“True enough,” he said. “But tell me things anyway.”
“Such as?”
“Tell me something I might not know,” he said, “something that might have escaped your official file or record. And don’t bore me with any of that Canadian nonsense, I know exactly who you are.”
She thought for a moment. She sipped the chilled tea that accompanied the meal.
“All right, here’s something,” she said. “I got into this line of work almost by chance. I never had any desire to do it. I was at a desk in Washington working on internet financial frauds. Next thing I know, they put me out in the field on a mission to Nigeria. That was a group effort. But thereafter, I got hooked into a trip to Ukraine. They needed someone who spoke Russian, so they tapped me.”
“You never thought there might have been an ulterior reason?” he asked.
“For what?” she asked, slightly surprised.
“For sending you. Specifically you, to Ukraine.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“It never occurred to you?” “Not until now.”
“Always consider something like that,” he said. “That’s a word of good advice for the evening, free of charge.”
She pondered the point.
“I’m enjoying this dialogue. Keep talking,” he said.
“About?”
“How you never sought your current métier. But like greatness in anything, rather than seeking it or attaining it, you had it thrust upon you.”
Plates of food arrived. Suddenly, Alex was very hungry. She dug in, and they retreated to small talk for several minutes.
“Here’s something else, since you asked,” she said at length. “I tend to take code names very seriously,” she said. “The more one examines them, the more they reveal something about the person who has taken them.”
“Do tell,” said Voltaire.
“The desk-bound intellectual who yearns for action takes the name of ‘Fireman.’ The outlaw takes the name of ‘Sheriff.’ The atheist takes the name of ‘Priest.’ Somehow your code name expresses something about you. A reference to French parentage perhaps instead of the Nazi cover story that you tried to sell me. A coy allusion to the Enlightenment in Europe. You’re obviously well educated, I suspect perhaps even in the French language, as you speak it with no accent that I can pick up and with excellent diction and grammar. Or you have a yearning again to be what you’re not, vis-à-vis, French. I may never know, but somewhere the name is a key.”
“Very, very clever,” he said. “Maybe as a reward, I should tell you part of it.”
“Maybe you should. If you chose to, I’d listen.”
“Consider it an expression of opposites. It’s an expression of personal philosophy as opposed to anything of action, strategy, or import. You’re a rather educated little imp, yourself,” he said. “My guess is that you’ve studied French extensively and probably read it on a university level. So if you read French literature of any sort, you probably read Candide.”
“I did. And I once saw a production of the musical in New York.”
“And what was the key phrase of Dr. Pangloss? Of what was the real Voltaire mocking so bitterly?”
“The concept that this is the best of all possible worlds,” she answered.
“Exactly,” he said. “And that is exactly the opposite of what I’m making fun of, what I’m alluding to. This world that we live in is, in my benighted opinion, often the worst of all possible worlds.”
“Hence your code name fits you completely and gives away a large part of you,” she said. “Because that was absolutely the feeling of the real Voltaire.”
He laughed. “You’re the first person I’ve ever met who cut right through to the core of that,” he said.
“I might be the first person who cared enough to,” she said.
“That too,” he admitted. “Impressive. It’s rare enough to find an American who has read Candide.”
“I’m Canadian,” she said.
“Good catch.”
“Nice try.”
A waiter came by and cleared their table. They ordered a final mint tea.
The conversation drifted back to Voltaire’s long residence in, and expertise about, the city of Cairo. From there he rambled into local politics as he smoked again. Alex found it wise to listen.
“The people of Cairo don’t believe their rulers, but they give credibility to every halfwit political rumor that goes around, no matter how stupid and ill-founded. Did you know that Coptic Christians were waging a secret war by going around spray painting crosses onto the clothing of Muslims? Did you know Israel had hired and sent to Egypt one thousand AIDS-infected prostitutes to infect young Muslim men? Did you know that radical Muslim extremists were planning to dump poison into the vats at the Stella brewery? You keep your ear to the ground in this city and you’ll hear just about anything,” Voltaire said. “Unless you trust your source beyond any question, you believe nothing that you hear and maybe ten percent of what you see.” He paused. “Want to experience an example of it for yourself?” he asked Alex. “Right now?”
“Where? How?” she asked.
“There’s a little group in a café near here that I join every now and then. People talk. Often in English. I drop by and listen and do some give and take. It helps to keep an ear to the ground.”
He glanced at his watch. Alex glanced at hers at the same time. It was 10:45.
“And they don’t know who they’re talking to?” Alex asked.
“They don’t know and they don’t care,” Voltaire said. “My cover is this: I’m a Monsieur Maurice Lamara, an importer of air-conditioning units from France and Italy. I run a midsized company here. I have a dozen employees and I treat them well. I never go near the embassy, and I collect a nice payment every month from the Americans who put an electronic transfer into a bank in Europe for me every month. Cairenes voice a lot of noisy opinions, but they know better than to ask many questions because they might get a visit from the police. You’ll see what I mean.”
“Who will you say I am?”
“My femme du jour,” he said with a trace of lechery in his eyes. “They’re used to seeing me with beautiful Western women, one after another. I bring women by, just to show them off. They rather admire me for it in their swinish Arab way. If you’re game, I’ll take you there.”
“I’m your squeeze of the night, huh?”
“So to speak.”
“I didn’t travel four thousand miles to go home early,” she said.
“That’s the spirit.”
“Am I dressed okay? For wherever we’re going.”
“You’re fine. Keep the headscarf. We’ll have some high-artillery backup, anyway. I don’t go anywhere without it.”
“I noticed. You have at least six.”
“There are more than that, but I’m not giving away numbers.”