Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“Seriously now,” said the Saint, “what are you up to in these parts?”

“I’m working for the Emir of Qabat.”

“Should I know him too?”

“My boss,” Tâlib said, bowing his head and touching his forehead. “The Sheik Yûsuf Loutfallah ibn Hishâm. Yûsuf is like in English ‘Joseph.’ Loutfallah means ‘Gift of God’ — like Abdullah here is ‘Servant of God.’ Hishâm —”

Never mind,” said the Saint. “Let’s just call him Joe.”

“Qabat is one of those tiny independent principalities the British helped to set up in the Middle East after the First World War,” Usherdown said. “Like Kuwait. In fact, it’s a whistle stop for some of the local planes from Basra to Kuwait… Say!” The little man’s eyes dilated with a blaze of exaggeratedly spontaneous inspiration. “I heard that BOAC man saying you might have to stop over in Basra. Why don’t you fly over to Qabat with me?”

“I don’t know,” said the Saint dubiously. “I’m still hoping I’ll be able to stay on to Karachi, and make a connection—”

“It’s hardly anything of a side trip, by air,” Usherdown persisted, in a tone that was not so much persuasive as imploring. “And it’s something unique — something you’ll never run into anything like again. Besides, you might even be able to help me!”

As if suddenly afraid that he might have gone too far, he turned quickly to Tâlib, who was staring at him with narrowed eyes, and said, “Don’t you think the Emir would like that? Honestly, in my racket, Mr Templar is really the greatest. If we could talk him into working with me, we might get twice as much done in half the time.”

The tall one turned and conferred in guttural Arabic with the Servant of God, whose qualifications for the job would not have been revealed by any superficial system of physiognomy; and Mr Usherdown said to the Saint, in a voice that almost broke with the pressure of its suppressed entreaty, “If you turn me down, you can’t be the man I’ve always thought you were.”

“Very good idea.” Tâlib said abruptly, while Abdullah nodded. “I think the Emir will make him most welcome. You two working together must be better than one. Double or quitting, okey-dokey?”

The PA system said, “Your attention, please. British Overseas Airways announces the departure of Majestic flight 904 to Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, now loading from Gate One.”

Names that had woven their iridescent thread through innumerable yarns of high adventure. Simon Templar knew most of them as they really were, in their underlying squalor even more than their romantic overtones, and yet he would never quite be able to strip their syllables of a music that echoed out of a youth in which other names like Damascus and Baghdad had been only the geography of fairytales instead of their modern sordid reality. It was positively unfair, he thought, to throw those mysteriously nostalgic sounds at him when he had only been trying to get transported from one place to another with a minimum of inconvenience on the way, and a total stranger with all the appeal of a scared rabbit was trying to sucker him into some fantastic situation which he hadn’t yet begun to understand…

“Let’s talk it over on the plane,” he said, and should have known even then that he was hooked.

He took a parting swallow from his glass, while Mr Usherdown drained the last drop from his, and stood up and led the way out.

Mr Usherdown followed, practically clinging to his coattails like a small boy trailing his mother through a department-store sale. And in a little while they boarded the plane in the same Siamese-twin proximity, except that in jostling through one of the bureaucratic bottlenecks which still seem to be inseparable from international air travel their positions had somehow become reversed, so that it was the Saint who trailed Mr Usherdown through the aisle of the Argonaut and was starting to follow him into a pair of seats when the tall Tâlib tried to push past him and take the other one. The Saint’s resistance was as decisive as a gently driven bulldozer, but it left him sitting in the chair next to Usherdown and gazing apologetically up at the Arab who glowered down at him.

“I sit here,” Tâlib grated.

“I don’t mind sitting here a bit, pal,” Simon insisted innocently. “You go on and get one of the good seats.”

“Plenty of room up front, gents,” sang out a cheerful steward, strategically posted to keep the passengers moving through the cabin.

Trapped between uniformed authority and the stubborn push of other passengers, Tâlib squirmed furiously into the next pair of seats ahead. Abdullah promptly followed him, and in an instant the irresistible flow of following voyagers had sealed them irrevocably in their upholstered slot. They could do nothing but twist around and stare suspiciously over the backs of their seats — until the steward made them buckle their safety belts and even that solace was denied them.

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.”

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.