O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [112]
The sleek figure—shiny high boots, immaculate khaki uniform, polished belt, starched hat, perfect hair, trimmed moustache, and the swagger stick he had been slapping against his elegant leg— turned with a diabolical grin on his face.
“Good Lord, Holmes, what on earth are you doing in that get-up? You’ll be arrested!” I had seen the man in any number of disguises, from paternal gipsy to ageing roué to buxom flower-seller, but none more outlandish, given his personality, than this one.
He just stood there and laughed at me. “By God, Russell,” he finally choked out, ”it was worth the untold bother of this fancy dress uniform and ten thousand accursed salutes to see you cringe like that. I didn’t know you were capable of it. You were slinking, Russell. Positively slinking.”
I didn’t think it at all amusing, and told him so. “You nearly gave me heart failure, Holmes. I thought you were here to arrest me for stealing antiquities. I ought to turn you in for impersonating an officer.”
He wiped his eyes and blew his nose, and began to divest himself of hat, stick, and military belt. “I wear this uniform with the approval of the highest authorities—although it is a decidedly temporary commission,” he added. “What antiquities have you stolen?”
I took out the tiny handkerchief-wrapped object, dropped into a squat on the floor, and opened the cloth parcel out on the floorboards. I picked up the little glass vase to examine it, rubbing the encrustations cautiously away, but the neck had a crack in it, and part of it came away in my fingers. A pity.
Still, it had spoken its message to me, even in pieces.
“This is a Roman phial, Holmes. Probably third or fourth century.”
“Yes?”
“So what was it doing among the rubbish being cleared from a Mediaeval bazaar?”
He sat down on his low pallet, a difficult manoeuvre while wearing rigid knee-high boots. “You are the historian here, Russell. What would you suggest it was doing there?”
I set the two pieces on the scrap of dirty linen and made myself comfortable on the floor. “This poor little thing was jerked forwards in time sixteen hundred years or so, and I should say it happened no earlier than the last couple of nights. Someone is clearing out an underground chamber.”
“Good. Oh, very good, Russell.”
I opened my mouth to begin the analysis of the someone’s character that I had constructed while I was working, but before I could say anything he stood up and pulled on his hat and belt.
“I shall have a car call for you at seven o’clock. It is now”—he patted his various pockets until he found the one he wanted, dipped in with his fingers, and brought out a silver watch on a chain— “three forty-five. That may even allow you time for a brief nap, although I suggest that you plan to devote considerable attention to the state of your fingernails.”
I held up my hands and looked at them. The nails were in a lamentable state, it was true, but if anything they added to the verisimilitude of my disguise.
“Why?”
“Because we are dining, of course,” he said in surprise, snapping his stick briskly under one arm. “At the American Colony. Not formal dress, of course. After all, there has been a war on.”
“Oh, no, Holmes, you can’t mean—”
He opened the door. “I left a frock in your room. If there is any other thing I’ve forgotten, ask Suleiman the cook to arrange it. I shall see you at seven.”
I did seriously consider an outright refusal of his peremptory summons; I wanted nothing but to strip off my turban and collapse onto my gently rustling bed. However, curiosity got the better of me— that and the challenge, which had not been voiced but which I knew had been made.
My fingernails, however, defeated me. In the end, after a hasty consultation of my Arab-English dictionary, I went through the room