by Harold Lamb
When he offered Razin some of the juice and bread, the other drank and ate mechanically. Seizing a moment when the radio grated louder than usual, Mike whispered, "Sergei Razin, when you lectured to the geology students you used to walk to the end of the platform to look out to the yard.”
"Eh?” Lost in his thoughts, the archaeologist stared. Then he smiled. "Yes. At the fountain. It never had water in it.”
Then Mike knew this was the real Sergei Razin.
Oblivious of anything except his ruins, hardly conscious of Mike's presence, the professor peered at the design on the altar, murmuring how this city had been different from others because it had been built by refugees from war or persecution, who had kept the secret of their sanctuary, apart from the empires of the outer world.
The moon rose over them. It clothed the skeletons of the ruins with illusion. Mike tried to shake off the stupefying drowsiness that gripped him after his long stretch of sleepless hours. The unendurable heat was lifting a little with the moon’s rising, and he had accomplished what he came for . . . the walls abound him looked real, as if people were sleeping behind them.
He felt a tug at his arm. In the gray light before sunrise, the director, Kavtaraz, sat on the altar by him, examining Steve’s .45 automatic.
"Durak” said he, "dumbhead—carrying a pistol with an American Army number.”
Stiff with bis numbing sleep, Mike grumbled in his best New Yorkese, "Hey, what gives? ”
"You understand me well enough.” Kavtaraz spoke casually in Russian.
"Last night you listened to us. Grishka noticed it. When he told me about the fires, you looked to see where they were. I don’t understand how anyone could be as dumb as you are.”
Reaching down with one long arm, Kavtaraz jerked open Mike’s shirt and the flap of the pouch on his belt. Drawing out the passport, he studied it intently, and smiled with a gleam of stainless steel.
"Well, that explains it, Mikhael Mailenin. A Finn from Washington, only four days ago. Nobody seems to have troubled to change the name or date. Well, Mailenin?”
It was all true enough. Razin was no longer there, but somehow Mike didn’t think that Razin had said anything against him. Probably he was off gathering up his precious specimens.
Examining the automatic curiously, Kavtaraz slipped the safety lug and fired a test shot. From a brush-grown break in a wall a brown-and-white gazelle streaked away. Quickly the Russian sent a burst of shots after it.
"Carries high,” he grumbled. "Too much kickup.” To the silent Mike he added," Well, dumbhead, who sent you after us in such a rush? You’re awake now. I’d like to be told that before we leave you, my amateur play actor.”
Mike thought, Steve said, 'Don't show that pistol unless you have to use it.' Aloud he said, "Speak English if you want any answers.” He did not mean to give any answers.
The shots did not seem to interest the other Russians, who were starting to break camp. Mike could only lie there like the dummy Kavtaraz called him, and listen to them.
Then Grishka stepped into the shrine to tell the director that a pair of Kurdish tribesmen had appeared in the square below.
Surprised, Kavtaraz motioned Mike to come with him, and stepped into the ruined hall, telling Grishka to stand by the gun, and telling the other mechanic to take the radio out of sight, to give the visitors some off-stage music.
He was obeyed immediately. Mike thought that, except for Sergei Razin, these were all trained soldiers, and not scientists. And since they no longer seemed to care what he heard or saw, he did not think they would leave him alive behind them.
For a moment, at the head of the steps, Kavtaraz scanned the square below, where only two men stood, rifle in hand, watching him. They were young and bearded, poised like animals in their loose smocks.
Kavtaraz seemed satisfied by what he saw, because he ordered one of the drivers to call down to the visitors that he wished to see the khan of the Sakari Kurds; that he had food for them, and weapons to trade.
Beside him, Grishka fitted a belt methodically into the gun while he waited for the two tribesmen to reply. Suddenly stone splintered near them, and a man shouted in agony.
The violence of the sounds broke into the silence of the Hamun like a stone into still water. Mike saw it happening at the altar, where Sergei Razin, crying out, caught at the technician who had shattered the figures on the altar with his rifle butt, evidently to clear a space to set up his radio.
The man knocked Razin aside and put the machine in place, as he had been ordered. Kavtaraz called sharply to Razin to stand clear, then started to run to the struggling men.
"Look out!” Grishka yelled.
Mike never knew if the Kurds had played the oldest trick in the world by sending out the two men to draw attention from their attack or whether the fight at the altar had stirred them to it. They came through the breaks in the ruins, shadows beneath the glare of sunrise. They came leaping like animals against the sudden blast of the guns.
Mike hardly realized what he saw. Kavtaraz went reeling past with blood spurting from his face. He almost fell over Sergei Razin, who caught up his roll of paper and bag instinctively. Catching Razin’s arm, Mike headed away from the ruin of the palace, running for both their lives. Neither had a weapon, and perhaps that was why no shot came their way. Dodging through the broken buildings, Mike angled back to the square.
There he heard concert music blaring from the abandoned radio. He heard the rifle fire, back in the ruin of the palace. With Razin he took the only chance left, and ran for the jeep.
Around the trucks, some tribesmen—mostly boys and unarmed old men—were tearing off the tarpaulins. They threw out a packing case that broke open, spewing out the parts of greased new machine guns, and they snatched at these as if they were gold. Mike was able to get into the jeep and start it and circle out of the square.
At the obelisk he swung left. At the entrance arch he stopped, listening. The music sounded faintly; the firing had ended. But now there was a chorus to the music—wildly shrilling voices.
Listening, Professor Razin nodded. "Kavtaraz was carrying coined gold and new-model weapons to the outlaw tribes of Afghanistan,” he said. "I knew that when I agreed to come.”
He was trembling with tension, but no longer seemed to be afraid. Holding his papers and specimens carefully, he stepped from the machine and thanked Mike as if he had just been given a lift along the road. "You are kind, my friend, but I shall stay here to finish my work.” He smiled. "I hope to prove that it is really a city of refuge.”
For a second, Mike thought that shock had made him hysterical. Then Razin explained. Because he had refused, twelve years before, to work for what the party in Russia called socialist realism, Sergei Razin had been put out of the party, his library taken from him and his work ended. He could no longer talk with his former friends, or buy books, or enter a museum. So, living alone with his memory, he had taught himself to work from memory. Until this summer, when they had promised him he could journey out to explore the site of the city he had seen in the Hamun. Razin had yielded to that temptation. "It is not likely,” he said quietly, "that I would be allowed to live if I went back. Not under the circumstances. ”
"Sergei Razin,” said Mike, "you can come with me to New York. There you can work in libraries and museums too.”
The scientist was silent. Then he shook his head. He showed Mike his paper and a pencil with which he could write down his notes. Somehow, he believed, they would survive.
There was no arguing with him, Mike said. He could not escape from the memory of those last years. He had only one hope, to stay in the Hamun.
I’ll never forget Mike’s voice when he made this report to me after he got back to New York, the two of us walking through the crowds in the park. I thought what a crazy world we lived in, where a hunted human being could find refuge only in a ruin beyond the deserts.
"He was the man, for sure, Jim,” said Mike. The peeled skin of his
face was a mask over jutting bones. He said slowly that the great scientist had been killed by a single rifle shot after six days of work in the ruins. Mike, who had stayed with him, made a grave for him under the archway and scratched an inscription over it: Sergei Alexievich Razin, President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.”
"I have his notes, Jim, here in the park.” His seared eyes probed into me. "Now will you do one thing, please, for me?”
Would I? "Sight unseen, Mike,” I told him, "I will.”
Mike whispered, "It is for a friend. Steve and the other kind boys arranged so I could bring him back on the airplane.” The gray eyes appealed to me. "He will need a name, and to be an American citizen. Is it okay?”
I looked at Mike, and said yes, it was okay. I watched him walk on quickly to the bench where a thin, white-haired man sat alone, holding a roll of papers, staring at the kids sailing their boats on the pond as if it were some strange sea. The old park looked good to me just then.
I heard Mike say to his new friend in Russian, "As I told you, it will be done. Now we can go to the museum.”
Watching them, I wondered whose skeleton might be buried in that grave in the Hamun, and I wondered at what a Finn would do for a friend.
Queen of the Mountains
BY seven o’clock there were only two adult passengers left in the first-class carriage of the Tabriz-Julfa train. The others had departed because the train, creaking up a rock ravine, was climbing into the mountains by the Caspian Sea, where, according to report, a local war was about to break out.
One of the remaining passengers, Maj. Rufus McCoy, of the United States Army, proceeding north on a mission of inspection as technical adviser to the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie, glanced out of his window thoughtfully. Along the nearby road under the chalk cliff he beheld one-way traffic—a stream of human families, bicycles and tottering carts, all heading south away from the mountains. That kind of traffic, in the major’s opinion, meant panic spreading under the sunset glow; he had watched it before, leaving the mountains back of Catania, Sicily. Although it was then the stifling month of August, more than a year after V-E day, a small war seemed to be making with the mountain folk ahead of the train, and Sergeant Ardalan advised the major to turn back toward Tabriz and safety without delay.
That the American officer had not done so already was due to his youth, inexperience, stubbornness and growing interest in the other passenger. A lady of his own age, with a dark elegance that would have drawn male eyes on the Place de Opéra, she was obviously frightened. With her head turned to the window the length of the car away, she watched him, and she kept her trim dressing case and costly sable jacket close under her arm, as a woman does when ready to run.
Although the major had served only two months at Teheran, he knew that Asiatic women of such distinction did not usually travel without escorts and a detail of servants—especially toward remote mountains beyond which lay only the forbidden frontier of the Soviet Union. Fondly, Mac, as he was identified by his fellow soldiers, imagined himself playing the role of protector to this fair passenger in distress.
Then, at five minutes after seven, hid daydream was interrupted by destiny.
The lady was escorted only by a seven-year-old son in a velvet jacket who had been occupying the aisle by launching attacks with a shining toy tank against the target of Mac’s comfortable aviator pull-ons. When this miniature tank—an excellent model of the German Tiger—reached its target, the dark-eyed child gave forth with "Brrr-ang," simulating fire from the tank’s cannon. Now the toy broke down and failed to respond to impatient twisting of the key.
Observing this, Mac picked it up, although the kid held to it tight, ejaculating, "Non, non! Donnez-moi, M'sieu Flic."
Flic was good Parisian French for Flatfoot. The toy itself, Mac noticed, came from Geneva, Switzerland, and he wondered where the toy came from. "You’ve jammed the bogies, kid,” he diagnosed the trouble.
"Amir!” called the young Indy, coaxing. "Amir!"
The boy, Amir, gave no heed to his mother. Scowling and holding tight, he watched the big American operate on the tank’s tread with a penknife until traction was restored. The major had a liking for mechanical gimmicks.
"Wind it easy, kid," he cautioned in the only language he knew. "That's a good one. A Tiger.”
"Well done, constable,” responded Amir, shifting easily to English. W'at is 'Tiger'.'”
Twice, Mac reflected, this impetuous young citizen of the world had called him a cop. Reminiscently he explained to Amir some of the virtues of the dangerous German tank. Having mastered the details of the best tank, Amir demanded to know what was the worst.
After considering. Mac said the Italian Fiat Ansaldo. A pile of tin junk, he said, and repeated the old gag about knocking over a Fiat by creeping up close and sneezing hard.
"Kih?" inquired Amir, mixing his languages. "You do 'ow?”
Mac illustrated, using the model. Whereupon Amir told him, "My king father ’as more better than all—les grands chars.”
Absently the major wondered what kind of father would be equipped with big tanks. The train had ceased its creaking to stop at a concrete-cube station where an eddy of human beings clutching rug rolls and children closed in on the engine. Immediately Amir trained the Tiger’s cannon on the new target of the mob.
With a swirl of dust, Sgt. Yusuf Ardalan entered the car, sweating in his new uniform of American wool. He had been riding with their vehicle, a small car, on the flatcar, and he held out a telegram flimsy inscribed with Persian pothooks that the major could not read.
”Well,” observed that officer, "what now?”
Inwardly the major believed that his new outfit. the Iranian Gendarmerie, rated close to zero as a state police: at the same time he suspected that Ardalan, his new driver-interpreter, had small faith in foreign technical advisers.
"Sir,” intoned the stocky gendarmerie sergeant briskly, "this talagraf arrives just now to order immediate protective custody for Madame Badr Khan and son, the same to be escorted safely back by you to Teheran, from which they have made fugitive escape. Signature is His Excellency, Minister of Interior."
Carefully, Mac asked, "Just who is Madame Badr Khan?”
With soldierly snap, the sergeant pointed down the car. "Here with us, sir, she is single wife of Badr Khan, paramount head of Sabakhs Kurds, now revolting under arms.”
That explained the mystery of his fellow passenger. Rapidly Mac pieced together her line of action. Warned, perhaps in Paris, to get home with the boy—probably in school in Switzerland—before the trouble broke, she had traveled light by plane; trying to slip through to her mountains, she had been traced to this train. The polite words "protective custody” meant she would be held in Teheran as hostage for the actions of her husband, Badr Khan. What kind of deal would that be for her and the kid?
"Now, sir,” broke in the sergeant impatiently. "while you arrest madame quickly, I will deter-rain our vehicle.”
"Um." Aware of the lady’s dark eyes on him. Mac rubbed back the sandy bristle of his head. Considering the situation, he decided it smelled faintly. His official boss, the minister in Teheran, wanted the lady badly, and she knew it. She was not afraid of the wilderness outside the train; she was afraid of him, Rufus McCoy. If he yanked her off the train, she would become a political prisoner by his doing. Would that stop the tribal outbreak?
Mac shook his head. "Sergeant, our duty happens to be to inspect the gendarmerie road posts.”
Fishing out his map, the major searched for the most distant post. "See this town of—uh —Sabakhs? 'That’s where we’re going.”
The sergeant did not argue. Quietly, he exploded. Didn’t the major know, he protected, the Suhakhs post was cut off already, with its personnel of twelve probable casualties? By now the only safe way out for the American officer was to keep madame close to him while they drove out of the mountains, as of now.
"Sergeant, you said something.” Mac considered an
entirely new plan of operation. "Let’s pick up the lady for a shield," he said, "and get going.”
A glance from the window showed him that the swarming crowd seemed to be holding the train at the whistle stop. Pulling down his tunic. Mac went over to Mrs. Badr Khan and her boy, telling the sergeant to explain that he wanted to give her a lift home.
She had been peering into her compact mirror, pretending to fix her make-up, but watching him. Now the color drained from her face.
"Sir,” explained Ardalan curiously, "she says she has jewels in her case and furs in her coat. She says take them, hut don’t touch your finger on her.”
So the dark lady did not know an American uniform when she saw one. So she took him for a gendarme. "Tell her,” Mac retorted, "we’re not thieves.”
A scent of dried flowers hung around her. Unexpectedly she smiled up at him. and Mac’s pulse accelerated.
"She says, then, do you make war on women, sir?”
The young woman flushed, but she still smiled and made a lovely picture.
"Hell,” breathed Mac.
At this point the boy, Amir, jumped in front of his mother and gave out in his mixed languages. "Va-t’en, constable! Go away from here. My king father will come for maman with t'ousands of ’orsemen and les grands chars”—he brandished his toy tank—"after first killing all of you dead.”
Amir was somewhat spoiled, Mac reflected, being the son and heir of a local ruler. His father could hardly have any tanks in these backwoods, but they said this Kurdish leader had graduated from Oxford. Mac remembered seeing Badr Khan once speeding through Teheran in a sport car, a fine-looking guy with his bodyguards tailing him in a truck—a hard man to size up.
Squatting before the boy, he said. "Look, Amir, I’d rather not be killed dead. I’m taking you and your mother home to Sabakhs. Tell her I'm not a gendarme, but an American officer, and I mean it. Understand?”