Mother Nile

by Warren Adler

  ***

  “Is he dead?” the driver had asked. He stood over them in the lonely moonlit road. His father had actually expired without a word, his eyes open to the star-studded sky. The donkey lay howling in a ditch, its hind legs crushed, helpless and pitiful in its agony, still attached to the upended, splintered cart.

  By some miracle, Zakki was thrown clear and had scrambled to his father’s side, embracing the dead man. Grief had not yet turned to anger. Behind him, he heard footsteps, the slam of the car door, then quick steps toward the shrieking donkey.

  “Poor bastard,” he heard the driver murmur, followed by the sharp crack of a pistol and the death gurgle of the donkey. The pistol shot had also exploded his anger, and he had lunged at the man and wrestled him into the ground.

  Their bodies rolled in the mud of the ditch, and his hands had instinctively reached for his neck, gripping it, pressing his thumbs against the windpipe.

  The man struggled, but he was no match for the strength of frustration. Surely, in a moment, he would have been dead. The life seemed to be running out of him. He had ceased to struggle. Then Zakki looked down at the face, saw the eyes pleading, open and bulging.

  “You,” Zakki said, releasing his grip. The king sat up and rubbed his neck. It was then that Zakki saw the pistol still in his hand.

  “I nearly pulled the trigger,” he said, struggling to his feet.

  “Forgive me,” Zakki had sputtered. Forgive him? Recalling that would always sear his guts.

  “I didn’t see you,” the king said. “These damned carts should have taillights.” He walked back to the sports car and kneeled near the headlights. Both casings were cracked and the grill had been bashed in.

  “Brand-new. I was just trying it out.” He looked up at Zakki, who stood behind him, filled with contrition and confusion. For the moment, he had actually forgotten about his dead father. “Ruined,” the king said. “It’s English. I’ll have to get the parts sent. Tough luck.”

  He stood up and lit a cigarette, puffing deeply. The match light had illuminated Zakki’s face.

  “Who was he?” the king asked, with a shrug of his shoulder.

  “My father,” Zakki murmured, looking toward the heap at his feet.

  “Shit,” the king said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t see you.”

  He threw the lighted cigarette at his feet and stamped it out.

  “Look…” Zakki could see the king’s hands pat his pockets. “I’d like to make this up to you. Really. I feel like hell about it. I can make it up to you.”

  “Why are you alone?” Zakki asked, stupidly. It had been inconceivable that the king could ever be alone.

  The king looked at him shrewdly, the sense of superior majesty restored. He ignored the question. They were about the same age, but the space between them was an ocean.

  “Come to the Qubbah Palace tomorrow,” the king said, the air of command abrupt. He grabbed the handle of the car door and pulled. The door seemed stuck.

  “Damned door’s out of line,” the king huffed, shaking his head. Without thinking, Zakki rushed to the rescue, grabbing the handle and tugging until the door squeaked open. The king bent and moved into the seat, Zakki holding the door open, then closing it.

  “No need to mention this,” Farouk said, touching Zakki’s arm. Zakki could see the king’s smiling features clearly. He nodded.

  “Good boy,” the king said, patting his arm. Zakki felt an uncommon flush of pleasure as he looked toward the ground. “What is your name?”

  “Ashraf Zakki,” he mumbled.

  “Speak up, boy,” the king commanded.

  Zakki repeated his full name.

  “Tomorrow then, Zakki.”

  The king waved, gunned the motor, and backed up until the car could be maneuvered around the wrecked cart. It did not quite clear his father’s body, bumping over the dead man’s legs.

  He had, of course, obeyed the king. It would have made little difference in any event. And yet, he had loved his father. Even now, he was grateful to him for the opportunity of meeting the king. He had always said, You must do better than me, Ashraf.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Slowly, awe had become merely admiration, and that had turned to disillusionment, then dislike, contempt, and finally hatred. But in the years with the king, Zakki had acquired wisdom. What he had learned from Farouk was that there was no end to man’s hunger. “Get it all!” Farouk had burned the message into his brain. At first, he had been amused by the assertion. But later, under the playboy guise, he watched the relentless greed become the king’s sole motivation.

  The weak fools had let him go into exile in Italy, along with a great deal of his wealth, much of it in whiskey cases filled with gold ingots. He had carted that off right under their noses. They had tried to recoup by auctioning off his precious collections, but for a fraction of their worth. He suspected that Farouk himself had actually bought a great deal of it. If it had been up to him, he would have blown up Farouk and every one of his lackeys.

  Less than a month after the abdication, the king’s agent arrived at the brothel where Zakki had made his temporary home. The man, Bordoni, brought him a letter from Farouk, who had set up business headquarters in Italy. The letter announced that Bordoni was his Italian business manager and also laid claim to the “various enterprises” that were the king’s conception, thanking Zakki for his “temporary management,” which was now to be “relinquished forthwith.”

  “So he still thinks he is king,” Zakki told the man. In his tailored, pinstriped suit and white-on-white shirt, Bordoni looked remarkably cool and confident.

  “Frankly, he is still willing to allow you to run things,” Bordoni said, picking his teeth with a gold toothpick. “Providing your accounts are accurate and your production increases steady.”

  Zakki assessed the man, dark hair, swarthy skin, a southern Italian. Zakki had, by then, taken over the brothels, and was still consolidating his hold over the hashish trade. This had proven enormously difficult and complicated, and had depleted almost all of the value of the gold ingots he had stolen from Farouk. They had covered the shipments already in the pipeline. In fact, he had overpaid to show his strength, but there was still a lack of confidence among many of the people in the long chain of distribution.

  The hash moved over time-honored Sinai smuggling routes, through the Levant and Syria, over the infamous Via Maris. Bedouin smuggling families had moved their contraband over this route for centuries. Whatever nation claimed the Sinai, it was always the indisputable turf of the Bedouins, who owed no allegiance to anyone but themselves. The bridge of dreams, Farouk had called it.

  ***

  Zakki had previously accompanied the incognito king to the Sinai, participating in the elaborate transaction between the king and Salah, the sly Bedouin chieftain who, with his family, controlled the smuggling route.

  It was 1946. The war was over, and Egypt had been given, under the benign hand of the British, nominal control over the Sinai. In Farouk’s eyes, it was a wasteland, good only for what it had always been, an avenue for invading armies going somewhere else, or a smuggling bridge between the Levant and Egypt.

  Not content to receive a mere commission, Farouk could not resist the temptation of acquisition. He wanted it all. En route to the Sinai, the king had sat beside him in the truck, disguised as an ordinary workman, enjoying the charade immensely. They had crossed into the Sinai by launch, loaded to the gills with gold, jewels, exotic foodstuffs, and three frightened, eleven-year-old virgins that the king had inspected personally to ensure their certification.

  “One busted hymen and our credibility goes down the drain,” he had said, roaring with laughter.

  They were met on the Sinai side of the Suez Canal by a motley band of Salah’s armed henchmen, complete with camels and salukis to carry them on the long hot trek to Salah
’s camp. The king was in good humor all the way, bouncing along on the camel, energized by the journey.

  Not far from Salah’s camp, the king changed into his grandest uniform, that of an admiral in the British navy, an honorary title that he had embellished with lines of decorations and elaborate gold braid, designed especially to impress Salah. Then, mounted on the lead camel, the resplendent Farouk entered the scruffy campsite, a conglomeration of filthy tents and arishas, a kind of temporary arbor booth, used as a makeshift shelter.

  Salah was a tall, fierce-looking man with a face of crinkled tar paper from which crafty eyes darted covetously under the ragged rim of his red-checked kaffiyeh. Obviously, Salah felt he was the equal of the king, and both engaged in an astonishingly elaborate round of salamats and handshakes.

  Finally, the king offered his gifts, including the three girls, whom the chieftain inspected with undisguised lechery. Farouk had an enormously good time, reveling in the character of a king play-acting a king before this selfpossessed megalomaniac who ran his moving empire with absolute control over the life and death of the men, women and animals under his care.

  All of the men carried guns. To the untrained eye, they appeared to be a pack of impoverished rabble, although it was well known that Salah and his family had sequestered vast wealth in this barren wasteland.

  The deal was agreed to and validated by a mutual shower of shukrans, again to the king’s vast joy. The two men, gulfs apart in background and breeding, understood each other well. To Zakki, it was a firm lesson in the affinity of greed and lust.

  In a gesture of extraordinary hospitality, Salah even offered the king the first choice of the virgins, which the king quickly obliged, performing the deed in an adjoining tent. Salah and Zakki had sat cross-legged outside the tent, listening with pleasure to the girl’s cries of pain. The king himself, emerging from the tent, showed his understanding of the niceties of this type of hospitality, waving a bloodstained handkerchief to prove the virgin’s penetration.

  As a further gesture, Salah himself provided a second penetration, as if it were a final sealing of the pact between the men.

  The deal was struck and, thereafter, as an annual ritual, Zakki had made this hegira by himself, although Salah, observing the protocol of kings, never offered Zakki quite the same hospitality.

  By the time the king had been deposed, the deal had been going for nearly six years. The only tender had been gold and hashish, and an elaborate distribution system had been carefully constructed. It was, of course, common knowledge that this was, among other things, the king’s domain, and no one had dared interfere.

  One of Zakki’s first acts, after the king had abdicated, was to cement his own relationship with Salah, who wisely continued as before, his shrewd eyes observing that the tribute had been tripled, which was enough evidence for him that Zakki had indeed inherited the king’s mantle. Loyalty transferred automatically with the gold.

  As for the steady supply of the traditional young virgins, Zakki had worked that out with what he boasted to himself was incredible ingenuity, establishing a network of “farms,” like the one at which he had deposited Isis, to serve his purposes. Even when, later, Nasser outlawed the brothels, Zakki had shown his reverence for the law, by closing them down, although the “farms” continued to operate. Lust and money were, as Farouk had shown him, man’s most basic motivation.

  “There are three ways to a man’s heart,” Farouk had told him, his eyes sparkling with amusement. “Through the pocket, the balls, and the stomach. It is the primary rule of life.”

  Oddly, the king had not trafficked in boys, as if some puritan instinct or, perhaps, some insecurity in his own sense of manliness did not allow that. Zakki, on his own, had violated that condition occasionally, when it was necessary to achieve his purposes. Indeed, he prided himself on having embellished the king’s lessons, and many an official, even in the supposedly incorruptible regime of the revolutionary idealists, was not without his price among the triumvirate of temptations. Under Sadat, the process continued, but by then it was practically institutionalized. As long as it did not interfere with politics.

  But at that early date, the king’s confidence was unshaken. In his own mind, Farouk had simply given up the throne of Egypt, not its commercial prerogatives. Italy, after all, was as good a base as any.

  ***

  “Farouk believes, too,” the unflappable Bordoni had continued, “that the hash trade can be considerably increased with export markets opening everywhere, particularly with friends in the Americas….” Bordoni paused. “We… are prepared to be generous.”

  They had been sitting on cushions in a parlor of the now outlawed bordello currently used for Zakki’s business transactions. Between them was a little table on which were a bowl of dates that the men ate as they talked.

  “I am in control here,” Zakki said quietly. “The king is gone.” Zakki cleared his throat. “In these humble enterprises, Zakki is king.”

  Bordoni smiled, a confident sardonic baring of teeth. “But, you see, there are partnerships now. This is not a freelance business anymore.” Bordoni moved in his chair and dipped his fingers into a side pocket, drawing out a black glove and putting it on the table. Bordoni’s eyes had narrowed and the smile disappeared. The symbolism was not lost on Zakki. He knew its meaning. The Black Hand. Sicilian Mafia. So, the king was paying for his passage, Zakki thought.

  “So you see, the king’s servant must always be the king’s servant.”

  Zakki nodded. Bordoni must have taken it for consent.

  “You are very clever. Farouk said you were very clever. There simply is no choice in the matter.”

  Zakki nodded again, sensing the man’s basic weakness. If the situation was reversed, Zakki would have simply slit the other’s throat. The man put too much of a premium on human life. He was ignorant of Egypt. Thousands could be lost, building a pyramid for an ancient king. A hundred thousand could be lost building a canal for Muhammad Ali. Farouk could run over his father and mourn for the dents in his sports car. Egyptians do not fear death. They welcome it. The man was a fool.

  Bordoni stood up, looking downward at Zakki, another symbol that was not lost on him. Zakki liked that. It was a fine point. Farouk must have been giving them lessons.

  Bordoni rubbed his hands together.

  “Well, then we had better get to work,” he said, smoothing the pinstriped suit, taking the black leather glove from the table and replacing it in his side pocket. He reached out his hand. The man, Zakki observed, was a stickler for these little niceties.

  From under his jacket, Zakki drew a curved dagger lodged in his belt, fashioned in the perfect shape of a half-moon, with a jeweled handle, one of those geegaws that Zakki had spirited from the Farouk collection years before the abdication.

  Bordoni had just time to see the metal flash as Zakki thrust it upward, entering the flesh just below the breastbone, lifting it until it could be imbedded directly into the heart muscle. Bordoni staggered backward, stumbling against the wall and sliding into a squatting position. Zakki let him fall, relieving his grip on the jeweled handle. Bordoni, the life ebbing with the beating gush of blood, watched it dumbly.

  “Beautiful work, don’t you think,” Zakki said, watching the man’s confidence wane in his now alabaster face. Unfortunately, death did not hurry and his features reflected the long painful struggle.

  Not to be outdone in symbolic gestures, he had Bordoni, dagger intact, transported back to Farouk’s new home in Naples, the black glove stuffed into the man’s mouth. Surely, Farouk would appreciate the act. Zakki was sure it would amuse him.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  By then, too, Zakki had permanently donned what was to become his permanent mask. Never again would he reveal the vulnerability, the inner mechanism of weakness and sentiment, that he had shown to Farrah. That had taught him the futility of revealed truth. On
e must never show other people the truth of oneself.

  Yet the memory of Farrah persisted in mocking and humiliating him again and again. It was especially virulent when it surfaced in his dreams. It was partially because of this that he trained himself to avoid sleep. Sleep was an enemy. It allowed the mind’s defenses to crumble, dredging up hidden myths, weakening one’s foundations. In his waking brain, he could devise a thousand ways to denigrate Farrah. A worthless cunt, the king’s toy, a shallow-minded, inconsequential whore, good only for a passing mindless pleasure with only the tiny aftertaste of a ripe olive. It was much more difficult in his dreams.

  She had been thankless, ungrateful. Yet all that vituperation had never erased the festering wound of his humiliation. Nothing in his life up to then had ever made him suffer with such incomprehensible pain. He could never erase the intensity of his longing, the terror of his anguish, as he had waited, twisted with jealousy, for her to finish her ministrations to the king.

  Never once had she glimpsed the full measure of his passion. Even when it had surfaced, even then, when she had mocked him with her power, did she know the true extent of his vulnerability. She saw him only as a clumsy ape, the king’s lackey, showing as much interest in him as in the droppings of a camel.

  He could have destroyed her. He regretted not having done that. Would that have destroyed the mind’s terrors, the dreams? He doubted it. What he had devised for her was a lifetime of fear. It gave him a special joy to watch the growing Isis, reminding him of his own special hidden innocence, the once pure love he had borne for both Farrah and the king, and the ransom he had extracted for their betrayal.

  The thought of Isis awoke the snake of agony again. If only he had killed her when he held her that day in the City of the Dead. But he had yielded to the enigma of his passion, the illusion that softness would endear him to Farrah, bond them. He had paid the price for that folly, paid for it with his substance, his manhood.