The Mahboob Chaudri Mystery
Page 1
Contents
Copyright Information
Also by Josh Pachter
Dedication
Introduction
The Dilmun Exchange
The Beer Drinkers
The Tree of Life
The Qatar Causeway
ASU
Jemaa el Fna
The Night of Power
Sheikh’s Beach
The Ivory Beast
The Sword of God
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Information
Copyright © 2015 by Josh Pachter.
Cover art copyright © 2015 by Solodovnikov Alekhander / Fotolia.
All rights reserved.
“The Dilmun Exchange” originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (July 1984). Reprinted in The Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories (Walker & Co, 1985).
“The Beer Drinkers” originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (December 1984). Reprinted in The Ethnic Detectives (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1985).
“The Tree of Life” originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Mid-December 1985).
“The Qatar Causeway” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (January 1986).
“ASU” originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (April 1986).
“Jemaa el Fna” originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine as “The Exchange” (June 1986).
“The Night of Power” originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (September 1986). Reprinted in The Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories (Walker & Co, 1987). Reprinted in Murder Intercontinental (Carroll & Graf, 1996).
“Sheikh’s Beach” originally appeared in Detective Story Magazine (Issue #2, 1988).
“The Ivory Beast” originally appeared in New Mystery (Vol. 2, #1, 1993).
“The Sword of God” originally appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best International Crime (Robinson, 2009). Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of the World’s Best Crime Stories (Running Press, 2009).
All of the stories, introductory materials, and afterwords in this book are copyright © 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1991, 2009, 2015 by Josh Pachter. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the permission of the author—except for brief quotations in a review—is prohibited. See “Publication Information” at the end of the book for more details about where each story originally appeared.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
Also by Josh Pachter
Styx, by Bavo Dhooge with Josh Pachter
(November, 2015)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
my daughter, Rebecca Kathleen Jones.
Although she’s never been to Bahrain,
her own story began there.
Introduction
“I want you to go to Bahrain next,” my boss told me on the WATTS line connecting the University of Maryland European Division’s Heidelberg headquarters to the education office at the US Naval Station in Rota, Spain, where I was teaching during that summer of 1982.
“Bahrain?” I said. “What country is that in?”
“Bahrain’s not in a country,” David explained. “It is a country.”
The 10 months I wound up spending in Bahrain changed my life in ways that ranged from small (I discovered the music of Michael Franks) to enormous (I met the woman who four years later would give birth to my daughter Becca). Among other changes, this was the year I came out of retirement as a crime writer.
My first published short story, written when I was 16 years old, appeared in the December 1968 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Over the next six years—while I was graduating from high school in New York and attending and graduating from college at the University of Michigan—I wrote several dozen more stories, selling six of them to EQMM and five others to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. In 1973, I was living in Reno, Nevada, and working as a scriptwriter at a tiny mass-media production company. My short stories, I thought, were getting better and better—but the better I thought they got, the less worthy of publication the editors of the magazines seemed to find them. One day, during my lunch hour, I dashed off a silly little story in no time and, for the hell of it, sent it to Ernie Hutter at AHMM … and, to my astonishment, Ernie bought it. Quality fiction I couldn’t seem to sell, but junk they would buy? In disgust, I quit writing crime stories.
In 1976, I spent nine months traveling around Europe on a rickety Czech motorcycle. While visiting with friends in Holland, I met a Dutch woman, who I married the following year; Lydia and I lived in Pennsylvania for a while, and in 1979 we moved to Amsterdam. The next year, 1980, I spotted an ad for the UMd European Division in the International Herald Tribune, and I ultimately taught for them for four months in Germany and Greece that year and for three months in England in ’81, right as Prince Charles was getting married to Lady Diana. In ’82, Maryland sent me back to Greece, and from there to southwestern Spain, and it was while I was in Spain that I had the conversation with which I began this introduction and learned that my next assignment would be the island emirate of Bahrain, which is located in the Persian Gulf, right off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
I flew to the Middle East as the only passenger on a military cargo plane bringing supplies to the US Navy’s Administrative Support Unit in Manama, Bahrain’s capital (and only) city. The Department of Defense Dependent School System—which runs elementary and junior high and high schools in locations where American servicemen and servicewomen are permitted to bring their families—had a school in Bahrain, even though assignments to ASU were in most cases what are called “unaccompanied tours.” Most of the students at the Bahrain School were the children of American and other-nation diplomats and bankers, and many of the wealthy Bahraini families also sent their kids there, since the quality of the education provided was superior to what was available on the local economy. At one point, the school had been a boarding school, but by the time I arrived it was open to day students only … and, as the University of Maryland’s sole faculty member in residence, I was given the dorm supervisor’s apartment in the otherwise unoccupied dormitory to live in.
Hold up your left hand, palm facing away from you, four fingers touching and thumb a little separated from the fingers. Now find that shape on a map of the Middle East, and you’ll be looking at Saudi Arabia (your hand) and Qatar (your thumb). Between your thumb and your fingers, you’ll see the blue of the Persian Gulf—and, if you look closely, you will (depending on the scale of the map) see a miniscule dot that you might easily mistake for a printing error.
That miniscule dot is Bahrain.
Actually, it’s only part of Bahrain. The country is an archipelago of several dozen islands, most of them uninhabited and too small to show up on any map showing more of the world than Bahrain alone. When I was there, in 1982, there were a total of 33 islands with a total area of just over 250 square miles; today, land reclamation projects have increased the number of islands to 84 and the total area to a little over 300 square miles. For the sake of comparison, Rhode Island—the smallest state in the US—is a bit over 1200 square miles in area, five times the size of Bahrain when I was there, and the city of Los Angeles, at 502 square miles, is double the size of the Bahrain I remember.
So it’s a pretty small place, and it was even smaller in 1982, and smaller still when you consider that the bottom half of Bahrain Island—the main island, the one that shows up on the maps, the one where I lived—was a m
ilitary area (theirs, not ours) and off-limits to foreigners.
The population was also small, which meant that new arrivals almost automatically became celebrities. Within three weeks of my touching down, I had been interviewed on the national radio station and by both national newspapers, I had been invited to dinner at the homes of the American ambassador and the commander of the US Navy’s Middle East fleet, and I’d been asked to give a speech at the British Council. (The Bahraini who called to invite me to speak at the British Council spoke English with a heavy accent, and I was a little surprised when he told me that my audience would consist of about 100 bakers. As small as the country is, I couldn’t imagine that there would be a need for that much bread. When I arrived to give my presentation, though, I discovered that I’d misunderstood his accent, and the crowd which had gathered to hear me was in fact comprised of about 100 bankers. You might think there’d be even less need for bankers than for bakers in a country housing only about a third of a million people, but, since Bahrain doesn’t have any oil, the way it kept up with the al-Joneses was by becoming a haven for off-shore banking, and pretty much every major financial institution on the planet had a branch office there!)
It didn’t take more than a month or so for the novelty of my arrival to wear off, and once that happened there wasn’t really all that much for me to do in Bahrain. The suq—the ancient marketplace—was fascinating, and there was Sheikh’s Beach (which was for foreigners only) and the National Museum, the Suq-al-Khamis Mosque and the Al-Areen Wildlife Park and a few other sights. The State Department folks and the Bahrain School faculty had dinner parties and cookouts just about every weekend. I had my classes to teach, of course, and I became friendly with some of my students.
But by the time I’d been there for another month, I was spending a fair amount of my time bored.
And eventually I decided that maybe I ought to take this fascinatingly boring place where I was living and use it as the setting for a new short story.
I sent the result, which I titled “The Dilmun Exchange,” off to Eleanor Sullivan, the editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. She bought it, and asked me to turn Mahboob Chaudri into a series character. So I wrote a second Chaudri story, and a third, and I kept on writing them for a while after moving from Bahrain back up to Europe and settling in Germany.
All told, I wrote 10 Chaudri stories—and then, for reasons far too complicated and personal to explain here—I stopped writing altogether.
This time, my “retirement” lasted longer, from about 1988 until 2003, when my daughter Becca, then 17, only half-teasingly said something about how it must have been fun to be able to write publishable fiction, once upon a time.
“I still can write publishable fiction, dear,” I told her. “I just don’t want to.”
And she gave me a look that said “Sure, Dad,” so I figured I’d better prove it to her and came out of retirement yet again. And here I am, once more an engaged member of the crime-writing fraternity—thanks both to Becca, who pushed me to resume writing a decade ago, and to my wife Laurie, who pushes me to continue writing today.
My thanks also to John Betancourt and the folks at Wildside Press, who encouraged me to collect all 10 of my Mahboob Chaudri stories into a single volume. I had fun writing the stories, back in the early and middle 1980s, and I had fun rereading them and writing the Afterwords to them now, 30 years later.
I hope you’ll have as much fun with them as I’ve had.
Josh Pachter
Herndon, Virginia
July 2015
The Dilmun Exchange
The muezzin’s call to dawn prayer echoed sadly down Bab-al-Bahrain Avenue. It was 4 AM, and the long narrow street—the main artery of Manama’s old shopping district, the suq—was almost deserted. A beggar woman squatted, motionless, beside the doorway of Dilmun Exchange Services and Wholesale Jewelers, completely covered by her black silk abba, even her face and her extended palm swathed in black and invisible. Except for her, the road was empty. It would be hours yet before the merchants began to arrive, to raise the heavy metal shutters which protected their shop windows, to unlock their glass doors and switch on their electric cash registers, to look over their merchandise and drink one quiet cup of strong coffee before the madness began.
It was October 1, the first day of the autumn sales. For the next two weeks, by official decree of the Emir himself, every shop in the tiny island-nation of Bahrain would slash 20 percent or more from its prices on all items but food. At 8 AM, the sales would begin, and thousands of Arabs and expatriates would pour into the suq from all over the country, showering tens of thousands of dinars on the merchants and artisans, driving home to dinner with the backs of their cars filled with a mind-boggling array of television sets, video recorders, stereo systems, cameras, typewriters, pocket calculators, digital watches, electronic games, refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, microwave ovens, furniture, hand-woven carpets, antique pearl chests, bracelets and necklaces of gold and silver, shirts and skirts and shoes and suits and dresses.
But the beginning of the madness was still hours away, and when Mahboob Chaudri turned off Government Road and walked under the tall white arches of the bab, the narrow street which stretched out before him was lonely and still, except for the solitary beggar and the dying echoes of the muezzin’s call.
Chaudri crossed the small plaza just inside the bab and paused to look up at the blue-and-white sign above the doorway of the squat off-white building on the corner. STATE OF BAHRAIN, the sign announced in English and Arabic, MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR, PUBLIC SECURITY, MANAMA POLICE STATION.
Why only English and Arabic? he wondered, as he wondered every morning. Why not Baluchi and Punjabi and Urdu, since almost two-thirds of us on the police force are Pakistani?
Then, as always, he shrugged his shoulders, pushed the thought aside, and walked up the three stone steps into the station house.
A small group of mahsools, all of them Bahraini, lounged in the hallway, smoking imported cigarettes and talking idly. Chaudri greeted them with deference—he was always careful to be courteous to his superior officers—and walked on back to the locker room.
He was early this morning and no one else was there yet. He unbuttoned his sports shirt and hung it away in his locker, took off his blue jeans and folded them onto a second hanger, and placed his tennis shoes neatly beneath them. Many of the other men came to work in jutti and the traditional Pakistani punjab—knee-length cotton shirt and baggy trousers, both in the same pale shade of orange or brown or blue—but Chaudri liked the look of Western clothes and wore them whenever he was off duty.
He pulled on his drab-green uniform shirt and pants, adjusted his shoulder braid, knotted his olive-green tie, tucking the bottom half of it away between the second and third buttons of his shirt, and stepped into his sturdy black shoes. Then he faced the mirror inside the door of his locker and positioned his dark-green beret on his head, turning this way and that to make sure it was sitting well.
Satisfied at last, he stepped back from the mirror so he could see more of himself. He liked what he saw: Mahboob Ahmed Chaudri, 28 years of age and not bad-looking, with his deep-brown skin, his regular features, and his immaculate, imposing uniform.
Mahboob Ahmed Chaudri, 18 months a natoor on the Bahraini police force and ready any day now for his first promotion. He would be sorry to give up that lovely green beret, but glad to trade it in for the peaked cap of a mahsool.
The room was beginning to fill up now, and Chaudri closed the door of his locker and joined one of the half dozen conversations going on around him. It was 4:20 AM, and he still had 10 minutes of his own time left before roll call.
* * * *
By the time his half-hour break began, at 9 AM, the sales were well under way. Bab-al-Bahrain Avenue and the labyrinth of side streets and alleyways branching off from it were inundated with honking c
ars and bustling shoppers. The air was hot and still, and heavy with the smells of cooking oil and automobile exhaust and sweat, the sounds of humanity and machinery joined together in grating cacophony.
But Mahboob Chaudri walked along with a smile on his face, patiently allowing the throngs to surge around him and jostle against him—small knots of Arab women in long black abbas, their faces hidden behind thin veils or the birdlike leather masks called berga’a; businessmen in ankle-length thobes with red-and-white checkered ghutras arranged carefully on their heads; bankers of 40 countries in expensive three-piece suits; expat wives in modest skirts and blouses; Dutch construction workers and Korean longshoremen and British oil riggers in grease-stained jeans; Indian nannies in flowing saris, their midriffs bare or swathed in filmy gauze; children of every color and nationality and description.
Chaudri’s monthly pay envelope was in his pocket, he had half an hour free, and he was on his way to the Dilmun Exchange to buy rupees to send home to his wife and children in Karachi.
Outside the money-changing office, the lone beggar woman still sat. Or was this a different one? Shrouded in black, not an inch of skin visible, unmoving, there was no way to tell. Chaudri pulled a 100-fils piece from his pocket and laid it gently on her covered, outstretched palm. “El lo, majee,” he mumbled in his native Punjabi. “Take this, mother.”
The woman did not answer him, not even with a nod.
Under that abba, she could be fast asleep, thought Chaudri. She could even be dead.
He went into the exchange office. It was a plain room. Behind a wooden counter running along the far wall, a gray-bearded Bahraini in thobe and ghutra sat working a pocket calculator. Above his head hung a large black board with the day’s exchange rates—buying and selling prices for American and Canadian and Australian dollars, French and Swiss francs, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian kronor, British pounds, German marks, Dutch guilders, Italian lira, Saudia Arabian riyals, Japanese yen, and a dozen other currencies. There were a few faded travel posters taped to the walls, an ashtray standing in front of the counter for the use of the clientele, an oversized air conditioner humming morosely, and that was all.