The Cairo Affair (40 page)

He opened his mouth, hesitated, then said, “I fear that may not be possible.”

“And why not?”

Again, an open mouth, and she saw that he was missing at least two molars on one side. He lowered his voice, glancing up the empty corridor. “The man who spoke with you.” He shook his head, voice now a whisper: “Do not trust him.”

Christ, it was starting up again. She just wanted to get out of here. “He’s FBI.”

“No, he is not FBI. And his name is not Michael Khalil.”

While Kiraly had told her this with that unsure deference that made her so comfortable, Halawi had said it with such stern conviction that her heart caught in her throat. “Then what is he?”

“He works for my superior, Mrs. Kohl. He is not FBI.”

She stepped back, repulsed as much by the man as by his information. She, too, was whispering now: “It doesn’t matter. I promised him I would meet him, but I’m leaving in the morning. I’ll never see him again.”

“You are on EgyptAir 777, leaving at nine thirty. Yes?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“If I know this, then Mr. Khalil does as well. So, too, does my superior.” He gave her a moment to comprehend that simple logical sequence. “Please, you must come with me.”

She took another step back, and he stepped to the doorframe but did not enter.

He said, “I do not think he will let you leave.”

“Of course he’ll let me leave. I’m nobody.”

“It’s not who you are, Mrs. Kohl. It’s what you know.”

“But I don’t
know
anything!”

He held up both hands to calm her, then glanced up the corridor again. He whispered, “I was wrong. Jibril was wrong. All of us were wrong.”

“About what?”

“About everything. This is not about Stumbler. It’s about…” He faded out a moment, frowning, as if unsure of the word. “It’s about betrayal.”

Betrayal. Finally, something Sophie Kohl understood. She said, “Tell me about betrayal.”

He took a breath through his nose, and she heard the clotted sound of a cold coming on. He didn’t look all that well, either. He sighed. “It would be a breach of security to share with you at this point.”

“It would be a betrayal.”

“Exactly.”

“Wouldn’t it be a betrayal to hide me from your superior?”

“Maybe not,” he said, as if that explained anything at all. “Please,” he said. “Gather your things. I can keep you safe.”

She didn’t want to go, but in less than five minutes she had dressed as he waited in the corridor. She lugged her bag, trying to keep up with him. They did not take the elevator, instead using the stairwell to reach the rear of the ground floor. Before they stepped out, he said, “Don’t go into the lobby. There’s someone who will recognize us both.”

“One of your people?”

“One of Stanley Bertolli’s men,” he said.

“Stan’s not going to hurt me,” she told him.

Lips tight, he shook his head. “I am more worried about who’s watching Mr. Bertolli’s man.” Then he opened the door.

She let him lead her back through glass doors and across the courtyard with its pool and garden, then they reentered the building and squeezed around a soiled room-service cart to reach a service elevator. Silently, they took it down into the guts of the building, the doors opening onto an underground parking lot. A car was waiting, behind the wheel a young, tough-looking Egyptian with thick eyebrows. She caught the name Sayyid as they got into the back and Halawi ordered the driver to go. He drove quickly past rows of cars and up ramps until he flashed a badge at an old lot attendant and they finally pulled out into light traffic. While she was initially able to tell their direction—north and then west across Qasr Al Nile Bridge, all the way across the southern tip of Gezira Island and then into Dokki—she was soon lost in Cairo’s tangle. That was when it occurred to her that she didn’t really know these men at all. All she had was the word of a woman she’d never actually met. They could be kidnappers. They could be al Qaeda. They could be CIA.

As they were entering Dokki, she said, “What is it your boss thinks I know?”

Halawi hesitated only briefly. “The identity of your husband’s murderer. Or, the person who ordered the murder.”

She sat up. “
You
know?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you think
he
did it? Your superior?”

“I cannot say for sure.”

“You don’t know much, do you?”

He didn’t bother answering that.

“How long are you hiding me?”

He considered the question. “Maybe until this evening. Maybe Tuesday. No later than Tuesday, I think.” He was turning, looking out the rear windshield as they wove through traffic. “I am taking you to my home. I would like you to stay inside until this has been settled. My wife will take care of you.”

“Wife?” she said, surprised, for she had assumed he was a bachelor.

Omar Halawi’s home turned out to be a fifth-floor walkup on a narrow, treeless street. Graffiti marred one of the buildings. The three of them went up together, both men opening doors for her along the way. When they reached his apartment, Halawi knocked, and after a moment a woman in her sixties opened the door. She was pleasantly plump, black hair shot through with gray, and she had a wide mouth that formed a warm smile. “Salaam,” she said, nodding at Sophie.

“Salaam,” Sophie answered.

Halawi whispered, “She speaks no English.”

It was a small apartment, smaller than she would have expected from a member of the Egyptian secret police—for that, she had gleaned from his insider knowledge and the way he had at least one young tough at his beck and call, was what he probably was. His home was claustrophobic the way old people’s homes always seemed to be, stuffed with trinkets of a long life, things without function or, in many cases, much aesthetic beauty. They seemed to serve only as reminders that the resident had once lived life rather than just watch it go by.

The wife’s name was Fouada, Halawi told her, and she brewed tea nervously while Halawi and Sayyid stepped outside for a talk. Sophie, feeling exhaustion returning all at once, said, “Fouada?”

The old woman turned to her, hesitant.

“Sleep?” Sophie said, placing two praying hands against the side of her tilted face. The rush of understanding seemed to give Fouada great pleasure, and she quickly ushered Sophie back to a guest bedroom that smelled of lavender. There were fresh folded towels on the dresser, and she was given a tour of the spotless bathroom. “Thank you,” she told the woman.
“Shukran.”

Fouada smiled, clapping her hands together, saying,
“Afwan,”
and then more words that breezed by. Still fully clothed, Sophie lay on the hard bed and closed her eyes. A brief rest before undressing, she thought, then wondered what Emmett would say if he could see her now. Would he be surprised? Might he even be impressed? She was soon asleep.

5

1991

Zora drove them down the mountain, north toward Novi Sad, and then headed west, occasionally skirting the Danube as they passed through towns that she named along the way—Sremska Kamenica and Ledinci and Rakovac and Beočin, whose cement factory was fed by an offshoot of the Danube. She pointed out historical tidbits: Sremska Kamenica had been the home of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, “greatest Serbian children’s author.” Ledinci was a young town, built after World War II to house the inhabitants of Stari—Old—Ledinci, which had been burned down by the dreaded Ustaše. In Rakovac the Croatian fascists had killed ninety-one citizens. Beočin created the first Serb schools in the Vojvodina countryside. She then pointed out another town, Čerević, where the Ustaše had killed eighty-seven.

Sophie thought of the concentration camps, the one for men, the one for women, and the one for children. She thought of ankles and the sharp corners of brick buildings.

As they made their way through small towns in that tiny Yugo, they listened to Zora’s roll call of atrocities. “They no rest until they exterminate every Serb. It is moral crime to let that to happen.”

When they didn’t answer, Zora looked at Sophie in the rearview. “You no believe me.”

“I believe you,” Sophie said, knowing it was the only thing to say. They were deep in the countryside, farms stretching as far as the eye could see, in a country where they couldn’t speak the language. They were depending on Zora for everything. But that’s what they’d been doing for the last four days, and hadn’t she only given them kindness? She remembered Viktor’s assessment:
I’ll fight with her, but I know she’s right about everything.

From the passenger seat, Emmett winked. Nothing to worry about. All fine.

They were soon in a region Zora called the “Serb Autonomous Oblast of Eastern Slavonia, Baranja, and Western Syrmia,” but was firmly inside the territory that Croatia was claiming for itself. As they passed a sign directing them toward Vukovar, she told them about Borovo Selo, a town just north of Vukovar. “They make big deal out of attack our boys do on Croat policemen, but that was retaliation. A Croat government minister—for fun, you know—use antitank missiles to blow up three Serb homes.
This
is what they think of us. Weekend sport. Since referendum on Croat independence, they do what they like. Eighty-six Serbs in Vukovar just
disappear.
” She paused. “You know what that means. We all know.”

Though they could hear the distant thumps of artillery and see smoke rising on the horizon, they were not able to go into Vukovar, where the Vuka and Danube rivers met, for it was surrounded by the JNA—the Jugoslav National Army. Instead, Zora drove them to a muddy village east of town that she never bothered to name. There were tired-looking horses standing amid the rusting Yugos, but the streets, lined with small old-style houses, were empty until they reached the center, where a single shop advertising ice cream had attracted a few disconsolate-looking young men in army uniforms clutching bottles of Lav. They watched Zora’s Yugo drive by.

“It’s dead here,” Emmett said.

“Not behind doors,” Zora said as she turned up a puddle-choked side road and stopped at a tiny house with smoke drifting from a chimney. Like the others, it looked a hundred years old, brick walls covered with cracked, sand-colored mortar, a clay-tiled roof. When she parked behind a mud-spattered pickup track, the front door opened and an enormous black-bearded man in battle fatigues limped outside, arms raised high.

“Draga moja, Zoro!”
he shouted, and she climbed out and splashed through the mud to accept his embrace. He lifted her more than a foot off the ground. They kissed cheeks, and she brought him over to meet her Americans. His name was Bojan, and he spoke no English. While he seemed initially pleased by their unexpected appearance, he hesitated and lowered his voice and spoke to Zora. A look crossed her face; then she shrugged elaborately.

“Something wrong?” Sophie asked.

“Nothing, nothing,” Zora said as she brought Bojan to the trunk of the car. She popped it open and let him look inside. A broad smile broke out on his hairy face as he reached into a ragged cardboard box and took out a military-green, pill-shaped metal canister, about the size of his hand, with a tube leading to three prongs opened like the flower petals. There were letters on the side, and Sophie could make out
PROM-1
.

“Bravo!” Bojan said.

“What’s that?” asked Emmett.

“Land mines. Bojan is paramilitary, but the army no share its mines.”

“We were driving with
explosives
in that car?” Sophie snapped.

Zora smiled and raised a finger. “And we live. Praise God! Come, we drink.”

They crowded into Bojan’s cramped, dirty kitchen. On the counter, beside the sink, were two old pistols with wooden handles and cylinders. Perhaps he’d been cleaning them, but now he ignored the guns and went to a cabinet, inside which were three large plastic bottles of homemade plum brandy.

“Does he have anything else?” Emmett asked, for the
rakija
they’d drunk the last days hadn’t done his stomach any good.

Zora asked, and Bojan said,
“Samo pivo.”

“Just beer,” she translated. “But first we toast successful trip.”

The
rakija
burned and then warmed her, and when Emmett switched to Lav, she stuck with the brandy. It helped keep her calm. Though he couldn’t talk to them directly, Bojan wanted to tell stories, but not war stories. He told them about his youth in Tito’s Yugoslavia, of swimming on the beaches north of Dubrovnik, now part of the Republic of Croatia, and climbing the Slovenian mountains. He was full of the glory of the communist past, yet he was no communist. “Ideology,” Zora explained, “is not his bag. He is simple man, and he like to remember good times. I think we all this way. In few years, after you make new life in America, you think of us nostalgically, too.”

By then the room was spinning, and Sophie was ready to agree. They were here,
here,
in a war zone, drinking with a sentimental soldier who—tomorrow, perhaps—would be back on the front lines, fighting against the children of the Ustaše. They had come. They had seen.

Emmett said, “What was that?” He was cupping his ear.

“I hear nothing,” Zora said, still smiling.

Sophie didn’t hear anything, either, and then she did: thumping. Not the distant thump of artillery, but something closer, under their feet. It was faint, but it was there, and it was close, inside the house.

“Yeah,” she said. “I hear it.”

Zora looked at Bojan, her smile finally fading, and said something to him. Bojan shook his head, almost embarrassed, and rubbed his face with a big, hairy hand. He spoke to Zora for a few minutes, another story, his face twisting into shapes of agony and anger as he went on. Finally he waved his hands, pushing everything away.

“What?” said Emmett.

Zora turned to them, her face hard now, no trace of warmth in it. “It is a man. Down. In basement.”

“Who?” Sophie asked.

“A monster.”

Silence followed. Then Emmett said, “Maybe you want to be more specific.”