Firebird

by Michael Asher

  Hammoudi raised his eyebrows and spewed out smoke. ‘Aldinaton!’ he said. ‘Seems that guy got his ugly snout into every damn place.’

  ‘Sure, but they weren’t exactly classmates. Story goes that one night Thutmose crashed out under the head of the Great Sphinx and dreamed he was about to become pharaoh. Like dreaming you were going to win the lottery. Anyway, the guy did become pharaoh, and he had the stela stuck between the paws to commemorate the dream. Funny thing was that in his day the Sphinx was half-buried in sand — only the head showed. According to the stela he ordered the whole thing dug out, but no one knows why.’

  Hammoudi blew smoke and brooded thoughtfully for a moment. ‘It’s hotter than hell,’ he said. ‘Let’s go grab a soda.’

  I nodded. He didn’t have to twist my arm. I was sick of gawking at the Great Noseless One anyway.

  We tottered back through the Valley Temple with its great pillars and architraves bending the sunlight into blocks of light and shade. We paused there in an island of shadow for a moment while Hammoudi stubbed out his cigarette, both glad of a moment’s relief from the heat. ‘Freak heat,’ Hammoudi commented. ‘They say a storm’s gonna strike in a couple of days.’

  I sniffed the air. ‘They’re wrong,’ I said, ‘it’ll be here tomorrow.’

  ‘Why don’t you run the met office?’ Hammoudi chuckled.

  I shrugged and ran a hand along one of the temple’s massive limestone blocks. As always, I marvelled at its hugeness. The two temples at the foot of the Sphinx — the Mortuary Temple and this one, the Valley Temple — are only forty feet high and haven’t attracted the same attention as the much more impressive pyramids nearby, yet they are real wonders of engineering skill. ‘You know these blocks were quarried out of the Sphinx pit itself?’ I asked Hammoudi.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Big buggers, though, aren’t they? How the hell did they lift them?’

  ‘That’s a good question. Some of them are reckoned to weigh two hundred tons — that’s nearly three times as much as most of the blocks used in the Great Pyramid. Even a modern gantry-crane — the type used in shipyards — can only handle about a hundred tons.’

  Hammoudi looked unimpressed. ‘And don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘they didn’t have gantry-cranes in those days. Come on, let’s get out of this garbage lot.’

  We went out through the exit, past a couple of tourist police asleep on their chairs. The aerobics team had gone and the TV crew were packing up their cameras and reflecting mirrors. We walked down the hill towards the bus park in the blistering heat. A knot of tourists in white sunhats was queuing to embark on a luxury coach, anxious to be back in its air-conditioned interior. They looked depressed, I thought. A few touts pestered them listlessly, holding up stuffed camels and soapstone models of the pyramids. In years past this place would have been packed with foreigners on a Friday, but the tourist trade was in the doldrums. It had been that way ever since the last terrorist massacre at Luxor when the Militants had shot and mutilated a bunch of foreigners — men, women and children, whose only crime was that they’d come for a looksee at the ancient ruins. What a debacle that had been, I thought. The foreign press didn’t know the half of it. The Militants had even shot up a couple of police stations and only a handful of troopers had had the guts to shoot back. The few wounded on the terrorist side had been topped by their own men to stop them squealing, and the Anti-Terrorist Squad had been unable to identify any of the stiffs, or even to say for sure whether they were Egyptians. You couldn’t blame the tourists for not wanting to come here, but the decline in the industry had hit the country hard. Of course, things were slowly getting better. There were more cops on the street, and more visitors were arriving as confidence was regained, but everyone knew that one more stroke like the Luxor fiasco would put the mockers on the business for ever.

  It was good to get under the awning of a soft drinks stall. We were the only customers there, and we sat on stools right up against the ice box while the barman dipped into it and brought out two bottles of Canada Dry so cold the stuff was almost frozen. I sipped the drink and gasped at its coldness. In a few seconds the liquid had worked its way to the pores, soaking me in sweat. Hammoudi drank half the bottle in one go, burped, then wiped his mouth with the hairy back of a hand. He lit another Cleopatra. I sipped and waited for his gambit, but he concentrated on his cigarette and ignored me until I caved in.

  ‘You didn’t come here just to quiz me about ancient history,’ I said.

  He made a wry face, the big, marble-smooth features shattering and reforming. ‘No, I didn’t. Something has come up.’

  I almost choked on my soda. ‘I knew it!’ I said. ‘What the hell is it this time?’

  ‘Something quite interesting.’

  ‘Look, unless it’s got at least one donkey’s foot, I’m not interested. I’ve been sidetracked too many times, and this is my day off, all right.’

  ‘All right,’ Hammoudi said, adopting a sympathetic tone that I’d learned to be wary of. ‘I just wondered if you’d ever heard of a guy called Adam Ibram, that’s all.’

  ‘You mean Doctor Adam Ibram, the American-Egyptian egghead who worked for NASA. Sure I’ve heard of him. I read in the paper a few days back he was over here for a visit.’

  ‘Yep, his final visit. Some assholes shot him dead in a coffee shop in Khan al-Khalili this morning.’

  I paused in the act of sipping my drink. ‘The Yanks won’t like it. Wasn’t Ibram a big wheel in the States?’

  ‘That’s right. Born in Egypt but brought up and educated in the US A. He’d become a real big honcho. Advisor to the U S president, no less, on environmental issues, and almost every other damn issue. You name it; he was boned up on it. The U S ambassador bent our minister of the interior’s ear as soon as the body was found, demanding to let his FBI office run the investigation. The minister OK’d it, but on the understanding a senior Egyptian detective would be top dog. His Excellency probably thought it would be just a rubber stamp job, but the minister told me he wanted someone who would put Egypt’s interests first, and had naturally thought of yours truly. I was flattered, actually. You know how much I appreciate the Yanks.’

  I horse-laughed openly this time. Hammoudi knew well enough that I was the product of a short-lived fling between my Egyptian mother and the American father who’d dumped me as a kid, leaving me to grow up hard as a street boy in the bazaars of Aswan. It was water under the bridge to me now, but I guessed secretly that the Colonel had added it to the list of grudges against the Yanks he’d been compiling for years. Hammoudi was well known for his patriotism and his dislike of foreign meddling in Egypt’s affairs. That was one reason he’d been tolerated for so long despite his remarkable and almost unique inability to lick the asses of his superiors.

  ‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘What happened to your duty assistant?’

  Hammoudi looked at me with feigned indignation. ‘You know I can’t trust anyone else on the squad,’ he said. ‘Remember the Shadowmen? I still reckon someone on the team tipped them off. You’re all I’ve got.’

  It was a sad admission, I thought, for someone who’d spent most of his life as a cop, but it was probably true. Hammoudi was a member of the despised Coptic minority, and had had to work his way up by sheer ability and devotion to duty. Any other man as good as he was would have been a general by now, but first he was a Copt, then a Sa’idi — a southerner — and to cap it all there’d been an enquiry a few years back about a subversive leader he’d allegedly allowed to escape. I happened to know the allegation was true, but I doubt anyone else on the force did. Hammoudi had kept his trap shut and in the end there’d been no evidence. Anyway, the Colonel was too smooth an operator, too obviously loyal to the country and too successful at what he did to be got rid of that easily.

  ‘What if the FBI don’t want me?’ I asked.

  ‘Sod them, Sammy. Their official brief is to “assist” local police on cases involving American property, interests or citizens, that�
�s all.’

  ‘Yeah, but those guys are mavericks. Plenty of times they’ve arrested suspects in foreign countries without the government’s approval.’

  ‘I know. As it happens, the FBI boss has already assigned a detective to the case.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah. Shit. That’s why I want to get down there now, before the FBI have stomped over every bit of evidence that might be of value. Let’s make damned sure we get the truth, even if we have to keep it under our hats.’

  I swivelled my baseball cap round and scratched under it with my free hand doubtfully, knowing I couldn’t refuse. If I had been any other officer on the team, Hammoudi would just have ordered me to hit the street on the double and that would have been it. But he and I had a special understanding. Ever since I’d finished police training school, Hammoudi had appointed himself my guardian angel — a sort of father-confessor and back-up rolled into one. He’d taught me more about detective work than all the training school instructors put together. I’d never stopped being amazed at the information Hammoudi had at his fingertips — the big man’s sources had got me out of tight spots more than once, not only with punters but also with the top brass. I guessed that he’d chosen me as a sort of personal successor — almost the son he’d never had. Hammoudi always said he hadn’t had time to get married and have children, but women found him attractive, and I’d always been staggered how easily he seemed to find willing partners.

  He cocked an inquisitive eye at me. ‘Well?’ he said, glancing at his watch.

  I finished my Canada Dry. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Yana binna.’

  ‘Good man,’ he said, draining his soda, ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘No you won’t. You never do.’

  I stood up and passed a hand through my hair. It was long overdue trimming, and I knew there was a three day stubble on my chin. Apart from my leather jacket and baseball cap, I was wearing a black sweatshirt, jeans so ancient they might have been designed by Fred Flintstone, and a pair of trainers only slightly less venerable.

  Hammoudi watched me for a minute, chuckling. ‘Don’t worry if you’re not dressed for dinner,’ he said. ‘After all, it’s only the FBI .’

  We sauntered up to Hammoudi’s unmarked Mercedes diesel, parked badly near the sidewalk. Mercifully, the Colonel had remembered to put up a cardboard sunshade on the windscreen, and the seats were still cool. As I settled in and clicked the seatbelt, Hammoudi nursed the big car into the street, his oversize hands gripping the wheel like he wanted to wrench it apart. Traffic was sparse. From Al-Malik Salem Bridge the Nile looked blue and calm — cool enough to dive into — and as we crossed the stream I looked up to see a silver shape dropping out of the sun. I realized suddenly that it was a grey heron, and I watched fascinated as it spiralled towards us on the thermals, its crested head haloed in sunlight as though it was on fire. As a kid in the south I’d spent hours lying on the riverbank watching herons. I loved the way their necks curved into an almost perfect ‘S’, the disdainful way they shook their wings when you approached them, the way they waited like statues for ever in the shallows, moving one leg almost imperceptibly forwards until the spiked beak flashed down like an ice-pick, and came up with a silver fish impaled on it, shimmering in the sunlight. I watched the bird now, the uplifted wings picked out in flame and thought of the Winged Disc that you found almost everywhere in ancient Egyptian inscriptions. Suddenly a phrase drifted into my head unbidden, and I heard myself muttering, ‘I have gone forth as the phoenix, in the hope of life eternal.’

  ‘What?’ Hammoudi asked, but I shrugged and he didn’t press it. He was well used to my irrational outbursts by now. I looked ahead to see a traffic cop with a dirty white band on his cap, who was waving us on with whistles and languorous movements of the hands. When I glanced back the heron was nowhere to be seen, and whether I’d imagined it I was no longer certain.

  After that I rode in a kind of daze as we followed the line of the Roman aqueduct, skirting around the stark dust-coloured sugar-loafs of Muqattam, on which the citadel of Mohammad Ali stood, with its array of castellations, onion-roofs and pinnacles like an image from Walt Disney’s Aladdin. The streets were crowded here with family groups, some of them sitting in corners sharing food set out on newspapers. Giza had been almost deserted, but half of Cairo, it seemed, was spending its day off at the old fortress. It was only when we reached the twin mosques of Rifai and Sultan Hassan, rising sheer out of the maze of streets like the walls of icebergs, that I snapped out of it and tweaked my head into some sort of reasoning mode. ‘What time was the incident?’ I asked.

  ‘Body was found at nine thirty,’ Hammoudi said, ‘in the back room of a kebab-joint-cum-coffee-house, with a bullet wound smack in the middle of the forehead, and others in the chest and legs. Eyewitnesses said three men were involved, but the only one who saw the actual shooting was a waiter who happened to be coming out of the john. They got him too, but he survived. A plain clothes officer from National Security who’d been mingling with the crowds went through Ibram’s pockets and found his U S passport, wallet and credit cards.’

  ‘No theft motive then?’

  Hammoudi chewed his lips silently. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘The perps were disturbed, of course.’

  ‘Anyone identify them?’

  ‘No, they were wearing shamaghs across their faces, and some onlookers claimed they were carrying sub-machine pistols.’

  ‘Sounds like a terrorist job.’

  ‘Sssh!’ Hammoudi hissed. He glanced at me urgently. ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention the dreaded “T” word. You want to give the minister a coronary thinking of those thousands of dollars that won’t be pouring into the economy from petrified tourists? This is strictly an SID investigation with a little help from our friends. The Anti-Terrorist Squad haven’t even been tasked.’

  I concentrated on the road and said nothing, but I knew there had to be more to it than he was letting on. I’d worked with him long enough to know he hadn’t come all the way to Giza to get me to investigate a simple homicide.

  2

  In Sayyidna Al-Hussayn Square the police had rigged up a wall of yellow and black striped crash-barriers to keep out tourists and nosey-parkers, and a squad of blackjackets with red bands on their berets stood on guard outside with pump-action shotguns and Kalashnikovs. The square was famous as one of the entrances to the bazaar of Khan al-Khalili, the sprawling warren of shops and artisans’ workshops that had been the heart of the walled city of Cairo in medieval times. It was named after a man called Jarkas al-Khalili — a fourteenth-century prince who’d set up a huge khan or caravanserai here where Persian merchants could hole up and sell goods shipped by camel-caravan from as far away as India and China. That must have been an amazing joint — the Hilton of its day, and then some. While the traders found rooms on the upper floors, their camels were stabled in the courtyard below. The precious merchandise — rare stones, pearls, perfumes, porcelain, carpets, cottons, spices and silks — was stowed safely in tiny warehouses built into the ground floor walls. The Khan’s courtyard doubled as a bustling market where the merchants erected stalls and bargained with their clients over mint tea. Eventually the trading had spilled over into the area outside the walls, which had grown into a sprawl of crooked dark alleys where anything and everything could be bought and sold. By the time the Turks made their successful takeover bid for Egypt in the sixteenth century, Khan al-Khalili had become one of the most important trading centres in the whole Middle East.

  A young lieutenant in clean black cotton combats and jump boots waved the Mercedes to a halt, and crossed his palm with a finger, silently demanding our ID. While he inspected our cards I glanced round at the small crowd that had gathered outside. Two TV teams were already setting up their gear from the back of vans, one Egyptian state TV, and the other CNN. A local TV reporter pushed through the crowd and pressed a bulb-shaped microphone right into the car’s open window. ‘Is it true this is a terrorist m
urder, sir?’ he demanded.

  ‘No comment,’ Hammoudi growled. He snatched back the ID cards from the lieutenant, who saluted smartly as the car pulled into the square.

  Sayyidna al-Hussayn Square was named after the nineteenth century mosque whose austere stone edifice bounded the whole of its northeastern side. The north-western side was a solid row of teashops and kebab joints stretching to the corner of the famous al-Muski alley, broken off-centre by a shadowy tunnel that opened into the depths of the Khan itself. Patrol cars and unmarked mini-buses were parked haphazardly around an oblong area in the centre of the square, where strong steel railings needlessly defended a few metres of sunblasted shrubs and dead grass. Normally the square was packed with tourists, shoppers, bootblacks, beggars and touts, just as it had been for centuries. Today, though, there were only clusters of stern-faced men and a few women in sombre suits and black uniforms, hanging about listlessly as if waiting to be told what to do. As I closed the car door, the heat slammed me like a hammer. It was just after midday. The body had been found at nine thirty, so the wheels had got in motion pretty sharply, I thought. That was the Yanks for you. The teahouse where Ibram had been shot was pretty easy to spot — the whole place had been surrounded by yellow incident tape on weighted stands — American incident tape, I presumed, since it formed an oblong of almost perfect right angles. The place was called Gahwat az-Zahra — Flower Coffeeshop — and there was nothing much to distinguish it from the rest of the row, except, I noticed, that it had a public telephone sign outside and a notice in English and Arabic reading You Can Telephone From Here. There were bare tables and chairs in the street for the tea — and coffee — drinkers, and inside tables spread with checked tablecloths for customers eating. As we approached, a black-uniformed captain separated himself from a huddle and saluted Hammoudi.