The hapless seer was dragged from the council chamber, and from the door he cried, “I say it was green, and to hell with it!” for he was doomed and knew it. Then dreadful silence reigned as the Imam sat down and rasped a fingernail along his teeth. The prostrate seers lay quivering.
“What is the consensus?” asked the Imam at last.
The seer with seniority, a seer named Ahmed Uris, spoke up alone. “We all agreed—right from the beginning!—that he is a scientist, perhaps a guided-missiles expert.”
“Perhaps?”
“Positively!”
The Imam fell silent. It was rather an extended silence.
“Or—” began the seer again, and “Silence!” snapped the Imam. Then he grew crafty. “Quickly, now, all together! What nationality? Quick, quick!”
No one answered, but there were soft murmurings. “No whispering!” shrieked the Imam.
“German!” blurted Uris at last, and an audible sigh went up from his colleagues. The Imam did not especially relish mass executions, and let it pass. “We must take measures,” he said sternly. Poised rumps stiffened in mid-air. “We must sow a spy in their midst. We must have fuller information. Or something.”
“Aiywaaah!” chorused the seers, on safe ground at last.
The Imam’s slitted eyes fell on one of them. “Ibn Caliban,” he thrust solicitously. “How was the operation?”
The seer named Caliban thrust back a hand and patted the spot where the hump used to be. “Mar-velous, Your Inmamship, marvelous!”
“Not that operation, donkey; the one on your ears! You still hear twangling instruments?”
“No, Your Inmamship nothing; nothing fantastical at all!”
The Imam stroked at his faint wisp of beard. “You will be our spy.”
Caliban’s crafty mouth pressed a grin into the floor. He was simply mad for assignments that might involve killing, or even a little maiming. The illegitimate son of a French Foreign Legionnaire, he had inherited his father’s cruelty and his mother’s Arabic guile, and was known to be a fastidious man with a knife. He thought himself even more wicked than the Imam, actually, although he would never confess it, for in Doom, to be more wicked than the Imam was the one unforgivable sin. It was unforgivable because there was never time for repentance. Guggle.
“It will require another operation,” said the Imam slyly.
Caliban almost raised his head, but caught himself in time.
“Samir of Fawzi Arabia will be eliminated,” continued the Imam.
“Can I do it, Your Imamship?”
“No. This is not a knife job. We shall use an asp.”
“Why an asp, Your Imamship?”
“It’s all the rage. I saw it in a movie.”
“You mean with Liz and——?”
“Shut up!”
“Yes.”
“You will replace Samir as eunuch in the harem of Fawz.”
Ibn Caliban’s toes writhed.
Chapter Eighteen
“YOU MEAN that golden dome is——?”
“Yes—exactly like the one at Notre Dame.”
“That’s wild!” murmured a bedded John Goldfarb, sipping thick Arabic coffee from a fragile demitasse cup.
“Don’t drink it down,” cautioned Guz. “Lot of muck on the bottom.”
“Thanks.” Goldfarb set the cup down on a nightstand beside his bed, then stared quizzically into the honest, yet somehow witholding eyes of the King’s aide. He had the air of Friar Laurence talking about the weather before giving Romeo the bad news.
“We’ve always maintained a small college of Koranic studies here on the grounds,” resumed Guz, fanning himself with a copy of Confidential, which was his wildest vice. “His Majesty—may Allah keep his beard dry—at first wanted to convert it into something every bit as grand as Notre Dame and give it to Ammud as a plaything.”
“Are you serious? You mean, just because——”
“Mr. Goldfarb,” interrupted Guz, “you are old, eccentric, and fabulously wealthy, and the darling of your soul has received a mortal wound at the hands of infidels, if you’ll pardon the expression. Now what do you do? How often have you said, ‘If I were King…’? Well, Fawz is King.”
“I see.”
“Perhaps you do. At any rate, His Majesty threw the Koranic students into sneakers and blazers and——”
“Sneakers and blazers…”
“Yes. He copied it from an American movie called Varsity Rag. Perhaps you’ve seen it?”
“No.”
“We’ll have to run it for you.”
“I won’t have time.”
Guz looked inscrutable and changed the subject. “Then the King slapped a golden dome over the kulliyah. But that’s as far as he got.”
“I should hope so,” muttered Goldfarb, wondering when the jolly stories would cease and a message from the American Embassy be forthcoming. God, how can I face them? Flying south instead of——!
“Oh, it isn’t the practicalities,” Guz was saying, “or money, heaven knows. Mostly time; that’s the problem. The King has something more immediate in mind.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You see, by making a slight addition to the—activities, shall we say?—of the college, the King hopes to salve his pride and make things up quickly to Ammud by making him quarterback of——”
A football crashed against the half-open door and dribbled in to the foot of the bed. Goldfarb eyed it with wild surmise and then looked up at Guz.
“Yes,” uttered Guz tonelessly; “of an All-Arabian football team even mightier than Notre Dame.”
The droning in the corridor brought Guz quickly to his feet as the golf cart made a screeching turn at the door. In falconed Fawz. He buzzed directly up to Goldfarb and leaned his glittering good eye within an inch of his face. “You da crookit pilot?” he growled.
“Your aircraft bellied to a safe landing,” explained Guz dolefully. “Your charts were checked; we know your mission.”
“You Wrong-Way Goldfarp?” pounced the King.
Goldfarb looked miserable. “Goddamit, goddamit, god——”
“Shurrup! You Joosh?”
“Yes.”
The King eyed him severely. “Don’ do it again!”
Ammud entered the room and Goldfarb stared numbly at the FAWZ U. legend across his robe. It was highly intimidating.
The King cackled slyly, breathing an odd mixture of garlic and attar of roses into the U-2 pilot’s face. “Got problem,” he began coyly.…
* * *
Ashley Yookoomian draped another TWX over his chief’s upturned palm.
“What now?” sniffed Whitepaper.
“From Fawzi. Cancellation on that Point Four request.”
“Came to their senses, eh?”
“No, sir. They’ve found a coach.”
* * *
“But I know nothing about the T-formation!” screamed John Goldfarb, backed up against a casement in his knee-length white hospital frock. His arms were extended like Spartacus awaiting crucifixion. “I’m bad, I’m bad, I run the wrong way!”
Guz stood by him, reeking ineffable pity, while Fawz in his cart whirred round and round the room errratically, mumbling epithets; a caged but mobilized parakeet from Berlitz.
“It’s really hopeless,” said Guz regretfully. “Your whereabouts are unknown to your government.”
“Tell! Tell!” Fawz shouted at Guz as he careened about, smashing into a giant urn containing the ashes of his great-grandfather’s horse, Kreevitch.
“Are you out of your minds?” roared Goldfarb hysterically.
“Partly,” answered Guz with a sidewise look at Fawz.
“What are you going to do with a football team?” screamed the pilot. “You’ve got nobody to play!”
“Tell!” thundered Fawz again.
“Yes,” sighed Guz painfully. Then he put an arm on Goldfarb’s shoulder. “Dear, oppressed, and noble heart,” he recited, “consider: what if the news
of your abortive mission were to be conveyed to the Kremlin? And what if your aircraft—as well as your own person—were to turn up in Red Square to the shame and horror of your government?”
“That’s blackmail!” raved Goldfarb.
“This is the Middle East,” shrugged Guz.
Fawz banged into a wall, cursing as a shower of plaster settled on him in flakes.
“You’re bluffing!” bluffed Goldfarb. “They’ll find me! Someone will find me! You can’t hide a four-million-dollar airplane!”
The King eyed him inscrutably.
Goldfarb’s jaw jutted out. “‘Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to——’”
“Hah-hah, Tiss Eliot,” mocked Fawz, chuckling. “Poo-poo-poo!”
“The aircraft has been hidden,” explained Guz in an oddly muffled tone. He avoided Goldfarb’s frimmled stare.
The U-2 pilot leaned limp against a wall and covered his eyes with a hand damp with nervous perspiration. “Nothing works,” he bleated; “nothing ever works.” He heard the drone of the cart zooming close and he peered through his fingers at Fawz.
“Nudnick!” he breathed.
The King waggled a finger at him. “If Rooskie find out, you country be dis-grace!” he threatened. “You be disgrace! Put in all newspaper!” He ticked them off on his fingers: “Karachi Times, Khartoum Gazette, Daily Worker, London———!”
“Now wait a minute,” yelped Goldfarb; “just wait a minute!”
Fawz gnawed on the exposed nerve. “Paris Match, Akhbarel Yom, Cincinnati——!”
“That’s enough!”
“Not like, hah?”
Goldfarb shook his head.
“Big headline!” thrust Fawz, illustrating with his hands and extending them wider, ever wider. “Big!”
Goldfarb’s eyes glazed. “‘I am the captain of my…’”
“You t’ink!” urged the King. “Only hurry up!” He whipped out his transistor and began droning around the room again, circling, veering, forward, back, while a Guy Lombardo arrangement of “Cherry Pink and Apple-blossom White” crackled forth at peak volume.
Goldfarb stared through the casement. Over the football field an eagle circled, squawking and clicking its beak on empty air, as though desperate for oxygen. John Goldfarb choked on his misery. Big headline. Big! He saw it all too clearly: WRONG-WAY GOLDFARB DOES IT AGAIN: ABORTS MISSION, WRECKS SUMMIT CONFERENCE!… It was the work of The Organization, he thought. The Organization: the one that arranged for your hotel bed to be five feet long when you were six-foot-one; the one that gave you wrong numbers or “This is a recording…” when you had dialed correctly; the one that sent your baggage to Dubuque when you were ticketed to St. Louis; the one that closed the ticket office when you were next in line; the one that made you run into your own end zone; The Organization. They were everywhere. Backward, oh backward, turn time in your flight, make a reefer again just for …
“I have one condition,” he uttered softly to Guz, who was at his elbow.
“Hah?” boomed Fawz, for he could not hear them over the music and he refused to tune out Guy Lombardo. Someone had once told him that “Lombardo” was an Arabic name.
“No one must ever know,” continued the U-2 pilot bleakly. “Not even my own government. You hear? No one!”
“A strange condition,” marveled Guz.
“You’ve never flown south instead of north,” uttered the pilot quietly. A godsend, in a way; a strange godsend that the American authorities did not know. Coaching an Arab football team. The depths of the ridiculous, the final slap in a lifetime of humiliations. He wanted to vanish quietly and be remembered once a year at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. To rest in honored glory was better; much better.…
“Still——” objected Guz, and “Please!” husked Goldfarb.
“As you wish.”
The King’s blazing eye had been scruting them like one tennis ball watching another tennis ball. Now he pounded on the arms of the cart. “What, what!”
Guz eyed him drearily. “Faust has signed.”
“What?”
Goldfarb whipped around, raving. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it, I’ll do it!”
A cry exultant broke from the King’s lips, a cry like that of Saladin listening from the walls of Jerusalem as Richard the Lionhearted begged him for anti-dysentery tablets in the name of the Geneva Convention. He falconed gleefully for the door, then screeched to a halt, turning.
“Have to change name!” he thrust at the U-2 pilot.
“Yes,” moaned Goldfarb fervently; “oh yes, God, yes!”
Fawz pointed an imperious finger at him. “From today—Wrong-Way Agajanian!”
Chapter Nineteen
THE PRESIDENT of the United States stood glumly at a window, the Washington Monument blurring beneath his gaze. “You have a cover story prepared?”
“Three of them!” snapped Heinous Overreach.
The President turned his head. “Wouldn’t one have been enough?”
“We’ve got to plan for contingencies,” replied Overreach vaguely, putting a hand on his wrist watch.
The President returned to his contemplation of the monument. “Nothing works,” he murmured dejectedly; “nothing ever works.”
His brother sidled up beside him and his voice was low. “You wanted college eggheads; you got college eggheads!”
Only the President’s lips moved. “Nobody likes a smartass, ‘Splash’; nobody likes a smartass.”
Chapter Twenty
WATCHFUL ON scented cushions, Jenny Ericson munched roasted chick-peas, scruting the harem’s activities from beneath hooded lids. Shuffleboard disks clicked merry hell, Mlle. Touloos lectured in slow gyrations, and a fan-tan game organized by a Eurasian named Lotus Klenk surrendered clinking, shuffled sounds of combat.
Samir, looking shifty-eyed and uneasy, was cornered in the homiletic clutches of a Jehovah’s Witness, a Miss Clydene Beaver, who strove to convince him that there was no God but the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society and that houris were not all. “Many now living will never taste death!” she gurgled at him, rapping his fez didactically with the edge of a subscription form. The girls were getting sick of it, and there were dark murmurings of “kangaroo court” and “lynch the frigging Christer!” Miss Beaver ignored the threats, even when she understood them, and dismissed with an equal aplomb accusations of hypocrisy; she saw no reason for the separation of church and concubinage, for it was a tenet of her faith that “it don’t matter what you do, see, you just gotta know what’s in the Book.” Besides, this was fertile ground; “There be Saracens there,” she had told herself just before signing on, and a Mohammedan in the bag was worth a Catholic in the bush.
Samir whimpered piteously.
Jenny watched, bemused, until she noticed a Nubian guard eying her cleavage with more than irrelevant interest. She flushed scarlet, gathered together her forces, and rose to join Sable, who was leaning from a casement, lambent and dreamy-eyed, like one awaiting the distant clatter of hoofs and a highwayman to come pounding, pounding.…
“Has anyone seen the King yet?” asked Jenny.
Sable gestured outside, where trucks had been rumbling incessantly all morning long, carrying cargoes totally unrelated to either sandalwood, cedarwood, or sweet white wine: bleacher seats. “Take a good look,” said Sable.
Jenny saw four robed Arabs emerging from the palace, watched as they climbed into a lemon-colored Rolls (it was Wednesday) and sped away, none knew whither.
“Well, ducks?”
“I saw four mumus.”
* * *
Guz drove. In the back, tassel to tassel, sat Ammud, Goldfarb, and a Fawz with fidgets and joy bumps.
“Hah!” gleed the King, ramming an elbow into the U-2 pilot’s ribs. Goldfarb said nothing; in his turquoise robe, he said nothing. His eyes shut tight, his arms folded stiffly, a magenta kaffiyeh drooped askew across his eyebrows, he asked nothing of the skies but a well-aimed lightning bolt.
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The car halted with a jerk that sent the trio hurtling against the front seat. “You cuck-oo!” rumbled Fawz, cuffing Guz behind the neck.
“It’s the power brakes,” mumbled Guz, and Fawz cuffed him again for his impertinence.
They emerged from the gleaming car without further incident. They were at the practice field. Arab workmen were throwing up bleachers.
Goldfarb felt the aide’s hand tight around his wrist, saw him staring deep, deep into his eyes. “Eyes I dare not meet in dreams,” thought the U-2 pilot, for his sense of direction was in no wise connected to his literacy.
“And now,” intoned Guz portentously, “you will meet the gentlemen who will constitute your team.”
“…in death’s dream kingdom.”
The quartet billowed to the side lines. Goldfarb stared out at the center of the field. Goldfarb. At the field. Stared. There. There, where at the appearance of the King, a brace of emaciated, blue-dyed, scraggle-bearded, turbaned Koranic students clutching footballs smiled toothlessly and prostrated themselves on the forty-yard line. There.
“Ahhhhhhh,” oohed the grinning skeletons as they bowed.
“Dervishes,” explained Guz compassionately.
Goldfarb knew the death wish.
“Demonstration!” announced the King, his eye swollen with pride and things unthinkable. And to the dervishes he shouted, “Yallah, yallah, belshuh!”
The dervishes understood him, a phenomenon to which they owed their very lives, and upward they snaked with wild ululations, falling on one another in a frenzy of milling savagery, butting and biting, flailing and bashing, chewing and snarling and kicking and screaming, while above the maelstrom footballs flew and shafts of sunlight, straining through clouds, drenched the melee in a horrible saffron haze.
Merciful vertigo dimmed Goldfarb’s vision, and then the macrocosmic world, as with Lear on the heath, tuned into his fever: oil gushed in spurts from scattered points on the field, in fits and in starts, by gallons and by geysers, and Arabs scampered frantically from one to another, sealing off the dark-pumping wounds.