prayer beads from his robe.
“The supplies are no longer there—having been, shall we say, liberated by the men on their way home.
“But if there was one cache…” Ali did not bother finishing the thought.
“Who were the officers?” I asked Holmes.
“These men knew the names, but said that, having had such a personal interest in the fates of their former superior officers, they made a point of hunting them out after the war. Of the half dozen they knew were in on it, all were either dead or in the custody of the British. Now all are dead.”
“Unfortunate,” commented Mahmoud laconically.
“Yes. They did say, however, that the six officers were not acting on their own, that orders came to them. And not from Damascus but from Jerusalem.”
We meditated on this for some time, and then Mahmoud asked, “You have the names of the Turkish officers?”
“I do. Perhaps they will have left administrative tracks that could lead to their superior. Had the Germans actually been in charge of the army rather than merely advising, we could certainly depend on records having been kept. The Turks, however, were less concerned with order. I suppose Joshua is the one to follow that particular lead; can a message be got to him?”
“It can,” Mahmoud replied.
Ali shifted slightly, but before he could rise and signal that the day’s events were ended, I stopped him with two questions aimed at Mahmoud.
“Are you suggesting,” I said carefully, because I wanted this quite clear, “that what we are looking for is a group of Turkish officers who have escaped capture and gone underground? And that these officers are plotting to take the country back from the British?”
Mahmoud clearly disliked being put on the spot, but after a moment he answered. “It is not so simple. It may be more a matter of encouraging the disorder and dissatisfaction that already exist here, hidden beneath the British rule of order. ‘A dust cloud hides all.’ Think of a man stirring up a cloud of dust so as to move around without being observed. When the dust settles, the man is where he wishes to be, with no-one the wiser.”
It was a picturesque image, if inaccurate (would not a stirred-up dust cloud attract suspicion?) and not terribly informative.
“His purpose being… ?” I prodded.
This time it was Holmes who responded. “Joshua appears to believe that the unrest is intended to, shall we say, encourage the British government to withdraw at all haste from the expensive and unpleasant business of governing an intractable province. I think that with tonight’s evidence, we may assume that the architect of the unrest further intends to be in a position to occupy the vacuum of power when the British depart. It is a plan both complex and simple, well suited to a patient man with a taste for manipulation.”
“You think there is such a man, then?”
“Or as Mahmoud suggests, a small coalition. As an hypothesis it wants testing, but yes, it is a strong possibility.”
“And he or they direct the
“Russell, Russell. Joshua all but told us that the good Yitzak was not just a farmer. Am I right, Mahmoud?”
“A spy, yes, during the war.”
Great, I thought; yet another thing that had passed me by. “Still,” I persisted, “this is a fairly ruthless approach to politics. Why hasn’t your man Joshua heard of him, or them, before this?”
Mahmoud answered me in Arabic. “ ‘When the cat looks at the feathers and says he knows nothing of the bird, does that mean the cat’s belly is not full?’ ”
It took me a while to sort that one out, first the syntax, then the meaning. Eventually, though, I thought I had it. “You’re saying that Joshua does know that there is an actual plot to take over the country. That his vague maunderings about wolves in the sheepfold and his attempts to put Holmes off the scent were a ruse. My God, the man is more devious than Mycroft. So what we’re searching for is a Turkish Machiavelli with the morals of a snake. Where do we look? Out here in the desert? In the Sinai? Jerusalem?”
Mahmoud answered with yet another aphorism, a long Arabic growl that translated something along the lines of, “Jerusalem is a golden bowl full of scorpions.” Ali chuckled in appreciation, and without warning I was hit by a bolt of fury at Mahmoud and everything he represented. It was an accumulation of things, some of them to do with him—his flat assumption of command and his aloofness, the shadowy Joshua behind his shoulder and the patronising air with which he tended to answer my ignorance, his endless proverbs and convoluted epigrams and rawest of all the ease with which he had forced me to help him fleece the poorest of villagers. There were other vexations for which he could not be blamed, but in the blink of an eye, all the irritations that plagued me welded themselves together and pushed out a question I had not intended to ask.
“Tell me, Mahmoud, how did you come by that scar?”
The instant the words left my mouth I regretted them. Ali looked ready to succumb to an attack of apoplexy, and even Holmes let out a small grunt of reaction at my thoughtlessness. I rubbed at my forehead in a gesture of tiredness and self-disgust.
“I am sorry, Mahmoud. It is none of my business, and even if—”
“I was captured,” he said flatly, his eyes glittering across the dim room at me. “I was questioned. I was rescued. I was brought here.” He shifted to Arabic. “Ali and Mikhail the Druse brought me to this village. The
I was struck dumb with remorse; I wished he had hit me instead of answering, or shot me dead. All I could think of was a gesture that left my English self far, far behind. I went onto my knees and put out my hand to touch his dusty boot. It was a strange thing to do, and where in my psyche it came from I do not know, but it was an eloquent plea for forgiveness in ways that words were not, and it reached him. After a moment I felt his hand on my shoulder, squeezing briefly.
“Don’t worry, Mary,” he said, using English.
“I had no right—”
“Amir,” he interrupted, in Arabic now. “Be at peace.”
And strangely enough, I was.
NINE
?
—
BAEDEKER’S
,
1912 EDITION
In the morning we made our farewells to the village and turned east. Before we left, I saw Ali take Farash aside, no doubt to press into the mans hand a piece of paper containing the names of six Turkish officers to be delivered to the spymaster Joshua. Heaven only knew where the answer would catch up with us. When the last of
