Firebird

by Michael Asher

  ‘What is his theory?’

  Halaby grunted, as if annoyed that I’d cut off his flow. ‘It’s all mathematics,’ he said. ‘Very involved. You know I don’t have a head for all that stuff, but basically he reckons he’s discovered that the Great Pyramid was built in alignment with various constellations. It’s kind of complicated.’

  I scratched my head. ‘Seems to me I’ve heard this stuff before, but the name Monod means nothing to me and records came up with zero.’

  Halaby looked pleased, as if he’d been waiting for this one. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s because he writes under a pseudonym. Calls himself Max Heinberg — ever heard the name?’

  ‘Sure — books are on every news stand. That explains a lot.’

  ‘Yeah, like I told you, I know lots of things you don’t. Anyway, this Monod-Heinberg was listed for appointment to the Millennium Committee, but about two months ago he just vanished. At first I thought he might be dead, but a little bird told me he’s alive, and hiding out in Khan al-Khalili. From what I don’t know — maybe his wife!’

  I weighed up his words, or at least I made a show of appearing to. ‘Andropov said he’d been getting threats from the Militants,’ I said. ‘Reckoned that Monod had dipped out for the same reason. If you look at it we’ve got three prominent men, either potential members or actual members of the Millennium Committee. Monod vanishes, Ibram gets himself whacked out, and Andropov gets cold feet and resigns. We know. the Militants have threatened the millennium celebrations. What makes you so sure it’s something else?’

  Halaby gulped and blew out his cheeks. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘it’s just my nose. Militant terrorism is a war fought in the media — it’s about publicity, about getting your name on TV. Why no claims in the press about the Ibram killing, then? Somehow it’s not right. And anyway, what makes you so damn sure Andropov is telling the truth?’

  ‘OK ,’ I said. My head was throbbing and I wished to hell I hadn’t let Monod escape. ‘What about Sanusi? Anything on him?’

  He sipped araq and wrinkled his face up into a good imitation of a giant prune. I looked at him, seeing what might have been veiled excitement in his eyes. Halaby had seen everything in his time, so anything that excited him had to be worth knowing. ‘Now, this is quite interesting,’ he said. That meant it was very interesting. ‘You wanted to know if Sanusi is bona fide — he is. He is the son of King Idris — last king of Libya — and would have been in line for the throne if Gaddaffi hadn’t kicked the monarchy out. It’s also true he’s a distinguished Egyptologist. He’s done quite a few excavations in his time —notably at Amarna where he unearthed a famous bust of Nefertiti. My sources reckon he’s actually a first class field archaeologist but he’s said to be more than the usual eccentric — definitely not playing with a full deck of cards.’

  He sat back and sipped araq as if he’d said it all. I knew there was more to come, but I played along and pretended to be aghast. ‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘Is that what you call interesting? There’s nothing there I didn’t know or couldn’t have found out myself.’

  Halaby examined his cigar and smiled with satisfaction. He loved to be badgered — made him feel wanted, I suppose. ‘You people,’ he said. ‘Too hasty. Too hasty by half. In the old days an agent would sit patiently for hours to get to the end of the story. Now you’re giving up before we’ve even started.’ He exhaled smoke in my direction, and I looked at him expectantly. The girl singer was growling out a throaty tune which bordered on a decent melody. ‘Let’s say our Doctor Sanusi is who he reckons he is,’ Halaby said, ‘but that he only told you half the story. Let’s say he failed to give you certain information you might have found relevant to the case.’

  I finished my beer, and he pushed over the bottle of araq. I shook my head. ‘Like what?’ I said.

  ‘Let’s start with history — Sanusi’s favourite subject. When the Brits whupped the Sanusiya in 1916, they pushed them out of Siwa Oasis and captured a whole bunch of fully fledged, card-carrying Brothers. These weren’t the rank and file Bedouin fighters who wore amulets like the ones you found, but big honchos of the Brotherhood, all trained in the Sanusi University at Jaghbub, all initiates into the inner workings of the organization. The British G H Q in Cairo sent one of their top Intelligence boys down to Siwa to interrogate them, and the results were collected in a fat file. All this was long before my time, of course, but as they say, “He who lives long will see the camel slaughtered.” Well, the file passed through my hands once. I was only meant to consign it to someone else, and I never read the whole thing. But I do remember that this blue-eyed boy was from the Cairo Intelligence Section — which used to be in the old Savoy Hotel in what’s now Medan Talat Harb. His name was Captain Thomas Lawrence.’

  I looked at him, startled, but Halaby’s gaze was distracted by something, and I gazed over my shoulder to see Bakhit, the doorman, easing his bulk through the crowds on the dancefloor. He looked unhurried, imperturbable, yet there was still something about his demeanour that disturbed me. ‘He never comes down here,’ Halaby whispered. ‘There’s trouble.’

  I tore my gaze away from the bouncer. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘but I want to hear the end of it. You mean the guy investigating the Sanusiya was Lawrence of Arabia?’

  Halaby narrowed his eyes, keeping them half on Bakhit’s advancing figure. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I mean, the name isn’t that rare among the Brits, so it could have been someone else. But T. E. Lawrence was working in GHQ Cairo then — it was before he was officially transferred to the Arab Bureau — and according to his own writings he did do some kind of hush-hush trip to the Sanusiya in 1916, though he never let on any details about the mission.’

  ‘What was the mission?’ I asked, feeling the excitement mounting now. Halaby had been deliberately leading up to this all evening, I realized.

  Suddenly Bakhit was looming over us, his scarred face a map of darkness in the ultraviolet light. ‘Your friends came back,’ he breathed. ‘You know — the Undertakers.’

  ‘You find out who they are?’

  ‘They got ID cards issued by the police department here. I said I hadn’t had a sniff of you tonight and threw them out, but you could tell they didn’t buy it.’

  ‘Thanks friend,’ I said, ‘I owe you.’

  Bakhit fingered the scar on his face, ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘you covered my ass when I needed it.’

  I thanked him again and watched him oozing off into the crowd.

  ‘Sound guy, Bakhit,’ Halaby said, ‘for a Turk.’

  I cast a discreet glance at Halaby. ‘Who are these assholes?’ I said.

  He flicked cigar ash into the ashtray, blinked his eyelids mechanically, and brought out a Luger pistol that looked like it had come out of the Ark. He laid it on the table in front of him.

  ‘That thing belongs in a museum,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said, ‘best handgun ever made.’

  ‘We ought to bug out of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but he didn’t make a move. ‘Let them stew a bit first.’

  I looked back at the stairs, through the pulsating dancers. Then I fixed on Halaby. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘what about this file?’

  ‘As I said, I didn’t really read it,’ he said distantly. ‘It seemed like old hat when I was a young sprog in the 1940s. There was a war on, Rommel was advancing on Cairo, and the Brits were more concerned about an uprising among the Egyptians and the Rebecca spy ring than digging up ancient files. But I do know that it was this Lawrence’s job to talk to the Sanusiya Brothers who’d been captured. The interrogations were very specific. They were concerned with an archaeological project — a project that the Brothers had organized in the Western Desert.’

  ‘Wasn’t Lawrence an archaeologist by profession?’

  ‘Before the war he’d spent years digging up Hittite cities in Syria, and he’d even worked in Egypt with Flinders Petrie. So he certainly would have been the right man for the job. Now, al
l I remember from my quick scan of the file was that this dig was being carried out by Sanusi labourers under the supervision of German and Austrian archaeologists. That’s why the Brits were so interested of course — they probably thought it was a front for something else. The really odd thing is that the dig was taking place right smack in the middle of the Western Desert — the place they call the “Sea Without Water”, the Bahr Bela Ma.’

  ‘That’s the most God-forsaken place in the Sahara,’ I said. ‘Why would anyone be digging out there?’

  Halaby pouted and laid his cigar in the ashtray. ‘I can’t answer that,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell you something surprising. About half a year back, our Doctor Sanusi also worked on a dig out in the Western Desert. It was kept very secret. No one I’ve talked to knows exactly what they were digging up, but there are two very intriguing coincidences...’ His eyes focused over my shoulder again, and he placed his big calloused hand on the Luger as if gaining comfort from its presence. ‘First, the director of the project was none other than your murdered man, Adam Ibram, and second, the excavation took place in the Sea Without Water — exactly where Sanusi’s ancestors were digging with the Krauts in 1916.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘One hundred per cent gilt-edged source.’

  ‘That lying bastard told me he didn’t know Ibram.’ Halaby smirked. ‘Saw you coming,’ he said.

  ‘Anton,’ I said, ‘where would that file be now? Shredded?’

  ‘Guys like the Brits don’t shred files. If it’s anywhere it’ll be in the basement archives of the old British embassy in Garden City. Now let’s get the hell out before we get shredded ourselves!’

  22

  We paused for a moment at the top of the outside stairs, and I spotted a huddle of dark cloaked figures lurking in a den of shadows farther down the street. ‘It’s them,’ I told Halaby. ‘Let’s go the other way.’

  The old man creased a smile at me and tapped the Luger in his pocket. ‘I’m too old for cloak and dagger,’ he said.

  We shook hands, and while Halaby trolled off defiantly in their direction, I slipped quickly into the combat zone — the wedge of ruined streets that lay between here and the smart island suburb of Zamalek. It was a dark underside of Cairo — a place where illicit araq stills lay hidden among disused brick kilns and dyers’ yards. There were basements that housed hashish — and opium dens, and filthy garrets that served as brothels. The place reeked of vice, I thought. You could get almost anything illegal or salacious here from a shot of heroin to a blowjob from a child. The unlit alleys were full of cameo figures smoking at corners with only the glowing butts of their Cleopatras visible in the darkness. Cairene voices muttered and grated. The air was full of the smells of cooking oil, gasoline fumes, urine and honey — tobacco, with the occasional distinct whiff of strong hashish. This wasn’t a place for cops to go wandering in alone at night, but that suited me fine. I glanced around cautiously and zipped up my jacket. I pushed my hands into my pockets and hunched up defensively as I turned along the street. A girl — a ghost figure in an ankle length dress — suddenly put her arms round me in the darkness. For a second I felt frantically for my stiletto. ‘You want to fuck me, friend?’ she said. Her body was thin but hard under the cloth, and I could smell the cheap alcohol on her breath like a trademark. Almost at once I caught the hand that streaked towards the back pocket of my jeans, and wrenched it savagely, bending the wrist back with both hands until the girl screamed in pain. ‘Son-of-a-bitch!’ she gasped.

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, sister,’ I told her, ‘I grew up in a place like this. Let me show you how it’s done some time.’ I let her go and as she melted into the night, I glanced back into the shadows. Dark figures were moving there, but whether they were my watchers I couldn’t be certain, and I wasn’t going to wait to find out. I cut down an alley between big warehouse-type buildings, so narrow that I almost had to turn sideways. It came out into a welcome splash of light along Aziz Abaza Street by the river, from where I could see the Nile glinting — a stream of diamonds on black velvet — and the security lights in the twin pagodas of Cairo Plaza across the river. Cars and pedestrians passed busily up and down the street, and I came to a black and white taxi rank and climbed in the first car. The driver started without even asking me where I was going, and it was only when he pulled out into the traffic that he turned around slightly and I recognized the same morose, shifty guy who’d brought me from Roda earlier in the evening.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, uneasily. A warning light was blinking behind my eyes. I hadn’t asked him to wait, and how could he possibly have known I’d head for this particular rank? It could have been pure coincidence, but how often do you hail the same cab twice anywhere, let alone in Cairo?

  His eyes focused on me in the mirror. ‘Back to Roda?’ he enquired.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I changed my mind. Stop right here.’

  ‘Anything you say, Lieutenant Rashid,’ he said, jerking his foot down on the brake so hard I was hurled forward against the back of his seat. Next thing I knew there was a gun in his right hand and a walkie talkie in his left, and he was out of the open door with the hardware levelled at me. ‘Get out!’ he growled, ‘Get out now!’

  I pulled on the handle with my right foot braced against the door and kicked it open as hard as I could, catching him right in the midriff. He took a step back and doubled over gasping for breath, and in that second I leapt out and kicked him in the head. As he buckled I wrenched the pistol out of his hand, grabbed the walkie talkie and tossed it into the river below us. It plummeted thirty feet down and landed with a splash. Passing cars were starting to hoot and flash headlights at us and there was a screech of brakes as a police squad car arrived. Four blackjackets armed with Kalashnikovs jumped out and surrounded me. The taxi driver cowered against the wall rubbing his head, as I slipped out my ID card. ‘Lieutenant Rashid, SID I said, ‘I’m arresting this man for assault on a police officer.’

  The senior blackjacket was a rotund man with a piggy face and great dewlaps of fat round his chin. His uniform was stained and ragged and his boots unlaced. He smiled crookedly at me. ‘It’s you who’s under arrest, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘There’s a general alert out for you!’

  For a moment I didn’t know whether to run or fight. ‘What the shit are you talking about?’ I said. ‘On whose orders?’

  ‘Mahmud Siyudi — the Commissioner of Police.’

  ‘You lying sleazewad!’ I said. Piggy-face scowled and went for his night stick. I bunnied out of range and grabbed the taxi driver by the throat, wheeling him around and digging the tip of my stiletto into his back. ‘One step closer and this guy will be stewing steak,’ I said. For a moment the other blackjackets looked at Piggy-face, uncertain what to do. In that instant I kicked the driver towards them, jumped on to the wall, and leapt clean through the night air, thirty feet down into the indigo waters of the Nile.

  23

  I pulled myself out of the Nile dripping and quaking 1 with cold further down the bank. The cops hadn’t been brave enough to jump in after me, and evidently they’d been given orders not to open fire. No one came for me, and there was no one much about to see the trail of dirty water I left all the way along the sidewalk. I decided not to go home. Tonight I was number one on the wanted list, and I had to lay low, so I made for a doss house I knew near the Marriott Hotel where they didn’t ask questions. I slept naked with my clothes on the radiator and in the morning they’d dried out. The first thing I did after I left the place was ring Hammoudi, praying that his phone wasn’t tapped. ‘What the hell’s this about a general alert?’ I demanded as soon as he answered.

  ‘It’s Fawzi,’ he said, ‘Van Helsing made a big brouhaha about his death and your negligence. I tried to stop it but he went over my head — to the police commissioner himself. The Big Man wants you picked up just to keep the Yanks quiet. That’s pending the outcome of
the autopsy, which will be done today. At least, that’s the story.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s always a story within a story, Sammy, wheels within wheels.’

  ‘You mean maybe Fawzi’s only an excuse, and Van Helsing wants me out of the way?’

  ‘Could be. Whatever you do, don’t come in. I just had a call from Little Miss Muffet, and she knows the heat is on you. Says to meet her at the mummies room in the Egyptian museum as soon as it opens.’

  ‘Can we trust her?’

  ‘God only knows.’

  There were Tourism and Antiquities policemen on duty at the museum, so instead of showing my ID, I bundled my handgun and my blade up in a plastic bag and handed it in at the cloakroom. Then I bought a ticket and went through the metal detector as a tourist. When I arrived at the mummies room, Daisy was already there, staring intently at the egg shell fragile skull of Ramses II in his glass case. ‘Sammy!’ she said, as I kissed her on both cheeks, Italian style. ‘What the hell is happening?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I talked to an informant last night. He says Sanusi was lying. He and Ibram knew each other well. They worked on a project together in the Bahr Bela Ma — that’s in the Western Desert — only a matter of months ago.’

  ‘Son-of-a-bitch!’ Daisy said. ‘He said he’d never heard of Ibram until he died. I’ll lay fifty bucks all that crap about Jinns and Mamluks was thrown in to put us off the scent, too.’

  ‘Sssh!’ the security guard said suddenly, and for a moment we pretended to be absorbed by the bodies of half a dozen of the greatest kings and queens in history laid out for public view. What struck me was how incredibly feeble they looked. Ramses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty was supposed to have been one of the richest of the pharaohs. He’d had vast temple complexes built, like Abu Simbel, with its immense statues. Yet his cadaver looked so rat like, with its protruding teeth and emaciated limbs that you couldn’t suppress the feeling that it had all been megalomania — dwarves making themselves into giants for posterity. I couldn’t help thinking of the wizard in The Wizard of Oz — the poor old man who used a projector to make himself look frightening on a cinema screen. No matter how great and noble you believed yourself to be in life, you ended up like this — a shrivelled bag of bones lying in a box — in this case a glass box, for every Tom, Dick and Harry in the world to gawk at.