Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“The whole place only runs to about eight hundred square miles,” Usherdown had told him, “and the only town, if you can call it that, would rate about four gas stations back home. But for a few years it produced enough oil to’ve supplied half of Europe.”

“And I never heard of it.”

“No reason why you should. It didn’t last long enough to get talked about much outside the trade. Then the flow started to dry up, and the big companies moved their main operations down to Kuwait and Bahrain. Don’t ask me why. I’m not a geologist. But apparently the experts decided that Qabat was only on the shallow edge of the underground oil pool, or something like that, and they decided to move on and drill somewhere else.”

“Which made Joseph rather unhappy.”

“You can’t blame him too much for that. His royalties’ve been dwindling away until last year they only came to about sixteen million dollars.”

“Thank God for technological progress. The stains from my bleeding heart will rinse right out of this Dacron shirt.”

“I know, it sounds as if I was trying to be funny. But you have to remember that in the same length of time, the Emir of Kuwait’s income has gone up to over three million dollars a week .”

At a figure like that, even Simon Templar was awed.

“If some Texans I’ve met heard about him, they’d blow their brains out,” he remarked. “So I suppose every time Joe thinks about that, it burns him to a crisp.”

“He’s about convinced himself that it’s only because the oil companies have a personal grudge against him, because he was the first sheik they made one of those fabulous percentage contracts with. He made up his mind he’d prove that their geologists were liars. First he hired some independent experts for himself. But eventually they gave him the same report. That only convinced him that they were afraid to buck the big companies. Then somebody must’ve told him something they’d read about me, and he thought I might be the answer.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Look, a dowser can’t make oil — or water, or anything else,” said Mr Usherdown, with a rather forlorn remnant of asperity. “He can only help to find ’em when they’re there. I’ve done my conscientious best, but so far I haven’t been able to contradict the regular geologists. All the signals I’ve picked up were definitely of the declining type.”

The town below their wing-tip looked even more hopeless than Mr Usherdown’s description had led Simon to expect. It sprawled in an approximate semicircle of which the diameter followed the blue-gray line of the Persian Gulf, which from that altitude had a leaden air of sultriness that suggested none of the cool relief of more hospitable seas. The most modern and efficient feature of its topography was the row of cylindrical silver-painted tanks, spaced and aligned along a section of the waterfront with the accuracy of guardsmen on parade, linked by identical patterns of catwalk and pipe, and centered symmetrically around the short straight white finger of a concrete pier projecting a couple of ship’s lengths from the shore. The most esthetic thing about it was the large wedding-cake edifice of domes and minarets which lay a little outside the semicircle at the end of a straight black ribbon of road, like a flower on a stalk, with half a dozen smaller sugar-frosted buildings clustered around it like buds on lesser roads, and even traces of improbably nurtured greenery scattered among them to add vividness to the simile. But in between, in the untidy half-moon of muck from which these exotic blossoms grew, there was only a hodge-podge of vaguely cubist agglomerations of gray-brown mud, cheap wall-board, and rotting canvas, blended together into the uniformity of a mummy’s wrappings, alleviated only by the occasional glitter of a patch of corrugated iron. And all around it, to the dust-fogged horizon, stretched the petrified ripples of a dead sea of sand, a faceless segment of the most utterly sterile desert in the world, its awesome emptiness and monotony interrupted only by the occasional stark skeleton of an oil derrick.

There was no evidence that any large percentage of the liquid wealth that had flowed out of that barren land had been spent on civic projects or the betterment of the Qabatis as a people. In fact, the bird’s-eye view of Qabat seemed to illustrate the local division of Nature’s bounty more graphically than any statistics. But Simon had been prepared for that.

“Yûsuf is the real old feudal type of sheik,” Mr Usherdown had explained. “His mind’s still in the Middle Ages, even if he has a different colored Cadillac for every day in the week. He owns Qabat body and soul because his father owned it before him and he inherited it like a farm. He wouldn’t feel there was any call to split his royalties with his subjects — except his own nearest relatives — any more ’n a Texas rancher would feel obligated to share his oil money with his cows. And the same way, he thinks he’s entitled to take anything he wants, because that’s something that goes with being an Emir.”

“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…?”