“This big scene at the Cham’s place, with all those queers looking on.”
Larry shrugged. “It was pretty messy,” he admitted.
“Damn it, I don’t care about that. That child-molesting jerk, from Brazil, Alvares Real. He said you hit the Cham.”
Larry couldn’t get what the other was so excited about. He thought back.
Dorry evidently felt some of the big man’s urgency. “What’s the matter, Bill?”
Larry said, “Yeah, I kind of cuffed him one, then that bastard Talmadge socked me. My reflexes were all slowed down.”
“You hit the Cham!”
Larry was indignant. “Sure I hit him. You heard the story. He must have spent five million bucks just to — ”
Larry broke off in mid-sentence and scowled at the big Irish-American.
Big Bill said urgently, his eyes going from one to the other, “Listen, no man touches the Cham except his father, the preceding Cham, from the day of his birth. Not even a doctor during his delivery.”
“Well. I touched him,” Larry said, with a certain degree of satisfaction. “And what’s more, if I lay my hands on the son-of — ”
“No. Listen, damn it. It’s the strongest tenet of their religion. Listen, Larry, believe me. As long as you remain alive, there are between twenty and thirty million of the most fanatical Moslem sectarians who are banned from paradise. If any living Ismailian Shiah dies while you are still alive, his soul drifts forever in the desert, like an afreet or whatever they call it in the Koran.”
Dorry said, “But that’s insane. Surely Muley Khalid doesn’t believe that nonsense.”
“Probably not. He doesn’t have to believe it. His followers do. Don’t you understand? The Cham is a direct descendant of the Prophet himself. He’s a holy man. To the Ismailian Shiahs he’s the holiest single thing in the world, short of the Kaaba stone in Mecca.” Big Bill turned quickly back to Larry. “You’ve got to get out of here, but quick.”
Larry’s attitude had turned to one of amused disbelief. “Moses, Bill, this is the twentieth century.”
“It sure is. This is the century in which the civilized Germans murdered six million men, women and children they decided were their racial inferiors. This is the century the civilized Americans dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If civilized people can do those things, what do you think thirty million semicivilized religious fantatics can do to one man who has rendered them soulless?”
Larry bad begun to answer that, too, when the three screaming Ismailians came vaulting over the terrace edge. How they had managed to get this close without being spotted remained a mystery; evidently they had crept up through the shrubbery. Dorry shrilled something in warning, and then the three were on them.
Even in spite of the speed with which they came in, Larry recognized two as members of the four-man bodyguard of the Cham, the other as a sometimes steward on Muley Khalid’s plane, a sometimes houseman in his villa. The two bodyguards were carrying yataghans. Hassan, the houseman, had what looked like a kitchen butcher knife.
Larry was saved only by the fact that the three, screaming something ununderstandable, had eyes only for him. Big Bill Daly and Dorry Malloy meant absolutely nothing to them.
Big Bill, standing in their way, bellowed like an enraged bull, kicked out in one direction, to temporarily throw one of the bodyguards off, then with a sweep of a giant paw threw a light deck chair under the feet of the other.
Larry Land instinctively went into the Zenkutsu-dachi lunge position, right knee front and bent so that the kneecap was directly over the arch of his foot, hands held slightly forward, knuckles up.
For the moment, Big Bill had engaged two of them. The third was on Larry like a maniac, his right hand grasping, his left coming up with the guardless Turk saber.
Larry began the Nineteenth Kata. He bent his body slightly to the right in a down motion, and he threw the edge of his left hand in a block hard against the other’s wrist. He grabbed the inside of the wrist with his left hand, forcing the arm up high, pulled the arm toward him, and brought his left foot in front of the other’s right foot. He pivoted on his left, slightly turning his body backward to the left, and with the edge of his right hand chopped the other’s left kidney. The Moslem screamed in agony, the sword dropping to the terrace. Larry was now slightly behind his opponent. With his right foot he quickly stamped the Ismailian’s left knee pit. He released the left-hand grip and let the other fall heavily to the pavement.
Larry sprang back, falling into the Kiba-dachi straddle stance, while he sized up the situation. He had only the briefest of moments before Hassan, the houseman, was upon him.
Unlike the bodyguard, the new attacker was hysterical in his rage. When he saw what must have seemed to be an inviting position, so far as attack upon the object of his hatred was concerned, he kicked out with his right foot. Larry simply swung back with his left foot, and grabbed Hassan’s foot with his left hand, just under the ankle. He pulled the other toward him, at the same time kicking the screaming Moslem in his groin. Hassan dropped to the terrace surface, and Larry looked up just in time to see the roaring Big Bill Daly slug the second bodyguard so hard as to send him reeling backward over the balustrade of the terrace, to fall with a sickening thud to the ground below.
Larry thoughtfully kicked the groaning Hassan in the side of the head and then checked the other unconscious guard of the Cham. The man was out like a light.
Big Bill growled nastily, “Now do you believe me, Buster? These characters are playing for keeps.” He looked at Dorry. “Have you got any money?”
She had been standing, terrified, her back to the wall of the house. The action, in all, hadn’t lasted for more than a minute. Sixty seconds. She blinked at Big Bill.
“Perhaps two hundred dollars, mostly in the form of pesetas.”
“Get it, quick.” Big Bill turned on Larry. “You’ve got two minutes to pack. Be sure and bring your cameras. You’ll be able to flog them, somewhere along the line.” His voice went louder. “Move, damn it. I’ve got my car below. Let’s get out of here!”
Larry was back almost within two minutes. He had both cameras, and the more expensive accessories he had bought. He also had three hundred or so dollars he’d accumulated from his supposed salary from Loretta. Aside from that, he’d had time to snatch up a sport jacket and his passport.
Without waiting for Dorry, they sped down the outer stairs to where Bill had parked his low-slung French Citroën. They piled into the front seat. Dorry came running out from a lower-level entry, carrying a purse and a small suitcase.
Big Bill had the car turning over, even as Larry flung open a rear door for her. She piled in, puffing.
Big Bill took off, the front-drive car throwing up gravel behind. He growled over his shoulders at her, “We’ll drop you at the bottom of the drive. Give Larry the money. He’s going to need every cent. I’ll pay you back later, when I can get in touch with my bank.”
“The devil you will,” Dorry snapped. “I’m coming along.”
Big Bill grunted.
Larry said, “All right. Let’s slow down. Where are we going?”
Big Bill had reached the main highway and was speeding up the road toward Malaga. He thought about it. “Not Madrid. We can’t risk Madrid. There are probably several Arab State embassies there, and that would possibly mean some members of the Ismailian Shiah sect. We’ll cut over to Seville, then to Portugal. I think we can risk putting you on a plane in Lisbon for Bermuda.”
Larry was having too much thrown at him too fast. “Why not fly direct to New York?”
“Because they might be waiting for you in New York. They can cable. They can phone. There are damned few of the Cham’s followers in Spain, even in all Europe, but there are quite a few in a town like New York, and probably quite a few in Washington. Diplomats and so forth.”
Larry said, “You’re being a bit dramatic, aren’t you?”
“No. Your only chance, Lar
ry, is to get back to the States and disappear. Your one advantage now is that you have a slight edge of time. It will take some days, even weeks, for the word to get out from the immediate staff of Muley’s to the rest of the organization. From then on there will be no expense too great, no sacrifice too great, to get you.”
Larry grunted, still in half-disbelief at this fantasy. He grumbled, “Well, I was figuring on returning anyway. I’ve got a job waiting for me in my own field. Frankly, I’m beginning to suspect that I was never cut out to be a member of the Jet Set.”
Big Bill Daly was shaking his head. “I’m still not getting through to you, Larry. Listen, the reason you’re going back to the States at all is because there you can disappear into a sea of one hundred and eighty million Americans. There you’ll have protective coloration you couldn’t achieve anywhere else. You don’t need a passport in America. You change your identity. Have you ever been fingerprinted?”
“Yes. I had a job once that called for it.”
“That’s too bad. You’ll always have to take that into account. At any rate, this is what we’ll do. I’ll drive you to Lisbon. You’ll take a plane for Bermuda. In Bermuda you’ll transfer to a plane for Mexico City. There you’ll take the Aztec Eagle and enter the States from Laredo.”
“What am I going to use for money?” Larry asked bitterly. They were pulling into Malaga now, and heading through town for the road to Granada. Big Bill temporarily slowed to avoid police interference, but once they had cleared into the lesser traffic of Calle de la Victoria, on the outskirts, he opened up again.
“I’ve got a little over a thousand on me. Dorry said she had a couple of hundred. That’ll give you enough to get back to the States. I’d make arrangements to get some more money to you there, but you daren’t risk it. They know now that I’m a friend and they’ll keep an eye on me. From now on in, Larry you never again look up any old friends, any relatives, anybody who’s ever known you before.”
Larry stared at him. “Are you nutty?”
“I keep telling you. As long as you’re alive, up to thirty million fantatic Moslems have no souls. How would you like to be some multimillionaire Pakistani, or Persian, or something who’s about seventy years old? Most of the Ismailian Shiahs are poverty-stricken, true enough, but there are others who are loaded. They’ll be willing to hire the best detective agencies in the world. They’ll hire ex-F.B.I. men, ex-C.I.A. men, ex-Nazi Gestapo men, the best man hunters in the world, just to find you, Lawrence Land. And when they find you, they can hire somebody else, one of their own people probably, to finish you.
“So this is what you do, Lawrence Land. You get back to the States and assume a new identity, in some part of the country where nobody knows you. You change your physical appearance to the extent you can. You find some kind of work that has nothing to do with anything you’ve ever worked at before. Absolutely nothing to do with sociology, absolutely nothing to do with photography. Don’t ever even subscribe to magazines in either of these fields.
“Then, no matter how established you get, don’t ever stay in one place for any length of time. After six months, or at most a year, drop out of sight again. Cut completely away from your old identity, the work you got into, and switch to another part of the country and get a still different job. Never make the mistake of thinking the police can protect you. They can’t. Maybe for a short while, if they believe you. But only for a short while.”
There were blisters of sweat now on Larry’s forehead. “Where’d you learn all about these followers of the Cham?” he said, an element of fear in his voice for the first time.
“I researched it once, for a novel I never got around to writing. I know what I’m talking about.”
“I begin to think you do,” Dorry put in, speaking for the first time. “There’s just one thing wrong with the picture you paint.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going, too.”
Larry said, lowly, “No you’re not.”
“Don’t you want me?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going, too.”
Big Bill let air out of his lungs, “Then the both of you will be on the lam the rest of your lives.”
“Yes,” Dorry said. “And that’s the way I want it. I’d rather live my way, the life I want, with the man I love, for a month in poverty, than without those things for half a century.”
Big Bill looked at her over his shoulder, calculatingly. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess you would. I’m sorry I didn’t see you first, before Larry ever came to town. I saw you, but I didn’t see you, Dorothy Malloy.”
She laughed, in spite of the tension they all felt. “Why, thanks, Bill Daly.”
Bill said, “And as of about twenty seconds ago, I’ve decided to go on back to the States myself. I’ve got a novel or two I’ve always thought I’d like to write.”
The front-wheel drive of the Citroën pulled them strongly around a sharp curve of the winding road that leads from Malaga to Granada. They narrowly missed a frightened boy, atop a laden burro. Larry was thrown against the door by the sudden twisting of the wheel.
He looked, indecisively, at the big writer. “This thousand bucks — how am I going to get it back to you?”
Big Bill Daly took time out from the road to glare at him. “What I’m ashamed of is that it’s only a stinking grand. It’s all I have on hand. I told you there in Pamplona, Larry, that I owed you a life.” However, he knew how the other felt. “If you ever get so stinking rich that it doesn’t make any difference to you, mail it to me in care of my publisher. But never try to look me up, Larry. Never. They’ll have me fingered as a potential contact.”
Larry accepted it. He reached a hand back over the seat and fumbled for one of Dorry’s to hold. Her hand was warm and safely comforting.
“The Jet Set,” he said bitterly, and with no particular meaning in the words.
The End
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Copyright © 1964 by Mack Reynolds
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 10: 1-4405-6320-9
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6320-1
eISBN 10: 1-4405-6319-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6319-5
The Jet Set Page 13