Relative Danger (14 page)

“But I was still fascinated by artifacts from the past. After the war I found myself in Munich where I earned my Ph.D., jumped into the museum circuit, and, for almost forty years, was blissfully happy. I was paid to research, to travel, to study and teach. I published my little books and I established what I thought was a rather secure reputation, ready to live out my final years doing pretty much what I had done for almost all of them. It was dull, routine and monotonous. And I loved it.”

Sergei paused and shifted again, this time so he could look above the high walls that enclosed the courtyard and up to the perfect blue sky. “Publish or perish, they said. Well, not in those words, but that’s what they said. But I’ve already written a whole series of books. Yes, that is true, but that was ages ago. But can’t I just advise, serve as a consultant? No you cannot. What is left for me to do? What indeed, Dr. Nikolaisen.”

They sat in silence again till Doug couldn’t take it any longer. “Well that sucks.”

Sergei looked at Doug and let out a loud laugh that echoed in the
iwan
. “Perfect, Douglas, perfect,” he said. “Yes, it sucks but you know, in a way I see their point. I was getting to be a burden on the museum and I really didn’t do much truly fine academic work after the early Seventies. And I was, I’ll admit, a bit arrogant, looking down my nose at the young people who were publishing well received monographs and organizing exhibitions that drew big crowds. Pandering to the masses, I cried, forgetting it was the masses that kept the museum going.”

“You know what I would like?” Sergei continued. “I’d like one last big find, one last moment to show them that old Dr. Nikolaisen still has something to say. Maybe publish one more book. My opus. My swan song.”

“How many books have you written?” Doug asked, nudging towards the question he wanted to ask and away from the somber mood his first question brought.

“Alone, fifteen. With colleagues, another dozen or two. And I honestly can’t say how many articles I’ve written. Hundreds, I suppose.”

“Mostly on Egypt?”

“Oh no, on many subjects.”

“Hey, ever do anything on diamonds? Maybe I can look in your books and find out where mine is.”

“The Jagersfontien Diamond? No, I’m afraid not. Other than its adventure in Casablanca, there isn’t much to write about.” He placed the empty water bottle in the small bag he carried. “Ready to go?”

They walked through the courtyard and into the winding corridors of the old building. “When I was flipping through the books in Dr. Hawanna’s office, I thought I saw a picture of the diamond I’m looking for.” There, he thought. It’s out.

“My books?” he said, sounding surprised. “Not in my books. What was the title?”

“It was in German, I don’t know.”

“Was it on the Royal Collection at the Soffia Museum? There was some mention of a blue diamond in that work.”

“Like I said, I don’t read German.”

“Was the title
Eighteenth Century Acquisitions of the Uthman Katkhuda?
There’s several diamonds in that one, but all too small to be yours.”

“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know, Sergei.”

“If it
was
in that book then it would have to be a later edition since the first two editions had no color plates.”

“It wasn’t in color. It was a black and white photograph.”

“Tisk, tisk, Douglas,” he said as the zigzagging corridor gave way to the three-story vestibule and the equally tall wooden doors, the bright sun blinding after their short walk through the building. Sergei fished his sunglasses out from his bag. “Identifying a rare object, a jewel no less, from one black and white photograph? That’s a bold claim for an expert to make. Do you know more about jewels than you’re letting on?”

No, Doug said to himself, but I thought you might.

“Miss Monroe was right, diamonds may indeed be a girl’s best friend. But to museum curators, they are over-priced security risks. We leave them to the jewelers. Up for one more site? It’s that one there, on the top of that hill. The Ottoman mosque of Muhammad Ali—the ruler, not the boxer. Like all things Ottoman, it’s too ornate, too showy. After this beautiful mosque, this masterpiece of simplicity, I do hope you’ll be disappointed.”

“Come on then,” Doug said, putting his arm around Sergei’s shoulder. “I promise not to let you down.”

Chapter 18

Doug had been sitting in the café for two hours already when he decided he would continue sitting there for about another two. Sitting. Just sitting. Not wandering around some historical site, not getting yet another lecture from Sergei, not having every other person trying to sell him something from a carpet to a chess set to a washing machine.

Sitting was good. The waiter, who spoke no English, kept the pots of coffee full and added a plate of pastry as dry and crumbly as papyrus. He left Doug alone to write out his dozen postcards, each saying just about the same thing. Left him alone to half-start and re-start a list under the heading
The Mystery of the Grape
. Left him alone to observe the tough guy sitting by the door, the one with the overly hairy mustache, overly hairy eyebrows, and overly hairy ears. Left him alone to glance down the alley and through the medieval gateway, watching for the unmistakable shape of Aisha Al-Kady heading towards the jewelry shop of Nasser Ashkanani. The waiter left him so alone that when a man entered from the rear of the café, pulled up a chair behind Doug, and placed a knife against the small of Doug’s back, Doug didn’t even bother to look up for help.

They sat silently long enough for Doug to feel the cold bead of sweat roll down his neck and under the collar of his short-sleeved shirt. He sensed the man lean forward, felt his breath on his ear. “So tell me, punk,” Clint Eastwood said, “do you feel lucky?”

Doug’s sigh was so long that Clint had time to pull his chair around to Doug’s table and set the butter knife down onto the tray of papyrus pastries.

“So, you smuggle any drugs for Moroccan tarts lately?” Abe said as he tried to get the waiter’s attention.

“Couldn’t you say hello like normal people?” Doug said.

“Could. But what fun would that be? I walked by the front window and waved like a fuckin’ tourist, but you didn’t see me. Consider it a lesson on being aware of your surroundings. You’re like an American Express commercial waiting to happen. I’d do a Karl Malden right now, but I’m not sure what he sounds like.”

“So I take it you got out of the jail alright.”

“Told you I would. It was that rarest of all things that got me locked up—an honest mistake. They wanted to grab another Abdoulrahim Al Abdulrazzaq, there being many of us in Cairo saddled with that name. A mere good ol’ American C note got me sprung, with the apologies of the man who put me in. The same man who, in fact, was able to get me out at that bargain price. The coincidence is sublime.”

“I don’t know how much it cost Sergei to get me out. Will you look at this, my hand is still shaking.” Doug held up his hand and watched as it twitched uncontrollably. “You’re an ass.”

“Oh I bet you say that to all the boys you shared a jail cell with. Yes, finally,” Abe said as the waiter approached the table. Abe ordered a coffee and a second plate of pastries. “So, Kimosabe, what are you doing here? Most tourists go to Fishawi’s.”

“I think that woman you called the Moroccan Tart will be coming by here.”

“Ooohh, an ambush. What are you going to do, sneak up behind her and give her a whack from your blackjack? Chloroform maybe? Or are you going to trail her to her mountain hideout to get the drop on her?”

“No, I just want to talk with her.”

“Talk? Okay, slick, let’s see if I have this right. You’re going to walk up to this woman and say ‘Excuse me, I am the gentleman on whom you chose to plant a pound of cocaine and I would like to discuss with you my displeasure at your most uncivil actions.’ Get real.”

“Well, your ideas were no better. How can you eat those things?”

“These are great, man,” Abe said, emphasizing his point by raising the half-eaten cookie. “And those were not my plans. Those are things I figured you might try. I, of course, have a better idea. Here’s what we do. I got a friend who owns a shop not far from here….”

“Everyone seems to say that.”

“Of course. Every
real
Egyptian knows someone with a shop. Anyway, I’ll show you where it is. He’s got some rooms on the floors above the shop. Then we’ll come back here, you point out the chick, skip on back to the shop and, the suave and debonair man that I am, I’ll convince the young lady that she has to come to the shop with me.”

“That’s your plan? The blackjack was better. Aisha is no tourist, there’s no way she’ll fall for that line.”

Abe shook his head. “Oh ye of little faith.” He said something to the waiter as he stood up. “I’ll show you the back route. Then we’ll sit here and you can tell me all about your years of success with women. That’ll kill ten minutes.”

The shop turned out to be just two blocks over, which of course meant five hundred yards of twisting alleyways and side streets to get there. Abe was quick with introductions and Doug looked around the cloth shop while Abe explained in Arabic his plans to the shop owner. Doug looked at the thousands of bolts of black cloth—and only black cloth—used to create the ninja-like abayahs that the most traditional women wore. Sergei had pointed out that they were worn by Muslim and Christian alike, but in either case Doug thought it was ridiculous. A hundred plus degrees and they cover themselves in black, on top of their regular clothes. The men, of course, Doug noted, wore white.

The spare rooms were three flights up a narrow, back staircase, the only light filtering down from a pigeon-shit encrusted skylight five stories above. The room was littered with fragments of remnants of black cloth, too small to sell, yet, damn it, too valuable to just throw away. There were boxes crammed tight with odd-shaped pieces, and plastic bags overfilled with factory seconds and other shop discards, but mostly the rooms were filled with loose piles of off-black strips, moth-eaten end-runs and miles and miles of frayed-free strings that entangled anything that stayed too long in the room. The desert-dry wood shelves and the football-sized mounds of black lint added to the firetrap feel of the place. It was a good thing that the air conditioning below kept the room at a chilly ninety degrees.

“Perfect,” Abe said as he looked around. “You two can have such a lovely chat. It’s as good as soundproof up here.”

“I’m not going to shoot her, Abe, just talk,” Doug said. Black strings inched their way towards his legs.

“I hope she feels the same way about you, Dougie.”

***

Back at the coffee shop, Abe got the waiter to find Doug a cold can of 7-Up and a small bag of Chips Ahoy cookies, while he ordered another pot of coffee—“
Qahawa
, Doug, say it right.”—and more dry pastries. They arranged the table so they could lean their chairs back against the wall and still see down the narrow street that sloped toward the coffee shop before branching off towards the Bab al-Badistan and the shop of Nasser Ashkanani. Doug explained that it might be a long wait and that Aisha might not even go by. “What else have I got to do?” Abe asked, “I’m not scheduled to get re-arrested until next Monday.”

After a half hour they had exhausted the standard small talk topics and got down to serious girl watching. The coffee shop was near the center of the tourist area and there was a constant stream of tourists, mostly organized groups of retirees, off-loading from the buses at the far end of the street. But, interspersed among the blue-hairs and the practical walking shoes, there were enough college-aged backpackers in baggy tank tops and shorts to keep them alert.

“What about that one, the one with the bandana? She your type?” Doug asked.

Abe tilted his head, a connoisseur appraising the specimen carefully. “I’m not a big fan of long hair, but on her, yes, it looks good. So, yes, I’ll take her.”

“But will she take you?”

“It’s funny,” Abe said as he watched the touts strike up conversations with the girls in the hope that they would end in a big sale and a nice commission, “if I met a girl like that back in the States, she’d have nothing to do with me. But here she’d sleep with me simply to be able to say ‘Once, when I was in Egypt, I met this really sexy guy….’”

“Oh Jesus, I think somebody’s got themselves an ego problem,” Doug said.

“No, you don’t get it. She’s not sleeping with
me
, she’s sleeping with her exotic, foreign, swarthy fantasy. I’m Aladdin, I’m Omar Sharif. I don’t matter. I could be as ugly as you and still get laid. It’s part of their tour package, right up there with a moonrise over the pyramids. I think the
Lonely Planet
even has a section called Sleeping With a Local.”

“So, Mr. Fantasy, why doesn’t it work in the States?”

“Here I’m a Letter to Cosmo. There I’m another dark-skinned nobody. Except when they find out I’m a dark-skinned Arab Muslim nobody. Then I become a terrorist.” Abe looked across the table at Doug. “It ain’t easy being different in America.”

“Oh get off it,” Doug said. “I hear this crap all the time from the black guys at the brewery. They’re always screaming racism whenever things don’t go their way. Sure, some people got a problem with race, but mostly that’s all gone. It’s not like that anymore.”

“Spoken like a good white male,” Abe said, popping the last half of a dry pastry into his mouth. “If I don’t see it, it don’t exist. The problem is, you’ve never been a minority. You’d think your time in prison….”

“I wasn’t in prison.”

“You’d think your time in prison,” Abe repeated, his voice rising to cut off Doug’s interruption, “would have changed you. How’d it feel to be ignored and powerless? God gives you this great chance to learn….”

“Oh shit, back to God again.”

“Everything comes back to God, my foolish little friend,” Abe said, and drained the rest of Doug’s now warm 7-Up into his coffee cup. “And, speaking of God—Oh my God, look at the rack on that chick.”

Doug followed Abe’s stare out the window and down the street. It was easy to spot Aisha, she was the one every guy was looking at. She wore a white tee shirt knotted at the side, loose-cut men’s jeans that slung low, exposing her flat stomach, thick gold navel ring and her bikini line. Other women wore something similar, no one wore it like Aisha. Doug smiled, both because it was Aisha and because he got to say, “That is the woman I slept with in Morocco.”

“
That’s
the Moroccan Tart? My God, Doug, I have grossly underestimated you.”

Doug couldn’t get the smile off his face, even when he remembered that she probably hid the drugs in his bag as he recuperated in her huge bed. “I still need to talk things over with her. Can you manage to convince her to get to the shop? Without stepping on your tongue?”

“I guess it all comes down to me. Cover me boys, I’m going in,” Abe said in a flat, mid-American voice. “That was my Audie Murphy, by the way.”

“I’ll have to take your word on it,” Doug said as he stood up, “I’ve got no idea what Audie Murphy sounded like.”

“Me either. Meet you at the shop.” Abe brushed the crumbs off his shirt and headed out the door.

Doug went out the back exit, through the maze of streets and was surprised to find he made it back to the shop, and the black cloth filled storeroom, without a problem. He sat on one of the firmer boxes and listened to his heart pounding in his chest. It dawned on him then that Abe was right, he had no idea what he would say. He thought through a few opening lines and settled on “Hello, Aisha. We need to talk.” He chose a half-sitting-on-the-box-half-leaning-against-the-wall-arms-crossed-tough-guy pose to go with his hard talk. He hoped that she’d take one look at him, break down, confess everything, and beg his forgiveness. He hoped that it would turn out this way since he didn’t have another plan.

As he was testing whether or not crossing his ankles made him look relaxed or just put him off balance, he heard Aisha’s unmistakable laugh coming up the stairs. Abe stepped up to the landing first, then into the room. He extended his arm out as if guiding Aisha into the place. She came up looking at the swaths of cloth on the ground and had surveyed half the room before she saw Doug.

“Oh my God,” she yelled and came at him with her arms outstretched. Before he could uncross his ankles, she had her arms wrapped around Doug’s neck, knocking them both backwards into a pile of black cloth that reached halfway to the ceiling. And it seemed she was trying to kill him by sticking her tongue so far down his throat he couldn’t breathe.

“I believe you know my friend, Douglas Pearce,” Doug heard Abe say as Aisha rolled him around in the pile. When she stopped to catch her breath, Doug managed to pry himself partially free and sit up as best as he could. “Aisha,” he said, “we need to….”

“Oh my God, Doug, what a great surprise, I thought you were avoiding me, you shit-head, my uncle told me you were still in town, but you never checked in at the Shepheard and I’ve been here doing nothing, waiting for you to call, and then I figure, fuck him, I mean, no offense, but I was hurt, you stupid ass,” a quick kiss and a breath, “and so I decided to come on down to his shop, my uncle that is, and then this guy, oh my God, he is
so
funny, says he has something for my uncle and like an idiot I believe him and he brings me—
me
—to an abaya shop, and I’m thinking, what’s going on here? and then I see
you
, you are
so
romantic,” she said and, refreshed, renewed her assault.

“And Doug, I believe you know Aisha.”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Aisha said as she spun off the top of Doug to sit on the pile. “I’m just rather fond of Doug and I’m
really
surprised.”

“Oh I understand,” Abe said. “I get the same way around him myself.”

Doug was trying to pull black strings out of his mouth. The dust cloud they raised in the room gave the few shafts of light a defined shape. He tried to figure out how to get his plan back on track. “Aisha, uh, I wanted to get you up here because I wanted….”

“Oh I can
guess
what
you
wanted,” she said, punching him on the arm, her inflection indicating something lewd, something erotic, and something she was all in favor of.

“My work here is done,” Abe said in a superhero voice. “I’ll leave you two kids alone to get reacquainted. I’ll catch up with the boys downstairs. Play nice, now.” He went out onto the landing and pulled a black curtain from the shadows across the doorway.