“You’re certain you’d recognise Ali’s jackal noise?” I asked after a while.
“He has not made the signal,” Holmes said firmly. “They are still in the house.”
“Raiding the pantry and having a kip in the soft beds, I don’t doubt.”
“Don’t be peevish, Russell.”
I fell silent. Another twenty minutes passed. In the two hours we had lain there, nothing had changed except that the rooster in the village had been joined by another perhaps a mile off. At two hours and a quarter Holmes breathed again in my ear.
“Something is moving near the house.”
Before I could react I felt more than saw a dark shape moving across the ground towards us.
“Ya walud,” came the now-familiar voice, pitched low.
“Here, Ali,” said Holmes.
The man had the eyes of a cat, and picked his way by starlight over the uneven ground to where we lay.
“There is a problem with the safe. Mahmoud cannot persuade it to yield, and the dog and the guard will awaken soon.”
“Does he wish me to try?”
“You said you knew modern safes.” It is difficult to express nuances of doubt and disapproval in a whisper, but Ali managed.
“I will come,” said Holmes, and rolled cautiously off the wall, sending a minor shower of stones off the cliff and rousing the dog of the house below, but not, fortunately, the human inhabitants. Holmes made to follow Ali into the blackness, then paused. “By the way, Russell, I meant to wish you many happy returns. Although I suppose by now I am a day late.” He vanished before I could respond, but in truth I had quite forgot that it was my nineteenth birthday. For which I had received a sunburnt nose, a matching set of blisters, a bone-deep bruise on my right heel, a stomach clenched tight with hunger, and whatever bruises my current wall-top position might leave me with. All in all, one of the more interesting collections of birthday presents I had ever received.
Much cheered, I resigned myself for another lengthy wait. To my surprise, less than half an hour later there was another motion of a shadow approaching, and Ali reappeared, much agitated.
“The safe is open, but that foolish man insists on looking at everything it contains. You must tell him to close it so we can leave. There is no more chloroform.”
I followed Holmes’ example and allowed myself to roll off the wall, only to be knocked breathless by a large stone in the belly. Gasping as silently as I could, I got to my feet and staggered after Ali and into the house.
From the outside it had seemed a large building, and moving through the dark rooms—over smooth marble floors and thick carpets, through air scented with cooking spices and sandalwood— confirmed my impression that this was indeed one holy man who did not embrace poverty.
We turned into a corridor towards a dimly lit rectangle and entered the room, Ali closing the door silently behind us. I looked at the two unshaven men in dirty headgear and robes, bent over the papers, then at the man in garish dress beside me, and could only hope that the guard Ali had chloroformed did not wake, because if he had a whit of sense he would shoot before asking any questions.
Holmes sat on a low stool in front of the wall safe, rapidly but methodically sorting through the stack of papers on his knees. As we came in I saw him pause over a letter, open it, glance at it, and slip it with its envelope into the front of his robe. Mahmoud was looking more animated than I had ever seen him, standing over Holmes and clasping his hands together as if to keep from wringing them, or applying them to Holmes’ throat. Ali held out one hand to me, gesturing with the other to the two men.
“Tell him,” he insisted. “Tell him we must go.”
I studied Holmes for a minute, and thought I recognised the disapproving set to his features. I turned to Ali. “What is he looking for?”
“We only wish to retrieve one letter. We have found it. We must be gone.”
“Is it possible that this mullah could be a blackmailer?” I asked. Ali’s eyes slid to one side and Mahmoud growled something about the man in truth not being a mullah, both of which I read as affirmatives. “Holmes doesn’t much care for blackmailers,” I commented, but added to the man himself, “It will be getting light out in another half hour.”
The only sign Holmes gave that he had heard me was a slight increase in the speed of his examination. There was no budging him, until twelve long minutes later he had reached the end of the stack, having removed several more papers, and stood to put the remainder back into the safe. In a flurry of activity Ali and Mahmoud returned the furniture to its place, closed and reset the safe, straightened the lithograph of Jerusalem that covered it, and hurried us out the door.
The sky was beginning to lighten. Mahmoud locked the villa’s door and we slipped among the shadowy shapes of fragrant trees towards the front wall (this one high, well maintained, and topped by broken glass) that protected the grounds from the road. Again Mahmoud took out his picklocks and applied them to the gate, unlocking it and relocking it after us. A groggy bark came from the back of the house, but we were away, down the hill, across two switchbacks in the road and the terraces of olive trees they wove through. We retrieved the possessions that we had left there, harmless bundles of provisions and armloads of firewood bound with twine, and finally rejoined the road some distance from the house. When dawn came we were just another quartet of stolid Arab peasants about our business. Half an hour later a lorry of British soldiers passed us without slowing, its dust cloud applying another layer of grime to our clothes and skin.
When we neared our camp site we could see two figures, squatting like gargoyles just outside the front edge of the black goat’s-hair tent belonging to Mahmoud and Ali. One was a young man, swathed in many layers of dust-coloured fabric; as we approached he stood up to thrust his wide, callused feet into a pair of once-black shoes that lacked laces and were far too big for him, but were the necessary recognition of an Occasion. The woman at his side remained hunched on the ground, a small heap of faded black with the married woman’s red strip of embroidery travelling up the front of her dress. Her head and upper body were wrapped in the loose shawl called a burkah, which she had raised across her face immediately she saw us coming, to supplement the red-and-blue veil decorated with gold coins that she already wore. I wondered, not for the first time, why the women in this country did not suffocate come the heat of summer. Her coal black eyes, the only part of her visible other than an inch of indigo-tattooed forehead and the work-rough fingers of her right hand, were trained on the ground, although when she thought no one was looking, she shot hungry, curious glances at us.
The man greeted Mahmoud as a long-lost brother, hanging on to his hand and talking effusively. We had been through this before, however, and I had read the sign of the borrowed shoes correctly, for rather than removing his guest to the more leisurely depths of the rug-strewn tent, Mahmoud merely dropped to his heels on the ground outside, away from the camel-dung fire that Ali was beginning to rekindle. This was business, then, not friendship.
The rest of us continued as before, ignored completely by the two engaged in their transaction and ignoring the quick glances of the woman (whom of course the man had not bothered to introduce, and who therefore did not quite exist). I took great care not to stare at her, despite my natural curiosity, since I was, after all, to all appearances a male. I had to be content with the occasional furtive glance as I dropped my bundle of twigs and sticks next to the fire and waited for Ali to empty the last of the water from the skin so I could take it half a mile to the well and fill it. Twice my looks caught hers, and on the second occasion she came as close to blushing as a dark-skinned woman can. It was a peculiar feeling, to be thought flirting with a woman, but I decided that if the poor thing took some scrap of pleasure in the idea that a travelling stranger, one who not only had exotic light eyes but flaunted a pair of mysterious and undoubtedly expensive spectacles over them as well, found her a source of secret desire, it could only do her good.