“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.”
“The imam in Hebron?” Mahmoud asked.
“And others.” Joshua turned to explain. “Until recently, Jew and Arab lived together in this country without severe problems. Not as family, necessarily, but neighbours. That is no longer the case, for many reasons. The Arab people fear what the Balfour and Sykes-Picot agreements might mean. They fear outsiders in general. They respect the British, and they revere General Allenby, but they need a focal point for their uncertainty, and the recent influx of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe looks to be that. Unless something is done, the Jews will become the scapegoat. The imams and mullahs are encouraging it, those who are political.” The man ran a frustrated hand through his thin hair.
“The speeches are escalating, becoming more bloodthirsty every day. We’ve had several incidents of rock throwing, a Jewish shop burnt, wild rumours. The murders of Yitzak and his two men are the worst; had you not made it appear as if the poor man had fallen on his scythe and his two hired men fled with the petty cash from the kitchen, I have no doubt that we would have had a full-scale riot on our hands in Jaffa by midweek.
“General Allenby does his best, but he’s only one man, and has only so much oil to pour on troubled waters. And there is so much misunderstanding—it’s difficult to know where to begin. When the fellah hears from his betters that the real meaning of the Balfour agreement is that his ten dry acres are to be cut in half and shared with a Jewish family from Russia, he believes that is what the government means by providing a ‘Jewish homeland.’ He does not know of the Paris peace talks, does not trust distant politicians to protect him. All he knows is that the Turkish yoke was on his neck for four hundred years; now it is off, he will fight to keep it off.”
“Aurens used to say, ‘Semites have no half-tones in their register of vision,’” Mahmoud commented. The precision of the words sounded incongruous in his heavy accent.
“Colonel Lawrence being something of an expert himself in the matter of black-and-white truths,” Joshua noted drily.
“Still, it is true,” Mahmoud persisted. “This is an emotional people, not an intellectual one.” Not entirely true, I thought, given the record of Arabic scholarship, but I was not about to quibble.
“Tell me this, Mahmoud,” said Joshua, addressing his teacup. “Do you think this reaction could be a deliberate one, rather than strictly spontaneous?”
The simple question instantly galvanised the room: Holmes quivered to attention like a hunting dog on point, Ali straightened, and Mahmoud’s eyes went dark. Holmes broke the silence.
“That is a most intriguing suggestion. May I ask what brought it to mind?”
“A certain degree of similarity in the … one couldn’t call them ‘attacks,’ exactly, although some of them were. ‘Symptoms’ is how I think of them. Arabic pamphlets that bear a strong resemblance to one another. Identical rumours springing up at two or more far-flung places before they are heard in the intervening countryside. Slanted translations of British policy statements that give signs of having been planted. An unexpected sophistication in the times and places where rocks are thrown and speeches made, and a marked tendency of the ringleaders to disappear without a trace.”
“The trembling of a web,” Holmes said to himself. There was a look of intense gratification on the few square inches of face visible between kuffiyah and beard.
“A web?”
Holmes waved the question away impatiently. “Where is the centre of this activity?”
“This is a small country, Mr Holmes. If the roads were in good nick one could motor down the better part of it in a day, or ride it in a week. Most of the disruptions have been within the triangle formed by Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa, but then most of the population is there as well. If there is a centre to the disturbances, I would guess it to be around Jerusalem, probably to the north of the city.”
Holmes controlled himself admirably, saying not a word against the idea of relying on a guess, which he regarded as a mental aberration, shockingly destructive to clean habits of thought. He merely mused as if to himself, “If conspiracy there is, who are the conspirators?”
Joshua took it as a question, and settled back in his camp chair for another lecture. “In Palestine, clearly there are three main parties: Christian, Jewish, and Moslem. I think for the time being we may leave aside the fringe minorities, the Druse, the Sufi Moslems, and so forth. And if we assume that the disturbances are aimed at increasing ferment and upsetting the status quo that the military government is struggling to maintain, then the Christians are unlikely to be the cause: Under British rule, they will be in the best position they have held since the Crusaders were evicted in 1291. Jews are more usually targets than instigators, although there have been several staged reprisals against Moslems, but it would be hasty to assume that this is a Moslem conspiracy. There are several factions among the Jews, particularly recent immigrants, who see the traditional complacency of the native Jewish population as the main obstacle to establishing a Jewish homeland here. Jews whose families have been here for generations tend to keep their heads down and pray; radical immigrants, the Zionists from Russia and Europe, can be firebrands, anxious to unite their people beneath a sense of adversity. It is worth noting that, Yitzak’s farm aside, there have been no deaths or serious injuries in the post-war clashes.”
“Yet,” I muttered.
“This man Mikhail,” Holmes broke in. “Where did he die?”
It was clear that Holmes had not heard a word of Joshua’s peroration. The round spymaster scowled, and addressed himself to Mahmoud. “Mikhail was found halfway down the Wadi Estemoa. Two boys chasing a goat spotted him. Sheer chance he was found at all.”
Holmes had bent to run his eyes across the map, and when he found the river-bed in question he pointed it out to me.
“You have no idea what he was doing there?” he asked Joshua.
“As I said, I assume he was listening.”
“Was he robbed?”
“There was nothing in his bag but the basics: flour and coffee—already ground—a bottle of water, his tobacco, that sort of thing. No money, and his gun was missing, but the two Bedouin boys took those. Had I forced them to hand their loot over,” he added in explanation, “they would never report anything else they might find in the future, nor would their entire clan. Instead I gave the boys a small reward, and they admitted to taking the gun and the money, but swore they took nothing else. I believe them.”
“Was he from this area?”
“Mikhail? No. Despite his Christian name, he was a Druse, from the hills above Haifa. However, he knew the whole of Palestine intimately. He was a dragoman before the war, especially popular with the English and German tourists, I understand.” He caught himself. “But Mahmoud knows this, and you do not need to. You’re not investigating a murder, Mr Holmes. You are not investigating anything, in fact. You are here in a strictly subordinate role. Is that understood?”
“I hear you,” said Holmes ambiguously, although Joshua did not seem to take it that way. He relaxed, and when he spoke next it was with an air of admission.
“When I heard you were coming, I thought Whitehall had lost their minds. A man older than most of the commanders here, with no military background, and a girl, neither of whom knows the land or the language as well as they ought. Frankly, I refused. And was ordered to give you a fair trial, after which I might send you home if I wanted. When Mahmoud here approved, I thought he had been out in the sun too long. In my experience, Mahmoud does not approve of many. But he said you would do, and here you are. Good to have you with us, Mr Holmes, Miss Russell. I wish you luck.” He began to pack away the tea paraphernalia.
Holmes ignored the fact that we were being dismissed. “I assume you have buried the body. What have you done with his possessions?”
“I have them.”
“I need to see them.”
“There is nothing of interest there.”
“Still.”
Joshua wavered on the edge of anger for a few moments; then, controlling himself, he shrugged.
“His pack is not here. I kept it at headquarters in Beersheva.”
“Shall I come there?”
“That would not be wise.” He sighed theatrically. “If you insist on seeing it, I shall have it sent over. You won’t remove anything?”
“Not without notifying you. We also need to know precisely where he was found.”
Again Joshua hesitated, but gave in more quickly this time. He squatted next to the map and showed Mahmoud the watercourse, asking him, “Do you know the place where the wadi turns, and there are three large boulders in a heap with a small tamarisk on the hill above them?” Mahmoud thought for a moment, and nodded. “Mikhail was found behind the westernmost boulder. His pack was about ten feet away.”
“He was killed by a revolver?” Holmes asked.
“If so, it was not his own. He carried a small gun; this one was larger, possibly even a rifle. The scavengers had been at him, though, so it was not possible to determine what damage the shot had done in the first place. The bullet was not in him.”
“I see. Well, let us have his possessions tonight, if you can. We shall let you know what we find.” Holmes rose and began to button his long sheepskin coat.
It was quite obvious that Joshua was not accustomed to being dismissed by his men, and he did not know whether to impose the might of military discipline on Holmes or to overlook his response. With a somewhat forced return of joviality he decided on the latter. Practically slapping our backs, he began to bundle us towards the door.
“You’ll let me know if there is anything you need,” he said, meaning he was quite certain we would not ask.
“Actually,” I said. He stopped, looking at me quizzically. My three robed companions stopped as well. “Another tent,” I suggested firmly.
“Another tent?” Joshua made it sound as if we had lost any number of them along our profligate way.
“Yes,” I said. “Please.”
“No,” said Ali. “It will look suspicious, three tents with so few people.”
“Either a third tent,” I said flatly, “or Holmes moves in with you.” A woman’s determination was not a thing with which any of these males (other than Holmes) had much experience. One by one their eyes dropped, and again Joshua shrugged.
“Very well. Another tent. It’ll be a small one.”
“So much the better.”
Desert dwellers do not possess luxuries. They use tents of hair, or houses of wood or clay, unfurnished. They have shade and shelter, nothing else. Their food is either raw or little prepared, save that it may have been touched by fire.
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
he road back to Beersheva seemed even rougher than the outward journey, and was definitely colder. We were let out on the south end of town, below the ancient wells, and in five minutes we were at the inn. Although it was nearly midnight, Ali called out for coffee as we passed the kitchen. I went off to the latrines behind the inn, in no pleasant mood.
I had left the mud-brick building in the hills stewing to myself over Joshua’s patronising words and attitude, and the long, jostling trip back had not dissipated any of my profound annoyance. I arrived back in the room on the heels of the coffee bearers, and waited impatiently while the thick brew was poured out. The instant the door was fixed into place, I gave vent to my irritation.
“‘Some use in holding a rifle,’” I grumbled furiously. “‘Running messages.’ Who does he think he is?”
Holmes did not answer, but Ali did. “He is Joshua.”
“And I’m supposed to be impressed by the name? For God’s sake, he’s got a resource he won’t even consider using.” I gestured to where Holmes sat on his heels, sipping from the delicate cup pinched between thumb and forefinger, his long mouth twitching in amusement. “Holmes, speaking objectively, would you not agree that it is a foolish commander who neglects to make full use of the strengths of his men?”
He inclined his head to show agreement, but Ali gave out a guttural laugh.
“Strengths? What strengths are th
ose? An old man and a girl.” He added an eloquent mock-spitting gesture of hand and lips, and that, on top of a solid week of disdain and the dismissive attitude of the spymaster, was simply too much. I leapt to my feet and stormed over to thrust my face into his.
“Hit me,” I ordered. Behind me, Holmes put down his cup with alacrity and moved out of the way.
“By Allah, it is a great tempta—” Ali began. So I slapped him. Hard. His face went purple and he surged up, reaching out to grab me by the shoulders, but before he had his balance I performed a manoeuvre that I knew would only work once on a man of his size and strength, when he was both unprepared and off balance. As he came at me, I seized the front of his robes and then hurled myself over backwards, kicking out hard to send him flying over my head and tumbling through the open doorway into the next room. Before he could find his breath or his feet, I was standing over him with one of my two throwing knives in my left hand. His eyes widened, his hand flew to his belt, and I half turned and threw the knife back into the main room, sinking it with satisfaction into the nose of a bearded face on a fly-specked 1913 calendar that decorated the back of the door. Then I turned my back on him and walked away, retrieving my knife and returning to my now-cool coffee.
Holmes dropped back into his place, working hard not to laugh aloud, and murmured, “Do you feel better now, Russell?”
I did, of course, although I was also beginning to regret the insult I had dealt Ali even before he stumbled back into the room with his wicked knife in his hand and his jaws clenched in fury under his beard.
Mahmoud, though, was looking at me with more interest than he had yet shown.
“Can you do that with the knife every time?” he asked me, speaking in Arabic, but slowly.
“Every time.”
Of course, I then had to prove it by dispatching three large spiders, two pencil marks, and a flying apple core. Mahmoud seemed inordinately pleased at this unexpected talent of mine. Ali, predictably, sulked. After the halved apple core had fallen to the floor, he stirred.
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