Convinced that we had broken some vital part of the machinery, I just sat. Ali and Mahmoud, however, struggled to their feet and dropped over the back. Holmes and I followed, straightening up slowly to allow our vertebrae to ease back into line.
“As the Irishman said when he was run out of town on a rail,” Holmes commented, sotto voce, “ ‘Were it not for the honour, I’d rather have walked.’ ”
“Are we there, then?” I asked.
“So it would seem.”
The headlamps of the lorry illuminated a heap of mud bricks topped with rusted sheets of corrugated iron that I should have taken for derelict but for the well-fitting door that opened on noiseless hinges at Ali’s touch. The moment we stepped inside, the lorry lamps went out. Mahmoud shut the door behind us, I heard Ali in front of me move, and then another door opened, spilling light into the tight vestibule the four of us had crowded into.
The room beyond was a singular piece of architecture, long and low, with roughly plastered walls, a floor of packed earth, and lengths of unpeeled tree trunks holding up the iron roof. Squares of flattened petrol tins were nailed up in place of window shutters, the interior whitewash had long since flaked off the wall, and the entire structure appeared about to collapse into the earth, but looks were deceiving: The ramshackle building was warm compared with the out-of-doors, and not a chink of light had shown from the outside. The two long walls, twenty feet apart, ran parallel to each other for about fifty feet, at which point the left one halted and both walls turned ninety degrees to form an L. The building was heaped with stored goods—crates, bales, and canvas-wrapped shapes. There were no internal walls in sight.
However, my attention was not on the room but on the solitary figure it held, halfway down. He was a small round man—round of body, round of head, his knuckles dimpled into the flesh of his hands—dressed in unadorned khaki and seated on a camp chair. He did not look up at our entrance, merely continuing his task, which appeared to be holding something on a stick a few inches above a paraffin stove. A plate with a few round objects sat on a tea-chest at his left knee, and another heaped high was at his right, but the incongruity of the sight kept me from acknowledging what he was doing until my nose brought me the smell, evocative of my Oxford lodging-house with its mugs of cocoa and of Mrs Hudson’s kitchen in far-off Sussex: the man was toasting crumpets.
When he finished with the muffin on his toasting fork he removed it, laid down the fork, took up a knife and smeared the crisp round with butter from a tin, and then balanced it on top of the plate at his right. He pushed the plate a fraction of an inch towards Ali, who with Mahmoud had gone up to the man and dropped to his heels across the small stove from him. Ali took two muffins, passed one to Mahmoud, and as they began to eat, the man reached down for his fork and proceeded to spear it into another muffin.
Holmes and I made our way down the room to the scene of domesticity and source of meagre warmth, following a path through the stores and shrouded equipment. We ducked our heads around a hanging oil lamp, settled onto a rough bench, and waited.
When our host was satisfied with the current muffin, he buttered it, put it with his others, and then picked up the plate and handed it to Holmes.
“There’s honey in here somewhere,” were his introductory words to us. “I’ll find it if you like. I haven’t any jam, I’m afraid. I can’t bear the stuff any longer, not since they started providing it in the trenches every night before a big push. I was only in France six months, but I can’t even look at a bowl of jam now without smelling mud and urine and unburied bodies. If you will excuse the reference. Shall I go digging for the honey?”
We reassured him that buttered crumpets were sufficient, and set to demolishing our share of the crisp, buttery, delicious, and utterly English fare. Fortunately, the crumpets were solid enough evidence to restore a degree of reality to the setting.
The left-hand plate was soon empty, the right-hand one containing the toasted crumpets nearly so. The round man reached behind him for a kettle, set it over the flame, took a khaki handkerchief from his shirt pocket, dusted his hands, and folded it away.
“I must say,” he mused, sounding as if he were continuing a conversation, “I was intrigued when I received word that you were coming here, Mr Holmes. Particularly when your brother suggested that we might put you to use. You and Miss Russell, of course,” he added, with a small bow in my direction. “However, I will admit to a certain hesitation. After all, there is some difference between London and Palestine.”
“But I take it our two guides have set your mind at ease that we will not commit some glaring faux pas and do not actually require nursemaids to help us survive our time here,” Holmes said evenly, sounding more amused than perturbed.
“You have passed their little tests satisfactorily,” the man replied, his eyes crinkling in his round face. “You did not drop from exhaustion or limp with sore feet, you did not lose your tempers or put your hands on a scorpion, you retained the appearance of who you are dressed to be, and you saw through the façade of the letter in the safe. And, Miss Russell, you make lovely maps. By the way, do call me Joshua. Everyone does.”
“ ‘Sending spies into the land,’ ” I murmured in Hebrew, thinking how appropriate the word “spy” was here, since in Hebrew its root meaning is one who wanders about on foot. I had the blisters to testify that this was what we had been doing ever since we arrived.
“Quite right,” he said in English, sounding pleased.
“And do your spies gather information, or spread rumours?” I asked him. “Those of your biblical predecessor seemed to do something of both.”
“As with my predecessor, it is not always clear just what the purpose of my people might be. Perhaps, as you say, something of both, listening and speaking.” He showed us his yellow teeth in a smile.
“And now that we have proven ourselves minimally competent,” Holmes said, dragging the conversation back to the main matter, “you have what my brother, Mycroft, might call a ‘task’ for us.”
Joshua shook his head and looked mournfully across the steaming kettle at Mahmoud, then said something in Arabic. It sounded to me as if he were accusing Holmes of drinking uncooked coffee beans.
Holmes responded with a brief phrase of his own, which my ears translated as, “When the dogs bark at night, it is [foolish?] to look to the sheep the next morning.”
I could not see what this had to do with coffee beans, but Joshua seemed to think it a worthy retort, because he nodded briefly. “You may be right,” he said. “However, I think in this case we may delay long enough for a cup of tea.”
He walked around to a heap of canvas and brought out a wicker basket, which proved to contain a formal tea service that had probably been designed as a picnic fitting for the boot of a Rolls-Royce. From it he unpacked five delicate flowered cups and their saucers, then a matching china teapot, milk jug, and sugar bowl, arranging them all to his satisfaction in our midst. Milk came from a small corked bottle sitting on the ground near his feet, and was poured into the jug. He performed the entire ritual: warm the pot, spoon the tea leaves, add the boiling water, wait the requisite three minutes, and then pour the tea through a silver strainer. When we each had a cup in our hand, Joshua sipped his twice and then rested his saucer on his knee.
“The problem is,” he said, again with the air of picking up a conversation that had been briefly interrupted, “that if one is given only the mildest inkling of dogs at the sheepfold, it is difficult to justify turning out the entire house to stand defence. Particularly when the family has just spent the last few years eradicating the countryside of dogs, with all apparent success.”
Holmes raised a disapproving eyebrow and said sharply, “Five days ago three men were killed in the outskirts of Jaffa. This is success?”
“An unfortunate incident, with potentially far-reaching consequences, but an isolated occurrence. We have caught the men.” Ali grunted; Mahmoud put down his cup and took up his pray
er beads, thumbing through them as Joshua continued. “It seems to have been a revenge killing. Yitzak was responsible for the jailing of three young Moslem Arabs last year, for beating up a Jewish boy who had made eyes at their sister. One of the lads died in jail last month, of the influenza. The two men who have been arrested were the dead boy’s uncles.”
“You would say then that it was a coincidence that Yitzak saw one of his attackers listening to a firebrand mullah the week before?”
“Not necessarily a coincidence. The mullah’s speech might easily have urged them to action. Tragic, and contributing to a state of mistrust, but nothing more, and certainly nothing to do with Yitzak’s… association with us. We can only be grateful that his wife and children were not at home. I do not believe they would have been let alone.
“There is, however, another matter.” He gazed down at the dregs in his cup as if unwilling to raise his eyes to the men across the stove from him. Ali eyed him warily; Mahmoud’s fingers slowed on the polished beads.
“Mikhail the Druse is dead,” Joshua said in a quiet voice, and then he did bring his eyes up, looking across at Mahmoud, whose face turned to stone. Ali’s cup fell, shattering into a thousand pieces of porcelain against the hard earthen floor, and he whirled to his feet and strode rapidly away from the light into the dark leg of the L. “He was shot,” Joshua continued implacably. “There is no certainty, but it appears to have happened two or three days ago. There are jackals in the wadi.”
“Who?” Mahmoud’s voice had gone hoarse.
Joshua shook his head. “It could have been some woman’s husband.”
“Mikhail loved women,” Mahmoud admitted slowly, his fingers wandering briefly to his scar. “And he was often in difficulties over them. ‘The cupboard is not locked against a man with the key.’ ” His heart was not in his aphorism, however, and it did not sound to me as if he believed much in a jealous husband.
“This was one of your men?” asked Holmes.
“Mikhail was mine, yes.”
“What was he working on?”
“I don’t know,” Joshua admitted. Mahmoud stared at him, and I heard a brief stir from Ali in the dark reaches of the building. “It’s true. There were rumours, out in the desert, of problems. Nothing substantial. He went out to listen.”
“For the sounds of dogs amongst the sheep?” Holmes suggested. He even made it sound as if such pastoral imagery were his daily fare.
“There were no dogs. I’d have heard them, if there were.”
“Something more silent, then. Wolves.”
Joshua sighed deeply, his jovial face looking more troubled than I should have thought possible. He put his hand into his breast pocket, drew out a pouch, and began to roll a cigarette. Recognising the signs, I settled myself for a longish story.
“I do not know how much you two know about our war here, so forgive me if I travel familiar ground, but our situation is a delicate one. I spent the first months of the war on the Western Front,” he began. “That war, as you undoubtedly are aware, consisted primarily of crouching in the mud a hundred yards from the enemy and occasionally, at immense cost of life, pushing his line back a few yards, or, conversely, of being pushed and losing a few yards of one’s own. Here, it was rather different. Other than the catastrophe in the Dardanelles and the constant loss of life from submarines, we contented ourselves with sitting in Cairo, gathering tit-bits of information and protecting the Suez Canal.
“Until Allenby came.” Joshua’s tone of voice when he said the name was not far from worship, although I thought this deceptively soft little man would not venerate another easily. “Allenby was given command in June of 1917. Four months later—four months!—we found ourselves crossing the Sinai into Palestine. We took Beersheva and then Gaza, and by God, we were standing in the gates of Jerusalem by Christmas. Nine months later, a year to the day after he’d begun this impossible task, he gathered up his rag-tag army of camels and colonials and pushed, and before we knew it we were in Damascus.
“It was a brilliant campaign—elegant, meticulous, sly, and inexorable. The Battle of Megiddo was a mighty victory, a beautiful thing to behold. In two stages a mere twelvemonth apart, Allenby had the country, and four hundred years of Turkish rule were broken.
“And now he’s stuck with it, and stuck with the job of keeping the country in one piece until they decide at the Paris talks how to cut it up. The French want it, the Arabs think it’s theirs, the Jews believe they were promised it, the British hold it, and General Allenby spends all the hours God gives him driving from Dan to Beersheva, calming arguments among the factions.”
“While you hear the rumour of distant wolves,” Holmes prompted.
“Who the wolves are I do not know, but yes, I believe I hear them. And I am quite certain, when we come close enough to hear their voices, we will find they speak Turkish.” Joshua was talking to Mahmoud now, and Mahmoud was listening attentively. “Not all of our enemy was taken, and by no means have all surrendered. Here as in Germany there are discontented young officers who blame their old régime for the losses during the war. They will be infuriated by the demands made by the Allies. The cost of their losing will be high indeed. A mistake, but what victor listens to counsel of generosity and reason when vengeance is at hand? We are looking here at the seeds of another war, with political ferment about to foam up around us and engulf us. Allenby believes we can salvage brotherhood; I will be satisfied if we can merely keep the upper hand. We will need it, soon enough.”
Holmes cut impatiently into this speech. “What do you wish us to do about the situation?”
“Do? I don’t want you to do anything.” The little round soldier was gone; in his place bristled a condescending and irritated military officer, putting a problematic subordinate in his place. “If we were in London, Mr Holmes, I might permit you to act, might even permit you to lead. However, may I remind you that this is not your home ground? Ali and Mahmoud are my men. Valuable men. I have few enough of those at the best of times, but in the last three months, between demobilisation and accidents, I am down to about half strength.”
“What accidents?” Holmes demanded sharply.
“Accidents. My men are tired, and peace has made them careless.” Holmes met his eyes, refusing to be dismissed. “One in a motorcar crash, the other went off a cliff.”
“And Yitzak with a knife, and Mikhail with a bullet. Do you normally lose a man on the average of one every three weeks?”
Joshua sat placidly, refusing to be drawn into an answer, but even I doubted that this was a standard rate of attrition. I also was beginning to think that Mycroft, whose job was accounting for odd fluctuations in the empire’s resources, had not been unjustified in offering us this little problem.
One thing I did not understand was why this rotund English spymaster was insisting that the deaths of his men were more irritating than worrying. Perhaps the bureaucratic passion for keeping face extended here as well. His next words seemed to confirm this.
“None of this is your concern, Mr Holmes. You are here—at my sufferance, understand, not due to any authority you might imagine your brother holds—because I want my two men to have someone watching their backs. Let me be brutally frank, Mr Holmes: you and Miss Russell are expendable. I have used better men than you, and I have even used men equally renowned. Were you to vanish, there is nothing to point to me. You are to regard yourself as a back-up, Mr Holmes. You and Miss Russell have proven that you can pass for Bedu under a cursory glance, and Ali and Mahmoud by themselves are vulnerable. Four men—if you will permit me, Miss Russell?— are safer from casual attack than two. And the two of you might be of some use in running messages or holding a rifle. Frankly, despite your brother’s influence, I should not send you if I had any others available. However, I haven’t anyone else, so I will use you, and trust you far enough to assume that you won’t get my men killed. More tea?” He held out the pot, as if his harsh insults had never been spoken. I retained my cup,
but Holmes, looking more amused than angry, handed his over to be refilled.
“Tell me more about those insubstantial rumours,” Holmes suggested, as if he had heard nothing of what the man said. Joshua studied him, but was apparently satisfied, because after the tea had been poured and milked, he put away the pot and drew a map from another breast pocket. When the camp chair had been moved back he spread the map on the floor and sat on his heels like an Arab beside it, agile despite his bulk. Ali emerged from the shadows and stood behind us, looking on.
The map was of the southern half of the land, from Jaffa on the Mediterranean down to Akaba on the gulf and over nearly to the Egyptian border. Beersheva was roughly a third of the way down, surrounded by a great deal of emptiness. Joshua touched the map with the fingertips of his left hand, and then drew the side of the hand down the sheet towards himself as if brushing crumbs from its surface.
“The desert has been a place of retreat for the oppressed and a source of trouble for the authorities for thousands of years. Fanatics hid out here, establishing monasteries or raising armies; rebels retreated here to die the deaths of martyrs, or to regroup and gain strength. It seems a deadly place, empty and sterile, particularly in the summer, but the intensity of life here has spilled over onto human dreams and ideas.
“You ask what and where these rumours are, Mr Holmes. I wish it were so simple. What we hear are whispers and words. A man here”—he tapped the map near a city called Salt—“tells a story around the fire one night, a tale of Arab conquest that ends with the unbelievers dead and the city of Jerusalem closed to all but the Moslem. A woman at a well here”—his finger rested on Ramleh— “speaks of a man buying weapons. The wind has more substance, but it has voices as well, voices that Mahmoud and Ali are trained to hear. They will go about their business and listen; you will fetch water and do as they tell you.” The small uniformed figure paused to stare at Holmes again and, seeing no response, seemed satisfied that his point had been taken. He sat back and spoke to Mahmoud. “The anti-Jew speeches are escalating.”
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