Authors: Paul Sussman
Having made himself a cup of warm milk Cy Angleton went through into the living area and settled himself down in the armchair, his paunch slumping out over the waistband of his pyjama bottoms, his hips pushing hard against the armrests
of the chair (who the hell designed this furniture? Midgets?). Most Embassy staff lived off site, in Garden City or across the river in Gezira and Zamalek, but he’d managed to bag one of the apartments on the top floor of Cairo 2. It was a tiny space, just a bedroom, living area, bathroom and kitchenette, with barely enough room to walk more than a few paces in any direction without slapping into a wall. But it was more secure than being outside the compound, less chance of people nosing around. And besides, it meant he could have all his meals sent up from the Marine Corps kitchen down in the basement, proper food, American food, including a steady supply of chef Barney’s Mississippi mud pie. Damn, that pie was good. Almost made all the other shit worth it. Almost.
He took a long, slow gulp of the milk and, reaching for the remote control, activated the CD player. Adjusting the volume, he flicked through the tracks until he came to the one he wanted: Patsy Cline, ‘Too Many Secrets’. A momentary silence, and then the familiar jaunty honk of clarinets as the song got started. He sighed with pleasure, leaning his head back and closing his eyes, drumming his fingers on the armrests.
He loved Country music; had always loved it, ever since he was a kid listening to crackly 78s on his ma’s old Crosley radio-record player. Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Lefty Frizzell, Merle Travis: without these he would never have survived those early years – the bullying, the endless hospital visits, his pa’s drunken rages. (‘Look at you, for Christ’s sake! I ask God for a son and what does he give me? A big fat pansy fucking hog!’) Country had provided an escape, a refuge, a place where he didn’t feel quite so alone.
Still did. If anything he needed it more today than he had back then, what with all the lies and suspicion and stinking corrupt filth he was forever having to wade through. ‘Country ain’t just music,’ his ma used to tell him. ‘It’s what gets you through.’ And she’d been right. The framed citation on the wall opposite proved it: ‘The United States Department of State Award for Heroism is presented to Cyrus Jeremiah Angleton. For heroic service under circumstances of extreme danger.’ It was Country that had got him that. He sure wished his ma was still around, so she could see how right she’d been.
He allowed the track to play through the first verse and chorus, then dropped the volume a few notches, finished his milk and leant forward, staring down at the floor. A large map of Egypt was spread out in front of him, the paper covered with a confusion of pencil scribbles: names, dates, phone numbers, sums of money, sequences of digits that might or might not have been bank accounts. There were photographs as well, lots of them, scattered across the country, all passport sized save for three larger images arranged side by side in the bottom left-hand corner of the map, above the words ‘Gilf Kebir Plateau’: Flin Brodie, Alex Hannen, Molly Kiernan. Reaching down, struggling to bend his body, he picked them up and sat back again, shuffling them in his hand like a pack of cards. He stared at each in turn: Brodie, Hannen, Kiernan, then back to Brodie again. Things were starting to open up, connections to appear, he could feel it, he could definitely feel it. There was still a way to go, but hopefully it wouldn’t be too long before he could get the hell out of here. No more Sandfire, no more heat, no more creeping around – job done, money
earned, employers satisfied. No more of chef Barney’s Mississippi mud pie either, but he could live without that. Could live without anything except his beloved Country music. Throwing the pictures down he reached for the remote control and pressed replay, the room falling silent before once again filling with the song’s jaunty instrumental opening, ‘Too Many Secrets’. He chuckled. Story of his goddam life.
The eastern sky was turning a cool shade of pink and the dawn birds were screeching in the trees as Fatima Gharoub stomped through the oasis, her capacious black robes flapping around her, her bulky frame moving with surprising speed. Every now and then she would stop and spit in the dust, muttering angrily, before moving on again, following the track as it switched back and forth through the palm and olive groves until eventually it brought her out in front of the American woman’s house.
‘Slut!’ she bellowed, striding up to the front door. ‘Where is he? What have you done with my Mahmoud?’
She raised a fist ready to hammer before noticing the door was already ajar. Kicking it open she barged through into the living area.
‘Come on, I know you’re in here! The donkey and his whore! Forty years of marriage and this is how he repays me!’
She stood listening, her face a rictus of indignant fury. Snatching up a plastic dustpan from the windowsill, she
started towards the main bedroom, the pan held above her head like a weapon.
‘Don’t make me come and find you, Mahmoud Gharoub!’ she yelled. ‘Do you hear? Because believe me, if I have to come and find you, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life!’
She was halfway across the living area when she sensed movement. A figure appeared in the bedroom doorway. She came to a halt, mouth dropping open in surprise.
‘Zahir al-Sabri? My God, how many of you has she got in here?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ snapped Zahir, scowling, clearly not pleased to have been found thus.
‘Oh yes you do!’ Fatima Gharoub cried. ‘I know what goes on out here! Always snuffling around, he is. Bewitched! They’ve bewitched him, the dirty little whores! Mahmoud! Mahmoud! Oh my beautiful Mahmoud!’
She started wailing, tugging at her robe, banging the dustpan against her head. As suddenly as they had come, her hysterics ceased and her eyes narrowed.
‘What are you doing here?’
Zahir shifted uneasily.
‘I came to see Miss Freya.’
‘At six in the morning?’
‘I brought her breakfast.’ He nodded towards a basket sitting on the living room table. ‘The door was open. I came in to make sure she was OK.’
‘You were snooping,’ said the old woman, wagging an accusing finger. ‘Poking around.’
‘I came in to make sure Miss Freya was OK,’ he repeated. ‘She wasn’t here. Her bed hasn’t been slept in.’
‘Snooping and poking,’ she pushed, sensing a juicy bit of gossip. ‘Looking at things you’re not supposed to look at. Just you wait till I tell … What do you mean her bed hasn’t been slept in?’
Zahir opened his mouth to answer, but before he could say anything the aggrieved wife had starting yelling again, tearing at her dress, slapping her palms against her forehead.
‘Oh God, I knew it! They’ve gone away together. She’s stolen my Mahmoud! Mahmoud, Mahmoud! My little Mahmoud!’
Throwing the dustpan across the room she swung round and, presumably intending to give chase to the eloping couple, rushed from the house, leaving Zahir standing where he was, shaking his head and looking distinctly uncomfortable.
Those who worked for Romani Girgis could sense when violence was imminent. They knew at such times either to keep out of his way or, if they couldn’t keep out of his way, to keep their heads well down, get on with what they were doing and not attract attention to themselves.
It had been brewing all morning. A little after dawn Girgis had taken a phone call out on the terrace at the back of the house and according to the old gardener who was at the time watering geranium pots nearby, he hadn’t been happy. Not happy at all, shouting at the person at the other
end of the line, hammering his fist so hard on the wooden table that his cup of coffee had tumbled off and smashed on the ground, leaving an unsightly stain on the gleaming white marble. The gardener hadn’t heard exactly what was being said, he later explained to one of the household cooks, hadn’t dared look up or get too close, but he definitely heard Girgis use the words ‘oasis’ and ‘helicopter’. And something about a black tower and an arch too, although by that point he had started to move away out of Girgis’s line of sight, and might have misheard.
That had been the start. From there Girgis’s mood had steadily worsened as the morning progressed. Around 8 a.m. his three lieutenants – Boutros Salah, Ahmed Usman and Mohammed Kasri – had arrived and disappeared into his study. A maid reported that she heard the sound of smashing glass and a yell of ‘You said the map would be enough!’ An hour later, at 9 a.m., a handyman mending a socket at the foot of the grand staircase had almost been knocked over as Girgis swept past him, mobile in hand as he bellowed, ‘I don’t care about the fucking fuel! Keep looking! You hear me! Just keep looking!’
Angrier and angrier he had become, the atmosphere ever more tense until just after noon there had been a thunder of rotor blades and Girgis’s helicopter had landed on the garden helipad, the twins emerging and crossing to where Girgis was waiting for them on the lawn. Most of the staff were by now aware that something was amiss and were gazing surreptitiously out of the mansion’s windows, although only the old gardener was near enough to hear what their employer said to the twins.
‘Find her,’ he cried. ‘Find the girl, find the camera film,
cut her eyes out and dump her in the desert. You hear me? Find the bitch!’
‘He’s going to hurt someone,’ the old gardener whispered to his assistant, keeping his face down over the flowerbed they were weeding. ‘Mark my words, he’s going to hurt someone.’
It was the thought on everyone’s mind as Girgis stormed back into the house. His staff, like fish scattering before a predator, all withdrew to a safe distance as he marched across the hallway and up the staircase to his study on the top floor.
All except for Adara al-Hawwari. She had only worked in the mansion for three days, and knew nothing of its owner or his temper, was just grateful to have found a job. For a sixty-year-old widow employment was hard to come by and the chance to work in such beautiful surroundings, even if it was for only fifty piastres an hour, had seemed like a boon from Allah himself. For three days she had been waiting for an opportunity to thank her new employer, to tell him how very grateful she was for his kindness. And now here he was coming up the stairs towards her as she polished the teak balustrade around the first-floor landing. She was a shy woman, and it did not come naturally to her to address such a great and important man. She thought it her duty, however, and as he reached the top of the stairs she stepped forward, touched a hand to her chest and, in a faltering voice, humbly thanked him for his kindness to an old widow. Girgis ignored her, walking straight past and down the corridor towards his study. He was halfway there when, suddenly, he turned. Striding back, he came up to her and slapped her hard across the face.
‘Don’t speak to me,’ he spat. ‘Do you understand? Don’t ever speak to me.’
Adara al-Hawwari stood staring at him, a heavy red mark staining her cheek. Her silence seemed to infuriate him even more and he slapped her again: harder. The force of the blow caused her nose to crack and threw her back against the balustrade, blood dripping from her nostril onto the carpet.
‘How dare you speak to me!’ Girgis cried, his voice rising, his anger and frustration now homing in exclusively on the cowering figure in front of him. ‘How dare you! How dare you!’
He hit her once more, across the side of the head. Snatching a pack of wet wipes from his jacket pocket, he ripped one out and rubbed it vigorously over his hands.
‘And make sure you clean up your mess,’ he panted, indicating the bloodstains on the floor. ‘You understand? I want your filth cleaned up! I want it pristine! Pristine!’
He threw the wipe at her, wheeled round and disappeared down the corridor, leaving Adara al-Hawwari trembling in mortified silence and wondering whether working for Mr Romani Girgis was really such a boon after all.
Humming ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ to herself, her favourite of all hymns, Molly Kiernan made her way through the winding streets of the
Masr al-Qadima –
Old Cairo – and down a set of worn steps into the Church of St Sergius and St Bacchius.
Normally she worshipped at a small community chapel in the Maadi district of the city, where the USAID offices at which she worked were based and where she lived in a small two-bedroom bungalow shaded by flame and jasmine trees. Today, however – 7 May – was Charlie’s birthday, and on this particular day she liked to go somewhere different, somewhere special. And so she came here, to the oldest church in Cairo, an ancient, crumbling basilica built, according to legend, on the site where the Holy Family themselves once stopped to rest on their journey into Egypt.
She always followed exactly the same routine on Charlie’s birthday, had done for the last quarter of a century. She would make him a special birthday breakfast – bacon, eggs, grits, waffles and blueberry jam, Charlie’s favourite – open the presents she had bought and wrapped for him, and spend a while with her photo albums, leafing through the story of their life together, smiling as she recalled all the good times they had enjoyed, what a handsome, special man her Charlie had been.
‘Oh my darling,’ she would sigh, ‘Oh my darling, precious husband.’
Later she would make up a picnic and go to the zoo – that’s where he’d taken her on their first date, to the zoo at Washington – and then to church. There she would spend the rest of the afternoon giving thanks for Charlie’s life, trying to reassure herself that there was a reason why God had taken him in that terrible way, that it was all part of some wider scheme, although even after all these years she still struggled to fathom what that scheme was exactly. Such a kind, gentle man blown apart by
those murdering savages. Oh my darling. Oh my darling, precious husband.
Walking into the basilica now, Kiernan paused for a moment to gaze at the large icon of the Virgin Mary just inside the doorway, before moving forward and sitting down in one of the wooden pews. A pair of sparrows fluttered around the vaulted wooden ceiling above her.