the boys seeing anything smaller than a gold guinea flashing past, but clearly the exercise was worth their while, or they wouldn’t have risked the sharks.
Heat settled over us as the launch approached the town, making me glad for once of the topee’s shade. We passed through the canoes and the dhows to tie up at the pier and be ceremoniously handed off; the solid ground felt oddly unforgiving beneath my feet, which in the eight days since leaving Marseilles had grown accustomed to the rise and fall of the decking. The air smelt intense, marvellously complex with the odours of dust and spice and animals, and only occasional whiffs of burnt fuel.
Our first stop was the post office, where we retrieved a handful of letters, including one from Mrs Hudson and two from my solicitors in London. A quick glance through them showed that there was nothing of any great urgency, although I did send off a telegram to the legal people to say that I’d got their letters and would write at leisure. We then slid the post into our pockets and turned into the bazaar.
Aden rides the border between several worlds, all of them represented in her marketplace. Skin tones from ebony to ivory, a thousand shapes of head covering, dialects to keep a linguist in ecstasy for a lifetime. Three dusty Bedu slipped down the streets behind a pair of British soldiers; a dark-skinned Jew displayed his copper pots to an African Moslem headed home from Mecca; four British tars with their distinctive rolling gait haggled with a Christian shopkeeper over the price of a small carpet; a pair of Parsee women, wrapped in loveliness and followed by a pair of watchful men, fingered lengths of brilliant silk; a British captain strolled with his lady, his eyes on her and not the pick-pocket trailing close behind.
All that in the first fifty feet, before Holmes ducked inside a gap between shops. However, I was ready for it, and made haste to follow him.
The noisome passageway was clotted with filth, its air stifling, the darkness such that one was tempted to feel for the walls—but for the knowledge that one really didn’t want to touch what was on those walls. I took half a dozen steps and stopped, waiting for my eyes to adjust before I found myself stepping into a coal cellar.
Then a door opened and the end of the passageway grew light, and I picked my way through unexamined shapes in that direction.
The room at the end was considerably tidier than its approach. It was a small space with a high ceiling, light but shaded from the direct sun hitting the courtyard outside its latticed windows. As soon as the door closed, the room’s fragrance of jasmine-flower and musk reasserted itself; it even seemed cooler in here, although it was probably an illusion brought about by judicious use of blues and greens in the hangings, and the pale wood of the walls and chairs. Just as, I noticed, it seemed larger than it was, since all the furniture was somewhat smaller than normal.
A light and lightly accented voice interrupted my survey. “You like my house, Miss Russell?”
I whirled, unaware that there had been anyone in the room. I had to look around for the owner of the voice, then look down, to find a tiny figure scarcely four feet tall, nearly hairless but wizened with wrinkles, seated in a nest of silk cushions beside a burbling hookah.
“It’s very attractive,” I replied. “How do you know me?”
He giggled, a sound I normally mistrust in a man but which seemed natural in him. “We have, shall I say, mutual friends. And you, Mr Holmes. I had not thought to lay eyes on you again this side of Paradise.”
“Good of you to imagine I might be headed in that direction, Solly. Russell, this is Suleiman Lal. Suleiman is the uncrowned king of Aden, and this room is the junction-box through which all the power of the Red Sea is dispersed. The state of the hall-way outside is his little jest.”
“I imagine it also keeps away stray tourists,” I said drily.
“Precisely,” said the small man, and took a draw at his pipe. “You have come for your mail, I think?”
“To see if there was any,” Holmes replied.
“In the cigar box on the second shelf,” said Lal. Holmes stepped over to the diminutive shelves and drew out the wooden box, thumbing open its lid and taking out the pieces of paper therein. They were not mail, but telegraph flimsies. “Please, do read them,” the small man urged. “You may wish to send a reply. And while you do so, we shall take tea.”
With that, a narrow door behind Lal opened silently and a very dark-skinned man of normal height padded in with an ornate brassware tray set with the makings of an Oriental tea. Lal laid his pipe aside and shifted forward to pour from the tall pot into the handleless porcelain cups, and as the odour of mint filled the room, I was transported back to Palestine. Yes, this was already sweetened, and I slurped at the scalding, syrupy mint essence with pleasure.
Holmes read the telegrams and handed them to me. Both were from Mycroft. They read:
YOUR PRINCE INDEED OF QUESTIONABLE VIRTUE
MAKING ENQUIRIES RE AMERICAN
MYCROFT
Followed two days later by:
TGH ACTIVE POLITICALLY AT UNIVERSITY NO CHARGES BUT MOTHERS GURU ARRESTED TWICE SPIRITUALIST FRAUD NO CONVICTIONS
TGH SEEN IN COMPANY OF MOSCOW SECURITY
SUGGEST YOU MENTION TO FRIEND IN DELHI
MYCROFT
“TGH” was doubtless Thomas Goodheart; his “political” activity at Harvard (to Mycroft, “political” would be synonymous with “subversive”) and his proximity to “security” in Russia went some way to justify Holmes’ interest in the man. Goodheart might be nothing more than Holmes’ shipboard hobby, but I agreed that whomever we were seeing in Delhi should be informed of our chance meeting.
I handed the flimsies back to Holmes, who stretched his arm over to Lal’s hubble-bubble to uncover its burning coal, using it to set the telegrams alight. He allowed them to burn out in an ash-tray, then thoughtfully tamped the ashy curls into black dust with his finger.
“There will be no reply,” he told Lal, who nodded.
“I was told your brother was unwell.”
“Is there any place you have no ears?” Holmes asked, sounding amused.
Lal thought for a moment. “Within the American White House I am currently friendless, but no doubt someone will come to my aid before long.” And with that revelation his smile changed from a thing of easy humour to a hint of what lay behind it, a knowledge of the world’s wickednesses and the sheer joy of possession. Suddenly his giggle was not so child-like and endearing.
Holmes continued to sip his tea, but I found the stuff too sweet, cloying along my throat, so that I had to force the last swallow down for the sake of politeness. The two men chatted of names I did not know while I hid my impatience to be gone, hid, too, my growing suspicion that there were things behind the airy silken drapes that I did not wish to see.
At long last, Holmes put down his empty cup and rose.
“You will not stay to lunch?” Lal asked, not really expecting that we would.
“We have purchases to make before the ship leaves, but thank you.”
Lal nodded, that curious sideways gesture of the Oriental, and his eyes slid to mine.
“Miss Russell, I am not, perhaps, on the side of God as you would see it, but I assure you, I am not on the other side, either. I am glad to have met you, my dear.”
He inclined his head, the equivalent of an offered hand, a gesture I returned. Then we left, through a door into the courtyard instead of the filthy alley, and came out on the next street over under the eye of a very large and well-armed Turk. I glanced around to be sure there was no one listening, and said in a low voice, “Holmes, do you trust that man?”
“Solly collects information, he does not sell it. He is utterly safe as a conduit because he is completely impartial, and would as willingly have given us our messages and served us tea if we were sworn enemies of the British Crown. Every side uses Lal because they know he will not sell them out. And no side tries to lay hands on his secrets because if they did, hell would pour down on them—secrets have a way of accumulating, and he lets it be known that his untimely death would loose them. Now, tell me what sort of silk you would like to practise your scarf act with.”
