Mecca for Murder Page 10

  “Yeah, I want it.”

  “What about a visa?”

  “I’ll get that. Got some drag.”

  “Take it easy, will you? I almost wish they’d hold up your passport some more. They had nothing to hold it on, though.”

  “Say hello to Betty.”

  “Thanks. I’ll drop the passport in the mail on my way home. You know something? You should have stayed in the F.B.I.”

  “You too.”

  “Nuts. Take it easy. Please. So long, Chet.”

  I hung up, and saw a shadow on the other side of the pebble glass of the door. I sighed and wondered how long it would take to get rid of him. When the door opened, I changed my mind.

  It was Davisa Tyler.

  “Sit down, Chester,” she said. “Does that empty gin bottle mean there’s none left? I could stand a drink.”

  “One with a seal on it,” I said, and fished the bottle out of the deep double drawer on the left side of the desk. I broke the seal with my thumb nail while Davisa sat down in the client chair. She was wearing khaki slacks and a striped crew-neck polo shirt. Her shoulders were too wide for the polo shirt, so that the sleeves didn’t fit right and exposed her arms almost to the armpits. Her upper arms looked as hard as cable. I poured a quarter of a tumbler full of gin and gave it to her. It looked like water and she drank it like water, then screwed up her walnut-colored face the way Humphrey Bogart does when he’s angry, said “Ah,” and thumped the glass down on the desk. I poured some more for her and she sipped it slowly.

  “I skipped my bail, you know,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you were out on bail.”

  “Hell, yes. I’ve been arraigned for the murder of my daughter-in-law. Funny, don’t you think?”

  “Do you?”

  “Hell, no. I skipped my bail because I had to see you. Then I’ll go back to Virginia and stay there. I hear you couldn’t stop Lyman.”

  “But that isn’t what you came to see me about.”

  “Chester, I’m here because I still have faith in you. I’ve got to have faith in someone. I don’t believe in miracles, but I need a miracle. My lawyer took a look at the facts and—another drink, will you please?—said they looked bad. Of course they look bad. Because that God-damn Moslem whore won’t talk.” She sipped her third drink. A muscle in her cheek twitched. “Chester,” she said, “I’m afraid I’ve had it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you think I killed Suzanne?”

  “Do you give a damn what I think?”

  “Then how would you like to earn five thousand dollars?”

  “Like I earned your one thousand?”

  “No. This is different. Win, lose, or draw, it’s yours.”

  “To do what?”

  She stood up and leaned on her hands on the desk. “When Suzanne shot herself, Fawzia Totah saw me. She was standing right there—” Davisa shut her eyes as if she were conjuring a vision of the scene as it had been “—by the guest house. I waved to her and she saw me and then Suzanne shot herself. I couldn’t possibly have done it, and Fawzia knows that and Fawzia is the only one who knows it. My lawyer says if I can’t get Fawzia to talk, I had better plead guilty. Temporary insanity, he says. If I don’t cop a plea, they’ll hang murder one on me. That’s what he says.”

  “What about the five thousand bucks?”

  “Fawzia—”

  “Make Fawzia talk? I can’t do that.”

  “Go after Fawzia. To save her life.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Look at me, Chester. A smart old dame, that’s me. But I outfoxed myself.”

  “You outfoxed yourself how?”

  “By ordering the execution of the one person who could save my hide. Give me another drink.” I gave it to her. It all came out in words of one syllable. Her call to ’Amman, Jordan, arranging the execution. The ease with which it could be accomplished on the pilgrimage. Her attempt to call it off after her arraignment and release on bail.

  “I couldn’t get hold of him,” she said. “He had already left ’Amman on his Hajj. There is no way to reach him. Unless he can be stopped in person, he’s going to kill Fawzia. If he kills Fawzia—” Davisa drew a finger across her own throat.

  “You want me to go there?”

  “And stop him. Yes. For five thousand dollars.”

  “You just asked him to do it and he said he would? What kind of a barrel have you got him over?”

  “No kind of a barrel. He’s a fanatic. He figures I can help swing American public opinion in favor of the Umma. He’ll do anything for that.”

  “No one’s that much of a fanatic. The guy probably has another reason you don’t know about.”

  “You don’t know Izzed-een Shafik.”

  I lit a cigarette. It took half a minute to do it just right, to inhale the first puff and kill the match with it just before my fingers got burned. “Don’t you read the papers?” I said finally. “I know Izzed-een Shafik.”

  Davisa said something, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of Izzed-een, the Umma fanatic with the Ivy-League look and the Dasher Abbandando vocabulary. Izzed-een and Fawzia.

  “Well?” Davisa said.

  “I’ll want a certified check,” I said.

  Davisa smiled and got a man’s wallet from the pocket of her khaki trousers. “I thought you would want a certified check,” she said. “I have one with me.”

  I took the check and looked at it. Five thousand dollars’ worth, and certified. I dropped the check in the middle drawer of the desk.

  “You’ll do it,” Davisa said. “You’ll do it for me, won’t you?”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Chester, you don’t really think I killed Suzanne?”

  “I don’t care if you killed the whole population of Toano. I’ll take your gratuity, Davisa. And I’ll earn it, if bringing Fawzia back alive is earning it. But not for you. I was going after Fawzia anyhow. I want you to know that.”

  Davisa smiled at me. It was not the smile of a good loser. Davisa would not be a good loser. It was a winner’s smile. “That’s all right,” she said. She took the wallet out again. She showed me another check—certified, for five thousand dollars. “I was prepared to go as high as ten,” she said. “So I guess we’re even.”

  We didn’t shake hands. Lean and athletic, Davisa headed for the door. “I never left Virginia,” she said.

  When I nodded my head a fraction of an inch, she got out of there.

  I spent ten more minutes in the office, calling another alumnus of the F.B.I. who now worked for the Army. I asked him a lot of questions about Izzed-een Shafik, an Arab fanatic who could somehow speak Brooklynese American, and about the war record, if any, of Lew Lash. I had nothing on those two, and the Army is usually a fine place to start.

  Then I went out into the bright hot summer sunlight.

  The Good Hope Hospital was a four-story white brick building half a mile from the Anacostia River. It was a private hospital and an expensive hospital and you could tell as soon as you entered the lobby. It looked like the lobby of a first-class resort hotel, the decor tasteful and subdued, the lighting indirect, the visitors all dressed expensively.

  The bey had a private room on the top floor with a terrace and a view of Garfield Park. He was alone on the terrace, fat and flabby in a pair of Bermuda shorts and soaking up the late afternoon sun, when I got there. His head was as bald as the light globes they hang outside police precinct stations. His hairy body was sweating, the sweat running down his chest and disappearing into the folds of flesh there. His legs were short and looked bowed as he reclined on the chaise longue. He sprang up lithely as he heard me come in and minced over to me with the small quick steps of the active fat man. He shook my hand with both of his.

  “I’m delighted you called, Mr. Drum,” he said. “We of the Islamic Center owe you a debt of gratitude which we can never hope to repay. If there is anything we can do. Anything.”

  “Ho
w are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Splendid. Splendid. There is nothing wrong with me now. I need a rest. I need my strength for the Hajj. You have no notion of what it is like in Mecca in your month of August. The Prophet must have ordained the pilgrimage at this time of year as an extra test of the faith of the faithful.”

  “I’d like to find out what it’s like in Mecca in August,” I said.

  “To go there, you mean?”

  “To go there. On the Hajj. With a pilgrim’s visa.”

  Azaayim Bey blinked his small eyes and smiled at me. “Welcome,” he said. “I welcome you, my son. Allah welcomes you. You are converting?”

  “You want me to lie to you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not converting. But I want a pilgrim’s visa.”

  “That’s impossible. I would be issuing it under false pretenses. No one but a Moslem can enter Mecca, particularly during the Hajj. It is written. It is law.”

  “I didn’t say you owed me a debt of gratitude which you could never hope to repay. That’s what you said. I need it now. This is what I need.”

  “But why?”

  “I’m a Christian,” I said. “It has nothing to do with religion; it’s a personal matter. It’s not important to the world, but it’s important to me and some other people. Including Fawzia Totah.”

  “Fawzia Totah of the center?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Drum, ask me for something else. Anything else, however large.”

  “I’ve already named it,” I said.

  Azaayim Bey had a look almost of physical pain on his face. “I want to help you,” he said. “I would do anything … Can’t you tell me at least why you must go there?”

  I shook my head.

  “They will stone you. They will kill you. What do you know of the ritual? And you have yellow hair.”

  “So does Lyman Lee Tyler, your new convert.”

  “They will vouch for him as a convert.”

  “You can vouch for me as a convert.”

  “Once I saw a man, an exiled German officer living in Lebanon, and a Christian, on the Hajj. He was doing it to win a considerable wager and he had lived in Lebanon among Moslems for years, so he knew something of the ritual. But they found him out and at the ritual stoning of the pillars he was stoned—by thousands of people, Mr. Drum. What was left could scarcely be recognized as a man.”

  “All right. It’s dangerous. But it’s got to be done to save a life. A Moslem life. Fawzia Totah’s.”

  “That is the truth?”

  “That is the truth.”

  He turned away from me and walked out to his terrace. He stood there for a long time, a very fat man in an outsized pair of Bermuda shorts. I barely heard his voice when he spoke. “Come to the center tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “You will get your visa.” He added, in an almost inaudible voice, “Assalamu aleikum.” He looked at his wrist watch and faced southeast and prostrated himself on the balcony.

  There was something solemn about the way he performed his rak’aa. A small, fat toadlike man, but solemn as a fugue by Bach. I liked him, suddenly. I wanted to thank him but felt foolish waiting there while he went through the ritual of his religion. I was an intruder.

  In Mecca I would be an intruder too—bucking a death sentence. I went outside and climbed into my car. In less than forty-eight hours I would be on my way to Saudi Arabia.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Late on Sunday afternoon, the tenth day of Dhu’l-Hijja, the twelfth month of the Moslem calendar, the month of pilgrimage, our ancient C-47 jerked and rolled out of the superheated sky to land at the Jidda airport. I peeled my drenched jacket away from my soaking shirt and returned my pilgrim’s manual to my breast pocket.

  It was like an oven in that plane. The other passengers, mostly North African Arabs from the Mahgreb and Egypt, were retching emptily. The big cargo door of the converted transport opened and I waited for a cooling breath of fresh air from Jidda, the Saudi Arabian port of entry for Mecca. But the heat, if anything, increased. My legs trembled from salt loss as I staggered toward the hatch. Azaayim Bey came after me mutely, the fingers of his hand on my elbow. I turned and he said, “So far it was easy. Now the trouble begins.”

  So far it had been easy. A pressurized, air-conditioned DC-7 had taken us across the Atlantic to Madrid. After a brief stopover, we had boarded a Spanish Constellation bound for Cairo, Egypt. The Constellation had also been pressurized, air-conditioned and bi-lingually, beautifully stewardessed. The Saudi Arabian C-47 had awaited us in Cairo, on its rudder the crossed white swords of Islam on a field of green. Here our party of ten Moslems from America had been joined by the Mahgreb Arabs and the Egyptian fellahin. From Cairo the bucket-seated C-47 soared southeast across the Red Sea. The heat mounted and we stopped at Medina to pick up three Saudi Arabian VIPs who looked with distaste at the huddled fellahin, and with curiosity and suspicion at Azaayim Bey and his fellow American-dwelling pilgrims. After the take-off from Medina, the turbulence boiled up from the Saudi Arabian wasteland, tossing the C-47 so violently that all safety straps were secured for the remainder of the flight.

  Now, as Azaayim Bey and I made our way across the apron of the landing field at Jidda, hundreds of yelling, gesticulating pilgrims ran back and forth or circled aimlessly in search of their belongings. An experienced hand at this, Azaayim Bey had sent our belongings ahead to the Hotel al-Taysir, but even so it took us half an hour, to fight through the crowds to the customs gate.

  A sweating Arab in a khaffiya examined our passports. We all wore Western-style clothing, and that should have meant we were employees of Aramco, a vast, partially American-owned oil company which helps the Arabians pump almost a billion barrels of crude oil a year. But attached to our passports were pilgrimage visas. We were soon ringed by unfriendly faces, and Azaayim Bey spoke rapidly, patiently, in Arabic. Most of the attention was centered on me. I was an American citizen, Azaayim Bey told me as the uproar continued. Was I not also a Christian? No unbeliever had entered the forbidden city for thirteen hundred years. Someone else quickly amended that. Entered, yes, Azaayim Bey translated, but returned to tell of it never.

  Finally, our passports were surrendered to the man in the khaffiya, who was an agent of the Lujnat al-Hajj, the Saudi Arabian pilgrimage committee which would issue us way passes instead of passports. I didn’t like that, and told Azaayim Bey. But he shrugged and said I would not see my passport again until I returned from Mecca and the forbidden city; and that was that. The way passes? We would receive them at our hotel when our passports were validated.

  We found passage on a rickety old bus which clattered along a dusty, winding road from the airport to the heart of Jidda. We sat gratefully atop the bus in the baggage rack. Jidda was a hot, gasping, dying animal of a city. The humidity was unbelieveable, although Azaayim Bey told me it rarely rained. You sweated and it clogged your pores and soaked your clothing and left a scalding, irritating acid deposit on your skin. Soon you were scratching everywhere, scratching uninhibitedly because everyone else was doing it, but scratching without relief, like the fierce Bedouins who came from the hills for their vitamin C shots to relieve heat rash.

  We confirmed our reservations at the Hotel al-Taysir and learned that all of us would share one medium-sized room which contained a dozen cots and nothing else—at the royal equivalent of about ten American dollars a head.

  Supper consisted of weakly sugared, slightly cooler than tepid water, a plate of roast lamb buried in rice and topped with an icing of yogurt, the whole thing called mausaf, and thin strips of paklava pastry. None of us was hungry, but Azaayim Bey suggested that we eat to keep up our energy in the enervating heat.

  At dusk a muezzin chanted the call to prayer. Afterward, Azaayim Bey received two visitors. The first was a little old man named Anwar Sidki, the bey’s wakil—the pilgrimage equivalent of a travel agent. With Azaayim Bey as my interpreter, I asked him about the earlier
American party; but he said they had already checked out of the hotel for the Mecca road, which meant we couldn’t follow them until we received our way-passes.

  I said, “Ask him how I would go about finding a Jordanese pilgrim. All I know is his name.”

  The bey and Anwar Sidki spoke in Arabic. Sidki chuckled, a dry sound, rasping deep in his throat. The bey said, “With half a million tourists being funneled to Mecca through Jidda, it is almost impossible. But give Sidki the man’s name and he may be able to locate him for you through his wakil.”

  “Izzed-een Shafik,” I said, and watched the bey’s eyebrows climb up his forehead toward the shining dome of his bare scalp.

  “Indeed?” he said. He gave Izzed-een’s name to Sidki, who wrote it down on a little pad hidden in the folds of his clothing. Sidki salaamed and began to withdraw, but Azaayim Bey held up his hand and said something. Sidki smiled, faced the dim and evil-smelling hallway and beckoned with a long, hooked forefinger.

  A teen-aged boy in a dirty gallabiya but a spotless white khaffiya with gleaming black leather thongs came into the room. I liked him on sight, I didn’t know why. The Arabian sun had transformed the skin of his face to the color of dark brown leather. His eyes were white slits with black pupils. He had a high-bridged Semitic nose and he smiled broadly, revealing very large, very white teeth.

  “This,” Azaayim Bey informed me, “is Anwar Sidki’s sister’s son, Mahmoud Boulos. Mahmoud’s parents are dead. Mahmoud will be your servant while you are here.”

  “My servant?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

  “Mahmoud’s parents are dead. He hung around the American school at one of the Aramco camps. He, speaks English after a fashion. He should be of tremendous help to you.”

  Mahmoud beamed and produced a string of blue beads. “To knock dead evil eye,” he said proudly, and tucked the string of beads out of sight in his gallabiya.

  “Yeah,” I told the bey. “Tremendous help.”

  “You understand,” the bey said, “that I have certain commitments. My family is due in Jidda tomorrow.” He groaned. “My wives. This year there is to be some intermingling of the sexes on the Hajj for the first time.”