Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

The Saint forced his mind to turn back from there, over the carpet of tenderly shaded and watered grass outside, across a scorching mile of barren sand, back to the sweltering teeming fetid cluster of desiccated hovels that was the rest of Qabat; and to anyone who knew him well enough his buccaneer’s face would have seemed dangerously thoughtful.

No longer seeming to feel called upon to play the tour conductor, Tâlib hustled them unceremoniously along a labyrinth of corridors and cloisters through which Mr Usherdown was almost immediately the one to take the lead, toddling almost a yard ahead of the Saint with his short legs pumping two strokes to Simon’s one. After a full five-minute hike they came to a doorway guarded by a gigantic Negro, naked to the waist and actually armed with a huge and genuine scimitar, exactly like a story-book illustration. Mr Usherdown, however, seemed to accept this extravagantly fictitious sight as a now familiar piece of interior decorating, and stopped expectantly by the door in a way that was comically reminiscent of a puppy waiting to be let out.

“I only hope Violet is still all right,” he muttered.

Tâlib growled a command at the Negro, who stepped aside from the rather theatrical pose he had taken before the door. Then the tall Arab addressed the Saint.

“I send you luggage right away. You rest, wash up. I tell Emir about you.” He turned to include Mr Usherdown. “Sheik Joseph send for you soon, I bet — Inshallah! ”

“These are our quarters,” Mr Usherdown explained to Simon. “Come on.”

He opened the door impatiently, and went in. Simon followed him. The door boomed shut on the Saint’s heels with an ominous solidity which suggested a prison rather than a guest suite, but Simon barely gave it the backward flick of a raised eyebrow. The scarcely half-subtle prison theme had been established long before that.

Simon had already accepted, quite phlegmatically by now, a snapshot impression of a sort of living-room which fitted well enough into the rest of the slightly stage-harem scenery (but after all, he was starting to think, some initial scene-painter must have had some authentic motifs to work from) and the curiosity that fascinated him above any other at this point was aimed wholeheartedly at the femme fatale who had been content once upon a time to settle for a quaint little husband like Mortimer Usherdown, and yet whose charms were still capable of raising the blood of an untamed desert chieftain to apparently explosive temperatures.

“Violet, my dear,” said the little man, disengaging himself from her bosom, against which he had plastered himself in connubial greeting, “I want you to meet my friend, Mr Simon Templar.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” said Mrs Usherdown, in the most gracious accents of the Bronx.

She had red hair and green eyes and the facial structure of a living doll; and in her very first twenties, Simon could see, she would probably have cued any typical bunch of sailors on shore leave to split the welkin with wolf whistles. She would have been a cute trick in a night club chorus line — or even in a carnival tent show, where her path and Mr Usherdown’s could plausibly have crossed. Now, some ten years later, she was still pretty, but about thirty pounds overweight. But this excess padding by Western standards, to the Eastern eye might well seem only a divine amplitude of upholstery, and her coloring would have seemed so startlingly exotic in those lands that it was no longer an effort of imagination to see an unsophisticated sheik being smitten with her as the rarest jewel he could covet for his seraglio… Suddenly the one element in the set-up which Simon had found the most mystifying became almost ludicrously obvious and straightforward.

“Mortimer has told me all about your problem,” he said conversationally. “I see that for the present you’re almost uncomfortably well looked after. Is that Ethiopian at the door a real eunuch?”

“I don’t know, I never asked him,” Mrs Usherdown answered with dignity. “I think a man’s religion is his own business.”

“But Yûsuf hasn’t bothered you?” persisted her anxious consort.

“Of course not. He’s very correct, according to his religion. You should know that. Did you remember to get me that candy?”

“Yes, dear. It’s in my bags, as soon as they bring them up. I just hope it hasn’t all melted… But I suppose you’ve seen Yûsuf?”

“Naturally. He’s had me in for coffee, and shown me his electric trains, and I’ve seen all his old Western movies three times. But he took me out for a picnic in the desert in the full moon, and we had silk tents with carpets, and camels, and everything, and that was very romantic. He’s going to buy a yacht, too, and I’m going to help him decorate it, and then we’ll take it to Monte Carlo and the Riviera and everywhere.”

Mr Usherdown swallowed his tonsils.

“Violet, my love, I mean — he hasn’t given up this crazy idea about you, has he?”

“I do not think it is so gentlemanly of you to call it crazy,” said his helpmeet, with a modicum of umbrage. “And I don’t think that is quite the way to speak of a genuine prince who has paid you more fees than you ever got before, and all he wants is not to be made a sucker out of. I am starting to wonder if you aren’t only jealous because he is taller than you and looks so dashing, and after all he only wants his own way, which is what they call the Royal Purgative.”

The Saint cleared his throat.

“I’m here to try and find you a way out,” he said. “I don’t want to make any rash promises, but I come up with a good idea sometimes.”

“You know who Mr Templar is, dear?” Mr Usherdown put in.

“He’d better stay out of this if he isn’t a better diviner than you,” said his wife, with a toss of her coppery curls. “Or he might end up the way you will, if you don’t divorce me. Yûsuf says he has thought of something that’ll let him make me a widow quite legally, and I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t just selfishness if you want me to suffer like that.”

Except for his costume, the Sheik Yûsuf Loutfallah ibn Hishâm, Emir of Qabat, would not have been instantly recognized as the prototype of the desert eagle and untamed lover immortalized in fiction by an English maiden lady earlier in this century, and brought to life on the silent screen, to the palpitating ecstasy of a bygone generation by an Italian named D’Antongualla, better known to his worshippers as Rudolph Valentino. Although his nose was basically aquiline, it was also a trifle bulbous. His teeth were prominent, yellow, and uneven, and his untidy beard failed to completely disguise the contour of a receding chin. As a symbol of his rank, his head veil was bound with twin cords of gold running through four black pompons squarely spaced around his cranium, instead of the common coils of dark rope, and as an index of his wealth and sophistication he wore no less than three watches on his left wrist — a gold Omega Seamaster, a lady’s jewelled Gruen, and a Mickey Mouse.

He ate rice and chunks of skewered and roasted mutton with his fingers, getting hearty smears of grease on his face. Seated on another cushion at the same low table, Simon Templar tried to be neater, but acknowledged that it was difficult. On the opposite side of the Emir, Mr Usherdown juggled crumbs to his mouth even more uncomfortably and with less appetite, seeming irreparably cowed by the sinister presence of Tâlib on his other side. The Saint was similarly boxed in by Abdullah, who kept firm hold of a pointed knife, with which he picked his teeth intermittently while staring pensively at the area under Simon’s chin. In a corner of the room, four musicians made weird skirlings, twangings, and hootings on an assortment of outlandish instruments, to the accompaniment of which three beige-skinned young women moved in front of the long table, rotating their pelvic regions and undulating their abdomens with phenomenal sinuosity. It was still quite unreally like a sequence from a movie, except that no censors would ever have passed the costumes of the dancers.