Affair in Araby (Spy Thriller). Talbot Mundy
for the Bull’s Kid. Murder! Won’t the scoff taste good!
“We’ll hit the Bull’s Kid hard for about a week—mix it with the fellers in from way back—you know—dry-blowers, pearlers, spending it easy— handing their money to Bessie behind the bar and restless because she makes it last too long; watch them a while and get in touch with all that’s happening; then flit out of Sydney like bats out of—and hump blue—eh?”
“Something’ll turn up; it always does. I’ve got money in the bank— about, two thousand here in gold dust with me,—and if what you say’s true, Grim, about me still being a trooper, then the Army owes me three years’ back pay, and I’ll have it or go to Buckingham Palace and tear off a piece of the King! We’re capitalists, by Jupiter! Besides, you fellers agreed that if I shut down the mine at Abu Kem you’d join me and we’d be Grim, Ramsden and Ross.”
“I’ll keep the bargain if you hold me to it when the time comes,” Grim answered.
“You bet I’ll hold you to it! Rammy here, and you and I could trade the chosen people off the map between us. We’re a combination. What’s time got to do with it?”
“We’ve got to use your mine,” Grim answered.
“I’m game. But let’s see Australia first.”
“Suppose we fix up your discharge, and you go home,” Grim suggested. “Come back when you’ve had a vacation, and by that time Ramsden and I will have done what’s possible for Feisul. He’s in Damascus now, but the French have got him backed into a corner. No money—not much ammunition—French propaganda undermining the allegiance of his men— time working against him, and nothing to do but wait.”
“What in hell have the French got to do with it?”
“They want Syria. They’ve got the coast towns now. They mean to have Damascus; and if they can catch Feisul and jail him to keep him out of mischief they will.”
“But damn it! Didn’t they promise the Arabs that Feisul should be King of Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and all that?”
“They did. The Allies all promised, France included. But since the Armistice the British have made a present of Palestine to the Jews, and the French have demanded Syria for themselves. The British are pro-Feisul, but the French don’t want him anywhere except dead or in jail. They know they’ve given him and the Arabs a raw deal; and they seem to think the simplest way out is to blacken Feisul’s character and ditch him. If the French once catch him in Damascus he’s done for and the Arab cause is lost.”
“Why lost?” demanded Jeremy. “There are plenty more Arabs.”
“But only one Feisul. He’s the only man who can unite them all.”
“I know a chance for him,” said Jeremy. “Let him come with us three to Australia. There are thousands of fellers there who fought alongside him and don’t care a damn for the French. They’ll raise all the hell there is before they’ll see him ditched.”
“Uh-huh! London’s the place for him,” Grim answered. “The British like him, and they’re ashamed of the way he’s been treated. They’ll give him Mesopotamia. Baghdad’s the old Arab capital, and that’ll do for a beginning; after that it’s up to the Arabs themselves.”
“Well? Where does my gold mine come in?” Jeremy asked.
“Feisul has no money. If it was made clear to him that he could serve the Arabs best by going to London, he’d consider it. The objection would be, though, that he’d have to make terms in advance with hog-financiers, who’d work through the Foreign Office to tie up all the oil and mine and irrigation concessions. If we tell him privately about your gold mine at Abu Kem he can laugh at financiers.”
“All right,” said Jeremy, “I’ll give him the gold mine. Let him erect a modern plant and he’ll have millions!”
“Uh-huh! Keep the mine secret. Let him go to London and arrange about Mespot. Just at present High Finance could find a hundred ways of disputing his title to the mine, but once he’s king with the Arabs all rooting for him things’ll be different. He’ll treat you right when that time comes, don’t worry.”
“Worry? Me?” said Jeremy. “All that worries me is having to see this business through before we can make a wake for Sydney. I’m homesick. But never mind. All right, you fellers, I’ll make one to give this Feisul boy a hoist!”
CHAPTER II
“Atcha, Jimgrim sahib! Atcha!”
That conversation and Jeremy’s conversion to the big idea took place on the way across the desert to Jerusalem—a journey that took us a week on camel-back—a rowdy, hot journey with the stifling simoom blowing grit into our followers’ throats, who sang and argued alternately nevertheless. For, besides our old Ali Baba and his sixteen sons and grandsons, there were Jeremy’s ten pickups from Arabia’s byways, whom he couldn’t leave behind because they knew the secret of his gold-mine.
Grim’s authority is always at its height on the outbound trail, for then everybody knows that success, and even safety, depends on his swift thinking; on the way home afterward reaction sets in sometimes, because Arabs are made light-headed by success, and it isn’t a simple matter to discipline free men when you have no obvious hold over them.
But that was where Jeremy came in. Jeremy could do tricks, and the Arabs were like children when he performed for them. They would be good if he would make one live chicken into two live ones by pulling it apart. They would pitch the tents without fighting if he would swallow a dozen eggs and produce them presently from under a camel’s tail. If he would turn on his ventriloquism and make a camel say its prayers, they were willing to forgive—for the moment anyhow—even their nearest enemies.
So we became a sort of travelling sideshow, with Jeremy ballyhooing for himself in an amazing flow of colloquial Arabic, and hardly ever repeating the same trick.
All of which was very good for our crowd and convenient at the moment, but hardly so good for Jeremy’s equilibrium. He is one of those handsome, perpetually youthful fellows, whose heads have been a wee mite turned by the sunshine of the world’s warm smile. I don’t mean by that that he isn’t a tophole man, or a thorough-going friend with guts and gumption, who would chance his neck for anyone he likes without a second’s hesitation, for he’s every bit of that. He has horse sense, too, and isn’t fooled by the sort of flattery that women lavish on men who have laughing eyes and a little dark moustache.
But he hasn’t been yet in a predicament that he couldn’t laugh or fight his way out of; he has never yet found a job that he cared to stick at for more than a year or two, and seldom one that could hold him for six months.
He jumps from one thing to another, finding all the world so interesting and amusing, and most folk so ready to make friends with him, that he always feels sure of landing softly somewhere over the horizon.
So by the time we reached Jerusalem friend Jeremy was ripe for almost anything except the plan we had agreed on. Having talked that over pretty steadily most of the way from Abu Kem, it seemed already about as stale and unattractive to him as some of his oldest tricks. And Jerusalem provided plenty of distraction. We hadn’t been in Grim’s quarters half an hour when Jeremy was up to his ears in a dispute that looked like separating us.
Grim, who wears his Arab clothes from preference and never gets into uniform if he can help it, went straight to the telephone to report briefly to headquarters. I took Jeremy upstairs to discard my Indian disguise and hunt out clothes for Jeremy that would fit him, but found none, I being nearly as heavy as Grim and Jeremy together. He had finished clowning in the kit I offered him, and had got back into his Arab things while I was shaving off the black whiskers with which Nature adorns my face whenever I neglect the razor for a few days,