The Antique Shop in Cairo
Cairo, Egypt.
Damn it.
I had been one last stamp away from finishing the divorce petition when the trip dropped on me out of nowhere, and something about it sat wrong in my gut. Not that my being out of the country was going to change the outcome. The evidence was already in my hands.
In the shots of the car pulling out of the motel, her face was crystal clear in the passenger seat, smiling. From the room where the two of them had stayed, I had even secured the used condom and the little disposable shampoo and shower-gel cases. Those toiletries were ones I had pocketed from a hotel during a business trip to Bulgaria—stuff you could not easily get your hands on in Korea.
Careless bitch. Then again, she had no idea a fool like me would dig that deep. Up until then I had always been docile. Obedient.
That was before. After I caught on to the affair, I spent a few days in shock, and once I finally decided it had to end, I changed. I kept my face blank and started gathering proof, piece by piece. I hired a private inquiry service to tail her and planted a recorder in the house. I confirmed that, while I was away, she was cooing on the phone with the bastard she was sleeping with, and from those calls I pieced together where the two of them met and started tracking them.
The evidence piled up. At last the agency called.
"Confirmed—they're going into a motel. Get here fast!"
I ran. From that point on it had to be me. For it to hold up legally, I had to take the pictures myself. Camera in hand, I waited for the two of them to come out.
"There! That's them."
I lined the lens up on the car as it emerged.
Click. Click. Click.
What arrived with the shots I wanted was a flash of elation, brief as a camera burst, and then a deep, hollow depression. The resolve that had been wavering—the decision to end all of it and drag my life back to zero—finally set hard.
When I served her the notice, the woman threw a fit, too stupid to grasp what was happening. The moment I laid the photos and the rest of it in front of her, she collapsed and started to cry. I had left her lonely. I had never once empathized with her. We could never keep a conversation going. On and on she went, reciting the same old repertoire.
I was sick of the excuses. I kept it short.
"Go live with the bastard you get along with so well."
The cold answer, nothing like the old me, rattled her, and this time she started in on property division and alimony. Ignorant, and uneducated besides. We had lived together barely a year. She had brought no savings into the marriage, had not even come with a proper dowry, and she wanted a split of the assets. On top of that she had quit her job the moment we married and loafed around the house the entire time.
Looking back, I had married with no plan at all. More accurately, I had been married off. I believed her when she said she was pregnant. Later, when she miscarried, she wept and wailed, and I felt sorry for her and let it pass. I decided to treat it as my own fault and end things cleanly.
"Take what you brought, and get out."
At that she shrieked, voice raw with spite.
"What about the apartment we won in the lottery! I'm not divorcing you until you hand over half of it!"
A presale unit in a new city out in Gyeonggi, right on top of a subway station. By some freak of luck I had beaten odds of several thousand to one and won the draw. Before we were married, of course. I had already paid every interim installment myself, and the balance was going to be my loan too, and here she was trying to lick her share off it. The place we were about to move into was sitting on at least 1.2 billion won in unrealized gains alone—something like a million dollars. It was the child I had poured every scrap of luck in my life into.
Was that why I had ended up married to a woman like this? Even so, I could not stand hearing her insult an apartment I loved like my own flesh. Listening to her talk nonsense, it was obvious the world had never taught her anything, and the thought settled deep that this was the moment to give her that education.
So I filed for divorce, and with it a suit for consolation money on grounds of infidelity. Once we were in court, tracking the bastard she had been sleeping with followed as a matter of course. A criminal complaint and a damages claim were prepared alongside it. The one regret was that, when I took the photos, the driver's window had caught the backlight and his face had not come out. No matter. Push the lawsuit, keep following the trail, and I would find him. Traces were everywhere, and though it would cost a fair amount, I could square the legal fees against the money I meant to take off the pair of them.
The preparations were finished. I was on the verge of lodging the divorce complaint with the family court when the travel orders landed.
Divorce or not, my life was going to keep going, and for that I needed a respectable job to stay intact. Living well is the best revenge, isn't it? So, same as always, I followed my boss's orders to the letter and arrived in Cairo.
The cargo that was supposed to be a problem had, fortunately, shipped without any real trouble. There was nothing much left to do. A few days of rest, then home. With that in mind I wandered the busy streets at the heart of the city.
Whenever I land somewhere new, the traditional market is the place I have to stop. I walked through the press of bodies, looking over the goods the merchants had set out. Ingredients, handicrafts, everyday wares spread across the stalls, and behind them the hawkers bawling loud enough to rattle your skull.
"One dollar, one dollar, very cheap!"
"Korea! I love Korea! Here, very expensive—but I give you special price. Come on, come on!"
I was pushing through the racket, half dazed, when a quiet little shop happened to catch my eye.
An antique shop. Since I was here, maybe I would pick something up.
Inside, the old proprietor sat in a corner, smoking nothing but a water pipe. He glanced at me once, offered no greeting, and kept drawing on the pipe. That suited me fine. I took my time looking around. Lamps, candlesticks, rings and other ornaments. A jewelry box or two.
Halfway through that slow circuit, a necklace with a tiny hourglass on it caught my eye. What was in there? Something purple—liquid, or sand, I could not tell—sealed inside the little pendant. I lifted it for a closer look.
"That one's quite expensive."
I turned. The owner was fitting the mouthpiece of the water pipe between his lips again. Cool about it. The indifference only made me want it more.
"Why is it expensive?"
The old man looked faintly surprised.
"You speak a little of our language."
"If you're going to do business, learning the local tongue is obvious. I picked it up bit by bit on the job."
"Everyone else just uses English. You know how to trade, friend. In that case I'll let you have it a little cheap."
"Before the price, I need to know why the thing is expensive, don't I?"
"That came out of a pyramid."
"What?"
Was he serious? If it had come out of a pyramid, that meant an artifact. Buying looted goods could get the buyer punished too. More than that, though, it looked far too new.
Maybe he read my face. The old man spoke again.
"If you don't believe me, don't buy it."
"If I'm going to believe you, there ought to be more of a story, shouldn't there? What was it used for? Which pyramid, and how did it get here?"
He stared at me, blank.
"If I knew all that, would I be selling it in a corner of a market like this? I'd have sent it to auction already."
Fair enough.
"It did come out of a pyramid. That much is certain. The friend who brought it isn't the sort to lie about a thing like that. Don't believe me, don't buy it."
What was this? For all I knew, something pulled out of a pyramid was cursed. How was I supposed to buy it without even that much history? It left a bad taste. Even so, the thought that it had come from inside a pyramid made me want one for myself.
Then I remembered the time. Any minute now I was due to meet the local staff who would pick me up. They were the ones who drove me while I was in Cairo, and once I went back to the lodgings with them I would have no reason to come out again before I left the country. After that, it was goodbye to Cairo.
I hesitated, and little by little my mind tipped toward the necklace. That useless curiosity of mine kicked in again. Strange, how timid I am by nature and how curious I still manage to be. A touch of safety-blindness, you might call it. Marriage had already wrecked me the same way, and I had not changed a bit.
In the end I asked.
"How much?"
I emptied every bill in my pocket, hung the necklace around my neck, and tucked it down inside my shirt. Nothing good would come of bragging that I had bought a thing like this. The money was gone, and somewhere in the middle of it the hour had run out. I simply slipped out of the market.
Out front, a Korean-made Jeep sat idling, waiting. I opened the rear door and climbed in—and found a man I had never seen sitting in the passenger seat. I looked at Hassan, the local employee behind the wheel.
"Who's this?"
"Ah, Mr. Kang. Say hello. He my friend. Today he come help me a little."
The stranger offered a greeting.
"Hello. I'm Amin."
"Ah. Yes. Good to meet you."
The words and what I felt did not match. What the hell. This was work hours, plain and simple. Hassan was local staff, but the one in charge was me, and he had put an outsider in a company car on company time without so much as a word to me. The face was ugly besides. Live thirty years or so and the life you have led starts to show in the face, and this was not a man who had lived an easy one.
I set the unease aside and decided to let it pass for now. Hassan, watching my expression, hurried to speak.
"Then we go, Mr. Kang."
He cranked the engine in a rush and pulled away. The motor growled. Once we got back to the lodgings, I meant to have a word with him, and I sank into the seat with that thought.
But the way it always went, once you put a thing off, the chance never came back around.