Firebird (2 page)
Authors: Michael Asher
I don’t care what they
say
, I thought,
the
head’s
too
small
for
the
body
. I glanced up at the monster’s inscrutable face, shading my eyes against the blazing light of the midmorning sun, and felt a quaint thrill of fear — a thrill that had never quite left me no matter how many times I’d visited the Great Sphinx enclosure here at Giza. To me, this sculpture had always seemed the product of an alien mentality, and I knew why the Arabs called it Abul-Hol: ‘The Father of Terror’. Its face was a frame without features, the face of a creature lurking at the cusp of reality and illusion — a shapeshifter’s face. Or maybe it was just that I saw my own face there. The Egyptologists claimed that its features were those of Khafre, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh who was also supposed to have built the second pyramid nearby. They said that the whole Giza complex — three large pyramids, six small ones, mastaba tombs, boat pits
and
the Sphinx — was constructed by a single dynasty of pharaohs around 2500 BC, and that each piece of the jigsaw was an integral part of a coherent whole. Something — call it intuition — told me that the Sphinx was much older, and even if it did have Khafre’s face, that didn’t prove he’d constructed it. Maybe it once had a lion’s head, and Khafre simply had it recarved in his image. The experts disagreed vehemently, of course, but then I’ve never had much time for experts. They always seem to have a secret agenda of their own.
I adjusted my baseball cap so that the peak covered the nape of my neck, and wiped the moisture off my forehead with my cuff. It was unusually hot for December, and the met boys were tracking a massive sandstorm that they reckoned would hit the city in a couple of days. There were a few people about — European and Japanese tourists in shorts and sunhats, and the odd curious clump of locals — but the place was by no means crowded. On my way into the Sphinx enclosure I’d passed a film crew shooting a troop of men in ill-fitting leotards performing sweaty aerobics for a TV programme. Anywhere else it would have been beautiful young nymphets in costumes so tight they had to be poured on, but this was Egypt and we had to be content with pot-bellied bruisers. I knew they were still going at it despite the heat, because I could hear the half-hearted shouts of their instructor over the thick granite walls.
Amid the murmur of foreign voices I picked out footsteps behind me, and I knew at once they were out of place. The tread was too heavy and deliberate for a tourist — sightseers here trod at a leisurely pace. Instinct told me the steps were heading towards me, and I felt discreetly under my old leather jacket for the handle of my .380 Beretta in its quick-draw shoulder-rig. It was just a precaution. The last thing I needed was a shoot-out under the eyes of the Sphinx, but in my few years as a Special Investigations detective I’d made some enemies, and I couldn’t afford to be casual. I still had the scar on my rib-cage from the time we’d staked out the Shadowmen’s stronghold in New Cairo and they’d been waiting for us with rocket-launchers and God knew what hi-tech shit. There was still flotsam of the Shadowmen about, and any one of them had a good excuse to stiff me if he had half a chance. Even before I’d turned, though, I’d recognized the tread of Colonel Hammoudi — the measured pace I’d grown used to over the years. He eased his bulk up beside me and squinted sideways at Abul-Hol.
‘Can’t leave this junkyard alone can you, Sammy?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Not even in your spare time.’
I snickered, relaxing my grip on the Beretta. It
was
kind of pathetic that an eligible young police lieutenant like me had nothing better to do on his day off than stare at the Sphinx alone. But I had no wife, no children, no girl, no social life outside the police and no friends apart from Hammoudi. Home was a spartan apartment at the top of a block on Roda. Some people said I was a hermit, socially awkward, or even a closet gay, but I wasn’t. It was just that until I’d completed my job here, that was the way it had to be.
I smiled at the Colonel. ‘Half the police budget goes on guarding our glorious heritage,’ I said, ‘so I reckon there ought to be at least one cop who knows what it is we’re protecting.’
Hammoudi grunted. ‘Our glorious heritage,’ he repeated, rolling the words around his mouth as if trying to suck some kind of meaning out of them. He was a good nine inches taller than me — six-three at least — and he wore a faded dark suit that must have felt like chain mail in this heat. His white shirt was frayed at the collar, and he wore a dark tie and black shoes that had been polished so much the uppers had begun to wear through. His shoulders looked almost impossibly broad, and I knew it wasn’t padding. His head was a dome, his hair receding, streaked with silver at the sides, and his face, hacked out of granite, was as aggressive as a bulldog’s, its cradle of intersecting lines emphasized by a neatly clipped moustache.
‘How’d you know I was here?’ I asked.
‘Call it empathy,’ Hammoudi said, a wolfish crease spreading between the corner of his mouth and left eye.
I stifled a rude snort. OK, Boutros Hammoudi had many gifts, but I wouldn’t have numbered empathy in the first ten. He still ran the Special Investigations Department with the same rod of iron he’d earned a name for years ago as a parachute sergeant in the Yemen. Then, he’d led a unit called the Night Butchers who’d operated at night behind enemy lines, bringing back the penises of their victims as trophies. Now he was sixty and nearing retirement age, but he still worked out with weights four nights a week, and could pack a wallop. I once saw him hit two slimeballs with a volley of snap punches that dropped them as clean as steel bolts through the skull. The sound of his knuckles on their flesh was like gunshots. Empathy?
Bukra
flu
mishmish
, I thought.
Hammoudi grimaced impatiently as if following my cerebral processes. ‘You told me days ago you were overdue for a trip to Giza,’ he said. ‘This is your first day off in weeks, so I guessed you’d be here.’
That was nearer the mark, I thought. ‘Well I hope it’s strictly social,’ I said, ‘because like you say, this is my day off, and every time I’ve had a day off in the past three months something has come up!’
The Colonel gave a feral grin and drew a flattened pack of Cleopatra cigarettes from his side pocket. He flicked one out, stuck it in his mouth and lit it with a disposable lighter. He breathed out smoke and stared with apparent interest at the front paws of the Great Sphinx. ‘Isn’t there supposed to be a stela or something in there?’ he asked.
I screwed up my eyes against the sun and turned my baseball cap the right way round. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘you can just see the top of it from here, but it’s crumbled and unreadable now. They call it the dream-stela of Thutmose IV, the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh who ruled before the heretic Akhnaton.’
Hammoudi raised his eyebrows and spewed out smoke. ‘Aldinaton!’ he said. ‘Seems that guy got his ugly snout into every damn place.’
‘Sure, but they weren’t exactly classmates. Story goes that one night Thutmose crashed out under the head of the Great Sphinx and dreamed he was about to become pharaoh. Like dreaming you were going to win the lottery. Anyway, the guy
did
become pharaoh, and he had the stela stuck between the paws to commemorate the dream. Funny thing was that in his day the Sphinx was half-buried in sand — only the head showed. According to the stela he ordered the whole thing dug out, but no one knows why.’
Hammoudi blew smoke and brooded thoughtfully for a moment. ‘It’s hotter than hell,’ he said. ‘Let’s go grab a soda.’
I nodded. He didn’t have to twist my arm. I was sick of gawking at the Great Noseless One anyway.
We tottered back through the Valley Temple with its great pillars and architraves bending the sunlight into blocks of light and shade. We paused there in an island of shadow for a moment while Hammoudi stubbed out his cigarette, both glad of a moment’s relief from the heat. ‘Freak heat,’ Hammoudi commented. ‘They say a storm’s gonna strike in a couple of days.’
I sniffed the air. ‘They’re wrong,’ I said, ‘it’ll be here tomorrow.’
‘Why don’t you run the met office?’ Hammoudi chuckled.
I shrugged and ran a hand along one of the temple’s massive limestone blocks. As always, I marvelled at its hugeness. The two temples at the foot of the Sphinx — the Mortuary Temple and this one, the Valley Temple — are only forty feet high and haven’t attracted the same attention as the much more impressive pyramids nearby, yet they are real wonders of engineering skill. ‘You know these blocks were quarried out of the Sphinx pit itself?’ I asked Hammoudi.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Big buggers, though, aren’t they? How the hell did they lift them?’
‘That’s a good question. Some of them are reckoned to weigh two hundred tons — that’s nearly three times as much as most of the blocks used in the Great Pyramid. Even a modern gantry-crane — the type used in shipyards — can only handle about a hundred tons.’
Hammoudi looked unimpressed. ‘And don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘they didn’t have gantry-cranes in those days. Come on, let’s get out of this garbage lot.’
We went out through the exit, past a couple of tourist police asleep on their chairs. The aerobics team had gone and the TV crew were packing up their cameras and reflecting mirrors. We walked down the hill towards the bus park in the blistering heat. A knot of tourists in white sunhats was queuing to embark on a luxury coach, anxious to be back in its air-conditioned interior. They looked depressed, I thought. A few touts pestered them listlessly, holding up stuffed camels and soapstone models of the pyramids. In years past this place would have been packed with foreigners on a Friday, but the tourist trade was in the doldrums. It had been that way ever since the last terrorist massacre at Luxor when the Militants had shot and mutilated a bunch of foreigners — men, women and children, whose only crime was that they’d come for a looksee at the ancient ruins. What a debacle that had been, I thought. The foreign press didn’t know the half of it. The Militants had even shot up a couple of police stations and only a handful of troopers had had the guts to shoot back. The few wounded on the terrorist side had been topped by their own men to stop them squealing, and the Anti-Terrorist Squad had been unable to identify any of the stiffs, or even to say for sure whether they were Egyptians. You couldn’t blame the tourists for not wanting to come here, but the decline in the industry had hit the country hard. Of course, things were slowly getting better. There were more cops on the street, and more visitors were arriving as confidence was regained, but everyone knew that one more stroke like the Luxor fiasco would put the mockers on the business for ever.
It was good to get under the awning of a soft drinks stall. We were the only customers there, and we sat on stools right up against the ice box while the barman dipped into it and brought out two bottles of Canada Dry so cold the stuff was almost frozen. I sipped the drink and gasped at its coldness. In a few seconds the liquid had worked its way to the pores, soaking me in sweat. Hammoudi drank half the bottle in one go, burped, then wiped his mouth with the hairy back of a hand. He lit another Cleopatra. I sipped and waited for his gambit, but he concentrated on his cigarette and ignored me until I caved in.
‘You didn’t come here just to quiz me about ancient history,’ I said.
He made a wry face, the big, marble-smooth features shattering and reforming. ‘No, I didn’t. Something has come up.’
I almost choked on my soda. ‘I knew it!’ I said. ‘What the hell is it this time?’
‘Something quite interesting.’
‘Look, unless it’s got at least one donkey’s foot, I’m not interested. I’ve been sidetracked too many times, and this is my day off, all right.’
‘All right,’ Hammoudi said, adopting a sympathetic tone that I’d learned to be wary of. ‘I just wondered if you’d ever heard of a guy called Adam Ibram, that’s all.’
‘You mean
Doctor
Adam Ibram, the American-Egyptian egghead who worked for NASA. Sure I’ve heard of him. I read in the paper a few days back he was over here for a visit.’
‘Yep, his final visit. Some assholes shot him dead in a coffee shop in Khan al-Khalili this morning.’
I paused in the act of sipping my drink. ‘The Yanks won’t like it. Wasn’t Ibram a big wheel in the States?’
‘That’s right. Born in Egypt but brought up and educated in the US A. He’d become a real big honcho. Advisor to the U S president, no less, on environmental issues, and almost every other damn issue. You name it; he was boned up on it. The U S ambassador bent our minister of the interior’s ear as soon as the body was found, demanding to let his FBI office run the investigation. The minister OK’d it, but on the understanding a senior Egyptian detective would be top dog. His Excellency probably thought it would be just a rubber stamp job, but the minister told me he wanted someone who would put Egypt’s interests first, and had naturally thought of yours truly. I was flattered, actually. You know how much I appreciate the Yanks.’
I horse-laughed openly this time. Hammoudi knew well enough that I was the product of a short-lived fling between my Egyptian mother and the American father who’d dumped me as a kid, leaving me to grow up hard as a street boy in the bazaars of Aswan. It was water under the bridge to me now, but I guessed secretly that the Colonel had added it to the list of grudges against the Yanks he’d been compiling for years. Hammoudi was well known for his patriotism and his dislike of foreign meddling in Egypt’s affairs. That was one reason he’d been tolerated for so long despite his remarkable and almost unique inability to lick the asses of his superiors.
