Firebird

by Michael Asher

  ‘Ah,’ Sanusi said, ‘is that so? Then what’s that lump under your jacket on your left arm? Eh? You are wearing a blade. I never knew a policeman to wear a knife, but I do know the customs of the desert Bedouin well, Lieutenant. Many of my ancestors were Bedouin. Now, the only tribe I know who wear blades on their left arms are the Hawazim. A coincidence, perhaps? Your street gang happened to have had that little quirk too!’

  Daisy was laughing to herself quietly when Sanusi closed the door behind us, and I wondered if the old man had blown it. ‘What was all that stuff about Bedouin tribes?’ she asked me.

  ‘Guy’s as nutty as a fruitcake,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe, but did you see the way he jumped when I mentioned Firebird — nearly had kittens. Then he realized it was a question about Egyptology and calmed down. The guy is scared.’

  ‘Yeah, scared of ghouls and Jinns.’

  ‘Didn’t Abd al-Alisay that Ibram had asked the doorman at the Mena about ghouls? Fawzi mentioned it too.’

  ‘Look, I know all about that stuff. It’s peasant superstition. Sanusi lives in cyberspace — he probably just imagined it.’

  ‘That why you went so quiet when he was talking about it?’

  ‘I’ve had to live with this kind of trash since I was a kid, that’s all. Ghouls, ghosts and things that go bump, and all that bullshit about knowing who you are. I know who he is, he’s a bloody sicko.’

  ‘Yeah, but those were pretty damn big rats we heard. Or was that a figment of the imagination too?’

  ***

  In darkness the Khan felt humid and oppressive. Heat radiated from the ground and the stonework, unleashing smells of stale urine and uncured hide. We walked in silence along an endless series of dark tunnels where sandpaper voices followed us, mingled with demonic laughter, and mysterious, disjointed groans. Shadows drifted past in long caravans like chains of slaves. Lights flickered momentarily from high windows, and the yellow eyes of cats seemed to glare malevolently from every cranny. ‘I hope you know your way out of this place,’ Daisy whispered.

  ‘Why the hell are you whispering?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. It just feels like I should.’

  At the corner of an alley a crabbed old man with a face like Mr Punch was cooking sweet potatoes on a contraption that looked like a miniature locomotive mounted on a barrow. An oil lamp hanging from the barrow cast a radius of yellow light, like an island in the darkness. ‘Watch out!’ the man told us as we passed, ‘there’s a ghoul about. Killed a boy near here only a couple of weeks ago.’

  We left him cackling in his little circlet of light. ‘How come you didn’t know about that?’ Daisy asked. ‘OK, it’s got to be a serial killer, but isn’t that scary enough?’

  ‘Not when you’re packing a .380 Beretta and you’re a crack shot,’ I said, ‘or when you’re with a Special Agent who passed top of her class at Quantico which was ninety per cent men. Why should Egypt fear?’

  ‘Leave it out,’ she said, but I noticed she was giggling now.

  ‘As it happens I did know about the kid’s death,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t want to contradict Sanusi at the time, but I read the autopsy report. The boy died of some rare blood disease, and the scratch marks on his body were probably caused by street dogs, cats and rats, that chewed the stiff before it was found.’

  Daisy shivered, and I hoped she was satisfied, even if I wasn’t. What I didn’t tell her was that I knew every inch of this bazaar from the hundreds of hours I’d put in over the past four years, trying to track down a monster that left its victims mutilated and drained of blood.

  We passed through an arch that looked like the open jaws of an enormous lion, and beyond it we found ourselves in tomb-like silence. Beams from high latticework windows fell across our path in dapples and brindles. We passed under another series of moresco arches that faced each other at such regular intervals that you felt like you were walking inside the ribcage of a giant beast. Occasionally we caught glimpses of side alleys illuminated for a moment in ghastly fluorescence. In one of them a hooded figure sat motionless on a chair, apparently staring at some grotesque stains on the wall as if trying to read them. In another I glimpsed two nun-like women gliding away from us, carrying in their arms dead chickens whose limp, severed throats dripped blood. Human shadows passed briefly behind shutters like cinema screens, and disjointed human eyes seemed to leer at us from high niches in the walls. In one place a giant fan set into the wall creaked disturbingly as it revolved, and in another I made out a set of lifesize murals — rat-headed Set, hawk-headed Horus, jackal-headed Anubis — the Guardian of the Underworld. We walked in silence for what seemed like hours, then Daisy whispered, ‘You sure this is the right way?’

  ‘You’re whispering again,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, so what?’ She stopped suddenly. ‘What’s that?’ she hissed. A cat yowled. Flying shapes flitted past, and I felt the waft of their wings against my face.

  ‘Bats!’ I said, now whispering myself.

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said, ‘someone’s following us. I swear it. Someone who’s stopping every time we stop.’

  I heard nothing, but I looked around. The street was a tunnel of blacks and greys, with the occasional spangle of illumination, and I had a sense of sheer ebony walls reaching up on either side like enormous cliffs, and of some malign presence crouching there in the darkness. We inched forward, and now I could hear it too. Soft footfalls behind us, keeping pace.

  I jerked on Daisy’s arm and we both stopped abruptly. The footsteps halted. I turned and looked behind again, and my scalp prickled. I had a momentary sensation that we were being followed by some huge, dark, spidery creature whose giant body reached up into the night.

  At night he roams the alleys, looking for helpless men and women to prey upon.

  Then the sensation passed, and I caught a fleeting glimpse of a figure dodging into a doorway. We started up, and I listened intently. There was the soft pad of feet again. I felt for the pencil torch I kept in my pocket, whipped it out and spun round, screaming, ‘Stop! Police!’ as loudly as I could. For an instant the feeble beam pinpointed the head and torso of a Bedouin woman — an exceptionally tall Bedouin woman — in dark robes and a vampire-like mask.

  He could be the man standing next to you in the bazaar, the man — even the woman — walking behind you on the street.

  The woman stood petrified in the light for a moment before she turned and bolted into the shadows, her rubber sandals making an eerie slop-slop sound as she ran. I exploded forward gripping the flashlight in my hand. She was surprisingly fast, but there were no convenient side turns. She made for a covered entrance way, tried the door without success, then turned to face me snarling. I closed in recklessly, going for my Beretta. Before my hand connected with the handle, though, something that felt like a battering ram crashed into my jaw, and I staggered, seeing a host of red planets whizzing round inside my skull. I struggled to stay on my feet, putting up a hand to defend myself, when another battering ram — even harder than the first — slammed into me just below the ear. A comet with a fiery tail blitzed across my vision and I felt myself falling down a deep ravine into gentle dark waters that closed above me like curtains.

  When I opened my eyes it wasn’t night any more, and although I was still in a dimly lit alley it wasn’t the same one, in fact it wasn’t even in Khan al-Khalili. It was the Aswan bazaar, and I was a ten-year-old kid dressed in a torn T-shirt, hand-me-down jeans and flip-flops, slapping a baseball bat nervously against my palm, and pressing myself into the shadow of an archway. Across the alley, Furayj and Mikhael were almost invisible in the shadows — all I could see of them were the whites of their eyes, almost popping with tension. There was an old man sham—bling towards us, and though he was dressed like a townsman you could tell a mile off he was Hawazim. They sometimes came into the souk, exchanging their russet-coloured jibbas for long gallabiyyas, but they couldn’t disguise their walk — that springy cameline gait, full
of vitality — or those drill bit eyes that seemed to look right through you. I didn’t want to rob a Hazmi. I knew they were poor and they were supposed to be good fighters. But Furayj and Mikhael were watching me, and I knew I would be the butt of jokes for ever if I didn’t have a go.

  The old man was almost up to us now, and giving no sign that he’d spotted anything. Then suddenly he halted in his tracks — just stood stockstill. I saw his lean face come up, sniffing the air like a hunting dog, and in that moment I noticed that he was wearing a tiny silver earring on the upper lobe of his right ear. I stepped out in front of him with the baseball bat raised, then I froze. The old man’s eyes seemed to burn into me like lasers, and I suddenly recalled that I’d seen him before. It was the strangest sensation I’d ever had — a feeling that I really knew this guy, that I’d been here before many times, standing in front of him like this. It was more than the ordinary sensation that you’ve seen or done something before — more like an absolute blinding certainty that this had all been meant to happen — that the old Hazmi had actually come here looking for me.

  The next instant Furayj and Mikhael came hollering out of their corner with big butcher’s knives, and suddenly a stiletto appeared like magic in the old guy’s hand. He seemed to erupt into a blur of movement you’d have thought impossible for such an old fellow. The stiletto flashed — only twice or three times — and I saw blood splash across the ground. There were sickening screams from Mikhael and Furayj, and I saw their knives drop into the dust as they fled down the alley, holding their arms, crying like babies and dropping big spatters of blood behind them. The old Hazmi turned slowly back to me, his eyes blazing, gripping his little stiletto and I started to shake uncontrollably, my eyes rolling, my breath coming in great gasps. It wasn’t because I was afraid, but because I suddenly remembered where I’d seen him before. Ever since I could remember I’d been dreaming about him — always the same dream of myself standing in a featureless desert with the wind spinning ghost-devils along the emptiness. In the dream I’d see a figure riding towards me on a camel — just a black exclamation mark at first, with shimmers of light playing around it — but becoming more and more distinct as it drew near, until at last it stopped, and I saw this dark figure slip out of the saddle. Then the dark figure would pull the shamagh off his face, and it would be this old guy.

  He smiled sadly, shaking his head. ‘So I found you at last,’ he said, ‘the boy with green eyes. I’ve seen you in the Shining.’

  ‘I know you, too,’ I said.

  The old man slid his stiletto into a sheath hidden under the sleeve of his jibba. He looked at me again. ‘The city is poison to the soul,’ he said. ‘Where are your mother and father?’

  ‘I have no mother and father.’

  ‘Then come with me. The tribe will be your mother and father. You belong with us. We need you.’

  I just dropped the baseball bat in the dust and burst into tears. It was that word ‘need’ that did it, I think. He put a hand on my shoulder and we never stopped walking till we came to the tumble down archway at the exit of the bazaar. For me it had been a doorway into another life.

  When I opened my eyes again, Daisy was slapping my face with her open hand.

  ‘Ouch!’ I said. ‘That hurts!’

  My ears were ringing like dinner gongs, and my jaw felt like I’d just swallowed a full sized football. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Daisy said. ‘Who was that bitch?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but whoever she was, she packs a punch like a fucking steam hammer!’

  13

  When Daisy dropped me on Roda Island, I told her I was going home, but I didn’t. I picked up a taxi, and had it take me to the Scorpion Club on the Gezira, where I knew Hammoudi would be waiting. We’d agreed secretly that I’d make a nightly report to him, and if I didn’t show he’d know something was wrong. The place didn’t look much from the outside — a steel door at the bottom of a flight of steps on a street of half derelict houses and crumbling masonry. The entrance was watched by a Turkish strong man, an ex-pro wrestler called Bakhit, who weighed about two twenty and had a scar running the entire length of his face from hairline to jaw, passing right through the centre of the left eye, which was totally blank. Another one-eyed man. to add to Sanusi’s list. When I entered he turned his good eye on my swollen jaw, and appraised the bruise professionally. He didn’t make any comment, though, and he didn’t bother patting me down for hardware. He knew Hammoudi and me. The Scorpion was still a hangout for pimps, pushers, local gangsters and creeps of all kinds, but once it had been much worse.

  When I first arrived in Cairo it had been a meeting place of the Shadowmen — the mob who’d run the local hard drugs scene, and who’d had several key politicians in their pockets. It was Hammoudi who had busted them, with a little help from me, of course. We’d tracked some of the capos back to their derelict hideout in New Cairo — the Gallery it was called — and then moved in with the Special Ops Squad. Problem was, someone in the know had snitched and the Shadowmen were ready for us. That was the day I’d copped a 7.62 short Kalashnikov slug in the ribs — a shot that had been intended for Hammoudi. He never talked about it much, but I could tell from the way he treated me that he’d never forgotten. Anyway most of the Shadowmen bosses were either inside or feeding the Nile perch now, but we’d never pinned anything on the politicians or found the snitch. The Scorpion itself was under new management, but stabbings and fistfights still occurred there almost on a nightly basis. Bakhit’s scar was the result of one such brawl, and he would have been pushing daisies by now if Hammoudi and I hadn’t been there to cover his back. That’s why Bakhit never minded having us around. It helped to know a couple of SID officers were there packing in case of real trouble, but otherwise keeping their noses out. Hammoudi always said he felt right at home here.

  Actually, the place was the cellar of a demolished warehouse and it was big — all alcoves and vaulted ceiling arches, lit with violet strips and little table lights done like miniature versions of Aladdin’s magic lamp. There was a bar running half the length of one wall — a glitter of bottles and stainless steel, and barmen whose faces and hands were shadows, and whose white shirts stood out so stiffly in the ultraviolet it looked like you were being served by an animated shirt. Pipe music uncoiled sensuously out of concealed speakers and the atmosphere was thick with cigarette smoke and the fumes of apple tobacco, hemp, and smouldering incense. There was a carnival feel to the place. It was a hubbub of voices, groups of men and women in cameo, a shock of faces distorted in the flickering light — women with the black eyes and snouts of wolves, women like Pekineses, and men with bloated cheeks and upturned nostrils like pigs. Or maybe the fact that my jaw was killing me just made it seem like that. In one corner a small crowd was gathered round a snake-charmer, a shaven-headed guy in a multi-coloured dervish cloak, who was swaying drunkenly to the music, holding a hooded cobra in his hands. Even from where I stood I could see the snake’s forked tongue flicking out angrily, and as a rose coloured spotlight turned on him, I saw the guy stick the head of the thing right into his mouth.

  There was an ‘ooh-aah’ from the audience. I shuddered and turned away, finding Hammoudi where Bakhit had said he’d be — sitting at a table in one of the secluded alcoves, drinking araq with a girl about thirty years younger than him, holding her hand across the table. My first impression of the girl was that she was overdressed. She was nut brown in the light of the table lamp with heavy, gypsy-like features and rich black hair that cascaded down her shoulders, almost to her midriff. She wore a loose-fitting robe of some velvety stuff that fell all the way to the floor, and her neck, wrists, fingers and ears were weighted down with jewellery that wouldn’t have disgraced Sanusi’s museum. She stood up as I arrived and extended a smooth hand. She smelt of sandalwood and strong musk. ‘Your Presence,’ she said, bowing slightly, before hurrying off into the shadows.

  I gazed after her admiringly. ‘Sorry to break up the party,’ I said, si
tting down opposite Hammoudi. The girl’s musk lingered.

  ‘That’s Nadia,’ Hammoudi said, lighting a cigarette, ‘she’s an ‘Alima.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. Now I understood the robe, the overdone makeup and the heavy jewellery — an Alima was a professional singer, one of a caste who could trace their ancestry back to the legendary Baramikah — the entertainers of the Caliph Hiroun ar-Rashid of The Thousand and One Nights.

  ‘Is she any good?’ I enquired.

  Hammoudi winked. ‘She’s on later,’ he said, ‘wait and see.’ He pushed a clean glass in my direction and poured half a measure of araq then topped it up with water from an earthenware jug. I watched the stuff turn cloudy. ‘Drink!’ he told me.

  I toyed with the glass, smelling the aniseed. ‘I shouldn’t drink this stuff,’ I said, ‘does funny things to me.’

  Hammoudi topped up his own glass and held it out in a toast. ‘Your health!’ he said. I touched glasses, downing the slug in one go, hoping that at least it would stop the throbbing in my jaw. I stroked the bruise gingerly, and Hammoudi noticed it for the first time. ‘Jesus and Mary!’ he said. ‘You and Miss Special-Agent-of-the-Year already had a bust up or what?’

  ‘Nah,’ I said, glancing round at the tables and alcoves, islets of light, the hunched cameo figures wreathed in smoke and raucous laughter. The snake eater had almost finished the entrees, I noticed — the cobra’s tail was now hanging disgustingly from his mouth, flipping ineffectually. ‘I had a fight with a Bedouin woman in the bazaar,’ I said. ‘Actually it was more like a massacre. She got away.’ Hammoudi looked at me, amused. He stubbed out his cigarette and sipped more araq, narrowing his eyes reverently as if it were fine wine. At the far side of the room lights had come up on a small platform, and a traditional orchestra of musicians in striped gallabiyyas and loose white turbans were setting up instruments — lutes, tablas, flutes and viols, and a zither-like stringed instrument called a qanun.