"She needs water. She is very weak."
"Why does she shiver, when it is so hot in here?"
"She fears you. She is hungry and thirsty."
"And you do not fear me? My knife thirsts for certain portions of your flesh."
"We shall see."
Durell started toward him. He could not wait. His thirst was a fever that blotted out all caution. Nor could he delay, because of Lisl. Her rigidity was catatonic, and the least offense she might give the Dancer could result in a single, instantaneous slash at her throat, too fast for him to check. He made no attempt to surprise the Dancer, and he did not hide the belt in his hand. Ahmed's eyes flickered to it, and his teeth gleamed around the knife. He pushed Lisl's half-naked form to one side and grunted softly and began to sing, a thin, whining melody that had no rhythm or meaning. He took the knife from his mouth and held it with its point toward Durell and began to circle the hut, moving in closer to where Durell now waited in the center of the floor.
"American, you are too soft-hearted to watch what I do to the little habibi? Then she must watch what I do to you, eh? You will give me warm pleasure when I adorn you with your blood and rearrange your members."
"You talk too much," Durell said. "You talk more than you can perform."
"Eeh-aye! You shall choke on your own words, and on your own flesh that I shall make you eat, effendi."
"Come ahead," Durell said.
Lisl made a small sound, but he did not look at her. Everything would be over in the next few seconds. The knife made shining arabesques that flashed through the dim air before his eyes. The Dancer leaped, screamed, and feinted. Durell was not drawn into a premature attack. His hands sweated on the leather belt gripped in his fists. It was a poor defense against that weaving blade. One proper slash of the Dancer's knife would slice through it as if it were paper. The tiny room was thick with the Arab's odor again. His breath came in quick, impatient grunts. ...
Durell moved first, after all. He had held his two fists before him, the strap pulled tight between them for a gar-rote attack. But now he released his left hand and flicked the buckle end of the belt out with a sudden whipcrack of a blow that made the metal fastener snap between the Dancer's eyes, on the bridge of his nose. The septum was crushed in and one eye turned into a bloody red egg that slid down the man's cheek from the ruined socket. Ahmed screamed and clapped a hand to his face and shrieked again and struck with the knife. There was no escape in these close quarters. The point hissed through cloth and ran like a red-hot wire slicing through Durell's left arm. The Dancer staggered, but was never quite off balance. Durell jumped, caught the buckle in his left hand again, and whipped the leather over the Dancer's shaved head and yanked it tight about the straining throat. The Dancer jerked and writhed and his knife whirled in a wild arc above his head and came slashing down like the strike of a snake. Durell pulled them both off balance to the hard floor. They rolled over and over, toward Lisl who crouched, big-eyed, in her corner. The Arab was a powerful man. Even with his ghastly wound, his eye out of its socket, he fought like a wild animal, his body slippery and writhing with muscles. Durell could not hold him for more than a few seconds. Thirst and hunger had taken its toll.
"Lisl ... I"
She was too far gone to be of much help. But she came at the Dancer with long, clawing fingernails and raked his arm and clung to his knife wrist until the blood came. The sting distracted him. He lurched and rolled over and over in the dust toward the doorway, and Durell followed, his belt still choking off the man's breath. But how long could he hold on? He did not know. His strength ebbed quickly.
Lisl crawled after them, more animal than human. The man's arm and hand holding the knife was momentarily flat, extended across the floor. She fell on it, her naked body gleaming in the harsh sunlight that poured blindingly upon them. Her face was savage. They were no longer human, in that tiny place. The smell of blood and filth and death filled the air.
The Dancer kicked spasmodically. His hand came up, trying to loosen the belt, then gave up and scratched at Du-rell's head. Durell jerked out of reach of those powerful fingers. Lisl gasped as the knife point pricked her. The sounds she made were not intelligible.
Then the Dancer suddenly went limp.
Durell did not relax his grip. He did not trust him. Ahmed's face was horrible to look at. Then all at once Lisl screamed, a sound of utter fury, and Durell saw that she had the Arab's knife. She plunged it hard into the man's writhing belly, pulled it free, and drove it in again. The body jerked and kicked.
"Stop it, Lisl "
She struck the Dancer again.
"He's dead, Lisl " Durell said.
He did not know which of them had actually killed the man. He released the belt carefully and the body rolled to one side, awkwardly. Lisl's eyes were blind. He wrenched the blade from her and threw it away and got to his knees, swaying. He tried to stand up, and could not. He looked at the open doorway. They were free.
Chapter Sixteen
LiSL WAS sick. She crouched on hands and knees in the shade of a mud wall and a dusty date palm and threw up, or tried to, for there was nothing in her stomach. Her thick hair was tangled, falling in a screen about her naked shoulders, and she looked small and wretched and oblivious to the empty oasis around them. Durell got to his feet and went to the stone-coped well nearby. It took all his strength to draw the bucket, made of a gasoline can, up to the surface. He tasted the water and found it sweet and pure, unlike the brackish stuff the guard had been giving them. It was just another small evidence of the man's brutal spite.
He drank sparingly, although he shook with the craving to gulp it all down with reckless greed. Reviving, he carried the rest to the girl, who did not look up from her kneeling position. He poured the water over her, and at the shock she wrenched sidewise, and then turned a tormented face upward to him.
"Have some of this. But be very careful."
She could not hold the heavy can, so he poured some into his cupped palm and she drank from his hand, and then he gave her another small portion and when she was through she pressed her lips to his palm and sighed.
"What have I done, Sam?"
"Nothing. We're free, and you must put it out of your mind."
"But I killed him. I did it again and again."
"No, I'd already strangled him."
"What does it matter? I was like a savage, I wanted to cut and stab and hack—"
"Stop it, Lisl. It does no good."
She covered her face with her hands. "I didn't know such things about myself. I never dreamed I was like that."
"We all are, when it comes to survival. Can you stand up now?"
"Help me," she said.
He got her to her feet. She leaned heavily on him and he said: "Next order on the agenda is some food."
"Where are we?"
"I don't know yet. We'll explore a bit, and find out." There were some dozen houses ranged behind walls around the tiny well, many of them with fallen roofs and with sand choking their broken doorways. The small gardens had grown rank and wild, filled with figs and pomegranates. The afternoon shadows were long as they walked from one to the other in search of the Dancer's quarters. They found a blanket roll in the largest house, a pink-walled affair that reeked of hashish smoke. Cactus and thorny shrubs grew around it, mixed with the high stalks of papyrus that shot up around a tiny pool in the back. Beside the blanket were some tins of food and, equally important, a Russian-made automatic rifle and a dozen clips for it, rolled in a silken prayer rug of delicate design. The hot wind blew curtams of sand against the boles of the date palms, making a lonely whisper. Durell opened one of the tins of beef, and they ate it cold and gelatinous, as it was.
"Why is no one here?" Lisl asked. She would not look at him. "It's so deserted—"
"That's the big question. I'd like to find out just where this place is."
"I want to get away," she said suddenly. "The others might come back, and when they find out wh
at we've done—" "Don't feel guilty. We had no choice." "But the way we did it, like a couple of beasts—" "Unfortunately, our world isn't too far removed from the jungle." They sat in the shade of the pink house, since the sun was too strong for them to expose themselves to its crushing heat. "We take pride in our civilization," he said quietly, "but the stupidity and greed you read about in any daily newspaper is proof enough of the fantasy we've created. We take in the so-called emergent nations and give them seats in the U.N., and when they hold hostages and threaten cannibalism, and we attempt to rescue the poor souls, the other side screams 'imperialism' with incredible hypocrisy and disregard for human civilization. The big lie and the brazen insult are the first things these new countries learn to manipulate—like a child learning dirty words. And if you and I had to resort to killing just now, it was in order to survive."
"Even if we go down to their savage level?" "I never adhered to Gandhi's passivity," Durell said. "To survive is a basic instinct. The Dancer was going to kill us —or me, anyway. He had worse plans for you. Slavery isn't unknown in this part of the world."
She shuddered. "I'm sorry. I must seem foolish and emotional to you."
"We're both exhausted. Come along. There must be a reasonably clean pool somewhere. We could use a bath."
"Shouldn't we run away at once? I mean, suppose someone comes back for us?"
"I don't think that will happen."
He had already looked about for transportation—for the camel he had hoped to find tethered somewhere, or a jeep. There was nothing. The oasis was ghostly in its isolation.
They found a pool in one of the back gardens, shaded by a mud wall and tall traveler palms. Flies buzzed in black swarms under the trees. He carried the auto-rifle with him and helped the girl over the wall.
"In you go. You'll find it refreshing."
There was a green scum on the water which the girl viewed with distaste. "Clothes and all?"
"What's left of it needs washing. Take your time—^we can't start until sundown, when the heat goes."
After their days in the black hut, the freedom of sky and wind was like a blessing. When the girl slid into the water, he turned to a small minaret nearby and found at its base a ragged wooden sign with Egyptian Army inscriptions on it, indicating this was Post 24, Dir-el-Birba. He was not sure where this might be, and he climbed painfully to the top of the square tower for the view. There was a dim track that meandered out of sight across what seemed an endless waste of sand dunes. It went westward into the sun until it was lost in the frozen combers beyond view. They would have to go that way. To venture into the trackless area in another direction would mean a quick death from sunstroke and thirst.
He hated to admit defeat. His escape was not a victory, but a setback, from which his mission might never gain success. True, if he could reach safety and cable his data on the Dancers to General McFee in Washington, he might set wheels in motion to crush the outward evidence of the human smuggling operation. But only the smallest tentacles of the octopus would be cut off. There was more, much more, to the Dancers than simply an underground railway. There was a wild fanaticism to the movement that could cause one of those world upheavals that left death and devastation in its wake. Somewhere in this vast, empty de» ert was a center, a heart of evil that had to be struck quick, sure blow. By escaping, he had lost his chance to be escorted there by his own enemies, however dangerous the way.
"Sam?"
He heard Lisl call thinly and he climbed down the stairway of the minaret and returned to the pond. She had shed her clothes and, having washed them, was swimming in the tiny pool. She looked refreshed, and there was a brighter light in her gray eyes. Her body with its pale provocative curves shone as she turned on her side and then floated on her back.
"Sam, come in here. You must wash that wound."
He had almost forgotten the thin gashes cut in his arm by the Dancer's knife. "In a moment. Stay there."
She was instantly alarmed. "Where are you going?"
"Back to the hut. Not for long. Wait for me."
The Dancer lay with bared, glistening teeth in the doorway of their prison hut. Dureil pulled him into the sunlight where he could examine the body more closely. The clothing consisted of a secondhand European jacket and baggy trousers with worn leather slippers, which he had taken off before leaping in to his death. He had been a powerful man, well-muscled, with the brown skin of a desert Arab and curious scars on his cheeks. Dureil opened the shirt and saw gray lice crawling there. Under the shirt he found a small golden chain ending in a heavy medallion that could also have been gold.
He broke it free and turned it over in his hands. Immediately his mind leaped back to Munich, and the clue that poor Carole Bainbury had managed to yield to hiE before her savage death. He recalled her postcard from the museum, the Alte Pinakothek, of a Byzantine mosaic with its curious design of a dancing monk.
The same portrait was etched on the gold medallion worn by the Dancer, with a faded and illegible Greek inscription. Dureil stared long at the curious little figure, with its transfiguring halo, the arms uplifted and one leg raised in a graceful and ecstatic dancing posture.
"Sam?"
It was Lisl again. He heard no alarm in her voice. Only a quiet invitation. He pocketed the medallion and walked back through the shadows of the oasis to the mud-walled pool, where she waited for him.
Chapter Seventeen
THE MOON was cold and hostile in the infinite darkness of space, regarding them with mockery as they toiled along the faint trace of a road leading to the west. The path wound among bleak dunes that at times towered over them like giant sea breakers about to shatter themselves over their heads. The Milky Way was a silver ribbon of brilliance across the sky. Durell had found an old burnous in one of the huts and the girl used it to fabricate some kind of protection over her own torn clothing. She had bandaged his arm, after washing it in the well water; it felt stiff, but no muscles were torn, and his fingers flexed well enough around the solid comfort of the automatic rifle he'd taken from the Dancer.
He had done all he could. He had filled the dead man's canteen and packed the remaining tins of food in a small sack that the girl insisted on carrying. They did not speak much as they trudged along. It was as if the empty spaces above and around them, the cold reeling sky, and the frozen sea of sand inhibited the sound of human voices. There was only the gritty echo of their shoes and the occasional slide and hiss of sand as they crossed drifts that filled the dim path.
After a time they rested on a dune. The toll taken by their captivity was greater than he had expected. Lisl would not be able to go on for long. The worst of it was that he had no idea of the distance ahead, or what dangers waited for them beyond the looming sands. His eyes scanned the crests for signs of life, but the only movement came from the thin plumes of sand blown hissing by the cold night wind. The girl moved into his arms, shivering.
"How far must we go, Sam?"
"I don't know yet."
"Do you really believe we'll make it?"
"We must think so."
She was silent. Then she said: "I know you're worried because every step takes us farther from my father, and what you've set out to do."
"It can't be helped. Don't worry about it, Lisl. All we can do is concern ourselves with the moment."
"But there isn't much time left for us."
"I don't intend to die here," he said flatly. "Come on, get to your feet."
"What's the use?"
"Get up," he said, and his voice was harsh.
"But I'm so tired. It's all hopeless, and you know it. You're cruel. Why can't we just stay here?"
"Because we'll die, if we do."
"It's as good a place as any, isn't it?"
"Then why did you help me kill the Dancer?"
His face in the moonlight was adamant. He knew better than Lisl how slim their chances were. He had been in diflS-cult spots before, but never one like this. Without her, he'd have r
emained at the oasis as long as the Dancer's scant supplies held out, hoping to be picked up again by the Dancer apparatus. Why had he yielded to sentiment? There was no room for such sentiment in his business. Lisl was lovely and helpless, confused in her attitudes toward him and her father. She was of no importance to the assignment that had brought him here. In other times, he'd had to sacrifice good men for the success of a mission, men who knew the risks and accepted defeat as part of the world they worked in. But perhaps that was just the point. This girl, this amateur, did not know the risks, and was simply a victim of a maneuver that had dragged her into this mess in her open-eyed innocence. He could not abandon her.
They walked, rested, and walked again. Lisl's pace was increasingly slow. Finally he had to help her, his arm sup-i porting her sagging body. She began to moan, and she whispered to herself in German. The moon reached its zenith and slid down toward the west. He had no idea of the time. His watch had been taken from him at some point in the, past days. Their rest halts grew longer and more frequent.
When the moon had dipped almost to the western horizon,! he caught a glimpse of movement that did not belong toj the shifting sand or tricky shadows. It was only a glimmer,! quickly come and gone, atop a dune behind them. He was] not sure he had seen it, and he said nothing to Lisl. His senses] might be playing tricks on him. He watched and waited.^
When it came again, he was not certain if it was buman or animal, but it was there, and it was real. The third time settled the question. Moonlight glinted on metal and glass. They were being watched through night glasses.
It might be an Egyptian Army patrol, in which case their lives were assured, if not a way out of their difficulties. On the other hand, the Dancers might be on their trail, ironically having arrived at the abandoned oasis shortly after their escape. Their path was easy to follow in the sand. He listened, but he heard no sound of distant engines that might betray a desert jeep.
He said nothing to Lisl, and they walked on. After twenty minutes, they halted again. The desert had not changed. In all the cold hours of the night, they had seen no sign of human habitation, no path or road that might lead them somewhere useful.
Assignment The Cairo Dancers Page 10