“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.”