“The Dead Sea has both kinds,” commented Ali absently, turning the striped pack inside-out to finger the seams and examine the straps. “If it is dirty, it is probably not government.” He threw the pack onto the floor. “Joshua was right, there is nothing here.”
Holmes had picked up the pencil stub and was eyeing it; it was two and a half inches long and sharpened with a wide blade. “No papers, diary, that sort of thing? Would your friend Joshua have mentioned if he had removed them?” he asked Mahmoud.
“Yes.”
“Mikhail was a friend of yours, I believe?”
“Mikhail was a friend.”
“What kind of man was he?”
“What does it matter? He is a dead man now.”
“A man is murdered because of what he is,” Holmes said, with what for him was remarkable patience. “If you tell me what Mikhail was, we may more easily find how his death came to him. Unless you believe it was an accident.”
Mahmoud reached out for the box of matches, slid it open as if hoping for a clue, then closed it, turning it over and over in his fingers—which, I noticed, were longer and more sensitive than I had realised. “Mikhail was a good man,” he said abruptly, eschewing maxims for the moment. “He was an honest man. and he hated the Turks. They killed his entire family some years ago, destroyed his entire village. A massacre: his mother and father, two sisters, wife, and son died overnight. He had no great love for the British, but he trusted Joshua. Mikhail was very good at what he did. There was no accident.”
It was the longest speech I’d heard Mahmoud make, in any language, and it had been delivered in an English nearly devoid of accent. Holmes did not acknowledge the occasion, merely pulled shut the strings on top of the little bag of salt and tossed it back onto the small heap of possessions. He held out his hand for the striped bag, which Ali had begun to re-load. Ali hesitated, then handed it over to him with a show of tried patience. Holmes upended it so that everything fell to the ground, turned it inside-out again, and set about examining it. In a moment his attention was caught by a small lump of something brown that had stuck itself to the seam. With a little “Ha!” of triumph he took out his penknife and began to scrape at the lump, using tiny motions to get every bit of the substance. When it was free he held it up to his nose and sniffed at it deeply.
“Do you know what it is?” I asked him.
“I ought to,” he said, and held it out for me to smell.
“Honey!”
“Beeswax,” he corrected me. “This is a short length of a candle that has been blown out, and left to go cold on a dusty piece of rock before someone scraped it off.”
“A bit of candle,” Ali said scornfully, and with heavy sarcasm added, “Even heathens use candles at times.”
Without acknowledging Ali’s remark, Holmes held the blob of wax on the end of his knife while he fished a bit of slick paper from inside his robe, and, taking great care to get all of it, scraped the wax onto the paper. He sniffed at it, wrapped it tightly, put the tiny packet inside his abayya, cleaned his knife blade on the knee of the garment, then said:
“We must go and examine the place where Mikhail died.”
“There is no point,” Ali protested. “We know where and how he was killed.”
“We know no such thing,” said Holmes placidly. Still ignoring Ali’s protests, he went to our pile of things, retrieved his wool rug, and proceeded to wrap himself in it. Sitting down on a portion of the rolled-up tent, he paused for a moment to fix Ali with a hard gaze. “I do not work well in harness with others,” he said. “If you wish to accompany me, I will permit it. However, I am not interested in your recommendations as to our course of action. Good night.” He pulled the rug over his head, curled up on the tent, and went to sleep.
As, eventually, did we all.
We woke at five o’clock to the banshee wail of the muezzin from the mosque. The hours between wakefulness and dawn were taken up with the final restoration of order to our possessions and with replenishing our supplies. After our breakfast (coffee, flat bread, and a mug of watery laban) Mahmoud rose, settled his knife in his belt, and looked at me. “Come,” he ordered.
It was only the fourth time he had spoken directly to me, and I nearly tripped over myself scurrying to obey. He did not make me walk a full pace behind him, either, as if I were a slave or a woman; he merely kept his shoulder in front of mine.
There were few shops and not much in them, but he bought a quantity of small, misshapen grey-green coffee beans, some knobs of hard brown sugar and a pair of equally hard cheeses, one tin of condensed milk that had originally belonged to His Majesty’s forces and was cause for intense bargaining, some millet, three kinds of pulse, two tins of tomatoes, a handful of aromatic mint leaves, a quantity of onions, half a dozen dry-looking pomegranates, two lemons, four small eggs (which were then wrapped in straw and placed in a string bag he had brought with him), four new tea glasses, two porcelain coffee cups and a bowl, a box of German matches and several packets of well-travelled Egyptian cigarettes, some dried fruits, a few small scoops of half a dozen spices, each wrapped into a tight square of paper with the end turned in, ten oranges, six carrots, and an antique cabbage. Mahmoud carried the eggs and the tea glasses; I was loaded with everything else.
From a side street came the sound of hammer on metal, and we were soon standing in a metalsmith’s while Mahmoud searched the artisan’s wares for a coffee-pot to replace the one broken beneath the British soldier’s boot. The bargaining and tea drinking looked as if they would go on for some time, and since no-one was paying me the least attention I allowed my burdens to slip to the ground and moved off to look about.
My eye had been caught by a stack of bright colours through a doorway, which seemed to be a workshop adjunct to this one. The colours turned out to be, not rugs as I had thought, but a pile of embroidered robes. Some of them were the traditional garish red-and-orange on black fabric, but two were a striking, subtle blend of greens and green-blues on a natural creamy cotton. The needlework was both strong and delicate, and had they not been so obviously women’s garments, I should have been very tempted.
Mahmoud, however, had no such compunction. Before I heard him coming, the lovely thing was plucked from my hand. I turned, startled, to watch him walk back over to the smith and drop the dress in a heap onto the carpet beside the pot that was under negotiation. It seemed, I decided eventually, that the garment was to be a bonus to justify the ruinous price the artisan was demanding for his work. After another twenty minutes the bargain was completed, money changed hands, and Mahmoud picked up his eggs in one hand and the four glasses in the other. I shoved the new purchases into my parcels and staggered after him.
When we returned to the inn Ali was missing and Holmes was trying, with limited success, to oversee the packing of our possessions onto the mules. Mahmoud seemed undisturbed at the absence of his partner, and simply set to and directed the inn’s servants in the packing and tying of loads. When we left town Ali had still not appeared. It was not until we were well clear of the check-point on the Hebron road north of town (manned by three taciturn but businesslike British strangers) that he materialised, sitting nonchalantly on a rock by the side of the road, in his hands a nubbin of wood and his great knife, at his feet the bulky parcel that we had buried in the wadi before approaching Beersheva.
Once the revolvers and rifle were distributed between their persons and the mules, we were away again, and I finally had the opportunity to ask Mahmoud to explain the transaction involving the dress.
“I wished to finish my business,” he told me. “We would have been there all day.”
“You said something to him about a girlfriend?” He and the shopkeeper had laughed after Mahmoud’s comment, one of those shared masculine laughs, the same in any language, that instantly raises a woman’s hackles.
“I told him you wanted the kaftan for your girlfriend.”
“I see. Oh. Do you mean you bought it for me?”
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“I paid three shillings for it. If you want it I will give it to you for four.”
“Truly? It’s a beautiful thing, yes. I’d love to have it. Thank you.” He grunted and picked up his pace, but suspicion had begun to dawn, and I trotted to keep up with him. “Mahmoud, did you buy the kaftan because you saw I wanted it?”
He glared over his shoulder at me as if I were mad. “Of course not. I wanted to hurry the business. That is all.” He began to walk even more quickly, and I allowed him to pull away. I was very pleased to own the garment, but I wished I could understand quite how it had come about.
And I did not forgive him for that hackle-raising laugh.
SEVEN
خ
Victories often have hidden causes. Muhammad said, “War is trickery.” A proverb says, “A trick is worth more than a tribe.”
—
THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN
North of Beersheva lies a strip of true agricultural land where the soil is more than a thin scum of dust on the surface of rock and there is water enough to encourage the crops. The small fields of green wheat and barley looked strange at first to eyes accustomed to the stony places, but when we entered a brief hollow where the green stretched out on either side and the trees along the edges of the track had miraculously escaped the Turkish axe, I was hit again by a flash of déjà vu, back to the previous summer as gipsies. Here we had mules clanking behind us instead of the creak and tinkle of a gaudy horse-drawn caravan, and the sky over our heads was brilliant and clear instead of grey, but the feel of being on the road incognito was very similar.
“This reminds me of Wales,” I said to Holmes.
“In Arabic!” he growled, in that language. This also was like our time in Wales, when I was required to maintain the disguise even when unobserved. Obediently, I re-worded the sentence into something resembling Arabic.
Holmes corrected my vocabulary and pronunciation, and waited until I had repeated it, before he answered that yes, he remembered Wales, and then launched off on a completely unrelated tale of a Bedouin raid he had participated in while a guest of the Howeitat tribe, of which I understood every second word. My Arabic was improving, but it was a strain to have to think in a foreign tongue.
We lapsed into silence. A mile or so passed, the only sounds our laden mules, the occasional lorry, the tinkling of various goat bells, and from time to time the drift of conversation from the two men ahead of us. Ali seemed in high spirits; I wondered idly what he had come upon during his trip to retrieve the guns that cheered him so.
Mostly, however, my thoughts were on the previous night’s curious encounter with the spymaster Joshua. His stubborn determination to present an unruffled, unworried façade in the face of what to me seemed some fairly serious problems had struck me as odd then, and seemed even more peculiar at a distance. And he certainly was no judge of men, if he thought Holmes would be deflected by pretty words and stern instructions. Indeed, had he wanted Holmes’ interest to be piqued, he could not have chosen a better approach.
I stirred myself and trotted forward to join Holmes, who had drawn ahead of me while I was deep in thought.
“Tell me, Holmes,” I began, only to have him hiss at me in disapproval. I laboriously constructed a sentence in Arabic, which came out something like “Consider Joshua want help you—your, or no?”
Holmes put the sentence right for me, waited until I repeated it with the correct inflection, and then said merely, “I think you’d find that our friend Joshua is a very clever man indeed.”
Which was all well and good, but I personally would not trust the little man one inch further than was absolutely necessary.
By the time we made camp that night, having walked eighteen or twenty very uneven miles and heard nothing but Arabic since leaving Beersheva, I was exhausted. I did my chores and ate Ali’s tasteless food mechanically, and sat slumped against a bundle in front of the fire in the black tent, dimly aware of Mahmoud pounding the coffee mortar and Holmes talking again, telling another story. Without making an effort of concentration, it was just a flow of Arabic, sweetly guttural noises that ebbed and flowed against my eardrums, until my attention was snagged by the sound of my own name. I bent my ears to his words and decided after a minute that he was telling Ali and Mahmoud the tale of our Welsh adventure; as I listened, an odd thing happened. Despite, or perhaps because of, my combined lack of sleep, physical tiredness, and psychic revulsion for the ubiquitous foreign language, I suddenly realised that I was able to understand virtually everything that was being said. It was as if some internal mechanism had clicked on and the strange and laborious patterns fell neatly into place, so that even individual words that I did not actually know were clear in their context. For half an hour I sat by the fire, drinking minute cups of thick, bitter coffee and listening to Holmes build an epic out of the case in Wales.
Holmes had always been a good speaker, but this performance was, I realised later, extraordinary, particularly coming from a man long critical of his biographer’s habit of making romance out of what the detective viewed as an intellectual exercise. In the general run of things he scorned Watson’s vivid adjectives, yet that night in front of the cook fire Holmes produced a narrative decorated with embroidery and detail that even Watson might have hesitated to include. It was an exciting story, and only when it had rung to a close did I become aware of the glances that our two companions had been throwing my way. When the air was still again but for the whisper of the fire and the distant bray of a fellahin donkey, Ali turned to me with a glare. “Mouhal,” he said: Impossible.
“El haq,” I replied: The truth.
He continued in Arabic automatically. “You climbed up a tree, entered the house of an enemy, and rescued this child of the American senator? Alone? A woman—a girl?”
“It is true,” I repeated, pushing away the irritation his naked doubt caused.
“I do not believe this story,” Ali declared fiercely. A female who could not only heave him across the room and throw a knife with potentially deadly accuracy but perform heroic rescues on top of it was obviously more than he could bear.
“You would accuse me of falsehood?” Holmes asked in a quiet voice.
Ali looked from one of us to the other, no doubt seeing hot anger on my face, cold threat on Holmes’, and scorn in both. He even glanced at Mahmoud, but found no help in that blank visage.
“Exaggeration,” he said resentfully, in English.
“Very little,” said Holmes, accepting the word as if it had been an apology. He did not allow the subject to pass, however, but continued to study Ali as if the younger man were a schoolboy in danger of failing his course of study. This made Ali understandably uneasy. Holmes finally spoke, in a voice with cold steel in it.
“I can see we are going to have problems if you continue to think of Russell as a woman, and English. It could be highly dangerous. I recommend strongly that you stop, now. Think of Russell as Amir, a boy from out of the district who does not speak the local dialect very well. Refer to him using the masculine pronoun, picture him as a beardless youth, and you just might succeed in not giving us away.”
In the course of this speech Ali’s expression had gone from a smirk to disbelief to fury. He rose, his fists clenched, Holmes’ bland face infuriating him even further. He took a step forward. Mahmoud said his name, and he stopped, but turned to his partner and flung his hand out at Holmes in protest. Mahmoud spoke again, a phrase too terse for me to take its meaning, but it cut Ali off as with a blade. The angry man stared furiously at the calm seated one, then turned his back without a word and stormed into the night.
We all turned in shortly thereafter, but the night’s silence was broken by the lengthy murmur of conversation, rising and falling, from the direction of the black tent. I could hear no words, but it sounded to me as if Mahmoud did most of the talking.
In the morning Ali seemed filled with brittle cheerfulness, Mahmoud was
more taciturn than ever, and Holmes was distracted and anxious to be away. We broke camp while Mahmoud made tea, then stood and sipped the hot, sweet drink in the chill dawn before entering the wadi, the shadows still stretched long against the ground.
Here at the lower end of the watercourse the wadi bottom was damp with pools of clear water, but the going was firm, with only the occasional patch of mud. Holmes walked in front, ignoring the tracks in the sandy soil, tracks left by those retrieving Mikhail’s dead body. His eyes were on the boulders above the wet line of the recent flood, and he stopped often to crane his neck at the top of the cliff above us.
The sun was overhead when we came around a bend to find Holmes standing on top of a group of three large boulders with a young tamarisk tree growing from the hill above them. We stopped. Ali gathered together a circle of stones and set about building a fire in the wadi bottom. Mahmoud retrieved his coffee kit. Soon the aroma of roasting beans filled the cold, damp canyon, but Holmes, oblivious, continued to quarter the hillside, stopping from time to time to finger a broken twig or bend close over a disturbed stone. Eventually I climbed up the rocks and joined him.
“There were at least two men,” he began without preamble as soon as my ears were within range. “And it was not a revolver but a rifle, three bullets, from there.” He jabbed a finger briefly at the top of the opposite cliff before returning to his task of gently prising pieces of stone free from the crumbling face of the cliff with the knife from his belt. “A first-rate marksman, too. He hit Mikhail’s turban with his first shot, fifty feet above here, and wounded Mikhail with this, his second.” His long fingers came out from the crack in the rock at which they had been worrying, holding a misshapen wad of grey metal between them. He displayed it to me, slipped it into his robe, and scrambled down a few feet to trace a faint smear of red-brown on the face of the rock and a small spatter farther on. “When the third one struck, he fell onto the boulder, as Joshua said.” On the boulder below, despite the intervening rainstorm, the stain was still clear.
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