Firebird (10 page)

The Blue Beret shrugged, shifted his feet and tapped the stock of his rifle impatiently. ‘It’s closed,’ he said again. Seeing we would get nowhere, we turned and walked down the stairs.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I should have remembered about this.’

‘Just my luck,’ Daisy said, ‘it’s not the same without seeing the King’s Chamber and all those things you read about.’

‘Bloody millennium celebrations,’ I said.

‘Well so much for the vacation. Have you been in touch with the Great Hammoudi this morning?’

‘Yeah, I talked to him. He was livid about Van Helsing sequestering evidence, but a bit mollified that we got the briefcase. I passed the map and the report over to him for safekeeping.’

‘What else did he have to say?’

‘Records drew a blank on Monod and Firebird too, but there’s a small lead on the Sanusi amulet. He traced a member of the Sanusi family in Cairo — name of Doctor Sid’Ahmad as-Sanusi, a direct descendant of the Brotherhood’s founder. Address in Khan al-Khalili.’

‘Near the crime scene, then. Interesting.’

‘Well, maybe. But Hammoudi says Sid’Ahmad’s completely legit — no record of contacts with the Militants. In fact, he’s a highly respected and quite well known Egyptologist. Hammoudi just thought he might be able to give us some background on the origin of the amulet.’

‘OK, let’s go talk to him.’

As we moved back along the base of the pyramid I sniffed the air. ‘It’s coming,’ I said, ‘and when it hits it’s going to be a Mother.’

‘That’s all we needed.’

‘Yeah.’

As we walked past the old museum rest house, I glanced up to see the crane operator in his box high above us. The boom was already swaying in the breeze and its lifting arm swinging slightly, its machinery clanking as it drew up its tackle. A broken wall encircled the museum building, and two mean looking Blue Berets wearing dark shades were on guard at the open gate. As we passed, I glimpsed activity in the yard — dozens of Blue Berets and some civilians in flint grey overalls talking excitedly and milling round a big wooden crate. Curious, I halted to watch as the crane’s boom swung overhead in a 180 degree arc, stopped, and began to lower its tackle. Just then, the Lightning Force goons at the gate advanced towards us menacingly, shouting ‘Move on, there!’ A second before I shifted, I caught a fleeting glimpse of one of the overall clad civilians in the yard as the man turned sideways to watch the descending gear. For a split moment I could have sworn I was looking at the half simian profile of Jan Van Helsing.

10

The storm chased us all the way down the Pyramids Road to the Nile, and by the time we were crossing the bridge the sky had turned an angry ochre red and currents of sand were streaking down the centre of the carriageway. Khan al-Khalili was protected against the storm by the massed buildings in the city centre, but the light was as dim as dusk, and the alleys were full of long shadows that seemed distorted and unnatural. To get to the address Hammoudi had given us we had to pass through tunnels clogged with rubble and effluent old newspapers, flimsy supermarket bags that rustled like trapped birds, flattened milk cartons, empty cigarette packs. The buildings seemed to have been created in one continuous organic mass, and a lot of them were lopsided, leaning on each other like invalids. Liquid ran in trickles down the teetering masonry, forming sordid pools in the dirt. Flea bitten cats darted about underfoot, beggars lurched from doorway to doorway, and streetwalkers congregated under the saracenic arches, leaning languidly in the half light, puffing water pipes spiked with hash. From  the outside it was impossible to tell how big Sanusi’s house was. There were no windows at eye level, only small iron grates placed too high for anyone to see through without a ladder. Above them I glimpsed a bunch of upper floors with projecting balconies supported by quarried blocks. The door looked as though it had been made to resist a siege. It was heavy teak, weathered almost colourless, perforated by huge brass studs and decorated by a symmetrical flower design with the words
Al
-
Khalig
,
al
-
Baaq
— ‘The Creator, the Everlasting’ — carved inside. There was a huge iron lock and a rusty knocker, which to my surprise seemed to be an effigy of a huge serpent — an odd contrast to the Islamic inscription. I tried the knocker and found it jammed so I rapped on the coarse wood with my knuckles. A moment later it creaked open to reveal a tall, almost cadaverous figure in a long grey
gallabiyya
, whose gaunt face was lit up weirdly from below by the beams of an oil—lamp hanging from his long fingers. His unkempt beard reached almost to his chest, but failed to cover an Adam’s apple almost the size of a marabou stork’s pouch. His bushy eyebrows were knitted together over piercing eyes — encased in half moon glasses — and a hooked kedge of nose, which gave him the look of an ayatollah after a bad day’s haranguing.

‘Yes?’ he demanded, holding up the lamp. ‘What do you want?’ The voice was pedantic, with an edge of barbed wire.

‘Are you Doctor Sid’Ahmad as-Sanusi?’ I asked.

The gaunt man ignored me and took a step out into the street, his eyes flicking left and right nervously. ‘Did anybody follow you?’ he demanded.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Like who for instance?’

His eyes bored into us, and he drew a long talon over his lips, beckoning us into a dim tunnel that smelt of lamp — black and dust. ‘Jinns,’ he said, ‘they come tapping at your door and creep in when you’re not looking. They lie in wait.’ Daisy rolled her eyes at me as the old man closed the door with a skeletal hand. He held the lamp up, so that Chinese puppet shapes fled across the walls. ‘Follow me closely,’ he said. ‘It is dark. The lights have been cut.’

‘Must be the storm,’ I said.

‘Ali!’ he wheezed. ‘That’s what they want you to think!’

We passed a couple of turns and he stopped us before another door. ‘Permission oh ye blest!’ he yelled, so loudly that Daisy and I almost jumped out of our skins.

When the door opened I half expected to find someone waiting inside, but there was nobody, only a hexagonal courtyard where heat thumped down from a six sided section of sky high above us. There were three or four storeys to the house and looking upwards was like looking up the sheer sides of a deep well. There was a trace of fire ash on the air, I noticed — the scent of the storm — but the yard was so deep that you felt no wind at all. The flagstones were intricately marbled in abstract Islamic patterns, and in the centre water sluiced from the head of a grotesque, scaly sea monster fountain and poured into a large marble pool. The place was crammed with interesting artefacts. There was an Islamic lion that might have been taken from the Alhambra, a polished wooden oil press, an Egyptian coffin from the Ptolemaic era with the remains of a man’s face painted on it, and copies of much more ancient figures — aardvark-headed Set and falcon-headed Horus on either side of a stela inscribed in hieroglyphs. Set into the niche of a granite slab was the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, a brooding eminence that seemed to lend a dark feeling of foreboding to the place.

Daisy let out a gasp of surprise. ‘This is fantastic!’ she said, in English. ‘You’d never guess it was here from outside.’

The gaunt man sucked in his breath and grimaced. ‘Ostentation is not the Arab way,’ he said, in perfect English. We both turned to stare at him. ‘What you see outside does not necessarily reflect what is inside,’ he went on. ‘It’s the old battle between surface appearance and underlying form. You have a saying in English that goes “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, do you not, Miss Brooke?’

‘How do you know my name?’

The old man grinned through curls of beard. ‘Colonel Hammoudi was good enough to let me know I might expect you. Otherwise I should not have let you in. I have to be on my guard. They’re always tapping at my door, begging and pleading to be let in, but I won’t have it. Oh no, I keep my defences up. You won’t believe what creatures lie in wait out there. In one week I have seen seven men with their left eyes missing. Seven! I have seen five men with no left arms. I have seen a hunchbacked man with red hair, and two albinos. Why, I’ve even seen a ghoul sitting on the roof of the Badestan Gate, chewing bones.’

‘A ghoul?’ Daisy said.

‘Yes. And that is precisely my point about outward appearance and underlying form. A ghoul is a creature that can take on almost any guise. In his natural state he is a human spider with one good leg and one like a donkey’s. But he is a shapeshifter. He can be a dog, a cat, a goat, a ram, a man or a woman, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew or even a heathen. He can assume the form of anyone, living or dead, with all their memories and idiosyncrasies. You might see him, but he looks ordinary and you don’t know who he is. He can change into a king or a beggar. He can be a Negro or an Indian or an
Afrangi
— sometimes you will see him as a modest-looking man with a long beard and a brown cloak. He could be the man standing next to you in the bazaar, the man — even the woman — walking behind you on the street. He could be the one you are talking to right now. At night he roams the alleys, looking for helpless men and women to prey upon, and in the daytime he walks the endless corridors of the Underworld — right underneath the city. He knows its secret exits and entrances and how to deal with its serpent guardians. He sneaks about changing his appearance, going invisible, hiding behind gates, sitting on roofs, passing through walls, dressing up as a beggar, mixing with all races and all religions as one of them. He’s a dirty shapeshifter, and a shapeshifter can’t be trusted.’ He watched me carefully, unsmiling for a second, his small eyes steady behind the glasses. ‘But then you already know that, I think, Lieutenant Rashid?’

I started, not expecting the question, and nodded too vigorously, not really grasping what he meant. ‘Did Colonel Hammoudi tell you why we wanted to talk to you?’

‘He mentioned the amulet,’ Sanusi said, eagerly, ‘I must have it back. It’s part of my defences.’

‘You mean this?’ I said, bringing out the Sanusi amulet, now neatly parcelled in a polythene bag.

The transformation in Sanusi’s features was sudden and dramatic. His eyes lit up and a tic activated in the corner of his left eye. The lines around it lurched skywards. ‘My amulet!’ he beamed. ‘It
was
the one Hammoudi mentioned!’ He put out his lean hand to take it, but I held it back deliberately and returned it to my pocket.

‘You say it’s yours?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Yes. It was stolen from my collection a week ago. But I explained all this to the Colonel.’

‘Anything else stolen?’ Daisy enquired.

‘No,’ Sanusi said, ‘but that was enough.’ He paused and peered at us through his half-moon glasses, muttering under his breath like someone used to going for days with nothing but his own company. Then he drew a large bunch of keys from the pocket of his grey robe. ‘Come,’ he said, gesturing towards one of the doors opening off the courtyard, let me show you my collection.’

The door was another solid hardwood piece with iron studs, a radiating chrysanthemum design in the centre, and flowing Islamic calligraphy on the lintel. The door creaked and we entered a long, narrow room — a small museum of sorts, with plaster walls covered in sepia tinted photographs, framed documents and antique weapons — scimitars, breech loading Martini carbines, daggers with weird and wonderful double blades, spears and shields. Pride of place in the room, though, belonged to the glass cabinets, one of which contained silver jewellery in complicated designs. Daisy stopped to stare at it. There were ornate necklaces of flat trapezoids, rectangles and plaited strands, and headdresses of silver hoops, nests of balls and dangling cylinders, with chains ending in what looked like tiny hands. Some of the pieces incorporated amber and carnelian, and others contained tiny boxes inlaid with finely worked gold or mother-of-pearl.

‘Good grief!’ Daisy muttered. ‘Some of these things must weigh a ton! How did they ever wear them?’

‘They didn’t,’ Sanusi said, ‘these things only
appear
to
be headdresses. They are Bedouin things, and to the Bedouin anything that is not mobile is useless. Isn’t that so, Lieutenant Rashid? These things were really the tribe’s mobile assets, which would be sold off in famine times — a reserve for when the going got tough.’

‘But they must be worth a fortune,’ Daisy said. ‘Why would thieves break in and leave them?’

‘Who said anyone
broke
in?’ Sanusi snapped. ‘I let the thief in, may God forgive my folly. The only thing broken was this.’ He pointed to a cabinet standing in the centre of the room, whose glass had been shattered and was now patched up with tape. ‘I haven’t got round to repairing it, yet,’ he said, apologetically. The cabinet was full of artefacts, and I saw that it contained a lot of amulets like the one I had in my pocket — tiny leather boxes, some of them delicately inlaid and inscribed.

‘You’re sure there was only the one missing?’ I asked.

‘Yes. And it’s not even the most interesting or the most valuable — though it is entirely unique to the Sanusiya Brotherhood. This type of amulet is known as a
hejab
. It contains a verse from the Quran written by a holy man — some of the verses in these amulets were actually written by my ancestor, Mohammad bin Ali, the Great Sanusi, almost two hundred years ago. Such charms would protect them from knives and bullets. Psychic defences. They would no more have thought of going into battle without such protection than a modern labourer goes on site without his hard hat.’ He led us aside and gestured to a lithograph of a saintly looking man with a white beard. ‘This is my ancestor, Mohammad bin Ali,’ Sanusi announced, as if giving us a guided tour. ‘He was not only a mathematician, theologian and astrologer, but was also gifted with tremendous organizing abilities. At the height of his power he was able to muster 25,000 Bedouin tribesmen to his banner. The amulets he gave to these tribesmen were absolutely effective, as long as they themselves continued to have faith. And faith is what counts.’

Daisy looked at him dubiously and I saw her choke back a comment. ‘You say you know who stole the amulet?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I had a premonition, of course. I knew something was about to happen. Seven one-eyed men, five one-armed men, two albinos and a hunchback — all in a week. Then the ghoul. I saw him sitting on the Badestan Gate, crunching bones, and next thing I knew he was tapping at my door, asking to see my amulets. Oh, he appeared to be a man, of course. He even had a name. He called himself Sayf ad-Din Ali, and said he was from the World Council of Islam. Gave me an address in the United Arab Emirates, but I knew he wasn’t a native of the Gulf. He appeared a tall man — wore a thick beard, Mecca style turban and a
gallabiyya
. Oh yes, he wrapped himself with the odour of sanctity all right, but I knew what he was. I smelt the Devil.’

Daisy giggled and Sanusi gave her a hard glance. ‘You seem to find this amusing, Miss Brooke,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you think ghouls don’t exist?’ He moved to a side table and picked up a battered red scrapbook. ‘This book is full of reports about them, I’ve been compiling it for years.’ He flipped through the thick pages and I saw they were crammed with pasted newspaper clippings, some of them yellow with age. Sanusi stopped at a certain page and held the open book out to Daisy. ‘Look here!’ he said. ‘You read Arabic?’

Daisy perused the page briefly and passed it to me. The clipping pasted on to it was from
Al
-
Ahram
— the most respectable of Egypt’s newspapers — and was dated two weeks previously.
Ghoul
Strikes
In
Khan
al-Khalili
? the headline ran. I looked at it but only pretended to read it. I’d seen it before.

‘A young tailor’s boy was found in an alley one morning, just round the corner from here,’ Sanusi said. ‘When the corpse was examined it was found that part of the skin had been flayed off and all the blood had been drained from the organs. In fact, the body was no more than a shell. There were strange marks on it too — marks which couldn’t have been made by any known animal.’ He took the scrapbook from me and scrabbled through more pages with his talon fingers. ‘Look at all these!’ he said. ‘It’s happened before. Six reports since 1995, all in the Khan al-Khalili area, all of men or women disappearing only to be discovered in the streets with their blood sucked out of them, and the marks of some creature in their flesh. And the deaths occur in a regular pattern — once every six months. Now if that’s not a ghoul, what is it?’