“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.