The Cairo Affair (30 page)

Silence, then: “You sound different, Mrs. Kohl.”

“Do I?”

“I almost thought you were someone else,” he said. “Pretending to be you.” Then, realizing the emptiness of his statement, he said, “No, we haven’t told the American embassy, and we won’t until we better understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

“You know the reason,” she said. “Jibril Aziz.”

“He’s in Cairo?”

“I don’t know. You told me he flew here.”

“Yes.”

“So he should be here, somewhere. Unless…” She frowned into the handset as it occurred to her. Stumbler. Aziz had written Stumbler.

“Unless what, Mrs. Kohl?”

“Unless he’s in Libya.”

Silence.

She said, “Do you really not know where he is?”

“I do not. Perhaps you should ask his family.”

“Family?”

He seemed amused by her surprise. “Most people have families, Mrs. Kohl. If you give me a phone number, I can call you with that information tomorrow. From the office.”

“What do you know about Zora Balašević?”

“Excuse me?”

She repeated the name, then at his request spelled it, and as he wrote it down she said, “She’s connected to my husband’s murder, but I don’t know how or why.”

“How do you know this for sure?”

“Can I just say that I know it?”

Silence, then he said, “Mrs. Kohl, if it hasn’t become clear to you yet, you are the one in control of what you do and do not say. Eventually, I would like for you to say more, but for the moment you’re choosing reticence. I will have to accept this.”

“Apologies, Mr. Kiraly.”

“I will look into this woman, as well as Mr. Aziz’s family. Would you like to give me a telephone number?”

“I’ll call you.”

“Of course,” he said. “Tomorrow, then, Mrs. Kohl.”

“Tomorrow, Mr. Kiraly.”

Back on Stan’s sofa, she remembered what Kiraly had said. Did she sound like a different person? Maybe. Someone new? Or had she again become last year’s Sophie Kohl, Sofia, who had thrived under Zora’s tutelage?

Yes, but the world was different now, too. She was alone. Zora had disappeared. Emmett was gone. She was in a city that had become even more foreign, for now Hosni Mubarak was holed up in faraway Sharm el-Sheikh. She had felt this on the bus, surrounded by the young and old who, for the first time in memory, were part of the construction of their own society. It didn’t matter that the military was in control; they knew that all it took to change their country was a critical mass of humanity willing to stand in the street. While she could appreciate this, it also scared her, for their newfound power made them that much more menacing.

All she had was Stan. Stan, who had lied to her immediately after her arrival by pretending to know nothing about Zora—but hadn’t he just been covering for himself? It was understandable, and beyond that mistake he seemed to be trying. He was committed.

No, she wasn’t alone, not really, and she could sense his desire when they stood close. She would have to make sure she didn’t lose him.

She had told Emmett the truth: For a week she had thought she might love Stan Bertolli, but that feeling had gone away. Yet she was fond of him, and he was the only thing left to her.

She used his old cell phone to call him. “What have you got?”

“Not much. How about you?”

“I…” she began, then changed tack. “I’ve been dozing in front of the television.”

“Give me another hour, and we’ll talk when I get home.”

When he returned that evening with a takeout bag of grilled chicken, she thought of Zora’s other girl, the one with the long legs who could convince Russian thugs and kleptocrats to give up secrets, but seduction had never been Sophie’s forte. She tried, though, for now she was thinking in terms of practicality, of balances of power, of what Zora had called
the push and the pull of seduction.
Yet when she focused on Stan, using her eyes, stroking her hair, trying to look dreamy and enthralled, she felt ridiculous, knowing that it wasn’t working.

As he prepared the food, she said, “Did you find out about Jibril Aziz?”

“Not much. Just his position in the Office of Collection Strategies. I sent him an e-mail—maybe he’ll get back to me.”

“No phone number?”

“None.”

That made no sense. “Why not?”

“Sometimes they don’t list numbers. Either they’re changing offices or the section head wants them undisturbed because of a project.”

“How about a wife?” she asked, thinking of what Kiraly had said. “A family?”

“None.”

So not even her gloomy Hungarian spy knew what he was talking about.

As they ate, he told her about Zora—Zora and Emmett and the ways in which Stan had gotten everything so wrong last year, hounding poor Emmett until he had to flee to Budapest. She wanted to cry, knowing it was her fault, but instead she turned it around.
Misdirection,
Zora called it. “You pretended you’d never heard of her. You
lied
to me.”
Put them on the defensive, always the defensive.
It worked, but as he made excuses, she felt the distance between them growing, and another part of her grew frightened:
He’s the only one you have, and you’re scaring him away.
So she moved to the sofa, knowing he would follow, and he did.

“Where is Zora?” she asked.

“Serbia. She went back home in September.”

Where else?

Then he told her the thing that she would not be able to shake for a very long time. “She told Emmett she was working for the Serbs. That was a lie.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“My Serb contact says that by then she was working for the Egyptians.”

A year, a full year, believing that, if nothing else, she was helping Zora’s people. She hadn’t even been doing that. She’d been feeding everything that Emmett brought home into Hosni’s grand machine. God, she hated Zora. Briefly, she also hated Stan for holding up this cracked mirror.

He went on, though, explaining how he’d put together his fantasy of Emmett’s guilt, then telling her why he hadn’t sent Emmett home. “The disaster is that you would have left, too.”

She didn’t have to do this, she realized. She didn’t have give herself to him tonight. But she had to give herself to someone, and with Zora gone who else was there?

He said, “What did Balašević have on Emmett?”

Misdirection. Now.

She leaned close and placed her head on the side of his chest; he wrapped an arm around her. In her head, she saw a flash of dirty leg, spastic, kicking at the damp earth of a musty basement floor. All desire fled her body; the only thing left was survival. When he kissed her neck, she knew it was accomplished.

The first orgasm surprised her. Entirely mechanical, but strong. She’d almost forgotten how good it could be, and the little, shattering explosions transported her elsewhere, to a hard bed in the Hotel Putnik, and a much younger Emmett praying between her legs.

4

1991

On September 20, Sophie and Emmett arrived in Novi Sad desperate for sex, for their rough, seven-hour train ride from Budapest had felt like their first true plunge into authenticity. They’d shared a filthy cabin with a pair of fat old women who ate cheese sandwiches and eyeballed them, and as they waited at the border wailing Gypsies swelled outside their window, reaching up to sell them T-shirts, cassettes, bottled water, and toys. The Hungarian border guards seemed to be waiting for bribes, shooting them looks of scorn as they rifled through their papers, so by the time they crossed into Yugoslavia they were expecting trouble. Yet they received none: The Yugoslav soldiers gathered around to hear their American voices, one telling of a cousin in Chicago, another sternly advising them to mix bad wine with Coca-Cola for a perfect evening drink. Toothy grins surrounded them as the young conscripts pushed in to get a glimpse of the West.

This was when the arousal flickered in them both, and by the time they reached the high marble-and-concrete lobby of the Novi Sad train station, bought dinars at official rates from a surly clerk, and haggled for a noisy taxi ride to the center of town, they were famished for it. They didn’t notice the haughtiness of the desk clerk or the mustached secret policeman watching them from behind a copy of
Politika
or even the scratches on the inside of their door that, had they been in the mood to notice, would have made them think that someone had been imprisoned in the room for a very long time. They weren’t in the mood to look around at anything in Milošević’s Yugoslavia, not even checking the nighttime view from their window until afterward, when Emmett, naked and satisfied, pulled back the heavy, dusty curtains to look down on a tree-lined street full of sleepy taxis under the tungsten glare.

It was late when they finally dressed and walked around the corner to Trg Slobode—Liberty Square—to mix with dour-looking dark-headed couples peering into sparse shop windows. The city hall was lit up like a cathedral, and the pedestrian avenue was choked with sidewalk cafés. They sat at one and ordered strong Turkish coffees. “Turska kafa,” Emmett read from the menu, and the waitress, a pretty yet bedraggled girl, giggled at his pronunciation. Heads turned to look at them. In that postcoital glow, neither was concerned. They had crossed into the Balkans. Anything could happen, and they were ready to welcome the unknown with open arms.

A tall man, one of a table of three, turned a leg toward them and leaned against his thigh. “American?” Dark eyes, a cigarette gushing smoke around his face.

“That’s right,” said Emmett, chin out, defiant.

“MC Hammer,” the man said, smiling now. “Madonna. Michael Jackson. J. R. Ewing.”

“Yes,” Emmett said, trying to hold back a grin. “All American.”

The man leaned back and waved at the waitress and ordered Lav beers for his new American friends. Soon they had joined the three dark-haired men who turned out to be great fans of America. Voislav had relatives in New York, while Steva had spent a university semester in Pennsylvania. They asked questions, often returning to the most important one: How do you like Yugoslavia? After ten hours, what could they say? So far, so good.

“Come,” said the third, Borko. “We go to disco.”

Sophie hesitated. It was one thing to chat with friendly strangers in an open-air café around the corner from your hotel, but a disco required taxis; it required giving yourself over to the care of strangers. Then she saw the glow in Emmett’s face. This was it;
this
was what he’d meant when he’d said,
To go. To see. To experience.

They were soon stuffed into a tiny taxi, laughing and listening to the men sing old, incomprehensible songs, crossing a long bridge to reach the Petrovaradin Fortress that, according to their hosts, had been built by the Romans. It had been rebuilt and reinforced over the centuries, developing into a winding labyrinth of cobblestone walkways and dark, hidden crevices that led them eventually to an enormous, crypt-like courtyard where, in one corner, a DJ was playing “Birthday” by the Sugarcubes, while in the other corner young people were lined up to buy beer. Crushed plastic cups littered the ground. Filling the center of the courtyard was a heaving mass of sweating young bodies, writhing in some vaguely synchronous dance.

Sophie needn’t have worried about their guides. Voislav, Steva, and Borko were riding a high of exhilaration, having recently been decommissioned from the army and their tenure in the drab, muddy camps where nationalist discord was fermenting. “And then we come back to find out Vojvodina is no longer autonomous,” Voislav told them.

“What?” asked Sophie.

“Vojvodina. Where you are right now. Fucking Milošević took away our political autonomy. Ours and Kosovo’s. It
stinks
.” Then he raised his hands, palms out, and pushed away everything he’d just said. “I give myself a headache.”

They were in dire need of a breath of fresh air, and to these three young Serbs in the last days of Yugoslavia this meant dance, drink, and travel. It didn’t take long before they’d found three pretty girls—one Serb, one Romanian, and one Hungarian—to share their escape, and by midnight all eight of them had formed a loose circle in the middle of the crowd, jumping and writhing and laughing as the DJ spun, his set list of eighties hits growing more manic as the hours wore on. By one, they were exhausted and drunk, slumped over one of the many picnic tables that lined the long courtyard wall, and it felt to Sophie as if they had accomplished their mission: They had become different people. They had, for one evening, forgotten their anxieties and petty worries. They had forgotten
themselves.
It was entirely new to her, and with Emmett she became a satisfied wallflower, watching the joy of all the young people around her.

“They look happy, no?” came a voice. A woman’s. Late thirties or early forties, with dark, sultry features. She had taken the seat to the right of Sophie. To Sophie’s left, Emmett had leaned his head back against the dirty courtyard wall, eyes closed.

“It’s nice to see,” she told the woman.

“It is hysteria,” the woman told her, her accent so deep and rough that Sophie imagined it could cut wood. “One last dance before end.”

Sophie laughed aloud. “You’re getting more from it than I am.”

“Because you cannot to understand,” she said. “You are American.”

“Then why don’t you explain it to me?”

“You would not understand. You must to know history.”

“I went to Harvard, lady. I think I can manage.”

The woman arched a brow, nodded, and then began to speak. She spoke not of these people dancing in front of them, but of the Turks and the Field of Black Birds, of Roman history and medieval times. She talked of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the mistakes of which would eventually lead to the First World War, and by this point Sophie lost track, treading in a sea of loose facts. Later, once they had returned to Boston and gained some perspective, she would see that this was part and parcel of extremist thought the world over: the heaping on of selective trivia that only a computer could fact-check in real time, the raw accumulation of unverifiable anecdote that could create a new reality. Sophie knew this, but in that open-air disco there was something hypnotic about this woman’s unabashed conviction. Emmett had woken and was sitting up straight behind Sophie, listening intently. There was no cynicism in this woman’s attitude, just the pure, untainted light of absolute knowledge. She understood everything, and nothing would ever get in the way of her worldview. It was seduction, pure and simple: This woman seduced them with her long fingernails, her two-pack-a-day voice, her wrecked grammar, her sultry eyes, and the feeling that she was the last woman on earth who knew everything.