Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  Also, because I was just plain pissed off. Even then, I didn’t believe I was in any real danger of getting killed over this crap, just seriously inconvenienced, a grim but acceptable risk for professional journalists.

  I sat there brooding, trying to think of a way to get my hands on an AI reader, until Halton judged we’d given the snoops enough time to root through our equipment.

  Upstairs, I opened the door and waited, looking at Halton. He scrutinized the room, and said, “Thanks, Kay Bee. I don’t think I’ll have any more problems on the HoloPak.”

  Well, hell. It didn’t look like intelligent conversation was going to be included on our list of hobbies for a while.

  EIGHT

  * * *

  We got a call about seven the next morning from the Deputy Minister of Information and Culture advising us that His Excellency would see us at ten. The screen had the telltale hairline ripple of a tapped system. I checked my eye in the bathroom mirror, and found it was worse today than it had been yesterday, but not as bad as I’d worried it would be. My crotch was recovering somewhat, and I managed to dress by myself, to my vast relief.

  Halton and I left, equipment ready, shortly before nine, and arrived at the palace with only five minutes to spare. It wasn’t that the palace was far from the hotel, but that morning rush-hour traffic crawled at a rabid snail’s pace. We could have walked in less time.

  The palace’s security screen was just a pinch tighter than it had been the previous night, searching our equipment and walking us through the sensor, followed by a quick and alarming pat-down which made me glad I’d taken a few precautions, padding my undershoits with a wad of the same material I once used to stuff in my bra. They didn’t get too familiar, and after they were satisfied that we weren’t concealing any guns, knives, bombs, booze or girlie magazines, we were escorted through long, long halls decorated with mirrors and French masters in heavy gilt frames, red velvet chairs with carved lions’ feet, Grecian and Roman statues on jade-marble pillars.

  The interior décor was a mad fusion of vaulted rococo ceilings covered with frescoes, walls veneered with the most gorgeous ornate tiling imaginable, marble floors in elaborate designs, rich Persian carpets hiding most of it, carved wooden screens overlooking the wide courtyard atrium, huge fountain splashing peacefully. We passed endless arched doorways, tasseled brocade curtains screening off a series of ma’gâlees, reception rooms. One door was open, and I caught a glimpse of a young boy in a Western suit sitting on the floor with his pet monkey sharing a plate of figs.

  Complete with a matching set of surly guys in brown khaki and mirror-shades strolling the grounds and toting machine guns, the palace could have been straight out of the Arabian Nights as interpreted by the Marquis de Sade.

  It was rumored that the palace sat on top of the Boy King’s personal underground bunker far below us, the best twentieth-century German technology money could buy. German engineers had built a number of these palace fortresses in several Islamic countries at the end of the last century, along with a scattering of poison-gas plants. They’d had a long historical expertise with both bunkers and toxic gases, and later had reason to regret sharing these rather esoteric specialties with various Muslim leaders. That part wasn’t included on the tour, however.

  Sheikh Larry was in his playroom, a two-thousand-square-foot chamber with its own sunken fountain, deep white velvet couches tastefully arranged on pale Art Deco camel-hair rugs, chandeliers with real cut-crystal tinkling overhead in the slightly aromatic breeze from a hidden air conditioner. A twelve-foot-high brass aviary held a dozen pure white macaws screeching at each other. A half-dozen or so of the Boy King’s highest advisors, all elderly men with snowy beards and bleached qaftans, lounged at a respectful distance, looking bored and irritated. All that white hurt my eyes.

  The Pillar of Allah, Beloved and Exalted Potentate of Khuruchabja, His Excellency was dressed in a pair of faded Levi’s worn at the knees, a pair of scuffed Adidas track shoes, and a T-shirt emblazoned with an iron-on photo of the deranged-looking lead singer from the French rock group Brain Damage. He lay supine on one of the immaculate white sofas, his legs draped over its back, and wiggled the controls of a holovideo game, projected above him and, from my point of view, wrongside up. Tiny green tanks fired at spaceships roaring upside-down beneath them. A miniature UFO hit one of the dwarf tanks, and it exploded in realistic fire and smoke before it completely vanished. No unsightly dead bodies left lying around to clutter up the playing field.

  Another alien craft followed the fate of the tank, and the game froze, a trumpet sadly blaring out the mourner’s march. Inverted Arabic script floated across the screen, indicating playing scores.

  “Hah!” Larry said. “Beat that!.”

  A dignified elderly man stood up from the group watching the Sheikh’s game, strolled over to a nearby chair, and with a resigned air, picked up his own set of controls. The projector flipped the perspective to an upright vantage, and as antique Mirages and Mig 34’s screamed overhead, ersatz tanks fired a barrage of weaponry at alien flying saucers. Goose-stepping soldiers began tossing phantom artillery at hordes of creepy-crawlies springing up out of thin air. They looked like tomatoes with legs, and when hit, exploded with a blossom of red and a muffled splat. It was the weirdest holovid game I’d ever seen. The minister reluctantly working the controls was doing so with his distaste barely concealed.

  Larry rolled off the couch like a gymnast doing a back flip, landing on his feet. “Hi,” he said, in a perfect American accent. “You’re Kay Bee Sulaiman from GBN?” He was eyeing Halton with undisguised interest.

  “That’s correct, Your Excellency,” I said. “John Halton, my holo optics photographer.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said, grinning. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. If the kid made it any more obvious, they’d have to import more neon. “You guys were supposed to do some kinda ‘in-depth’ piece on me—you know, ‘meet the king’ sort of shit.”

  “That’s about it, Your Excellency—” I hesitated, eyeing his clothing. “It’ll take only a minute to set up our equipment…”

  “Sorry, but I guess you’ve heard. The palace is in official mourning, so no pictures now. Maybe later on. Right now, I thought we’d just talk, get to know each other, discuss how you’re gonna film it, that kinda thing. A king’s gotta be dressed for the camera.” He laughed. “But a king’s still got an obligation to his audience. The show must go on, right?”

  He didn’t look like a bereaved husband. Regardless of how his wife had died, I would have thought he might have shown a little more sorrow. Somehow, I liked him better when he’d been stuffed into his tight wedding-cake uniform, hair slicked back, and scowling. This boy seemed no different from any other pampered rich snot I could have found soaking in a jacuzzi in some Beverly Hills ultra-private club.

  The original game plan had been set up this way: We were to do an extended interview of the kid, take about a week or two, after which he would “offer” Halton a job as his personal PR consultant. Halton would accept, and I’d sign over the paperwork in private, then go home. No one outside a handful of people would ever know Halton was a fabricant. It seems Allah doesn’t approve of fabricants in Khuruchabja any more than He does AI’s.

  But now it seemed I wasn’t even going to get a story to justify my own trip, even one I wasn’t interested in. I was still a journalist, and the thought of wasting my time, never mind slipclips, on this cocky, narcissistic brat was annoying. Just do it, Kay Bee. You’re paid for the time, and the slip-clips can be better spent on something else. I swallowed my ego, and got down to work.

  Halton dumped the now verboten HoloPak in the corner and sat off to the side, out of the way but where the kid could still eyeball him. I started doing a half-assed exploratory interview, at least allowed to record on audiochip instead of scribbling notes. I had been told to keep it all trivial and light, the kind of toothless chat show bah-bah wah-wah questions like, “if you were a teabag, Your
Excellency, what flavor teabag would you be?”

  The kid was more than happy to give me his complete background from the time he was three years old and tried to stuff the maid’s cat down the electronic garbage disposal. I practically fell asleep listening to him prattle on vacuously. Where was the serious, aloof young man I’d seen at dinner? That should have been my first clue, and I wasn’t paying attention. Halton was doing his part, his current one, which consisted of doing less than I was.

  We were being watched by the king’s advisors from a circumspect distance. The kid’s opponent lost his last tank to invading hordes of Monster Zucchinis from Outer Space, breathed a weary sigh of relief and retired to the back benches with the rest of his buddies.

  Larry broke off long enough to glance at the old man’s score and laugh. “Is that the best you can do, you old fart?” he called out to the stoic minister. “I’m gonna have to rewrite the damn programming to make it easier for you.” The old man looked back steadily without saying a word. Perhaps he didn’t speak English.

  “Al-Hasmani’s okay, but he’s just no challenge. You play?” the king abruptly asked Halton.

  Halton shrugged his eyebrows. “I could learn.”

  “You wrote the programming?” I asked, eyeing the phantom Marching Mutant Munchies as they devoured tanks and fighter jets in midair.

  “Sure,” the kid bragged. “It’s pretty easy, really. All you have to do is take something like the IBM 8 MicroModel 470 for the basic holo paradigm with a track-link conditioner to upgrade the HB display, and interface it with an A-Zed-190 timing sequencer and grafting on some standard ComPleet-catacode logistics for the tanks and the planes. Then, for the Alien Veggies…” There was a lot more of enthusiastic computer babble about hologames, which interested me not in the least.

  “Very impressive,” I finally managed to interject, and steered the conversation back toward his personal history. He seemed happy to prattle on about anything at all, so long as the theme was himself. I changed chips in the recorder after another half-hour, stifling my yawns and trying to keep my mind from wandering to more interesting subjects, like lunch. The alien vegetables must have been having a subliminal effect on my appetite.

  “So after Yale, I applied to Oxford to do some post-grad studies on the influence of nineteenth-century British imperialism in the Middle East on the current popular culture and mythology in Islam.” He grinned. “It seemed appropriate.” I must have fogged out of paying attention. I blinked at him stupidly for a moment. “You know,” he prompted, “Lawrence of Arabia?” He laughed. “My grandmum was half English, loved all that kind of mystical shit, even badgered my father into naming me after the greatest English hero in the Middle East. Christ, I’m just glad she didn’t name me after Glubb Pasha! Can you imagine? “His Royal Highness, Sheikh Glubb’?” He nearly fell off the sofa, laughing. “Anyway, Grams had this crazy idea I was going to be another Lawrence. You could use that as an angle, couldn’t you? She was the one who insisted I go to Oxford, more because it was T.E.’s alma mater, rather than because it was a really good school.”

  “Which is where I understand you met your wife, Khatijah?”

  I couldn’t have done better had I farted in the middle of High Mass at Notre Dame. For a brief, tense moment, the kid lost his brainless computer nerd cum born-again yuppie act, observing me narrowly, eyes shrewd. Two of his ministers, I noted from the corner of my eye, also reacted, including old al-Hasmani. Yup, definitely English-speakers.

  “Khatijah is… was… one of my wives, not my senior wife. Muslims are still allowed four wives in Khuruchabja, as you’re well aware. Khatijah and I hadn’t been married all that long. In any case, that is part of my private life, which is not open for discussion or examination.” He seemed to remember hastily that he was in mourning. “It’s just too painful for me to talk about right now.”

  Sure. In any case, anything more personal than the rambling nothings of Sheikh Larry’s public life was going to be unlikely. I wrapped up the wah-wah’s and made an appointment with one of his secretaries (a portly minister who scratched in a large vellum-paged book with a quill pen, I kid you not) to return when the king would dress up for the camera.

  Oh, goody, I could hardly wait.

  We trudged out of the palace with little more than we’d come in with. Halton didn’t look in the least discouraged, but then he was only playing at being an Intrepid Reporter.

  It was only half past noon, the day was young. “We might as well get some lunch,” I said, “then walk around, see what we can find for background shots.”

  I had something else on my mind, so I guess I was only playing, too. But then, everybody was only playing at their roles. So what else was new in Nok Kuzlat?

  NINE

  * * *

  The weather was already searingly hot, and we found refuge under the shade of a solitary acacia tree left standing in an abandoned construction site turned impromptu public park in the Old City. Birds rustled in the thorny branches, snapping up the insects attracted to the scattering of yellow flowers. The scarred bark of the tree still bore traces of a fire, a gnarled survivor.

  We sat in what had once been the home of some government building, a faded and graffitied sign proclaiming this to be a reconstruction site. The bombed rubble had been bulldozed to the sides, and dry brown weeds grew in the furrows, as far as the “reconstruction” ever got. The backsides of windowless office buildings bordered the lot, graffiti-decorated aging service doors chained and locked. The anorexic spires of minarets and the gold gleam of a dome wavered in the distant heat.

  The acacia tree was the central feature of a makeshift outdoor restaurant, if the establishment we were currently gracing with our patronage could actually be called that. White-collar workers certainly scorned the place, and the few loyal customers seemed to be the local office buildings’ garbage collectors and janitors.

  The three sides of the kitchen “walls” were made from old cardboard, sheet tin and canvas tenting. Facing the open kitchen, two rough tables had been cobbled together from scrap boards. I sat on an empty packing crate; Halton perched atop a large rock.

  We had one table; the other was shared by a half-dozen grizzled men in dingy workclothes who were sipping coffee and eyeballing us over a lethargic game of dominoes. Occasionally, one of them would get up and shuffle behind the kitchen to piss on the mountain of trash behind the cook tent wall. We wore Western clothing and spoke English, but unlike many other Middle Easterners, the average Khuruchabjan was cautiously aloof. The secret police were known to drop by and ask a few pointed questions with rubber hoses and electric wires if you were too friendly with foreigners, particularly Americans.

  I had Halton film the man sweating over the three barbecue grills made from oil drums sawed in half, as I interviewed him. Yes, yes, death to America and the Zionist pigs, he chanted dutifully for the camera, Allah bless the king forever, hang all accursed Western unbelievers head-down over the fires of Hell, would we like to try some of his homemade pepper sauce in our sha’warmdâa’s?

  The old man grinned hugely as he broiled speared chunks of mystery-meat kibbâa’hs, using the edge of his dirty kaffiyeh to avoid burning his fingers. Behind him, a tiny generator burbled, keeping an ancient refrigerator running.

  Actually, it wasn’t bad. The proprietor brought us his special “apple juice,” tickled we had filmed his humble establishment for our reviled, godless Western but most important news station. It was cold, at least, a bit watered but still tart and delicious. A pretentious little vintage, but a very good week.

  Served with wilted mint, yogurt, and pickled vegetables stuffed into a roll of flat bread the chef had fried on the side of his makeshift oven, the sharp, peppery spices in the meat surely killed any lingering bacteria foolish enough to stick around. I wasn’t sure what species of animal the meat had originally claimed, but didn’t want to know that badly. Our chef handed us our sha’warmâa’s wrapped in torn pieces of newspaper, along
with several more pieces of the tortillalike bread. I dusted the charred bits off the bread and used it to dip into tiny jars of vegetables, oily mashed chickpeas, an aubergine faux-caviar, and an odd sort of curried tomato and cucumber yogurt mixture, which I guessed was made from sheep’s milk. Attracted by the smell, flies buzzed around us.

  A skeletally thin cat slid its bony body around my legs begging for a bite. I leaned over to feed it a scrap of meat, then grimaced when I straightened, a sudden shot of latent pain in my crotch. I hissed my breath in between clenched teeth. Startled, the stray cat took off, taking its prize with it.

  “Are you all right?” Halton stopped his constant observation of our surroundings to eye me discerningly.

  “You’re not my mother, so stop worrying about me, okay?” I retorted hotly. “I’m fine. Just fine. So back off.”

  He looked at me, his expression neutral. “I apologize if I’ve said something to offend you,” he said. I thought I detected a hint of reproach behind his cool voice. “Maybe if you could explain what it is I’m doing to annoy you, I might be able to improve our working relationship.”

  I had been a complete bitch. I sighed, brushing the constant swarm of annoying flies away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Fucking hell. I don’t mean to take it out on you,” I said lamely. “It’s the heat, it’s this place, it’s this whole fucking setup pissing me off.”

  He kept looking at me like he didn’t believe me. “I don’t know if I could explain it to you. Halton.” I took another sip from the “apple juice,” feeling the sting of alcohol in my cut lip. “I don’t think I really understand it myself. You, personally, don’t offend me. Even you’re being CDI doesn’t bother me, or not as much, anyway. But just the fact that you exist at all makes me nervous.”