“I didn’t say that.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Play ball with dictators. Hold hands with the lunatic fringe of the right so you can keep the lunatic fringe of the left at bay a little longer. Maybe I haven’t had your training, Taggert, but I’ve knocked around some. I saw how the Reds operated at the Benares Conference in India, I got all tangled up in a banana republic revolution in South America, and I put in an unofficial tour of duty in Mecca a few years back, where I gather there’s no American consul at all.
“I don’t have the complete picture the way you have it, but you know what I think? Wherever you go in what you guys call the underdeveloped countries they want an end to the man on horseback and the midnight visit of the secret police so bad they can taste it. But go ahead, play footsie with the dictators a little longer. We can always pull in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and use them as doormats and hope for the best.”
“That’s high-level policy you’re talking about,” Taggert said in a very small voice. “I know nothing about that.”
He said nothing else for a long time. Neither did I. We stared at each other. Then he grinned, and it was still too boyish, but sincere. He took out a pack of cigarettes and lighted one and tossed the pack on the desk. “I’ll leave these with you. Do you really think the room is—ah, bugged?”
“Not a chance. I’ve been over it. I was kidding.”
“Here goes a personal prediction,” Taggert said. “You are looking at a man who’s going to go places in the Consular Service. I look the type, that’s why,” he went on, almost apologetically. “Madison Avenue.” He fingered his tie-pin. “Even, so help me, notwithstanding this little old badge of demerit, I’ll go places in the Service, and I want to Got a little notion way in back of the gray stuff up here—” he tapped his head and his grin now was almost rueful “—that just possibly I can be of some help to Uncle. But to get where’ I have to, to be of what help I can, I’ve got to wear a tight check-rein.”
The smile went away. “I brought you the Consul-General’s message. I asked you his question. Now for crying out loud will you pretty please answer it the way he wants you to?” Taggert held up a hand before I could talk. “Just between us girls and assuming this luxury suite of yours is not bugged, I think the Consul-General is fifty-seven different varieties of a horse’s ass. Now will you please say the words he wants to hear, so I can carry them back to him with my check-rein intact? What you do when you get out of Motamar—if you get out, because I’m not sure the Consul-General’s optimism is warranted, and if you can do anything, which I doubt—that’s your own business.”
So I told the lie he had come to hear. He thanked me. I said I had expected a stuffed shirt and he’d given a pretty good imitation of one at first. He said he’d expected an ersatz tough-guy out of his element almost five thousand miles from home, with a brain as subtle as a cauliflower ear, and I’d given a pretty good imitation of one at first.
We shook hands. “Now let’s see what old Horse’s Ass Smiley can do,” he said.
But the chief of the Scourge of Allah had other ideas.
11
I DIDN’T SEE DR. Capehart again until dusk, when we both were conducted to a larger room where a table had been set for dinner. Motamar fashion, the table-top was barely a foot off the ground. You did your eating reclining on the floor, head propped up on one hand and the other hand free to scoop mouthfuls of dinner out of a big pot with round slices of unleavened bread not quite so hard as armor-plate and only a little more digestible. There were three piles of unleavened bread, which in Motamar meant the table was set for three.
“Looks like we’re going to have company,” I said.
Dr. Capehart was pensive. “Umm-mm.”
“Also looks like we’re being buttered up for something. Got us a tablecloth and all. You think Smiley’s been pulling strings for us?”
Dr. Capehart shook his head. “I know Gerald Smiley. His idea of pulling strings is to spend a week figuring what minimum action he can take to offend as few people as possible, and then reluctantly do half of it.”
“Okay, then you explain this setup. Taggart looked like a pretty sharp cookie, didn’t he?”
“Taggert’s different. I wasn’t talking about Taggert. He’s the best man we have in Motamar. But he takes his orders from Consul-General Smiley.”
We sat around and smoked a few of Taggert’s cigarettes. Pretty soon two flunkies wearing what looked like dirty white bathrobes came in with a steaming cauldron. They set it down in the center of the table and took off.
Dr. Capehart leaned forward and sniffed. “That’s roast kid,” he said, sounding surprised. “Too gamey for some tastes including mine, but a delicacy around here. The white stuff on stop of the rice is yoghurt, and those olives have been pitted for us. We’re being given the full treatment, all right. Why, I don’t know.”
The door opened again. I caught a glimpse of our guards salaaming. Then, still wearing his battle fatigues, El Thamad appeared in the doorway.
I stared at Dr. Capehart. Dr. Capehart stared at me. The gray man gave us his best iodine-bottle smile. “May I join you for dinner?” he asked in English. “I hope our humble efforts will satisfy your palates.”
Dr. Capehart waved him in ostentatiously. “Mit allah wah salan,” he said, which means welcome a thousand times. He said it sarcastically, but El Thamad, bowing and entering, let that ride. I realized that the commander of the Scourge of Allah was doing his best to be ingratiating. Since, with his leathery gray skin and deep-sunken eyes and bloodless lips, he resembled a corpse that refused to lay down and die, that wasn’t easy.
It also didn’t make sense. Why—all of a sudden—did El Thamad have to go out of his way to be nice to us?
We started to eat. Dr. Capehart and I were both big men and hungry. We tore into the kid, rice, yoghurt and olives enthusiastically. El Thamad just picked at his food. Maybe, I thought, he sucks blood.
“I believe, Doctor,” he said, “that you are a surgeon.”
“A plastic surgeon. There’s a world of difference.”
“But you have performed surgical operations as well? Here in Motamar, for example?”
“In Motamar I was everything from midwife to pathologist.”
“And previously in the United States you had been a surgeon?” El Thamad persisted.
“Yes, a long time ago.”
“Where?”
“Johns Hopkins.”
El Thamad rubbed his hands together. They made a dry sound. “Of Johns Hopkins I have heard. A famous medical research center. Once, when King Khalil was a child, he traveled there. He had a curvature of the spine, you see, and the specialists at Johns Hopkins are renowned even here in poor Motamar. Afterwards, King Khalil rode his horse straight and tall. At Johns Hopkins they cured him. That is not forgotten in Motamar. It is believed—it is known—that you are a very great surgeon.”
“Have it your way,” Dr. Capehart rumbled. He wanted El Thamad to get to the point. The Arab way of reaching first base by way of left field was beginning to get him down.
“Good. If you will do us the honor, there is an operation you must perform.”
Dr. Capehart raised a bushy eyebrow. “I don’t have my instruments. They’re in Al Saydr.”
“The operation will be performed in Qasr Tabuk. We will supply everything you need.”
Dr. Capehart shot me a glance. “What happens after I operate?” he asked El Thamad.
“If your performance meets my expectations, you are a free man. Though, of course—as you will presently appreciate—due to the circumstances, you will have to leave Motamar.”
“It’s what kind of operation?”
“Appendectomy. Emergency, Doctor. A ruptured appendix.”
Dr. Capehart’s professional instincts made him leap to his feet. “Then what the hell are we waiting here for?”
El Thamad said blandly: “Transportation. Please sit down. I take it you will perform the operation?”
“What happens to Drum?”
“Didn’t I say? He accompanies you. He reports, afterwards, that you did your best. Then, as with you, he will be a free man.”
“I’ll do it,” Dr. Capehart said. He was smiling at me. I sat there staring at El Thamad. The smile faded from Dr. Capehart’s face. Blandly El Thamad asked: “Something disturbs you, Mr. Drum?”
“Maybe. How did you put it? I report afterwards that the Doc did his best?”
“Correct, Mr. Drum.”
“Isn’t he supposed to?”
“Supposed to what?”
“Do his best.”
El Thamad’s bloodless lips parted. He made a sighing sound which I realized was laughter. “You surprise me, Mr. Drum. You have the subtle mind of a true son of the desert.”
“Then the answer’s no?”
“What answer?”
“Look,” I said, “let’s get to the point some time this year. You know damn well what I’m talking about. You want Dr. Capehart to operate and fail, don’t you?”
El Thamad’s eyes were shut. He said almost dreamily: “I want the operation to be a success. But I want the patient to die.”
Dr. Capehart was still standing. Rage choking his voice, he said: “You’re out of your mind if you think I’ll be a party to anything like that.”
“No Western impetuosity, Doctor,” El Thamad said, and shook his head. “The patient’s condition is very grave. Our doctors in Qasr Tabuk are better diagnosticians than they are surgeons. That much they know. If you refuse to operate, the patient will die. If you do operate, he will probably die anyway. But there is a chance you can save him. A small chance, but one we have to consider. What you must do is consider it and then see that it doesn’t happen.”
“In a pig’s eye,” Dr. Capehart said furiously. He didn’t use the word eye.
El Thamad raised a fleshless hand. “Consider, I said. You operate, apparently doing your best, and the patient dies. Then you are a free man. You refuse to operate, and the patient also dies. Is there any difference?”
“You wouldn’t understand. I took an oath when I became a physician. I took an oath.”
“And I, I have taken many oaths. The latest was before I sat down to dinner with you. I swore to Allah that if you refused me, I would have you killed.”
There was a silence. El Thamad clapped his hands, and one of the lads in the dirty white bathrobes came in. “Shall we have some pomegranates?” El Thamad said. “In Motamar they are juicy and delicious. Their flesh is almost exactly the color of blood.”
Dr. Capehart was outraged. But my line of work wasn’t his line of work. I was curious. I asked: “Who’s the lucky patient?”
With the point of a small knife, El Thamad picked a blood-red berry out of his split-open pomegranate. “Insh’allah, Mr. Drum, do you believe in fate?”
“I believe in the American Consul,” I said. “I think you’re bluffing. You wouldn’t have the Doc killed. You wouldn’t dare.”
El Thamad smiled his ghastly smile. “Twenty years ago there was a riot in my village. I was a youth in my twenties then, and though you wouldn’t believe it now, the women considered me handsome. The riot had to do with the distribution of food, and the side I championed lost.
“They dragged me to the Cliff of Thieves, Mr. Drum. There it is the usual practice to smash the kneecaps of a convicted criminal and drop him over the edge. In my village the Cliff of Thieves was not very high. Usually the criminal lived to have his eyes picked out by vultures.
“My kneecaps, they did not smash. Instead they doused’ me with kerosene and lighted a match. I tumbled down the Cliff of Thieves a human torch. I remember rolling and rolling, and the smell of my own flesh burning. And then there was pain and darkness, and after a long time soft hands and a sweet voice pleading. Her name was Miryam, she was the most beautiful girl in my village, and we were to have been married.
“Insh’allah,” El Thamad went on. “Miryam nursed me. For many months I was as helpless as a babe. We lived in a cave together, beyond the Cliff of Thieves. Something had happened to my jaw. I could not chew, so Miryam chewed my food for me and put it from her mouth into my mouth. Then one day we went out into the pitiless sun together. I was as I am now. Miryam said nothing, but that night she cried and the next night she shuddered when I touched her and the night after that, quietly while I slept, she slashed her wrists and died.
“When she died, Mr. Drum, in a way I died. That is, I stopped caring whether I lived or died. It is bravery to some, but foolishness to others. I am what I am. I may live or I may die, as Allah commands. But don’t tell me I wouldn’t dare. Bravery or foolishness or a lack of concern, call it what you wish. I will dare anything.”
“Who’s the lucky patient?” I persisted. “Thieves fall out? Baki Osman maybe? Or Galib Azam?”
El Thamad waved a skeletal hand disdainfully. “And in this case, whether I would dare or not hardly matters. There are ways the doctor can die, ways you can die, where the blame would be Allah’s, not mine.”
“Yeah. Who’s the lucky patient?”
“I asked you before if you believed in fate. Ever since the Cliff of Thieves, I have.”
“Good for you. Now can we talk about the patient?”
“There was a man named Shafik. This morning Haroun Totah, the opium merchant, died for him.”
“Shafik planted the bomb for you?”
“He was a dynamiter from Lebanon. He has been used there and in Syria as well. He placed the bomb on the royal aircraft. There was a timing mechanism. It could not fail, Shafik was sure. Do you believe in fate, Mr. Drum?”
My mouth was suddenly dry. I said nothing.
“Shafik reported the success of his mission. He was paid. He will never spend the money. He died slowly, and the jackals of the desert are feeding tonight. Do you believe in fate, Mr. Drum?”
“Keep saying that and I may get the idea,” a croaking voice I hardly recognized said. It was my own voice.
El Thamad leaned forward and got it out: “The royal aircraft did not explode. It reached Qasr Tabuk. The fate of the king was not to die by dynamite. The patient is King Khalil.”
12
YOUR NAME IS KHALIL and you are third of the line and your father’s father was a Bedouin chieftain who swept out of the desert fifty years ago to conquer and unify Motamar with sword and fire. You grew up in the shadow of your father, who ruled by his wits and with the implacable cruelty of the desert. He was surrounded by a coterie of lesser sheiks who would have slit his throat as readily as they would have slain an old camel to eat its hard, ropy flesh, except that he never gave them the chance.
Your name is Khalil and your father died in bed, and that is something to remember. At the start of your reign, Aramco and Shell and the other big oil companies laid their pipe across the length of your land to the sea. You smiled the royal smile on their efforts, for their pipelines gave them a vested interest in the stability of your kingdom.
With their blessings, you hired a professional soldier—an infidel from a far country but a man who knew his business and grew to love your land—to train your father’s royal army and keep the peace. Your father died in bed with his three favorite wives at his side and a muezzin wailing the prayer that would lead him to the gates of heaven. Your father was lucky, but you had the oil companies and Falcon Pasha’s Legion going for you, and if the writing on your forehead was not the same as on your father’s, with their help you could make it so.
Your name is Khalil, and you grew careless. You spent less and less time on the hard, parched earth of your kingdom. One day a Greek who owned a fleet of oil tankers that picked up the crude oil at the western ‘end of the pipelines took you aboard a yacht as white as the thighs of the houris in Allah’s heaven, and you sailed with him to the watering places of the West—to Capri and Rapallo and Antibes and Monaco. You had discovered the good life, and the years fled. The saddle-hardened body grew soft, the hawking eyes less keen
, the palate and the loins jaded. But you were living a life your father never dreamed.
Motamar and your own conscience worried you. Wouldn’t Falcon Pasha become too ambitious and too powerful during your long absences? And didn’t the people love him too much?
So you ask the Mufti of Jerusalem, an austere fanatic who secretly scorns your sybaritic life, for help. He sends a man who frightens you, a man with a head like a corpse’s, a ruthless terrorist from the Mahgreb, and under El Thamad the Scourge of Allah is born in Motamar.
Your name is Khalil and there were other places to see, other tastes to savor, other plump white thighs … Under the banner of Motamar-e-Alam-e-Islami, under the rallying cry of “cling to the cord of Islam and be united,” El Thamad husbands his power. In your name and in your absence, he acts. With its back to the wall, the Legion fights. Fifty pounds heavier than the day you boarded’ the Greek’s white yacht, you return to Motamar and civil war.
Urged by El Thamad, you fly from your palace in Qasr Tabuk to the big port in Shughur City, where the Scourge of Allah is mopping up the infidel Englishman’s Legion. You see enough, and the royal aircraft is readied for your flight back to Qasr Tabuk.
It takes off and flies low over the desolate mountains. A bomb with your name on it in letters of treachery does not explode.
The Legion’s bomb? Or the Scourge of Allah’s?
Your name is Khalil, and you do not know.
“It make sense to you like that?” I asked Dr. Capehart aboard the DC-3 an hour out of Shughur City.
He scowled out the dark window. El Thamad sat in a club chair in front of us. Our voices didn’t carry over the roar of the DC-3’s two big engines. “Up to a point, I guess it does,” Dr. Capehart admitted. “But if the bomb fizzled, and obviously that’s what happened, why didn’t Khalil let his people know he was still alive?”
“He was afraid to. He’d been out of the country a long time, don’t forget. He didn’t know who to trust. Show himself to the wrong people, and the Scourge of Allah would come running, sword in hand. Or look at it this way. El Thamad’s hatchetman brings the good news prematurely to his boss, and El Thamad goes on the radio with it. Which is when Khalil really knows he’s up the creek without a paddle. Because if his death is publicly announced and the assassin executed, El Thamad would have to see that he stays dead.”
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