by Harold Lamb
"Look, doc,” Din said, "I know I’m a wrong number here, and you’ve lived here twenty years. Tell me why all the folks, including my gendarmes, are scared blue, and why my best friends, the Rudbars, are taking a beating and I’m being named the goat. You must have some hunch.”
Yeats glanced at the closed door. "It could only be foreign provocateurs, a gang sent here to stir up trouble to weaken the authority of the government. Probably Russian, but who knows in these terrible times of power politics? Your gendarmes, then, are being intimidated, because otherwise they might interfere with the strike.” Reflectively, he nodded. "I think the Iranians know that or they sense it, and that is why they are silent and frightened.”
Thinking of Sulaiman, Din nodded.
"It adds up ... all but me.”
"You have been made the official culprit. By the same token, as long as you stay, the violence will continue. If you leave, it may cease. After all, Major Alford, if it had not been for the training under you Americans, poor Isfandiyar might be alive today.”
Din said quietly, "Would you like me to sign a confession?”
"Of course not.” The Scot rubbed at his tired eyes. "Forgive me if I—I’ve been tarred with the same brush. Doctor Nasir warned me that word is going around that I am killing the sick who come under my care. And I”—his voice quavered—"have one assistant and eighty beds to take care of four hundred patients in the last stages of typhus. You can do nothing except leave Isfahan.” He opened the door. "May God make us unafraid,” he murmured, "for the pestilence that walketh in darkness . . . nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’”
Something stirred in the depths of the Virginian’s brooding. "Say that again,” he demanded with sudden interest.
When Yeats repeated his snatch of the Psalm, Din tried to remember something familiar in long-forgotten Sunday-school days. An arrow that flies, yet misses you. "Isn’t there something else, about other folks being casualties, but ——"
"It shall not come nigh thee.”
Din nodded. The daytime arrow had missed. "I hope it’s true.” For the first time in twenty-seven hours he smiled. "Doc, never mind if this sounds crazy. When you visit Joe, tell Mary I’m going to stick around. There’s a chance I may be useful after all. That’s not logical, is it? Better still, tell the Sidi fellow I’ve promised you the criminals will be locked up by this time tomorrow. Tell everybody you meet—the whole grapevine.”
When the physician had gone to battle with his pestilence, Din locked the door and sat down with paper, ruler and pencil. He drew an outline plan of the Maidan square, and then worked out on it a delicate problem of timing. This done, he stripped off his clothes and slept around the clock.
Not until high noon the next day did he emerge from his hotel. And scores of attentive eyes took note that he had changed his appearance. Major Alford was clad again in his American uniform with the shoulder emblem of the state police. His manner also had changed. Briskly he hailed a droshky and drove through the most crowded streets to gendarmery headquarters.
There he found, as he expected, that no one else had volunteered to serve as acting commander. When he announced that he would make the inspection round that day, faces brightened.
When he inspected the guard relief detail, he did something unusual. Requisitioning the four pairs of binoculars available at the post, he distributed them to four gendarmes going to stations on the Maidan. With the binoculars he gave each man brief instruction. After watching the guard detail march off briskly, he glanced at his wrist watch, climbed into the late colonel's jeep and drove himself very slowly the bazaar entrance.
By that time several thousand individuals had observed that Din was alone and in uniform in the jeep. Thereupon he headed the machine into the gloom of the great bazaar passageways. Deftly he squeezed past laden donkeys and curious throngs to the stall of Sulaiman, the antique dealer, with a growing audience escorting him.
Swinging himself into the shop, he greeted the impassive Sulaiman and explained in his best Persian that he had come to pay the twenty-five tomans offered once for the knife.
"I could not leave Isfahan,” he explained even more clearly, "without paying you as I said I would.”
A hundred varied heads around the jeep took note of every word. Sulaiman, with the dignity of a judge acknowledging a confession of guilt, wrapped up the knife.
"And now, Sulaiman,” Din added very distinctly, "you also must do what you promised me. Find the pretended hadji who caused the riot the day before yesterday.”
Heavy breathing testified to the absorbed interest of their audience. For once, Sulaiman looked startled. "But if it please your honor ——”
"Take the hadji to the gendarme at the Street of the Coppersmiths,” Din barked, "in one hour! Or you will be taken as well as he, for blood guilt! ” Sulaiman stared at the mild American who had suddenly become inflexible. Then he plunged out of his stall with a wail, as if already condemned.
Leisurely, under the eyes of his audience, Din studied his watch. After this dramatic pause he estimated that the report of his scene with Sulaiman would be well on its way outward. Climbing back into his jeep, he drove out of the bazaar by the Street of the Leathermakers. Once in the open alleys, he increased his speed.
At twenty-five minutes past one by his watch, he turned sharply back toward the great square, by way of the Mosque of the Shah. Here he nodded to the gendarme on duty and swung out of the shadow into the sunlight by the adjacent goal posts.
Ahead of him stretched the long, shimmering expanse of the erstwhile polo field. He took what might be his last look at it. He was soaked with sweat, and something like a cold cramp clutched at his stomach. Although the sunlit square was empty, every shadowed niche around it seemed to be packed with men. Along the domes and roofs, a regiment of watchers might be hidden. And Din’s jeep rolled out upon the field in strange fashion.
He was timing an invisible rifle, allowing seven seconds for a reckless marksman to line the sights on the moving target. At every count of six, he twisted the wheel or braked or accelerated. Nervous sweat in his eyes blurred his vision.
Past the midpoint of the Ali Kapu throne stand he rolled, keeping his count. Sighting the far goal posts, he made for them. Before him yawned the entrance of the great bazaar, packed with a silent throng. "Crang,” and the air cracked beside his ear. Dust spurted ahead of him and to the right.
A clear miss, his mind told him. Speeding up, he swerved toward the nearest gendarme, wielding binoculars at the entrance. The man shook his head violently. Accelerating, Din raced back to the far side, to the small mosque opposite the Ali Kapu.
The gendarme watching there shouted, "Nothing!”
Swearing softly, Din hesitated. So far, none of his observers had spotted the flash of the rifle.
Then from behind the gendarme leaped the big figure of Arslan, the Gashghai, clutching an Enfield. Pointing violently across, above Din, he shouted, "There! He’s in the Ali Kapu. Hurry! ”
Instead, Din stopped, his eye on the Enfield. Arslan Khan roared at him, "Do you think your gendarmes can spot a rifle against the sun, like this? Move, you idiot!”
"Crang.” Another bullet screamed ricocheting off the metal of the jeep. Wrenching at the wheel, Din started across the square toward the sound of the shot. Behind him he heard a muffled clamor, like a cheer.
Then a third shot. Din, past reckoning what was happening, whirled his jeep at the entrance steps of the lofty Ali Kapu, deserted at this hour by its guard. The sniper would be on the shadowed roof where shahs had sat enthroned.
Forgetting that he had only a bazaar knife for a weapon, he jumped for the narrow stair and raced up the steep turns. At least no one had managed to get away. On the last steps he nearly fell over Sulaiman, crouched against the wall as if trying to shrink through it.
At the summit he ran from the stair into silence. Behind the low wooden railing, shaded by the weather-stained roof, lay a tall man. His shoulders bulked un
der a white sport shirt; worn army boots covered his feet. He had been shot through the forehead and he was dead.
No papers of any kind showed on the body. Under one arm lay a Mauser, numbered, with numbers also for regiment and division. Two empty cartridge shells.... Din’s mind snapped back five years to Highway 7 above Anzio and German prisoners with such rifles and boots.
Sulaiman’s hand clutched Din’s shoulder and pointed to a dirty robe and a loose green cloth shoved against the rail. "Ai, he bought the pilgrim clothes before the riot, from the Sidi brothers in the bazaar. They said he had much money,” cried Sulaiman’s voice, "and they were afraid because he said that in a little while he would give orders, instead of the officers of the gendarmes, in Isfahan. Yet I followed him here as your honor ordered, and I am innocent of blood guilt. But who killed him?”
"Neh mi-danam. Khoda mi-danad,” answered Din mechanically. He did not know; only God knew. This German marksman who must have been a prisoner of the Russians, who had been given a rifle that suited him, and money; who had been a jeering voice among the strikers and rioters, to earn his money and spread the fear of death in Isfahan, he had not shot himself, because he had fired his two shots at Din and missed.
Another voice hailed from below. Going to the rail, Din saw Arslan Khan with rifle poised on the portico steps beneath.
"Did I finish him?” shouted the Gashghai. And then, when Din nodded, "You were a fool to go after him without a rifle. I heard about it and brought mine. Now you can arrest him without trouble.”
Din stared down at the hundreds of human beings hurrying to the Ali Kapu. They were hurrying out of the shadows, laughing and cheering him like children. For the thousand and first time, he felt that he could never understand Orientals.
At quarter past two, with his luggage stacked in the jeep behind him, Din stopped in front of the Rudbar home. In the bedroom, Joe and Mary and the two children greeted him in reverent silence. Already they had heard the news.
"It’s all yours now, Colonel Rudbar,” said Din quickly, before they could speak. "The sniper's in the gendarmery guardroom, and you can start rounding up any others of the gang. Although,” he added thoughtfully, "I'm blessed if I know how you’ll report this to Teheran to make it fit the regulations.”
Joe’s broad face registered newborn decision. "Din,” he said gratefully, "I will tell you. I will wire: ’Unidentified foreigner went mad in midday sun with stolen rifle necessarily shot before arrest by officers on duty time one o’clock and a half, inst.’”
After long years of experience, Din recognized a good report when he heard one. "Just right,” he nodded.
Mary wiped at her eyes. She looked more like Rita Hayworth than ever. "But, Din,” she protested, "it isn’t the truth. You and Arslan ——”
Firmly he clamped his hand over her supple lips. "Mary, your husband knows best. It will be the truth and the whole truth,” explained Din rapidly "because there won’t be any other truth after I confirm it in person at Teheran.”
Then before anything else could happen, he ran down and jumped into his jeep. He took off before they could realize that he was on his way back to Virginia.
Snowbound Interlude
"THEY said everything was wonderful— "zdorovo,” they called it. And then the two of them laughed, as if that was a good joke that only they understood. She said Kmita was a wonderful mechanic, and he called her "Princess.” As nearly as Max could judge, Kmita was about nineteen, Princess a couple of years younger. Nothing seemed to worry them.
When the car skidded around hairpin turns, Princess, who was driving, said this was the finest military highway in the world, and if Uncle Max, the American, could see through the mist, he would see how the gorge fell away one thousand, two hundred and forty-two meters right beside him. What a pity, she chattered on, that Max could not see the magnificent scenery of the Dariel Pass, the highest point on this Georgian Military Road.
She was still explaining about all the American could not see, when the car dived off the road. It did not skid. It just plunged off, and zipped down through the snow until it crashed into a nest of rocks, throwing Max, who was numb with cold, hard against the dash, twisting his leg under him.
Kmita picked himself up in the back seat and laughed. "You are a wonderful driver,” he said.
Princess rubbed some blood away under her shock of fiery hair, and choked, "The road wasn’t there!”
"If I had been driving,” the boy retorted, "the road would be there, under the machine.”
Before the redheaded Princess could answer that one, Max intervened. "From here on,” he growled, "I am taking over this thing.”
He was as old as these two kids combined. During the war he had been around the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf theaters as background correspondent for his Chicago journal; he had never been inside Russia before, and he had drawn this assignment to go through the Caucasus for the human-interest angle in this little-known terrain—to meet the people, his chief had cabled, and forget ideologies—for the reason that he had taught Russian at the university once. He couldn't help it that Princess had been assigned to him as interpreter-guide the minute the plane landed him at Tiflis. And Princess apparently had brought the slant-eyed Kmita along to look after the car. Undoubtedly, it needed looking after, but Max did not feel at all assured that the boy member of this Caucasus twosome was the one to do it—although he claimed to have graduated from the higher technical school at Tiflis.
"What thing are you taking?” Princess demanded at once.
She had a way of using English words as they were written in books, and, furthermore, pronouncing them as they were spelled. Her thin body was wrapped in an army overcoat much too big for it; her gray eyes stared without any womanly misgivings from under that thatch of burnished gold hair; she had no manners of the ordinary sort, and Max had thought her dumb until he noticed how she kept awake at night, when there was a light, to read through the few books he had brought along with him. Otherwise, she resented being taken away from her sociological studies to steer him around. When he said he wanted to talk with all the country people, Princess conscientiously took him around to assorted Georgians, Armenians, Lesges, Ossets, Kurds and Kazaks. And it irritated Max that while his brand of Russian did not go down well with these mountaineers, Princess had no trouble understanding him or them. Carefully, she explained that she herself was Bashkir-born, that all Bashkir women had red heads, while Kmita was a Tatar.
Proudly, she related that the youngster had chauffeured vehicles when the Germans had almost fought their way into the Caucasus, which she called "Kavkaz.” She chattered like a juke box, preferring to practice her English on Max instead of improving his Russian.
"I am going to drive—to chauffeur this machine,” he told her. "Because you have done some very bad driving, and Kmita has been a bum—a bad mechanic to let you do it. Understand?”
The two kids were silent, although they looked stubborn. Reaching over, Max threw out the gear lever and tried the starter pull. Nothing happened.
He thought, if they had any notion of time, if this Kmita had not delayed at the last village, seven or eight miles hack, to inspect some gray buffaloes nosing haystacks, we would he out of the pass now. Aloud, he enunciated, "You have done nothing but delay my journey.”
With an effort he hauled himself out of the car. Particles of hard snow drove into his face, and he turned his back, bracing himself against a fender while he wrestled up the hood. The car was jammed fast against an outcropping of rock angled steeply down, twenty feel from the roadbed.
As far as Max could make out, there was nothing on the other side of the rocks but mist. It billowed past him like smoke from invisible flame throwers. It wiped out the road and the shoulder of the mountain as he looked.
Beneath the hood, the distributor head lay with its wires in several pieces. That, Max thought, has done for this bus.
They would have to be picked up, to telephone. Then he remembered tha
t they had passed no other vehicles since leaving the village, and he could not remember seeing a house or telephone around the Pass of Dariel. Then he became aware that it was growing darker rapidly, although his wrist watch showed only a few minutes to four. He had a feeling as if the unseen snow slopes and pinnacles around him were closing in on him.
Beside him, Kmita was not examining the motor. Watching the mist, the boy listened. "Yakka buran,” he muttered.
"What’s that?”
"First-category, full-strength windstorm and cold,” the girl interpreted dutifully.
Max thought about that. In the Midwest he had had some experience with blizzards. Here, they were parked in a mountain pass three thousand, eight hundred and thirty-one meters up, according to Princess.
Peering around for a sight of timber, he could glimpse only gray mist streamers shooting across a dark sky. The light, such as it was, seemed to come from the ground. The wind, now, was like an iron door pushing against him, driving the ache of cold into his muscles, upward to the base of his skull. Thinking back, he recalled that they had left the forest growth, with its potential of shelter and fire, below them a half hour ago.
Behind him, the two youngsters were jawing in their outlandish dialect. In the crescendo of the wind, he caught only a few words, and these did not make sense: "Two can provide heat better than three,” and "Power, it needs.”
Princess was grabbing the boy's collar, trying to shake him. But Kmita stood solid, looking stubborn, as when Max had called him a bad mechanic. "What’s all this?” Max shouted.
"He says . . . buffaloes . . . their holes in haystacks ... a very bad indication, certainly.”
"Look, you two!" Max shouted, swinging over to the car door. "Cut the cackle! We've got to start walking!”
"Where?” the girl’s face peered up at him anxiously. While Max hesitated, the boy stepped over and felt his raincoat, that had a wool lining under it, and then leaned down to peer at the American’s wrist watch.