Countdown in Cairo rt-3 Read online

  Steps within the church led down past the altar to a refuge and a crypt where, according to legend, the Holy Family found shelter after fleeing from Herod. Christianity had been the religion of most Egyptians from the third to the tenth century after Christ. Egypt had settled into the Muslim world thereafter.

  Carlos and Janet continued their walking tour in the afternoon and visited the ancient Synagogue of Ben Ezra. It bore a resemblance to the Coptic Church because it had once been one too. The Church of St. Michael had stood here during the first ten centuries after Christ, but the Copts sold the structure to the Jews to pay a tax by Ibn Tuylun for the erection of a mosque.

  The building, which contained some of the original structure from almost two thousand years earlier, remained a temple, but its parish had long since dispersed. Most of Cairo’s Jews had been forced out of the country after the modern wars with Israel. Today, the building remained a historical oddity, a reminder of the two pasts, near and distant.

  In the late afternoon, exhausted and with feet sore from their first day of sightseeing, they went back to their hotel and refreshed themselves. Then they settled into the hotel bar and restaurant.

  It was a very comfortable modern bar in a splendid hotel, the Grand Hyatt of Cairo, a towering modern edifice located at the edge of the old city where the fortress of Babylon had once stood. But there was one problem. Right now, all that was on Carlos’s mind was that they were in the capital of a Muslim country and the bar served no alcohol, even though alcohol was readily available at other locations in the city. At the end of a hot day, Carlos would have chucked the whole journey to be able to knock back a couple of cold brews.

  “Who ever heard of a bar with no booze?” Carlos grumbled. “That’s like an airplane with no wings.”

  Janet laughed slightly.

  “You know that Bon Jovi song ‘Dry County’?” he continued. “That should be the national anthem here. It’s like driving through western Kansas, only worse.”

  “Carlos,” she said, “zip it, would you? There’s beer in the cafes. We’ll go to another place, okay?”

  “I should be able to get a brew here.”

  Selections of European and American pop music played on the sound system, covering their conversation. Soon something played in Italian, and it was incomprehensible to them.

  “Budweiser. Coors. Schlitz,” Carlos continued. “Iron City. Lone Star. Did you know there’s a beer in Connecticut named Hooker? Their slogan is ‘Get caught with a Hooker.’”

  “Carlos, honey…”

  “Or how about Pabst’s? Yeah, Pabst’s. I’d kill for a ‘PBR’ right now, know that? You know what else? I’d pay fifty bucks for a lukewarm can of Bud Ice with a slice of lime in it. That’s how desperate I am.”

  She held his arm, squeezed it hard, and shook it. “Okay, okay! Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.

  “Sold!”

  They took off for a downtown beer garden named the Royale, located in one of the more artsy neighborhoods. The guidebooks had told them it was akin to the Left Bank in Paris. Neither of them had ever been to the Left Bank, but they had an idea what that meant.

  The Royale was anything but royal. It was a narrow noisy bar on a backstreet. It evoked the air of a sordid 1920s speakeasy, complete with a paunchy one-armed barman and another barman who had an ear missing. The waitresses dressed as belly dancers. They had nice yummy flat bellies, Carlos noticed, but they did no dancing.

  And that was just for starters.

  Behind the bar was an array of bottles, mostly local brands that ripped off better known European products: Golden’s Dry Gin in recycled Gordon’s bottles, with the head of a dog replacing the boar’s head of the authentic logo; Tony Talker Black Label in bottles that looked suspiciously like Johnny Walker castoffs. There was another suspicious-looking scotch concoction called Chipas Renal.

  “Let’s stick to the beer,” Carlos said on arrival, “from closed bottles.”

  The Royale was crowded, filled with pungent smoke from Cleopatra cigarettes and the nasty stench of spilled Egyptian beer-Stella and Sakara, the two liquids that seemed to fuel most of these cafes. Underfoot, the floor was crunchy from cigarette butts and lupin shells from the trees on the block outside. But at least the Stella made Carlos happy when he finally got a couple of them, and if Carlos was happy, Janet was too.

  They hunched together on small wooden chairs at a small wobbly table with a zinc top. Carlos wandered off after one hour and three beers to find a men’s room, and Janet scanned the room, warding off the smiles and eye-contact of local young Arab men who had been waiting for Carlos to get lost.

  Suddenly Janet’s eyes went wide, as if she had seen a ghost.

  Carlos returned. He slid easily into his narrow chair, bumping elbows with some irritable Arab men sitting next to him. Janet looked to Carlos in disbelief and urgently placed a hand on his arm. “What?” he asked, slightly drunk.

  “That man at the bar!” she said in a loud whisper.

  “ What man?”

  She motioned with her eyes in quick hard glances, agitated enough not to move her head, directing his attention across the smoky room to the end of the bar.

  Carlos looked. He saw the man she had indicated, a moderately sized man with thinning hair in a rumpled dark brown suit. Carlos could only see him from the rear. He was chatting with two other men.

  “ That guy?” Carlos asked.

  “Him!” Janet said.

  “What about him?”

  “That’s Michael!” she whispered in urgency.

  “Michael who?”

  “The Michael we used to work for in Washington,” she said.

  “Michael Cerny?” he asked.

  “Yes! That Michael!”

  Carlos looked again, then looked back to her.

  “No way!” he scoffed. “You’re toasted.”

  “Yes, way. I’m not toasted.”

  Carlos looked again. No recognition. “Michael Cerny’s dead,” he said.

  “Sure. That’s what they told us,” she said. “The CIA people.”

  “He was shot, remember? In Paris. He died,” Carlos continued. “When you die you become dead and tend to stay dead.”

  “I know,” Janet answered again. “But that’s Michael Cerny over there!”

  “It might look like him, but it can’t be!”

  She leaned back and folded her arms. “Then you go look,” she insisted.

  Carlos waited for a second, as if to reject the entire notion. Then he gave her a glance of exasperation and stood again. He was tipsy. He squeezed out from the table onto the floor of the bar and wound his way through the crowd toward the bar.

  He neared the man Janet had indicated. He jockeyed for a position to get a good look. He moved into eavesdropping range. Janet saw Carlos’s expression freeze. He stared for a moment. Then the man they were watching turned his attention away from his friends at the bar and stared directly at Carlos. Janet saw their eyes lock for a moment.

  Then Carlos raised a hand to conceal his own face, quickly turning away. Carlos fled in her direction, and Janet watched as the man kept Carlos in his sights. Janet grabbed a battered menu and raised it to hide her own face. Carlos returned and slid awkwardly back into his narrow seat.

  “It’s him,” Carlos said in an astonished tone.

  “He recognized you too,” Janet said.

  “I know,” Carlos answered. “And they were talking in some funny language.”

  “Arabic?”

  “No. It was something else. It sounded Slavic. And one of his friends’ names was Victor. I heard him call him by name.”

  She worked up the nerve to glance over the top of the menu. The man was still at the bar, looking hard in their direction. Then he looked away.

  “So I was right?” Janet asked.

  “I… I don’t know. I don’t know if you’re right or not, but this guy looks exactly like Michael Cerny. It’s incredible!”

  “It’s him!”
Janet insisted.

  They both looked back to the bar. But now the man they had spotted lifted a drink from the bar and went over to a corner table, where he sat down. Within a few minutes, the two men who had been with him at the bar moved over and joined him.

  They fell quickly back into an animated conversation. Both of the other men wore Western suits and white keffiyehs, the traditional headgear with two rope circlets. At one point, one of the men in a keffiyeh turned and glanced at Carlos.

  “I want to have another look,” Carlos said.

  But Janet was starting to turn against the intrigue. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t like this at all. Let’s get out of here. You know what type of work Michael Cerny did. He was a CIA guy. Let’s blow out of here.”

  “No, no. I want to have some fun,” Carlos said.

  “Fun? This isn’t fun!”

  “It could be,” Carlos said. “It could also be a big career break for us, you know? They’d trust us because of the work we’ve done in DC and Virginia. So maybe we can get worked into something over here. Or Europe. Maybe they’d send us to Europe for free. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “The system doesn’t work that way.”

  “It does if you make it work that way. Don’t fight me on this.”

  She sighed. “Why did we ever leave the hotel? A couple of lousy beers, that’s why! Sheesh!”

  They argued the point for several minutes, keeping the man in view with sidelong glances. Finally the three men at the table they were watching stood up. It looked as if they were preparing to leave. But instead, the two men in Arab headgear sat, and the man they were watching-who either was or wasn’t Michael Cerny-made his way toward the men’s room.

  “Here’s my shot! I’m going to go talk to him,” Carlos said.

  “Don’t do it, Carlos!”

  “No, this’ll be cool. Know what I think? I think he’s under some ‘deep cover’ of some sort. Well, we spotted him. We’ve been dealt a hand. I’m going to go play it.”

  “This is so not good,” she moaned.

  Carlos was on his feet again, to the irritation of the people at the next table, whom he again jostled. Janet sat, even more irritated, wishing she had kept her mouth shut. She watched Carlos weave his way through the smoky room.

  The washroom was cramped and steamy. It stank of stagnant plumbing and disinfectant. When Carlos walked in, the man in the brown suit was the only other person there. He stood close to and facing the far wall at an old fashioned 1940s-style latrine. It was nothing more than a gutter at the base of a barely tiled wall. The man snapped shut a cell phone and pocketed it as soon as he knew he had company.

  Carlos took a position a few feet away at the urinal. A big wooden fan rumbled overhead at the center of the ceiling. It turned slowly with old wooden rotors, and its function seemed to be to blend all of the ugly odors of the room into something that was even worse than the sum of its parts.

  Carlos waited for his moment. Then, emboldened by his beer, he said, “Hello, Mr. Cerny. You know me from DC. Heck of a coincidence, huh?”

  The man at the urinal slowly turned his head toward the intruder. He gave Carlos a long, smoldering look but didn’t speak. Then he looked away again and faced the multilingual graffiti on the tiled wall in front of him.

  “I mean, you being dead and all,” Carlos said. “Then I bump into you here in a dive in Cairo, right? I guess that means you’re not dead anymore, doesn’t it, sir?”

  The man didn’t speak or acknowledge him. He was very still, hands in front of him, tending to business. He looked as if he could have stood that way all day, without moving a muscle.

  “See, the thing is, Mr. Cerny,” Carlos said, “I know all about secrecy and keeping things quiet. And heck, I was at your funeral, same as Janet. We’re friends, you know? We’re going to be here sightseeing. But you know, we like to travel the world too. So if there are ever any assignments outside the US, you know you can count on-”

  The swinging door burst open. Two young Arabs came in, laughing about something and bantering in Arabic. The man in the brown suit abruptly finished at the urinal. He stepped quickly to the wash basin.

  Carlos followed. The Arabs took a place at the urinal wall and continued their loud banter, which suited Carlos just fine.

  The man in the brown suit washed his hands carefully with the soap from a dispenser, which looked like a chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong. The man was lathering quickly.

  Carlos pursued and took up a position at the next sink. For a moment, the eyes of the two men smashed into each other in the broken mirror above the washbasin.

  “I’m staying at the Grand Hyatt Cairo, Mr. Cerny,” Carlos said. “I’ll be there for a few days, me and my girlfriend. If you want to talk sometime in secret, we can do that. Pick your place. I mean, I got a cheap rental car at the hotel and I could meet you-”

  The could-be Mr. Cerny looked him straight in the eye. Then the man angrily shook off his hands, grabbed a paper towel, and made quick work of drying himself. He turned toward the door.

  “Okay, okay,” Carlos said, taken aback. “I won’t tell anyone I saw you,” Carlos said. “Okay? I’ll be cool. No matter whether I hear from you or not. It’s okay if you don’t acknowledge.” Then he added with a grin, “Say hi to ‘Victor’ for me.”

  A final glare, then the man was gone in a huff, the door closing sharply behind him and the two Arab men looking at Carlos and grinning.

  Carlos washed his own hands and returned to his table. When he slid back into his chair, there was a new group next to him and Janet looked frightened.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Carlos related the incident. He shook his head and appeared mildly shaken. “You were right,” he said. “Whoever he was, I should have left him alone.” Then Carlos looked around. “Where did he go?” he asked.

  “When he came out of the washroom, he went straight toward the exit,” Janet said. “And the men he was with left while he was in the washroom. They left together.”

  Carlos shook his head. “Strange, huh?”

  “What did you say to him?”

  Carlos repeated everything.

  Janet shook her head. “I don’t like any of this,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. I’m sorry I said anything.” She paused. “Do you think it was really him?” she asked, changing her tone. “You had a good look.”

  “I think it was,” Carlos said. “Yes,” he decided, “it was him.”

  Janet shuddered. “I don’t want any part of this,” she said. “I mean, we were at his funeral. Old superstition of mine: don’t mess with people if you’ve already been to their interment! Let’s scram.”

  THREE

  The next morning, Carlos and Janet hooked up with some other tourists and took the motor coach on the eleven-mile trip south of Cairo to view and the Pyramids of Giza. As soon as they were away from Cairo, the incident at the Royale began to recede, though not completely.

  The highway passed across fields that historically had flooded whenever the Nile rose, but nowadays the area had been built up and the road elevated slightly. At its final stretch past the Mena House Hotel, the road wound gently uphill. Suddenly they were upon the pyramid and tomb of Cheops, the fourth-century pharaoh who ruled Egypt during the Old Kingdom, as well as the tombs of Chephren, Mycernius, and the smaller tombs of their wives. The pyramids stood, as they had for forty-six centuries, at the edge of the desert plateau.

  Yet striking as the antiquities were, a small part of the specter of Michael Cerny haunted both Carlos and Janet. They looked for a way to dispel altogether what they had seen; but in the evening, almost against their better judgment and certainly against common sense, they visited the same ragged quarter of Cairo they had the previous day. They arrived again at the Royale at 9:30 in the evening. They sat at a different table and waited. But there was no sighting of Michael Cerny that evening, incarnate or otherwise. They half expected him to step out of a
shadow, an alley, or a doorway in the raffish old quarter, but he didn’t. They were relieved.

  When they awoke early the next morning, it was as if some foul air had lifted. They began to think less of the man they had or hadn’t seen and more about their trip. They fell easily back into the role of young lovers enjoying a holiday.

  After an American breakfast, they took their deft little rental car to the ancient citadel, Midan Salah al-Din, the tenth-century fortress that had once been a starting point for Egyptian pilgrims to Mecca. A Crusader-era fortress. Carlos drove.

  They were lucky and drew a clear day. They walked up to the esplanade that overlooked Cairo and took in the view of the city and the desert beyond. They enjoyed the journey better than had others who had made a similar trek centuries ago. It had been here that in 1811 the ruler Mohammad Ali had, behind the high walls and with the gate drawn, ordered the massacre of five hundred Mamluks who had been his dinner guests.

  By evening Janet and Carlos felt their time in Cairo running out. They had made friends with some other tourists from America and joined them for drinks at a more upscale location in the early evening and then a Western-style dinner at a Tex-Mex place near the hotel. As they savored contact with other Americans, the bizarre notion of Michael Cerny’s still being alive retreated from the improbable into the impossible. The whole incident in the Royale took on the aura of a strange little anecdote to tell to friends and one day to grandchildren. That, or it would be forgotten completely.

  Their final full day in Cairo arrived; they had it in mind to take their car out onto the highway again and travel down to Memphis, on the Nile, which centuries ago had served as the first capital of a united Egypt.

  Thirty centuries ago, the fortress-city controlled the water routes between northern and southern Egypt. The shrines and mud-brick palaces of the ancient civilization had vanished over the years, but Saqqara, the necropolis of the ancient city, still stood and drew visitors by the thousands every year. Saqqara would be the destination for Janet and Carlos on their final day. They planned to continue to Alexandria the next morning.