“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.