Shooting the Sphinx (20 page)

“Ari?”

Ari pulled the walkie off his belt. “Yes, Samir?”

“How are you? Are you thirsty?”

“Not yet.”

“Do not drink all your water at once.”

“Don't worry. I'm good about that kind of thing.”

“I can see you.”

Ari turned around. Samir waved at him from a thousand feet away, the top of the neighboring dune. Ari waved back. A white speck rolled over the top of a dune and descended down into the bottom of the valley between them, slow and weightless.

“What is that?” asked Ari.

“It looks like a plastic bag for shopping.”

It was exactly that, but it must have rolled in from a thousand miles away. Faded to translucence and sandblasted to the consistency of tissue paper, the thing was hardly a bag, but a ghost of one, a tumbleweed from a distant city.

“Where did it come from?” asked Ari.

“Libya.”

“All the way across the Sahara?” Ari marveled that garbage could penetrate the emptiest place on earth.

“Yes, the wind is from Libya.”

“The west?”

“Yes.”

“The plastic wind.” Ari heard Samir's laughter as he turned and descended down the far side of the dune, out of sight. When Ari reached the bottom of the next valley, he put the wind at his back. Knowing that the road was to the east, Ari walked and walked a serpentine path through the harder sand of the valleys beneath the dunes. Samir called him on the radio, but Ari did not answer.

The radios could only transmit line of sight, so Ari soon lost contact. He stopped every so often and snapped a few pictures of the most magnificent dunes, but try as he might, the camera didn't convey the scope and power of the tidal waves of sand.

He began to hum, then sing, a tune he had heard once in a movie.

“As he walked along the Bois de Bologne

With an independent air,

You could hear the girls declare,

‘He must be a millionaire.'

I'm the man who broke the bank at Monte Car-arlo!”

After an hour of walking, he continued east. They had not come for him, so they were still stuck, reasoned Ari. The sun was already halfway from high noon to the horizon. He had only one objective now—to find the road before dark. The wind died down, giving him no direction, but as the sun set in the sky, Ari walked away from it. He walked for another hour in the twilight. The dunes diminished in size as darkness closed in. There was no moon, only starlight. He scanned the sky for the North Star or the Southern Cross, but the stars seemed scrambled and unfamiliar. Stumbling over a ground that he could barely see, Ari hoped that he was moving in the right direction.

He crossed over the top of one dune and saw headlights illuminating the black road at high speed from miles away. To intercept them, Ari would have to run. He tried to find the hard-packed places. He ran around the dunes and not over their soft tops. He picked up his pace until the dunes shrank back down to ripples lapping at the black ribbon of asphalt. Ari ran out into the middle of the road waving his hands.

“Stop! Stop!” he yelled.

A white pickup truck approached at high speed. Ari had to step out of the road to avoid getting hit. The truck came to a halt and reversed back to him.

A tall thin young man with very dark skin and a pointy beard stared bewildered at Ari as if at some alien from another planet. The man said something in Arabic. Ari shook his head.

“I…” Ari pointed at his own mouth. “… show…” Then he pointed ahead down the road. “… you?” Ari asked, pointing at the empty passenger seat. Comprehending, the man opened the door, which had a Governmental seal and some Arabic writing on the side. Ari got in. Ari pointed down the road and nodded. The man began to drive slowly.

Ari sized him up. He wore a white shirt with breast pockets that had flaps on them. He had boots on and khaki trousers. He was not a city person, but very much of the desert. Ari read him as some sort of park ranger-type of a Bedou tribe.

After about a mile, they both spotted the Toyota's tire tracks in the sand on the roadside.

“There! Right there!” cried Ari, but he didn't have to. The ranger nodded. He put the truck into four-wheel drive and set out at about twenty miles an hour through the black desert night. The ranger drove expertly, much lower on the dunes than Wael had driven before. They followed the twin snakes of tire tracks back across the most giant dunes.

Cones of headlight illuminated the sand in the night until, slowing, they came upon a great mess of sand and footprints. The red Toyota Land Cruiser sat in the middle of a large hole. Wael and the location manager were both sweaty and shirtless in the cool chill of the desert night. Their skin was plastered with dust as if they wore tan makeup on their faces. They had been digging the sand from under the car with their bare hands. They peered up out of their giant foxhole, blinded by the headlights.

The Bedou ranger got out of the cab of his truck and walked over to the two heads sticking up. Ari followed.

“Where is Samir?” asked Ari.

“He went to find you,” said the location manager. “When he could not hear you on the radio, he became frightened.”

“Ugh.” Ari should have expected Samir to worry and come after him.

The ranger waved for the two men to get out. Sheepishly, they climbed up the side. The ranger began to kick sand down into the hole around the car. Ari thought for a moment that they would tackle him, as he was undoing what they had spent hours on with their bare hands, but the ranger's confidence gave them pause. He piled sand around the wheels, then gestured for all three of them to join him and put their shoulders to the car. Ari jumped down into the hole. Under the ranger's command, the four of them rocked the vehicle back and forth. With each sway, the car raised up a quarter of an inch as the sand spilled under its tires. The Toyota slowly rose up out of the hole as if lifted by an invisible string. They rocked some more, and the ranger kept plying the wheels with more sand. In a matter of twenty minutes the car was back up on top of the dune. Sheepishly, they got into the Toyota and followed the ranger back out of the dunes along their tracks.

They found Samir sitting in the sand by the side of the road surrounded by cigarette butts. He had seen the second set of tracks and realized that another car had come to their aid, so he had waited.

On the drive back to Cairo, he did not speak or look at Ari. Ari wanted to make small talk, say something of the day, but Samir was humiliated. They reached Giza as dawn was breaking behind the Sphinx. Samir hadn't said a word.

 

PART SEVEN

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

—Khalil Gibran

 

Chapter 41

The following morning, Ari headed to the airport to meet Beth, who was arriving on the overnight flight from New York. He grew more excited to see her the closer the moment of reunion. He had a bounce in his step walking through the terminal. Even the sight of the dreaded customs desk didn't kill his mood. He did notice several wealthy Egyptian families with school-aged children rushing to make flights. Shouldn't they be in school? he thought.

He stopped behind the customs desk and looked up at the portrait of President Mubarak in a gilded frame. Lighthearted, Ari started humming the song from the protest. “Leave, leave, Hosni Mubarak.” One of the customs officials recognized the tune and gave him a dirty look. Ari quit humming, but savored the moment and the power of little bit of song.

When he saw Beth rolling her suitcase toward customs, his heart quickened. Despite her anger over the cost overrun on the Sphinx, he had missed her. He hadn't realized how much until that moment. He felt the urge to run to her and embrace her like long lost lovers in a movie. But for the customs officers between them, he might have done so until he noticed her talking to somebody. She wasn't alone. Omar el Mansoor from Studio Giza, dressed in his bell-bottom jeans, was rolling his own suitcase right next to hers. He had a pair of ski boots slung over his shoulders.

“What the…?”

They both waved at Ari and walked past the customs desk without being stopped. Ari and Beth reached out to each other to shake hands, very businesslike, concealing their relationship from Omar. Ari felt a strange energy from her, sexual yet searching, as though she wondered if they were still lovers.

“Same flight?” asked Ari with as much nonchalance as he could fake.

“Same row,” said Beth.

Ari turned to Omar. “I thought you were going to Sundance?”

“I felt I had to come back,” said Omar. “The press of business.”

“Omar came to visit our set, Ari,” said Beth. “He met Frank.”

“Oh?”

Omar gestured at the exit. “Shall we take my car?”

“Thank you, no.” Ari craved a few minutes alone with Beth. “We have our own driver.”

“Send them away, Ari.” She cast a meaningful glance at him. “We're going with Omar.”

In the back of Omar's car, Beth sat between the two men.

“How was the film festival?” Ari asked.

“Sundance was fantastic.” Omar gave Ari a thumbs-up. “Awesome snow.”

“Did you see any movies?” asked Ari.

“Nope,” admitted Omar, “but I did catch a few great parties.”

“That so?” Ari spotted the
Cairo Times
English Edition in a pocket behind the front seat. He pulled it out and began to read the lead story.

After a minute, Beth asked, “What's your take on Jordan, Ari?”

Ari didn't answer. He was lost in the newspaper.

“Ari?”

“What?”

“You seem so … distracted. I just asked you a question.”

Ari pointed at the newpaper. “This story I'm reading. It's so … I can't believe it.”

“Oh yes, very sad,” agreed Omar. “An old story. It's been all over the news.”

“What happened?” asked Beth.

Ari described the article. “Says here that this guy was driving in downtown Cairo. He gets stopped by a couple of cops. They take his cell phone and 163 Egyptian pounds.”

“How much is that?” she asked.

“Thirty-five dollars,” said Omar, “a little less.”

Ari continued. “So the next day the guy goes to the police station, fills out a complaint. The day after that the two cops come over to his apartment…” Ari stopped scanning the page. “… and throw him out the window.”

“What?” Beth was aghast. “How horrible.”

“For thirty-five dollars and a cell phone. The cops just got sentenced to two years in jail.”

“Two years? That's it?” Beth looked at the newspaper.

“That's the headline.” Ari pointed at it. “ONLY TWO YEARS.”

“Very sad, very sad,” said Omar, “but I wouldn't take it at face value.”

“What? They didn't kill him?” asked Ari.

“No, no, I'm not saying that he jumped out the window from depression. It's just that in Egypt you get an ear for when the news is too simple and everything's tied up in a nice little bow.” Omar made a dainty little knot in the air. “He might have been Muslim Brotherhood, he might have been involved in something shady, the cops could have been paid to kill him—”

“Paid?” asked Beth.

“Or someone who did kill him could be paying the cops to go to jail instead.”

“What?” That made no sense to Ari. “Cops volunteering to go to jail?”

“If someone confesses to a murder,” explained Omar, “there's no trial, no investigation. If someone's poor enough, you could pay them to confess in place of you.”

Beth was curious. “How much?”

“I've never done it, but…” Omar looked out the car window at some poor kids playing football barefoot in the street. “Maybe … ten thousand dollars for each year in prison, I'd imagine.”

Ari folded the paper back up gingerly as if it were unclean and slipped it back into the pouch behind the driver's seat.

 

Chapter 42

“I was allowed to purchase Studio Giza from the government a few years ago,” Omar told Beth and Ari as they drove through the front gate of Omar's facility. “The studio was built in the 1930s along the Hollywood model.”

Now comes the seduction process, thought Ari. It was all very familiar. Just like in LA, there was a front gate in the tall white walls and a guard who checked them in. They pulled up in Omar's personalized studio chief parking space closest to the head office bungalow.

“Hundreds of movies have been made here,” continued Omar as they got out of his car. “We might not be on the same scale as a Paramount or a Universal, but we're still very Hollywood. I ask you, what's the difference between the Spanish Moorish LA style of architecture and the Arabic Egyptian style?”

“This place is cute,” said Beth.

She's drinking the Kool-Aid, thought Ari as Omar led them through his campus of art deco buildings.

“We have about a dozen soundstages, a scene shop, lights, equipment, cameras, a mixing stage, everything you need to make a movie. The government has always understood that Egypt's image was crucial to its economic development—see, we have a movie and three TV shows shooting right now.”

Omar laid it on thick. How the studio had been built by the government in the 1930s and the Egyptian film industry was created. He elaborated on the history of the studio, showing them through a dark soundstage where a film crew was shooting on a set. He took them outside onto the studio street lined with building façades of every style from Venetian to Wild West. Two more film crews were working at either end of the street.

“And you?” asked Ari. “What's your interest in all this?”

“Me?” Omar stopped and put his hand on his heart. “I'm on a one-man crusade to modernize Egypt's film industry.”