The Jerusalem Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  The place was busy. The older part of the hospital was a Victorian/Ottoman wedding cake of a building made of pale icing-like sandstone. It had pointed arched windows and a first floor balcony at the front where visiting Edwardian-era royals could have waved at the crowds who had come to see them. It probably didn’t get much call for that sort of thing any more.

  I held Isabel’s hand as the nurse cleaned her leg in the modern emergency ward. It had taken only twenty minutes for Isabel to be seen, despite the waiting room being busy, which says something for the Israeli health care system. The examination cubicle we were in was as modern as anything you’d find in London or anywhere else.

  ‘I’m not going to let them keep me in,’ said Isabel, as we waited for the nurse to come back. She had a determined look on her face.

  There was a loud hum coming from the blue and grey equipment around us and from the lighting, but what I noticed most was that the hospital was dealing with an amazing cross-section of people. There were Arabs, Orthodox Jews with ringleted hair, secular Jews, French tourists, two ultra-thin Ethiopian-looking women, and a big blonde Mitteleuropean.

  And that was just what I could see in the area near us. I’m sure if I’d looked further I’d have found more. The place wasn’t a melting pot, it was a simmering stew.

  The nurse dealing with Isabel was a small pale lady with short blonde hair. She was attractive, though not in Isabel’s league.

  After the nurse came back Isabel was invited to receive a tetanus injection. She declined. She’d had one only six months before, she said.

  The nurse left us again. She was going to get a doctor to look at Isabel before they released her. The examination table Isabel was sitting on was set high up. Its covering was a white paper sheet with big Hebrew letters in blue running all over it.

  ‘You were lucky it wasn’t worse,’ I said.

  ‘Do you always have to look on the bright side?’ She rubbed at her forehead.

  ‘You’d prefer it if I moaned?’

  ‘Do you think Susan’s disappearance is to do with that dig?’ said Isabel.

  ‘Could be. Kaiser was always involved in weird shit, from what I can gather.’

  Isabel straightened her back. ‘It wouldn’t take a genius to inscribe Pontius Pilate’s name on some piece of marble. I hope you’re not taken in by it all,’ she said.

  ‘It could be real,’ I said. ‘I reckon Kaiser asked Susan to come here for her expert opinion on preserving what’s in that building. He may even have taken her down there to see what they were doing.’

  ‘He probably wanted her to verify that the place was as real as it looks.’

  The level of background chatter rose suddenly. I looked up. Two Israeli policemen were marching toward us. I assumed, for a long moment, that they were heading for someone else, for some criminal who was about to get his comeuppance, but I was wrong.

  That had us in their sights.

  ‘Are you Sean Ryan?’ said the larger of the two loudly, as they came up to us. Their gaze was fixed on us, as was the gaze of everybody nearby. The chatter in the room died away.

  Everyone was waiting for my reply.

  Even the equipment around us seemed to go silent. All I could hear was blood thumping in my ears. What the hell was going on?

  23

  The girl bowed low, she was on her knees and her forehead almost touched the cream marble floor. Her hair, and most of her face, was covered by a tightly bound black headdress, but he could see ridges under it, as if she wore it the way they do in parts of Sudan. His father’s house used to have servants like this girl.

  ‘Rise,’ he said.

  She did. She was very thin.

  The imam smiled. It wasn’t often he got a young woman visiting him on her own these days. His house, the best one on the street and in the whole area, was in a poor part of Cairo, but it wasn’t that which put them off coming. It was his reputation.

  ‘As-salaˉmu Aleikum, Ali Bilah, my teacher. I need your help. I have done wrong. I am so terribly frightened.’ She bowed her head low.

  He didn’t ask her to sit on the cushions nearby. It wouldn’t be right. He shifted his big bottom on the low couch, looked at her. This would be a good afternoon.

  She took a step forward and glanced up for a moment. Her green eyes, all he could see of her face, had a jewel-like intensity to them.

  ‘What place are you from?’

  ‘Juba.’ She bowed her head under his gaze. It was a true sign of her respect.

  He’d been right about her coming from Sudan. ‘What wrong have you done?’

  The room was warm. The window shutters were open and a square of dust-flecked sunlight lit up the floor between them. The early afternoon sun had meant there was no need to light the fire in the big black stove below in the kitchen. That also meant he was alone in the house. His wife was dead, cancer had taken her early, but her sister came and made his evening meal most days, except for the occasional sunny day at this time of year, like this one, when she took her own children to walk by the Nile first.

  ‘May I show you?’

  He nodded.

  What she did next brought a gasp to his throat. She bent, grabbed the bottom of her long black dress, and pulled it up to her thigh. She held it up with one hand.

  Her legs were brown, slim. There was a blue tattoo of a snake coiled around her thigh, where a garter might have been. Its scales were purple, dark brown. He’d never seen anything like it.

  ‘Have I done wrong?’ she said. There was tremble in her voice.

  He closed his eyes. This one deserved, without any doubt, to have the evil beaten out of her. A few seconds later he opened them.

  The last thing he saw was the flash of the blade.

  And the last thing he heard was the gurgling of blood from his throat as his vocal chords flapped ineffectually.

  24

  ‘Yes, I’m Sean Ryan. What’s going on?’

  The larger of the two policemen was holding a pair of handcuffs. They were shiny, and bigger than I’d imagined such things would be. He was wearing a dark blue shirt with a shield emblem on each arm featuring a white Star of David.

  Then he did something that I’d never seen done before, except on TV. He stepped in front of me, put his hand on my wrist, and had a handcuff on it before I could say a word.

  ‘You are under arrest for trespassing on a restricted archaeological site and violating the terms of your visitor’s visa.’

  I think my mouth opened in shock at that point. They say your jaw drops when you’re surprised, and it’s true, it does.

  The other policeman was talking to a male nurse who had appeared. The second policemen had receding hair and a wiry frame, as if he hardly ate.

  Isabel moved to get off the examination table, on the other side to where he was. He didn’t like that.

  ‘Stop, Isabel Sharp, do not move,’ he shouted. Oddly, the sound in the ward went from a hush to a sudden buzz, as if swarms of bees had exited from the walls around us.

  ‘I’m only getting off the bed,’ said Isabel, politely.

  The policeman who was nearest Isabel had his gun out. He was pointing it at her. My heart thudded. What were they expecting? That Isabel was going to blow herself up?

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ I said loudly.

  ‘You will follow our instructions,’ said the policeman.

  ‘There’s no need for you to pull your gun.’ I spoke slowly, hoping to calm things.

  ‘We’re tourists, that’s all.’

  I turned to Isabel.

  ‘Let’s do what they say. This must be some mistake. I’m sure we can sort it out.’

  She held her wrists out in front of her. The policeman had his cuffs on Isabel a second later. His expression told me that maybe I was being optimistic.

  ‘We understand your treatment is finished here, that you are fit to leave,’ he said to Isabel.

  ‘You got the news before I did,’ she said.

&nb
sp; I could have said something about the doctor not having told her himself, but the cut on her leg was relatively minor and it had been bandaged with an impressive looking skin-toned plaster.

  And I was right about being optimistic. They’d made no mistake about who they’d arrested.

  We were taken to a large concrete bunker-like police station. It was only ten minutes’ drive from the hospital, but I had no idea what part of Jerusalem it was in. It was on a main road with low office blocks set behind trees.

  We were taken to it in the back of a white police car with blue stripes, no door handles in the back, and tinted windows. It brought us into an underground car park beneath the station.

  After being thoroughly body-searched in separate rooms and having passed through metal detectors, we were brought down a windowless corridor together. As I looked at a pale-faced Isabel I had a vision of a long period of incarceration without trial, of being stuck in an Israeli prison not knowing what would happen to us next.

  Then we were split up. I had no idea why they brought us back together just to walk down a corridor, but they probably had a reason.

  Maybe they hoped Isabel would plead with me about something we’d done as soon as she saw me, but she didn’t. If anyone imagined her as someone who scared easily, they were wrong.

  Judging from what she’d told me about some of her escapades in Istanbul before we met, and from her behaviour during incidents when we were there together, a period in police custody wasn’t likely to faze her.

  It took them two hours to get the basics straight about us; to verify that we were staying where we said, that we were who we said we were, that we had return airline tickets, that I was one of the founders of The Institute of Applied Research in Oxford and that we had a good reason for visiting that site in the Old City.

  I wasn’t too concerned during all this. We’d done nothing wrong, in my opinion. In fact, we were trying to help them by looking for Dr Hunter.

  It took them only another thirty minutes to decide to deport us. There is something to be said about the speed of Israeli justice. It was the exact opposite of what I’d imagined.

  Isabel and I met up again in a room at the back of the police station. We were also reunited with our belongings from the hotel. That was the next of the surprises for me that night. It seemed as if they knew what was going to happen to us from the moment they picked us up.

  Our backpacks had been searched thoroughly too. They’d been turned inside out. It wasn’t hard to figure this out. Every item that had been in them had been put back in a different place. Clearly they didn’t care whether we knew what they’d done or not.

  The good news was that everything from the hotel was in our bags. Nothing was missing. Not even the old newspaper from the bedside table, which had been stuffed into my bag.

  What surprised me most though was their decision to deport us. Sure, we’d pushed our way into that dig, and maybe we had broken several important regulations about who’s allowed onto archaeological sites, but I’d never imagined that someone trespassing at a dig would be treated this way.

  It didn’t matter to them that we’d been taken there by Simon either. They would deal with him separately, they said. And we were lucky not to be facing criminal charges.

  ‘You cannot be unaware of the importance of archaeological laws in Israel,’ was how the policeman put it, while explaining what was going to happen to us.

  In the end I didn’t believe all that. Someone high up had decided we weren’t welcome and that was it. We were history.

  My hopes of helping to find Susan were gone.

  The next big surprise was that we were allowed to pick which city we’d be deported to. That was a decision we were asked to make on the drive to Ben Gurion International Airport.

  They had the siren on whenever we met traffic, so the journey took only thirty minutes. The main thing of interest I saw on that drive was a long line of military vehicles, tanks on trailers and odd-looking trucks pulling sand-coloured containers, which we passed, all heading for Jerusalem. There must have been fifty of them. Something else was going on here.

  We were told by the friendlier policeman in the car that there were flights to London, Istanbul, New York, Frankfurt and Athens in the next few hours.

  Isabel nudged me with the side of her hand. Then she turned to me. There was just the two of us in the back of the police car. She spoke to the policemen in front as her eyes were on me.

  ‘We’ll take the flight to Athens,’ she said. She granted me a thin smile. It said don’t argue.

  I decided to go along with her. I shouldn’t have.

  I was hoping Isabel might have a plan. I assumed she still had enough contacts in London in the Foreign Office to help us in some way.

  When we reached the airport I got another shock. Standing right in front of the terminal building, talking on his telephone, was one of the old white-haired preacher’s sidekicks from the dig in the Old City. It was a weird coincidence. So weird my alarm bells were ringing and dancing at the same time.

  It looked very much as if our swift departure from Israel had been precipitated by a complaint from this guy’s buddies. It wasn’t just about us breaking a regulation.

  But why the hell was it so important that we left Israel, that someone had to make sure it happened?

  ‘Did you see your friend outside?’ I said to Isabel, as we waited for our bags to be scanned.

  Isabel didn’t even turn her head. She just smiled. When we got past the security check she asked the policemen whether she could go to a news-stand nearby. They nodded their agreement. She bought a copy of The Jerusalem Post. The front page was about a military call up. All reservists had been told to report to their units.

  Half an hour later, after buying expensive tickets and getting fast-tracked through two further security checks, we were waiting in the departure area. Our policemen were sitting nearby, keeping an eye on us. Thankfully they hadn’t insisted on handcuffing us. That was, they said, because we’d agreed to leave immediately, and hadn’t challenged the deportation order.

  They’d made it clear that if we hadn’t agreed, it would have meant a few days in prison, or longer, maybe even ten days, as we waited for a hearing. And if we lost that we’d never be allowed back into Israel again. This way we could come back, if we applied to an Israeli embassy first.

  ‘So why are we really going to Athens?’ I said, leaning close to Isabel.

  Our heads were almost touching. ‘Simon Marcus told me something while you were in the bathroom in that juice bar in Jerusalem. It came back to me while I was in the police station.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  She spoke quickly. ‘He said Kaiser was obsessed with Ibn Killis.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘Simon said he was a Grand Vizier in Cairo. He was Jewish apparently. He helped establish the Fatimid dynasty in the tenth century.’ She said all this as if I was supposed to know why any of this had any relevance to today.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Apparently Kaiser was planning to go to Cairo this week, to visit the Museum of Antiquities.’

  ‘You think we should go there?’

  ‘Yes. And if we want to get to Cairo from Israel by plane, Athens is the place to go. There are no direct flights.’

  Egypt has been so much in the news, not only in the last few years with all the ousting Mubarak drama, but recently too, as some of the changes there had begun to have an impact. An hour later we were in the air.

  It was after lunch on Wednesday before our Egypt Air flight took off from Athens, almost sixty minutes late. The flight only took one and a half hours, and there was another delay at Cairo Airport’s Terminal 3 after we arrived.

  We had to queue to buy a visa and then queue again at passport control. The process seemed endless. While we waited, Isabel gave me some facts about Cairo. It was, apparently, the largest city between the Americas and India, and that include
s the rest of Africa and all of Europe.

  Its eighteen million inhabitants lived in one of the most densely populated places on earth, three times the population density of London. The pyramids of Giza were in its western suburbs and most of its good hotels, on the opposite east bank of the Nile, particularly on their higher floors, had amazing views out to the pyramids and on to the desert.

  The city had been Roman, Greek, and then Muslim under various caliphates including the Umayyads, the Fatimids and the Ottomans. Each had left a layer behind in the city.

  Saint Peter had written his first epistle here too. Coptic Christians, a long protected minority in Egypt, had held onto much of the oldest teachings of the Christian Church.

  The greatest library in the world had been located here too, in the tenth century, under Fatimid rule. The Fatimids had, according to legend, been among the most tolerant sects in Islam, allowing Christians and Jews to partake fully in the affairs of the state.

  After the Fatimids came Saladin, the Grand Vizier of Cairo, the man who pushed the Crusaders out of Jerusalem.

  Finally, we were through the queue. We headed straight for the taxi rank. We ended up in a new, air-conditioned taxi, and had a slow, but uneventful journey to the Rameses Hilton on the east bank of the Nile, a ten minute walk from the famous, or infamous, Tahrir Square, where demonstrators had toppled Mubarak and still gathered regularly. The Museum of Antiquities, Cairo’s must-see attraction, with its permanent exhibition of ancient mummies and Pharaonic-era gold, was even closer.

  ‘You can see the Mediterranean from up there,’ said the taxi driver in hesitant English, as he dropped us off. He was pointing to the top of the hotel tower. It certainly was tall enough. I found out later it had thirty-six storeys.

  The hotel was at a busy intersection and there was a constant honking of horns as traffic sped by. There was a faint smell of burning in the air too, as if fires were somewhere not far away.

  We checked in and were given a double room with, much to my displeasure, two single beds. Isabel claimed we were given that room because we weren’t married. I asked for another room with a double bed to prove her wrong. I was told there were none available, as there was a convention on and all the rooms were booked.