Whiplash River (19 page)

Babb's cell phone rang. He checked caller ID. Gardenhire. The boss. Gardenhire, who had hired Babb to work in the garden. To do some pruning.

“I'm really sorry,” Babb told the translator to tell the old Mennonite woman. “Do you mind if I take this?”

He stepped off the porch and away from the little girls in bonnets, still frolicking away.

“We got a hit on the passports,” Gardenhire said.

“Where?”

“Cairo.”

“Great!”

“Great?”

“The pyramids!”

Silence. Then: “Just get it done.”

Gardenhire hung up. Babb climbed back onto the porch. He gave the old Mennonite woman his card and asked her to call him if she remembered anything about the two dangerous fugitives.

She said something to the teenage boy. The teenage boy asked Babb if he would still be staying the night.

“I'm sorry, no,” Babb said. And he was sorry. He'd been looking forward to staying the night. “I'm afraid I have to run.”

PART III

Chapter 29

S
hake had never seen traffic like the traffic in Cairo. No lanes, no lights, a thousand grimy cars locked tight together on a street that would have been crowded with half that many. Creep and lunge, creep and lunge, horns beeping. Every beeping horn on earth, it seemed. Shake, in the backseat of the cab with Gina, was closer to the guy in the car next to them than he was to her. Shake could have reached through the guy's open window and picked the dandruff flakes off his shoulder, that's how tight the traffic was locked.

Pedestrians, when they wanted to cross the street, waded in and took their chances. They darted when the cars crept, they dodged when the cars lunged.

Shake saw a grimy old Peugeot that had bumped into a wooden cart full of watermelons. A few watermelons had spilled onto the street and broken open, dark green rinds and dark red fruit. A guy in a long gown down to his ankles was trying to calm the donkey who'd been pulling the wooden cart.

Because, sure, the traffic in Cairo included donkeys pulling wooden carts.

“It's called a galabiya,” Quinn said, turning around in the front seat of the cab. “The dress he's wearing. But don't call it a dress, he'll kick your ass.”

What was kicking Shake's ass was jet lag. He felt fogged and loopy. They'd landed in Cairo last night around midnight. Shake had tried to sleep when they got to the hotel, but he was still on Belize time. And his mind was still working, trying to figure out what Gina had in store for him. He didn't nod off until almost dawn. When Quinn pounded on his door a few hours later, it was like being wrenched from the dead.

The signs on the buildings didn't help his jet lag, everything written in Arabic. Shake was in a dream where words had melted and gone squiggly.

Gina looked crisp and alert—in sunglasses, her hair pulled back, fresh lipstick—not fogged in the slightest.

Yeah, Shake thought, like she needed the extra edge on him.

“It's a beautiful city, isn't it?” Quinn said, turning around in his seat again.

It was dirty and hazy and chaotic, stack after stack of buildings the color of dirty sand, dirty bone, dirty butter. Though Shake did like all the mosques, the skyline bristling with minarets. He liked the donkeys in the street. He was prepared to admit that Cairo did have a certain exotic appeal.

“You know you're not in Kansas anymore,” Gina said. “For sure.”

“So my buddy with the security firm,” Quinn said. “When I called him this morning, he says the clock's ticking. He says his client, the rich expat asshole, put it on the market a couple of days ago. Opened the bidding, already has an offer. Not a great offer, my buddy doesn't think, but these things move fast. We've got to make hay while the sun shines or we'll lose it.”

“What is it?” Gina said. “The it?”

Quinn winked at her. “Just wait. I'm going to tell you.”

The cab turned a corner, squeezed down a narrow street crowded with giant tour buses parked up on the curb, and then turned another corner. Suddenly Shake found himself staring straight at the pyramids, right there, practically on top of him. “Holy shit,” he said. If he'd felt like he was in a dream before, he really felt like it now. The pyramids looked exactly the way you'd expect the pyramids to look. But even bigger, even more impressive.

There were a lot of people moving around at the base of the biggest pyramid, but you didn't notice them at first, they were so puny in comparison. The blocks at the base of the pyramid were taller than the tallest person.

“Sheesh,” Gina said. “Somebody had a teeny pecker, didn't he, whoever built these?”

“You know who stood right here and gazed in awe at those pyramids, same way we're doing right now?” Quinn said. “Herodotus. Julius Caesar. Napoleon. Mark Twain. Among others. If that doesn't blow your mind, I don't know what will. Come on.”

He paid the cabdriver and the three of them walked down another street lined with tour buses. That street led them to an enormous sandstone lion with the head of a pharaoh. The Sphinx. The pyramids were lined up perfectly in the background.

“Holy shit,” Shake said again.

Gina hooked her arm through his. “It's sort of romantic, isn't it?”

He looked at her. “I know what you're doing,” he said.

She laughed.

“I have a general idea of what you might be doing and possibly why,” he said.

“Come over here,” Quinn said. “Take a look at this.”

Shake and Gina walked over. A tourist was taking a photo of her husband with the Sphinx in the background, a forced perspective that made it look like the husband was holding the Sphinx in the palm of his hand.

Quinn found a spot with an unobstructed view. “What do you think of that?” he said. “See the nose?”

“The nose?” Shake said. He must have been missing something, because the Sphinx was missing its nose. There was just a flat slab of stone between the eyes and the lips.

“Speaking of teeny peckers,” Quinn said. “Napoleon. The story is, 1773, his troops are screwing around, taking target practice with their cannons, they blast the Sphinx's nose off. What really happened, though, the nose was already off by the time Napoleon ever showed up in Egypt. The Muslims, some Muslims or other, they're the ones knocked it off in the fourteenth century. Religious issues, I don't know.”

Shake and Gina were quiet for a minute. Shake finally got it.

“The nose,” he said. “We're gonna boost the nose?”

“It was in a museum, wasn't it?” Gina said, nodding. “And then it got stolen during the revolution. The rich asshole ended up with it.”

Quinn looked at them both. “Have you been listening? The Muslims knocked the nose off seven hundred years ago. It's dust. It's long gone.”

Shake was glad Gina looked confused too. “Why are we here, then?” he asked Quinn.

“Because we're in Cairo! I thought you should see the pyramids, the Sphinx. When's the next time you're going to be in Cairo?”

“Harry, sweetie,” Gina said.

“Okay,” Quinn said. “You're right.” He paused for effect, turning his vintage-movie-star profile to them and lifting his chin. “The speech that saved Teddy Roosevelt's life.”

Wonderful,
Shake thought. Quinn didn't have enough material of his own, now he was gonna start delivering other people's speeches too.

Shake and Gina waited. Quinn didn't say anything else.

“The speech that saved Teddy Roosevelt's life!” he said. “That's what we're going to boost!”

 

THEY FOUND A TABLE IN
the shade. A café with a view of the Sphinx.

Shake had never heard about a speech that saved Teddy Roosevelt's life. Shake had been forced to talk his way out of several hairy situations, and Gina had too. Gina probably couldn't even count all the times. But Shake couldn't imagine how a president of the United States ended up in the hair like that.

“That's not what I mean,” Quinn said. “It wasn't Teddy giving a speech that saved his life, it was the speech itself.”

Calling him Teddy, like they'd been buddies. Maybe they had been.

The waiter who brought their coffee could have been Quinn's twin brother, Shake noticed when he poured Quinn's coffee. Tall, tan, the same waves of white hair. The main difference, the waiter had dark eyes and a big dark mustache, and he walked with a bit of a stoop.

Shake watched Quinn frown at the ghost of his Christmas future.

“I'm not following,” Shake said.

“Shocker,” Gina said. But she wasn't following either.

“Teddy could give a speech,” Quinn said. “I mean it. Two hours long, three hours. A fascinating historical figure, but long-winded as hell. Don't say it, I know what you're thinking. Anyway.

“Teddy's in Milwaukee, October of 1912, running for president again. He's on his way to give a campaign speech. He steps out of his hotel in Milwaukee and some whack job pulls a gun. Takes a shot at Teddy. But guess what? The bullet hits the speech Teddy has in the pocket of his overcoat. Fifty pages long, folded in half. The speech stopped the bullet. Slowed it down, at least. And I think there was a metal eyeglass case involved.

“Anyway, Teddy survived. The bullet only went in him about three inches, it didn't get past the chest muscle. It didn't hit the heart. That speech saved his life. And get this. Teddy went ahead and gave the speech, on schedule, before he let them take him to the hospital. He told the people in the audience about the bullet. His exact words: ‘It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!' ”

It was a good story, if it was true. But Shake didn't know what any of it had to do with Egypt or some guy selling conflict antiquities on the black market.

“It's a good story,” he said. “Is it true?”

“Of course it is,” Quinn said. “Teddy didn't win the election, though. It's a better story if he had. He never won another election, sad to say.”

“What does Teddy Roosevelt have to do with Egypt?” Gina said.

According to Quinn, the king of Egypt, back when there was still a king of Egypt, right after the Second World War, was a nut for American historical memorabilia. He bought everything he could get his hands on. An oar from the boat George Washington used to cross the Delaware. Grant's last cigar, the stub of it. The bloodstained cards that Wild Bill Hickok was holding—the original dead man's hand—when he got shot.

When the king was forced to abdicate in the fifties, the new government didn't know what to do with his collection.

“We're talking a lot of valuable items,” Quinn said. “The Smithsonian would have killed Wild Bill Hickok all over again to get their hands on those aces and eights. Not to mention the Bull Moose speech with the bullet hole through the middle of it. But the Egyptians were pissed, they're still pissed, as a matter of fact, because half of ancient Egypt is in museums somewhere else. The archaeologists who dug it all up, you know this, they were foreigners. They took the best pickings home. London, Berlin, Rome. You know where the Rosetta stone is right now? The most important Egyptian antiquity in existence? It's in London. The British Museum.”

“So the Egyptians started their own museum,” Gina said. “A museum of American historical artifacts.”

“The lady gets a prize. Hardly anyone even knew about it. It was famous for a minute in the sixties. But who comes to Egypt to see Harry Houdini's handcuffs? They come to see the Sphinx.”

He swept a hand across the view.

“And then the revolution happened,” Shake said.

“That's right. Nobody paid any attention to some forgotten little museum. Well, somebody did. Somebody knew Teddy's speech was worth money on the open market and they nabbed it. Our rich expat probably picked it up for pennies on the dollar, and now he'll auction it off to the highest bidder.”

“Let me get this straight,” Shake said. “The conflict antiquity we came to Egypt to boost is a speech Teddy Roosevelt gave in Milwaukee.”

Shake glanced at Gina. She'd lifted her eyebrows up above her sunglasses.

“I know,” Quinn said. “Not your usual everyday score.”

“Well,” Gina said. “That's our specialty.”

She gave Shake a little bump with her knee and Shake couldn't help it—he caught himself wondering, for a second, if maybe she'd told the truth after all. If maybe she'd come to Egypt because there might still be something left between them.

She caught him wondering, and smiled.

“There's not a huge market for this sort of thing,” Quinn said, “from what I understand. But the players have serious money. The kind of people who can have anything they want, so they want what they can't have.”

Gina gave Shake another smile, another little bump with her knee.

Quinn stood up. “There he is!” he said.

A scrawny Egyptian guy, about Shake's age, hustled toward them, grinning. He had a big black mustache, a world-class mustache, and was wearing a dark gray suit two sizes too big for him. One of his teeth was missing.

“Mr. Quinn!”

“Mahmoud!”

Quinn stood up and they hugged. “How long has it been, you old son of a bitch?”

“Very long, Mr. Quinn, you old son of a bitch.”

“Now, hold on one second. I am in fact an old son of a bitch. So you may call me a crazy bastard, not an old son of a bitch.”

“Okay, you crazy bastard.”

They laughed and grinned and stared at each other. Quinn eyeballed Mahmoud's suit, two sizes too big and shiny at the elbows. Mahmoud eyeballed Quinn and then eyeballed Shake and Gina.

“And where are the remainder of your associates?” Mahmoud said finally. “That you mentioned?”

Of course,
Shake thought.

“Mahmoud here runs his own private security firm,” Quinn said, pointing, watching for Mahmoud's reaction as he said it. “That's what he's been telling me.”