No, it didn't surprise him to imagine her here either. Her life had also been unusual in so many ways, yet in other ways it wasn't at all. For surely she'd never wanted anything more than to be herself, to care and to live life fully.
Modest, like these people. Doing the best she could to make some sense out of the terrible mistakes of the past. So often a stranger again in the endless slippage of lives, the conflicting journeys of hope and need where people met and parted. Trying to face the wounding demons of the past, not escape them, because the past never went away. But trying to know herself well enough so those demons could no longer torment her. Struggling to stand alone and yet also to love—in the end, the explanation for all her wanderings. From the coal fields of a little town in Pennsylvania to the mountains of Albania, and Athens and Jerusalem and Smyrna, and Istanbul and Crete, and now here. A lifetime of searching, trying to find her place.
Joe gazed down the narrow little street. He looked up at the fading light and somehow everything seemed right. After all these years this was the kind of place where Maud and Stern would meet for a quiet evening together, here in this ordinary little neighborhood with its modest concerns, its small failures and triumphs. After all these years of struggle and pain and love, of losing and trying again, this was exactly where two people would come to celebrate life in the midst of a terrible war. To talk and sit silently, to smile and laugh and share for a moment those dreams that could never be wholly lost or forgotten, coming together in this simple place as the world raged and died just a little bit more beyond the corner .
. . beyond the solitary beggar who sat at the end of the street in the dust, alone in the twilight, unmoving.
A beggar of no particular era, homeless and stateless and of no use to anyone, a beggar of life from nowhere who would one day return whence he had come. And yet also, strangely, the man for whom the war was being fought, the prize for all the great armies, the solitary man who would survive their terrible victories and their legions of victims.
Anonymous in his rags in the dust at twilight, a beggar surveying his limitless kingdom. . . .
***
Joe hovered off to the side, out of the way, waiting for her to come as Liffy had said she would. And then all at once she was there down the street, a small woman moving quickly in the way he remembered so well. That hadn't changed at all.
She stopped to greet a shopkeeper, her face lighting up, and that hadn't changed either. There was the same eagerness in her smile, the same concern as she tipped her head and made the shopkeeper laugh, some little thing said in passing.
Joe smiled too, he couldn't help it. When he had known her before, she had made an effort to take clothes seriously, even though somehow it had never seemed to work. But now apparently she had just given up on it. Yet she was beautiful, Joe couldn't believe how beautiful she had become with the years.
Such a strong face and her eyes so expressive, so direct and smiling.
She was going into the restaurant and Joe turned away, excited and confused, frightened. Twenty years, it had been, and where had the time gone since they'd been together? She seemed a stranger now and yet she could never be that, they knew each other too well. They had a son who had been born in Jericho. They had met in Jerusalem and gone to the Sinai, to an oasis on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba.
Two decades ago and less than a year together . . . but still.
He wanted to walk up behind her and whisper her name, and see her smile and look into his eyes.
Instead he turned away, he had to. How could he explain what he was doing here? What could he say about Stern? No, he didn't know enough about Stern yet. He didn't know enough about any of it yet.
Joe moved quickly up the street, excited and afraid, confused. She seemed a stranger but she couldn't be that. He knew her, of course he did, and she knew him.
The beggar on the corner held out his hand as Joe rushed by, a long slender hand, calloused and hard and beautiful, as mysterious as an ancient map of some lost desert. Joe glanced at the beggar's shadowy face and gave him a coin and kept moving, his thoughts tumbling, racing. He had gone several blocks before he suddenly stopped in the midst of the swirling crowds, stopped dead still, alone and hearing nothing in the warm night air.
It was impossible. The beggar at the end of that quiet street had been Stern.
***
Joe had no idea how long he stood there in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, oblivious to everything around him. He turned.
No, there was no point in trying to go back, Stern would be gone by now. But what was he doing there?
Why was he watching over Maud? And why was he back in Cairo when Bletchley had said he would be away for two weeks?
Bletchley?
No. Joe was sure he couldn't have been lying about Stern having gone away. Nothing would make any sense if he had been. So Stern must have returned to Cairo without Bletchley's knowledge, against Bletchley's orders, and in fact Joe was beginning to think Stern could go almost anywhere without anyone knowing it. He was like Liffy with his disguises, only more so. With Liffy the disguises were always part of a role, but with Stern they were simply another part of him, another face on the turnings of his path.
And now Stern knew Joe was in Cairo, which meant he had to know why someone like Joe had been brought in, and that made everything backward because Joe himself didn't know why he was here, not really. How could he when he didn't know what Stern was doing, let alone why he was doing it? . . .
Unless Ahmad had been hinting at something real when he spoke of Stern bartering away his soul to the Nazis. Unless there had been more in that than one of Ahmad's dramatic turns of speech. . . .
Joe drifted along through the crowds, feeling more lost by the moment. Everything was moving too quickly and he had to break out of these networks of the past which seemed to obscure Stern ever more deeply in the feelings of others. . . .
Talk to Bletchley then? Put it to Bletchley outright?
No, that was too dangerous. He didn't want to be the one who told Bletchley that Stern was back in Cairo. Not the way things were, the reasons for Stern's return unknown.
Talk to Liffy?
Yes, and for other reasons as well. Since becoming so deeply involved with Ahmad, Joe had begun to have an uneasy feeling that Liffy might not be telling him everything he knew about Stern, that he might be holding something back because he cared so much for Stern, an effect Stern often had on people.
Instinctively they wanted to protect him, to safeguard that fragile essence Stern carried within him, perhaps for everyone. Joe himself had always felt that way and there was no reason why Liffy shouldn't, but the sooner he talked to Liffy the better.
Joe stopped at a public telephone, keeping his eye on the young Egyptian across the way who was following him on Bletchley's orders. It didn't bother him that Bletchley would know he had gone to the restaurant where Stern and Maud often met, or that he had waited there to catch a glimpse of Maud.
Bletchley would have been expecting him to do something like that by now. Nor was he concerned about his behavior since then, for it could only tell Bletchley that seeing Maud had confused him.
He dialed Liffy's number and let the phone ring once before breaking the connection. He made a show of continuing to dial numbers, reaching Liffy's phone again and letting it ring twice before hanging up. So there was nothing to do now but wait and see if Liffy turned up in an hour where he was supposed to.
Nothing but one minor matter. Joe spent some time eluding the young Egyptian, and when he was sure he was no longer being followed he headed in the direction of the bar where he hoped Liffy would be waiting. It was down by the river and he hadn't been there before, but it was supposed to be a safe place where Europeans seldom went.
Strictly a refuge for the lowest of lowlifes, Liffy had said.
One of those downstairs dives, Joe, where the dregs of riverfront society and other serious alcoholics fade away in the shadows a little bit more every night. But also the kind of cave where a spirited actor who never succeeded, and an ex-shaman from an obscure American Indian tribe, could comfortably mutter together in sign
