“You look for someone, I think?” he said in English, a cheerful conspirator.
Holmes’ hand shot out, and seized the young imp by his collar, dragging him forward until their faces were mere inches apart. The boy’s grin vanished and he started to struggle, but Holmes just held him and hissed in furious and colloquial Arabic, “If you think I shall do any business with a donkey as stupid as you, child, you are too dumb-witted to live, and I ought to put you out of your misery. Get away from my sight.” He shook the boy, let go of him, and we watched him pick himself up from the dirty stones and flee. “Come,” said Holmes. I followed him to a niche against the wall, and there we squatted, with the dust washing over us and our bellies empty, until eventually the chastened lad reappeared, carrying a basket of oranges. He sold a few to passers-by before he reached us.
“Oranges from Jaffa?” he offered, speaking Arabic this time. “Juicy, sweet. Three for one piastre.”
“Six for one,” countered Holmes, looking bored.
“Four. Large ones.”
“Done.” The coin and the fruit changed hands; the boy faded away; we stayed seated and picked up our oranges. I rolled mine around in my hand, speculating on the chances that this particular fruit had been grown by the man I had seen bleed to death, and then I dug in my nails to peel away the rind. I grimaced at the black smears my fingers left on the damp skin, and separated the segments gingerly, trying to touch only the edges of the fruit’s flesh with the very tips of my fingernails. When we had each eaten one fruit and wiped our hands on our robes, Holmes took the other two and stowed them in the mule’s pack, then handed me the lead rope and set off in the direction in which the boy had gone. Down the narrow street, and there he was, leaning casually against the wall, the empty basket tucked under his arm and a half-eaten orange in his hand. Without looking up, he pushed away from the wall and wandered off.
He led us a short distance down the narrow, cobbled street, then turned left and left again, a circle that brought us back to a gateway we had already passed—reluctantly on the part of the mule, which had tugged at the lead rope, knowing his partners were within. We entered through a pair of high, stout wooden doors opening into a small cobbled yard with stables, a covered cistern, some bare vines growing up the stone walls, and several windows, all of them lacking paint and most of them standing open to the flies and the smells. Against the right-hand wall an ancient wooden stairway clung precariously, leading in two stages to a doorway twenty feet above the yard. On the very top step of the stairway sat Ali.
He watched us arrive, then dropped his attention back to the wooden figure he was working at with the long knife from his belt, the blade he used for slicing onions, carving figurines, and killing men. As the wicked steel blade caught the sun, it struck me that the reason he used one knife for such diverse and often unsuited tasks was so that his hand might know it as a natural extension of itself, carving donkeys and cleaning fingernails to make it the more accurate when the time came for violent applications. I swallowed hard and looked away.
There was no sign of Mahmoud. Our urchin guide ran up the stairs and perched next to Ali, who ignored him and went on shaving paper-thin curls of wood from the emerging figurine. I stood with the mule’s rope in my hand, looking dull (with very little effort) while Holmes negotiated a pair of rooms. One room would have been more expected and therefore less conspicuous, but I had insisted, and he had agreed, that some risks were necessary. When I saw the rooms I was glad that at least I should not have to share the windowless cubicle and its narrow single mat on the floor: “tiny” was an understatement, and if it was a step up from squalid, one would have to be remarkably generous to call it comfortable. Still, there seemed to be little insect life, be it crawling or hopping, and the dirt on the walls and floor seemed to be mere dust and débris, not actual filth.
There was a bath, of a sort, or rather two: a dank closet in one of the cellars where cold water sputtered from a dripping green pipe to form a primitive shower-bath, or a tin bath behind a flimsy partition on the open roof. I sighed, and walked down to the cellar.
Refreshed, if not precisely clean, I went back upstairs and found Holmes just coming down from the roof. He was whistling. He looked, and smelt, beautifully clean, and although he retained a moustache, his handsome salt-and-pepper beard had given way to startlingly smooth (if still dark) skin.
“You had a bath,” I said.
“A fine, hot bath,” he replied, radiating good cheer.
I scowled at him.
“With one servant to pour hot water over my head, another to shave me, and a masseur who would make a fortune in the best Turkish bath in London.”
“May your eyebrows grow inward,” I growled in Arabic. “May your hair itch and fall from your head. Sabah el-kheir, Mahmoud,” I added, greeting that gentleman as he appeared in the doorway across from mine. His room, I saw, was blessed with both window and the exterior door to which the stairway led, and a small but well-fed charcoal brazier glowed merrily from the middle of the floor.
“Allah yesabbihak bil-kheir,” he returned my good morning—using, of course, the masculine ending. I was quite used to it by now. In fact, if someone had addressed me using the feminine I might well have turned around to look for the woman standing behind me. “Have you eaten?”
“We ate bread only, with the sunrise,” I told him.
“Let us eat,” Mahmoud said, and Ali, who was still sitting on the top step of the stairway, obligingly rose, leant over the side of the rickety topmost landing, and bellowed down at the courtyard that we wanted food, and coffee, with tea first, and did not wish to wait for it until the vultures were perched on our very window-sills. Abuse was traded, and soon Ali drew back into the room, nodded at Mahmoud, and they and I took seats on the mats and familiar bedrolls that were piled up near the walls of the room. Holmes went over to the window and glanced out, first down at the courtyard and then up at the rooftop.
“Does anyone know we are here?” he asked.
Mahmoud answered. “The boy and the innkeeper. Others know we are in the city, but not where.”
“Those two: are they trustworthy?”
“Both, to the death.” He knew what Holmes was saying, and was telling him in return that however it came about that Holmes was captured, it would not happen a second time—not through Mahmoud at any rate.
Holmes nodded. “Let the others remain ignorant.”
“Yes.”
Only then did Holmes take his seat on the impromptu bolsters with us.
“We expected you yesterday night,” Ali said. Coming from Mahmoud, the same words might have made a question, but in Ali’s mouth they were an accusation. Holmes, however, did not respond to anything but the query.
“We chose to spend the night on Olivet.”
Both men looked at us sharply. “You slept among the tombs?” Ali asked.
“I slept. I do not think Russell did so.”
“You did not… object to the presence of the dead?”
“It was pleasant,” Holmes said. “Quiet.”
Ali glanced at me, and then at Mahmoud, and resorted to pulling out his embroidered pouch and building a cigarette. I thought their fear of ghosts in a cemetery an amusing thing, considering everything else they readily put up with.