“Where do you find these guys?” I was feeling kind of sore about the way the evening had gone so far.
“Wlazyslaw can be quite charming sometimes,” she said. “But I’ll admit, tonight was not one of those occasions.”
“Just sitting next to him made me want to look for some life insurance.”
“He was jealous of you, that’s all.”
“‘He was jealous, that’s all’? Elena, a guy like that gets jealous, you’re liable to end up with a pillow over your face. And me taking an early-morning plunge in the Nile.”
She sipped her tea from a glass, snuggled up next to me on the sofa, and crossed her legs, carelessly.
“Did you ever do this with him?”
“Now who’s jealous?”
“That means yes. In which case no wonder he’s pissed. If you were my girl, I’d be pissed myself.”
“I’m nobody’s ‘girl,’ Willy. He knows that. Anyway, whatever happened between me and Wlazyslaw happened right here on this sofa. He’s never seen the wallpaper in my bedroom. Nobody has. Not since Freddy died.”
“That’s a long time to spend on the sofa. Even in Egypt.”
“Isn’t it? A long time.” She sighed, and for a moment we were both silent. “Why did you leave Berlin?”
“I’m half-Jewish, remember?”
“Yes, but the Nazis didn’t know that.”
“Maybe so, but I did. It took a while for my Jewish half to wrestle my Catholic half to the floor. Longer than it should have, perhaps.”
“So it wasn’t me.”
I shrugged. “But for you, I’d probably have left a lot earlier. It’s all your fault.”
“It sounds like you’re going to punish me.”
“Right now I’m having a lot of fun thinking about it.”
For a moment Elena’s eyes grew more distant, as if she were trying to visualize something important. “What’s she like? The girl in Washington.”
“Did I mention a girl anywhere?”
“Not specifically. But I can tell that there is one. I always could with you.”
“All right. There is and there isn’t. Not anymore.”
“Sounds like Wlazyslaw.”
“We got further than the sofa.”
“What happened?”
“She wanted me to care when I was pretending not to.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Not really.”
“Tell me about it. And don’t think you have to make a joke about it. I can see it still hurts.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only when I look in your eyes.”
So I told her about Diana. Everything there was. Including my betrayal of her. It took a while, but when I had finished I felt better. I had lifted something from my shoulders. Like a couple of hundred tons of self-pity. It helped that she kissed me, of course. For quite a long time. The way old friends do sometimes. But for now, we kept it to the sofa.
“Do you want to stay?” she asked at about two A.M. “There are plenty of spare rooms.”
“Thanks, but I have to get back to my hotel. In case there are any messages from my boss.”
“Would you like Ahmed to take you in the car?”
“No, thanks, I’ll walk. It will feel nice to put one foot in front of the other without breaking into a sweat.”
“Tomorrow evening,” she said. “Let’s do something.”
“Something sounds good,” I said.
“Come around seven.”
I WALKED NORTH, with the Nile and the British embassy on my left. In front of the embassy, British soldiers stood in sentry boxes looking slightly embarrassed at the size and grandeur of the building, a great white wedding cake of a place set in lush green gardens that looked as big as, and a lot nicer than, Buckingham Palace. For a while it seemed that a dark green sedan was following me. But after I had crossed the road, close to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, and walked east along Aldo Street toward Opera Square, I looked back and saw that it had gone.
Not that I felt at all nervous. Cairo was still wide awake. Despite the late hour, shops remained open, clinging on to life like moss-covered shellfish in some ancient aquarium, their shabby owners surveying me with a mixture of amusement and toothless fascination. Old men in turbans dozed on street corners. Families sat in gutters and talked and pointed at me. And from an open window in a building, what sounded like a party was under way: rhythmic hand-clapping and women ululating like a war party of Cherokee Indians. Dogs barked, trams whined, car horns blared. That night, Cairo seemed like the most magical city on earth.
I walked past Groppi’s, the Turf Club, and Sha’ar Hashmayim-Heaven’s Gate, the largest synagogue in Cairo and instantly recognizable from the Hebrew inscriptions on the wall. The black sky above my head was swept by the cones of searchlights, hunting for German bombers that would never come. In Opera Square, near Shepheard’s, neon lights advertised the existence of Madame Badia’s Opera Casino. I looked at the place, remembered Coogan, and smiled. I thought I saw a man in a tropical suit step smartly sideways into a shop doorway.
Curious to see if I was being followed, I retraced my steps a few yards, but was forced to make a retreat when I encountered a whole posse of fly-whisk sellers, shoe-shine boys, flower sellers, and unshaven men selling razor blades (mostly used), at the edge of the open-air movie theater in Ezbekiah Gardens. There was a movie showing. Or rather, it was just ending, and I found myself walking against a human current made up of hundreds of people on their way out of the gardens.
I had removed my jacket to walk home. And now I dropped it on the grass. As I bent down to retrieve it I felt and heard a smallish object zip over my head. It sounded like a thick rubber band flying through the air and then striking something. I straightened up again and found myself face-to-face with an Egyptian wearing a tarboosh and a surprised expression on his face. His mouth was wide open as if he had been trying to catch the largish red fly that was crawling on his forehead. Almost immediately he dropped onto his knees in front of me, and then collapsed onto the ground. I glanced down and the red fly seemed to settle on the man’s head; then I saw that it was not a fly at all, but a very distinct hole from which six small leglike threads of blood were now running. The man had been shot between the eyes.
I knew that the shot had been meant for me. I put my hand in the specially tailored pocket of my tux and on the grip of the little. 32-caliber hammerless Colt they had given us at Catoctin Mountain for evening wear. I was ready to put a hole through the lining if I saw what I was looking for. A man with a silencer on the end of a small-caliber pocket pistol like my own. At the same time, I walked quickly away from the body, which no one had yet noticed belonged to a dead man. Cairo wasn’t the kind of place where it was uncommon for people to lie on the ground. Even dead ones.
I walked back toward Shepheard’s Hotel, my tux jacket wrapped around my hand like a large black bandage, my finger on the trigger of the little Colt. Ahead of me I saw a man walking almost as quickly. He was wearing a beige tropical suit, a straw hat, and two-tone wingtips. I couldn’t see his face, but as he went by a shop window, I saw that he had a newspaper in his hand. Or rather he had a newspaper folded over his hand, and pressed close to his chest, like a bath towel. He didn’t run. But he was on his toes, and I knew that this was my man.
I wanted to shout after him but guessed that this would only have made him run or draw his fire. I had no idea what he was going to do. I didn’t expect him to run smartly up the red-carpeted steps of my own hotel, neatly sidestepping the man who had been there all day working a dirty postcard pitch. The street hawker had his reputation to consider. He wasn’t about to be sidestepped so easily again. Not when he had a living to make. As soon as I neared the edge of the red carpet, he saw me and calculated my likely route. Wheeling around, he held up his obscene wares in front of my face and brought me to a standstill, using his malodorous body to block me first one way and then the other. The third time he did it, I swore and pushed him roughly out of my way, which earned me a mild rebuke from a British officer sitting behind the safety of the brass rail on the terrace.