Countdown in Cairo (23 page)

He put his strong arms around her and hugged her so hard and dearly that her feet lifted from the ground. Then he set her down again.

“Who are you going to be dealing with in Cairo?” he asked. “Arabs and Russians, correct?”

“Probably.”

“If hell itself emptied out tomorrow morning we would discover that it was mostly filled with Arabs and Russians,” he grumbled. “I do not like this for you!”

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Really! I’ll be all right.”

“Let me go with you,” he said. “I can join you in a day.”

“I can’t do it that way,” she said. “I have specific orders from Langley how this is supposed to be done. There will be a team in Cairo and—”

“I don’t trust your team in Cairo,” he said. “And you shouldn’t either.”

On the airport public address system, the last call was made for boarding Flight 34 from Rome to Cairo.

“I need to go, Gian Antonio,” she said.

“Va bene,”
he said at length. “And I will contact Rolland Fitzgerald for you. But I know how these things go. One holds to all game plans until the first shot is fired. Then chaos. So when there’s chaos, you’re allowed to call in people whom you trust. Those are the rules of engagement. I will stand ready. I will be your chevalier,
your
cavalier, when you need one.” He paused. “I would not want anything to happen to you,” he said again.

He held her as long as he could, then released her to a world he knew to be cruel and calculating. At the last step before the gate, she turned and gave him a smile and a wave. She knew he would still be watching. To Alex’s eyes, he looked sad and overly concerned.

Then she boarded another Alitalia jet.

She was seated in 5-H of business class, a window. She had a wonderful view of Rome and Naples as they flew south. Her eyes then followed the bold coastlines of Corsica and Sicily and the boot of Italy in the Mediterranean as the plane banked and turned to the southeast. The geography had not changed since the time of Christ, and with suddenly refreshed eyes, she was thrilled to gaze upon it.

She watched out her window with fascination as the flight traveled southeast and crossed the Mediterranean. She was finally on the final leg of her trip to Egypt.

THIRTY-ONE

Within two hours she saw the topography of northern Africa for the first time. She recognized the contours of the Nile Delta where it met the sea. Far away to the east she could see the ancient land where the Suez Canal had been built a hundred and fifty years ago. Beyond, also within her view in the distance through the hazy sky, she could see the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea, the land of so many of the Bible tales of her youth.

For much of the flight Alex had been prowling through files on her laptop and poking through a phrasebook of Egyptian Arabic. Now she leaned back from the window. A strange feeling was upon her, accompanied by a poignant memory.

When Alex had been in her midteens, she had been too good a student for her own school system. One thing had led to another, and she had been sent away on a full scholarship to a private boarding school in Connecticut where she was allowed to excel in all her studies, particularly languages. The summer after her junior year she had won an internship to work in France, and off she had gone again, full of adventure and naïveté, and hiding within her a heavy element of fear and intimidation.

She had been away from home before but had never been so far away, never on another continent and immersed in another culture. Additionally, it was one thing to have excelled in French in the classroom, quite another to be smacked down in it in real life.

She had flown from New York to Paris. Her first night in Paris passed safely and securely. She had registered in advance at a student residence in Paris and had hung out with some other Americans. But the next day had been different. She had taken a train deep into the center of France, a single girl of seventeen traveling alone, with one cramped bag of clothes, three hundred dollars in cash, and a single credit card that would max at five hundred dollars.

She had been scared and had felt lost and vulnerable. She asked herself why she was doing this, whether this was what she had really wanted, whether it might have been easier and more pleasant to have just spent the summer hanging around her mother’s home in California.

On the southbound train, Alex fell into a conversation with an older French woman, a woman old enough to remember the world war in which, fifty years earlier, she said, she had lost her husband at Dunkirk. The old woman befriended her, even gave her some fresh fruit from a basket. They both descended from the train at Saint Etienne and said their good-byes. The old woman, whose name was Marie-Claire, gave her a hug, and Alex reciprocated. Marie-Claire felt frail and bony in her grasp and almost unsteady when Alex released her. She reminded Alex—distantly and in spooky kind of way—of her own late grandmother.

Alex had to find her way on foot to a local youth hostel, where she would stay overnight, and then the next morning take another train to the Camargue region where her job awaited her.

She walked down some questionable streets to get to the hostel. She took the wrong route twice and was corrected twice when strangers answered questions. When she arrived at the hostel, early in the evening, it was not the nicest place. Peeling walls, worn linoleum, dim corridors that reeked of age and abuse. Worse, the hostel had been overbooked and there wasn’t a room for her. There wasn’t even an extra bed in the dormitory. The staff wasn’t entirely helpful, and to top it off, the phones weren’t working.

She was near tears. Had the trains been running, she might have turned around, retraced her route to Paris, then to New York, then home to California. Who could blame a frightened teenager for wanting to go home?

She sat in the lobby and tried to evaluate what to do. Several minutes later, a young man came over to her and sat down next to her. He was very slight of build, with a mocha complexion. In French he started a conversation and asked what nationality she was.

“I’m American,” she said in French. “From California.”

“My name is René,” he said. “I’m French, but of Tunisian origin.”

He smiled and tried to speak English with her, but his was limited, so their conversation ensued in French. He was eighteen and had technical training in computer engineering, he said, mostly self-acquired. He had enlisted in the French Air Force, he said,
l’armee de l’air
, he proclaimed proudly. This was his final evening at liberty. The next day he would take a train in a different direction and travel onward to Nantes in west central France for six weeks of basic training. It was his hope to eventually see the world, to be posted in someplace exotic like Polynesia or Martinique where the French maintained bases. He added that it had always been his dream to visit America, as well.

Alex joined him for dinner. They had soup and bread and cheese in the hostel cafeteria. She waited to see whether the hostel keepers would find a place for her. But while her conversation with René played out in the forefront of her mind, in the back of her mind her worries accelerated.

What would she do? Despite the kindness of the old lady on the train and the gentle amity of René this evening, she had never felt so homesick in her life, so cut off from everything she knew. In her stomach was a knot that wouldn’t untie.

After dinner, there was a change at the concierge’s desk. The new man told Alex that the phones were up and running again and they had called everywhere, including local homes that might take in an overnight border. But it was early summer and there were no beds to be had anywhere within a hundred miles. Nor was there any way for a single girl traveling alone to get to anywhere else. And it was against regulations for anyone to stay in the hostel’s lobby or office area.

There was still some daylight remaining. In midsummer in the south of France daylight remained until almost ten o’clock. Alex walked outside the hostel, stood in the street and tried to decide what to do. She noticed that across the street there was a small Catholic church. It was white stucco with peeling green paint on its front door.

Alex walked to it. She tried the door but it was locked. When she turned around, however, she was surprised to find René standing very close to her.

“I heard what’s happening,” he said. “You can have my room for the night.”

She was shocked. “That’s kind of you,” she said. They spoke in French, and at this time in her life, hers was halting. “But you’re about to go into the military. I couldn’t possibly take your room for the final night.”

“I wish you would,” he said.

“Where would you go?”

“I have a backpack. I can sleep in the park. Among the hobos,” he said with a smile, “among
les clochards
. It will be an adventure. I’ll be gone before dawn as long as the police don’t catch me.”

“No, no,” she said. “You mustn’t take such a risk for me.”

“Then let me sneak you into my room and we will share it,” he said.

Her expression must have conveyed her confusion, appreciation mingled with anxiety and suspicion. He sought to defuse it. “I warn you, there is only one bed. It is very narrow and there is no space on the floor. But I will be honorable.”

She searched his eyes. Sometimes, she thought, angels take strange forms.

“All right,” she said.

They returned to the hostel. A friend created a distraction for the concierge and Alex darted down the corridor to René’s room. The concierge either didn’t see her or chose not to.

The door to René’s room was unlocked and the room empty. He followed a minute later, closed the door and locked it. The room was tiny, maybe eight by ten, with a nightstand and a bed, just as René had described. Barely enough room for two people to stand up together, much less lie down together.

The shower and bathroom facilities on the corridor were communal. They took turns so that Alex could have privacy to change and so that he could too. Awkwardly, at 11:00 p.m., they turned off the single room light and lay down together, Alex between the wall and René’s body. Around her neck, Alex wore the small gold cross that her dad had given her years earlier, the one she had eventually lost in Kiev. She knew René had noted it, but he said nothing about it.

A moment passed. They both started to laugh at the preposterousness of the situation. Then they started to talk about their homes, their families. They discovered they were both only children raised by a single parent. René had been raised by his very strict father, who worked in a factory. His mother had deserted the family when he had been five. René had been raised as a Muslim but had fallen away from his faith, perhaps as a reaction to the strictness of his father’s Islam.

“What would your father say if he knew you were here, lying in bed, with an American girl?” Alex asked.

“Oooh!” René answered quickly. He laughed and pointed to his lower backside in the dim light. He furiously waved a finger to indicate that he didn’t even want to
think
about what would happen. He made a moaning sound over the beating he probably would have received. “But my father and I do not agree on many things,” he said. “It is one reason I am going away and joining the
armée de l’air
. It doesn’t mean I don’t love him or respect him. It only means we disagree.”

After hushed conversation of nearly an hour, fatigue rolled in upon them. Alex taught René some words and phrases in English.
Hello. How are you? Good-bye. Good luck
.

René reciprocated with some useful words in Arabic.

Marhabbah. Assalaam Alaikim. Maasalaamah.

Hello. Peace be unto you. Good-bye.

“If you greet most Arab people in their language, you break the ice,” he said. “They will trust you more and treat you with a genuine smile,” he said. “
Assalamou Alaekom
means ‘hello’ or ‘hi’ in Arabic. Another word is
Ezzayak
, said as a question. It means, ‘How are you?’ Learning a few Arabic words will always make a difference.”

“Assalamou Alaekom
,” she tried, laughing, garbling it.

“Assalamou Alaekom
,” he corrected. It quickly became a joke between them. They laughed until she felt herself drifting, trying to stay awake but no longer able. The last thing she remembered was René saying something to her that she didn’t understand. She was too tired.

The next morning she awoke with a start. It was 8:00 a.m., and she was alone on the bed. She looked everywhere in the small room. René was gone and had taken all his things. She waited for several minutes to see if perhaps he was in the shower or the bathroom. But no. He was gone.

She pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans. She snuck out of the hostel. The new concierge on the morning shift gave her a cursory glance but said nothing. She went outside into a warm summer morning. She was still unsure what to do, whether to go forward with her trip or go back to America. The knot had returned to the pit of her stomach, and she again felt alone, sad, and vulnerable. She had made one friend, or thought she had, and now he was gone too.