The Five Fakirs of Faizabad (7 page)

N
imrod chartered a private plane to fly from London to Saiss Airport in Morocco. He was accompanied by John, Philippa, Moo, Zagreus, and Groanin, who was now fully restored to his old self after his ordeal at John’s hands. This made him very happy. In fact, he was so happy he didn’t even complain about the prospect of visiting a foreign country, which was something that he always hated. And he sat at the back of the plane singing, like a man in the bath.

“‘We’re off on the road to Morocco,’” he sang, even as the plane was taking off.

“What’s that song you’re singing?” Philippa asked the butler.

“‘The Road to Morocco,’” said Groanin. “As sung by the great Bing Crosby in the film of the same name. Probably the greatest film ever made. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour.” Groanin grinned as he recalled some scenes from the movie in his mind’s eye. “Marvelous stuff.”

Philippa, who had never heard of any of the names Groanin mentioned, smiled thinly and nodded. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.” He started to sing again.

Nimrod, who was so disturbed by Groanin’s sunny disposition that he had already moved seats twice to be as far away from his butler as possible, winced. “Why is he so cheerful?” he asked his nephew.

“For one thing, he’s no longer the size of a garden gnome,” said John. “That might have something to do with it. And maybe he’s looking forward to a few days of sunshine, after Bumby. The weather in Bumby was awful.”

“But Morocco is a foreign country,” said Nimrod. “They do things differently there. Very differently. Groanin hates everything foreign. Especially when it’s as foreign as Fez. That’s one of the reasons I like taking him with me when I travel abroad. Because he detests it so much. Having Groanin along always reminds me of everything I hate about England.”

John smiled even more thinly than his twin sister. There were times when his uncle seemed really strange, even for a djinn.

“Besides,” John said, “we’ll probably be staying in a five-star luxury hotel, so when you think about it, maybe it won’t seem all that foreign, so Groanin might actually enjoy it a bit. I’m kind of looking forward to it myself. Room service, enormous beds, huge bathrooms, plenty of first-class food, a swimming pool, a minibar.”

“I can see I’ve been spoiling you all,” said Nimrod thoughtfully. “And, as a result, neglecting your education.” And very quietly he muttered his focus word.

“How do you mean?”

“Nothing.” Nimrod shook his head and made a mental note to teach the twins something about economic and social reality as soon as they got to Fez. “Do me a favor, would you please, John? Tell Zagreus to come up here. I want to speak to him.”

“Sure.”

Nimrod had attached a binding to Zagreus to temporarily disable him from jinxing people and machines around him, but he had not yet decided if and how he could help the Jinx and, until he did so, he thought it best that Zagreus accompany them to Morocco. For his part, Zagreus was pleased to have been asked along and to have a chance to speak to Nimrod. He just wanted to help.

“My nephew, John, tells me that you were captured by some bad men and taken to Bumby.”

“That’s right,” said Zagreus.

“Can you tell me anything about these men? Who they were? Not to mention how and why they did it? After all, when John first saw you, Zagreus, you were invisible. At least to human beings.”

“I don’t know for sure,” said Zagreus. “But I believe it was them who interrupted my progress to my next incarnation. There was some kind of séance. One minute I was traveling through the spirit world, and the next there was
someone calling me. At least I think it was me. Then I was in a room and there were these men standing inside a circle. In fact, there were two circles, one inside the other, with a lot of writing in between.”

“A magic circle, perhaps,” said Nimrod.

“Whatever that is. Either way, I seemed to have no will of my own. It felt like my spirit had been arrested. I can’t explain it any better than that. The rest is all a bit of a blur. The next time I was aware of anything I was in that horrible little town.”

“Bumby.”

Zagreus shrugged. “I’m afraid there’s not much more I can tell you, sir.”

Nimrod nodded thoughtfully.

“Except the name of one of the men who arrested my spirit. It was Mr. Churches.” “Churches?”

“I think so. I can’t be sure.”

“What did he look like, this Mr. Churches?”

“A bit like you, sir. Very well dressed, very well-mannered. English, in an old-fashioned sort of way.”

“Hmm.” Nimrod glanced out the window of the plane. “We’re coming in to land. Perhaps we can talk of this again. Right now you’d better make yourself invisible so that we can get through Moroccan customs without having to answer any awkward questions about importing live animals. No offense intended.”

“None taken, sir.”

A stretch Mercedes met them off the plane and drove them into Fez. The fourth largest city in Morocco, Fez was once the largest city in the world. Founded in
A.D.
789, the city is situated just below the most prominently northwest point in Africa — a sort of continental thumb that pokes up at the soft underbelly of Spanish Europe. It was full of narrow, winding streets, minarets, and strange smells, not all of them good. Men in long striped-cloth hoodies stood around on street corners, shouting at one another and gesticulating wildly, while the women seemed all but invisible. Everywhere — spilling out of bars and shops, blasting out of open car windows — there was the infectious sound of Arabic music.

Nimrod told the driver, a handsome Moroccan named Saadi, to drive them into the new part of the city and, arriving at a graceful avenue of trees, he announced that they were looking at the Morisco Palace Hotel.

“This is the best hotel in Morocco,” he explained. “It might even be the best hotel in the whole of North Africa. As you might expect, given the enormous price of a room.”

“Excellent,” said Groanin, who winked at John and reached for the door handle. “Room service, here I come.”

“Which is why we’re not staying here,” added Nimrod.

“You what?” said Groanin.

Nimrod told Saadi to drive on.

“You mean we’re not staying here?” said Philippa.

“I realized that I’ve been giving you and John an incorrect impression of what the world is really like,” Nimrod told her. “Which is hardly fair of me. I’ve been thinking of my
own comfort and convenience when I should have been thinking of your education.”

“What does that mean?” asked Groanin.

“It means we’re staying somewhere else,” said Nimrod.

“So where
are
we staying?” asked Moo as the car neared the edge of the Sahara desert.

The car stopped outside what looked like a cross between a giant pyramid and a skyscraper.

“Here,” said Nimrod. “One hundred and five stories high, three thousand rooms: Welcome to the internationally famous El Moania hotel.”

“It looks like a rocket launchpad,” observed Moo. “Simply awful.”

“Why is it internationally famous?” asked an invisible voice that belonged to Zagreus.

“For the simple reason that this is without doubt the worst hotel in the world.” Nimrod smiled at Moo. “Rest assured, dear lady; as I recall, you still have one wish left from yesterday.”

“Do I?”

“Very much so,” said Nimrod. “We always grant them in threes, for the sake of a harmony that includes and synthesizes two possible opposites.”

“I always wondered why that was,” said Moo happily.

“The worst hotel in the world?” John sounded outraged. “How is this going to help with our education?”

“It is my experience,” said Nimrod, “that you can only really appreciate the finer things in life when you have had to endure some of life’s hardships. And believe me, there’s
no greater hardship in the whole of North Africa than the El Moania hotel.”

“I can see that,” admitted Philippa. “But don’t you think it might be better for us all if we just said ‘thank you kindly’ when we left?”

“No,” said Nimrod.

“Well, I shan’t put up with it,” insisted Groanin. “I shall check in somewhere else. I said, I shall check in somewhere else. Like that hotel we were just at a few minutes ago.”

“And pay with what?” asked Nimrod. “The Morisco Palace is a thousand dollars a night. Or whatever that is in the local currency, which is the dirham. I’m just guessing, but I’m assuming you don’t have any of what passes for money in this neck of the woods.”

“Then I shall make some, using djinn power,” said John.

“You tell him, John,” said Groanin. “That’s the spirit.”

Nimrod smiled. “You do that, nephew of mine,” he said, opening the car door.

John winked at Groanin. “Don’t worry,” he told the butler. “You can rely on me. I’ll sort things out. Just see if I don’t. In just a few minutes we’ll be checking into the Morisco Palace.” But when John opened his mouth to utter his focus word, he found that he could not. “Ab-ab-ab-ab-”

It wasn’t that he had forgotten it, merely that he couldn’t pronounce the word.

“Your word is ABECEDARIAN,” said Groanin. “I said, it’s ABECEDARIAN.”

“Ab-ab-ab-ab-” John shook his head. “What’s happened? I can’t pronounce my focus word.” He looked helplessly at
Philippa, who discovered to her equal horror that no more could she utter hers.

“Fab-fab-fab-fab-”

Nimrod laughed. “Now you see the importance of keeping your focus words secret,” he said. “I’ve attached a sesquipedalian binding to each of you for the duration of our stay here in Morocco. I’m afraid it specifically prevents each of you from pronouncing your own focus word.”

The driver unloaded the luggage on the pavement outside the hotel entrance.

“I think this is so unfair,” said John.

“So now you’re stuck here whether you like it or not,” said Nimrod. “You can either stay here, at the El Moania …” Nimrod pointed at the undulating sand dunes that marked the beginning of the Sahara desert. “Or you can stay there, I suppose.” Shaking his head, he added, “But I really wouldn’t recommend it.”

Moo then made her final wish, which was to stay at the Morisco Palace, and Nimrod ordered the driver to take her back there.

“It’s lucky I brought my usual supply of sterilized baby food from England,” said Groanin. “At least we won’t starve.”

F
or about five minutes the hotel didn’t seem quite as bad as the twins and Groanin had feared it would be. The receptionist greeted them warmly and promised them each a room with an en suite bathroom and a panoramic view of the desert. Nimrod signed the register. Room keys were handed over. Groanin even admired the beauty of the entrance hall.

But things started to go a bit wrong when the hotel manager appeared and told Nimrod’s party that the air-conditioning in the hotel was not working, nor were the elevators. And it was at this point they discovered that their rooms were all on the hundredth floor. What was more, the hotel porters were on strike, which meant that there was no one to carry the luggage.

“How do you expect us to get all the way up to the hundredth floor carrying our own luggage?” Groanin demanded.

“The stairs,” said the manager. “You will find them very convenient as they go all the way up to the top of the hotel, where the view is the best in all of Fez.”

“Couldn’t we have rooms on a lower floor?” asked John.

The manager smiled sheepishly. “I regret that the rooms on the lower floors are not yet finished,” he said.

This was something of an understatement as it swiftly transpired that most of the hotel between the second and the ninetieth floors was one large building site, and the noise of men drilling walls, hammering nails into wood, or operating cement mixers was deafening.

Arriving on the hundredth floor, hot and out of breath, Groanin kicked open the door of his room, flung his bags down on the floor, and collapsed onto the bed only to discover that his bed had no mattress.

“I suppose it could be worse,” said Philippa, experimentally opening and closing her own door — which lacked not only a lock but a door handle, too.

Meanwhile, Groanin had discovered that his minibar was empty, which made him very cross indeed.

“Mine isn’t empty,” John reported. “There’s a large cockroach living in it.”

“Probably got the most comfortable room in the hotel, I shouldn’t wonder,” observed Groanin.

Philippa yelled for everyone to come to her room, and they all found her standing in the bathroom and looking down at the floor of the shower, which seemed to be made of bare earth. “There are no tiles on the floor of the shower,” she said. “It’ll just turn to mud when the shower is turned on.”

“Actually, that’s not true,” said Nimrod, trying to turn the shower faucet. “For the simple reason that you can’t actually turn the shower on. John, you’d better call downstairs and have someone see if they can come and fix it.”

John picked up the telephone, which wasn’t working. And then another, which wasn’t connected to the wall. Finally, he found a phone that was working and managed to speak to someone.

“What you want?” said a hostile voice.

John explained that the shower in Philippa’s room was not working.

“Why not just have a wash?” said the voice. “The hand basin works okay, I think.”

John insisted that the shower be fixed and the voice said that he would send someone just as soon as possible.

Half an hour later a very tall man wearing a red tarboosh — this being a kind of hat that is also sometimes called a fez — and a white robe appeared and said he had come to fix the shower.

“You got any tools?” asked the very tall man. “To fix the shower.”

John shook his head. “Er, no,” he said.

The tall man glanced around the room, picked up one of Groanin’s boots, and started to beat the faucet with it until, finally, the knob turned and water started to spray from the showerhead. Quickly, the floor of the shower turned to a small, square sea of mud. But he paid that no attention.

“Shower’s working now,” he said. Then he tossed the boot aside and walked out.

Philippa shrugged and went into the bathroom to turn off the shower and discovered that this was now impossible. “Hey,” she shouted after the man, “now it won’t turn off.”

But it was too late. The man had gone.

Naturally a little shy, Zagreus had waited until now before rematerializing. He walked on his knuckles around the interconnecting rooms for a while and then sat down to watch Moroccan television. On one channel it was
Strictly Belly Dancing,
on another it was
So You Think You Can Belly Dance on Ice,
and on the third it was
Who Wants to be a Belly Dancer?
Zagreus decided that he liked Moroccan television a lot more than he liked English television.

Groanin glanced at the television and then at the Jinx uncomfortably. “Just tell me that you’ve got nothing to do with any of this,” he said.

Zagreus gave a sheepish look. “Er, I really don’t know,” he said. “I mean, it’s possible, I guess.”

Nimrod grinned at his butler. “Really, Groanin, this isn’t known as the worst hotel in the world for nothing,” he said. “None of this has anything to do with Zagreus. Besides, I took the precaution of putting a binding on him while he’s with us, so you can rest assured that his jinx won’t affect us for now.”

“Thanks,” said Zagreus. “I was wondering about that myself.”

Meanwhile, Groanin picked up his boot off the floor, where the man with the fez had tossed it. “What’s this doing here?” And then, “Flipping heck, the heel’s come off me boot. How did that happen?”

“The guy with the fez was using it as a hammer to fix Philippa’s shower,” explained John. “My boot? A hammer?”

“Better put that boot on, Groanin,” said Nimrod. “You’re going to need a pair of sturdy boots where we’re going.”

“And where’s that?” asked Philippa.

“A better hotel, I hope,” said Groanin. “I said, a better hotel, I hope.”

“The Atlas Mountains,” said Nimrod. “Specifically Jebel Toubkal, the highest peak in Morocco.”

“Anything’s better than actually staying here, I suppose,” said John.

“There’s a man called James Burton who lives there,” continued Nimrod. “He’s one of the reasons we came to Morocco in the first place. Mr. Burton used to be a butler — a very good butler, actually. And now I urgently need his help.”

The twins looked at each other with horror and then at Groanin, who was now looking thoroughly offended.

His lip quivering with self-pity, the butler turned his back on the three djinn and walked quietly across the room.

“I see,” Groanin said stiffly. “So that’s the way the wind blows. Maybe I should just stay here and start looking for another job?”

The butler leaned his forehead thoughtfully upon the windowpane; at least he did until the pane fell out of the window frame. He leaped back with fright, collided with a small table, knocked over a lamp, slipped, and sat down heavily on top of Zagreus. Nimrod helped Groanin to his feet.

“You mistake me,” said Nimrod. “It’s not Mr. Burton’s skills as a butler I need to enlist. It’s his experience as a holy man.”

“You mean, I’m not being sacked, sir?” said Groanin.

“Of course not,” said Nimrod. “Mr. Burton is a fakir. And a very good one, I believe. Which he should be, as he had an excellent teacher. Before he was a fakir, Mr. Burton was for many years a butler in the service of Mr. Rakshasas.”

“He was a butler?” said John. “And now he’s a fakir?”

“That’s a career path I hadn’t thought of,” Groanin said wryly.

“Weird, isn’t it?” said Nimrod. “Although there’s not much an English butler can’t do when he puts his mind to it. Isn’t that right, Groanin?”

“Yes, sir.” Groanin grinned back at his employer. “Might I inquire, sir, how we are to get to the Atlas Mountains?”

“I’m glad you asked me that,” said Nimrod. “That’s the other reason we came to Morocco. We need to go and get ourselves a decent carpet.”

John inspected the floor of the hotel room.

“I guess this one is a little threadbare in parts,” he said. “But it seems to me there are plenty of other things in this place that are a heck of a lot worse than the carpet.” He shrugged. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to go to another hotel?”

“I’m not talking about that kind of carpet, my boy,” said Nimrod. “I am referring to the flying carpet of King Solomon.”

“But I thought magic carpets didn’t exist,” objected Philippa. “That’s what you said. Isn’t it?”

Nimrod shook his head. “I said nothing of the sort. I said that nearly all modern djinn prefer to travel by whirlwind. Or airplane. And we did. But since it’s no longer permitted for good djinn to travel by whirlwind, and since it is notoriously difficult to get to the summit of Jebel Toubkal, we must needs look to more old-fashioned methods of transport. Such as a flying carpet. Of the kind described — as I’m quite sure you will both remember — in night number five hundred and seventy of the
Arabian Nights.
And please don’t let me hear you describing it as a ‘magic carpet.’ You know my views on the use of that word. A flying carpet is vulgar, clichéd, embarrassing — you, John, would probably say it was corny — but I can now see no alternative to owning one. A flying carpet must be procured. Which is why, before we do anything, we must visit the rug emporium of Mr. Barkhiya, in the medina, which is the old part of Fez.”