O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [45]
“There were at least two men,” he began without preamble as soon as my ears were within range. “And it was not a revolver but a rifle, three bullets, from there.” He jabbed a finger briefly at the top of the opposite cliff before returning to his task of gently prising pieces of stone free from the crumbling face of the cliff with the knife from his belt. “A first-rate marksman, too. He hit Mikhail’s turban with his first shot, fifty feet above here, and wounded Mikhail with this, his second.” His long fingers came out from the crack in the rock at which they had been worrying, holding a misshapen wad of grey metal between them. He displayed it to me, slipped it into his robe, and scrambled down a few feet to trace a faint smear of red-brown on the face of the rock and a small spatter farther on. “When the third one struck, he fell onto the boulder, as Joshua said.” On the boulder below, despite the intervening rainstorm, the stain was still clear.
We sat for several minutes, Holmes contemplating the sequence of events and I regretting the death of this man I had never met, until eventually the aroma of bread joined that of coffee, and we descended to take our midday meal.
When we had finished eating, the men lit their cigarettes and Holmes narrated the last scant minute of the life of Mikhail the Druse. “He was coming down into the wadi. He must have known someone was after him, because he was moving quickly, at a greater speed than is wise on this terrain, which caused him to skid and slide. He may not have known that the man with the rifle was there on the other side until the first bullet went through his turban…” He paused to lay a tuft of white threads on a flat stone. “He did wear the usual white Druse turban, I take it? I thought so. When the bullet went through it, he panicked, jumped and fell, caught himself on that rock with the black vein in it”—Ali and Mahmoud turned to look at the hillside—“and the second shot hit him, a flesh wound that bled quickly. It was on the left arm; there’s a partial hand-print farther along. This was the second round.” He took the flattened bullet from his robe and put it beside the scrap of fabric. “You can see the track of his flight down, even from here. Across the slide area, jumping to the boulder, he fell, rolled, and caught himself briefly on the dead tree, pulling it from the ground. He lost his bag then, turned to reach for it, and as soon as he stopped moving the third shot came, and he died. A short time later, the pursuer whom Mikhail was fleeing came down the same hill in Mikhail’s tracks, at a considerably slower pace. He checked to see that the Druse was dead, then went through his possessions. I would suggest that he removed something that had been written with that recently sharpened pencil we found in the pack.”
“How can you know that?” shouted Ali. “You were not there watching! Or were you?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing with sudden suspicion.
“Don’t be a fool,” Holmes replied in an even voice. “I read it on the stones. Ali, I know that Mikhail was your friend. I am sorry, but this is how he died, with thirty seconds of fear and a clean bullet.”
“And the knowledge of failure,” said Mahmoud bitterly.
“Perhaps we can change that failure.”
“But how do you know this thing?” Ali insisted. “You found the bullet and the threads, but how do you know of the second man?”
“It could not have been the man with the rifle who went through the Druse’s pack because the marksman was on the other side of the wadi, and by