By answer, he picked up the roll of gauze. When I had wrestled my arm out of the garment and pulled away the stained hand-towel, he gazed at my arm in silence.
“You have been in a knife-fight.”
“I’ve been in a lot more than that,” I replied. “My epidermis appears to have been bounced down a rocky hillside.”
His hands slowly resumed their motion, wrapping a neat bandage around my arm. As I stood there, feeling his unexpectedly strong fingers at work, my attention was drawn by the laden tray on the table; my stomach rumbled. To distract myself, I asked where, and what, this place was.
“This is the guard-room and guest quarters attached to Dar Mnehbi, the headquarters of the French Resident General, in the Fez medina. Dar Mnehbi is where Maréchal Lyautey holds meetings, houses the occasional guest, and keeps his finger on the pulse of the city—and thus, the country.”
“He doesn’t live here?” Passing through the ornate building next door, it had seemed small to me, and decidedly non-European.
“The Maréchal and Madame have quarters in a larger palace a quarter mile away. He keeps rooms here, to use when he has been working late. Which seems to be most nights.”
That explained the formality of the main portion and the more cramped quarters we had veered into before coming up the steps. It also explained the new-looking European elements, such as external windows and internal doorways.
The man—Holmes—finished binding me up, gesturing at the table.
I hesitated no more, but applied myself with enthusiasm.
Holmes poured out some of the sweet mint tea, setting the gold-rimmed Venetian glass by my plate. “Have you lost your spectacles, Russell?”
By way of answer, as my mouth was otherwise occupied, I dug a hand into my pocket and dumped the resulting fistful of my earthly possessions onto the table. “Broken,” I managed indistinctly. He stared down at the tumble of objects; the boy looked at the pile, too, his eyes for some reason going wide; but it was the other man’s reaction that had my chair flying over and me scrambling backwards with the stolen dagger in my hand.
Hazr had been at the window with a glass of the tea, looking down at the city. He glanced around at the sound of metal hitting wood, and then he was in urgent motion, leaping across the room to snatch at—not the damaged spectacles, but the heavy gold signet ring caught up in the earpiece. He shook the spectacles free, sending the loose lens skittering down the table, and thrust the ring towards me.
“Where is he? Where is Mahmoud?”
“I don’t know!” He stared, breathing heavily, and now I saw that he was not angry—or, not just angry. He was afraid. “Who is this Mahmoud? What does he look like?”
“Like me. Shorter, heavier. He has a scar on his face.”
A peculiar sensation, like a mental tickle, passed through my thoughts. “Scar?”
“Not as dramatic as that of Captain De la Rocha,” said Holmes.
“Who is— Oh, never mind, I don’t know either of them. And I’m very sorry, but I don’t know why I have that ring or where it came from.”
Hazr looked near to exploding, an expression that made his face slightly more familiar.
“I am sorry, Mr Hazr. If I knew, I would tell you.”
“Ali,” Holmes said, “let her finish her meal. Shouting won’t bring her memory back any faster.”
I pulled my attention away from the angry man at last, and met the other man’s eyes. They were intriguing eyes, grey and calm and sure and very, very intelligent.
I hoped to God this man actually was a friend. If he was my enemy, I was in grave trouble.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Food helped.
So did having this Hazr fellow’s furious gaze turned away from me. He watched me put away the weapon and gingerly reclaim my chair and plate, then lowered his attention on the boy.
Interviewing someone who lacks speech is a slow business, particularly when the mute person is only vaguely literate. Granted, it kept Ali’s attention occupied while I put away the meal, but it did not make him any less irritable. His questions were put in a combination of Arabic and the language I had heard in the medina. The boy’s answers took the form of nods, negative shakes, waves of the hand, and the occasional laborious scripting of answers. Which, since the only alphabet he knew was Arabic even if the words were in the other tongue, caused Ali a great deal of puzzling.
Trying to follow their conversation brought my headache back, so I closed my ears as best I could, and concentrated on the sensation of being clean, warm, and fed.
And, apparently, safe, for at some point, I closed my eyes, to be startled back into the room by the closing of a door.
The boy was gone, the nearby sound of running water explaining his absence.
Ali sat, tugging at his beard as he studied the boy’s scratches on the page. The robe he wore, I thought, was subtly different from those I had seen in the medina—rather, the robe itself was the same, but the way he wore it was not. On other Moroccans, the djellaba was a shapeless hooded garment that opened far down the sternum, like a large feed sack with a hood stitched on. When the men sat, one side or the other tended to fall off the shoulders entirely, revealing the shirt beneath. Ali’s, on the other hand, was pulled neatly to his collar line. The turban he wore—snug and high on the head, in the Moroccan fashion, but lacking the common plait—was a darker shade of the rich café au lait colour of his robe. The shirt beneath it was crisp white.
The man was a dandy.
“Idir and Mahmoud arrived in Rabat after two nights on the road,” he told me, “which, as you say, puts it on Monday, in the afternoon. They’d spent Sunday night in Fez, then took the train to Rabat, where they went to the hotel where Mycroft had said you would be.”
I’d been listening with interest to his accent—upper-class central English with long years of Middle Eastern Arabic laid over it—but now I interrupted. “Would you be so good as to tell me who all these people are?”
The two men exchanged another glance; I was beginning to grow tired of that look.
“He is Idir.” Ali gestured with his thumb at the adjoining room. “Mahmoud is my brother. By blood a cousin, but we are as brothers.”
“And Mycroft?”
Holmes stirred. “Mycroft is my brother. He is head of a … an Intelligence wing of the British government.”
“What—you two are spies?”
The sharp hiss Ali made was accompanied by a slice of the hand, telling me I had said the word too loudly. Was he concerned about ears from the balcony, or from the bath-room?
“Look,” I said, “maybe I should just sleep for a while and leave you to your plans.”
Ali looked ready to agree, but Holmes did not. “They are your plans, too, Russell.”
“Then God help you,” I said.
“Bismillah,” Ali muttered, as an echo.
“You were saying?” Holmes asked him.
“Yes. They went to the hotel in Rabat and found you both missing. Mahmoud asked for paper to write something, leaving it with the man at the desk. Then they went back to the station—Idir is very fond of trains—and took a train. Where to, I don’t know, but when they got off, they got into a motorcar and drove through a lot of mountains and desert.”
“Someone was waiting for them with a motor?”
“No. It would appear that Mahmoud … commandeered a motor.”
Spies and motorcar thieves. Good companions for a pick-pocketing tight-rope walker like me.
“They drove until dark. Then, after a village, they left the motor and walked for a time into the dunes. Mahmoud gave the lad instructions on how to locate you among the moving picture crew, and gave Idir a note to hand to you. And he gave the lad his ring, by way of proof.”
“Mahmoud did not want to approach the encampment himself because of the guards?” Holmes asked.
“Perhaps. In any gathering of foreigners, there are children all over, but a man would be stopped and questioned.”
Not a circus: a moving picture encampment. Although I imagined the distinction to be a small one.
“Does Idir know what the note said?” Holmes asked.
“No, he couldn’t read it, but it must have told her simply to come, because she took him inside just long enough to put on her shoes and coat. Later, after she and Mahmoud talked, she returned to the tent to get some things and leave a note.”
“And the ring?”
“She returned it to Mahmoud. The boy is clear on that. When she came back, all three of them set off the way he and Mahmoud had come, by foot, then motor, and then train, arriving in Fez on Thursday.”
“That’s, what, 250 miles? More? Quite a lot of rough road to cover, for one driver.”
“Miri drove part of the time. Idir was quite impressed with her driving.”
“I can imagine,” Holmes said drily. “Where did they go, when they got to Fez?”
“They took beds in a small funduq—that’s the local caravanserai—near the city walls. They had coffee, and Mahmoud gave Idir enough money to gorge himself on sweets, and then Mahmoud and Idir went to the hammam—Idir likes baths, as you can hear.”
“Unusual child,” I remarked.
“He’s lived his whole life among soldiers. He may never have seen a private bath before today—most people use the hammam. The bath house,” he added for my benefit, although I knew the word.
Holmes was growing impatient with the side remarks. “So, the three of them took lodgings in Fez, and Russell was forced to forgo a bath lest she reveal her gender. What next?”
“Mahmoud and Idir went into the medina, and bought clothing for Miri—what she brought was incomplete enough to attract attention. Mahmoud sent the clothes back to the funduq with the boy, saying he had some business in the town. Idir does not know where Mahmoud went, but he came back after a couple of hours, and they all went out for a meal. The two of them talked a great deal, although the only word Idir understood was aeroplane.”
I twitched at the word: What sounded like a truly unspeakable motoring experience left me with no reaction at all, but the idea of flying carried with it a load of discomfort and a stir of cold terror. Ali did not notice.
“When they returned to the funduq at dusk, there was a message. Later that night, Mahmoud and Miri left. He ordered Idir to stay behind. Naturally, the boy followed. But once they left the medina—through Bab Guissa, at the north—he was forced to lag behind, since even at night the ground is too exposed to follow unseen.”
“But he is certain that Mahmoud and Russell were together when they left the city?” Holmes asked.
Ali made a face. “He would like to be certain. He swears it was so. But he would have me believe that he never took his eyes off Mahmoud, that my brother’s disappearance is not his fault. So … I would say that chances are about equal that Mahmoud was with Miri, or that Miri left the city alone—possibly with a man of a similar build to Mahmoud.
“Once the pair left the city to climb the hill out of town, the boy admits that he does not know what happened, since as I said, he was far behind them, and the night was dark. All he knows is that there was shouting, and a single gunshot, and he was running up the hill with a stick when a motorcar’s engine roared, and nearly ran him down.
“When he got to where the motor had been, he found Miri, trying to crawl up from the hillside below the road. A cart-man with a lamp was standing over her, and Idir beat at him with the stick until the man took it away and cuffed him. When he then climbed down the hill to help Miri, Idir realised that he was not one of those from the motorcar. I should imagine, in fact, that the man just happened to be coming along the road when the assailants saw him and fled, taking Mahmoud but leaving Miri.
“Her head was bleeding and she was babbling, but Idir knew Mahmoud would want him to help her, so he didn’t run after the motor. Instead, he spotted her knife and revolver and put them into her boot and pocket, then helped the man get her onto the cart, and kept her steady as they went downhill. Only at the bottom did the boy decide that Mahmoud might also be lying off the road rather than in the motorcar, so he jumped off and ran up the hill again. The cart-man shouted, to ask where Miri lived, but since Idir couldn’t answer him anyway, he just kept running. He did, I should say, look back to make sure the man didn’t just abandon you on the side of the road.
“He didn’t find Mahmoud. I’m not sure where he spent the night—possibly among the tombs—but the next morning he searched the ground carefully, and found nothing.
“He returned to the funduq, hoping to find Mahmoud, but the owner said that some bad men were looking for him, so he did not stay.
“He spent the afternoon searching the medina, then decided that Mahmoud’s absence did not change the task he had been given: namely, to meet a tall, thin foreigner drinking coffee at the café nearest the train station, either first thing in the morning or last thing at night, and deliver him to Dar Mnehbi. So he went to the station, and waited there until it shut for the night.
“Again, he wouldn’t say where he slept, probably in a doorway, but this morning he alternated between the café and the medina until he found you, Holmes. Once he’d brought you here, he went for another look in the medina and discovered Miri as well. The lad feels quite proud of himself. He intended to go back out and look for Mahmoud, until I convinced him the task was now our responsibility.”
As Ali talked, I had progressed from wolfing food from the tray to a leisurely sampling of the crumbs. As at a signal, both men turned to look at me.
I straightened. “You believe all that?”
“I see no reason to discount the lad’s testimony,” Holmes answered.
“No reason apart from his age, his inability to communicate, and his wish to please adults, you mean?” To say nothing of the boy’s face: Never trust a look of innocence.
I was doubly dubious about this information, since Ali was the only one who claimed to make sense of the boy’s scratchings, and what was Ali to me?
“In any event, I don’t remember. All I know is that I woke yesterday morning in an upstairs room, which I left when soldiers came.”
But it was time for detail. Holmes led me through my last twenty-four hours, from waking in the dim, whitewashed room to being dragged through the doors of Dar Mnehbi. He was gentle, but thorough. Ali said nothing the entire time. He sat, down the table from me. After a minute, he stretched to retrieve the wayward spectacles lens, then its frame. I eyed the big knife he drew out, but he did not look up, merely applying its scalpel-thin point to the tiny screw as the first in a series of precise adjustments to the wonky steel.
“I had … there was blood on my hands. Dried blood. Quite a bit.”
Ali’s fingers faltered, then resumed.
“Tell me again about the two people who came onto the rooftop, after the soldiers had gone,” Holmes ordered.
My headache had returned, with a vengeance. I wanted to find a heap of something very soft, lower my skull onto it, and leave it there for a long, long time.
“A man and a woman. They looked Moroccan. At any rate, they were wearing Moroccan dress.”
“Tell me your impression of the pair. Married couple? The house’s owners? Servants?”
“How should I know? Servants. Maybe. My head feels as if there is a red-hot poker through it.”
“Was the woman wearing a head-covering?”
“Of course. No.” I considered, head in hands. “They didn’t match.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean they were together, but not intimates. And she was in charge. That seems unlikely, doesn’t it? They were consulting. Her skin was lighter than his. She … she was older.”
“As if he was her long-time employee?”
I raised my head to meet his eyes. “Exactly.”
He smiled, and for the first time, I knew his face. Not his history or who he was to me—but that he was a part of me, I no longer doubted. I came near to weeping, at
the relief of having a companion in this lost world.
His expression shifted, to one of concern. “You must sleep.”
I did not exactly require his help to stand, but I did permit it. He led me to the adjoining room, which held a pair of beds. He even pulled back the bed-clothes for me. “There is a lock, if you wish, although following a concussion, a locked door may not be the best of ideas. You will be safe here.”
When he had left me, I looked at the key in the door, then poured myself onto the soft mattress, where I stayed until the sun had left the sky.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sound of men’s voices slowly wormed its way into sleep’s cocoon. I felt my breathing change. I could smell bread baking, somewhere near. And coffee.
As if in response, my body turned onto its back for a hard stretch. The odours suggested morning, but it felt more like night. I raised my head to blink at the dimly lit room: A lamp was burning low; brighter light came from around the doorway, but not from the window.
I threw back the coverings, then remembered the dangers of motion. More cautiously, I sat upright on the side of the bed, but my head’s pain had changed, to a localised ache over the right ear; the previous day’s terrible throb of pressure did not come with the change in elevation. My fingers made gentle exploration of the tender spot, feeling the stiff thread of the stitches and the dried scab, but no fresh blood.
You may survive, Russell, I thought.
Russell: yes. It was what Holmes called me—and with his name, several large pieces of myself came tumbling into place.
Mary Judith Russell, child—orphaned child—of a Boston Brahmin and a rabbi’s daughter. Apprentice-turned-partner of one Sherlock Holmes, survivor of motorcar smashes, bullets, knife-fights, and furious theological debates. Mycroft Holmes was now a person, the source of countless intricate machinations on the stage of international politics. I could even recall the outlines of Ali Hazr, if not the specifics—he seemed to inhabit the hazier edges of what I knew.
But I remembered his brother, Mahmoud, a man I’d once compared to an amused stone. Solid and dark beside Ali’s colour and energy, Mahmoud Hazr had taken us into their small band, forced me to learn the ways of the desert, led me to the beauty of the Qur’an. We had fought side by side. Together, we had rescued Holmes from a terrible death. The four of us had saved a nation from catastrophe.