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.”