Firebird (5 page)

4

Outside, the area beyond the barriers had already become a media circus. Gaping citizens were five deep, and local and foreign reporters had homed in like hyenas and were busy chatting up anyone who looked like he might have something to say. You could almost hear the word ‘terrorism’ humming like a mantra, and I knew if someone didn’t put the dampers on it pretty soon the incident would be blown up into another Luxor massacre. Hammoudi surveyed the scene grimly and marched up to the local TV camera like he fully intended to kick it over. The reporter — a young, hip Egyptian in jeans, suede boots and a cowboy shirt — thrust a microphone at him like a sword and the crowd closed in for the kill, knocking the barriers aside. Videos and tape recorders whirred, and cameras popped. ‘Sir,’ the TV reporter said, ‘isn’t it true that the murdered man was Doctor Adam Ibram, the former NASA scientist, who was over here for a meeting of the Giza Millennium Committee?’

‘Yes,’ Hammoudi said, ‘Doctor Adam Ibram — an American scientist of Egyptian origin — was murdered in the early hours of the morning by unknown assailants.’

‘Unknown assailants?’ the reporter repeated, smiling. ‘Isn’t it possible that Doctor Ibram was murdered by Militants, who have already threatened to disrupt the millennium celebrations?’

Hammoudi refused to be drawn. ‘As far as the police can ascertain, terrorism is not involved. I repeat, terrorism is
not
involved. The police Anti-Terrorist Unit has not been mobilized, and we are treating it as a criminal case.’

I shifted nervously behind him, ignoring the microphones jabbed at me, and tried to keep my face out of the picture. A little way off, Marvin was surrounded by another school of media sharks, talking to a CNN camera — probably telling the same pack of lies.

‘Why’s the FBI in on this?’ the reporter asked Hammoudi. ‘Is this interference in Egypt’s affairs acceptable?’

‘The FBI team is attached to the US embassy here,’ the Colonel said. ‘Its function is to assist the local police with their investigation into the death of an American citizen.’

Suddenly another reporter wearing a dark suit, a beard and a white turban elbowed his way to the front of the crowd and shoved a portable tape recorder almost into Hammoudi’s face. ‘Is it true that champagne is to be served at the so called millennium celebrations?’ he demanded furiously. ‘Is it also true that there is to be an orgy of eating and Western pop music at a time when most Egyptians are fasting during Holy Ramadan? Is it true that tickets are to cost four hundred dollars each — a year’s salary to many Egyptians?’

‘You’ll have to ask the organizers,’ Hammoudi said. ‘The year 2000 is a Western invention,’ the reporter went on, ignoring him. ‘It is meaningless to most Egyptians, both Muslim and Coptic Christian. Doctor Ibram was a Muslim — wouldn’t it be understandable if a fundamentalist sect decided he ought to be punished for his part in this desecration of Egypt’s heritage?’

Hammoudi’s face stayed deadpan. ‘I told you terrorism is not involved,’ he said again, voice cold as a guillotine, ‘and that’s really all I have to say on the matter right now.’

He turned on his heel and together we strode back to the teashop, where Daisy was waiting. I noticed her gaze falling on my right ear, and I reached up instinctively and covered the blemish there with the rim of my cap. That was a mistake. Her eyes fixed on the place and never left it until we were right in front of her.

‘That’s about it as far as the crime scene business goes,’ Hammoudi said briskly. ‘I know this isn’t an ideal situation for any of us, Special Agent, but believe me, we
are
on the same side. As Mr Marvin said, you’ll both be reporting to me, and your orders will come out of my office. And watch your mouths with the press. Those boys are squealing for blood as usual. I’m going back to the office now to make my initial report. I’ll leave you two to get to know each other.’

‘I think we should go talk to the waiter,’ Daisy said, ‘he might be able to give us a lead.’

‘An excellent suggestion,’ I said, ‘only there remains the little matter of communication. Since you don’t speak Arabic, how’re you going to talk to him anyway?’

‘
Min
gaal
lek
ana
mush
‘arif
‘arabi
,
’
she said, her blue eyes flashing suddenly. ‘Who said I don’t know Arabic? Actually, I speak it fluently!’

My mouth must have aped a goldfish. ‘You said this was your first time in Egypt?’ I protested.

‘Maybe you hadn’t noticed,
sonny
,
’
she said, ‘but Egypt’s not the only Arabic-speaking country in the world. I’ve worked in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the Emirates, Oman, Israel and the Yemen. I have a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Berkeley. I speak some Hebrew too.’ Her full lips pouted so antagonistically that for a minute I thought she was going to add: ‘And put that in your self-opinionated pipe and smoke it.’ Somehow I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.

Actually, I was still smoking it when I sat down in the passenger seat of her dinky little white Fiat Punto. ‘So,’ I started lamely, as we drove through the police barrier, ‘where’re you from?’

‘Monterey, California. It’s a small town — I guess you’ve never heard of it.’

‘I’ve been to California,’ I said, ‘and I know where it is, thank you very much.’

‘You mean they let you people out of your cages?’

‘From time to time. As it happens I’ve been on attachment with the San Francisco Police. And I tell you what — your California is the most racist, sexist society I’ve ever met.’

‘We’ve still got to go some to beat you boys.’

‘OK, so what’s a nice girl like you doing in the FBI?’

She gripped the wheel with slender hands and pouted again. Her lips were so opulent that they gave an almost elongated look to the face that was amazingly expressive. I watched them fascinated as they formed and broke, and she saw me looking and flicked her plaited hair sideways with an angry snap of the head.

‘For a start, I’m not a “nice girl”,’ she said. ‘For a second, the FBI takes women these days. More than ten per cent of Bureau officers are female.’

‘Ten per cent! Am I supposed to be impressed?’

‘Listen, to you Arabs women are second class citizens, and you’re scared brainless of them. In Saudi they won’t even give women driving licences! I had a friend in Dubai whose fifteen year old daughter, a beautiful blonde, was out horseriding when a carload of Arab youths spooked the horse till she fell off, then beat her up. A fifteen year old kid! She wasn’t badly injured, but it was still one of the weirdest things I’d ever come across. I mean, rape I could have understood, but there was no sexual assault involved. It took me a long time to work out that they were so scared of the kind of power she had over them that they had to attack her. That’s how terrified you are of the “inferior sex”, and that’s why you keep your women veiled. It’s a kind of control.’

‘The veil is optional in Egypt,’ I said, ‘but a lot of women like it. They don’t want to be seen as sexual objects except by their husbands, and the veil earns them a lot more respect from men.’

‘Because men don’t find a shapeless lump as threatening as a beautiful blonde girl riding a horse.’

‘It wouldn’t happen here.’

‘Like hell! I’ve had my butt pinched so much in the past week I’m black and blue.’

‘Maybe you should try wearing a veil, then.’

She flicked her hair aside again, and bared her lips over very white teeth as if she’d have liked to take a chunk out of my neck. ‘Don’t get clever with me, buddy boy,’ she snapped. ‘As far as I’m concerned you forced your way into this investigation. It might go down hunky dory with my chief, but I want to make it clear that I still regard myself as the investigating detective, and that I’m working with you under protest.’

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘If you think I want to waste my time escorting a greenhorn of the “inferior sex” you’re crazy. I can’t think why they chose you for the case.’

‘Because I’m the best they’ve got. I passed out top of my class at Quantico, which was ninety per cent men, and because I know more about the Arab world than all the other special agents here put together. Probably more than you, too.’

I clapped my hands silently. ‘Congratulations! Why should Egypt tremble with heroes such as these to defend her!’

Daisy set her lips into brooding mode and the effect was stunningly attractive. She squeezed the wheel till her knuckles paled, and I could see she was forcing herself to concentrate on the road. ‘Go to hell!’ she said.

5

There were US Marines in full dress blues at the entrance to the embassy hospital facility in Garden City, and I had to concede that they belonged in a whole different ballgame from our blackjackets in their ill-fitting cast-off uniforms and dirty unlaced boots. If things had worked out differently, I thought, I might have ended up as one of these men. If my father had married my mother. If he’d taken us back with him to the States.
If
.
If
.
If
Your life seemed to turn on a pattern of conditionals, but I knew that was just how it appeared. Part of me had realized even as a kid that anyone who could abandon a child as my father had done wouldn’t have been worth growing up with anyway. I knew I’d been lucky. And I’d been doubly lucky, because I’d escaped the fate of an Aswan street-rat, the slow inevitability of turning from petty theft to drugs, extortion and murder, and got myself a life. I knew whom I had to thank for that, and I knew where my real loyalty lay.

The first thing I noticed about the marine corporal behind the desk, though, wasn’t his immaculate uniform, but his politeness. At least, I thought, these guys didn’t need to act macho to prove how tough they were. Almost as soon as we’d shown our ID and signed the book, a male nurse in a starched labcoat arrived to escort us to Fawzi’s room.

‘How is he?’ Daisy asked.

The nurse looked like the marine corporal in another guise — young, tall, clean-cut, crop-haired — then again, I thought, perhaps he
was
a marine corporal. You could never tell in a place like this. ‘He’s off the critical list. The danger of gunshot wounds in the thigh is that a whole bunch of main arteries run through there. Getting shot in the thigh is one of the easiest ways of bleeding to death. All you have to do to stop the victim pegging though, is hold a cloth over the wound. This guy can thank his lucky stars whoever was first on the scene realized that.’

‘Is he lucid?’ I enquired.

The nurse laughed. ‘Lucid, I don’t know, but he’s been gabbling in Arabic to anyone who came near him for the past two hours. For a while there we even debated giving the guy a tranquillizer shot just to shut him up!’

Our footsteps were almost silent on the rubberized carpet that curved interestingly between walls of clean, unfaced stone. This place was state-of-the-art, I thought — a little oasis of modern Western medical practice in the middle of North Africa. Closed circuit TV cameras shifted angle slightly as we passed, almost invisible air coolers kept the internal temperature stable, fire doors opened automatically before us. Fawzi’s room had a sterile viewing window, through which we saw a stout, balding man lying in bed on starched cushions. His face was plump and sallow, and his eyes looked like peepholes buried in a mass of red and purple bruise tissue. Like Marvin said, he must have weighed more than three hundred pounds. A saline drip was attached to his arm and monitoring electrodes to his chest and the bridge of his nose, but despite all this he was apparently rambling to an attractive young nurse who was taking his temperature and trying her best to ignore him. At one stage he even tried feebly to pinch her bottom.

‘Now, you can tell that guy’s a Cairene,’ I chuckled, ‘a couple of hours ago he’s on the critical list, and already he’s pinching behinds. You’ve got to hand it to them —you just can’t keep them down.’

Daisy brooded. ‘Cave men quickly revert to their old habits,’ she commented icily.

‘Excuse me, Special Agent,’ the male nurse said suddenly, ‘we searched the patient’s clothes as a matter of routine when he was admitted. We found these little babies in his pockets.’ He held out five inch and a half long cubes the colour of gravy browning, covered in clingfilm.

Daisy cocked a knowing eye at me. ‘So our friend makes a little something on the side,’ she said.

I picked up one of the cubes. It was Lebanese Red — the best quality grass on the streets. Then suddenly it made sense. ‘I should have remembered the name,’ I told Daisy. ‘Fawzi Shukri — I’ve heard of him. Small time grafter who peddles dope to tourists. My team’s picked him up a couple of times, but he always had something interesting to say, so they let him off with a warning.’

‘A ten dollar snitch?’

‘You got it, only here they come cheaper.’ I flashed the nurse a grateful smile. ‘Thank you,’ I told him, ‘these little guys here are going to make it very difficult for Mr Fawzi to withhold the truth.’

‘He’s still a patient,’ he said, ‘and I have to ask that you don’t overtax him.’

‘Oh I won’t,’ I said, pushing through the glass doors, just as the female nurse inside was leaving. The fat man didn’t move — probably he couldn’t anyway, but his slit eyes followed my progress towards the bed.

‘Lord help us,’ he whined feebly, almost to himself, ‘I smell SID. I should have known the fuzz would turn up. I’m a sick man, Your Presence. I haven’t done anything.’ His half-closed eyes fell on Daisy as she slipped in behind me. ‘Help me, miss,’ he stammered, ‘this cop is going to kill me!’

‘It’s all right, Fawzi,’ I said, ‘you’re not under arrest. You’re a hero. Tried to save a foreign visitor from the thugs.’

Fawzi’s mouth formed a big ‘O’ of surprise. ‘Me?’ he said. ‘I was in an accident. I didn’t see nothing.’

‘Don’t you want to help us nail the men who shot you?’ Daisy asked softly.

‘You’re a cop too?’ Fawzi said. ‘An
Afrangi
woman cop! That’s all I needed!’

‘What happened?’ I demanded.

‘It was an accident, Your Presence. I don’t know anything. Born and bred in Khan al-Khalili, that’s me. We go by the Law of Silence there, you know that? If I was to blab they might finish me off next time.’

‘Don’t give me that Law of Silence bullshit,’ I snapped. ‘They didn’t finish you off when you blabbed to the SID officers who picked you up for dope peddling, did they?’

‘That wasn’t me, Your Presence, that was another Fawzi. It’s a dirt common name in Cairo.’

I opened my hand and showed Fawzi the five cubes of hashish. ‘Down to selling five pound deals now, Fawzi? Not exactly big-time, is it?’

‘They’re not mine.’

‘They were found in your pockets.’

‘Someone must have put them there, Your Presence. I don’t know nothing about it, honest. I don’t know nothing about anything.’

Daisy and I exchanged glances. Only minutes ago we’d had our knives out, but this was business, and we were both professional enough to know it was time for the good-cop-bad-cop routine. Daisy sat down on the chair next to the bed and leaned over Fawzi, smiling sweetly, showing her white teeth. ‘Look Mr Fawzi,’ she said, ‘you’re in a US government facility. This officer can’t touch you here. You’re not under arrest, just like he said. Now, tell us what happened in the back room of the tea shop. Tell us all you remember and I’ll persuade this guy to forget the dope, OK?’

Fawzi shifted his eyes painfully from Daisy to me. Then he grinned weakly.
Tukra
flu
mishmish
,
’
he said. ‘Tomorrow in the apricots.’

Daisy looked at me, mystified. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ she asked.

‘It’s a expression they have in Cairo,’ I said. ‘Loosely translated, it means “pull the other one”.’

‘Look, Mr Fawzi,’ Daisy said, ‘anything you say stays between us. No need for anybody to know.’

‘I’m saying nothing.’

‘You owe it to the dead man.’

‘Owe it? The guy did nothing for me. I don’t even know who he was.’

Daisy sighed, bowed her head and cupped it in her hands sorrowfully. It was a lovely act, I thought. ‘If you go on like this, there’s nothing much I can do for you,’ she said. She slapped her hands back into her lap and stood up as if she’d suddenly come to a difficult decision. I was rapt in admiration.

‘No, wait,’ Fawzi pleaded, ‘don’t leave me with him. I know SID. I know what they do. They string people up naked and poke electric cattle prods up their arses. Don’t go. I’ll tell you what happened.’

Daisy sat down again. ‘All right,’ she said, taking a notebook and pencil from her handbag. ‘You’re a good guy, Mr Fawzi. No one’s going to poke you with a cattle prod while I’m here. Let’s start with what you were doing in the john.’

Fawzi giggled. ‘What does anyone do in a john?’ he said.

‘But you weren’t answering nature’s call, were you Mr Fawzi?’ I glanced at her in surprise, knowing instinctively that she was right but wondering how the hell she’d been so sure. I realized suddenly that it was intuition — the kind only the best detectives have — and my admiration increased.

‘OK,’ Fawzi said, ‘but it goes no farther than here, right?’

‘Right.’

‘OK, see, I went in there to cut this grass I’d just scored from a dealer. It’s good Red Leb — the very best. All right, I’m not big time, but a man’s got to make a farthing to feed his wife and kids.’

I had to suppress a guffaw. I’d have bet a tenner that Fawzi wasn’t even married. ‘See,’ he went on, anxious to talk now, ‘a lot of tourists come to Sayyidna al-Hussayn after they’ve toured the bazaars, knackered, and sit down at the teashops for a rest. A lot of them ask to smoke a  hubble bubble. Most haven’t done it before, and they think it’s sort of romantic — the mysteries of the East and all that baloney. Of course the teashops only serve tobacco, but when I see a likely type I sidle up and whisper to them that it’s not the real thing. If they want to have a real experience, I say, they should try a cube of hashish with it. Some are horrified, but it’s surprising how many go for it.’

‘Right, so you’re in the john carving up your deals, and what happened next?’

‘Well I hear the connecting door bang open and then footsteps, and of course, I’m all of a jitter. I wonder if it’s the rozzers come to nab me. So I shove the dope in my pocket and crouch there sort of holding my breath. Then I realize that the guy who’s come in is panting real heavy — kind of sobbing, you know. Sounds like he’s having a stroke or something — puffing and groaning real bad, he is. So I think, well if this is the fuzz it’s a bloody good act. It can’t be. If they knew I was there they’d have smashed in the door by now. But then another thought strikes me. What if this geezer
does
drop dead, and the fuzz arrive and try to pin it on me? Better make a run for it now. Then there’s the click of the phone being lifted and I hear the guy dialling. “So that’s it!” I think to myself — “he’s calling an ambulance!” I hang on just a second more to make sure this isn’t some set—up, then I hear a coin drop and this wheezy voice saying, “Monod, is that you?” in English. I’m no English speaker, of course, but in my line of work you’re bound to pick up a smattering. That’s exactly what it sounded like: “Monod, is that you?” I relaxed a bit then. The guy’s a foreigner, probably a tourist, and he’s made contact with someone. Now’s the time to make a run for it. I slide back the bolt, open the door, and see this old guy on the telephone with his back to me, chest heaving, gripping the phone like he’s trying to crush it. I’m just about to sneak past, when the door busts open and there’s three hooded guys standing there with these little submachine guns, sinister like. Perfect timing, I’m thinking. The pigs set me up good and proper this time. I’m about to give myself up, when they start shooting at the old geezer on the phone. Funny, the guns made this kind of whizzing sound, like electricity. Hardly any noise at all. Surprise, Fawzi! It wasn’t you they was after! Then everything happened so quickly. The old guy pitches over, sort of scrabbling at the air with his hands, trying to scream. The old throat’s working overtime but nothing’s coming out, see, and there’s blood spurting all over everywhere, including me. Then, just as he hits the floor, the old boy grunts, “Firebird”. Just one word, “Firebird” — like that.’

‘You sure about that, Fawzi?’ I cut in.
Firebird
.
Phoenix
, I thought.
I
have
gone
forth
as
the
phoenix
in
the
hope
of
eternal
life
.

‘That’s what it sounded like,’ Fawzi groaned, ‘I mean it’s a pretty simple word, isn’t it? Fire and bird? You don’t need to have studied English at some fancy school to recognize it.’

‘OK,’ Daisy said. ‘What happened then?’

‘Well suddenly I feel like someone’s just whopped me in the legs with a barbell, and crump! Next thing I know I’m lying on the floor near the old guy, who’s still wheezing away. Suddenly this thug in a
shamagh
waltzes over cool as a cucumber to the old geezer, slips out a pistol and lets him have it right in the head. Wham! Almost blew my eardrums out. Then the gunman’s looking at me in this beady way, and I remember thinking, “I’m a goner. Forgive me Lord for all my sins!” Suddenly there’s a shout of “Police!” and a rumpus outside. The gunman sticks the pistol in his belt pretty’ niftily, and the three of them scarper out through the curtain and up the stairs as quick as you like. Bloody good job they did, too, else Fawzi wouldn’t be here talking to you. The next one to get it in the head would have been me.’

‘OK,’ Daisy said, almost purring. ‘That’s excellent, Mr Fawzi. You’ve been really helpful.’