As they continued, Alex could overhear heated conversations from open but barred windows, music from radios, the drone of televisions, and at least one violent argument between a man and a woman. The noise, like a steady irritating disco beat, just kept on going.

The argument descended into physical fighting. Alex and Voltaire kept on walking. Husband and wife? Alex wondered. Prostitute and customer? Mother and son?

It could have been any.

“Mubarak saw what had happened to his predecessor, getting shot down by his own people, so he was smart enough to attack all the things that were wrong. And he had some success, which is why he stayed in power so long. Mubarak got money from foreign powers for acting as the regional peace broker. He planted trees, built roads and sewers, and gave the main thoroughfares a facelift. He got the Chinese to build a new conference center, got the Japanese to build an opera house, induced the French to build a subway line, and got the Americans to give him just enough military clout so that he could stay in power but not enough military power to attack Israel again. So what happens? All the middle-class Egyptians who had moved to Europe and America started moving back. The doctors. The engineers. The middle-class émigrés. Cairo didn’t become Paris, but it was no longer a slum surrounded by sand and camel dung. You’d think that would be a good thing, right?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Alex answered.

Alex did a double-take. They passed an establishment that was wide open from the back. It was obviously a brothel, with several half-naked women hanging out in the doorway and in the windows, dark-haired, sullen, and tattooed.

They smiled at Voltaire as he passed. He waved and they waved back. They probably know him, Alex thought. The girls looked disapprovingly at Alex, as if she was infringing on their business. One of them said something to her in Arabic and the others laughed.

“The pseudo-prosperity created its own problems,” Voltaire said, continuing in French. “The people in the slums, the people who were in those overcrowded high-rises, and even the working-class people of the city, the people who drove taxis or cleaned the streets or worked in the hospitals, the ‘new affluence’ never trickled down to them. It was grabbed off by the émigrés who had moved back. And so the poor and uneducated got even angrier. You’d think they would have tried to embrace the new order, run their lives a little differently, try to Westernize their lives the way the successful returned émigrés had. No. Know what they did instead?”

“My guess is that they clung to their own traditions all the more fervently,” Alex said. “And that would mean an even more tenacious embrace of Islam.”

“That’s exactly right,” Voltaire said. “The fundamentalist Islamic preachers used the mosques and the television to convince this great struggling mass of people that they weren’t doing anything wrong. The problem was the Egyptians who had become Westernized and fallen away from Islam faith, the mullahs said. The people who had returned with wealth and Western wives and cars and credit cards, they were the big problem in society. You’d see graffiti all over the city that said, ‘Islam is the Solution.’ And as an example of proof of Islam being the solution, they held up Saudi Arabia.”

“Why Saudi Arabia?”

“Saudi Arabia is one of the most piously conservative countries in the Arab world. Never mind the hypocrisy. Ignore the fact that all the ne’er-do-well Saudi princes go on debauched trips to Europe and America and dissipate themselves in the nightclubs and the whorehouses. We’re talking about official Saudi policy and society. It is a tenet of Islam that Allah will take care of the truly devout. Well, the Saudi sheiks from the bloody House of Saud park their camels and their Rolls-Royces right on top of the world’s greatest petroleum reserves. What better proof is there of Allah’s favor than that? So if you were a traditional young Egyptian, you were impressed by your devout friends who went, not to Europe and got corrupted, but to work in the Gulf in the oil business. They’d do it for three to five years and then come back with a car, gold jewelry, a fat bankroll, and a veiled teenage wife that to all intents and purposes they owned, some poor girl not destined to get an education or a breath of free air in her entire life. But that’s just my opinion. Not a bad reward in this life for keeping the faith, is it?”

“A lot of men wouldn’t think so,” Alex said.

Abdul disappeared around a dim corner. Voltaire suddenly grabbed Alex by the arm.

“Tiens! Attends un moment!” he said. Wait a moment.

He cocked his head, as if to listen for danger. They held their ground; then, when nothing happened, Voltaire indicated with a nod that they could proceed. Alex and Voltaire turned the same dark corner a few seconds later.

Abdul had already vanished. They were in a black dead-end alley. Alex and Voltaire stood for a moment. There were a few doors, back entrances to homes, Alex thought. The doors were wooden and shabby. Somewhere a big dog was barking. Abdul had disappeared through one of the doors, Alex guessed. The only light was a bluish hue from an overhead window, either a florescent bulb or an old television. Sounds of second-story conversations tumbled down into the alley. Somewhere a man was snoring loudly. Alex couldn’t tell where.

Alex glanced at Voltaire and wondered if she had been set up. “Are we all right?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” Voltaire whispered. “Just another few seconds.” He shot back to his civics lesson. “Anyway, the influx of wealthy émigrés allowed the fundamentalist mullahs to gain even more influence,” Voltaire said. “Not with the government, but with the unwashed masses. Look, one fundamentalist preacher wanted zucchini to be banned from Cairo markets because of its phallic shape. Another one claimed that the Cairo Tower, a big, new, long, narrow building that rises out of a newly greened parkland, should be destroyed. He claimed that its size and shape might sexually arouse a generation of young Egyptian women.”

“And people took that seriously?” Alex asked.

“Educated people? No. Of course not! But one Egyptian journalist, a headstrong chap named Farag Foda, was indelicate enough to make fun of that idea and some others at the Cairo book fair one year. The book fair, pour l’amour de Dieu! You’d think he would have been speaking to people who were at least somewhat enlightened. Instead the mullahs declared him ‘a foe of Islam’ and he was assassinated. And a local Islamic scholar, a witness before the court, testified that the killers had done nothing wrong since there was no sin in killing a foe of Islam. He said that the murder of Farag Foda was an apostate’s punishment that the local imam had failed to implement. The killers were eventually executed, which only made their cause more sympathetic to their followers. It was a time, not unlike now, when assassination was not uncommon. And it wasn’t carried out by geniuses, either. A squad of gunmen on motor scooters once assassinated the speaker of the Egyptian parliament right in front of a new Western hotel. No one could figure out why they had hit this guy because he was middle level and not even disliked by the radicals. It turned out later that they mistook him for their real target, Mubarak’s minister of the interior, who tended to pass by the same place every day. It was typical. The killers were reckless and ignorant, but they didn’t lack for aggressiveness, and they were bent on shooting someone, anyone. So they did.”

There was a noise above them as Voltaire concluded. Alex ducked and cringed. Then she raised her eyes to the window from which came the bluish light. A head appeared, silhouetted by the back light. Someone-a pudgy woman in a head scarf-looked down at them and said something in Arabic.