by Talbot Mundy
“You talk like a madman! How can I show either?”
“Then how can you swear by them? Father of easy words and evil deeds, give me the letter back!”
Yussuf Dakmar appealed to me as presumably responsible for Jeremy.
“You saw, effendi, didn’t you? I tried to help him. But he who plays with the cat must suffer her claws, so now he accuses me of stealing. I call you to witness that I took nothing.”
“You must excuse him,” I answered. “That is a highly important letter. If it isn’t found the consequences may be disastrous.”
“By Allah, it shall be found!” exploded Jeremy, glaring harder than ever at Yussuf Dakmar. “Look at his face! Look at his evil eyes! He came in here on purpose to spy on us and steal that letter! It is time to use my razor on him! I swear not by the Prophet’s beard or anybody’s honor, but by the razor in my sock that he has the letter and that I will have it back!”
Well, that was a challenge there was no side-stepping. Sure of being able to prove innocence, Yussuf Dakmar decided that a bold course was the best. He proceeded to empty his own pocket, laying the contents on the seat before Jeremy’s eyes. And Jeremy watched like a puzzled puppy with his brow wrinkled. The process took time, because he was wearing one of those imitation Western suits, of prehistoric cut but up-to-date with every imaginable pocket that a tailor could invent. Their contents included a dagger and a clasp-knife with a long blade sharpened on both edges, but no pistol.
“Now are you satisfied?” he demanded, after turning inside-out the two “secret” pockets in the lining of his vest.
“Less than ever!” Jeremy retorted. “Until I see you naked I will not believe you!”
Yussuf Dakmar turned to me again. He was a patient spy, if ever there was one.
“Do you think I should be put to that indignity?” he asked. “Shall I undress myself?”
“By Allah, unless you do it I will cut your clothes off with my razor!” Jeremy announced.
We drew up at a station then, and had to wait until the train went on again. By that time Yussuf Dakmar had made up his mind. He slipped off his jacket and vest and began to unfasten his collar-button as the train gained speed.
Everything went smoothly until he stood up to remove his pants. He had the top of them in both hands when Jeremy seized him suddenly by the elbows and spun him face about. And there the letter lay, face downward on the seat he had just left, bent and a little crinkled in proof that he had been sitting on it for some minutes past.
Now it doesn’t make any difference whether a man meant to take off his trousers or not. In a crisis, if they are unfastened, he will hold them up. It’s like catching a monkey; you put corn into a narrow-necked basket. The monkey inserts his arm, fills his hand with corn, and tries to pull it out, but can’t unless he lets go of the corn, which he won’t do. So you catch him. Yussuf Dakmar held up his pants with one hand, and tried to free himself from Jeremy with the other. If he had let go his pants he might have seized the envelope and discovered what a fake it was; but he wouldn’t do that. It was I who pounced on it and stowed it away carefully in my inner pocket.
Yussuf Dakmar’s emotions were poignant and mixed, but he was no quitter. He thought he knew definitely where the letter was now, and the wolf glance with which he favored me changed swiftly to a smile of ingratiating politeness.
“I am glad you have recovered what you lost,” he said, smiling, as he fastened up his pants and resumed his coat. “This friend of yours — or is he your servant? — made me nervous with his threats, or I should certainly have found it for you sooner.”
And now Grim resumed a hand. The last thing he wished was that Yussuf Dakmar should consider his quest too difficult, for then he would probably summon assistance at Haifa. Encouragement was the proper cue, now that Jeremy had tantalized him with a glimpse of the bait. We had nothing to fear from him unless he should lose heart.
“The value of a sum lies in the answer,” he said, quoting one of those copybook proverbs with which all Syrians love to clinch an argument.
“The letter is in its owner’s pocket. The accuser should now apologize, and we can spend the rest of the journey pleasantly.”
Jeremy proceeded to apologize:
“So you’re not such a thief as you looks.”
Then he provided entertainment. He drew out the razor and did stunts with it, juggling it with open blade from hand to hand — pretending to drop it and always catching it again within a fraction of an inch of Yussuf Dakmar’s person. By and by he juggled with coins, match-box, cigars, razor and anything he could lay his hands on.
“Mashallah!” exclaimed the Syrian at last, his face all sweaty with excitement as he shrank back to avoid the spinning razor. “Where did you learn such accomplishments?”
“Learn them?” answered Jeremy, still juggling. “I am a dervish. I was born, not taught. I can ride through the air on cannon-balls, and whatever I wish for is mine the next minute. Look, I have one piaster. I wish for twenty. What do I do? I spin it in the air — catch it — d’you hear them? There you are — twenty! Count ’em if you like.”
“A dervish? A holy person? You? Where do you come from?”
“I was born in the belly of the South Wind,” answered Jeremy. “Where I come from, every shell-fish has a pearl in it and gold is so common that the cattle wear it in their teeth. I can talk three languages at once and swear in six, use sulfur for tobacco, eat sardines without opening the can, and flavor my food for choice with gun-powder.
“I’ve been everywhere, seen everything, heard all the lies, and I found that big effendi in Jerusalem. I saw him first. He calls himself Ramsden, which is derived from the name of a creature bearing wool, which in turn is a synonym for money. He’s on his way to supply Faisal with money, and I’m going to show him the streets of Damascus. Anything else you want to know?”
“Supply Faisal with money? That is interesting. American money perhaps? An American banker by any chance?”
“Nothing to do with chance. He’s a father of certainties. Didn’t he give me that letter to keep, and didn’t I find a safe place for it between you and the cushions? Yes, I put it there. I’m an honest man, but I have my reasonable doubts about this other fellow. Ramsden effendi found him somewhere, and engaged him as a servant without asking me. Perhaps he’s honest. Only Allah knows men’s hearts. But he hasn’t got an honest face like yours, and when pay-day comes I shall hide my money.”
“So you know Damascus?” answered Yussuf Dakmar. “I hope you will come and see me in Damascus. I will give you my address. If Ramsden effendi has only engaged you temporarily, perhaps I can show you a way to make money with those accomplishments of yours.”
“Make money?” answered Jeremy, prattling away like a madman. “I am weary of the stuff. I’m hunting the world over, in search of a friend. Nobody loves me. I want to find someone who’ll believe the lies I tell him without expecting me to believe the truth he tries to foist on me. I want to find a man as tricky with his brains as I am with my hands. He must be a politician and a spy, because I love excitement. That’s why I called you a spy. If you were one, you might have admitted it, and then we could have been friends, like two yolks in one eggshell. But I see you’re only a shell without a yolk in it. Who cleaned you?”
“How long have you been in the service of Ramsden effendi?” Yussuf Dakmar asked him.
“Not long, and I am tired of it. He is strong, and his fist is heavy. When he gets drunk he is difficult to carry upstairs to bed, and if I am also drunk the feat is still more difficult. It is a mystery how such a man as he should be entrusted with a secret mission, for he drinks with anyone. Aha! He scowls at me because I tell the truth about him, but if I had a bottle of whisky to offer him he would soon look pleasant again, and would give me a drink too, when he had swallowed all he could hold.”
If he had really been my servant I would naturally have kicked him off the train for a fraction of such impudence. I didn’t ex
actly know what to do. There is a thoughtful motive behind every apparently random absurdity that Jeremy gets off, but I was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that my wits don’t work fast enough to follow such volatile maneuvers. Perhaps it’s the Scotian blood in me. I can follow a practical argument fast enough, when the axioms’ are all laid down and we’re agreed on the subject.
However, Grim came to my rescue. He had his pencil out, and contrived to flick a piece of paper into my lap unseen by Yussuf Dakmar.
Jeremy’s cue is good [the note ran]. Dismiss him for talking about you to a stranger. Trust him to do the rest.
So I acted the part of an habitually heavy drinker in a fit of sudden rage, and dismissed Jeremy from my service on the spot.
“Very well,” he answered blandly. “Allah makes all things easy. Let us hope that other fellow finds it easy to put you to bed tonight! Allah is likewise good, for I have my ticket to Damascus, and all I need to beg for is a bed and food at Haifa.”
I muttered something in reply about his impudence, and the conversation ceased abruptly. But at the end of ten minutes or so Yussuf Dakmar went out into the corridor, signaling to Jeremy to follow him.
CHAPTER 8. “He’ll forgive anyone who brings him whiskey.”
You remember, of course, that line that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Puck? “What fools these mortals be!” The biggest fools are the extra smart ones, whose pride and peculiar joy it is to “beat the game.”
Yussuf Dakmar assessed all other humans as grist for his mill. Character to him was expressed in degrees of folly and sheer badness. Virtue existed only as a weakness to be exploited. The question that always exercised him was, wherein does the other fellow’s weakness lie? It’s a form of madness. Where a sane man looks for strength and honesty that he can yoke up with, a Yussuf Dakmar spies out human failings; and whereas most of us in our day have mistaken pyrites for fine gold, which did not hurt more than was good for us, he ends by mistaking gold for dross.
You can persuade such a man without the slightest difficulty that you are a fool and a crook. Jeremy had turned the trick for his own amusement as much as anything, although his natural vein of shrewdness probably suggested the idea. Yussuf Dakmar, ready to believe all evil and no good of anyone, was convinced that he had to deal with a scatter-brained Arab who could be used for almost any purpose, and Jeremy’s riotous bent for jumping from one thing to another fixed the delusion still more firmly.
But Lord, he had caught a Tartar! Outside at the end of the corridor, in full view, but out of earshot, of Narayan Singh, Yussuf Dakmar made a proposal to Jeremy that was almost perfect in its naive obliquity. There was nothing original or even unusual about it, except the circumstances, time and place. Green-goods men and blue-sky stock salesmen, race-course touts and sure-thing politicians get away with the same proposition in the U.S. every day of the week, and pocket millions by it. Only, just as happens to all such gentry on occasion, Yussuf Dakmar had the wrong fish in his net.
He jerked his head toward where Narayan Singh sat stolid and sleepy- looking on a camp-stool with his curly black beard resting on the heel of one hand.
“Do you know that man?” he asked.
“W’Allah! How should I know him?” Jeremy answered. “He looks like a Hindu thinking of reincarnation. Inshallah, he will turn into a tiger presently!”
“Beware of him! He is an Administration spy. He is watching me talk to you, and perhaps he will ask you afterward what I have said. You must be very careful how you answer him.”
“I will tell him you asked me for a love-potion for the engine-driver’s wife,” Jeremy answered.
“I am listening. What is it you are really going to say?”
“That master of yours — that Ramsden, who dismissed you so tyrannically just now—”
“That drunkard? There is nothing interesting to be said about him,” Jeremy answered. “He is a fool who has paid my fare as far as Damascus. May Allah reward him for it!”
“Are you telling me the truth?” demanded Yussuf Dakmar, fixing his eyes sternly on Jeremy’s.
Your con man never overlooks a chance to put his intended victim on the defensive at an early stage in the proceedings. “How can he have paid your fare as far as Damascus? This line only goes to Haifa, where you have to change trains and buy another ticket.”
“I see you are a clever devil,” Jeremy retorted. “May Allah give you a belly ache, if that is where you keep your brains! It was I who bought the tickets. The fool gave me sufficient money for three first-class fares all the way to Damascus, and I have the change. He forgot that when he dismissed me.”
“Then you won’t need to beg board and lodging in Haifa?”
“Oh, yes. I need my money for another matter. It is high time I married, and a fellow without money has to put up with any toothless that nobody else will take.”
“So you hope to find a wife in Damascus?”
“Inshallah,” Jeremy answered piously.
“Well, I will find you a good-looking girl for wife, provided you first prove that you will make a good son-in-law. I take men as I find them, not as they represent themselves. He who wishes for the fire must first chop wood. You understand me?”
“W’Allah! I can chop wood like an axe with two heads. Is the woman your daughter?”
“That is as may be. Let us talk business. I reward my friends, but woe betide the fool who betrays my confidence!” said Yussuf Dakmar darkly.
“I see you are a man after my own heart,” answered Jeremy; “a thorough fellow who stops at nothing! Good! Allah must have brought us two together for an evil purpose, being doubtless weary of the League of Nations; Unbosom! I am like a well, into which men drop things and never see them anymore.”
“You are a fine rascal, I can see that clearly! So you think that Allah is cooking up evil, do you? Tee-hee! That is an original idea, and there may be something in it. Let us hope there is something in it for us two, at all events. Now, as to that fellow Ramsden—”
“Avoid him unless he is drunk,” advised Jeremy. “The weight of his fist would drive a man like you like a nail into a tree.”
“Who fears such an ox?” the Syrian retorted. “A fly can sting him; a little knife can bleed him; a red rag can enrage him; and the crows who devour that sort of meat won’t worry as to whether he was killed according to ritual! He has money for Faisal, has he? Well, never mind. He has a letter as well, and that is what I want. Will you get it for me?”
“Do you need it badly?”
“By Allah, I must have it!”
“By Allah, then I am in good luck, for that makes me indispensable, doesn’t it? And an indispensable man can demand what he pleases!”
“Not at all,” Yussuf Dakmar answered, frowning. “I have taken a fancy to you, or I would see you to the devil. When we reach Haifa, ten or even twenty men will present themselves to do this business for me. Or, if I choose, I can use that fellow Omar who is traveling with Ramsden; he would like to be my accomplice, but I don’t trust him very much.”
“In that you are perfectly right,” answered Jeremy. “He is not at all the sort of man for you to trust. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he has warned Ramsden against you already! Better beware of him!”
According to Jeremy’s account of the conversation afterward, it was not until that moment that he saw clearly how to prevent Yussuf Dakmar from calling in thugs to attack me either at Haifa or at some point between there and Damascus. Until then he had been feeling his way along— “spieling,” as he calls it — keeping his man interested while he made all ready for the next trick.
“To tell you the truth,” he went on, “Omar isn’t that fellow’s real name. He is a sharp one, and he is after the letter every bit as much as you are.”
“How do you know that?”
“W’Allah, how not? because he himself told me! just like you, he tried to get me into partnership. He offered me a big reward, but he’s not like you, so I didn’t
believe him; and he has no daughter; I’ve no use for a man who hasn’t a good-looking daughter. What he’s afraid of is that someone else may get the letter first. And he’s a desperate fellow. He told me his intentions and whether you believe me or not, they’re worthy of a wolf!”
“I’m glad I resolved to take you into my confidence,” said Yussuf Dakmar, nodding. “Go on; I’m listening. Tell me what he told you.”
“He plans to get hold of the letter between Haifa and Damascus. He thinks that’s safest, because it’s over the border and there won’t be any British officers to interfere. Somewhere up the Lebanon Valley, after most of the passengers have left the train, looks good to him. But I think he knows who you are.”
“Yes, he knows me. Go on.”
“And he’s afraid you’ll get help and forestall him. So he’s going to watch Ramsden like a cat watching a mouse-hole, and he’s going to watch you too. And if anybody tries to interfere at Haifa, or if men get on the train between Haifa and Damascus who look like being accomplices of yours, he’s going to murder Ramsden there and then, seize the letter, and make a jump for it! You see, he’s one of those mean fellows — a regular dog-in-the-manger; he’d rather get caught by the police and hanged for murder than let anybody else get what he’s after. Oh, believe me, I didn’t trust him! I laughed when he made his proposal to me.”
“Now that is very interesting,” said Yussuf Dakmar. “To tell you the truth I had a little experience with him last night myself. He came on me by accident in a certain place, and we conversed. I pretended to agree with him for the sake of appearances, but I formed a very poor opinion of him. Well, suppose we put him out of the way first; how would that be? You look like a strong man. Suppose you watch for an opportunity to push him off the train?”
“Oh, that would never do!” Jeremy answered, shaking his head from side to side. “You mustn’t forget that Indian who sits in the corridor. It was you yourself who told me he is an Administration spy. If he suspects you already, he will suspect me for having talked with you, and will watch me; and if I try to push that fellow Omar off the train, he will come to the rescue. Surely you don’t expect me to fight both of them at once! Besides, you must consider Ramsden.