Glass House (3 page)

“You can put that down.” Megan’s voice
showed no emotion.

Waldoch looked at her. He smiled and nodded.
He held a finger up to her.

Hang on a second….

“I have to go,” he was saying. He didn’t
wait for a reply from the other end before hanging up.

“Good morning, Megan,” he said. His voice
was rich like his suits. It was precise but warm, educated but open
and friendly, sociable and inviting. It was perfectly affected,
enunciated and tailored to him, fitting him as flawlessly as his
clothes did. Anyone who looked at Jeremy Waldoch and then heard him
would think,
This is exactly what this man should sound
like.

“Such a pleasure to see you again,” he said.
Then, as if convincing her against some looming doubt, he added,
“Really. It is.”

Waldoch shooed the other man away, brushing
his hand toward him like he was cleaning a table laden with crumbs.
The man stepped through the open door, closing it behind him.

“I meant the picture,” Megan said. “You can
put the picture down.”

Waldoch lifted the beach photo. He studied
it, still smiling as he breathed against the glass where his thumb
had rested. He rubbed the forearm of the expensive suit on it to
wipe the fingerprint away.

“Ah,” he said. “This.”

Waldoch returned the picture to its place,
his eyes – brown now, Megan thought absently – fixed on
the image of Megan and her husband. He reached a finger that
threatened to re-smudge the freshly-wiped glass, stopping just
before it touched the image of Ben’s face. The finger tapped
without contact as Waldoch spoke.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I heard, of
course.”

“You heard of
course?
”

“I’ve paid attention while you were
away.”

Megan waved Waldoch from her chair, stepping
past him. He found a seat on the client side of the desk as she set
her briefcase down.

“How’d you get in?”

“I’m a client, remember?”

“You were a client. The case is over. We
won, you paid me, we shook hands. I wrote the self-congratulatory,
nice working with you
letter and the file closure request
myself. Both of them. So you
were
a client.”

“Was a client, then. But is that any way to
talk to a former client?”

“I’m talking that way because you’ve
magically appeared in my office, Jeremy. No notice, no invitation.
You just showed up here, sitting at my desk, using my phone,
holding my pictures.”

“Your secretary was far more
considerate.”

“Linda let you in?”

“Linda likes me,” Waldoch said. “She finds
me charming.”

“Women finding you charming is what gets you
in trouble.”

“In point of fact, women finding I’m
wealthy
is what gets me in trouble.”

Megan didn’t respond to that. She sat,
looking with resignation at the man across the desk from her. “What
is it you think I can do for you?”

“I need your help.”

“My help?” Megan laughed. “You. Need
my
help.” She leaned back in her chair. She was more
comfortable with Waldoch in his new seat, and her expression was
curious and more than a little challenging. “I paid a little
attention while I was away, too,” she said. “Not that much, but
enough. The word is that you’ve become successful enough to hire
bigger hitters than me.”

“True. And I did hire them.”

“But…?”

“But I’m talking to you.”

Megan waited for the explanation. She knew
Jeremy Waldoch well. You didn’t live through litigation like she’d
led him through, working off and on for months, then through long
days and nights for the week of a trial itself, without getting to
know how people acted. How they thought. How they got their points
made.

She knew Waldoch would go on, even without
prompting from her. He was a rhetorical man, the type that always
was setting up interest, letting it germinate into something that
might be eagerness, and then being the one to resolve it with what
he knew.

He loved that. He thrived on it.

Megan waited. He watched her, his last
statement hanging between them. And then he spoke.

“Someone has brought a case against me.”

The
News in Cairo

The city wasn’t built by the pharaohs. It
started as a small Roman outpost at the southern tip of what
ultimately became the Khalij, the canal that connected the Nile to
the sea. Since then the settlement had moved north. Consistently
from its beginning, a town and then city has crept toward the
Mediterranean, with each new phase being added beyond the earlier
ones.

The Roman outpost became a fortress and then
the Christian district of Mari Girgis, as that area remains. But
Roman rule was followed by Arabic invaders in the seventh century,
and they built a successor city, Fustat, farther to the north. In
the millennium of Arabic government that followed, the city
progressed even more in that direction, with each new ruling group
building downstream from its predecessors. And so Fustat gave way
to a series of capitals in an Islamic district centered on the
hilltop Citadel fortress and, later, a medieval-walled town. That,
in turn, gave way to the colonial district and the modern
Downtown.

They had called one of the original Islamic
areas “the Victorious” –
al-Qahira
 – and it has
given its name to the greater city on the Nile:
Cairo
.
Today, the districts of the largest city in Africa fall in a
somewhat crooked line, like a toppled building. They’ve maintained
their distinctions – from the old city of Mari Girgis to the
modern areas, the districts are an historical chain, a highly
visible, horizontal stratification of years and cultures along the
east bank of the Nile.

The most dominant by far remains the Islamic
district, the medieval area around the city’s old fortifications.
It is the heart of the Arabic community in Egypt, the home of its
culture and traditions and gathering places.

The man could see a portion of the Citadel
and the Old City Wall from the window in the café where he sat. He
was drinking dark, thick-tasting tea, his fingertips holding the
edges of a delicate, white china cup.

Despite the man’s casual demeanor, his eyes
were constantly checking the street outside. He set the cup down
and picked at the
pastilla
before him. It was a pigeon
pastry, spiced and dusted in sugar and cinnamon, and it was not,
truth be told, an especially good one. He gingerly pulled at the
crust, putting a small bit in his mouth and letting it melt. Wiping
his fingertips on a fold of the white robe he wore, the man pursed
his lips as the sweetness came together with the bitterness of the
tea.

Outside, Cairo displayed its usual bustle.
People hurried, their faces set. Cars slowly worked through and
around them, honking uselessly as children scampered past their
bumpers.

A small shopping area was only a block away.
The noise of it and the scents of perfume and incense being sold
drifted down the street and into the café. The man knew that area
well. People would be haggling there, arguing the prices of gold or
silver jewelry, spices, cloths. The tones of bells sounded nearby,
and birds cooed from a place even closer, both of those things
adding pleasant notes to the cacophony of the city.

His frequent and quick glances also examined
the inside of the café. The floor was brick and clay tile, the
tiles over the bricks. Most of them – tiles and bricks
both – were broken. Cigarette butts littered the floor. Many
were Egyptian, some Russian. Mainly, they were Turkish.

The café’s walls were plaster on concrete.
Or they once were, at any rate. For most of the lengths of the
walls, the plaster was broken away up to the height where sitting
people could reach.

It was as if a never-ending succession of
people had sat at these tables over the years. They’d leaned
against the walls, brushed against them, rested against them, until
the plaster surface crumbled away to show the concrete beneath.

A silent, contemplative man sat in the
café’s far corner, his robed left shoulder toward the window. His
head was wrapped in a cloth, its drapes falling down his back. He
was drawing on a
sheesha
, a water pipe the locals also
called a hubbly-bubbly. The pipe was tight in his mouth, and he was
focused on it completely. The smoker’s feet, socks in sandals, were
tucked neatly under his chair. His eyes were closed.

The man at the window could smell the
tobacco’s apple scent. It blended with the odors from the shopping
area up the street, and for a moment that brought a hint of
nostalgia.

He pushed the pastry and its plate away.
Old smells in old places
, he thought.

He sipped his tea and watched a man and a
woman together. They were dressed in Western clothes, polo shirts
over jeans, he in deck shoes, she in Nikes. A knapsack was slung on
one of the chairs beside them.

They were chatting in quiet tones, a map
spread on their table, next to two glasses of white Gianiclis wine.
The woman was pointing out the café window, where the view looked
toward the Citadel, and her companion responded with a point in a
different direction.

The man at the window couldn’t hear them,
but they were American by their looks and mannerisms. In any place
but here, he would have frowned at the sight of people so woefully
out of place and so deliberately drawing attention to themselves.
Here, though, he only sat and observed.

He was still watching them when a new face
entered the café. A man came past the Americans and took an empty
chair at the table. He studied the
pastilla
as though he
might try it himself, then took his turn pushing it away.

“He missed the check-in,” the new man
muttered.

It was said in passing, like a comment on
the weather. He followed it with a lazy look around the room.

The café in sight of the Citadel was a
regular meeting spot. The two men were themselves Americans, both
of them dark-skinned and dark-haired enough to blend in with the
Cairo crowds. They wore beards cut to a ragged, two-month length.
Along with three or four other languages, they knew Arabic
fluently.

Jackson Hanley, who’d had time to come early
to eat, wore the white robes that were still common in the city.
His skin was rough and tanned, betraying his parentage as much as
the sun exposure from Hanley’s youth in Texas. His head was wrapped
in a soft red cloth, its tails draping off his shoulders, much like
those of the man smoking in the other corner.

Allen Saifee, the second man, was Egyptian
by ancestry and a Chicagoan by birth. He wore American knock-offs
that looked dated to 1978 or so. He had gray wool slacks that were
tattered at the cuffs. Socks, colored dark blue, and sandals. A
cotton shirt, cream-colored and worn at the elbows.

“Which check?” Hanley asked.

“Forty-eight hour night.”

“When did he miss?”

“His last check was Thursday.”

Hanley sat back. “I’m just hearing about
this?”

“I haven’t known long myself.”

“It’s your neighborhood, your watch, and you
haven’t known long? It’s been four days.”

Saifee smiled broadly, pretending to enjoy
the comment of the other man at the table. He shrugged and
gestured, his hands open to the sides.

“Two days for the contact to be made at
all,” he said. “Forty-eight hours. Another day to run the usual
checks. A day to get here and report, which is what protocol
requires.” Saifee reached across the table and patted Hanley’s
hand, still acting with a light laugh about a joke that wasn’t
made.

“This isn’t Paris, my friend,” he went on.
“It’s Africa, and you’re at the wrong end of the continent to learn
something like this quickly. When it comes out, news isn’t exactly
hot off the press, no matter the topic or its urgency.”

Saifee was right and Hanley knew it. “What
type of check?” he asked.

“Apartment. We expected the two-day on the
Morse. It didn’t come through.”

“Did we ever get a bus drop in place?”

“Too dangerous.”

“Said who?”

“Said the District.”

“The District? They think maybe it’s as
dangerous as a missed contact?” Hanley sipped the tea and watched
the hubbly-bubbly man. He’d gained a slight stoop, a lean to the
right that suggested he’d drifted off, and Hanley was waiting to
see if he might fall from his chair to the floor. “What was our
last news?”

“We have a report that he managed the
placement at the truck on that Thursday. We also think he made it
through initial screening the same day.”

“What happened to that drop?”

“The truck never showed.”

“Naturally. And that was supposed to be a
stone?”

“Yes.”

“Was a return due?”

“Due but never made.”

“Makes sense, I guess. If the truck never
showed in the first place, the return of a stone couldn’t have been
made.” Hanley finished the tea. He set the cup down. “That’s not
like him, though.”

“Not like him how?”

“Not like him to go missing. I’ve known
Anthony five years. Even if there’s a need for silence, he surfaces
for a contact.”

“Not this time,” Saifee replied. “Not so
far.”

Hanley considered that.
“Recommendations?”

“We’ll check his dormitory apartment.”

“Has anyone else been in?”

“Not that we know. Not that we can
say.
”

“And the value…?”

“Unknown. Any equipment he may have had will
be incidental. Anyone else in there wouldn’t be able to make heads
or tails of it. But I’d do it anyway.”

“Then go with that, and make it as soon as
possible. What else?”

“What else?” Saifee asked. He smiled again,
this one genuine but more bitter. “I’d like to find Anthony
Dikembé. How’s that for
what else
?”