O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [96]
There was a bath, of a sort, or rather two: a dank closet in one of the cellars where cold water sputtered from a dripping green pipe to form a primitive shower-bath, or a tin bath behind a flimsy partition on the open roof. I sighed, and walked down to the cellar.
Refreshed, if not precisely clean, I went back upstairs and found Holmes just coming down from the roof. He was whistling. He looked, and smelt, beautifully clean, and although he retained a moustache, his handsome salt-and-pepper beard had given way to startlingly smooth (if still dark) skin.
“You had a bath,” I said.
“A fine, hot bath,” he replied, radiating good cheer.
I scowled at him.
“With one servant to pour hot water over my head, another to shave me, and a masseur who would make a fortune in the best Turkish bath in London.”
“May your eyebrows grow inward,” I growled in Arabic. “May your hair itch and fall from your head. Sabah el-kheir, Mahmoud,” I added, greeting that gentleman as he appeared in the doorway across from mine. His room, I saw, was blessed with both window and the exterior door to which the stairway led, and a small but well-fed charcoal brazier glowed merrily from the middle of the floor.
“Allah yesabbihak bil-kheir,” he returned my good morning—using, of course, the masculine ending. I was quite used to it by now. In fact, if someone had addressed me using the feminine I might well have turned around to look for the woman standing behind me. “Have you eaten?”
“We ate bread only, with the sunrise,” I told him.
“Let us eat,” Mahmoud said, and Ali, who was still sitting on the top step of the stairway, obligingly rose, leant over the side of the rickety topmost landing, and bellowed down at the courtyard that we wanted food, and coffee, with tea first, and did not wish to wait for it until the vultures were perched on our very window-sills. Abuse was traded, and soon Ali drew back into the room, nodded at Mahmoud, and they and I took seats on the mats and familiar bedrolls that were piled up near the walls of the room. Holmes went over to the window and glanced out, first down at the courtyard and then up at the rooftop.
“Does anyone know we are here?” he asked.
Mahmoud answered. “The boy and the innkeeper. Others know we are in the city, but not where.”
“Those two: are they trustworthy?”
“Both, to the death.” He knew what Holmes was saying, and was telling him in return that however it came about that Holmes was captured, it would not happen a second time—not through Mahmoud at any rate.
Holmes nodded. “Let the others remain ignorant.”
“Yes.”
Only then did Holmes take his seat on the impromptu bolsters with us.
“We expected you yesterday night,” Ali said. Coming from Mahmoud, the same words might have made a question, but in Ali’s mouth they were an accusation. Holmes, however, did not respond to anything but the query.
“We chose to spend the night on Olivet.”
Both men looked at us sharply. “You slept among the tombs?” Ali asked.
“I slept. I do not think Russell did so.”
“You did not… object to the presence of the dead?”
“It was pleasant,” Holmes said. “Quiet.”
Ali glanced at me, and then at Mahmoud, and resorted to pulling out his embroidered pouch and building a cigarette. I thought their fear of ghosts in a cemetery an amusing thing, considering everything else they readily put up with.
Mahmoud had his prayer beads out and was thumbing them methodically. “What did you find?” he asked.
“It is to be soon. There is a false monk involved. And it will be a bomb,” Holmes replied, and reached for his pipe. Mahmoud appeared as untouched as ever by this terse summary. Ali waited, but when Holmes had his pipe going yet did not elaborate, he began to splutter