The Saint Around the World

1

The BOAC manager located Simon in the bar of the Cairo airport, and said, “I’m awfully sorry, Mr Templar, but I still haven’t been able to get you confirmed beyond Basra on this flight. So you’ll have to get off there, and hope they’ll be able to put you right back on the plane. If not, they can definitely put you on the Coronet flight to Karachi on Tuesday. So you’d only be stuck there for one night — and two days. You might find ’em interesting. Or of course you could just stay here. I can book you all the way through to Tokyo on this flight next week.”

“I’ll take a chance on Basra,” said the Saint amiably. “I’ve nothing against this charming place, but I’ve already been here a week.”

“I’ve been here for six years,” said the manager neutrally. “But I’m surprised the Saint couldn’t find any excitement in Egypt.”

Simon Templar grinned lazily.

“I leave this territory to Sax Rohmer,” he murmured. “I liked it better in Cinemascope, anyhow — in a nice air-conditioned theater. Your ruins are wonderful, but the Nile just doesn’t send me without Cleopatra. Maybe I’ll come back when you start running time machines.”

“Well, if I’m still here, I hope I can be a bit more help to you then.” The manager fumbled out a carefully folded sheet of paper and a pen. “I know it’s a frightful bore, but would you mind very much doing an autograph? I’ve got a young son who thinks you’re the greatest man who ever lived, and I’ll never hear the last of it if I let you get away without a souvenir.”

“You should have brought him up with more respectable heroes,” Simon said, writing his name.

“And that little stick-figure drawing with the halo — your Saint trademark… Would you?”

“Sure.” Simon drew it. “How do you feel about a drink?”

“Thanks, old chap, but I’ve still got a spot of work to do.” The manager recovered his pen and paper, and put out his hand. “The station officer will be looking out for you at Basra. Have a nice trip, Mr Templar, and come back and see us.”

“Just as soon as you can make me that date with Cleopatra.”

Simon sat down again as the manager hurried away. The friendly smile faded from his tanned face as inevitably as the memory of that whole encounter would presently fade. It had been pleasant indeed, but it was still only part of the routine of travel.

And exactly three seconds later, as a direct result of it, nothing could even remotely be called routine.

His hand was grabbed off the table and practically taken away from him by a little man whom he had never seen before in his life, who pumped it and clung to it with the almost hysterical fervor of a parent greeting a long-lost son or a politician looking for a vote.

The little man beamed from ear to ear, and his little brown eyes were bright with terror, and he said in a frantically pleading undertone, “My name’s Mortimer Usherdown. Please pretend you’re an old friend of mine. Please play along with me. Honestly, it’s one of those life-and-death things…”

“Well, Mortimer,” said the Saint automatically. “Long time no see.”

He patted Mr Usherdown on the shoulder, and gently reclaimed his other hand. The little man with the big name sank into the nearest chair as if his knees had melted. He had a round button-nosed face that made one think of a timid gnome, topped with thinning wisps of mouse-colored hair; he might have been five years on either side of fifty. His trembling could be felt rather than seen as if he were sitting on some kind of delicate vibrator.

“Gosh, this is a break, running into you here, Simon,” he said, still with that fixed and desperate grin. “If I could have picked anyone out of the whole world to run into now, I’d have asked for you.”

He looked up abruptly, and Simon looked up with him, as two other men loomed over them, crowding close to the table with unmistakable intent to be noticed.

“Oh,” Mr Usherdown said, as though he had momentarily forgotten them. “These are two friends of mine—”

The two men did not look like friends of anyone, except possibly some Middle Eastern Ali ben Capone. They were obviously Arabs of some kind and did not care who knew it, since although they wore conventional Western suits of fascinatingly inaccurate fit, with what appeared to be striped pajama tops taking the place of shirts and hanging gaily out below the hem-line of their coats, their heads were still shrouded in the traditional red-patterned cowls bound to their brows by what looked like two quoits of heavy black rope. But even making allowance for the fact that the typical seamed and aquiline Arab face, especially when bearded, has a cast of intolerant cruelty that only a Tuareg mother would have no misgivings about, the two specimens that Mr Usherdown introduced exuded less natural kindliness than any couple of their race that Simon had seen up to that date.

“This is Tâlib,” the little man said, indicating the taller and lankier of the two, whose suit was a couple of sizes too loose. “And Abdullah.” The other was shorter and broader, and his clothes were too tight. “This is Mr Templar, a very old friend of mine,” Mr Usherdown said, completing the introductions.

The two Arabs also sat down.

“I’m glad everyone’s so friendly,” murmured the Saint. “Who’s got the cards? Shall we cut for partners, Mortimer, or do you and I take these two on?”

‘Tâlib speaks English.” Usherdown warned him quickly.

“How you do?” said the tall lanky one, to prove it.

“Mr Templar is in the same business that I am,” Usherdown explained — or it was apparently intended for an explanation.

“Ah,” said Tâlib, with interest. “He is a hot dog, I bet.”

He leaned his elbows on the table with a solidity which not only underlined the impression that he was there to stay but added a certain air of possessiveness to his presence which spread out to include the Saint in its orbit.

Simon lighted a cigarette while he tried to make sure of his cue. Although Mr Usherdown had most of the conventional earmarks of a Milquetoast type, his current state of suppressed panic reached an almost psychopathic intensity. But Tâlib and Abdullah, for their part, had none of the reassuring air which might have been expected even of the local counterpart of the men in white coats. They were not actually as conspicuous as their description might sound to anyone who has not seen that cosmopolitan crossroads which shuffles together not merely the costumes and countenances of Europe and Arabia but also Afghans, Indians, Pakistanis, Burmese, Thailanders, Malays, Chinese, Japanese, and every sect and subdivision in between, in what is probably the maddest mixing-bowl of this airborne age; but the aura of self-confident menace about them was as internationally obvious as that of any two dead-pan goons in a gangster movie. Yet it seemed preposterous that they could reduce even such a mild-looking person as Mr Usherdown to something so close to quivering paralysis in such a crowded and brightly lighted modernism as the Cairo airport bar.

Simon glanced calculatingly around the swirling jabbering room, adding up a little knot of transient American GI’s, a trio of British officers identifiable even in mufti, and a couple of Egyptian policemen in uniform quietly studying everyone, and found it hard to believe that even such a frightened goblin as Mr Usherdown wouldn’t have dared to call the bluff of two goons who tried to crowd him in such a setting. But it was still a wild possibility that had to be methodically disposed of.

He estimated the extent of Tâlib’s idiomatic accomplishments with another blandly analytic glance, and said, “Spill it, Mortimer. Do you want me to clobber these fugitives from a road show of Beau Geste?”

“Oh, no,” said the little man hastily. “Not on any account, please. Their religion doesn’t allow them to drink. But I’ll have a brandy, if I may.”

He was quite fast on the uptake, at any rate, or perhaps fear had lent wings to his wits as it might have to another man’s feet.

Simon stopped a passing waiter and relayed the order, along with another Peter Dawson for himself.

“What on earth are you doing here, Mort, old boy?” he asked, trying to offer another opening.

“I’ve just been up to Greece. For Hazel.”

“And how is the dear girl?”

“Who?” Mr Usherdown looked blank for a moment. “Oh, do you mean my wife? Violet?”

“Of course,” said the Saint. “How stupid of me. I knew the name was something vegetable.”

“She’s fine. I had to leave her in Qabat.”

“That’s too bad. Or is it? Does she know about Hazel?”

Light dawned at last on Mr Usherdown’s anxious face.

“Now I get it. You’re kidding. I was talking about hazel twigs.”

“Hazel Twiggs?” Simon repeated foggily. “I’m sorry, I still can’t seem to place her.”

“Stop pulling my leg, Simon,” pleaded the little man, with a nervous giggle. “You know what I’m talking about. Hazel twigs — for dowsing.”

“Nothing like ’em,” agreed the Saint accommodatingly. “Although I have heard that these new-fangled fire extinguishers—”

“People have tried a lot of new things,” said Mr Usherdown, with beads of perspiration standing out on his upper lip. “Down in Jamaica I’ve seen it done with branches of guava. I met a chap in South Africa who did it with a clock spring. And I’ve read about a fellow in California who uses a piece of bent-up aluminum. But I still say that for sound, consistent divining, there’s nothing to beat the old-fashioned hazel twig.”

It was Simon Templar’s turn to receive a glimmer of illumination as at least a part of the dialogue suddenly lost its resemblance to an excerpt from the Mad Hatter’s tea party and became startlingly rational and clear.

“I had to see if I could get a rise out of you, Mort,” he apologized. “But you didn’t even give me a chance to ask you ‘Witch Hazel?’  ”

Mr Usherdown cackled again with the giddiness of relief, and nudged Tâlib, whose piercing black eyes had been trying to follow the conversation from face to face like a tennis umpire watching a fast rally.

“Don’t let Mr Templar fool you. He’s one of the best dowsers in the business — perhaps even better than I am, and there’s no one else I’d say that about. But always making a joke of it, anything for a laugh.”

“I get you,” Tâlib said. “Very funny man. Very wise in cracks.”

He bared his teeth in what was doubtless meant to be an appreciative grin, and succeeded in looking almost as jovial as a half-starved wolf.

The arrival of the drinks, and the business of paying for them, gave the Saint a brief respite in which to digest the exiguous crumb of information which was all that he had to show for several minutes of mild delirium.

Mr Mortimer Usherdown, he had finally gathered, had a wife named Violet and was a water diviner by profession, and apparently wanted Simon Templar to pretend to be one too. But what this could have to do with Mr Usherdown’s life-and-death problem, or the scarcely disguised menace of the two Arabs, was a riddle that Simon preferred to spare himself the vertigo of attempting to guess.

He sipped his Peter Dawson, while Mr Usherdown took a large and evidently grateful gulp of brandy.

“Seriously now,” said the Saint, “what are you up to in these parts?”

“I’m working for the Emir of Qabat.”

“Should I know him too?”

“My boss,” Tâlib said, bowing his head and touching his forehead. “The Sheik Yûsuf Loutfallah ibn Hishâm. Yûsuf is like in English ‘Joseph.’ Loutfallah means ‘Gift of God’ — like Abdullah here is ‘Servant of God.’ Hishâm—”

Never mind,” said the Saint. “Let’s just call him Joe.”

“Qabat is one of those tiny independent principalities the British helped to set up in the Middle East after the First World War,” Usherdown said. “Like Kuwait. In fact, it’s a whistle stop for some of the local planes from Basra to Kuwait… Say!” The little man’s eyes dilated with a blaze of exaggeratedly spontaneous inspiration. “I heard that BOAC man saying you might have to stop over in Basra. Why don’t you fly over to Qabat with me?”

“I don’t know,” said the Saint dubiously. “I’m still hoping I’ll be able to stay on to Karachi, and make a connection—”

“It’s hardly anything of a side trip, by air,” Usherdown persisted, in a tone that was not so much persuasive as imploring. “And it’s something unique — something you’ll never run into anything like again. Besides, you might even be able to help me!”

As if suddenly afraid that he might have gone too far, he turned quickly to Tâlib, who was staring at him with narrowed eyes, and said, “Don’t you think the Emir would like that? Honestly, in my racket, Mr Templar is really the greatest. If we could talk him into working with me, we might get twice as much done in half the time.”

The tall one turned and conferred in guttural Arabic with the Servant of God, whose qualifications for the job would not have been revealed by any superficial system of physiognomy; and Mr Usherdown said to the Saint, in a voice that almost broke with the pressure of its suppressed entreaty, “If you turn me down, you can’t be the man I’ve always thought you were.”

“Very good idea.” Tâlib said abruptly, while Abdullah nodded. “I think the Emir will make him most welcome. You two working together must be better than one. Double or quitting, okey-dokey?”

The PA system said, “Your attention, please. British Overseas Airways announces the departure of Majestic flight 904 to Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, now loading from Gate One.”

Names that had woven their iridescent thread through innumerable yarns of high adventure. Simon Templar knew most of them as they really were, in their underlying squalor even more than their romantic overtones, and yet he would never quite be able to strip their syllables of a music that echoed out of a youth in which other names like Damascus and Baghdad had been only the geography of fairytales instead of their modern sordid reality. It was positively unfair, he thought, to throw those mysteriously nostalgic sounds at him when he had only been trying to get transported from one place to another with a minimum of inconvenience on the way, and a total stranger with all the appeal of a scared rabbit was trying to sucker him into some fantastic situation which he hadn’t yet begun to understand…

“Let’s talk it over on the plane,” he said, and should have known even then that he was hooked.

He took a parting swallow from his glass, while Mr Usherdown drained the last drop from his, and stood up and led the way out.

Mr Usherdown followed, practically clinging to his coattails like a small boy trailing his mother through a department-store sale. And in a little while they boarded the plane in the same Siamese-twin proximity, except that in jostling through one of the bureaucratic bottlenecks which still seem to be inseparable from international air travel their positions had somehow become reversed, so that it was the Saint who trailed Mr Usherdown through the aisle of the Argonaut and was starting to follow him into a pair of seats when the tall Tâlib tried to push past him and take the other one. The Saint’s resistance was as decisive as a gently driven bulldozer, but it left him sitting in the chair next to Usherdown and gazing apologetically up at the Arab who glowered down at him.

“I sit here,” Tâlib grated.

“I don’t mind sitting here a bit, pal,” Simon insisted innocently. “You go on and get one of the good seats.”

“Plenty of room up front, gents,” sang out a cheerful steward, strategically posted to keep the passengers moving through the cabin.

Trapped between uniformed authority and the stubborn push of other passengers, Tâlib 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.”

2

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 view 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.

“Yûsuf 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 Yûsuf 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 — Tâlib 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 Yûsuf 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 threateners might be.

While the Saint didn’t suffer from any of those inhibitions, he realized that the comparatively easy step of stiffening Tâlib 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 Tâlib 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 VIPs 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 Tâlib 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 rear-view 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.

“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 Tâlib. “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 Yûsuf’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 less. The town gets whatever’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 old-fashioned 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 forty-five million more into a pipeline to bring water from the Tigris and Euphrates — more than two hundred miles. Yûsuf’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,” Tâlib 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 Tâlib 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, Tâlib 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.

Tâlib 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 followed 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 Yûsuf 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 Yûsuf?”

“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. Yûsuf 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.”

3

Except for his costume, the Sheik Yûsuf Loutfallah ibn Hishâm, 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 Tâlib 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 intermittently 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 Tâlib had brought.

“Not custom here to have wifes at men’s dinner,” Tâlib 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 Yûsuf 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.

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

The Sheik 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 waiting docilely.

The Emir burped, regally and resonantly.

Tâlib 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.

Yûsuf gave an order to Tâlib, 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.

Yûsuf 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,” Tâlib said.

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

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

Tâlib conveyed the message. Yûsuf 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,” Tâlib 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 Sûrah 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’ — Bismillâhi’r Rahmâni’r Rahîm!”

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.”

Tâlib 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,” Tâlib 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, Tâlib 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 Tâlib 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 cold-blooded 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 Yûsuf 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 Tâlib 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.”

Tâlib repeated the argument haltingly, but must have succeeded in conveying the general trend of it, for Yûsuf 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.”

Yûsuf 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, Yûsuf 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 Tâlib: “You take money?”

“I love it,” said the Saint.

Yûsuf 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,” Tâlib 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,” Tâlib 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 diaphanously 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?”

4

“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 Tâlib 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 Tâlib 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 Yûsuf 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 onto 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.”

“But I love you, Vi,” pleaded her spouse. “I couldn’t sacrifice you like that.”

“What is a woman’s life but sacrifice?” she asked. “And it isn’t as if I would have to put up with his old wives, because he has promised me he will give them away. And even if he is getting down to his last few millions we wouldn’t starve to death. When I think of some of the things I’ve had to put up with since I married you, Mortimer Usherdown, I cannot say it is the worst fate that could possibly happen to me, although naturally it is always a shock to a lady to be put asunder.”

Both Mr Usherdown and the Saint looked at her in oddly similar ways for a moment.

Then Simon touched the little man’s arm. “I want some sleep before the performance tomorrow, chum,” he said. “But before I turn in, you’d better dig out those hazel twigs and show me how to make like a real dowser.”

It was quite a large and colorful gallery that turned out in the still bearable warmth of the early morning to watch the Saint set forth on his quest, as if it had been the tee-off of a golf championship. There was a group of about three dozen VIPs, identifiable by their fine robes and arrogant bearing, whom Simon took for the squires of the smaller manors and their personal friends. There were, inevitably, Tâlib and Abdullah, with no less than four of the scimitar-bearing Negroes hovering close behind them to add muscle to their menace. At a respectful distance stood a sizeable crowd of somber and ragged citizens from the town, summoned by whatever served as a grapevine in that grapeless land. A full platoon of the militarily uniformed guards was deployed to keep the common herd at bay — and was also a sobering reminder of the unromantic improbability of the dashing kind of getaway that Mr Usherdown had dreamed of. From the palace entrance had spilled a heterogeneous collection of servants and minor functionaries, including the quartet of musicians, but the dancing girls were not with them, or in fact any other feminine members of the Emir’s household. However, glancing up at the façade, Simon was sure that he could detect a stirring of veils behind every barred window. He might have imagined it, but he even thought that in one of the gratings he saw a timid flutter of pale fingers, instantly withdrawn…

The only woman in plain sight was Violet Usherdown, and the descriptive phrase was not strictly apt, at that, for she had tied a square of brocade over her head in a sort of babushka effect, and fastened what looked like a man’s white handkerchief across the aperture in front in such a way that it masked her completely from the eyes down.

“I’ve got to obey the custom of the country if Yûsuf is going to respect me at all,” she had explained with dignity. “Why, I’ve found out that the women here would rather expose any part of themselves than let a man see their face. That means, if I didn’t wear a veil, all the men would be staring at me — and I know what men are like, Mortimer — as if I was stark naked! When I think how I used to let anyone here see me with a bare face, before I knew what it meant to them, I’m so embarrassed I could blush all over.”

The Sheik Yûsuf Loutfallah ibn Hishâm, in conformity with his royal prerogative, was the last to appear, but his arrival was a welcome signal that the period of suspenseful waiting was over. The Sheik confirmed this himself, barking a few words directly at the Saint which needed no interpreter to announce that they meant “Okay, let’s get going.”

“You want camel or jeep?” Tâlib amplified, with a lavish wave of his arm which embraced both forms of transportation, conveniently parked along the driveway.

Simon had already considered the possibility of stretching the reprieve to the limit by embarking on a safari to the remotest corner of Qabat, but after reckoning that that could hardly be more than forty or fifty miles, he had decided that the time he could gain would not be worth the discomfort involved.

“I shall begin here” he said, pointing dramatically to the ground at his feet, “where nobody before me has thought of beginning.”

From the buzz of comment that came from those within earshot of Tâlib’s translation of that announcement, the Saint knew that he had at least scored a point of showmanship.

He raised the hazel branch which he carried and took hold of it very carefully in the way that Mr Usherdown had taught him. It was cut and trimmed in the shape of a “Y” with long arms, and he held it inverted, in a peculiar kind of half-backwards grip, with the ends of the arms of the “Y” in the upturned palms of his hands. The main stem of the “Y” pointed almost straight up, but seemed to be in rather precarious balance because of the way he was spreading and twisting his arms at the same time, against the spring of the wood.

“You have to stretch it till it feels almost alive and fighting you,” Mr Usherdown had told him. “And then you just concentrate your mind on oil, or whatever it is you’re looking for. It’s the concentration that does it.”

Simon could feel the almost-life of the twig, reacting against the odd strained way he held it, but his concentration fell far short of the prescribed optimum. He found, rather disconcertingly, that his mind was capable of simultaneous wandering in at least three directions. One part of it remained solidly burdened with the involvements of the basic situation; another maverick element insisted on leaning back and making snide observations of the percentage of ham in his own performance; while whatever was otherwise unoccupied tried to think about oil, found it an elusive subject after picturing black sluggish streams of it in which revolved ponderous cams and gears, which merged into the oscillating stomachs of harem dancers, so that he switched quickly to the smog-belching sexlessness of a California oil refinery, and the gray haze creeping out to the Pacific Ocean where the sybarites thought it was too cold to swim but it would be wonderful to leap into straight out of the blazing sand and sky of Qabat… and he found that his intensely aimless circling had brought him smack up against the gate in the fence around the Emir’s precious private lawn.

The impulse that seized him then was pure gratuitous devilment. Letting go the hazel twig for a moment, he indicated the barrier with an air of pained indignation.

There was an awe-stricken mutter among the spectators, and Tâlib seemed to swell up in preparation for an explosion, but the Emir cut in with half a dozen words that abruptly deflated him. The gate was opened, and Simon resumed the proper grip on his oddly shaped wand and walked in.

He went on trying to think about oil, because the effort helped him to maintain a convincing aspect of strenuous concentration, but a perverse slant of association insisted on linking it next with salad dressing, and then leaving only the lettuce, fresh picked and still jewelled with morning dew, like the drops that sparkled on the grass he walked on, relicts of the mechanical sprayer which until a few minutes ago had been scattering its priceless elixir over the sacrosanct turf…

What happened next was that the hazel began to twist in his hands, the upright stem of the inverted “Y” trying to swing over to point downwards, so startlingly that he involuntarily fought against it. But it was as if the wood had become possessed of a will and a power of its own, so that with all his strength he could not hold it, and it writhed slowly and irresistibly over in his grasp until the stem pointed vertically down.

Simon Templar felt the sweat of his body chilled by a passage of ghostly wings, and would never know how he succeeded in keeping his face from looking completely fatuous.

He thought that a distant roar came to his ears from a hundred indistinguishable throats, though it might as well have been only a subjective amplification of the turmoil in his own brain, yet it seemed almost breathlessly quiet in the enclosure, where except for the Emir himself only Tâlib and one pair of sword-bearing guards had presumed to follow him. And in that brimming silence, he released the forked twig and extended his forefinger imperatively towards the spot where it fell, almost in the geometrical center of the Sheik’s most treasured enclave.

“Here,” said the Saint.

“You mean close here, outside, okay?” Tâlib said, shaken for the first time since Simon had known him into an almost incoherent dither.

The Saint’s arm and pointing finger remained statuesquely rigid.

“I mean here,” he repeated inflexibly.

Yûsuf was studying him in thunderous gloom, his head on one side like an introspective vulture. Simon met the inquisitorial scrutiny without blinking, letting everything ride with the bet that the Sheik’s cupidity would be stronger than his interest in horticulture — or at least that he was capable of the arithmetic to realize that a new oil well would buy a lot more lawns. And finally Yûsuf spoke.

“Sheik say,” Tâlib transmitted it, “you deliver, you get rich, pronto. Not deliver no goods, we cut your bloody head off. What you say, Mac?”

“You’ve got a deal, schlemiel,” said the Saint blandly.

After that it became much less orderly — in fact, it rapidly lost all semblance of order. The Emir rattled off another cataract of injunctions, and stalked away. Tâlib began to shout supplementary orders in four directions. The privileged spectators who were inside the cordon of militia pressed forward, gesticulating and shrieking in friendly conversation until they reached the fence, which bulged and bent and then meekly disintegrated before the weight of their excitement. At a word from Tâlib, the two Negroes closed in on Simon and hustled him unceremoniously through the jabbering mob. Outside the remains of the enclosure, the two other scimitar-bearers had already sandwiched in Mr Usherdown, who looked limp and pallid with stupefaction. Simon’s unit joined up with them, and the four guards formed a hollow square with Simon and Mr Usherdown in the middle and rushed them towards the palace entrance.

Simon caught one glimpse of Violet Usherdown, off to the side, with Yûsuf making gestures towards the palace, and a few of his nobles gathering curiously around, and Tâlib heading across no doubt to volunteer the assistance of his extraordinary brand of English; and then he was pushed through the great doorway and hurried into the labyrinthine route that led back to what he now felt it was somewhat euphemistic to call the guest quarters.

The massive door slammed shut and quivered with the clanking of bolts, leaving Simon and Mr Usherdown alone to gaze at each other.

At last Mr Usherdown achieved a shaky voice.

“Why did you do that, Templar?”

“I guess I was born ornery,” said the Saint. “It was such a priceless chance to trespass on Joe’s holy of holies, I just couldn’t resist it. I was quite tempted to take my shoes off and do it in my bare feet, but I was afraid that might be going too far.”

“But you didn’t have to pretend to find there.”

“I didn’t. Your hazel twig did that.”

“Nonsense. You made it look terrific, but I knew you were faking.”

“I wasn’t,” said the Saint flatly. “I admit, I’d thought of it. But I hadn’t quite made up my mind I was still ad-libbing. And then that silly stick took over.”

The little man stared at him unbelievingly.

“It couldn’t. You said you’d never done any dowsing.”

“I haven’t. But there has to be a first time for everything. Maybe I have unsuspected talents.”

“Did it feel as if it was sort of magnetized?”

“It was the eeriest sensation I’ve ever experienced in my life. I couldn’t control the damn thing. I tried. It almost tore the skin off my hands, twisting itself over.”

“There’s no oil under the palace — least of anywhere,” Mr Usherdown said stubbornly, but in blanker perplexity than ever. “I’ve held a rod around here myself — not too seriously, but you were wrong when you said nobody had tried. You must’ve been trying so hard, you got a sort of auto-suggestion. I’ve heard about things like that.”

Simon shrugged.

“Could be. It doesn’t matter much, anyway. All I wanted to do was stall for time, and give Joe a new place to dig. While he’s busy with that, we can work at digging ourselves out of this Arabian Nightsmare. What will the next move be?”

Mr Usherdown shuffled to the nearest barred window, where the Saint joined him. The opening did not look out on the front of the palace, where the latest activity had been, but through it drifted echoes of clangings and hammerings and a natter of filtered voices erupting in occasional screeches of peak enthusiasm.

“Yûsuf has a well-drilling rig of his own now,” Mr Usherdown said. “He bought it after the big company refused to put in any more wells, and he’s only been waiting to be told where to use it. They must be setting it up already, where you told them to.”

“How long will it take ’em to find out if it’s doing them any good?”

“I don’t know. I never had to study that sort of engineering. It seems to me if they were good enough they could get it working in less than a week, because they don’t have any union hours, and then of course they’d be expecting something from the minute the drill started to go down. I don’t know how many feet a day this kit he’s got could drill, but they wouldn’t wonder how deep they might have to go, either—”

“All right,” said the Saint impatiently. “We can figure we’ve got a few days, anyhow.”

“I wish I knew why they didn’t bring Vi back with us,” Mr Usherdown said worriedly.

There was no answer to that for almost an hour, when the door was flung open again and Tâlib came in. He was accompanied by one of the possible eunuchs, an ordinary manservant, and a dumpy woman heavily swathed in drab veils; a militiaman armed with a Tommy-gun brought up the rear, and stopped in the doorway with his weapon at the ready and a very competent look in his eye. The woman bustled on through the apartment, located a suitcase, and began to stuff it with everything feminine that caught her eye. The manservant followed her, examining the articles which she discarded, opening drawers and cabinets, and occasionally tucking things away in his pockets.

“What’s the idea?” bleated Mr Usherdown. “And where’s my wife?”

“Wife go live with Sheik’s other wife mothers,” Tâlib said. “Sheik don’t want her live with you no more, no sir. But take yourself easy. Nobody hurt her. Sheik only make sure you don’t be like jealous husband, perhaps bump her over yourself. Or perhaps you and friend try run off with her. Not bloody like it.”

He spoke to the big Negro, who gave Tâlib 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,” Tâlib said. “You wait. Very soon we know if you full of balloons. We dig up oil, Sheik Joseph make you rich sonofabitches. 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 submachine gun 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 Tâlib 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 had 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 facsimile 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 Usherdown 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 Tâlib hovering behind him — or even Violet Usherdown standing near the Sheik, recognizable in spite of an orthodox veil by the copper curls which hung below a gold lamé 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.

5

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,” Tâlib 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 Tâlib 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 Qabat 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.”

Tâlib was still stumbling over the last few words when Yûsuf 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 Yûsuf turned inquiringly.

Tâlib, 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 Yûsuf’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.

Tâlib 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,” Tâlib 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.

“Okey-dokey,” Tâlib 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 Tâlib 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!”