Shooting the Sphinx Read online

  Frank drifted over, drawn to the statue of the Sphinx.

  “One possibility,” continued Ari, “is that we start tight on the head of the Sphinx,” Ari held his toy helicopter up to the little gold statue mimicking a possible flight path, “so tight we don’t know where we are.…”

  Frank reached down and picked up the tourist trinket Sphinx. He brought it up to his weary eyes to study closely for a moment, his large impassive face dwarfing the little hand-painted golden lion like a witch doctor with a voodoo doll.

  “Where did they pick this up?” asked Frank.

  “In Cairo,” said Ari.

  Frank’s cell buzzed. He didn’t even have to look at it. “That’s our leading lady. I made a promise to come over to her hotel to discuss her lines for tomorrow, and we have a four thirty A.M. shooting call.” Frank stifled a yawn, girding himself to that thought, then tossed the Sphinx to Ari. “Astonish me. You always do.” Then Frank walked out of the room.

  “No pressure,” said Beth.

  “Oh, man.” Ari picked up his model pyramids. The other producers descended on him.

  They all chimed in at once. “What day is your permit for?” “Do you have enough time to pull this together?” “What’s your backup plan?”

  “I get the shot,” insisted Ari. “That’s my backup plan.”

  “And I’ve got something for you.” Beth started for the door. “Come to my office.” She didn’t wait to see if Ari would follow. He just did.

  Chapter 3

  Beth’s assistant was waiting outside the screening room door. She held up a folded check request form between her hands almost as if in prayer.

  “What’s this check for?” asked Beth as she started walking down the hall to her office. Ari and the earnest young novice fell in beside her.

  “They want to rent a camera crane for Monday,” said Beth’s assistant.

  “No,” said Beth.

  “But if we don’t get it picked up tomorrow, it won’t get on the truck for Monday morning—”

  “Tell them to call me.”

  “But … it’s Friday night,” stammered the assistant.

  “So what?” Beth turned on the fresh young thing. “I’m still here. You’re still here.” Beth pointed at Ari. “He’s still here.”

  “Beth,” Ari wanted to calm her down. “It is Friday night.”

  Beth turned her glare on Ari, then tore the check request in half and gave it back to her girl Friday.

  “I said no.” With that, she disappeared into her office.

  Ari gave it a second, then patted the quivering assistant on the shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, kid, Beth’s not angry with you. She’s not even angry at these clowns for asking for a crane at the last possible second in the work week. She’s angry at … someone else.” Ari winked at the assistant. “We’re all under a lot of pressure. Go fill out another check request. In half an hour she’ll get around to signing it.”

  Ari took a deep breath, as if jumping into an icy pool, and then slipped into Beth’s office, shutting the door and locking it behind him.

  Beth was already dialing the combination of her big safe, which was about the size of a wardrobe. She always wore new high-tech running shoes, crisp jeans, and a tight Lycra jacket, the zipper slightly open to accentuate her long neck. Her erect posture made her seem even taller. She wore no makeup, yet had a perfect white complexion, which was prone to red blotches just before she got angry. Ari had seen big macho union grips, electricians, and teamsters reduced to fidgety little boys under the gaze of her piercing gray eyes. Her straight red hair was always twisted into a bun with a pen stuck through it. She was a study in casual precision.

  With a clank, she pulled the handle and yanked open the heavy gray doors of the tall safe. Inside were stacks of hard drives, hundreds of them, containing in digital form all of the footage of the movie. On a small part of one shelf sat bundles of cash. She picked up some packets of hundreds and turned back to Ari, who reached out for the money.

  “Such a pleasure doing pleasure with you,” he joked, hoping she had calmed down a little.

  “Don’t you ever contradict me in front of my staff again.”

  “Beth, lighten up. Why tear up the kid’s forms? She’s just going to have to fill ’em out again when the key grip calls you in fifteen minutes to kiss your ass.”

  “And you cut me off while I was talking to Frank.” Her ice-gray eyes went wide.

  “So that’s what we’re really mad about here?” Ari tried not to betray his own nerves. “I only had twenty seconds of his attention.”

  “Just because you’re the director’s pet doesn’t mean you can cut me—”

  “Hey,” he interrupted, “I thought I was your pet?”

  “Don’t you pull that charm stuff on me.” She gazed at him, her anger wavering.

  He thought, she’s either going to slap me or … He moved in toward her slowly, almost imperceptibly. Whenever Beth got mad, Ari fell into a hypersexualized state. He could usually stop himself from acting on it, but sometimes he was overwhelmed with a sensation of falling or spinning and felt a strong urge to reach out and hold on. He kissed her suddenly, backing her up between the doors of the safe, biting any other words of anger out of her mouth.

  They kissed roughly, like vipers, for a few seconds, then, her anger spent, she caught her breath and held out a packet of hundred-dollar bills, swaying, a little woozy in his arms. Pink blotches blushed onto her cheeks and earlobes.

  “Only ten thousand?” asked Ari.

  “That’s the most you can bring, by law.” She composed herself, tore a petty cash chit off of a pad and pulled the pen out of her red hair, which spilled down around her shoulders. “Sign for it.” He let go of her. “Ari, we’ve got to stop doing this.”

  “I agree.” He didn’t mean it.

  “I’m a married woman.”

  “Right.”

  Beth collapsed into her chair. The months of high stress were wearing on her. Ari suspected that under normal conditions, she might not have noticed him, but in crisis, in emergency, he seemed to thrive, to enjoy himself. He had a perfect calm. Beth and others often drew relaxation from his presence like a drug. “Are we making the right move in Cairo?”

  “Of course.” He leaned over her desk, close enough to kiss her, and signed the piece of paper.

  Quivering with tension, she breathed in the charged air between them. He could taste her fear. “You will pull this off?” She looked into his blue eyes, searching for an answer. Her tough tomboy exterior was paralyzed.

  “When have I ever failed you?” He smiled his most radiant smile, trying to make all her worries seem trivial.

  “Are we thinking with our brains and not our…”

  “Balls?” He prompted her with a most immature possibility.

  She rolled her eyes, her anxiety falling away. “Not exactly the word I was looking for.” Beth slapped him gently on the face a few times, a love tap. “Just promise me.”

  “Anything.”

  “Don’t make me look bad with the studio.”

  “Baby”—Ari slid his fingers around her cheek, over her pink ear tip, and into her red hair—“no one could ever make you look bad.”

  “Oh god,” she groaned, “who writes your lines?”

  He answered her with another kiss while he checked his watch out of the corner of his eye.

  “What the…?” She caught him. “Were you just looking at your…? What time is your flight?” Worry suddenly creased her brow.

  “We still have a few minutes.” He grinned, then swiftly unzipped her jacket and pawed voraciously at the buttons on her white blouse.

  “Are you crazy?” She slapped his hands away. “People know we’re in here.”

  “We’ll just have to be quiet then.” He popped open the last button and reached behind for her bra.

  “Stop that!” she whispered. “Is your car here?”

  “What car?”

  “T
o the airport? Oh my god, we didn’t call you a car?” She reached for the telephone and started dialing.

  “I don’t need no stinkin’ car.” He took the phone out of her hand and hung it up. “Saving you money, babe. Always thinking of you.” He pushed her down on top of her desk and she surrendered to the calm caress of his roving hands.

  “But…” She stopped him. “How are you getting to the airport?” He simply answered her with a kiss as he pulled down his pants. He had no more time for talk.

  Chapter 4

  A rental truck pulled up in the dark outside the glaring light of the International Terminal at JFK. Ari hopped out of the cab. A couple of big teamsters climbed down after him.

  “Hey, Cooch,” Ari called to the driver, Tom Cucinelli, “you and Vinny meet me at the Lufthansa counter with all the camera cases, will ya?”

  “But the cops?” said Cooch.

  “They can’t tow you. It’s a five-ton truck.”

  “But Beth doesn’t like us getting tickets.”

  “Blame it on me. Tell her I told you to because I was running late. Tell her exactly like that and she won’t say a thing,” Ari called over his shoulder as he walked in.

  At the Lufthansa desk, Ari presented the ticket agent with a list: seventeen camera cases and their weights. Three of the cases weighed over one hundred and fifty pounds, and the heaviest weighed over two hundred.

  “That will be fourteen thousand six hundred and ninety-one dollars in excess baggage fees,” said the tall blond ticket agent, in a slight German accent. A fine-looking fräulein in her sharp Lufthansa navy blues, thought Ari as he produced his Amex card and held it out to her. The agent tried to take the credit card, but Ari didn’t let go.

  “And all this gear will be put on my flight?” asked Ari.

  “We cannot guarantee that all will be transferred through Frankfurt on to Cairo.” She seemed to have a certain frosty satisfaction in saying that. “The Cairo leg is almost full, and checked baggage is the priority.”

  “I am checking it.” She’s a passive-aggressive masterpiece, thought Ari. “I’m paying fourteen thousand dollars to check it.”

  “Any object over eighty-five pounds, we consider not checked baggage, but air freight. We cannot guarantee arrival at the destination for at least seven business days.”

  “A week?” He knew that that would screw things up in Cairo big time.

  “Maybe longer,” she said with a dry hint of sadism.

  Ari started to experience his vertigo sensation. A flirtatious smile took possession of his face. “I need this stuff in Cairo on Monday, all of it, together. It’s for a helicopter shot of the Sphinx.”

  Whenever things started to go wrong, Ari’s charisma instinctively buoyed him. His smile had become so hardwired into his personality that he couldn’t control it anymore. He couldn’t turn his charm off. He imagined leaning forward and kissing her right at the counter. Somehow she read his thoughts and she blushed.

  “Checked luggage must be our priority,” she replied, flustered but unmoved from a Teutonic adherence to the rules. He wanted to reach out and pull the hairpins out of the curled braids of gold hair that crowned her head. He had to consciously quash the impulse. Stop it, he told himself.

  “Does any airline treat two hundred pounds as checked baggage?” asked Ari, wishing he were on Air France.

  “Well…” She melted a little and glanced over suggestively at the EgyptAir counter.

  A few minutes later, Ari, his two teamsters, and two skycaps were standing next to two luggage carts piled impossibly high with black cases before a dark-haired, green-eyed EgyptAir ticket clerk with the bangs of a Cleopatra haircut.

  “Not a problem, sir,” said the Egyptian clerk.

  “But the heaviest is over two hundred pounds and takes four men to lift.” Ari smiled his smile.

  “Not a problem.” The clerk smiled back bigger, broader—a love fest.

  Most of the cases were too large to fit through the scanner, so all seventeen had to be wheeled straight past the TSA scanning area, lined up against a far wall, and opened in order to be hand searched. A male TSA agent with a hangdog face walked with Ari down the line of cases, about sixty feet long.

  “It’s a SpaceCam,” explained Ari, “a gyrostabilized camera that mounts on a helicopter.”

  The TSA agent stopped. “And what’s that?” He pointed down at one case, containing a lawn mower engine mounted inside a metal frame.

  “That’s nothing. Just a portable generator.”

  The TSA agent shook his head. “You can’t fly with it.”

  “Why not?” asked Ari. “It’s been completely drained of gasoline.”

  “Against the rules.”

  “Do I look like a terrorist?” Ari turned on the charm again.

  “And what does a terrorist look like?” asked the TSA agent.

  Ari frowned. “Cooch?”

  “Yeah, boss?” said the teamster.

  “Send this back where it came from.” Ari closed up the case and dragged it off the wall.

  Luckily for Ari, the EgyptAir flight was almost empty. He found a whole row of seats in coach on which he could stretch out. He took a pill, put in earplugs, and slipped a blindfold over his eyes. Getting away from the daily grind of months of sixteen-hour workdays on the main unit of the film did have its advantages, he thought as he sank into a deep exhausted sleep.

  Hours later he roused from a dream. The plane was flying through flames. Flames licked at the windows. The plane banked and weaved to avoid giant clouds of fire in the night sky. The pyramids lit up. The Sphinx came to life and leapt from the top of one pyramid to the next to escape the mounting conflagration erupting from burning, shifting desert sandstorms of fire rising up into the blackness like orange tornados.

  In a sweat, Ari opened his eyes. His ribs ached from the rise between the seats he lay across. He tugged at the flash of a turquoise skirt on a passing flight attendant. Stunned, the Egyptian stewardess spun around.

  “Sorry, sorry.” Ari pushed himself up, a little panicked. “I smell smoke. I think the plane might be on…”

  “No, no,” the flight attendant reassured him. “Look out the window.”

  Ari peered out into the blackness. Dozens of small fires dotted the night below. The plane was descending.

  “What are all those bonfires?” asked Ari.

  “Just another Egyptian celebration,” she explained as she turned away. Her crazy 1970’s turquoise stewardess skirt disappeared down the darkened aisle.

  Chapter 5

  Ari shivered in the cool night desert air as he stepped out of the plane onto the rolling jet stairway. The night sky was pitch black, starless and moonless. He scanned the runways, the tarmac, even the terminals, all very dark for a large international airport. Ari stepped aside letting the Egyptian passengers file by out of the glowing hatchway behind him. He turned back and looked along the underbelly of the plane. The baggage handlers opened up the cargo bay doors and started pulling out luggage. Lingering until he was the last of the slow groggy line, he followed the others down the steps glancing over his shoulder at the baggage piling up on the carts. Where are my cases? He thought. Where the hell are they? They’re so big wouldn’t they be the last things to load and the first to pull off?

  At the bottom of the jetway stairs, Ari squeezed into the only available spot on the crowded people mover as the glass folding doors closed behind him.

  “I can’t believe I’m in Egypt. I can’t believe I’m in Egypt!” said a teenage girl with a Long Island accent as Jewish as any in the Five Towns. Ari turned looking for a Jewish girl, but saw instead a petite dark-skinned Egyptian-American on tip-toes, craning her neck to see out the window, holding on to her parents. Her father, a short stocky balding man with a black goatee, held her arm to keep her from falling.

  “Wait ’till you take a drink of water from the Nile, darling,” said her mother with her own thick Long Island accent. “Then you’ll know you’re
in Egypt.”

  At passport control, Ari put down fifteen dollars for his Egyptian tourist entry visa, a large stamp that covered half a page in his well-thumbed passport. They do things big in Egypt, he thought, as he went to find baggage claim.

  The terminal had a 1970’s architectural vibe. Scattered around were gangs of porters loitering, sitting on large wooden wagons that looked like they must have been in use since the 1930s. The nearest gang of porters noticed Ari. Without a word exchanged, they gravitated toward him when the big black cases started to arrive, slid through a portal in the wall by baggage handlers. The porters stacked all sixteen precariously high on their cart.

  “Mr. Basher?”

  Ari turned around. He saw his name on a piece of paper held up by a smartly dressed young woman with chic cat’s-eye glasses. She was evidently his contact.

  “Please call me Ari.” He flashed his smile. “Are you from the Press Ministry?”

  “Yes, oh my…,” she said. Ari followed her gaze up at the towering wall of stacked cases. “That is a lot of equipment.”

  “Too much?” asked Ari as the porters pushed the squeaky, groaning cart under the omnipotent smile of President Hosni Mubarak. His framed portrait hung on the wall above.

  “This letter”—she held up a paper written in both Arabic and English—“says that you are making a documentary. I don’t know if the customs man will believe it.”

  As they walked in front of the sixteen cases to the customs desk, Ari saw Western tourists wheel their suitcases straight through, but the wealthy Egyptians pulled out of line. Customs officials directed them to lift their expensive luggage onto a table to search for dutiable items. What’s wrong with this picture? thought Ari. The rich are actually getting soaked.

  The towering wagonload of equipment cast a psychic shadow over the entire customs section. All the customs agents seemed to lean in and cast furtive glances toward Ari and his mountain of gear. A ferret-faced agent working the line, selecting who would get searched and who would walk through, took the Press Ministry letter and slowly read it. He looked up at the tower of cases, did some sort of abstract mental calculation, and said, “Tomorrow.”