The Jerusalem Puzzle (16 page)

But she’d never expected to encounter such a thing herself.

Who was this bastard? And why was he resurrecting an evil that should have died out thousands of years ago?

And then a bigger question loomed, what was he planning for her? Was it what she feared?

‘Hi Xena, you didn’t want to join us for a drink?’ I asked.

She looked up at me. Her eyes seemed bigger than before. Her expression was friendly.

‘I don’t go to bars,’ she said. She put her hand forward, as if she wanted to shake mine. But all she did was open her fingers, as if passing me a handful of air.

‘What brings you to Cairo, effendi?’ She said slowly, leaning forward.

She had a beautiful face, almost too perfect in its proportions. There was something unsettling about her.

‘I’m looking for a friend.’ It was the truth.

‘If you find friends in Cairo,’ she smiled, revealing sparkling teeth, ‘you can die here. That is what they say.’ Her smile hardened.

The way she said it, it was almost a threat. A tiny shiver ran up my back, as if a spider had walked there.

‘Sean?’ It was Isabel’s voice. I turned. She was walking towards us. Her gaze was on Xena though, as if she was examining her.

‘You get around,’ she said to Xena.

Xena switched her attention to Isabel. She nodded at her.

‘Do you know Cairo?’ asked Xena.

‘No,’ said Isabel.

‘I can show you some interesting places tonight,’ she said. She was looking at me when she said that.

‘Maybe another time,’ said Isabel. She put her hand on my arm. ‘Mark is waiting for us.’

‘Gotta go,’ I said to Xena.

Her smile had a condescending edge to it now.

‘What the hell are you doing talking to her?’ said Isabel as we got in the elevator.

I hadn’t seen such a flash of anger from her before.

‘I was just being friendly. Where are we going?’

She looked at me for a few seconds, then replied. ‘To the third floor, to the Pane Vino Italian restaurant.’

We rode the rest of the way up in silence.

The restaurant was on a terrace overlooking the Nile. I could see why Mark liked it. It was busy, dark, and the tables were far enough apart that you wouldn’t feel you were being overheard. Pale yellow candles in elaborate ironwork Ottoman lamps sat on the floor. The view over the Nile was spectacular. The far side of the river was lit up by strings of street lights and the glow from apartment blocks beyond.

As we walked through the restaurant, being led by a waiter to Mark’s table, a section of the far river bank, to the north of where we were, went dark, as if a piece of the picture in front of us had been wiped out.

As soon as we sat down, I asked Mark what had happened across the river.

‘There’s been a lot of power cuts recently. It’s no big deal.’ He turned to look at the dark section of the river opposite. ‘Some idiot probably tried to steal some power cables. Probably fried himself. We’ve had a bit of that recently.’

As if in response to what he’d just said, flashes of brilliant white light broke out in the darkened section. They were small, but they were reflected in the water and went on for seconds.

‘Is that gunfire?’ I said. ‘This place is like the Wild West.’

Mark shrugged.

The flashes started up again. They were from two sources now. People in the restaurant were pointing. Over the rumble of traffic and the din of car horns, I could just about hear a distant snapping noise.

Then, just as suddenly as they’d started, the flashes stopped. The noise in the restaurant went up, as if a wave of relief had passed through us all. I saw a few men waving at waiters, as if they were determined to consume with a renewed vigour.

‘Order the Mediterranean pasta,’ said Mark. ‘They get their fish from Alexandria every afternoon, fresh from the fishing boats, which come in in the morning.’

I ordered a pepperoni pizza.

Mark shook his head in horror. I was sitting beside Isabel, Mark opposite her. Over the next few minutes he began to irritate me, like a wasp does when it circles a picnic. Not only would he not stop talking, most of it was directed at Isabel.

Eventually I got a word in. ‘What do the locals call Cairo? I read the name Cairo is a European invention,’ I said.

‘A lot of them call it Misr; the metropolis, the city. That’s probably where the word misery comes from. Did you know that fifty percent of Cairo’s population is on the poverty line?’

I shook my head.

He jabbed a finger into the white linen tablecloth. ‘A lot of people here say things were better back in Mubarak’s day. If you’re at the bottom of the pile in Cairo, living in the Muqattam Hills south of here, you eke out a life from trash mountains and live eight to a room in temperatures like an oven in the summer.’ He paused for a few seconds. ‘While you wait for the hill behind your mud house to fall on top of you.’

‘What part of the city is Xena from?’ I was wondering why she was hanging around with Mark. Was she his
girlfriend
, his bodyguard?

‘She lives in Zamalek, an island in the Nile near here. But she’s originally from Sudan. She likes it in Zamalek. Rich people live there. It’s full of fancy boutiques, businessmen and fortune tellers with gold-plated mobile phones. And it has two million people living in it.’

He waved a hand in the air to catch the attention of a waiter.

‘There’s a lot more to Cairo than shuffling past Tutankhamun’s mask in a sweaty crowd of tourists, or getting stuck in a traffic jam of tourist buses at the Pyramids,’ he said. He pointed his finger at me. ‘The Qaytbay funerary complex alone is better than all of the sightseeing in Venice put together.’

‘What does Xena do?’ I asked. I was being pushy, but I didn’t care.

‘She helps me with a few things,’ said Mark. He looked at me as if I’d spat on the floor between us.

‘She told me if you find friends in Cairo, you can die in Cairo.’

Isabel sat forward. ‘Is that what they say?’ she said, looking at Mark.

‘I never heard it,’ he said.

‘Is she … ?’ Isabel paused, smiled. ‘Close to you?’

He replied, quickly and emphatically. ‘No.’

‘I hope you’re not getting sucked in, like you did in Iraq,’ said Isabel.

He stared at her, his eyes wide, as if she’d just extolled the virtues of living with Jack the Ripper.

‘What exactly do you want, Isabel?’ he said. ‘Why are you here?’

‘We need a little help.’

He sighed, as if he’d heard such pleas far too often. ‘What sort of help?’

‘We want our deportation notice taken off the Israeli Immigration system.’

There was silence at the table.

‘That’s a big ask,’ he said. ‘A very big ask.’

Isabel’s expression hardened. She tilted her head to one side. ‘I’m your ex-wife, Mark. I don’t think it will look good for you to have me barred from Israel.’

Mark stared at her for a minute before responding. ‘I might be able to do what you’re asking, but I won’t guarantee it.’ He paused, his hand at his mouth, as if thinking hard. Thinking hard what lie to tell us, most likely.

He leaned forward.

‘I’m going to Taba tomorrow,’ he said. ‘To a meeting of border security officers. I’ll see if I can do anything.’

Isabel looked sceptical. ‘You can do it, Mark, if you want to. I know that. You know that. So don’t bullshit me. Remember, we worked together. This is in your interests.’ She spoke slowly, emphasising each word.

‘Are you planning to go back to Israel?’ he said.

‘If you get our records changed maybe we should,’ she said.

‘Wouldn’t you both be better off staying away for a while, perhaps a few years.’

I leaned towards him. ‘We were that close to finding out what the hell happened to Kaiser. I could feel it.’ I held my thumb and forefinger almost touching in front of his face. ‘Before we were thrown out over some stupid bureaucratic nonsense.’

‘Are you doing all this to help your institute or for personal reasons?’ he said.

‘Both.’

He’d probably think I was crazy if I told him I thought there was a connection between Susan’s kidnapping, her husband dying, and the book she was translating. It was all too much of a coincidence that she’d got involved, just as disaster struck.

He looked at me. ‘Are you planning to give Isabel a job at your institute?’ he said.

She pointed a finger at him. ‘I’m not doing all this to get a job. I want that deportation off my record.’

He was staring at her. There was simmering admiration in his eyes. I didn’t like the sight of it. ‘I told you, I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘And I will. Seeing as we’re old friends.’ He smiled at her, as if I wasn’t there.

‘Tomorrow?’ she said.

‘What’s your hurry?’

‘We have a return flight booked for Sunday from Tel Aviv,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to waste the tickets.’

I could have said I didn’t care about the tickets. I had more money than I knew what to do with. I’d been piling up cash in my bank account since Irene had died, not going out much and not spending, but I didn’t say anything. Maybe I should have. What blinded me to the danger of going back to Israel was a sharp urge to get out of Cairo.

‘You’re not going straight back to Israel?’ he said. He stared at me, wide-eyed.

I shrugged.

‘Why don’t we come with you to Taba?’ said Isabel. ‘Once the Israeli computers are updated, you can drop us at the border. You go through that way, don’t you?’ She turned to me. ‘Taba’s near Sharm el-Sheikh. There are taxis on the Israeli side that can drive us to Jerusalem in a few hours, if we’ve a few hundred dollars with us.’

‘Great,’ I said.

Mark pursed his lips, tapping hard on the table. ‘You can come with me,’ he said. ‘But I won’t be responsible for what happens if you go back into Israel. That’ll be on your heads.’ He pointed at me, then at Isabel.

If I was the type to believe in omens, I’d probably have interjected right there with a decision not to go through with it all. But I don’t believe in them, even the ones that are just common sense.

After we’d eaten we arranged to meet at the Hilton the next morning. We should be in front of the hotel when he came, he said, as he’d be on a tight schedule. It would be a four hour drive to Taba.

Then he rang the Hilton to see if it was reopened yet, after the attack.

I assumed it had been evacuated, that we would have to find other accommodation.

‘That’s not the way they do things here,’ he said.

And he was right. Apparently they had closed the hotel for all of two hours, while every room was searched, but as only one restaurant had been shot up and a controlled explosion had gone off, they’d reopened the hotel. The main restaurant would be closed only until the morning, he said.

We took a taxi back to the Hilton and went straight up to our room. I poured some slightly odd-tasting orange juice from the minibar for both of us. We stood at the window, looking over the city. It was midnight. There were still car horns honking. The traffic on the bridge in front of us made it look like a pearl necklace of lights.

‘I didn’t realise you wanted to go back to Israel tomorrow,’ I said.

Isabel put her hand on the glass and leaned on it, looking down. I moved a step closer to her, brushing against her bare arm.

‘I thought it was a good idea when I heard he was heading for Taba,’ she said. ‘I know how responsible you feel for Susan disappearing. We were getting close to finding out something in Jerusalem. I could feel it in my bones. You said so too.’

‘You’re right.’

She kept staring down. ‘I got this weird feeling when I saw Xena with you.’

‘What feeling?’

‘There’s a lot of stuff going on here that we don’t know anything about.’

‘That’s the truth.’

‘No, no, not just in general.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘I mean about us getting thrown out of Israel like that. There’s something strange going on. Maybe I’m crazy, but …’ She shook her head, as if she didn’t want to say any more.

‘But what?’

‘Nobody seems to care much about what happened to Susan Hunter. The Israeli police didn’t even blink when we mentioned we were looking for her.’

‘I’m sure the British Embassy in Tel Aviv is trying to find her.’

She shook her head, slowly. ‘I’ve seen what happens. They’ll make a few enquiries; talk to the police, the hotel she was staying in, contacts of hers that they know about, and that’s it. They’re too busy to do much more. That’s the reality. They’ll do their best, but there’s so much to do.’

‘Do you want vodka in that?’ I said, pointing at the tall glass of orange juice I’d given her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a thumping headache.’ She looked me in the eyes. ‘I need to go straight to sleep.’

‘Sure.’ I said. I wanted to ask her if seeing Mark had given her the headache, but I decided not to go there.

It was the third night in a row she’d wanted to go straight to sleep. I lay in the dark wondering what was happening to us.

I knew for sure that if I asked her whether she still had feelings for Mark, she’d deny it. And that if I didn’t like her smiling at him, I was just being jealous.

But maybe knowing her answer wasn’t the real reason I wouldn’t ask her.

Was I afraid that if she hesitated at all, I couldn’t pretend that everything was okay between us? Because then I’d have to confront her. I couldn’t avoid it. And who knew what would happen after that. Best to leave it all alone until we got back to England. I had my own feelings to figure out too. They couldn’t be denied.

We had an early breakfast. I’d told her about my plan to go to the Antiquities Museum and be back by 10.30 a.m. I had to find out if I was right about why Kaiser had come here.

‘Do you want to come?’ I said, as I picked up a second croissant from the plate I’d brought over from the breakfast buffet. We were in the Hilton’s other restaurant, the Desert Café, overlooking the Nile. The white tablecloths, cutlery and blue bone china were all sparkling in the early morning sunlight.

The only sign I could see of the attack the night before was a notice saying the main restaurant would be closed until lunchtime.