“What do you know about that?”
Hamid shrugged a shoulder. “It was no accident, if that is what you mean. Someone planted a bomb in the tail. Very accurately timed to explode over one of the wildest regions in the Elburz Mountains.”
“And you tied it to Leon Decebilus?”
“If we could connect it to him he would be under arrest. To you, my friend, I shall admit this much, no more. There were indications.”
“There was a shift of hotels, and a suite taken near that reserved by the Maharajah, is that what you mean?”
“More than that. Tell me, Ballantyne, did you know the Maharajah of Kasur?”
“Only by reputation.”
“Would you say he was an impulsive man? A dreamer? I mean, was he impractical?”
“No…I saw films of him driving in the Le Mans race, and I’ve read of him playing golf and polo. A realist, I would say, a very cool, hardheaded man, but with imagination.”
“I see.”
Ballantyne was watching the place where his car was parked. Was that a moving shadow? Or a trick of the eyes?
“What is she like?”
“Intelligent. She’s been courted around Paris and Cannes by a lot of playboys, but she’s more levelheaded than you might suspect.”
“She was a model?”
“I’m guessing she could go back to it. She has something a girl is born with if she has it at all. Women always look to see what she is wearing that gives her that look, but it’s the lady, not the clothes. She traveled a good bit following her business as a model, but she invested a little money in Broadway shows and a couple of them did very well. Being a beautiful girl, she meets everybody sooner or later. That’s about the size of it.”
“Did she tell you all this?”
“We met only today. We were introduced by a goatherd.”
“Rashid?”
Hamid never missed a trick. Ballantyne’s surprise must have shown in his face because Hamid smiled with obvious satisfaction. “Oh, yes! I know Rashid. In fact, he reported a murder. A weaver named Yacub…stabbed to death, out at Eski Hissar.”
Like the Ottomans of old, Hamid must have informers everywhere. Ballantyne made his decision suddenly: When in doubt, be frank.
He explained in detail his visits to Eski Hissar, hoping to meet Villette, his discovery of the body, his recognition of the wounds. And then he repeated what Villette had told him, that the dead man had followed her to the Abdullah. He did not mention the rug.
“Have you any idea why?”
“You’re joking. Men always follow Villette. Only…she mentioned his following her to Decebilus.”
“You’re not suggesting he was killed because of that?”
“I suggest nothing. I comment, that is all.”
He glanced toward his car once more, but saw no movement there. “Can I drop you somewhere, Hamid?”
“I have my own car.” Yet Hamid made no move to go; he lingered, as if about to say something, then at last when he dropped his cigarette to the pavement he said only, “He has not changed, Ballantyne. Decebilus is the same.”
“They tell me his fingers reach even into the government, to the police.”
“If they do, I should like to know it.” Hamid glanced at Ballantyne. “They do not reach to me.”
“If it was shown to me in black and white, I still would not believe it,” Ballantyne said.
“Thank you. Thank you, my friend.” Hamid turned and walked away. He looked hard, capable, and tough. Hamid was a true Turk, and it would never do to underestimate him.
Ballantyne started for his Land Rover. He was thinking of what might be done before morning, for whatever was to be done must be done quickly. Decebilus was not one to waste time.
The VW had been replaced by another, larger car. Ballantyne dug out his key, his eyes sweeping the other vehicles, searching for that movement he had seen. He heard the whisper of clothing behind him…too late.
A knife-point pricked his back, and a car door opened behind him, the car parked directly alongside his own. The knife must have been put against his back through the window of the car. If that was so, when the door opened for the man to emerge the knife must be for a moment withdrawn while he moved it around the window frame.
Ballantyne stood very still, trying to judge from where the knife-blade was how tall the man might be. It was not Mustafa Bem, but a shorter man.
“Don’t move!” the voice growled, in English. The pressure of the knife-point slackened and Ballantyne spun swiftly, hands shoulder high, knocking the knife-hand aside.
His attacker lunged out of the car but Ballantyne jerked a knee into his groin and knocked him back into the car seat. Then he slammed the door on the man’s leg.
The man screamed.
People around the hotel stopped, staring toward the parking lot. Ballantyne climbed into the Land Rover and backed out, taking his time. He could hear his attacker moaning and cursing, but he ignored it. Turning his car, he drove unhurriedly away.
—
When Villette Mallory closed the door behind her, she stood for long minutes with her back against it, her eyes closed. No matter how desperately she fought the feeling, she was frightened.
The poise that was so distinctly a part of her was endangered by the frightening realization that she was broke…and in a foreign country where she had no friends.
She had always earned a good living, but she had lived too well and there had seemed no end to the money or the opportunities. Planning for the future, saving, had seemed something she could put off for a while. Despite her reputation as a glamor girl, despite how easy it had been to accept the attention and the pay, she had never been truly comfortable in that world. There was a darkness at its core, a corruption that made her uneasy.
When Jay had come along she was at a low ebb, emotionally. She had almost despaired of finding the sort of man she wanted, the sort toward whom she was naturally attracted.
Like many another girl who becomes a success in the world of fashion, motion pictures, or the theater, she had not realized how much it would limit her choice of men. Instead of meeting more men when she became famous, she met fewer…fewer she actually trusted, at least.
Too many were alcoholic playboys, veterans of a handful of unsuccessful marriages; still others were simply not interested in women at all, or were those who pretended an interest for protective coloration. Many men merely thought she was unapproachable, others assumed she was too approachable, but among them she found no men of character.
Not, at least, until she met Jay. His fortunes had been up and down so many times that he had no illusions left. Born into fabulous wealth in one of the poorest countries in the world, when India was torn asunder he had rebuilt what was left of his inheritance, enough to allow him a comfortable living. More than money, it was his dominance on the polo field and in the Team Lotus cars at Le Mans and Monaco that had kept him in the public eye. He had a love of life and a great trust in himself and the hand of fate.
When his investments in Cuba had been lost to the revolution, he found himself on the verge of going broke again. Villette was concerned—she had passed up another contract when they married. She made arrangements to fly to Paris to see what work was available.
But Jay had laughed. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he had said. “I’ve still got the rug.”
“The rug?”
“It’s a long story. And it will be quite the adventure for us.”
Later he had commented on it again. “There’s millions in it, but it will take some doing.”
He was excited by whatever plan he was making, but then he was off with the team and their ponies to India…and while there something had gone terribly wrong.
Now Jay was gone, and if she was to believe Ballantyne, he had been murdered.
She moved away from the door, and as she undressed and prepared for a shower, she considered the situation as coolly as she could.
J
ay dead…He had been so filled with energy and the desire to do things that it was hard to conceive of the idea that he was gone.
COMMENTS: Dad left behind a bewildering array of revisions of this particular story. In trying to create a single coherent vision of his best ideas, I have combined the most complete material from five of the nine or ten drafts into the version that you have just read.
All of these drafts seem to originate from a very short short story, one that seems like an autobiographical vignette, called “By the Ruins of El Walariah,” first published in Yondering, The Revised Edition. It is merely an amusing conversation between a Moroccan boy and a young traveler, a man like Louis might once have been. It contains no hint that it ever could or would attempt to transform itself into a thriller.
I can only assume that was this story’s original incarnation. It is the simplest version, and stylistically it feels like a part of the “Yondering era,” stories that Louis wrote in the 1930s and ’40s before his mainstream career took off. At some point later on, he seems to have gotten the strange idea to turn that particular story into a treasure-hunt adventure.
The next step in the evolution of this narrative seems to be the following concept, one that does not use either the Moroccan (El Walariah) or Turkish (Istanbul) locations. These notes read:
Ali Brogan is a bit of the flotsam of the Middle East. He lives by his wits, and usually lives well, but occasionally he fails to come upon the needed opportunity.
He knows a multitude of things. Most of it is highly useless knowledge, and he has a horror of work. Wherever he is, he gets along, and always with a weather eye for the chance.
In Samarkand he overhears a conversation about a rug…a very rare rug, indeed, and woven into it is a map indicating the presence of a buried treasure.
Let’s say Ali sees a man killed and finds the rug. He carries it off, then an attempt is made to buy the rug from him. He studies the rug with great care, can find nothing, only the design in the center strikes him as a bit off pattern (in one corner, rather) and has a faintly familiar appearance.
He goes to a woman who knows most things and discovers to whom the rug belonged, and gets some of the story from her, an old lady. One thing she says rings a bell.
The elderly lady with whom he deals was once married to a nobleman of Turkish or Arabic background….She was an adventuress, but a shrewd and beautiful woman in her youth. Now an old lady with little money left she is still the grand dame, and still as gifted in her way as always. Ali has an admiration for her which he cannot keep secret, and he gives up his own profit for her.
Perhaps the design on the rug gives a map of a ruined building outside Samarkand. He is a crook who is outsmarted by his own sentimentality.
That idea led to a draft of the story that is much more like the chapters of The Golden Tapestry that you have just read. It included the characters of the shepherd boy, the mysterious and beautiful young woman, and some Bad Guys who want something she has. This draft was, like “By the Ruins of El Walariah,” set in Morocco. Subsequent versions, however, make the jump to Turkey and incorporate Hannibal’s treasure and the whole cast of characters; in fact, there is very little difference between the next nine drafts. Dad made small adjustments, the timing of some of the events, figuring out how to best establish certain bits of information, and that is about it. In one draft, Ballantyne is named Baliran and he experimented with some different names for Jay, the Maharajah of Kasur.
He wrote one of these drafts in the first person from Ballantyne’s point of view…then realized that was a mistake, that he needed to allow his audience to witness a number of scenes where Ballantyne could not be present. The first-person perspective made the delivery of that information difficult, and led to some extremely awkward expositional dialogue.
There were so many rewrites that I could see the storytelling begin to deteriorate; even as he got certain aspects of the plot nailed down, he began to take others so much for granted that he glossed over them, probably because he knew them too well by then. Louis did not like rewriting for this exact reason—unless a writer truly enjoys revision (and he did not), too many drafts can suck the life out of a story before it ever gets going.
It is very rare to see Louis sweating a bunch of little details like he did in these drafts. Usually, he was very self-assured about what he was doing and forged ahead with certainty. Even though he gave up on The Golden Tapestry, it seems like this is a pretty solid concept. Ultimately, he did get all those troublesome details nailed down in one version or another, and as you will see, he had a version of the entire story mapped out. Possibly Louis’s biggest issue when it came to rewrites was that he didn’t bother to do a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each draft. That, combined with the lack of a secretary (or a word processor!) to quickly shuffle all the good bits together, may have caused some of these story concepts to be left behind.
The bulk of these “Istanbul drafts” seem to have been written in 1960 and ’61, the same era when he wrote the first version of The Walking Drum and tried to develop several other ideas to break out of the Western genre. Only one novel, Sackett, was published in1961, and it ended up being a lean year. That was also the year I came along, and Mom and Dad were forced to move because their apartment building didn’t allow children.
Eventually, they bought a house, and it’s my guess that the financial pressure of the failed attempts to broaden his style, then my being born, plus the down payment on the house was what pushed him to accept the deal to write the novelization of the movie How the West Was Won, which came out in 1962.
At some point it seems Louis tried to sell The Golden Tapestry as a motion picture, no doubt feeling he could afford to go back to it if he had a buyer set up. No deal was ever made, but at least we will get the benefit of being able to read a treatment that suggests how the story might have developed and then ended if he had written the full novel.
As you read through the treatment below you may notice slight differences from the chapters of prose Louis wrote. Although the outline allows us to see what the overall structure of the story would have been like, I believe it was written fairly early in the process; the outline gives us the best overview, but the two chapters of prose you have just read are an indication of how he would have continued to work out the details in a more complete and sophisticated fashion.
* * *
THE GOLDEN TAPESTRY
Outline of a Novel
CAST OF CHARACTERS:
BALLANTYNE: He knows who is bribing who from Delhi to Istanbul, from Cairo to Samarkand…he knows where the power and influence lie, and who to see about getting things done.
His father was an Irish-American adventurer who came out to the Middle East with a bridge construction company and stayed on as an oil prospector. His mother was a Eurasian girl of good family, and Ballantyne, except for a few short periods in the States and in Europe, has grown up in the East.
His experience has been varied and colorful; he speaks a dozen languages, most of them fluently; he knows the argot of the beggars and the thieves; and he has wires out to all parts of the East where the only secrets that exist are the ancient ones. The bazaars, the coffee shops and wine shops teem with gossip.
At thirty-three he is good-looking, rugged, quick to make a fast buck or a fast lady, and is a good man in a fight, but a better one at talking himself out of them.
He makes his living by acting as liaison man for oil companies in their dealings with Arab sheiks and other tribesmen, as a local contact for motion-picture companies, for archaeologists, etc. Occasionally, when he noses about old ruins he comes up with a fine head, a plaque, or a vase…and he knows who will pay best for what he has found.
He speaks fluent Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Persian, English, and French; he speaks a smattering of Russian, Chinese, Bengali, German, and Greek.
They know him in Aleppo and Isfahan, in Kashgar, Srinagar, Damascus, and Bagdad as a fast operator,
but one whose word is good, whose courage is unquestioned.
He has had frequent dealings with LEON DECEBILUS.
—
VILLETTE MALLORY: Born in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, on a ranch, she was singing on various radio stations in the vicinity when only fourteen; at sixteen, passing as older, she was a model for Neiman Marcus in Dallas; at seventeen she had gone to New York and had become within a few months one of the best-paid models in the country, her income had moved up to five figures, and she was known as “The Incomparable Villette.”
She is beautiful, bright, and quick in conversation, and she knows how to take care of herself. Even with all her glamor and the romance that has become attached to her name she is a very regular gal who has never forgotten where she came from.
She has been courted without much success by an assortment of international playboys, visiting nobility, Texas millionaires, and the usual names that make up cafe society.
She had met the Maharajah of Kasur, a sportsman noted for his polo playing, race driving, etc., but a very regular guy who lost most of what he had when Pakistan split with India, and who divided much of what remained among relatives and some old family retainers.
Villette is not in love with him, but she does like him very much and they have become engaged. He has told her, and at first she believed he was joking, that he was not worried about money. He said he had a rug that would make his fortune…a prayer rug.
Villette knows a good deal about the world and about men, but she has never encountered the kind of trouble represented by LEON DECEBILUS.
—
LEON DECEBILUS: Tall, strong, and with a superficial polish that quickly disappears when he grows angry. His voice grows rough, his language changes.
“Decebilus” is a name he uses; his own name is unknown, and he himself may never have known it. His nationality is equally indefinite, except that he comes from the Levantine coast.
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 19