Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 5, April 1968

The Moving Finger by Joseph Commings

“She is beautiful,” the sheik said. “She is also unfaithful. Find the man. I mil do the rest!”

The big electric fans churned the suffocating desert air down from the smoky blue ceiling onto the three people around the low banquet table below. Sitting on cushions around the feast were the senator, the sheik, and the American girl.

U.S. Senator Brooks U. Banner was a big fat man wearing an old-fashioned, enormously wrinkled white suit. After an inspection of the fighting areas in Viet Nam, he was on his way back home. He had a “standing invite” to drop in on the Iraqi oil sheik. Now there was an added attraction. Six months ago Sheik Ali Sa’ab had married an American girl.

Bernice was tall, blonde, and beautiful, presiding like a perfect hostess over the roast lamb, rice, spices and yoghourt.

At the end of the meal she rose, smiling.

“Hamdullah,” she said dutifully, the way every Moslem, ended a meal. “I will leave you gentlemen to your drinks and chess.”

They watched her walk away, the down-drafts flowing through her soft white garments, until she disappeared like a genie in the wavering haze of the bronze filigree braziers.

The sheik leaned forward, his bearded head muffled in the folds of his keffiyah. He had something more deeply personal on his mind than a chess problem. “She is unfaithful.”

“What’s that?” Banner stared, a Pittsburgh stogie clamped in his teeth. “Who with?”

“I don’t know.” The black eyes, hanging in the wrinkled leathery face, glittered venomously. “I ask you to help me find out.”

“Don’t appeal to my morals.” Banner sipped his cloudy potent arak. “I haven’t any.”

The sheik tasted his bitter tar-black coffee and lit a long Turkish cigarette. “Then let me appeal to your deductive analysis. In the old days I would have been a Caliph and you would be my Grand Vizier. That is no small honor. I would pick the most acute brain in the kingdom.”

Soft soaping me, thought Banner. His frosty little blue eyes watched the dark-skinned face. “What makes you think she’s—”

“Anouk, her old serving woman, told me. B’Illah! There’s loyalty! The man is one of the three young Americans I have helping me run my oil company. All three of them work and sleep in the administrative wing. It’s not far from here. Bernice, in a weak moment when she needed a confidant, told Anouk that she was having an intrigue with a man she had known back in the United States before she married me. Under my nose” — it was a sharp proud beak — “they are passing messages back and forth. Meetings in secret places. Only she didn’t tell Anouk with which one.”

Banner said slyly, “So you want me to help you find out. Let me warn you, Ali. I’m all in favor of young romance. What’s an old rummy like you want with a girl like that?”

“I’ve offered her all the delights of the perfumed garden.”

“Fah!” snorted Banner. “Sand and flies! And all this heat!”

“I’ve given her clothing, jewels, motorcars. Even air conditioning. It’s just been installed,” he said enthusiastically. “Tomorrow I will throw the master switch that will cool the whole palace.”

“Maybe old Anouk is jealous,” suggested Banner, “she could be lying.”

The sheik shook his hooded head. “She has watched Bernice. During the hottest part of the day, when everyone else rests and sleeps, Bernice goes down the corridor where the Americans work, stopping off at each office.”

“Are the men there at the time?”

“No,” said the sheik, “the men are absent. Bernice goes into each office for perhaps a few minutes, then emerges. She carries nothing in except her handbag, and nothing out. Yet I am fully convinced that they communicate with each other in one of these offices.”

“Why’re you so sure?”

“No man approaches her. Not during the day. She receives no letters or notes. No telephone calls.”

“What’re these offices like?”

“Very simple. A desk, a chair, a telephone, a typewriter, a filing cabinet. I’ve examined all of these things, even before Bernice has entered, but they reveal nothing.”

“Yet you still feel that there’s writing left there somewhere?”

“I’m positive. But where? I’ve searched and searched. There is nothing written on the walls, floor, or ceiling. Once, after Bernice had returned to her own rooms, Anouk looked through her handbag. The only strange article that she found in it was a piece of chalk.”

“Chalk!” Banner’s fat body gave a forward bounce. “There’s one significance about chalk.”

“What is it?”

“It can be easily rubbed out again.” He peered around mysteriously. “Did you try following her?”

“Impossible! I cast too large a shadow.”

“Hire somebody to do it.”

“I will tell no one about this folly except you. It could become the choice gossip of the bazaars.”

“Suppose I find out which one it is.” Banner shifted the cigar in his mouth. “What’ll you do?”

“I will eliminate him,” said the sheik fiercely.

Banner’s furry black eyebrows juggled. “Eliminate?”

“In the old days he would be drawn and quartered.” Obviously he regretted the passing of the old days. “Now I will have him banished from Iraq. Once he has gone, she will return all her affection to me.”

Wishful thinking indeed, Banner thought. But this was a stickler to solve. He couldn’t resist the challenge. And he had a curious interest in this ghostly young man who was out to steal the old desert hawk’s darling, a young man he had never seen and perhaps never would.

He struggled to his feet. “Okay, Ali, let’s take a look.”

Slowly and thoughtfully they walked through the moonlit garden to the administrative wing of the palace.

“Why don’t you fire all three of ’em?” Banner suggested.

The sheik spread out his hands helplessly. “Then I would have no one at all to run my oil business.”

The three offices off the corridor were, as the sheik had described them, small, neat, and almost identical. Banner entered each one, standing there with his fists on his hips, staring around.

They reached the third one. There were twin electric switches just inside the door. The sheik reached in and flicked one.

Banner stared around and up.

“I’ve noticed,” he said, “that there’s something that you can see — yet you can’t see.”

“Invisible writing?”

“In a way. Who uses this office?”

“Gordon Cook.”

“Does he always leave his fan running?”

“Sometimes he is forgetful.” The sheik reached out for the second switch.

“Yes,” drawled Banner. “Turn it off. And look!”

The big four-bladed fan suspended from the ceiling whirred to a stop.

The sheik’s black eyes were on it, staring.

“The fan!” he cried out.

“Chalk writing on the blades. Ali. You can’t see it while the fan’s in motion. All they had to do to reach it was stand up on the desk.”

“B’Illah!” The sheik was straining his eyes up. “What does it say?”

“Air conditioning operative tomorrow. Fan messages will be obsolete. Why stay any longer, love? Meet me at Baghdad Airport for the 10:30 flight out.”

The sheik cried out: “He’s running away with her! I’ll stop them! What time is it?”

Banner hauled out a ponderous pocket watch and held it up.

The sheik looked at it with a frightful groan.

It was already 10:45.