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“Dry up,” Ozgur said, dropping a green towel on the poolside.
Hector climbed out of the pool and picked up the towel. “Somehow I was expecting you.”
“Put some clothes on.” Ozgur turned and sat in the chaise lounge, one suede on the slate-gray tiles. “And don’t wake her. You got a fine piece in there. You must be working really hard to please her.” He circled his finger to indicate the superb penthouse suite. “Don’t take too much time, buddy. We’re kinda running out of it.”
* * *
Yubi hated covers. Always a messy sleeper, she would kick the sheet, blanket, and bedspread to the floor. It only took a man in her bed to stifle this pent-up revulsion of bedly restraints. Only in a man’s arms was Yubi complacent. Some incident in her childhood, she’d told him, her father saving her from her mother’s punishment or some such Electra theme.
That was why she liked older men.
Wasn’t that what she told him?
Hector pulled the sheet and coverlet from the floor and spread them gently over his wife. He tucked the edges under her elbow and knees.
Yubi opened her eyes. “Where’re you going?”
“Get some air, sweetie.” He kissed her forehead. “I won’t be long.”
“Have you been smoking?”
“Sorry, babe. I need to get some air.”
She closed her eyes, and Hector skirted the bed to the nightstand. Beside the Shiva statuette was his wallet, his charging iPhone, and the suite’s keycard. He dropped them all into his jeans’ pockets and checked his watch. One a.m. Let’s play, Ozzie, he thought.
Out in the hall he checked his phone. A few administrative emails, but only one missed call. Kero of all people. And one text, also from him:
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Hi Doc I’m looking for you to give you my novel! I found the door open so I left it there inside. It is on this small glass table in front of your couch. This novel is partly autobiographical based on our trip to Paris. It is a silly romance maybe you will not like it but please Doctor READ it QUICKLY. I need it back. I love you Doctor and wish you everything good. See you soon.
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Hector shook his head and ignored the text. Then he glanced at the lower deck. Ozgur was motionless in the chaise lounge in his light sandy suit and suedes, a frozen picture from the past.
Hector then thought of something. He stepped away from the balcony and heard six beeps before the voice answered:
“Yep.”
“You’re ignoring me,” Hector said.
Jeff hawked up phlegm and coughed. “Nope. Been kinda busy with the Egyptian drama that never ends. What’re you up to? Spying away, huh?”
“What have you got for me?”
“Royal flush. You’re spot-on with this guy. This one is like bin Laden, al-Zarkawi, and Mosa al-Damawy mashed into one son of a dog. He’s the most dangerous man on earth. You’ve nailed it, buddy.”
“And you say you hate drama?”
“It grows on you. Politics is nothing but drama, Hickey.”
Ozgur now flickered. He was growing impatient.
“So he’s in the clear?” Hector asked hastily. “And don’t call me ‘Hickey.’”
“Why, Hickey? She still talks about you. She loves you, man.” Sound of a chomp: some fruit, or a carrot. “Grinch. Grinch. Your Afanasy isn’t even Russian. He’s Ukrainian. I’m looking at his passport right now. Blue. Emblem looks like a goat in a witch sermon. Grinch. Grinch. I made some calls. My sister’s fiancé—”
Ozgur was already up.
“Get to the point, Jeff.”
“Okay. He went to some sinkhole on the Vorskla called Poltava Medical U. Redid three years. Graduated by a miracle in eighty-four. After that, he got a B-one visa to visit his brother in San Fran. Broke it. USMLE board exams: failed twice. I’m telling ya, this guy is lucky to have a job at all—”
Ozgur was walking.
Hector dashed to the kitchen. “Yeah, yeah. Carry on.”
“Pizza delivery, cleaner at a mall, the whole illegal immigrant enchilada. Paid some chick to marry him. He wanted a green card. Rejected. Got deported in eighty-seven. Marital status: divorced. I’m reading the State Department file on him. You wanted me to give this guy a scholarship? Screw you.”
“So he came to Cairo to be a doc?” Hector said. “What a stupid idea. How?” His rye blue cheese sandwich was there.
“Ask your dean. She gave him the job: met him at a conference in Kiev, and he boarded the same flight over with her.”
“Why would she do that?”
Footsteps in the hall. The suedes stopped.
“Grinch. Grinch. Why do you think? American university in the Middle East. Pay is too low for a real doctor from the States. He looks white enough and he’s desperate.”
Hector sank his teeth into the cold rye bread. “No Russian connection, eh? Grind. Grind. Who knows, they could’ve recruited him along the way.”
“Would you?” Jeff said sarcastically.
Fair enough. Hector thanked him and ended the call.
The cheese was soft and buttery, a mold bomb in his mouth. And when Ozgur came in, Hector proffered, “Want a bite?”
Ozgur shook his head and turned back. Hector followed him.
* * *
They walked somberly back to the lower deck. In the ferny hedge, there was a discontinuity: the wire net carefully clipped, sharp edges bent, allowing a hole they squeezed through.
Now they were on a terrace of sorts. Behind them a two-story complex—the octopus’s siphon—stood before a narrow view of the Bay and the Royal Botanic Gardens. Centering the terrace was a big circular tub glowing in green. Flower pots dotted its circumference, and a woman was lolling there. Green bikini, blonde, French, a prodigy in environmental science. A cigarette was burning in her fingers, sending a smudge up to heaven.
“I booked the flights,” she said to Ozgur, almost defiantly.
Ozgur walked on silently.
Hector said, “Nice flowers,” and followed suit.
When they reached the complex’s side door, the same girl from the Embassy—the mask-fit criminal—emerged through the French window. She was wearing a yellow bikini and carrying a martini glass with an olive pick.
“Hi,” she said jauntily, devouring the olive. She giggled and hurried, unsteadily, off to the tub.
“Langley will go bankrupt,” Hector said to Ozgur. “Do you have any idea how much this hotel charges a night?”
“The Pulauis are covering it all,” Ozgur said glumly. “Besides, ask yourself. Who’s paying for your stay?”
“Prince Mohamed,” Hector answered simply.
“I didn’t know you were lovers.”
“It’s his farewell present. I’m leaving the Institute soon, you know.”
Now the same agricultural attaché—the second mask-fit criminal—eased out onto the terrace from the lower floor of the complex. He folded his arms and breathed in the haze-free air. “Shame it’s such a good night. How long are we staying for, sir?” he asked Ozgur.
“As long as it takes you to pack up,” Ozgur answered.
He walked out of the door, and Hector followed.
* * *
The octopus’s siphon drained into a different tentacle. This side faced east. As the elevator descended, Hector was mesmerized by a sweeping view of the Bay. Its Jubilee festivities. Its stock of toy ships. And, blotting out the rest, the murky beyond: the South China Sea.
The view was so breathtaking that Hector didn’t notice the elevator had stopped, the door opened, and two passengers had walked in.
“I see zis and I think Paris after dark,” a tenor voice said behind him.
Hector turned and was briefly stunned by a phosphorous blow of blue. The man standing before him was wearing a laughably garish shirt. He was a paunchy fellow with the broad, low-slung build of a veteran weightlifter. His head was big and bald and acne-scarred, punctuated by a pair of small, dark eyes. Eyes that were puzzlingly, if not mystically, cold. Eerie detachment shone from them, and his smile didn’t take away from that.
He’d gotten sturdier and meaner with age, but the eyes remained the same. Hector knew who he was. Or at least who he had been.
“I do not blame you,” the starshy leytenant Hector and Ozgur had monitored for two weeks in Paris, eight years ago, said. He crept closer under Hector’s nose. “I struck with glory vhen I come here. I here four days. Zis island is miracle in time and destiny. I vish I have voman here.” And the leytenant let out a sonorous laugh: It too didn’t assuage the rotten vibe coming off him. (For who laughs with open eyes!)
Ozgur stuck out his hand to the leytenant, the Bay’s panorama quickly slipping out of view, imploding into tawdry glimmers, street lights and car lights. “Kerry Grant,” Ozgur said, shaking the man’s hand. “Have we, by any chance, met before? You look a little familiar,” he added with a phony smile.
Hector was so taken by the leytenant’s presence that he hadn’t noticed the other man until now. That one stood back by the dial pad. He was a brown-haired, six-foot fellow about Hector’s age, dressed in a blue aloha shirt, black gabardine shorts, and matching leather sandals. A pair of pilot sunglasses covered his eyes, making him look passive-aggressive.
Ozgur dismissed him completely, narrowing his gaze on their old booby-trap defector.
“I do not think ve met, no,” the leytenant—whatever his rank was now—responded, his hand resting longer than usual in Ozgur’s hand. “Cary Grant like in cinema? Ha ha ha. You like Charade I vonder. Got many names like in movie picture. Ha ha ha. You like me then, love beautiful vomen. Audrey Hepburn. She crushed my heart vhen I vas teenager.” The man whose heart Audrey Hepburn had crushed slapped Ozgur’s shoulder in camaraderie. “Glad to make acquaintance, Agent Grant.”
The elevator’s door opened. The Russians stepped out.
“Pakah!” Ozgur called after them.
But neither pakahed back.
* * *
Hector had expected one of the thousand hawker centers strewing the island, but this restaurant was Thai. It was only a three-minute walk from the hotel, and it had the air of a Cairo café. A dozen tables or so occupied the sidewalk. Same illicit, ad-hoc feel.
They opted for the more distant of two available tables, and soon the waiter materialized beside them: a thirty-ish man with a broad Stalinistic mustache and glistening brown skin, his gut stretching his yellow polyester polo, armpits sodden with sweat.
Ozgur ordered pad noodles and a butter chicken sandwich, and Hector only coffee. Two minutes later, the waiter came back with the orders. Pad noodles was a mix of fried noodles, bean sprouts, tofu, chopped green onion, beaten egg, soy sauce, and chili powder on top. And the chicken sandwich had a lot of big onion tranches bulging out of it. Hector’s coffee was a typical Southeast Asian kopi, heavy with milk and sugar.
Ozgur’s teeth ground the food with relish. The noodles squirmed in his lip. And slowly, a sore smile manifested.
“So,” Ozgur said.
“So,” Hector replied.
“Quite the company we had in the elevator. Any insight?”
“You’re the one who’s seen God.” Hector sipped his kopi.
“Even your humor is stale.”
“That’s authority for you. I was officially promoted today. I would’ve made it last year if the Company hadn’t fired me. But anyway.”
“Knock it off, will you?” Ozgur quickly scarfed down his noodles, sweat droplets breaking out on his forehead. It was getting warmer and a veritable stench heralded the haze’s comeback. But the atmosphere was lively. Customers plenty. And Pulau’s endless trees respiring, twigs rustling, fruit and flowers blossoming.
“Why the signal?” Hector asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“The perfume. Your secret night visit to my neighbor and replacement. What was that about?”
Ozgur turned to his butter-chicken sandwich, then he laid it down. “How do you know he’s your replacement?”
“Let’s say I have my sources.”
Ozgur was silent awhile, debating whether to eat his sandwich at all. He looked up at Hector. “Believe it or not, I wanted to warn you.”
“Against who?”
“Yourself. You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
Hector took a painful swig of his kopi and studied his old friend.
Ozgur pushed the sandwich away, giving up on it completely, and began, “Tell me—”
“I’ve nothing to tell you.”
“Do you have something not to tell me, then?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ask me,” Ozgur said. “I tell you my story, you tell me yours.”
“Okay,” Hector said. “For starters, I need to know where you went after you passed away.”
“Order another kopi,” Ozgur said. “This is going to take a while.”
* * *
“Everything starts and ends with a woman,” Ozgur said. “You come to life from a woman’s womb. You fight the world to get a woman. When you die, you also wanna make her yours. Your widow, your daughter, your bereaved mother. It’s always about you and her. Nothing more. When you’re a young stud, you fail to see that. But once you hit forty, everything becomes terribly clear. Life falls into a pattern. You see what you didn’t care to see. You see her. And mine was a girl I met eight years ago in Paris. You’ve seen her yourself. How not to fall in love!”
“Who’re talking about?”
“Sally. The environmentalist. My Frenchie. The mother of my child.”
“I don’t buy any of this.”
Ozgur pulled out his wallet and let Hector see a picture of a toddler, or old-enough infant, in an ornate pink romper. She had Ozgur’s wolfish eyes and his strong forehead.
A soft curtain fell before Hector’s eyes then lifted. He handed the wallet back to Ozgur.
“Her name is Courtney,” Ozgur said.
“Like the guy I mentioned yesterday?” Hector said dubiously. “Don’t you think this is too coincidental?”
Ozgur raised his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “Life has a mystical pattern, a code if you will. But my Courtney is eleven months old, and we live in Paris.”
“I was there in March,” Hector said dryly. “I would’ve dropped by if I knew the address.”
Ozgur went on. “Ever heard of a guy called Mosa al-Damashqy?”
Bloody Moses? Sure. A Syrian “martyr” who’d blown himself up in Damascus last year.
“He didn’t just blow ‘himself’ up,” Ozgur said. “He blew up Assad’s whole National Security HQ. The explosion killed Assad’s brother-in-law, two defense ministers, and a man called Suleiman, the godfather of Egyptian intelligence.”
“Thought he died of heart failure, in Cleveland.”
“Hah, how convenient! A year after the Arab Spring the man who knew everything about the region dies of a heart attack. But anyway, he was an Assad supporter. Not a good guy. Useful sometimes—remember the Algerian guy from Marseilles?—so good riddance.”
“I have one of his pupils riding with me on this trip,” Hector blurted out.
“Good word. ‘Pupil.’ Is that how you talk in Canada?”
“I’m American, Ozgur.”
“And Canadian. And Irish. And Armenian. We never forget. I remind myself I’m Greek every single day. But you know what I do when I feel lost? I check my pay stubs. Wherever they come from, that’s my home.” Ozgur gave Hector a penetrating look with his slate-gray eyes.
Hector was halfway through his second mug of kopi. He sipped silently, then asked, “The Egyptians: What’s their part in your story?”
“They have no part. They just happen to pass by. Suleiman is gone, so no more trouble. Lisa’s Crazy Horse will make sure they’re cooperative.”
“Then why the fuss over this Mosa al-Damawy episode?”
“Because you’re looking at him.”
Hector felt a tingling in his jaw. The kopi spilled over his pinstriped shirt.
“Bloody Moses,” said Ozgur, “the emir of the resistance! He cries to heaven and—lo and behold—it rains M-fourteens and RPG-sevens. He strikes a rock—Allah akbar!—we have sarin. No wonder Assad was frustrated. How could he beat a CIA prophet?”
Hector stared at the man sitting across from him, this old friend of his.
This twice-dead spook.
This symbol of the Syrian resistance!
And he was about to utter something—he didn’t know what—but Ozgur was faster.
“But that’s not where the story begins,” Ozgur said. “As I said, it starts with a woman. She was a silly teenage girl at the time. A girl Bloody Moses—before he was Bloody Moses—meets on a blown-up operation in Paris in twenty-O-five. Know which operation I’m referring to? Bin-go. It was your first run in the rain. Your baptism. Remember those funny clothes I brought you? Damn right. It was her! The Jewess from les puces de Clignancourt. You know me, I’m not the romantic type. But these things just happen. And for that reason, I ran away and avoided her for six whole years. Till I was burning in Syria. And where would I go? Yep, straight to Paris! Spy meets girl, they hook up, spy skedaddles. Perfect spy story. But not when the prophet is on a diet of sea salt and cumin, sleeping on explosions in Assad’s camp. Not when he’s preaching celibacy to horny jihadists. Not in those cold February nights—the Phoenician sky a waltz of winks, whispers in nightdress-red. Not when you drown in milky dimples and wake up wet and disgusted with yourself, and you are pushing fifty. Spy calls girl, and girl is pregnant. The spy stages his second death and becomes husband and father. That’s my story, Hector, and I can’t wait to hear yours.”
* * *
Yet Hector’s story was no match for Ozgur’s.
Ozgur’s Odyssey was finished, definite, indisputable.
Hector’s was still hazy. He had to clear it out before he could share it with anyone.
So he downed his second kopi and deflected. “That doesn’t explain the window.”
“What window?”
“The guardhouse.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?”
“I’m the one asking questions now.”
“And I’ve got no answers for you.”
Ozgur slammed his fists on the table. A customer turned and frowned at them. “Here I am,” Ozgur rasped, “talking to you in private before anybody can lay a hand on you. And what d’you give me? Claptrap. Let’s talk about your library adventure.”
“Guilty.” Hector raised his hands with a smirk.
Ozgur glared at him. “You’re finished, buddy! Legally, professionally, and—as far as I can see—mentally. So unless you’re suicidal, you should be grateful we’re having this conversation.”
“Arrest me now if you can,” Hector said.
Ozgur rotated his neck to see if anyone was watching them. “Do you know what you’re about to be accused of? It’s treason, idiot!” he hissed. “Please, Hector, let me help you. Turn yourself in. It’s not too late. We can figure out a way out of this.”
Hector stood up. He examined the kopi stain on his shirt, then said, “Next time, call before you show up.”
And he walked back to the hotel.