Mahmoud had his prayer beads out and was thumbing them methodically. “What did you find?” he asked.
“It is to be soon. There is a false monk involved. And it will be a bomb,” Holmes replied, and reached for his pipe. Mahmoud appeared as untouched as ever by this terse summary. Ali waited, but when Holmes had his pipe going yet did not elaborate, he began to splutter rather as the downstairs shower-bath had done. It was left to me to give the details.
I was halfway through our conversation with the abbot when Mahmoud abruptly interrupted with a loud question about the price of a mare in Nablus. When I hesitated, Ali stepped in with a comment about her cracked hoof, and then I heard the footsteps on the stairs. In came fragrant rice and new bread, lamb cooked tender with onions, nuts, and some tangy green leaf, little bowls of chopped salads as garnish, with fresh tea to slake our thirst and a pot of coffee to follow. We fell silent while applying ourselves to the serious business at hand.
Afterwards, Mahmoud poured out the coffee and set a plate of sticky sweetmeats in the middle of the carpet. He handed cups to Ali, then Holmes, and finally to me: This was the first time he had given a drink into my hand instead of laying it on the carpet in front of me. I met his eyes, nodded my acknowledgement, and sipped the tepid liquid with gratitude.
Ali sucked the honey from his fingers, then wiped them delicately on his robe. “Why do you think all this adds up to a false monk with a bomb?” He did not bother to conceal the doubt in his voice.
“It is the only theory which fits all the facts,” Holmes answered.
“Which facts are those?” Mahmoud asked.
“You’ve seen them. The Jaffa murders, Mikhail’s death and possibly that of the false mullah, Mikhail’s missing notebook, the candle in his pack and the salt smuggler’s odd customer, the attempt to torture information out of me, the widespread rumours that keep General Allenby busy, the strange visitor at Wadi Qelt, and the missing habits of the monks.”
“They are not necessarily related,” Mahmoud objected mildly. ”Strange things happen all the time here. You do not know the country, it all looks odd and probably sinister to you.”
“The country I know marginally; the criminal mind I know very well indeed.”
“Criminal mind,” Ali said with a snort.
“You do not believe that there is a threat,” Holmes said coldly.
“Threat? There is always a threat. This is a land of threats and blood feuds, your eye for mine, your brother to avenge my father.”
“And the ambush?”
“Oh, that was political, certainly. But Allah alone knows what the aim was.”
“And my… interrogation?”
“That was no interrogation,” Ali nearly shouted. “There are those in this country who do that sort of thing for pleasure, don’t you understand that, you stupid man?”
“Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind,” Holmes said in a dangerously low voice.
“I apologise. But I do not see—”
“You do not, no. But you,” Holmes said, turning to Mahmoud, “you, I think, have your doubts.”
“ ‘Only God is sure,’ ” Mahmoud said after a minute. “But you may be correct. There may indeed be some sort of bomb plot in the works. However, it is unlikely to be immediate; we have heard nothing at all while we have been in the city.”
“What about the watchmaker, the one whose advertisement was in the papers you found?” I asked him. The ornate golden watch on Ali’s wrist was still not keeping time, but that did not mean they had not been to the watchmaker; as far as I could tell, he wore it solely as an ornament.
“He seems merely a businessman. We are having him followed.”
“General Allenby’s visit to Jerusalem is in little more than two weeks,” Holmes said half to himself.
“It has been moved forward to this weekend,” answered Ali, reaching forward for the beaker of coffee to pour himself another cup.
“What? In three days?”
“That is correct. I believe he—”
“But why? Why has he changed his plans?”
“He does not inform us of his reasons; one has learnt merely to be grateful for any prior notice.”
“Are the rest of his intentions the same?” Holmes asked. “Meeting with a few religious leaders, a tour of the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and then a gathering at Government House?”
“I believe so, although I suppose he will also go to a church service in the morning, he usually does, and he will probably have less formal conversations with the governor, the mayor, the mufti, and any of a dozen others.” Ali blew across the top of his cup, although the coffee was now scarcely warm, and sipped deliberately. “Also, the number of men invited to the tour of the city has grown. It now includes the Anglican bishop, the Orthodox patriarch, the Armenian patriarch, Governor Storrs—”
“A veritable gathering of the gods,” Holmes said weakly. “The only figures missing will be Feisal and Lawrence.”
“It was suggested that the two fly in from the Paris talks for this occasion, although I do not think it will prove possible.”
Holmes had gone pale beneath his skin dye; Mahmoud’s face was thoughtful, and his fingers slowed on the prayer beads; I felt distinctly queasy at the thought of the entire hierarchy of Palestine moving about the city with two hundred fifty pounds of high explosive unaccounted for. Ali stared at Holmes defiantly, refusing to acknowledge any cause for concern.
“You do not care for my theory,” said Holmes, “because it is mine.”
“I do not care for it because it is wrong. You have constructed a plot against Allenby out of air. I need to see solid objects.”
“And if your brother Mahmoud had discovered this plot, would you believe him?”
Ali darkened in anger. “You are not my brother, and you have no sense for this land and its ways. I have no reason to listen to you.”
Holmes fixed him with a look from those grey eyes that soon had the younger man shifting his eyes despite his anger. “A dog on his dunghill, a cock on his fence, and a peacock on the hat of an unclean woman,” Holmes said quietly. Like most insults in Arabic it does not translate without its cultural context, but it acted on Ali like a slap across the face: he went rigid, and pale, then the blood rushed back and his right arm moved.
“Akhuyi,” Mahmoud murmured: My brother. Ali’s hand froze on the hilt of his knife. Mahmoud spoke again, in the language I had heard them speak back in the mud hut in Jaffa; for thirty seconds he spoke, and at the end of it Ali, who had not taken his eyes from Holmes, seemed slightly to relax.
“My brother,” Holmes said, a deliberate echo of Mahmoud’s Arabic word, “Mycroft, would not be happy were I to allow General Allenby to be killed and another war to find its roots here. I would not wish to displease my brother.”
Ali sat for a long moment, and then, to my astonishment, his lips twitched. His gaze slid sideways to where Mahmoud sat, then back at Holmes, and then he removed his hand from his knife, reached out to clap Holmes on the shoulder, and began to laugh. He picked up his cup and drained it, the gap in his teeth leering out from his swarthy bearded face.
Never, never will I understand men.
NINETEEN
غ
Language is the expression by a speaker of his intentions. Its origin is in the desire to convey meaning, and it must become a habit on the portion of the body that produces it: that is, the tongue.
—
THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN