That bizarre first exposure led to a genuine love for the city and its hospitable Najdi population. Over the past eighteen years I had taken engagements there whenever they were offered to me. Apart from anything else it allowed me to follow the fantastic change from desert to garden as ten billion gallons per day of fresh water gushed in from Dammam on the Persian Gulf .
Not only that, Riyadh had the best zoo in the whole world. The new Tokyo Zoo was the only competitor, but Tokyo didn’t have those hushed deserts to the north and west, less than a day’s drive away, where I could struggle mentally with tough nuts like the Hammerklavier, and decide how I was going to play them that night.
So here I was, maybe half a day ahead of the killer pack. But how was I going to take the next step? Scouse and Xantippe must have some idea where Leo had been heading, but I didn’t. Yet I had to get the Belur Package — and keep them from getting it while I stayed in one piece.
A nice problem.
My chartered plane had arrived at the airport north of the city at midnight . I hired a car, parked it at the exit to the rental area, wandered back into the arrival area, and settled down to wait. Each time that any plane with a stop in Calcutta came in to land, I went over to watch the passengers arrive in the lounge. And every couple of hours I risked leaving my inconspicuous post for ten minutes, to wolf down a sandwich or go to the bathroom. Naps were taken when I knew there was no flight due in the next hour.
Dawn at last. The passengers who straggled off in the chill morning light were paste-white and red-eyed, shuffling zombies sifting the piles of luggage for missing bags. In half an hour the last of them was leaving. An age until midday . Then I stretched, yawned, and dozed through a long afternoon. The glow of a fine evening streamed in through the high lounge windows, and finally the hush of desert night, lulling the activity in the airport. I had to prop my eyes open, and the lure of a hotel bed grew stronger and stronger. I went to the rest room, washed and shaved, and came back to my seat. Midnight again; cramps in my legs and back; imagined insults and bloodcurdling oaths from Sir Westcott about the way I was abusing my body. Worse aches as the second night wore on.
If my analysis of the situation were wrong, I was in for an uncomfortable couple of weeks.
Anywhere else but in an airport I would have been conspicuous, but here I was surrounded by dozens of weary passengers waiting for their flight, the one that had been delayed in London, Rome, Athens, Bombay, Moscow, Baghdad, Jakarta, or Sydney.
There was plenty of time for thinking, about Leo, Nymphs, and Ameera. I did a negligible amount of it. Other factors were taking over. The latest signs of sensory distortion had begun in Calcutta , when I was overtired after the drive from Cuttack . Now they came sweeping back, con brio, during the long hours of solitary waiting.
The towers of the flash distillation plants that took piped seawater from the Persian Gulf and turned it to drinking water and valuable solid minerals lay ten miles east of the airport. By day they had appeared to me like new temples to Allah, dazzling white spires and metal skeleton mosques rearing their heads four hundred feet above the desert while the watchful German engineers sat in the control rooms at their summit, infidel muezzin flooding the plain below with water instead of the call to prayer. Now, as midnight approached, the warning navigation lights on each tower glowed in the night, red eyes in the desert. They crept steadily closer until they peered in at me from outside the glass windows of the lounge, glowing tigers ten times my height. I was a homunculus in the dust beneath their paws as they pressed against the fragile panes.
I forced myself to look away, to concentrate on my hands in front of my face. This was what Sir Westcott had warned about back in Reading . I struggled to recall his fat, scowling jowls and brusque orders.
If you feel like you’re getting smaller and smaller, cram a couple of these pills down as fast as you can… get to a hospital…
Inside my head, the nerve cells were sprouting their long, threadlike axons, reaching out to couple and reconnect with a billion neighbors. The slow work of regeneration had been going on for months, but no results could come until near the end. As the neurons finally locked in to their matrix of shared pathways, information would begin to flow through the new lines: a tiny trickle at first, then suddenly a mind-breaking flood, a trillion items of data transfer between the lobes of my brain and Leo’s. When the flood came, I ought to be a patient at peace in some quiet hospital ward of a London suburb — not a stiff-limbed hollow-eyed ghost in a foreign airport lounge.
I heaved myself to my feet and picked up the little bag of necessities I had brought with me from Calcutta . If I drove carefully it was less than half an hour in the rented car to Riyadh ’s Yaghut Hospital . I had been there six years ago for a gamma globulin shot, when the hepatitis epidemic was running wild through the Middle East . There would be no traffic at this hour — it was almost three A.M.
Before I had taken two steps, there was a shimmer of green lights behind me. The big screen that provided arrivals information in Arabic and English was flickering again. Terminating passengers from the Manila-London flight were now clearing Immigration; intermediate stop: Calcutta .
I moved back to my favorite spot, a balcony above the main concourse. Passengers would look around them, but they seldom looked up.
If Pudd’n hadn’t been there, I would have missed them completely. Scouse was wearing flowing white robes to the manner born, and Zan, two paces behind, wore no makeup and the concealing black veil and gown of the chador. Their dark complexions matched those of the crowd, and they both blended well with the homecoming Riyadh businessmen and their wives. Zan had even adopted the slow, hip-swaying walk that looked so attractive in the women of the town.
But not old Pudd’n. He was half a head too tall and a hundred pounds too heavy. He wore a robe, but it didn’t help a bit. It was too short. Size twelve shoes and six inches of grey trouserleg were visible below the white hem, and his face was flushed and rosy as he carried their three bulky suitcases.
All three of them were looking around suspiciously and I was afraid that they might somehow catch sight of me. I kept well hidden behind a pillar in the lounge as they headed for the exit and piled into a taxi.
The dawn was just a glimmer in the eastern sky, but already there was a good deal of traffic on the road from the airport. I moved my rented car out onto the access road a few hundred yards behind them, and kept my distance. I had assumed that they would go first to a hotel, and catch up on missing sleep; then I could do the same, close enough to track their movements. But as soon as we came to the Medina Highway that led around the city to the west, the orange taxi left the road to Riyadh .
I followed.
The volume of traffic was picking up rapidly. Trucks and cars roared and reeled about me, and their sizes changed as I looked at them. In most cities of the world I would have been arrested at once for wild driving; here I didn’t stand out from the crowd. Put a sober Saudi citizen behind the wheel, and he becomes so macho that a new word is needed to describe his behavior. To yield right of way is unthinkable, and traffic lights are an insult to driving prowess. The flowerbeds that stood in the middle of the broad double roadway were scored by tire tracks, and in ten miles I saw three wrecks.