After a few minutes, the beating began to slow to an occasional rabbit punch and side kick, as if the officers had tired themselves out. They hauled me up and shoved me between Sherif and Mustafa, grinning dishearteningly at the three of us. We rode for nearly an hour in silence. My ribs were almost caved in, and blood from my sinuses drained down the back of my throat. But what was most painful was the way Sherif and Professor Farid would look at me every few minutes. Of course, I had not named any names, but I knew it would go hard for me if we were locked up together.

  Radios belched and blurted fragments of information about several other simultaneous plots being interrupted in other parts of the country. At least twenty other Muslim Brothers had been arrested for conspiracies to take over general headquarters, the Egyptian Mint, and the Egyptian Broadcasting Company.

  The truck came to a halt and the back doors were flung open. I realized that we had been taken to the Citadel, Saladin’s medieval compound beneath the Mukattam Hills. How many times had I played with Sherif in the shade of these battlements? Back then we were just two boys pretending to be warriors fighting in the Crusades. Sherif being Saladin, me being Richard the Lionheart, like Henry in The Crusades. Now we were arriving in chains. We were helped down from the truck and led out onto the cobblestoned passageways. I looked up at the old castle towers and imagined I could still hear eight hundred years of anguished voices crying out from the barred windows.

  The number of officers surrounding us doubled and then tripled as we were brought through a courtyard and up a flight of granite steps, soldiers wanting to share in the reflected glory.

  “We are going to die here,” Sherif muttered.

  “No,” said Professor Farid. “We won’t be that lucky.”

  It was late afternoon, the sun slanting bleached white rays straight into the line of cells we were nearing. Faces came to the rusting bars to watch us pass: sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked men in their twenties and thirties. They couldn’t have been here long—the crackdown on the Ikhwan had only begun after the aborted assassination attempt—but already their spirits were broken. Nasser’s minions had worked quickly.

  The officers stopped before an empty cell, opened the door, and shoved me in, slamming the bars behind me before they moved off with Sherif and the others.

  I sank into a squat in the corner of the cell and clasped my hands under my chin, asking for Allah to find me and protect me within the confines of my tiny cell. But all I saw was a single drip of water running between the crumbling bricks, thinning strips of light between the bars of my cage, and a cloud of insects already beginning to assemble and feast on my exposed skin. Then I looked across the way and saw Raymond’s hooded eyes staring back at me from the opposite cell.

  “So, Mr. Hassan,” he said, “I guess you’re off the picture as well.”

  May 12, 2015

  To: GrandpaAli71@aol.com

  From: calIFate28@protonmail.com

  Grandpa,

  It’s hard for me to know what to say about this turn in the story. You were wrong to turn against your Brothers at that late stage in the plan. If you still don’t know that in this life, I think you’ll find out in the next one. May God have mercy on you for your mistakes of judgment and loss of nerve.

  Obviously, my commanders are forbidding me to continue our communication. I had to beg them to let me send you a final farewell. They believe that you tried to play a trick on me by sending me your book. Some stories are instructive, and some are corrupting. I would like to believe that was not your intent, but I don’t know what was in your heart. I only know I will not be following the same path.

  I do want you to know that I still care what happens to you. I hope your follow-up appointments go well. I would say I’ll be in touch to check in, but I won’t. I mean, I can’t. My commanders are shutting down this server. But I will be thinking of you. In fact, I was reminded of you by the guy who came to interview us the other day about the video game. He said he used to watch The Ten Commandments all the time with his family back home. But never mind all that. What’s done is done.

  May Allah show compassion for your immortal soul,

  Abu Suror

  P.S. It turns out that what Shayma wanted was for me to help her get back to her family. That’s so not happening.

  22

  After spending a long, cold night at the Citadel, I found myself among the dozens of prisoners being transferred on a caravan of exhaust-spewing buses to a former British military installation known as the Al Siggn Al Harbi. The base had been converted into a prison, just outside Cairo, to the east of the Nile. When they realized where we were headed on the bus, several of my fellow detainees began to weep openly.

  I was sick to my stomach and deeply confused by the situation I was in. Yes, I comprehended all too well that I had been caught up in the crackdown against all of Nasser’s perceived enemies. But I did not understand why my attempt to foil my cousin’s plot had not earned me at least some consideration. Nor did I understand why Mr. DeMille had suffered a heart attack at the crucial moment of the filming. But from Sherif’s reaction I strongly suspected that it was not a coincidence. And finally, no one had explained why Raymond had been locked up with the rest of us. Yes, he had been caught with the time pencil I had given him. But it was impossible for anyone to believe that this Jew had played a role in a Muslim Brothers conspiracy.

  And yet here he was standing to my immediate right, still wearing the clothes he was arrested in, among four rows of ten inmates apiece in the prison yard, listening to the welcoming speech of the deputy warden.

  “Gentlemen, there are days when the course of a man’s life changes forever. Sometimes, it’s the day he leaves his parents’ home. Sometimes, it’s the day of his wedding. Sometimes, it’s the birth of his first child. And sometimes, it’s the day that he knows will be his last on earth.” The deputy warden paused to let the notion sink in. “Gentlemen, today will be such a day for all of you.”

  He was a short man with a high voice, squinting eyes, and a small troutlike mouth with a gray-white sprig of a mustache. He derived his authority solely from the stripes on his uniform sleeves and the sentries aiming high-powered rifles down at the thirty-nine other prisoners joining him in the inner courtyard.

  The Siggn itself was a disheartening place, made up of five large gray cement-block structures surrounded by thirty-foot-high granite walls, coils of razor-ribbon barbed wire, and a ring of soldiers at the base. Each building operated as a prison within the prison, two tiers with a courtyard in the middle and guard towers in the corners. There were twenty officers on hand to greet the new arrivals in the yard—one for every two inmates—large, thuggish men who moved in a more slovenly way than regular soldiers, smirked at the new arrivals, and spoke in rough rural accents. As the deputy warden spoke, they waded in among us, pulling men out of line for imaginary infractions, putting them against the walls of the cellblock, and then striking them on the arms and kicking their legs while frisking them for contraband.

  “You have all been brought here because you are considered enemies of the state,” the deputy warden continued. “You do not have the same rights as normal prisoners. You are not subject to civilian law. You have no right to a speedy trial. You have no right to see a lawyer. You have no right to unmonitored visits. In fact, you have no right to even hear the reasons for your detention. If you are given any of these things, you should bow down to Gamal Abdel Nasser and give thanks.…”

  The deputy warden stopped in front of me and chucked me under the chin, giving a sidelong glance to Sherif, who was to my immediate left. My cousin had still not spoken to me since our arrest.

  “If you are given a chance to go to court or face a military tribunal, you will stand in a cage, like the dirty animals you are, and hear the charges read against you. I would advise you to plead for mercy and admit the nature of your disloyalty at the first opportunity.” He leaned close to me and sniffed, a dreadful insult, since I took great care with my personal hygiene. “Enjoy your stay. We’re glad to have you.”

  A sergeant grabbed my arms, cuffed my hands behind my back, and led me into the Block 2 building. Hope died in a long hot corridor lined with iron cell doors on each side, bloodshot eyes strafing me from three-inch slits, crazed voices erupting from within, from men trapped too long with their most dire ruminations and fears. An empty five-by-eight cell was waiting at the end of the hall. I was pushed in and the door slammed behind me, leaving me alone with a naked bulb radiating gray-blue light on a stone floor. Odors of mildew, shit, and ammonia attacked, bypassing my nostrils and going straight to the pit of my stomach.

  Through watering eyes, I saw a waterlogged straw mattress in one corner and a rubber bucket in the other that smelled like it had been recently used as a toilet. A snapped-off loop of rope was knotted around a sagging part of a wooden beam, as if something had recently been dangling from it. A series of dark spots formed an almost-solid line halfway up a gouged stone wall. At first, they appeared to be deliberate marks that could have been made by a former resident, counting off the days of his sentence. Closer examination showed that they were bodies of blood-fattened bugs that had been methodically squashed one by one.

  I stared at the pattern until it became a code to be deciphered. What was to become of me? Less than three weeks before, my beautiful American dream had seemed almost within reach. Now I pictured my father hearing news of my arrest on the putting green at the edge of the desert, a bag of clubs slipping off his shoulder while customers moved on to the next hole. That’s if he knew where I was. Then I remembered how Mona had stared after me as I was being led away from the Exodus march. I could still taste the grit in my mouth from the soldiers driving my face into the sand while the cameras rolled. No wonder my cousin laughed at me; I tried to play the hero but wound up acting the fool.

  Out in the courtyard, a bugler from a nearby training camp kept practicing his call to arms over and over, hitting a wrong note in the same place each time and then starting over.

  I raised my eyes to the high barred window, finding a dull sliver of the sun behind a gray cloud, like an old coin half hidden under a man’s shoe. Over the next few hours, I watched it slowly dim, until everything else went dark and I was left with just the singing radiance of the bulb above me and the army bugler practicing his scales outside.

  Just after dusk, the cell door opened and a tall fleshy man came in wearing the uniform of a brigadier emir, with two guards accompanying him.

  “Good evening, Ali Hassan,” he said. “I am Hafez Digwi, the warden of this facility. I trust everything is as it should be.”

  “Yes, sir.” I had heard the name already in the hallways, from men who tended to spit on the ground and cough into the crook of their elbows after they said it.

  “I am informed that you are one of our more educated inmates. Perhaps when we get more accustomed to each other, we can discuss improving programs for the population here. It could be very good for morale.”

  Contrary to his reputation, the warden showed a rather sincere and humane expression. When I spoke, he thrust his head forward and cocked it to the side, as if he was honestly interested in what complaints a common prisoner might have. Every few seconds, his gray-brown eyes half closed into what looked like a wince of sympathy, as if he was truly pained by the wails and complaints of prisoners in adjoining cells. But in repose, there was a sullenness to his features that made him appear coarse and much less intelligent.

  “There is a problem in our facility, though, I must confess,” the warden said. “Many of our guards are poor men. They don’t read books or go to nightclubs like L’Auberge. They resent anyone who has had a superior education and often treat them quite brutally. May I ask where you attended school?”

  “King Fuad University in Cairo, Warden.” The wiser choice would have been to lie, but I had not yet learned to rid myself of pride.

  “I expect that you might have a very difficult time, then.” The warden inclined his head kindly, but I was shaken by his apparent reference to that night I’d met with the Englishman.

  “It would be in your interest to make your stay as brief as possible,” he said. “Do you follow my meaning?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I’m saying your best decision would be to start cooperating immediately.” He took great care to enunciate each word. “If I were you, I would provide a full confession and information about your friends from the Muslim Brothers, so that we can expedite your sentence before the military tribunals.”

  “But, Warden.” I attempted a smile, even though my face was still sore from the beating in the truck. “Surely you know that if the Brothers even imagine I’m cooperating, great harm could befall not only me but my loved ones outside these walls.”

  “Yes, we can all see why that would be a concern.” The warden shared a nod with the other officers in the room. “Which is why we must make a sincere effort to persuade you to see that our way would be easiest.”

  One of the guards stepped forward, a sergeant about six and a half feet tall with a small bluebird tattoo near the corner of his right eye that indicated he was from one of the mystically inclined tribes of Upper Egypt.

  He pulled off his belt as two more guards entered the room. They seized me by the arms and held me down.

  “Give him the baton,” the warden said.

  I squeezed my buttocks, to keep them from violating me.

  Instead, the tattooed sergeant stunned me with a slap. Someone else wrapped the belt around my head, just above the eyebrows.

  “What’s happening?” I yelled.

  One of the other officers pulled the belt tight and buckled it snugly. Then he inserted the baton into the space between the belt and my forehead. He started to turn it, so that the leather tightened and the metal studs of the belt began to press agonizingly into my skull.

  “In the name of all that is holy, stop!” I shrieked.

  Instead, they twisted the baton again, and I heard a cracking sound inside my head.

  “You’re going to kill me!” I yelled. “It’s too much pressure.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” the warden said.

  I gritted my teeth, praying the top of my head wasn’t about to pop off like a section of squeezed sausage.

  “What good can I do you if my brains are coming out of my ears?” I cried out.

  There was some discussion among them. The bluebird sergeant stunned me with another slap. The belt was pulled away and a blindfold went around my eyes. A rope was tied under my arms and used to hoist me up toward the ceiling. They spun me around, laughing hysterically as they kept beating me like a Mexican piñata. I was on the verge of spewing everything inside me into every corner of the cell. Each blow was a shock because I couldn’t see it coming. The out-of-tune bugler added to my nightmarish delirium. Finally, they let me down and undid the blindfold. My vision gradually returned from pitch-black to charcoal gray. The sergeant with the bluebird tattoo uncuffed my wrists as the warden stood before me, holding his arms out.

  “You see?” He blinked twice. “We’re all reasonable men here.”

  * * *

  I was too sick and swollen to eat breakfast the next morning, having been kept up the majority of the night by guards bursting into my cell, yelling and clanging pots to keep me from sleeping, and then insects feasting on my ankles. I was in a zombie state for most of the day, staggering out for head counts and exercise times, and at the end of the day answering the bugle call to join the dinner line. An ovenlike heat remained constant in the air, promising no surcease for the evening and a long rich afterlife for bad smells. The stench of unwashed bodies and dust from crumbling cement walls filled the air. Dun-colored smoke wafted from the prison incinerator, making a brown film over the sun. Rats frolicked near the shower shed, enjoying a freedom denied to the humans in the facility.

  I looked around, recognizing few of the men in line. Some of them may have been part of other Ikhwan plots I was kept ignorant about. But from the predatory way they sized me up and smiled at one another, I knew most were probably just common criminals. Plainly, I’d been set down among them to make cooperation a more attractive option.

  At the head of the line, a trustee with jaundice-yellow skin and a hacking cough was dispensing soapy broth from a giant steaming tureen, while armed guards stood watch on either side. Every time an inmate’s metal bowl was half filled with the viscous liquid, guards would order the man back to his cell on the double, brandishing bullwhips.

  “Eddie,” who had so unceremoniously replaced me as Mr. DeMille’s personal assistant and chair boy, limped by. On the set, he’d been a fashion plate in a seersucker jacket and a bow tie. Now patches of his hair were already falling out and two front teeth were conspicuously missing. To this day, I have no idea if he was a part of any conspiracy. I rather doubt it. He was probably just a cinema enthusiast like myself. But he had been placed here as another lamb among the wolves. As he tried to hurry back into the cellblock, Eddie had to pass a long double gauntlet of guards on either side. I watched them take turns sticking out their shoulders and legs to trip him and jar him for sport until the tall sergeant with the bluebird tattoo stepped forward and shoved him hard with both hands, knocking the bowl from the lad’s hands. Eddie fell to his knees, tear streaks visible on his smudged face as he looked up in hunger and confusion. The sergeant spat on him and the other guards laughed as the boy got up, collected the empty bowl, and ran back to his cell.

  My stomach bowed in toward my spine. It had been more than a day since I had eaten, and I had been counting on this meager sustenance to get me through. I reached the front of the line and tried to steady my bowl with both hands. The trustee ladled in two spoonfuls, spattering drops on my wrists, which I wasted no time in licking off.