The Search for Yaser Abdel Said (Part 50)

What in tarnations was James Bond doing in Gaza? He didn’t belong in the Land that God forgot and the Devil remembered. He was a decrepit old man! He was supposed to be retired—on half-pay, playing chess with Sherlock Holmes in some rest home with Doctor Watson taking his pulse every half-hour. Good grief! He had more wrinkles in his face than a kennel full of Shar-Pei. He was old enough to have been best man at Mickey Rooney’s last wedding. And what in the Devil was he doing wearing a chauffeur’s uniform? Sure, he was piloting Sheikh Rahman Al Kabibble’s 18 Passenger SUV around Gaza but what was he really doing? Something wasn’t cricket—perhaps cockroach but not cricket.

Maybe if he had been Sergeant York with a steel pot on his head and a Model 1917 Enfield Rifle in his hands he might have stood a chance or if he had been Audie Murphy in a burning Panzer tank armed with a machine gun he wouldn’t have cared how many Mujahideen stormed into the crowded little room but he was Bernard Piffy, a temporary ten-year-old boy disguised as a girl with a wig on his head and a crop top Bratz bra and rosebud panties under his borrowed dress. The only reason he hadn’t been shot dead was because the Mujahideen had mistaken him for a girl.

Bernard Piffy was not an expert in the Qur’an nor in any other Holy Book; he had never finished the Bible—not the one he got from Mom and Dad the day he graduated from High School or the one that had laid on Grandma Piffy’s dresser during her long and fruitful life or the one Grandpa Piffy used to prop open the window in his study on those hot, humid summer nights in Mayberry, but he knew what Al Kabibble meant when he said, “It is no sin.” The look in the Sheikh’s eye was warning enough. It would be one hot time where the devil met with Jack the Ripper and the Marquis de Sade and if the Sheikh should discover that the object of his amorous intentions was not what she appeared to be, well, who could tell what might happen then.

Bernard Piffy stood there trembling in his crop top Bratz bra and rosebud panties. What else could one expect from a ten-year-old boy in girl’s underwear? St. Anthony had stolen puppy dog from under his nose. His charade had been a dismal failure—if anybody had been fooled or deceived or tricked it had been Bernard Piffy. The Holy Man had slipped into the room while the kid played his silly little game with his preteen accomplices. They had been expecting the Madrassas inspection team. Now his guardian angel dog was gone and Piffy was as defenseless as Pee-wee Herman would have been at a Hells Angels convention. He could have chased after St. Anthony and the thought did occur to him but the chances of arresting the dognapper in mid flight ranged from slim to none. The Holy Man was more than a mere mortal. He could appear and disappear whenever he wanted and he was no stranger to the Elysian Fields where the Gods changed water into wine.

It was the first time Bernard Piffy had been caught in a strange bedroom with a dead body and a naked lady and it wasn’t going down easy. It would have been child’s play for someone like Mike Hammer. Spillane's creature would have taken the dead man’s pulse, slapped the naked bimbo on the derriere and explained to Chief Detective Pat Chambers what had happened in twenty words or less. But Bernard Piffy was not Mike Hammer; he was a middle-aged private detective groveling in the body of a ten-year-old child. He didn’t like touching dead things; he had never learned how to take a pulse and the last time he had slapped a naked lady on the butt his mother had just stepped out of the shower and he had received a talking-to he hadn’t forgotten till this day and though he could be as talkative as the next guy for the moment he was at a total loss for words, but he had to say something besides, “Aw, shucks, ma’m…it was Opie Taylor…he ate my homework…” He had tried that once and it hadn’t worked.