"You cheat me! I will cut out your heart!"
And, astonishingly, there was a knife in Amr's thin hand, a slim, curved blade with an ornate, jeweled handle. The steel flickered wickedly in the cone of smoky light over the table. Everything seemed to explode: chips, cards, thick bodies all tumbling out of the way.
Only Durell sat still, facing the danger.
He looked up at the congested face and the knife-point at his throat. He kept his hands in plain sight, flat on the table.
"I did not cheat you, Bogo."
"You lie! It must be so. I never lose."
"That's because your friends see to that," Durell said.
"Eh? What do you say?"
"You're a rotten poker player. You shouldn't be allowed near a professional table until you've learned the rules of the game."
"No one speaks to Amr like this!" the boy shrieked.
"I do. I will. If nobody else will tell you the truth, I will, Bogo. Now put that knife away."
There was a moment's pause. The Arab's body trembled in the storm of his passion. Yet the knife was held steady. Durell knew he was very close to death.
Then Amr whispered, "You are not afraid?"
"Of course. Only a fool is not afraid."
"Yet you sit here and tell me I am a poor player? You dare to insult me?"
"It was not meant as an insult. Only as advice. And the truth."
"You did not cheat? On your honor?"
"On my honor."
The fox face grinned cruelly. "I could kill you, anyway. I would not be punished for it. No. I am too important to your government. They would find an excuse for me. They would call it a schoolboy prank."
Durell's voice hardened. "Put that knife away, Bogo."
"You speak as if you give me orders/'
"I do. I've had enough, Bogo. Put it away, sit down, and play cards. Or get out."
MacTivers' voice rumbled out of the smoky background.
"God. boy, be careful. He's a savage in schoolbov pants—"
Durell moved. His hands were quick flickering, strong. The edge of his palm cracked against Amr's wrist in a stashing blow. Old Jonathan had taught him what to do against a man armed with a knife. Durell was fast and accurate. The blade went spinning to the table, shone evilly on the green baize. Durell swept it to the floor and stamped on it, broke it. And stood before the Arab prince.
"I'm sorry, Bogo. I've had enough of you."
Amr ibn Alid al-Maari breathed deeply. His eyes flared. He hated Durell. And then something changed in him. He shook his head. He picked up the pieces of the knife. He began to laugh softly and said something in Arabic that Durell, at that time, could not understand.
"We will be friends," said the Prince of Jidrat.
Durell reached the Hotel de la Paix without incident. No one followed him. The desk clerk had an envelop( foi him. He waited until he was alone in his room before he opened it. Inside the envelope was four thousand dollars in American currency and a series of airline tickets to Rome, Athens, Ankara, and Jidrat. There was no message, but none was needed. He knew the envelope had come from Haggarty.
At five o'clock he got his rented Fiat from the garage and drove out along the lakeside highway toward Lausanne, following the northern shore of Lake Geneva. The city already exhibited its flare for notorious night life. The Genevese, Durell thought, originally reared in the traditions of John Calvin, whose pulpit still stood in St. Peter's Cathedral, had come a long way from the Protestant sumptuary laws. He drove past ornate villas and the vast, mausoleum-like piles of igue of Nations' buildings. His thoughts swung back to Bogo and a frightened girl named Zoraya.
He had first met Zoraya on that night when Amr had come to the room near MacTivers' place where Durell lived during his undergraduate days. Amr had been upset. His thin, arrogant face had been perspired although the October New England day had been raw and bleak.
"Sam? Cajun? Can you come with me?"
"Where?" Durell asked. It was late in the evening and he had been reading law and thinking of bed. "What's the trouble?"
"I must go to Baltimore."
"Baltimore? Now?"
"I must get a look at her."
"At who? What are you talking about?"
The prince explained impatiently. The Imam Yazid Abu al-Maari, his grandfather, had sent him orders. He was to visit Zoraya, the daughter of a powerful sheik—a man educated in England. Zoraya's mother had been English. In any case, it was part of the Imam's old feudal policy of arranging political matches this way, Bogo said. His eyes were shifty. Durell did not think he was getting the whole story.
"Of course," Amr said, "I can have four wives, and concubines if I wish, later on."
"Lucky you," Durell said. "Will you marry this Zoraya?"
"I must see her. I must obey. Will you drive down to Baltimore with me?"
"What about classes tomorrow?"
"Don't worry," Amr said. "I'll fix it."
Durell did not doubt that he could. He went with the slim Arab because Bogo seemed to need a friend, and because, for all the youth's bravado, it was plain that he was frightened, even desperate.
They were in Baltimore an hour before dawn. Near a private school for girls that was surrounded by a high stone wall. The driveway ended in an ornate iron gate that seemed insurmountable in the moonlight. Beyond the shrubbery Durell glimpsed, from the car, a wide sweep of lawn and the blind eyes of ivied windows. The place seemed to be impregnable. There was a brass plate with the name of the school, but it was in the shadows and he could not make it out. He watched Bogo get out of the car.
"What do you do now?"
"We wait," Amr whispered. "Someone will bring her."
"Just what do you expect to do, anyway?"
"Talk to her. See what she is like."
"Do you have any choice in the matter? I mean about marrying her, Bogo?"
"Not now. But I shall. The Imam Yazid rules, at the moment. I am considered only a boy, a schoolboy. But I will not have my choice of brides dictated to me!" Amr spoke with abrupt ferocity.
"She might be pretty."
"I am not concerned with that."
"And intelligent."
"One does not seek a mind in a woman, my friend."
So they waited.
The prince paced up and down the road in the growing, brightening dawnlight.
At last he spoke again. "There. The slave brings her."
"The slave?" Durell asked.
"Do not be shocked. We have slavery in my country. All correct and legal—in the order of things—according to the Qur'an and the Prophet."
There were two figures hurrying toward them. Women who were veiled and muffled, looking odd, somehow, in their Western-style coats in the chill of the October morning. Durell, in his role of spectator and companion to the prince, could only watch with curiosity. His attention centered on the slight figure beside the hulking woman. He was undoubtedly shocked. He was aware of enormous frightened eyes, upon him. And he had a feeling that this was only a child, not more than twelve, playing the role of a woman.
There were mutterings in Arabic; the tones of a quarrel; a sharp haughtiness in Amr's manner as he addressed the woman attendant. She seemed reluctant to agree but terrified to cross the prince's wishes. Durell wondered how Amr had arranged this clandestine meeting in the first place, and then he remembered Bogo's imperious way with people and money. He was not surprised when the older woman fell back and the slight, fearful girl stepped into the car.
"Get in," Amr said in English. "Please drive, Sam."
"Where?"
"Anywhere. I must talk to her."
"This is a hell of a way to arrange a date," Durell said.
"But I must learn what she knows about the Imam Yazid. There is treachery here, I think, and I would not like to be the last to know about it, while I am in this country, playing at being a schoolboy."
Thinking about it as he drove along the shore of the Lake of Geneva years late
r, Durell remembered that those were the days just before Hitler's war on mankind, when Middle East intrigue still had a flavor or romance and faraway mystery remote from the ordinary world of a Yale man.
The girl had been submissive. He had never succeeded in erasing her from his mind. Most of all, he had been impressed by her enormous liquid eyes, her small face, her humble manner that somehow held a tiny spark of freedom and individual identity.
Durell had driven aimlessly toward the Chesapeake shore that, in later years, during his work in Washington, he came to know so well. At Prince John he found a lane that led to the water's edge and he parked there, somewhat amused by his role as chauffeur, wishing he could understand the mut-terings in Arabic that came from the back seat.
The girl's voice was thin, like a flute; anxious at first, almost inaudible, then rising in surprise and anger. Then she was silent for a long time, even when Bogo's voice lifted in shrill, authoritative rage.
Bogo finally opened the door and jumped out of the car and stood on the road beside Durell, who remained behind the wheel.
"I don't know what to do," Amr muttered.
"What's wrong? What are you trying to get at?" Durell asked.
"This girl . . . she thinks I can believe . . . Oh, you don't understand, Sam, how it is with my people."
"What are you sore about, anyway?"
"Perhaps she has too much English in her—from her mother, I suppose. She says she will cling to me, no matter what happens."
"Is that bad?"
The fox face grinned, marked even then with the shadow of future weakness and evil. "I have rejected her. When I choose my wives, it is I who will pick them. It is not for you to understand, Sam. It is a matter of my honor."
"She's pretty young to worry about it, anyway."
"Zoraya is old enough. In my country she is a mature woman, ready to bear children."
Durell, who had fumbled with girls in the Bayous before coming north, and who had dated Westover girls in Connecticut, found it all somewhat incomprehensible.
"Wait here/' Amr said. "I must think. I will walk. Wait."
It was a beautifully clear dawn. Durell remembered it distinctly—the way the light lifted like a curtain over the broad, calm reaches of the Chesapeake. There were the cries of gulls and the sudden rush of wild ducks in the reeds. There was a mist over the water that turned to pure gold. It was warmer here than in Connecticut. Durell lit a cigarette and settled behind the wheel, watching the prince walk in dejection, hands jammed into his pockets, until he was out of sight.
Then he became aware of the girl's tears.
It seemed to him that the sounds she made were like the thin cries of a wounded bird.
He twisted around on the seat and looked at her small, huddled figure in the brightening daylight.
'Take it easy," he said awkwardly. "Can you understand me?"
"I am sorry. Please do not tell Amr that I wept. Yes, I speak English. And French and Spanish."
"I see."
"You are a good friend to Amr." She made it a statement. "He told me about you. I am afraid we were not polite, speaking so you could not understand."
"Here. Use my handkerchief," he said.
She blew her nose like a child. "I am sorry. Forgive me. I am—what do you call it?—rejected. Jilted."
"There is plenty of time to settle things."
"No, he will persist. He will not believe me when I . . . Even if I could make him love me, later on, he will not have me."
"Why?"
"Because it is his way."
"Perhaps you should be happy about that."
"Oh, no! He will recognize me some day," the girl said. "I will be patient. Some day he will need me and call for me, and I will be ready and I will go to him."
"Are you in love with Amr?"
She was silent. Her eyes reflected the gold of the morning sunrise. He looked at her and saw the strange confusion in her of child and woman—half sobriety, half mischievousness. Her eyes were tawny, liquid. Her face, half-molded as yet, partly screened by dark, tumbled, bedewed hair, considered him soberly from under her scarf.
"You are a good friend. Did Amr tell you I am his wife?"
"No."
"It is true. We were married four years ago."
"But.. "
"Yes, I was only eight. But such things are done in my country." She laughed, almost giggled. "I can remember Amr now, sitting on all those cushions on the barada, glass-eyed, half-drunk with qat. They gave it to him to chew. He was so funny then, I—" She paused, and the tawny eyes darkened. "But something happened. There was fighting, and before the sun set I was taken away by some men who were enemies of my father. They held me in the desert for three days. And Amr, ever since, will not believe I was not really touched by them. Do you see? His honor, he thinks, has been injured. He will not accept me as his bride. He will never forget it. But I will never stop trying to persuade him."
"Then you do love him," Durell said.
"You are a kind man," she said quietly. "You are Amr's best friend, he told me. Some day, perhaps, you will be kind to me, too."
"If I get the chance," he said.
"The time will come. I know it. I shall never forget you." She paused. "Amr loves me. He listens to me, even now. But he will not yield." Then she smiled. "I won't forget you, either, Sam Durell."
In the long years since that dawn, Durell remembered Prince Amr al-Maari and the child-woman, Zoraya. He finally taught Bogo how to play poker, but Bogo returned to Europe that summer and transferred to the Sorbonne in Paris; later, when Hitler's armies smashed across Europe, the little Arab fox vanished for the duration of the war.
Afterward, however, Durell occasionally saw the small, handsome face in newsreels and society pages, and each time the sharply defined features seemed less clear, slowly growing bloated with dissipation and self-indulgence. It was said that Prince Amr's income measured a hundred million a year. For a short time he ran his sultanate with enlightened care, only to return it back later to his grandfather, the Imam Yazid.
Bogo never married. During the postwar years he brought his tiny nation out of the darkness of feudalism, changing it from a harbor for pirates, slave-runners, camel traders, and shepherds to an oil-rich land that eagerly embraced every vice of the West and every warped ideology of the East.
There was a time when Zoraya's pursuit of her desert prince made fine grist for the society columns and the social sycophants of Europe. But never had Zoraya's photograph appeared with Amr's. He continued to reject her. He refused to see her. Yet he did not choose the easy path of Moslem divorce.
And Zoraya moved into obscurity, her face denied to news photographers. For Durell she remained the child-woman of twelve years on that misty-bright morning on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
You can never go back, he thought.
Whatever Amr was today, the Yale undergraduate was gone. And whatever Durell had become, as he drove his Fiat along the fine Swiss highway toward Lausanne, he was a far distance from his bayou boyhood and his years in New Haven. He had even come a long way from the relatively simple days of service with G2 and the old OSS. He had been manipulated, by time and circumstance. He had been at war too long, he thought, fighting in this secret war of sudden death in obscure parts of the world.
Like his opposite number here in Geneva, Major Kolia Mikelnikov, Durell had become a professional, a specialist, a finely honed weapon for defense, a deadly mechanism for assault. He would probably stay in the business, he thought, until he ended, through a tiny, momentary error, like John Blaney, in Jidrat.
Very dead.
Chapter Five
The Hospital of St. Homerius was midway to Lausanne in a piny valley on the upper slopes of an Alpine ravine. Dusk had turned the surface of the lake to lavender. Up here, a cool wind blew and hinted of the ice of the glaciers on the summits much higher up.
The hospital was one of those small, private retreats dedicated to the peculiar affli
ctions of Europe's rich. The main building was a large log chalet. Smaller cabins were secluded in pine groves along bark paths.
Dr. Franz Gehman-DeWitte made no objection when Du-rell sent in his name via a prim, starched receptionist. There were rows of chaises on the chalet's balconies containing bundled, motionless forms, like mummies turned carefully to face the setting sun, as if in some religious ritual. Nobody conversed. A hushed, exhausted silence hovered over the place.
Dr. Gehman-DeWitte looked exhausted, too. A thin bearded man with the avaricious eyes of a racketeer rather than a doctor, he sat glumlv behind his desk and smoked a cigarette in an elaborate filter holder. He stood up briefly as Durell was ushered into his office, and listened, again with an air of exhaustion, when Durell introduced himself and asked if it were possible for him to see the Prince of Jidrat.
"No, not possible," DeWitte said promptly. His English had a strange Bronx flavor. "Item one, Prince Amr saw no one, absolutely no one, while he was here. He refused all interviews, all contact with the other patients, refused to cooperate, refused to take medication, refused to act like a rational human being."
"You put it all in the past tense, Dr. DeWitte."
"Correct. He is gone. This morning. And good riddance."
"Doctor, I would like to be sure this is not just another measure used by the prince to avoid people while he . . . uh ... is resting here. He would like to see me. I am an old friend."
"You don't look like one," the doctor said sourly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You do not appear to be a man addicted to drugs, women, liquor, or any other dissipating vice known to men—although your prince, I admit, has invented several new depravities of his own."
Durell smiled. "You seem happy to be rid of him."
"I am. He is an animal."
"But with a fat wallet."
"I will never accept him here again. I do not care who knows it. I could not endure such ignominies, such tantrums, such grossness, such inhuman cruelties."
"Surely he can't be as bad as all that."
The doctor drew a deep breath. "I divulge no medical confidence when I tell you the prince came here in a delirium induced by drugs, exhaustion effected by over-indulgence in rather exotic sexual exercises, and an acute case of indigestion. God knows what he eats. The man is grossly overweight, flabby, neurotic, self-indulgent. His blood is poisoned, his liver is enlarged, his thyroid is totally abnormal. And you say you are his friend, M'sieu Durell?"
Assignment Zoraya Page 4
