O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [56]
“Non !” That was Mahmoud’s voice, not that of Holmes. “Il ne peut pas le faire,” he said. I wondered idly if his use of the masculine pronoun in referring to me was deliberate or due to an ignorance of French grammar.
“Pourquoi pas?” I asked. Why must I not go?
“Ali va revenir. ” Ali will return.
“Holmes?” I asked for confirmation.
“Oui,” he said. “Ça va.”
Fine, I thought, and dug a little deeper into the lee of the boulder. We’ll all just wait here for Ali to rescue us, or until we’re picked off one by one.
We lay, cramped and still. Every so often the man above us would fire a couple of bullets into the wadi, and once he moved, forcing the three of us to scuttle around to the more protective sides of our rocks. However, he was such a bad marksman that we were in more danger from a ricochet than a direct shot. The day faded, my bladder filled, and then in a distinct anti-climax came a noise from above, followed by Ali’s voice calling the all-clear.
We climbed stiffly up the steep wall and found Ali along with a man firmly bound by what seemed to be gardening twine. A rifle lay on the ground beside them, a piece of armament so antique it explained the man’s wretched marksmanship. Ali was seated comfortably on the man’s back, smoking a cigarette, and I looked in wonder at the surrounding landscape, which seemed to me utterly open, flat, and devoid of objects to hide behind. The same thought obviously occurred to Holmes.
“How did you manage to come up on him?” he asked Ali, who merely grinned at him.
“As invisible as a rock,” commented Mahmoud drily.
“That was Ali, who took out the gun over Jerusalem?” Holmes asked.
“That was Ali.” Mahmoud shook his head as if at the prank of a high-spirited son, then looked at his partner sternly to ask, “The others?”
“A camp with three horses, two of them gone. This fool”—he paused to swat an all-too-conscious head with his open palm— “thought he could act on his own.”
Mahmoud squatted down to peer into the bandit’s face. “When will they return?” he asked the man.
The man began to snarl threats and bluster, despite his position, until suddenly he screeched and began to buck his body up and down in an attempt to dislodge Ali from his back. Ali calmly took his cigarette from the man’s backside and put it back between his lips. The air smelt of burning wool. The bandit groaned and began to curse, then went very still as the hot end of Ali’s cigarette appeared three inches above his cheek-bone.
“When will they return?” repeated Mahmoud, his voice even more gentle. The man stared through his one visible eye at the cigarette, and jerked violently when it dropped an inch closer to his face. Ali laughed; Mahmoud waited; Holmes looked on in stony silence; I tried not to look at all.
“When?” Mahmoud said for the third time. There was no answer. Showing no emotion, he took the cigarette from Ali’s fingers, drew deeply on it, tapped off the ashes, and then whirled his bulky body around the man in a swift movement that trapped the bandit’s head underneath one knee and against the other, grinding his left cheek into the ground. The cigarette end approached the man’s eye, slowly, inexorably. I gulped and looked away.
The bandit began to scream, but in fear, not in pain, and there were words in his voice. His Arabic was too rapid for me to understand, but whatever he said seemed to satisfy Mahmoud because when I looked again the hand holding the cigarette was resting on the man’s shoulder.
“Good,” he said in a soothing voice. “I have one other question, then we will leave. Tell me about the men who killed a man in the Wadi Estemoa.”
“I did not kill him,” the bandit gabbled. “I don’t know anything about a killing in the Wadi Estemoa.”
“You did not kill him, no, but you do know who did. Tell me.” He lifted his hand, took another draw from the now-short cigarette, and touched it briefly to the man’s ear. The man jerked as if he’d been shot. When the burning tip came back to hover above his face, he tried to focus on it with an eye as white