"Yes. Only twelve," she said bitterly.
He felt a vast well of sorrow deepening inside him. He held her closer. There was no way to bridge the worlds that lay between them. In Zoraya there was a deep and terrible struggle between the blood of her English ancestors and the blood of her Arab parents; between everything she had been trained to be, all she had been taught to submit to, and the Western world that she had lived in, in exile, for so long. There were the years between them, too. He did not know what to say to her that might comfort her. Words were nothing—like the gusts of wind that threw the sands of the desert around the truck and buried them in the howling darkness, making the silence inside the cab all the more intense and pitiful.
He kissed her again, and this time her lips were quick and warm and demanding. He felt her whole being pressing against him, wanting him, like a cry of despair against the inevitable fate she knew waited for them when the dawn came.
Perhaps she was right, he thought. Long ago he had taught
Amr to weigh and calculate the odds of a gambling throw. The wise gambler knew how to call a halt and cut his losses when his hand was too weak to win. All he had here with him now was Amr, and Amr was too weak, too crushed by what had happened to him when the Al Murra lashed him like a common slave back there in the desert camp. How could he hope to have this man stand up tomorrow against the wild mobs of revolution in Jidrat? It was too much to ask. He had no idea of what the situation in the city might be or of how he could use Amr when the dawn came.
Yes, they might all die tomorrow.
He held the girl closer and felt the warm wetness of her tears on the cheek against his face.
The wind blew and the sand hissed against the windows and the night closed in around them.
Chapter Fifteen
The wind reached out from the desert and blew clouds of turbulent sand out to the sea and screamed over the city of Jidrat. At ten o'clock in the morning all fighting had stopped, all living creatures had sought shelter from the biting, stinging elements. The wind found the open corners of Faiz and came tumbling into the palace, blowing draperies and tapestries, overturning light furniture and screens, whistling through windows and spreading sand everywhere on the polished tile floors.
The Imam Yazid could not sleep. Sleep came with difficulty to an old man of his years, he thought, and tonight, besides, had been different from all the other nights of his life. He had seen wars and desert campaigns when the Englisi had first come and the tribes had carried on guerilla warfare for years.
He'd been ambitious then. The al-Maaris were an old family, the rightful rulers of Jidrat. He'd been young and strong in the battles he'd fought before he won his way to Faiz, the seat of government.
His mind turned and twisted as he lay on his couch and listened to the desert wind. He was old and tired now. He remembered his strength against the Englisi. When had this weakness begun? Perhaps when Amr's father was killed in a minor tribal skirmish and Amr himself, his hope for the future, changed, and left Jidrat and refused to return.
The old man sighed. The sound was faint against the clamor of the wind. He remembered the wedding of Amr and Zoraya and the treachery of the Al Murra, who kidnapped the child bride. Amr had changed then. The hope that Amr would come home and rule with kindness and intelligence was long given up.
Yazid's mind drifted back through history to the Portuguese who came to Arabia in the fourteenth century and stayed for almost two hundred years. They were followed by internecine warfare between the Sunnite and Shiite sects of Islam and by the rise of the early Wahabis and of Ibn Saud who only cast a patina of modernity over his people.
Someday, Yazid prayed, the Mahdi would come and all would be well in Islam. But not the Q'adi Ghezri, that pretentious vulture in his black robe, stirring up the people as he rode about on his white donkey and pretended poverty while he lived with luxurious riches. . . .
The old man sighed and went to the balcony to look out over the stormy city in the night. He ignored the cold wind, the bite of the driven sand. His books were behind him. Useless to read, he thought, while the mob rioted and the guards repulsed the first outrageous attack against Faiz. He found no consolation in the philosophy of Al Gazel or Kindi; nothing to help him in the historic works of the sage Ibn Batuta and Masudi. The heavy leather books gave him no answers. He had tried to read the formal, exaggerated style of the court poets of the eighth century who had flourished during the Baghdad caliphate—Abu al-Atahiya and Abu Nuwais. Their measured cadences sounded hollow under the thud of mortars and the billowing smoke that moved over the city.
Too late. . . . Tomorrow, at dawn, the end would come.
The old man was not afraid of the dark city or the next hours. An old man knows no fears except those that always live within him. His heartbeat was erratic, his breath labored, and the strength was gone from his limbs.
He had made mistakes. He knew the inflamed mob did not understand the slogans they chanted. They lived in poverty and hunger and filth. He had taken the West's oil money and built schools and hospitals and tried to see that no man suffered from extreme want. But it had not been enough.
The world moved too swiftly for his people to catch up. But that must not be. There was an answer somewhere. Not from the Soviets, with their patient, guileful promises, waiting the way a tiger waits to spring upon his prey. Not from the West, either, the old man thought. His mind moved clearly toward the ultimate question.
The Jidratti had to find the future in themselves. It would be a slow and painful process. To hope that one leap, by fire and destruction, could bring equality was an impossible dream. More education was needed, and a dignity that could come only with time and new generations. Meanwhile, there was the dawn. He would try to hold back the mob, but his troops were exhausted, sick with firing on their own people. In the morning the gate would be breached and the mob would howl for plunder in old Faiz. He looked down at the distant wall, in darkness now. From the main gate a wide avenue swept uphill to the palace; a boulevard lined with palms and gardens, an oasis of green in the limestone hills.
He could see the dirty, panting mob, shrieking their hate.
He would meet them at the Bab es-Salam, the Gate of Peace. Yes, there, just inside the gate. He would stand alone and tell them the truth. They were his children—all of them. They would obey.
They would see their Imam stand before them and they would stop and listen and he would speak to them, and it would be ended.
There was nothing else he could do.
Thinking this, listening to the wind that screamed around the sprawling palace, he felt the bite of the cold night air at last, and he went slowly back into his chamber. He did not sleep. From his bedside he took his Koran and slowly began to read.
The wind seemed to sweep the holy words through his mind, tumbling them away into darkness. . . .
In the Hotel al-Zaysir, in the cup of the darkened city, Naomi Haledi lay staring into the dark night. She had been awake for hours. She was hungry and thirsty but she was afraid to leave the hotel room that Esme Kenton had spirited her into.
Why had she slept so long? She remembered that the Englishwoman had given her a mild sedative and urged her to rest. In her state of exhaustion, the pill had worked like a blow on the head. But now she was awake again, staring—wide-eyed—at the high, dark ceiling, and she could not understand how she had been able to forget her danger.
Where was Mrs. Kenton? There was no note, no word at all. No one had come to the room since she had wakened herself, and she heard nothing at all inside the rambling corridors of the hotel.
If Esme did not come back, what could she do? She was trapped here. It would be easy enough for Ta'arife's secret police to find her, even with all the confused fighting in Jidrat.
It was hopeless to think of escape. And useless to hope.
Yet she felt no fear now. Her heart beat calmly in her breast. How many times had she waited like this for Kolia, in their secret apartm
ent in Budapest? Like clandestine lovers, even though she wore his wedding ring. It was over. All over.
And she no longer thought of Kolia Mikelnikov as a monster that had killed her gentle father in the square that day. She listened to the wild wind over the city and felt a new understanding. They were all trapped—all of them-living as best they could. Her first hatred toward Kolia had been useful, sustaining her in her flight through strange lands until she had come home to Israel.
Home, she thought. Yes, it was home. Where there was new strength and a pioneer spirit that seized the desert and" changed it, with patience and love, and made it bloom again as the Bible said it had in the old days.
She no longer hated Kolia. She could remember only their love.
Tomorrow, she thought as she listened to the wind, it would end, and she decided to remember Kolia only as her husband, as her gentle lover. It would be better if things ended like that.
In the hotel room directly below, never suspecting how near she was, Major Kolia Mikelnikov lay fully dressed on his bed and also thought of Budapest and of the past and of the future.
He listened to the wind, and although this was a desert wind, full of stinging sand that whipped the city, he remembered the snowy plains before Moscow when the Nazis advanced and he thought of the fighting that last frozen winter in the brittle reeds along the river bank.
It all seemed long ago in the past. Yet it was part of today, too. He thought of all the killing, and the war that had not ended yet for him, and he remembered the men he had known who were now only skeletons in their graves. All gone, gone.
Like Naomi had gone, leaving him desolate and alone.
Then he thought of what had to be done tomorrow, when the storm ended. Somehow, he had to find Durell, the American agent, in all this alien confusion. Somehow, he had to kill him.
Kill or be killed. That was the rule, the law of those who always lived with death.
He touched the cold barrel of his Tokarev, beside him. The gun was ready. Waiting. He would do it himself, trusting no one else.
Otherwise he could never go home. His superiors would condemn him. And life beat too strongly in him to surrender now.
He did not know yet how to accomplish his mission. But it would be done. He felt sure of his strength and ability.
He listened to the wind and he remembered rain in the streets of Budapest and the orders General Murov had given him. He had protested, but Murov had not listened. Murov had sneered at his protest against shooting down innocent people in the old squares and streets of the beautiful city on the Danube. His words had been met with cold suspicion.
"I know about your lady love," Murov had said. "The little Jewess, eh? The pretty little actress you've been seeing."
"Comrade General, I can't say—"
"A bit of fun is all right. A man must relax. And you have no wife and family back home. You were very young during the war. One would think . . . but no one blames you, Kolia, though you could have chosen a woman more wisely."
He had wanted to tell Murov he was married to Naomi. But then all would be ruined. It was not the moment—with rebellion in the streets, with revolution rising through all the Hungarian countryside. It was incredible how those people had fought: with sticks and stones, young boys streaking from doorways to climb up on passing tanks and drop homemade grenades down the turret on the crew. It was incredible.
How they hated us! Kolia thought. Why?
He knew why, now. Since Budapest, he had been trusted with missions in the West. He had read the free press of the world and now he understood what he had done.
It was all wrong. But he did not know the final answer. It was neither all black nor all white. You did what you were told, however, or you were lost. They killed you, otherwise. One way or another, you lost if you tried to break free of life's traps.
He thought of his meeting with Durell in Geneva, three days ago. He was like Durell in so many ways, he thought.
He tried to think of how it would be when he killed him. He would just do it, he decided. And then it would be over.
The soldiers drowsed, sprawling, in the lobby of the Hotel al-Zaysir. They were restless, troubled by the wind. The foreign guests in their rooms offered no trouble. Only a madman would try to escape the security of the al-Zaysir. If they went into the city, they would be torn apart by the mobs. No, there was nothing to worry about here.
A dim light shone in the bar and T. P. Fenner, the American consul, helped himself to a new bottle of bourbon from the shelves, wondering where Messaoud had gone in the day's confusion. Fenner worried about the state of the consulate building, but Ta'arife had assured him there would be no more wanton destruction of property. Tomorrow there would be a last assault on Faiz, and then law and order would be restored.
Fenner felt badly shaken by the violent disorder. The looting and burning and deliberately ineffective police, who grinned while shops were smashed and people were killed— all this, and the pall of smoke like a shroud over the city— well, it shook a man up; gave him a feeling of unreality that he could escape only by seeking sanity for himself in bourbon.
He knew he had failed in his job.
He could go back to his own quarters, he supposed, but he preferred the al-Zaysir, not trusting his Arab servants now. He certainly did not want to be alone, because then the wind would snatch him up and strip his flesh to the bone and show him naked, as he really was.
He was badly frightened.
The bottle of bourbon didn't help either. He had had so much that under ordinary circumstances he'd have gone out like a light—stinko, blotto. But this time the bourbon only made him feel colder and more alone.
He felt as if he had made a whole series of mistakes somewhere in the recent past. But he couldn't figure out what they were. He'd done his job, hadn't he? Fulfilled all the duties and obligations of a U.S. Consul, right? Was it his fault if these crazy people didn't respect the United States, if they shrieked, "Kill the Englisi!" and then, in the same breath, screamed, "Kill the Americani!"?
He had never suspected the depth and violence of the searing hatred that engulfed the city now.
And he felt as if it were all directed against him. Against T. P. Fenner personally—his own body, his own identity.
They'd like to tear him apart. He was the object of their hatred.
And he could not understand why.
He drank again, deeply, from the bottle he'd helped himself to behind the al-Zaysir bar. There was no servant in sight. They were all gone, merged into the howling mob. He drank again and wiped his mouth and sighed. His heart pounded strangely. He felt cold. The quiet of the city was misleading. Two o'clock in the morning, and the windstorm had swept the revolution right off the streets. He wished it would keep blowing forever. But he did not delude himself. He knew that at dawn, when the storm was over, all red hell would break loose again.
"Mr. Fenner?"
He turned violently, clutching the bottle, his round face reflecting fear. Then he saw that it was Colonel Ta'arife. The colonel looked tired. His sharp, dark, ambitious face was worn by the failure of his coup to achieve an immediate success yesterday.
"Mr. Fenner? I want a word with you/'
"Sure. Of course, Colonel."
"Are you feeling well, Mr. Fenner? You look ill."
"No, I'm fine. Just fine. It's fine here," Fenner said.
"Yes. Well, what I wanted to speak to you about was this Captain MacPherson who came to your office to see you yesterday."
"Who?"
"MacPherson," Ta'arife said patiently. "From the Atlantic Maid."
"Oh, him. I couldn't help him. I'm afraid he didn't get much satisfaction from me, Colonel."
"I know this. But he asked you to give sanctuary to the Israeli woman who was a passenger on his ship, did he not?"
"Sure, but I couldn't do a thing like that," Fenner said. He wanted to please Ta'arife. The man didn't look right. There was a funny look on his face. You couldn't tr
ust these people, Fenner thought. Stick a knife in your back while they smile at you. He said, "It wasn't anything the Consulate could or ought to do, you see."
"Yes. What did Captain MacPherson do then?"
"Do? I don't know."
"Of course you know," Ta'arife said patiently. He spoke like a cop who knew his business. Cops were cops everywhere, Fenner thought; but this one couldn't keep order in his own town. Hell, no. Then he heard Ta'arife say, "You sent MacPherson to try to get help for the Israeli girl elsewhere, did you not? You wanted to help this spy, did you not?"
"Oh, come now, I don't know that she's a spy—a young woman like that. . . ."
"My business is intelligence, Mr. Fenner. Of course she is a spy. You know that too. I know the ship did not just happen to break down and make port in Jidrat at just this time by coincidence, by simple chance. Did you know that she isn't on the ship now?"
"No, I didn't. Where is she?"
"That is what you must find out for me."
"Me? How can I find out?"
"You must think. You must help me. Where did Mao Pherson go after he left your office? You gave him a suggestion, did you not?"
"I ... I mentioned Mrs. Kenton. . . ." Fenner faltered.
"Ah."
"Really now, this girl can't be as dangerous as all that."
"You know nothing about it, if you will pardon my saying so, Mr. Fenner. I say she is dangerous. I say we must find her at once. So MacPherson went to Esme Kenton?"
"Yes."
"And she went to the ship for the girl?"
"I don't know."
"And then she took the girl ashore, is that not right?"
Fenner's mouth and throat felt dry. He reached for the bourbon bottle, saw Ta'arife's dark eyes follow his hand, and he suddenly pulled back his fingers, feeling strangely ashamed. Goddam it, he thought. What's the matter with me? His stomach burned and churned and his heart lurched when Ta'arife smiled at him.
"Colonel, you could help me, too, you know. I've got to get a cable off to my government. They want to know—"
"All communication except through Radio Jidrat is forbidden."
Assignment Zoraya Page 15
