Sheep Dog and the Wolf

by Douglass, Carl;

  He walked over and stood by the man as they both washed their hands. The butler turned his back on Sheep Dog and began a step towards the door. Sheep Dog caught the back of the butler’s neck with a sudden very violent knife-hand karate chop which felled him as effectively as if the weapon had been an ax. Sheep Dog swiftly dragged the man’s inert body into the men’s room work closet where he broke his neck. He stripped the corpse of its livery and white gloves and took off his own clothes and replaced them with the livery. He carefully folded his suit, shirt, and tie into as tight a pack as possible and forced them into his brief case. He had to stand on the case to force the lock clasp to connect. Then, he removed several arm loads of paper and cloth toweling trash from the wheeled container. He cut of the man’s right thumb then hoisted his victim up and into the trash bin, and replaced the trash on top of him. He wrapped the severed thumb in plastic torn from the roll of waste can bags sitting on one of the work room shelves and slid it into his pocket.

  He walked out of the men’s room and into the general hubbub of the working hallway wearing the butler’s livery, gloves, and ID badge. He was one of the invisible work figures and attracted no more attention than did any of the other employees. On his first inspection of the area and its activity, he had noted a pantry shelf lined with gallon sized glass bottles of nonalcoholic fruit juice imported from Albania. He strode into the pantry and poured a few drops of the deep burgundy colored juice onto the palm of his hand. It was a little bitter and cloyingly sweet. That suited his purposes perfectly. He walked back into the hubbub and found a line of food carts ready to be taken up to the pent house for distribution to the august guests. The major-domo was gathering his butlers into a line to take them. Sheep Dog took the first one in the line and moved it quickly into the unoccupied pantry.

  He removed the food and put it into the trash bin. He filled a dozen empty crystal water pitchers with the viscous fruit juice, added a generous helping of purple/blue crystals from his baggies of Furadon, mixed them well, and put them on the cart. He opened the pantry door and took a quick look into the hall. The line of butlers was marching in lock-step down the hallway to the elevators with the major-domo in the lead. Sheep Dog moved into last place and followed them to the bank of elevators, waited his turn, and went up to the pent house floor.

  The butlers were streaming into the banquet hall, each one stopping long enough to press his thumb print against the sensor. In the busy rush, the muscular security men could give only a cursory look at IDs before passing each butler into the main room. Time was of the essence. It was nearly 11:30, and the food had to be on the table in front of every important guest by the stroke of 11:45 when the opening toast would be drunk.

  Sheep Dog surreptitiously exposed the end of his victim’s severed thumb from the opening of the baggie and pressed it on the sensor. The door opened. As Sheep Dog moved the cart through the door, the major-domo demanded:

  “Where have you been, lout!? You have fifteen minutes to fill every glass, or you will be working in the laundry room, understand?”

  He was speaking English, because the butlers came from so many different countries and cultures that it was necessary to use American English as the lingua franca. Sheep Dog lowered his eyes and his head obsequiously—nodded his understanding—and hurried into the room. His task was—indeed—daunting. There were twelve regular circular tables of ten men each and a rectangular head table for twelve men. Women were not allowed in the room or even on the pent house floor.

  Sheep Dog moved quickly and efficiently. The table settings were elegant with white damask table cloths and napkins. Gold plates and utensils, three on each side of the impeccably clean plates, and three Waterford English goblets of varying size constituted the place settings. Fresh orchids from Indonesia stood in single flower vases by each setting and a huge bouquet of flowers from the Spice Islands sat in an Orrefors Swedish crystal vase in the center. Sheep Dog puzzled briefly over the choice of which goblet to use for the punch and decided on the one furthest to the left. He began to pour half a glassful for each man.

  At the second table, in his hurry, he let a droplet of the heavy dark juice splash on the back of one man’s hand. The man glanced at the drop on his left hand with such repugnance, that it was as if Sheep Dog had spat on him. Sheep Dog—the butler—quickly dabbed away the drop; and the imperious Arab snapped away his hand and snarled some invective in Arabic. Sheep Dog was angry; here was a man who used that hand instead of toilet paper, and he was upset at a drop of sterile fruit punch soiling it. He drove away any thought of showing his displeasure on his face and hurried on to the next seat and the next table and the next. He finished at 11:44, and he was sweating.

  He moved his cart with its empty crystal pitchers quickly and quietly to the door. As the guard passed another butler out, Sheep Dog laid a calling card discretely among the cards sitting on the small round cloth covered table placed at the entrance door for that purpose. His card was printed on the finest polished card-stock paper manufactured in Yemen. It had a simple message:

  The Arabic is “Al Qaeda”, and the English printed name is that of the generally accepted leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen.

  As Sheep Dog pushed his cart the rest of the way out through the door, Abdel-Karim al-Wahishi, leader of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, flicked the nail of his third finger on his right hand against the edge of his delicate crystal goblet sending a melodious chime resonating through the hall.

  “La ilaha illa Allah, Brothers, Mohammadun Rasulu Allah, bless his name forever. Let us toast to the success of our enterprise with the pure juice of the grape that comes as a gift from those of our compatriots in jihad in Albania.”

  He lifted his goblet and downed the entirety of the sweet aperitif in single swallow. Each of the other 135 men, including the security agents, followed his lead, chorused his praise of Allah and his Prophet, and quaffed their fruit drink to the last drop.

  He pointed his goblet and smiled at Afshar Ali Montazeri, Supreme Leader of Hezbollah, who had flown in that morning from Tehran to attend the large ecumenical gathering. He, and the director of Hamas in Palestine, were both seated in places of honor at the head table. Both honorees gave a self-effacing little head nod to acknowledge having been singled out.

  “Brothers,” al-Wahishi, said simply.

  It was the first time a Shi’ite had ever been in the same room as the al Qaeda Sunnis. The Arab upon whose hand Sheep Dog had spilled the drop of juice gave a look of complete disdain at the interlopers from Iran.

  He muttered to his seat mate, “Dogs. Sub-human kaffirs.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Sheep Dog moved quickly but without drawing attention to himself. He knew that he was on borrowed time, but was unsure of exactly how long it would take for the Furadon poison to bring on symptoms. He had put enough into the grape juice for a glassful to kill four or five people, but maybe most of the targets had not drunk it down. He found himself alone on the second floor for the moment. All hotel kitchen and wait staff activity had shifted to the subbasement where a factory like process of cleaning dish ware and utensils was in full swing.

  He pushed his cart into the pantry, removed all of the tainted pitchers and hosed them out quickly and lined them up on shelves. With any luck, they could possibly dry in place and not be noticed until the next banquet. He knew the body was still in the trash can, and would shortly be discovered which would start a dragnet after him. There were several dozen trash bags piled up in the hallway outside the pantry door. He tested them and found that they were segregated into bags of heavy wet garbage and lighter dry trash. It seemed to be worth a try; so, he lugged the heavy sack of corpse and paper trash into the hall and set it under a pile of heavy garbage bags. Now he was panting with the exertion and keenly aware of the passing time and mounting danger.

  He walked calmly to the exit stairway and tentatively opened it and peered in. No one was there; his luck was holding. He ran down to the basement which opened
into a lower garage. He found a rest room and dashed inside to change back into his starched white shirt, Armani-like suit, and Hugo Boss tie. The clothes were wrinkled, but passable. It did not matter; they would have to do. He jammed the butler suit and white gloves into the brief case, opened the heavy metal door into the garage, and walked briskly across the pavement towards the exit. He passed several people exiting from their cars and a few going the same way as him towards al Aminyah Street.

  He reversed his route back towards the Tulip Inn Olaya Hotel and shortly encountered his first impediment in the form of a street crowd filling the sidewalk and Al Ameria Street. A folkloric dance troupe had been brought into the Al Faisaliah Center by the hotel. Although he was in no mood to be entertained, he recognized that he was witnessing one of Saudi Arabia’s most compelling folk rituals—Al Ardha—the country’s national dance. This sword dance is based on ancient Bedouin traditions which pre-date the very existence of the nation itself. Sheep Dog was trapped in a crowd of tourists and city dwellers and found himself having to edge his way through sets of drummers beating out a rhythm and a poet chanting verses while a dozen sword-carrying men danced shoulder to shoulder even moving out around him and leaving him caught in the middle temporarily. A street commentator called out information to his tourist group from Germany who had gotten off a huge Al-Sherif air-conditioned bus to view the spectacle.

  Despite his sense of ever pressing haste, Sheep Dog had to hear about Al-sihba folk music from the Hejaz, Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah, that this kind of dance and song incorporated the sound of the mizmar—an oboe-like woodwind instrument in the performance of the mizmar dance. As Sheep Dog slowly threaded through the crowd—whose numbers were diminishing at the periphery—he heard the throb of the drums important and native to the Samri, a popular traditional form of music and dance in which poetry is sung. The performers had been flown in from the Eastern Region of Saudi Arabia for the week. His ears were assaulted by the music of the Arabian oud—a pear-shaped, stringed instrument commonly used in Middle-Eastern music. It is considered to be the predecessor of the western lute, distinguished primarily by its lack of frets—drums. The musical number included a screeching singer. In addition to the unpleasant auditory stimulus, Sheep Dog’s sense of smell was assaulted by the pungent aroma of oud perfume that permeated the gathering; and his sense of well-being by men waving swords and bamboo canes which came uncomfortably close to him as he began to worm his way out of the crowd. He cleared his last hurdle by literally making a running jump over two rows of men seated on their knees and swaying to the odd tempo of the Arabian rhythms.

  The dispersal of the crowds which helped Sheep Dog make progress was being facilitated by the arrival of the mutaween—religious police—which are numerous in ultra-conservative Riyadh. Known by locals in their very private conversations as the “Dead Center of the Kingdom”, Riyadh is the most straight-laced of the Kingdom’s big cities owing to the great local power of Wahhabism, the most stringent, most intolerant, and harshest sect in Islam. With most forms of entertainment banned, few sights of interest and a brutal climate, Riyadh is a business-only destination by determined design; but it is also the best place in the Kingdom to watch at arms length the continuing collision of tribal Wahhabi conservatism—manned in the streets by the mutaween—grappling with modern technology and Western influences. The mutaween moving into the crowd took a dim view of the festival in progress.

  He was back out on Al Olaya Street finally. It seemed like he had been stuck in a human quicksand for hours; but in reality, it had only been about twenty minutes. There was no indication of police action behind or in front of him, except for the mutaween thugs. Aside from them, he sensed no threatening presence. Now, he made rapid progress up the street to the Tulip Hotel.

  Once inside the lobby, he took a deep inhalation and calmed himself. He was going to be his own worst enemy if he did not stop looking so harried and nervous. He closed his eyes and tried to think of the towering La Plata Mountains of his native Colorado, a place where he always found peace. Under better control now, he walked calmly to the door leading to the subbasement where he found an overfull dumpster ready to be hauled away. He dug into it enough to be able to bury the butler’s suit and white gloves, ID badge, and severed thumb. Now back in full control of his keen senses, Sheep Dog went back to the lobby, turned left to the luggage room, and presented the cards for his two bags to the woman behind the shelf of the half door of the room.

  She was not the same worker who had taken his bags that morning.

  “Do you see them, sir?” she asked.

  She spoke with a mild lisp, and that, coupled with the face covering veil that was perfectly in concert with the Islamic principle of modesty—hijab—made it difficult to understand her. Sheep Dog strained to make out what she was saying. He pointed to his two large bags. She seemed not to be particularly inclined to help; so, he pushed open the half door and fetched them himself. She was perfectly content to have him do her work, and was positively overjoyed when he gave her a somewhat excessive tip.

  “Do you need help getting your bags to the reservation desk, sir?”

  “No, thank you, I can manage.”

  She paid him no mind as he left her, turned right into the lobby; and, avoiding the gaze of the reservation desk attendants, he made his way swiftly out onto Al Olaya Street in front of the hotel. Shortly, a white taxi cab driven by a Pakistani wearing a ghutra—a plain white square made of finer cotton held in place by a cord coil—pulled to the curb in front of him. Sheep Dog knew to keep safe by only getting into a metered cab; and further, he knew that the only likelihood of getting a driver who spoke decent English was to find an Indian or Pakistani.

  “Where to, sir?” the cabbie asked with the typical Indian sub-continent lilt to his accent.

  “King Khalid International Domestic Terminal,” Sheep Dog said, leaning into the passenger side window to inspect the meter. “How much?”

  He and the driver discussed the meter and off-meter price, and after a bit of good-natured haggling agreed on an acceptable fee for the 35 kilometer, 30 minute, ride north. As they discussed the price, Sheep Dog observed two burly and angry mutaween beating a woman with short billy clubs. She was middle-aged, a suicide blond, and was wearing a low-cut casual blouse that exposed her technologically enhanced bosoms, a decidedly foolish thing to do in Riyadh. The mutaween were screaming at her in Arabic, which she obviously did not understand, and had reduced her to a tear-sodden shadow of her former self as her aging husband stood helplessly by.

  “Do not look at them, kind sir. Best not to get involved or even to show an interest. Take it from one who knows.”

  Sheep Dog knew better than to call interest to himself and was relieved when they pulled out into traffic. The route took them through the bustling city with a series of hair-raisingly daring maneuvers executed with the voluble driver all the while providing a travelogue, history lesson, and social commentary as if he were talking to himself. Sheep Dog relaxed as he listened to the impassioned soliloquy while they weaved in and out between cars, trucks, busses, motor scooters, and inattentive pedestrians. From Olaya Road the cabbie careened onto Al Arouba Road, then out onto the teeming King Fahd Highway.

  The educational part of the excursion came in rapid staccato bursts which amused Sheep Dog, and he did not mind not having to respond the entire trip.

  “Kind sir, let me tell you about Saudi Arabia, which is, of course, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Did you know that it is an African country and both the largest and the richest country of the Middle-East? That is why I am here. There is no work in my poor country. I come from Lahore as do many of my countrymen to be abused by the haughty Saudis.”

  He laughed at his bit of irony.

  “The Kingdom is also known as ‘The Land of the Two Holy Mosques’. I am sure even you as a Westerner have heard of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in all of Islam. I have made the Hajj, just last February; so, you co
uld call me Haji Hakimullah Farooq, but that would be too complicated. Just call me Haki.” Scarcely taking a breath, Haki went on, “The two mosques are the Masjid al-Haram and Masjid Al-Nabawi, but surely you already know that. Forgive me for even suggesting that you could be ignorant, kind sir.

  “Less than two percent of the kingdom’s total area can be watered and made fertile for crops. Were it not for oil, the Bedu would still reign here, and there would be no need for the likes of me. The country can’t run without imported workers like me, the Filipinos, and the Turks. For one thing, there are a lot of stupids here. That is because they produce Mongoloids and have lots of other mental illnesses coming from the extraordinarily high rate of cousin marrying cousin here. This is forbidden in my country. And you know, there are 7,000 useless princes who do nothing but suck up the money that Allah and the land gives the people. Maybe not so many, but they are all lazy and arrogant. It is an awful place to live as a foreigner. It is my sad lot to have to find work in this accursed place.”

  “What is so bad about it?” Sheep Dog hazarded an interruption to the stream of conscious conversation coming from Haki.

  “Ah, I am glad you asked. The list is endless, but I would not want to bore you.”

  A mini-bus swerved in front of the cab, and Haki rolled down the window and hurled invectives at the offender which were met with the world’s universal one-finger signal of disrespect.”