The
Search for Yaser Abdel Said (Part Seven)
Piffy clambered to his feet. “Hi, fellas,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
What else could he have said? He wasn’t Mike Hammer; he wasn’t Travis McGee; he wasn’t Shell Scott; his peashooter was back in the remains of his flat and his vocabulary of cuss words began with “Good Grief!” and ended with “Gee Whiz!” He was Bernard Piffy. He was Mayberry County’s all-time Junior Bronco-Busting and Calf-Roping champion and he had won every skeet-shooting contest ever held in the Tri-County area for contestants of all ages. When he was nine-years old he won the annual George Gabby Hayes Tobacco-spitting championship against all comers, most of them six times his age. He won every footrace he had ever entered and he rewrote the Marine Corps book on the Art of Self Defense during the four years he spent in the Corps. And he had tossed a lot of drunks into the tank when he had been Deputy Sheriff of Mayberry County. Despite all that he was still closer to being a Keystone Kop than to being Mike Hammer. And he was outnumbered, there were two of them—at least that was how many he counted, Mohammed Atta on the left and Hani Hanjour on the right. Yeah, that made two. And they were supposed to be dead!
If the 9/11 twins had seen Asma bint Marwan they gave no sign of it—most likely, they hadn’t. She could make herself scarce in one heck of a hurry—she was here one minute and gone the next. She had dragged herself inside her oscillating bra and vanished into the Netherworld!
Atta said something in Arabic and Hanjour nodded. If only Hulk Hogan had been there …or better yet Bob Hope and Bing Crosby—yeah, Hope and Crosby, they could play that little game they played. It was better than shooting guns out of bad hombres guns with silver bullets What was it…Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man? Yeah, that was it. Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man; they would face each other, clap their hands on their knees and then turn and knock the bad guys on the head and run. It looked so easy when they did it. Road to Rio…Road to Singapore…easy as pie but the boys had never made A Road to the Birmingham Central Mosque.
Hanjour reached inside his shirt. Atta shifted to one side so the stiffs that might have been watching from the other end of the bar wouldn’t be able to see what was going on. A voice buzzed in Piffy’s ear. “Run! Run!” it said. So Piffy ran. He didn’t get far—two steps, three steps and Atta had him by the arm and Hanjour was pressing the muzzle of a field howitzer into his ribs. It wasn’t actually a field howitzer, it was a SIG Sauer P228 9mm but it felt like a field howitzer and it would have had just about the same effect at that range!
They hustled him out the back door and into a deserted alley. “Now wait just a minute—“ he began.
POW! The sucker punch caught him alongside the head and knocked him to his knees. Gee Whiz, that was a hell of a thing to do! He looked down the alleyway. He was hoping to see something green and orange and oscillating hurrying toward him—bint Marwan’s magic bra galloping to the rescue, perhaps—but there wasn’t anything in sight, just trashcans and litter, no daughter of Zeus, no bride of Hephaestus, nothing resembling Aphrodite in a low cut blouse, not even a mutt urinating on a stack of old newspapers. Damn! Maybe he was expecting too much. He should have been paying attention to the business at hand, that’s what he should have been doing. Atta kicked him in the ribs and he went sprawling.
Piffy rolled over and sat up. “You’re going to make me angry!” he warned.
The threat did not frighten Atta. His face was as ugly as last year’s sin. “Where are the toenail clippings?” he screamed.
“Toenail clippings?” gasped Piffy. “What toenail clippings?”
Hanjour pressed the muzzle of his field howitzer to the side of Piffy’s head. “Don’t play dumb, Kuffar swine!” he barked.
Suddenly Atta cocked his head to one side. “Wait!” he hissed. “Did you hear something?”
Hanjour nodded. He had heard it too. Something was coming down the alley—a very large something, something large enough to set the trash cans stacked along the pub’s back door to trembling. And that wasn’t the half of it. A loud screeching sound like an off-key air-raid siren was beating against the buildings on either side of the alley. Or maybe it was a chorus of banshees mourning a gargoyles passing. Piffy had heard the sound before. It was the assassin’s theme song! It was Umyar! And from the way Atta and Hanjour were acting they had heard it before too. They exchanged glances—nervous glances. A strong wind had come up. Debris was flying about the alley like chaff in a monsoon! Suddenly it was difficult to see.
“Let’s get out of here!” cried Atta. And without further ado, he took to his heels and disappeared into the growing monsoon. Hanjour started after Atta, then stopped, turned around and pointed his SIG Sauer P228 9mm at Piffy
“Jesus Christ!” cried Piffy.
A violent gust of wind seized Hanjour. He was swept off his feet and tumbled end for end down the alley. He picked himself up, and as if nothing untoward had happened, hurried after Atta.
As suddenly as the wind had come up it ceased and the banshees stopped their dirge. In the eerie silence that followed, the massive Umyar appeared. He stalked over to Piffy, glared at the private eye.
Okay—now it was one on one. The odds had been reduced. Still he didn’t like playing Fay Wray opposite King Kong. He preferred Bernard Piffy against Peewee Herman or Woody Allen. He glanced at Hanjour’s gun. It was lying within easy reach—right where Hanjour had dropped it before galloping after the fleet-footed Atta. Should he make a try for it? It was only two steps away, maybe three. All he had to do was scoop it up and turn it on Umyar. How long could that take? A second? Two seconds? If he could distract the lout for just a moment…
He grinned, stepped toward the gun. “Boy, was that a close call,” he said. “Those guys were going rob me. It’s a lucky thing you came along.”
Umyar blinked. “Rob you? Of what?” The words were like thunderclaps rolling across the Planet of the Apes. They came from above, from below, from inside Piffy’s head; they set his fingertips to tingling.
He had been about to say something but he had to wait for the reverberations inside his head to subside. Then he tried again. “They were going to rob me of my money,” he said.”
Umyar looked Piffy straight in the eye. “You have no money!” he thundered.
Once again the words seemed to come from everywhere. They ran up Piffy’s legs; they set his knees to trembling, clawed at the insides of his skull.
“Where is bint Marwan?” roared Umyar.
“Bint who?” echoed Piffy
It was the wrong answer. Umyar grabbed Piffy by the front of his shirt, raised him off the ground. “Do not play games with me!” he warned.
“I’m not playing games,” said Piffy. Smoke was coming from the Assassin’s eyes. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. Okay, that wasn’t very bright.
“What did the Deobandis want?” demanded Umyar.
Piffy licked his lips. The buttons were popping from his shirt like fleas leaping from an Imam’s beard. “They wanted the Prophet’s toenails clippings,” he said.
Umyar frowned. He set Piffy down. He picked up Hanjour’s gun, crunched it into a compact mass; tossed it aside. He was thinking. The frown changed to a scowl. His eyes had come to a boil. ‘You were the man in the mosque,” he said. “You are the Kuffar who threw his shoe at ul-Haq. You are a bad man…a very bad man.”
It was too late to run. Not to late to die, but too late to run. The phantasm was at Piffy with lighting speed. The enormous hands encircled the private eye’s throat. It was too easy. It was like wringing the neck of a halal chicken. Piffy never had a chance. He landed one punch before a red haze swam before his eyes. In a moment he was gasping for breath. Then everything went black and suddenly he was on the ground but, miraculously, he was still alive!
He drew a deep breath and sat up. He was still in the alley but something was different. It was like walking into a theatre in the middle of a Hoot Gibson western—it was the same saloon, there was a lot that was familiar but something had been added. Umyar was cowering against a trash barrel, whimpering, his massive hands in front of his face trying to protect himself from the vicious assaults of an itty-bitty wisp of a man, scarcely four-and-a-half feet tall, armed with a cat-o’-nine-tails! The whip was cracking and popping, sparks were flying and the imp was shrieking and laughing like Beelzebub on holiday in Dante’s Inferno. The Prophet’s Assassin was terrified!
Piffy almost felt sorry for the giant. He got to his feet. “Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a bit?” he said.
The imp turned on Piffy. There was a maniacal light in his eye—Luciferous, Piffy would later describe it—and he came at the private detective with a gusto that would have routed Superman and caused Bat Man to turn in his tights and call it quits. The whip popped and cracked, sparks set debris afire alongside the trash barrels. Piffy managed to get his hands up in front of his face but the whip tore and snatched at his clothes. What the hell was going on? Who the hell was this bastard? A button popped from his shirt…a crimson gash appeared on his chin…
(To be continued)