Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "Have you really?" Zimmer asked. "You saw that as the right thing to do?"

  "That's right," she said. She was looking around the chamber to see if Fotheringill was still with them, if she could make out any sign of him.

  Within seconds there sounded through the chambers a tremendous clash of metal and a tumbling of stones like a wave receding over a rocky shore.

  "That's them, mister," Sonia said. "You call it."

  Except she did not really believe that it was Shin Bet or the Border Police. She found herself thinking, of all things, about "The Fall of the House of Usher," which she had once read Poe had based on something he had read about an Egyptian temple-tomb situated on an island in a swamp.

  "The tunnel's collapsing," one of the men in the group said, without much interest.

  "No it's not," Zimmer told him. "You—you are fucking collapsing."

  Then came a mighty voice, one without the faintest transcendent quality. It was plainly a police bullhorn. It had two messages, one in Hebrew, the other in English.

  Sonia was too astonished to speak.

  "Shabak," one of Fotheringill's band said. "She did it."

  "She did it," Zimmer said calmly.

  "Jew fighting Jew," one of the men in the group said. "Jew killing Jew. This is what we feared."

  "No one's killing anyone," Zimmer shouted. "Put your weapons down." He shone the beam around the chamber and called off eight or nine names. "Walk toward the tunnel entrance."

  The men hesitated.

  Fotheringill appeared behind a flashlight as though he had spirited himself through the wall.

  "Do it," he called out in a military manner. "You heard the man."

  "How about Lestrade?" Zimmer asked him.

  The men he had brought down into the chamber milled about in some confusion.

  "Lestrade's provided fer," Fotheringill told him. "We didn't drive him out. But the town's bagged. He'll be with Lucas and the press."

  "So you thought you'd pop over?"

  "Aye. Thought I might be useful like."

  "All of you take cover," Zimmer said to the men who had come down with him. "The army is nearly through. Watch out for ricochets. We don't want any misfortunes."

  Most of the men in his company did as they were told.

  "We're betrayed," said one of the men. It was the junior-college football coach from New England. "You're a traitor," he told Zimmer. "A Christian—Christians, all of you."

  "Not really," Zimmer said. "She's a Sufi. And this gentleman," he said, indicating Fotheringill, "works for me."

  "The soldiers of Ahab," the football coach said. "The soldiers of Manasseh." He put the light on Sonia. "The soldiers of our Jezebel here."

  "You're the soldiers of Saul," Sonia proclaimed. "And I'm the Witch of Endor, how's that? I think she was black like me. And I can call up the prophet Samuel like she did, and the prophet Samuel would call you traitors against God and the Jewish people and the land of Israel. I come from a long line of rabbis."

  Fotheringill laughed. "She's barmy," he told his boss, Zimmer. "But I love her."

  67

  DODGING searchlights, stones and the odd stray bullet, the crowd of shebab, followed by Lucas and Sally Conners and Ibrahim the guide, made their way over the dark rooftops of the Muslim Quarter toward the Bab al-Hadid. Some of the roofs sustained fragrant gardens, some were derelict. There were accordion rails for the protection of children and sometimes lines of broken bottles set in cement, to pierce the flesh of evildoers. The streets below were swarming with an increasingly excited crowd.

  Approaching the Bab al-Hadid above a narrow street, they encountered a charge of mounted police who turned a crowd headed for the Haram into a Pamplona-like stampede, with young buckos running before the horses or crowding against doorways. At the end of the street, the mounted police turned smartly to avoid being separated from their own lines and rode back up the same alleyway, administering baton whacks to some of the kids they had missed the first time through. At another point, a force of soldiers had a contingent of shebab trapped in an alley and were amusing themselves firing gas canisters into it. Now and again an empty canister would come flying back, but the rioters seemed to have picked themselves an unlucky refuge.

  At this point, against Lucas's inchoate advice, the young men with whom they were traversing the rooftops were unable to refrain from tossing everything loose and handy down onto the ranks of soldiers below them. This in turn provoked an enraged charge by a flying squad from the far end of the street, who smashed through the doors of the street-level dwellings and made for the roofs. Everyone scattered, including Lucas and Sally, who were now operating in a kind of uncoordinated alliance, Ibrahim in pursuit of his fee, and Dr. Lestrade, who obviously preferred not to be the solitary representative of Western Christendom among an angry crowd prepared to drink the wine of paradise.

  Not all the soldiers found their way immediately to the rooftops, so it was possible for the four of them to maneuver across several roofs and across the souk on the arching roof that covered its stalls. Lucas had a look over the edge of the first building they came to on the east side of the souk and found it full of soldiers and police, apparently being held in reserve.

  For better or worse, they had put the hot side of the riot behind them and were back of the Israeli lines. But in every direction from the lighted vital center the army and police were holding, a huge crowd, partly visible through its own mixed media of homespun light and powerfully audible in its chanting, was pressing dangerously against them. The shots, the rattle of stones and the popping of canisters continued.

  Discovering himself where he was, Ibrahim expressed his unhappiness. He was good at being unpleasant—as became a man used to raising his prices after a deal was made—but the talent gave him little comfort at this time and in this place.

  "They are destroying the Haram," he declared. "You must pay me."

  Sally Conners winced at this non sequitur. Crouched beside a potted pomegranate tree, she searched her fanny pack and came up with about a hundred dollars in shekels.

  Ibrahim screeched imprecations.

  Lucas gave him three American twenties. Like a baby bird, he chirped for more.

  "I don't know if I should let you do that," Sally said. "I hired him."

  "Good," Lucas said. "I'm firing him, and it's worth every penny." He turned to Lestrade. "Would you like to give him something?"

  "I?" asked Lestrade. "What? What? I give him something?"

  Ibrahim immediately homed in on Lestrade. They quarreled in high-flown Arabic until Lucas physically removed the professor from the rooftop. Pushing open a door, they found themselves in a room full of crying children. A dozen, Lucas thought, and not one of them over four years old. They huddled together on huge mattresses placed on the floor.

  A woman swathed in layers of cloth was hiding, not very successfully, behind a curtain at one end of the room, ostrich fashion, keeping her face averted. Lucas, Sally and Lestrade headed for the street. They were not far from the Bab al-Hadid. The Border Police squads ran past them, paying no attention. From the roof, Ibrahim hissed down at them like an animated, alienated gargoyle.

  "Salman Rushdie is not here!" he croaked malevolently, as though to disappoint them. There was a large Palestinian crowd not far away.

  "Do you know where you're going?" Sally Conners asked Lucas.

  "The professor here knows," Lucas told her.

  Suddenly, they knew not how, the Palestinian crowd had broken through and they were now part of it. The mob's purpose seemed to be to penetrate the barriers at the Bab al-Hadid, make an end run around the police lines and hurl itself against the Haram wall.

  In a burst of youthful athleticism, Sally Conners took off with the rioters. Lucas, with Lestrade following, raced after her. Sally had a volatile effect on the mob. Some of the young men looked delighted with her, others infuriated, many appeared to register both reactions, by turn or in combination. In any case, the
Palestinian charge was contained by soldiers who waded into it, using their rifle butts liberally.

  Lestrade, Lucas and Sally were shoved to one side. Lucas cowered, protecting his head with his arms. Lestrade, breathless, panted and crossed himself. Sally Conners stood tall, like Nurse Edith Cavell before the Hun, ready to take her medicine.

  An angry officer accompanied by two troopers approached them. Perhaps because of Sally, no blows were struck.

  "Who are you? Where do you think you're going?"

  Farther down the street, protected by metal barricades and under massive white lights, soldiers were operating Michigan loaders under the guidance of gray-haired men in civilian clothes. They seemed to be digging up the cobbled street close to the Haram wall.

  "Press," Lucas said.

  "Press? You're engaging in disorder. I saw you. Staging riots to write about?"

  Then the officer stalked off, leaving them in custody of the two soldiers, who stared at them in slack-jawed menace. In a moment, the officer returned with a civilian.

  "No press here!" the civilian declared. "The area is closed. How did you get here in the first place?"

  The officer spoke to him in Hebrew.

  "You led that crowd in here. You could be responsible for deaths. You're under arrest."

  "Wait," Lucas said. "Is there a bomb under the Temple Mount?"

  The Shabak man looked at him closely. "Who told you this?"

  "We think there is," Lucas said. "This man," he said, indicating Lestrade, "is an archeologist. He thinks he knows where it's planted."

  The representative of Shin Bet looked doubtfully at Lestrade.

  "Well," Lestrade said. "I've an idea."

  "An idea," the Shin Bet agent repeated.

  "A good idea," Lestrade said.

  "Basically," Lucas told them helpfully, "he knows where the thing is. He can take you to it."

  "Well, yes," Lestrade said. "The chamber of Sabazios. That would be my guess."

  The Shabak man went away without a word.

  "That is all nonsense, isn't it?" Sally Conners asked. "About Salman Rushdie?"

  "I have to tell you," Lucas said, "I don't see him."

  "Do you really know where there's a bomb under the Temple Mount?" she asked Lestrade.

  "Yes, I think so," the professor said.

  "Crikey," said Sally Conners. As discreetly as possible, she hugged herself with joy.

  68

  THE BOMB that lay at the feet of Sabazios was one that looked vaguely familiar to Sonia. She once had a boyfriend, a dropout from Long Beach State and a Maoist militant, who had quit school to organize the shipyard workers at the San Diego Navy Yard. At the time, it had become the most radical and Maoist-influenced shipyard in the country. But Bob Kellerman, the militant, had given it all up for nitrous oxide and drowned in his own bathtub.

  Bob Kellerman had showed her how bombs were made, with gelignite and acid batteries and telephone wire. She had sat together with several other adepts to assist in, or at least to watch, the process, and somehow they had not blown themselves to kingdom come like the comrades in Greenwich Village some years earlier.

  It was a similar bomb. Its timer was an alarm clock that did not show the correct time.

  "Who made the device?" she asked Fotheringill.

  "Never mind," Zimmer said.

  "And the statue is Sabazios?"

  "Correct."

  "So you thought that was a good place to put it," she said. "One of the American chaverim make it? Ex-cop or something?"

  "Doesn't matter now, does it?" Zimmer looked at the clock timer in the rucksack.

  The sound of earth-moving machines grew louder and closer. Shots were fired inside the foundation, the reports echoing endlessly. Something that might have been a tear-gas canister rattled over the stone.

  Zimmer took Sonia by the arm and led her in the direction of the noise. Fotheringill was crouched with his Galil, covering the men in the chamber.

  "What about the bomb squad?" Sonia asked. "What about the soldiers who come in here?"

  "What about the Temple rising again?" Zimmer said. "Don't worry about a thing."

  He shouted something in Hebrew down the tunnel. The noises stopped abruptly, all at once. Zimmer shouted again.

  In the next few seconds the chamber was full of light and helmeted policemen. The men who had come down with Zimmer backed away from their piled weapons. Then Sonia saw Lestrade and Lucas in the glare of floodlights.

  "This is the place," Lestrade said. "Now for God's sake, don't harm that statue."

  "Get back!" the soldiers ordered. They shoved Lucas and Lestrade aside and began to shout at Sonia and Zimmer's captured band.

  Lucas saw Fotheringill in a shaft of light.

  "Jesus," he said. "I remember it.

  " Rillons, Rillettes, they taste the same,

  And would by any other name,

  And are, if I may risk a joke,

  Alike as two pigs in a poke."

  "What the bloody hell are you talking about?" Sally Conners asked him.

  Lucas was entranced:

  "The dishes are the same, and yet

  While Tours provides the best Rillettes

  The best Rillons are made in Blois."

  "Fotheringill!" he called. "Did you get that?"

  But then he, and Sonia, saw that Zimmer and Fotheringill were gone, vanished from the chamber, and though she probed every corner with her feeble light, there was no sign of them. What she did see, just before turning off the redundant flashlight, was the football coach making a run for the pile of weapons.

  One of the soldiers took off to intercept him. Before the soldier could stop him, the coach seized an Uzi, pointed it at Sabazios's feet and, diving forward, fired a burst into the packed rucksack.

  There was a dazzling eruption of white flame, and the room filled with chemical smoke. Everyone hit the deck. When the flash came, it mocked the soldiers' lights and blinded everyone.

  69

  AFTER AN AMOUNT of time he could not judge or measure, Raziel came to consciousness on Sonia's sofa. He got to his feet, staggering among her photographs and Kilim rugs. It was still night. When he went into De Kuff's room, he found it empty.

  Raziel's footing was unsteady. Sometimes things seemed in motion on the edge of vision, and he was not always completely certain what room he was in. But eventually he was straight enough to determine that the old man had truly taken off, simply put his covers aside and gone. He would be making for the Old City, Raziel thought. For the Bethesda Pool, the source of prophecy for him. It was the night of the bomb, of the unmaking of all their plans.

  Raziel composed himself to the point where he could struggle to a public phone at a bus kiosk near the railroad station. He took a token from his pocket and called a taxi. He did not tell the dispatcher where he wanted to go. Over the shoulder of Mount Zion, he could see fires reflected in the sky and hear distant sirens and the report of weaponry. He stood beside the enclosed kiosk and stared at the lighted sky. Drivers passing on the road slowed their vehicles to look at him in suspicion and dread.

  The taxi that arrived was driven by a sullen man in his twenties with a fake silk shirt, open at the neck to show his chest hair and the variety of gold-colored chains around his neck. He did not care for the appearance of his fare, and when Raziel opened the door and climbed in beside him he recoiled as though from an assault.

  As they drove downtown, the driver peered fearfully at the agitated Jewish crowds in the streets. It was as if he were lost in his own city. As it happened, it was not his city: he was a Gentile from Romania.

  "I would like to go to the Lions' Gate," Raziel told him.

  The Romanian volubly refused. When Raziel realized that his driver's mind was not about to be changed, he got out of the taxi and set out on foot for the Old City.

  At the Jaffa Gate, things seemed less tense than elsewhere. The security forces were in control there, although it was easy to hear the shots
and cries and rattling canisters in other parts of the Old City.

  Edging along the army's lines on David Street, he looked for a place where instinct might promise him an easy crossing. He found a few unconfident-looking young soldiers near the Muristan and showed them his American passport and let them search him. The soldiers permitted him to proceed into the deserted quarter of market cafés.

  As he hurried toward the Pool, army patrols and jeeps passed him from time to time. The soldiers bellowed at him to step aside, get out of the way, stay off the street. But the soldiers were preoccupied with a fiery struggle close by that he could not see.

  He could sense the inhabitants of the Christian Quarter huddled behind their massive doors and dark barred windows. There were people on the rooftops too. Several shouted down at him. Threats, warnings.

  Approaching the end of the Via Dolorosa, almost at the Lions' Gate, he saw a noisy milling crowd of Palestinians. A line of policemen and soldiers stood between them and the gate. Raziel found that he had put himself on the inside: the crowd stood between him and the gate and the Jewish troops that held it.

  Above the shouting, he heard a voice he knew. It was the voice of Adam De Kuff speaking from the upper quadrant of his interior universe, strong, unafraid, joyful, thoroughly delusional. Raziel shouldered his way through ranks of astonished Palestinians until he saw the man himself.

  The gates to the Pool and the courtyard in front of St. Anne's Church had been forced open. De Kuff and the crowd that surrounded him all stood within it. About halfway between the crusader church and the ruined temple of Serapis, De Kuff, standing on a cement bench, addressed the enraged Palestinians.

  He wore what looked like an army jacket that fitted him so badly its cuffs stopped a little past his elbows. He had hugely baggy army trousers and untied muddy boots whose laces coiled around his ankles and twisted underfoot as he shuffled passionately from one end of the bench to the other like a dancing bear. There was a kippa on his head and a white scarf tied around his forehead like a turban and he crooned at the top of his voice.