by P. B. Kerr
“The end justifies the means?” offered John.
“Perhaps,” said Nimrod. “Yes. In this particular case it does, I’m afraid.”
John’s eyes narrowed. He knew that usually the idea of the end justifying the means was something his libertarian uncle had no time for; he was always saying as much. So Nimrod’s admission that here the end did justify the means made John wonder just how far his uncle was prepared to go in order to achieve the end, which was, he imagined, to save the world from the threat of catastrophe caused by this sudden rash of volcanic eruptions. Recollecting what his sister had told him about the books their uncle had been reading in the Rakshasas Library and the passages he had underlined, John wondered if, in Nimrod’s mind, the end might even justify the sacrifice of his nephew and niece.
More dung appeared from the camel dealer’s mouth.
“Make it stop!” he wailed.
“There’s a very easy way to make it stop, of course,” explained Nimrod. “And that’s simply to tell us everything we want to know about Dunbelchin.”
“I cannot.”
Mr. Bilharzia coughed and retched a fourth and a fifth piece of quite malodorous camel dung onto the floor.
“It’s said that the taste of a quaesitor remains with you for many months afterward,” said Nimrod. “And the longer it lasts, the more the memory lingers in your mouth. I once knew a man who used more than a hundred gallons of mouthwash to get rid of the taste of a really nasty quaesitor.”
“Very well,” yelled the camel dealer. “I will tell you everything, mighty lord djinn.”
“Promise?” said John. “On your word of honor?”
“Yes! Yes! I promise. On my word of honor. As I hope to see heaven, yes.”
“Excellent,” said Nimrod. “I’m so glad. Doing this sort of thing to people always leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, too.” He shrugged. “But not, I imagine, as nasty as the taste in yours.”
“Please come this way,” said Mr. Bilharzia.
He led them into the basement of the house, where he unlocked an ancient-looking door.
“The house is new,” he explained. “But down here is very old. These cellars belonged to the original house and stables, which were destroyed by an American bomb in 2003. The cellars date back to the mid-sixteenth century, and possibly before that. I keep all the Bilharzia family records and accounts down here, not to mention the family treasures.”
He ushered Nimrod, John, and Axel into the cellars, past a series of shelves that were full of leather-bound ledgers, to a room that looked like an inner sanctum if only because it was dominated by a rather threadbare-looking stuffed white camel that was wearing a fine old leather saddle and a jeweled bridle. Mr. Bilharzia switched on a light to properly illuminate his treasures.
“There it is,” he said. “The saddle, the bridle, and most important, Dunbelchin herself. All of them bought by my ancestor from the thief who stole them: Kamran Hotak Mahomet of Charikar.”
“And this is the original animal?” said Nimrod. “The camel that was stolen from Genghis Khan?”
“The very same. My ancestor, Ali Bilharzia, had Dunbelchin stuffed when she died in 1240. The taxidermist was the most skilled in all of central Asia. But she has been stuffed twice: once by the great Louis Dufresne in 1799, and again by the great Carl Akeley, in 1920. I keep these things secret, O mighty djinn. The Darkhats would kill to have these things in their possession. This is why security is so tight here. And why I have always denied even knowing about Dunbelchin. If they so much as even suspected that these things were here, our lives wouldn’t be worth living.”
“But don’t they know about Sidi Mubarak Bombay’s book?” asked Nimrod. “The Secret Secret History of the Mongols.”
“They are not great readers, sir.” Mr. Bilharzia shook his head. “Books are a foreign country for the Darkhats. They do things differently in their world. Besides, there were very few copies ever printed. Four to be exact.”
“Hardly a bestseller, then,” observed John.
“I have one here. There was one in the British Library but that was lost many years ago. The third copy was bought by the billionaire Rashleigh Khan, who is deluded enough to believe that he is the descendant of Lord Genghis Khan. And the fourth copy was bought from a bookshop in Calcutta by a Mr. Rakshasas in 1867.”
“I have that one,” said Nimrod. “In my own library.”
“Then thank goodness they don’t have it,” said Mr. Bilharzia. “The Darkhats.” He spat on the floor, hoping to get rid of the awful taste that remained in his mouth.
John fished in his pocket and produced a packet of mints and gave one to the hapless camel trader.
“Thank you, young sir, thank you.” Mr. Bilharzia put the mint into his mouth and sucked it with considerable relief, like it was the choicest ambrosia. “But what more can I tell you, sir?”
“Is the story true, do you think?” asked Nimrod. “As described in Sidi Mubarak Bombay’s book?”
“Oh, yes sir. Very substantially true, I am thinking. It was very remiss of my ancestor to tell Sidi Mubarak Bombay these things. But he was a most persuasive fellow.”
“I’m still not sure how any of this helps us to find the tomb,” said Axel.
“The tomb of Genghis Khan?” Mr. Bilharzia shook his head. “It is lost forever. Only the Darkhats know where it is.”
Nimrod was wandering among the leather-bound ledgers in the adjoining cellar.
“What are these? Scrapbooks?”
“No, great djinn. They are my sales-and-purchase ledgers, invoices, profit-and-loss accounts, audit reports, camel-breeding records.”
“Going back how far?”
“All the way back, sir. To Ali Bilharzia and beyond.”
“Do you mean to tell me that you have records going back almost eight hundred years?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you could actually trace the descendants of Dunbelchin?”
“Oh, yes sir.”
He opened one of the older ledgers and turned the vellum pages.
“This is the purchase ledger for the year 1227. And here is a record of Dunbelchin’s purchase from Kamran Hotak Mahomet. This record is cross-referenced with …”
He opened another ledger.
“Here. Yes. You see? Bull camels and mare camels, their calves and their calves, when they were born, when they died. Everything. Dunbelchin had another calf after the one that was buried alive in the tomb of Genghis Khan. A male calf called Bigbelchin.”
He turned some more pages of the breeding-record book.
“Bigbelchin had three calves himself. Two died. But Loudbelchin survived and sired three calves: Stinkibelchin, Burpbelchin, and Silentbelchin.”
“Would it be possible to trace Dunbelchin’s line to the present day?” asked Nimrod.
“Oh, yes sir. But it would take several hours.”
“Please do it,” said Nimrod. “Yes, please do it now.”
CHAPTER 23
IT’S A, IT’S A, IT’S A, IT’S A SIN
The fierce men of Şābh al-Mjnwn drove northeast from Yemen across the great desert of Ar-Rub’ al Khali into the United Arab Emirates and Oman, where they boarded a ferry that carried them across the Strait of Hormuz, into Iran.
From time to time, one of the three gang members listened through the backseat armrest of the Toyota to check that Groanin was all right and hearing the sound of loud snoring they concluded, rightly, that he was still alive and coping well with the discomfort of traveling in the trunk of the car.
Driving all through the day, the Crazy Gang reached the Afghan border, about four hundred miles from the coast of Iran, just before dusk.
For much of the journey the leader of Şābh al-Mjnwn, Sheikh Raat el Enrool, busied himself on his laptop trying to write the speech that he intended to make on Groanin’s ransom video.
This was difficult, however, not because the poor condition of the road made it hard to type on the laptop’s Arabic keybo
ard, but because the noise of Groanin’s snoring grew louder and louder until it filled the interior of the car like the growl of an extremely large tiger. But it was the whistle that topped and tailed the sound of the butler’s snoring that annoyed the sheikh most of all because, according to the sheikh’s strict way of thinking, whistling was a kind of music and therefore immoral and forbidden.
“How are we going to stop this English dog from whistling?” he asked the driver.
“We could wake him up, perhaps,” suggested the driver, whose name was Assylam. “Only he might escape. Or we might have to endure his unbelieving conversation that would surely be worse.”
“Nothing could be worse than this infuriating sound,” said the sheikh angrily. “The snoring is bad enough. It sounds like the rumble of thunder. Or an earthquake. But the Englishman’s whistle is infinitely worse. It is making a nervous wreck out of me. I keep thinking that it is an artillery shell flying through the air toward us.”
“In which case perhaps it is not music at all and therefore not forbidden,” said a third member of the Crazy Gang, who was in the backseat of the car. His name was Ben Yussef.
“That might be true,” said the sheikh, “if the whistle was always the same. But from time to time the pitch of his whistle doesn’t descend like an artillery shell at all and actually holds a perfect C. If a note of music could ever be described as perfect. But you know what I mean.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s a dilemma,” said Assylam.
At this point, Groanin stopped whistling in and out of his snore for almost an hour.
“That’s a relief,” said the sheikh, and returned to his typing.
But when Groanin’s whistle started again, it seemed that his whistling had acquired a much more musical character. Assylam tried to think of the tune he had heard that the Englishman’s whistling snore was trying to pipe into his mind, and finally it came to him. With horror, he realized that the whistle sounded exactly like two notes from the whistling in the Monty Python tune “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” He debated whether or not to inform the sheikh of this; finally, when the temptation to actually finish the rest of the tune grew almost too great for him, he decided that the right thing to do was to tell the sheikh even though he knew that this would make him very angry indeed.
As soon as Assylam had imparted this information, the sheikh realized he was quite right about the tune, and was properly horrified.
“Now we’ll have to wake him up,” said the sheikh. “We can’t drive all the way to Kabul with this maddening tune in our heads.”
“Agreed.”
“The question is how to wake him up without opening the trunk and risking his escape.”
“Tell you what, sir,” said Assylam, “I’ll aim the car at a few of these potholes and maybe their impact will wake him up.”
“Good idea,” agreed the sheikh. “And honk the horn while you’re at it, for good measure.”
“Wait,” said Ben Yussef. “Isn’t honking the horn making a kind of music, too?”
“Good point,” said the sheikh. “Is it?”
Everyone thought for a moment.
“I think the horn would only sound musical if it was done in a rhythmical way,” said Assylam. “Like the evil noise that is made at a football match when people clap together and then shout Eng-land or Eee-gypt. If I avoid any hint of rhythm when honking the horn, then no one is offended.”
The sheikh nodded. “Agreed.”
Assylam honked the horn loudly, and hit several potholes in succession, which made the car shudder like an aircraft enduring air pockets of turbulence. But none of this was enough to rouse the sleeping butler and, if anything, the noise emanating from Groanin’s nose and throat actually seemed to get worse.
“It’s not working,” said the sheikh.
“No,” agreed Assylam, “and if the car hits another pothole, I’ll break the axle.” He winced as, accidentally, the car hit another enormous pothole that almost loosened the fillings in his teeth. “This is a new car. And I don’t want it damaged.”
“How is it possible that any man can sleep so soundly?” said an exasperated Ben Yussef.
“Only a fool could sleep so much when he has been kidnapped to be held for ransom,” said the sheikh. “It’s wrong to have no fear, I think. And immoral to sleep so much.”
“Most certainly,” agreed Ben Yussef.
“You’d better stop in Kandahar,” said the sheikh. “We’ll get out and beat him there. It may not stop him from snoring again, but it will certainly make us feel better. And it will teach him to have better manners.”
“Good idea,” said Ben Yussef.
When they reached the southwest of Kandahar, Assylam slowed the Toyota and drew up next to a brightly lit, modern-looking house with a camel-shaped swimming pool.
“Wow, look at that pool,” he said. “I have always wanted a camel-shaped swimming pool.”
“It is immoral to swim if one does it for pleasure. And especially immoral if one does it without clothes.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. Don’t even look at it.”
The sheikh and the others got out of the car and stood next to the trunk, ready to throw it open and give the Englishman a beating. Now that the car had stopped, Groanin’s snoring sounded very much like a large polar bear and it was hard for the three Crazy Gang members to believe that there was only a human being inside the trunk.
But of course there wasn’t only a human being in the trunk of the Toyota.
“I will punch him in the face,” said the sheikh. “You, Assylam, will punch him in the stomach, and Ben Yussef will strike his thighs. We will teach him to sleep when he should be praying for his life.”
The other two nodded. Then the sheikh nodded at Assylam who unlocked the trunk and then pressed the catch to release the lid.
Groanin opened his eyes. “Are we there yet?” he asked, and sat up. “I said, are we there yet, Mustapha?”
The three Crazy Gang members regarded Groanin with even more horror and distaste than might have been expected for, attached to the Englishman’s chest and ample stomach like an enormous pink breastplate was the largest camel spider any of them had ever seen. All three screamed at once and ran in opposite directions as if Groanin had been carrying a deadly plague.
“What the heck’s wrong with them, I wonder?” mused the butler. He yawned loudly and sleepily. Oblivious to the hideous creature that was clinging to his front, he stretched his arms and got out of the trunk. “Not that I’m sad to see the back of them, mind. I said, not that I’m sad to see the back of them. Treating a person like that. Making me ride in the trunk like I was so much baggage. I’ve a good mind to report them to the police. In fact, I think I will. Let’s see now. I wonder if I have paper and pencil to make a note of this car number.”
Groanin glanced down to find his trouser pocket and, in the red rear lights of the car, dimly saw something shift on his torso as the camel spider, sensing that the butler was no longer immobile, tightened its ten-legged grip on his portly person.
“What the dickens is that?”
At first, Groanin thought that the members of the Crazy Gang must have attached a bomb to him — not least because the bony pink legs of the camel spider resembled several sticks of gelignite, and the creature’s thin and spindly antennae made him think of electrical wires. Naturally, he was very scared at the idea of exploding.
“And to think I used to complain about being in old Nimrod’s service. What kind of lunatic, psycho, nutcase, weirdo-fanatic attaches an Englishman to a bomb?”
He took several nervous breaths and tried to contain his panic.
“No, wait a minute, lad. Wait a minute. If they’ve run away and the thing still hasn’t gone off, then probably it’s not going to go off. Aye, that’s right. So, think, lad. Think. Think of Her Majesty the Queen, lad. What would she do in a similar situation? Yes, of course. She’d keep her cool. That’s
what she’d do. She’d stay calm. The way she always does in situations of adversity. Like when she has to shake hands with some spotty little Herbert with dirty hands. Or when she is obliged to eat the filthy food at a dinner in some nasty little pimple of a foreign country. Or when she has to knight some creep of a pop star. Or when she does her Christmas radio and television broadcast to the nation. That’s it, lad. Keep calm, like Her Majesty does. What would she do? Yes. Yes, that’s it. I can detach the wires and defuse the thing before the nutters who did this to me come back. Only I need a bit more light here.”
Seeing that the headlights of the car remained on, Groanin walked around to the front and then surveyed the problem before him. Then he gave one of the spider’s legs an exploratory tug.
“What the dickens?”
At which point, the spider felt obliged to warn the creature pulling its leg not to mess with it, and clacked together its chelicerae — the substantial and venomous mouthparts or mandibles for which the camel spider is renowned.
Still dazed with sleep, it was another second or two before Groanin realized the true nature of the peril in front of him.
“Flipping heck,” gasped Groanin. “It’s a … it’s a … it’s a …”
Not a bomb at all. But something alive and rather horribly animated. Something creepy and very crawly. Something very large and quite repulsively disgusting.
And strange to say, something much more horrible and terrifying than an explosive vest.
CHAPTER 24
THE SCREAM
Mr. Bilharzia moved the big leather ledger toward Nimrod, John, and Axel.
“All of these books are bound with the finest camel skin.” He smoothed the cover of the ledger with his hand and nodded at John. “Feel.”
John rubbed his hand along the smooth surface and nodded his appreciation back as Mr. Bilharzia opened the ledger.
“So, here we are.” He pointed to an entry on the old vellum page. “You see? Dated winter 1859. We have the last of the direct descendants of Dunbelchin: Morebelchin, Sourbelchin, Rudebelchin, and Vilebelchin, owned by the Bilharzia family. After that, the line, if you can call it that, disappears from our family’s breeding records. Which means these camels must have been sold.”