Firebird (3 page)

‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘What happened to your duty assistant?’

Hammoudi looked at me with feigned indignation. ‘You know I can’t trust anyone else on the squad,’ he said. ‘Remember the Shadowmen? I still reckon someone on the team tipped them off. You’re all I’ve got.’

It was a sad admission, I thought, for someone who’d spent most of his life as a cop, but it was probably true. Hammoudi was a member of the despised Coptic minority, and had had to work his way up by sheer ability and devotion to duty. Any other man as good as he was would have been a general by now, but first he was a Copt, then a Sa’idi — a southerner — and to cap it all there’d been an enquiry a few years back about a subversive leader he’d allegedly allowed to escape. I happened to know the allegation was true, but I doubt anyone else on the force did. Hammoudi had kept his trap shut and in the end there’d been no evidence. Anyway, the Colonel was too smooth an operator, too obviously loyal to the country and too successful at what he did to be got rid of that easily.

‘What if the FBI don’t want me?’ I asked.

‘Sod them, Sammy. Their official brief is to “assist” local police on cases involving American property, interests or citizens, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, but those guys are mavericks. Plenty of times they’ve arrested suspects in foreign countries without the government’s approval.’

‘I know. As it happens, the FBI boss has already assigned a detective to the case.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah. Shit. That’s why I want to get down there now, before the FBI have stomped over every bit of evidence that might be of value. Let’s make damned sure we get the truth, even if we have to keep it under our hats.’

I swivelled my baseball cap round and scratched under it with my free hand doubtfully, knowing I couldn’t refuse. If I had been any other officer on the team, Hammoudi would just have ordered me to hit the street on the double and that would have been it. But he and I had a special understanding. Ever since I’d finished police training school, Hammoudi had appointed himself my guardian angel — a sort of father-confessor and back-up rolled into one. He’d taught me more about detective work than all the training school instructors put together. I’d never stopped being amazed at the information Hammoudi had at his fingertips — the big man’s sources had got me out of tight spots more than once, not only with punters but also with the top brass. I guessed that he’d chosen me as a sort of personal successor — almost the son he’d never had. Hammoudi always said he hadn’t had time to get married and have children, but women found him attractive, and I’d always been staggered how easily he seemed to find willing partners.

He cocked an inquisitive eye at me. ‘Well?’ he said, glancing at his watch.

I finished my Canada Dry. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘
Yana
binna
.’

‘Good man,’ he said, draining his soda, ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

‘No you won’t. You never do.’

I stood up and passed a hand through my hair. It was long overdue trimming, and I knew there was a three day stubble on my chin. Apart from my leather jacket and baseball cap, I was wearing a black sweatshirt, jeans so ancient they might have been designed by Fred Flintstone, and a pair of trainers only slightly less venerable.

Hammoudi watched me for a minute, chuckling. ‘Don’t worry if you’re not dressed for dinner,’ he said. ‘After all, it’s only the FBI .’

We sauntered up to Hammoudi’s unmarked Mercedes diesel, parked badly near the sidewalk. Mercifully, the Colonel had remembered to put up a cardboard sunshade on the windscreen, and the seats were still cool. As I settled in and clicked the seatbelt, Hammoudi nursed the big car into the street, his oversize hands gripping the wheel like he wanted to wrench it apart. Traffic was sparse. From Al-Malik Salem Bridge the Nile looked blue and calm — cool enough to dive into — and as we crossed the stream I looked up to see a silver shape dropping out of the sun. I realized suddenly that it was a grey heron, and I watched fascinated as it spiralled towards us on the thermals, its crested head haloed in sunlight as though it was on fire. As a kid in the south I’d spent hours lying on the riverbank watching herons. I loved the way their necks curved into an almost perfect ‘S’, the disdainful way they shook their wings when you approached them, the way they waited like statues for ever in the shallows, moving one leg almost imperceptibly forwards until the spiked beak flashed down like an ice-pick, and came up with a silver fish impaled on it, shimmering in the sunlight. I watched the bird now, the uplifted wings picked out in flame and thought of the Winged Disc that you found almost everywhere in ancient Egyptian inscriptions. Suddenly a phrase drifted into my head unbidden, and I heard myself muttering, ‘
I
have
gone
forth
as
the
phoenix
,
in
the
hope
of
life
eternal
.’

‘What?’ Hammoudi asked, but I shrugged and he didn’t press it. He was well used to my irrational outbursts by now. I looked ahead to see a traffic cop with a dirty white band on his cap, who was waving us on with whistles and languorous movements of the hands. When I glanced back the heron was nowhere to be seen, and whether I’d imagined it I was no longer certain.

After that I rode in a kind of daze as we followed the line of the Roman aqueduct, skirting around the stark dust-coloured sugar-loafs of Muqattam, on which the citadel of Mohammad Ali stood, with its array of castellations, onion-roofs and pinnacles like an image from Walt Disney’s
Aladdin
. The streets were crowded here with family groups, some of them sitting in corners sharing food set out on newspapers. Giza had been almost deserted, but half of Cairo, it seemed, was spending its day off at the old fortress. It was only when we reached the twin mosques of Rifai and Sultan Hassan, rising sheer out of the maze of streets like the walls of icebergs, that I snapped out of it and tweaked my head into some sort of reasoning mode. ‘What time was the incident?’ I asked.

‘Body was found at nine thirty,’ Hammoudi said, ‘in the back room of a kebab-joint-cum-coffee-house, with a bullet wound smack in the middle of the forehead, and others in the chest and legs. Eyewitnesses said three men were involved, but the only one who saw the actual shooting was a waiter who happened to be coming out of the john. They got him too, but he survived. A plain clothes officer from National Security who’d been mingling with the crowds went through Ibram’s pockets and found his U S passport, wallet and credit cards.’

‘No theft motive then?’

Hammoudi chewed his lips silently. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘The perps were disturbed, of course.’

‘Anyone identify them?’

‘No, they were wearing
shamaghs
across their faces, and some onlookers claimed they were carrying sub-machine pistols.’

‘Sounds like a terrorist job.’

‘Sssh!’ Hammoudi hissed. He glanced at me urgently. ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention the dreaded “T” word. You want to give the minister a coronary thinking of those thousands of dollars that won’t be pouring into the economy from petrified tourists? This is strictly an SID investigation with a little help from our friends. The Anti-Terrorist Squad haven’t even been tasked.’

I concentrated on the road and said nothing, but I knew there had to be more to it than he was letting on. I’d worked with him long enough to know he hadn’t come all the way to Giza to get me to investigate a simple homicide.

2

In Sayyidna Al-Hussayn Square the police had rigged up a wall of yellow and black striped crash-barriers to keep out tourists and nosey-parkers, and a squad of blackjackets with red bands on their berets stood on guard outside with pump-action shotguns and Kalashnikovs. The square was famous as one of the entrances to the bazaar of Khan al-Khalili, the sprawling warren of shops and artisans’ workshops that had been the heart of the walled city of Cairo in medieval times. It was named after a man called Jarkas al-Khalili — a fourteenth-century prince who’d set up a huge khan or caravanserai here where Persian merchants could hole up and sell goods shipped by camel-caravan from as far away as India and China. That must have been an amazing joint — the Hilton of its day, and then some. While the traders found rooms on the upper floors, their camels were stabled in the courtyard below. The precious merchandise — rare stones, pearls, perfumes, porcelain, carpets, cottons, spices and silks — was stowed safely in tiny warehouses built into the ground floor walls. The Khan’s courtyard doubled as a bustling market where the merchants erected stalls and bargained with their clients over mint tea. Eventually the trading had spilled over into the area outside the walls, which had grown into a sprawl of crooked dark alleys where anything and everything could be bought and sold. By the time the Turks made their successful takeover bid for Egypt in the sixteenth century, Khan al-Khalili had become one of the most important trading centres in the whole Middle East.

A young lieutenant in clean black cotton combats and jump boots waved the Mercedes to a halt, and crossed his palm with a finger, silently demanding our ID. While he inspected our cards I glanced round at the small crowd that had gathered outside. Two TV teams were already setting up their gear from the back of vans, one Egyptian state TV, and the other CNN. A local TV reporter pushed through the crowd and pressed a bulb-shaped microphone right into the car’s open window. ‘Is it true this is a terrorist murder, sir?’ he demanded.

‘No comment,’ Hammoudi growled. He snatched back the ID cards from the lieutenant, who saluted smartly as the car pulled into the square.

Sayyidna al-Hussayn Square was named after the nineteenth century mosque whose austere stone edifice bounded the whole of its northeastern side. The north-western side was a solid row of teashops and kebab joints stretching to the corner of the famous al-Muski alley, broken off-centre by a shadowy tunnel that opened into the depths of the Khan itself. Patrol cars and unmarked mini-buses were parked haphazardly around an oblong area in the centre of the square, where strong steel railings needlessly defended a few metres of sunblasted shrubs and dead grass. Normally the square was packed with tourists, shoppers, bootblacks, beggars and touts, just as it had been for centuries. Today, though, there were only clusters of stern-faced men and a few women in sombre suits and black uniforms, hanging about listlessly as if waiting to be told what to do. As I closed the car door, the heat slammed me like a hammer. It was just after midday. The body had been found at nine thirty, so the wheels had got in motion pretty sharply, I thought. That was the Yanks for you. The teahouse where Ibram had been shot was pretty easy to spot — the whole place had been surrounded by yellow incident tape on weighted stands — American incident tape, I presumed, since it formed an oblong of almost perfect right angles. The place was called Gahwat az-Zahra — Flower Coffeeshop — and there was nothing much to distinguish it from the rest of the row, except, I noticed, that it had a public telephone sign outside and a notice in English and Arabic reading
You
Can
Telephone
From
Here
. There were bare tables and chairs in the street for the tea — and coffee — drinkers, and inside tables spread with checked tablecloths for customers eating. As we approached, a black-uniformed captain separated himself from a huddle and saluted Hammoudi.

‘Good afternoon, Colonel,’ he said. ‘Good to see you on the job.’

‘What’s going on?’ Hammoudi growled.

‘The Americans have taken over, sir,’ the captain said. ‘They won’t let any of our boys through the tape.’ He gestured to a tall, massive American with a craggy face and spectacles, who was standing at the tape barrier holding a clipboard and a pen.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Hammoudi said. He assumed his most truculent expression and strode straight up to the FBI man. I tagged along behind. ‘What’s this about not letting my men into the incident area?’ he demanded in passable English. The American just grinned at him sleepily. He was almost as tall as the Colonel and wore a pistol in a black shoulder holster over a white shirt that was damp with perspiration. A heavy walkie talkie hung in a pouch at his belt, and an ID card with a photo attached to his shirt pocket read ‘Special Agent Craig, FBI’.

‘Sorry,’ Craig said. His voice rasped like he’d eaten sandpaper. ‘No can do, buddy. Legat’s orders. No one but FBI goes through the wire until the chief investigating officer arrives.’

‘I
am
the chief investigating officer,’ Hammoudi said, holding up an ID card inscribed in both English and Arabic. ‘And I am a full colonel, so you can call me sir.’

The FBI man looked at the card but remained non-plussed. ‘OK...
sir
,
’
he said, ‘your name’s on the list.’ He glanced at me, taking in my antediluvian jeans and sneakers. ‘But who’s this guy?’ he asked. ‘Is he a cop?’

‘This is Lieutenant Sammy Rashid of the SID,’ Hammoudi said, ‘my investigating detective on this case.’

I presented my ID, but the FBI man scanned the list and shook his head. ‘Sorry. The Legat only specified one local officer. Your name isn’t on this list. I can’t let you in.’

Hammoudi fixed the agent with a ferocious stare. ‘OK, Special Agent Craig, or whatever you call yourself. This is Cairo, not Chicago, and I’m in charge of the case. I have shown you my ID. You have exactly ten seconds to stand aside and let us both through your bloody “wire”, otherwise — you see those men over there?’ He half turned and gestured to the platoon of blackjackets at the barrier. ‘I will order them to get in here, take your tape apart and use it as toilet paper. And you can explain
that
to the Legat. Let’s not forget you are guests in this country, and believe me, those men will do as I say.’

I had to admire the agent’s cool. ‘Sir,’ Craig said, ‘I must advise you we have a Tactical Unit deployed for protection. There are powerful scopes trained on you right now. Anyone who threatens U S personnel or property will be taken out.’

Hammoudi didn’t turn a hair. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you will be committing an act of aggression against friendly government forces in their own country. I’m sure President Clinton will be pleased to hear about it. I am still ordering my men in, and you still have ten seconds.’

For the first time the big American looked uncertain. He shook his head slowly as if dealing with unreasonable savages. ‘OK,’ he said finally, picking his walkie talkie out of its pouch and flicking the ‘send’ button. ‘Hello, sir,’ he rasped in his buzz-saw voice, ‘this is Craig.’ I wondered why Americans always seemed to shout. With a voice like that, the guy hardly needed a radio anyway. ‘Sir,’ Craig went on, ‘there’s a guy here says he’s the CIO —a Colonel, er...Hammoudi. He’s on the list and his ID checks out. But he’s got this kinda doohickey-looking sidekick with him claims he’s the investigating detective. Got ID but he’s not on the list. I told him he couldn’t pass the wire, but it looks like an incident might be brewing, and there are TV cameras out here.’

The FBI man released the ‘send’ switch and held the radio to his ear. I could just make out the low crackle of a voice. Finally, Craig said, ‘Got it, sir,’ and slipped the walkie talkie back into its sheath. ‘The Legat’s inside there with a bunch of forensics and photographers,’ he said. ‘You can proceed, but I have to ask you both to log on.’

We signed the sheet on the clipboard and the agent stood aside. As we ducked under the yellow tape, I asked, ‘Who is this Legat guy, anyway?’

‘FBI foreign station chief,’ Hammoudi said. ‘It’s one of those slick words the Yanks make up because they’re in too much of a rush to say “Legal Attaché”. Legat is a cushy number given to FBI officers who’ve proved themselves — this one is a guy called Marvin. Used to be FBI Assistant Director for Special Operations.’

I nodded and looked around the teashop. From outside it had seemed small and claustrophobic, but inside it was surprisingly deep, and obviously older than you would have judged from the exterior. The ceiling was high and crisscrossed with Moorish-style vaulted arches painted in black and red stripes. Beyond the tables was a bar of hardwood carved with ancient Egyptian symbols — ankhs, Wedjet eyes, falcons and cobras. I followed Hammoudi through the open door to the back room, where a knot of FBI men in suits or white labcoats was grouped around the body.

Doctor Adam Ibram lay on the floor staring upwards with wide eyes that were partly obliterated by pools of coagulated blood. The blood had soaked into his shirt and dark suit so completely that they had become an almost solid mass. Blood was liberally spattered over the floor and walls. There was a gaping hole in the middle of Ibram’s forehead, and other, smaller wounds scattered over his chest, stomach and thighs. One of his shoes was missing and lay in a corner nearby. There was a nauseating butchery smell in the air — flies everywhere — and I struggled to stop myself losing my breakfast. I’d seen dead bodies before, but I’d never got accustomed to it like Hammoudi, who looked about as concerned as a man weighing up the quality of steaks in a meat market. A telephone swung from its coin box near the body, and at the far end of the room I saw the open door of an Arab-style squat toilet. A few steps beyond the WC there was an entrance arch, covered with a baize curtain, and beyond that I saw a fan revolving slowly, set into a niche in the main wall.

‘Now we know why Ibram chose this teashop and not the others,’ I said.

‘You mean to take a dump?’ Hammoudi said, grinning.

I smiled. The Colonel’s black humour seemed an affront to propriety, but I had long ago realized that it was a defensive mechanism. If you stayed too grim in the presence of death, the horror could overwhelm you.

‘No, I mean to make a phone call. This is the only joint on the street with a public phone. There’s a big sign right outside. Ibram had to get in touch with somebody urgently, and that phone call cost him his life.’

At the sound of our voices, one of the FBI men glanced up. He was tall — taller than me, anyway — and he looked muscular, with a gymnast’s chest and beefy arms and legs. His face was creased with lines that looked like they’d been gouged in with a cut-throat, the hair a honed-down silver mat. His eyes were deep-set and guarded, his mouth turned down at the corners giving you the feeling that he could be a very mean son-of-a-bitch indeed.

‘Colonel Hammoudi?’ he said, holding out a hand. The accent was clipped — probably New England, I thought. ‘I’m Thomas Marvin, Legat to the US embassy here. I run the FBI team. Glad to have you aboard.’

Marvin smiled with his mouth, but his eyes stayed cold as permafrost, and he spoke down to Hammoudi as if he was a new kid on the block. The American gave me the same condescending onceover, and I realized that my ragged jacket and jeans were hardly a match for his lightweight Armani suit. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

‘Lieutenant Rashid, my investigating detective,’ Hammoudi said.

Marvin fixed his piercing eyes on my prehistoric trainers. ‘We already have an investigating detective.’

‘Not a local one,’ Hammoudi said.

Marvin frowned nastily. ‘This is an FBI case. My ambassador and your minister agreed that there should be only one local officer — a senior detective who was to act as liaison. That’s you, Colonel.’ He shot me a glance as cold as an ice axe. ‘And with all due respect, this is a job for hard-core professionals.’

‘I don’t believe in rubber stamping reports,’ Hammoudi said, ‘if that’s what you expected. My instructions are that I am in charge of this case. I can appoint whom I like.’

‘I’m going to have to talk to my ambassador about this.’

I ignored the bickering and knelt down to examine the body. The limb and torso wounds formed a pattern, I saw, and the size and colour of the entries told me the shots had been fired from a few metres away, probably from the door. They’d also been fired from submachine guns, because there was a burst pattern on the body, moving down the chest, to the abdomen, to the legs, and all submachine guns tended to pull down. The head wound was quite different, though. The flesh around the entry was black with powder burns, showing that it was a hard contact wound — the muzzle of the weapon had been laid flush against the skin. I lifted one of the limp hands gently. It was cold to the touch, and as I held it between a thumb and two fingers, I suddenly felt my senses twinge. My skin was tingling — a sure sign that I was losing control — and my heart began to thud. It was as if a chasm had opened in the fabric of the universe and I was falling inside it, slipping over the edge of darkness. I fought against it desperately but it was too strong. A wave of nausea engulfed me. The hubbub around me subsided, and the room went out of focus until I was suspended in a void where the only sound was the eerie soughing of the desert wind. At once, I started to get glimpses — faint disjointed images of a sphinx, constellations of stars with Orion’s belt burning brightly, the sun rising over the desert like a giant orange balloon. I saw a vast underground structure filled with huge pillars like giant trees, and a woman with the head of a lioness. I saw images of Doctor Adam Ibram running through a maze of dark alleys, of his face emerging into the light, of a man in a black suit lurking in the shadows. I saw a tall woman in Bedouin clothes with a veiled face, saw Ibram tearing up something with the help of a blunt knife. The last thing I saw was a strange shadow creature with projecting, spidery limbs, whose eyes burned like beacons from beneath a shroud of darkness. I began to shake uncontrollably. Someone — it must have been Hammoudi — shook me suddenly and hard, and I opened my eyes to let real time come flooding in. I knew that only seconds had passed, but in those moments I’d been completely out of it, and I thanked my lucky stars Hammoudi was there to cover up for me as he had done so many times in the past. I stood up, sighing, shaking my head and blinking rapidly to bring myself round.