E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action

by E. Hoffmann Price

  The town was ignoring the war. It had ignored it to a degree which had shocked Rayne. Though the eight-sided Ezbekiyah had not been festooned with neons, it might as well have been. Pompous-looking pashas, rolling by in long, sleek cars only conceded to Rommel’s air force the flattery of blue headlights. In side streets, marriage processions still wound heedlessly along, torches flaring. Until this evening Rayne had not suspected the true state of affairs.

  Too many merchants of Cairo had figurative welcome signs for Rommel on their doorstep. That made things bad for sailors on shore leave.

  Rayne, with a bottle clutched by the neck, fairly swooped toward the battle. Excitement brought out his last reserve of energy as he swung the bottle.

  “Ruh, ya kilab,” Rayne yelled, and cracked down on a felt skullcap.

  A police whistle shrilled.

  For a time there was no sound in the darkness other than heavy blows and the other noises of furious combat. The sailors continued to swing their fists recklessly, letting go at every head they saw.

  After his first shout and efficient use of the liquor receptacle, Rayne had intervened no more in the battle. He had an excellent reason for this. A chance wallop from one of the seamen had laid him down in the Egyptian mud, stunned and breathless.

  The men from the ship continued to use their fists with effect. Soon their assailants began to dodge away. One of the seamen now had opportunity to speak to his companion who, likewise, had backed up against a wall.

  “That feller who helped us out with the bottle,” growled the sailor. “He ain’t no pansy. What d’ye say, friend? Shall we check out of here like he did? The cops is on the way.”

  “Aye, aye, shipmate,” responded his companion. “Let’s shove off quick.”

  And they merged into the shadows just as the police rushed into the street from another direction.

  Rayne, still groggy from the punch, was unable to get away either. In addition to the blow a kick from a hard shoe had nearly knocked him unconscious. The police approached, flashing lights upon the scene.

  The scattering thugs distracted them. By the time they collared one prisoner, and given the others up as a bad job, Rayne had crawled painfully into the angle of a wall. A flashlight played on the arena.

  One of the khaki-clad policemen seemed surprised.

  “Wallah, this was the grandfather of battles,” he said. “One of these dogs has a crushed skull. Doubtless he sings in Paradise at this very moment.”

  “Infidels did this thing,” a groggy ruffian mumbled through shattered teeth to a policeman. “Allah knows we were innocent.”

  “Silence, thou father of thieves,” snapped the policeman.

  One of the officers flashed a light into the alley. He saw Rayne. So did the man with the thickened mouth.

  “There’s one of those sons of pigs,” he cried. “They wore Feringhi clothes.”

  One man lay dead, one badly gouged, one in need of some dental work. And there in the angle rested Rayne, just recovering from his bruises. Thus he seemed to be an ideal candidate for a scapegoat. Spectators came flocking out of houses, although thus far no one had emerged from Kassim’s place.

  Assembled policemen held a conference in Arabic.

  “Wallah, this fellow wears Feringhi clothes, still he doesn’t look like one of them,” they said.

  “He’s an unbelieving dog,” muttered the man with the broken teeth. “He stole my purse.”

  “But he’s not one of the men who were beaten up by the infidel,” muttered a policeman. “Who can he be?”

  They hoisted Rayne to his feet.

  “The peace upon you, but ruffians knocked me down,” he gasped, with difficulty. “They kicked me in the stomach. Allah, first I am booted asunder, and with the father of all boots, and now they accuse me.”

  “By the prophet, a true believer,” the cops exclaimed. “Which way did the infidels run?”

  Things looked better for Rayne.

  “Allah knows all things, but it seemed that way,” he answered, pointing in a wrong direction.

  Then Kassim waddled out.

  “O Men, what is this thing?” he puffed. “Who makes these riots?”

  “Wisdom is with God.”

  Kassim squinted at Rayne. “This fellow lies like Iblis, the condemned. He is a friend of the Feringhi. He sat at their table.”

  “Let us take them all to jail,” decided the policemen.

  Well, things could be worse. Though Grandma would shudder, bailing her grandson out of jail, Rayne figured he could live it down. But a real wallop knocked the relief out of him.

  From the doorway opposite Kassim’s lurched a man who reeked with mastika. “There’s the eater-of-filth who stole my bottle,” he bawled, as he stumbled and wove through mud and offal. “O True Believers, make him return my bottle.”

  That fatal bottle! It had killed a man and Rayne’s fingerprints, whether sharp or blurred, were nevertheless on the glass neck. This looked like it would be something from which Grandmother could not extricate him. The old lady’s influence did not carry weight enough with the pashas.

  Rayne made a lunge. He tripped one policeman and cold caulked another. The uniformed men had barely hit the dirt when he was darting into the darkest of the Muski, and he thanked Allah that he knew where to go.

  The effects of the kick and the punch had worn off and he moved easily, lightly upon his feet. After him followed the police and various idlers, like a pack of hunting dogs, raising their voices in wild yells. But this did not bother Rayne. He thanked his stars for the training of his youth and a thorough knowledge of the furtive alleys of the city.

  He went through murky passageways, around the corners of wooden shops, past shadowy buildings, twisting and turning, but holding to a general direction. Pedestrians whom he met were careful to draw back and give him room. For this was the East where a man’s business is his own, and they knew not what crime he had committed or what weapons he carried.

  Rayne headed for the more lawless sections of Cairo, knowing that in such a section on general principles, all men aid a fugitive from the law.

  In a few minutes by skill and quick wit the sounds of pursuit had died out and he had lost the howling pack. Then he swung around another corner and halted, leaning against the side of a building in the dark. He was breathless but calm. For a few minutes he waited, regaining his wind.

  Then he sauntered off as if nothing had happened. And as he strolled along, he was thinking hard.

  Rayne was not old, but he had not become a master mechanic by having folks pat him on the head.

  Battered and half asleep, he began to reckon the score. Kassim and his loqanda were off color. That the ambush had occurred so near the place proved nothing. But it was odd, during the riot, no one had come out of Kassim’s to get a look until the police had arrived. And then that effort to connect Rayne with the seamen, when Kassim knew well that he, Rayne, had been rebuffed as a prying foreigner.

  His last waking thought was, “When I can think straight, when I’m not so dopey, I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Again weariness seeped through him and he longed for rest. His course now took a definite direction. He turned his steps toward a ruined mosque with which he was acquainted and soon stopped before the wide steps of the deserted building. Further along was a coppersmith’s bazaar but not a light showed either there or here.

  Rayne slipped down along the structure out of sight. Halting before a door he cast a quick glance up and down the narrow lane. No one was near. In a minute or two he was inside the mosque. It was pitch dark inside but he managed to find a clean corner which would do for a bed. In a minute or two he was settled down and composed for sleep. He had a last waking thought.

  “Tomorrow, when I’m not so tired and dopey, I’ll find out what became of those missing tank parts,” he sai
d to himself.

  Rayne passed the night undisturbed in the mosque. At dawn, awakened by the muezzin’s call to prayer from another mosque nearby, he crawled further into the crumbling masonry and caught up with some more sleep. After the bedlam of the tank shop, the sounds of the market failed to disturb him.

  Not until mid-afternoon came had he rested enough to notice the discomfort of his rocky bunk. This told him how correct had been Colonel Mitchell’s diagnosis, and how near Rayne had skirted utter collapse.

  He plunged his head into a nearby fountain. His hat was gone, and in Egypt, running around bare-headed is a worse breach of etiquette than roaming about without pants. So Rayne lost no time in buying a tarboosh. Then he got out of that quarter of Cairo.

  Near Khan el Khallili, where caravans from the Soudan used to unload gum and leather and ostrich plumes, he found a loqanda. Here he ordered sour milk, cucumbers, and a flat cake of bread. Borrowing an Arabic newspaper from the proprietor, he read an account of the previous night’s fray as he sipped his coffee.

  The two sailors, Walt Kearney and Robert Irwin, were in jail. They had been held in connection with the death of Zahir-ud-Din Mohammed, a resident of the Kordofan Bazaar. In addition to this, one Abu Najeeb, who had been severely cut by broken glass, was in the Ismailia Emergency Hospital. Kassim, restaurant proprietor, stated that the two sailors had come in with a bottle of mastika, and had left in a quarrelsome mood. Therefore, the street fight had not surprised him, Kassim informed the police.

  Since every paper in Egypt is government controlled, this was official. It bothered Rayne. According to that version, the actual owner of the bottle, despite his loud protests to the police, did not and never had existed. Neither could the seizure of the bottle by Rayne matter much to the police since Rayne, likewise, had no official existence. All of which seemed odd to say the least.

  “Kassim, is a liar,” Rayne told himself. “Kearney and Irwin didn’t have a bottle, and he knows they didn’t.” The only reason Kassim could have for building up a case against two seamen would be that he had some good motive for covering up the fact that a gang had jumped the sailors at the first alley beyond his place. But why cover that up?

  Rayne had two guesses: first, the Garden was a deadfall; or, the men had during their brief visit said or done something which made their disappearance necessary to Kassim. What made Rayne want to follow through was the fact the two seamen might know more about the Iron King and her cargo than they had let on.

  Still puzzled, Rayne left the restaurant. His chief needs were suitable garments in which to carry on his investigations.

  Wandering from shop to shop, he bought sandals here, baggy trousers there, and elsewhere, a jacket. In a ruined house he made a quick change. Then he resumed his tour of the bazaars. When it was done, Rayne had become a lemonade and cigarette peddler, raucously offering his wares to the shoppers who crowded the narrow street.

  The customers he really wanted were in jail. The official smoke screen and the distortion of facts told Rayne anyone trying to get in touch with Kearney and Irwin would be blocked by miles of red tape.

  Whoever, consul or otherwise, tried to investigate would surely run into a yarn about the prisoners having just been shifted to such and such station. So Rayne asked no questions. He settled down to patient guessing.

  At each station, he gave the man at the desk free lemonade and a pack of cigarettes; there was similar baksheesh for the jailer. This detail settled, he was allowed to peddle his wares to the prisoners.

  CHAPTER III

  The Toils of the Law

  It was near sunset when he found the two sailors in the tank with half a dozen natives.

  Rayne pretended a lofty scorn of the seamen. “Have these two infidel pigs any money?” he asked the natives, in Arabic.

  “Ya Allah, they have,” was the answer. “We tried to rob them, and they kicked us breathless.”

  Kearney and Irwin indeed looked as though they had been battling for their rights. So did their cellmates.

  “Then stand back, little brothers, and the blessing of Allah upon you,” said Rayne. “I speak their language a little, they will think I am a friend. Watch me loot them.”

  “God give you strength,” came the pious wish, and the natives edged as far away as, they could.

  Rayne addressed the sailors in dragoman-English.

  “Lemonade, Mister,” he inquired. “Cool and freshing. Fine Egypt made cigarettes, cheap.”

  “Go jump in the lake, you greasy swab.”

  The other, seaman nudged his companion.

  “Bob, don’t you remember this guy? Only he was wearing white man’s clothes then.”

  For a few moments Rayne continued his patter. He displayed his jug, his greasy little cups, the packages in his basket.

  Then, in Americanese, “Dish out a bit of small change and keep on cussing me out. I told the others I was out to give you a rooking.”

  Red-haired Kearney offered a piastre. Rayne babbled for more.

  “Who are you, anyway?” asked Kearney.

  “Army Intelligence. You fellows are buried so deep no consul will ever find you, but maybe I can give you a break. You’re wanted for murder.”

  Both sailors started; their faces changed. “Cut it out, brother.”

  “Gospel truth,” Rayne insisted. “It’s not in any English or French paper in town, just in the Arabic papers. The whole yarn is phony. Dig up some more dough, and take some cigarettes. Keep up the game, and growl at me a little.” They wrangled and bartered. Rayne winked at the interested native prisoners, elaborated his gestures.

  “Wait until this unbelieving fool gives me a one-pound note and wants his change,” he smirked.

  Meanwhile Kearney and Irwin carried on. “How come we went to that dump, Kassim’s? A dragon-man or something met us on the train and said he’d show us around reasonable. In Suez, a black fellow gave us cards, be sure and go to Kassim’s and was it a washout when we got there. That’s what we were sore about, no girls, nothing but that arrak.”

  “Do you remember the dragoman’s license number?”

  They did not. Tourists should, but never do, take their guide’s number. Rayne went on, as he palmed a pound note and slipped it to Kearney.

  “When I start walking out, wave this folding money, call me back, and buy something. I’ll take the money and run out on you, and you yell and raise the roof, like I’d robbed you. Get it?”

  They did. “All right,” Rayne continued. “Now what were you fellows talking about before I came into Kassim’s?”

  “About the cargo of the Iron King, how lucky it was they salvaged all those spare parts for tanks. We were in port when she was being loaded, back home. We knew what she had.”

  “I’ll do my best to get you fellows out,” Rayne promised. “Do you know any more about the cargo?”

  “No, how would we? Except it landed at Suez.”

  “Okay. Go into your dance.”

  The act was good. The prisoners got several packs of cigarettes, and Rayne made off with a pound Egyptian, worth close to five American dollars. The cursing was an inspiration. And the native prisoners howled with glee.

  Mike Rayne grinned at the sergeant, tossed him a piece of silver, and went on. The sergeant caught the backsheesh on the fly, and thought it was a grand joke.

  * * * *

  That night, Rayne sat in a restaurant, eating an eggplant and mutton stew. He mopped the gravy with a flap of leathery bread, and wished that he had time to take the interurban train to Grandma’s house. But for the time, he was too busy piecing together the information Irwin and Kearney had given him. Though it did not seem important, actually it was dynamite.

  First, runners in Suez handed out cards to merchant marine sailors with shore leave to Cairo. Second, a dragoman met them in Cairo to guide them to the spot, and appa
rently, managed to get them moderately drunk on the way. Third, two men who discussed the cargo of the Iron King had narrowly missed being murdered. And fourth, after escaping from ambush, they had been jailed on false testimony largely concocted by Kassim.

  Rayne did not know whether to tell Colonel Mitchell, or carry on alone. The colonel, in his official capacity, would have to confer with whatever officer handled much matters. Then that man would confer with the British, who in turn would have to take it up with some of Egypt’s swarm of pashas. These tricky scoundrels would decide it was consular business, and the merry-go-round would keep whirling.

  Meanwhile, Rommel was kicking up sand in the wrong direction.

  “A short circuit,” Rayne told himself, “may blow some fuses, but it is also the shortest distance between two points.”

  To save time and avoid lengthy explanations, he had been forced to tell the sailors he was Army Intelligence, and they had accepted it. Rayne hated the deception but there had been no other way. Now he figured it might be wise to make that harmless lie a temporary truth.

  Rayne hurried away from the jail and turned his steps back in the direction of the place where he had left his clothes. He nearly dropped his lemonade peddling kit when he approached the place where he had made the change.

  A crowd had gathered and the police were bringing out of hiding the shoes and suit which Rayne had concealed.

  Now it turned out in his haste, he had not performed the task as well as he should have done.

  The hat, lost in the alley brawl, must have started the search. Rayne raised his voice, adding to the chatter, but got no customers. Then he edged into the crowd. Whether the police had found the wallet he had buried under a loose slab, was not certain. But if they had, Rayne’s identity would soon be disclosed by cards and papers.

  As nearly as he could gather, however, an American cigarette, in the side pocket of his coat, along with the stamped corner of an envelope mailed from the States, told them what brand of infidel was on the loose.