The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus

by Sean McLachlan

  Faisal pushed with all his might. The baboon was stronger than he was, but lighter and shorter, and he managed to knock it off its feet.

  Then he had to jerk to the side again to dodge the second animal, losing grip on his improvised shield as he did so.

  He ran. The match burned out. Faisal stumbled and stopped.

  A low chuckle emanated from the darkness. “Well done. Very well done.”

  The animal trainer made a couple of short cries. Faisal backed away as he heard the baboons’ claws skitter across the dirt floor. After a moment there was silence.

  Hakim lit a third match. One baboon stood sentinel by the door. The other squatted beside its master. Neither moved. Hakim lit an oil lamp and held up the coin.

  “I think you have earned this.”

  He flicked it through the air. Faisal caught it and stuffed it in his pocket. Hakim nodded with satisfaction.

  “Look at that. Panting and trembling as you are, you still snatched that coin out of the air like a pleasant thought. I think I might have work for you. Yes, I bet you’re quite the little pickpocket and housebreaker, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not good at any of that.”

  “Oh, don’t be modest, Faisal. One has to make a living in this cruel world. I have need of an assistant. My baboons are quite useful, quite clever, but they are still animals. They have their limitations, but a clever little boy like you could be just the thing I need. Whatever you do not know I will train you to do. And you will be rewarded, Faisal. You can have a roof over your head and money in your pocket.”

  “Thank you, but I really—”

  Hakim raised a silencing hand. “Oh, but Faisal, I insist. God has placed us in each other’s path. You need someone to take care of you and give you shelter. I need a little thief. It is ordained.”

  “But I already—”

  “Accept your fate, Faisal. You’re mine now.”

  13

  As soon as Moustafa showed Augustus the note the Apaches had left, reality shattered.

  The crude drawing of the firing squad became a real one. The Frenchman stood lashed to a post, a defiant look on his face. When he had refused a blindfold, the French officer had put one on him anyway, but while it could hide the contemptuous gleam in his eyes, it could not hide the fanatical pride graven on his features.

  “Do you have any final words?” the officer asked. It was Captain Fortier, who had held the line next to his own detached unit of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.

  “I forgive the working men who do this deed, and condemn the tools of the ruling class who make them do it!” the man shouted.

  “What did he say?” Mark asked beside him. He was the only other Tommy on the firing squad, the rest being French poilus like the man they had to execute.

  “Nothing,” he muttered.

  Captain Fortier stood aside, raised his saber.

  “Ready, aim, fire!”

  The saber came down.

  They fired. He had decided to deliberately miss, but at the last instant shifted his aim and put a bullet dead between the man’s eyes.

  The other shots ripped apart the prisoner’s chest, all save one, which lodged in the post several inches above the man’s head.

  The man slowly crumpled, seeming to deflate, the ropes going slack. Blood poured down his face and chest.

  Captain Fortier strode up to the executed man and tapped at the bullet hole in the post with the tip of his sword. He gave the two Tommies a suspicious look but when he asked the question he asked it in French.

  “Who missed on purpose?”

  The only answer was silence.

  Captain Fortier walked slowly down the line. Mark stood on the far right and the officer passed him first. He stared at Mark for a moment, who held his gaze, and the officer continued to where he stood. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his French counterpart. He could only look at his hands, hands that had never trembled before but now could barely keep a hold of the rifle. Sweat poured down his face. He felt like he was going to be sick. That brought more fear, the fear of heaving up his half-digested bully beef and spattering it all over Captain Fortier’s shiny boots.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “You didn’t miss, did you?” The words came out almost kindly.

  All he could do was shake his head.

  “Executions are never easy,” Captain Fortier said as if from a father to his son. “But they are vital to maintain the fighting spirit of the army. You saw what this man did. You saw how he tried to turn my regiment into some rabblerousing workers’ collective. Why, if he spoke English he would have tried to do the same with your regiment.”

  The gorge rose in his throat, and he just managed to turn enough away that his breakfast ended up on the grass and not on the captain.

  “Easy there, easy,” Captain Fortier said, his fine, upper class Parisian French sounding oddly beautiful in this ugly scene. “Mustn’t let the men see you waver. You set a good example by volunteering to be on the firing squad instead of ordering one of your men. Don’t ruin it now.”

  Captain Fortier continued his slow walk down the row, his saber waving slightly over the grass as if he would suddenly bring it up high and swing it down on the guilty party. The captain stared at each man in turn, forcing them to look him in the eye.

  His own gaze slipped past Captain Fortier to a man further down the line. When they had all raised their guns in unison, he had glanced to his left to avoid looking at the prisoner, and saw one rifle raised slightly above level. The way the man held it, he got the sense that he would raise it a little further before he fired.

  The man had a calm look on his face, too calm. The others all looked sick or angry, but not this fellow. That made it even more likely that he was the culprit.

  Then the fellow returned his gaze. Suspicion, anger, fear, and collusion all flickered through his features like the windows of a passing train.

  Then his face became a mask again, and remained so as Captain Fortier stood before him.

  “So it appears that miss was accidental,” Captain Fortier declared when he got to the end of the line. “With shooting like that, no wonder we still haven’t defeated the Bosche. All you men will have gunnery practice for an hour each morning until further notice, and fatigue duty for the rest of the day.”

  Captain Fortier turned to him.

  “Captain ––––,” Fortier said, addressing him by a name long buried. “I suggest you do the same with your man.”

  “My man did not miss,” he replied, then added, “Nor do I think any of yours did, at least not deliberately.”

  Captain Fortier’s expression was unreadable. “So you say.” He nodded to the bloody mess tied to the post. “At least there’s one less of his kind. Men, return to your duties!”

  The line broke up. He staggered away with Mark at his side, feeling dizzy. Mark walked faster, eager to get away, and once Mark had gone ahead of him a few steps, he sensed another figure come to his side.

  It was the poilu who had deliberately missed.

  “Thank you for not turning me in,” the man whispered. “I am Yves Savatier. Remember that name, comrade.”

  “Don’t call me comrade. And as for remembering your name, I doubt I’ll forget anything of this day, although I will certainly do my very best to.”

  Yves Savatier glanced at his captain with a sneer. “Fortier is a fool. He thinks there is one less for killing Gascon. No, he created a hundred replacements.”

  Augustus came back to reality on the floor of his own showroom, one hand pressed against the floor and holding up his upper body, the other arm extended, the hand spread out as if to ward off a blow.

  Or to warn off his assistant.

  Moustafa stood a few feet away, a grim look on his dark face.

  “You went away again, boss.”

  “Thank you for informing me,” Augustus said as he stood up. The drawing lay on the floor. He picked it up without lookin
g at it.

  “All you all right, boss?”

  “Don’t be a pest, Moustafa.”

  “What does that note mean? Do you know the man who sent it?”

  Augustus nodded. “An old partner in crime.”

  “Crime? You?”

  “Murder. But all quite legal. Quite neat and tidy.”

  For a moment neither said anything. Moustafa broke the silence.

  “I need to know everything if I am to be of help, sir.”

  Augustus didn’t look at him as he replied.

  “You’ve probably heard of the Great Mutiny, when the French poilus as a mass refused to go on any more of those pointless, bloody attacks. They also demanded better living conditions and leave. Some of those poor fellows hadn’t had leave in a year, and spent their days in damp, lice-ridden funk holes ten times worse than what we had, wondering when their lives would be thrown away by their idiotic commanders. Well, the mutiny didn’t happen all of a sudden. There was a great deal of discontent in the ranks in the months leading up to it. In March of 1917, after another mess of a battle, a portion of my regiment had become detached from the main body and ended up fighting side by side with the French. A certain Captain Fortier ordered a counterattack to even up the line. The Germans had taken a hill from where they could fire down on our position and he wanted to retake it. Perfectly sound reasoning from a military point of view, but hundreds would die for this perfectly sound reasoning, just like millions had already died for the sake of other perfectly sound decisions.”

  “I cannot even imagine what it must have been like, boss.”

  “No you can’t, and for that I am glad. So this one private named Gascon stirred up some trouble among the poilus. He said that their regiment had already taken fifty percent losses in the past two days, and why should they take more? When zero hour came and Captain Fortier ordered the assault, my men went over the top but virtually none of the French did. We got hit hard, and scampered back to our starting positions as quickly as we could. The good captain was beside himself with rage, smacking at his men with the flat of his sword. Gascon punched him, and urged the men to kill him then and there. Luckily his comrades balked at that, but just barely, and I and a few of my men managed to pull Fortier out of the tussle before Gascon could rile them enough to do it.

  “We got out of there and back to the support trench, where Captain Fortier gathered some officers and men made of sterner stuff and went up to arrest the lot. A good thing the Germans didn’t choose that moment to make another attack, or the whole sector might have collapsed.”

  “Did you have to fight the mutineers?” Moustafa asked. They had moved to the side of the room where they kept a couple of chairs for customers. Augustus sat down hard in one of them, rubbing his temple. Moustafa remained standing.

  “No, they gave up, thankfully. Captain Fortier did the right thing. As we came up, he declared that only Gascon would be brought up on charges of mutiny. The others would only have to face charges of gross insubordination.”

  “What is the difference?”

  “One carries the death penalty and the other merely fatigue duties or some time in military prison. If he had charged them all with mutiny, we would have had a firefight on our hands.”

  “Divide and conquer.”

  “Indeed. We held a military tribunal that same evening in regimental headquarters. Gascon was found guilty and sentenced to be shot. The others got sent to rear areas to build roads on suspended pay. Since my regiment had been imperiled as much as Captain Fortier’s, he asked that two of my men be on the firing squad. While that was highly irregular, those were irregular times. I didn’t want to do it, but Fortier got his commission five months before me and thus was the most senior officer present. To spare one of my men I volunteered to be on the firing squad. We drew lots for the second.”

  “So how does this connect with the Apaches?” Moustafa asked.

  Augustus shook his head and looked at the sarcophagus that had contained two of the gang’s victims. “Gascon was an Apache, one of the more political ones. He had never been arrested and so when he got drafted he wasn’t sent to a convict brigade but rather the regular army. Once there, he started to foment insurrection much like the Bolsheviks in the Czarist army. It turned out one of the poilus forced to be on the firing squad was an Apache sympathizer. Yves Savatier. That act pushed him over the edge and I suppose he joined the Apaches. It could only have been him who could have done this little sketch. The question is, how did they learn my assumed name and learn that I live in Cairo?”

  “It also doesn’t answer why they have chosen to focus on you.”

  Augustus sighed. “War is a strange thing, Moustafa. It creates ties between the most unlikely of men. I will always be tied to the men who made up that firing squad, even a low-bred slouch with revolutionary pretensions like Savatier. He might be chasing me for his own reasons, just like I cut myself off from all my fellow veterans for mine.”

  Augustus stopped talking. He hadn’t meant to reveal so much to his assistant, but it had all come tumbling out.

  So was that what all this was about? Savatier wanting to put the war behind him somehow? He had picked a funny way to do it. Unless Savatier thought he could convert him to the cause …

  Augustus glanced at the message again.

  Fools. If they think that, they’re barking up the wrong tree.

  “So what else have you learned?” Augustus asked in order to get his mind off the past.

  Moustafa told him about his experiment with the meter stick and what he had learned from the boatmen.

  “Hmm,” he said, scratching one side of his chin. “I agree that particular line is a clue of some sort, but we’re obviously missing the mark. No, I must admit it eludes me as it does you. But that detail about the attack on the waterfront and the disappearance of the procurer Aziz might just be the lead we need.”

  “How so?”

  Augustus looked at him and grinned. Moustafa got a guarded look on his face. Why did the poor fellow always turn sour just as everything was getting fun?

  “We wanted to meet the Apaches, and the Apaches are down by the waterfront attacking foreign men looking for ladies of the evening. Well,” Augustus straitened his tie, “I’m a foreign man, and I just so happen to feel a mite lonely tonight.”

  The waterfront was quiet, the only sounds the not-too-distant chatter of the hotel terrace and the occasional clop clop of a horse or mule on the road. The streetlights did not give much illumination as far as where the sand met the water, and Augustus realized that from the relative brightness of the road or hotel terrace, people walking along the riverbank would be impossible to see. The dear departed Aziz had chosen a good spot to set up his nocturnal business.

  Augustus strolled casually along the roadside until he found a spot where one of the street lamps had guttered out. Hoping this patch of darker road would be enough to hide his disappearance, he quickly made his way down the slope leading to the river.

  He had dressed up for the occasion, favoring a winter suit because it was darker than his light summer suits and thus hid him better at night, and had added a formal shirt with a high collar. On his head he wore a broad slouch hat pulled down over the masked half of his face. He hoped this would hide his features enough that the Apaches wouldn’t recognize him. Completing the ensemble was his walking stick, which he swung jauntily in time with his steps. His automatic rested in his pocket and his assistant, also armed, tailed him about two hundred yards behind.

  Augustus looked out over the Nile. The water rippled under the faint yellow gleam of the distant streetlamps. All remained quiet but for the palm trees rustling in the breeze and the slap of oars from an unseen boat far out on the river.

  He took a deep breath and smiled. It felt peaceful here. No people. He would have come here more regularly if not for its bad reputation. Augustus had, of course, heard that this was a spot for assignations. When social or business duty forced him to spend
time with other Europeans, he’d heard many a drunken boast about the commercial transactions along this stretch of the river. Such encounters interested him not at all.

  Far more interesting would be the encounter he presently encouraged.

  He stopped his descent a few steps from the water and turned to the bridge, visible as a string of lights spanning the river. Eyes and ears alert, he made his way slowly toward it.

  About halfway there, he spotted the form of a woman standing by the river ahead, staring out over the water. She wore a loose caftan over her plump body. A headscarf hid her features. After Augustus had taken a couple of more steps the figure turned and he could just make out a careworn but still pretty face.

  “Hello, mister,” she said in broken English, her voice coming out soft.

  “Good evening,” he replied in English. Best not to give the game away by speaking in her own language.

  “Is the good mister looking for something?”

  “Yes. Yes I am.”

  “Come.”

  She walked away toward the bridge. Augustus followed a few paces behind. He glanced around but saw no one. She was obviously a professional, completely at ease with the situation. Briefly he wondered if this wasn’t a trap, and what he would do if he found himself alone under the bridge with her. How does one make excuses to a woman of this sort?

  They passed a few boats beached on the sand. Augustus gave them a wide berth.

  The woman turned, as if to make sure he still followed. Then she stopped and looked him full in the face. In the dim light he could see her expression of open invitation.

  Yes, a professional. She didn’t even change expression when they jumped him.

  14

  The Apaches came out of nowhere. One moment Moustafa was following his boss at a safe distance, the fallen woman almost invisible in the darkness further along the riverbank, and the next moment there was an explosion of motion.