Shooting the Sphinx (14 page)

She invited him to her folks' house for the weekend. When he got there, he realized they were rich.

“What does your dad do?” he asked.

“He's a diamond merchant,” she answered.

“What?” He was shocked. “Apartheid paid for this house. The price of diamonds is controlled by the De Beers cartel in Johannesburg.”

“I know,” she said. “I've heard the speeches.”

At dinner, in front of her parents, she kept prompting him to talk about divestment. This is too weird, he thought. There was some kind of father/daughter rebellion thing going on here, and Ari didn't go for it. She was mad at them both, he could tell. She argued divestment with her dad, but Ari kept silent. Did I even believe what I said at the rally? he wondered, or was I just carried away with the adulation of the crowd?

Later, when she sneaked into his room, they argued. “I'm not going to eat the man's food, stay under his roof, and insult him. If I'm going to insult him, I'm going to have to leave here. And you can't take his money for tuition or whatever and say you're anti-apartheid. You're saying one thing and doing the opposite. He wants you to stay in school, so he's not calling you on it, but I'll bet you he's thinking exactly that.” They made love that night, but it wasn't the same.

On Monday, back at school, he didn't see her at the rally. Mid-week the university issued a statement from the board of trustees recommending divestment. He saw her at finals.

“Thank you, we did it,” she had said as they were filing out their Macro exam. “Do you want to go study together?”

“I can't; I've got a review group for my History of the Middle Ages test.”

They lost touch over the summer. The next spring he got a postcard from Cape Town. She was going to school there, spring semester abroad. About exam time, there was a story in the school paper, then in the news, that she'd been arrested for hiding fugitive members of the ANC in her room at night. She was sentenced to ten years in prison. He thought of writing her in prison, but he never did. He felt responsible in some way, that he had made her face some inevitable conclusion from which she could not turn back and resume her previous life.

After graduation, Mandela was freed, and so, presumably, was she, but he knew that if he ever saw her again, he would be embarrassed. He had talked the talk, but she had hidden revolutionaries under her bed.

 

Chapter 29

Ari was staring at himself upside down in the giant polished brass headboard of his bed when his computer rang. He dreaded answering it.

He hit a button. “Hello, Beth.”

“Hey, buddy,” said his old friend's voice.

“Frank?” Ari sat up in bed. “How you doing?”

“I hear you're flying tomorrow.”

“That's right,” said Ari, proud he could tell Frank himself. “
Inshallah
, as they say around here.”

“Good work, be safe.” They had both seen men get hurt and even die filming. “If anything seems out of whack, don't fly.”

“Don't worry Frank, we'll get a great shot for you.” Ari was touched that in all the maelstrom of trying to finish the filming in New York, Frank had found time to call him. “I'm told that the Air Force is giving me the best pilot in the best squadron.”

“Right.” Frank didn't speak for a moment. Their private conversations were short, but often had long pauses. They had known each other since they both were kids just starting out in the business. They had developed some tacit way of communicating. “Ari, why'd you think I was Beth? Were you expecting her to call you?”

“She's waiting on a budget and … we haven't sent it yet.”

“Are you two uh…?” Frank let the question peter out. He already seemed to know the answer.

Ari was evasive. “Why do you ask?” Then an idea dawned on him. Could it be that Frank wanted her? “Frank, look I didn't know that you…”

“That I what…? Me and Beth? Are you nuts?”

“If I knew, I mean if I had the slightest idea that you and Beth were … then I wouldn't be … You do know that, don't you?”

“Of course, of course. Don't worry about it.” Frank reassured Ari, then added, “Be careful. She's never going to leave Glenn. He gives her exactly what she wants.”

“Which is?”

“Masochism. Be safe tomorrow.”

“I will.”

They hung up.

Ari flopped around in bed a few times, then kicked off the sheets and turned on the light. He paced the huge suite like a caged animal.

“What am I doing?” he said to his reflection in the polished bronze headboard with Arabic etchings all over it. Sleep was impossible. He stepped on a shirt on the floor and noticed that he had amassed quite a bit of dirty laundry. Time to clean house. He grabbed the Mena Hotel laundry bag from the closet and violently snatched up his pile of discarded clothes, stuffing them into the bag, committing a kind of reverse purge.

As he hung the fat bag on the doorknob to his suite, he noticed the laundry price list clipped on to it.

“Four dollars a shirt!” he said to himself.

Outrageous, he decided, and grabbed up the bag. He walked out of the hotel and down into the dark streets of Giza. He knew he had to leave the tourist quarter, so he put the pyramids to his back and kept walking.

Every woman he passed wore the hijab. At every corner, he asked another woman: “Laundry?” He pantomimed washing clothes. They pointed him further into Giza on the big street until he saw the laundry, with steamy windows. A man was ironing at incredible speed with a big heavy metal iron, which had a gas flame inside of it. The man had a big powerful right arm holding the iron and a scrawny little left arm moving the clothes around.

Ari liked this. It was real. He wanted to vote with his money, to spend it, give it to someone who did the work, not the hotel chain owned by some giant corporation somewhere else. He liked the laundry man, who was happy to see him and take his clothes. Armed with his ticket and a sense of satisfaction, Ari strolled out on the street and meandered his way back toward the hotel. He had found what he was looking for, a simple pleasant human interaction with an ordinary Egyptian.

It was past midnight and the street was teeming. He strolled in front of a storefront mosque packed with thin men who had long beards and very short hair. An imam was making a passionate speech. Ari stopped to watch, and thought, he's a true believer. Ari found himself nodding along with the group, entranced by the imam's intensity and hypnotic rhythm. Even though Ari knew nothing of what was said, he felt a sense of agreement.

The imam spotted him and stopped talking instantly. All the men turned to look at him. Ari nodded to them, smiled, and waved. All of them wore dishdashas and sandals. They stared at him, their eyes unfriendly.

Ari smiled harder, but it didn't work. They hate me, he realized, because I'm an American.

 

Chapter 30

Ari, Samir, Don, Charley, and the location scout all stood outside the guardhouse at the entrance to the Air Force base, which coincidentally was on the far side of Cairo International Airport. They had been standing there for over an hour.

Ari was pacing and muttering to himself, looking at his watch, holding his model Sphinx, pyramids, and helicopter. Everyone gave him a wide berth. His eyes were bloodshot. He had not slept. He had the distinct look of urgency that had reached the point of pain like that of a child forbidden to go to the bathroom. He had contained himself, repressing the urge to start yelling. He needed to get that helicopter off the ground before Beth called to stop it.

Samir was arguing with a tall, wiry sergeant of the guard, who smirked at anyone without a uniform, then looked past them as if they didn't matter. Samir's sheer volume of Arabic increased, driving the sergeant backward. The angry outburst calmed Ari a bit. He walked over to Don and Charley, who leaned against the airforce base wall.

“What's he saying?” asked Ari. The sergeant of the guard retreated from Samir's wrath all the way inside the guard booth, and he was now yelling back, gesticulating defensively.

“The sergeant is pointing at the fax machine,” said Don.

“Fax machine? Don't tell me a written order has to get here from some other place.” Ari started to hyperventilate. There goes the day, he thought. He wanted to punch the brick wall with his fist.

“Looks like the camera just arrived.” Charley pointed out toward the road.

The dilapidated white truck pulled up on the road with the camera cases in the back. The driver jumped down out of the cab and walked over, all smiles, his sandals slapping on the road.

“Finally,” said Ari, and he walked over to the guardhouse. “Samir, what's going on? We're losing the morning light.”

“Just one second.” Samir held up his hand and continued his Arabic rant.

Ari was pissed off by the gesture, but he said as calmly as he could, “The camera's here.”

A jeep pulled up inside the wall and a lanky young lieutenant stepped out. He had a face pocked from acne scars. He walked directly up to Ari. This must be a good sign, thought Ari. Someone's expecting us.

“I am the military censor,” said the lieutenant.

“Can you help us?” Ari changed in his anger for supplication. “We can't seem to get permission to go inside.”

“No, I am the military censor. I must see every shot.”

“Do you know how to reach the base commander?”

“No base. No aircraft,” insisted the censor.

“Right.” Ari looked at his team with mock seriousness. “Don, Charley, no base. No aircraft. Only Sphinx. Only pyramids.”

Don and Charley both said “Yes, sir!” simultaneously, with the same tone of mock seriousness.

The military censor looked at them, suspicious that he was the butt of a joke, which he was. Ari turned his back on the censor and walked over to the guard booth.

“Samir, what is taking so long? At this rate, it'll be dark before we get the camera mounted.”

Samir looked down. Ari knew he would get angry at what Samir was about to say. “The authorization for us to enter must be faxed to the guard.”

“Faxed? Really? So?”

“The fax is out of paper.”

“Oh my god!” Ari couldn't believe that a country could run this way. “Send someone to get some paper.”

“That is already happening,” said Samir.

“Who uses a fax anymore?” lamented Ari. “Samir, I need a word with you.” Ari took him aside. “What do we have to do if we don't get the shot today? Apply again?”

Before Samir could answer, Hamed's car zoomed up and screeched to a halt on the road surrounding the base. Hamed held a roll of thermal fax paper out the window like a runner's baton. The truck driver grabbed it and ran it over to the sergeant in the guardhouse.

“Okay.” Ari turned around to face his crew. “Let's get that camera in here.”

Beyond them, Ari saw something that he simply couldn't comprehend. The camera truck was driving away. Ari looked at the truck driver beside him, then back at the truck. The cab was empty. No one was in the driver's seat.

“Not possible,” said Ari. “That's impossible.”

Slowly, but picking up speed, the truck rolled straight along the road, which dipped down to a long hill.

Ari started to jog. As the truck accelerated, so did he. Everyone else watched for a moment in disbelief, then ran after Ari, who was now sprinting as fast as he could. He sprinted alongside, then in front of the truck, put his hand on the grille and planted his feet like Superman stopping a train. The truck would have easily run him over, but on that stretch of road was a fine, sandy dust, a slight incursion of the desert into the city, and Ari's sneakers skated along the surface of the asphalt gaining no traction at all. Samir ran up next to him.

“Ari, get out of the way!” he yelled.

“No!” Ari would not let go.

“Please, you will be crushed!” begged Samir.

Ari looked down at his white sneakers skimming over the black gray asphalt, the tiny tan rivulets of a dust cloud sweeping behind them. “I didn't come all the way here just to have the camera roll down a hill and crash!” yelled Ari.

Samir grabbed hold of the truck and tried to slow it, to no avail. Don, Charley, Hamed, the guards, and the censor all ran up and grabbed hold of the truck while yelling at Ari.

“Ari…! Let go…! You will be killed…! Mr. Ari, stop…! There is no way!” they all shouted.

The truck driver ran up last. His sandals prevented him from closing the gap. They broke or flew off as he put on one final burst of speed. He reached the cab in his bare feet, jumped up on the running board, and opened the door just as the truck was about to go through the intersection of the busy road that wrapped around the base to the airport.

“Stop! Damn you, stop!” Ari commanded the truck with every last shred of his will.

The driver hit the brakes. The truck screeched to a halt, stopping at the stop sign. Everyone doubled over exhausted, sweating, red faced, smiling, gasping down great gulps of air, relieved. All of them except for Ari, whose face had a maniacal wrath. He had skated on the dust under his sneakers most of the way.

“Why didn't you put on the emergency brake?” Ari demanded from the relieved truck driver.

“I did, Mr. Ari! I swear it! I swear I put it on!” the truck driver protested innocently as he reached in and pulled on the brake handle. With a metallic clicking, grinding sound the whole emergency brake came off in his hand. He held up the useless lever out the truck window to Ari as proof.

 

Chapter 31

“That's not a chopper.” Ari shook his head as they drove across the tarmac to the old Soviet Mi-17. “That's a bus with a rotor on top.”

“An old bus,” added Don.

The crew chief and ground crew stood by, milling around as if they'd been waiting there for hours. The camera truck, the censor's jeep, Samir and Hamed's cars all pulled up. Then Ari, Don, and Charley jumped out and went into overdrive pulling the cases off the back of the truck, laying them out and opening them up, their frustrated energy exploding into a frenzy of work.