Whiplash River (22 page)

Chapter 33

Q
uinn ate like a horse the next morning, dipping back twice into the hotel buffet and knocking down a pot of purple Egyptian tea that smelled like flowers. Shake wondered if the old son of a bitch had managed to get lucky again last night when Shake and Gina were off chasing Devane.

When Shake, more precisely, was off chasing Gina.

“Try this,” Quinn said. “It's called
karkade.
Hibiscus tea. It'll lower your blood pressure.”

“Do I need to lower my blood pressure?” Shake said. “Or do you?”

Quinn gave him a wink. “I did meet a nice lady at the hotel bar last night, yes. A corporate something-something from London, retired. A very nice lady, I'm a sucker for the accent. Any accent, tell you the truth.”

Gina made her way across the dining room. She gave them both big friendly hugs, then sat down next to Shake, looking as dewy and innocent as a fresh-plucked rose petal.

“I like it,” Quinn said after Gina filled him in on what happened at Devane's club. “It's perfect. Sometimes the best angle is the simple angle. Point A to point B, don't get fancy. Ask me about my time in Lisbon sometime, when I'm in an expansive mood.”

“No,” Shake said. “It's not perfect. This guy Devane, he's the real deal. He's smart. The suspicious type. He's gonna be thinking a step or two ahead, every step he takes.”

Quinn looked at Gina. Gina nodded. That annoyed Shake, both the look and the nod.

“What?” Shake said. “You need confirmation?”

“Is baby cranky?” Gina said. When Quinn turned to flag down the waitress for another pot of tea, she whispered in Shake's ear. “Didja wake up with a big achy boner this morning? That would make me cranky.”

Shake ignored that. “And those bad boys working for Devane,” he said. “If we're still on the subject of why this isn't perfect. We don't want to tangle with them.”

Quinn nodded. “Former SSI. State security. That's what my buddy Mahmoud says. After the revolution, the military broke up the SSI. All the meanest bastards in the Middle East out on the free market to the highest bidder. We do not in fact want to tangle with them.”

“Great,” Shake said.

“It's pretty perfect,” Gina said. “It's as close to perfect as we're gonna get. Porkpie thinks we're buyers because he was the one who thought of it. Don't you see? He pulled, so we didn't have to push. So he's not suspicious now.”

“He's suspicious,” Shake said.

“You know what I mean. We're over the wall, at least. That's what I mean.”

“She's not wrong,” Quinn said.

“Fine,” Shake said. “We're over the wall. He thinks we're buyers. Now what?”

“We use that to get him on the move,” Quinn said. “We get the item out of the safe, out of the house.”

Gina nibbled at the base of her thumbnail. Shake had never seen her do that before. Maybe she'd picked up the habit when she quit smoking.

“I don't know,” she said. “A different situation, I'd say maybe that was enough. But Porkpie is totally the suspicious type.”

“And Egyptian state security working for him,” Shake said. “Let's not forget.”

She nibbled her thumbnail. “He has to carry it in something,” she said finally. “When he takes it around to show buyers. A briefcase or whatever. He's not going to carry Teddy Roosevelt's seven-million-dollar speech folded up in his back pocket.”

“Aha!” Quinn said.

Shake saw where Gina was headed too, but wasn't sure it deserved an
Aha!

“Harry,” she said, “can your buddy Mahmoud get us the specs on the case Porkpie carries the speech in?”

“Mahmoud can get us the specs. He can get us measurements, pictures on his telephone, the whole shebang.”

“It has to be exact,” Shake said. “The specs. We'll have to hunt down an identical case.”

“I know we'll have to hunt down an identical case.”

“Then all we have to do is throw the bump,” Gina said.

Shake shook his head. “If it doesn't go like clockwork, he'll know it's a switch.”

“Bet your ass he will,” Gina said.

She waited. Shake had to smile.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“When have you ever heard of something like that working?” he said.

“We turn a negative into a positive.”

Shake noticed that Quinn was frowning.

“What's wrong, Harry?” Gina said. “It might work.”

“Look here,” Quinn said. “It's a good idea, but I don't like it that Devane thinks Shake's the buyer. No offense, Shake. But you're not my idea of a wealthy collector of illicit antiquities.”

Shake didn't take offense. He doubted he was anybody's idea of a wealthy collector of illicit antiquities.

“Porkpie was tuning out,” Gina said. “I had to get his attention. I had to put the buyer right there in front of him so he'd take us seriously.”

Shake didn't know if that was true. Maybe it was. He knew it was more true that Gina had just wanted to fuck with him when she'd ambushed Shake by telling Devane that he was the buyer.

“You did a helluva job, young lady,” Quinn said. “Don't get me wrong. I wish I'd seen you in action. What I'm saying is, it should be me. It's not too late. We call Devane up, we move the furniture around a little.”

“It's too late, Harry,” Gina said. “You know that. You're the bump. You have to be the bump. You're the only one he hasn't seen yet.”

“The bump.” Quinn scowled. “The bit part, you mean.”

So that was it. Shake let Gina take this one.
Have fun, young lady.

“Harry. Sugar pie. Suck it up, okay?”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Now Shake frowned. He'd expected Quinn to put up more of a fight. He'd expected Gina to emerge at least a little worse for the wear.

“We have to move fast,” she said. “What do we have? A couple days max?”

“That's probably the window,” Shake said. “The other bid isn't great or he would have taken it. But it's a bid.”

“I'll go see Mahmoud right now,” Quinn said.

“I'll go with you,” Shake said. The specs on the case had to be exact. That point had to be communicated very clearly to Quinn's guy.

“Fine,” Quinn said. “Maybe there's a lightbulb you can help me change afterward.”

“And I'll go see Porkpie,” Gina said. “Make arrangements for the show-and-tell. I can get to know him a little bit, soften him up.”

She gave Shake a sweet, rose-petal smile. Shake remembered her threat last night about sleeping with Devane. Not like he'd forgotten it.

“Why don't I go see Porkpie?” Shake said. “And you go with Quinn.”

“No, I can handle it,” she said. She leaned over to whisper in Shake's ear. “His boner, I mean.”

“He'll start digging, you know,” Quinn said. Ignoring them or not ignoring them, Shake couldn't tell which. “Once he has the name of the potential buyer.”

Gina nodded. “Suspicious type that he is.”

“Not to mention, look at our potential buyer,” Quinn said. Meaning, Shake was nobody's idea of a wealthy collector of illicit antiquities.

“Harry.”

“Okay, okay.”

“My IT guy back in San Fran, I can have him put up a fake Web site, hack around and create a footprint. You know, for whoever Shake is supposed to be. John Q. Dingus, whoever. My guy can hack it so our John Q. Dingus shows up top of the page on Google. No, fuck it, hold on.”

“Devane will dig deeper than Google,” Shake said.

“He'll call around. Shut up, I know.”

“Use a real name, for chrissakes,” Quinn said. “Don't make one up. Find a shoe that fits, don't build one from scratch. That's how we always did it.”

Shake and Gina looked at each other.

“Roland Ziegler,” she said.

The Wall Street swindler Shake had channeled last night.
I collect stories, not objects.
Roland Ziegler was a doughy, pretentious weasel who made sure you knew in the first thirty seconds of a conversation that he owned two private islands off the coast of Panama and a building on Park Avenue. He was exactly everybody's idea of a wealthy collector of illicit antiquities.

“Ziegler's a fit,” Gina told Shake. “You totally nailed him last night. You're already playing the part.”

“Ziegler's in the federal pen. Small problem, don't you think? When Devane starts digging and—oh.”

“Good boy. Keep going and you'll get a big hug at the finish line.”

“Shut up. I get it.”

“The way we play it,” Gina said, “Ziegler
was
in the federal pen. Past tense. Until, let's see, a few months ago?”

“We say he cut a deal with the feds so they let him walk. He's done it before.”

“He promised to rat out a few of his old Wall Street buddies.”

“All of it very hush-hush,” Quinn said, catching on. “They kept it out of the papers.”

“I'll still have my IT guy do some hacking. You know? Drop a hint here, a hint there.”

“Maybe,” Shake said. “I don't know. What if Devane knows Ziegler? What if he knows the feds would never cut another deal with him after he screwed them the first time?”

“Bad for us,” Gina said.

“And the case Devane carries Teddy's speech in. What if it's custom? What if we can't find a look-alike for it?”

Teddy's
speech.
Christ
. Shake was doing it himself now.

“Shake.” Quinn set his cup of tea down. “You got a better hand on the table, I'd love to see it. I mean that sincerely. But from where I sit, my perspective, your other hand on the table looks like dead broke and Sticky Jimmy trying to pop you.”

“Sticky Jimmy?” Gina said.

“Logan James.”

Gina laughed. “Oh, Harry, I'd want to kill you too, you gave me a nickname like that.”

“I didn't give him the nickname. Well. Let's just say he earned the nickname.”

“I bet he did.”

“We have to play our hand, Shake,” Quinn said. “Another opportunity like this, it won't drop down from the sky.”

Quinn meant the money. Or maybe he meant Gina. Both. Either way, Shake knew he didn't have a better hand to play.

“The case he carries the speech in,” Shake said. “We have to find one that's identical.”

“Go ahead,” Quinn said. “Tell me one more time so I don't forget.”

Chapter 34

S
hake and Quinn waited outside the hotel while a bellhop called them a cab.

At the lobby entrance was a metal detector manned by two Egyptian soldiers holding machine guns. Down at the end of the drive were two more soldiers, poking mirrors beneath the chassis of every car that wanted to come closer.

“So the military runs the show now?” Shake said.

“They always ran the show,” Quinn said. “They own half the country. They own construction companies, factories, resorts. The hotel we're staying in, I wouldn't be surprised the military has a piece of that. They build roads, they make bread. I mean the kind of bread you eat.”

“The military does?”

“They were always independent, more or less. Mubarak had his security forces, separate from the military. The SSI, remember? The guys work for Devane? During the revolution, the military sided with the people, not Mubarak. It's more complicated than that, you know what I mean. The honeymoon's over now, between the people and the military. Hell, the honeymoon's over between the people and the people, the liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Noor. Don't even mention the Christians.”

Shake had to give Quinn credit. The old guy knew a lot about Egyptian politics. Or seemed to.

“That's the problem with honeymoons,” Quinn said. “Sooner or later, they're over.”

“Yeah,” Shake said. That was something he knew about.

The soldiers down at the end of the drive finished checking over the cab. It pulled up. Shake and Quinn got in.

“Sabah el kheir,
” Quinn told the cabdriver.

“Sabah el kheir,”
the cabdriver said. “Where you go?”

“Qarafa. You know?”

The cabdriver looked at Quinn. Then the cabdriver waved over the bellhop and said a lot of things to him, fast, in Arabic. Shake hadn't made up his mind about Arabic. It was harsh but also at times musical, a lot of hacking up phlegm but also some sweet surprising lilts. It was like listening to a hard-core metal band do a cover of “Hey Jude.”

The call to prayer, this morning, warbling and scratchy through the amplified speakers of the mosques nearby, had sounded a little to Shake like mournful mountain bluegrass.

When the cabdriver finished talking to the bellhop, the bellhop looked at Quinn.

“Please, sir,” the bellhop said. “Am I mistaken? You wish to visit the City of the Dead?”

Shake looked at Quinn too.

“It's not what you think,” Quinn told Shake.

Shake hoped not.

“Yes,” Quinn told the bellhop and the cabdriver. “That's exactly what I wish. How far is it? Half an hour?”

“Inshallah,”
the cabdriver said, and pulled away from the curb.

Shake tried not to think about Gina and Devane. Gina with Devane. Shake didn't think she'd really sleep with a douche bag like Devane just to get back at him. The odds were about a million to one against. But they were still odds—that was the problem. Not to mention that Gina was such an expert liar. Even if she didn't sleep with Devane, she could convince Shake that she had.

Or the other way around. Shit. Shake came up a loser on this one no matter how fine you chopped. Gina knew it.

“Keep your head in the game,” Quinn said.

“My head's in the game.”

“What did I tell you? About letting your emotions get in the way because of some girl.”

“Some girl.”

“She is some girl,” Quinn admitted. “Why in God's name did you dump her?”

“What about you?” Shake said. Anything to change the fucking subject.

“Me?”

“Were you ever married?”

“Yes,” Quinn said, and nothing else.

Shake looked around for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “That's it?” he said. “No story it takes you an hour just to get started?”

“Keep your head in the game,” Quinn said, and then nothing else again.

 

GINA USED HER BURNER CELL
to call the number Devane had given her. The call went straight through to him. He sounded like he was in the shower. He sounded like he was in the shower with a couple of the girls from the night before.

Ick,
Gina thought. You'd need a shower after showering with that kind of girl.

Devane said he'd send a car for her but Gina told him she'd make her own way over. She didn't want him to know where they were staying yet, and she didn't want to be trapped at his place.

Gina had no intention of banging Devane. No way. She'd only told Shake that to make him suffer. Devane could not have been more unappealing to her. There was something cold about him, both stiff and limp at the same time, like frozen fish you left in the fridge overnight and had only partway thawed by morning.

Ick
. But she might get some fresh ideas, during her private visit with Devane, for teaching Shake a lesson. The interesting thing about being her, Gina had discovered over the years, was that she never quite knew what she was going to do, not until she actually did it.

The old Gina, that is. The new Gina, who always ordered the same poached salmon for lunch and listened to pitches all day, who attended charity fund-raisers and went out with perfectly nice guys, that Gina hardly ever surprised this Gina.

This Gina? Did that mean that the real Gina was the old Gina?

As mad as she still was at Shake, Gina had to admit that she was having more fun now than she'd had in a while. She felt—happier. Was that because of Shake, or was it because she loved wheels and deals and that tingle she always got when she stood on the end of a diving board, no idea how deep or how cold the water was far below?

Fuck. She didn't know.

And, okay, she had to admit that teaching Shake a lesson wasn't the only only
only
reason she'd come to Cairo with him.

She realized she was biting at her thumbnail again.

“So give me your address,” Gina told Devane. “I'll grab a cab.”

“Meet me on the river,” he said. “There's a private
dehabeah
docked across from the Cairo tower. That's a boat, like a yacht. You can't miss it.”

“That's where you live?”

“Yeah right,” he said. “Like I'm going to tell you where I live.”

“Really?” Gina said. “You're that paranoid?”

“Ha. I'm a lot more paranoid than that.”

Good,
Gina thought. She was counting on it.

 

THE CAB DROPPED SHAKE AND
Quinn off at the edge of a slum that sprawled for miles. Most of the houses were small, almost miniature, crowded close together. Baking in the sun, crumbling, chunks of plaster dropped away to reveal the ragged gray brick beneath.

“Why do they call it City of the Dead?” Shake asked Quinn.

“You'll figure it out,” Quinn said. “I have complete faith in you.”

Shake guessed it was because a lot of the buildings looked like tombs. The place reminded him of the cemeteries in New Orleans, where they couldn't put people in the ground because the city was below sea level.

And then Shake realized that a lot of the buildings didn't just look like tombs, they were in fact tombs.

“It's an actual cemetery?” Shake said.

“Gold star.”

But there were people everywhere, moving up and down the narrow dusty lanes between the tombs, kids kicking around a soccer ball, a guy selling fruit from a cart.

“People live here? In the tombs?”

“Twenty million people in Cairo, that's what they say. More than that, probably. Everybody needs a place to lay their head.”

“In a tomb?”

“Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Free rent and you don't have to worry about your roommates making a lot of noise. Come on.”

They passed through a crumbling stone arch and entered the cemetery. Nobody paid much attention to them. Quinn called over one of the kids playing soccer. He gave the kid an Egyptian pound coin, fifteen cents or so, and the kid led them toward Mahmoud's house. His tomb.

“It doesn't bother you,” Shake said. “Our inside guy on the score, the guy everything hangs on, he lives in a tomb?”

“It bothers me. Did I say it didn't? He told me he had a fancy office, he told me he was Devane's right-hand man. But if he can get us the specs on the case, if he helps us take off Devane, does it matter where our inside guy lives or which hand he wipes his ass with?”

Mahmoud came out of the tomb, grinning, that big hole where an eyetooth should have been. He shook Quinn's hand. “You crazy bastard!”

“You old son of a bitch!”

“Come in, my friends! Come in, please. These are only temporary lodgings, of course.”

They went inside. The tomb was clean and cool. There was a mattress in one corner, a TV in another. Mahmoud put three teacups on the table in the center of the room, an old green stone slab that had faint Arabic markings carved on it.

“Why don't we do this outside?” Shake said.

Mahmoud looked confused, but Quinn didn't seem too thrilled about drinking tea off a gravestone either.

“Let's just cut to the chase,” Quinn said. He asked Mahmoud if he knew what Devane used to transport Roosevelt's speech when he took it out of the house to show potential buyers.

“Oh, yes,” Mahmoud said. “Of course. The attaché.”

“The attaché?”

“Yes. Such as a businessman might carry? Leather, black. Many of the items that Mr. Devane sells, if the item is of a certain size and no larger, he prefers the attaché.”

“Can you get us the exact specs?” Shake said.

“Specs.”

“Dimensions. Size.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“We need to know the exact color of the leather. We need a photo. Okay? We need to find a case exactly like it. Devane can't spot the difference.”

“But I will bring you the exact match!” Mahmoud said. “Leave this to me. I will bring you the very twin of Mr. Devane's attaché! My cousin Sayed, you must understand that this is his business. Do you understand me? Leather and luggage and such. Leave this to me.”

Shake glanced at Quinn. Quinn cleared his throat.

“Mahmoud,” Quinn said. “This is important. A little bullshit now and then, two old friends, what does it matter? But bullshit in a situation like this one, we blow a serious payday. Maybe worse than that. Do you understand me?”

Mahmoud assumed a grave expression. Shake waited.

“My old friend,” Mahmoud told Quinn. “I need this money. If I do not get out of this shithole soon, I am going to die. That is no bullshit.”

 

DEVANE'S YACHT WAS BIG, NO
surprise. But it also had a British colonial charm that Gina hadn't expected, with teak decks and wrought-iron railings, and fat old-fashioned life preservers along the hull. Gina could picture Agatha Christie on the deck of a boat like this, chatting with a man in a white tuxedo. Katharine Hepburn playing Agatha Christie in a movie.

There was a guy at the gate to the dock. Another guy at the walkway to the boat. Different guys from the ones who had been with Devane at the club, but they wore the same dark suits, they had the same dead eyes, they held their hands the same way. The guy at the gate opened the door of the cab for her. He had a pale knotted scar that ran the entire length of his face.

Gina told the cabdriver to wait for her. He didn't look too thrilled about that, what with Scarface dead-eyeing him, but he nodded. Scarface led her onto the yacht and through it. The interior was surprisingly tasteful too, British desert colonial, but not obnoxiously so. Gina saw a Picasso she thought might be real.

Devane was lounging on the top deck, by the pool. A very tan naked girl was lounging next to him, her hand down the front of Devane's silk pajama pants. The naked girl was working away at Devane in a sort of vacant, absentminded way, like she was petting a dog while watching TV.

“Hope you don't mind,” Devane said. “I got antsy and I knew you weren't gonna fuck me. You weren't ever gonna fuck me, were you? But you were gonna try to make me think you might. That's your game.”

“Nailed it.”

“Part of your game, I should say. I'm not stupid.”

To illustrate “stupid” he used his hands to make a dunce cap. At least that's what Gina thought he was doing.

He was wearing a different straw porkpie today. Really? Was this still 2008?

The naked girl kept petting away. She looked like she was trying not to yawn.

“She'll go down on you if I tell her to,” Devane said.

“I prefer my sex with a consenting partner. Crazy me.”