They dared not risk even a whisper of English. Their speech was Arabic, but in effect Farrell said, “Red, something is screwy. Why in hell did that gun boat blast our sambuk out of the water? And why did they hose us with a machine gun when we went over the side?”
“Because, like a couple of saps,” countered O’Hara, “we left Tajura in a boat loaded with nigger slaves, and the British patrol was tipped off.”
“But that,” declared Farrell, lowering his voice, “doesn’t account for the persistent search of the whole damn’ town. How do they know who to look for?” O’Hara’s face lengthened.
“By God! That’s right.”
Farrell ceased his coffee-making and probed his loin cloth. He dug out a packet of oiled silk. The papers it contained were faked credentials to enable him to go north to Sanaa, the capital of the fanatic Imam of al Yemen. He tossed the documents in the fire.
“Someone in Cairo got wise that Ibn Saoud is sending us to spy on his friend the Imam. If we’re caught with this evidence, our number is up.”
O’Hara glared at the coals.
“We can’t make it without papers,” he muttered. “But in case we’re jammed up trying to get out of this louse-bound corner of hell, we’d better separate. Chances are better for at least one of us to get through.”
“Right,” agreed Farrell. “Be seeing you in Sanaa.”
The two American soldiers of fortune were making their final coup before resigning from the service of King Ibn Saoud. Their mission was to enter the guarded capital of the king’s enemy, the Imam of al Yemen and find out what strangle hold that sour-faced prince had on a powerful desert tribe whose allegiance Ibn Saoud had thus far not secured. That done, the pay-off; then back to the states, and to hell with Arabia.
Farrell turned again to his coffee-making, but before the contents of the burnished brass pot foamed up to the bell mouth, the door burst open. A squad of the governor’s askaris filed in, bayonets lowered.
“In the name of His Excellency—”
“Nuts for His Excellency,” rasped Farrell, and as he spoke his hand flashed forward, splashing the now foaming, sticky coffee into the sergeant’s face. O’Hara flung himself aside as a ragged volley raked the room. Farrell, kicking over the taper that illuminated the cubicle, hurled a newly purchased duffle bag at two bayonets closing in on him. As it entangled the blades, he tackled low, bowling over one of the askaris.
O’Hara’s lunge from the flank carried him through the doorway and down the gallery.
Farrell snatched a rifle. Plying butt and bayonet, pounded his way to the gallery. The pack wheeled, but he cleared the railing.
A blast of rifle fire spattered slugs about him as he dropped to a tower of baled merchandise stacked in the compound. The group of merchants at its foot scattered in every direction. Farrell, rolling down the heap of bales, dashed for the entrance of the compound.
It was blocked. A squad of askaris guarded it.
“Hell on the sea shore!” gasped Farrell. “Which way did Red go?”
No time to think. But the merchant’s evening meal gave him a hint. Snatching a pot of pilau from the fire, he hurled it at a bearded Arab who was scrambling to his feet. The kettle connected, catching the merchant squarely between the shoulders. He pitched headlong, covered from head to foot with rice and gravy.
“I’ve got him!” roared Farrell diving from the shelter of the bales and toward the prostrate Arab. “Help, O true believers! I’ve got a robber.”
The guard at the entrance charged.
As the law pounced down on the gravy covered merchant, Farrell skirted the wall and dashed toward the exit.
It worked for about three split seconds. Then the sergeant learned what was beneath the pilau. The pursuit wheeled. A ragged volley followed Farrell into the street.
A donkey with a heavily laden pack saddle blocked the narrow street. Farrell stretched long legs, hurdling the obstacle. The pursuit, however, was seriously disorganized. Farrell gained; and to improve the lead, he tried looping and doubling. Each turn stole a yard from the foremost pursuer; but his grin faded as he reached the end of a blind alley. The maze had tricked him.
A blank wall faced him, and not the archway he had expected. Shouts and the pounding of feet around the corner became louder every moment The wall was too high to scale.
An askari rounded the corner. Farrell froze into the shadow of a pilaster, but he was an instant too slow. A whoop, a rifle blast, and a slug flattened against the masonry.
“This way, ya naik!”
The askari paused to gesture to the detachment that followed him. As they answered, he bounded down the alley, bayonet lowered.
Farrell wrenched savagely at a loose block in the face of the pilaster, hoping to brain the askari with a well placed missile. It was slipping. Another tug—
And that was much too good. The sudden yielding threw Farrell off balance, and empty-handed. But during that heart-stopping instant in which he was wondering whether to pray or curse—the only two things left to do—he not only crashed backward against the wall, but through it. A door, un-perceived in the shadows, had flung open, precipitating him into a dark passageway.
Farrell gained his feet with an instant to spare. He slammed the door and shot the bolt home. The alley was now a confusion of voices. And as he crossed the courtyard, the askaris attacked the door with rifle butts.
The house had the musty odor of vacancy.
Farrell dashed up three flights of stairs and to the roof. The bolt of the street door was still holding, but it was time to travel.
He was too far up to dive down into the street in the rear of his pursuers. He dashed to the further coping. From its edge he looked down to the adjoining roof, a story lower.
A plump, full-breasted woman was reclining among heaped cushions, seeking the sea breeze that filtered in from beyond the city wall. She was unveiled. Her broad, sensuous mouth was a crimson splash against the whiteness of her face. Hennaed curls crept from the confinement of a head dress spangled with golden coins. She wore voluminous trousers of scarlet silk, gathered at the waist by a girdle embroidered with gold thread.
A Circassian, judging from her white skin and reddish hair. The number one wife of some dignitary. One yeep from her, and half a dozen eunuchs would make short work of an intruder.
And in the meanwhile, the askaris were pounding the door to splinters. If Farrell dropped to the adjoining roof, and thence to the street, the Circassian woman would betray his direction of flight.
“Might throttle her before she yelps!”
He gathered himself to clear the parapet; but he checked himself as a slender, shapely Syrian girl with swaying hips and long lashed, dark eyes emerged from the stairway and handed the henna-haired Circassian a note. He certainly could not nail both at one swoop.
And then the door yielded. The pursuit surged into the house.
He had to risk an alarm set up by two women.
Luck, however, turned his way. The Syrian maid, dismissed by her mistress, turned to the stairway and faded into its sombre depths.
Farrell lowered himself over the side. He was barefooted. His landing would be soundless. And while the hennaed Circassian’s attention was distracted by the letter she was trying to read by the failing light, he could slip to the shadow of the western parapet without being observed.
Only, it did not work out that way.
Farrell had scarcely landed when he heard a crumpling of paper and an exclamation of annoyance. The Circassian woman was looking directly at him. The discarded note lay at her feet.
“Ayyub!” she exclaimed. “Why—I just got your letter—”
And then she saw it wasn’t Ayyub. Her eyes widened.
Farrell gathered himself to lunge; but she smiled and regarded him with friendly interest.
“Let’s say no mo
re about Ayyub,” she said, beckoning. “It may be just as well that he is conferring with the governor tonight.”
Whoever Ayyub was, his breaking two dates in succession was giving the Circassian beauty vengeful ideas.
Beauty?
Well—a few years ago, yes. Her hips were as generous as her full blown breasts, and nothing shorter than Farrell’s long arms could hold her tight enough to do either party much good; but she had nice features, and tiny feet.
Her appraisal of Farrell’s aquiline face and bare, bronzed chest put an eager look in her splendid eyes.
“With that terrible riot going on next door,” she said, catching him by the hand, “I think we’d better go downstairs. We’d be conspicuous here.”
Before they reached the lower floor, he learned she was Djénane Hanoum, whose husband was in Zanzibar; but though that was a long way off, Zayda, her maid, had arranged to open the vacant house so that Ayyub could follow the route which had saved Farrell.
“Because I simply couldn’t have him come in my front door,” she explained. “I have to be awfully discreet. The governor’s wife is a very dear friend of mine.”
The room into which she ushered Farrell was a grotesque blend of Arabic architecture and European furniture of the gilt-rococo period; but Djénane gave him little time to survey his surroundings.
From a cabinet she took glasses and a flask of arrak, downed a slug of the blistering stuff, and then draped herself around Farrell’s neck. The enthusiastic embrace toppled him over in a heap of cushions. He began to envy the missing lover; but before he could regain his balance, the torrid softness of her body made the problem of leaving Hodeidah less and less important.
Somehow she managed to wriggle out of her pearl-embroidered jacket, leaving nothing but a silk slip between Farrell and that simmering double armful of amorously scented flesh. And when he finally caught his breath, he saw less and less reason for objecting to the match; though he was outweighed by thirty odd pounds, they were well placed…
By dint of straining one arm, he drew her close enough to wake up to the advantages of Circassian upholstery. There was lots of Djénane, and she was alluringly soft and resilient and clinging.
Her lashes shaded her misty eyes, and in the wavering light of a pair of tapers she was becoming lovelier every moment. Her breath murmuring in his ear sent thrills racing down Farrell’s spine…and when one arm uncoiled from his neck to loosen still further her clinging, pearl-embroidered garments, Farrell didn’t know whether to lend a hand or hold her tighter—
But both alternatives were out of order.
The door flung open. Djénane gasped and broke away. Zayda, the Syrian maid, was at the threshold.
“Sitti,” she apologized, “I thought—I’m sorry—”
“Get out, you idiot!” flared Djénane.
But Zayda persisted, “Sitti, the governor’s wife—I didn’t know—”
A chatter of feminine voices and a tinkle of anklets came from the hall. Djénane’s expression changed thrice in as many instants. Then she lifted the lid of a teak chest. Farrell needed no directions. He made it just as the ladies entered the room.
“Darling,” the governor’s wife greeted, “your maid said you were bored to tears, and that you’d like to go to the hammam with us.”
“Awfully sweet of you,” purred Djénane, assembling scattered odds and ends, and doing some swift retouching before her gilt-framed mirror.
In a few moments Zayda had her dressed for the street, and with her mistress was following the invasion out of the house.
Farrell emerged from the chest. He wrathfully cursed the governor’s wife, then decided that it might have been for the better. Find some of the absent husband’s clothes and check out.
His search, however, was interrupted. A hinge creaked. The teak chest was too far away. He snuffed the taper and darted to the shelter of a pilaster. The door slowly opened. He could just distinguish a shadowy, shapeless figure silhouetted against the sky glow filtering in through a barred window.
Farrell poised himself. The robed figure advanced into the gloom. He lunged. They piled headlong across the room and into the cushioned alcove.
But those feminine curves certainly did not belong to any askari! Farrell struck light.
It was Zayda. The gauzy veil could not conceal the crimson loveliness of her lips and the delicate olive oval of her face. And her legs, exposed by the disarray of her gown, were amber-tinted fascinations in the taper glow.
“Ya Allah!” she gasped, recognizing him as she regained her breath. “I thought you’d still be in that chest.”
“Allah be praised, I wasn’t!” countered Farrell, still tingling from the pleasant contact.
“The governor’s car,” explained Zayda, “is the only one in town, and his wife’s friends are so crazy to ride in it there wasn’t enough room for their maids, so I had to come back.”
All of which gave Farrell time to decide that his antics with Djénane had been a bit foolish. A deadly waste of talent.
Her next remark hinted that Zayda had a like opinion on what she had witnessed.
“Are you awfully wild about her?”
“Yes—if she stays at the hammam long enough,” he countered; and to make the point clear, he reached for an armful of Zayda.
The shapeless native robes tricked the eye but not his sense of touch. He simultaneously learned that she was high-breasted, that the inward curve of her waist had been designed for his left arm, and that another instant’s delay in kissing her would have left her smoking. Djénane’s unintentional demonstration apparently had left Zayda a bit upset!
The Syrian girl finally had to break away to catch her breath, and shed her habara and a few other encumbering odds and ends. Farrell saw that his caressing explorations had given him scarcely a suspicion of the ivory-tinted loveliness that now smiled at him through a single layer of gauze. But before he was fairly cross-eyed from trying to cover all her fascinations in one glance, Zayda cut short the sightseeing by drawing him to her torrid lips.
And that was better than any amount of looking…
“Maybe,” she finally suggested, “we could do with a bit of that arrak Djénane Hanoum always keeps locked up.”
The first few gulps of the blistering stuff were hard to take, but as they reached the bottom of the flask, Zayda remembered a quaint Turkish song. Then they hunted and found more arrak. Farrell became very despondent.
“Allah blacken his face!” he cursed, referring to the governor. “I’ve got to get out of town before sunrise.”
Between planning on making the flight a duet, arrak and Farrell contrived to give Zayda a few hints about the governor’s unaccountable grudge against him and Red O’Hara.
In the meanwhile, the taper was guttering to extinction. They both were passably dizzy. Zayda was warm and clinging; and they forgot that the governor’s wife would not stay at the hammam forever…
* * * *
They made a charming picture, some hours later, but not to Djénane Hanoum, who had spent an entire evening wondering when she could break away from the Hodeidah center of gossip.
Farrell, breaking away from a closely fitted armful of Zayda, thought for an instant he was back in the states listening to a police siren.
“Ya mumineen! O true believers! Help!”
Djénane was calling for the guard, and the tiles shuddered. Farrell was the first to reach his feet, but his dash toward the street was hampered by Zayda, who clutched for support and caught him about the ankles. He pitched headlong to the floor.
But it wasn’t the guard that floored Farrell a second time. It was a vase Djénane smashed across his head. And when the city watch arrived, scooping Farrell from the deck was simple enough.
They hustled Farrell down the deserted streets, and through the side door of a pretentious building.
A long corridor opened into an audience room at the further end of which was a dais occupied by a hook-nosed, white-bearded Arab who radiated garlic, attar of roses, and wrath in equal proportions: Shaykh Yussuf, the governor of the city.
“The peace upon you, ya shaykh!” Farrell saluted.
“No peace to you, O son of disease!” countered Shaykh Yussuf. He addressed Farrell by his most recently acquired alias: “Abu Faris, we know that you are a spy sent by the enemy of our Lord, the Imam.”
That deflated Farrell’s last chance of bluff. One stroke of a sword would take the place of evidence and a trial.
Then the governor uncorked his second surprise. He smiled amiably and said, “You may buy your head by serving me instead of Ibn Saoud. My Lord the Imam is holding my cousin as a hostage in Sanaa. You will go there and release him from captivity.”
The wily Imam had secured the fidelity of this official by imprisoning some relative whose head would guarantee good faith. Shaykh Yussuf’s demand hinted that he was preparing to revolt against his overlord, the Imam; but, how could that white-bearded schemer trust Farrell?
Shaykh Yussuf anticipated the query.
“I have a hostage to compel your fidelity,” he explained.
Farrell froze. That must mean that Zayda had been denounced by her jealous Circassian mistress. Her head would answer.
The governor clapped his hands. An orderly left the audience hall. In a moment he returned, followed by a squad of askaris. They had a prisoner: Red O’Hara.
“Abu Faris,” said the white-bearded intriguer, “if my cousin is not in Hodeidah within thirty days, this man’s head will be spiked to the city gate. And I may first have the hide peeled from his carcass.”
Then, to a steward, “Daoud, get Abu Faris some clothing and a mule. See that he gets clear of the guards. And happy journeying to you, Abu Faris!”
“Satan rip you open!” countered Farrell as they marched him away. But as he passed O’Hara, he said, “Hang on, Red. I’ll make it.”
* * * *
A week later, Farrell reached the end of his march to Sanaa, a pearl grey city whose shimmering spires and minarets towered above the verdant Arabian plateau.
E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates Page 46
