“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 rain-storm, the stain was still clear.
We sat for several minutes, Holmes contemplating the sequence of events and I regretting the death of this man I had never met, until eventually the aroma of bread joined that of coffee, and we descended to take our midday meal.
When we had finished eating, the men lit their cigarettes and Holmes narrated the last scant minute of the life of Mikhail the Druse. “He was coming down into the wadi. He must have known someone was after him, because he was moving quickly, at a greater speed than is wise on this terrain, which caused him to skid and slide. He may not have known that the man with the rifle was there on the other side until the first bullet went through his turban.…” He paused to lay a tuft of white threads on a flat stone. “He did wear the usual white Druse turban, I take it? I thought so. When the bullet went through it, he panicked, jumped and fell, caught himself on that rock with the black vein in it”—Ali and Mahmoud turned to look at the hillside—“and the second shot hit him, a flesh wound that bled quickly. It was on the left arm; there’s a partial handprint farther along. This was the second round.” He took the flattened bullet from his robe and put it beside the scrap of fabric. “You can see the track of his flight down, even from here. Across the slide area, jumping to the boulder, he fell, rolled, and caught himself briefly on the dead tree, pulling it from the ground. He lost his bag then, turned to reach for it, and as soon as he stopped moving the third shot came, and he died. A short time later, the pursuer whom Mikhail was fleeing came down the same hill in Mikhail’s tracks, at a considerably slower pace. He checked to see that the Druse was dead, then went through his possessions. I would suggest that he removed something that had been written with that recently sharpened pencil we found in the pack.”
“How can you know that?” shouted Ali. “You were not there watching! Or were you?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing with sudden suspicion.
“Don’t be a fool,” Holmes replied in an even voice. “I read it on the stones. Ali, I know that Mikhail was your friend. I am sorry, but this is how he died, with thirty seconds of fear and a clean bullet.”
“And the knowledge of failure,” said Mahmoud bitterly.
“Perhaps we can change that failure.”
“But how do you know this thing?” Ali insisted. “You found the bullet and the threads, but how do you know of the second man?”
“It could not have been the man with the rifle who went through the Druse’s pack because the marksman was on the other side of the wadi, and by the time he reached this place the blood would have been dried. It was another man, already on this side, who reached Mikhail’s body and stepped in a patch of wet blood. He tracked it over to where the bag had fallen, paused there, shifting his position three or four times, and then went down to the floor of the wadi, where marks of his passing have been erased by the rising water. He wore boots,” Holmes added. “Stout ones. If you wish, I will show you the marks left by the bullets and Mikhail’s passing.”
“That will not be necessary,” Mahmoud said. “We have spent too much time here already. For all of us to examine the hillside risks attracting attention. Let us pack up and go.”
Ali was too troubled to argue. He merely rinsed out the coffee cups in one of the rain pools and stowed them away on one mule, tied the broad iron saj on another, and set off with Mahmoud up the wadi.
We followed them with the mules rattling along behind. After a while I asked Holmes, in cautious Arabic, if he knew where we were going.
“Mahmoud certainly knows,” he replied helpfully, and then ordered me to recount the history of my widespread family members. In Arabic, of course.
I stumbled over kinship terms and the stony ground for a long time as we continued our way up the wadi, rising always towards the tops of the cliffs. In the late afternoon the wadi’s youthful beginnings, bereft now of easy sand, forced the four of us to scramble and crawl, tugging and pushing at the outraged mules, until finally we emerged onto a high plain, a vast and empty highland lit by the low sun of evening.
There was not a soul in sight.
To my astonishment, Ali’s reaction to the emptiness was to tuck his skirts up a bit, settle his knife more firmly into his belt, and without a word of explanation set off towards the north in an easy jog-trot. He was soon out of sight. We followed at the speed of the walking mules, pausing to eat cold bread and let the mules rest when the last rays of the sun had completely disappeared, then r
esumed our march when the faint light from the new moon gave outline to the objects around us. As the moon drooped towards the horizon, bobbing lights appeared on a distant hill, and shortly after that Ali’s shout came through the night along with at least half a dozen other voices.
The men greeted Mahmoud as a long-lost brother, kissing his hand and bestowing compliments with such exuberance that I wondered if perhaps, despite their appearance and manner of speech, they were Christians—or else Moslems who had overlooked their religion’s injunction against alcohol. It appeared, however, that this group comprised a large percentage of the population of an isolated village, and visitors, particularly those not only known and useful but trustworthy as well, were cause enough for an intoxication of spirits.
Moreover, I thought that, unlike similar demonstrations of enthusiastic greeting we had seen in the previous days, this one was actually based on true friendship and long acquaintance. The vigorous middle-aged man walking at Ali’s side met Mahmoud with a hard, back-slapping embrace and loud, easy laughter. What is more, Mahmoud responded, giving the man a grin of unfeigned pleasure and slapping his shoulders in return. The expression looked quite unnatural on his face, but it lasted while the other men crowded around and took his hands in greeting.
After we were introduced all around and the initial drawn-out welcome was giving way to a redistribution of burdens to the newcomers’ backs, I witnessed an odd little episode. The headman, whose name had been given as Farash, held up the lantern he was carrying and peered at Mahmoud’s face. He even reached out and touched the ugly scar with one finger.
“It is well?” he asked quietly.
“Praise be to God.”
“And now Ali.” Farash shook his head. “You and your brother, you always come to us hurt.”
Mahmoud laughed—actually laughed. “When Ali has a sore, he fears an amputation. His head is fine.” Then, so quietly that I could barely hear, he said to the man, “Mikhail the Druse is dead.”
“Ah!” It was a sound of pain Farash made, and then he asked, “Killed?”
“Shot.”
Farash shook his head again, mournfully this time. “Another good man is lost,” he murmured. After a moment he stirred, and with a deliberate effort pulled himself back into good humour. “But you and Ali are with us again, and we shall feast.”
The festive air of the villagers carried us across the uneven ground and through a couple of minor wadis until without warning we were parading into a tiny village, through a sparse collection of mud huts with lean-tos holding them upright, past a well and some bare trees and up to the grandest villa in town, a windowless box twelve feet square and so low that even Mahmoud, the shortest among the four of us, had to stoop. There were clear signs that chickens and at least one goat had recently vacated the premises, and the fleas were appalling, but the honour was great.
Every man in the village was soon in the hut with us, with the women crowded outside of the door. Cigarettes were taken and glasses of cool water given while coffee was made and distributed by the ancient village mukhtar, whose house this obviously was. After the coffee had been drunk, four men staggered in carrying a vast platter heaped high with rice that glistened with grease in the lamplight, topped with a mound of hastily cooked and venerable mutton. The combination of hasty cooking and the age of the animal did not make for an easy meal, at least for those of us who tried actually to chew the meat, but we filled our bellies on rice and bread and the less gristly bits, drank more coffee, and then sat listening to the fireside tales of wartime valour and pre-war derring-do until the wee hours, when the mukhtar abruptly stood up, shook our greasy hands with his, and departed, taking his village with him, all but a few shy and giggling children who lurked around our door until the morning.
The next day a bank holiday was declared, and all day long people from neighbouring tents and houses drifted in for the fun. Mahmoud was kept busy writing letters and contracts, Ali sat beneath a tree with needle and thread, repairing the mule packs and pads while talking easily to acquaintances, and Holmes squatted in the shade of our fine villa and absorbed the local colour and gossip. I, however, beat the dust and the wildlife from one of our rugs and took it out to a distant grove of bare fruit trees beside an irrigation ditch, trading fleas for flies and dozing to the rhythmic creaking of the mule that worked the dulab, drawing water from a deep well. I slept the sleep of the just and the profoundly weary, unconcerned about potential threats and undisturbed by the occasional passer-by checking on my well-being, until the noise of thundering hoofs made me bolt to my feet, certain that I was in the path of a cavalry charge or at the least a stampede. It was only a horse race, and it was won by a remarkably unfit-looking beast with a gloating, exuberant Ali on its back. Mahmoud, I gathered, won a great deal on his wager.
In the late afternoon the cook fires started. Following the afternoon prayers, I led the mules down to the nearest rain pool to scrub their dusty hides, accompanied by what seemed to me a number of children disproportionate to the population as a whole, who were soon wetter than the mules, if not as clean. The youngsters found me greatly amusing, a mute but comprehending boy who wore strange glass circles on his face and laughed at their antics, and I returned to the village in the midst of a noisy, wet entourage.
While I was restoring the animals to their hobbles, I heard someone call my name. To my surprise, when I looked around I saw Mahmoud, surrounded by a knot of men. He was tucking something that looked like money away into the breast of his robes with one hand, and gesturing to me with the other.
I brushed some of the mud off my garments, straightened my turban, and went to see what he wanted. To my even greater amazement, when I approached he flung his heavy arm around my shoulders and turned to his companions.
“Amir is a very clever boy with the knife,” he said, enunciating carefully enough for me to follow his words. “I will wager his throwing arm against anyone.”
The juxtaposition of my grandiose name with my unprepossessing appearance had its usual effect, reducing the villagers to helpless laughter. Mahmoud grinned like a shark and kept his arm firmly across my shoulders while I stood and wondered what was going on in that devious mind of his, and what he had in store for me.
When the villagers realised that he was seriously proposing to bet on the knife skills of the youth with the ridiculous name, they made haste to accept before this madman had second thoughts. If he wished to give back all the money he had won from them during the day, who were they to object? A couple of the men scurried off to devise a suitable target, the remaining dozen began to sharpen their knives, and Mahmoud, giving my shoulders a final hard embrace, turned his head and whispered in my ear in clear English, “Do not be too good at first, understand?”
I had a sudden coughing fit to conceal my astonishment, and turned away to watch the men bringing up a length of tree trunk and some stones to prop it upright. Mahmoud proposed to run a con game on these villagers, absorbing what remained of their hard-earned cash after Ali’s unlikely victory at the horse race. Oh, I had done the same myself in English pubs armed with darts, but I had only done my opponents out of a few drinks, and they had always been people who could afford the small loss. This was something else, and I disliked the taste in my mouth.
I pulled myself up. Mahmoud knew what he was doing; these were his people, after all. Maalesh, I said my-self—as no doubt the villagers would say before too long. I only wished I could feel so easy.
Under the tutelage of Holmes and a number of others, over the last four years I had accumulated a variety of odd abilities. I could pick a lock laboriously, drive a horse or a motorcar without coming to grief, dress up in a costume as a sort of amateur-dramatics-in-earnest, and fling a fully grown man (an unprepared and untrained man) to the ground. My only two real gifts, gifts I was born with, were an ear for languages and a hand for throwing. Be it a rock or a pointed object, my left hand had a skill for accuracy that I could in all honesty take no credit fo
r, although I had on occasion found it tremendously useful. As I was about to again.
The men giggled at the sight of my thin and obviously inadequate little throwing knife, and they slapped their knees whenever my first throws went wide of the mark. Mahmoud began to look worried—well, not worried, but he took on a degree more stoniness and his right hand crept up once to rub at the scar—when three largish wagers were swiftly lost. The villagers were ecstatic. I tossed my knife in my hand and gave Mahmoud an even look, trying to get across a mental message.
Either he received it or he well knew how the game ought to be played. In either case he trusted me. He reached into his inner pocket and drew out a considerable stash of money, which he proceeded to count out, milking the drama. He laid it on the ground in front of his feet, and looked back at me.
We took those villagers for a lot of money that afternoon, with the rest of the village, men and women, looking on. I did try to lose a bit when the less prosperous men had their bets in, but it was not always possible. My losses ceased to concern Mahmoud when he saw what a good investment they were, both in the short-term cash returns when over-confidence blossomed and in the long-term benefit of goodwill. It is never a good idea to alienate your host by making him feel completely swindled.
But we did take the money of poor men. And I did not care at all for the way Mahmoud had manoeuvred me into taking it.
Eventually, enough cash had changed hands to lower the interest in the contest. My last challenger stood down, jovial to the end, if rueful. Mahmoud folded away a thick wad of filthy paper money, tucked two heavy handfuls of coin into the purse at his belt, and gave me a look under his eyebrows that was very nearly a complacent smile. As the crowd thinned, I looked over their heads and saw our companions, standing and watching with all the others. Ali gave me a sour look, Holmes an amused one. I squatted down to sharpen the tip of my blade on a stone, slipped it back into my boot, and joined them. Feeling, truth to tell, a bit cocky but more than a little ashamed.