The Saint Around the World (22 page)

He spoke to the big Negro, who gave Talib his scimitar to hold while he made a quick but thorough search of Simon’s and Mr. Usherdown’s persons.

The woman went out, lugging the heavy valise, with the manservant sauntering after her.

“Men starting to dig right now,” Talib said. “You wait. Very soon we know if you full of balloons. We dig up oil, Sheik Joseph make you rich somofabitches. Not find oil”—he bared his teeth, and drew the back of the blade luxuriously across his throat before handing it back to its owner—“it’s too goddam bad, you betcha.”

He strode out, followed by the Negro, and lastly the guard with the submachinegun backed out and kept the room covered with it from the passage until the door was closed again.

“Lovable fellow,” drawled the Saint.

“What are we going to do?” whimpered the little man. “Did you see what he did? I know you only made it worse by telling them to tear up the Sheik’s garden. Now they’ll cut off our heads instead-of just our hands.”

“I can’t see that it makes much difference, Mortimer. But Talib is probably exaggerating. We should have asked him what it says in the Koran about making divots in an Emir’s green.”

“And it wouldn’t do us any good to escape now. Even if we got out, we wouldn’t have any idea where to look for Violet.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“I don’t think we’re going to do any escaping for a while, anyway,” he said. “Didn’t you watch the valet character going through everything while the maid was packing up? And the Ethiopian who searched us didn’t even leave me my nail file.”

He had no reason to correct his hunch after they had gone over the apartment virtually inch by inch. Every article of metal that had a point or an edge or even a sharp corner bad been neatly removed from their possessions. And when the first meal of their incarceration was brought to them, it was a reminder that in a country where the fingers were still the accepted eating utensil there would not even be the ordinary remote hope of secreting a fork or a spoon. As for the possibility of scratching away the very modern concrete in which the window ironwork was set with a shard from a broken dish, Simon could not even delude himself into giving it a trial.

“There must be something,” persisted Mr. Usherdown numbly.

“There is,” said the Saint, stretching himself out philosophically. “You can tell me the story of your life.”

That was about what it came to, for the next five days, and some of it was not uninteresting either, once the desperate need for any kind of distraction had got the little man started.

It may seem a shatteringly abrupt change of pace to suddenly condense five days into a paragraph; yet in absolute fact it would be nothing but outrageous padding to make more of them. Mr. Mortimer Usherdown’s wandering reminiscences might have made a book of sorts by themselves, but they have no bearing on this story. Nor, in the utmost honesty, do the multifarious schemes for escape with which the Saint occupied his mind: since they were built up and elaborated only to be torn down and discarded, it would be a dishonest use of space for this chronicle to get any reader steamed up and then let down over them. It should be enough to say this time that if Simon Templar had seen any passable fascimile of a chance to make a break, he would obviously have taken it But he didn’t. The main door of the suite was only opened twice each day, when their meals were brought, and each time the operation was performed with such efficient precautions that it would have been sheer fantasy to think that it offered a loophole. The Saint was realistic enough to conserve his energy for a chance that would have to come sometime.

It must be admitted, however, that when it came it was like nothing that he had dreamed of.

The first hint of it came around the middle of the sixth day, in the form of a vague and confused rising of noise that crept in on them even without any window that looked out on the front of the palace. When they noticed it, after the first idle surmises, they ignored it; then wondered again; then shrugged it off; then could not shut it out; then could only be silent and wonder, without daring to theorize in words.

It was an eternity later when the door was flung open, the four giant Negroes marched in, this time directed by Abdullah, and backed up by twice the usual detail of armed militia, and the Saint and Mr. Usherdown were once again boxed in a square of herculean muscle and marched headlong around the corridors and courtyards and corners that led back with increasing familiarity to the main forecourt. Since Abdullah spoke no English, it was useless to ask questions, although Mr. Usher-down ineffectually tried to; and so they hurtled eventually through the grand portals into the ugly stifling heat and glare of the afternoon without any warning of what was to greet their eyes.

Simon was prepared for the tall skeletal pyramid of the oil derrick that now towered starkly amidst the withered remnants of Qabat’s only garden. The voices that he had heard from far off had also prepared him for the excited swarm of laborers, palace servitors, guards, and notables from the nearest mansions, who were milling vociferously around it. Nor was it surprising to see the Emir himself as a secondary focal point of the group, or Talib hovering behind him—or even Violet Usher-down standing near the Sheik, recognizable in spite of an orthodox veil by the copper curls which hung below a gold lame turban which she had adopted.

What the Saint was incredulously unprepared for was the thick shining silvery column of fluid that shot up between the girders of the derrick and dissolved into a white plume of spray at the top.

For the first few dizzy seconds he felt only a foggy bewilderment at the color of it. Then as the observation forced itself more solidly into his consciousness he wondered deliriously whether he could have topped everything with the all-time miracle of bringing in a well that gave only pure refined high-octane gasoline. But in another moment his nose gave crushing refutation to that alluring whimsy. There was no smell of gas. And as his escorts wedged him through the encircling congregation and delivered him beside the Emir, at the very base of the scaffolding, a shower of drops fell on him, and he caught some on his hand and brought the hand right under his nostrils and then touched it with his tongue and knew exactly what it was.

It was water.

v

As if it had been only six minutes ago, instead of six days, Simon re-lived the capricious insubordinations of his mind, when he had been trying to concentrate on oil, and had been wafted through refineries to the ocean and through salads to irrigation; and it became clear to him that his latest discovered talent would need a lot more disciplining before it would be strictly commercial.

It also dawned on him that he was not his own only critic.

“Sheik know now, you one big goddam thief,” Talib bawled at him.

The Saint drew himself up.

In the superb unhesitating confidence of his recovery, he turned that flabbergasting moment into one of his finest hours.

“Tell Joe,” he said coldly, “that he is one big goddam fool.”

Mr. Usherdown gasped, and even Talib blanched as he blurted out an indubitably expurgated rendition of that retort.

“I didn’t promise to find oil,” Simon went on, without waiting for the Emir’s reaction. “I can’t find it if it isn’t here, which you’ve already been told. I said I would make him rich. And I’ve done that. In Kuwait, isn’t water worth more than oil?”

As that was repeated, a hush began to fall, and even the Emir’s furious eyes settled into sharp and penetrating attention.

“Lots of places around here have oil,” said the Saint disparagingly. “But I’ve given Qabat something that none of the others have. I was told that Kuwait is spending forty-five million dollars to build a pipeline to get water. Won’t they be glad to save nearly two hundred miles of it and just bring the pipeline here, and give you the money instead? Is there any place around this Gulf that wouldn’t trade you ten barrels of oil for one barrel of water? Let Kuwait and Dharhan sweat out their oil, while in Quaba you take their money and buy beautiful cars and jewels and walk about in grass up to your knees.” He swept his arm grandly towards the jet of pure and glistening H2O that was roaring merrily into the parched and burning sky. “This is what I’ve done for you, Joe.”

Talib was still stumbling over the last few words when Yusuf demonstrated his lightning grasp of practical economics by enfolding the Saint in a grateful and embarrassingly affectionate embrace.

He then turned ebulliently towards Mr. Usherdown, but concluded the gesture much more perfunctorily, as if a different and disturbing thought had obtruded itself midway in the movement.

Suddenly Mrs. Usherdown’s voice cut stridently through the rising babble around.

“I don’t know what you’re taking a bow for, Mortimer Usherdown,” it said scathingly. “After all, you didn’t do anything.”

The interruption was on such a rasping note that Yusuf turned inquiringly.

Talib, whose expression had been getting progressively sourer as the atmosphere of congratulation and camaraderie seemed to be gaining the ascendant, brightened visibly as he translated.

The carnivorous gleam came back into Yusef’s stare as he stepped back and contemplated Mr. Usherdown with a new and terrifying exultation.

But instead of quailing under that baleful regard, the little man ,was not even aware of it. Instead of trembling with fear, he was quivering with the stress of what Simon realized was: a far more cataclysmal emotion. He straightened up to the last millimeter of his height, inflating all that there was of his chest until the veins stood out on his neck, and sparks flashed from his small watery eyes.

“Why, you nasty creature,” he squeaked indignantly. “I know what you’re trying to do. But you needn’t bother.” He stuck out a straight skinny arm ending in a wrathfully pointing finger. “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you. There!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Usherdown tartly, “you’re very welcome, I’m sure.”

She turned, with a toss of her head, and strutted away towards the palace, bouncing her ample hips.

Talib construed the passage in the tone of voice that he might have used to bring tidings of a major disaster, and this time the hug that the Emir gave Mr. Usherdown was unmarred by any reservations.

“Sheik say,” Talib droned gloomily, “you ask anything you want, you get it, if not too much.”

“We’ll settle for the price of one small oil well,” said the Saint. “And our tickets on the next plane to Basra,” he added casually, wishing that he knew more about geology, and vowing not to uncross his fingers until whatever freakish artesian source they had tapped had proved that it was capable of keeping the gusher flowing at least until he had taken off.

“Okay, dough kay,” Talib said. “But tonight, Sheik order big feast and whoopee.”

Mr. Usherdown winked at the Saint, slapped the Emir on the back, and poked the outraged Talib in the ribs, while a broad beam of ineffable rapture overspread his lumpy little face.

“That’s what I’m waiting for,” he crowed. “Bring on the dancing girls!”

THE PLUPERFECT LADY

i

Simon Templar stayed at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore for sentimental reasons. Although more modern and more luxurious caravanserais had been built in the many years since he had last been there, the Raffles was one of the places that was simply synonymous with Singapore to him, as it always will be to the real Far East hands from away back. And as to why that one particular place had won out over two others almost equally traditional, Major Vernon Ascony had a theory.

“I just looked at the name on the front and felt sure you couldn’t have resisted it,” Ascony said.

“Since you couldn’t possibly have been thinking of A. J. Raffles, the immortal Amateur Cracksman of fiction,” said the Saint, “I wonder what there can be about me that reminds you of Sir Stamford Raffles, the illustrious pioneer and Empire builder, whose name is commemorated on so many landmarks of this romantic city.”

Major Ascony permitted the vestige of a smile to stir under the shadow of his closely clipped mustache.

“Nothing, old chap. Positively not one single thing.”

“And why were you trying to find me anyway?” Simon inquired.

“I’m with the Police,” Ascony said, and modestly refrained from specifying that he was an Assistant Commissioner.

The Saint sighed.

“One day I’m going to have this printed on a card,” he said. “But if you’ll accept it verbally, I can save you a lot of time. No, I am not here to stir up any trouble. No, I am not looking for any crime or criminals. Yes, I am just an ordinary tourist. Of course, if something irresistibly intriguing happens under my nose, I can’t promise not to get involved in it. But I don’t intend to start anything.”

“What made you decide to come here? This is a bit off your beat, isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t always. As a matter of fact, one of my first big adventures started not far from here, though it came to a head in England. But that was an awful long time ago. And the other day, out of the blue, I had a sudden crazy belt of nostalgia: I just had to come back and see how much the place had changed. I hadn’t anything else in mind for a couple of weeks, and BOAC flies here awful fast. I remember the first time—it took me six weeks on a freighter from Lima.”

Ascony proffered his cigarette case, and Simon accepted one.

“How about a drink?”

“I’d like it,” Simon said.

They sat down at a table on the terrace overlooking the bustling Esplanade, and a soft-footed “boy” came quickly to dust it off.

“A stengah, or something fancier?”

“Peter Dawson will be fine.”

“Dua,” ordered the Major. He rubbed his mustache thoughtfully. “I suppose you’ve already noticed a lot of difference?”

“Quite a bit,” Simon grinned. “The plumbing, especially. And air conditioning, yet. And no more rickshaws.”

“Yes, there’ve been a few improvements. But a lot of things are worse, too.”

“I’ve heard about that. You’re pretty high on the Russian list of places to make trouble in.”

“It’s not too bad right here. We’ve had a few nasty riots, but nothing so far that we couldn’t handle. But it’s a bit rugged for the blokes up-country sometimes.”