The Case of the Golden Greeks

by Sean McLachlan

  The front door stood just beyond it. The Englishman and Moustafa would be hiding in the shadows across the street, waiting for him to let them in.

  And he would, but he wanted to explore a bit first while the djinn were away. It was a nice night, cool with no wind. A pleasant night to be out, as the Englishman said. They wouldn’t mind waiting for a couple of minutes.

  Faisal tiptoed down the front hall, his candle casting a feeble light ahead of him. There were no more statues or masks here and he felt better.

  To his right, an open doorway led to a dining room. Silver cutlery gleamed in the light of his candle, and Faisal’s eyes gleamed too. He could sell those for a lot. The European who owned this house was a killer, the Englishman and Moustafa said so. That meant that all his possessions would be confiscated by the government. But what did the government need with some extra knives, forks, and spoons? They had plenty, and he didn’t have any.

  He started going around the table, putting the cutlery in his pockets.

  Then the sweet smell of roasted meat wafted to his nostrils. His stomach grumbled.

  A small door led away from the dining room. It stood partially open. No doubt it led to the kitchen.

  He studied the door, then looked at the table, which still had half its silverware.

  This is one of those situations where the Englishman had told him he should use logic. The Englishman always talked about logic any time Faisal brought up djinn and magic, but logic could be used in any situation where you were faced with something you couldn’t quite figure out.

  Faisal’s main job was to open the front door. So logic said he should go straight to the front door and open it. But he was already halfway through stealing the cutlery, and it would be against logic not to finish. That would be lazy too, and Faisal wasn’t lazy. He worked very hard at begging and stealing. Most people didn’t realize what a hard job that was.

  But his stomach kept growling, and he needed to keep quiet so those servants upstairs didn’t hear him, so logic said he should go into the kitchen and take a few bites of that rich, juicy, wonderful-smelling meat. Just a few bites. Because he had a job to do. And silverware to steal.

  And didn’t logic also say that he could open the door just as easily five minutes from now as he could right away?

  His stomach grumbled again. Yes, best take care of that first.

  He tiptoed into the kitchen, the silverware rattling in his pockets. A dim light came from the coals inside the cast iron stove. Grabbing a cloth off the counter, he wrapped his hand and opened the stove door.

  Just as he thought, there was a big chicken in there, roasted with lots of juice and potatoes.

  The Englishman was right. Faisal should use logic more often.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Faisal opened the door right on schedule. Faisal’s schedule.

  “Well, you certainly took your time,” Augustus said.

  Faisal burped.

  “The servants are upstairs.”

  Augustus and Moustafa moved into the front hall. Faisal handed him a candle and hurried out the front door, clinking and clanking as he went.

  Moustafa frowned as the boy disappeared around the corner. “What’s he stolen this time?”

  “Never mind that,” Augustus whispered. “Let’s overpower the servants and have a look around.”

  Augustus took a quick glance around the front hall and knew he was in the right house. Spears and masks in the style of the tribes of the Amazon hung on the walls, and there was a statue in the center that looked Malay. Ainsley Fielding, retired solicitor, amateur ethnologist, world traveler, and member in good standing of the Geographical Association of Egypt, was also, according to Sir Thomas’s investigations, wanted for murder in France, extortion in Germany, and theft in more nations than Augustus had bothered to read in the report. More importantly, he had spent a great deal of time in the tropical regions, most pertinently Amazonia.

  He was, according to all accounts, a retiring man, more a listener than a talker. No one in Cairo had heard of his Amazonian travels.

  At least no one they had spoken to yet, but murdering someone with a blowgun sent an abundantly clear message to those in the know.

  Mr. Fielding was not to be trifled with. At least he would be in handcuffs before long. In the meantime, Augustus wanted to see what other little twists and turns there might be to this mystery.

  He also needed to catch that Egyptian who had been trained in the use of the blowgun. That was not the sort of man to be left free to roam the streets. Then there was that mysterious foreigner the weapons dealer had told Moustafa about. Could he possibly be an Amazonian native, brought all the way here? That stretched credulity, but he couldn’t deny the possibility.

  Augustus went to the bottom of the stairs and blew out the candle. A faint light came from above, just enough to see by as they crept up and found themselves in a long hall. They could hear conversation and see light from a door that stood open a crack at the end of the hall.

  He motioned to Moustafa and they both pulled pistols from their pockets, he the usual compact automatic, and Moustafa a heavy Webley service revolver from the Great War. The floor was stone with a thick carpet of Mexican pattern that muffled their footsteps as they crept to the door, flung it open, and held up the servants …

  … at least that was how it was supposed to happen.

  When Augustus kicked the door open, they saw three Egyptians sitting on cushions around a low table. Two were playing backgammon while the third, who faced the door on the opposite end of the table, watched.

  Their recovery from being surprised would have done credit to a squad of German Sturmtruppen. One man grabbed the backgammon set and flung it at the intruders while the other two rose, drawing pistols from the pockets of their djellabas.

  Augustus batted away the backgammon set with his free hand and fired three quick shots, but his defensive move put his aim off and only one of the servants went down. Another jerked back an instant later with a shot from Moustafa, but then they both had to dive for opposite sides of the doorway as the third man fired.

  Cornered, outnumbered, and unsure of the situation, the servant made a bold move, one for which Augustus gave him enduring respect.

  He charged, firing as he went.

  He burst out the doorway directly between Augustus and Moustafa, making it too risky for either man to shoot.

  So Augustus fired at the man’s foot.

  The servant toppled over, but not before firing one last time at Augustus, who was already dodging to the side.

  That move saved his life, or at least an important part of it. The bullet grazed his upper thigh, cutting a hot trail along the flesh.

  Augustus slammed into the wall and stood there for a second, dazed. Moustafa fired again, the servant’s head jerking back as he took a bullet to the throat. Then the Nubian peeked around the doorway to see if either of the other two servants remained alive, nearly got his head shot off as an answer, and got back out of the line of fire.

  “You all right?” Augustus asked, his own voice sounding distant, unreal.

  “Yes, boss. He’s behind the table, which he has overturned to make a shield. It looks thick. Now what?”

  Augustus paused a moment as his head cleared. He knew how to focus through the shock of a fresh wound, and ignore the pain that came moments later. He had done it all too many times. Augustus pulled a jam tin from his pocket. An igniter was fastened to it.

  “Here’s a little trench engineering for you,” he said with a smile. Moustafa’s face wavered and faded, partially replaced by the mud-stained visage of an old comrade.

  Augustus blinked, tried to focus. It was happening again. He was slipping.

  But he could see the doorway clearly enough. Or the entrance to the German dugout. Whatever it was, he needed to throw a flash grenade into it.

  He pulled the igniter and tossed the jam tin into the room. The gun cotton and chemicals inside burst into flame wit
h a loud bang and a shower of sparks. Augustus and his companion popped out from behind their cover, ending up shoulder to shoulder as they fired at the man who was staggering about the room, holding his hands to his eyes as his clothes smoldered.

  Augustus leaned on the doorjamb as his companion (Moustafa. His name is Moustafa and you are in Egypt) stamped out little fires that had flared up on the furniture and carpet.

  “Are they all dead?” Augustus asked.

  “Yes, boss,” Moustafa said, fetching an ewer of water and pouring it on a particularly stubborn flame. “Are you badly hurt?”

  Oh right, his thigh. He parted the tear in his pants and took a look.

  “No, only a graze. Hurts like the devil, though, and ruined a brand new set of trousers.”

  “Then don’t dress up when you’re going on jobs like this,” Moustafa grumbled.

  Augustus smiled. His assistant was still cross with him for letting Faisal into the house. He had been in an ill mood ever since. Moustafa hadn’t even wanted to bring the boy along. Augustus agreed that Faisal was dirty, grasping, unreliable, and irritating in general, but what Moustafa failed to see was that Faisal was also useful. His assistant needed to realize that Faisal’s services would be called upon any time they were needed. He was just as useful as Moustafa, although in a quite different way. That was why he had sat the boy down to tea, something that nearly caused Moustafa to have a fit. Augustus had wanted to prove a point.

  Perhaps he had gone a bit far with that, Augustus mused. Seeing the boy gobble scones and slurp tea while holding the cup with both hands was enough to turn a man’s stomach. It was a miracle the urchin hadn’t broken anything. A tea set was not the sort of thing one should get attached to, but it would have been a damned inconvenience if he had smashed it all.

  Moustafa came out of the servant’s room, coughing from the smoke.

  “None of those three looked like the man with the blowgun,” Moustafa choked out. “Two were too stout and the third too tall.”

  “Pity. Let’s find Fielding’s office,” Augustus said, tying off his wound with some bandages he had brought for the night’s outing.

  They found it in less than a minute, a large room off the same hallway. The door was locked, but a good kick from Moustafa took care of that. Inside they found a desk, a file cabinet, and two large shelves of books.

  As they started to rummage around, Faisal poked his head around the corner.

  “You made a lot of noise. The neighbors are shouting for the watchman. Don’t worry, they think the noise came from a different house.”

  “How could they?”

  “I paid that shoeshine boy on the street to say he saw some men with guns go into a house a couple of doors down. That won’t fool them for long. Oh, you owe me a piastre.”

  “Shut up and go stand watch!” Moustafa shouted.

  “All right, but stop shouting or they’ll hear you.”

  Faisal moved away, still clinking and clanking from whatever he had looted.

  “I don’t know why you put up with that little thief, boss.”

  “Because he’s proved himself useful in the past,” Augustus replied, searching through the desk as Moustafa rummaged through the file cabinet. His thigh burned and blood oozed around the bandage. “He can be our eyes and ears, and nobody suspects him. As he said himself, he is beneath notice. An invisible scout can be quite handy. Besides, you or I could have never climbed that palm tree and gotten in that window.”

  “You will regret it, sir. He will rob you blind one day.”

  “Oh, I doubt that. He’s getting a steady supply of piastres and free meals. Besides, I don’t see any way he could get into my house, even with his abilities.”

  “He’s probably robbed you a dozen times already. Mark my words. Ah!”

  Moustafa held up a topographic map bearing the logo of the Geographical Association. It showed the caravan route to Bahariya Oasis.

  “Well isn’t that interesting,” Augustus said.

  They searched some more and found a more detailed map of the oasis itself, and a sheaf of notes on the place. They also found a couple of books on the Western Desert and its oases, but they were standard volumes and they didn’t bother with them.

  “We should go, boss.”

  “A quick survey of the house and we’re off,” Augustus said as he limped out the door.

  They went through the rest of the upstairs rooms and found nothing of interest except a well-equipped chemistry laboratory. By now the pain was increasing, but Augustus didn’t let that slow him down much. He needed to find something more, something that would tell him just what they were up against.

  He found it not in the house, but in the courtyard downstairs.

  Most Cairene homes of any size have a courtyard with a fountain where the family could rest in the cool shade. This one, however, had been turned into a greenhouse. The heat and humidity were almost overpowering. Strange, unfamiliar plants grew in abundance in orderly rows, each plant provided with a small sign stuck in the earth with its taxonomic designation.

  Knowing that haste was essential, Augustus hobbled along the rows until he found what he was looking for—the leafy vine called Chondrodendron tomentosum.

  Well, it would have been leafy, but nearly all the leaves had been stripped. Augustus felt the edge of one stub of a leaf, and could feel the moisture from inside it.

  The leaves had been stripped quite recently.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  “I’ve been saying that for quite some time now, boss. Even the Little Infidel has been saying it.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Moustafa was growing a bit too bold. Of course, boldness was one of the reasons he had originally hired him. That and his knowledge of Egyptology and his remarkable ability at languages. But the boldness was beginning to wear on him. He disliked the cringing obsequiousness of the colonial servant class, for it generally masked disrespect if not downright hatred, but Moustafa was taking it a bit far in the other direction.

  Still, it was best not to be present at the scene of a gunfight when the authorities arrived.

  They got to the front door and opened it a crack. A crowd was clustered around the front door of a house two doors down. They could see the neighborhood watchman, recognizable by his long stick, arguing loudly with a man standing at the house entrance, who was obviously the owner and who did not want an excited mob entering the private domain of his wives and daughters. The crowd was beginning to back off, convinced by the owner’s protestations of innocence. This was their neighbor, after all, and most likely there had never been the sound of gunfire from his house before.

  Beyond the crowd, on the opposite side of the street, stood Faisal, unnoticed as usual. He leaned against some large water pots almost as tall as he was. The boy was looking right at the door behind which Augustus and Moustafa hid.

  The crowd began to look around curiously. Augustus tensed as he saw one young man, his headscarf in disarray from having put it on in haste while running out of the house, stare in their direction. His brow furrowed.

  “That’s torn it,” Augustus said. “I think he’s noticed the door is a bit ajar.”

  “Now what do we do?” Moustafa asked.

  A resounding crash stopped Augustus from answering.

  Faisal had tipped over one of the water pots, shattering it. As water spread out across the street, the boy leaned against another pot and tipped it over. It smashed just like the first, releasing a gush of water.

  The entire crowd turned and began shouting. Several men ran for Faisal.

  Augustus and Moustafa took that as their cue to leave.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Moustafa glanced nervously over his shoulder as they walked through the darkened streets. No sign of pursuit. Just as well, because it didn’t look like Mr. Wall would be able to run. In fact, he was slowing down. They had already stopped to bandage the leg again—Mr. Wall always brought along bandages as well as a smal
l personal arsenal on these little excursions—but the man was obviously in pain. Moustafa felt tempted to carry him but no, let him suffer the consequences of his rashness.

  “What was that thing you threw?” he asked. That bomb had been something he hadn’t seen before. He thought he was familiar with all his boss’s weapons.

  “A flash bomb. Easily made with commonly bought materials and stuffed into an ordinary jam tin. The only manufactured part is the igniter, which can be purchased from miners or demolition crews.”

  “Is it legal to purchase igniters?”

  Mr. Wall’s laugh was sufficient answer.

  “How in the world did you learn to make such a device?” Moustafa asked.

  “In the early days of the last war, the army didn’t see fit to provide us with grenades, so we had to fashion our own. A few months in the trenches was the equivalent of three years at Oxford reading chemistry and engineering.”

  “They didn’t give you grenades?”

  That surprised him. The English were usually so organized and efficient. If only the Egyptians and Soudanese could be like that.

  “No they did not. They also didn’t give us steel helmets, proper shovels, or anything approaching sufficient quantities of barbed wire, high explosive artillery shells, or machine guns.”

  “During the war I read about the fighting, boss. All those things were essential.”

  Mr. Wall sighed. “Essential for trench warfare, my good man. The generals, in their infinite wisdom, thought the war would be one of movement, not position. They envisioned a grand thrust to Berlin and everyone would be home by Christmas. And we were home by Christmas—Christmas 1918!”

  Mr. Wall’s wild, sarcastic laugh echoed off the darkened buildings.

  Moustafa found himself edging away from his boss. The man was a lunatic. In times of danger he thought himself back in the war, and every night he drugged himself free from nightmares by smoking opium until he fell unconscious.

  The man was also brilliant, and had given Moustafa a good job, access to his personal library, and more respect than any other European Moustafa had ever met.