Shooting the Sphinx (6 page)

“Some mango juice, sir?” asked the server.

“I shouldn't really.” Ari lingered longingly. “Maybe just half a glass.”

Ari ate looking out at a green manicured lawn and palm trees. He could have been in LA, but for the pyramids and the faint acrid smell of some distant fire that one often smells in the third world, the burning of garbage. After a few half-hearted bites, Ari went to find his ride.

In the driveway a security guard with a mirror on a stick and a bomb-sniffing German shepherd were making a cursory check of Hamed's car. Ari got right in and the dog and man abandoned their task.

Hamed drove to the airport through heavy but fast-moving ever-honking pre-rush-hour traffic. They parked in the lot and walked up to the modern glass-and-steel terminal. Inside, Hamed and Ari passed by a huge palm tree growing up to the ceiling. They threaded their way through the bustle of white robed Arabs from the Gulf and colorfully dressed Africans, until they reached the farthest corner of the modern terminal. There in the wall was a panel—not really a door, but a door-sized rectangular cut in the wall. Hamed pulled out his cell and dialed. The wall opened.

A short, wizened Egyptian stood on the other side expecting them. Behind him, a steady stream of grayish drone people scurried up and down the corridor holding forms or chits out in front of them with singular purpose. In a hushed urgent tone, Hamed spoke to the man in Arabic. Ari figured out his name was Walid. Walid beckoned, but Ari hesitated.

“Mr. Ari, you go in. Walid will stay with you. I wait here,” said Hamed.

“Okay…” With trepidation, Ari left the comfort of his driver/translator and stepped through the portal. Walid, who seemed to speak no English at all, swept Ari into the tide of bureaucrats. They were off into a netherworld part Soviet socialism, part British colonialism run amok, as if those two forces had mated and produced some metastasized progeny alive well beyond its historical moment, like that old Japanese soldier who never surrendered still in his cave forever on some South Pacific isle.

Ari's eyes had to adjust to the dark corridor. Bare lightbulbs hung from old wires out of light fixtures long ago broken. He found himself on line with the drone people shuffling between walls gray from decades of dust. The architectural detail had a 1930's feel. There were windows into darkness and doors leading nowhere. Ari figured that he must be in part of an old terminal that had not been torn down but engulfed by the modern buildings around it. The Egyptians, the original builders of history, must never demolish anything, he thought.

Walid led Ari down a busy well-worn flight of stairs to a small dark office with windows that opened out into a narrow blackness.

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Basher,” said the young woman from the Press Ministry with the cat's-eye glasses. “Please sit down. Would you like some tea?”

“Tea?” asked Ari.

“Mint tea?”

“Thank you, that's very kind of you.”

She seated Ari in a chair next to her desk, which was covered in neatly organized piles of paper. She disappeared for a moment, then returned with a tea in the Arabic style: fresh mint tea in a small glass mug on a glass saucer, a sugar cube on the side.

“Thank you.” Ari looked at her without blinking, never taking his eyes from her face. He adopted a slight smile, which he increased with an ambiguous hint of flirtation whenever she glanced at him. This made her anxious to turn her attention to her desk, the result Ari was hoping to create.

“You do remember,” said Ari, “that my permit to fly around the Sphinx from the Ministry of Defense is for tomorrow only?” Get on with it, he thought, and get me out of here.

“Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Basher.” She nervously ran through the papers on her desk. He noticed that today she was wearing the hijab over her chic haircut, but her cute cat's-eye glasses poked out with a hint of stylish defiance. She selected a paper and excused herself.

Ari looked down at his tea in the small clear glass. He picked up the sugar cube. As he had no teaspoon, he dropped the cube into the tea and tried to stir it with his pinky, but the greenish liquid was too hot. Ari just watched the sugar dissolve.

After a while, he drank his tea. He looked around the dimly lit room and decided that this part of the building must have been built during the 1950s because one wall was entirely of aluminum-framed windows that swung open into the black void. When Ari lost any expectation that the young woman would return, she did so. Ari set his teacup down and stood up.

“Mr. Basher, please come with me.”

She took him out into the hallway, up several flights on the busy staircase, then to a corner office also looking into that same black void. An older middle-aged woman sitting at the desk was surprised when Ari walked in wearing his disarming smile. The young woman approached the older one and leaned forward, whispering in her ear. Ari guessed from slight gesticulations that she was telling how the SpaceCam had been taken in customs the day before.

Ari got the distinct impression that the two women didn't know what to do with him and were arguing over some course of action that frightened them. Glancing every so often in his direction, he would smile and they would force polite smiles back. Their whispers reached a soft crescendo. The middle-aged woman picked up the phone and made a phone call. Some minutes later the fax machine rang and a fax came in.

“Very well,” said the middle-aged woman. “I will take this to the head of customs, General Moussa.” She started for the door, then she stopped, remembering something important. “Would you like some tea?”

“Tea?” Another cup of tea, thought Ari. That's the last thing I want right now. “Thank you. That would be so very … kind.” And he flashed his million-dollar smile.

 

Chapter 11

Ari looked at the tea leaves in the dregs of his cup. He slowly swirled around the viscous sugary syrup, studying the sweet muck, as he had nothing better to do. He stood. He walked to the windows and looked out at what once must have been an exterior view of the runway or the desert, but now was a black wall of shadows. What if I don't get the SpaceCam today? What will Frank think…? Stop it, he commanded his brain. What if we miss our date with the military? Stop it, or you'll lose your cool, and you need to be cool.

His thoughts grew hazy, unfocused, liquid; indeed, he tried not to think. That would only make him nervous and look at his watch; better to detach from time and park his brain for a while until the middle-aged Press Ministry woman in the hijab returned. She finally did so, holding up the fax.

“I'm so sorry, Mr. Basher, but General Moussa needs to see the original letter, not a facsimile.”

“The original letter?” Ari didn't understand. “The letter we already sent to you?”

“Yes. But it is not here at the airport.”

“Where is it?” Ari wondered if that essential piece of paper had been lost.

“At the Press Ministry downtown.”

Problem solved, he thought. “Can't you … request it?”

“Yes, Mr. Basher, this is the customary procedure.”

“How long does that take?”

“Several days.”

“Several? Several?” stammered Ari as he started to experience a new kind of vertigo, bureaucratic vertigo. “But we'll miss our date!”

“What date?” asked the Press Ministry woman.

Why doesn't she know about the date to fly over the Sphinx? wondered Ari. Should I tell her? If no one told her for a reason, you'd better not tell her now. “I will get the letter. I will get it from the Press Ministry and bring it here.” Ari pointed at the fax. “Who has the original?”

She wrote the person's name on the fax. Ari dashed out the door, almost slamming into Walid, who was hovering in the corridor. They joined the teeming throng of chit holders. Ari, clutching the fax of his own letter, his own chit, tried to pass the shuffling crowd, but this was impossible as everyone else had the same intent, to get their little pieces of paper through this rat's maze and get on with their lives.

Finally, Walid opened the portal and let Ari emerge from that netherworld into the bright modern terminal. He explained everything to Hamed as they ran outside to the lot and jumped in the car.

The two men drove away from the airport. They raced alongside thirty-, even forty-year-old black Fiat taxis. They passed trucks piled high with bales of cotton, three-wheeled carts made out of motor scooters, and even horse-drawn wagons rolling along on automobile tires. Toward the city center the traffic slowed to a crawl. Ari thought of getting out and walking, but the pace would pick up for a few moments and fool Ari's hope.

He looked at his watch. Two o'clock. How was that possible? Had each cup of tea consumed an hour?

“This drive'll kill the whole day,” Ari said to Hamed. “I have to hand-deliver them a letter that they have in their own headquarters. Insane.”

They passed the minaret of an ancient mosque. The call to prayer sounded. Several taxis pulled over to the side of the road, some of their drivers dashing into the mosque, others unrolling mats on the ground, then facing toward Mecca and starting to pray.

Traffic stopped short. Hamed pounded the horn. A great cacophony of honking erupted. Hamed leapt out of the car and started yelling in Arabic.

“What is it?” Ari got out and stood up on the car to see what was blocking traffic. A quarter mile ahead was a bridge that spanned the Nile. A small blockade of protesters stood in the middle waving banners and Egyptian flags. The protesters must have timed it with the call to prayer as their signal.

Under his breath, Ari cursed them. He was relieved to see a few police running across the bridge from the other side. There was yelling and shoving, then more police and the blockade broke up. Traffic started crawling again.

They turned by the river and followed it for a few blocks, stopping outside a big modern building. Its many balconies rose up overlooking the Nile.

“We are here,” said Hamed. “The Ministry of Information.”

Hamed ushered Ari in through security, but couldn't leave the car alone on the busy street, so he left Ari to fend for himself. Ari showed his fax to anyone who would take a moment to speak with him. He found the office of an almost identically chic young woman also wearing glasses and a hijab. She, too, fed him tea, made him wait while she vanished with the fax and came back, then brought him upstairs to the office of yet another middle-aged woman also wearing a hijab and glasses. More tea. A furtive whispered conversation. A phone call. They went out and came back half an hour later bearing the original letter identical to the fax. Ari thanked them each profusely. He dashed downstairs, ran outside, and hopped back into Hamed's car.

They beat their way back through traffic. They were racing the clock. The business day soon would draw to a close. Somehow they made it out of downtown without obstruction, back to the airport. They ran through the terminal to the little door.

Ari stepped back through the portal into the bureaucratic netherworld, shuffled through the corridor, and ran up the stairs. He reached the office of the middle-aged Press Ministry woman, who took the letter, gave him tea, and again disappeared.

Had he made it in time? Ari wondered. Would he be able to claim his sixteen camera cases to shoot his helicopter shot tomorrow, the assigned date on his permit to fly around the Sphinx? He started biting his fingernails.

In a very short time, the head Press Ministry woman came back holding the letter as if it were somehow unclean. “There is a problem.”

“That's not the right letter?” Ari reached out for it, smiling his biggest smile but feeling like hell.

“No, the letter is correct.” She looked at him sternly as if he were a naughty child. “It gives you permission to bring your camera into Egypt to shoot a documentary. However, all this equipment is obviously for a Hollywood movie. The Press Ministry cannot help you.”

“But, but…” The smile was frozen on Ari's face. He racked his brain for the best thing to say. “Uh, honestly … it really is uh … based on a true story.”

A porter came in and cleared away Ari's tea.

 

Chapter 12

Dejected, Ari sat on a bench in Terminal One staring up at the arrivals sign. Samir walked up, nodded to Ari, and sat down next to him. Their mood was somber.

After a while, Samir spoke. “Have you read Kafka?”

“Read him? He wrote my day.” Ari faced Samir, his fixer. “How did it go at the Ministry of Defense?”

“The same as you.”

“So we're not going to make our date tomorrow.” Ari inhaled deeply. “And the military won't give us a new one?”

“No…” said Samir in a clipped, defensive way, as if expecting an argument.

“So we have a problem.”

The words on the arrivals board started to flip over. The latest flight from New York showed
AT THE GATE
status.

“Your men have arrived.” Samir stood up, avoiding a response. “Don and Charles.”

“It seems to me”—Ari stood as well—“that we are going to have to start doing something differently.”

“Yes.” Samir nodded. A suggestive silence hung between the two men.

Ari said nothing, but rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign of bribery.

Samir glanced around the terminal. “It's best not to speak of such things.”

“I'll leave it to you then.”

Samir peeled off and walked away toward the gates. Ari caught up to him.

“Speaking of money…” Samir veered abruptly into the mens' room.

“Yes?” Ari followed him into the empty bathroom. They were now alone.

“The money did not arrive in my account today.” Samir pulled out a cigarette. He looked at Ari in the mirror.

“Ugh.” A financial crisis of confidence is the last thing I need right now, thought Ari. “I'm sure it'll come tomorrow,” he said in a soothing tone.