The Cairo Affair (5 page)

“Sophie Kohl,” she said, then listened to his breathing.

Finally, he said, “Wow. Sophie. It’s good to hear your voice.”

“You talked to Emmett today.”

“No.”

The outright
no
threw her. “When did you last talk to Emmett?”

“Never—I mean, not since you left. Are you all right?”

“Shouldn’t I be? Yes, I … well, no. Not right now. But I was angry.”

“Angry?”

“I was, but not now. Emmett’s dead.”

“Emmett’s …
what
?”

“We were having dinner and a man walked into the restaurant and shot him in the head and the chest.”

“Oh, God. Sophie. I’m sorry, I—” He paused. “What can I do?”

“There’s nothing you can do. I just had to talk to you.”

“Right. Of course.”

“They gave me a babysitter.”

“They do that.”

“She fed me and put me to bed, but I can’t do this.”

“I’m coming. Next flight out.”

“No, Stan. I’m not calling for that.”

“Of course I will. Anything you need. You know that.”

“Just tell me why you told him. Now, of all times.”

He paused again. “Told him what?”

He was being coy, she thought. Diplomatic. But he was a spook, not a diplomat, so perhaps it was better to call it lying. “About us. You told him about us, and you said you were in love.”

His silence this time was longer, and it was a silence she recognized. The gears were moving in his head. He said, “Sophie, I didn’t tell him anything about us. You know I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then why did he tell me otherwise?”

“I don’t know. Maybe … I don’t know. He
told
you that I told him?”

“One of the last things he said.”

An intake of breath. “Maybe he was just fishing. Maybe he heard it somewhere else. He certainly didn’t hear it from me.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him, then she wasn’t sure she wanted to believe him. If Emmett had heard this from someone else, it would have been a simple thing for her to deny it into the ground. Emmett would have been relieved, and she would have been free of at least some of this crushing guilt. She said, “He sounded convincing.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Sophie. I haven’t talked to him since your going-away party.”

She digested this slowly, finally saying, “Okay. I believe you.”

“I hope so. Now, do you want me to come? It’s no problem at all.”

“No, Stan. Really. Thanks, though. I just need to sleep.”

“Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

She hung up and, after considering it a moment, dialed the other number, the one she still knew by heart, though her heart was in her throat when she pressed the buttons. A single ring, then a recorded voice told her something in Arabic. Sophie didn’t know the language but she knew the tone—the number had been disconnected. Of course. She hung up and turned off the phone again. Yet even with that done, she still couldn’t sleep.

4

1991

After Prague they moved on to Budapest and the drearily aristocratic Gellért Hotel. With the memory of that Czech boy and her stolen Lenin still fresh, Sophie shied away from tourist spots, preferring to sit with Emmett in dusty Hungarian cafés on streets called Vaci and Andrassy, reading the
Herald Tribune
and pretending to be locals. It didn’t work, for their clothes gave them away, and as soon as they opened their mouths they received shocked stares, but it did give them time to read and learn about the war bubbling just to the south, in Yugoslavia.

In late June, Croatia and Slovenia had declared their independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and after a brief ten-day war Slovenia had become sovereign. By September, as they huddled over their newspapers, the young Croatian republic had been fighting for its existence for two months.

“It’s the biggest news since the Berlin Wall,” Emmett told her in their hotel room as they watched grainy television images of bombs and talking heads. “And we’re right here, one country away.” She could feel his excitement.

During breakfast, their waitress told them in spotty English that Budapest was swelling from an influx of Yugoslavs—mostly Serbs—fleeing military conscription, smuggling goods across the loose borders, and escaping the prospect of an unknown future. “Criminals,” she said with undisguised contempt, but this only added to their vision of themselves as explorers into the unknown. At a bar in Liszt Ferenc Square they listened to a drunk young Serbian man ranting in English to a table of Hungarians about how Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman were preparing to “set fire to the Balkans, you mark my words.”

The tension in the air, whether real or imagined, added a new dimension to their honeymoon, and on the white Gellért sheets they tangled and fought as if their room had caught fire and this was their last chance for connection. Sophie lost track of herself during sex; this kind of exhilaration was new to her. While a part of her was terrified by the loss of control, when she saw the look of pure satisfaction on Emmett’s face her fear faded away.

On September 18, two days before their scheduled return to Boston, Emmett suggested they travel south. “We missed the Wall, Sophie. You really want to miss this?”

She didn’t know. They were at breakfast again in the Gellért dining room, and she was tired. A part of her longed to get back to their friends in Boston, where they could understand the language again and spread tall tales of their adventures; another part was enchanted by the idea, recently hatched, that this honeymoon could be the first step of a journey that would take them around the world.

“We can go down to Novi Sad,” Emmett said as he pulled out the regional map they’d only used a couple of times. Now, she saw, there were pencil circles around cities, and she realized that he’d gotten up sometime during the night to scribble on it. Where had he worked? The bathroom, or had he snuck down to the hotel bar?

Novi Sad, she saw, was a town in the north of Yugoslavia, on the banks of the Danube, not so far from the Hungarian border. To the west, he’d circled another town, also along the Danube, called Vukovar, just inside Croatia, though on their map Croatia did not exist. He pointed at it. “There’s fighting right there.”

Sophie knew the name. For nearly a month, Vukovar had suffered under a continuous rain of artillery by the JNA, the Jugoslav National Army. “It’s not too close?” she asked.

“I’m not suggesting we go
to
the fighting, Sophie. We get to Novi Sad, and we settle in for a week. We keep our ears open; we see what we can see.”

“To what end?”

He stared at her a moment, as if he only now realized that he’d married an imbecile. Or maybe he was asking himself the same question. He smiled and opened his hands. “To go. To see. To experience.”

They were only twenty-two.

It was a straightforward enough proposition, but Sophie saw it as a life-changing decision. She was right to think of it like that, for in a way the decision redirected their shared life. At the time, though, she couldn’t predict any of this. It was simply the first test of their marriage. Either she would encourage her husband’s sense of adventure, or she would take the initial steps toward clipping his wings. She was already thinking more like a wife than the independent woman she’d always told herself she was.

She was also thinking of that boy in Prague. She was no wiser a week later, but her eyes were a little more open, and she was beginning to understand how ridiculous she had looked among those gray, historically miserable people with her dollars and her American smile and her little trinket of communist kitsch. She didn’t want to be like that anymore. She, like Emmett, wanted to be someone who’d
seen
things, and not just on television. She was beginning to think of her friends in Boston as cloistered, just as she had been. While her courage faltered occasionally, she knew that she wanted to be different from them. She wanted to be authentic. She wanted to
know.
She said, “Sure, hon. Let’s go look at a war.”

5

Thursday was full of visitors. Fiona was ready with coffee and eggs when Sophie rose around noon, and soon afterward Mary Saunders, the ambassador, called to tell her that everything was being done to track down the cretin who had shot Emmett. “Like what?” Sophie asked.

Perhaps noting the tone in her voice, the ambassador hesitated. Or maybe this was just Sophie’s imagination, for she felt as if she’d woken a different woman from the night before. The grief and guilt remained, but she’d woken angry—angry that some thick-necked bastard had been able to walk into a restaurant and end life as she’d known it. She was angry for Emmett, because he hadn’t had the chance for his “little shit” moment, and that was something he had deserved. She was angry with Stan, because she wasn’t sure she believed him, and she was livid with Zora Balašević, who had destroyed her marriage long before that gunman had destroyed Emmett. Most of all, she was angry with herself for being so much less than she could have been.

Mary Saunders listed the law enforcement and security agencies who were “on top of this” and told her that she should expect to have to answer some questions for them. “Of course,” Sophie said, “but is this a two-way street?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are they going to answer my questions?”

“I’m sure they’ll be as helpful as they can be, Sophie.”

Afterward, she received a call from Harry Wolcott—a colleague of Emmett’s in Cairo, and Stan’s Agency boss. He offered breathy, muddled condolences. Sophie appreciated that the man was emotional and confused, but that wasn’t much use to her now. She wanted answers—and if not answers, then at least the feeling that people she trusted knew what was going on. She’d lived in the diplomatic corps long enough to know that just because people act as if they understand the world, it doesn’t mean they know it any better than you do.

After she hung up, Glenda appeared at the front door, her dark, wiry hair out of sorts, claiming to have been accosted by a journalist, though when they looked out the window there was no sign of paparazzi. “But it has made the news,” she told them as she crouched in her short skirt, long-legged on insecure heels, and turned on CNN, where they saw a picture of Emmett from when he first arrived in Budapest. A newscaster mentioned “sketchy details” and a “Hungarian restaurant” and an “unknown assailant.” A talking head gave some noncommittal words on what this could mean for American-Hungarian relations (“Nothing,” he finally admitted). There was no mention of Sophie, just the banner headline
MURDER IN BUDAPEST.
The embassy, Fiona Vale guessed aloud, was working overtime to keep her out of the news cycle.

Glenda held her hand and whispered lovingly that she was going to take care of her. Fiona disappeared to make calls—babysitting, Sophie suspected, wasn’t her actual job, and her work was probably piling up. Then Gerry Davis, pink and clean in a perfectly pressed greatcoat, arrived to take her through more of his vision of the future. She couldn’t help but admire the way he was able to act as tragedy’s soothsayer.

There were funeral arrangements to be made, but she wasn’t to worry—the embassy was taking care of the details. After an inquest (“Sorry, this is required, but we’ll deal with it”), Emmett’s body would be sent back to Massachusetts and the family plot near Amherst. Would she like to fly back with him? “Of course,” she answered without even considering the question. Twenty minutes later, Gerry Davis told her that there was a first-class reservation for tomorrow, Air France to Boston via Paris, with her name on it.

The Hungarian police were scheduled to visit at four, but beforehand, Gerry Davis said, some folks from the embassy wanted to have a word with her. It turned out they were already in the apartment, drinking coffee in the kitchen with Fiona. Two tall men wandered in, smiling stiffly, and asked Glenda if she would please step out for a little while. (Glenda’s
Hell no
caught in her throat once she realized they were spies.) They introduced themselves, but their given names passed Sophie by. She referred to them by their surnames: Reardon and Strauss.

Reardon took the lead. He was bald on top, cropped short on the sides, and blushed whenever the subject made a turn toward the personal. Strauss was younger, early thirties, and more dark than his name would have suggested. He used both thumbs to type notes into his BlackBerry.

Reardon said, “Did your husband share information about his work?”

“Not usually, no.”

“But you know what he did?”

“He was a deputy consul,” she said. “He worked under Ray—Raymond Bennett, the consul—sometimes taking over his schedule, meeting with Hungarian officials and businessmen. That sort of thing.”

Reardon nodded—he knew this already. Of course he knew this. “We’re looking into it now—whether some part of his job led to this incident. If, however, the cause is rooted in something else, something more personal, then perhaps you would know about it.” He was already blushing.

Yugoslavia, 1991.

Zora Balašević.

A disloyal wife.

But all she said was “I have no idea.”

There were more questions—Emmett’s friends, his extracurricular activities, his business interests—but they were softball compared to the lie she’d begun the conversation with: She had plenty of ideas, too many ideas.

Reardon and Strauss were attentive, but not suspicious, and as they talked Sophie began to relax, describing her and Emmett’s shared life to them. It was almost comforting speaking these things aloud, and by the time they stood and handed her their cards she was feeling a warm wave of nostalgia. The anger had slipped away, and she only wanted Emmett back. She gave them thankful smiles, but Glenda gave them another face, for she was in hysterics again, furious that they’d kept her away from Sophie for a full forty minutes.

Fiona was manning the phone in the kitchen, which was by then ringing off the hook. Journalists. Each time, Sophie heard a single ring, then Fiona’s cold voice saying, “Kohl residence,” and then lowering to a whisper as she got rid of them. Around two, though, she came in and announced that Emmett’s parents were on the line.