Relative Danger (16 page)

“Oh my God,” she said as she drew in a deep breath.

Doug turned, expecting the hairy man an arm’s length away, but there was no one. He looked back and saw the man in the green tracksuit leaning forward, standing at the edge of the mosque roof. He was looking down to the street.

“Oh God, Doug, I saw him fall.” Aisha’s voice sounded tiny and far away. “He wasn’t even close. I watched him fall.”

Doug hadn’t seen or heard a thing, but he wasn’t about to go to the edge and look. He swallowed—his throat was quite dry and burning—and reached for Aisha’s hand. “Let’s go.” She stood fixed to the spot for a moment, then slowly allowed Doug to get her walking again. She turned back twice and both times said “Oh my God.”

“Aisha, what could we do?” Doug asked. “It was a long jump and nobody told him to try it.”

“Besides,” he said after they climbed over a series of pipes and wires and were heading for what looked like a fire escape a few rooftops away, “he was trying to kill us. I mean, sure I feel bad for him, but he was shooting at us.”

She glanced over at Doug as if he had suddenly appeared. “Fuck
him
,” Aisha said. “I’m thinking about
me
. I mean, that could have been
me
falling there.”

“Us,” Doug reminded her. “It could have been us.”

“I could be dead right now. Flat on the side of a street like some…some
dog
. Me. Dead. Just like
that
.” She snapped her fingers for effect but it looked more like she was calling an inattentive waiter.

“Who do you think he was, and why was he chasing us? Or does this stuff happen all the time around here?” The ladder was a fire escape and only two families had expanded out from bedroom windows to turn their section of the rusted iron stairs into an open-air closet. And no one, not even the old man whose reclining chair they had to climb over to get around, seemed at all inconvenienced by their passing.

“How would I know who they were?” Aisha asked as she ducked under a row of birdcages and stepped around a kettle of tea on a hotplate. “You’re the one that pointed them out to me. I thought you knew who they were.”

Doug tried to figure out a way to grab a hold of the last handrail without touching the line of bras drying in the non-existent breeze. In the end he just hoped the stairway wouldn’t collapse and risked not holding on. “I just saw them in the crowd. I thought they might have something to do with your uncle’s shop. I guess you’ll have to jump,” he said noticing that the last five steps had been removed and were being used nearby to prop up air conditioning units in the ground floor windows.

“I’ll kill them if they did anything to Uncle Nasser,” Aisha said. “Well, the guy in the tracksuit, anyway.”

Back on the ground, Aisha got her bearings and a three-minute walk took them to an open square filled with more shops and street vendors. That was the number one industry in Cairo, Doug decided, selling things—selling the same thing the guy next to you sold, the same packet of socks, the same alarm clocks, the same knock-off Barbie dolls, the same basket of rotting vegetables. You bought it, then you sold it. The same handful of goods could keep a neighborhood employed for months.

“I want to call my uncle,” Aisha announced, “I don’t have my phone with me. Wait here while I find a phone.” Before Doug could ask if she thought it was smart that they split up like this, she dove into the crowd. He could tell where she was for a few seconds by watching for the men whose heads were turned one way while they walked another. Doug found a lamp pole to lean against and tried not to look conspicuous. This proved difficult since everyone who passed by, even the man leading the camel—the only one in downtown Cairo—stopped to stare. At least the touts left him alone, tourists being so rare in this area that they didn’t know what to do with him. Other than stare, that is. Doug stared back, not directly, of course, but in a casual, friendly way, smiling as he scanned the crowd for other homicidal maniacs who might be stalking him.

And why him? It’s not like he had the diamond—he didn’t even have a clue. And who would know where he was or anything about the Ashkanani connection? Maybe it was Aisha they were after, God knows she must have enemies all over the world. But why today, and why was the hairy guy following him? Something Sergei said rolled in from the back of his mind. “I’m not suggesting that the original killers are out there….” But maybe they were. And maybe they had assumed he knew something.

And now some guy was dead, Doug thought, and how do you think
that
makes me feel? So he thought about it for a moment and realized he didn’t feel anything at all. No guilt, no remorse, no regrets. Then he thought about that, since not feeling anything didn’t feel right, but after ten minutes he realized his thoughts had drifted to trying to figure out how the woman with the four-foot-tall basket on her head managed to maneuver through the shopping area without once reaching up to steady the load. He took a deep breath and tried again to focus on the diamond and all the trouble it had caused.

Back in Morocco he had written up a list of things he knew and now, weeks later, he had little more to add to that list. The diamond left Casablanca and came to Cairo, and left Cairo for Singapore and no one seemed to know what happened to it there. This was the easy stuff and if it was so easy for him to find out, why didn’t Edna already know? Oh boy, Edna. He called when he got out of jail but he was vague about what he was doing. It didn’t seem to matter what he told her though, she was happy with anything he did, even when it was obvious to anybody he wasn’t doing anything. He thought about feeling guilty and then remembered the gray meat in the jail and decided to follow Aisha’s advice—take the money and keep her happy.

And where was Aisha? It couldn’t be that hard to find a phone around here, especially for someone as pushy as her. Doug bought a cold bottle of Coke from a passing vendor, overpaying again since he had still not figured out the exchange rate or buying power of the Egyptian pound notes. Other than a few professional level gawkers who still found him fascinating to watch, the locals ignored Doug, which gave him more time to watch them. It was mostly men in the crowd and all of them, perhaps by some harshly enforced law, sported the same thick, black mustache that hung down over their top lip. A few wore the traditional galabiyya, but most wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned to the top, despite oven-like heat. Doug was roasting in his khakis and polo shirt, both, he noticed, still carrying stray black strings from the abaya shop.

And everybody smoked, all the males anyway. Packs of kids young enough to get into movies for free puffed away on unfiltered Camels while the adult men seemed to keep two cigarettes going, one to smoke and one to point with. But given the amount of exhaust fumes that flooded the street, thick fumes you could feel slide up your skin and roll down your throat, what difference would it make if you smoked a carton or two a day? Greasy smoke from greasy trucks that idled so high you’d expect an explosion added to the noise and heat of the whole area. And add to that the dust, the city-wide layer of litter, and the pervasive smell of sewage that had gone bad in the sun and you had Cairo. How do people live here, he thought.

That’s when he realized that the background music to this whole scene, more pervasive than the diesel trucks, more common than the hawkers’ nonstop shouts of
aywah!
, louder than the call to prayer that had just started up, was the laughter. Everybody seemed to be having a great time, slapping hands with a sideways low five, stopping only to cough up a lung or light up another cigarette. The kids hacked out a smoky laugh, the old men wore big, one-tooth grins and there were high-pitched giggles coming from under the black sheets that hid teenaged girls as they wove through the crowd. Maybe the fumes had got to them, he thought, since they were sure starting to get to him. Or maybe, despite the totally shitty reality that was their lives, they were happy. Fathers bought their children bags of out-of-date candy, friends greeted friends with hugs and kisses as if they had been separated for years instead of minutes. There were happy couples holding hands as they strolled through the market. Granted, they were both guys, but that seemed to be normal around here. They’re not gay, Abe had said, they just look that way.

An idea started to form in Doug’s mind, a fundamental idea that held together a worldview, a core philosophy. He found it hard to pull his thoughts together and it took his focused thinking for a full five minutes until he could attach words to these feelings. Maybe the environment didn’t matter. Maybe happiness was something you found inside you, not in your surroundings. Maybe his whole way of looking at the world—Pottsville, the brewery, Egyptian jail, this intersection—maybe everything was neither good nor bad, maybe it was all what you made of it. Maybe the keys to happiness and despair, to your own personal heaven or hell, were yours all along. Life could be good, you could be happy, if you wanted it to be so.

Doug thought about this for a while and decided that no, it was the fumes. Nobody could be happy here.

He looked at the digital watch he bought the day before from a street vendor. It still flashed 99:99 like it did ten minutes after he bought it. He waited another forty minutes until his watch said 99:99 before he decided to take a cab back to the hotel. Aisha was a big girl, she could find her way back home. Whether he could or not remained to be seen.

Chapter 20

“That funny taste? That’s formaldehyde.”

Doug held his beer up to the light, as if he could check chemical content by sight, and wondered if it really was formaldehyde. He’d never tasted formaldehyde but was willing to believe that’s what the strange taste was. It would explain the smell.

“The people that make Osiris beer? They also own a chemical company and their main product is formaldehyde.” Jeff Willett, twenty-four, from Norman, Oklahoma, was staying at the Sheraton with his new wife, Stacey, also twenty-four, also from Norman, Oklahoma. “That’s what the guy at the papyrus shop said.”

Jeff had sat down at the hotel bar, the Nile Sunset, the one with the excellent view of the river, less than twenty minutes ago, and in that time Doug learned just about everything he wanted to know about Jeff and Stacey Willett from Norman, Oklahoma. Like the fact that this was their first trip out of the States, that they were on their honeymoon which they had been planning since their first date at the sophomore Halloween dance where he went as King Tut and she as Cleopatra, that Stacey’s Uncle Frank gave them two hundred dollars to spend “just on drinks,” and that in two days they were going to take a Nile river cruise all the way from Aswan back to Cairo. Jeff provided intense details about his job—he “sold, maintained and repaired commercial swimming pool pumps and filters”—as if Doug was about to fill in for him while he took his Nile cruise. Jeff Willett found it exciting work and naturally assumed so did everyone else. And he lectured about his first impressions of Cairo, since, having been here for three days, he was now an expert.

“Know what you should go see? You should see the light and sound show at Giza. Man, you really start to understand just how old the place is. Plus they got a lot of good souvenir shops over that way, good stuff. Stacey picked up this real nice model of the pyramids in a glass ball, not one of those snow ball things that you shake, just a glass ball,” he said and paused for dramatic effect. “Ten bucks.”

Doug took a long pull on his Osiris beer. It was his fourth since Jeff Willett sat down and Doug was hoping that if it indeed were formaldehyde, it would soon kick in. He wasn’t sure what formaldehyde would do to you if you drank it, but, as Jeff Willett described how everyone at the wedding reception got such a laugh when he and his two brothers—Steve and Little Jimmy—got up and danced the Macarena, Doug hoped it would at least make him deaf.

“…but Stacey’s aunt is really two years
younger
than Stacey, so we all went to Hooter’s to celebrate and who should be there? Right! Mr. Keiffer, our old math teacher….”

The bar, with its unique and breathtaking view of the ancient river, was decorated in the American Style Family Orientated Theme Restaurant motif, all dark woods and phony antiques hanging from the ceiling. A Texaco gas pump stood by the men’s room door and sepia-toned team photos covered the walls. Lacquered to the bar top were high-quality photocopies of “old tyme” beer ads and 1930s era baseball programs. The bartender wore a starched white apron and a little red fez, the signature headgear for the hotel. Other than the fez, it could be Anybar, USA. For some reason, Doug found that depressing.

“…The way we figure it, why pay someone else’s mortgage when we can use that money on a place of our own….”

There wasn’t anything really wrong with Jeff Willett. Hadn’t he bought all the beer and an order of nachos?

“…it’s a little par three with a wicked slope to the green and this pocket bunker that has to be five feet deep….”

I know this guy, Doug thought.

“…I pointed out the sign clearly said ‘three day rental on all first run movies,’ and it was only two days anyway….”

Not him, not Jeff Willett from Norman, Oklahoma, but Jeff Willett, typical guy.

“…she’s got a rack out to here and legs that just don’t quit….”

I know what he likes, what he does in his spare time and what he’ll do when he retires.

“…sixteen Buds, four shots of tequila, four of JD,
and
a rum and Coke….”

I went to school with Jeff Willetts, worked with them, hung out at the Rusty Nail with them.

“…so we put the housing back on and it’s
still
leaking so I’m thinking gasket….”

Jeff Willetts made up just about everybody he knew in Pottsville. They wore jeans, drove pickup trucks or Trans Ams, cheered on the Steelers in October and the Pirates in June. They liked to hunt but were just as happy when they came home without a thing. They married women they had screwed in high school and lived and died fifty miles from where they were born.

“…he goes ‘who you calling stupid?’ and I go ‘I just call ’em like I see ’em’ which really pisses him off, right? So he goes….”

He knew Jeff Willett.

“…but as a designated hitter? He’s
unreal
. If he was with, say, the Yankees….”

He was Jeff Willett.

“Whoa, Doug, you look like you could use another. Yeah, a couple more beers down here and how about a bowl of peanuts? Put your money away, this is on Uncle Frank.”

This can’t be me, Doug thought as he drained half the Osiris beer in one swig. I can’t be this….

“…just give me a cold beer and a game on cable and color me happy….”

…this…

“…but the highlight is the three-day layover in Minneapolis ’cuz they got that Mall of America….”

…boring.

“…Led Zeppelin II. Enough said.”

Don’t panic, Doug thought. Think. Do Jeff Willetts jet off to Morocco? Do they end up in jail in Cairo? Are they hired as detectives to find stolen jewels and are they tracked down by professional killers? Are they shot at and do they make daring leaps across mile-wide alleyways? Do Jeff Willetts have exotic sex with hot Arab women?

“Hey Stacey! Finally. Pull up a stool and meet my friend Doug.”

No, they do not.

“I got
such
a great deal on a carpet. I talked him down to just fifty dollars!” She looked at both Jeff and Doug to see if they were as amazed. “Fifty!”

So maybe he wasn’t a Jeff Willett. Not now, anyway.

“…I’m not sure, but I think the mosques are a lot like a church, just the wrong god is all….”

On the tenth beer, the formaldehyde kicked in.