Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

And so the Saint found himself landing at Qabat with some vague and fantastic idea of trying to do something about it single-handed. A sardonic quirk widened his mouth and turned the corners fractionally downwards at the same time. Indubitably, he would never learn…

The local authority vested in Tâlib and Abdullah was amply demonstrated by the magical ease with which they marched Mr Usherdown and the Saint through four separate formality barriers manned by Qabati militia in facsimiles of British battle dress but still capped with the square rope-bound cowls of their forefathers, who had every air of being set for an orgy of red tape at the expense of any unprivileged passengers. If this portentously lubricated transit was somehow uncomfortably reminiscent of the fast clearance which, in other countries might be given to prisoners in the custody of police officers, rather than VIPs in the care of protocol expediters, Simon preferred to ignore the resemblance.

They had to wait only a few minutes outside the row of converted Quonset huts which served as airport buildings, until their baggage was hustled through the surging, shouting, screaming, and apparently almost homicidal mob which was in fact merely a typical assortment of Allah-fearing citizens assembled to greet arriving friends and relatives, to bid departing others Godspeed, or simply to pass a few idle hours observing the activity. Then Tâlib shepherded them into a salmon-pink Cadillac convertible which rolled majestically away with the uniformed driver playing an astounding symphony on an American police siren, twin klaxons, and a Bermuda carriage bell.

The road from the airfield curved around the outskirts of the town, which at close quarters liberally fulfilled all the promise of tumbledown squalor which it had made to the sky, and dipped briefly into a souk where shapeless black-veiled women and biblically gowned merchants brooded and haggled over mounds of dates and bowls of mysterious spices, baskets of dingy-hued rice, and chunks of half-withered meat mantled with crawling flies, all of it spread out on the ground to be seasoned with the dust and dung stirred up by the passing populace and their sheep, goats, donkeys, camels, and Cadillacs. Of the last-named there was a concentration, in terms of car per yard or roadway, which could only have been matched in Miami Beach at midwinter. There was also a fair sampling of only slightly less expensive makes, all equally new, even if sometimes lacking a hood or a fender, and all in the most brilliant colors — together with an assortment of motorcycles overloaded with rear-view mirrors and silver-mounted saddlebags, and even bicycles trying to get into the act with candy-striped paint jobs, tassels, pennants, windmills, and supernumerary bulb horns and reflectors.

“I suppose the biggest cars all belong to Joe’s close relatives, the smaller ones to cousins and in-laws, the motorbikes to the pals they do business with, and the pedal pushers are the lads who just manage to catch some drips from the gravy train,” Simon observed, raising his voice with some difficulty above the din with which every other vehicle on the road was enthusiastically answering the diverse fanfares activated by their own driver.

“Something like that,” Mr Usherdown yelled back.

“Only Emir can buy cars,” shouted Tâlib. “He give them to big shoots.” He turned to scream a sirocco of parenthetic invective at some hapless nomad whose recalcitrant burro had forced their chauffeur to apply the brakes for a moment, and turned back without a perceptible pause for breath. “He give me a car now, maybe. Me big shoot!”

“It sounds rather like that.” said the Saint discreetly.

Almost at once they turned off the seething aromatic street which presumably meandered to the heart of the town, and speeded up again through the bare desert on what Simon recognized as the straight stem of highway that he had seen from the air, leading towards the flower-arrangement of palaces. On contact, it proved to be a badly rutted and potholed road which taxed all the Cadillac’s resources of spring and shock-absorber even at the death-defying velocity of about forty miles an hour at which their Jehu launched them over it, still tootling all his noise-making devices in spite of having no other traffic to compete with. In about a mile they reached the first touches of imported verdure — at first clumps of cactus, then a few hardy shrubs, then a variety of palm trees at increasingly frequent intervals, finally a hedge of geraniums with a miraculous sprinkling of pink blossoms.

“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.