Assignment The Cairo Dancers

by Edward S. Aarons

  "What is your name, dog?" he asked the guard.

  "My name is known to Allah, blessed be His name."

  "And is Mohammed his prophet?"

  "All men know this." The Arab giggled. "And all men know a Second Prophet has been named by the Blessed One."

  "I would like to meet and talk with your Prophet."

  "Such a blessing may be granted to you." Again the giggle rasped like a fingernail drawn across slate. "You may not welcome the vision, effendi. It may blind you. Or leave you less than a man, eh?"

  The guard suddenly made an unmistakable sweep with his knife that threatened Durell with mutilation. Durell stepped back, and the Arab grinned.

  "This makes all men afraid. And how is the houri today?" He turned his head to regard Lisl. "She is very beautiful, and could be amusing, I think."

  "On your life," said Durell.

  "Who knows what will be done with you, effendi? I have a feeling we are all forgotten."

  "Then your friends have gone?"

  The man grinned. "Ah, no. There are thousands with me, all about us!"

  He whirled suddenly, spinning on his dirty, naked toes, and flashed his knife in glittering arcs while a strange ululating song came from his throat. He leaped forward at Lisl, seized her, and held her in an obscene embrace for just the instant it took Durell to start for him. The Arab released her and threw her to the dirt floor and jumped to the doorway with a scream of defiance, laughing as he bolted it again from the outside. His guttural screams came for another moment, then ended.

  Durell knelt beside the cowering girl.

  "Are you hurt?"

  "N-no. But he is quite mad, isn't he?"

  "It's the hashish. You can smell it on him."

  She said desperately: "Can't we get away? I'd rather die at once, than stay like this. Don't you want to escape? You could have tried just now—"

  "And should we abandon your father? They'll take us to him, eventually."

  "Oh. I see. You're willing to risk it?"

  "That's what I'm here for." He took the bowls of food and said, "It's time to eat. Whether you want to or not, you must. We may be here for some time, and I'm hungry enough to eat worse stuff than this."

  She shook her head. "I couldn't. I'm all upset inside. Here we're in this awful place, with no decency, no privacy, like two animals in a cage—"

  "The animals are out there, Lisl. Eat."

  The heat built up rapidly as the sun rose in the sky. In an hour, it was all they could do in their airless little room to keep breathing. Durell made the girl lie flat on her back,~ and warned her not to exert herself too much. The following hours were a nightmare, as yesterday had been. He had to concentrate on simply staying alive, and their chances did not look good now.

  He thought that something had gone wrong with the Dancers' organization. It was possible they were to be abandoned in this lost and hellish place. The same thought came to Lisl after a time. She got up and crawled to the thick paneled door and pressed her ear to it. She listened for a long time, then turned her pale face toward Durell.

  "No one is out there. I don't hear a sound." Her voice lifted. "Have they just left us here to die?"

  It occurred to Durell that the Dancer guard would hardly go off without Lisl, who fascinated him. But he did not add to her burdens by pointing this out to her. Just the same, he felt a twinge of anxiety and joined her at the door. It was true. There was only silence.

  "He must be sleeping," he suggested.

  "Can we get out, then?"

  "I don't know if we should. It's a gamble, Lisl. If we try to escape and fail, he'll have an excuse to kill us. And if we succeed, we may never find your father again."

  She said dully: **We won't find him, anyway, like this. It's hopeless. I know what's going to happen to me."

  He began to think she was right, and for some moments considered abandoning his plan by making an effort to escape. Simply as an exercise, to keep his mind from the stupefying heat, he prowled the hut to look for a way out. He spent an hour going over every inch of the stenciled walls, and another half-hour using his belt buckle and his shoe, which were all he had that could be used as tools, to dig through the hard-packed floor. He might as well have scraped at iron. After long minutes of sweaty, exhausting effort, he had gained less than half an inch at the base of the back wall. Lisl offered to spell him, her interest aroused, but he told her to save her strength. It was useless. There was no way out. As for the door, it was too solid, and he could find no inner hinges or means of getting through the thick planking.

  And everything was silent outside.

  Through the night, he felt the ordeal steadily sap his will and strength. Another day or two, and he would no longer offer any obstacle to the Dancer, if he were still out there, when he tried to take Lisl.

  Lisl slept in his arms again, her mood changed.

  "We're going to die here," she whispered. "How can you be so calm about it? Are you really so brave?"

  "I'm just as afraid as you are, Lisl."

  "No, you have courage. And even if you are cruel, too, you can be gentle. You helped clean me of my hatred, do you know? I hated Papa and never listened to anything good about him, even when in my childhood I believed him dead and good riddance. But you showed me the other side of the coin. You are willing to admit he might be innocent. You are willing to hope and believe. You made me ashamed, and at first I turned my hatred against myself. But that is wrong, too. We are all just victims of these events."

  "You're growing up, Lisl."

  "If you've been thinking of me as a child, I am not. I am a woman."

  He smiled as he held her. "I'm aware of that."

  "Then don't treat me as a child. I know we are going to die here. Something went wrong with their plans and we are abandoned here, and they don't care what happens to us. We can't escape. We'll die of the heat and thirst here. Isn't that what you think, too?"

  "I don't know."

  "And if we are going to die—" She paused. She turned in his arms, trembling, but not with the cold now. "Sam, we have so little time left. ..."

  He kissed her, meaning to be gentle with her, but her arms came around his neck and she responded with a wild passion that was startling at first, and then it evoked an inevitable response. The hut was cold and dark. Silence enveloped them.

  "Sam . . ."

  She kissed him and moved beside him in the darkness and he felt the sudden silken shock of her bare thighs against him and the soft and urgent pressure she exerted. They were alone in an empty sea, a desert that lifted and fell in frozen waves, waiting with sullen hostility to destroy them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  NO ONE came to the hut in the morning. They had no food and no water. Silence waited beyond the dark ugliness of their primitive prison, an echoing vastness beyond the imagination. When the sun came up, the heat struck with toxic, incredible strength, dulling their senses until they each had only a desperate urge to survive. Hunger and thirst turned them into torpid entities, waiting only for the end.

  It seemed that Lisl was right. They were deserted.

  Toward noon, he made up his mind that the worst had happened, that something had really gone wrong with the Dancers' plans. He and Lisl were forgotten and ignored. He had no choice now. It was no longer a matter of remaining a willing prisoner in order to follow the trail to its end. The end had another meaning now. If they were to survive, he had to escape.

  He spent the long hours digging with bloody fingers and hands, using the belt buckle and his shoe, at the hard dirt floor. It was as adamant as the walls of the hut. He knew he was draining precious strength with the effort, but there was no help for it. When he had to stop and rest, Lisl took up the labor.

  By nightfall he had dug only a shallow depression eight inches deep. The base of the hut wall was still sunk somewhere below his reach.

  The little oasis was silent outside. An occasional whimper of a vagrant wind made the sand hiss against the do
orway. On that next night, Lisl lay quietly in his arms. He was alarmed about her. He could not guess at the limits of her endurance, but considering her recent trials, he did not hope that she could last much longer. His own thirst was very severe now. Hunger cramped him, and the cold of the desert night had a new intensity. Lisl spoke very little, and her mind turned back to dim memories of her childhood. She tried to recall anything she could about her father, but Dr. Hubertus Steigmann had fled with the Nazi collapse, when she was still in her infancy, and she could remember nothing. She had spent her life in compensating for the evils done by her country, and she still felt a sense of national guilt, but Durell had ignited a spark of hope for her father's personal innocence. She talked of this gratefully, and then she slept, her breathing light and shallow, and he held her quietly and let the long night hours drift endlessly by.

  On the morning of the third day, he was desperate. The thick silence continued outside the hut, echoing with strange ringing noises he heard within his mind. He knew the toll of thirst and hunger was taking effect. When he looked at Lisl, he did not think she would live to the next dawn.

  He continued to dig at the base of the back wall. No one came with food or water. He made the girl sit quietly when she offered to help. The heat was too much for her, and he worked alone.

  Toward noon, when he had to stop, gasping, stripped to the waist and slippery with sweat, he heard more ringing noises and the sounds of a drum and the high ululation of someone's song. The singing was repetitive, starting on a thin high note and drifting down and down, then pausing to begin again its atonal notes at the top. He thought it was all in his mind, a fevered impression so real it made him believe someone was dancing and singing out there. . .

  Lisl gave no sign that she had heard the sounds. In the dark oven of the hut, she lay with her eyes closed, her breath lifting and falling in a shallow rhythm.

  The tambour was distinct, the thin ululation clear and somehow menacing. He covered his ears and heard only the thud of blood that surged heavily in his temples. When he took his hands away, the singing came clearer.

  It was no delusion. Someone was out there. Someone had come back to the oasis.

  Or perhaps had never gone away.

  Perhaps the Dancer had simply enjoyed an exercise in subtle Arabic cruelty, displaying patience of an exquisite type in letting the last two days go by without visiting them.

  "Lisl," Durell whispered.

  She opened her eyes.

  "Lisl, he's still out there."

  "The guard?"

  "Can't you hear him?"

  She sat up, her face taut with strain. At last she nodded. "I thought it was in my dream."

  "He's out there, all right." Durell wet his parched lips. His mouth felt full of cotton. "He's coming this way. He's waited it out, Lisl, you understand? To weaken me, and make sure that we've been abandoned by his bosses. Now he's dancing out there in the sun, and coming for us. We'll have only one chance."

  "What can we do?"

  "Kill him," said Durell.

  "Can you do it?"

  "I've got to do it."

  "But if you fail—"

  He looked at her, and she understood, and she gathered herself together to stand up. She wavered on her feet and leaned heavily against him. "What do you want me to do?"

  "Encourage him, Lisl. Occupy his attention."

  "How far?"

  "As far as necessary."

  She looked away and made a curious gesture to tidy her thick, pale hair. Her skirt was badly torn and her long, tanned thigh showed through the rents. She wore only her bra and skirt in the black heat that Slled their little prison.

  "I'm not very enticing," she said ruefully.

  "Call him," said Durell. "He might dance for hours out there, otherwise. And we won't last that long. Call him now."

  "All right, Sam."

  His weapons were several, after all. He had his shoe, his belt, and the tiny tube of nerve gas he had taken from the hollow heel of his shoe when he first awoke in this place. He decided against the gas. In this confined cell there was every chance that he and Lisl would also fall victim to the stuff, which worked instantaneously. It had to be the belt, then. It could be as lethal a weapon as any.

  Lisl stood at the door. At his nod, she cried out loudly, putting a plea and a promise in her words that could not be misunderstood. At a signal, she paused, and Durell listened. The thud of the drum and the shrill singing went on without pause; he could hear the stamp of feet in the dust as the Dancer sang his song of praise to the Second Prophet of Allah. There was a mad ecstasy in the singing that worried Durell. Perhaps nothing could penetrate the man's frenzy.

  Lisl called out again and beat feebly against the hut door. Durell made her wait. The music and song went on, but the beat of naked feet in the dust outside was just beyond the panel now, and when he pressed his ear to the door, he heard the heavy breathing of the Dancer as he whirled in the harsh sunlight beyond their prison.

  "Once more," he whispered to Lisl.

  She nodded and called again, "Please, can't you understand? I need food, water—I'll do anything. . . ."

  It was questionable whether the Dancer understood English. But there was no mistake about Lisl's meaning.

  The drum stopped abruptly.

  The man's breathing was like that of an animal in heat, just beyond the thick panel, quick and hot and harsh.

  There was a shrill scream of triumph that shattered the hot silence like a lance hurled through glass. Durell flattened against the wall beside the door, winding his leather belt into a garrote between his hands. Lisl retreated slowly to a corner. She looked young and helpless, without defense. But her eyes trusted him and pleaded with him not to fail her. When the heavy iron lock suddenly rattled, he nodded.

  For some moments, the door did not open. Silence flowed back. Not even the Dancer's panting breath could be heard.

  Then, with a flash of speed, the Dancer burst open the door and in the glare of sunlight that temporarily blinded them, he leaped in, legs bent, the knife flashing in a wild, deadly arc around him. He landed with a thud in the center of the hut, beyond Durell's reach as he stood against the wall. A shrill yelp of triumph came from the man's twisted mouth and he made a gurgling sound and thrust and jabbed the knife menacingly at Durell and shouted something that could not be understood except by the devils to whom the man prayed.

  "Effendi, do you hunger? And do you thirst, little one? Ahmed brings you life and joy! Ahmed brings you the peace of death!"

  There was no chance of taking him by surprise now. His wild leap, which would have done justice to a ballet master, had carried him in a single flashing movement beyond reach to the other end of the hut. Lisl had no chance to escape. The man giggled and reached out for her with a claw and caressed her shoulder. But his eyes flashed like white crescents as he watched Durell.

  "Did you miss me, habibiT' he crooned. "Did you long to hear my steps, bringing you drink and food? I have much food, my white dove. Much wine, although Allah forbids it, and sweet, cool water from the well, so cool it makes the drops bead on the pitcher, delicious as it slides down one's throat "

  "Please, please," Lisl moaned.

  "I cannot understand your words, habibi," the Dancer grinned. "But you are a true pearl of Paradise for one who follows the Second Prophet, even as he promised us when we made our vows to follow him."

  "Do you speak of Selim El-Raschid?" Durell asked, to distract him.

  "I speak of Allah's anointed one, the true messenger who will spread fire and sword throughout the world, if the world fails to accept him." The Dancer paused and giggled again, then suddenly reached out to pinch at Lisl's rigid body. Lisl obeyed Durell's instructions. She did not move. She even managed a weak, uncertain smile at the evil-smelling man with the flashing knife.

  Durell was accustomed to the glare of the sunlight now. The day was later than he had thought. The Dancer had left the door open, as if to entice him, and he
saw again the empty squalor of the hamlet gathered around the oasis, the dusty palms and tamarisks, the sand-colored huts and mud walls baking in the hot sun under the brazen sky. There was no car, no camel in sight. The empty dunes beyond were like giant waves frozen in waiting, waiting to crash and fall and bury the tiny, ghostly settlement.

  "Sam . . ." Lisl breathed tightly.

  "Let him do what he wants."

  "I don't know if I can endure it."

  '*It won't be long. Keep him busy."

  "I—I'll see if I can."

  The Dancer paid no attention to their words. He put his knife between his teeth and pulled Lisl toward him; his odor, like that of a tomcat, filled the hut. But those flashing crescent eyes never left Durell, who knew now the speed and precision with which this man could move, faster than any enemy he had encountered before. The Dancer, with a swift clawing movement, hooked a finger in Lisl's bra, tore it free, and flung it aside. Lisl moaned softly. Her arms were rigid at her sides. Durell knew he could wait no longer.

  "Dog, there is no pleasure in a frightened woman," he said quietly.

  "There is pleasure even in a dead one," the Dancer said. His teeth shone as they gripped his knife. His words hissed around the steel. "You will stay there, and not interfere. Your turn will come later."

  "You're not afraid to do this, without your friends to help you?" Durell taunted.

  "They are all gone, effendi. And tonight I must go, too."

  "Are we forgotten, then?"

  "By Allah and by Shaitan, too, but not by Ahmed, the Dancer-for-God." The man grinned. "So you are both for my pleasure and your pain. Why does the girl moan so much?"