fifty-eight

“This is not about stealing junk from Cairo, kid,” Ollie said as Bear and Poor Nic continued interviewing Keys in his office. “It’s about revenge. I guess it’s time to clear some of this up.”

I looked at him. “Yeah, that would be nice.”

“Come on, kid. Follow me.” Ollie led me out of the office to the rear of the Kit Kat West and down into the basement. There, he made a beeline to an old covered steamer trunk sitting beside a wall full of Nomad Air Freight boxes like the ones we’d found in William’s basement. He opened the trunk without difficulty.

“Ollie, how come you can move things without any juice or anything?” I asked.

“Age, kid. And experience” He reached in and pulled out a shoebox full of old papers and photographs and dumped them onto a nearby table. “Take a look. Keys and me share a lot of history. And somewhere back there, there’s a killer and a spy.”

Ollie’s face was sullen and sad and in his eyes I could see him reminiscing over the pile of old black-and-white photographs. “A spy—like Eppler and Fahmy? Like in my vision when somebody killed Youssif?”

“Yeah, exactly,” Ollie said, handing a photograph to me. “Youssif was a good man—smart, a family man, and he didn’t like the Jerries. He didn’t like the Jerries one bit.”

“Tell me about him.” I looked at the photograph. It was of Cy, Claude, Keys, and William again; they were standing together on a stage surrounded by beautiful belly dancers. Between them was the mysterious belly dancer, Hekmet, from the original Kit Kat Club in Cairo. “What do these four have to do with Youssif?”

“Youssif was an archeology professor at the American University in Cairo. He was also a big-shot with the Egyptian Antiquities people—that much, Keys got right.” He reached out and touched the photo in my hand. “But that’s not why he was so important.”

His fingers closed on the photograph and mine at the same time. The room snapped shut.

The woman’s wail sent chills down my spine like fingernails on a chalkboard. “Laa, laa, laa!”

We were back. We stood in front of the three-story, pale stone building I’d visited last time, when the old mare and her rickety cart had waited while a strange man loaded it with two heavy chests. The mare and cart were already gone, and this time Ollie was beside me.

But the Ollie I’d left the Kit Kat’s basement with was not the man beside me now. His face was covered by a dark shroud—sad, removed, fearful.

“Damn, Ollie, I’ve already been here.”

He went toward the house and hooked a thumb at the side door. “Coming?”

“Inside?”

“Yeah, you should know how this started.”

“Sure. Okay. Start at the beginning.” I followed him and found what I didn’t want to.

Youssif lay facedown on the floor. He had close-cropped graying hair, and dark leathery skin—life had already left his eyes. His thobe was matted in blood from his shoulders to his waist. The room was a shambles of broken pottery, toppled stone statues, and papers littering the floor. Above him, a woman of indeterminable age lay across his head, holding it delicately as though she could retain the life that had already poured from his wound. Her wailing continued, and each cry stabbed me deeper and brought back my own last moments on this earth two years ago.

In the corner of the room, at the foot of a staircase, stood a toddler and his older sister. They stood there, mouths agape, staring at their mother as she erupted over and over with the sorrow the murder had delivered. Their faces were blank—stone—uncertain of what lay ahead without their father.

“That’s Tahira.” Ollie pointed at the woman holding Youssif. “His wife. I don’t know why she and the kids weren’t killed.” He turned and threw a chin toward the children on the stairs. “Tahira, Malek, and Aalia were hiding upstairs.”

The door banged open behind us and a man ran in. I recognized him even through the dark Egyptian night. He was younger, thinner, and wearing baggy tan cotton pants and a sweat-stained tan shirt, but it was OSS Captain Oliver Tucker.

“Oh, dear God, no, Tahira,” the younger Ollie yelled as he went to the Tahira’s side. He bent down and rolled Youssif over. “I’m so sorry. What happened? Who did this?”

The woman spoke in rapid Arabic and thrust her finger out, pointing outside. Then she stood and went to her children, gathered them before her, and delivered slow, moving words. When she was through, she addressed each child until they nodded and said, “Na, ‘am, umm.”

“What’s that all about?” I asked.

“Revenge,” spirit Ollie said. “She swore them to a blood oath. They must hunt down their father’s killer no matter how long it takes and no matter how many generations of their children it takes. He will be avenged.”

“Damn, they did that?”

The younger Ollie spoke to Tahira in Arabic and then bolted from the house.

We followed. But when we stepped out of Youssif’s house, we were not standing beside his dusty three-story home, but along a busy music-filled street where the aroma of grilled meat and fish hung in the air. Ahead of us, Ollie-the-younger stood in the shadows of a doorway and watched two men unload the horse-drawn cart the murderer had escaped in. The second man was neither Arab nor American and both men spoke unguarded in dulled accents. An occasional loud word hinted of Germanic heritage and for the first time, I understood.

Youssif’s murderer was a German spy.

When the cart was empty and the two chests moved down into a dark alleyway, Ollie-the-younger moved in. He crept through the darkness—a .45 handgun now at his side—and disappeared down the alley after the two men.

“Remember,” spirit Ollie said, “we’re observers. We cannot interact. We cannot do anything. We watch and listen. Got that, kid?”

“I get it. I’ve got a little experience in this.”

We maneuvered down the alley for a hundred yards deep behind a row of dilapidated stone buildings. Spirit Ollie led me in a back door and up to the top story of the building that was empty but for a few broken pieces of furniture and stacks of discarded trash. On the second floor, in the corner of the room, the two men from the cart sat at a table dialing in a whiny, fuzzy military radio. They spoke German. One of them wore headphones and gave instructions over the radio, then he sat waiting for a response.

Of all I heard, the only words I understood were Salaam and Hekmet. I looked at Ollie. “Did you find out who the spy was?”

“Back in ’44—right now, that is—I was just about to when I ran into a little trouble.” Spirit Ollie winced when an outcry reached us from the first floor.

“What about—”

“Shush.”

Him, too?

We returned to the first floor in time to see two new men—both dressed in Arab attire—kicking and stomping Ollie-the-younger on the floor. His face was bloodied and his body contorted as he took the savage attacks over and over.

“No! Stop!” I tried to rush forward, but my feet wouldn’t take me. “Stop this, Ollie, stop it!”

“We can’t, kid. You know that. It happened seventy years ago.” He turned away. “And it happened to me. So trust me, it’s gonna happen—it did happen.”

The attackers rained down kicks and brutal heel-stomps. One of them found an old board amongst the trash and used it for a thorough thrashing. When Ollie-the-younger stopped moving, the men continued their attack for another few moments. They tired and stopped, then retreated to the front window and looked outside—checking that his torment hadn’t attracted any unwanted passersby.

He made his move.

Ollie-the-younger staggered to his feet and made a hobbled run for the back door. He’d made it into the doorway when the pistol shot cracked from behind him. The shot slammed into his back. He staggered through the door and into the darkness.

“No!” I tried to run to him, but the room was already spinning. “We have to help him. We have to go back.”

“No point, kid, no point. It’s been over for decades.”

The photograph wavered in my hand and its dull black-and-white images drifted in and out of focus until they coalesced into the men and the belly dancers. Ollie sat on the steamer trunk watching me.

“Understand now?”

Did I? “That German spy killed Youssif. The killer was part of a spy ring. So how do Keys, William, and the others fit into all this? Are you saying …”

He nodded. “You know about Operation Salaam: Eppler and Sandstede, the two German spies, sneaked across the desert into Cairo.”

“I get that.”

“What you don’t know, and what no one knows but me …” His face formed a wry smile. “There was a third German spy who sneaked into Cairo in ’42 with them. Eppler and Sandstede were captured early on, but not the third one. He was never caught—never.”

Holy Mata Hari. The images of Ollie-the-younger being beaten, the German shooting him in the back—it all sent a wave of anger raging through me. “Do you think Keys and William and their pals had something to do with that? Are they part of it all?”

He shrugged. “Somebody was. I got wind the third spy set up a new network out of a houseboat on the Nile. Me and Youssif were hunting him.” He tipped his ball cap onto the back of his head. “Youssif knew Eppler years before, when he went under the name Hussein. He also met several of Eppler’s old pals and he worked those contacts trying to find this third spy. That’s why I went to see Youssif that night. He thought he found the third spy and had arranged a meeting. He never should have involved his home and family. But he told me about it too late to change it.”

“That’s why Youssif was so important to you.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked away. “After the war, OSS became the CIA. So did I. I kept looking for him. I used CIA’s resources and networks. I owed Youssif that much; OSS owed him that much.”

“Is that what happened to you? Did they kill you that night?”

“No, kid.” He smiled a faint, hollow smile. “I told you, I don’t know who killed me. Besides, I didn’t die in Cairo—but I did get another purple heart. No, somebody did me eleven years later.”

“Your murder has to have something to do with Youssif, right? That’s what’s so important about him?”

“No, that’s not why.” Ollie turned and walked away into nothing, leaving only his tired, sad voice behind. “Youssif Iskandr is important because he was my friend.”