The Mahboob Chaudri Mystery

by Josh Pachter

  Five men and a woman were waiting to be helped, as the Bahraini made his computations and counted out stacks of 10- and 20-dinar notes.

  Chaudri took his place at the end of the line and looked up at the rate board. Almost 30 rupees to the dinar, he read happily. A good rate. Shazia and the children would have a comfortable month.

  The first man in line scooped up his wad of bills from the counter, muttered a low-pitched “Shukran,” and left the office. Chaudri and the other clients shuffled a place forward.

  And then the door behind them banged open, and Chaudri whirled around at the noise.

  A tall man with dark-brown hair and burning eyes stood just inside the doorway. It was impossible to tell whether he was a native or an expat. A woman’s leather berga’a hid most of his face, and he did not speak. There was a gun in his hand, a dull-black revolver, and he held it firmly, not trembling.

  He stood for a moment, allowing the realization of danger to reach through layers of shock into the minds of his victims, then he reached behind him and flipped the sign hanging inside the glass door to read CLOSED, turned the key in the deadbolt, and pulled down the shade. Only then did he wave his gun at them, motioning them to the side wall of the office.

  “Turn around,” he told them, “faces to the wall. Hands high above your heads, feet spread wide.” His voice was cold and hard; he spoke accented but precise Arabic.

  A Yemeni? thought Chaudri automatically, his eyes fixed on a flyspeck on the wall two inches before him. A Kuwaiti?

  Over the irritated hum of the air-conditioner, he could hear the thief unfold a plastic grocery bag and begin to stuff it with stacks of crisp banknotes. He’ll take the dinars, the American dollars and the riyals, Chaudri guessed, and leave the rest of it be—

  “Now listen carefully,” the voice interrupted his thoughts, “especially you, natoor. Do exactly what l tell you and by Allah’s grace no one will get hurt.”

  “By Allah’s grace!” the gray-haired clerk burst out furiously. “How dare you talk about—”

  There was a blur of sound as the thief dashed across the room and clubbed the old Bahraini fiercely with the butt end of his revolver.

  Chaudri stole a look to the side in time to see the clerk crumple limply to the ground and the masked figure back away.

  “Do what he says,” Chaudri instructed the rest of them. “Don’t speak, don’t move, and don’t worry. It will be all right.”

  “Thank you for your assistance, natoor,” the bandit said crisply. Chaudri could hear no sarcasm in it, which surprised him. This man is truly calm, he thought. He knows just what he is doing.

  “If you follow the advice which the natoor has so intelligently given you,” the voice resumed, “no one else will have to be hurt. And as you have seen, if you do not heed that advice, I will show you no mercy. No mercy at all.”

  Chaudri listened intently. If I can’t memorize his face, he thought, at least I can memorize that heartless voice.

  “In a few moments I will be leaving you,” the thief went on. “Before I go, I will say to you the word ‘Begin.’ When I say that word, you will begin to count aloud, in unison, from one to one hundred. You will keep your faces to the wall and your hands high and go on counting, no matter what happens. When you reach one hundred, you may put your hands down and turn around and go about your business. If any of you should decide to take a chance and come after me before you have finished counting—well, that is a chance I would recommend you avoid. I have a confederate in the street, who is armed and will shoot to kill. Your families will be saddened to hear of your senseless death.”

  That was a lie, Chaudri was certain. There is no confederate in the street. This man works alone and will share his loot with no one, I can feel it. But can I afford to gamble my life on that feeling?

  No, he decided. No.

  “Thank you all for your cooperation,” the voice concluded. “And now, you may begin.”

  “Oahed,” Mahboob Chaudri said tightly, and the others spoke with him. “Th’neen, t’lasse, arba’a, hamseh….”

  As they counted, he heard the door bolt being thrown and the door swing smoothly open and then, after soft footsteps passed through it, shut. The temptation to give chase, or at least to raise the alarm, was very strong, but the thief’s words rang loudly in Chaudri’s ears: Your family will be saddened to hear of your senseless death.

  “Thamnta’ash,” he counted grimly, “tsata’ash, ashreen, oahed ashreen…”

  Suddenly there was the sound of a shot, and glass shattering, and an overwhelming clamor from the startled mobs of shoppers outside.

  Chaudri stiffened. Allah give me strength, he prayed silently, as he continued to count the Arabic numbers out in the charged atmosphere of the exchange office. Forty, he reached as the bedlam outside swelled riotously, and sixty as it crested, then seventy as it began a slow descent back toward the everyday pandemonium of the October sales, and eighty-five as the strident cries of a dozen police officers became audible above the din, shouting questions and issuing commands to the crowd….

  “Sa’ba’ah watis’een,” Chaudri counted diligently, his palms itching with a feverish ache to be out in the street, “thamania watis’een, tis’ah watis’een, ma’ah!”

  Before the dull echo of the final number had faded, Chaudri was on the sidewalk outside the Dilmun Exchange, his eyes drinking in the scene before him greedily: a tight half circle of police and passersby across the street gathered in front of the smashed display window of the Akhundawazi Trading Company. Up and down Bab-al-Bahrain Avenue as far as he could see in either direction the shoppers ebbed and flowed, laden with bags and boxes and gaily wrapped packages, an endless tide of bargain-hunting humanity.

  “Did you see him?” Chaudri demanded of the black-draped beggar, who had not moved from her perch beside the door. Unlike the first time he had addressed her, he spoke now in flawless Arabic. “The last man to leave this office, mother—did you see which way he went?”

  The woman nodded her head stiffly and moved a hand underneath her abba to point south.

  Chaudri was off at once. “Thank you, mother,” he threw back over his shoulder as he ran, his feet pounding against the concrete paving stones, his clenched teeth jarring with every stride.

  But it was hopeless, he realized, before he had gone a hundred yards. Completely hopeless. By now the thief could have bolted down any one of a dozen side streets, could have strolled casually into any of a thousand shops, could be trying on a pair of trousers or pricing gold bangles or sipping sweet tea from a gently steaming glass.

  What chance did he, Mahboob Chaudri, have of being lucky enough to stumble across a single man with a bag of money, a woman’s face mask and a gun, intent on losing himself in the tangled, teeming maze of the old suq?

  Hopeless, he thought as he ran, disgusted with his caution back at the exchange office, with the cumbersome uniform and clumsy shoes which slowed him down, with the infuriating crowds.

  What could he do? What, if it came to that, could the entire 6,000-man Public Security Force do? One hundred friends are not enough, as the old Bedouin saying had it, but a single enemy is too many.

  Yes, they could close off the airport and watch the fishing dhows and almost certainly prevent the criminal from leaving the country.

  But if the man chose to stay, if he went to ground, say, out in A’ali or Bani Jamra or one of the other villages, if he actually had a confederate, after all, who was willing to hide him, then there was no way they would ever find him. He could disappear into the desert sands of Bahrain, and the country would swallow him up so completely that it would be as if he had never existed.

  Chaudri stopped running, leaned weakly against a stretch of wooden scaffolding, and lowered his head, gasping hoarsely and filling his exhausted lungs with air.

  Was it but a single enemy he was faced with? Wh
at if he’d been wrong, if there had been a confederate out in the street? The thief could have passed him that incriminating plastic bag, gotten rid of the money and mask and gun, and melted invisibly away into the crowd.

  But that made no sense. Giving the bag to a confederate would leave the thief in the clear, yes, but then what about the confederate? If he were found with the bag in his possession, then —

  And what was the point of the gunshot? Was it intended simply to draw the crowd’s attention away from the thief’s escape? If so, then why had he bothered? The shoppers hadn’t known that the Dilmun Exchange was being robbed.

  Chaudri pulled himself upright and began to retrace his steps. He arranged and rearranged the pieces in his head, manipulating them like the misshapen interlocking loops of the silver puzzle ring he had bought for his daughter Perveen’s last birthday, trying to fit them together into an organized, sensible whole.

  The Dilmun Exchange. A tall, controlled thief, his identity hidden behind a leather mask. The violent attack on the harmless old Bahraini clerk. “Count to one hundred” ... “Your families will be saddened” … a gunshot … the crowds … the clamor … the Dilmun Exchange….

  And then suddenly the pieces dropped softly into place.

  “Merea rabba!” Chaudri exclaimed aloud, reverting unconsciously to Punjabi. “Oh, dearie me, of course!”

  He was sure of it, he was positive, but before he could prove it there was one question he would have to ask—if only he was not too late! He broke into a jog, weaving carefully from side to side to avoid the scores of shoppers milling in his path.

  As he neared the Dilmun Exchange, he saw that the old beggar woman was still there, rocking rhythmically back and forth, her upturned palm—still covered by the black fabric of her abba—a silent plea for charity.

  He walked up to her, stood over her, looked down at her—and asked her his question: “Tell me, mother, what is your name?”

  The black shape that was her head turned up to him, but the woman did not speak.

  “Your name, mother,” Chaudri repeated. “Tell me your name.”

  She put a hand to her lips and shook her head.

  “Oh, no, mother,” said Chaudri, “you are not mute. It is only that you do not wish to speak. And why is that, I find myself wondering?”

  Her other hand began to rise, but the natoor gripped the wrist firmly and pointed it towards the sky.

  “No, mother,” he said. “Your friend has already fired one shot this morning, and one shot was more than enough for today.”

  * * * *

  “I was certain the thief had lied when he told us about his confederate in the street,” Chaudri admitted to the eager ring of shurtis who surrounded him, “but I was wrong. There was a confederate, strategically situated right outside the door of the Dilmun Exchange while the robbery took place.”

  “The beggar woman,” supplied Sikander Malek.

  “Of course.” Chaudri leaned back in his chair and sipped slowly at his tea. He was enjoying himself immensely. “She was out in front of the Exchange very early this morning,” he told his listeners. “I saw her there when I reported to work at dawn. And when I went to the exchange office at nine to buy a bank draft to send home to my wife, she was still there. I even gave her a hundred fils, laid the coin on her palm and blessed her, and scolded myself for not giving more. She never said a word of thanks, but I thought nothing of it at the time. It was not until later, after the robbery, that I realized the importance of her silence—realized that her silence had been necessary in order to preserve the illusion.”

  “The illusion?” one of the shurtis prompted.

  “The illusion that the figure underneath that all-concealing black abba was an innocent beggar, an innocent beggar woman, no less—when in fact it was a man, our thief’s accomplice and brother.”

  “But how could you have known they were brothers?”

  “I didn’t know. But when I pulled the abba away from him, revealing the bag of money and the mask and the gun, proving his complicity in the crime, he confessed the entire scheme to me and led me straight to the small apartment in Umm al Hassam where they lived together—where his brother, unarmed, was awaiting him.”

  “And their scheme?”

  “A simple plan, devised by simple men, but a clever one nonetheless. As soon as he stepped out of the exchange office, the thief fired a shot across the street, above the heads of the crowd, shattering the window of the Akhundawazi Trading Company. Then he stuffed his gun and mask into the plastic bag which already held his loot, set the bag down next to the black-draped form of his brother, and melted away into the crowd. With a quick readjustment of his abba, the beggar woman brother covered over the bag, and that was that. Transferring the incriminating evidence from brother to brother took no more than a few swift seconds and easily went unnoticed in the excitement and confusion that followed the gunshot. Then, when I finally reached the street and asked the beggar which way the thief had gone, ‘she’ had only to point in the wrong direction—and I, suspecting nothing, chased futilely after a thief who had in truth gone exactly the other way.”

  “But why did the brother sit there and wait for your return? Why didn’t he make good his own escape as soon as you’d gone? No one would have seen the bag beneath the folds of his abba.”

  “A good question, my friend,” said Chaudri. “But before I answer it, let me raise another, equally interesting. Why did the thief’s brother take up his position in front of the Dilmun Exchange before four o’clock this morning, when his presence there would not be required until after nine? The answer to your question and to mine will seem obvious once you recognize it: the thief’s brother arrived at the scene much earlier than he needed to be there, and stayed on well after his role in the commission of the crime was finished, because he could not risk being seen walking either to or from the Dilmun Exchange. And why not? Because if he had been seen, it would have shattered the illusion he had created so carefully—shattered it as finally as his brother’s bullet shattered the plate-glass window of the Akhundawazi store. They were brothers, you see, similar in appearance and—this is the critical point—almost equal in height. And have you ever seen a beggar woman as tall as our unhappy prisoners? No, he had to get there early, before anyone else was about, and he had to sit there until the streets were again deserted before he could try to escape. Otherwise his height would surely have been noticed.”

  “One more question,” said Sikander Malek. “How did you figure it all out?”

  “Ah, now that is a question I would much prefer to leave unanswered. Because, you see, I’m not really sure that I did figure it out at all. I was thinking over the features of the robbery when the explanation suddenly came to me from nowhere—or perhaps I should say ‘by Allah’s grace.’ The Dilmun Exchange: that was not only the scene of the crime, it was the solution to the crime as well. For there had been several exchanges, you see: first when the bag of money changed hands and, more importantly, when the thief’s brother exchanged his own identity for that of an old beggar woman. I had been running away from the Dilmun Exchange, but the answer was there, back where I had started, all the time.”

  An appreciative murmur rose from Chaudri’s audience.

  “When I was a boy in Punjab,” he went on, “my grandfather once said to me, ‘If you are on the road to knowledge, my child, then you are journeying in the wrong direction. For knowledge is not a place you can get to by traveling. It is a place you come from, by standing still and listening to your heart.’”

  Mahboob Ahmed Chaudri, natoor, smiled broadly and drank the last of his tea.

  “Stand still,” he repeated contentedly, thinking of the promotion which this day’s work was certain to bring him, of the raise in salary that would go along with a higher rank, and of the bungalow back home in Jhang-Maghiana that he was saving to build for Shazia and the chi
ldren. “Stand still and trust in your heart.”

  Afterword

  In 1982, most of the members of Bahrain’s Public Security Force were Pakistanis. Why? Well, as you probably know, Islam is divided into two sects—Sunni and Shi’a—and the members of one don’t always get on with the members of the other. The Bahraini government knew full well that a police force comprised of both Sunnis and Shi’as wouldn’t have worked well, and putting either group in charge of the police while excluding the other would have been worse. So the Bahrainis came up with a creative solution and basically imported police officers from Pakistan, just as they imported hotel workers from Egypt and construction crews from Holland and so on.

  Bahrain’s Pakistani police were all men, and many of them had wives and children back home in Pakistan. Their salaries—though low by Western standards—were high by Pakistani standards, and the men received free housing and meals, so they were able to send enough money home to make the long separations from their families economically worthwhile.

  The Juffair Police Barracks housed about a hundred of these Pakistani officers, and it was located right next door to the grounds of the Bahrain School, where I lived. So I got to know some of the men—not well, since they tended to be shy and private—but well enough to exchange small talk when our paths would cross.

  When I decided to write a crime story set in Bahrain, I sat down with a small group of them and asked them many questions. What would be a good name for a Pakistani man? What would the names of his wife and children be? Where in Pakistan would he come from? The answers came almost faster than I could ask the questions—and I finally realized that they weren’t hypothetical answers. In fact, the men were telling me about themselves. So the Mahboob Chaudri I created for my story has the first name of one of them and the last name of another, the wife of a third, the children of a fourth, the home town of a fifth … and so on.