by Josh Pachter
“Jeremy, what on earth are you doing here? I thought I told you to stay with your brother!”
He stood before her, panting, his right palm pressed tightly to his heart. “I know, Mum,” he gasped. “I’m sorry. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Shouldn’t have done what?” Gillian Steele felt her throat constrict. “Jeremy, please, what’s happened?”
Hot tears welled up in the boy’s eyes and spilled to his cheeks. “It’s Adam, Mum. He’s gone!”
* * * *
“I thought I might find some seashells,” Jeremy sobbed. His face was twisted with grief. “Adam was sleeping, and I thought perhaps I’d find some pretty ones he could play with when he woke up. I only went down to the edge of the water. I only meant to be gone for a moment.”
“And what happened?” asked Mahboob Chaudri gently. They had placed themselves around the perimeter of the Steeles’ brightly colored beach blanket—Jeremy, Gillian, the Pakistani and the Sheikh—and an outer circle of curious sunbathers had formed beyond them. Jeremy’s rubber sandals, denim shorts and rolled-up T-shirt held the blanket’s four corners in place; a canvas tote bag rested in the sand to one side, and Gillian’s book lay where she had thrown it. The center of the blanket was very empty.
“A man,” said Jeremy. “He took him. I saw it—I shouted at him to put him down, but he ran away.”
“Can you remember what the man looked like? Was he a dark man, like me?”
“No, sir. I was only down at the water, so I could see him clearly. He was a white man, his legs and chest were very pale.”
Chaudri nodded approvingly. “He was wearing only a bathing costume, then?”
“Shorts, sir. Khaki shorts. I noticed him walking along the beach earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention to him. I mean, he was just a man, I didn’t have any reason to be interested in him. But then he snatched up my brother and ran into the trees, toward the parking area.”
“And what did you do?”
“I chased him, shouting and shouting. Some people came to help, but they were too late: the man put Adam in the back of his car and drove away. It was a white car, I don’t know what kind.” Jeremy put a fist to his mouth and spoke through it, his voice tortured. “I shouldn’t have gone off! He’s going to hurt him, I know he is, and it’s all my fault!”
Gillian knelt beside her son and put her arms around him, tousled his smooth brown hair with a comforting hand. “Hush, Jemmy,” she crooned. “Hush, now, we’ll find him. He’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.”
But her eyes shone with the desperate fear of an animal in a trap.
“There is only one way out of this compound,” the Sheikh said softly. “You must have seen the car, mahsool.”
“Indeed,” the Pakistani frowned. “But many automobiles have come and gone today, and many of them have been white. If only I had noticed the little one and recognized that he was being taken away in a different car than the car he arrived in. But I did not notice, and now we have nothing, no slightest clue.”
“A clue, sir?” Jeremy Steele looked up from his mother’s embrace. “Would the license number of the car be a clue?”
“The license number? Most excellent child, did you see the license number of the car? Not the letters, the letters are the same on every Bahraini license plate, but the Arabic numerals? Is that what you saw? Can you remember?”
“Yes, sir. I memorized it, sir, that’s what they always do on the police programs on the telly. I didn’t really memorize it on purpose, I just—”
“Jeremy.” Gillian’s voice was strangled, strained with hope. “Just tell the officer the number, please.”
“Sure, Mum. It was 9107, sir.”
Chaudri repeated the figures, offered them to Allah in a fervent prayer. “Master Steele,” he said, “are you certain you have remembered correctly?”
“Yes, sir. Quite certain, sir. It was 9107, I swear it.”
“Then we have him,” Mahboob Chaudri exulted, his fist clenched triumphantly beneath the fire of the afternoon sun. “We have him!”
But it was not to be that easy.
An urgent telephone call to the Vehicle Registration Office of the Traffic & Licensing Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior produced the information that the automobile carrying license plate number 9107 was a 1981 Volkswagen Golf, and was registered to one Jassim Ismail Shirazi, a resident of the public housing project at Isa Town.
Jeremy Steele had seen a white man carry off baby Adam, but the owner of the vehicle with the plate number the boy had memorized had an Arabic name. Had the car been stolen? Chaudri’s second call, to the Officer in Charge of the Investigation Division of the Criminal Investigation Directorate, revealed that the Volkswagen had not—as yet, at least—been reported missing. It was, of course, entirely possible that Jassim Shirazi had not as yet realized that it was gone.
A third call, to the Investigation Officer of the Isa Town Public Security Station, resulted in the immediate dispatch of a Land Rover and a pair of mahsools to Mr. Shirazi’s address.
The officers found the suspect vehicle parked behind the modern six-story apartment building in which Shirazi lived. The car was pale green, not white, and its owner lay on a canvas drop cloth beneath it, busily engaged in replacing its badly rusted muffler. Several of Shirazi’s neighbors were clustered around the Volkswagen, observing the work in progress and offering suggestions and encouragement.
Adiyay, the policemen demanded. How long had Shirazi been working? All day, the man vowed, since early that morning. And after a huddled conversation, the bystanders agreed that neither Shirazi nor his automobile nor its license plates had left the parking lot for many hours. Are you certain, the policemen insisted. Aywah, the Arabs nodded sagely. They were certain.
“Beri pani peh geya,” Mahboob Chaudri uttered, when the news was relayed back to Sheikh’s Beach. “It is wrong, all wrong. The car is the wrong color, the owner is the wrong color, everything is wrong.” He wiped the sweat from his burning forehead and wished Sheikh Abdulaziz and the Steeles would turn their heads just long enough for him to empty the infuriating sand from his heavy black shoes.
* * * *
Mahboob Chaudri and Jeremy Steele stood side by side at the water’s edge, staring silently out across the opalescent Gulf at the hazy brown line on the distant horizon that was the coast of Saudi Arabia and the flickering pinpoints of orange flame that were the burnoffs atop the Dharan oil refinery’s smokestacks.
“Are you certain?” the Pakistani said at last. “Are you certain you have remembered the numbers correctly?”
The boy traced a 9 in the damp brown sand with a thin stick he had picked up as they walked the beach. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It was 9107, I’m positive.” He pushed the tip of the stick into the sand and pulled it toward him, adding a long 1 beside the 9 he had drawn.
Chaudri raised his head and gazed again at the infinite beauty of the Gulf. In Karachi, where his family still lived, he had often taken his children to Clifton Beach to bathe, had often stood proudly and watched Arshed and Perveen and little Javaid as they frolicked happily in the gently lapping wavelets of the Arabian Sea.
Beside him, Jeremy scratched an oval and the crooked shape of a 7 in the sand, but Chaudri’s mind was elsewhere. He was thinking of his son Javaid, his youngest, whose innocent nut-brown face was the very image of his father’s. Javaid was almost five, now, but the last time Chaudri had seen him, the last time he had been permitted to return to Pakistan on home leave, the child was only three, barely a year older than the poor kidnapped Adam.
If it had been Javaid who was missing, his own flesh, his own blood, would he be standing here in idleness? Of course not, the idea was absurd. Yet what was there to do? As small as the emirate was, it was much too large for him to search its every corner, far too large for the entire Public Security F
orce to track down an infant and a single unknown criminal who could be hiding anywhere in its capital city or its many villages or its 200 square miles of desert.
Chaudri sighed, and writhed uncomfortably within the hot confines of his olive-green uniform. He rested a hand on Jeremy Steele’s shoulder and, glancing down, noticed the numerals the boy had scrawled so carefully in the sand.
He froze.
“Oh, dearie me,” he breathed. “If only we are not already too late!”
* * * *
“He is, I fear, quite mad,” Chaudri explained. “He resented your husband’s replacing him at the British Council and determined to avenge himself by stealing away your child. By Allah’s grace, however, we were able to find him before….”
He allowed the sentence to trail away unfinished.
“Would Brian have—do you really think he would have hurt Adam?” Gillian winced at the possibility. “He seemed like such a harmless little chap.”
The Pakistani turned up his palms. “There is no way of knowing. We can only be grateful that he brought the baby directly to his home, where it was easy for us to locate them.”
They were seated on plush red couches in the spacious living room of the Sheikh’s beach house. The room was tastefully decorated, with deep brown carpeting on the floor and paintings by Bahraini artists on the ivory walls, brass coffee tables and a crystal chandelier and an enormous picture window offering a magnificent panorama of the Gulf.
Gillian Steele had barely noticed the furnishings or the view, though, despite her earlier interest in the interior of the house. Her entire universe at that moment extended no farther than her younger son, who sat merrily in a wooden high chair Naveen Jayasinghe had brought down from an upstairs storage room and basked in all the wonderful attention he was getting. Adam seemed none the worse for his experience, and it was clear that the kidnapper—now in custody at Jau Prison—had treated him gently.
“I myself am most entirely grateful,” Sheikh Abdulaziz murmured. “But what I do not understand, mahsool, is how you were able to discover so quickly where the child was being held.”
Chaudri smiled wryly. “What I myself am not understanding,” he said, “is how I can have been so blind as not to have seen the answer much sooner. When young Master Jeremy told me that he had seen the number of the kidnapper’s automobile, I asked him if he was certain that it was the Arabic numerals he had memorized.”
“It was the Arabic numbers I saw,” Jeremy cried. “But 9107 turned out to be a different car!”
“Indeed. But do you also remember, my young friend, that when you first arrived at Sheikh’s Beach this morning, I was telling you that many things are different here from what you are used to in faraway England?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy agreed. “You said the rules are different, and the language, and even the alphabet.”
The Sheikh’s eyes widened.
“Even the alphabet,” Mahboob Chaudri repeated. “And even the numbers. What you in the West call Arabic numerals, you see, are not entirely the same as what we in the Arabic world call Arabic numerals. In some cases, they are the same: your one and your nine are the same as ours, for example. But there are also differences. Our seven looks exactly like your letter V, our eight like your V turned upside down, our zero like the period you use at the end of a sentence.”
“But there was one of our zeroes and one of our sevens on the license plate!”
“And that is the oddest difference between Western ‘Arabic’ numbers and Arabic Arabic numbers,” Chaudri nodded. “We make use of the same symbol which to you represents zero, only for us that endless oval is the numeral five. And, for us, the symbol which you call a seven stands for six.”
“In that case,” said Gillian, “what Jeremy thought was 9107 was actually—or, no, half a tick. There’s another difference between Arabic and English, isn’t there? We read our language from left to right, but you read yours from right to left. So Jeremy’s 9107 turns out to be—let’s see, now—6519.”
“Very close, Mrs. Steele. But another of the unusual features of the Arabic language is that, although words are read from right to left, numbers are read from left to right, just the same as English. I should have realized immediately that the number your son saw was in fact 9156, but I foolishly failed to do so. It was not until I saw him trace the English numbers 9107 in the sand that I recognized my mistake and had the Vehicle Registration Office look up the owner of the automobile with plate number 9156. Who, of course, turned out to be Brian Stevens, your husband’s predecessor at the British Council and still a resident of Manama.”
“And the Manama Directorate sent policemen to Mr. Stevens’ home,” the Sheikh completed the recital, “where they found the car and the criminal … and, most importantly, the child.”
“The child,” Gillian Steele beamed, “the lovely child. I—I can’t thank you enough, officer, for getting him back safely. If Brian had—if Adam was—I don’t know what I—”
And then she was crying, and Jeremy slid closer to her on the sofa and put his arms around her and held her. After a while, she looked up and sniffled and parted with an embarrassed laugh. “There’s so much I want to say to you, officer, and I don’t even know what to call you. You’ve mentioned your name, I’m sure, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten it. It’s frightfully stupid of me.”
“My name is Chaudri, madam. Mahboob Chaudri. And I—”
Baby Adam banged his fists on the metal tray that held him in place in the borrowed high chair. “Boob,” he yelled gaily, delighted at the sound of the word. “Boob boob boob boob boob!”
Afterword
The last three Chaudri stories I wrote were all submitted to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and after Eleanor Sullivan turned each of them down, to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, where Cathleen Jordan did the same. I’m sure Eleanor and Cathleen must have told me why, but I don’t recall—and all of our correspondence is now long gone. Rereading the stories today, it seems to me that their quality is on a par with the first seven—and, since I’m including them in this volume, I hope you’ll agree!
At that time—1987—there simply weren’t many other markets for short crime fiction. The revival of The Saint Mystery Magazine lasted for only three issues in 1984, the 30-year run of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine ended in 1985, and, although Espionage was still in business and publishing me regularly, “Sheikh’s Beach” was by no stretch of the imagination a spy story, so I didn’t even bother sending it to editor Jackie Lewis.
Following in the footsteps of Wayne Dundee’s Hardboiled, a semiprozine (midway between a fanzine and a professional publication) which first appeared in 1985, Gary Lovisi launched his own semiprozine, Detective Story Magazine, in 1988. Partly to support what Wayne and Gary were doing and partly to find a home—be it ever so humble—for work the “big” magazines didn’t want, I submitted several of my stories to each of them.
Gary ran “Sheikh’s Beach” in DSM #2 (September 1988)—and in fact made it the issue’s featured story. Ron Wilbur’s cover illustration was an imaginative rendering of a critical scene, though he didn’t do much in the way of research: that plumed hat Mahboob is wearing doesn’t look like anything I ever saw during my year in Bahrain! But the numerals the child is drawing in the sand are the story’s principal clue—and constitute, in fact, the most authentically Middle Eastern clue in any of the 10 Chaudri stories.
If I wrote this story today, the clue unfortunately wouldn’t work, since Bahraini license plates nowadays show the plate number in both Western and Arabic numerals. Back in the ’80s, though, only the Arabic Arabic numerals were used, as you can see in the modern (left) and older (right) photos below:
I mentioned in my Afterword to “The Night of Power” that I used the name Gillian in two consecutive Chaudri stories, that one and this one. Perhaps you noticed that I also named characters Abdul
aziz in both tales. No idea why. There are plenty of other mellifluous British and Arabic names I could have chosen!
A couple of other notes:
• In 1982, Sheikh’s Beach really existed. It was open to foreigners and off-limits to Bahrainis, and was owned, not by the fictional Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Yousif al-Sayed, “one of the wealthiest men in Bahrain,” but by Sheikh Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa, the country’s ruler, who really did hang out in a beautiful beach house and invite attractive Western women to join him for tea. (After Sheikh Isa’s death in 1999, the beach’s ownership descended to one of the country’s sheikhas, who ultimately stopped admitting foreign visitors.)
• The story of the “impertinent natoor from Baluchistan” that Mahboob recalls on page 166 is a story I heard told many times on American military bases while I was teaching overseas for the University of Maryland. As I heard it, it usually featured a private and a general as its main characters, and I think this repurposed version fits nicely here.
• On page 167, Gillian Steele is reading a trashy romance novel set in Bahrain. There actually was a trashy romance novel set in Bahrain, which someone gave me soon after I arrived in the country and which I read about 20 pages of before giving up in disgust. (It was not Lucy Caldwell’s The Meeting Point, which came out in 2011. In 1982, Lucy Caldwell was one year old.) The description of the cover illustration is an in joke, a reference to a conversation I had with a very well known Gothic Romance writer at a Mystery Writers of America cocktail party in the early ‘70s. I forget if it was Phyllis Whitney or Mary Stewart, but I think it was one of those two. When I translated Piet Schreuders’ Paperbacks, USA: A Graphic History, 1939-1959 from Dutch to English for Blue Dolphin Books in 1981, I inserted this passage with Piet’s permission: “One popular Gothic author tells a wonderful story about the immutability of the Gothic cover: ‘Once, just to see what would happen, I wrote a story set in a suburban ranch house in a densely populated valley, with every single scene taking place in broad daylight; the heroine was a short-haired redhead who wore jeans throughout the entire book. But when the paperback came out, sure enough, there on the cover was a long-haired blonde in a flowing white dress, haring away from some frightening mansion at the top of a lonely hill in the dead of night!’”