both, he noticed, still carrying stray black strings from the abaya shop.
And everybody smoked, all the males anyway. Packs of kids young enough to get into movies for free puffed away on unfiltered Camels while the adult men seemed to keep two cigarettes going, one to smoke and one to point with. But given the amount of exhaust fumes that flooded the street, thick fumes you could feel slide up your skin and roll down your throat, what difference would it make if you smoked a carton or two a day? Greasy smoke from greasy trucks that idled so high you’d expect an explosion added to the noise and heat of the whole area. And add to that the dust, the city-wide layer of litter, and the pervasive smell of sewage that had gone bad in the sun and you had Cairo. How do people live here, he thought.
That’s when he realized that the background music to this whole scene, more pervasive than the diesel trucks, more common than the hawkers’ nonstop shouts of aywah!, louder than the call to prayer that had just started up, was the laughter. Everybody seemed to be having a great time, slapping hands with a sideways low five, stopping only to cough up a lung or light up another cigarette. The kids hacked out a smoky laugh, the old men wore big, one-tooth grins and there were high-pitched giggles coming from under the black sheets that hid teenaged girls as they wove through the crowd. Maybe the fumes had got to them, he thought, since they were sure starting to get to him. Or maybe, despite the totally shitty reality that was their lives, they were happy. Fathers bought their children bags of out-of-date candy, friends greeted friends with hugs and kisses as if they had been separated for years instead of minutes. There were happy couples holding hands as they strolled through the market. Granted, they were both guys, but that seemed to be normal around here. They’re not gay, Abe had said, they just look that way.
An idea started to form in Doug’s mind, a fundamental idea that held together a worldview, a core philosophy. He found it hard to pull his thoughts together and it took his focused thinking for a full five minutes until he could attach words to these feelings. Maybe the environment didn’t matter. Maybe happiness was something you found inside you, not in your surroundings. Maybe his whole way of looking at the world—Pottsville, the brewery, Egyptian jail, this intersection—maybe everything was neither good nor bad, maybe it was all what you made of it. Maybe the keys to happiness and despair, to your own personal heaven or hell, were yours all along. Life could be good, you could be happy, if you wanted it to be so.
Doug thought about this for a while and decided that no, it was the fumes. Nobody could be happy here.
He looked at the digital watch he bought the day before from a street vendor. It still flashed 99:99 like it did ten minutes after he bought it. He waited another forty minutes until his watch said 99:99 before he decided to take a cab back to the hotel. Aisha was a big girl, she could find her way back home. Whether he could or not remained to be seen.
Chapter 20
“That funny taste? That’s formaldehyde.”
Doug held his beer up to the light, as if he could check chemical content by sight, and wondered if it really was formaldehyde. He’d never tasted formaldehyde but was willing to believe that’s what the strange taste was. It would explain the smell.
“The people that make Osiris beer? They also own a chemical company and their main product is formaldehyde.” Jeff Willett, twenty-four, from Norman, Oklahoma, was staying at the Sheraton with his new wife, Stacey, also twenty-four, also from Norman, Oklahoma. “That’s what the guy at the papyrus shop said.”
Jeff had sat down at the hotel bar, the Nile Sunset, the one with the excellent view of the river, less than twenty minutes ago, and in that time Doug learned just about everything he w
anted to know about Jeff and Stacey Willett from Norman, Oklahoma. Like the fact that this was their first trip out of the States, that they were on their honeymoon which they had been planning since their first date at the sophomore Halloween dance where he went as King Tut and she as Cleopatra, that Stacey’s Uncle Frank gave them two hundred dollars to spend “just on drinks,” and that in two days they were going to take a Nile river cruise all the way from Aswan back to Cairo. Jeff provided intense details about his job—he “sold, maintained and repaired commercial swimming pool pumps and filters”—as if Doug was about to fill in for him while he took his Nile cruise. Jeff Willett found it exciting work and naturally assumed so did everyone else. And he lectured about his first impressions of Cairo, since, having been here for three days, he was now an expert.
“Know what you should go see? You should see the light and sound show at Giza. Man, you really start to understand just how old the place is. Plus they got a lot of good souvenir shops over that way, good stuff. Stacey picked up this real nice model of the pyramids in a glass ball, not one of those snow ball things that you shake, just a glass ball,” he said and paused for dramatic effect. “Ten bucks.”
Doug took a long pull on his Osiris beer. It was his fourth since Jeff Willett sat down and Doug was hoping that if it indeed were formaldehyde, it would soon kick in. He wasn’t sure what formaldehyde would do to you if you drank it, but, as Jeff Willett described how everyone at the wedding reception got such a laugh when he and his two brothers—Steve and Little Jimmy—got up and danced the Macarena, Doug hoped it would at least make him deaf.
“…but Stacey’s aunt is really two years younger than Stacey, so we all went to Hooter’s to celebrate and who should be there? Right! Mr. Keiffer, our old math teacher….”
The bar, with its unique and breathtaking view of the ancient river, was decorated in the American Style Family Orientated Theme Restaurant motif, all dark woods and phony antiques hanging from the ceiling. A Texaco gas pump stood by the men’s room door and sepia-toned team photos covered the walls. Lacquered to the bar top were high-quality photocopies of “old tyme” beer ads and 1930s era baseball programs. The bartender wore a starched white apron and a little red fez, the signature headgear for the hotel. Other than the fez, it could be Anybar, USA. For some reason, Doug found that depressing.
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