The Mark of the Assassin (34 page)
“Anything, my love?” she asked.
“No, petal.”
The Director’s ability to make love to a woman had been severely impaired, the by-product, he assumed, of a lifetime of lies and betrayal. She reached beneath his robe, taking him inside her long hands.
“Nothing at all?”
“Afraid not, my love.”
“Pity,” she said. “Shall I?”
“If you’re in the mood.”
“You
are
a silly boy, sir. Want to help or just watch?”
are
a silly boy, sir. Want to help or just watch?”
“Just watch,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
Her hand slipped between her thighs. She gasped sharply, her head rolled back, her eyes closed. For the next ten minutes he took her the only way possible, with his eyes, but after a while his mind drifted. He thought of Michael Osbourne. Of the failed assassination on the ferry. Of the man called October. It would be an interesting fight. One would not survive. If it was Osbourne who died, the Society would endure and Mitchell Elliott would make his billions. If it was October. . . . The Director shuddered at the thought. He had worked too long, too hard, for it all to fall apart. Too much at stake, too much invested, for failure now.
He turned his gaze on Daphne once more and found her brown eyes fixed on him. She had the straight, unobstructed gaze of a small child. “You went away for a few minutes,” she said.
Surprise flickered across his face; Daphne robbed him of all his old defenses.
“I watch too, you know. I want to know if I’m making you happy.”
“You make me very happy.”
“Is everything all right, love?”
“Everything is fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, quite sure.”
30
CAIRO
“My God, this fucking city.”
Astrid Vogel stood at the French doors, open to the cool winter’s dusk. There was a small balcony with a rusted wrought-iron railing, but Mr. Fahmy, the desk clerk, had warned that balconies had a way of falling off these days so, please, it is best you not stand on it. They had been in the hotel two days, and the toilet had stopped working three times. Three times Mr. Fahmy appeared, in jacket and tie, armed with a roll of packing tape and a coil of copper wire. The hotel had no handyman, he explained. All the good handymen were in the Gulf—in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or the Emirates—working for oil sheikhs. Same with the teachers and the lawyers and the accountants. The professionals and the rich had fled. Cairo was a crumbling city of peasants, and there was no one qualified to repair it. Then the toilet would flush, as if on cue, and he would smile sadly and say, “It is fixed,
inshallah,
” even though he knew he would be back again the next day with his elixir of packing tape and copper wire.
inshallah,
” even though he knew he would be back again the next day with his elixir of packing tape and copper wire.
The evening call to prayer started up—first a single muezzin, very far off, then another and another, until a thousand crudely amplified voices screamed in concert. The hotel was next to a mosque, and the minaret rose just outside their window. That morning, when the thing began blasting away at dawn, Astrid startled so badly she grabbed her gun from the bedside table and rushed onto the balcony nude. Astrid was a devout atheist. Religion made her nervous. In Cairo, religion was everywhere. It enfolded you, surrounded you. There was no escaping it. Her solution was to flout it. That afternoon, when the muezzin’s call started up, she took Delaroche to bed and made frenzied love to him. Now she listened to the call as a marine biologist might study the mating sounds of gray whales. She realized it was vaguely musical, harmonious, like one of those simple fugues where one violin plays the same series of notes after another has finished. “Cairo’s Canon,” she thought.
The call died away until one voice hung on the air, somewhere in the direction of Giza and the pyramids, and then it too was gone. Astrid remained in the French doors, arms folded beneath her breasts, smoking a beastly Egyptian cigarette, drinking ice-cold champagne because the hotel was out of bottled water, and the tap water could kill water buffalo. She wore a man’s galabia, sleeves rolled up, unbuttoned to her navel. Delaroche, lying on the bed, could see the faint outline of her mannequin’s body through the translucent material of the white gown. She had purchased it earlier that day in a souk near the hotel, drawing attention the way only a five-foot-eleven German blonde can in the sexually repressed streets of Cairo. For a while Delaroche thought he had made a mistake letting her loose, but it was winter, and there were thousands of Scandinavian tourists in town, and no one would remember the tall German woman who insisted on buying a peasant gown in the souk. Besides, Delaroche liked walking the throbbing streets of Cairo. He always had the sensation of moving through other cities—now a corner of Paris, now an alley of Rome, now a block of Victorian London—all covered with dust and crumbling like the Sphinx. He wished he could paint, but there was no time for it this trip.
The night wind drifting through the open doors smelled of the Western Desert. It mixed with the stink that is unique to Cairo: dust, rotting garbage, burning wood, donkey shit, urine, exhaust from a million cars and trucks, toxic fumes from the cement works of Helwan. But it was cool and dry, wonderful on the bare, damp skin of Astrid’s breasts. Dust collected on her face. It was everywhere, gray, fine as flour. It worked its way inside her suitcase, her books and magazines. Delaroche was constantly cleaning the Beretta left for him in a Cairo bank safety deposit box. “The dust,” he would groan, working an oiled rag over the barrel. “The goddamned dust.”
Astrid liked the window open—the air conditioner was broken, and nothing in Mr. Fahmy’s bag of tricks could fix it—but the maids always sealed the room tight as a sarcophagus. “The dust,” they would say, by way of explanation, rolling their eyes at Astrid’s open window. “Please, the dust.”
She ventured onto the balcony, ignoring Mr. Fahmy’s dire warning. Below her, men pushed silent cars around a choked, narrow street. A million cars in Cairo, and Astrid had not seen a single real parking garage. Cairenes had developed a perfectly insane stopgap measure: They simply left their cars in the middle of the street. For a handful of crumpled piasters, clever entrepreneurs would watch over a car all day, rolling it about, making room for others. Many downtown side streets were impassable because they had been turned into makeshift parking lots. Across the street, next to the mosque, an office building was slowly collapsing. Rather than take the furniture out in an orderly fashion, workers were simply throwing things out windows. Twenty soldiers, peasant boys from the villages, sat at the foot of the doomed building, cooking over small fires.
“Why do they put soldiers outside the building, Jean-Paul?” she asked, watching the spectacle.
“What?” Delaroche shouted from inside the room.
Astrid repeated herself, louder. Conversation, Cairo style. Because of the deafening cacophony of street noise, most conversations were conducted by shouts. This made planning Eric Stoltenberg’s assassination difficult. Delaroche, for reasons of security, insisted they talk on the bed, face-to-face, so they could speak softly, directly into each other’s ears.
“They put soldiers there to keep pedestrians away from the building, in case it goes without warning.”
“But if the building goes without warning, the
soldiers
will be killed. That’s insanity.”
soldiers
will be killed. That’s insanity.”
“No, that’s Cairo.”
A cart entered the street, pulled by a lame donkey. The driver was a small boy, blond, green eyes, dressed in a filthy robe. Garbage spilled from the bed of the cart. The soldiers taunted the boy and threw scraps of bread at the donkey. For an instant Astrid thought of getting her gun and shooting one of the soldiers. She said, “Jean-Paul, come here, quickly.”
“Zabbaleen,”
Delaroche said, stepping onto the balcony.
Delaroche said, stepping onto the balcony.
“What?”
“Zabbaleen,”
he repeated. “It means the rubbish collectors. Cairo has no sanitation, no official system of trash removal. For years the garbage was simply thrown into the streets or burned to heat water in the baths. In the thirties, the Coptic Christians migrated to Cairo from the south. Some of them became the
zabbaleen.
They earn no money, only the garbage they collect. They live in a village of garbage in the Mokattam hills, east of Cairo.”
he repeated. “It means the rubbish collectors. Cairo has no sanitation, no official system of trash removal. For years the garbage was simply thrown into the streets or burned to heat water in the baths. In the thirties, the Coptic Christians migrated to Cairo from the south. Some of them became the
zabbaleen.
They earn no money, only the garbage they collect. They live in a village of garbage in the Mokattam hills, east of Cairo.”
“Jesus Christ,” she said softly.
“Time to get dressed,” Delaroche said, but Astrid remained on the balcony, watching the boy and his garbage.
“I don’t like him,” she said, and for a moment Delaroche wasn’t certain if she were talking about the
zabbaleen
or Eric Stoltenberg. “He’s a cruel bastard, and smart too.”
zabbaleen
or Eric Stoltenberg. “He’s a cruel bastard, and smart too.”
“Do it just the way we planned it, and everything will be fine.”
“Don’t let him hurt me, Jean-Paul.”
He looked at her. She had killed a dozen people, lived her life on the run, and yet she still became as frightened as a small girl at times. He touched her face, kissed her forehead softly.
“I won’t let anyone hurt you,” he said.
They looked up. A large wooden desk teetered on a tenth-floor balcony of the condemned office building. It hung there a moment like a passenger clinging to the rail of a sinking ocean liner, then crashed to the street, shattering into a hundred pieces. The
zabbaleen
’s donkey bolted. The soldiers scattered. They looked up and began shouting in rapid Arabic, shaking their fists at the men on the balcony.
zabbaleen
’s donkey bolted. The soldiers scattered. They looked up and began shouting in rapid Arabic, shaking their fists at the men on the balcony.
“Cairo,” Delaroche said.
“My God,” Astrid said. “What a fucking city.”
The hotel elevator was an old-fashioned lift, threaded through the center of a spiral staircase. It was broken again, so Delaroche and Astrid had to wind their way down from the seventh floor. Fahmy, the eternal desk clerk, shrugged his shoulders in apology. “Tomorrow, the repairman comes,
inshallah,
” he said.
inshallah,
” he said.
“Inshallah,”
Delaroche repeated, in a perfect Cairene accent, which Fahmy acknowledged with a formal nod of his bald head.
Delaroche repeated, in a perfect Cairene accent, which Fahmy acknowledged with a formal nod of his bald head.
The lobby was quiet, the dining room deserted except for two aproned waiters silently pursuing the dust. Delaroche found it depressing and vaguely Russian, with its long tables, curled meat, and warm white wine. Astrid had wanted to stay in one of the big Western hotels—the Inter-Con or the famous Nile Hilton—but Delaroche insisted on something more secluded. The Hotel Imperial was the kind of place guidebooks recommend for adventuresome travelers who want to get a taste of “the real Cairo.”
Delaroche had stolen a motorbike: small, dark blue, the kind of scooter young Italians use to race round the streets of Rome. He felt slightly guilty, for he knew some Egyptian boy had worked three jobs and saved years in order to buy it. He put Astrid in a cab and in rapid, precise Arabic told the driver where to take her. Delaroche roared off on his motor scooter, Astrid behind him in the cab.
Zamalek is an island, long and narrow, which the Nile surrounds like a moat. It is an enclave of Cairo’s wealthy: the residue of the aristocracy, the young rich, a clique of Western journalists. Dusty apartment houses rise above the corniche and stare disapprovingly across the river toward the noise and chaos of downtown. Below the corniche, along the water, is an embankment where the liberated youth of Zamalek screw into the early morning. At the northern tip of the island lie the cricket fields and tennis courts of the Ghazira Sporting Club, the playground of the old British elite. In the shops and boutiques of Zamalek one hears the French brought to Cairo by Napoleon. The inhabitants wear Western clothes, eat Western food in restaurants and cafés, and dance to Western music in discotheques. It is the other Cairo.
Eric Stoltenberg lived on the top floor, the ninth, of a building overlooking the river. His neighbors complained about his loud parties and the mating sounds of his constant conquests. He ate dinner each night in one of Zamalek’s fashionable restaurants, then stopped at a nightclub called Break Point to do his late-night drinking and hunting.
It was all in Delaroche’s dossier.
The Break Point had a doorman and a statutory line, like a New York club. The doorman selected important clientele and pretty girls for quick entry. Eric Stoltenberg fell into the first category, Astrid Vogel the second. Delaroche, single male, attractive, mid-forties, had to wait ten minutes. He immediately went to the bar. In Cairene-accented Arabic he ordered Stella beer, the Egyptian brew. In the nightclub, with its murky lights and pall of smoke, he could pass for a certain kind of upper-class Egyptian.
He paid for his beer and turned around to face the room. The place was filled as usual: scantily clad Egyptian girls who would sleep with strangers, boys who would do the same, a few high-class tarts, a smattering of adventurous tourists who couldn’t stand another evening in the dreary bar at the Nile Hilton. A pretty girl asked Delaroche to dance. He politely refused. A moment later her guardian angel appeared, a rough boy with a leather jacket and tight-fitting shirt to prove he lifted weights. Delaroche murmured something in his ear that made the boy immediately leave the bar, pretty girl in tow.
Astrid was dancing with Stoltenberg. She wore one of the black skirts purchased in London and a tight-fitting black pullover. She was a tourist named Eva Tebbe, born in the East, who spoke German with a Saxon accent. Astrid and Stoltenberg met the previous night, when she had come with Delaroche, who posed as a Frenchman from her tour group. Stoltenberg flirted with her relentlessly. She had two days left in Cairo; then it was off to Luxor. Stoltenberg had tried to pick her up, but she sadly declined, saying the little Frenchman would be furious. Tonight she was supposed to be alone, which is why Delaroche didn’t want to dance and why he remained at the bar in shadows.
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