Firebird

by Michael Asher

  ‘Just my luck,’ she said, ‘and I’m not your sweetheart.’

  She pouted and was about to accelerate again when a motorcycle cut in front, carrying another family — a man and a woman and no less than three children, the tiniest of whom was sitting happily on the fuel tank. ‘Will you look at that!’ she gasped. ‘Five people on a motorcycle! Is that legal?’

  ‘No, but who cares!’

  ‘I’ve had it with this traffic,’ Daisy said, ‘this is like Dante’ s Inferno!’

  Earlier the streets had been almost empty, but now every motor vehicle in the city, it seemed, was either heading out for the evening or heading home. In Tahrir Square the cars were almost bumper to bumper and the air was heavy with gasoline fumes drifting nauseatingly in the heat. Cairene drivers like to drive at breakneck speed, and there was a deafening cacophony of motor horns as they vented their frustration on each other. I saw a whole bunch of them sticking their heads out of their windows, waving their arms, and carrying on a running battle of abuse.

  Past Tahrir Square the traffic freed up and as we circled slowly back into the sun on to the Corniche, a shaft of light shone directly into my face, blinding me. ‘By the way,’ Daisy said, staring at me suddenly, ‘how did you get those green eyes?’

  ‘Crusader genes,’ I said. ‘Result of all that raping and pillaging your ancestors did here. Specially the raping.’

  ‘Come on. That’s bullshit.’

  ‘OK, maybe it is. If you want to know, my father was a Yank.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘Believe what you want. I have to live with it. My father was a USAF sergeant over here on some kind of attachment — I don’t know what. Mother was only sixteen when she met him and he was sort of brawny and handsome. She really fell for him. She lived in Aswan, and every time he came back he’d bring her presents. Swept her off her feet. It was frowned on by her family and the neighbours — big scandal, and even bigger when she got pregnant and I was born. Dad set us up in a flat and lived with us part of the time, but Ma was regarded as a whore and ostracized by the community. She didn’t care, she said, because she loved him so much. Then Dad’s posting came to an end and he pissed off and left us. He always promised Ma he’d come back for us, but he just dumped us without a cent. It was a long time afterwards that Ma got a letter explaining that he was already married and had three kids at home. He’d been married all the time. That killed Ma. They said she’d died of cancer, but I reckon it was a broken heart.’

  I sighed and looked at the road, wondering as I’d always wondered whether that was the whole story. I’d been very young when my father had left, but I still remembered how he’d sat me on his knee and tousled my hair, saying ‘I’ll come back for you, Sammy, if it’s the last thing I ever do.’ The truth was that despite my mother’s later claims, I remembered him as a kind and considerate man who’d loved me. I could even remember the big sad face at the window of a train in Aswan station the day he’d gone for good. In the States I’d tried to find him again, but no one, not even the USAF Records Section, seemed to have heard of a Sergeant Desmond Redfield. He seemed to have disappeared without trace, and the wife and three kids he was supposed to have had — my half-brothers or sisters — had vanished too.

  ‘So now you hate Americans?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘I don’t hate Americans,’ I said, ‘I just hate hypocrites and people coming over here telling us our jobs. There’s good and bad everywhere.’

  ‘What happened to you in the end?’

  ‘It was bad enough to live with a woman who had no money and who everybody said was a whore. But after she died there was no one to look after me. No one wanted me, I belonged to no one. I wasn’t even an Egyptian — not full-blooded anyway. I went wild, drifted on to the streets, mixed with all the other rejects. I became a regular street rat — I mean I was smoking dope and drinking neat araq before I was ten. Got initiated into a gang and into everything — mugging, pick pocketing, burglary, fights — I carried a shiv as long as my arm. Always in the shit with the cops — I mean if it hadn’t been for my mother teaching me to read and write I’d have had no schooling at all.’

  ‘Quite a transition — street rat to SID officer.’ She glanced sideways at my sleazy jacket. ‘Though perhaps not. Street gangs — that explains the pierced upper ear, right?’

  I fingered the upper fold of my right ear self-consciously, probing for the perforation I’d received at the age of twelve — the brand that would always make me different from others. I’d been right about her spotting it, and I’d have bet money she’d clocked the dagger I wore on my left arm, too. The woman was sharp as a needle. She’d disarmed me in a split second by reaching out for my pistol with a confidence that seemed almost psychic, and a speed that defied logic. Damn Hammoudi, I thought: why the hell had he agreed to this? Daisy had what the Bedouin called guwwat al-mulahazza — an extraordinary perceptive ability. That and her unbelievable speed was a dangerous combination. Given half the chance she would blow my cover, and that was one thing Hammoudi and I couldn’t afford. If we were going to work together over the next few days, I’d have to watch my step.

  I pulled my cap down firmly over the pierce mark. ‘Every gang has its own rituals. The earring in the upper right ear was ours.’

  ‘You should get yourself a bigger cap,’ she said, ‘or grow your hair longer. That’s what they’re designed to hide, isn’t it? Why not just have plastic surgery — it wouldn’t be much of a job these days. I mean, if you’re so ashamed of it, why keep it?’

  ‘Let’s say it’s because it reminds me of where I came from and who I really am.’

  ‘And that blade you’re wearing on your left arm. That a souvenir from your street kid days, too?’

  I smiled and slid the razor sharp, double edged stiletto from under the cuff of my sweatshirt, showing Daisy its bone handle, intricately and beautifully carved. ‘How’d you guess?’

  ‘All the time I had a bead on you, you remained completely confident. Most people — even the most macho types — go apeshit when they look into the muzzle of a firearm they know could blow their brains out. But you behaved as if you still had the jump on me and that had to mean you’d got another weapon on you. Then I clocked a bulge in the leather of your jacket above the left wrist. Whatever was there was too small to be a gun, so it had to be a knife. That’s a pretty unpolice-like weapon. I never knew a cop who wore a knife before.’

  ‘Welcome to Egypt,’ I said, putting the blade away again. ‘It always helps to have a backup.’

  ‘You reckon you’re pretty fast with that stinger, huh?’

  ‘I could have stuck you any time, gun or no gun.’

  ‘Maybe we should try a contest sometime, for real.’

  ‘Sure. Didn’t you ever see that film The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner? There’s the scene where the cowboy challenges the knife thrower, saying he can draw his shooter quicker than the guy can nail him with his blade.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw it. The way I remember it, the cowboy won.’

  By the time we reached the stone lions at the entrance to Tahrir Bridge, the traffic had already thinned out. The heat of the day had melted away and the sun was a rose coloured globe spinning gigantically between the sky scrapers over the Gezira. The Nile had become a red river with enough colours dancing around its edges to give you the feeling that it was as diaphanous as a rainbow. Even in Cairo, I loved this time of day. The light was so crystal clear that every object it illuminated seemed larger, more real, more intense. It gave me an odd, vaguely spiritual feeling that I wouldn’t have revealed to anyone in Cairo, not even Hammoudi, and certainly not Special Agent Hard-Ass Brooke of the FBI. I could understand how the ancient Egyptians had felt about the sunset. They saw the sun as a boat — the Bark of Millions of Years, they called it — which crossed the sky every day carrying the sun god Ra. The sunset was a gateway into the Underworld — a terrifying dark land where Ra and his crew had to fight battle after battle w
ith demons and evil spirits in order to emerge victorious next morning at sunrise. Sometimes, I thought, I knew exactly how that felt.

  We crossed al-Gala’a Bridge and entered the built up streets of western Cairo, where lights were already firing up in the apartment buildings. At the end of the great boulevard of Tahrir Street a huge, multi coloured flyer was stretched across the road, with writing and an emblem picked out in the last of the sunlight. ‘Phoenix Insurance International’, it read, ‘World Conference, Cairo, 1999’. The emblem, I noticed, was the scarlet image of a phoenix in cameo, rising from a ring of flames.

  ‘Phoenix,’ Daisy said suddenly.

  ‘Arizona?’ I said.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ she snapped, mumbling something under her breath that I suspected was insulting. ‘The phoenix is a mythical bird that the ancient Greeks believed would erupt into flames every millennium or so, and renew itself from the ashes.’

  ‘So what?’ I said, playing dumb but knowing she’d hit the nail right on the head.

  ‘So the phoenix was known as the Firebird — and that was the last thing Ibram said, right?’

  I have gone forth as a phoenix, in the hope of life eternal.

  I paused, then looked at her, wondering whether it was worth continuing with the pretence. I decided it wasn’t, and relaxed. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I know about the phoenix, except that that part of the myth is ancient Greek. The Firebird story is actually ancient Egyptian and existed millennia before the Greeks were even heard of.’

  Daisy squinted at me suspiciously. ‘You told Hammoudi the only Firebird you knew was an American car!’

  ‘OK, so I was being a little obtuse for your benefit. You expected a caveman, so that’s what I was giving you. Actually, I know about all this stuff because I did a course in Egyptology with the Tourism and Antiquities Police. I’m also an enthusiast. If you’re interested, I passed out top of my class.’

  ‘No shit. I’d have said you couldn’t string a sentence.’

  ‘Thanks. In ancient Egyptian myth, the Firebird was called the Bennu Bird, and it was supposed to represent the soul of Ra, the sun god. The story went that the universe was originally a void of dark waters — the Waters of Nun, they called it — through which a mound of earth one day appeared. They called this the Primeval Mound and the Firebird was the first thing to land on it at dawn on the first morning, giving out this ear splitting cry which was supposed to have set Time in motion. You could say the Firebird was a sort of ancient Egyptian version of the Big Bang’.

  ‘OK, but what does the Firebird have to do with Ibram?’

  ‘Odds are Fawzi got it wrong, and what Ibram really said was “bye-bye” or something. Our only solid clue at the moment is the Sanusi amulet — one scrap of evidence that links the killers to a fundamentalist sect, even if it is a bit out of date. If it was the Militants, they scored an own goal on this one, though, because Ibram was almost an Egyptian folk hero — a poor boy who made good in the USA .’

  ‘Sounds a good motive for whacking him,’ Daisy said. ‘Maybe in their eyes he’d done a Salman Rushdie on them. Maybe they considered him a Muslim who sold out to American imperialism and all that. I mean, he was a very big wheel in the States — I’ve read his FBI file. Born in the slums of Alexandria, but emigrated with his parents to New York in the 1950s. Learned fluent English in two years, and raced past his classmates. Harvard graduate, Professor of Earth Sciences at Cornell, won the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement — twice. Science advisor to the U S president, consultant to NASA and an expert on the environment — especially desertification, the ozone layer and all those green issues. In on the Mars probe and studied the Martian landscape. He reckoned the nearest thing on earth to it was the Western Desert of Egypt — even wrote a paper on it. He was also on the National Research Council, the Medical Advisory Board of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a consultant for the National Security Council.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘I don’t know, that part of the file was highly classified.’

  ‘Maybe the Militants just bumped him off because they were jealous of his lifestyle. Or maybe we’re right off course, and it was a grudge killing going back to his Alexandria days. Maybe it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Hey look!’ Daisy cried out suddenly. She pointed along the road to where a peak of stone stood out above the roofs of hotels and houses — a single polished facet glowing like a jewel in the sun’s last embers.

  ‘That’s the Great Pyramid,’ I said.

  ‘Okaaay!’ Daisy said, beaming. ‘So I got a glimpse of it after all!’

  7

  The Mena palace was one of the oldest and most famous hotels in Egypt — a rambling mansion of mash-rubiyya windows and Turkish-style archways standing not more than a hundred metres from the Giza Plateau. Before Cairo had expanded up the Pyramids Road it had stood out in desert, and was used as a hunting lodge by Ismael Pasha — the son of the great Mohammad Ali — in the early 1800s. Later it was bought as a private house by a British couple, Hugh and Ethel Locke-King, who’d eventually turned it into a hotel. In the old days it had had a famous golf course, and in 1915 the British Prince of Wales is supposed to have driven a ball on to the green from the top of the second pyramid. Daisy drove the Fiat under the arch and into a garden full of the perfume of bougainvillea and oleander. The main entrance was set beneath an elaborate portico where a barrel chested commissionaire in Ottoman dress — fez, baggy trousers and an embroidered waistcoat — opened the car door for Daisy, took the keys and parked up the Fiat. Only one of the entranceways to the lobby was functional, and inevitably there was a metal detector beyond it. We were both armed, so we flashed our cards at the blue blazered security men and sidestepped the detector frame.

  The decor was marble and brass, the reception curving around beneath a gilt-encased ceiling towards a passage that contained a row of shops — a jeweller, a bookshop, a T-shirt boutique. There appeared to be almost no guests about. An exceptionally polite young Egyptian in a dark suit hurried off to fetch the front desk manager as soon as we showed our ID. The manager was a dapper man called Abd al-Ali, who wore a spotless suit of precisely the right shade of grey, and shoes so highly buffed you could have used them as mirrors. He bowed slightly as he shook hands with me, but gave Daisy only the ghost of a nod. Then he ushered us unctuously to a brass topped table in the lobby bar. ‘May I offer you a beer, coffee, a cocktail?’ he asked. ‘Won’t you try our fresh lime juice? It’s highly recommended.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I’d like to get down to business. We’re here to enquire about the disappearance from this hotel of Doctor Adam Ibram.’

  ‘Ah, such a tragedy,’ Abd al-Ali said smoothly. ‘I learned of Doctor Ibram’s murder on the afternoon news. Is it true that terrorism is not involved?’

  ‘Not as far as we know,’ I said, pursuing the official line. ‘We are treating it as a criminal investigation.’

  The manager nodded seriously, but I noticed a twinkle in his eyes. ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ he said. ‘These days every puff of wind is put down to terrorism, and the tourist trade suffers as a result. The Mena Palace used to be one of the most popular hotels in Egypt until all the brouhaha about terrorism started. Now it’s all we can do to fill half the place on a regular basis. I try to tell them that Egypt is actually one of the safest countries in the world, and incidents occur once in a blue moon. It’s blown up out of all proportion. Did you know...’ he turned and gave Daisy a sour look, ‘that statistically you are twenty five times more likely to be murdered in the USA than in Egypt? I’d appreciate it if you’d keep the name of this hotel out of the press. Things are bad enough — this’ll only make it worse.’

  ‘I think we can promise that,’ Daisy said, giving the manager her sweetest ‘good-cop’ smile. ‘When did you first notice Doctor Ibram’s disappearance?’

  The manager shifted his gaze from me to Daisy, then back to me. He raised an eyebrow at me interrogatively. ‘It’s
OK,’ I told him. ‘This is my partner. You can answer her questions.’

  Abd al-Ali made a camp frown at us. ‘As far as I have been able to find out, Doctor Ibram hadn’t returned to the hotel for the past two nights. People like to...well, enjoy the attractions, and of course, there’s no law that says a guest has to return to his room every night. It’s enough that the bill is paid — but even in a hotel like this we do get guests who flit without paying. You’d be surprised, actually. I’ve had people who you would have said were the soul of respectability just slip out leaving their baggage behind them. One guest even left an expensive stereo system. Not that a lovely man like poor Doctor Ibram...well, anyway, I let myself discreetly into his room. His baggage was all there — washing and shaving things laid out in the bathroom. He had some very nice things, actually — clothes very chic — probably Bloomingdale’s. Anyway, I waited until this morning and when he didn’t come back I thought I’d better refer the matter to the tourist police.

  This afternoon I saw that hunky detective on the news saying Doctor Ibram had been killed, and that was that. Awful tragedy — and he wasn’t even that old. Well preserved, I should say.’

  ‘Did Doctor Ibram do or say anything unusual before he disappeared?’

  ‘I talked to Viktor, one of our commissionaires. He’s a nice man — strong, silent type — who knew Doctor Ibram well. Said he had looked very worried in these last few days. Apparently he asked Viktor if he believed in ghouls. Viktor said yes, and that they were hairy and had one foot like a donkey’s. I must admit it was a bit of a joke with the staff at the time.’

  ‘And what did you do with Doctor Ibram’s baggage?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Well we couldn’t just leave it, you understand,’ Abd al-Ali said, ‘I mean, we might have needed the room. When it was clear Doctor Ibram wasn’t about to come back, I had it packed up and placed in the storeroom.’

  ‘You had no right to do that,’ Daisy said.