The Mahboob Chaudri Mystery

by Josh Pachter

  Along the quayside, hordes of brown-skinned men and women and children milled to and fro in restless excitement. Mahboob Chaudri, forward on the main deck of the Ivory Beast, leaned against its warm white railing and scanned their faces, searching, searching, his pulse racing with the sweet pain of expectancy.

  And there, there in the front rank of the crowd, there they stood! Shazia, Arshed, Perveen, Javaid—his wife, his children, his family, his life!

  “Mahsool?” The voice at his side was tentative, questioning. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  Chaudri blinked in confusion, and the city before him disappeared. In its place were only cobalt and cream, the placid sea and the sky. The joyous homecoming of his daydream still lay a day and a night to the east.

  “Not at all, Captain.” His throat was dry, and the words emerged in a gravelly parody of his voice. “I would be most honored.”

  They stood there, the Pakistani and the American, side by side in silence, as the Coronado’s bow carved a passage through the Arabian Sea. It was late afternoon, and they had left the Strait of Hormuz and the Omani gunboat and the worst of the midday temperatures behind them.

  “Drugs aboard my ship,” said Captain Buck at last. “Drugs and murder.” He shook his head sadly. “We’re in your debt, mahsool.”

  The little policeman shrugged modestly. “You were saying it yourself, sir. I have had some experience in these matters.”

  “Damn good thing you were able to find the cocaine. Without that, we wouldn’t have a shred of evidence against him.”

  A gentle breeze stirred Chaudri’s neat black hair and tickled his forehead. “There was simply no time for Peterson to have spirited the contraband away from Officers’ Country,” he explained, “so I was certain he must have concealed it somewhere in the galley. But where? Where else but in a place where searching eyes would fail to notice it, even if they should happen to see it.”

  “It amazed me, the way you went straight for the right shaker. There must have been 20 of them on that tray.”

  “Indeed there were. But table salt is coarsely grained, sir, where Peterson’s cocaine was fine. And in his haste to conceal the drug, he failed to add the grains of rice that were in all the other shakers to protect their contents from the humidity. The differences might not have been visible to one who was not looking for them—but I was looking for them, unhappily for Seaman Peterson.” Chaudri fell silent for a moment, then faced the captain and asked a question that had been bothering him for several hours. “What will become of him, sir?”

  “Of Pete? We’ll hold him in our brig until we reach Karachi, and from there he’ll be flown back to Bahrain under guard. He’ll have a trial, of course—Captain’s Mast, we call it. They’ll charge him with possession and use of a controlled substance and either first- or second-degree murder. I’d say first, under the circumstances. And given his confession, I don’t think there’s any chance he’ll avoid being court-marshaled.”

  “And his punishment?”

  “He’s going to spend a lot of years behind bars, I’m afraid. And they’ll bust him down to Seaman Recruit and withhold his pay for the length of his sentence.”

  Mahboob Chaudri sighed, and buried his hands in the pockets of his uniform trousers. His fingers brushed cool metal. “This bracelet was quite important to young Jensen,” he said. “Perhaps it should be returned to his wrist.”

  Captain Buck took the silver strip from the policeman’s palm. “That’s very thoughtful, mahsool. Thank you. I’ll take care of it myself.”

  Chaudri turned back to the sea, filled his lungs with fresh sea air and exhaled it slowly.

  Ahead, in the distance, the sky began to darken.

  “You know,” the captain said, “I suppose I really ought to be angry with you.”

  “Angry, sir?” Chaudri looked up in surprise, but the man at his side was smiling.

  “Because of you,” Buck scolded, “we’re stuck with that damn Crockett’s so-called cooking till they can send us out a replacement from ASU.”

  Young Jensen was dead, young Peterson doomed to prison—but the sea was unchanged, the sky took little notice, and the Ivory Beast sailed on.

  Mahboob Chaudri’s perfect teeth sparkled in the day’s last rays of sunlight. “Oh, dearie me,” he said.

  Afterword

  In late November of 1982, during the heat of the Iran-Iraq War—which on the first page of this story Dolly Miller refers to as “all this fuss there’s been in the Gulf” and which was known as the Gulf War until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 co-opted that name—I was invited to teach a remedial English class to off-duty sailors aboard the USS Coronado as it made what was called a “show-the-flag” cruise from Bahrain to Karachi. The first photograph in the story is the Coronado; I took the picture as I was being ferried out to the ship from the harbor at Mina Sulman.

  I was given a compartment to myself in Officers’ Country and ate three meals a day in the Officers’ Mess—with Captain Dave Buck and Lieutenant (JG) Bill Kundo, who gave me permission to use their real names in the story and are presented as accurately as I could depict them, right down to Kundo’s pipe and ongoing rants about how much better life would have been on a pirate ship. The names of the other officers in the story are also the names of real people, though not the names of real Navy men. By the time I wrote “The Ivory Beast,” I was living in southern Germany. Gary Steen was an American guy who lived around the corner from me, Fred Meacham was a teacher at the DoDDS school on the US Army base in nearby Erlangen—and Tony Policastro was a lab technician who worked for my father when I was a kid on Long Island.

  Anyway, our voyage took several days—and the incident involving the Omani gunboat happened pretty much precisely as I chronicled it in this story. From a distance, the Omani and Iranian flags do look very similar, especially when they’re fluttering wildly in a sea breeze on a gunboat traveling across choppy water at full speed. Here, see for yourself. This is the Iranian flag on the top and the Omani flag on the bottom:

  I was standing at the main deck aft rail, watching the gunboat rocket toward us, when the ship went to General Quarters—which is Navy speak for full battle alert—and I was absolutely terrified until Captain Buck, who was standing right beside me, peering at the approaching craft through powerful binoculars, finally identified the flag it was flying as Omani, not Iranian, which told him it was a friendly vessel, approaching in order to accompany us through the narrow Strait of Hormuz. I took the second picture used in the story, which shows our escort, after we stood down from General Quarters and I could breathe again.

  While we were at sea, I became friendly with three of the enlisted men aboard the ship. Here’s “Bear” Jensen, who not only granted permission for me to kill him off in fiction but practically begged me to do so:

  And here are Tom Sanders (at the left) and Miller (whose first name I have sadly forgotten, although I’m pretty positive it wasn’t Dolly) and me chilling out during our voyage:

  If you look closely, you can make out a thin strip of silver on my right wrist: that’s a POW/MIA bracelet from the Vietnam era—and, sure enough, it bears the name S/SGT John Jakovac and the date he was reported missing in action, which was May 29, 1967. In the story, of course, the bracelet turns out to be an important clue. In the real world, I put it on my own wrist on November 11, 1972, and it remains there today.

  I think it may be because the Gulf War was still being fought when I wrote the story that Eleanor at EQMM and Cathleen at AHMM turned it down. By 1993, though, both Gulf Wars were history, and an interesting gentleman named Charles Raisch had recently started up a new mystery magazine called, well, New Mystery. I submitted “The Ivory Beast” to Charles, and he featured it in Volume 2, #1, which came out early in 1994. My last name is the first name listed on the front cover (above the names of two much more prolific and better known of my colleagues, Henr
y Slesar and Jerry Kennealy), a nice photo of me with my then-six-year-old daughter Becca appears both on the inside front cover and again on the back cover, and Charles’ editor’s note on the first page of my story calls me “a well-known and well-liked master of the short story,” at least two-thirds of which is hyperbole.

  The story, I think, shows Mahboob at his most Western. It’s a straightforward tale of murder and detection, with classical fair-play clues in abundance. At the time, I intended it to be part two of a trilogy; “ASU” had been the first episode, and the third was to be titled “Home Leave.” My idea was that the third story would pick up where “The Ivory Beast” leaves off, as the Coronado enters Karachi harbor, and that Mahboob would return home to find his wife Shazia falsely accused of a murder which Mahboob would have to solve in order to prove her innocence. That story never did get written—but I still think it’s a good idea, and maybe I’ll tackle it, one of these days….

  For those who may be interested in such things, the USS Coronado (AGF-11) was an Austin class amphibious transport ship. She was launched in 1966 and commissioned in 1970, and in 1980 she was redesignated an auxiliary command ship so that she could see duty as the flagship for the US Third Fleet in the Persian Gulf while the “real” Ivory Beast of the Middle East was in dry dock undergoing repairs. The Coronado was the first Navy combat ship to welcome female crew members—so Dolly Miller could in principle have at some point been assigned to her. She served in Desert Storm from January 1989 to January 1992, was decommissioned in 2006, and, on September 12, 2012, during Operation Valiant Shield, she was sunk 100 miles south of Guam in 3,045 fathoms of water as part of a live-fire training exercise.

  The Sword of God

  In the neighborhood where Mahboob Chaudri grew to manhood, where his beloved wife and children still lived, in the Defense Housing Society a safe distance to the southeast of the incessant clamor of central Karachi, Westerners were an infrequent sight. Oh, dearie me, yes, occasional tourists passed through on their way to the Tuba Mosque, in horsedrawn Victorias hired for 100 rupees a day with driver, but otherwise the pale-skinned foreigners were scarce.

  Here in Bahrain, though, Chaudri had lived among them for six years, and he had developed an amused tolerance of their curious ways. From time to time, of course, they still were able to surprise him. Take this remarkable game of theirs, this—this golf, they called it.

  There stood Senator William Adam Harding, an eminent statesman, tall and athletic and attractively graying, one of the highest-ranking members of the American government ever to visit the emirate. Chaudri could not recall which of the 40 or 50 states the Senator represented, but it was one of the larger ones, that much he knew, one of the more powerful ones, one of the ones with oil and cowboys.

  It was oil which had brought the Senator to Bahrain, where he had spent most of the last three days touring the Sitrah refinery and meeting with executives of BAPCO, the Bahrain Petroleum Company.

  Yet there he stood, that distinguished gentleman, hunched over a pockmarked orange ball on a square of artificial grass in the middle of the fiery desert, waggling a long metal stick foolishly in his thick hands and fully intending to smite the little ball with the stick, to smash it away into the distance, only in order to trudge after it and place his bit of plastic sward beneath it and hit it away from him once more, again and again until at last he succeeded in tapping it into a metal cup with a flag on a pole sticking out of it, the flag now barely visible through the shimmer of heat which rose from the desert surface several hundred yards away.

  This was obviously not recreation for the body, Chaudri mused, as beads of itchy sweat trickled within the blouse of his olive-green uniform. Nor, in its pointlessness, could he conceive of it as recreation for anything but the most limited of minds.

  Why, then, did they bother with it, the Senator and his deferential young aide and the two exuberant BAPCO executives? Why were they still hard at it after well over an hour, with the thermometer reading in three figures and the merciless sun overhead and their idiotic balls already tapped into a dozen or more of their idiotic cups?

  And how much longer would they go on before returning to the bliss of an enclosed and air-conditioned space?

  And why, Chaudri marveled, why in the name of the Prophet must they attire themselves in those outrageous costumes? The Senator, whom he had previously only seen in sedate charcoal-gray suits and rich silk ties, now wore a pair of lime-green trousers, an open-necked canary-yellow shirt with a crocodile at the breast, a peaked mechanic’s cap and white shoes with leather tassels flapping at every step and—incredibly—nails extending downward from their soles!

  Chaudri shook his head sadly. He would never really understand these foreigners, never. They lived in another world; their values were hopelessly alien to him.

  Which of them was right? The thought disturbed him. In his heart, he knew that neither culture was right, neither wrong. Each was what it was, neither more nor less, and perhaps this golf seemed as normal to the Senator as it seemed normal to Mahboob Chaudri that he should live and work and be lonely in Bahrain while his dearest ones stayed behind in Pakistan and lived in vastly greater comfort off the money he was able to send them from his monthly pay packet than they could possibly have enjoyed had he chosen to remain with them and earn perhaps a tenth as much at home.

  Though these thoughts occupied his mind, Chaudri was still the first of them to notice the swirl of sand and the faint rumble of an engine in the distance.

  It was a dusty Land Rover with four-wheel drive, and as it approached them the Pakistani recognized its driver as a minor functionary at the American embassy, where he had accompanied the Senator to a brief and apparently purely ceremonial meeting with the ambassador two days earlier. Ostensibly, Chaudri had been assigned to provide the Senator with personal security for the length of his stay, but—given the general peacefulness of the emirate since Saddam Hussein’s forces had been pushed back out of Kuwait at the beginning of the ‘90s—he considered himself more of a uniformed guide than a bodyguard.

  The Land Rover’s rear tires swung wildly and threw up a curtain of sand as the vehicle slewed to a stop. The gentlemen from BAPCO seemed scandalized by the interruption, the Senator’s aide continued to look as if he were waiting to be switched on, the Senator himself wore suit-and-tie solemnity over his ridiculous golfing garb.

  “Sorry, sir,” the boy from the embassy blurted, jumping from the hot Land Rover to fumble in his pockets before them. “The ambassador thought you’d want to know. The Suq-al-Khamis Mosque, sir, and four Americans. They’re going crazy back there!”

  The Senator stepped forward and put out a soothing hand. “Slow down, there, son,” he said, his deep voice a velvet command. “What’s this about four Americans?”

  “Hostages!” the young man gasped. “Some group of terrorists has moved into the Suq-al-Khamis Mosque, and they’re holding four Americans hostage, a doctor and three nurses from the Mission Hospital.” He pulled at last a sheet of yellow flimsy from a pocket and unfolded it triumphantly. “They sent this message to Radio Bahrain and both of the national newspapers.”

  The Land Rover’s engine ticked its disapproval and settled into silence. For a long moment, the only sound was the whisper of the heat. Then Senator Harding snatched the slip of paper and his aide handed him a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. He hooked them over his ears and read the note aloud in the stillness of the desert afternoon.

  “The decadent era of Western dominance is at an end,” it said. “The Great Satan will be driven far beyond Bahrain’s borders. We will re-establish a true Islamic society and return the land to its former glory as the 14th province of Iran. It is written in the Book of Books: ‘As for the unbelievers, their works are as a mirage in a spacious plain which the man athirst supposes to be water, till, when he comes to it, he finds it is nothing; there indeed he finds God, and He pays him his account in full
; and God is swift at the reckoning.’ Saifoullah.”

  The Senator looked up. “The Great Satan,” he scowled. “That’s supposed to mean the U.S. of A., I reckon. But who the hell’s this Saifoullah character? One of them damn ayatullahs, is that the idea?”

  “Saifoullah is a what, sir,” said Mahboob Chaudri, “not a who. I have heard of them before. They have been writing inflammatory letters to the Arabic media, but this is to my knowledge the first time they have been committing an act of political aggression. We are knowing very little about them, but from their demands it would seem that they are Iranians, or at least that they are sponsored by Tehran. Bahrain, you see, was a part of the Persian Empire for almost two centuries previous to 1782, when the first of the al-Khalifas was driving the invaders back to Persia. Whatever else they may be, Saifoullah are Shi’ite fundamentalists, and if they—”

  “Whatever the hell else they may be,” the Senator snarled, “Saifoullah are a pack of kidnappin’ terrorist dogs, and if they think they can get away with holdin’ four Americans hostage they damn well better think again.”

  “Saifoullah.” The younger of the gentlemen from BAPCO said the word slowly, tasting it. “You know what it means, officer? I’ve only been here four months; my Arabic doesn’t go much beyond please and thank you.”

  Mahboob Chaudri nodded. His nut-brown face was drawn with lines of concern. “Saifoullah is meaning ‘the Sword of God,’” he said.

  * * * *

  The American Embassy in Manama was not sequestered behind concrete bunkers and grim Marines—not yet—but the windowless walls of Ambassador Paul Northfield’s private office were three feet thick and made of steel; his door was as strong as that of any bank vault and opened only to those few high-ranking members of his staff who were privileged to know the combination to its sophisticated electronic locking mechanism.