ARAB (7 page)

“A what?” the driver said, glancing at the mirror.

Bashir leaned back. “Never mind.” The idiot probably blew his nose on his nightshirt.

Faisal’s safehouse was at the end of a narrow alley in a village in the suburbs west of Cairo. It was a large white house fronted by a small garden, a house that probably had once belonged to a village leader. Two men were sitting on wide steps at the entrance playing cards. On a hot Egyptian day in summer, at the edge of the desert, only an idiot would sit on a stone slab in the sun unless he had been ordered to do so.

As Diab led Bashir up the steps, he told the men to cross the driveway and sit under a tree.

“We were ordered to—”

“I am your general. Do what I say.”

The men looked at each other, shrugged, gathered up their cards and walked toward the large shaded area under the tree.

“You have a kind heart, Diab,” Bashir said.

“Only for men who are loyal.”

Meaning?

But Bashir would not ask. It would not be dignified to ask. He was not a soldier. He had never been part of Faisal’s now defunct military band of thieves. He operated at a higher level. He would learn what he had to learn directly from Faisal Ibrahim, whom he considered socially inferior but professionally his equal. He may have been raised in poverty, but this was the modern world. A man creates his own place in society. And he does it with wealth.

Despite his resolve to be bold and unafraid, his legs trembled as he entered the small, curtained room at the end of a long hallway. The room had an air conditioner in a window with two ribbons fluttering off a grill. Faisal, in a striped
galabeya
, was sitting within inches of the ribbons in a lounge chair, his bare feet resting on a pillow, his eyes closed. A wad of cotton was wedged between one of his big toes and the toe next to it.

Although Faisal was still fat, he had lost weight. Deep lines marked his face. He looked tired.

“You look wonderful!” Bashir said, striding right up to him.

Faisal opened his eyes and regarded Bashir with displeasure.

“Sit down,” he said, pointing at a chair a few feet from him. “We have much to talk about.” He shot a glance at Diab who had lowered himself into a straight-backed chair against a wall under a faded tapestry—a faintly erotic depiction of two partially naked women kneeling in supplication before a seated potentate of the mythical past, a bearded man with one hand resting on the arm of his chair, the other dangling over a bowl of fruit held by a black Nubian slave.

As though brimming with enthusiasm, Bashir pulled up a chair to within inches of Faisal’s shoulder. The scraping sound of the move made Faisal wince.

“I wish I had known you were in Egypt, Faisal. I have been eager to tell you about my trip to Istanbul.”

“I know all about your trip to Istanbul,” Faisal said, leaning his head back, closing his eyes.

“Then you know how hard I’ve been working to keep us in the mainstream. The world is changing, Faisal. Every day it’s different. We have new competition, eager competition that has to be dealt with.”

Faisal raised a hand in protest, turning his head aside as though to ward off a pestilent odor.

“If you had contacted me,” he said.

“I tried! I didn’t know how to reach you!”

“You knew exactly how to reach me.”

“What I mean, Faisal….”

“If you had brought it to a conference, you would have learned that those two who pretended to be Germans were fakes. They said they had worked with me in Libya? They never worked with me. They were British agents. They had no weapons for sale. What they showed you were empty containers. You were sucked in.”

He raised his head to be sure Bashir was listening.

Bashir felt blood rising to his face. That couldn’t be true! He had questioned those men. They knew every intimate detail of Faisal’s Libyan operations! They had to be who they said they were! And how did Faisal learn these details!

“I knew….”

“You knew nothing! You believed what some drunken Greek told you in a bar on Alfy Bey Street. You didn’t check with us. You thought you’d grab a big swindle for yourself. If Diab hadn’t heard about it, you’d be floating face down in the Bosporus right now.”

“Diab? What did he…?”

“He did what a leader has to do. He used his head. How do you think the police found out? Why do you think they raided that warehouse? You think those British agents took off because they were afraid of you?”

That’s exactly what Bashir thought. Oh, my God! Was I a fool? He thinks I’m a fool. He thinks I’m a traitor!

“I did it for us, Faisal!” And he shot a quick, desperate, pleading glance at Diab who was sitting with elbows on his knees studying Bashir without a trace of sympathy.

“You don’t know what ‘us’ means,” Faisal said, lowering his head to the pillow, closing his eyes. “And that trip to Foz do Iguacu….”

“For us!” Bashir said. “That was for us! I got a chance to fly over there. I didn’t try to betray you! I’ve always been loyal. Honest to God, Faisal!”

“I think he needs retraining,” Diab said, laughing. “He’s forgotten who he is.”

“Come on,” Bashir said, unable to get a smile into the stiffened muscles of his face, fear prowling through his bowels. “Maybe I didn’t handle it well. Maybe I made mistakes. But I wouldn’t betray you, Faisal. Whatever I got over there I was going to bring to our people on Malta. It’s what you’d have done. I did it for us! For the organization!”

Only after he spoke did he become conscious of the obsequious wheedling in his voice, a sound he had heard in the voices of people he had thought despicable, a sound he had thought himself incapable of. That a weakness in him could emit such a sound was frightening. Hadn’t he outgrown that? Hadn’t he worked all these years to overcome that weakness?

“And this girl you were seen with,” Faisal said. “Are you stupid as well as disloyal? You had to know that hanging around a girl like that would bring the secret police down on us!”

“Not on you!” Bashir said. “They couldn’t find a connection between you and me.”

“Because there isn’t one,” Faisal said. “No more. I don’t trust you now. We are finished.”

“But I haven’t done anything!” Again he shot a pleading glance at Diab, and Diab just looked at him. Bashir raised both hands in a gesture of bewildered helplessness. “I haven’t done anything wrong! I swear to God!”

“Have the police questioned you about her?”

“They question everyone who comes in contact with her.”

“What did you hope to gain from her?”

“Influence, Faisal. Influence at the very top. It’s for us. It would have given us a voice at the top level of the Department of Interior. Think what….”

Faisal frowned. He glanced at Diab and turned his whole body toward the air conditioner and drew up his knees.

“I wouldn’t betray you, Faisal! I owe everything to you! I’ve always been grateful!”

Diab got up. “You and me are going for a ride,” he said.

Bashir had heard that expression in exactly that tone. He knew what it meant. Always it had been directed toward fools, toward unimportant people, people no longer of use to the organization. Not to people like him.

“This is insane!”

When Diab took his arm and lifted him from the chair, Bashir pushed both hands into the big man’s chest. “Get away from me!”

Diab, nearly twice Bashir’s size, grabbed Bashir’s shirtfront and slapped his face.

Cringing in pain, enraged by the indignity, Bashir yelled, “Get your hands off me!”

Diab roughly turned him around and bullied him out of the room.

“Many years ago,” he said, forcing Bashir down the hall, “I was in your old neighborhood in Gaza. I got very drunk one night and looked for a woman. Maybe the woman I found in one of those lice-ridden buildings was your mother.”

*

Little more than three miles east of Cairo on the far side of a plateau called Mokattam there is a large colony of Coptic Christians who live in a culture of filth, earning a meager living collecting garbage in the city, carrying it on donkey carts to the hills where their women and children pick through it for whatever they can salvage for their own use or for resale. They live in roofless shanties of cement blocks and metal siding, old boards and mud. Although they dwell in stinking fields of swill, they appear, at least to casual observation, contentedly resigned to their situation, sometimes even happy. Their children, like children the world over, laugh and sing and chase after each other in play, seemingly oblivious to the squalor of their surroundings.

When Diab came down the hardened roadway in his green Pontiac and pulled up to the shack of Elskran, “the drunk,” children ran in from their games and stood in silent clusters watching the big man and his driver pull a smaller man out of the car—a slender, frightened man in white shirtsleeves who was blindfolded, whose face had been bruised, and whose hands were tied behind his back.

They watched Elskran push the blindfolded man across a mound of garbage to a pig shelter behind his house where he tied up his donkeys. They watched him feed a chain through a retaining ring in the wall of the house and padlock the chain around the man’s ankle. They watched the big man test the chain, then come around front and hand Elksran a bottle and a small package of what he called
monzoul
, which they knew to be a cheap narcotic.

“Feed him scraps,” they heard the big man tell Elskran. “He is to live like the other pigs. But don’t kill him. If he dies, you die.”

“The way we did it before, Master?”

“Only hang a sheet of canvas over this one. I don’t want him burned. Every morning before you water him … Here, I’ll show you.”

He grabbed a stick from one of the children and went out back where the man in shirt sleeves was cowering against the building. The children watched Elskran remove the man’s shoes and jumped back when the big man started striking the bottoms of the cowering man’s feet.

“Twenty times or more every morning, twenty times every night. Bring blood. But nowhere else, just the feet.”

“I understand, Master,” Elskran said, looking at the children as though hoping they realized the significance of his having been entrusted with this important task. Maybe they wouldn’t ridicule him after this. Maybe he’d get some respect from them.

When the big man and his driver went away, the children followed Elskran to the back of the house and watched him stand over the cowering prisoner.

“No screaming,” they heard him tell the man. “No swearing in front of the children. We are Christians here.”

“I’ll pay anything you want,” they heard the cowering man say.

“And when they kill me for taking your money, where will I spend it,” Elskran said, “in hell?”

They watched the cowering man try to scrub flies off the bottoms of his feet, grinding them into the slime of the garbage. They watched a dog timidly approach the man and sniff at his bleeding toes. They laughed when the man cried out in pain because he had tried to kick the dog with the foot that was chained.

“Get away from here!” Elskran shouted at them, coming around the corner of the house with a bottle to his lips. “He is a bad man who has to be punished. Stay away from him!”

Chapter Five

East of the city, Nick Palermo turned his pickup into a narrow road that led across a field to the river where a girl in skirt and blouse was walking barefoot on the grass near the water. She was slender and had long black hair that fell gently over her shoulders. Occasionally she stooped to pick something off the ground, examine it, toss it aside.

“I’ll wait here,” Habib said, admiring the girl through the windshield.

“She’s a child,” Nick said.

Habib laughed. He pointed at the man on a bench further down the river whose back was turned to them. “Probably his daughter.”

“Stay in the car in case there are messages—”

“It will be my pleasure,” Habib said.

As Nick walked over gravel toward the man on the bench, he glanced at the girl. She was pretty, and maybe seventeen years old. The breeze off the river occasionally flattened her skirt against her buttocks, no doubt what Habib was fascinated by.

“And what do you have for me?” he said as soon as Nawaf turned, a small man in a linen jacket and gray slacks. He had a narrow face and a nose like a hawk’s beak and a mole on his forehead the size of a third eye.

“A name,” Nawaf said. “Nuha Za’im is the woman at the café where Bashir Yassin was picked up.”

“Where can I find her?”

“That’s her address,” handing Nick a slip of paper. “She has some kind of supervisory position in a dress shop. That’s all I could find out. It wouldn’t pay me to become too inquisitive, you know.” He glanced toward the girl, gazed at her for a few moments, then looked at the ground. He picked up a stone and hurled it into the river.

“A handsome child,” Nick said. “Your daughter?”

“My eldest. Next year she goes to the university, God willing.”

“If you need help with that, let me know.” Nick handed Nawaf a sealed envelope.

“Thank you,” Nawaf said, making a slight bow in gratitude as he tucked the envelope into his jacket pocket.

“I mean it,” Nick said. “You were very helpful to my father as you are to me.”

He left the sand at the edge of the river and walked back to the truck.

“Nuha Za’im,” he told Habib, handing him the slip of paper.

“I know where this is,” Habib said, folding the paper, tucking it into his shirt pocket.

“Don’t tell me you know this woman.”

Habib laughed. “I know the building. It’s a beehive of single young women.”

*

They got off the elevator at the fourth floor and walked down a carpeted hallway through odors of decaying varnish and old cigarette smoke.

“She must be doing all right,” Nick said. “This looks reasonably expensive.”

“She probably shares it with others,” Habib said. “They are the new breed, ‘liberated,’ they call it—the hope of the West,” and he laughed.

Nick knocked on a painted door. There was no response. He knocked again. No response.