The Search for Yaser Abdel Said (Part 33)

Printer-friendly versionSend to friendPDF versionIt 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 didn’t mind the horse sweat—he had grown up with wild mustangs. He had won the Mayberry Junior Bronco-Busting Championship three years in a row before he turned to bulldogging. He didn’t like mules and he didn’t know much about donkeys and he could have done without the raw sewage. He hoped the smell wouldn’t make puppy dog cranky. He checked into the first hotel he came to—the Grand-Something-Or-Other. There was a large picture of Jimmy Carter in the lobby—and one of Yasser Arafat—and one of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The desk clerk looked as if Hamas had just selected him in the first round of the annual terrorist draft. “Would you like to contribute to the Rachel Corrie Fund?” he asked. “Vas ist loss?” said Piffy. “Each year we send a deserving child to camp in Pakistan,” said the clerk. “Vas ist loss?” said Piffy. He singed in, took his dog-in-a-birdcage up to room 6-B. He was supposed to meet Ka'b in a couple of hours. No one had said where. He hadn’t seen Ka’b since Dallas when Mohammed Atta and Hani Hanjour had machine-gunned the poet’s floating time warp into a thousand pieces of splintered wood. Ka’b had not been pleased. Piffy fed puppy dog the sole from an old slipper, smeared the cage door with black Transylvania garlic, chucked the mutt under the chin and turned the air-conditioner down a notch. He wondered what kind of conveyance Ka’b would be using. He was a delicate old man and getting from the netherworld to where the woodbine twineth wasn’t easy. Time warps were complicated and floating doorways were expensive. Maybe he had insurance. Maybe he had more than one means of transportation. Bint Marwan got about in an oscillating bra, a shopping bag and a halo but bint Marwan was a thoroughly Modern Millie compared to Ka’b. Piffy would look for a floating doorway in some shadowy corner. He should have been on the lookout for umbrellas. He had scarcely left the hotel when a gnarled old man, half-hidden beneath an enormous red-and-white bumbershoot, called to him from a dark corner. “Have you seen my friend John?” he asked. “John?” said Piffy. “Have you seen my friend John?’ repeated the old man. “John?” said Piffy. The man was obviously a pimp. “It’s me—Ka’b, you fool!” hissed the old man. “You were supposed to say, ‘Hey, Jude!’” “Hey, Jude?” said Piffy. “The countersign! The countersign!” said Ka’b. “I wasn’t given any countersign,” said Piffy. “Not given a countersign?” exclaimed Ka’b. He flung up his arms. “Amateurs! Amateurs! I am surrounded by amateurs!” “Where’s your doorway?” asked Piffy. “As if you didn’t know,” said Ka’b. “It was your fault those devils shot it to pieces! I have a replacement on order but good carpenters are hard to find in the hereafter so, thanks to you, I’m traveling about in a used umbrella. And I was once a world-renowned poet!” “Well, what’s up?” asked Piffy. Ka’b looked up and down the street. “I have a man who can take you to Yasser Arafat’s fuhrerbunker,” he whispered. “Wow!” said Piffy. “That was quick! How did you manage that?” “I used mirrors,” said Ka’b. Piffy wasn’t sure but he thought Ka’b was being facetious. “Do you want to know who he is?” asked Ka’b. “Sure,” said Piffy. “Who is he? Anybody I know?” “He is Jurgen Stroop,” said Ka’b. “Stroop?” said Piffy. Ka’b must be kidding. “Not the Jurgen Stroop that destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto?” “The same,” said Ka’b. There was a gleam in his eye. “Can he be trusted?” asked Piffy. “Oh, yes,” said Ka’b. “He will do whatever you wish or he will go back to where I found him.” “Well, where is he?” asked Piffy. “Ramallah…Rafah…Nablus…” “You are such an amateur,” said Ka’b. “When I said I had a man who could take you to Yasser Arafat’s fuhrerbunker, I meant I had a man who could take you to Yasser Arafat’s fuhrerbunker.” “I’m a private detective not a mind reader,” said Piffy. Ka’b reached inside his umbrella, rummaged around for a minute, withdrew a smaller umbrella, opened it and a man clad in the remnants of a Nazi uniform tumbled to the sidewalk at Piffy’s feet. It would have been impossible to tell who was the more surprised—Jurgen Stroop or Bernard Piffy. But Ka’b wasn’t finished. He produced a long, white Muslim robe—a thobe—wrapped it around Stroop. “It won’t do for him to roam the streets of Gaza dressed as he is,” he said. “Now if you don’t mind, I have business elsewhere.” And without further ado, he crawled into his umbrella and just as he was about to disappear into the red-and-white striped fastness, he reached back with one hand and dragged the whole darn thing after him into the netherworld and just like that he was gone and Piffy was alone in the darkening street with a long dead Nazi and not the slightest idea of where he was to go or what he was to do! It was another fine mess handed him by Asma bint Marwan! Why did he believe every last thing she told him? There had to be a limit to his gullibility. Even Opie Taylor would occasionally second-guess Barney Fife. Surely, Piffy was the equal of Opie Taylor and if not Opie, at least, Potsie Weber. Well—regardless—he would have to make do with what he had. He looked Stroop up and down. The man was a wreck. He was more than a little confused and it soon turned out he didn’t understand a word of English! If there was one thing Piffy didn’t like it was a toy soldier with a dead battery and a speech impediment. He was getting angrier by the minute. “Mach schnell!” he roared. “Take me to das fuhrerbunker and be quick about it, schweinhundt, or I’ll have you doing pushups with Barack Obama in the White House!” Maybe it was the mention of the White House or maybe it was Piffy’s tone of voice but it worked. A smile crossed Stroop’s face—a remembrance of a past holocaust perhaps. It was gone in a second but a thought of some kind must have registered for Stroop started down the street as if he understood what was expected of him. That was good enough for Piffy. The former SS General maintained a pretty good pace and Piffy was hard pressed to keep up. It wasn’t long before they left the broad boulevard that ran past the hotel in favor of the back alleys of the casbah. The smell of raw sewage was strong, almost overpowering, not as bad as Soweto in the summertime but worse than anything Li’l Abner might have experienced in Dogpatch even with the wind blowing in hard from the Skonkworks. Piffy held his breath. If his guide wasn’t brain dead he was as close to it as possible—there were no “Heil Hitlers,” no fancy salutes, and only a half-hearted goosestep. He was like a zombie. Ka’b must have found him in the Devil’s outhouse, grabbed him by the testicles, stuffed him in his umbrella, dragged him through Dante’s Inferno and when he was totally disoriented, dumped him at Piffy’s feet. That’s the way it must have happened. But Ka’b knew what he was doing, an old SS man would be sure to head for the nearest fuhrerbunker no matter where he was and in the Gaza Strip that would be the Yasser Arafat’s “Look-at-me-I’m-Adolph-Hitler” hideout. Oh, Ka’b was a smart man; that’s why the Prophet had hated him and had him killed but intellects like Ka’b’s don’t die and the feud had never ended, not in the netherworld or anywhere else. It took Piffy some time to figure this out and by then Stroop had led him to the entrance of an abandoned building and that was where he tried to kill Piffy. It was not a wise decision. Piffy had been expecting something of the sort right from the beginning and the broken-down relic from Herr Hitler’s past glories had next to no chance against the former Marine Corps Close Combat Instructor. It was over before it began. Stroop picked up a rock and Piffy responded by picking up Stroop. He slammed the wretch to the ground like Dick Butkus would blind-side a rookie quarterback. For a moment Piffy considered killing the wretch but it would have taken more effort than it was worth—jinns were a dime a dozen in the big leagues, they kept coming back and Piffy was no longer a rookie—besides he had never considered murder to be a small matter. A second collision with the ground and it was all over and Piffy hogtied the unconscious Nazi with one of the pigging strings he carried in case of an emergency. Finis. He was sure he was at the entrance to Arafat’s fuhrerbunker. He pushed past a sagging doorway and into a cluttered corridor. He could hear a low mumbling sound in the distance. He felt his way through the darkness. Maybe he should light a match. What the hell—he didn’t carry matches! That was kid’s stuff, the kind of thing Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher would do, but he should have brought a flashlight. Something scurried across his feet. As long as it wasn’t an oversized spider he wasn’t worried. He had been bitten once by a ten-pound black widow but that was another story. He went down a flight of stairs, turned a corner and came out in what must have been Yasser Arafat’s office. There was a man sitting in Yasser’s chair. His head was bent and he appeared to be praying. Piffy edged closer, he wanted to hear what the man was saying. “I tremble for my country when I realize there is a just God,” the man said. Then he snuffled. “Oh, Yasser, oh, Yasser, if only you could have lived a few more years…what great things we could have accomplished…the Awards…the accolades…What a better place the world would be…and the judenfreuden would be kept in their place…perhaps put in the way of extinction.” He sighed. “I feel so humble sitting here in this chair that supported your soft, little bottom. If only I could press my lips one more time to your sere cheeks…Oh, dear God…Mortal man is so weak…I have sinned…I have looked on many women with lust…I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times…God knows I will do this and he forgives me…Perhaps he sent the rabbit after me as a warning…God works in mysterious ways…If I had known Yasser had a penchant for young boys…ah, but I would never have been able to talk Dennis Kucinich into something like that…never” By then Piffy had recognized the man. He was stunned! “Well, I’ll be a cross-grained jackass!” he said. “It’s Jimmy Carter!” (To be continued)