Firebird (14 page)

Hammoudi watched with sparkling eyes. When Nadia turned back a moment later, I saw she’d picked up a tambourine, and now she stood with her feet apart, shoulders angled passionately as she slapped the skin on her instrument, and began to sing. This time the voice was more forceful and energetic, as if Nadia had suddenly lost that shy, virginal character of the first round. The music became faster and faster, the musicians leaning into their instruments, lost to the world, their hands working in a blur of movement. Nadia began to sway more rapidly, as perspiration tracked down her makeup, and her movements became increasingly sensuous as she rotated her full hips and thrust out her breasts under the velvety robe. She paused again from singing, and now the music had gone wild. She danced about the stage with her head up, stretching her neck as if oblivious to anything but the beat. She caught the last bars of a phrase and joined in again, her body moving frenetically, the contralto voice lilting up and up, until it reached a soaring climax. She turned her back on the audience again, and the viols and
qanun
assumed the part of the human voice, running down slowly, as the instruments seemed to explore variations of the melody. The music grew quieter by degrees until it faded out. Then Nadia turned shyly again and bowed to frenzied applause.

Hammoudi slapped his great palms together deafeningly. ‘Well?’ he said.

The music had done something to me. Or maybe it was too much araq. I had sunk an inch into my chair and the top of my head felt like it was coming loose.

‘That’s what I
call
an
‘Alima
!
’
I said. My voice came out slightly slurred, I noticed. ‘A perfect performance!’

Hammoudi beamed proudly and poured us both another araq. ‘Hey,’ I protested, ‘that’s enough. Any more and I’ll have to be carried out.’ But Hammoudi wasn’t paying attention. He was watching Nadia taking her leave, saying she’d be back later.

He lit another cigarette. ‘Knew her mother,’ he said, ‘beautiful girl, like her. Used to be an
‘Alima
too. Father was a real lowlife, though. Small-time heel grifter like Fawzi. Only the guy got himself mixed up with the Shadowmen pushing heroin. Started packing a Colt .45 and thought he’d hit the big time.’

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘You run him in?’

‘No, I shot him. Right here in the club.’

‘Shit. And she still holds your hand!’

‘Why not? The guy spent most of his time beating up on her. After he’d driven the mother to suicide, that was. Did her the biggest favour of her life when I shot him.’

I looked around, catching a glimpse of a wriggling shadow on the floor, sneaking under one of the tables. ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘You see that?’

‘What?’

‘There’s a cobra on the loose!’

Hammoudi grinned. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘you’ve had enough.’

‘Yea,’ I said. ‘Now, what was it you were going to tell me?’

Hammoudi scratched his chin. A new performer had started up in a corner — a magician with a strange conical hat like a Tibetan monk. He was choosing volunteers from the crowd and pouring something into their hands — some kind of divination, I supposed. ‘Oh yeah,’ Hammoudi said, ‘Records came up with a name. Professor Milisch Andropov. Ever heard of him?’

‘No.’

‘He’s a specialist in Earth Sciences — Ibram’s field. Right now he’s a professor at ‘Ain Shams University, but he worked with Ibram for a long while in the States. They were real pals at one time, but ended up having a set-to and weren’t on speaking terms any more. Now Andropov happens to have been on the Millennium Committee too.’

‘He isn’t any more?’

‘You guessed it. This morning — a day after Ibram gets whacked out — Andropov resigns from the committee. He then applies to his university for a six month sabbatical and skips town.’

I tried to sit up. The floor was spinning, and there was more than one cobra wriggling under the tables. I lurched slightly and gripped the edge of my chair to steady myself. ‘Where’d he go?’ I asked slowly, making a great effort to enunciate the words.

‘Now that’s the most interesting bit. His faculty says he’s at St Samuel’s Monastery in the Fayoum having a “retreat”.’

I looked at him in dumb surprise. St Samuel’s was where the first reports of the ghoul had come from — the reports that had set my people on its track in the first place.

‘They tell me he’s been going to the place for twenty odd years. I phoned the monastery up, and they didn’t want to tell me at first, but I laid down the law, and in the end they admitted he was there. I think you should make St Samuel’s a priority, Sammy.’

‘Yes, I will. Sure. But Boutros — Fayoum’s a whole day’s drive from here.’

Hammoudi had suddenly undergone fission — there were two Hammoudi clones now, both of them smiling crookedly. ‘The FBI’s got a chopper available,’ he said.

‘Nah — the bloody Yanks wouldn’t give us priority!’

‘Try sweet-talking Miss Daisy Brooke.’

14

I still had the hangover when the unmarked FBI Jetstream swooped in over St Samuel’s Monastery near the Fayoum. From a thousand feet it looked like a wedge of interlocking boxes set in a tiny patch of green that was almost lost amid scarps of salmon-coloured rock and sheets of amber sand. The pilot — a grizzled U S veteran with about five gold bars on his shoulder straps — put us down with perfect precision on a landing-strip between shelter belts of pencil cedars, eucalyptus and mesquite. We waited till the rotors stopped whizzing, then jumped out to meet a heavy set monk, who was waiting for us beside a limousine. ‘Brother Paul,’ he said, bowing slightly. His beard was like a dark fan round his face, and he wore silver glasses and a black pillbox hat that went with his black soutane. He shook hands coldly. ‘This is most irregular,’ he told me, ‘the retreat is sacrosanct. The Patriarch is very disturbed about it.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but this is a murder enquiry.’ My head was hurting and my stomach felt queasy after the helicopter ride. I was in no mood for niceties.

‘Couldn’t it have waited?’ he demanded.

‘Ask the murderers.’

He shrugged, ushered us into the car and sat next to the driver in the front. We rattled through acres of olive and almond groves, through palmeries and vineyards that looked greener than green against the desert’s pastel hues. ‘Must be a lot more water here than there seems,’ I commented.

Water’s a problem,’ the monk said without turning round. ‘It’s also a priority. We have some of the best engineers and environmentalists to help us. We have deep bores, but some of them are brackish — in this season we rely on our irrigation tanks. Professor Andropov is a dry land specialist and he has been most valuable to us.’

Now I understood. Andropov was more than just a guest — he was a benefactor of the monastery. That was why they were so cut up about our disturbing him.

I looked out of the window and suddenly noticed a string of Bedouin riding fast on lean camels along the roadside. They wore ragged
jibbas
and layered headcloths the same hue as the desert itself, their features knapped down by generations of thirst and desert winds into their irreducible core. They looked as if they lived in another dimension, and to prove it they ignored us disdainfully as we roared by. It gave me a sudden surge of nostalgia to see them so unexpectedly.

‘Who are those guys?’ Daisy asked, staring back after them as they faded into the distance. I could have told her, but I left it to our host.

‘They are Bedouin of the Harab tribe,’ he said, ‘people of the desert fringes. They have served the monastery for generations. Without them we could not have survived.’

I was going to add that they had probably plundered the place periodically too — for Bedouin serve no one but their tribe but I was distracted by the appearance of the monastery itself, looming suddenly up out of the trees. It was a huge rambling mass of high walls that had the same look as the tribesmen we’d just seen — honed down by the erosion of sand and wind over centuries into a form that had somehow established a kind of truce with the environment. The stone blocks were sun—scorched and blackened, and the walls were riddled with eye slits and openings and strange little overhanging trapdoors. The car passed through a long arch and up a tree lined avenue that spoke almost audibly of water richness, towards the newly whitewashed edifice of a church with twin towers. To the left was an ancient block building with external pillars and raised verandahs, which the monk told us doubled as the infirmary and museum. ‘Our monastery has an interesting history,’ he said. ‘Please take a glance in the museum before you leave.’ There was a tiny graveyard outside the building, I noticed, and an old man in a torn
jibba
and turban was working on the plot with a hoe.

‘Stop!’ I said suddenly. ‘I’ll take a look right now.’

The driver stopped the car and the monk turned on me with a puzzled frown. ‘Didn’t you say you were in a hurry?’ he demanded.

‘Yes, but there’s something here I want to see.’

I walked over to the graveyard, and Daisy followed me. The monk sidled up behind us. The old man stopped his work as we approached, leaned on his hoe and felt his back.

‘Peace be on you.’ I said.

‘And on you.’

He watched me in silence as I studied the graves. Most were marked with a cross and seemed to be the graves of Christian lay workers who had served the monastery. One, though, was clearly an Islamic burial, marked with an oval of stones around a mound with headstones at either end. A crude wooden inscription read, ‘Mohammad Fustat. 1995.’

‘Who’s the sheep among the goats?’ I asked Brother Paul.

He swallowed. ‘An unfortunate affair,’ he stuttered, ‘I mean...he died in the infirmary. Actually he’d lost so much blood...an accident in the desert.’

‘The boy was killed by a ghoul,’ the old man piped up suddenly. ‘Everybody knows it. He was looking for a stray calf in the Cave of the Owls. They told him not to go there, and when he didn’t come back after two days they went looking. Found him still alive, half torn to shreds — and one of them saw a creature running off in the distance.’ He made the sign of protection against evil spirits, and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘They said it was a hairy beast with one leg like a donkey’s.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ Paul said, looking daggers at the old man, ‘just primitive superstition. He’d had an accident — been bitten by a bull camel — he’d almost bled to death. There was nothing we could do.’

‘It was the
Afrangi
,
’
the old Bedouin blurted out suddenly, ‘the
Afrangi
doctored him. You know...Androboff — the water man. He’s not a doctor at all.’ He made the two-fingered sign for protection against the evil eye, and Brother Paul caught his hand, wrenching it down savagely.

‘That’s enough!’ he bellowed, ‘I’ll have no paganism in the monastery. You can collect your wages and go back to your hovel!’

The old Bedouin threw down his hoe. ‘I’ll go!’ he said.

‘Curse your father, and a curse on all
Afrangis
and Christians!’

Paul went red in the face and took a step towards him, but the old man refused to be intimidated. ‘There’s evil here in the monastery,’ he growled, turning to me, ‘the ghoul was in the boy, that’s why they wouldn’t take him in the Muslim burial place. The ghoul crossed over — and it’s still here.’ He gave Paul a contemptuous glance and spat suddenly and venomously on the ground in front of him. Then he swirled his headcloth across his face, turned sharply, and was gone.

15

The car halted by another arch, and we got out and walked through into a wide cloister — a central square full of oleanders, figs, wild olives and brilliant purple bougainvillea. You could hear the constant trickle of water down tiny feeders and here and there were miniature rainbows where the drops of moisture were momentarily penetrated by the light. Monks walked around the covered paths silently, lost in their own thoughts, and there was an almost palpable sense of contemplation to the place — a feeling that here was an unchanging haven of peace in a malevolent world. Brother Paul strode along in silence for a few moments, no doubt brooding over the little altercation with the old Bedouin. After a while, though, he turned round. ‘I’m sorry about that scene,’ he said. ‘It’s just that one gets so tired of local superstition. What with the storms and the drought everyone’s been on edge lately.’

‘I understand,’ I said, ‘but is it true that Professor Andropov doctored the boy who died?’

‘The Professor has some medical experience, I believe, and if I remember rightly the Patriarch was away when the...accident occurred. Perhaps you had better ask him about it yourself.’

We walked a little further, looking around. ‘This is the heart of St Samuel’s,’ Paul said, pointing to two very ancient-looking buildings opening off the cloister. ‘Those structures have been here since the beginning. The one on the right is the chapel founded by St Samuel himself. He was a hermit, you know, who lived in a cave in this region, and who was tortured by the Muslims and sold into slavery by the Bedouin. He escaped eventually and made his way back here and built this church with his own hands. It’s no longer used, of course. For centuries it has been a mausoleum containing the remains of all the Brothers who have served the monastery. There are thousands of skulls in there — a memento of the continuity of purpose our church possesses. Men who lived from generation to generation dedicated to the same end. Would you like to see them?’

‘Maybe another time,’ I said. ‘What’s the other building?’

‘That’s the library,’ the monk said. ‘In medieval times it was one of the best in Egypt. Had manuscripts in Coptic, ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew — even Syriac. European adventurers bought a lot of them, though, in colonial times, when the monks had no choice but to sell. Today it’s only a shadow of what it once was.’

I swallowed. There was a message here too — outsiders had continued to sack the place right up till modern times, even if it was by filthy lucre rather than the sword.

He led us through a doorway, up a staircase and along a dark stone corridor supported by massive granite buttresses and lined with antique darkwood chairs and plain carpets. We halted before a heavy, studded door with a curved lintel. He knocked reverently.

‘What’s this?’ I enquired.

‘The Patriarch’s office,’ he said, ‘Professor Andropov is in there.’

A reedy voice shouted, ‘Come!’ and we marched in to find ourselves in what was little more than a cell. It was spartan in the extreme, with only a mahogany desk carved in baroque style with angels and cherubs, some straight-backed chairs that looked like they’d been designed for doing penance, and a single beautifully carved crucifix on the wall. The windows were a series of slits, glassed with diamond panels, which allowed light to fall in golden ingots across the bare stone floor. The Patriarch was seated behind the desk, and Andropov sat on a hard chair in front of it as though he was being interviewed for a job. Both of them stood up to greet us. The Patriarch was a small, bent man whose face looked as if it had been scoured by abrasive sands into troughs and channels. He wore a badly stained and patched soutane with a thick leather belt, a velvet pillbox hat and a tiny silver cross around his neck. His beard was thin and moth-eaten, and his eyes beneath his thick-lensed glasses were full of irritation.

Andropov was an interesting looking figure, I thought — almost oriental. In different clothes he might have been taken for a Mongolian tribesman. But he was dressed mundanely in a loose cream suit, with open-sided shoes, and his silver coloured hair was pulled back from a skull that was pickled red in colour, and tied in a tight ponytail against the nape of his neck. His grey goatee beard formed a dense ovoid shape around the lower section of his face, and his eyes were set in high Slavic cheekbones which gave you the impression that his face was frozen in a permanent condescending smile. His hand felt cold, soft and clammy like a mozzarella cheese, and there was an aloofness to his manner that made me feel he regarded us as ants that ought to be squashed. The Patriarch waved a hand towards some upright chairs and we sat down. There was an odd distribution of power in the room, I sensed. The body language of the two monks was subtly deferential to Andropov, as if he were the real Patriarch.

‘I’m sorry, Father..’ I said.

‘Father Grigori.’

‘Father Grigori. Before I talk to the Professor, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to give us some privacy. This is a murder enquiry.’

The little man’s cheeks turned bright red, and he fumbled in the pocket of his robe, and came out with a packet of Cleopatras and a box of matches. He struck match after match, but his hands were trembling so much that each one expired long before the cigarette was lit. Brother Paul rushed to help him but Grigori waved him away impatiently. ‘I’m all right!’ he snapped. Finally he steadied his right hand with the left long enough to light the smoke and took a deep drag. Only then did I notice that his fingers, teeth and beard were stained yellow with nicotine. ‘You are police officers,’ he said heavily, pronouncing each word carefully, ‘you should know the right channels. These things should be set up through the highest authorities — the commander of your division should have approached the High Patriarch. Professor Andropov is a good friend of this monastery and he is a man of the finest moral character and the highest credentials. Without Professor Andropov this monastery would have collapsed years ago for lack of water. I have to say that I object to this bullying from the State, I resent this intrusion into the holy retreat of our honoured guest, and I repudiate implications of dishonourable behaviour against Professor Andropov.’ There were a few moments of silence. Father Grigori drew in more smoke and blew it out.

‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Father Grigori,’ I said, ‘but a man has died — a colleague of Professor Andropov. This is an urgent enquiry and we had no time for bureaucracy. I’m sorry we have to intrude, but...’ I strung out the word for emphasis, ‘a quiet word with the Professor here, in private, is surely better than a show of force.’

Father Grigori looked at me sullenly and his eyes found the pierce mark on my upper right ear. He pursed his lips. Then he took a last, infuriated glance at us and stormed out of the office, followed by Brother Paul. Daisy and I exchanged a silent glance. I wondered why the hell Father Grigori had looked so scared.