Mecca for Murder Page 13

  “There is you!” a voice cried.

  I spun around and wanted to embrace what I saw. It was Mahmoud. He showed me good teeth and offered me a salaam. “At consulate they say imshi! imshi! he not here.”

  “Mahmoud,” I said, “it’s good to see you! Have you heard from Sidki?”

  “Yes, effendi. Anwar Sidki have way pass, hook or crook. But at night hasheesh dens open and Anwar Sidki forget. I too young, you too Amrikani. We wait.”

  “We wait, hell. Can you get me a burnoose or something?”

  “Mahmoud can.”

  “Then get it. Do you know exactly where Sidki is?”

  “In favorite den, street of tinworkers. Yes.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Yallah,” said Mahmoud.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was probably my imagination, but the burnoose and turban Mahmoud had found for me itched. We walked along the street of tinworkers, Mahmoud beaming proudly because he had procured the clothing for me in a matter of minutes. The dirty turban covered my blond hair. The flowing burnoose and the stoop I affected seemed to take inches off my height. My skin was lighter than we would have liked, but dusk had fallen across the Hejaz, and Mahmoud told me the interior of the hasheesh den would be lighted only by a few kerosene lamps.

  I was Mahmoud Boulos’s cousin from Pakistan. I spoke Hindi and Bengalese but none of the dialects of the Hejaz. I was here in Jidda for the Hajj and if Mahmoud Boulos seemed too young to enter the hasheesh den, Allah would forgive him because he came as interpreter for his cousin. If Allah forgave him, the proprietor of the den could do likewise.

  We entered the den through a wrought iron gate, the spikes decorated with the crescent of Islam. Beyond the gate was a short stone walkway, and then an unlocked door. We went inside the house and across a narrow hallway which smelled like a latrine, then up a flight of stairs. At the top, Mahmoud paused and looked at me. I nodded. A kerosene lamp glowed dull orange above the door.

  Mahmoud grinned from ear to ear and knocked on the door. After a little while we heard footsteps creaking across the wooden floor on the other side of the door. The door opened suddenly and a short fat man with perfectly round eyes, the pupils black as anthracite, peered out at us. He studied Mahmoud for a moment and the expression on his face was exactly like the expression on the face of a bartender who is about to tell a minor to get lost. He sneered and said, “Imshi!”

  The door began to close. Mahmoud wedged his foot in the way and spoke quickly in Arabic. The little fat man listened, then looked at me. “Pakistani?” he said.

  I smiled. “Pakistani. Pakistani.”

  “Hajji?”

  “Hajji.”

  The man offered Mahmoud another sneer, then showed us a plump, soft palm and stared at the ceiling. I loaded down the palm with a gold Arabian sovereign and the stubby fingers closed over it. When they opened, the sovereign had vanished.

  The little fat man salaamed and waved us before him into a foyer. It opened on a large room. The first thing you saw was the floor, spotted in the orange kerosene glow with spittle and phlegm. There were several groups of men huddled on bullrush chairs. Every few seconds a man would cough, choke and hack spittle. This would be followed by a loud, contented sigh. There was a sweet, cloying odor in the room.

  Mahmoud and the fat man spoke together for a moment and the boy asked me, “Do you wish it strong or weak?”

  “How does Sidki take it?”

  “The strongest, effendi.”

  “Then we want the strongest,” I said.

  Mahmoud said something and the proprietor smiled and ushered us over to one of the groups of men. I sat down on a bullrush chair. There were four men in the group and Anwar Sidki was not among them. The proprietor disappeared through a curtained alcove and I whispered to Mahmoud, “Find him, and find him fast.”

  Mahmoud drifted away toward one of the other groups. Soon the little fat man returned with the hasheesh pipe. He stood directly in front of me and mixed the pale green hasheesh pellets with charcoal inside the bottle, smiling at me all the while. He handed me the nargileh, bamboo stem foremost. The users were watching me avidly, impatiently. Only one of them had the gray, loose flesh, the sagging lids and the severely dilated pupils of the addict. He was trembling with impatience. I let my eyes rove the room, seeking Mahmoud. I couldn’t see him. The addict croaked something in Arabic and the proprietor made a noise in his throat, still watching me. His eyes seemed wary now, suspicious.

  I clutched the bamboo reed, got it between my lips and inhaled. The hasheesh smoke burned fiercely. It scorched my throat and lungs and seared through my nasal passages. It made water stream from my eyes. I began to choke and cough and spit. When I could see again, the proprietor was beaming. The addict was beaming too. He couldn’t wait. He seized the pipe as I extended it and took three deep puffs. The effect was violent. He rocked and swayed, almost rhythmically, then coughed and hacked, took one more puff and went into a paroxysm of choking, gasping and coughing while the proprietor beamed some more at the efficacy of his product.

  When the addict surrendered the pipe to the next member of our group, he leaned back in his bullrush chair, let his sagging lids close, and dreamed. I felt no kick from the hasheesh yet, and wondered about that. The pipe made the rounds swiftly, too swiftly. I looked up almost desperately for Mahmoud but couldn’t find him. Someone thrust the pipe at me and I smoked again. Instead of trying to keep the coughing bottled up this time, I let it out at once.

  After the third round, the proprietor sniffed at the tendril of smoke emerging from the bamboo reed and took the pipe with him behind the hanging. Another bullrush chair was dragged over to our group, and a man sat down. Someone tapped my shoulder. It was Mahmoud. Palsied, sweating, his face peppered with gray beard stubble, Anwar Sidki smiled at me. I smiled back and waited. Sidki looked at Mahmoud, who was standing behind me. Mahmoud said something and Sidki reached inside his dirty gallabiya with a trembling hand. He withdrew a folded sheet of parchment and gave it to me. He cackled and watched the hanging in front of the alcove expectantly. What was written on the parchment was written in Arabic.

  “Your way pass,” Mahmoud whispered.

  “But I thought my passport—”

  “It is the way pass of a Pakistani, Hassan el Tel by name.”

  “Where’s el Tel?”

  “With Allah and his reward,” Mahmoud said, shrugging. “Way pass says his home is in cool hills above Shalimar. Heat of Hejaz pluck his spirit through his nose and …”

  “He’s dead?”

  “But he lives on. You take his name. You are Hassen el Tel, effendi.”

  I thanked Sidki. I don’t think he heard me. With Mahmoud I got up and headed for the door.

  It opened before we reached it. A man clad in a double-breasted western-style jacket, a pair of khaki trousers and a fez stared at us. He looked familiar. I recognized him a moment before he spoke. He was the clerk at the al-Taysir Hotel.

  He pointed a finger at me and said clearly, in a loud, accusing voice, “Amrikani!”

  The curtain parted before the alcove. The pipe dropped and shattered on the floor. The hotel clerk jabbered excitedly, wildly. Bullrush chairs scraped back. Only the addict seemed unconcerned. He sat and dreamed.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I told Mahmoud.

  The man in the double-breasted jacket barred our way, still jabbering and pointing at me. Someone threw something, and the proprietor groaned. It was another pipe, and it shattered against the door frame, sparks flying. This brought a volley of curses from the proprietor, who waddled toward us, shaking his fist. I grasped the lapels of the hotel clerk’s jacket and shoved him out of the way. I felt unexpectedly, amazingly lightheaded. I stood, legs apart and arms folded across my chest, atop the tower of Babel while lesser mortals scurried and fought and cursed far below me in languages I didn’t understand. If I lifted my feet I would float. The knowledge brought a secret smile to my lips, a smile
of contented superiority.

  Mahmoud’s voice came to me from a vast distance. “Allah begs you, effendi. We go.”

  A face swam in front of me, rocking, dancing to the music of the spheres, the hasheesh music. On top of the face was a fez. A fist came slowly at me on the waves of music, covering immense distances with prodigious speed, growing slowly. The knuckles were brown and hairy. It seemed I had hours in which to study the knuckles as they came. Then a wave of sound engulfed me. I shook as the wave passed. I felt myself swaying. In front of me, the man with the fez was howling and sucking his knuckles.

  “Effendi!” Mahmoud pleaded from the other side of the moon.

  The face with the fez opened. It spewed venemous, incomprehensible words at me. I shrugged and grasped something and lifted it. The face floated magically above me. It screamed and screamed. I whirled. Mahmoud was laughing. It was a frightened laugh and the man in the fez was still screaming. I hurled him and there was a clatter and more screaming.

  I was descending the slope of a hillside into the Valley of Delight where the Old Man of the Mountain and his houris were waiting among their fountains.

  At the bottom of the slope someone named Chester Drum, someone I had known long ago and in another, less important life, stooped and dragged to its feet a limp package in a torn double-breasted jacket with an elasticheld fez perched crookedly above one ear. This Chester Drum said, “Why did you come here after me?”

  The fez bobbed. The face trembled and from somewhere leaked blood.

  “Hurry!” Mahmoud cried.

  “Who told you to follow me and go screaming I was an American?”

  “They come!” Mahmoud cried.

  “From Mecca,” the trembling thing croaked. “Izzed-een Shafik call from Mecca. Amrikani Drum. No Hajj for Amrikani Drum.”

  “You’re of the Umma?”

  The fez bobbed again. Above us, there was a shout. I thrust the face away from me. Feet pounded on wooden stairs. The hasheesh was still there, hovering. I was in the trough between waves of it. I still felt incredibly strong, and if that was the hasheesh it might come in handy before this night ended.

  Mahmoud took my arm, and we ran.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Above the Gate of the Prophet were the bright glittering stars of the Hejaz in the cloudless black Hejaz sky. Toward the horizon, the stars paled. Heat lightning flickered there. It was Walpurgis Nacht, Saudi Arabian style. Trucks and old buses rumbled by beneath the coral block arch of the gate. Exhaust fumes from overheated engines made the hot still air difficult to breathe.

  We spotted Azaayim Bey squatting on the baggage rack of a junior-sized bus. Mahmoud clung to my ihram and did the cursing while I did the elbowing. When we came within ten yards of the bus, I called Azaayim Bey’s name, but it was swallowed by the din of a thousand shouting voices. A man near me groaned. His eyes rolled and he would have collapsed there in the suffocating heat, but the crowd held him up, unconscious, and he was borne along with it.

  We had changed into our pilgrim shrouds at a small house not far from the Gate of the Prophet. The people there had known Mahmoud and had known what he wanted. At first the ihram had been cool and comfortable. But now in the mobs of the shrieking faithful that fought their way through the Gate of the Prophet, the white cloth had wilted and was plastered to my shoulders, my back and my legs with sweat.

  We reached the bus, and Mahmoud offered me a feeble wave and clambered through its open tail gate. I got one leg on the tail gate and another on the rear window frame and climbed up alongside Azaayim Bey.

  There were three figures with him in the darkness, two in black purdahs and another in the pilgrim shroud. Azaayim Bey was immensely fat in his ihram. He gave me a weak smile and shook my hand limply. The heat had drained him of all but the will to see the sacred Black Stone and the Valley of Arafat and the Stoning Places of Mina. He said nothing.

  I figured the two women in purdah were his wives. The third figure sat with its back toward us and had not heard me climb aboard the bus. When it finally turned around, I said, “So you did come along, after all.”

  “I told you I would,” Terry Maddox said. “I was worried about you, Chet. I got my way pass earlier from Anwar Sidki, but he said he’d have to procure the pass of a dead man for you.”

  “I’m Hassan el Tel of Shalimar, Pakistan,” I said. “Better get used to calling me that.”

  “Hassan. That’s easy.”

  We passed under the gate. We stopped on the other side for about five minutes while Saudi Arabian soldier-slaves checked our way passes. They looked twice at my blond hair in the light of their kerosene lamps but Pakistan was probably no more than a name to them, and while most of the Pakistani they had seen were dark, it was possible that some Pakistani had yellow hair. Besides, was not Hassan el Tel in the company of Al Hajj Azaayim Bey, a veteran of the pilgrimage? They also looked twice at Terry. One of them ogled her. Her hair was fair, too, and it had been shorn almost as short as a man’s. She was a pretty girl and the ihram, which exposed her right shoulder and the partial curve of her right breast, did not hide it.

  The bus rolled forward and climbed through the naked hills and the night but for a long time the glow of Jidda sat upon the hills behind us like a coronet.

  I told Terry about Fawzia and Limerock. About Davisa Tyler’s long-distance call. About what I knew personally of Izzed-een Shafik.

  When I finished she said, “You must like Fawzia very much if you came after her halfway around the world like that.”

  “Unless someone came after her, she didn’t have a chance.”

  “Still.”

  We lapsed into silence. The bus purred smoothly along. The asphalt road was unexpectedly good, its bed rising and twisting among sandstone crags. Taillights were two red eyes a dozen yards ahead of us. When we reached the top of a curving hill, you could see the long line of traffic in double file behind us. Any vehicles coming the other way would have to leave the road.

  We rolled to a stop at a check point high in the Hejaz hills. There was a turretlike fortress of sun-dried brick and a large sign lit by kerosene lamps. The message was repeated in several languages, English included. The sign said: Forbidden Area—None but Moslems permitted beyond this point.

  Our way passes were checked again. It was a tossup whether my blond hair or Terry in the ihram received more stares from the team of Saudi Arabian soldier-slaves. One of the soldiers barked something at the driver of the bus. The driver laughed, put the bus in gear. Azaayim Bey said something to one of his wives as we rolled beyond the check point.

  “What are you going to do in Mecca?” Terry asked me. “How are you going to find those people, Chet? There’ll be half a million pilgrims.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “The hasheesh has given me the strength of ten men and the courage of a lion.”

  “Oh, be serious.”

  “Okay. Fawzia and her colonel are with the first American party. With Azaayim Bey’s help, we find the first American party.”

  We passed a battered old Pontiac sedan stalled on a wide, level stretch of road shoulder. The hood was up and steam was rising into the night from the radiator. Four Arab youths sat against the Pontiac, leaning back, their elbows on the obsolete running board, sharing a nargileh and calmly waiting for their radiator to stop boiling. They were Moslems. Like Moslems everywhere in the Near East, they had all the time in the world to get where they were going.

  We didn’t.

  The bus rounded a curve, then climbed between high square sandstone bluffs. Suddenly Mecca loomed ahead of us, ringed by heat lightning, dark and brooding and massive, donjonlike, a black page torn from the dead past of superstition, and anachronism surviving in the same world as jet planes and wonder drugs and H-bombs.

  Mecca. The Forbidden City. It lay under a pall of heat and dust. Somewhere among its half-million sweating, ecstatic pilgrims was Fawzia Totah. And somewhere was Izzed-een. And everywhere was death to unbelievers. />
  The bus lurched forward toward the gate in the city wall. Mecca was a hole in the night that swallowed us.

  Chapter Twenty

  The room was on the street floor of a private home half a mile from the Mosque of the Sanctuary in Mecca, hard by the most direct route from the Jidda gate to the Gate of Greeting of the sacred mosque itself.

  Azaayim Bey put the telephone down and waddled toward me, but one of his wives stopped him and said something. He shrugged vaguely. He came over to the window where I was waiting with Terry. He said, “Dena wonders about you. If Dena wonders, you’re not safe. It means other people will wonder too. Over Dena I have a certain authority, but you realize …”

  “All right,” I said. “What about the phone call?”

  “I was able to contact the house at which the first American party was staying.”

  “Was staying?”

  “Yes. An hour ago they left for the Mosque of the Sanctuary, to see the holy Ka’bah and the Sacred Well Zem Zem. From the Mosque they head for Arafat and from Arafat tomorrow night for Mina. They won’t return to Mecca until their pilgrimage ends. I’m sorry, Mr. Drum.”

  “I’ll go after them.”

  “Mr. Drum. On the road to Mecca—” Azaayim Bey shrugged—“your masquerade was simple. But at the Ka’bah and in the Valley of Arafat and at Mina—if you ever reach Mina, but you won’t because first there is the Ka’bah and Arafat—it is something else. If your masquerade had been discovered on the road to Mecca, you might have been given the benefit of a trial—both because you hadn’t yet profaned the holy places and because the ecstasy was not yet on the Hajjis. But if they find you out now they will stone you as surely as they stone the symbolic pillars at Mina.”

  “Then suggest some other way.”

  “You only suppose Izzed-een Shafik will make an attempt on Miss Totah’s life. You do not know. Assuming he wishes to make the attempt, do you think he can find her? Have you been able to find her? Why not let Allah …” He shrugged again. The nearer he approached the holy places of Islam, the less he resembled the Azaayim Bey I had met in the Islamic Center on Embassy Row in Washington. The closer he came to the holy Ka’bah the more he drank of the waters of his ancestry. “Kismet,” he finished. “Fate, Mr. Drum. Can you stop the hand of fate? Is it worth your life to try?”