Firebird

by Michael Asher

  ‘Yes?’ he demanded, holding up the lamp. ‘What do you want?’ The voice was pedantic, with an edge of barbed wire.

  ‘Are you Doctor Sid’Ahmad as-Sanusi?’ I asked.

  The gaunt man ignored me and took a step out into the street, his eyes flicking left and right nervously. ‘Did anybody follow you?’ he demanded.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Like who for instance?’

  His eyes bored into us, and he drew a long talon over his lips, beckoning us into a dim tunnel that smelt of lamp — black and dust. ‘Jinns,’ he said, ‘they come tapping at your door and creep in when you’re not looking. They lie in wait.’ Daisy rolled her eyes at me as the old man closed the door with a skeletal hand. He held the lamp up, so that Chinese puppet shapes fled across the walls. ‘Follow me closely,’ he said. ‘It is dark. The lights have been cut.’

  ‘Must be the storm,’ I said.

  ‘Ali!’ he wheezed. ‘That’s what they want you to think!’

  We passed a couple of turns and he stopped us before another door. ‘Permission oh ye blest!’ he yelled, so loudly that Daisy and I almost jumped out of our skins.

  When the door opened I half expected to find someone waiting inside, but there was nobody, only a hexagonal courtyard where heat thumped down from a six sided section of sky high above us. There were three or four storeys to the house and looking upwards was like looking up the sheer sides of a deep well. There was a trace of fire ash on the air, I noticed — the scent of the storm — but the yard was so deep that you felt no wind at all. The flagstones were intricately marbled in abstract Islamic patterns, and in the centre water sluiced from the head of a grotesque, scaly sea monster fountain and poured into a large marble pool. The place was crammed with interesting artefacts. There was an Islamic lion that might have been taken from the Alhambra, a polished wooden oil press, an Egyptian coffin from the Ptolemaic era with the remains of a man’s face painted on it, and copies of much more ancient figures — aardvark-headed Set and falcon-headed Horus on either side of a stela inscribed in hieroglyphs. Set into the niche of a granite slab was the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, a brooding eminence that seemed to lend a dark feeling of foreboding to the place.

  Daisy let out a gasp of surprise. ‘This is fantastic!’ she said, in English. ‘You’d never guess it was here from outside.’

  The gaunt man sucked in his breath and grimaced. ‘Ostentation is not the Arab way,’ he said, in perfect English. We both turned to stare at him. ‘What you see outside does not necessarily reflect what is inside,’ he went on. ‘It’s the old battle between surface appearance and underlying form. You have a saying in English that goes “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, do you not, Miss Brooke?’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  The old man grinned through curls of beard. ‘Colonel Hammoudi was good enough to let me know I might expect you. Otherwise I should not have let you in. I have to be on my guard. They’re always tapping at my door, begging and pleading to be let in, but I won’t have it. Oh no, I keep my defences up. You won’t believe what creatures lie in wait out there. In one week I have seen seven men with their left eyes missing. Seven! I have seen five men with no left arms. I have seen a hunchbacked man with red hair, and two albinos. Why, I’ve even seen a ghoul sitting on the roof of the Badestan Gate, chewing bones.’

  ‘A ghoul?’ Daisy said.

  ‘Yes. And that is precisely my point about outward appearance and underlying form. A ghoul is a creature that can take on almost any guise. In his natural state he is a human spider with one good leg and one like a donkey’s. But he is a shapeshifter. He can be a dog, a cat, a goat, a ram, a man or a woman, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew or even a heathen. He can assume the form of anyone, living or dead, with all their memories and idiosyncrasies. You might see him, but he looks ordinary and you don’t know who he is. He can change into a king or a beggar. He can be a Negro or an Indian or an Afrangi — sometimes you will see him as a modest-looking man with a long beard and a brown cloak. He could be the man standing next to you in the bazaar, the man — even the woman — walking behind you on the street. He could be the one you are talking to right now. At night he roams the alleys, looking for helpless men and women to prey upon, and in the daytime he walks the endless corridors of the Underworld — right underneath the city. He knows its secret exits and entrances and how to deal with its serpent guardians. He sneaks about changing his appearance, going invisible, hiding behind gates, sitting on roofs, passing through walls, dressing up as a beggar, mixing with all races and all religions as one of them. He’s a dirty shapeshifter, and a shapeshifter can’t be trusted.’ He watched me carefully, unsmiling for a second, his small eyes steady behind the glasses. ‘But then you already know that, I think, Lieutenant Rashid?’

  I started, not expecting the question, and nodded too vigorously, not really grasping what he meant. ‘Did Colonel Hammoudi tell you why we wanted to talk to you?’

  ‘He mentioned the amulet,’ Sanusi said, eagerly, ‘I must have it back. It’s part of my defences.’

  ‘You mean this?’ I said, bringing out the Sanusi amulet, now neatly parcelled in a polythene bag.

  The transformation in Sanusi’s features was sudden and dramatic. His eyes lit up and a tic activated in the corner of his left eye. The lines around it lurched skywards. ‘My amulet!’ he beamed. ‘It was the one Hammoudi mentioned!’ He put out his lean hand to take it, but I held it back deliberately and returned it to my pocket.

  ‘You say it’s yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes. It was stolen from my collection a week ago. But I explained all this to the Colonel.’

  ‘Anything else stolen?’ Daisy enquired.

  ‘No,’ Sanusi said, ‘but that was enough.’ He paused and peered at us through his half-moon glasses, muttering under his breath like someone used to going for days with nothing but his own company. Then he drew a large bunch of keys from the pocket of his grey robe. ‘Come,’ he said, gesturing towards one of the doors opening off the courtyard, let me show you my collection.’

  The door was another solid hardwood piece with iron studs, a radiating chrysanthemum design in the centre, and flowing Islamic calligraphy on the lintel. The door creaked and we entered a long, narrow room — a small museum of sorts, with plaster walls covered in sepia tinted photographs, framed documents and antique weapons — scimitars, breech loading Martini carbines, daggers with weird and wonderful double blades, spears and shields. Pride of place in the room, though, belonged to the glass cabinets, one of which contained silver jewellery in complicated designs. Daisy stopped to stare at it. There were ornate necklaces of flat trapezoids, rectangles and plaited strands, and headdresses of silver hoops, nests of balls and dangling cylinders, with chains ending in what looked like tiny hands. Some of the pieces incorporated amber and carnelian, and others contained tiny boxes inlaid with finely worked gold or mother-of-pearl.

  ‘Good grief!’ Daisy muttered. ‘Some of these things must weigh a ton! How did they ever wear them?’

  ‘They didn’t,’ Sanusi said, ‘these things only appear to be headdresses. They are Bedouin things, and to the Bedouin anything that is not mobile is useless. Isn’t that so, Lieutenant Rashid? These things were really the tribe’s mobile assets, which would be sold off in famine times — a reserve for when the going got tough.’

  ‘But they must be worth a fortune,’ Daisy said. ‘Why would thieves break in and leave them?’

  ‘Who said anyone broke in?’ Sanusi snapped. ‘I let the thief in, may God forgive my folly. The only thing broken was this.’ He pointed to a cabinet standing in the centre of the room, whose glass had been shattered and was now patched up with tape. ‘I haven’t got round to repairing it, yet,’ he said, apologetically. The cabinet was full of artefacts, and I saw that it contained a lot of amulets like the one I had in my pocket — tiny leather boxes, some of them delicately inlaid and inscribed.

  ‘You’re sure there was only the one missing
?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. And it’s not even the most interesting or the most valuable — though it is entirely unique to the Sanusiya Brotherhood. This type of amulet is known as a hejab. It contains a verse from the Quran written by a holy man — some of the verses in these amulets were actually written by my ancestor, Mohammad bin Ali, the Great Sanusi, almost two hundred years ago. Such charms would protect them from knives and bullets. Psychic defences. They would no more have thought of going into battle without such protection than a modern labourer goes on site without his hard hat.’ He led us aside and gestured to a lithograph of a saintly looking man with a white beard. ‘This is my ancestor, Mohammad bin Ali,’ Sanusi announced, as if giving us a guided tour. ‘He was not only a mathematician, theologian and astrologer, but was also gifted with tremendous organizing abilities. At the height of his power he was able to muster 25,000 Bedouin tribesmen to his banner. The amulets he gave to these tribesmen were absolutely effective, as long as they themselves continued to have faith. And faith is what counts.’

  Daisy looked at him dubiously and I saw her choke back a comment. ‘You say you know who stole the amulet?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I had a premonition, of course. I knew something was about to happen. Seven one-eyed men, five one-armed men, two albinos and a hunchback — all in a week. Then the ghoul. I saw him sitting on the Badestan Gate, crunching bones, and next thing I knew he was tapping at my door, asking to see my amulets. Oh, he appeared to be a man, of course. He even had a name. He called himself Sayf ad-Din Ali, and said he was from the World Council of Islam. Gave me an address in the United Arab Emirates, but I knew he wasn’t a native of the Gulf. He appeared a tall man — wore a thick beard, Mecca style turban and a gallabiyya. Oh yes, he wrapped himself with the odour of sanctity all right, but I knew what he was. I smelt the Devil.’

  Daisy giggled and Sanusi gave her a hard glance. ‘You seem to find this amusing, Miss Brooke,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you think ghouls don’t exist?’ He moved to a side table and picked up a battered red scrapbook. ‘This book is full of reports about them, I’ve been compiling it for years.’ He flipped through the thick pages and I saw they were crammed with pasted newspaper clippings, some of them yellow with age. Sanusi stopped at a certain page and held the open book out to Daisy. ‘Look here!’ he said. ‘You read Arabic?’

  Daisy perused the page briefly and passed it to me. The clipping pasted on to it was from Al-Ahram — the most respectable of Egypt’s newspapers — and was dated two weeks previously. Ghoul Strikes In Khan al-Khalili? the headline ran. I looked at it but only pretended to read it. I’d seen it before.

  ‘A young tailor’s boy was found in an alley one morning, just round the corner from here,’ Sanusi said. ‘When the corpse was examined it was found that part of the skin had been flayed off and all the blood had been drained from the organs. In fact, the body was no more than a shell. There were strange marks on it too — marks which couldn’t have been made by any known animal.’ He took the scrapbook from me and scrabbled through more pages with his talon fingers. ‘Look at all these!’ he said. ‘It’s happened before. Six reports since 1995, all in the Khan al-Khalili area, all of men or women disappearing only to be discovered in the streets with their blood sucked out of them, and the marks of some creature in their flesh. And the deaths occur in a regular pattern — once every six months. Now if that’s not a ghoul, what is it?’

  ‘Every six months?’ Daisy repeated. ‘Sounds to me like a serial killer with some sick MO.’

  ‘Then how do you explain the loss of blood, and the animal-like marks?’

  ‘Stranger things happen where I come from, believe me. You want to try visiting California.’

  Sanusi closed the scrapbook and slapped it down on the table hard. ‘I’ve been to other places,’ he said, ‘I just want to remain who I am. The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose touch with who he is. There was a time in my life when I forgot who I was, you see.’ He looked around as if there might be someone else listening, then he suddenly grabbed hold of my arm tightly. His eyes seemed to start out of his head, and his mouth trembled slightly. ‘I tell you these ghouls aren’t from this world at all,’ he whispered, ‘and they’re planning to take over. Oh yes, they covet the earth all right, and only our psychic defences will protect us. No one believes me. They all think I’m mad. But I tell you — be prepared!’

  I disengaged my arm and took a step backwards. ‘OK ,’ I said, ‘this er...Sayf ad-Din character you claim took the amulet. You said he came from the World Council of Islam. What’s that?’

  Sanusi swallowed and his eyes dimmed for a moment. Then he seemed to recover himself. ‘I’ve never heard of any such thing,’ he said. ‘He told me it was a new organization whose objective was to disseminate Islam in the nations of non-believers, especially Africa. He said he’d read all about the Sanusiya and wanted to know more — especially about the amulets. I showed him my museum and he asked if he could make notes. I said yes, of course, and I had to leave him for a moment. When I came back, the case was smashed as you see it now, the amulet had gone and so had the man. I did report the theft to the local police at the time, who searched the place, dusted the cabinet for fingerprints, and will no doubt have made a voluminous and incredibly tedious report on the subject. I told them it was the work of a ghoul, but they just laughed. Now, dear me, I am failing in my duty as a host. If you are finished here, may I offer you a glass of tea?’

  11

  The salon Sanusi showed us into was furnished Arab style. There were no high tables or chairs, but low divans and nests of richly embroidered cushions on the floor, calf-high tables of carved wood set on costly Persian carpets. In this room there were no clocks, no machines, no ornaments, only a low shelf of books — most of them large format pictorial works on Islam and ancient Egypt. Everything else seemed entirely functional. Sanusi stuck the oil lamp into a niche in the wall, and settled gracefully into a set of cushions, ringing a silver bell that stood on the nearby table. He removed his sandals and placed them out of sight. ‘Please,’ he said, as I stooped to pull off my trainers. ‘I know old habits die hard, but don’t bother, Lieutenant.’

  That was his third or fourth shot across my bows, I thought. I was tempted to grab the crazy old man by his scrawny beard and demand what the hell he meant by it, but I checked myself and was about to plump down in some cushions when Sanusi shrieked, ‘No, please, not there! No, that’s where my Mamluk is sitting!’

  Daisy looked startled and gazed around her. ‘What Mamluk?’ she asked.

  ‘My Mamluk — a Circassian soldier from the time of Mohammad Al Pasha. He was shot dead in this house, and his spirit has never left it. There he is, lighting his pipe. Can’t you see him?’ His eyes widened as he goggled at something invisible between us.

  ‘No,’ Daisy said, shifting uneasily.

  ‘He doesn’t speak,’ Sanusi said, ‘but he’s always there — watching. It would be a mistake to annoy him though. You know the ancient Egyptians believed that each human being had a ka or ghost, which haunted his tomb after death. That’s one reason they were afraid of entering tombs. My Mamluk is a ka.’

  Daisy raised her eyes silently to the ceiling and we sat down side by side in another corner. The old man stared at us accusingly. ‘So what have you come to see me about if it’s not to return my amulet?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Doctor Adam Ibram?’ I asked.

  He beamed humourlessly at nowhere in particular, but he didn’t seem surprised. He flipped off his glasses and placed them on the table, screwing up his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I read about his murder in Sayyidna al-Hussayn Square yesterday. Muggers, wasn’t it? The paper said that terrorism definitely wasn’t involved.’ He halted and rubbed his eyes vigorously with the palms of his hands. ‘But what has this to do with my amulet?’

  I pulled out the amulet again and laid it on the carpet in front of me. Sanusi’s eyes were suddenly riveted on it. ‘I’m
glad you asked that, Doctor Sanusi,’ I said, ‘because your amulet was found at the scene of Doctor Ibram’s murder.’

  Sanusi looked genuinely astonished, and his tic suddenly began to work furiously. He stared at me, shaking his head. ‘It must be a mistake,’ he mumbled.

  ‘It’s no mistake,’ Daisy said. ‘Have you any idea what it was doing there?’

  The old man’s mouth beneath the grey curls formed a moue of sullen fury, and suddenly he stood up, breathing hard, with eyes blazing. ‘Just what are you suggesting?’ he shouted. ‘Huh? That I had something to do with Ibram’s death? Why, I ought to call my lawyer this minute!’

  ‘That’s your right,’ I said, ‘but we’re not accusing anyone. We just want to find out how the thing got there. Please, Doctor Sanusi, sit down.’