“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?”