The Saint Around the World (20 page)

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,” Talib put in proudly. “Also one hundred eighty concubines. Very big shoot.”

The Shiek 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 wating docilely.

The Emir burped, regally and resonantly.

Talib 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.

Yusuf gave an order to Talib, 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.

Yusuf 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,” Talib said.

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

“Okay, Sheik say you take all three,” Talib 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,” Talib 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.”

Talib conveyed the message. Yusuf 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,” Talib 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 Surah 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’— Bismillahi’r Rahmani’r Rahiml”

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.”

Talib 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,” Talib 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, Talib 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 Talib 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 coldblooded 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 Yusuf 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 Talib 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.”

Talib repeated the argument haltingly, but must have succeeded in conveying the general trend of it; for Yusuf 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.”

Yusuf 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, Yusuf 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 Talib: “You take money?”

“I love it,” said the Saint.

Yusuf 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,” Talib 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,” Talib 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 diapha-nously 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?”

iv

“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 Talib 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 Talib 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 Yusuf 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 on to 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.”