Mecca for Murder Page 16

  He’s raking her now with his fingernails. Long welts across her breasts and down her flanks. She’s standing there and taking it. She’s not fighting him, but Terry is. That’s Terry climbing on his back and trying to hurt him. Look out, Terry. There’s a man with a Mannlicher.

  He shakes Terry off and hits her. Get a move on, Drum. Anything. Just twitch your pinky to show you’re alive. Where there’s life, old saw. There goes the old tent flap. Can you move now? That’s not your pinky. It’s your whole hand. Congratulations.

  “Get your hands off her or I’ll shoot you dead where you stand, Shafik,” Azaayim Bey says. The bey’s great girth, ihram-clad, fills the opening in the tent.

  He has something in his hand. A pistol. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s something. His cheeks are beginning to blow. His cheeks blow when he’s very mad. I guess he sees Fawzia, naked and being hurt like that. He’s mad.

  Some noise for a little pop gun of a pistol to make. It isn’t the pistol. It’s the Mannlicher. No, it’s both of them. That’s no third eye on the Bedouin’s forehead. He falls across Limerock’s body, dropping the Mannlicher. The bey comes staggering inside the tent, clutching his huge middle, leaning forward slowly, reluctantly, blood seeping out between his clutching fingers. He falls against the ridge pole of the tent. The tent shakes. There goes the ridge pole. So the ceiling comes down, billowing and flapping.

  This is like a dream and will you please for crying out loud try to get up and do something instead of sprawling there and thinking how you feel about as corporeal as fog or the dust outside or the ghost of El Burak flapping up to the Moslem heaven with the shades of Azaayim Bey, the Bedouin and Limerock?

  On your knees. Izzed-een’s on his knees but I can’t see his hands. Where are your hands, Izzed-een? His hands surround Fawzia’s throat and constrict there. Move, Drum. Crawl. Fellow crawler. It’s Terry. She’s crawling for the Mannlicher. Her lips are all bloody. Good girl. You get the Mannlicher and I’ll get Izzed-een and maybe he won’t choke Fawzia to death.

  He sees Terry. Terry has the Mannlicher. He takes his hands off Fawzia’s throat. Terry is kneeling there with the Mannlicher, waving it unsteadily in our direction. It looks like the Mannlicher is under water and ripples. She fires.

  The kick knocks her flat. The Mannlicher skids across the sand and Izzed-een is laughing. He crawls over to get the Mannlicher and I crawl after him. Izzed-een turns around. I grab for him and he grabs for me. I’m on my back. He’s on top of me. But he doesn’t know what to do. Limerock’s dead. He needs somebody as a rapist. Some American. But I’m trouble, and I won’t let him go ahead with choking Fawzia to death. Terry’s crawling toward us. Izzed-een removes something from the folds of his ihram.

  It’s a knife. Terry screams. I see the knife, baby, I see it. Grab his hand? No. Don’t grab his hand. You can barely move. He’s stronger than you. If you grab his hand you’ll both of you drive that blade into your chest. Wait till the last split second. Then roll. Roll, because here comes the knife flashing down, blurring.

  He misses. He has a surprised look on his face. The knife buries itself to the hilt in the sand. I wrap my hand around the back of his head and push. He buries his face in the sand.

  I grab the knife. He flounders. He shakes his head like a dog coming out of water. Sand sprays. He sees the knife in my hand. He hits me. His fist travels about a foot and clobbers the side of my neck. I fall down on my back and one elbow and we’re both fighting for the knife again. But the point points in Izzed-een’s direction and he gets his weight on it and I give a very gentle push. It’s enough. It’s enough because Izzed-een’s weight comes down on the knife blade. The knife goes in and there’s a grating sound. The knife grates in between Izzed-een’s ribs and he makes a kind of gurgle. I pull the knife out and he flops over. I drive the knife again. The knife keeps going in and out and there is a lot of blood.

  Terry helps Fawzia to her feet. Terry is yelling “Chet, he’s dead.” I drop the knife. Fawzia is swaying, naked and bruised, the sweat giving her skin a silken sheen. Terry cloaks her with the ihram. Her right breast is still exposed and she looks at me. She covers her right breast.

  “Are you all right?” Terry asks.

  She means me. Mechanically, I explore Limerock for signs of life. He’s dead. Azaayim Bey is dead. I say I am all right.

  “Can you walk out of here? Can you run, if you have to?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  The tent flap is crumpled. I open it and crawl out.

  Most of the dust cloud is gone. Most of the pilgrims have fled but some stragglers are still going by, trotting, picking up the rhythm of the distant thunder of half a million faithful. Izzed-een’s station wagon is parked out there, and another car, much smaller, a Renault, black but grayed over with dust and sand.

  There are half a dozen pilgrims standing between the station wagon and the Renault. “Nosrani!” one of them screams, as if I am his cue.

  “Nosrani!” They take it up and bat it around the hot valley of Arafat.

  “Attl!” one of them shrieks. Izzed-een’s cheering section. Professionals with professional blood in their eyes. Attl! It must have sounded like a pretty good idea, because a crowd of them charge at me. Attl. Attl means kill.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  One of them came at me out of the swirling yellow dust, his ihram flying like a cloak. I ducked and gave him the shoulder in his gut and he folded over my shoulder like flapping wet paper in a wind. When I stepped back he fell.

  “Effendi!”

  It was Mahmoud Boulos. He was leaning out the rear window of the Renault and shouting at me. I whirled back in the direction of the collapsed tent. Terry was helping Fawzia out, then supporting her to her feet, then staggering with her across the sand. I ran back and helped them. They were choking on the yellow dust. We half dragged, half carried Fawzia to the Renault. The cheer leaders were at a loss. They had expected a dead girl and an attempted rape. They had expected Izzed-een Shafik to lead the way. They milled about the tent and watched us. We pushed Fawzia in through the narrow back door of the Renault. Mahmoud grabbed her arms and tugged, and a moment later I slammed the door and Terry opened the front door and climbed inside the tiny Renault.

  As I ran around the front of the car, one of the Bedouins poked his head inside the tent. I opened the door and sat down in the driver’s seat. The ignition key was in the dashboard. By now a large crowd of pilgrims had gathered. They were the stragglers: the old or the very weary or the sufferers from heat rash who had been all but trampled in the first wild exodus from the Valley of Arafat.

  I bore down on the starter and almost drove it through the floor boards of the Renault. The Bedouin came out of the tent screaming and waving his arms. Everybody came charging across the sand, sending a volley of rifle fire as their calling card. Then the Renault kicked over and I swung her around in the tightest U-turn in these parts since the automobile began to replace the camel.

  Through the rear-view mirror and the yellow dust cloud stirred by the Renault, I could see them piling into Izzed-een Shafik’s station wagon. They sawed the station wagon back and forth savagely across the hard-packed sand which passed as a road in the Hejaz.

  I took a deep breath. The hot, dusty air tickled deep in my lungs and I began to cough. But I, was functioning again. Until the Renault kicked over I had been going through the motions, but it had been one part reflex and two parts habit, like a punch-drunk fighter or a soldier too long in combat.

  Fawzia was crying, softly and steadily. It was one of those sounds that had no beginning and no middle and no end. We clattered and bounced along and climbed out of the Valley of Arafat. Daylight still clung to the higher hills and the heat had not abated and would not until the rains came next winter.

  “Bedouins come follow,” Mahmoud said, breathing on my neck. I knew they were following us—I thought they were gaining. They had four or five times the horsepower that the little Renault carried, but they could no
t take the sharp turns and the dips the way the Renault could. I was counting on that to keep their gain slight. The Bedouin driving the station wagon was probably playing the gas pedal and the brake as we roared around and among the sandstone crags. I kept the Renault’s gas pedal to the floor boards and we took the hairpin turns on two wheels—but we took them.

  It was full dark when we caught up with the rear guard of the overheated pilgrim buses and trucks bound for Mina. They had crawled down from the hills which separated Arafat from Mina, and now they were crawling across the desert flats bumper to bumper.

  Fawzia stopped crying. She sniffled and said, “Limerock’s dead. He’s dead. Isn’t he?”

  After that she was absolutely silent.

  We crawled along some more and I remembered Fawzia in the Islamic Center in Washington, sure of herself except where Limerock was concerned, and Fawzia on Massanutten Mountain offering herself to me to prove she wasn’t Limerock’s private nymph. And I thought that something in Fawzia had died when Limerock died, and in one way or another she would be in mourning the rest of her life.

  The station wagon pulled out of line at the first of the Stoning places. I saw it coming from a long way off, cruising slowly alongside the file of pilgrim vehicles. We had stopped moving now and there was no sign of motion as far as you could see in the long line of vehicles ahead of us. When the station wagon came abreast of the Renault a volley of rifle fire would wind it up.

  The pilgrims would love it. They had been on the go too long, and it had been hot even longer than that, and they were dying a little every moment. Attl! Attl! They would cry it lustily and those with firearms, if any, might join in the game. Otherwise, they would use stones.

  They had already gathered their stones for the Pillars of Mina, the first of which was thirty yards ahead of the Renault, surrounded by a mob of the faithful who were pelting it. The courtyard in which the pillar stood was lit by kerosene lanterns and torches and the pillar, a dozen feet high, stood in a cup of stone ten yards across. From all sides the pilgrims pelted the pillar with their stones and they used their umbrellas for shields against the missiles flung from the opposite side, but often the stones ripped through the taut cloth and there was much screaming and howling as the Devil was stoned ritually in Mina by half a million of the faithful. Behind the tamer pilgrims were the Badawi tribesmen with their single-shot rifles and they would fire over the heads of the peltists, then reload rapidly and fire again. They shouted and hooted, and although liquor is forbidden on the Hajj they were more pickled than ecstatic.

  I was going to swing the Renault out of line and make a break for it when the station wagon was still thirty or forty yards behind us, but Mahmoud leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Wait, effendi.”

  He got out of the Renault and trotted back down the row of vehicles. When he had gone a few loping strides, he started yelling. He yelled in a variety of languages. I missed most of it, but Mahmoud’s shrill voice carried across the hot, choking air and through the neck or the narrow gorge in which the crumbling village of Mina lies, and as he loped along and shouted he pied-pipered a couple of dozen of the Hajjis including five or six Badawi with their rifles. I caught the word Nosrani several times and in English Uncircumcised and attl attl attl first as a whisper then as a groan then as a droning roar that swept across the narrow valley and bounced off the rocky crags.

  I joined in, shouting and pounding the Renault’s horn.

  The faithful left the pillar in droves, in wild waves. They swept down upon the station wagon and for a few moments you heard nothing but the pounding of their feet and the attl attl attl roaring across the gorge. For a split second time put on the brakes and you heard nothing, absolutely nothing, and then all at once the clatter of stones hurled by the faithful against the station wagon. For Satan was there in the station wagon and so the sacred Stoning was forgotten.

  When, an hour later, the pilgrims flowed away from the ruined station wagon and the battered corpses inside, the line of vehicles began to move again. We never saw Mahmoud Boulos after that. Perhaps he had slipped off to return by himself to Jidda and report to Anwar Sidki that he had helped us safely through the. Hajj. Perhaps he had allowed himself to be swept along by the tide that flowed back to the pillar in its huge cup of stone. Perhaps he had climbed into the hills with the Badawi tribesmen, where it is cooler.

  In the morning we reached Jidda. Fawzia had not said a word, nor had she slept. I felt drained. It wasn’t the years piling up. The years so far have hardly left their mark on me.

  It was the Hajj. It was the hundred-and-thirty heat in the oven of the Hejaz. It was the stinking, dirty, latrine-smelling streets of Mecca and Jidda and the slaughterhouse stench of Arafat. It was life and death in the forbidden Hejaz, all of it incredibily ugly. It was the Arab world. And it was Izzed-een Shafik and Limerock and Azaayim Bey and the Bedouin whose name I had never known, all of them dead, violently dead where violence is forbidden. And it was the shell which was left of Fawzia Totah.

  There would be much fuss with a self-righteous but well-meaning little man named Elander, but in the end he would return my passport to me. There would be no investigation. Did they investigate the deaths of the forty thousand pilgrims who perished on the Hajj every year, their bodies either buried in the desert or piled in trucks and returned to Jidda for identification?

  So, it was over. And it was not over. I needed a drink.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The telephone answering service had twenty-three messages for me, most of them duds. There were forty-nine items of mail, but only ten of them pertained even remotely to my profession. Of those ten, one was a long, bulky document from my friend at the Department of the Army and six were from Sidney Lasitter. Eight of the phone calls had been made by Lasitter.

  The twenty-three telephone calls and forty-nine items of mail represented a considerable investment on the part of Father Time. First there had been Elander. Then there had been Al Hajj, which had misplaced Terry’s passport. Then there had been a brief visit to Azaayim’s two widows. Then there had been inter-plane time at Cairo and again at Madrid. Then there had been a few days spent in settling Fawzia at Terry’s place in College Station, Dolly Madison College, Virginia, and in getting a psychiatrist with the improbable name of G. Lance Jagoda to look at Fawzia and assure us that all she needed was some rest and a change of scene and after the rest plenty of diversion, plenty of fresh air, plenty of exercise, plenty of sunshine.

  And now it was today, a very special day.

  Item: in the mid-afternoon Fawzia Totah of ’Amman, Jordan, and Washington, D.C., would, in the office of the County Attorney, Toano, Virginia, sign a deposition which she had made voluntarily the day before and which had been typed during the evening with four copies. Said deposition stated that Fawzia Totah had been approaching the rear of Tyler House and had seen Davisa Lee Tyler there, weaponless, at the precise moment that the shot which had killed one Suzanne Tyler, daughter-in-law of Davisa Lee Tyler and wife of the late Lyman Lee Tyler, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army, had been fired. The signing and recording of the deposition at the office of the County Attorney, Toano, Virginia, would free Davisa Lee Tyler of all charges brought against her and would change the coroner’s verdict in the case of Suzanne Tyler to simple suicide with the merely quasi-legal complication of a spite note.

  I thought it was an accident and not suicide, but it couldn’t be proved. I thought Suzanne had hated her mother-in-law enough to frame her once the accident had occurred, but not enough to kill herself intentionally. No one bothered to establish the fact that Chester Drum had pulled the strings which worked the brain-strings of the Fawzia Totah puppet which then gave and would soon sign the deposition because he hoped it would prove better medicine than that which G. Lance Jagoda had offered.

  Fawzia’s dead eyes said: I killed Limerock. They screamed a violet self-accusation. I was trying some complex psychology—although I’m not a psychologist�
�because Fawzia had to realize that if anyone had killed Limerock by remote control it had been Davisa. If she hated Davisa when Davisa went free, it would be better than hating herself.

  Another item: Terry thought she was in love with me. Tonight she was going to ask me to ask her to marry me.

  Yes, this day, exactly one month after Azaayim Bey granted me the pilgrimage visa, was special. It wound everything up.

  I called Sammy Green at his three-man agency and he said, “I don’t know what to say, Drum. I wish to hell I could do something to square things with you. I won’t send you no bill, how’s that?”

  “How did you find out your boy Lasitter surrendered to the opposition?”

  “He’s a jerk with earlaps. He should drop dead. He figured you had already beat him to it, I guess. He comes in crying he was tricked, this Lash guy gave him a yarn about going to work for him but Lash is a loner like you. He wants his job back. It won’t happen again, he says. I almost threw him down the stairs.”

  “What does he want to see me about?”

  “You kidding? Why in hell should he want to see you? I don’t know, Drum. I can’t even guess. You know what? My wife says she oughta do the hiring for me from now on. Maybe she got something.”

  I asked him for Lasitter’s address, listened to his lament for a moment or two longer, grunted an acceptance of his apology and hung up. I had already tried the phone book, but Sidney Lasitter was not listed there. I went downstairs to the luncheonette in the lobby of the Farrell Building and ordered a couple of bacon and tomato sandwiches and a chocolate malt. After that I drove the De Soto convertible to Lasitter’s address.

  It was a sagging clapboard house with beat-up rockers on the large board porch. One of them was occupied by a little girl in a stiffly starched dress with a very broad bright blue ribbon in her straw-colored hair.