The Saint Around the World (18 page)

Trapped between uniformed authority and the stubborn push of other passengers, Talib squirmed furiously into the next pair of seats ahead. Abdullah promptly followed him, and in an instant the irresistible flow of following voyagers had sealed them irrevocably in their upholstered slot. They could do nothing but twist around and stare suspiciously over the backs of their seats—until the steward made them buckle their safety belts and even that solace was denied them.

Nevertheless, the Saint waited until the plane was airborne and he could adjust the level of his voice with the certainty that no sudden fluctuation in the background noise would leave it audible to the two men in front, before he said: “Okay, Mortimer, you can talk now. What the hell is all this? Are you in dutch because you haven’t been able to find water for Joe’s goldfish pond?”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Mr. Usherdown said, quite seriously. “I haven’t even thought about ordinary water divining for years. None of the top-notch dowsers bother with that any more, you know. There isn’t enough money in it, and too many amateurs can do it.”

“What do wizards like you and I work at, then?”

“Well, I’ve dowsed for gold in South Africa and opals in Mexico, but mostly I specialize in oil. Had a bit of luck finding some new fields in Oregon and Nevada. Not for myself, of course—I just went over the land where these big companies had leases, and told ‘em where to sink their wells. But I got a lot of publicity at the time, and somehow this sheik got to hear of me, and one day he sent me an offer. It might have made me a millionaire, too. Except that I haven’t been able to do a single darn thing for him.”

Simon frowned.

“You mean it turns out to be an ‘or else’ deal? If it doesn’t make you a Croesus, you think they’ll make you a corpse?”

“It’s likely to come to that.”

“Don’t you believe it, Mortimer. You get off with me at Basra, and tell those two Bedouin brigands to go jump on a camel.” The Saint smiled sweetly at the two pairs of scowling eyes that kept turning to peer suspiciously over the backs of the seats ahead. “If they get rough, I’ll hold ‘em while you call a cop.”

“It isn’t as easy as that,” Mr. Usherdown said lugubriously. “I told you, my wife’s there in Qabat. Violet. She insisted on going with me—she had some crazy idea that if she didn’t I’d be running wild in a harem, or something. So now the Emir’s fallen in love with her; and whatever he does about me, he’s not going to let her leave.”

ii

It had been an hour past midnight when they took off from Cairo, so that only a few anonymous winking lights in a black carpet served as a parting glimpse of the land of the Pharaohs and their considerably less glamorous successors. It was soon after an orange-colored dawn when they landed on the outskirts of the formless sprawl of habitation that is Basra. And it was dazzling beige high noon, after sundry inevitable delays, as the shuttle DC-3 from Basra slanted down towards the landing strip of Qabat.

Leaning over Mr. Usherdown to get a partial bird’s-eye biew through the porthole, Simon Templar wondered philosophically if there would ever be a limit to the cockeyed places he could be dumped into by his constitutional inability to turn down anyone who looked helpless enough in the toils of a sufficiently unstereotyped predicament.

“The whole place only runs to about eight hundred square miles,” Usherdown had told him, “and the only town, if you can call it that, would rate about four gas stations back home. But for a few years it produced enough oil to’ve supplied half of Europe.”

“And I never heard of it.”

“No reason why you should. It didn’t last long enough to get talked about much outside the trade. Then the flow started to dry up; and the big companies moved their main operations down to Kuwait and Bahrain. Don’t ask me why. I’m not a geologist. But apparently the experts decided that Qabat was only on the shallow edge of the underground oil pool, or something like that, and they decided to move on and drill somewhere else.”

“Which made Joseph rather unhappy.”

“You can’t blame him too much for that. His royalties’ve been dwindling away until last year they only came to about sixteen million dollars.”

“Thank God for technological progress. The stains from my bleeding heart will rinse right out of this Dacron shirt.”

“I know, it sounds as if I was trying to be funny. But you have to remember that in the same length of time, the Emir of Kuwait’s income has gone up to over three million dollars a week.”

At a figure like that, even Simon Templar was awed.

“If some Texans I’ve met heard about him, they’d blow their brains out,” he remarked. “So I suppose every time Joe thinks about that, it burns him to a crisp.”

“He’s about convinced himself that it’s only because the oil companies have a personal grudge against him, because he was the first sheik they made one of those fabulous percentage contracts with. He made up his mind he’d prove that their geologists were liars. First he hired some independent experts for himself. But eventually they gave him the same report. That only convinced him that they were afraid to buck the big companies. Then somebody must’ve told him something they’d read about me, and he thought I might be the answer.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Look, a dowser can’t make oil—or water, or anything else,” said Mr. Usherdown, with a rather forlorn remnant of asperity. “He can only help to find ‘em when they’re there. I’ve done my conscientious best, but so far I haven’t been able to contradict the regular geologists. All the signals I’ve picked up were definitely of the declining type.”

The town below their wing-tip looked even more hopeless than Mr. Usherdown’s description had led Simon to expect. It sprawled in an approximate semicircle of which the diameter followed the blue-gray line of the Persian Gulf, which from that altitude had a leaden air of sultriness that suggested none of the cool relief of more hospitable seas. The most modern and efficient feature of its topography was the row of cylindrical silver-painted tanks, spaced and aligned along a section of the waterfront with the accuracy of guardsmen on parade, linked by identical patterns of catwalk and pipe, and centered symmetrically around the short straight white finger of a concrete pier projecting a couple of ship’s lengths from the shore. The most esthetic thing about it was the large wedding-cake edifice of domes and minarets which lay a little outside the semicircle at the end of a straight black ribbon - of road, like a flower on a stalk, with half a dozen smaller sugar-frosted buildings clustered around it like buds on lesser roads, and even traces of improbably nurtured greenery scattered among them to add vividness to the simile. But in between, in the untidy half-moon of muck from which these exotic blossoms grew, there was only a hodge-podge of vaguely cubist agglomerations of gray-brown mud, cheap wall-board, and rotting canvas, blended together into the uniformity of a mummy’s wrappings, alleviated only by the occasional glitter of a patch of corrugated iron. And all around it, to the dust-fogged horizon, stretched the petrified ripples of a dead sea of sand, a faceless segment of the most utterly sterile desert in the world, its awesome emptiness and monotony interrupted only by the occasional stark skeleton of an oil derrick.

There was no evidence that any large percentage of the liquid wealth that had flowed out of that barren land had been spent on civic projects or the betterment of the Qabatis as a people. In fact, the bird’s-eye view of Qabat seemed to illustrate the local division of Nature’s bounty more graphically than any statistics. But Simon had been prepared for that.

“Yusuf is the real old feudal type of sheik,” Mr. Usherdown had explained. “His mind’s still in the Middle Ages, even if he has a different colored Cadillac for every day in the week. He owns Qabat body and soul because his father owned it before him and he inherited it like a farm. He wouldn’t feel there was any call to split his royalties with his subjects— except his own nearest relatives—any more ‘n a Texas rancher would feel obligated to share his oil money with his cows. And the same way, he thinks he’s entitled to take anything he wants, because that’s something that goes with being an Emir.”

“But I thought the Koran was pretty starchy about adultery—that is, about trespassing on any other guy’s four legal wives.”

“Yes, it is. But all you have to do to divorce your wife is to say ‘I divorce thee’ three times, in front of witnesses. That’s what Yusuf wants me to do to Violet. If I’d only do that for him, he could marry her after three months. But if I’m stubborn, then something could make her a widow, and then he just has to wait four months and ten days.”

“Which doesn’t give you a lot of cards to open with,” Simon admitted. “But you’ve just been up to Greece, out of his bailiwick–-“

“Of course, I made up that excuse about needing some fresh hazel twigs, because mine had dried out in the desert heat. But he isn’t so easy to fool. He sent those two along with me —Talib and Abdullah. And any time one of ‘em went to sleep, the other one stayed awake. I don’t suppose either one of ‘em, or both of ‘em, would bother you very much, from some things I’ve read; but I’m only half your size, and I’ve never done any fighting. And you’ve seen ‘em for yourself. Wouldn’t you say they’d as soon cut a man’s throat as talk to him?”

“Maybe sooner. But if you’d started yelling for help in the middle of Athens, in Constitution Square, right under the nose of a policeman, what could they have done about it?”

“I’ve read about these Mohammedans,” the little man said darkly. “They’re fanatics. If they die killing an unbeliever, they think they go straight to Heaven. And on top of that, these two have been brought up to believe it’s their holy duty to do anything Yusuf tells ‘em. If he’d told ‘em to kill me rather than let me start any fuss, they’d be even less likely to care what happened to themselves. I mean, it’s all very well to say it’s ridiculous and it couldn’t happen, but it wouldn’t do me much good to be saying it after I was dead and Violet was left for this sheik to do anything he liked with.”

Simon had to concede that Mr. Usherdown had a tenable argument. It was, after all, no different from the attitude of any average man who has ever submitted to armed robbery. And in this case there was certainly room for even more than ordinary uncertainty about how reckless the theateners might be.

While the Saint didn’t suffer from any of those inhibitions, he realized that the comparatively easy step of stiffening Talib and Abdullah would not contribute much towards the rescue of Violet Usherdown. True, Mr. Usherdown would then be free to head for the nearest American consul and appeal for help. He might even, after a time, succeed in convincing the consul that his fantastic tale was true. But then the matter would have to go through Channels. And, in Washington, those Channels would be bound to filter it up to the very highest level. In a flash of absolute clairvoyance, Simon could visualize the gnawing of well-manicured fingernails that it would cause in the upper echelons of the State Department. For the days were long past, not necessarily for the better, when all the might of the United States stood ready to enforce the lawful rights of any American citizen anywhere. Simon could hear every word that a composite of all Official Spokesman would say. “My dear fellow, it isn’t like it was when Teddy Roosevelt would send the Navy and the Marines into any banana republic that got too much out of line … With the Russians grabbing every opening they can find to throw in a red rag about Colonialism … And the United Nations … And the trouble we’re having trying to keep friends in the Middle East … Well, suppose we steamed into the harbor at Qabat and started talking tough to this sheik—can you imagine the kind of propaganda the Reds could make of it in all the other Arab states … ?”

And so the Saint found himself landing at Qabat with some vague and fantastic idea of trying to do something about it single-handed. A sardonic quirk widened his mouth and turned the corners fractionally downwards at the same time. Indubitably, he would never learn …

The local authority vested in Talib and Abdullah was amply demonstrated by the magical ease with which they marched Mr. Usherdown and the Saint through four separate formality barriers manned by Qabati militia in facsimiles of British battle dress but still capped with the square rope-bound cowls of their forefathers, who had every air of being set for an orgy of red tape at the expense of any unprivileged passengers. If this portentously lubricated transit was somehow uncomfortably reminiscent of the fast clearance which in other countries might be given to prisoners in the custody of police officers, rather than VIP’s in the care of protocol expediters, Simon preferred to ignore the resemblance.

They had to wait only a few minutes outside the row of converted Quonset huts which served as airport buildings, until their baggage was hustled through the surging, shouting, screaming, and apparently almost homicidal mob which was in fact merely a typical assortment of Allah-fearing citizens assembled to greet arriving friends and relatives, to bid departing others godspeed, or simply to pass a few idle hours observing the activity. Then Talib shepherded them into a salmon-pink Cadillac convertible which rolled majestically away with the uniformed driver playing an astounding symphony on an American police siren, twin klaxons, and a Bermuda carriage bell.

The road from the airfield curved around the outskirts of the town, which at close quarters liberally fulfilled all the promise of tumbledown squalor which it had made to the sky, and dipped briefly into a souk where shapeless black-veiled women and biblically gowned merchants brooded and haggled over mounds of dates and bowls of mysterious spices, baskets of dingy-hued rice and chunks of half-withered meat mantled with crawling flies, all of it spread out on the ground to be seasoned with the dust and dung stirred up by the passing populace and their sheep, goats, donkeys, camels, and Cadillacs. Of the last-named there was a concentration, in terms of car per yard or roadway, which could only have been matched in Miami Beach at midwinter. There was also a fair sampling of only slightly less expensive makes, all equally new, even if sometimes lacking a hood or ‘a fender, and all in the most brilliant colors—together with an assortment of motorcycles overloaded with rearview mirrors and silver-mounted saddlebags, and even bicycles trying to get into the act with candy-striped paint jobs, tassels, pennants, windmills, and supernumerary bulb horns and reflectors.