Shooting the Sphinx (8 page)

Mohamed clutched at his hand desperately, “Give me a dollar. I'm hungry.”

Ari reached into his pocket and fumbled out his boarding pass and some receipts for airport food. He produced a dollar and, before he knew it, out of the night came a dozen boys about Mohamed's age. They surrounded Ari, leaping up trying to grab the dollar out of his hand. “I'm hungry! I'm hungry!” they all yelped plaintively. Ari had to hold the dollar bill straight over his head to keep it from being torn. He crumpled it into a little ball and stuffed it into Mohamed's fist.

Three tourist police charged out of the café in their white uniforms with oversized black berets. They raised long rubber truncheons over their heads and brought them down with a swift crack, bashing the legs of the little boys. In seconds, the boys had vanished, behind rocks, through gaps in the wall—gone so fast it was as if they were never there in the first place. But Mohamed, the police had caught by the shirt. They dragged him away on the sand toward the gate.

Mohamed was no match for them, but it took a surprising amount of effort for three grown men to pry the dollar from Mohamed's little fist.

“Noooo!” wailed Mohamed, bursting into tears. Ari cringed. Spellbound, he followed them to the street outside the café. A flatbed truck was parked there, a giant navy blue box on the back. One policeman opened the padlocked door. Maybe thirty boys lay on the floor, lifting their heads up groggily to watch another one tossed inside.

The door slammed on little Mohamed. Ari just stood there. He couldn't believe it. He refused to believe what he had just seen. He closed his eyes and opened them. The truck was still there. This was beyond his comprehension, beyond his limited ability to trust his own senses at that moment. But the box was still on the back of the truck. The police noticed Ari. He drifted toward them, some kind of objection stirring in his throat. They banged on the cab of the truck and hopped up onto the running boards. The driver started the engine and pulled away.

Ari stood and watched the blue box police truck as it drove its catch of the day all along the road around the Necropolis past the Mena House hotel.

 

Chapter 15

Back in his hotel room, Ari immediately Skyped Beth. Staring at his computer, he watched as it rang and rang. He knew he was waking her up. A dim image popped on the screen. Her hand, her face, her white breasts and tousled hair, and beyond, lying next to her, Ari could see the naked fat belly of Beth's husband, Glenn.

“Honey?” mumbled Glenn. “What the hell?”

“I've got a unit in Cairo,” said Beth. She rubbed her eyes. “Must be something wrong. Go back to sleep, Glenn.”

Then she noticed her husband's nakedness on the screen. Wincing, she hit a button. Her image and Glenn's disappeared. Ari could hear the thumping slap of her feet on the floor as she carried her computer through to some distant corner of her home. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, thought Ari. What a mistake. I should never have called her this early. You idiot! he berated himself.

“What is it, Ari? What's the matter?”

“Nothing.” Ari couldn't even picture her face. He was stuck with the latent image of Glenn's fat white belly.

“Did you get the cash from Charley and Don?” Beth guessed at a potential problem.

“Yes, yes, thank you, I did.”

“Did you get your SpaceCam?”

This was what Ari knew he had to tell her, but not yet. “Darling, please, could you turn on your camera?”

“Keep it professional, Ari.” She was very tense. “This thing's on speaker. I'll take that as a no. No SpaceCam.”

“Not yet.”

“What's your plan B?”

Ari bristled. “I get the shot.”

“But if you don't?”

“I get the shot.” Ari repeated the words slower, forcefully, deliberately.

“I told the studio, Ari.”

Now he was shaken. “When?”

“Yesterday, after we spoke.”

“But why?”

“Ari.”

“I thought we had agreed not to tell them until … this morning? Today, morning your time?”

“Bad news is radioactive. Best to get rid of it before it rubs off on you.”

“On you, you mean.” Ari's ire rose. “So I can't trust you? My own—”

“Ari, please!”

What was he going to say? Girlfriend, lover, boss? He didn't even know. She had been naked. Glenn had been naked. The thought revolted him. “Throwing me under the bus like that?”

Beth turned on her webcam. They could see each other again. She had tossed on a thin silk kimono that was not entirely closed. “They're not stupid, Ari. If you had waited until today, they would have figured out you were sitting on information. I did you a favor.”

“Are they worried?” asked Ari.

“Not yet, but we're paying Charley and Don two grand a day to take a vacation?”

“I asked the guys to cut their rate when we don't fly.”

“Thank you.” She softened.

“In half.”

“Very nice.” She seemed pleased and leaned back; her kimono fell open. She didn't adjust it. “Did you really ride a camel?”

“Tomorrow. Open your e-mail. When would I have had time to do that?” He was hostile, offended. He never thought of Glenn, as if he didn't exist. On other nights Ari knew how to keep the boundaries that would never intersect with married life.

“How's the food over there?” she asked, another question to keep him talking, and Ari could see that she knew he was upset.

“Now I understand hummus.” Ari opened up slowly, cagily. “I mean, I really finally get it for the first time. And the mango juice is so good. It costs about a dime. I gave a glass to a kid, big mistake.”

“What's so bad about that?” She prompted him to talk, to keep him on the line.

“The tourist police beat him for … begging.”

“Beat him?” The words hit her and she closed her kimono reflexively. “How old was he?”

“Ten, maybe eleven. They marched him out to the street where there's always a truck with a big blue box on the back—no windows, just a giant box. They opened the door. There are about thirty kids sleeping inside right now.”

“Oh my god!”

“And they threw him inside the box and locked it.”

“What did you do?”

“Me? I didn't know what to do. I was so stunned.” Ari realized what was upsetting him more than anything else. “I just stood there and … I didn't do anything.”

 

PART THREE

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.

—Gamal Abdel Nasser

 

Chapter 16

Hamed pulled up in front of a British colonial building that might easily have stood in Knightsbridge or Bayswater. Ari was not expecting anything so grand, yet the number of the address matched the one he was looking for. So did the name on the brass plaque: P
ETROLEUM
A
IR
C
HARTERS
.

In the States, when Ari went to a helicopter charter company, it was always in some shack on the far side of an airstrip. This place was an imposing limestone building about the size of the White House, girded by a tall wrought iron fence twelve feet high with black spikes on top. Outside the gate, a Horse Guards–style booth housed a well-pressed policeman bearing a submachine gun.

Ari gathered his props—his little gold Sphinx, his plastic pyramids, and his toy helicopter—then walked up the steps into the echoing lobby.

What imperial purpose this building had served for the British he could only guess. He crossed a white polished marble floor and passed through black Georgian columns. A twin circular staircase with red Persian carpet runners led upward.

“May I help you?” asked the receptionist. She wore a navy blue Chanel suit and had her hair in a twist.

“I have an appointment with General Hanawy.”

“Follow me, please.”

The receptionist led Ari upstairs through a reception room. Green leather couches around a coffee table faced the secretary's desk. Ari assumed he would sit and wait but she kept leading him on toward a mahogany door. She knocked and pushed the heavy door open.

“Mr. Basher is here,” she said.

“Send him in,” said an imperious voice.

Startled by not having to wait, Ari was shown into the largest office for any one person that he had ever seen. On one side was a sitting room area with Edwardian furniture where one could have tea. Models and pictures of different aircraft all painted with the same red-on-white pattern adorned the room.

Ari walked past a conference table down toward the enormous desk at the far end, where two rows of leather-backed chairs faced inward in the Middle-Eastern martial style.

The general arose. He wore a dark Savile Row suit. Ari had to stifle an urge to burst out laughing. The resemblance that Ari saw was uniquely Egyptian.

General Hanawy was a taller, younger, more handsome, more statuesque version of President Hosni Mubarak, the movie star version. Ari found it quite surreal, but he had come to sell, so he forced his grin into a smile and kicked into action.

“Hello, sir, thank you so much for seeing me.”

“It is nothing. Don't mention it,” said General Hanawy with a regal gesture as if shooing away a bug. “Ahmed Maher was my teacher. He taught me to fly. He taught me the MiG-21 fighter jet. He taught me how to stay alive and how to kill the Israeli pilots. He put me in the squadron of Hosni Mubarak.” The general pointed at a younger picture of himself in uniform with Mubarak as his squadron commander. “Without Ahmed Maher, I would have died in the skies over Sinai when I was twenty-two years old. And he has asked me to help you. What may I offer you? Whiskey? Wine?”

“Oh, no, thank you.” Ari shook his head.

“It is not a problem. We keep those for our American friends. And there is always the proverbial mint tea,” added the general, as a tea tray landed on his desk and the porter handed Ari his cup.

“So my teacher, Ahmed Maher, told me you are from Hollywood, California?”

“Oh, no, sir. I live in New York, but he is correct. I do work for the movies, and I'm a pilot. If you ever come to New York, I will take you flying,” Ari continued. “I will fly you down the Hudson River, over Central Park, over the Brooklyn Bridge, next to the skyscrapers of Wall Street, out over New York Harbor, then we'll fly in a tight circle around the Statue of Liberty.”

As different as these two men were, they were both pilots. They knew something about each other that regular people didn't. They shared the fellowship of addicts hooked on a drug they had to wait ever so carefully to use. The price of this drug was competence—and a thorough understanding of how not to use it. Within a minute's inattention, one could cause, then suffer, the most terrifying fate. Every time one stepped into the cockpit, then pulled up and off the runway, a specter of death hovered, always quickening the heart just a little bit—waiting for the slightest mistake or malfunction, and making one feel a little more alive.

“Ahmed Maher said you require some assistance with aerial photography?” asked the general.

“Yes, sir.”

“And the Egyptian Air Force will not provide what you need?”

Sell him first, thought Ari, then tell him your troubles. “Oh it's complicated, but … If I may, sir?”

Ari leapt out of his chair and set up the pyramids and Sphinx on the general's desk. The general raised his hand.

“One moment.” The general picked up his phone and barked an order in Arabic.

“Before you start, let me call in my number two.” General Hanawy leaned in confidentially. “I am something of a figurehead here. He is really the one who runs this company, Mustapha Shawky. He is a good man. He was never in the Air Force, but all of his brothers were. His is a fine family.”

A very short bald man with a moustache and a hand-tailored Egyptian suit walked in.

“Hello?” said the diminutive Shawky, looking at Ari and not knowing what to expect.

“Mustapha, this is Mr. Ariel Basher from New York and Hollywood. Ahmed Maher Shehata, my flight instructor, sent him to us. He is about to make a presentation. Go ahead please.”

Ari finished placing the pyramids and Sphinx on the desk.

“So, here's the Great Pyramid, and the others.”

“As they would be situated,” said the general.

“But the Sphinx would be below them,” Shawky corrected him.

The general turned on Shawky annoyed. “Of course, that goes without saying.”

Ari picked up the toy helicopter and mimed the action as he described it.

“So the shot would start very close, tight on the head of the Sphinx, so tight that we wouldn't know where we were. Then, as the helicopter orbits the Sphinx, we start to see the head and recognize it. As we pull back, we see the whole body. We come around back here and go right past the tip-top of the pyramid of Khafre and the pyramid of Khufu. Then we see the whole Necropolis—and the desert in the background.”

“Impressive plan,” said General Hanawy. “I can envision what you want to achieve. It will be very dramatic.” General Hanawy turned to Shawky. “Can we do this?”

“We have the capability,” said Shawky. “Our pilots are very good.”

“The best,” added the general.

“What kind of helicopter do you desire?” asked Shawky. “We have eight Eurocopters and seventeen Jet Rangers.”

“Seventeen?” Ari had never heard of so many helicopters belonging to one company.

“We have a total of twenty-nine helicopters.”

“Wow.” This was practically an airline, thought Ari. “In the U.S., when you charter a chopper, you usually go to some shack by a hangar where they have one helicopter, maybe two. This is a very grand building. How can you afford to have so many aircraft?”