The Mark of the Assassin

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. De-laroche, 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