“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.”
“Eight then? The two Persian women have guns?”
“Now you have it.”
“I never for a moment thought you were stupid,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Voltaire turned and gestured to a burley man seated two tables away. The man stood. As his body straightened up to standing position, Alex realized he was even larger than she had guessed. He stood maybe six-four. He wore a white robe and an Islamic skull cap. He came to the table and a grin spread across his face. He had the torso of a Kodiak bear and the face of a cherub with a stubbly beard.
“This is Abdul,” Voltaire said. “Abdul and I have known each other for twenty years. He’s one of my bodyguards and he’ll lead the way.”
Abdul held out a hand to Alex.
“Charmed,” he said.
“My pleasure, I’m sure,” Alex said. Abdul’s hand was like a catcher’s mitt.
Abdul nodded.
“Where are you from in America?” he asked.
“I’m from the Toronto area,” she said. “I’m Canadian. What about you? You’re a native of Cairo?”
“I’m Iraqi,” Abdul said. “I grew up in Detroit. I was in the US Army for six years. Fort Hood, Texas. Fort Benning, Georgia, stateside, one tour in Afghanistan.”
“Surprising place, isn’t it?” Voltaire asked. “I assume you have a weapon. Check that it’s functioning in case there’s trouble.”
“Expecting any?”
“I never expect any. And I always prepare for it.”
“My weapon is fine,” she said. It was where it always was, on her right hip, accessible, the safety catch on.
“Then let’s go,” he said.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Abdul left the room for several seconds, then came back and gestured that they should follow. They took off. Alex stayed close to Voltaire. They were back in the alley but now headed in a different direction. It was close to 11:00 in the evening, and Voltaire led her into an alley between shops. It was so dark that she couldn’t see and so narrow that they had to pass one at a time.
“You’re a brave woman, coming here by yourself, Josephine,” Voltaire said softly and affably. “You’re well educated and attractive. There must be easier ways for you to make a living. Safer too. Why do you do it?”
“Sometimes I ask myself the same question,” Alex said.
He snorted a little in reaction. “We all do,” he said. “What is it? The adrenaline? The danger of hanging out with disreputable people? The feeling that we’re on the side of the angels? A sense of justice? Must be some reason why we kick through back alleys and put our lives on the line. My question is rhetorical, really. I don’t know the answer and I suspect you don’t, either.”
“When I figure it out, I’ll let you know,” she said.
“I promise you I’ll do the same.”
They came to an even narrower passage between buildings. No more than two feet in width, jagged nails sticking out from bricks, plus some electrical wires. For a moment, Voltaire took her hand to steady her. “This is tricky here,” he said. He eased Alex through sideways for twenty feet until they emerged into a wider alley.
“Tu parles francais,
“Je parle francais,
For good measure, even though there was still noise from the city in the background, he suggested switching into French. Less chance of being overheard and understood. Alex concurred and agreed. While French was not uncommon in Egypt, it was nowhere nearly understood as much as a second language as English.
“I’ll give you thirty years of history in six minutes as we walk,” Voltaire said, still in low tones. “And my history lesson will tell you where we are today. Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser in 1970, was assassinated by his own soldiers in 1981. Several of the soldiers who shot him had had family or close friends who had been displaced by one of his urban renewal projects. Sadat was liked and respected outside of Egypt, but here the poor and the Islamic militants hated him. It was a matter of time before his own people murdered him. And he misplayed his most basic politics at home. He quietly funded some Islamic radical groups, figuring they would combat the leftists who Sadat actually feared. His plan backfired. Some of those who conspired to kill him had been radicalized by the same groups that Sadat had founded. Other leaders of the assassins were people whom Sadat had himself freed from Nasser’s jails. They weren’t grateful, they were bitter. They hated the government no matter who was running it. They felt the government had betrayed Islam. It was their theory that if someone had betrayed Islam, it is the duty of the individual as a Muslim to right that wrong. So they righted the wrong by murdering the president of their country. Quite a place, huh? Egyptian politics as usual. That’s how it’s been for centuries. It will never change.”
The alley widened.
Abdul was about fifty feet up ahead, and Alex realized one reason he wore white. He was more visible that way. There were no overhead lights, just reflected lights from the windows of the back entrances of the stores and the houses that they passed.
“Were you in Egypt at the time?” Alex asked. “When Sadat was assassinated?”
“I was a young lad,” he said. “I was a student at the American University in Cairo. Beautiful place until it got trashed by the unwashed Islamic masses.”
They wound their way down several more alleys, each one more serpentine than the previous. Alex realized they were in a different district now. The omnipresent stench of backed-up plumbing was everywhere, as was the scent of stale cigarettes. In the better locations there was a melange of cooking smells, mostly spices she didn’t recognize as well as onions and garlic frying.
“Hosni Mubarak was Sadat’s successor. Mubarak was on the reviewing stand when Sadat was assassinated,” Voltaire said. “While Sadat turned and glared at his assassins, Mubarak had the good sense to duck when the shooting started. His reward? He became president of the country. Then he did some other smart things too. A quarter of a century ago Cairo was a mess. A million cars. Pollution so thick you could chew on it. Sewage overflowed into the streets. Skyscrapers were overpopulated and poorly constructed. The blight spread practically all the way out to the Sphinx’s testicles, and, ironically, the desert was spreading right into Cairo. Sand covered the streets. Sand and garbage. And on top of the sand and garbage, more sand and garbage and the bodies of people who had died overnight, natural or otherwise. The whole place, the whole population, was festering. Work into that the fact that this was one of the most overpopulated cities in the world and you begin to get the picture.”
As they continued, Alex could overhear heated conversations from open but barred windows, music from radios, the drone of televisions, and at least one violent argument between a man and a woman. The noise, like a steady irritating disco beat, just kept on going.
The argument descended into physical fighting. Alex and Voltaire kept on walking. Husband and wife? Alex wondered. Prostitute and customer? Mother and son?
It could have been any.
“Mubarak saw what had happened to his predecessor, getting shot down by his own people, so he was smart enough to attack all the things that were wrong. And he had some success, which is why he stayed in power so long. Mubarak got money from foreign powers for acting as the regional peace broker. He planted trees, built roads and sewers, and gave the main thoroughfares a facelift. He got the Chinese to build a new conference center, got the Japanese to build an opera house, induced the French to build a subway line, and got the Americans to give him just enough military clout so that he could stay in power but not enough military power to attack Israel again. So what happens? All the middle-class Egyptians who had moved to Europe and America started moving back. The doctors. The engineers. The middle-class emigres. Cairo didn’t become Paris, but it was no longer a slum surrounded by sand and camel dung. You’d think that would be a good thing, right?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Alex answered.
Alex did a double-take. They passed an establishment that was wide open from the back. It was obviously a brothel, with several half-naked women hanging out in the doorway and in the windows, dark-haired, sullen, and tattooed.
They smiled at Voltaire as he passed. He waved and they waved back. They probably know him, Alex thought. The girls looked disapprovingly at Alex, as if she was infringing on their business. One of them said something to her in Arabic and the others laughed.
“The pseudo-prosperity created its own problems,” Voltaire said, continuing in French. “The people in the slums, the people who were in those overcrowded high-rises, and even the working-class people of the city, the people who drove taxis or cleaned the streets or worked in the hospitals, the ‘new affluence’ never trickled down to them. It was grabbed off by the emigres who had moved back. And so the poor and uneducated got even angrier. You’d think they would have tried to embrace the new order, run their lives a little differently, try to Westernize their lives the way the successful returned emigres had. No. Know what they did instead?”
“My guess is that they clung to their own traditions all the more fervently,” Alex said. “And that would mean an even more tenacious embrace of Islam.”
“That’s exactly right,” Voltaire said. “The fundamentalist Islamic preachers used the mosques and the television to convince this great struggling
