Leon Uris (60 page)

‘Beggars, we are beggars,’ Father said, taking the money, tickets, and cash.

‘I am very sorry, Haj. It was the best I could do.’

‘No, no, my friend. You have done too much already.’ Father then turned to me, strangely. ‘Ishmael, you will wait in Dr. Mudhil’s workroom. I wish to have private words with him.’

They spoke for a time. I don’t know how long because I always ascended to heaven when I could walk around Professor Doctor Nuri Mudhil’s studio, filled as it was with wonderments. At his bench was a complex drawing of a Byzantine mosaic he had uncovered that was once a church floor. I studied it. At last the office door opened and I was summoned to return and told to sit down.

‘You are leaving with Dr. Mudhil,’ my father said tersely. ‘Right now.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘While I am away it would be better for you not to be in Aqbat Jabar.’

‘But, Father, why?’

‘Because your life is in danger!’ he barked.

‘It would be cowardly of me to go!’

‘Not cowardly, only wise.’

‘Who will defend the women?’

‘There is Sabri, there is Omar, and there is Kamal. The women will be safe.’

‘Sabri must work and Kamal is worthless. Omar cannot do the job by himself.’

‘He will have to,’ my father said.

‘But where do I go?’

‘You will cross the Jordan River,’ Nuri Mudhil said. ‘Then deep into the desert to the border of Iraq, where you will stay among my very good friends the al Sirhan Bedouin. And you may take many of my books with you.’

I began to weep, then felt a strange and most wonderful thing. My father stood over me and placed his hands on my shoulders with great affection.

‘What of Jamil?’ I finally blubbered.

‘I will not be blackmailed by those dogs in Amman. Jamil’s fate is in Allah’s hands. Allah has told me to make a terrible decision which of my sons must survive.’ I looked at him.

‘I have made that decision, Ishmael.’

F
AWZI
E
FFENDI
K
ABIR RECLINED
on an elevated Romanesque couch in a remodeled boathouse down-lake in Zurich’s sumptuous suburb of Zollikon. There were four steps down from this ‘emperor’s throne’ to the mats of a circular room, mirrored all around and lit for debauchery.

Several control panels were at the emperor’s fingertips. He could touch off a range of music from the atonalities of Hindemith and Bartok or to shrill Stravinsky, or lofty Beethoven, or muted Mozart, or the sweaty driving thumping of the
Bolero,
or Wagner’s wings to Valhalla, or
le hot
or
le cool
jazz, or sentimental French love songs, or the familiar and deliriously discordant wails of the Orient.

The large control board next to it activated a limitless selection of lighting effects, some two hundred thousand combinations from swirling maddening little octagonal dots to sudden bolts of lightning.

Yet another set of buttons could release a plethora of special effects down on the revelers on the mats: tropical mists tauntingly perfumed, slithering oils, fog, live snakes, rose petals, doves, and occasionally, when everything was working, he could lower trapezes from the ceiling or ropes for dwarfs to slide down.

The final panel rotated the emperor’s couch so he might observe every part of the room below and raise and lower his couch on a hydraulic lift much as one sends one’s automobile aloft for repairs.

There were other rooms: a generously stocked bar and buffet; a hot pool with a waterfall; a dressing room filled with costumes from Greek togas to leathers, to animal skins and all sorts of toys, the full assortment of whips, chains, masks, dildos, torture and debasement devices. The selection of drugs was also complete: basic Lebanon number one hashish, heroin, pure cocaine, slowdown dream substances, speed-up pills.

The boathouse had been re-created by a team of the best motion picture technicians and interior decorators on the Continent at a cost of slightly over two million dollars.

Fawzi Kabir rarely got down on the mats, and when he was visited at throne level his participation was abstract, for he was bloated, generally drugged, and without potency. Nonetheless his perverse imagination was bottomless and the games to be played and performances to be performed were endless. His lust for inflicting pain and debasement provided him with unique wild bursts of orgasmic joy.

The whores of Zurich were as bland as the country and limited in number. The Effendi preferred German men and women. When it came to an orgy, they were peerless. Ursula traveled to the fleshpots of Munich, which she knew intimately and where she obtained the players.

It took about a dozen couples to fill the mattresses and their mirrored images ran to infinity. At times a live string quartet performed along with a poetry reader. Muscled, cocoa-buttered men and sultry girls with panther movements performed individual and collective feats of wonderment. Party themes varied according to the limitations of Ursula’s imagination and often lasted for a hundred hours, ending usually with a superman or superwoman contest. The winner! A diamond bracelet, a gold watch, a car.

The whores of Munich were drawn magnetically to the Arabs. Not only did Islam’s high and mighty potentates require servicing, but the Arabs generally traveled with enormous entourages, so there was enough business to filter down to the most lowly servant. Cash up front, no bargaining. The whores and their pimps earned their fees, for they were often treated crudely and always with an undertone of savagery.

Ursula convinced Kabir that if he was to partake of such sights, it was the one place he could not guard his pocketbook. Couples, food, transportation, lodging, drink, costumes, drugs, repair of the room, individual performers, gifts could run a party to upward of a hundred thousand dollars.

On this night the players were heading into a third straight dawn and the Effendi had reached the point of collapse. Before he spun into a gasping glob, he had gone on a binge, pelting faces and bodies with bunches of juicy purple grapes, urinating down from the throne, overturning gallon cans of body paint until he collapsed with a ripsaw battle between sleeping pills and cocaine raging in his body and head.

Ursula climbed up to his couch, where he now lay moaning incoherently, and broke a capsule under his nose. He twitched and blabbered to some sort of consciousness, lifted himself to all fours, his belly nearly touching the floor ... and vomited.

‘Wake up, Fawzi!’ she demanded over thunder bursts of storm music and dizzying flashes of light.

He mumbled an unintelligible complaint and vomited again. She put another ammonia capsule under his nose, then doused him with icy water.

He looked up at her, dripping perspiration, his eyes rolled like ball bearings on polished floor, and he tipped flat on his face. She whacked his buttocks hard. ‘Wake up!’

A few of the revelers, in Mardi Gras masks, howled in delight at the foot of the steps.

‘You dirty bitch, leave me alone!’

Kabir groped for the emperor’s couch, but he slipped on the oil and wetness beneath his body and skidded down to the mat and lay on his back bleating to be left alone. The revelers pelted him with a tattoo of grapes, ripe plums, and kirschwasser until Ursula beat them off.

He breathed in short gasps.

‘Prince Ali Rahman has phoned,’ she said. ‘I put him off for a half hour.’

The prince! Oh God!’ Kabir groaned. He tried to swim to his feet but skidded down again. ‘I can’t ... I can’t ... oh God ... what ... what ... time is it?’

‘It is four in the morning.’

‘Oh God! The prince.
No!
No more to sniff. My head is splitting.’

‘Throw up again,’ she commanded, signaling a pair of servants to bring cold water and sponges and to clean him up. As he was attended, Ursula dimmed the music to a soothing, drifting theme and set the lights at a pleasant shade of pastel. The partygoers then either collapsed and slept entwined in twos, threes, and fours, or crawled off to clean up.

He was set upright but toppled over again and lay still. Ursula reached across his blubbery back.

‘It was a good party,’ he said.

‘Yes, Fawzi, a wonderful party.’ She stroked him with the tips of her meticulously sharpened and painted claws. ‘A wonderful party.’

‘Get the doctor, I am sick. I need a shot.’

‘He is on his way from the main house.’

Within the hour the Effendi was sobered enough to return Prince Ali Rahman’s call. The voice on the other end of Kabir’s line screamed a string of Saudi obscenities, commonplace when Ali Rahman was angry, which was a good part of the time. Kabir waited patiently for the royal wrath to wane with a calming repetition of ‘Yes, my prince,’ and ‘No, my prince.’

‘Have you seen the morning papers!’ Rahman demanded.

‘No, my prince. I do not usually get out of bed and read the papers at five in the morning.’

The prince shrieked out a front-page story that a three-man delegation of West Bank refugees had arrived in Zurich and demanded credentials to the arbitration convention. They had said in a news conference that King Abdullah was holding fifty-two refugee boys as hostages in an Amman prison.

‘Who are these intruders, Your Highness? What are their names?’

‘There is a Bedouin, a Sheik Ahmed Taji. There is Charles Maan, the nonbeliever of whom we have already heard, and there is a Haj Ibrahim al Soukori al Wahhabi.’

‘I know them,’ Kabir answered.

‘I want them assassinated!’ the prince screamed.

‘No, that will do us no good in Switzerland. Look, give me an hour and I will be at your villa.’

Prince Ali Rahman was attired in a silken morning gown. His long thin face held an indelible stamp, the beak of the Saudi family resembling that of a desert hawk, which he truly was. Although far down the line of succession, Prince Rahman had emerged into the top circle of power in a royal court stocked with hundreds of princes and princelings.

Ali Rahman was of the proud old breed. He had ridden alongside his grandfather, the great Ibn Saud, who went to war for control of the Arabian peninsula at the turn of the century. Ibn Saud had rid the place of the Turks, outlived a British protectorate and had driven their archrivals, the Hashemites, out of the Hejaz. Ibn Saud declared a nation, which without the burden of modesty he named after his family. In the early 1930s he had initiated oil explorations with the Americans, a move that was now beginning to cause billions of dollars to gush into a dry treasury.

Ali Rahman was given the task of investing the new fortunes. He was not a sophisticated man in matters of international finance but he had native shrewdness.

Fawzi Kabir had long had an operational base in Switzerland and during the war had shown great finesse in the intricate business of arms dealing and transforming or hiding funds. When one of the ranking princes dropped nearly a half-million dollars in IOUs at the Monte Carlo gaming tables in a twelve-hour streak and could not make his markers good, he became a candidate for imprisonment. Fawzi Kabir cleverly bailed out the wayward prince, a move that caught Rahman’s eye.

Kabir could offer a full range of financial services, interesting investments, floating of high-interest loans, stashing untraceable millions. He made enormous sums for the Saudis and enormous commissions for himself, so much so that Kabir moved into Zurich, a crown city of hidden accounts. The Effendi had only to sit behind the desk of his mansion in Zollikon and appraise the endless petitioners from banks, arms merchants, drug runners, floundering little nations with mineral deposits.

The royal family was just getting around to placing its young heirs in American and British universities. There were fifty of them on the Continent now, with their entourages. Kabir controlled their funds, covered their gambling debts, their fifty-thousand-dollar hotel bills, their purchases of jewelry and cars, their pursuit of European flesh. He kept their excesses out of the papers and saved the royal family from numerous potential humiliations.

When the United Nations called for an arbitration conference to present all outstanding Arab claims from the war, Kabir engineered its location, had it held in Zurich, and had himself named as head of one of the Palestinian delegations. Prince Rahman leased an enormous villa in the wooded Zurichberg district and the two conspired to manipulate the conference. A new chapter in Saudi political thinking had opened: the use of vast oil revenues combined with blackmail and the outright purchasing of allies. The prince knew that if he could control the avaricious mind of Fawzi Kabir, he might well control the Arab world, or, at least, manipulate it to Saudi whims.

Kabir’s first move was to get a signed agreement from all the Arab states and delegations that none could negotiate with or sign an agreement with the Jews on their own. The Saudis had not fought in the war, except for a token unit, nor did they involve themselves with the refugees. Their main purposes were to avenge Moslem and Arab honor for the insult the Jews had inflicted on their manhood, and to claim leadership of the Arab world. This solid Arab front that they had helped create was now being broken by the arrival of three ragtag delegates representing the West Bank refugees.

‘Why can’t we assassinate these refugee dogs?’ Ali Rahman demanded.

Fawzi Kabir rested his belly on his legs on the edge of his seat and politely refused the fruit bowl, a sight that gave him more than usual discomfort this morning.

‘Let us put it this way. We are guests of the Swiss. We are under their tent, in a manner of speaking. They have made a career of not getting involved in other people’s wars in order to service other people’s money. They will not permit foreigners to shoot each other in their streets. They are adamant about such details.’

‘Then we take our money elsewhere!’

‘If it were only that simple, Your Highness. They have built a great reputation for caring for money with great tenderness. Nowhere else is money so safe. We can sleep at night. This is the Swiss culture, the Swiss innovation. If we start shooting in Zurich it won’t even be a question of them throwing us out. They will. Besides that, my prince, the assassination of the refugees would create a bad image for us in the press.’