Countdown in Cairo

what they called their “pre-honeymoon.” They had been working together in Washington, DC, for more than two years as techies for one of America’s more nefarious national security agencies. They had also been living together for a few months, though Janet still retained her own apartment. But this one-week trip to Egypt and the Holy Land was something special, their first trip together out of the United States. So far, it was going just fine.

They would visit Egypt and see the Great Pyramids and antiquities of the Nile, then the ancient cities of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Palestine. They had always wanted to take this trip together ever since they had discovered a joint interest a year earlier. Their plans for a honeymoon, the following year, would be more prosaic: sun and surf in Maui. What was not to like?

Today was their first full day in Egypt. They visited the ancient quarter now known as Old Cairo, which had grown up around the Roman fortress of Babylon. They wandered through the old town, a largely Christian neighborhood of narrow, winding streets bordered by low beige buildings of sandstone. They passed quiet homes and shops and the occasional cafe filled with Christian Arabs sipping walnut-colored tea and eating small sandwiches and pastries. They came to the Coptic Church of Saint Sergius, one of the oldest houses of Christian worship, which was built like a fortress, and paid the admission to enter and admire it from within.

When the old church had been built, three centuries after the time of Christ, churches were exactly that-fortresses. Entrances were often walled and bolted against attack. There was no large entrance door like modern churches have, just a small door in a bare facade. In the Middle Ages the Coptic Church of Saint Sergius had been a destination for many Christian pilgrims because of its association with the flight into Egypt.

Steps within the church led down past the altar to a refuge and a crypt where, according to legend, the Holy Family found shelter after fleeing from Herod. Christianity had been the religion of most Egyptians from the third to the tenth century after Christ. Egypt had settled into the Muslim world thereafter.

Carlos and Janet continued their walking tour in the afternoon and visited the ancient Synagogue of Ben Ezra. It bore a resemblance to the Coptic Church because it had once been one too. The Church of St. Michael had stood here during the first ten centuries after Christ, but the Copts sold the structure to the Jews to pay a tax by Ibn Tuylun for the erection of a mosque.

The building, which contained some of the original structure from almost two thousand years earlier, remained a temple, but its parish had long since dispersed. Most of Cairo’s Jews had been forced out of the country after the modern wars with Israel. Today, the building remained a historical oddity, a reminder of the two pasts, near and distant.

In the late afternoon, exhausted and with feet sore from their first day of sightseeing, they went back to their hotel and refreshed themselves. Then they settled into the hotel bar and restaurant.

It was a very comfortable modern bar in a splendid hotel, the Grand Hyatt of Cairo, a towering modern edifice located at the edge of the old city where the fortress of Babylon had once stood. But there was one problem. Right now, all that was on Carlos’s mind was that they were in the capital of a Muslim country and the bar served no alcohol, even though alcohol was readily available at other locations in the city. At the end of a hot day, Carlos would have chucked the whole journey to be able to knock back a couple of cold brews.

“Who ever heard of a bar with no booze?” Carlos grumbled. “That’s like an airplane with no wings.”

Janet laughed slightly.

“You know that Bon Jovi song ‘Dry County’?” he continued. “That should be the national anthem here. It’s like driving through western Kansas, only worse.”

“Carlos,” she said, “zip it, would you? There’s beer in the cafes. We’ll go to another place, okay?”

“I should be able to get a brew here.”

Selections of European and American pop music played on the sound system, covering their conversation. Soon something played in Italian, and it was incomprehensible to them.

“Budweiser. Coors. Schlitz,” Carlos continued. “Iron City. Lone Star. Did you know there’s a beer in Connecticut named Hooker? Their slogan is ‘Get caught with a Hooker.’”

“Carlos, honey…”

“Or how about Pabst’s? Yeah, Pabst’s. I’d kill for a ‘PBR’ right now, know that? You know what else? I’d pay fifty bucks for a lukewarm can of Bud Ice with a slice of lime in it. That’s how desperate I am.”

She held his arm, squeezed it hard, and shook it. “Okay, okay! Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.

“Sold!”

They took off for a downtown beer garden named the Royale, located in one of the more artsy neighborhoods. The guidebooks had told them it was akin to the Left Bank in Paris. Neither of them had ever been to the Left Bank, but they had an idea what that meant.

The Royale was anything but royal. It was a narrow noisy bar on a backstreet. It evoked the air of a sordid 1920s speakeasy, complete with a paunchy one-armed barman and another barman who had an ear missing. The waitresses dressed as belly dancers. They had nice yummy flat bellies, Carlos noticed, but they did no dancing.

And that was just for starters.

Behind the bar was an array of bottles, mostly local brands that ripped off better known European products: Golden’s Dry Gin in recycled Gordon’s bottles, with the head of a dog replacing the boar’s head of the authentic logo; Tony Talker Black Label in bottles that looked suspiciously like Johnny Walker castoffs. There was another suspicious-looking scotch concoction called Chipas Renal.

“Let’s stick to the beer,” Carlos said on arrival, “from closed bottles.”

The Royale was crowded, filled with pungent smoke from Cleopatra cigarettes and the nasty stench of spilled Egyptian beer-Stella and Sakara, the two liquids that seemed to fuel most of these cafes. Underfoot, the floor was crunchy from cigarette butts and lupin shells from the trees on the block outside. But at least the Stella made Carlos happy when he finally got a couple of them, and if Carlos was happy, Janet was too.

They hunched together on small wooden chairs at a small wobbly table with a zinc top. Carlos wandered off after one hour and three beers to find a men’s room, and Janet scanned the room, warding off the smiles and eye-contact of local young Arab men who had been waiting for Carlos to get lost.

Suddenly Janet’s eyes went wide, as if she had seen a ghost.

Carlos returned. He slid easily into his narrow chair, bumping elbows with some irritable Arab men sitting next to him. Janet looked to Carlos in disbelief and urgently placed a hand on his arm. “What?” he asked, slightly drunk.

“That man at the bar!” she said in a loud whisper.

“What man?”

She motioned with her eyes in quick hard glances, agitated enough not to move her head, directing his attention across the smoky room to the end of the bar.

Carlos looked. He saw the man she had indicated, a moderately sized man with thinning hair in a rumpled dark brown suit. Carlos could only see him from the rear. He was chatting with two other men.

“That guy?” Carlos asked.

“Him!” Janet said.

“What about him?”

“That’s Michael!” she whispered in urgency.

“Michael who?”

“The Michael we used to work for in Washington,” she said.

“Michael Cerny?” he asked.

“Yes! That Michael!”

Carlos looked again, then looked back to her.

“No way!” he scoffed. “You’re toasted.”

“Yes, way. I’m not toasted.”

Carlos looked again. No recognition. “Michael Cerny’s dead,” he said.

“Sure. That’s what they told us,” she said. “The CIA people.”

“He was shot, remember? In Paris. He died,” Carlos continued. “When you die you become dead and tend to stay dead.”

“I know,” Janet answered again. “But that’s Michael Cerny over there!”

“It might look like him, but it can’t be!”

She leaned back and folded her arms. “Then you go look,” she insisted.

Carlos waited for a second, as if to reject the entire notion. Then he gave her a glance of exasperation and stood again. He was tipsy. He squeezed out from the table onto the floor of the bar and wound his way through the crowd toward the bar.

He neared the man Janet had indicated. He jockeyed for a position to get a good look. He moved into eavesdropping range. Janet saw Carlos’s expression freeze. He stared for a moment. Then the man they were watching turned his attention away from his friends at the bar and stared directly at Carlos. Janet saw their eyes lock for a moment.

Then Carlos raised a hand to conceal his own face, quickly turning away. Carlos fled in her direction, and Janet watched as the man kept Carlos in his sights. Janet grabbed a battered menu and raised it to hide her own face. Carlos returned and slid awkwardly back into his narrow seat.

“It’s him,” Carlos said in an astonished tone.

“He recognized you too,” Janet said.

“I know,” Carlos answered. “And they were talking in some funny language.”

“Arabic?”

“No. It was something else. It sounded Slavic. And one of his friends’ names was Victor. I heard him call him by name.”

She worked up the nerve to glance over the top of the menu. The man was still at the bar, looking hard in their direction. Then he looked away.

“So I was right?” Janet asked.

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know if you’re right or not, but this guy looks exactly like Michael Cerny. It’s incredible!”