The Five Fakirs of Faizabad (20 page)

N
imrod, flying back to London with Mr. Burton, tried to read the Joseph Rock papers that Rabbi Joshua had lent to him from the Jewish National Library. But his mind was elsewhere. Mostly his mind was back at the library in Jerusalem and the scene in the Einstein Archive where several hundred papers, including the great scientist’s personal diary, were now missing, to say nothing of one golem.

“Remind me,” said Nimrod. “The Lahore earthquake was when exactly?”

“April 1905,” said Burton.

“A month before Einstein published his first great work on special relativity.”

“Exactly. But why do you ask?”

“I was trying to think of a good reason why Jirjis Ibn Rajmus would want to steal Einstein’s diary for the year of
1905. When he was working for the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. And I think I just thought of a good reason. Because the diary must explain something about the Faizabad fakir whose live burial was disturbed by the Lahore earthquake. There must be something in that diary about the man who quite possibly revealed to Einstein one of the great mysteries of the universe.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” said Mr. Burton, stroking his long beard. “Who is this Jirjis Ibn Rajmus, anyway?”

“Jirjis is the son of Rajmus, who is himself the cousin of Iblis the Ifrit,” said Nimrod. “Jirjis lives in the state of Georgia, in the southern United States of America.”

“A djinn?”

“Yes, and a particularly nasty one, too,” said Nimrod. “Jirjis killed his wife, you know — chopped her into pieces with an ax. And her, he loved. Imagine what he might do to someone he didn’t like.”

“It doesn’t bear thinking of,” agreed Mr. Burton. “But perhaps she provoked him in some way. The course of true love ne’er runs smooth, and all that sort of thing.”

“The man who had tried to rescue her from a hole in the ground Jirjis turned into an ape.”

“Better than killing him, I’d say,” said Mr. Burton. “Still, I take your point. This Jirjis sounds like a thoroughly bad fellow.”

“Oh, he is.”

“Have you ever met him?”

“No, but I know his father, Rajmus,” said Nimrod. “I fought a djinn duel against him once.”

“Which I suppose you won,” said Mr. Burton. “Since you’re still here.”

“Yes.”

“So this Jirjis is not likely to feel particularly well-disposed to you or any member of your family,” said Mr. Burton. “Or any of your friends.”

“No, indeed,” said Nimrod. “If ever we met, I think I can safely say it would be him or me.”

“And you think he might be connected with the change in the world’s luck?”

“It would certainly explain a great deal about what’s going on,” said Nimrod. “Possession of one or more as yet unrevealed secrets of the universe would be just the kind of power a djinn like him would crave. I imagine he wanted the Einstein papers for some clue that might be there as to how he might find one of the five remaining fakirs.”

“But if he’s a powerful djinn,” said Mr. Burton.

“He is,” said Nimrod. “Very powerful.”

“Then what could he want with human knowledge?”

“Knowledge is knowledge,” said Nimrod. “Whether it’s human or djinn. And physics is physics. If there’s another secret of the universe that’s as important and momentous as
e
equals
mc
squared, then Jirjis would certainly want to have that knowledge. To build a weapon perhaps. To make himself more powerful. Who knows what’s in a mind as warped as that?”

“I had forgotten how much wickedness is in the world,” said Mr. Burton.

Arriving back in the garden of his house in Kensington and Bayswater, Nimrod eyed the flying carpet that was
already lying on his lawn with concern because it was smaller than he remembered and scorched along one edge. And full of worry that something might have happened to Philippa, or to John — he was as yet uncertain to whom the flying carpet belonged — he hurried through the back door of his house.

Philippa was sitting in the kitchen nursing a cup of coffee, and seeing her uncle again she stood up and faced him nervously.

“It’s not my fault,” she said. “It’s not my fault because there was this terrible storm, right? And the flying carpet got struck by a sheet of lightning. And the carpet got split into two and we got separated in a thick cloud and I flew around and looked for them for ages. And Moo recited a poem for me so that I might have some idea where they were. But it was no good because I couldn’t see a thing inside the cloud and for all I know, she and Mr. Swaraswati are still up there, because they’re not here like I hoped they would be. And I really didn’t know what to do so I came back here, but they weren’t and now you are, thank goodness, because we have to go back and look for them right away even though I’m tired and I just want to go to bed and sleep for, like, a thousand years.”

Philippa sat down and looked miserable.

“Mr. Swaraswati?” asked Nimrod.

“Mr. Swaraswati is the fakir,” said Philippa. “The real fakir. One of the fakirs who got told one of the secrets of the universe by the Tirthankar of Faizabad. And not one of those fake mendicant fakirs. I had to deal with them. Two of them.
They were really unpleasant. I had to turn them into budgies. Only they got eaten by a couple of ferrets. Which kind of upset me.” Philippa swallowed with difficulty. “A lot, because I guess that means they’re dead. Which makes it my fault. And I’m really not very happy about that. I mean, I’m beginning to see my mother’s POV on this one, Uncle Nimrod.”

Tears welled up in Philippa’s eyes and, taking off her glasses, she blinked several times and tried to hold on to herself.

Nimrod handed her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose loudly.

“And you left him alone on a cloud, with one of the last great secrets of the universe?” said Mr. Burton.

“And Moo,” said Philippa. “He’s not alone. Moo’s with him.” She offered Nimrod back his handkerchief.

“Oh, well, I suppose that makes it all right,” said Mr. Burton.

“Keep it.” Nimrod tutted loudly. “Budgies, eh?” “Yes.”

“Pity,” said Nimrod. “It would have been useful to have questioned them.”

“Oh, I did,” said Philippa. “They told me they were working for some sheikh who lives in Cairo. A man called —”

“Jirjis Ibn Rajmus,” said Nimrod.

“Yes. How did you know?”

Nimrod shook his head. “Never mind that. We’ve got to find that fakir before someone else does.” Nimrod pointed
at the garden. “Come on,” he said. “There’s no time to lose. A flying carpet without a guiding mind could end up just about anywhere, depending on the wind. Fortunately for us, when properly directed to do so, one rug will follow the other. I shall simply direct my own carpet to pursue what remains of your own carpet, much as I would instruct a bloodhound to go after a scent.”

“I might have done that myself,” explained Philippa. “But I didn’t know how.”

“Didn’t you see me do it with Groanin?” asked Nimrod. “Back in the Atlas Mountains?”

“No.”

“By the way, have you heard anything from Groanin? Or John?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure they’re all right. I armed Groanin with a discrimens, just in case of an emergency. Not to mention enough stores to equip an expedition to the South Pole.” Nimrod frowned. “Now where was I?”

“Telling me how to sic one carpet on another.”

“Oh, yes. Well, it’s quite simple,” said Nimrod, and in the garden he showed Philippa how it was done.

“You take a very sharp knife or a razor,” he explained. “And with it you lightly shave the surface of the carpet until you have collected a small amount of material on the blade’s edge.” Nimrod produced a disposable razor from his coat pocket and scraped it across the carpet until there were a few millimeters of blue fibers visible on the blade. “Now, the
carpet is made of silk, of course, so you have to make a mark of respect to the carpet by crushing the larva of a
Bombyx mori
in your hand. That’s a domesticated silk moth to an American like you, Philippa.”

Muttering his focus word, which was QWERTYUIOP, Nimrod opened his palm to reveal a white lepidopteran larva, about one inch long, with a little horn on its back.

“Like this,” he added. “Fascinating little creatures, really. Each one can make a cocoon that’s made of a raw silk thread of up to three thousand feet long. Think of it: Just ten of these little blighters and you could have a thread that’s the height of Mount Everest.” He sighed. “Shame to kill it really, but that’s the thing about a lot of old djinn bindings. It is rather cruel. But then so is meat, I suppose.”

Philippa pulled a face at the sight of the worm in Nimrod’s hand.

“Then you blow the fluff from the blade into the air above the carpet and strike it hard, three times with the palm of the hand in which you just crushed the silkworm larva, and shout
‘suivi,’
as if you were playing baccarat or chemin de fer. I kid you not.”

“I’m surprised I didn’t work it out myself,” said Philippa.

Nimrod shrugged. “I know it all sounds terribly arcane and old-fashioned, but this is one of the reasons we djinn abandoned flying carpets in the first place and took up riding whirlwinds. That and bad weather, of course. Flying carpets aren’t so good in storms, as you’ve already discovered.”

“And how.”

When Mr. Burton and Philippa had seated themselves on the flying carpet, Nimrod blew the silk fibers into the air, crushed the silkworm larva in his hand, and banged hard three times on the surface of the carpet. Nothing happened.

“Ah,” said Nimrod. “I was forgetting something.” And taking hold of Philippa’s thumb, he stabbed it quickly with a pin. “The scent.”

“Ow,” she protested loudly.

Nimrod held her thumb so that a large red pearl of blood dripped onto his carpet.

“Didn’t you have some of my blood already?” she said, wincing as her uncle squeezed her thumb like the rubber end of an eyedropper.

“Fresh is best, I think,” said Nimrod. “Besides, I already used that blood to set Groanin on his way from Morocco.”

Once again, he slapped the carpet three times with the flat of his caterpillar-sticky hand and shouted
“suivi,”
and, once again, nothing happened.

“Perhaps it already thinks it’s found what it was supposed to be looking for,” said Philippa, pointing to her flying carpet that lay a few yards away on the lawn of Nimrod’s back garden.

“Yes, of course,” said Nimrod. “Stupid of me.” And uttering his focus word once again he flicked a small ball of fire at the remnant of Philippa’s carpet, which disappeared in a cloud of smoke. “Sorry about that. But we’ll get you another when we have to take Mr. Burton back home to Morocco.”

As soon as Philippa’s carpet was no more, the carpet rose in the air, and soon they were flying south.

“Er, are you sure about this direction?” Philippa asked her uncle. “Yorkshire’s north of here, isn’t it? Not southeast.”

“A
suivi
binding is quite infallible,” insisted Nimrod. “This must be the direction where the other half of your carpet is headed or has ended up.”

“I hope they’re all right,” said Philippa.

And on they flew, across the English Channel and into mainland Europe.

“This is all to the good,” insisted Nimrod. “We’d have to fly in this direction, anyway. Because as soon as we have rescued Moo and Mr. Swaraswati, we are headed for Tibet.”

“Tibet?” said Philippa. “What’s in Tibet?”

“When I was inside the omphalos at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem,” explained Nimrod, “the oracle revealed to me that if I wished to bring about the impossible — suddenly to make a great many people feel that the world is a better, happier place than it was before and that they themselves can actively share in the world’s new good fortune — then I should find Shangri-la.”

“Shangri-la?” said Philippa. “You mean there really is a lost paradise in the Tibetan Himalayas where time and history have no meaning?”

“Apparently so,” said Nimrod. “Except that it’s not really called Shangri-la but Shamba-la. This archive, the Joseph Rock Archive I brought with me from the Jewish National Library, explains exactly how to get there. Wherever we seem
to be going now appears to be vaguely southeast, which is on the way to Tibet, as the crow flies.”

As if to confirm this, a crow flew alongside them for a while, and even perched on the edge of the carpet for a short rest before Mr. Burton, who held that crows were birds of ill-omen and therefore unlucky, shooed it away.

Finally, after almost ninety minutes, the flying carpet dipped toward what Nimrod declared to be Germany’s Main River, which is not the main river in Germany — that’s the Rhine — but a tributary of the Rhine called the Main.

“We seem to be heading for Frankfurt,” said Nimrod.

The carpet dipped again and seemed to aim itself at the city’s tallest buildings in Frankfurt’s banking district, and then at one building in particular — a rather ugly-looking skyscraper with a signal mast and a yellow logo that enabled Nimrod to identify it as the Commerzbank Tower. Like many other European banks, the Commerzbank had gone bankrupt several months ago, and there was an enormous sign on the uppermost window that read
zum verkauf,
which in German means “for sale.” Next to the signal tower was a flat roof on which, some eight hundred feet above the city of Frankfurt itself, was a small blue carpet and two people waving at them.

“It’s Moo and Mr. Swaraswati,” said Philippa.

The carpet circled over the rooftop for a moment and then descended slowly.

“Thank goodness,” said Moo. “I thought we were going to be stuck up here for ages. We’ve been waving to those blasted window cleaners on that building opposite for almost
an hour. They were waving back, too. They must have thought we were just being friendly.”

“Not waving but drowning, eh?” said Nimrod as his carpet settled on the rooftop. “Well, it looks like they’ve got something else to think about now. Us. We’d best get going soon, before a television crew turns up. It’s not every day people see a flying carpet.”

“It’s been a very trying time,” said Moo. “After we lost you, Philippa, we thought we were done for. Especially when we crossed the North Sea. Where on earth are we, anyway?”