Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

We stayed and watched her steam out of the anchorage and then Ruffini heaved himself down off the wall. ‘Do you ever ‘ear of the Emir of Hadd?’ he asked as we walked back to the taxi. The Emir Abdul-Zaid bin Sultan? Well, no matter.’ He wiped the perspiration from his face. ‘But try shooting that name at the political people ‘ere and see ‘ow their faces go blank. I tell you,’ he added, ‘this country is worse than a Sicilian village, full of old vendettas and not a clear boundary anywhere to mark the finish of one sheikh’s piece of sand and the beginning of the next.’

He took me back to the hotel and I lay and sweated on my bed till dinner time, wondering how I was to contact Gorde and thinking about Ruffini. Was there really trouble brewing? But it all seemed remote — as remote as Colonel Whitaker out there in Saraifa and utterly inaccessible. And next day, after a full morning’s work, I was no nearer either of my objectives.

I rang the Passport Office, but nothing had been decided. And when I checked on transportation I found that even if I were willing to charter a plane, there was none available with sufficient range to fly direct to Saraifa, and in any case flights there were prohibited. I went to the bank then and settled David’s affairs as far as I was able. It was the same bank that his father dealt with and the manager was helpful. He confirmed that Colonel Whitaker was living in Saraifa, this contrary to his very strict instructions. But he could tell me little else and I went back to the hotel and had a drink with two RAF officers and a civilian pilot, a Canadian named Otto Smith. After lunch we all went down to the Sailing Club for a bathe.

Half the English colony was there, for it was Saturday, and amongst them was the girl from the GODCO reception desk sprawled half-naked on the cement of the old seaplane jetty. ‘So you’re off to Sharjah, Mr Grant?’ And when I told her I was having visa trouble, she smiled and said, ‘I think you’ll find it’s all right.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Oh, I know everything.’ She laughed. ‘No, I happened to see your name on the flight list for tomorrow’s plane.’

She was perfectly right. When I got back to the hotel that evening I found my passport waiting for me, stamped with visas for Sharjah and Dubai. There was also a message, signed by Erkhard’s secretary, informing me that ‘owing to the Company’s desire to help you in every possible way’ free passage was being granted to me in a Company plane leaving for Sharjah at 1030 hours the following morning, Sunday. The message added that accommodation would be available at the Fort and it was not anticipated that I should have to wait long before Sir Philip arrived from Abu Dhabi.

There was no doubt in my mind that Erkhard had intervened to get me the necessary visas. But why? The day before he had made it clear that he didn’t intend to help me. And after the way I had cross-examined him I hadn’t expected it. And yet here he was giving me a free ride on a Company plane. I sat on my bed and smoked a cigarette whilst the hot evening breeze blew in through the open window, and the only conclusion I came to was that they had sent my note to Gorde and he had given the necessary instructions. Whatever the reasons, it was a great relief to me and I got up and started to pack.

I had just closed the larger of my two suitcases when there was a knock at the door. It was one of the house-boys to say there was a young Arab asking for me at the desk. ‘It is a boy from the bazaar, sir. From the al-Menza Club.’ And he grinned at me.

I had a wash and then dressed. The boy was still there when I got down quarter of an hour later. He was little more than an urchin and none too clean, and when he realized I didn’t speak Arabic, he seized hold of my wrist, pulling at me and hissing the words al-Menza and girl-want. Girl-want seemed to be the sum total of his English and I told him to go to hell. He understood that for he grinned and shook his head. ‘Girl-spik. Spik, sahib.’

I got hold of the house-boy and then he said the boy had been sent by one of the girls at the al-Menza Club. ‘She wishes to speak with you, sir.’ This time he didn’t grin. And he added with a puzzled frown. ‘It is a personal request. This boy is from the house where she lives.’

I didn’t like it. ‘Tell him No,’ I said and I went over to an empty table and ordered a beer. It took two house-boys and a lot of argument to get rid of the boy. I drank my beer and then went in to dinner, a solitary, dreary meal. I had just finished when the waiter came to tell me a taxi-driver was waiting outside for me. It was Mahommed AH. ‘There is a boy in my taxi,’ he said. ‘Is wishing you to go to the al-Menza to meet a girl.’

‘I’ve already told him I’m not interested.’

‘You should go, sir. She ‘as something to tell you.’

I hesitated. But after all the man was a taxi-driver attached to the hotel. ‘You’ll drive me there, will you?’

‘Okay, sir.’

It wasn’t far to the bazaar area and we finished up in a side street that was barely wide enough for the car. The al-Menza was sandwiched between a cobbler’s shop and a narrow alley, the door guarded by a turbanned Sudanese. I told the driver to wait and the boy took me by the hand and hurried me down the alley and through the black gap of a doorway into a dark passage. He left me there and a moment later footsteps sounded, high-heeled and sharp, and then a girl’s voice, low, with a peculiarly resonant quality, almost husky. ‘Monsieur.’ She took my hand, her fingers hard, not caressing. ‘Through ‘ere, pleez.’

A door was pushed open and there were soft lights and the faint beat of Western music, a jive record playing somewhere in the building. A beaded curtain rattled back and we were in a little room no bigger than a cell. The floor was bare earth with a rug and a few cushions. A naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling showed me my companion.

I don’t know quite how to describe that girl. She certainly wasn’t beautiful, though I suppose that is a matter of taste, for she was obviously Arab; Arab mixed with something else — European, I thought, with a touch of the real African. She stood very straight with a lithe, almost animal grace. She was the sort of girl you could picture at the well drawing water and striding across the sand with a pitcher on her head. She was that, and she was the other sort, too — the husky voice; dropped a shade it would be totally erotic, a vicious invitation. No point in dramatizing; she was just a Middle Eastern tart, but I’d never met one before and it made an impression.

We sat cross-legged on the cushions, facing each other.

She wore a queer sort of dress and I had a feeling that at the touch of a secret button she’d come gliding out of it like a butterfly out of a chrysalis. Her hands were pressed tight together and she leaned forward, her eyes, her lips devoid of invitation, hard almost and urgent. ‘You know why I ask you to come ‘ere?’

I shook my head.

‘You do not guess?’ There was the ghost of a smile on her half-open lips. But when I said, ‘No,’ she snapped them shut. ‘If you are not the man,’ she blazed; ‘if you ‘ave come ‘ere because it is the sort of place-’ At that moment she didn’t look at all nice. ‘All right,’ she said, biting on her teeth. ‘You tell me now — is it because of David you come to Bahrain or not?’

David! I stared at her, beginning to understand. ‘Did David come here then?’

‘Of course. He was an oilman and this place is for oilmen. They ‘ave the same devil in them as other men where the sun is ‘ot — but David was nice, a vair nice boy.’ She smiled then and the hardness went out of her face leaving it for a moment like a picture of Madonna-with-child, despite the slightly flattened nose, the thickened lips. It was a queer face, changeable as a child’s. ‘How did you know I was here on account of David Whitaker?’ I asked her. ‘It is David Whitaker you’re talking about?’