Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men)

by Ranulph Fiennes

  “This is no case for qithit, blood money, since those responsible for the murder of Amr’s sons will clearly not admit their guilt. It is for him to identify each guilty party, confront them and execute them. Only then can he redeem himself and avoid further disgrace. O Ashrafi, I request that you, as our qadhi, order Sheikh Amr bin Issa to state his intentions unequivocally here and now in front of Allah and our people.”

  Hamoud returned to his family grouping. A hooded woman of the tribe called out: the morning meal was ready. The gathering moved out of the cave and down to the clearing.

  Three cows, short, stringy beasts with stubby horns, munched a mixture of dried sardine, coconut pulp and hashish. One beast was selected by a powerfully built black man, a khadim, or ex-slave, of the late sultan. Two boys emerged from a nearby wattle hut and, at the slave’s bidding, squatted together in the dirt. With four men immobilizing the cow, the slave slit its jugular. Blood splattered the shaven heads, backs and shoulders of the boys. They were lucky, for cows were not often killed and this was a powerful cure for all sicknesses.

  A woven bowl containing the cow’s warm entrails was passed around as an hors d’oeuvre. Then the lightly boiled intestines were cut up and mixed with rice. This was served on four great tin platters around which the Bait Jarboatis sat.

  A youngster cradling a six-foot-long flintlock rifle, a useless relic, switched on a Sony ghetto-blaster that blared the Voice of Aden. But the qadhi waved in irritation and the noise ceased. Amr listened halfheartedly to the conversations going on around him. His thoughts were far away. Baaqi listened but overheard little, for the Qara language, Jebbali, is spoken in staccato bursts, and to miss a single word can be to miss a complete sentence. For instance, fdr means to shiver with fear, ikof to pick off scabs, and stol to brandish a dagger. Ged means to drift ashore after a shipwreck. All useful phrases.

  The Ashrafi and the elders had separated from the rest. During and immediately after the meal they would come to their decision. Two armed men in the dark brown fatigues favored by many adoo entered the clearing. There were reserved greetings but a marked lack of the spontaneous warmth that normally marks the arrival of a visitor.

  The two men ignored the coolness of their reception. Then, spotting Hamoud, they expressed friendly greetings. Here was an old friend. They sat beside him. The eating continued.

  “We have been active between Zeak and Jibjat.” The man who spoke was obviously the leader of the two, a wiry jebali in his thirties with black, curly hair, high cheekbones and narrow, almost slit eyes—a caricature of the Devil. He ate with his AK47 across his thighs.

  “The Army think we are finished in this region. They are wrong. Yesterday we destroyed a Civil Aid team on the main road only five hours from here. Where were the Army then? We can still move and do as we please.”

  “Why do you attack the Civil Aid people?” The Ashrafi asked the question that was in everyone’s minds. “They are not the Army. Their only work is to help us by building wells and schools. They have good animal doctors for our cattle.”

  There was no answer to this. The PFLO’s stated intention was to bring progress to the Qara. Now that Sultan Qaboos was, through Civil Aid, doing just that, the adoo were only alienating the population by such acts as their murder of the Pakistani Civil Aid workers.

  “Do not be taken in by the hindee”—Indian—“puppets of the government.” The adoo then began a peroration of Marxist invective that he had learned at the PFLO school in Hauf, South Yemen. He probably understood no more of what he preached than did his audience.

  The Ashrafi and the elders were silent. They more than anyone had learned to detest the strident bluster of the PFLO bully-boys. The Ashrafi’s family had been tortured and killed by men like these just two years before. His only surviving daughter, badly hurt at the time, had since lost her mind and the power of speech.

  The elders were caught between two stools. They wished to make an example of Amr in order to stop the rot that might otherwise set in. The open failure of a tribal sheikh to respect the age-old law of the blood feud, especially when three of his own sons were to be avenged, might lead to a general collapse of the system, and this, as conservatives who knew no other way, they greatly feared. Amr must obey the sharia or else be seen to be punished. On the other hand the elders knew that Hamoud and his large clan had prepared the ground with care. If Amr were to go, there could be little doubt that Hamoud would become sheikh, a prospect they feared, for they associated him with the worst of the PFLO bully-boys, the blackshirts of Dhofar, and their anti-Islamic atrocities. It was a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils.

  Back in the cave the elders found they were unable to reach a unanimous decision and formally invited the Ashrafi to settle the matter on behalf of the tribe. The Ashrafi had decided to pronounce not for the good of the Jarboatis but in memory of his once garrulous, life-loving daughter. “The sharia,” he said, as the marble glare of his near-sightless eyes traversed his expectant audience, “divides human activities into five groups, the first of which, the fardh, are strictly enforced. Such is the law of justice for the killing of kin.”

  The Ashrafi stared at Amr. “By flouting the thaa’r, Sheikh Amr bin Issa appears to believe that he can disregard the sharia. I say to you all, especially to your sheikh, that nobody is above the law. Others today have said that Amr bin Issa is ayeb, and has disgraced himself and his clan. I agree that this is so.”

  The old man snorted within his throat and spat bile.

  “As your selected qadhi I submit that Amr bin Issa be given six months in which to avenge any one of his dead sons. Failing this, that he and his family be exiled from the country that lies between the Hadhramaut, the Rhubh al Khali and the sea. This exile to be until such time as he avenges each and every one of his dead children. Thanks be to Allah, the gracious.”

  The Ashrafi sat down. To Baaqi, no one’s fool, this judgment was a clear reprieve, or at least a second chance for Amr, and as such a better deal than he had dared hope for. He had seen the Ashrafi’s black looks at the Lenin Regiment men and their open comradeship with Hamoud. He thanked God for sending these thugs at such a timely moment.

  • • •

  Baaqi’s relief was short-lived. Events overtook, or at least modified, the Ashrafi’s pronouncement when, five months later, Amr’s favorite son, Tama’an, a fighter with the Bin Dhahaib unit, was killed in the western war zone. Amr was sad at his latest bereavement but not bitter. He knew that the scandal of his inaction had spread beyond the hearths of the Bait Jarboat and he suspected correctly that Tama’an’s death would bring matters to a head.

  Amr still felt no inner desire for vengeance. The day set by the Ashrafi passed and he had still avenged none of his sons. The elders came to him and asked if he knew of any reason why the edict of the conference should not be carried out. There being none, as far as he could see, he bowed to the inevitable. Failure to comply would mean death for his family, so, in the autumn of 1975, he said farewell to Baaqi and his remaining supporters and left Dhofar forever, taking with him his closest kin.

  3

  De Villiers immersed himself in the demimonde of Paris night life. He needed a honey-pot trap, but with a difference. Davies meanwhile watched the judge, sought out his “pattern,” meticulously logged his every move. It was early October 1976. In two or three weeks the pair would meet and put together a schedule for the judge’s death. The lady client had specifically ordered that the target’s posthumous reputation be disgraced. So de Villiers concentrated on the sordid. He ignored the obvious tourist traps of Pigalle, Montparnasse, St. Germain des Près and the Champs-Elysées. All expensive froth and no action; or, as Davies put it, “All mouth and no trousers.”

  The hostess masseuses offering gentlemen “the ultimate body massage,” the pseudo-Thai girls with their body-body bathrooms and the quick hand- or blowjobs of the parks—all these lacked the extreme denigration de Villiers sought. Zoophilia was available; indeed the Pa
ris milieu interfered only “if the animals suffer.” The most commonplace were canine séances but there were also studios with donkeys, horses, pigs and monkeys. Most of these dens of iniquity made their profit through selling videos of the action.

  De Villiers considered the possibilities of pedophilia, rampant in Paris with pedophiliac rings and films featuring two- to twelve-year-olds of both sexes, but decided against it. Not with a member of the judiciary. It lacked the ring of truth, and he was a perfectionist. In his experience most pedophiles had one thing in common: they were men whose careers put them in close contact with children. Social workers, vicars, schoolteachers, but not judges.

  He looked into the closed world of sadomasochism. There were only four women in Paris who specialized in flagellation and “tortures.” Their clients, who averaged one or two visits per month, were forbidden to touch them and yet paid 1,000 francs per hour. Not the sort of scene de Villiers was seeking. Too parochial; a strange face would stand out a mile.

  By the end of his first week in Paris, having made short work of the private-subscription orgy clubs and the exhibitionists of the rue de Roland-Garros, de Villiers was concentrating on the gay scene and in particular the graveyard where his old favorite, Edith Piaf, resided. In the late seventeenth century a Jesuit named Père Lachaise was confessor to Louis XIV. The graveyard that is named after him is a dismal, rambling place with many dingy corners, gothic tombs and derelict chapels. After the war the cemetery served as a perfect spot for DIY prostitutes with no rooms of their own. Homosexuals took over in the sixties. De Villiers counted seventy-nine young men, between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, who operated in the graveyard between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Their customers, numbering hundreds at certain times of the week, were usually middle-aged or elderly pederasts. Uniformed inspectors of the Brigade des Parcs et Jardins patrolled between the rows of chrysanthemums but had little authority and seldom intervened. On the approach of an inspector, or one of the mainly Soviet tourists who came to see Piaf’s tomb, the young man and his client, sitting on a gravestone, would simply cover their laps with a tourist map or a copy of Le Figaro.

  De Villiers decided the Père Lachaise Cemetery was a distinct possibility but, wishing to explore every lead, he took a cab to the frenetic roundabout of the Porte Dauphine, on the edge of the city near the Bois de Boulogne. Every evening of the week, their work done, a host of Parisians descend by car on the Porte. Each driver circles until he or she makes eye contact with a fellow joy-seeker. Hand signals are exchanged and the two parties leave the concourse to seek intimacy elsewhere. This custom, de Villiers discovered, was a favorite with wife-swapping couples, and so again lacked sufficient degradation for his purposes. His dilemma was resolved by good fortune. Davies confirmed on the twelfth day of his judge-watching that on two Tuesday evenings in succession the judge had driven his Citroën ID19 to the Bois de Boulogne. Davies called de Villiers at his hotel and the method was agreed upon.

  To Parisians the Bois has always meant romance, the mythical forest of the fairy temptress Mélusine, a place of moonlit fauns and summer idyll.

  In 1970 a handful of the entrepreneurial freelance prostitutes known as tapineuses tried their luck with motorists either in the backseat of the car or in the bushes. Harmless fun that bothers nobody, the chief of the brigade decided. Then, in 1973, the travelos came.

  Veroushka was the first. In São Paulo, where she learned to “faire la nuit,” she met a madame who sold her a package deal for 12,000 francs including air tickets, identity papers and a three-month tourist visa for France. At first, tolerated by the established Bois whores as an oddity, Veroushka made up to 2,000 francs a night. But by 1976 a further two hundred Brazilian transvestites had followed her route to the forest and thrown out all but half a dozen of the “genuine” prostitutes. Competition was fierce.

  Minister Poniatowski tried that year to oust the travelos. He failed and the police continued to turn a blind eye. Every three months each of these androgynous workers took a day-trip to Belgium to receive a passport stamp enabling him/her to apply for a further three-month visa. This was no great trouble in return for a job paying an untaxed fortune, compared with likely takings back in Rio or Bahia.

  Pia was twenty-four and about as sexy a travelo as the Bois regulars could remember. She was blond, tall and sad: exactly what de Villiers was after except that her specific beat was in the wrong part of the forest. The best spots, on the roads most used by motorists, were jealously guarded by the older and richer bisexuals. Davies, given the job of changing Pia’s beat, drove out to the Bois around midnight. Most of the “girls” worked between 11 p.m. and dawn, for daylight was their enemy, revealing hair growth and highlighting other remnants of masculinity.

  The travelos were heavily outnumbered, Davies discovered, by voyeurs who parked their cars, left the headlights on and mooched around the business sites staring at the weirdos and their customers. Vendors of hamburgers and beer did good business in the most popular areas. Their trade, Davies noticed, was with the girls and the voyeurs, never with the clients, many of whom slunk away when sated, their eyes averted from the light—a fact that pleased Davies. The travelos mostly displayed their breasts, and those with more feminine thighs wore miniskirts or just a G-string. In winter, Davies mused, this sort of business conducted al fresco must leave a lot to be desired. What clothes the girls did wear were gaudy in the extreme: leopardskin leotards, polka-dot T-shirts, plumes reminiscent of Rio samba queens, and glittering sequins tacked on everything from high-heeled shoes to hair bands. Davies cruised the roads of the Bois for an hour or more until he was satisfied he knew its layout and the location of all the girls.

  Pia was indeed a good looker. Davies warmed to the idea of his job. Initially he had felt disgusted. As he watched the voyeurs he realized many were affluent. They had only to visit riverbanks or sandy beaches anywhere in summertime France to enjoy the sight of countless real breasts and bare bodies. Davies shrugged. It takes all types, he thought, unaware of any irony, since he saw himself and his work as perfectly mundane.

  Studies of the travelos’ clients say that over half go only once in their lives to “see what it is like” and are put off for good. The majority of the rest are “normal” citizens—plumbers, professors and office workers—happily married with happy children. They appear merely to be pursuing their hidden fantasies despite the knowledge that they are entering the body of a man who, high on drugs and unwashed, has just received many other clients among the discarded condoms and beer cans of the same copse. Why they thrill to the false, pumped-up breasts, the body odor and the baritone voice with its heavily accented Portuguese, remains a mystery to the milieu. How to explain the nonstop supply of clients and the ever-increasing attractions of this outside theater of sodomy is not the job of the local police, the Brigade Mondaine.

  Davies parked at the curb behind two other cars and right beside the waste bin that marked Pia’s habitual site. He had not long to wait. A small man—a town clerk, Davies decided—in a rumpled brown suit and thick spectacles, emerged from the bushes and made for his car, fumbling with the key. Pia followed, wearing a black mini-petticoat that concealed little. Her blond hair was cropped urchin-style, and Davies felt himself roused despite the dictates of common sense.

  Pia leaned against the waste bin. Davies’s window was down. He could clearly see Pia’s maleness and smell the mix of sweat, cheap aftershave and the afterodor of previous clients. She had a pretty smile.

  “How much?” Davies asked.

  “It’s one hundred francs.”

  “But if I—”

  She cut him off. “Anything extra is fifty more francs.” Davies nodded. He locked the car and followed her into the bushes.

  Afterward he told her, truthfully, it was the first time for him. Her French was only a little better than his, so he kept his sentences short and spoke slowly.

  “You are very beautiful,” he said.

  She seemed to like his fla
ttery, but already she was showing signs of impatience. Perhaps she was losing a customer. He took the plunge. “Here is an extra two thousand francs, Pia. You’re unlikely to have another twenty clients tonight, so let’s go to a nightclub of your choice for an hour or two. I have a special proposition to make you. Good money is possible.”

  Pia was of course interested. She fetched a chic mackintosh and calf boots from a carry-all in the shrubbery.

  “Where are you living?” she asked.

  “In a motel in town,” Davies told her.

  “We go there. I do not like nightclubs.”

  This suited Davies. He stopped off at a bar to buy whiskey and cheese biscuits.

  In the car Pia unwound a bit. She was, Davies soon realized, a desperately unhappy person. Every Sunday she prayed at the church in Pigalle dedicated to Saint Rita, who, in Brazil, is the Patron Saint of the Hopeless. She was homesick for her parents in a shantytown in São Paulo. Much of her savings was spent each winter on a two-month trip back to Brazil.

  “I like to buy myself pretty clothes,” she laughed; a quick, masculine noise.

  Vice in the Bois, thought Davies, must be a hideous, tortured misery for these people. Why do they do it? he wondered. It can’t be for money. To alleviate her black moods Pia took alcohol, cocaine and marijuana. She craved the love of a real relationship, but she knew men never fall in love with travelos. Some of her Bois friends had committed suicide from despair. All professional travelos have the regular hormone treatment, silicone operations and expensive weekly hair removal necessary to prevent reversion to visible masculinity. Life consists of the taunts of voyeurs, the fear of murder by weirdos or mugging by one of the many Bois predators, the dubious pleasure of twenty or more possibly diseased clients per night in all weather, and the never-ending cost of unnatural medical inputs. Since there is no way of saving money the only apparent gain is the ability to remain a transsexual.