Bernard Piffy

The men seated around the conference table stared at Jimmy Carter. Richard the Lion-Heart could have parachuted into the middle of their séance from the siege of Acre with a crossbow strapped to his back and would have caused less alarm. Mouths gaped open; eyes flickered with fear. Che Guevara was the first to recover. He smiled. He was Alfonso Bedoya in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. :”Ah, Senor Carter,” he said. “Mi amigos tell me you were Presidente of the United States. It is an honor to meet you.” The peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, seemed embarrassed.

It wasn’t Des Moines, Iowa, or Gun Blast, Texas, it was Gaza City, the land of Yasser Arafat and Hamas, of car bombings, honor killings and nasty old men filled with 1,400 years of hatred. But no one had promised Piffy a rose garden, least of all Asma bint Marwan. He got off the bus from Rafah carrying puppy dog in a covered birdcage—yes, a covered birdcage. The mutt was sound asleep and no one could see inside so no one was the wiser. The first thing Piffy noticed about Gaza was the smell, a combination of cooking oil, horse and donkey sweat and raw sewage.

He wasn’t Audie Murphy; he wasn’t Alvin York; he wasn’t Shane or Rooster Cogburn; he wasn’t Cump Sherman marching through Georgia; he wasn’t any of those, he was Bernard Piffy, an average private eye up to his neck in a lot of things he didn’t understand—Mike Hammer had once called him a nerd—but he would be damned if he was going to let some Muslim SOB shoot him dead in the basement of a dirty, stinking, little Madrassas because that particular Muslim SOB thought Allah had given him a license to kill unbelievers He lurched to his feet.

For once Bernard Piffy was at a loss for words. He had no idea of what he should do. He was in a cell full of dead roaches in the basement of a Madrassas not in an emergency room at a Metropolitan hospital where trained medical personnel looked after rape victims or in a woman’s shelter where psychiatrists and psychologists with more degrees than he had days in school had some idea of what would work and what wouldn’t. But he tried his best and if cursing were part of the healing process he might have been some help. He tried to make Henrietta as comfortable as possible.