The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus

by Sean McLachlan

  Moustafa nodded grimly. Any hint of scandal attached to Simaika’s family would be all the authorities needed to crack down on him. Copts and Muslims were showing a rare unity these days, and no doubt the British would love any excuse to drive a wedge between them.

  This murder already involved European politics, and now it could stir up the boiling cauldron of Egyptian politics.

  6

  That night, Faisal had two jobs to do. He did the safer one first to delay doing the more frightening one.

  He waited until long past sunset, late enough that Mina would be asleep.

  Faisal walked down her street in silence and near darkness, the only light being that of the crescent moon. He saw few people. There was no café on this stretch of the road, so no reason to linger after all the shops were closed. A couple of men out for an evening stroll passed by not far off, but they paid Faisal no attention as he walked silently along the shadows next to the buildings and came to the little lean-to made of reed mats.

  He squatted next to the thin wall and pressed his ear against it. If anyone saw him through the gloom, they would assume he was asleep.

  For a while he didn’t hear much except for the regular clack clack clack of a knife hitting a cutting board. No doubt Mina’s mother preparing the vegetables for the next day’s batch of ful. Then Faisal heard a body shift, followed by a groan. Mina’s father. He had been helping some workmen haul bricks to make a little extra money and had wrenched his back. Now it hurt every time he moved.

  Before his injury, Mina’s father had run the ful stand and did all sorts of extra jobs. Mina could play with him and the other children. After the injury, the man could barely walk and Mina had to take over helping her mother at the stand. Plus the extra money he had earned from odd jobs had disappeared. Mina began looking thinner and more worried. Even when business was slow and she had a bit of spare time she didn’t have the energy to play jacks or mankala any more.

  Faisal sat still and listened, waiting to hear what he needed to know. He could be patient when he had to.

  “I just don’t like it,” Mina’s mother said at last. The way she said it made it sound like she had said it many times.

  “I don’t either,” Mina’s father replied. “But what can we do? He isn’t even asking for a dowry.”

  They spoke in low tones to keep from awakening their daughter. Faisal had to strain his ears to pick out the words.

  “She’s all we have,” Mina’s mother said, her voice breaking a little.

  “Yes, but what does she have? She’ll get a better life at Abbas Eldessouky’s household. The older wives will take care of her.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. What choice do we have? Would it be better to say no and let her live in this misery? She’ll never have another offer like this again. She’ll end up marrying a street sweeper! This way she has a chance to live in a proper house and wear proper clothes. God gives with one hand and with the other He takes away. He took away my work, and then gave my only daughter the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  “She’s so young.”

  “Hamid’s daughter got wed at ten. Even rich people do it. If I could work, I would never consider it. But as things are …”

  Mina’s father let his voice trail off. Faisal imagined him giving a resigned shrug. There came another groan as Mina’s father moved. The clack clack clack of the knife started up again. He heard a soft snuffling, as of suppressed weeping.

  Faisal tiptoed away. So that was it. That pot-bellied bastard had made an offer Mina’s family couldn’t afford to refuse.

  What could he do? If Mina got married to a rich man, she’d be stuck in his house all the time and Faisal would never see her again. This was terrible!

  At least he had learned the man’s name. Also, Mina’s parents hadn’t actually said yes yet. It sounded like they would soon, but weddings took many days to plan. Faisal had some time. Probably not much, because Abbas Eldessouky sounded like he was in a hurry.

  He wasn’t sure what could do about it tonight. Find Abbas Eldessouky’s house? And then what? Sneak in and steal enough money for Mina to run away? No, she would end up in more danger than she was in now. Poison his tea? No, Faisal couldn’t kill anyone, not even someone who wanted to steal Mina. He squatted against a wall and remained there for an hour, deep in thought, but no solution came.

  Faisal realized he was delaying doing what he really needed to do, which was to go check on the jinn at the Englishman’s house. That scared him almost as much as Mina going away.

  Still, he had to do it. The Englishman’s home was his home too, and neither of them would be safe until those jinn got taken care of.

  As he snuck through the alley behind the Englishman’s house, he tried to summon his courage. He needed to enter through his secret entrance on the roof and go all the way down to the ground floor of the house in order to check on the magical amulet he had placed there. If the Englishman or Moustafa had found it and thrown it away, he’d have to buy another, even if it cost another 25 piastres. He had no idea how he’d afford it. Magical amulets didn’t work if you bought them with stolen money.

  He scampered up the side of the house and went into his shed to find a match and a candle. There was no way he’d go into that house full of jinn without some light.

  The large, square roof was open in the center, looking down on the courtyard below. Faisal peered down, searching every shadow for any strange shapes. Once his heart clenched when he thought he saw a pair of eyes looking up at him, but then he realized it was only the moonlight gleaming off the polished stone of a statue the Englishman had put near the fountain.

  At least he hoped it was a statue. Jinn could turn into statues sometimes.

  Faisal shuddered and looked away. He made his way to a raised area on the other side of the roof. It sloped up and had a row of windows facing the north, the direction of the prevailing winds. The wind blew through the windows to cool the main sitting room below.

  The Englishman hardly ever used that room, since he didn’t have a family and almost never had company over. Faisal didn’t understand why he wanted to live alone, but it meant that Faisal had a free run of the house at night.

  At least until the jinn had arrived.

  He peeked through the window. The moon was only a thin crescent, and its pale light barely penetrated the gloom below. Faisal swore he saw the shadows move. Biting his lip, he struck a match—the Englishman had so many matches he never missed them—and lit the candle.

  He raised the candle over his head and peered down into the sitting room again. All seemed still and empty down there. Then his heart flew into his mouth as one of the shadows wavered and seemed to grow arms that reached up to grab him.

  Faisal almost screamed before he realized a breeze had made the candle flicker and caused the shadows to dance.

  He let out a breath of relief and leaned his head against the glass.

  Something caught his eye.

  There were marks on the glass. They looked like paw prints. Faisal held his candle up to get a better angle. Now that he could see better, he noticed they looked a bit like paws and a bit like handprints. And on the windowsill, a few hairs were caught in a rough part of the metal. He pulled them off and examined them. They were a silver-gray.

  Then it struck him. Baboons! They had hands and hair just like this. He had seen lots of baboons. Street entertainers did shows with them. They could be trained to dance and jump and take coins from people’s hands. They were very clever animals, almost as clever as monkeys and a lot stronger. But they were smaller than him, and could easily get through this window and climb down. From the looks of it, more than one baboon had come through here. But there were prints only on one side of the glass. The baboons had entered this way, but they had either stayed in the house or had gone out another way.

  So the jinn were turning themselves into baboons! He had to be careful. Baboons were dangerous. Not as dangerous as a giant man
with a crocodile head, but bad enough.

  Now came the really scary part. He had to blow out the candle. He needed both hands free to climb down the wall of the sitting room. If the baboon jinn came at him while he was doing that, he’d be in big trouble.

  Summoning his courage, he blew out the candle. He stood there for a moment shivering in the warm spring night, then finally put the candle in the pocket of his jellaba and squeezed through the window. The window frame scraped at his belly and back as he wormed his way through. Once he made it, he held onto the windowsill for a moment to rest before swinging over to grab the lip of an arched doorway connecting the sitting room and the hallway. From there it was an easy climb down, his fingers and toes gripping the seams between the worn old stones along the side of the arch.

  Faisal relit the candle the instant he got down. That made him feel a little better. He peered around the sitting room. A couch and low table with a few books on it were the only furnishings. The rest of this floor was empty. The Englishman only came up here to use the sitting room sometimes on hot days. Jinn liked abandoned places, so they could be lurking anywhere.

  With a shudder, Faisal moved to the main hallway, starting a bit when he saw his own reflection in the inside window overlooking the courtyard. He squared his shoulders. He had to be brave and not think every little shape was a jinni coming to get him.

  Faisal tiptoed down the stairs to the first floor. He could hear the Englishman snoring. Holding his hand in front of the candle so he didn’t cast too much light, he peeked in on him. The Englishman lay fast asleep as usual. Nothing could wake that man once he went to bed. He noted with satisfaction when he saw no bottle of alcohol on the bedside table. Faisal hated it when people drank. His father of vile memory got drunk every night before he had disappeared one day when Faisal was eight. The Englishman used to drink before bed, and Faisal took it upon himself to pour out the bottle anytime he came in the house. The Englishman had stopped bringing bottles to bed for a couple of weeks now, although for some strange reason the room had a funny odor these days, like the Englishman had been burning something.

  He glanced around the room. He didn’t see any jinn in here, but of course they couldn’t hurt the Englishman so they were probably hiding elsewhere. Jinn had no power over Europeans, although they could still cause lots of mischief. Faisal took care not to look at the Englishman’s face. He took his mask off when he went to bed, and Faisal had seen what it hid. A German shell had taken half his face off.

  Faisal shuddered. Those baboon jinn would do the same to him if he wasn’t careful.

  Turning away, he passed through a room full of books and to the top of the stairs leading down to the ground floor.

  He crept down the stairs, his bare feet making no sound on the cold stone. The candle wavered as he moved, making the shadows dance and his heart jump.

  Passing through a short hallway, he came to the main front room, where the Englishman kept most of the ancient junk he collected and sold. Why did foreigners like this stuff so much? All it did was take up space and attract spirits. If Faisal was rich, he’d never spend his money on things like this—just food, a nice place to live, good clothes, toys, and food.

  He trembled as he crept between all the strange shapes, those graven faces staring at him in the dim candlelight. Some looked like men, while others had the heads of jackals and hawks.

  And over there was the worst one of all—the giant jinni with the crocodile head that Faisal had defeated with a magical amulet. It looked like it was still turned to stone, but Faisal knew that jinn could be tricky. He approached with care, ready to bolt for the door if the jinni moved a muscle. He kept his ears perked and glanced behind him at every step, worried that one of these creatures would sneak up behind him.

  At last he made it to the statue. He squeezed his arm between the crocodile jinni and the wall, expecting at any moment for the stone to become flesh and for the huge creature to reach down and pop him into his gaping maw.

  But the crocodile jinni didn’t change, and Faisal’s hand grasped the amulet he had placed there a couple of months before. He pulled it out and examined it. It hadn’t been defaced or broken. Its magic remained intact. So how could the jinn be up to their old tricks?

  Faisal turned from the crocodile jinni and screamed. A baboon squatted on a shelf nearby, looking at him like it wanted to eat him up.

  He backed away, saw an old bronze sword lying on a table, and grabbed it. The blade was bent and chipped, but it felt reassuring in his hands. The baboon still sat on the shelf, staring directly at him.

  “Go away!” Faisal said, shaking all over. “This is my house.”

  The baboon didn’t respond.

  Faisal stepped forward and clonked it on the head with the sword. Metal rang out on stone, and the sword snapped in two.

  Luckily for him, the baboon didn’t attack. In fact, it didn’t do anything. Faisal saw it was a statue just like the crocodile-headed jinni.

  Faisal stared at the two stone creatures. What was going on? It looked like the spell worked to trap the jinn, but they still managed to move that stone box somehow.

  Clutching the stub end of the sword in his hand, he moved over to the stone box. While Faisal never liked coming in this room in the dark, he had been here enough to know that the big stone box must be the one that had appeared. He had never seen it before.

  Cautiously he examined it, even daring to peek inside the half-open lid. Nothing. Just a big stone box. He got on tiptoe and noticed something carved on the top. Setting the candle on the lip of the box, he climbed up and saw it was a carving of a lion. Could this lion jinni have transported itself and the box into the house?

  Then he understood. Of course! The lion jinni picked up that European body somewhere (because jinn couldn’t kill Europeans he must have already been dead), and decided to play a trick on the Englishman by putting the body in his house. But the magic charm Faisal had placed in the room took effect, and the lion jinni turned to stone, stuck on top of the very same box it had wanted leave in the house. The baboon jinni had been turned to stone the very same way.

  So the house was safe from jinn after all! They could come in, but once they did they got trapped.

  Sitting atop the stone box, Faisal let out three silent cheers. Then he rubbed his foot on the face of the lion, gave it a crude gesture, and hopped off.

  He put the sword back where he had found it, fitting the two broken pieces together. The Englishman would never notice.

  Feeling much better, he went to the pantry, grabbed a few things to resupply his stock upstairs, and headed back to the roof window.

  As he clambered through the window, he wondered about those baboon prints on the glass. More than one baboon had come through that way, but he’d seen only one downstairs. Where could the others be?

  The more he thought about it, the more troubled he became. Obviously if jinn could still enter the house, the charm didn’t take effect immediately. That baboon jinni had managed to make it all the way downstairs before getting turned to stone. Who knows how much mischief the jinn could get into in the meantime?

  No, he and the Englishman still weren’t safe, he thought as he bedded down in his rooftop shed. He’d have to talk with him tomorrow.

  And there remained the trouble with Mina. That troubled his dreams all night long.

  7

  Augustus woke up the next morning in a foul mood. He scoured the house and found no sign that the murderers had returned. That left him feeling oddly neglected. He had hoped they would leave some taunting note, some clue, as to their identity.

  Moustafa had wanted to stay the night to stand guard, but Augustus forbade him. If the murderers had come back, they would have ended up in a fight with his assistant while he lay drugged and helpless.

  He could, of course, have not taken opium last night, but that meant a sleepless vigil with a pot of strong coffee while awaiting the dawn. Sleep without opium was not an option.


  Now Moustafa was just opening up the shop. Augustus said little to him, lost in his own thoughts. He had to babysit those women this afternoon. How on Earth was he supposed to investigate a murder while saddled with them?

  His mood was not improved when the peddler who brought him his copy of the Egyptian Gazette every morning made his delivery. Right there on the front page he saw a photo of his showroom, prominently displaying the sarcophagus under the headline “Deadly Delivery to Local Antiquities Shop”. Below was a long article about the murder and discovery of Monsieur Legrand’s body, recounted in lurid detail with numerous embellishments to the facts. The claim that Monsieur Legrand had been done up in full pharaonic regalia was the least creative among them, although it did paint an amusing picture. Augustus began to skim the article until one line near the end caught his eye.

  “Sources at the highest level state that the police are searching for the band of Edmond Depré, a prominent leader among one of the fiercest bands of Apaches, the criminal anarchist gang that terrorized Paris before the Great War. Depré had been sentenced to twenty years at a penal colony in southern Algeria but is known to have escaped and come to Cairo, swearing revenge against the former Parisian chief of police.”

  “Moustafa!” Augustus shouted.

  His assistant came running. Augustus thrust the paper in his hands and waited as he read it.

  “I am sorry, boss. I thought he was a customer and the minute I turned my back he pulled out a camera.”

  “Now we’re going to have half the city beating a path to our door. We’re closed today.”

  “Sorry,” Moustafa repeated.

  “It’s not your fault. These newspapermen stick their noses in everywhere. Actually this might be a good thing. I can’t imagine Sir Thomas leaked this information to the press, and he runs a tight enough ship that no one else would have either. No, I think this journalist got his information from a different source. Let’s go pay him a visit.”