Relative Danger (13 page)

“Sasha?”

“That may have been his name, but it is a common familiar name in Russia. I only saw him one or two times. She wanted to leave him in Morocco but he followed them here. She told him that they were smuggling the diamond out of Egypt and going somewhere else, I can’t remember where she said, but of course it never went there. He did, however, the Russian. Then she and your uncle had a falling out—over someone she was romantically involved with.” He made a grunting sound to punctuate his displeasure and sipped the remainder of his tea.

“Those two. Your uncle wanted me to talk to her, help smooth her ruffled feathers, but I just couldn’t. She was not the kind of woman I like to talk with. Well, they worked it out on their own, after a fashion. I helped your uncle secure a position on a steamer heading to Japan. Naturally she couldn’t sail with him, not on that ship. Arab owners. Not like the Europeans.”

A man entered the shop and he and Nasser talked in loud, rapid, gesture-filled Arabic. Doug thought it would end in a fight when suddenly both men started laughing and shaking hands. “My friend Salam here wants me to help him convince this British tourist to spend far too much on a piece of dubious quality.”

Doug took one last look at the photo as he stood up. Nasser noticed and said something to the man that Doug couldn’t understand. They talked some more and again it led to laughter and handshaking.

“Stop by before you leave Cairo. After tomorrow. I’ll have a copy made of that for you.”

“That would be great. I don’t have any pictures of my uncle. You’ve been a big help, Mr. Ashkanani. Maybe you could suggest some people I could talk to in Singapore.”

“Yes, when you come for the picture, we’ll talk. But you’ll want to stop by anyway, picture or no picture,” Nasser said, laughing with his friend. “Salam tells me Aisha is in town. I’m sure you’re anxious to see her again.”

Chapter 17

“Well what do you think?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“It’s a fucking let-down.”

“Of course! That’s why we’re here.”

Here was in the burial chamber at the center of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and Doug was fucking let down because, other than a couple of bed-sized slabs of unadorned, dull gray stone and a bare light bulb suspended from an extension cord, duct taped to the ceiling, the room was empty. It had taken twenty minutes to get to this point, the last ten of it stuck in a three-foot-wide, four-foot-tall, sharply sloped passage that served as both the up and down route to the heart of the pyramid. Alone he could have scampered up the incline in twenty seconds, but the passage was crammed, nose to ass, with a busload of British tourists from a retirement home, with Doug and Sergei stuck in the middle. It wasn’t the heat, which was mind-numbing, that made it difficult, nor was it the contortionist-like positions everyone assumed, in total darkness, to allow for both up and down traffic. No, it was the smell of urine—an ancient, dust-encrusted reek, pissed down this slope over four hundred centuries. After enduring that, finding Tutankhamen sipping tea in a La-Z-Boy would have been a disappointment.

Most people came in, said, “This is it?” and turned around, ready to endure the downward version of the trip up. Sergei took a seat on one of the slabs and motioned Doug to sit next to him.

“This is one of my favorite spots in Cairo,” he said. “Just watching the look of disappointment come over everyone’s face, it’s so ironic.”

“You’ve got a sick sense of humor, Sergei.” Doug took out the already soaked bandana he was using as a sweat rag and wiped the stream from the back of his neck.

“You misunderstand me, Douglas. I don’t find it funny, I find it so beautifully ironic. Everyone comes here expecting a treasure and leaves disappointed, the whole time missing the wonder of this space.”

“Yeah, I wonder about it too.”

“There are tons and tons of stone above us and here we are, safe inside one of the oldest man-made spaces on the planet. It’s an engineering marvel, a timeless monument to human ingenuity. A sacred site. Yet everyone comes with their mythological expectations for the pyramid and leaves disappointed when the reality does not match up with their version of what the reality should look like. This place offers so much and people still leave empty handed.”

“I guess,” Doug said. “But I’m still disappointed.”

Sergei kept watching the tourists who, one by one, popped into the chamber, mumbled something in whatever language they spoke, snapped a photo that would turn out to be an unidentifiable gray mass, and forced themselves back down the deadly slope. “You’re too young to understand, Douglas.”

“Oh, that old line. Believe it or not, Sergei, I’ve had a few disappointments in my life too.” He hadn’t, but it sounded good.

“You’re missing my point, my friend. I’m not saying that it’s about disappointment. We all share that. No, it’s about reaching a goal, getting what you think you wanted only to find out that what you wanted never really existed. And then that sudden realization, the realization that they are all missing,” he swept his hand in front of him, taking in the never-ending stream of sweaty, stooped-over tour group adventurers, “that what you get is much more valuable than what you sought. You need to reach your goal many times in life to begin to understand.”

“The journey being better than the destination, is that it?”

“Yes, but you make it sound so trite. Life is a journey. The goals are so small and fleeting and inherently disappointing. Arriving here these people have the opportunity to consider all that they did to get here, the planning, the saving of loose change in large glass jars, the well wishes of loved ones. They could have a life-altering epiphany yet they settle for an unoriginal
bon mot
. The journey
is
the goal.”

“Okay, Socrates, can we get out of here now so I can take a breath that actually contains oxygen?”

On the way down Doug didn’t think about the journey being the goal. He thought about the books he saw on the shelf in the Egyptologist’s office. Sergei had started him out early with a pre-dawn trip to the desert area near the pyramids. The sunrise was, as Sergei promised, awesome, and the camel ride Sergei arranged was definitely cool. The old man could argue in Arabic as well as any of the dozens of camel drivers that descended on every arriving tour bus or cab like ants on a slow-moving worm. Doug was impressed with his ability to get just what he wanted for just the price he told Doug he would pay.

They had climbed a few blocks up on the main pyramid but the official entrance was closed, Sergei explaining that they would have to come back around noon to get inside. And what about the pyramids, Doug thought. “They are really, really big,” he could see himself saying to the guys in Pottsville. Other than that? They would never understand, and I’ll never be able to explain. Getting wedged in this shaft, that they’d understand, but since it was his nose on someone else’s ass, he’d keep that to himself.

They had breakfast in the National Museum, in the office of an old friend of Sergei’s. The museum wasn’t open yet but Sergei had no trouble getting them past the legions of underemployed guards and museum workers who congregated by the staff entrance, waiting to start their day so they could get on with their coffee break. Dr. Hawanna and Sergei chatted in Arabic as they drank their tea and ate their cheese, bread, and olives, from time to time consenting to speak in English so Doug wouldn’t feel left out for too long.

“You have a most wise friend here,” the museum man said. “Dr. Nikolaisen is much respected. I myself refer to his works often.”

“Hopelessly out of date,” Sergei said.

“Timeless,” the man countered. “Look. I’ve worn out the bindings.” He motioned to a shelf across the room, too far away to confirm his claims.

“If you ever have a bout of insomnia, Douglas, I do strongly recommend them to you.” Sergei translated his little joke for the man and the two laughed, rattling on in Arabic for another ten minutes.

Bored, Doug found himself wandering about the spacious but cluttered office. Stacks of paper-filled folders that looked as old as the artifacts were scattered on top of desks and crammed in the Victorian styled display cases. Everywhere there was the settled dust that said that it had been years since any real research had been done in this office. He worked his way around the room, coming to the bookshelf the man had pointed to. Wedged among the dog-eared books, Doug saw a small section of books with nearly identical spines, all from the same publishing line. They were all in German, but Doug could make out
Dr. Sergei Nikolaisen
among the foreign words. He pried out a copy and it was as worn as Dr. Hawanna claimed. Doug flipped through the pages, glancing at the impossibly long German words, the typeface making the thirty-year-old book look medieval. There were shiny pages with black and white photographs of small artifacts placed next to a ruler to provide scale. The photos in one book were of what looked like beetles carved out of stone with Egyptian hieroglyphics engraved on their underside. Another book was all on beads, beads in piles, beads strung together, beads up close. Doug was thumbing through a thin volume filled with pictures of small stones and what looked like ancient jewelry. He stopped thumbing when he saw something he recognized.

Lying on a white background, a ruler alongside marking off the millimeters, was
Al Ainab
. The Grape.

The words in the white border were undecipherable and nothing looked like it said
Al Ainab
. But Doug did make out the phrase
der Rot Diamant
, which had to be what it looked like. And the tints in the black and white photograph meant that it couldn’t be a regular diamond. If it was
Al Ainab
then Sergei knew about it, enough to put it in a book.

“Careful, Douglas,” Sergei said from across the room.

“Huh?” was the best Doug could manage.

“Just put the book down slowly and back away,” Sergei said, setting his teacup down.

“Huh?”

“My books can bore the average man to death in just three minutes,” he said breaking into a smile, “and even short passages can cause irreparable damage.”

“Oh? This?” Doug said, holding the book up before he crammed it back into place. “I wish I could read German, I’d love to know what it says.”

“You can thank your wonderfully insular educational system for keeping you from ever being harmed by inane vanity tracts by self-absorbed European academics, the most deadly of the species, you know.”

Dr. Hawanna objected but Sergei would hear nothing of it. “Come,” Sergei finally said, “let’s show this young man around the museum before the masses arrive. Museums would be so much better if we could just keep the people out.”

They toured around the museum for two hours, stopping at almost every display until Doug was ready to scream. The King Tut artifacts were the highlight, the endless display cases filled with fragments of papyrus or pottery the most painful. An hour after they left the museum they were back at the Great Pyramid, an hour and a half after that they were discussing goals and journeys, and now, with his head wedged between the ass of a Korean tourist in track pants and the cold and slimy wall of the corridor, Doug thought about the photograph.

He had only seen it for a moment and had looked at Aisha’s photograph for not much longer. Was it the same diamond? Could he even tell one diamond from another? Maybe it was just a stone of some kind or another red diamond. But what were the odds it would be a different diamond? About the same as it being the very diamond I’m looking for, he thought.

Later that afternoon, as he floated in the shallow end of the hotel’s pool, he thought about the pyramids, the ridiculously tiny locks on the King Tut display cases, the row after row of mummies in the museum’s storage area, off limits to tourists.

And he thought about the diamond.

And that led him to think about Aisha and for an hour that’s all he thought about.

***

Towards the end of the second day of sightseeing, it was clear to Doug why Sergei had wanted to show him around.

Sergei led them through the fifteenth-century spice market, with its ten-foot-tall stacks of garlic, up to the intricately carved timber balcony in the V-shaped building in the middle of al-Mu’izz Street, across the roof of a four-hundred-year-old tenement to climb the tightly twisting staircase of an equally old minaret, clinging to the walls as the steps narrowed and the handrails disappeared. Sergei’s stories—of princesses killed off by plagues, slaves who rose to be sultans, the eighty-day rule of the only sultana—were peppered with advice on bargaining, buying aphrodisiacs, and crossing the street. He seemed to draw energy from each site they visited, from every question Doug asked.

Inside the Sultan Hasan Mosque, in the shade created by the four huge
iwans
surrounding the central fountain, Doug and Sergei sipped the cool bottled water they bought on the street.

“Each of these arches, these
iwans
, represents the four branches of Islamic law, and the doorways at the rear of each
iwan
lead to the
madressa
, or school. Students would sit here then, much as we are now, and study their respective disciplines or relax in what I believe is the most restful place in all of Cairo.”

“You said that about the first mosque we saw. And about that caravan place….”

“Caravansi.”

“Caravansi. And about that house with the wooden windows.”

“Ah, no, this is the best place of them all.”

“Until we get to the next place.”

“Exactly.”

Doug looked around the courtyard. “Okay, professor, let’s see if I remember. There’s the thing that indicates the direction to Mecca….”

“The
minrahb
,” Sergei added.

“I knew that. And that thing there, with the steps, that’s the minibar.”

“
Minbar
. Big difference.”

“Right. That’s where the Iman does his little chat thing on Fridays. That platform is where the sultan would do his praying to keep him safe from assassins.”

“And so he could be seen by the people. That was very important.”

Doug noticed a smaller archway next to the
minrahb
. “Where’s that lead? Another school?”

“There’s an interesting story behind that,” Sergei said, sitting upright, ready to continue his lectures.

“You say that about everything, Sergei.”

“Through that doorway is the mausoleum of Sultan Hasan. And while his mosque is regarded as one of the crowning achievements in Islamic architecture, Sultan Hasan himself was of little importance. He came to power as a small boy and was therefore himself ruled by his ministers. When he did reign on his own he was ineffective and was eventually killed, his body hidden, never to be found again.”

“And the tomb?”

“In the late fourteen hundreds, more than a century after Hasan was murdered, they placed the body of some minor amir in the tomb. Today no one bothers to read the rather informative plaque and everyone assumes Sultan Hasan is in there.”

Doug laughed. “Sergei, you are amazing. You can even make that story sound interesting.”

They sat in silence for a time.

“You miss the academic world, don’t you?”

Sergei sighed and didn’t answer, and for a minute Doug thought that he had upset him. He sighed again and turned to better see Doug.

“When I was a small boy I had a collection of buttons. Military buttons off old uniforms. I used to arrange them in my room, sketch them, list them from oldest to most recent, group them by regiment or by nationality, and line them up for battle. They were my link to the past. They had actually been in the battles I had read about, battles that took place a hundred years before. I’d think of the soldiers who wore them and how they fought and, naively, how they died. I’d always found that exciting. Then a real war came along and swept me along with it. I fought against the Nazis on the Eastern Front. I lost my interest in things military.