The Saint Around the World (19 page)

“I suppose the biggest cars all belong to Joe’s close relatives, the smaller ones to cousins and in-laws, the motorbikes to the pals they do business with, and the pedal pushers are the lads who just manage to catch some drips from the gravy train,” Simon observed, raising his voice with some difficulty above the din with which every other vehicle on the road was enthusiastically answering the diverse fanfares activated by their own driver.

“Something like that,” Mr. Usherdown yelled back.

“Only Emir can buy cars,” shouted Talib. “He give them to big shoots.” He turned to scream a sirocco of parenthetic invective at some hapless nomad whose recalcitrant burro had forced their chauffeur to apply the brakes for a moment, and turned back without a perceptible pause for breath. “He give me a car now, maybe. Me big shoot!”

“It sounds rather like that,” said the Saint discreetly.

Almost at once they turned off the seething aromatic street which presumably meandered to the heart of the town, and speeded up again through the bare desert on what Simon recognized as the straight stem of highway that he had seen from the air, leading towards the flower-arrangement of palaces. On contact, it proved to be a badly rutted and potholed road which taxed all the Cadillac’s resources of spring and shock-absorber even at the death-defying velocity of about forty miles an hour at which their Jehu launched them over it, still tootling all his noise-making devices in spite of having no other traffic to compete with. In about a mile they reached the first touches of imported verdure—at first clumps of cactus, then a few hardy shrubs, then a variety of palm trees at increasingly frequent intervals, finally a hedge of geraniums with a miraculous sprinkling of pink blossoms.

“This is the nearest thing to an oasis in the whole of Qabat,” Mr. Usherdown explained. “There’s actually a small natural spring, obviously where the first Emir staked out his private estate. It doesn’t flow many gallons an hour, though. And after Yusuf’s relatives built their own palaces, with American bathrooms and everything, there wasn’t much to spare. When he took up gardening, there was even Jess. The town gets what-ever’s left over. I don’t think anyone ever dies of thirst, but that’s about as far as it goes.”

“I should think Joe would have wanted you to do some plain oldfashioned water divining before he sent you dowsing for oil,” said the Saint.

“What for? Right next door, in Kuwait, they had to spend fifteen million dollars on a sea-water distilling plant, and now they’re going to put fortyfive million more into a pipeline to bring water from the Tigris and Euphrates—more than two hundred miles. Yusuf’s got about all the water he needs, personally. All he’s interested in is getting something more like the Emir of Kuwait’s money.”

Seen at somewhat closer range from the royal boulevard, the minor mansions of the Sheik’s favorites looked considerably less than palatial, and in fact would not have sparked any fast bidding if they had been on sale in Southern California. The Sheik’s own palace, however, although falling well short of Cinemascope dimensions, would have comfortably met the standards of a producer of second features. The one feature of it which would not have been likely to occur to a Hollywood set designer was the wire-fenced area opposite the main entrance, about a hundred feet long and half as wide, shaded from the merciless sun by strips of cloth stretched between poles spaced around it, bordered by colorful beds of petunias and verbena, and displaying as its proud and principal treasure a perfectly flat and velvet-smooth lawn of incredible green grass.

“Every morning, after prayers, Sheik Joseph walk there without shoes,” Talib said almost reverently, as they got out of the car.

This time the Saint’s smile was a little thin.

Two uniformed sentries at the entrance came to sluggish attention as Talib led his charges through a small rat-hole ‘ door cut in one of the main doors, either one of which was big enough for a double-decker bus to have driven through, and which Simon surmised were only thrown open in their full grandeur for the passage of the Emir himself.

Even the Saint had to admit that it was rather like stepping over an enchanted threshold into a very passable likeness of an averagely romantic man’s idea of the Arabian Nights. The spacious patio in which he found himself had a vaulted roof intricately patterned with pastel paints and gold, but cunningly placed embrasures admitted sufficient daylight while filtering out all the eye-aching glare of the desert. A tile floor in exquisite mosaic lay at his feet, and in the center of it a fountain created three-dimensional traceries of tinkling silver. Silken hangings softened the walls, and archways with their peaks cut in the traditional onion shapes of Islam offered glimpses of enticing passages and courtyards. But even before those details the thing that struck him first was the coolness, whether from air conditioning or nothing more than the massive protection of the structure itself, which was in such contrast to the searing heat outside that it supplied in its own tangible surcease the most fairytale unreality of all.

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, Talib 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.

Talib 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 fol-lowered 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 Yusuf 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 Yusuf?”

“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. Yusuf 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.”

iii

Except for his costume, the Sheik Yusuf Loutfallah ibn Hisham, 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’Antongualla, 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 Talib 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 intennittently 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 Talib had brought.

“Not custom here to have wifes at men’s dinner,” Talib 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 Yusuf 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.