Assignment - Karachi (13 page)

“I do not know this name.”

“Tell me!”

“I cannot—”

Durell hit him with the gun barrel, and when the man tried to roll away, scrambling on all fours. Durell used his fist and smashed him back against the nearest truck fender. He had no pity, remembering the moment of strangling in his bed. The man fell to his knees and whimpered. Durell looked at Alessa. Her face was white and strained.

“Must you do this?” she    whispered.

“Memsahib!” the man groaned. “Have mercy!”

“There is no mercy,” Durell said. He hit the man again, harder, and heard a small bone break in the man’s nose. Blood gushed from his nostrils and he coughed and choked. “Who hired you?”

“In the bazaar of Qissa Khani—”

Durell waited.

“—in the Street of the Storytellers—”

“I know it. Tell me no fables, Ali.”

“I am employed there by Omar, the Storyteller. The old
_man
—everyone knows him on Jehanistan Lane. I run errands for him. I do everything. He is an evil old man. He promised me one hundred rupees to do this terrible thing, but I am an honest man and I do not like it. I have a wife, sahib, and six children, six hungry little ones I must always feed—”

“You are lying!” Durell snapped.

“I swear by Allah! It was Omar who ordered me to kill you.”

Durell paused. If he exerted more pressure, the man would shriek and scream in hysteria. It would waken the others and bring Colonel K’Ayub into it. But he wanted to take care of this matter alone. It was not mere personal pride or outrage at the attempt made on him. He had been selected by name, but more than that, he trusted no one, not K’Ayub or Alessa or even Sarah Standish, whose love affair with Rudi von Buhlen had blinded her to normal realities.

He found some cord in one of the trucks and tied up the turbaned man, lashing the wrists tightly, then the ankles, then taking more cord to lash him to the rear wheel in the shadows of the shed. Before he finished he searched the man, found only a few coins, a police identity card with the name Ali Hamadourji on it. He put them back and walked to the door of the shed. Alessa moved with him. In the moonlight, he looked at his watch. It was only a few minutes before eleven, to his surprise.

“What are you going to do?” Alessa asked.

“I am going to the Qissa Khani. That street never sleeps.”

“Don’t you think the police—” She frowned anxiously.

“You’re coming with me. It may be dangerous, but I’d feel safer with you in sight, even in the Qissa Khani. I want no interference.”

“You don’t trust me to be quiet here?”

“No,” he said.

There were dancing boys with bobbed hair walking hand in hand in the twisted lanes, and fakirs and blind beggars, one-legged beggars and naked beggars in the yellow-lighted dust. A radio in one of the Arab tenements spewed out the latest hate-hysteria propaganda from Cairo. Another radio played American jazz, relayed from the European hotels in Karachi or perhaps from as far away as Bombay. Camels and donkeys vied with the surging humanity that crowded the lanes between the shops, where gasoline lanterns added to the fragmentary electric street-lighting. The smells of coffee, curry and hides filled the air. A flute wailed somewhere, candy vendors monotonously hawked their wares. A lemon-drink seller bobbed up in front of Durell, urging a drink from the huge copper jug on his bent back. He poured the sweetish, sticky fluid from a long spout into a cup he took from his pocket, before Durell could wave him away. The man had one eye only, the other a shriveled, puckered socket. Durell gave the man a coin and turned the drink over to a naked urchin tagging at his heels. He reflected that everything was for sale here—live birds, fortunes, bullet belts, fruits and every diversity of women.

A cool wind from the northern hills had washed away the day’s heat. In the Qissa Khani, he had no difficulty finding Omar. The man held forth in a lane of shops not far from the teahouse of Swerji Hamad. Above the shops were rooms with balconies where the bazaar merchants lived and dispensed their more profitable products—stolen goods, opium, women and bhang—the ubiquitous derivative of Indian hemp, which is smoked, chewed, eaten in sweetmeats and downed in drinks throughout the sub-continent.

Omar’s operation was a little more elaborate than his competitors, Durell noted. Two musicians, one with a horn and another with a goat-skin drum, banged out ear-splitting Pathan music while a girl of ten, her eyes already indicating trachoma, stamped out a mountain dance in the dust. The crowd was appreciative, throwing coins to the men and the child.

Then, with a showman’s gesture, the old man stepped from a curtained doorway and the music stopped as he settled to a squatting position on a dusty pillow. The drummer went around collecting a rupee from each spectator.

Omar was the most famous of the entertainers in the Street of Storytellers. The old man wore a green gown that accented his sallow face in the flickering kerosene lamps. His straggly white beard and dark, piercing eyes and sunken cheeks gave him a diabolical appearance that he apparently cultivated. A fat Punjabi stood behind him, studying the crowd with careful impassivity.

The old man began with the usual glorification of ancient Arab conquests in the Sind, went on to diatribes against the British and their machinations—relayed directly by the Cairo radio, Durell thought—and for emphasis, the old man flourished a glittering dagger and drove it with hatred into the ground again and again between his folded legs. His voice lifted and fell, grew sad, dripped vitriolic hatred. The crowd listened with rapt attention.

Then he began on his special tales of long ago, fables of Alexander the Great and Roxana, the virgin daughter of King Oxyartes. The sum of his narrative, told in detail with much lewd emphasis, was how Roxana had induced the Greek conqueror to swim naked in a pool with her on a cold night, maddening the Macedonian with her ivory body, her pomegranate breasts, her hips and loins, and how Alexander then caught a chill and fever and died as a direct result of Roxana’s plan.

“The crown!” someone muttered. “Tell us of the crown, old man!”

Durell tried to see who had called for the story, but the voice had come from the thick of the audience, and he could not identify anyone. More rupees were collected, and Durell felt Alessa’s hand close on his arm in tight anticipation.

There were many embellishments about King Mahandra, sovereign over eighty purs, who had bowed to the conqueror from the West and offered a fabulous ransom for his cities in the form of a jeweled crown. There was a description of brave Xenos, the Greek zamindar, loyal captain of a thousand in Alexander’s army, and how one night a thief slipped into King Mahandra’s palace and stole the crown and fled into the Gilgit mountains and beyond, across the valley of Kashmir and into the towering Himalayas. Xenos volunteered to find and punish the thief and the tribesmen who sheltered him, and was ordered to march into the mountains. Xenos never came back. It was said that the gods who ruled at the time were angry at the invaders and shook the mountains and trapped the Greeks, every man of the thousand, and they died of thirst and starvation and cold in a black valley especially created for them by the gods, after they had sacked and tortured the hill tribes and found the crown.

And ever since, Omar said softly, his satanic eyes glistening, the skulls of the hated enemy rest in a black void somewhere in the Himalayas, piled high upon the golden, flashing crown of jewels given by King Mahandra.

The music of horn and drum began at once, when the old man whispered the end of his tale, and the mountain girl returned to stamp out her tribal dance in the dust of the Qissa Khani. The old man in the green gown vanished through the curtained doorway, and the crowd dispersed. Alessa was frowning.

“Is something wrong?” Durell asked “I am interested in the crown,” she said, uncertainly. “You know it is my only reason for going back to S-5. The antiquities departments of several European museums have backed my search.”

“Was there anything new in the old man’s tale?”

“The story of Roxana is an old one, of course, repeated in every generation. These people emphasize local pride, even after two thousand years. But the story of Xenos—” She paused. “I’ve heard it before, except for the black void that trapped the Greeks and still keeps them captive up there in the hills. That’s entirely new. It doesn’t really make sense.” 

“Well, we’ll ask Omar for more details about it,” he said. Alessa still hesitated. “You’re going inside?”

“That’s what I came here for.”

“But it may be dangerous.”

“Sleeping in my own bed was dangerous,” Durell pointed out. “It can’t be any worse.”

“I do want to know if the old man can tell us more than he put into his public tale. It’s almost as if he knew we were here—”

“He’s probably waiting in there for us,” Durell said.

No one stopped them as he pushed inside the beaded curtain in the doorway. The Punjabi and the musicians and the mountain girl kept up their ear-splitting entertainment. There was a dim corridor, the walls painted blue, and a Moorish arch at the end opening into a tiny garden furnished with a rusty iron Victorian bench, a plank table under a scraggly palm. The surrounding houses towered four and five stories high, making the garden a well of darkness. But enough light came from an opposite doorway to beckon him forward. The old man stood there, bowing, his smile old and evil. “Welcome, doctor memsahib,” he said to Alessa. “It is an honor that you come to see me.”

Alessa shivered slightly. “You know of me, Omar?”

“Your fame is deserved. Mine is not.” The old man looked at Durell. “And this gentleman’s reputation is equal to his deeds.”

“My deeds are not as bloody as yours,” Durell said.

“One must live. Omar has struggled all his life, and in struggle one learns wisdom.” The old man’s white brows lifted. “You have dealt with Ali?”

“He failed you.”

“Then I hope you have killed him.”

“He will be turned over to the police or the military.”

“Ali was an expert,” the old man said. “I feel much respect for you.”

“Who ordered you to send him to me?”

“I am an old man,” Omar sighed. “I have dealt with life as it has come my way. Being full of years, thanks to Allah, I have not yet any desire to see the end. But if I answered your question, I would be as dead as Ali by sunrise.”

“One way or another, you will be dead, old man,” Durell said. “Now, or later.”

“You would not harm a helpless old man?”

“I will kill you, if it is necessary.”

Omar looked at Alessa and licked his lips, like the quick flick of a snake’s tongue over a blackened, reptilian mouth. He bowed slightly. “Come into my house, please.”

“You first,” Durell said.

The rooms beyond the little garden were decorated with rich silken hangings, brass plates, ancient Saracen armor, jade vases that would have graced any Western museum. There was a low couch in the second room, and as the old man sank down on it; a young veiled Arab girl came in silently and took off Omar’s slippers and rubbed the gnarled old feet with an oily paste taken from a brass jar. Another young woman came in silently and brought a brass samovar and poured steaming tea. There were rattan chairs, a smell of incense, a drifting hint of bhang; he wasn’t sure. The girl at the old man’s feet began to chafe and massage the skinny calves of Omar’s legs, working up above the bony knees under the green gown toward the old man’s thighs. The old man smiled and patted her head.

“Not now, my dear,” he said in Arabic.

“Yes, father.”

Durell said, “She is your daughter?” as the girl went out.

“I have many daughters. They are kind to me.” Omar looked at Alessa with brooding, speculative eyes. “You are the doctor memsahib who wishes to find the crown of Alexander?”

“Do you have any information more than you tell the public?”

“Perhaps. It could be for sale.”

“For how much?”

The old man shrugged. “Perhaps only for your mercy, in exchange for my life. Mr. Durell says he will kill me, because I cannot tell him who wishes his death enough to have me hire Ali.”

“The crown,” Alessa said, ignoring Durell. “What more do you know of it? Does it still exist?”

“Yes, doctor memsahib. So they say.”

“Who says?”

Omar shrugged. “It is said; that is all.”

“Can it be found?”

“It is in an accursed place. The Pakhustis would not go there. To enter this place brings death.”

“Why? Where is it?”

“There is a cave the Pakhustis call the Cave of a Thousand Skulls. It can be seen if one stands on Roxana’s breast and watches the sun on her golden belly in the hours of the morning,” Omar said.

“You speak in riddles.”

“I can say no more.”

“You can tell me,” Durell said, “who hired your man Ali.” “It was directed that I send him to his destiny.” Omar’s black eyes flickered to Durell. “And I did as I was bidden.” “Who gives a man like you orders to do murder?” “Who wishes to die by having a tongue that wags too much?” The old man laughed thinly. “You can kill me, but you know I would not talk to you. You are foolish, like all Americans. You are an imperialist spy, here on a mission of capitalistic espionage—”

“Cut out the garbage,” Durell said. “That’s fine for your mobs in the street, to whip them into a frenzy for the glorification of Islam. But you have no god and no politics, only money, old man.”

“You may speak the truth.”

“How much will loosen your tongue?”

“Ten thousand American dollars.”

“I haven’t got that much.”

“Can you get it?” Omar asked eagerly.

“There isn’t that much time.”

Omar said, “There is no more time for you now, sahib.” His eyes looked beyond Durell. Durell turned. The fat Punjabi had entered the room from the garden. He was not alone. From the doorway where the girls had gone, two Arabs appeared. Another man came in behind the Punjabi. They were all armed.

Omar clapped his bony hands.

“Kill the man,” he said.

DURELL ignored the others and jumped for the old man. Omar shrieked and tried to wriggle away, rolling over the silk-covered couch. His flailing arm struck a lamp vase and it fell from an ivory inlaid taboret and shattered on the tiled floor. Durell caught the flailing arm, wrenched it around without mercy, jumped on the couch, and hauled the old man around in front of him.