Shooting the Sphinx Read online

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  This book is dedicated to those courageous people in Egypt who faced down tyrants twice, then were so cleverly tricked out of democracy. May they find it again some day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For a debut novelist, the excitement that comes with seeing your first advance check, your first uncorrected proof, your first blurb, your first book cover, and your first encounter with a pleased reader fills you with a childlike glee and a deep sense of gratitude to everyone who believed in your book.

  First and foremost, I have to thank Bob Gleason, my editor, who agreed to read this manuscript unsolicited over a glass of wine at a book signing and ten days later told me he wanted to buy it. I have to thank Margaret Mclean, one of Bob’s authors, who introduced me to him, and Megan Carroll, who introduced me to her. Bob’s capable editorial assistants, Elayne Becker, Kelly Quinn, and Paul Stevens, at Tor/Forge shepherded me through the process of publication. Elisa Pugliese helped me with an initial cover design, and Dan Cullen designed the final cover. Ed Chapman and Meryl Gross copyedited the book. Eftihia Stephanidi took my author photo. My agent, Richard Abate at 3 Arts, handled the negotiation. And finally I have to thank the founder of Tor/Forge, Tom Doherty, an old-school publisher who decided to take a chance on an unknown author.

  The idea for this story was born at the Sundance Film Festival, where I saw the Oscar-nominated documentary The Square, about the Egyptian Revolution, by my friends Jehanne Noujaim, Karim, and Dina Amer. That film took me back to Cairo and started my mind churning over old memories of making movies there. My old friend and partner in crime, director Doug Liman, first sent me to Cairo to shoot a helicopter shot of the Sphinx for his movie Jumper and again to do more filming for the political thriller Fair Game. My gratitude also goes out to William Martin, Ambassador Joe Wilson, Whitley Strieber, Geraldine Brooks, and John Gill for their words of encouragement. And I must credit Fred Gilbert for a stanza of his old British music hall song “I’m the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” which some may remember from Lawrence of Arabia.

  My life has had various other directions than novel writing, yet I’ve always craved to write and be read. It’s taken thirty years to get to this point. Many people have aided me in that quest and helped me to get ready to write this work.

  Naomi Wolf edited my writing before this. Her rigorous notes made me a novelist. Malaga Baldi was my first agent and believed in me professionally before anyone else. Patricia Marx, Adam Langer, and Jane Rosenman taught writing classes that I took at the 92nd Street Y, as well as all my classmates there who edited my earlier work.

  Thanks to my friend Mary Frances Young, who was the first person to read Shooting the Sphinx and encouraged me by asking again and again for more chapters, spurring me on to completion even as the end of the book was being written. She told me that the ending was not right and had to be redone. Finally, this story started out as a play and might have stayed that way but for film director Oday Rasheed, who read it and told me he wanted to make a movie out of it. He worked with me as I wrote a film script, but there was just more to this story than a movie could hold.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Ari Basher, a film producer

  Charley Foster, an aerial camera technician

  Sal Montevale, a helicopter pilot

  Don, an aerial cameraman

  Frank Solomon, a top Hollywood director

  Elizabeth Vronsky, an executive producer

  Tom Cucinelli, a movie teamster

  Hamed, Ari’s driver in Cairo

  Farah Aziz, a graduate student and revolutionary

  Samir Aziz, Ari’s fixer

  Rami, a popular singer and revolutionary

  Walid, a fixer at Cairo International Airport

  Mohamed, a street urchin at the pyramids

  Glenn, Elizabeth Vronsky’s husband

  General Hanawy, president of Petroleum Air Charters

  Mustapha Shawky, his number two

  Farouk, an archaeology student and guide

  Dr. Hamoud Nesem, minister of archaeology

  General Moussa, chief of customs at Cairo International Airport

  Omar el Mansoor, the head of Studio Giza

  Ali, ticket taker of the Sphinx light show

  Major Horus, a helicopter squadron commander

  Khaled Nahkti, the biggest movie star in Egypt

  Leela, Samir’s wife

  Yasmine, Samir’s daughter

  Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority

  Sharif, ex-minister of tourism in Jordan

  Prince Amir, brother of the King of Jordan

  Princess Jala, his wife, an ex-journalist

  Wael, a driver

  Detective Kek, of the Cairo police

  PART ONE

  Allah has not promised us tomorrow.

  —Old Arabic proverb

  Chapter 1

  Ari Basher hopped out of a van into a blast of rotor wash at the Thirtieth Street Heliport. He hiked up his jeans and tried to keep the grin from devouring his face as he let himself into the gate through a tall chain-link fence. He loved to fly.

  A sleek white corporate Sikorsky S-76 had just touched down, the rotors still spinning overhead. A bored CEO in a business suit stepped out of the aircraft. He cast a grim dry glance right through Ari, who politely held the gate open for him. Ari wanted to ask, “Dude, why so serious? You get to soar over all the bus riders on your daily commute.”

  Instead Ari called out, “You’re welcome!” The businessman faltered, dazed by the radiance of Ari’s confident exuberance.

  “Thank you.” He cracked back a wan creaky smile of his own, rusty from disuse. Ari knew that he’d won the CEO over as he disappeared into his typical black SUV.

  On the other side of the large corporate Sikorsky, Ari found his ride, a smaller Eurocopter, and his team: Don, Charley, and Sal, the pilot.

  Charley Foster, a gruff, elfin ex-Navy F-16 mechanic, who had worked on aircraft carriers for years, was threading film into a special aerial camera inside a gray three-foot ball mounted on the nose of the chopper.

  Sal Montevale, a compact, bushy-white-haired Vietnam vet, who had been an air cavalry pilot and was now the dean of New York aerial photography, sat in his cockpit waiting. Ari waved. Sal had flown on Ari’s first job in the film business, twenty years prior, in the Hamptons. The star of the picture was supposed to steal a helicopter and buzz a crowd of extras at a lawn party. When the star stepped into the chopper, they had called “Cut” and slapped a curly blond wig on Sal’s head; Sal was the one who’d taken off, buzzing the crowd with low, shaky moves as if he didn’t know how to fly. The result was some gr
eat acting as the extras had run for their lives like Viet Cong in a village about to get hit.

  Don, the cameraman, sat in the backseat, a monitor and camera control console in his lap. Mellow and unflappable, Don was an Australian surfer who had somehow risen to become the top aerial cameraman in the world. They would all be spending a lot of time together in the coming weeks, so Ari expected that life story to come his way over a beer—or ten—in the hotel bar.

  “How we doing, Charley?” Excited to get in the air, Ari walked around to the front of the chopper and peeked over Charley’s shoulder at the camera.

  “I said we’d be ready by the time you got here, and we’re ready, so back off.”

  “I love you, too, Charley.”

  Charley shut the round three-foot SpaceCam housing, then grabbed his fist with his hand, a signal to Don that the camera was ready to fly. Don moved his controls up, down, left, and right. So did the ball on the nose of the chopper—like a giant eye with a tiny pupil. Ari spun his finger in the air as a signal to start the engine, but Sal was already flipping switches and easing the throttle in. The whine of the turbines spooling up and the smell of jet exhaust put the grin back on Ari’s face. He opened the door and stepped up into the right-hand seat beside Don so they both could see the monitor.

  “Can you believe they pay us for this?” Ari winked at Don.

  “Don’t tell the studios how much we dig it.” Don put his finger to his lips. “Or those greedy buggers might just start charging us to come to work.”

  Sal pulled on the collective and the rotors bit into the air, lifting the chopper off the ground. Ari hadn’t been in a chopper in a while, and the first sensation of helicopter flight always startled him a little. As a private pilot, he was used to flying a plane and feeling like he was sitting on top of something. A helicopter always made him feel a different center of gravity, a different weight, like he was hanging from a coat hanger stuck in the back of his jacket. Ari pulled a rough sketch of their flight path out of his pocket.

  “Sal, the director wants us to try this. To loop around over the middle of the George Washington Bridge.”

  “Sure.” Sal studied the drawing for a second. “Got it.”

  Don, too, memorized the pattern and nodded. Then he focused the camera downward, practicing moves: zooming in and out on moving cars below on the West Side Highway.

  They flew over tiny little people jogging in the park, biking on the streets, coming and going. Not one of them having as much fun as I am right now, thought Ari. Ain’t my life cool?

  “Here’s your bridge,” said Sal. The GWB loomed up in the windshield, an elegant massive structure, its two giant cables strung over pylons rising out of the Hudson River between the Palisades of New Jersey and Washington Heights on the New York side.

  “Ready, Don?” asked Ari.

  “Set.”

  “Roll it.”

  Like a dragonfly in slow motion, the little helicopter flew right over the middle of the bridge, its lowest point, then banked around and came back.

  “You get it?” asked Ari.

  “I can do better,” said Don. “The shot takes a long time to develop.”

  “Can you fly it faster, Sal?”

  “How much?”

  “As fast as you can. We’re going again.”

  Sal repositioned the chopper in the sky. He pushed on the stick and the craft surged forward, nose down. Again they crossed over the dip in the suspension bridge and banked hard left. Ari felt two Gs on his ass, then three as the weight of his body literally tripled in the tight turn. He watched the screen, figuring that he had about six takes in him before he lost his lunch. The chopper leveled out of the turn and crossed back over the bridge, returning to its starting point.

  “How was that?” asked Sal over his headset.

  “Eh,” said Ari. He wasn’t thrilled. “Let’s try it again.”

  The three men did the shot a few more times, but they knew collectively that it wasn’t special, just adequate. They shared one of those rare moments in movie-making when the best plans, the best people, the best equipment just don’t add up. The editor will end up hacking off the front and back of the shot and pick a fairly boring piece of footage, where the audience can see the whole bridge and know what it is. All this for nothing—movie-making was just like that, hours and days of work for seconds in the finished film.

  On take six, Ari looked out of the window to fight his nausea. He could taste a little bile on the back of his tongue. Sal and Don seemed fine and ready to go again. Ari looked down at the Palisades: sheer granite cliffs that dropped three or four hundred feet into the Hudson.

  “We’ve got to tell a story in every shot,” he said, almost to himself. “Sal, Don, cut. Forget this. We’ve got it as good as it’s going to get, and it’s going to wind up on the cutting room floor anyway.”

  Sal and Don looked at Ari like scolded children. The best of the best always internalize failure. Ari pointed down at the Palisades.

  “What if we start along the edge of those cliffs, really tight, and we don’t know where the hell we are. We could be in the middle of the Rockies for all the audience knows, then we bank, we find a piece of the bridge, see the river, follow the traffic really close, then descend down underneath the roadway; and, voilà! New York City is revealed as we drop beneath the bridge!”

  “Could work,” said Don, starting to visualize the shot in his mind. Sal grunted in agreement. He eased off the stick, banking wide over the river to come right to the edge of the cliff.

  They skimmed over the tops of barren winter trees sticking up from the craggy rock ledges, then banked out over the Hudson alongside a massive suspension cable dipping down below the roadways and their flow of traffic, to finally drop and find the distant Empire State Building dead on in the middle of the shot. The entire bridge looked as if it were balancing like a teeter-totter right on the very tip-top of the art deco building’s giant antenna, an optical illusion.

  “Yeah!” cried Ari. The three men grinned at each other like demons. They had bagged the big one, caught movie magic in the camera. “We got it!” Ari reached out and slapped his pilot and his cameraman on the shoulder. “We got the shot!”

  Chapter 2

  Ari sat in the darkened screening room watching his aerial footage with the other producers, the key crew on the film, and the director, Frank Solomon. There had been a lot of “oohing” and “ahhing” at the George Washington Bridge shots, but only one opinion in the room mattered: Frank’s.

  The film business was the last true feudal society, replete with droit du seigneur, courtiers—even court jesters. All things and all people revolved around the director in this aristocracy of creative commerce.

  Up on the screen, the next shot started at the top of an art deco radio mast, which, of course, turned out to be the needle of the Empire State Building. The camera passed right over the antenna’s tip and then tilted down a thousand feet to reveal tiny cars and buses on Fifth Avenue below. The effect stole your breath.

  Frank gasped in the front row. Elated, Ari knew the shot would make it into the movie.

  “Is that all?” asked Frank.

  “One more,” said Ari, holding up his finger. Empty sky popped on screen. A green spike came up from the bottom of the frame, then several other spikes appeared. They grew until everyone realized that what they were seeing was the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Her face rose slowly up, filling the screen. Her blind eyes were almost grotesque, even horrifying.

  “That close-up’s a little too close.” Frank stood, signaling the end. The lights came on. The projector stopped rolling.

  Ari looked around the small screening room. About a dozen producers and studio execs, the editor, the cameraman, the production designer, wardrobe, hair and makeup: every department that had something to do with the look of the film was present and waiting for a chance to ask endless questions of the director.

  Ari knew that he would only have a minute or two a
t most before the others jumped in, distracting Frank with tomorrow’s shoot questions, all more immediate than his own. In order to steal the director’s attention, Ari had come equipped with props: six plastic pyramids, a toy helicopter, and a kitschy little golden plaster statue of the Sphinx.

  “How’d you like the bridge shot?” Ari walked up to Frank.

  Frank didn’t nod, or even smile. He rarely paid anyone a compliment, but something on his face, some tacit shift in his expression betrayed that he did like Ari’s shots—very much.

  “Good,” was all Frank said. Yet Ari knew that one quiet “good” from Frank was worth a hundred superlatives from everyone else in the room. The producers started to crowd around.

  “Great stuff.”

  “Terrific!”

  “So much to choose from,” they said on the coattails of Frank’s approval.

  “When do you leave for Cairo?” asked Frank, shutting off the compliments.

  “Now,” answered Ari.

  “So soon?”

  Elizabeth Vronsky, the executive producer responsible for the business side of the film and its budget, stood up. She was taller than most of the men in the room and had a cool confidence in her ability to shoot down any risky idea. This ability always put everyone in that room, including Frank, on the defensive. She spoke for the studio in Hollywood. If Frank was the king of this film, Elizabeth was the queen.

  “The problem is…” began Beth. Ari dreaded his precious minute getting sucked up by what might go wrong with his work, instead of what had to be done. “… that we might miss our date at the Sphinx. We just got permission for only one day next week. We don’t know if we can get it again or how long that might take—”

  “Frank.” Ari cut her off by walking past her to the control console at the front of the screening room. “How do you want me to do the shot?” He quickly set up the little statue of the Sphinx and the plastic pyramids on the console, then held up the toy helicopter.