Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

When Mr Usherdown looked at them, he did it furtively, as if he was afraid that at any moment his wife might loom up behind him and seize him by the ear. But Mrs Usherdown was not present, having been expressly excluded from the command invitation to dinner which Tâlib had brought.

“Not custom here to have wifes at men’s dinner,” Tâlib had explained cheerfully, but Simon, remembering the moonlight picnic which Mrs Usherdown had mentioned, figured that the local customs could always be adapted to the Emir’s convenience.

The Saint had hoped to achieve a more personal acquaintance with that lovelorn sheik, and he was disappointed to learn that his host spoke nothing but Arabic, which was not included in Simon’s useful repertoire of languages. He had to be content with an impression of personality, which added nothing very favorable to the character estimate which he had formed in advance. He no longer wondered whether the Emir’s infatuation with Violet Usherdown’s voluptuous physique might not have blinded him to her shortcomings as an Intellect; obviously Yûsuf could never even have been thinking of spending long evenings in enthralling converse with a cerebral affinity, and Simon doubted whether the Emir would have had much to contribute to such a session even in Arabic. But in a ruthlessly practical way he was probably a shrewd man, and certainly a wilful and uninhibited one. For perhaps the first time Simon realized to the full that his displeasure might be very violent and unfunny indeed.

It was characteristic of the Saint that the crystallizing of that awareness made him, if possible, only a little more recklessly irreverent. As the dancing girls stepped up their performance to coax even more fabulous rotations from their navels, and Mr Usherdown’s attention seemed to become even more guiltily surreptitious, Simon leaned forward to call encouragement down the table to the little man.

“Joe may think he’s the Gift of God to women, Mortimer, but you can’t say he’s selfish with his samples.”

“Sheik Joseph got three wifes,” Tâlib put in proudly. “Also one hundred eighty concubines. Very big shoot.”

The Sheik suddenly threw down the bone on which he had been gnawing, wiped his mouth and whiskers on the back of his hand, wiped that on the lace tablecloth, and uttered a peremptory command. The musicians let their tortured instruments straggle off into silence. The belly dancers slackened off their gyrations and stood waiting docilely.

The Emir burped, regally and resonantly.

Tâlib and Abdullah eructated with sycophantic enthusiasm in response, vying with each other in the rich reverberation of their efforts. The Emir looked inquiringly at Simon, who finally remembered something he had once heard about the polite observances of that part of the world, and managed to express his appreciation of the meal with a fairly courteous rumble. Everyone then turned to Mr Usherdown, who somehow contrived a small strangled kind of beep which evoked only a certain pitying contempt.

Yûsuf gave an order to Tâlib, and the big Arab fumbled in his robes and brought out a thick bundle of American currency tied with a piece of string. He slapped it on the table in front of Mr Usherdown.

“This pay for your work,” he said, “all time since you come here to find oil. Okey-dokey?”

“Why, thank you,” said the little man nervously.

“Sheik, say, you take it.”

Mr Usherdown picked up the bundle uncertainly and stuffed it into his pocket.

Yûsuf made a short speech to Mr Usherdown, accompanied by a number of gestures towards the three supple wenches standing in front of the table, while the little man strained to appear respectfully attentive.

“Sheik say, you choose which girl you like,” Tâlib said.

“Why, they’re all very nice,” Mr Usherdown said, in some embarrassment.

“Okay, Sheik say you take all three,” Tâlib reported, after relaying the evasion.

Mr Usherdown’s eyes bugged.

“Who, me? Thank you very much, but I can’t do that!”

“Here in Qabat, Muslim law allow you four wifes. Or if you no want to get marry, you keep for concubine, like Sheik. You be little shoot.”

“I can’t take any of them,” Mr Usherdown protested, with his face getting red. “It isn’t our custom. Please explain to the Emir — and the young ladies — I don’t mean any offense, but my wife wouldn’t like it at all.”

“You lose wife,” Tâlib said. “Divorce wife, very quick. Give her the boom’s rush. Then you keep dancing girl. Whoopee!”

The flush died out of Mr Usherdown’s complexion, leaving it rather pale. But perhaps emboldened by the Saint’s presence, he said quite firmly, “Tell the Emir I wish he’d stop this nonsense. I’m not going to divorce my wife, and that’s final.”

Tâlib conveyed the message. Yûsuf did not seem particularly annoyed, or even interested. He grunted a few words in reply which sounded as if they were little more than a cue.

“Sheik Joseph say you have money what you steal,” Tâlib translated, as if from a prepared speech. “You take money to find oil. But you not find oil. So you have stealed money. You goddam crook. Now Sheik must give you the works according to the law of Muhammad. It say in the Qur’an, in the Sûrah Al-Ma’idah ‘From a thief, man or woman, cut off the hands. It is right for what they done, a good punish from Allah’ — Bismillâhi’r Rahmâni’r Rahîm! ”

Mr Usherdown’s face was chalk-white at the end. He clawed the thick wad of greenbacks out of his pocket and dropped them on the table as though they had been red hot.

“Tell him he can keep his money. I only promised to do my best, and I’ve done it. But if he feels I haven’t earned it, we’ll call it quits.”

Tâlib did not touch the money.

“That all finish — you have taked already,” he said with a fiendishly happy grin. “Thief cannot change to not-thief just because he give back what he steal. If he can, any thief get caught, he give back stealings, everything uncle-dory, nobody can be punish. But Sheik say because he love you wife so much, you divorce her, you go free. Not get punish. But if you not divorce her—”

He made a sadistically graphic gesture with the edge of his hand against his own opposite wrist.

“What difference would that make?” demanded the Saint harshly. “His wife still wouldn’t be divorced.”

“No need, maybe,” Tâlib said. “After hands cut off, without doctor, man often die.”

The Emir had been following all this with his eyes, as if he had a complete enough anticipation of the scene not to need to have it interpreted line by line. Now, as if he sensed that a psychological moment had arrived, he clapped his hands and called out something that seemed to include a name, and through the velvet drapes on the far side of the room stepped a bare-chested Negro who might have been a cousin of the one who guarded Usherdown’s apartment, and who carried the same kind of gleaming scimitar. The man made an obeisance and glared around hopefully, lifting his blade, and the three dancers huddled together, their eyes round with horror. Beside Mr Usherdown, Tâlib stood up.

The little man leaned forward and looked at the Saint piteously.

“What am I going to do?” he croaked. “ He means it! ”

“You know, I almost think you’re right,” said the Saint, fascinated.

Actually, he no longer had any doubt at all. It was all very well to call it fantastic, but he knew that the primitive Islamic law had been correctly cited, and that there were still backwaters in the world where a primitive and autocratic ruler could enforce it to the letter. It would not be much use protesting through diplomatic channels after the deed was done. If, in fact, there were ever a chance to protest at all. Simon Templar could vanish from the face of the earth in Qabat as easily as a far less newsworthy Mortimer Usherdown.