“He was a member of the Umma later. He became a member of the Umma because he was pro-Red, not the other way around. Because after the war the Umma began to embrace what the Reds call adapted communism. It isn’t universal and it isn’t in every Arab country, but there was enough of it so Izzed-een Shafik could feel at home in the Umma. Pan-Islam, they call it. Anyhow, while he was in Iran with the Army, your pal Lash almost got himself killed by the Umma fanatics. Izzed-een Shafik saved his life. Lash being the kind of man he is, it was a debt he had to repay. He did not get a chance to repay it until Limerock came along.”
Davisa took another drink. She drank it the way you drink cold beer if you’re very thirsty.
“Izzed-een played you for a sucker,” I said. “Did you think he’d knock Fawzia off just to make you happy? Exactly how much noise do you think your God-damn League can make, anyway? Shafik had another idea. If he could kill Fawzia, if Fawzia could be raped and killed while on Hajj, and if an American—particularly an American soldier and a supposed convert to Islam—could be blamed for it, the Commies of the Umma would like that fine. That’s why what you asked Izzed-een Shafik to do was worth his while. That’s another way you killed your boy, Mrs. Tyler.”
She moved across the small room lithely and for the moment it took her to slap my face hard with both her hands, she was the old Davisa Lee Tyler. I stood there and took her slaps and didn’t budge. Moses watched both of us from a few feet off. Then suddenly Davisa slumped against me and began to sob. It was a dry asthmatic sound and after five seconds of it Davisa cut it off, stepped away from me and asked, “Did Lash know what Shafik had in mind?”
“He knew,” I said. And with those two words Limerock and Azaayim Bey had died in the Hejaz. If Davisa’s hands were red with blood Lash’s hands had been washed in the same blood because he had known.
Davisa nodded, very businesslike. She said, “I could have liked you, Chester. You could have been like a second son to me.”
“No thanks,” I said. “Look what happened to the first one.”
“You make me feel so stupid,” she said drunkenly. “You make me feel so guilty. Would you have liked being a second son to me? I could have taught you how to ride and box and all the things I taught my Lyman because his father was dead. Wouldn’t that have been fun?”
“You had better go now, mister,” Moses said to me.
“Oh, no, Chester. Please. You’ll never leave me now, will you?”
“Tell her you’ll never leave her, mister,” said Moses. “You please tell her whatever she wants to hear.”
“It’s a sham,” Davisa said. “I can tell when it’s a sham. I don’t want it to be a sham.” She went over to Moses suddenly and plucked the .32 from his hand and pointed it at me. “I don’t like shams,” she said and pulled the trigger.
The gun made a cracking sound and jerked in her hand. The slug tore at my sleeve. I grabbed the gun and let Davisa slap my face and sob against me once more while I broke the .32 and removed the shells and gave them to Davisa.
“You’ll need these,” I said.
She was fumbling them back into the .32 when I got out of there. She said, “He’ll be here any minute.”
Moses did not say good-by. I started the De Soto and went around the circular driveway. A Buick passed me just the other side of the gate posts. Lew Lash was driving it.
The storm broke a moment later.
Chapter Twenty-six
I got drunk. I got very drunk and I stayed very drunk. There were two days of it with almost no food and almost no sleep. I woke up on the third day and said the hell with it. I had a big breakfast, shaved, showered, put on my best lightweight summer suit and drove down to College Station through the clear bright late summer sunshine.
I walked across the campus which was paved with red brick. There were big shade trees which had been old before Davisa Lee Tyler was born. There was azaleas and rhododendron and camelias and red brick and white-pillared buildings. There was a statue of Dolly Madison in front of the largest building.
Terry rented a small neat white clapboard house about a quarter of a mile from the campus. You walked along a black-top road to reach it and there was pine forest on either side, very unexpected in Tidewater, Virginia. I rang the bell and Terry opened the door almost immediately. She was wearing white.
“Fawzia is in back, soaking up some sun,” Terry said. “You want to see her?”
“No. How is she?”
“Much better. I think she’s going to be all right. Did you read the papers?”
“Not for a couple of days.”
“Davisa Tyler shot him. She killed him and then tried to kill herself. The Negro butler stopped her, the papers said.”
“Oh.”
“Then he went to see if Lash was dead. He was dead. While he went to see she got the gun herself and put the muzzle in her mouth and fired.”
“I see.”
It was a severely plain white dress with buttons down the front of it. Terry looked very beautiful in it but I knew everything was over between us and I didn’t know if I was sorry or not.
“You did it, didn’t you?” Terry said.
“Yes. I told her everything. And a little lie, too. Is that what you mean?”
“I thought you did. Come in, Chet.” She stepped away from me stiffly and I went inside the house and she closed the door behind me. The drapes were drawn and the light was dim.
“Do you think I did wrong?”
“I won’t try to judge you. How can I judge you? How can anyone judge you? It’s for you to decide.”
“Yes,” I said. I reached out to take her hand.
She drew it away from me with an unexpected savage fury. “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Don’t you see? If you held Davisa and Lew Lash responsible, who’s going to hold you responsible? Where is it going to end? I’m not as smart as I once thought I was, Chet. Maybe you did right. Maybe you did what you had to do. But maybe being manager for Davisa’s dying and Lash’s dying was worse than what they did. It’s a way of playing God, isn’t it? You’re going to have to live with yourself. I couldn’t.”
She didn’t mention anything about marriage and neither did I. That was as dead as Davisa and Lew Lash. “I’d better shove off now,” I said. “Are you sure Fawzia’s all right?”
“Yes. Dr. Jagoda says she can return to work in a week.”
“Does she know about Davisa?”
“Yes. That surprised me. It seemed to be just the thing she needed. You see, if Davisa felt guilty enough to kill herself, some of Fawzia’s guilt feelings disappeared.”
I didn’t say I had hoped it would be that way.
“I guess you were planning on that too. I have to congratulate you. Judge, jury, and executioner. Davisa hadn’t done anything the law could touch her for. Lash did nothing but his job. But you wanted it to end the way it ended. If the law couldn’t punish them, you decided you would.”
“Go ahead and call it murder if you want.”
“You knew it would be all over between us if you did it, didn’t you?”
“I thought it might be.”
“And you didn’t care?”
“It had nothing to do with you, Terry,” I said. “Say good-by to Fawzia for me. Tell her maybe I’ll call her some time.”
“But you won’t call me?”
“You don’t want me to, do you?”
“I guess I don’t, Chet.”
I reached out for her hand again. She pulled it away, but her eyes pleaded with me, as if there were something she wanted me to understand before we said good-by. Her voice was so soft when she spoke I barely could hear it.
“You knew I wanted to marry you,” she said. “You knew I was going to work you around to asking me. I guess I owe you something. Do you know what it is? Do you want it?”
I didn’t say anything. Slowly, never taking her eyes off my eyes, Terry began to unbutton the white dress. For some reason the white dress reminded me of the ihram,
although the ihram has no buttons. We all wear shrouds all the time and nobody can see inside them. You can’t even see inside your own. You really don’t want to.
For a moment Terry and I got a look beneath each other’s shrouds.
“You don’t want to,” she said. “Do you?”
I shook my head.
“I thought I would die if you didn’t want to, but now I’m glad, I’ll miss you, Chet.”
“You’d rather miss me,” I said, “wouldn’t you?”
“Chet.”
“That’s all right. I’d rather miss you too. It’s nice to build a dream and balance it against the bad things you’ve done or will have to do.”
“It would have been perfect. Chet, all the rest of our lives.” She was lying and she knew it and I knew it and she knew I knew it.
I got out of there and on the street before I climbed into the De Soto I put my shroud back on.
About the Author
Stephen Marlowe (1928–2008) was the author of more than fifty novels, including nearly two dozen featuring globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum. Born Milton Lesser, Marlowe was raised in Brooklyn and attended the College of William and Mary. After several years writing science fiction under his given name, he legally adopted his pen name, and began focusing on Chester Drum, the Washington-based detective who first appeared in The Second Longest Night (1955).
Although a private detective akin to Raymond Chandler’s characters, Drum was distinguished by his jet-setting lifestyle, which carried him to various exotic locales from Mecca to South America. These espionage-tinged stories won Marlowe acclaim, and he produced more than one a year before ending the series in 1968. After spending the 1970s writing suspense novels like The Summit (1970) and The Cawthorn Journals (1975), Marlowe turned to scholarly historical fiction. He lived much of his life abroad, in Switzerland, Spain, and France, and died in Virginia in 2008.
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Copyright © 1956 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4512-4
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