The Search for Yaser Abdel Said (Part 45)

CHAPTER 45:

A CORPSE, OF COURSE

It wasn’t King Kong versus Fay Wray, it was Jamaluddin, the lumbering ox, versus Bernard Piffy; the Madrassas janitor against the ten-year-old invader of the suicide bomber’s harem; the giant in size if not in intellect against the middle-aged brain in Opie Taylor’s body but it might as well have been the ape against the damsel in distress. He was three times Piffy’s size and if he was constrained by any moral values they weren’t those of Jesus Christ—they were those of the Prophet Muhammad. He would have his way with whoever was in the closet and by now his excitement was so great it mattered little whether it was Fatima or Bernard Piffy.

Any ten-year-old would have been frightened out of his wits and Piffy was certainly frightened but his middle-aged brain had kicked into gear. He would go down fighting! He kicked Jamaluddin in the shins as hard as he could; smashed the wretch in the face again and again with his free hand.

But it was to no avail. If the assault accomplished anything at all, it stimulated Jamaluddin to greater effort. He jerked the ten-year-old out of the closet and tossed him head-over-heels across the room. As Piffy scrambled to his feet, the ox lumbered toward him. The ten-year-old doubled his fists.

Jamaluddin stopped, scowled. Something wasn’t right here. “You’re not Fatima!” he exclaimed.

“Brilliant deduction, Watson,” said Piffy.

The janitor reached for the ten-year-old; he would teach the brat a lesson he would never forget. It was only then that he became aware of the deafening noise that had filled the room—harsh, strident, beating at his eardrums with the force of a sledgehammer; a thousand screaming cougars accompanied by the whistle of the blockbusters that had rained down on Dresden in ’45, a Devil’s dirge from yesterday’s Apocalypse!

It didn’t take Jamaluddin long to discover where the sound was coming from. It was the dog in the cage! The mutt was tearing at the bars of his prison trying to get out. Jamaluddin grabbed the cage and shook it. The howling intensified.

“Silence, dog!” hissed the giant. “You will wake the Imams!”

The howling continued.

Jamaluddin scowled. Maybe he should toss the cage into the corridor. He started toward the door with the dog; then stopped. No, the chances were the mutt would keep howling. He had a better idea. He opened the cage. He would strangle the accursed thing and be done with it! Wasn’t that what King Kong did to the pterodactyl when the oversized flying reptile got in his way? Sure—Jamaluddin had seen the movie a hundred times. He would break the dog’s neck!

He reached into the cage. The howling had ceased and before Jamaluddin was aware of what was happening a double row of razor-sharp teeth had torn the tips from his fingers!

Allahu akbar! What was this…a jinn from Hell? A monster escaped from Jahannum? Well, he would return this terrible thing to the dungeon from whence he had taken it!

He recalled a verse from the Qur’an. “Fight the unbelievers around you, and let them find harshness in you.”

His religion would give him strength! Allah would help him!

He recalled another verse: “I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

Strike off their heads! Strike off their fingertips! That is what he would do!

He grabbed puppy dog unaware that it was his own fingertips that were being stricken off! He would cast terror into the heart of the beast—he would strike off its head! He was game—he was as game as they came. He was Benny Kid Paret going after Emile Griffith!

But the mutt could not be stopped. It chewed Jamaluddin’s fingers back to the palm of his hand, spitting out great gobs of flesh and bone and blood with every bite. Then, suddenly, the mutt was at the janitor’s throat!

Piffy came up as quickly as he could. He grabbed a chair, swung it at Jamaluddin’s head but the giant was already down, blood spurting from a severed jugular! The exploding claret turned puppy dog into a snarling red fur ball, sprayed across Aisha’s bed and ran across the floor like a tidal wave!

The ten-year-old froze! What else could he do? He wasn’t Doogie Howser or Doctor Kildare. He had left his medical kit back in Mayberry County along with his Junior G-man’s badge. He stood there mesmerized as Jamaluddin’s blood flooded the area around Aisha’s bed. He retreated across the room to avoid the worst of the deluge and after a while the bleeding stopped.

Jamaluddin was dead. There was no denying that. So what next? He had a problem…a big problem. He would never be able to dispose of the corpse and get the place cleaned up before Aisha got back from prayers. Should he even try? Well, yeah…he could stuff the corpse in the closet or slide it under the bed…then he could get a mop…yeah, a mop…but from where? It was ridiculous, totally ridiculous…

He heard a lapping sound. It was puppy dog, helping himself to Jamaluddin’s blood. It was gross! The mutt drank its fill, then looked at Piffy. It seemed to smile and after making a soft mewling sound like that of a repentant kitten, it retired to its cage for its early morning siesta. Oh, what a lovable mutt!

The ten-year-old was in a quandary—a mega-Apocalyptic quandary. He was worse off than Calvin in a flooded bathroom with Hobbes thumbing through a worn copy of Plumbing for Dummies. He would have been better off naked and handcuffed to a bed in a sleazy hotel room with a house detective pounding on the door. Naked…handcuffed to a bed…why did he always identify with George Costanza when he was trapped in an impossible situation not with Mike Hammer or with Travis McGee—it was always Costanza!

Maybe if he pulled the bed away from the wall he could drag the corpse into the empty space and then push the bed over it. Yeah, that was a good idea. It would have been a better idea if he had been a middle-aged private detective instead of a puny ten-year-old kid but he gave it a try.

The first thing he discovered was that the bed was heavier than it appeared—by at least at hundred pounds; give or take a ton. It took a considerable amount of huffing and puffing and tugging and pulling just to drag it away from the wall. And Jamaluddin was even heavier than the bed.

He spit on his hands—he had seen Grandpa Piffy do that a hundred times when getting ready to lift heavy objects. Then turning his back to the door, he grasped the corpse by the ankles and started for the other side of the bed. That was when the door popped open!

Good grief! He had forgotten to secure the beachhead! He should have checked the door to make sure it was locked. What would Aisha think?

But it wasn’t Aisha returning from her morning prayers standing in the open doorway. Oh, no, that would have been too easy. It was somebody he didn’t know—a sloe-eyed girl, a year or two older than Aisha perhaps, with long black hair and a large bath towel wrapped around a nubile body.

She stared at Piffy. “You’re not Aisha!” she exclaimed.

“I’m not?” said Piffy.

“You’re a boy!” she said.

Piffy let Jamaluddin’s feet plop to the floor. “What gave me away?” he asked.

By then the sloe-eyed girl had managed to put two and two together and it didn’t come anywhere near four. There was a strange boy in Aisha’s boudoir, blood on the floor, an overturned chair, a bed in disarray, and a corpse though she couldn’t know for sure if the corpse was a corpse of course, but whatever it was, it was not what one would expect to find in a prospective suicide-bomber’s room at the Osama bin Laden Madrassas for Girls—at least not before graduation day.

The sloe-eyed girl took to her heels but Piffy was after her like a black widow spider looking for a mate to carry it through the winter. He caught her by the arm, jerked her back into the room and shut the door behind her. She was larger than Piffy by a couple of inches and several pounds heavier and would have put up a good fight if she hadn’t lost her towel, made a grab for it and then slipped in the blood alongside the bed. Her own modesty was her undoing. She fell flat on her face.

Piffy threw himself across her before she could get up. He put a hand over her mouth. “You say one word,” he hissed, “and I’ll…I’ll…I’ll make you wish you hadn’t!”

“Who are you?” she squealed.

“I’m…I’m…the Ghost of Christmas Past,” he said. He had wanted to say ‘Mike Hammer’ but if it ever got back to Hammer that he had used the Hammer name for any reason at all he would be in worse trouble than he was now.

“Christmas Past?” said the girl.

“You got a problem with that?” said Piffy.

“Yes!” she said.

“Okay,” said Piffy. “How about Jolly Saint Nick…or St. Anthony of Padua…that’s a good one.”

“You’re an infidel!” she screamed. “A Kuffar! A blasphemer!” Her eyes blazed with a sudden fury.

“Easy now! Easy now!’ said Piffy.

She bucked and rolled beneath him. She was as strong as the devil and if he weren’t careful she would get the upper hand. He slapped her across the face—harder than he intended, hard enough to draw blood. It had no effect. She was bigger and stronger and it wasn’t long before he was on the verge of being pinned to the floor by a naked sub-teen girl! How ignominious that would be! He would never live it down!

He was reduced to two choices: he could surrender and be forever embarrassed or he could combine the skills he had learned as a Marine Corps close-combat instructor with those of Mayberry County’s three-time Junior Calf-Roping Champion…maybe if he had been the adult Bernard Piffy and his opponent had been Asma bint Marwan he would have been willing to succumb, but in this matter he had little choice.

Once he had made up his mind the naked girl with the sloe-eyes never had a chance and she was soon gagged and hog-tied and lying on the floor alongside Aisha’s bed.

Okay—now what? It was getting crowded in the little room, it was so full of corpses, naked sub-teen girls and adult males in the bodies of ten-year-old boys there wouldn’t have been room for George Costanza. He picked up the girl’s bath towel and draped it across her naked body. She glared at him, her sloe-eyes full of contempt and hatred.

He smiled at her. “You’re cute,” he said. He was being smart—or maybe stupid, one or the other.

He heard a noise behind him. The door—once again he had forgotten the door!

“Bernie?” a voice said.

He whirled around. It was Aisha! She was standing in the open doorway and Fatima was right behind her.

How in the hell was he going to explain what had happened—or should he even try?