Descartes inhaled sharply.
Sonnenby turned to him, “What?”
The Frenchman turned to Elsa and took her arm. “Gertrude Bell has returned from Cairo. Damascus knows this. We may look like her travelling party from the air. They would not dare shoot us.”
“Horses would not make it that far from the river. We would need camels.” Sonnenby was looking at Elsa. “And we don’t have the proper clothing to make Elsa look like her. And Miss Bell has red hair.”
“She can wear a veil.”
Marshall interjected. “Miss Bell wears European dress. Never this Bedouin get-up.”
“I have the blue damask,” Elsa suggested.
All three men burst into laughter.
“No,” Descartes put a hand up. “Miss Bell might not wear a ball gown on a camel, but it would make the pilot think twice before firing. Fraulein Schluss doesn’t have to pretend to be her, just look European and female.”
They stopped laughing.
“The French might shoot her anyway,” Marshall said, half seriously, “Just to annoy Churchill.”
“That would cause an international incident,” Sonnenby grumbled. “The pilots won’t shoot her.”
Elsa was growing increasingly uncomfortable with all this talk about getting shot. “I do not know who Gertrude Bell is, or why she should be shot at all.”
“She is an advisor to the British in Baghdad. She’s been here several years,” Marshall explained. “Archaeologist or some such academic. She moves freely around the country and is well-known to the locals who would not shoot her. Certainly the British pilots would not shoot her.”
“Or we could just travel at night,” Descartes suggested. “If you think such a disguise is far-fetched. The planes don’t fly at night.”
“And during the day?” Sonnenby waved an arm toward the desert across the river.
“She would scorch in that dress in the desert,” Marshall warned. “There are no sleeves, and the beads would get hot and burn her.” He spoke like a man who knew the gown intimately. “We can’t afford to only travel at night.”
Descartes said, “She can wrap herself in the veils to protect herself. If we hear an engine, they come off. The beads will shine in the sun. No pilot, French or English, would shoot a blonde woman in a ball gown on a camel.” The three men laughed nervously. Elsa did not think it was so funny. She was not as certain as they were.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “This plan may keep us from attack from the air, but who will be attacking from the ground? Not all the tribes would honor Mehmet’s request. Other tribes would have no qualms about shooting me dead, gown or not. Nor you either.”
This brought a murmur of agreement from the men. Sonnenby spoke, “It is true that not all the tribes welcome Miss Bell’s influence. Yet you are under Mehmet’s protection. His people will not harm you.”
She pointed to the south. “Just his people? Can we be sure that this information is known to all the tribes? You men are not wearing ball gowns, and if you were, the pilots would shoot at you.”
“But we could get Arab dress,” Descartes said. “Sonnenby here is a natural. But you…” he pointed to Marshall. Hard to hide that stiff upper lip under a keffiyah and agal.”
Sonnenby had already decided. “Elsa protects us from the air, camels and thobes protect us from the ground.” He turned to Descartes. “How much money do you have? And I don’t mean paper francs.”
“All I have is paper francs.” They both looked at the stack of supplies and the crate of rifles.
Descartes nodded. “Agreed. Those rifles will get us some Ruwallah clothing and some more food. It is enough for camels? And to get us across the river?”
“Probably. Mehmet has told them that Elsa is not to be harmed. The older ones remember my mother.” He looked up at her. “We show Elsa to the elders and borrow the camels. Give them the horses as collateral. Make sure they can get us across the river.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Wait,” Marshall had a hand to his neck and stepped forward. “Do you know what they are going to do?” His voice wavered when he added, “the Ruwallah?”
“They are going to kill any man in trousers from Baghdad to Damascus.” Sonnenby gathered up the pack horse’s picket line.
Descartes reached for the pack saddle and nodded toward her briefcase. He said to Elsa, “Time to get ready for the dance, cherie.”
Chapter Sixteen
Elsa shifted her weight because a beaded dress is uncomfortable to wear when one is riding a camel. The beads dug into her posterior and made it feel like sitting on sharp pebbles. There was not one moment of stillness; she was constantly shifting one direction or the other. It was worse than a ship, and though Elsa had never suffered from seasickness and had spent many summers on little sailboats on the lakes, she found that riding a camel was something she would not miss when she returned to Vienna.
Her animal was placid enough. It was a wooly female and she trudged through the desolate wastes with her head high and her nostrils opening and closing as she tested the air. Elsa swayed back and forth until she ached all over. She was relieved when Sonnenby called a halt for the day in the shelter of a wadi that connected to a tributary of the river. Despite all their worries and planning, they saw no aircraft at all. Descartes set to work with his camp shovel and dug a hole in the sand that filled with water after an hour.
Sonnenby and Marshall took care of the camels and Elsa just stood. Her bottom would permit no more sitting, and her back ached terribly from the ride. She bent and stretched and walked back and forth until she could think clearly again. When the sun set they gathered into a fireless circle and chewed stale flatbread and some more dates Sonnenby had brought from the village. Descartes had a little bag of precious pistachios and some kind of tart fruit paste that tasted good with the dry bread.
Descartes sat facing the east and Sonnenby the west. One could see an approaching rider for miles. But then a rider would be able to see them as well. The stars are bright in the desert, and the moon reflects brightly on the sands.
After a few hours the relief of the cool breeze from the distant river reached the camp and Elsa breathed it in gratefully like it was water over her face and hands. She had never thought much about the scent of water. It had always been all around her in Austria. Here in the desert, the sweet smell of the wiry sage mingled with the constant smell of dust, and when the wind carried the scent of water, it felt like paradise.
“Thank God for that,” Descartes said of the breeze.
“I almost miss the constant rain and fog of England,” Sonnenby said.
“Almost?” Elsa looked at him.
He smiled. Marshall made a noise in his throat. She decided when she returned to Vienna that she would never complain about rain or cold again. Ever.
Marshall turned stiffly toward her. “You will be glad to return to Vienna, fraulein.”
“I will,” she agreed.
“I am sorry to have involved you in this trouble,” he said. “It was not my intention.”
Sonnenby snorted. “You are not sorry to have involved me,” he said.
“You were already involved,” Marshall answered shortly.
Elsa sat quietly, first on one side of her bottom then the other. She tried to stretch out her legs, but the dress hampered any real movement. Descartes noticed her discomfort.
“Fraulein, let me slit that gown, at least to your knee.”
“No, by God. Do you know how much that dress cost?” Marshall put a hand to the bandage on his throat.
There was nervous laughter all around. Elsa moved so her right hip was up and scissored her legs for Descartes who used his hunting knife to tear the dress in a nice straight line from her ankle to her knee. She moved her legs again. Much better.
“God,” Marshall said, “you’ve ruined it.”
Descartes held up his knife. “Monsieur,” he said to Marshall. “Shall I cut your skirt for you
as well?” The three men were now in Arab dress, though Descartes refused to give up his fedora. As predicted, Marshall wore his burnouse over his trousers and shirt and carried his body like he was in an office and not on a camel. He did not laugh and Descartes sheathed his knife with a low chuckle. “You sleep first, Mr. Marshall.”
Sonnenby nodded to Elsa. “Go to sleep.”
She did not have to be told twice and lay down with her head on her saddle blanket. She slept fitfully, however and when she woke again the moon had moved halfway across the sky, but still hung high over the western horizon. Descartes snored to her left but Marshall lay too quietly to be really asleep. She stood up and moved to sit beside Sonnenby, who was now on watch.
“What will happen next?” She whispered to him.
“Many things could happen next.”
“I am interested in only the good things,” she told him.
“Then we will travel two more days and meet up with a group that is friendly to the British or the French, and find our way back to civilization without dying of thirst or being murdered in our sleep for our camels and supplies.”
“What are the odds that it will happen that way?”
He was silent and he turned his head to look at her. His eyes were sad.
“I see.” She tried to keep her face as still as possible forbidding herself to despair. This is an event. Like any other. One does the best with what one has.
He took a deep breath. “Why did you agree to come with Marshall? Why not refuse? You could be in a drawing room in Vienna right now, sipping coffee and listening to lectures.”
“That is not my purpose, Mr. Sinclair.”
“What is your purpose?”
“I am trained to help the sick and wounded.”
“Plenty of them around,” he said softly.
“Indeed.” Elsa tucked her knees up and put her arms around them. It was cold at night. The dry air and clear sky held no heat, and after midnight, the warmth of the sands had given off the day’s stored energy. There was nothing but chill. “I regret that I have not had the opportunity to properly analyze you.”
He gave a short laugh. “No. You haven’t.”
She continued, “Though I have decided that you do not seem to be as disturbed as Mr. Marshall had originally suggested.”
He turned to her and his dark eyes searched her face. “I assure you, doctor, that I am very disturbed.”
They stared at each other for a time. Sometimes talk therapy could not touch the deeper parts of a man’s psyche. There were places where words had no meaning. She could see that Sonnenby had been there. Many men who had been face to face with death had been there. It was a place where a word like “blood” or “horror” became only a symbolic sound that a mouth made. The reality could not be communicated. She knew that.
She had never killed a man in battle, though in the hospitals she had watched many die beneath her hands. She knew this feeling from what they communicated as they looked up at her, and how they squeezed her hands at the end. The light would fade and the body would relax and they would be gone. Where did they go? That would be another lesson somewhere else, she told herself.
But right now Sonnenby was looking at her like he was one of those dying men. She took his hand and squeezed it. “I am not sorry I came,” she told him. “You must believe me.”
He nodded and narrowed his eyes as he looked at his hand in hers. “I believe you. But this,” he lifted their joined hands, “this is how a nurse holds the hand of a dying man.”
She let it go and he took his hand back and rested it on his knee. She stared at him.
“Do you feel like you are dying?” She asked him softly.
“Every minute of every day,” he answered.
Elsa tried again, “When was the last time you felt wonderfully alive?”
He shook his head slowly. “Is this talk therapy? Are you being my nurse now, instead of my friend?”
This response took her aback. Of course it was therapy, and when did she become his friend? She thought back over the last week or so. Perhaps when he had fed her that flan. It had not been professional to drink so much or to permit him to pick her up and carry her. Elsa tried to excuse herself by remembering how stressful the car chase and crash had been, and how she needed something for her nerves. But the truth was not so simple.
It may have been in the offices in Damascus, when the general had him hauled away in a straight jacket. She had not felt professional then. She had felt like his mother, or his sister. Or perhaps when she saw him in the tent that night and had to pretend to be his wife. It had been difficult to be professional then, certainly. He was still looking at her, waiting for an answer.
“I am your friend,” she decided.
He moved his hand and took hers again. He lifted it to his lips. The wiry hairs of his short beard and mustache scratched her knuckles. His lips were a soft contrast. He smiled. “I will tell you, then, friend, what you want to know.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t think I cannot understand what caused my troubles, Elsa Schluss. When I was fifteen I watched helplessly as my father murdered my mother in a terrible rage.” His eyes watched her closely for her reaction.
She worked to keep her face still.
He kissed her hand again. “He was never punished for it. The coroner wrote that she committed suicide by throwing herself from the third floor balcony to the paved yard. That is what my father told him to write, but I had seen him push her over the balustrade.”
Elsa swallowed hard. She asked very softly, “What did he tell you to say?”
“He told me to be silent, or he would do the same to me.”
“And you were silent.” It was not a question.
“My mouth was silent, but I behaved very very loudly, to be sure.”
She looked at the way he tightened his jaw, remembering. She imagined how it must have been to live in the same house, no matter how large, with such a vile man. And to be so completely under his power.
He must have seen the sympathy in her eyes for he said, “It was a long time ago. He is dead now, too. Burning in hell for all eternity, if you can believe the vicar. My father was not popular with the churchmen.”
“And yet you spent a year in an asylum.” She offered this, hoping he might continue.
He did. “That was years later, as I said. I carried on in the British fashion for nearly fifteen years, Elsa. Until I behaved somewhat beyond the accepted norm, even for a soldier, while in Cairo. My superior officers naturally assumed I was insane. They signed a paper that said I was.” He lifted her hand and turned it palm up, looking at it as though he had never seen a woman’s hand before. His rough fingers smoothed down the planes of her palm and the mound of her thumb and touched lightly the blisters that were forming from the camel’s rope.
Elsa thought about the military files. There was nothing from before his commitment besides general language about his state of mind, and his superiors’ conclusion that he was non compos mentis. They would have recognized seizures as a physical ailment. It could not have been that. What then? Erratic behavior? Unexplained sudden catatonia? She thought about asking him what exactly he had done to cause the military to restrain him and ship him home. He was still looking at her hand with an odd fascination. She decided to wait and asked him a safer question, “You have had several instances of loss of consciousness just in the last week. Do they usually happen so frequently?”
“You are sounding like a nurse again, friend.”
Elsa lowered her head. “As your friend I want to help you.”
“As my friend, you should accept me as I am. Damaged. I cannot be cured. I have been told as much.”
“So you think your mother’s murder is the reason for your troubles?”
He looked up sharply. “Is that not enough?”
Elsa set her face in a serious doctoral expression of thoughtfulness and concern. “You had known for years that your father was a
bully and a tyrant. While his action was cruel and despicable, you were fifteen years old. You were nearly a man. A four-year-old might have had trouble reconciling the revelation that a trusted parent is a cruel murderer. But you,” she leaned in meaningfully, “you had long ago learned that your father was cruel and deceitful.”
She waited for him to nod, then continued. “You were sent to the army as soon as you were old enough. England would not have taken you if you were insane. Therefore you were sane when you received your commission. You have been to war. You have seen more terrible things than even such a heinous crime against a defenseless woman. Yet you remained sane. You were commended and decorated by your commanding officers. Traveled widely and promoted. Given the command of other men. This is not what one can expect from a boy who went mad after seeing the brutal murder of his mother. No, Mr. Sinclair, I do not believe that your mother’s murder, no matter how painful and disturbing it was, sent you to the asylum fifteen years afterwards.”
He listened to her words, and she saw him digest them. She watched the flutter of thoughts as they glided across the planes of his face. She saw him agree with her. She saw him understand. Then a real fear overtook his eyes and his mouth tightened and his throat moved. He looked at her with the most desperate flash of terror she had ever seen on a man’s face. It was fleeting, and then was gone, replaced with that British stiffness again. Neither of them spoke.
She put her hand on his shoulder. Something else had happened. Something more recent. Sonnenby didn’t know what it was. She offered him the water skin. Not because she thought he might be thirsty, but to refuse the offer of water in the desert was rude and to drink he must relax his jaw. He was grinding his teeth now. He would crack a tooth if he didn’t stop. He took the skin from her hand and held the tied opening before his lips. But he did not drink. His eyes were far away.
“Mr. Sinclair,” she said softly. “Please take a drink.”
His hands and arms trembled as he lifted the skin to his mouth. He had neglected to unwrap the cord that tied the corner shut. He did not seem to notice that water was not touching his lips. Elsa took the water skin back and unwrapped the cord and positioned the corner properly to allow him to drink. He did. His eyes were vacant now.
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