The Mahboob Chaudri Mystery

by Josh Pachter

  “Then why did you agree to take part?” Malek demanded. “Why did you give them your money?”

  A broad grin spread across Mahboob Chaudri’s nut-brown face.

  “For 50 dirham,” he said happily, “we have had the opportunity to participate in Moroccan street theater at its finest. But there is something more important than that.” He took the counterfeit bill from Malek’s fingers and held it up between them. “For 50 dirham,” he said, “I have bought myself the souvenir I was searching for, a souvenir which will forever remind me of our afternoon in Marrakesh.”

  Afterword

  This is, I think, the most autobiographical story I’ve ever written. In 1984, while I was living in Germany, I spent two weeks in Morocco on vacation, including several days in Marrakesh—where I actually bargained for and bought the “ceremonial Berber belt” with its “bold colors and long tassels and colorful bits of mirror” which Mahboob regretfully passes up as too expensive, and I watched in fascination the workings of the con game by which Mahboob willingly allows himself to be victimized. I wanted to write about the city, so I sent Mahboob there as part of a security detail accompanying the Bahraini Minister of Defense to a Conference of Non-Aligned Nations, gave him a day off to explore, and then just reported very directly on my own experience.

  I’d love to show you a picture of the belt, but I unfortunately lost it in my 1991 move from Europe back to America. (Long story.) I wish I could show it to you, since it looked every bit as beautiful hanging on my bedroom wall as Mahboob knew it would look on his. But the best I can do is show you a similar belt, so at least you’ll have a general idea of what it looked like:

  As you’ve noticed, I’ve peppered the Chaudri stories with occasional Arabic words and phrases—and with Mahboob’s occasional swearing in Urdu. The Arabic alphabet is different from ours, though, so when I use Arabic words in the Chaudri stories, I have to transliterate them from the Arabic alphabet to ours. In the stories set in Bahrain, I consistently use the spelling suq for the old marketplace in the center of Manama. Depending on where you look, you may find the same word transliterated in a number of other ways, such as sook and suq. When this story was published in EQMM, the spelling used was souk, which is the English transliteration often used in Morocco. For the sake of consistency, I thought about changing that to suq for this collection, but ultimately decided not to. To emphasize the difference between Mahboob’s usual stomping grounds and the setting of this story, I decided to let the marketplace in Marrakesh remain the souk.

  You probably know that some English-language words vary depending on which country or which part of a country you’re in—American cars have “hoods” and “trunks,” for example, while British cars have “bonnets” and “boots,” and a carbonated soft drink would be called a “soda” in New York but a “pop” in Michigan—and the same applies to some Arabic words and phrases. For example, the traditional checkered men’s headdress which in Bahrain—and, therefore, in the Chaudri stories—is called a ghutra is in other parts of the Middle East called a keffiyeh (by Palestinians), a shemagh (by Jordanians), and so on. Similarly, the traditional ankle-length garment worn by men is called a thobe in Bahrain, while in Morocco it’s a djelleba.

  Parenthetically, the Bahraini thobe is usually (but not always) a solid color, generally white, while the Moroccan djelleba is usually (but not always) striped and dark. Here, have a look:

  And, since I’ve used the terminology in many of the stories, this is perhaps a good time to identify the red-and-white checked headdress the man on the left is wearing as a ghutra and the black band used to keep it in place on his head (also useful for hobbling camels in a desert sandstorm!) as an agal.

  Original EQMM editor Fred Dannay was notorious for changing his authors’ titles, but I had much better luck with Eleanor Sullivan. She left all of my Chaudri titles intact—except for this one. My title, “Jemaa el Fna,” was way cool: how could a reader see the word “Fna” on the page and not be sucked right into the otherness of the world of the story? But, for reasons of her own, Eleanor changed this one story’s title to “The Exchange.” I loved Eleanor dearly and still love her memory—but “The Exchange” is not only boring and bland, it’s almost identical to the title of the first Mahboob story,

  “The Dilmun Exchange,” which had appeared in EQMM only two years earlier! So the story is published here for the first time under its original title.

  The Night of Power

  The burning in his lungs was a hawk with sharpened claws, and it tore at his flesh with cruel anger.

  Ana aouz cigara, he thought, his throat parched, his breathing hoarse. I must have a cigarette!

  But it was Ramadan, the month of Saum, and the Holy Quran commanded all able-bodied adult Muslims to “eat and drink until so much of the dawn appears that a white thread may be distinguished from a black, then keep the fast completely until night.”

  The sick were temporarily exempt from fasting, as were nursing and pregnant women and travelers making long journeys, though they were all obliged to make up any of the 30 days they missed for such reasons as soon after the end of the month as they were able. Only the very young and the very old were fully excused from participation.

  He had no reason not to fast, so he tasted no food in spite of his hunger, his cracked lips touched no water in spite of the heat of the day, and—worst of all—the packet of cigarettes in the pocket of his thobe remained unopened, and its cellophane wrapper crinkled in laughter at his suffering as he caressed it with longing fingers.

  He looked out the plate-glass windows of the great Presidential Hotel, past the green-tiled roofs and golden central dome of the Guest Palace to the sea, where the sun’s nether rim flamed but a centimeter above the slate-gray waters of Gudabiyah Bay. He watched without appreciation as the fireball extinguished itself in the Gulf and brilliant streaks of salmon and orange and brightest yellow washed across the ivory sky. He clenched his teeth and waited impatiently as darkness fell, and the imams peered solemnly at their white and black threads in the gathering dusk.

  Then at last, at 8:07 PM, the signal canon sounded. Almost instantly there was a cigarette between his lips and he was drawing its soothing smoke deep within himself, blessing the Almighty for having given him the strength to conduct himself faithfully throughout the day.

  Praise Allah, he thought, only three days more and I am free of this torture for another year!

  When he had smoked his cigarette down to the filter, he stubbed it out in an ashtray and crossed the lobby to the doors of the Al-Wazmiyyah Coffee Shop. The room was already crowded, but he filled a plate with mezzah and ouzi and kofta kebabs from the Iftar buffet and found an empty table by the window. He ate slowly and sparingly and drank three glasses of cool spring water, then he left the restaurant and, after a brief stop to pick up the object he needed, rode the elevator to the sixth floor of the hotel.

  The corridor was deserted—all the Presidential’s guests but one, he felt certain, were downstairs at the buffet, even the Westerners, who had been cautioned not to eat in public during the daylight hours as a sign of respect to Ramadan and to the Muslims observing the fast. He walked quickly down the hallway to the fire door, let himself through it, and climbed the last two flights of stairs to the hotel’s top floor.

  Here, too, there was no one to be seen, no one to see him as he crept along the thick brown carpeting to the door marked 613. He put his left ear and the fingertips of his right hand to the wood and listened intently. There was nothing to be heard from within. His hand darted into the pocket of his thobe, not for his cigarettes this time but for the ring of keys, which he clasped tightly in his fist to keep them from jangling as he drew them forth.

  He selected one key from the dozen on the ring and fitted it soundlessly into the lock set into the doorknob. He held his breath as he turned the key, turned the knob, and swung the door inward just enough to allow h
imself to slip through the opening and ease it shut behind him.

  The room was dark, illuminated only by the faint glow of the hotel’s exterior lighting that filtered in through the drapery covering the single window.

  He waited. The only noises in the room were the gentle hum of the air conditioner and the deafening pounding of his heart. When his eyes had adjusted to the almost-blackness, he was able to make out the shape in the left-hand bed, imagined he could actually see the one thin blanket rising and falling with the breathing of the figure who lay there asleep.

  He stole across the room to the side of the bed and reached once more into his thobe’s deep side pocket.

  When his hand reappeared, he was holding neither cigarettes nor keys. He was holding a small black revolver that glittered evilly in the diffused light admitted by the curtains, and his hand was steady as he touched it to the temple of the sleeping man in the bed.

  * * * *

  Mahboob Chaudri’s temples throbbed and his pulse raced with exasperation as he stood looking down at the dead man.

  “Where in the name of the Prophet is his clothing?” he demanded of no one, though there were four other people in the room to hear him. There were angrier words in Chaudri’s mind, but he was able to bite them back before they escaped his lips. Fasting is only one half of faith, he reminded himself. During the month of Saum, hostile behavior was also to be avoided—as were lying, backbiting, slander, the swearing of false oaths, and the glance of passion. So it was written, and—a devout believer—so Mahboob Chaudri would comport himself, the better to avoid distraction from the pious attention to God that was the meaning of Ramadan. It was not easy for him to calm his thoughts, but he held them inside his mouth with the tip of his index finger as he returned his gaze to the bed.

  The dead man was completely naked, covered only by a light blanket of a blue several shades paler than his eyes. He was a Westerner, a Caucasian, but his skin was richly tanned. He had close-cropped blond hair, a fine Roman nose, and what Jennifer Blake under happier circumstances would have called a dishy moustache. There was a small black hole just above his left temple, and the blood that drenched his pillow was still damp.

  The Pakistani turned away in disgust. In spite of the air conditioning, he was hot and sticky in his olive-green Public Security uniform. There was a line of perspiration on his upper lip.

  “Where are his trousers?” he exclaimed, fighting to keep his voice below a shout. “His shirt? His shoes and stockings? Where is his billfold? Where are his papers?”

  “The murderer—” Abdulaziz Shaheen began, but Chaudri cut him off.

  “Yes, yes, of course. The murderer has taken everything away with him, including the gun and the keys they used to let themselves into this room.”

  “But, why?” said Jennifer Blake, a willowy brunette in a trim gold-and-white suit with a nametag on one lapel that identified her as the hotel’s night receptionist.

  “So that we would not be able to determine the victim’s identity, of course.” Chaudri had been called away from his Iftar meal at the Juffair Police Barracks to investigate a report of a gunshot at the Presidential Hotel, and he was tired and hungry after a long day of fasting.

  “That’s not what I meant.” The Blake woman frowned, her cultured British tone beginning to broaden under the strain of the evening’s events. “It’s bloody well obvious that’s why his kit was taken off, excuse my French. What I meant was, why was he here?”

  “Yes,” said Mirza Hussain from a straight-backed chair by the low couch where the receptionist, Shaheen, and an elderly woman bundled up in a terrycloth bathrobe were all sitting. “That is exactly what I have been asking myself all along. Why was this man sleeping in room 613 in the first place? Why, for that matter, was he in the hotel at all?”

  “He was not a guest?” asked Chaudri.

  “I never checked him in,” Jennifer Blake said firmly. “Not tonight nor any other night.”

  “Mr. Hussain? Mr. Shaheen?”

  Although the Presidential was part of a large American chain, it was—like all major hotels in the emirate—run by Bahrainis and staffed by a mixture of British expatriates, Indians, and Pakistanis. Mirza Hussain was general manager, Abdulaziz Shaheen chief of security.

  Both men were native Bahrainis, both now wore the traditional Arabic long white thobes and red-and-white-checkered ghutras, but there the resemblance between them ended. Hussain was built along the lines of the country’s ruler, Sheikh Isa bin Sulman al-Khalifa; he was small in height but rather portly, with golden skin, a graying moustache and chin beard, and wise black eyes behind the glittering lenses of a pair of spectacles with thin golden rims. Shaheen was muscularly built and clean shaven and olive-complected, a decade younger and a full head taller than his superior.

  “I have never seen him before,” said Hussain, with an uncomfortable glance at the lifeless figure on the bed. “Perhaps Miss Ramsey or Miss Messenger checked him in during one of the other shifts.”

  The security chief shook his head. “I don’t think he was a guest,” he said, and paused to draw deeply on the cigarette held between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. When he spoke again, wisps of smoke puffed from his mouth along with his words. “But of course I can’t be certain. It should be easy enough to find out.”

  “You yourself do not recognize him?” Chaudri persisted.

  “No. I have no idea who he was. But whether he was a guest here or not, he had no business in this particular room, that much is certain.”

  “And why is that?”

  It was Mirza Hussain who answered. “Standard hotel practice, mahsool. Sometimes important visitors drop in on us unexpectedly. We must always have space available to accommodate them. So, no matter how fully booked up we may be, we keep this one room vacant in case of an emergency. It is never rented out in the ordinary way.”

  Chaudri made an irritated grimace and turned back to the dead man in the bed. “Then what were you doing here sleeping?” he muttered. “What is it you were doing in room 613, where you ought not to have been at all, asleep so early on a Ramadan evening? And who is it who shot you, by all that is holy? Why were you here, and why were you killed, and by whom?” He curled his nut-brown hands into fists and rubbed wearily at his eyes. “All right,” he sighed, “let us begin at the beginning. Frau Jurkeit?”

  The older woman in the bathrobe stirred restlessly on the green leather sofa. “I am in ze room next door,” she said, her English heavily accented. “Room 611. I am here in Manama wiss ze trade delegation from Bonn. We were to meet in ze coffee zhop downstairs for dinner at 8:30, but I twisted my ankle as I was dressing and decided to dine alone in my room. I ordered a—how do you say it?—a cutlet from room service.” She glared disapprovingly at Mirza Hussain. “It was undercooked. Tomorrow I shall recommend zat we try ze Hilton instead. Just after nine o’clock I heard ze shot from zis room.”

  Chaudri took a pad from the pocket of his uniform jacket and made a note. “And what did you do then?”

  “I called down to ze desk and reported what I had heard to, I assume, zis young woman.”

  “You did not look out into the corridor?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “Ah, yes,” Chaudri remembered. “Your ankle.”

  “Mein Gott, it had nuzzing to do wiss my ankle! Someone is shooting a gun, do you sink I am sticking my head outside for a better look?”

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “Of course not. Miss Blake?”

  The receptionist brushed a stray lock of hair into place and took up the story. “It was three past nine when I spoke with Frau Jurkeit, I checked the time as I hung up the phone. I immediately rang Mr. Shaheen’s office, but he wasn’t there at the moment. Then I tried Mr. Hussain, but he didn’t pick up, either. So I did what I ought to have done straightaway, I expect—”

  “You rang up the Ma
nama Directorate,” Chaudri completed the woman’s sentence for her. “And the officer you spoke with reported to the Investigation Officer, and the Investigation Officer sent for me. And by the time I arrived here at the hotel, you had located Mr. Shaheen and Mr. Hussain, and you gentlemen had already come up to this room and let yourselves in, and discovered....”

  He let his voice trail away and indicated the body in the bed with a wave of his hand. He worked his jaw thoughtfully from side to side and went on. “And discovered a naked man in a room where he ought never to have been, shot to death by an unknown assailant who then took all the victim’s clothing and other belongings away with him when he left.”

  “It seems incredible,” said Abdulaziz Shaheen. “What will you do now, mahsool?”

  The Pakistani clapped his hands together decisively. “Now,” he said, “I will begin to earn the salary which the Public Security Force is so generously paying me.”

  * * * *

  It was almost midnight, and Mahboob Chaudri was alone in the room with Abdulaziz Shaheen. Mirza Hussain had gone down to his second-floor office, where he had promised to keep himself available in case his further presence should be required. Jennifer Blake was back at her post. In a few moments, she would be relieved by Gillian Messenger, who would be on duty at the reception desk until 8 AM. Frau Jurkeit had long since returned to her own room next door. Even the body of the murder victim was gone.

  Much had happened during the last two hours. Two and three at a time, the Presidential Hotel’s entire night staff and those members of the daytime and graveyard shifts the security chief had been able to reach by phone had paraded in and out of room 613 for a look at the dead man. Yousif Albaharna, the daytime doorman, thought he might have seen him entering the hotel that afternoon, but all Westerners looked more or less alike to him, he admitted sadly, and he could not be sure. No one else could remember ever having seen the man before, and both Gillian Messenger and Leslie Ramsey were certain they had not checked him in as a guest.