The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 16

  The Saint forced his mind to turn back from there, over the carpet of tenderly shaded and watered grass outside, across a scorching mile of barren sand, back to the sweltering teeming fetid cluster of desiccated hovels that was the rest of Qabat; and to anyone who knew him well enough his buccaneer’s face would have seemed dangerously thoughtful.

  No longer seeming to feel called upon to play the tour conductor, Tâlib hustled them unceremoniously along a labyrinth of corridors and cloisters through which Mr Usherdown was almost immediately the one to take the lead, toddling almost a yard ahead of the Saint with his short legs pumping two strokes to Simon’s one. After a full five-minute hike they came to a doorway guarded by a gigantic Negro, naked to the waist and actually armed with a huge and genuine scimitar, exactly like a story-book illustration. Mr Usherdown, however, seemed to accept this extravagantly fictitious sight as a now familiar piece of interior decorating, and stopped expectantly by the door in a way that was comically reminiscent of a puppy waiting to be let out.

  “I only hope Violet is still all right,” he muttered.

  Tâlib growled a command at the Negro, who stepped aside from the rather theatrical pose he had taken before the door. Then the tall Arab addressed the Saint.

  “I send you luggage right away. You rest, wash up. I tell Emir about you.” He turned to include Mr Usherdown. “Sheik Joseph send for you soon, I bet—Inshallah!”

  “These are our quarters,” Mr Usherdown explained to Simon. “Come on.”

  He opened the door impatiently, and went in. Simon followed him. The door boomed shut on the Saint’s heels with an ominous solidity which suggested a prison rather than a guest suite, but Simon barely gave it the backward flick of a raised eyebrow. The scarcely half-subtle prison theme had been established long before that.

  Simon had already accepted, quite phlegmatically by now, a snapshot impression of a sort of living-room which fitted well enough into the rest of the slightly stage-harem scenery (but after all, he was starting to think, some initial scene-painter must have had some authentic motifs to work from) and the curiosity that fascinated him above any other at this point was aimed wholeheartedly at the femme fatale who had been content once upon a time to settle for a quaint little husband like Mortimer Usherdown, and yet whose charms were still capable of raising the blood of an untamed desert chieftain to apparently explosive temperatures.

  “Violet, my dear,” said the little man, disengaging himself from her bosom, against which he had plastered himself in connubial greeting, “I want you to meet my friend, Mr Simon Templar.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” said Mrs Usherdown, in the most gracious accents of the Bronx.

  She had red hair and green eyes and the facial structure of a living doll; and in her very first twenties, Simon could see, she would probably have cued any typical bunch of sailors on shore leave to split the welkin with wolf whistles. She would have been a cute trick in a night club chorus line—or even in a carnival tent show, where her path and Mr Usherdown’s could plausibly have crossed. Now, some ten years later, she was still pretty, but about thirty pounds overweight. But this excess padding by Western standards, to the Eastern eye might well seem only a divine amplitude of upholstery, and her coloring would have seemed so startlingly exotic in those lands that it was no longer an effort of imagination to see an unsophisticated sheik being smitten with her as the rarest jewel he could covet for his seraglio…Suddenly the one element in the set-up which Simon had found the most mystifying became almost ludicrously obvious and straightforward.

  “Mortimer has told me all about your problem,” he said conversationally. “I see that for the present you’re almost uncomfortably well looked after. Is that Ethiopian at the door a real eunuch?”

  “I don’t know, I never asked him,” Mrs Usherdown answered with dignity. “I think a man’s religion is his own business.”

  “But Yûsuf hasn’t bothered you?” persisted her anxious consort.

  “Of course not. He’s very correct, according to his religion. You should know that. Did you remember to get me that candy?”

  “Yes, dear. It’s in my bags, as soon as they bring them up. I just hope it hasn’t all melted…But I suppose you’ve seen Yûsuf?”

  “Naturally. He’s had me in for coffee, and shown me his electric trains, and I’ve seen all his old Western movies three times. But he took me out for a picnic in the desert in the full moon, and we had silk tents with carpets, and camels, and everything, and that was very romantic. He’s going to buy a yacht, too, and I’m going to help him decorate it, and then we’ll take it to Monte Carlo and the Riviera and everywhere.”

  Mr Usherdown swallowed his tonsils.

  “Violet, my love, I mean—he hasn’t given up this crazy idea about you, has he?”

  “I do not think it is so gentlemanly of you to call it crazy,” said his helpmeet, with a modicum of umbrage. “And I don’t think that is quite the way to speak of a genuine prince who has paid you more fees than you ever got before, and all he wants is not to be made a sucker out of. I am starting to wonder if you aren’t only jealous because he is taller than you and looks so dashing, and after all he only wants his own way, which is what they call the Royal Purgative.”

  The Saint cleared his throat.

  “I’m here to try and find you a way out,” he said. “I don’t want to make any rash promises, but I come up with a good idea sometimes.”

  “You know who Mr Templar is, dear?” Mr Usherdown put in.

  “He’d better stay out of this if he isn’t a better diviner than you,” said his wife, with a toss of her coppery curls. “Or he might end up the way you will, if you don’t divorce me. Yûsuf says he has thought of something that’ll let him make me a widow quite legally, and I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t just selfishness if you want me to suffer like that.”

  3

  Except for his costume, the Sheik Yûsuf Loutfallah ibn Hishâm, Emir of Qabat, would not have been instantly recognized as the prototype of the desert eagle and untamed lover immortalized in fiction by an English maiden lady earlier in this century, and brought to life on the silent screen, to the palpitating ecstasy of a bygone generation by an Italian named D’Antonguolla, better known to his worshippers as Rudolph Valentino. Although his nose was basically aquiline, it was also a trifle bulbous. His teeth were prominent, yellow, and uneven, and his untidy beard failed to completely disguise the contour of a receding chin. As a symbol of his rank, his head veil was bound with twin cords of gold running through four black pompons squarely spaced around his cranium, instead of the common coils of dark rope, and as an index of his wealth and sophistication he wore no less than three watches on his left wrist—a gold Omega Seamaster, a lady’s jewelled Gruen, and a Mickey Mouse.

  He ate rice and chunks of skewered and roasted mutton with his fingers, getting hearty smears of grease on his face. Seated on another cushion at the same low table, Simon Templar tried to be neater, but acknowledged that it was difficult. On the opposite side of the Emir, Mr Usherdown juggled crumbs to his mouth even more uncomfortably and with less appetite, seeming irreparably cowed by the sinister presence of Tâlib on his other side. The Saint was similarly boxed in by Abdullah, who kept firm hold of a pointed knife, with which he picked his teeth intermittently while staring pensively at the area under Simon’s chin. In a corner of the room, four musicians made weird skirlings, twangings, and hootings on an assortment of outlandish instruments, to the accompaniment of which three beige-skinned young women moved in front of the long table, rotating their pelvic regions and undulating their abdomens with phenomenal sinuosity. It was still quite unreally like a sequence from a movie, except that no censors would ever have passed the costumes of the dancers.

  When Mr Usherdown looked at them, he did it furtively, as if he was afraid that at any moment his wife might loom up behind him and seize him by the ear. But Mrs Usherdown was not present, having been expressly excluded from the command invitation to
dinner which Tâlib had brought.

  “Not custom here to have wifes at men’s dinner,” Tâlib had explained cheerfully, but Simon, remembering the moonlight picnic which Mrs Usherdown had mentioned, figured that the local customs could always be adapted to the Emir’s convenience.

  The Saint had hoped to achieve a more personal acquaintance with that lovelorn sheik, and he was disappointed to learn that his host spoke nothing but Arabic, which was not included in Simon’s useful repertoire of languages. He had to be content with an impression of personality, which added nothing very favorable to the character estimate which he had formed in advance. He no longer wondered whether the Emir’s infatuation with Violet Usherdown’s voluptuous physique might not have blinded him to her shortcomings as an Intellect; obviously Yûsuf could never even have been thinking of spending long evenings in enthralling converse with a cerebral affinity, and Simon doubted whether the Emir would have had much to contribute to such a session even in Arabic. But in a ruthlessly practical way he was probably a shrewd man, and certainly a wilful and uninhibited one. For perhaps the first time Simon realized to the full that his displeasure might be very violent and unfunny indeed.

  It was characteristic of the Saint that the crystallizing of that awareness made him, if possible, only a little more recklessly irreverent. As the dancing girls stepped up their performance to coax even more fabulous rotations from their navels, and Mr Usherdown’s attention seemed to become even more guiltily surreptitious, Simon leaned forward to call encouragement down the table to the little man.

  “Joe may think he’s the Gift of God to women, Mortimer, but you can’t say he’s selfish with his samples.”

  “Sheik Joseph got three wifes,” Tâlib put in proudly. “Also one hundred eighty concubines. Very big shoot.”

  The Sheik suddenly threw down the bone on which he had been gnawing, wiped his mouth and whiskers on the back of his hand, wiped that on the lace tablecloth, and uttered a peremptory command. The musicians let their tortured instruments straggle off into silence. The belly dancers slackened off their gyrations and stood waiting docilely.

  The Emir burped, regally and resonantly.

  Tâlib and Abdullah eructated with sycophantic enthusiasm in response, vying with each other in the rich reverberation of their efforts. The Emir looked inquiringly at Simon, who finally remembered something he had once heard about the polite observances of that part of the world, and managed to express his appreciation of the meal with a fairly courteous rumble. Everyone then turned to Mr Usherdown, who somehow contrived a small strangled kind of beep which evoked only a certain pitying contempt.

  Yûsuf gave an order to Tâlib, and the big Arab fumbled in his robes and brought out a thick bundle of American currency tied with a piece of string. He slapped it on the table in front of Mr Usherdown.

  “This pay for your work,” he said, “all time since you come here to find oil. Okey-dokey?”

  “Why, thank you,” said the little man nervously.

  “Sheik, say, you take it.”

  Mr Usherdown picked up the bundle uncertainly and stuffed it into his pocket.

  Yûsuf made a short speech to Mr Usherdown, accompanied by a number of gestures towards the three supple wenches standing in front of the table, while the little man strained to appear respectfully attentive.

  “Sheik say, you choose which girl you like,” Tâlib said.

  “Why, they’re all very nice,” Mr Usherdown said, in some embarrassment.

  “Okay, Sheik say you take all three,” Tâlib reported, after relaying the evasion.

  Mr Usherdown’s eyes bugged.

  “Who, me? Thank you very much, but I can’t do that!”

  “Here in Qabat, Muslim law allow you four wifes. Or if you no want to get marry, you keep for concubine, like Sheik. You be little shoot.”

  “I can’t take any of them,” Mr Usherdown protested, with his face getting red. “It isn’t our custom. Please explain to the Emir—and the young ladies—I don’t mean any offense, but my wife wouldn’t like it at all.”

  “You lose wife,” Tâlib said. “Divorce wife, very quick. Give her the boom’s rush. Then you keep dancing girl. Whoopee!”

  The flush died out of Mr Usherdown’s complexion, leaving it rather pale. But perhaps emboldened by the Saint’s presence, he said quite firmly, “Tell the Emir I wish he’d stop this nonsense. I’m not going to divorce my wife, and that’s final.”

  Tâlib conveyed the message. Yûsuf did not seem particularly annoyed, or even interested. He grunted a few words in reply which sounded as if they were little more than a cue.

  “Sheik Joseph say you have money what you steal,” Tâlib translated, as if from a prepared speech. “You take money to find oil. But you not find oil. So you have stealed money. You goddam crook. Now Sheik must give you the works according to the law of Muhammad. It say in the Qur’an, in the Sûrah Al-Ma’idah ‘From a thief, man or woman, cut off the hands. It is right for what they done, a good punish from Allah’—Bismillâhi’r Rahmâni’r Rahîm!”

  Mr Usherdown’s face was chalk-white at the end. He clawed the thick wad of greenbacks out of his pocket and dropped them on the table as though they had been red hot.

  “Tell him he can keep his money. I only promised to do my best, and I’ve done it. But if he feels I haven’t earned it, we’ll call it quits.”

  Tâlib did not touch the money.

  “That all finish—you have taked already,” he said with a fiendishly happy grin. “Thief cannot change to not-thief just because he give back what he steal. If he can, any thief get caught, he give back stealings, everything uncle-dory, nobody can be punish. But Sheik say because he love you wife so much, you divorce her, you go free. Not get punish. But if you not divorce her—”

  He made a sadistically graphic gesture with the edge of his hand against his own opposite wrist.

  “What difference would that make?” demanded the Saint harshly. “His wife still wouldn’t be divorced.”

  “No need, maybe,” Tâlib said. “After hands cut off, without doctor, man often die.”

  The Emir had been following all this with his eyes, as if he had a complete enough anticipation of the scene not to need to have it interpreted line by line. Now, as if he sensed that a psychological moment had arrived, he clapped his hands and called out something that seemed to include a name, and through the velvet drapes on the far side of the room stepped a bare-chested Negro who might have been a cousin of the one who guarded Usherdown’s apartment, and who carried the same kind of gleaming scimitar. The man made an obeisance and glared around hopefully, lifting his blade, and the three dancers huddled together, their eyes round with horror. Beside Mr Usherdown, Tâlib stood up.

  The little man leaned forward and looked at the Saint piteously.

  “What am I going to do?” he croaked. “He means it!”

  “You know, I almost think you’re right,” said the Saint, fascinated.

  Actually, he no longer had any doubt at all. It was all very well to call it fantastic, but he knew that the primitive Islamic law had been correctly cited, and that there were still backwaters in the world where a primitive and autocratic ruler could enforce it to the letter. It would not be much use protesting through diplomatic channels after the deed was done. If, in fact, there were ever a chance to protest at all. Simon Templar could vanish from the face of the earth in Qabat as easily as a far less newsworthy Mortimer Usherdown.

  The Saint knew that the error of underestimation which he had committed was of suicidal dimensions. Now he reviewed the situation in a single flash, adding up the Emir and Tâlib and Abdullah, the four musicians, the ebony giant with the scimitar and an unknown number of other palace guards of his ilk, and an equally indeterminate but certainly larger number of the less picturesque but better armed and probably more efficient militia outside—and came up with a very cold-blooded assessment. He had blithely accepted some extravagant odds in his time, but he hadn’t lived as long
as that by kidding himself that he was Superman.

  But he did attain a modest pinnacle of heroic effrontery as he turned and tapped Yûsuf on the shoulder with a genial nonchalance that made Mr Usherdown’s trembling jaw sag.

  “Just a minute, Joe,” he said. “You may be an old goat, but that doesn’t mean you can jump all over the rules if you want everyone else to be stuck with ’em.”

  The Sheik stared at him with incomprehension mixed with indignation and incredulity, and then turned to Tâlib for enlightenment.

  “Tell him,” said the Saint, “that Mortimer isn’t a thief yet, because at his own expense he’s brought me here to finish the job. Joe will be satisfied if I make him rich, won’t he? And until I’ve had a chance to show what I can do, nobody can prove that Mortimer hasn’t delivered.”

  Tâlib repeated the argument haltingly, but must have succeeded in conveying the general trend of it, for Yûsuf listened with a deepening scowl that was not without sharp calculation, and promptly came back with a question.

  “Sheik ask, when you do this?”

  “Hell, I only just got here,” said the Saint. “Give me a chance. I’ll go to work tomorrow morning, if you like.”

  Yûsuf stared at him for what seemed like an interminable time, from under lowered beetling brows. Simon could almost hear the wheels going round behind the beady and slightly bloodshot eyes, like the cogs of a laborious sort of cash register. He was betting that the Sheik’s tender passion was not quite so intoxicating that it would have obliterated the much longer established urgings of avarice. Besides, Yûsuf should figure that he might have his cupcake and his oil too, if he delayed just a little longer. And delay was what the Saint needed first and most desperately.

  The Emir growled another question, through Tâlib: “You take money?”