“But you didn’t have to pretend to find there.”
“I didn’t. Your hazel twig did that.”
“Nonsense. You made it look terrific, but I knew you were faking.”
“I wasn’t,” said the Saint flatly. “I admit, I’d thought of it. But I hadn’t quite made up my mind I was still ad-libbing. And then that silly stick took over.”
The little man stared at him unbelievingly.
“It couldn’t. You said you’d never done any dowsing.”
“I haven’t. But there has to be a first time for everything. Maybe I have unsuspected talents.”
“Did it feel as if it was sort of magnetized?”
“It was the eeriest sensation I’ve ever experienced in my life. I couldn’t control the damn thing. I tried. It almost tore the skin off my hands, twisting itself over.”
“There’s no oil under the palace — least of anywhere,” Mr Usherdown said stubbornly, but in blanker perplexity than ever. “I’ve held a rod around here myself — not too seriously, but you were wrong when you said nobody had tried. You must’ve been trying so hard, you got a sort of auto-suggestion. I’ve heard about things like that.”
Simon shrugged.
“Could be. It doesn’t matter much, anyway. All I wanted to do was stall for time, and give Joe a new place to dig. While he’s busy with that, we can work at digging ourselves out of this Arabian Nightsmare. What will the next move be?”
Mr Usherdown shuffled to the nearest barred window, where the Saint joined him. The opening did not look out on the front of the palace, where the latest activity had been, but through it drifted echoes of clangings and hammerings and a natter of filtered voices erupting in occasional screeches of peak enthusiasm.
“Yûsuf has a well-drilling rig of his own now,” Mr Usherdown said. “He bought it after the big company refused to put in any more wells, and he’s only been waiting to be told where to use it. They must be setting it up already, where you told them to.”
“How long will it take ’em to find out if it’s doing them any good?”
“I don’t know. I never had to study that sort of engineering. It seems to me if they were good enough they could get it working in less than a week, because they don’t have any union hours, and then of course they’d be expecting something from the minute the drill started to go down. I don’t know how many feet a day this kit he’s got could drill, but they wouldn’t wonder how deep they might have to go, either—”
“All right,” said the Saint impatiently. “We can figure we’ve got a few days, anyhow.”
“I wish I knew why they didn’t bring Vi back with us,” Mr Usherdown said worriedly.
There was no answer to that for almost an hour, when the door was flung open again and Tâlib came in. He was accompanied by one of the possible eunuchs, an ordinary manservant, and a dumpy woman heavily swathed in drab veils; a militiaman armed with a Tommy-gun brought up the rear, and stopped in the doorway with his weapon at the ready and a very competent look in his eye. The woman bustled on through the apartment, located a suitcase, and began to stuff it with everything feminine that caught her eye. The manservant followed her, examining the articles which she discarded, opening drawers and cabinets, and occasionally tucking things away in his pockets.
“What’s the idea?” bleated Mr Usherdown. “And where’s my wife?”
“Wife go live with Sheik’s other wife mothers,” Tâlib said. “Sheik don’t want her live with you no more, no sir. But take yourself easy. Nobody hurt her. Sheik only make sure you don’t be like jealous husband, perhaps bump her over yourself. Or perhaps you and friend try run off with her. Not bloody like it.”
He spoke to the big Negro, who gave Tâlib his scimitar to hold while he made a quick but thorough search of Simon’s and Mr Usherdown’s persons.
The woman went out, lugging the heavy valise, with the manservant sauntering after her.
“Men starting to dig right now,” Tâlib said. “You wait. Very soon we know if you full of balloons. We dig up oil, Sheik Joseph make you rich sonofabitches. Not find oil” — he bared his teeth, and drew the back of the blade luxuriously across his throat before handing it back to its owner — “it’s too goddam bad, you betcha.”
He strode out, followed by the Negro, and lastly the guard with the submachine gun backed out and kept the room covered with it from the passage until the door was closed again.
“Lovable fellow,” drawled the Saint.
“What are we going to do?” whimpered the little man. “Did you see what he did? I know you only made it worse by telling them to tear up the Sheik’s garden. Now they’ll cut off our heads instead of just our hands.”
“I can’t see that it makes much difference, Mortimer. But Tâlib is probably exaggerating. We should have asked him what it says in the Koran about making divots in an Emir’s green.”
“And it wouldn’t do us any good to escape now. Even if we got out, we wouldn’t have any idea where to look for Violet.”
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“I don’t think we’re going to do any escaping for a while, anyway,” he said. “Didn’t you watch the valet character going through everything while the maid was packing up? And the Ethiopian who searched us didn’t even leave me my nail file.”
He had no reason to correct his hunch after they had gone over the apartment virtually inch by inch. Every article of metal that had a point or an edge or even a sharp corner had been neatly removed from their possessions. And when the first meal of their incarceration was brought to them, it was a reminder that in a country where the fingers were still the accepted eating utensil there would not even be the ordinary remote hope of secreting a fork or a spoon. As for the possibility of scratching away the very modern concrete in which the window ironwork was set with a shard from a broken dish, Simon could not even delude himself into giving it a trial.
“There must be something,” persisted Mr Usherdown numbly.
“There is,” said the Saint, stretching himself out philosophically. “You can tell me the story of your life.”
That was about what it came to, for the next five days, and some of it was not uninteresting either, once the desperate need for any kind of distraction had got the little man started.
It may seem a shatteringly abrupt change of pace to suddenly condense five days into a paragraph, yet in absolute fact it would be nothing but outrageous padding to make more of them. Mr Mortimer Usherdown’s wandering reminiscences might have made a book of sorts by themselves, but they have no bearing on this story. Nor, in the utmost honesty, do the multifarious schemes for escape with which the Saint occupied his mind, since they were built up and elaborated only to be torn down and discarded, it would be a dishonest use of space for this chronicle to get any reader steamed up and then let down over them. It should be enough to say this time that if Simon Templar had seen any passable facsimile of a chance to make a break, he would obviously have taken it. But he didn’t. The main door of the suite was only opened twice each day, when their meals were brought, and each time the operation was performed with such efficient precautions that it would have been sheer fantasy to think that it offered a loophole. The Saint was realistic enough to conserve his energy for a chance that would have to come sometime.
It must be admitted, however, that when it came it was like nothing that he had dreamed of.
The first hint of it came around the middle of the sixth day, in the form of a vague and confused rising of noise that crept in on them even without any window that looked out on the front of the palace. When they noticed it, after the first idle surmises, they ignored it, then wondered again, then shrugged it off, then could not shut it out, then could only be silent and wonder, without daring to theorize in words.