The Search for Yaser Abdel Said (Part 38)

CHAPTER 38:

CIRCUMSCRIBED

Piffy had stared into the barrel of the Redhawk before. “On the count of three…Mr. Piffy,” Che Guevara had said. Jimmy Carter’s rabbit and the arrival of White Robe had saved his butt, now it was White Robe who was wielding the gun. Turn about was not always fair play.

He was about to say something, to suggest some kind of a deal, like maybe borrowing the flea for a day or two and returning it but janitor Jamaluddin was beginning to stir and Piffy was distracted. He never made the offer. Perhaps it was just as well.

“I’m warning you—“ began White Robe.

By then the janitor had sat up. He was puzzled. His fingers slid across his beard. “Allahu akbar!” he said. “The itching has stopped!” A grin spread across his bucolic face. “It is a miracle! A miracle!”

“Give me the lockbox, Mr. Piffy,” ordered White Robe.

Piffy shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I think I’ll keep it for a while.”

“Give me the lockbox!” screeched White Robe. His face had turned red.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Piffy, “you put the gun down and we’ll talk—otherwise I’ll open the box and let Mr. Sufi Flea elope with history. How would you like them apples?”

White Robe scowled. He wouldn’t like them apples at all. He would have preferred peaches or pears. The very thought of Piffy freeing the flea terrified him. “I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot, damn you!” he screamed. By then it was obvious it was the last thing he would do.

Piffy held the lockbox in front of his chest as if he were warding off a vampire. His threat to release the flea was as meaningless as White Robe’s threat to shoot. He would never open the lockbox. Without Mr. Sufi he wouldn’t have anything to swap for Aisha. Of course, if they didn’t know the lockbox was empty…

By then Jamaluddin had clambered to his feet. He was excited. “I can’t believe how good I feel!” he exclaimed. “I’m a new man! All those crazy thoughts that have been going through my head are gone! All of them! I am once again a good Muslim! I no longer care what happens to those silly little girls at the Madrassas. I am no longer their slave! I am free! I don’t care if they are gong to be circumscribed next week. Let them be circumscribed—what is it to me? It will do them good.”

“Circumscribed?” said Piffy. “What do you mean—circumscribed?”

“Circumscribed,” said Jamaluddin. “They snip them. They do it to all the girls at the Madrassas. It makes them behave better when they get older. That’s what the Imam told me. He said if I am a good janitor he will let me do some of the snipping.”

Piffy couldn’t believe what he had heard. “You’re crazy!” he said.

“Oh, no, I am not crazy,” said Jamaluddin. “I am cured. I am normal again!” He glanced round the room. “To who do I owe this miracle?”

“To me!” Piffy said quickly. “I brought you here…remember?”

“No, no!” squealed White Robe. “It was not him! It was me! I saved you! I was the one that removed the flea from your beard! It was me! ”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Piffy.

Janitor Jamaluddin looked from Piffy to White Robe and then back to Piffy. He frowned; he was confused. “My head is starting to hurt again,” he warned “Please, stop!”

“It won’t stop until you take the gun away from the doctor, “ said Piffy

“No!” said Jamaluddin. “No!’

“The doctor is an evil jinn,” said Piffy. “He is going to kill us.”

Jamaluddin clamped his hands to the sides of his head. The last thing he wanted to do was tangle with a jinn—especially one armed with a long-barreled pistol that seemed to reach half across the room.

“I will shoot!” warned White Robe.

“Go ahead,” taunted Piffy.

“My head hurts!” squealed Jamaluddin. “Stop it! Please, stop it!”

White Robe began to cry.

It was then that Che Guevara marched into the conference room.

Yes—Che Guevara! And he wasn’t alone! He had Jurgen Stroop with him—Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi android Ka’b had dredged up from Dante’s Inferno to guide Piffy to the Fuhrerbunker!

Where Guevara had found the Obergruppenfuhrer was anybody’s guess but the tired old Nazi hadn’t changed a bit since the last time Piffy had seen him. He was still more dead than alive. His mouth was open and he was emitting a stench that even the Prince of Darkness would have found offensive. And he hadn’t joined Guevara’s parade voluntarily. There was a gun in back and his hands were in the air. Maybe they had been arguing over the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. It was something that still infuriated Ward Churchill.

“Look what I found wandering around outside!” crowed Guevara. “A Capitalist spy!”

“Senor Che!” exclaimed White Robe. “What are you doing here? The next meeting isn’t for two months!”

Guevara removed the gun from Stroop’s back and waved it in the air so everyone could see that it wasn’t his finger but was something that could actually shoot bullets. It was a Ruger Super Redhawk, a step up from the gun White Robe was holding.

But Guevara’s exuberance didn’t last long. He soon realized he had stumbled into a delicate situation. The smile froze on his face. He recognized the gun in White Robe’s hand. It was his old Redhawk 357!

And the Gringo was here too—the Gringo that had humiliated him! And there was another man, a lumbering giant whom he didn’t know but he would kill him too if it should be necessary. But it was the Gringo that worried him; he wasn’t normal.

Suddenly he was back in Bolivia…in a dilapidated mud schoolhouse in La Higuera…surrounded by his enemies! His eyes darted from face to face. Then he noticed that the Gringo was unarmed! He smiled.

“Damn!” said Piffy.

Then everything happened at once! White Robe pulled the trigger of Redhawk 357! It was an accident. The gun hadn’t been aimed at anybody.

The bullet zipped over Piffy’s head. The private eye lost his grip on the lockbox and it popped open as it fell to the floor!

Jamaluddin must have thought the next bullet was meant for him. He pounced on White Robe like a chicken on a June bug. He knocked the old man down with one ponderous blow! The Redhawk 357 sailed across the conference room!

And then Jurgen Stroop took a hand. Maybe he thought he was back in the Warsaw Ghetto. He turned on Guevara, ripped the gun from Che’s hand, tossed it aside and began punching Berkeley’s Patron Saint as if he were methodically beating a Jew in a back room at Gestapo Headquarters on the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. Guevara screamed and crawled under the conference table

Piffy never hesitated. He leapt across the room, grabbed White Robe’s gun, spun the cylinder, removed the bullets, stuffed them in his pocket and tossed the gun to the floor. He was going to do the same thing to Guevara’s gun but he stepped on the lockbox. His ankle turned and he went down!

Guevara, looked around, saw his chance and started toward the exit on his hands and knees. Stroop picked up Guevara’s loaded Redhawk.

This was not the way Piffy had planned it. He leapt to his feet. “Put the gun down!” he screamed at Stroop. He shouldn’t have said anything—it only drew attention to him.

Slowly the Obergruppenfuhrer turned the Ruger Super toward the private detective. His finger tightened on the trigger. But then he changed his mind. He turned the gun on Che Guevara! He would shoot the Marxist instead. Marxists were bad; Marxists were evil!

But Che had come across White Robe’s gun—actually his own weapon—the Redhawk 357 he had discarded when he had failed to kill Piffy in Arafat’s office. He grabbed the gun. He pointed it at Stroop, then at Piffy, then back at Stroop.

It would have been a Mexican standoff if the gun in Guevara’s hand had been loaded.

Then suddenly Guevara gave up. He threw the gun away and raised his hands. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he cried. It was Bolivia all over again. “I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

No one heard him. All eyes were on White Robe. The Keeper had crawled to the lockbox. He had picked it up! It was open! His worst fears had been realized! His Sufi Flea had escaped! “Nobody move!” he screamed. ”Nobody move!”

Stroop turned toward the old man. “Vas ist los?” he said.

“My precious flea has escaped!” screamed White Robe. “He is gone—gone! Please, nobody move—you could step on him! Please… please…I beg of you! Nobody move!”

It was too much for Jamaluddin. “You people are driving me crazy!” he screamed. “All of you—you are driving me crazy! I shouldn’t be here! I am a poor goatherd, can scarcely keep my family fed. I don’t have anything to do with this! I don’t know any of you people! You are killing me!”

“Help me look for Mr. Sufi!” begged White Robe.

Mr. Sufi?” thundered Jamaluddin. “You want Mr. Sufi? I will give you Mr. Sufi!” He grabbed the conference table. Suddenly he had the strength of a dozen Hulk Hogans. He flipped the table upside down, tore a leg from the frame and waved it over his head. He was as mad as a March hare at an Elmer Fudd convention, as mad as King Kong on the way to the Empire State Building with an elevated train stuck in his butt. There would be Hell to pay!

Piffy got out of the way.

The crazed janitor kicked White Robe into a corner, smote Guevara a terrible blow to the back of the head that drove Berkeley’s Patron Saint half across the conference room.

Stroop turned his gun on the mad janitor. But he was slow, lethargic, little more than a zombie. Piffy came up on the Obergruppenfuhrer from behind. He knocked the Redhawk aside, delivered a rabbit punch to the base of the Nazi’s skull and then took the gun from his hand as he slid to the floor.

Jamaluddin now focused his rage on Piffy. “You!” he screamed. “You brought me here! You are the cause of this!”

It was time Piffy took to his heels. He had enough bullets to kill all of them but it would have served no purpose and it wouldn’t have been fair to Jamaluddin or White Robe—they were innocent enough. And it was doubtful if he could kill Stroop or Guevara even if he tried. They were jinn or zombies of some sort—netherworld creatures from beyond the void—probably indestructible using normal methods. He could kill them in their current manifestations but they would be back—their sponsors would see to that. So it was time he left…

As a ten-year-old he had won the Mayberry County Annual Adult Cross-Country Arctic Mountain Run. He had raced mustangs on the open plains, chased wild boars in the Texas Panhandle, had pursued and hog-tied an ostrich in the sub-Sahara. He could pick ‘em up and lay ‘em down. There was little chance that anyone in the conference room could catch him even with a head start.

He was in the engine room before Jamaluddin knew he was gone. He paused in Yasser Arafat’s office long enough to turn out the lights. He didn’t stop running until he was three or four blocks from the Fuhrerbunker. After that he slowed to a trot.

It had been am exciting six hours. He hoped he had learned something…

He spent the next few days hanging around the hotel. He did a lot of soul searching. He had a decision to make. Maybe he knew what it was going to be before he had got off the plane at Rafah. Maybe it was why he had agreed to go to Gaza in the first place. As crazy as it seemed he had been thinking about it off and on even before bint Marwan had approached him with the latest of her ridiculous schemes.

He fed puppy dog twice a day and every afternoon at five o’clock he went for a short walk. He was hoping he would meet bint Marwan or Ka’b.

Five o’clock—that was the time they usually appeared. He would need one of them for what he wanted to do. He would have preferred bint Marwan for the obvious reasons but it was Ka’b who finally showed up.

He found the gnarled old poet crouched underneath his enormous red-and-white striped umbrella in the shadows of a meat market.

“It’s about time you showed up,” said Piffy. “I’ve been coming here every day for a week!”

Ka’b glanced up and down the street. ‘Have you got the flea?” he asked.

“To Hell with the damn flea!” said Piffy. “I want you to turn me into a ten-year-old boy!”

“A what?” said Ka’b. He was not sure he had heard correctly.

“I want you to turn me into a ten-year-old boy!” said Piffy.

“Have you lost your mind?” said Ka’b.

“No,” said Piffy. “I’m as sane as the day I was born. I’m going into that damn stinking Madrassas and I’m taking Aisha out of there!”

“Madrassas?” said Ka’b. “What Madrassas?”

“The Osama bin Laden Madrasses For Girls,” said Piffy.

Ka’b was silent for a moment. “They will kill you!” he said.

“Turn me into a ten-year-old boy,” said Piffy, “or I will rip this damn umbrella of yours to shreds!”

“You wouldn’t dare!” said Ka’b.

Piffy put his hands on the umbrella. “Turn me into a ten-year-old boy!” he said.

Ka’b studied the private eye. “Do you have any idea of what you’re getting into?” he said slowly.

“I’ve been a ten-year-old boy before!” said Piffy.

“So I’ve heard,” said Ka’b. “But a boy in a boy’s Madrassas is one thing—a boy in a girl’s Madrassas is something different. You wont last ten minutes! They will kill you!”

“I’ll take my chances,” said Piffy.

“A pity,” said Ka’b. “You have a full life ahead of you”

“It’s my life,” said Piffy.

The old man sighed. He looked up and down the street. “By the way,” he said. “Who is this Aisha?”

“She’s a ten-year-old girl,” said Piffy. “The sweetest ten-year-old girl that has ever lived.”

Ka’b shook his head in resignation. He could see that Piffy’s mind was made up. “So you want me to turn you into a child so you can sneak into a Madrassas—a girl’s Madrassas—to rescue the sweetest ten-year-old girl who has ever lived?”

“Something like that,” said Piffy.

“You are a fool,” said Ka’b.

“Okay, so I’m a fool,” said Piffy. “But I’m going into that damn stinking Madrassas and I’m going to drag her out of their one way or another!”

Ka’b sighed. “You are more trouble than you are worth, you know that?” he said.

Piffy didn’t answer.

The old man scowled. If something happened to this crazy loon bint Marwan would hold him responsible. She would blame him—Ka’b—not the crazy loon. She would assume the shape of an old hag and hound him until the end of time. He would never know a moment’s peace again. She would nag and nag and nag. And if he refused to help her silly protégé in his mad scheme she would be just as angry. The netherworld was not a happy place.

But the fool had done well in London. He had run successfully with the devils and the jinn; he had trampled over mere mortals with an insouciance that belied his tender years; he had shown a capacity to inflict great hurt on the evil ones; and he had survived. Yes, he had survived. He had potential. Perhaps it was not as hopeless as it seemed.

An omnibus rattle by; a horn tooted.

The old man sighed. He had come to a decision. “Okay,” he said “I will turn you into a ten-year-old child but you won’t like some of the conditions.”

“Why?” said Piffy. “Do I turn into a pumpkin if I don’t get back by midnight?”

“Be careful what you say,” warned Ka’b. “This is not an exact science—things could go wrong.”

“Like what?” laughed Piffy.

“You could have an arm and a leg amputated on opposite sides,” said Ka’b.

“That’s only for thieves,” said Piffy.

“And what do you think sneaking a ten-year-old girl out of a Madrassas is?” asked Ka’b.

Piffy smiled. “It’s kidnapping,” he said. “And it’s allowable under the Rooster Cogburn Charter of Human Rights.”

Yes, he had potential.