I had a blank moment, bordering on despair. Alone I might have chanced it. But there was Dr. Capehart. Take him over the mountains with me to the Jordanian frontier? He’d come here straight from a soft practice as a plastic surgeon in Washington. He was big and he looked tough, but behind him were too many years of the soft leather consulting chair, the necessary cocktail parties, the occasional walks through Rock Creek Park for his exercise. He’d never make it. We’d have to keep off the roads, have to climb and hide and run and keep one step ahead of El Thamad’s soldiers. Maybe Dr. Capehart could take a day or two of that; Maybe he’d even find it exciting. But after three days I’d have to carry him pick-a-back.
It would take us a week to reach the frontier.
Princess Farat looked at me and smiled. She tossed her head to give El Thamad a scathing look. Her long hair swung, loose and dark I could smell the jasmine in it.
“Keep your gun, Chester Drum,” she said. “We may need it.”
“We?”
“Some day—when the Husseini and the Khalili are united—Nasser’s U.A.R. will have a new stable force in the Middle East to reckon with. That is why my father sent me here to marry King Khalil. But now that must wait. I am a Husseini, and a Husseini pays his debts. You saved the king’s life, making my father’s dream possible. The least I can do is try to get you out of Motamar alive.”
“You?” I gaped. Except for Switzerland, she’d been cloistered all her life. Her beauty was almost doll-like. I could have spanned her waist with my hands. I couldn’t picture her wearing anything but the filmy silk robe. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything more strenuous than making some lucky sybarite who happened to be born of royal blood a dandy partner—in a boudoir.
“Of course. Do you think I am in Motamar alone? El Thamad will come with us—as far as the women’s quarter. Tonight my entourage will leave Motamar—on the royal road to the Jordanian border. We travel with silk-lined tents and Persian carpets for their floors. We have camels and horses and six royal trumpeteers from Amman. All Motamar will know we are passing.” She turned to El Thamad again and smiled, almost sweetly: “Tell me, would you dare stop us?”
El Thamad wouldn’t meet her smile.
“We couldn’t let you risk it, Princess,” I said.
“But I would be risking nothing.” She gave me a strange look, her eyes wide and steady on mine. “At least I wouldn’t be risking—what you think. Will you come with us? Across the frontier?”
I said nothing. Dr. Capehart said: “What about Khalil?”
She answered that one promptly. “The Qasr Tabuk Giants will guard his safety. As for medical care, a doctor accompanied my entourage from Jordan. He will remain behind. He can be trusted. Please don’t be foolish enough to say no. I have made up my mind. I can be stubborn. I am returning to Jordan. There will be no wedding until the king is well. Will you come with me?”
Dr. Capehart nodded his head slowly. El Thamad glowered, Omar stared stonily at air above all our heads; his soldiers and El Thamad’s, getting no orders, did nothing.
I opened the door. “You first,” I told El Thamad. He went through the doorway. I held the Sten gun in the crook of my right arm, its short barrel pointed at the small of his back.
For some reason Farat squeezed my hand. Then we went out together.
16
IN OTHER TIMES OR other places, or both, they would have called it a harem.
There was a big central courtyard with a large pool in it, and on the surface of the water, lilies floated. There was a stone lion that spouted water, and soft cushions and ornate white leather camel saddles, and glazed tiles forming abstract designs on the walls, and pans of oil in niches with wicks burning in them, and dark corridors leading off in a dozen directions.
The central courtyard had no roof. The night air was cool. I had taken a position in one dim corner of the courtyard, standing guard over El Thamad with the Sten gun until Farat’s entourage had assembled. I felt like a character out of a Hollywood epic that had been filmed in Beverly Hills in a phony Moorish castle.
Or maybe, I thought, old Cecil B. de Mille knew what the hell he was doing.
Pretty soon there were voices, women’s mostly, and white-shrouded figures drifted out like dream-stuff into the courtyard. When they saw me and Dr. Capehart, they giggled. About the only items missing were lyre music and a big flabby eunuch waving a fan the size of a barn door.
Princess Farat had been gone fifteen or twenty minutes. She drifted out of one of the dark corridors with the old battle-ax who’d tried to get her to leave the surgery anteroom in tow.
Farat had changed to a pair of whipcord jodhpurs and a soft pale blouse of antelope-skin. She clapped her hands and said this and that in Arabic and the giggling girls scurried. The old battle-ax was still wearing black and looking as if she enjoyed it. If she did, it was probably the only thing she enjoyed. She snarled a few words at me in Arabic, and Farat translated:
“She is introducing herself. Her name is Teerah. She says she is not happy you are traveling with the caravan. The women are her responsibility. If you touch any of them, Teerah says, she will personally see that you’re flayed alive and boiled in pitch.”
Teerah smiled and showed one tooth. Surprisingly, she stuck out a hand like a vulture’s claw and shook with me. Her yellow-flecked eyes studied mine. She snarled a few words more.
“Teerah says she thinks it is utter foolishness that we return to Jordan. She says again that if you touch any of her girls—”
“Tell her she’s the only one in the whole crew who appeals to me.”
Farat told her. Teerah stalked off, but when she reached the far side of the lily pool she glanced back over her shoulder and showed me her single gold tooth in a smile.
I decided I had a way with women.
Caravans being caravans and women being women, by the time we were ready to move the sun had risen over the crenelated walls of the palace, Teerah had fallen asleep in her quarters and had to be sent for and far off over the city a muezzin could be heard calling the faithful to prayer.
I’d taken turns with Dr. Capehart watching El Thamad, but he was as docile as the corpse he resembled. Flanking him, we walked down a flight of stone steps to a wide courtyard between the inner and outer walls of the palace. There the caravan had been assembled during the night. Farat’s women, cloaked against the strong Motamar sun, already had mounted their camels. Other camels, loaded with boxes and baskets and bales, stood patiently by in two long files strung together nose-ring to tail. Porters and camel-drivers, none of them looking a day under sixty, waited with their beasts. To make up for her snooze, Teerah was bellowing orders like a muleskinner.
Six white Arabian stallions, caparisoned as befitted a royal princess, were waiting too. Dr. Capehart and I wouldn’t slink away from Qasr Tabuk with our tails between our legs. We’d be fleeing in style.
“Do you ride?” Princess Farat asked us, indicating the stallions with a toss of her head. “They’re quite spirited.”
I nodded. Dr. Capehart said: “I guess that lets me out.”
Princess Farat smiled. “Then we have a camel for you.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Dr. Capehart scowled, but a few moments later one of the camel-drivers helped him mount.
“You’re one lucky guy,” I called to him. “Look who you’ve got for company.”
Teerah had mounted the camel next to his.
Farat straddled one of the stallions and reined it back to where I was waiting with El Thamad. “You who call your men the Scourge of Allah,” she said, her dark eyes flashing and her voice all but crackling with anger, “it will be well for you to remember whose caravan this is. I am a princess of the royal Husseini blood, and as this caravan leaves Qasr Tabuk, so it will arrive in Amman.”
El Thamad bowed low, either impressed or mocking her. With his impassive death’s-head it was impossible to tell.
“Also, I will hold you responsible directly for the
welfare of the king, my future husband. If he dies, all the desert from the Mahgreb to the Fertile Crescent won’t be vast enough to hide you.” She raised her riding crop and flicked air an inch from El Thamad’s face. He took that without moving a muscle or even blinking. He remained stock-still even when Farat tugged at the stallion’s reins, making it rear, muscular forelegs and sharp hooves just missing El Thamad’s head. Then she dug in with the” heels of her riding boots and the stallion trotted off.
I mounted its twin, and four of Omar Al Hadji’s Giants, who would ride with us as far as the Jordanian frontier, mounted four more just like it. My stallion was spirited, all right. It tried to bolt and I had to rein up hard and work the bit in its mouth. “Easy, fellah,” I said.
El Thamad stood at my stirrup. “You sit high in the saddle—now,” he said.
“So?”
“If it is Allah’s wish, we will meet again. Under other circumstances.”
“You can always drop in and pass the time of day in Washington.”
“I’ll remember that,” El Thamad said. And so would I.
A caravan crawls across the tufa-stone and the sun is hot and low jagged peaks bite at the deep blue sky; after just a few hours of it, time and space have converged on this moment and this expanse of soft rock and those mountains hiding the horizon, and you are almost convinced there never was any other life and never will be another except the steady, relentless march from Qasr Tabuk to the Jordanian frontier.
The first day we passed two Scourge of Allah checkpoints on the unpaved road. I held the Sten gun ready. and Omar’s four Giants unslung their rifles, but we were passed through without as much as a hostile stare. There were villages, too, the houses of sun-baked brick clinging to their hillsides, and the people lined the single street in each to watch us file by Word moves quickly in the desert. In the second village we heard shouts of, “Farat Zindabad!” And Princess Farat smiled and raised her riding crop, almost bringing the mud-brick houses tumbling off their hillsides.
You couldn’t blame the villagers. Some day Farat would be their queen.
She looked the part too. She had been a dream in white silk in Qasr Tabuk, as anachronistic as she was beautiful, a royal princess harem-bred for the delight of a king she’d never met. She’d been like a little girl and lost, and she’d needed a shoulder to cry on and found mine. But just when you thought you could, you found you really couldn’t pin her down. Little girl and lost, delicate product of the royal harem in Amman and a brief interlude at a finishing school in Switzerland, she up and points a belly-gun at Dr. Malik and shoots him dead with a roomful of soldiers standing by. There she is, reading the riot act to the one man feared more than any other all over the Middle East, all one hundred pounds of her, but making it stick.
And, if she was a dream in white silk in Qasr Tabuk, on the road to the Jordanian frontier in antelope-skin blouse and jodhpurs she was as spirited as the white Arabian steeds. Sometimes, riding a little way ahead, she’d sing. There was an Oriental catch to the melodies, alien and provocative. Sometimes, all animation and sparkle, she’d cheer up the women of the caravan, who took the long ride with glum resignation. Sometimes she’d rein next to me and we’d talk. The animation and sparkle was there, but a strange shyness too. I’d turn in the saddle to face her suddenly and find her staring at me. Then her face would color and those big grave eyes would turn away and she’d spur her horse and be off, urging it on with that voice like a caress, to return galloping half an hour later, her face flushed and damp, her eyes glowing.
Our third night on the trail, Dr. Capehart didn’t go out after dinner for his usual long walk. He claimed it was the only way he could unkink his knotted muscles to mount Old Rock-and-Roll the next morning.
“Too beat for the nightly constitutional?” I asked him.
He was sitting on a rug in the tent we shared, staring at the glowing embers of the charcoal brazier that fended off the chill night winds. “No. It isn’t that, Chet.” He moved restlessly and then stood up and sat down again. Whatever it was he wanted to say, I realized it made him feel awkward.
“Then what’s up?”
He lit a cigarette. “You don’t speak Arabic, do you?”
“Not a word.”
“Or understand it?”
“Uh-uh.”
He scowled at the charcoal and tossed his cigarette in it. “Then I guess you wouldn’t know what it feels like to be the talk of the camp.”
“Who, me?”
“You and Princess Farat.”
“Come on. You’re kidding.”
He got up, paced, crouching under the canvas, then sat down again. “Listen, you know your way around. I don’t want to blow your nose for you. But just do us both a favor and remember who Farat is.”
“I know who she is,” I said, a little angrily. “If you mean what I think you mean, you’re nuts.”
“That why you’re getting yourself in an uproar?” he asked mildly.
“Sure, okay. I like her. Is there any law against it? She’s a nice kid.”
“The nice kid you’re referring to is a princess of the royal Husseini blood who—”
“I know all that,” I snapped. For some reason, talking to him about Farat made me feel irritable.
“Let me finish. The nice kid you’re referring to would also walk off with first prize in any beauty contest from Amman to Hollywood, or haven’t you noticed that?”
“I noticed it.”
“I’ll bet you did.”
“Doc,” I growled, “lay off.”
“The nice kid you’re referring to is also loaded with more sex appeal wearing a riding habit or—hell—wrapped in sack-cloth, than a dozen starlets in Bikinis.”
“Doc,” I said, “shut up.”
“At least admit it to yourself.”
“There’s nothing to admit. I said I liked her. That’s all.”
“She talks about you to her women.”
That should have got an is-that-so smile from me. Instead it made me feel, all of a sudden, like puffing out my chest.
“At night she sings songs.”
“So?”
“Take three guesses who they’re about.”
“Go on, take your walk.”
But he didn’t. I asked: “Where’d you get all the scuttlebutt?”
“Teerah.”
“Oh, hell. Her,” I said.
Dr. Capehart said nothing. After a while I asked him: “Sings songs about me, does she?”
Somehow that broke the tension. We both grinned.
“Teerah’s furious,” he said.
“Mad enough to spit back at camels.”
“Can I assure her you won’t—go poaching in royal territory?”
That was a pretty good line, but it made me feel edgy again. “Assure her anything you want.”
“For you?”
“Hell, no. You already said it. Nobody has to blow my nose for me. Good night, Doc.”
He scowled, shrugged his sloping, bear-like shoulders, told me I was making a mistake and went out for his walk.
He’s making a mountain out of a wart on a flea’s fanny, I told myself, staring at the glowing Charcoal. He’s got a bug in his ear. So does Teerah the terror. Heck with them both. Sure, she gets under your skin. Just when you think you’ve got her read, she up and puts on a fresh personality. And sure, she’s stacked. So what? If you were getting that way over her, wouldn’t you be the first to know?
Nuts to you, Doc. Nuts to you, Teerah. And to you both, nuts.
I went on staring at the charcoal. I scowled and shut my eyes. That didn’t help.
Open or shut I saw Princess Farat’s face.
17
IT WAS OUR LAST night on the trail. I sat outside the tent, using a blanket as a cloak, gazing up at the stars and telling myself the Milky Way never looks like this in Washington, D.C.
Far off a jackal yelped. One of the tethered horses pawed the tufa-stone restlessly.
“You an
d me both, boy,” I said.
Four days had passed since Dr. Capehart’s warning. Jordan was ten miles away. We’d make it by mid-afternoon tomorrow, Farat would cloister herself in the palace at Amman, Dr. Capehart and I would board a jet for the States and that would be that.
I lighted a cigarette, took two puffs and flicked it away, watching the glowing coal arc through the night. Teerah, I realized, must have read the riot act to Princess Farat. Since Dr. Capehart’s little fatherly session with me, she’d really kept her distance. I missed our talks, and riding next to her stirrup to stirrup, and the way a smile could suddenly change the grave look in her eyes. Or maybe Teerah hadn’t said anything to her at all. Maybe she just looked at herself in the mirror four mornings ago and told herself she was a princess of the royal blood and I was a fellahin-type who hired himself out at a. hundred bucks a day and an expense-account which has been known to be padded.
Maybe she just got tired of flirting with the hired help.
Flirting? No, she hadn’t been flirting. “Knock it off,” I growled.
“You say something?” Dr. Capehart called from inside the tent.
“No.”
“Effendi?” It was a woman’s voice, close in the darkness. She had come across the tufa as quiet as a cat. I could just make her out. She was wearing a hooded mantle trimmed with some kind of white fur.
“American doctor?” she said.
“Inside.” I jerked a thumb toward the tent-flap, but she didn’t budge. “Hey, Doc,” I said, “you’ve got a patient.”
Dr. Capehart came out, and the woman started to talk in Arabic. I heard her mention Teerah’s name. Dr. Capehart nodded. She tugged at his sleeve.
“Teerah’s got a chill on the stomach,” Dr. Capehart explained. “We’d just call it a bellyache and have done with it, but that’s the British influence in Motamar and Jordan—a chill on the stomach. I’ll go have a look at her.”
Their footsteps faded across the tufa-stone. I lighted another cigarette and smoked this one, then parted the tent-flap and ducked inside. Dr. Capehart had left our petromax lantern lighted. It bounced my shadow off the tent wall as I sat down on a rug which had come from Persia and probably would have rated display in a museum in the States. I took my shoes off. Something rustled outside the tent.
Manhunt Is My Mission Page 10
