The Search for Yaser Abdel Said (part 59)

CHAPTER 59:

MSNBC SCARY

It was the second time M had called Bonds on his cell phone in less than six hours and what M said pretty well negated what he had said the first time. Things had changed—there had been a conference. And help was on the way.

“Zolo!” exclaimed Bonds. “Beauregard Zolo? You’re calling in Beauregard Zolo? Blimey! Have you gone mad? What do we need him for? I can handle this! What does he know about fleas? He’s an old man! He uses a cane! Duldul would have chewed him up and spit him out! Why not his Russian friend—Ivan what’s-his-name? Have you asked for Don Quixote? I don’t want to be stuck with some washed-up old has-been. Couldn’t you have found one of Charlie’s Angels? I can handle this! How old do you think I am?”

“Calm down, Six-and-seven-eights” said M. “Get a grip on yourself. We have bigger problems than those bloody fleas.”

Bonds set his cell phone on a rock. It was Twilight Zone dark, he was shivering and he was angry. He stared into the fire he had started to dry his clothes. Twelve hours of dodging Hamas patrols and hiding in the bulrushes had not only dampened his enthusiasm for his return to active service it had made him realize how much he hated outdoor life. Mosquitoes? Fresh air? He must have been crazy!

Then he noticed that the clothes he had draped over the makeshift clothesline he had stretched across his little campfire had caught fire! He muttered under his breath—something about there would always be an England even if the King were a Pakistani. He would rather be bitten by Jaws or circumcised by Rosa Klebb than go through this again!

“Bonds? Bonds? Are you there?” It was M.

Agent Six-and-seven-eights grabbed his clothes just before they fell into the fire. As he beat out the flames that were turning his chauffeur’s pants into a set of Little Lord Fontleroys the strange little beast that had been shadowing him most of the day—a cross between a packrat and an oversized gerbil—stole what was left of his breakfast, dinner and supper!

Curses! Where would he find another moldy half-eaten orange?

He forced himself to concentrate. What was it M had just said? Zolo? Beauregard Zolo? They were bringing in Beauregard Zolo?

Perhaps he was being hasty. A Man from AUNTIE could conceivably be of some help. They were educated; they could go into a restaurant and order something besides beer and taters. Some of them even knew how to cook. It was a skill that could come in handy in the bulrushes. A Man from AUNTIE might know how to convert an oversized gerbil caught in the wilds into a campfire delicacy.

He picked up his cell phone. “Bonds, here,” he said. “Stockton Bonds.”

M was still talking—he had never stopped, he had a lot to say and Bonds would listen, if not now, eventually. Old men, men even older than Bonds, were notoriously curious and M was talking about Bernard Piffy—that was something that should interest Agent Six-and-seven-eights more than a flea from some old geezer’s ‘beard.’

And M had news—startling news!

Bernard Piffy, the brown bag private detective, the one-time low-level colleague of Mike Hammer, Barney Fife’s poor country cousin, a simple Deputy Goober, had hit the big time. Yes—in three short weeks Bernard Piffy had gone from a second-rate gumshoe to a master criminal! He was now the most wanted man in the history of the English Secret Service! He was a junior Blofeld!

“You can forget the fleas,” said M. “They’ve been put on the back burner for now. It’s Bernard Piffy we want. The big boys held a meeting an hour ago—all the security chiefs were there and so was the Archbishop of Canterbury and Tariq Ramadan. They’re all agreed—Mr. Piffy has become the greatest threat to England since Herr Hitler. Ramadan has compared him to Robert Spencer.

“In just 25 days he has put a half-century of political correctness and cultural diversity in jeopardy. He has angered our Asian community more than Geert Wilders and Kurt Westergaard combined. The list of his crimes is unsurpassed in modern history. He invaded the Birmingham Central Mosque and threw a shoe at Riyadh ul-Haq; he threw a ham sandwich at Abu Hamza al-Masri. He has insulted Islam again and again. He is believed to have had a hand in the assault on Prince Chauncey, sixth cousin twice removed of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on the Kharma With Darma Show. He is wanted for the murder of an unarmed Asian in the basement of the Ahmad Madrassas in London.

“A colleague of his reversed the commode in the bathroom of his flat in London so that it points in the direction of Mecca. The Archbishop of Canterbury now says that some of the papers stolen by Piffy and then returned are actually missing. It appears that he has several accomplices and they all use the name Piffy. They come in all ages and shapes.

“This man has done more to destroy good relations between the Crown and its Asian citizens than Michael Savage—more than Salman Rushdie.

“If he resists arrest you are authorized to use extreme force. It would not be looked on with disfavor if he should meet with an unfortunate accident. We are placing our trust in you, Six-and-seven-eights. If you fail Her Majesties Government may be forced to make a deal with its Asian community that could bring England to its knees. Life as we know it could come to an end. A further warning—Piffy may be in the employ of Abu Afaq or MOSSAD.”

Bonds groaned. Abu Afaq? MOSSAD? He had friends in MOSSAD and Algernon A. Algernon, an employee of Abu Afaq, had saved his life. No, if Piffy were associated with either of them he would be one of the good guys. What was he to do?

He had met Piffy. He had interviewed him. He was a likable chap. He reminded Bonds of Junior Tracy—not that Bonds had ever met Junior Tracy, he hadn’t. Maybe it was Mike Hammer that he reminded him of—a Mike Hammer that had finished grade school. He was eager and innocent. Of course Bonds had never met Mike Hammer either. It was surprising how many of the great detectives he had never met.

But orders were orders and he would obey them. If M wanted Piffy dead he would do his best to see that Piffy was brought back to England in a body bag. He wouldn’t like it but he would do it. He would keep a stiff upper lip; he would be a good dhimmi. Yes, a good dhimmi!

Dhimmi! How he hated that word. Dhimmies were people too—it wasn’t their fault they were inferior to Muslims.

Maybe something would turn up—maybe Oliver Cromwell would come to him in a dream like Churchill had come to Maggie Thatcher or was it Franklin Roosevelt that had come to Hillary Clinton? No, it was Grover Cleveland that had come to Hillary Clinton…

He stared at the cell phone. If Tariq Ramadan could shout “Allahu akbar” in the halls of Oxford he should be able to shout “God Save the Queen” in Trafalgar Square without fear of being accused of racial insensitivity.

His mind began to wander. He could hear the Asians in the Birmingham Central Mosque chanting “Allahu akbar!”

“Allahu akbar?” Why did it remind him of “Heil Hitler?” Was it because he was more English than dhimmi? And where had all the Englishmen gone? Dr. No was more English than Tariq Ramadan. Blofeld was more of a Limey than that Bunglawala character.

Maybe M could parachute the Man from AUNTIE into the bulrushes with a good meal and a change of underwear. Things of that sort had done wonders for morale at Tobruk and Singapore. Aye, and London was beginning to look and feel more and more like the Singapore of 1942 with each passing day.

Dr. Haribert ul-Heim studied the face of the girl on the examination table. Even with the black eye, the gash on her forehead, the smudged lipstick and muddied mascara, she was prettier than the others and more muscular too though it wasn’t apparent to the naked eye.

She was still semi-conscious from the homemade SP13 (Sodium pentathol) he had administered several hours previously. He had questioned her three times and he was stumped. She should have answered every question he had asked—how al-Kabibble had lost his immensity; how she had got the black eye; how she came to be in the Midnight Rider but all he got from her was what amounted to name, rank and serial number.

Her name was Kris Odin, she was from Aden, her father was a metallurgy professor and she had a cat named Poobah. At times she seemed to struggle with her own nomenclature, sounding more like a boy than a girl but that was not usual in children under the effects of SP13.

The answers would not have been surprising to the ‘little girl’ or to Ka’b. They were the answers Asma bint Marwan had drummed into the brain of the freshly minted ten-year-old boy before she had sent him into the Ahmad Madrassas in London some three weeks previously in search of the fleas from the Prophet’s beard and the answers were still lodged in his mind because there were no other answers he could give. And bint Marwan’s influence seemed to grow more powerful the farther the child was removed from her presence.

The failure to illicit the answers he had wanted forced ul-Heim to speculate. Life had become increasingly ugly with the passing years. He had grown cautious, hesitant. He would turn everything over in his mind again and again before he committed himself to a course of action.

Perhaps he had given the child too much SP13. If that were the case he dare not give her any more—it would kill her and he did not want another death on his hands. There had been too many…

He had made a Google search of the child’s background and it had turned up absolutely nothing. Ten, fifteen years ago she would have been the perfect guinea pig for one of his experiments. Yes, one of his experiments…his ugly experiments. Of course he may have been asking her the wrong questions. But there was time.

He would transfer three of the girls—Fatima, Aisha and the unresponsive one they called Krista—to the new wing of the Ul-Heim Sanitarium, Rehabilitation Center and Experimental Psychology Laboratory for observation. Hanadi would be staying with her older brother, Hafez Hamza, a Hamas Lieutenant, in his apartment in Gaza City. Al-Kabibble would be sent to the Ul-Heim Reproductive Surgery Center for emergency surgery. Dr. ul-Heim had many connections. His word was still good in Gaza and why not? Hamas had endorsed him and so had Hezbollah and the Taliban.

But now he must hurry to the airport in Rafah to greet Diabolica Tungsten who was flying in from Kosovo to apply for a position at the Laboratory. Diabolica had served as a volunteer scrub nurse in Bosnia during Bill Clinton’s Balkan Initiative and had participated in some of ul-Heim’s early experiments on Serbian POWs. She had recently converted to Islam and was filled with a heady intoxication for the Jihadist cause. Her grandfather had been an aide to Dr. Josef Mengele; he had disappeared after the fall of Berlin in 1945. Some said he had gone to Egypt; some said to Paraguay. Diabolica would make the perfect scrub nurse.

Piffy swung his feet over the edge of the bed. He sat up and grinned at Aisha. “Well, so far, so good,” he said. He couldn’t believe they had been so lucky.

The three girls had been sharing a mini-ward in the new wing of the ul-Heim Sanitarium, Rehabilitation Center and Experimental Psychology Laboratory for three days. So far the hospital staff had not discovered he was a boy. He had had plenty of sleep and was in great shape, ready for anything that might come his way.

The Sanitarium had provided him with clean clothes—a thigh length smock and new underpants and the Bratz bra and nylon-lycra rosebud panties had been laundered. The bra rested snugly—if not comfortably—on his ten-year-old chest.

He had managed to take a shower while Aisha and Fatima stood guard. Islamic separation of the sexes had been a God Send.

They had been at the hospital for three days and were hoping to be released into the custody of al-Kabibble. A foolish hope, of course, but they were only ten-years-old—Fatima was nine. Piffy should have known better but there were times his middle-aged brain operated at Opie Taylor speed.

“That dress is too young for you, Bernie,” said Aisha. “It makes you look five-years-old. When you bend over everybody can see your underpants. You should be wearing something older—something with a waistline.”

It was enough of a warning. He changed to the nylon-lycra panties—they were less revealing; there were no unsightly bulges.

He studied his reflection in the mirror. “I should be wearing—“ He stopped in mid-sentence. He had almost said, “levis jeans, a Dennis Weaver Stetson, and two-inch Laredo boots.”

He winced. What a disgusting little rat he had become! It was one thing to lie to al-Kabibble and Duldul and to the monsters that ran the Osama bin Laden Madrassas for Girls and to Bonds and Hanadi but Aisha and Fatima? They were so innocent, so trusting. They would believe anything he told them.

But how could he tell them the truth—that he was a grown man in the body of a ten-year-old boy. There were times when he didn’t believe it himself. How had he gotten into this stinking mess? Sure, sure, he was a middle-aged private detective hired to track down Yaser Abdel Said, the notorious Dallas cabdriver who had murdered his daughters, Sarah and Amina Said, in a fit of Islamic rage. At least that was how it had started. Then it had gotten complicated.

The few times he had mentioned Said to the girls they had looked at him blankly. If he had told them he was a grown man temporarily ensconced in the body of a ten-year-old boy in order to track down some flea thieves they would have laughed and snapped the waistband of his panties. Who would believe such nonsense? Even Aisha would think he was crazy. And she wouldn’t be far off.

His nose was running. He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.

Aisha was staring at him. “Bernie?” she said. “Why are you crying?”

That was another thing he didn’t like about being a ten-year-old boy. He cried a lot—usually for no reason.

All at once Fatima bounced into the mini-ward. She was excited. “They’re coming!” she exclaimed.

‘They’ would be the interns and they could have only one destination—the mini-ward containing the three ‘girls.’ It was the only room in the entire building that was occupied. In fact, most of the buildings that composed the ul-Heim Medical Complex were empty. There were more donkeys in the stables than there were patients in the wards; more stable hands packing guns, than nurses taking temperatures or filing reports. The ul-Heim Institute was more an idea than a reality and if the truth were known, ul-Heim had lost interest in it.

The interns were big and brawny and dressed in white. They bustled into the mini-ward like Sturm-und-Drang. “We want Krista,” said the larger one.

Piffy stood up. “That’s me,” he said. He smiled at Aisha.

“Goodbye, Bernie,” she said. There was a sad look on her face—she was getting ready to cry.

Goodbye? He frowned. What was this? He wasn’t going anywhere. He would be back in a few minutes. Sure he would. He touched two fingers to his forehead. “See you, kid,” he said.

He was Humphrey Bogart—yeah, Humphrey Bogart. He tugged his skirt down over his knees. Well, maybe not Humphrey Bogart…

The interns took him down the corridor to the elevator and then to the sub-basement. From there he was led to a small room filled with the props they hadn’t had room for in the laboratory scene in The Bride of Frankenstein.

Dr. ul-Heim and Diabolica Tungsten were waiting for him. The interns placed him on an examination table. The props didn’t frighten Piffy. He had been there before. Ul-Heim had a large hypodermic needle in his hand. It wasn’t the one he used—it was for show, to soften up his patients, to frighten them into confessing before he could jab them.

But it was the scrub nurse that caught Piffy’s attention. He hadn’t seen her before. She was a cross between Vampirella and Morticia Addams—more clothes than Vampy, more boob than Morticia. She was smirking like, “Oh, boy, are you going to get it now.” He expected to see a bat fly out of her hair at any moment.

She thrust her face close to his. If she had said, “Sarah Palin,” he would have thought she was Rachel Maddow. She was scary—MSNBC scary.

By then the interns had strapped the ten-year-old to the examination table and he couldn’t move. Ul-Heim was filling his hypodermic, a smaller one; the one he would actually use.

While Piffy eyed the hypo Nurse Tungsten fiddled with his smock and before he was aware of what she was doing, she had pulled his underpants down to his knees!

“Well, well,” she exclaimed. “What have we here?”

Ul-Heim was still measuring his dosage. “She’s one of the girls they rescued from al-Kabibble’s limo,” he said.

“Girls?” smirked Nurse Tungsten. Oh, yes, she was Rachel Maddow—the smirk, the condescension, the whole works. Scary! “Are you sure?” she said.

“Oh, yes,” said ul-Heim. “She’s the tough one I was telling you about.”

“She?” said Nurse Tungsten.

“Yes,” said ul-Heim.

There came another smirk. ”Don’t look now, Hari,” she said. ”But your she is the most unusual she I’ve ever seen.”

Ul-Heim’s back was to the examination table. “How’s that?” he asked.

“She has a wart growing where a wart shouldn’t be growing.”

“A wart?” said ul-Heim. “Well, we can remove that easily enough.”

If Piffy hadn’t been frightened before he was now! Exposure was one thing; he could handle that but wart removal? The mere thought of a wart removal—the removal of anything at all was more than normal terrifying! It was Little Annie Fanny “Leaping gonads” terrifying! In fact, it was so terrifying, so excruciatingly terrifying it caused the most embarrassing premature preteen hormonal eruption he had ever experienced!

“Oh, God, oh, God, why do these things always happen to me” he mumbled. He could die—he could just die!

And he might damn well before the day was over!