The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 17

  “I love it,” said the Saint.

  Yûsuf spoke to the huge Negro, and pointed to the packet of currency in front of Mr Usherdown. The guard stepped forward, flourished his scimitar, and dextrously picked up the bundle with the flat of the blade, like a flapjack, and held it out towards Simon.

  “Oh, no,” wailed Mr Usherdown. “Then you’ll be in the same mess as me. I can’t let you—”

  “But I’m one of the best dowsers in the business,” said the Saint. “Maybe the best. You gave me the testimonial yourself.”

  He took the parcel of money from the sword.

  “Now if you not do nothing, you a big thief too,” Tâlib said unnecessarily. “Can have hands cut off like him. Okey-dokey?”

  Simon had slipped the string off the wad of greenbacks and was riffling through them for a rough estimate of their total.

  “This is all right for a retainer,” he said coolly. “But you can tell Joe that if I strike it rich for him he’s going to owe us a lot more than this.”

  “You find plenty oil,” Tâlib brought back the answer, “Sheik say, he be very generous. You betcha. But you get on the ball damn quick, skiddoo.”

  “Fine,” said the Saint. He put the money in his pocket, lighted a cigarette, and indicated the neglected trio of diaphanously veiled beauties with a gesture of magnificent insouciance. “And now can we go on with the floor show? And may I pick a girl too?”

  4

  “I still wish you’d kept out of it,” Mr Usherdown repeated miserably, for perhaps the eleventh time. “You shouldn’t have let them trick you into touching that money.”

  “I wasn’t tricked,” said the Saint scornfully. “I just decided that if I was going in at all, I might as well go in with a splash. Didn’t you ever play poker? If you were bluffing, in a no-limit game, would you expect to impress anybody with a two-bit raise?”

  This was very much later, when they were back in the guest suite, on which the guards had been doubled—which Simon had been tempted to call a two-edged compliment.

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” moaned the little man.

  “Phooey,” snarled the Saint. “You invited me in, didn’t you?”

  “I just happened to hear your name, and I realized who you were. I never thought I’d have had the nerve to pretend to know you like that, right in front of Tâlib and Abdullah. But I was frantic. I thought you might be able to do something.”

  “Well, I’m trying.”

  “I mean, something sensational, like I’ve heard about you—like fighting our way out of here.”

  “Too much of this is like a B picture already, Mortimer. Don’t make it any worse. What did you think I was going to use for armaments?”

  “I thought someone like you…you know…would have a gun.”

  “I did. It’s in the suitcase I left in bond in Basra. Did you think I’d try to sneak it into a place like this, when I’m supposed to be a peaceful water-diviner? You should know how hysterical it makes little big shoots to think of anybody but their own trigger men having nasty toys that go bang. Do you think my overnight bag wasn’t searched before they brought it up here, and Tâlib didn’t paw me over himself while he was hustling us through the Customs?”

  “Perhaps we should have jumped on them at dinner,” Mr Usherdown said weakly. “We didn’t talk it over enough beforehand. I could have distracted their attention while you got the sword away from that eunuch, if that’s what he was, and then you’d have grabbed Yûsuf and taken him for a hostage, and we might’ve fought our way out…”

  Simon gazed at him in genuinely sympathetic amazement.

  “My God, my public,” he said dazedly. “You must have really seen it like that, with me whacking our way through the infidels like Errol Flynn in his prime…Forgive me, Mortimer, but there was a moment when I dallied with an idea of that kind myself, only I sobered up in the nick of time. I suppose I might have wrought some havoc among the Saracens—with your help, of course—but I’d still have had to get all of us all the way out of this castle. Including Violet. And after that, where would we go? Take a running dive into the Persian Gulf and start swimming through the sharks? Leap onto three conveniently parked camels and gallop off into the dunes? Or just hitch a ride to the airport and talk our way past the local Gestapo on to the next plane out?…Assume that we’ve busted loose, and we’re running: how do you see us getting out of Qabat?”

  “I deserve anything that happens to me,” Mr Usherdown said wretchedly. “I think you should forget about us and try to escape on your own. I know we’d be a terrible burden, but perhaps you could make it by yourself.”

  The Saint stood by a window and examined the ornamental iron grille across it with professional appraisal.

  “Crashing out of this gilded cage is liable to be more than an overnight project, even for me,” he said.

  Violet Usherdown helped herself to another chocolate cream from the box beside her.

  “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard from you for a long time, Mortimer. Mr Templar should not feel obligated,” she said with remarkable cheerfulness. “Anyway, you know now that you aren’t in half as much trouble as you were afraid of.”

  Mr Usherdown’s eyes took on a slight glaze.

  “Nothing worse than having my hands chopped off,” he chattered bravely. “Lots of soldiers have had that happen. And you can get wonderful artificial limbs now. I’ve seen pictures of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could even go on divining, with a bit of practice—”

  “In a pig’s eye,” said Mrs Usherdown trenchantly. “You wouldn’t be doing me any favors, wanting me to live with a man with nothing but a pair of hooks. I couldn’t stand it.” She shuddered delicately. “I mean, knowing it was on account of me, of course, even though he was most heroic. I would rather be divorced and taken into the Sheik’s harem.”

  “But I love you, Vi,” pleaded her spouse. “I couldn’t sacrifice you like that.”

  “What is a woman’s life but sacrifice?” she asked. “And it isn’t as if I would have to put up with his old wives, because he has promised me he will give them away. And even if he is getting down to his last few millions we wouldn’t starve to death. When I think of some of the things I’ve had to put up with since I married you, Mortimer Usherdown, I cannot say it is the worst fate that could possibly happen to me, although naturally it is always a shock to a lady to be put asunder.”

  Both Mr Usherdown and the Saint looked at her in oddly similar ways for a moment.

  Then Simon touched the little man’s arm. “I want some sleep before the performance tomorrow, chum,” he said. “But before I turn in, you’d better dig out those hazel twigs and show me how to make like a real dowser.”

  It was quite a large and colorful gallery that turned out in the still bearable warmth of the early morning to watch the Saint set forth on his quest, as if it had been the tee-off of a golf championship. There was a group of about three dozen VIPs, identifiable by their fine robes and arrogant bearing, whom Simon took for the squires of the smaller manors and their personal friends. There were, inevitably, Tâlib and Abdullah, with no less than four of the scimitar-bearing Negroes hovering close behind them to add muscle to their menace. At a respectful distance stood a sizeable crowd of somber and ragged citizens from the town, summoned by whatever served as a grapevine in that grapeless land. A full platoon of the militarily uniformed guards was deployed to keep the common herd at bay—and was also a sobering reminder of the unromantic improbability of the dashing kind of getaway that Mr Usherdown had dreamed of. From the palace entrance had spilled a heterogeneous collection of servants and minor functionaries, including the quartet of musicians, but the dancing girls were not with them, or in fact any other feminine members of the Emir’s household. However, glancing up at the façade, Simon was sure that he could detect a stirring of veils behind every barred window. He might have imagined it, but he even thought that in one of the gratings he saw a timid flutter of pale fi
ngers, instantly withdrawn…

  The only woman in plain sight was Violet Usherdown, and the descriptive phrase was not strictly apt, at that, for she had tied a square of brocade over her head in a sort of babushka effect, and fastened what looked like a man’s white handkerchief across the aperture in front in such a way that it masked her completely from the eyes down.

  “I’ve got to obey the custom of the country if Yûsuf is going to respect me at all,” she had explained with dignity. “Why, I’ve found out that the women here would rather expose any part of themselves than let a man see their face. That means, if I didn’t wear a veil, all the men would be staring at me—and I know what men are like, Mortimer—as if I was stark naked! When I think how I used to let anyone here see me with a bare face, before I knew what it meant to them, I’m so embarrassed I could blush all over.”

  The Sheik Yûsuf Loutfallah ibn Hishâm, in conformity with his royal prerogative, was the last to appear, but his arrival was a welcome signal that the period of suspenseful waiting was over. The Sheik confirmed this himself, barking a few words directly at the Saint which needed no interpreter to announce that they meant “Okay, let’s get going.”

  “You want camel or jeep?” Tâlib amplified, with a lavish wave of his arm which embraced both forms of transportation, conveniently parked along the driveway.

  Simon had already considered the possibility of stretching the reprieve to the limit by embarking on a safari to the remotest corner of Qabat, but after reckoning that that could hardly be more than forty or fifty miles, he had decided that the time he could gain would not be worth the discomfort involved.

  “I shall begin here” he said, pointing dramatically to the ground at his feet, “where nobody before me has thought of beginning.”

  From the buzz of comment that came from those within earshot of Tâlib’s translation of that announcement, the Saint knew that he had at least scored a point of showmanship.

  He raised the hazel branch which he carried and took hold of it very carefully in the way that Mr Usherdown had taught him. It was cut and trimmed in the shape of a “Y” with long arms, and he held it inverted, in a peculiar kind of half-backwards grip, with the ends of the arms of the “Y” in the upturned palms of his hands. The main stem of the “Y” pointed almost straight up, but seemed to be in rather precarious balance because of the way he was spreading and twisting his arms at the same time, against the spring of the wood.

  “You have to stretch it till it feels almost alive and fighting you,” Mr Usherdown had told him. “And then you just concentrate your mind on oil, or whatever it is you’re looking for. It’s the concentration that does it.”

  Simon could feel the almost-life of the twig, reacting against the odd strained way he held it, but his concentration fell far short of the prescribed optimum. He found, rather disconcertingly, that his mind was capable of simultaneous wandering in at least three directions. One part of it remained solidly burdened with the involvements of the basic situation; another maverick element insisted on leaning back and making snide observations of the percentage of ham in his own performance; while whatever was otherwise unoccupied tried to think about oil, found it an elusive subject after picturing black sluggish streams of it in which revolved ponderous cams and gears, which merged into the oscillating stomachs of harem dancers, so that he switched quickly to the smog-belching sexlessness of a California oil refinery, and the gray haze creeping out to the Pacific Ocean where the sybarites thought it was too cold to swim but it would be wonderful to leap into straight out of the blazing sand and sky of Qabat…and he found that his intensely aimless circling had brought him smack up against the gate in the fence around the Emir’s precious private lawn.

  The impulse that seized him then was pure gratuitous devilment. Letting go the hazel twig for a moment, he indicated the barrier with an air of pained indignation.

  There was an awe-stricken mutter among the spectators, and Tâlib seemed to swell up in preparation for an explosion, but the Emir cut in with half a dozen words that abruptly deflated him. The gate was opened, and Simon resumed the proper grip on his oddly shaped wand and walked in.

  He went on trying to think about oil, because the effort helped him to maintain a convincing aspect of strenuous concentration, but a perverse slant of association insisted on linking it next with salad dressing, and then leaving only the lettuce, fresh picked and still jewelled with morning dew, like the drops that sparkled on the grass he walked on, relicts of the mechanical sprayer which until a few minutes ago had been scattering its priceless elixir over the sacrosanct turf…

  What happened next was that the hazel began to twist in his hands, the upright stem of the inverted “Y” trying to swing over to point downwards, so startlingly that he involuntarily fought against it. But it was as if the wood had become possessed of a will and a power of its own, so that with all his strength he could not hold it, and it writhed slowly and irresistibly over in his grasp until the stem pointed vertically down.

  Simon Templar felt the sweat of his body chilled by a passage of ghostly wings, and would never know how he succeeded in keeping his face from looking completely fatuous.

  He thought that a distant roar came to his ears from a hundred indistinguishable throats, though it might as well have been only a subjective amplification of the turmoil in his own brain, yet it seemed almost breathlessly quiet in the enclosure, where except for the Emir himself only Tâlib and one pair of sword-bearing guards had presumed to follow him. And in that brimming silence, he released the forked twig and extended his forefinger imperatively towards the spot where it fell, almost in the geometrical center of the Sheik’s most treasured enclave.

  “Here,” said the Saint.

  “You mean close here, outside, okay?” Tâlib said, shaken for the first time since Simon had known him into an almost incoherent dither.

  The Saint’s arm and pointing finger remained statuesquely rigid.

  “I mean here,” he repeated inflexibly.

  Yûsuf was studying him in thunderous gloom, his head on one side like an introspective vulture. Simon met the inquisitorial scrutiny without blinking, letting everything ride with the bet that the Sheik’s cupidity would be stronger than his interest in horticulture—or at least that he was capable of the arithmetic to realize that a new oil well would buy a lot more lawns. And finally Yûsuf spoke.

  “Sheik say,” Tâlib transmitted it, “you deliver, you get rich, pronto. Not deliver no goods, we cut your bloody head off. What you say, Mac?”

  “You’ve got a deal, schlemiel,” said the Saint blandly.

  After that it became much less orderly—in fact, it rapidly lost all semblance of order. The Emir rattled off another cataract of injunctions, and stalked away. Tâlib began to shout supplementary orders in four directions. The privileged spectators who were inside the cordon of militia pressed forward, gesticulating and shrieking in friendly conversation until they reached the fence, which bulged and bent and then meekly disintegrated before the weight of their excitement. At a word from Tâlib, the two Negroes closed in on Simon and hustled him unceremoniously through the jabbering mob. Outside the remains of the enclosure, the two other scimitar-bearers had already sandwiched in Mr Usherdown, who looked limp and pallid with stupefaction. Simon’s unit joined up with them, and the four guards formed a hollow square with Simon and Mr Usherdown in the middle and rushed them towards the palace entrance.

  Simon caught one glimpse of Violet Usherdown, off to the side, with Yûsuf making gestures towards the palace, and a few of his nobles gathering curiously around, and Tâlib heading across no doubt to volunteer the assistance of his extraordinary brand of English; and then he was pushed through the great doorway and hurried into the labyrinthine route that led back to what he now felt it was somewhat euphemistic to call the guest quarters.

  The massive door slammed shut and quivered with the clanking of bolts, leaving Simon and Mr Usherdown alone to gaze at each other.

>   At last Mr Usherdown achieved a shaky voice.

  “Why did you do that, Templar?”

  “I guess I was born ornery,” said the Saint. “It was such a priceless chance to trespass on Joe’s holy of holies, I just couldn’t resist it. I was quite tempted to take my shoes off and do it in my bare feet, but I was afraid that might be going too far.”

  “But you didn’t have to pretend to find there.”

  “I didn’t. Your hazel twig did that.”

  “Nonsense. You made it look terrific, but I knew you were faking.”

  “I wasn’t,” said the Saint flatly. “I admit, I’d thought of it. But I hadn’t quite made up my mind I was still ad-libbing. And then that silly stick took over.”

  The little man stared at him unbelievingly.

  “It couldn’t. You said you’d never done any dowsing.”

  “I haven’t. But there has to be a first time for everything. Maybe I have unsuspected talents.”

  “Did it feel as if it was sort of magnetized?”

  “It was the eeriest sensation I’ve ever experienced in my life. I couldn’t control the damn thing. I tried. It almost tore the skin off my hands, twisting itself over.”

  “There’s no oil under the palace—least of anywhere,” Mr Usherdown said stubbornly, but in blanker perplexity than ever. “I’ve held a rod around here myself—not too seriously, but you were wrong when you said nobody had tried. You must’ve been trying so hard, you got a sort of auto-suggestion. I’ve heard about things like that.”

  Simon shrugged.

  “Could be. It doesn’t matter much, anyway. All I wanted to do was stall for time, and give Joe a new place to dig. While he’s busy with that, we can work at digging ourselves out of this Arabian Nightsmare. What will the next move be?”

  Mr Usherdown shuffled to the nearest barred window, where the Saint joined him. The opening did not look out on the front of the palace, where the latest activity had been, but through it drifted echoes of clangings and hammerings and a natter of filtered voices erupting in occasional screeches of peak enthusiasm.