Shooting the Sphinx (7 page)

“Tell me, Ari,” said Samir, flicking open his brass lighter and taking a furious drag. The tip of his cigarette burned red. “How did you pick me for this job? Did you first call Studio Giza?”

“Of course.” Ari admitted to having called the biggest and oldest film studio in Egypt.

“So why didn't you pick them over me?” Samir studied Ari carefully. Samir's suspicion of not getting paid would increase or decrease in the next minute. He would certainly quit if Ari gave a wrong answer.

“Studio Giza didn't call me back for two weeks. You called back the next day. You were direct, no nonsense. You got your bid to me in a week. One hundred and twenty-five thousand. Our accountants looked it over. It made sense. And, most of all … I trusted my gut.”

Samir took another drag. He tipped his ash into one of the sinks on the counter. “Your gut?”

“Right here.” Ari slapped his stomach twice. “My insides, my instinct. Also, I like to work with a guy who is on his way up and works harder than somebody who's already on top.” Ari stepped over to the counter close to Samir. Ari knew he had to crush any doubt that might have arisen in Samir's mind. “Are you worried about the money?”

“Yes,” admitted Samir. “I'm not Studio Giza. I must pay people in advance.”

“You think we're not going to pay you?” Ari unzipped the secret pocket in his pants and pulled out the packet of one-hundred-dollar bills Beth had given him. “Here's ten thousand dollars.” He slapped the green bills down on the red Formica counter. “In a few minutes, I'll have twenty thousand more. Go on, take it.”

Samir glanced at the door nervously. Anyone could walk in. Ari was playing a game of chicken: Here's my wad and I can throw it on a bathroom counter if I want. If I can throw it around like that, there must be more to come, was Ari's implication.

Samir didn't touch the money. He took another drag on his cigarette. “Ariel Basher. What kind of name is that?”

Ari smiled his big smile. He was glad Samir had moved onto the topic of Ari himself, where he could always play his strongest card. “It was Beshert, which means ‘Destiny' or ‘Fate' in Jewish. When my great-grandfather came to America, they changed it.”

“Why?”

“The officials wrote it down wrong, or they couldn't spell it, or they wrote it the way it would sound in English—who knows? I'm ‘Fate.' Ariel Destiny.”

“It suits you.” Samir was amused for a moment, just for a moment, then serious again. He gazed down at the money. “And Ariel? That was the name of the president of Israel.”

“It's an ancient name for Jerusalem,” explained Ari.

“Have you been there?” Samir asked. Ari could feel the hidden weight of the question, Muslim to Jew.

“I shot two movies there. I even shot in the Arab quarter before…” Ari wondered if he should have mentioned that.

“Before what?” Samir was probing, evidently testing Ari for some sign of Israeli nationalism.

“Before suicide bombs, before 9/11, before everything went crazy. You can't do that today,” said Ari.

“Why not?” Samir studied him for any hidden racism.

“Just use an Arab crew, you mean?” asked Ari.

“Not Israeli,” said Samir.

“Right.” Better get off this subject, thought Ari. “Like we're doing here on this film. This is the coolest job we can do. Shooting the Sphinx from a chopper? The first to try. How cool is that?”

“No one has ever done it.” Samir was pensive, considering Ari's words.

“It will make your reputation with foreigners, with the studios.” Sell him, seduce him, flatter him, thought Ari. “And you got that right away. You were quick.”

“To do something that has never been done before…” Samir was speaking more to himself than to Ari. Ari saw his opening.

“The first time is always hard. For anything, it's hard. Samir the Hammer, I chose you because I knew you would never give up.” Ari knew he had said the magic words. Like everyone else, Samir wanted to be wanted for himself, for his own eccentric skills, for his honor.

Samir ground out his cigarette on the floor, then he slid the bundle of money back along the countertop to Ari. “Keep this. If I need it later, I will ask you for it, but get me the wire transfer confirmation, please, so we do not lose time.”

“How much is this payment supposed to be?” asked Ari, picking up the money and stashing it.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” said Samir.

“It will come tomorrow,” said Ari.

“
Inshallah,
” they both said simultaneously.

 

Chapter 13

Ari spotted Don, the lanky Australian cameraman, and the squat technician, Charley Foster, as they walked toward the customs desk. They both recognized the stack of sixteen cases piled up against the wall outside the impound storage room, still guarded by President Mubarak's gigantic portrait. From the sour look on their faces, they both understood that something had gone wrong. The customs officials waved them through without a search. Ari and Samir stepped up to greet them.

“Don, Charley, this is Samir, our fixer.”

Charley rudely ignored the introduction. “And is that our camera?”

“So we're not flying tomorrow?” asked Don in his Australian drawl.

“No,” answered Samir.

The three Westerners moved away from Samir slightly. Ari, Don, and Charley were the most disparate of men: a New York Jew, an Australian surfer, and a Texan Navy vet. Off the job, they probably would never see each other. They probably wouldn't even like each other, but one fundamental principle drew them together. They had come halfway around the globe to get something and bring it back with them. For centuries the mantra of Western man was not just “hunt and gather” but also “extract.” This was the highest imperative, the very foundation of Western civilization. Whether they knew this consciously or not, every Egyptian was either a collaborator or an adversary, but never an equal partner, never one of them. Only they could return to the West bearing their prize.

There wasn't much else to say. Ari, Don, and Charley piled into Hamed's car and went back to Giza. The traffic had thinned for the night, so the trip to Mena House was quick. Ari gave them an hour to check in and clean up. Then he went to Don's room for a visit. Charley handed Ari a beer.

“I see you guys found the local bodega.” They toasted, clinking their bottles together.

“How'd Frank like the New York footage?” asked Don.

“Loved it.” Ari knew he had to lay it on thick, as he was about to hit them with a pay cut. What else could he do? Things had gone wrong. “The George Washington Bridge shot was fantastic.”

“And the Empire State Building?” asked Don, beaming proudly.

“Spectacular.”

“Statue of Liberty?” Don pressed.

“Eh, not so much. But two out of three. That's”—Ari raised his bottle and clinked Don's—“not bad. Listen, guys, Beth is going to want you to cut your rate.”

“Okay.” Don nodded easily. Ari wasn't worried about Don. He rode the wave, not the money.

“In half,” added Ari.

“Come on man!” Charley, true to character, objected gruffly and raised his beer bottle as if to hurl it at the floor. He didn't. Charley was all bark, and Ari knew that, too.

“When's your next gig?” Ari distracted him.

“Not till the end of the month. In Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.”

“The Petronas Towers. A James Bond flick,” added Don.

“Good,” said Ari, “gives me a few weeks to maneuver.”

“What's the plan?” asked Don. “How do you get our camera?”

Ari's answer was a question. “You guys got something for me?”

Don and Charley both reached into their pockets. Each man pulled out a ten-thousand-dollar bundle of hundred-dollar bills with the bank band still around them.

“We should keep this money and get on the next flight out of here,” said Charley bitterly. But when Don handed over his bundle, Charley reluctantly followed suit. At the moment he laid the packet of bills on Ari's outstretched hand, a dramatic sting of music played outside through the open terrace door.

Charley jumped. “What the hell is that?”

“It's the light show.” Ari laughed. “Come and get a load of this.”

The three men stepped out into the twilight. The lights on the Sphinx changed from white to green. A booming voice with a posh English accent echoed from the Necropolis into the night.

“You have come tonight to the most fabulous and celebrated place in the world,” the voice echoed off the pyramids. “Here on the plateau of Giza stands forever the mightiest of human achievements. No traveler, emperor, merchant, or poet has trod on these sands and not gasped in awe. For five thousand years I have seen all the suns men can remember come up in the sky. I saw the history of Egypt in its first glow, as tomorrow I shall see the East burning with a new day.”

Charley and Don stared out at the Necropolis dumbfounded.

“I didn't know the Sphinx was a Brit,” said Don.

“He also speaks French, Swedish, German, Italian. At nine o'clock tonight he's Japanese,” added Ari. “He's an international lion of mystery.”

 

Chapter 14

Back in his room, Ari knew he would have to call Beth in a few hours and tell her that he had made no progress on the camera. With the time difference, he didn't want to wake her up at four in the morning and ruin her sleep. He tried to nap for a few hours, but the bed seemed too big, too empty. If only she were there, he could calm her down, but from a distance, he couldn't predict how she would react. She was fundamentally a “no” person. Her job was to say no to risk, say no to mistakes, and rein in crazy filmmakers from burning through millions of dollars without a plan. And he had none.

Ari flopped around on the bed for a while. Sleep was impossible. He put his clothes on and went out for a walk. He left the gates of the Mena House, turning down several offers of dilapidated taxis, and strolled out onto the ancient road down the side of the Necropolis. The vast expanse around the pyramids was closed for the night except for the light show. The Sphinx was speaking Japanese; Toshiro Mifune's voice boomed through the Valley of the Dead. Tourist police, some on foot, some on camels, patrolled the pyramids and the smaller tombs that were still under excavation to keep the grave robbers away.

Ari skirted the wall around the pink, then green, then purple Sphinx. The café was still open to serve the handful of Japanese tourists at the late show. Ari asked for a mango juice. His stomach had held so far today, but he had eaten mostly rice. He didn't want to sit in the empty café with the waiter staring at him expectantly. He didn't want to buy a ticket to the light show, so he walked out onto the sand and found a large fallen stone against an ancient wall. He nursed his glass of juice listening to the guttural samurai Japanese.

Ari didn't like to think about himself or his life. He wasn't introspective. He had stumbled into film as a career and loved it. He was bored easily and hated routine. Each film was a new set of people, a new family. Each day was a different location, a different scene. The relentless stream of novel and unique problems that everyone hated was exactly what Ari loved. He was a problem solver, and film was all logistical challenge. How do you get the shot?

This vagabond life of hotel rooms, campers, soundstages, airplanes, riding around in vans, to scout or to shoot—he didn't mind it. He was full of energy. People liked him. They wanted him around, especially women. He heard people talk about him sometimes. They called him adolescent, a big teenager. He didn't care. He did hate gossip. He had no memory for it. “What you think about me is none of my business,” is what he used to shut people up when they were about to repeat something nasty about him to his face.

His last girlfriend, Molly, was a screenwriter on his previous film. He overheard her on the phone one day: “Ari's got a first-rate smile, but a second-rate brain.” Yet, as a writer, she hadn't seen him doing the impossible, the cinematic equivalent of finding water in the desert. At least Beth understood him. All of his career, he had never had a failure, a real disaster happen to him. What would that be like if he couldn't get back the SpaceCam? He wondered what he was going to say to Beth.

Ari sighed and put his half-full glass down on the rock. He'd had enough mango. He heard a sound, a crunching of the dusty sand. Ari looked at the wall behind him. There, in a gap at the bottom, were two gleaming eyes—the face of a little boy. He peeked out of a black rectangle where a missing stone left a tomblike hole in the wall. Eyeing Ari's glass, the boy looked like a wild animal come upon suddenly.

“I'm hungry,” said the boy in English.

Ari picked up the glass and handed it down to him. The child drank with a thirsty violence as if the liquid might escape. Ari took the empty glass back against some resistance. The kid seemed to want to keep it. Apparently feeling more at ease, the kid slithered out of the gap in the stone wall. He sat down next to Ari.

“I Mohamed,” said the kid.

“I'm Ari.”

Mohamed reached out his hand. “Shake?”

Ari shook his little hand.

“I like you,” said Mohamed.

“I like you, too.”

“Where are you from?”

“New York City.”

Mohamed, still holding Ari's hand, leaned his little head against Ari's shoulder. “Take me with you.”

“I can't do that.” Ari looked around for some kind of an adult.

Sadly, Mohamed lay his head on Ari's lap. Somewhere on the other side of the wall, Ari heard the sound of a soft moan, then, in German, “
Ich liebe dich…”

From the horror of recognition, Ari jumped almost involuntarily off the rock, sliding out from under the boy's head.