The Haj - Leon Uris [206]
‘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.’
12
FAWZI EFFENDI KABIR 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