by Colin Smith
‘Now Coxhead is a prize fool – you know the type, GHQ is full of ‘em. But somewhere in that dim noddle of his he has retained the basic instincts of self-preservation. He also happens to be mounted on just about the best stallion the Desert Mounted Corps can provide. So he makes a run for it but he soon realises that poor old Johnny Turk is riding dogs meat as usual and doesn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of catching up. In fact, the next time he takes a look behind they appear to have stopped to get their breath back.
‘Coxhead is the stalkin’ sort, bit of a Bisley man in his time, and he decides to show them that nobody chases Bertram Coxhead with impunity. It’s probably the family motto. “Chase me not with Impunity”. So, he gets behind a handy clump of cactus and rocks, puts his sights up at four hundred and lets them have it. Knocks two of them off their nags before he decides he’d better be off but that’s when it all starts to go wrong. He’s stirred up a regular wasps’ nest. Old Turkeycock has really got his gander up and he’s firing away like billy-o with those silly little carbines he has. As luck would have it, just as Bertram’s mounting up, one of them managed to hit him in the arm.
‘Catastrophe! He’s trying to hang onto his rifle but he’s bleeding like a stuck pig and the stallion, like all the best, is strung like a violin and not taking too kindly to all this lead flying about. Not to put too fine a point on it, he’s beginning to get a bit frisky and Coxhead is having difficulty keeping his seat. After all, they have winged him and it’s beginning to hurt. The next time he looks he sees that the Turks are a darn sight closer than they should be. In fact, they’re coming at him hard with pig-stickers levelled. This is a bit more than he bargained for. Let’s face it, a lot more than he bargained for. Well, to be quite frank, just between you and me, I think Coxhead got into a bit of a funk. Anyway, he uses his spurs on that Arab like a garden rake and comes up at our own pickets so fast he might have been shot if they hadn’t been expecting him. But, what with one thing and another, he’s dropped his rifle and – oh Lord! – he’s dropped his fieldpack with the letter from his missus and the twenty pounds in five pound notes and his bully beef and biscuits wrapped up in greaseproof paper and the report on the water resources . . . Oh Careless Coxhead! What do you think?’
‘I think Careless Coxhead should be court-martialled,’ Ponting had said. ‘Then given the VC.’
They discussed how long it would be before they knew whether the Turks had swallowed the bait. Meinertzhagen had replied that he hoped Daniel would tell them. Sometime soon he expected to receive a desperate signal from their hero in the lion’s den informing them that the Turks now knew from captured documents that Allenby’s main thrust was not to be at Beersheba. Ponting had reminded him then that Nili had not got a message through for some time. Next day they heard that there was no hope Daniel could get anything out for the time being because the Nili network had been smashed.
Of course, they had both known something was wrong when the pigeons stopped coming. They had prayed, in Ponting’s case literally, that there might be the kind of tame explanation for this that would give them no cause for real concern. Ponting had suggested that perhaps some pigeon influenza had wiped out the entire brood, but Meinertzhagen had merely shaken his head. And soon every story they had ever heard of the birds’ unreliability came back to haunt them. The war was full of tales of feathered couriers flying treacherously into enemy air space, although Ponting, with his dogged optimism, had reminded them that the French had awarded one bird a posthumous Croix de Guerre for a heroic crash landing out of Verdun with a message and its shrapnel.
One monitor off Athlit had spotted the red and white distress signal but had been unable to send a party ashore at that moment. The next day, most ominously of all, the shore line refused to speak to them at all: no red sheet, no white sheet. Eventually, one skipper dared to take his vessel in close enough to pick up one of the fishing caiques belonging to George’s clan. The fishermen were very nervous that the contact might have been spotted and demanded that some rifle shots be put into their hull as proof that they had not talked to the Royal Navy willingly.
These precautions, they explained, were necessary because the Turks were in savage mood. The Jews were suffering, as were the Bahai at Acre. And Christians like themselves no longer felt safe. One of them wept when he described what had happened to Sarah.
The monitor’s news was picked up by the new RN wireless signalling station that had been set up on the coast at Rafah, near the old boundary between British Egypt and Turkish Palestine. Ponting got it the next day because nobody had brought to their attention the existence of an advance intelligence headquarters a few miles up the road, so they relayed it all the way back to Cairo via the aerial on the Cheops pyramid.
Ponting had been rather ashamed to find that his first reaction was one of relief that he was not in Cairo, and that it would not fall to him to tell her brother what had happened. He wondered if Meinertzhagen had encountered Aaron Aaronsohn during his current visit to the Savoy Hotel. And if he had, whether Aaronsohn would blame his sister’s death on their desire to speed up the intelligence flow by using pigeons.
Ponting suffered more than usual sadness for the loss of an agent. His abiding memory was of the little figure in a hat coming through the breakers. But there was no guilt on his part, no regrets. Daniel spied on what was essentially a tactical headquarters. What he learned might be out of date within a few days. There could be no doubt that it was essential to receive Daniel’s reports by the fastest means possible. Besides, if it came down to it, Aaronsohn’s unquenchable flamboyance, his uniformed posturings around Cairo, might have been as much danger to his sister in the long run as any pigeon guilty of navigational error.
Ponting poured himself another whisky, put his tumbler on the sandbagged entrance to the dugout and packed a fresh pipe. A flock of migratory birds was silhouetted by the sunset as they headed south. The birds were another reminder of their most pressing problem: how to renew contact with Daniel?
‘Who is Daniel?’ Meinertzhagen had asked a few hours before he left for Cairo.
Ponting had looked at him incredulously. ‘You mean you don’t know either?’
‘Search me, old boy. Nobody ever told me.’
‘My God! I should have thought they would have told you.’
‘No. Not a dicky bird.’
It seemed probable that Daniel had been in place and working for the British before either of them arrived in Egypt. Ponting imagined that he had been recruited in the pre-war years; that he had something to do with those eccentric ex-naval types who inhabited remote Whitehall offices and had been given the purse to concern themselves with things like the growing Turko-German alliance long before the assassination at Sarajevo lit the powder train.
Ponting always imagined that Daniel was a Turkish officer, perhaps from one of the Ottoman minorities with a score to settle against the Anatolian mainstream. He saw him as a dapper man, perhaps a whiff of eau de cologne about his cheeks, cigarettes smoked in an amber holder, disdainful but brave enough in his own way. In his more honest moments though he had to admit that, for him, Daniel’s courage was tainted by his treachery. Certainly, it was not to be compared with the bravery displayed, even before her capture, by Sarah Aaronsohn, a member of a subject race. Be that as it may, he was the most valuable agent they had in play in Palestine.
‘He’s worth three divisions to Allenby,’ Meinertzhagen had said, ‘and now he can’t talk to us.’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to talk to us at the moment. Perhaps he intends to go to ground until he’s sure that the hounds have lost the scent.’
‘This,’ Meinertzhagen had muttered, ‘is no time to go to ground.’
Ponting picked up his whisky which had gone a strange cloudy colour, the water from the canteen not being as clean as it might be. He took a large sip and told himself that the alcohol would kill off anything in the water. He wondered if Daniel liked whisky. No, arak, he decided. Dani
el would be an arak man.
11
Jerusalem: 20 October 1917
***
Grey-caped Asian crows, slightly smaller than their occidental brethren as well as being two-toned, groaned a last protest at the dying of the day. Magnus skirted the wall the Franciscans had erected around the Garden of Gethsemane and made his way along the track which passed through some of the olive groves that gave the mount its name. Each step was aided by a punt from his great staff. When he got to the Church of the Tomb of the Virgin he did not take the carriageway to the summit, where the Russian hospice had just been commandeered as a billet by newly arrived German reinforcements. Instead, he followed the Bethany road that at this point runs parallel to the Kidron Valley, the fold in the land which lies between the Mount of Olives and the south-eastern walls of the Old City.
Shortly after he had passed the fork that leads down to the Tomb of Abselom, Magnus left the road on its right side and descended into the flinty, terraced land that contains the Jewish cemetery. Here the observant are buried with their faces towards the Holy City to await the return of the Messiah, when those lying nearest to the ancient stones will be the first to be raised and judged at the Resurrection. Here Levi Smolenskin would be buried and had already paid for his plot. And here Magnus sought out a tomb which housed the mortal remains of a Baghdad rabbi.
Hebrew was not among the Swede’s tongues, so he had no way of reading the headstone. He had to look out for a grave on which five small stones had been arranged – four light-coloured ones and one dark one placed in the middle. Once he had found these he sat down, with his staff leaning against his leg. He had come directly from a pew in St Anne’s church where instead of the usual scroll for Smolenskin he had discovered a note written in German telling him to go to the rabbi’s grave at sunset and await instructions. Nothing else, nothing to collect. Just to be there and place the message he had received under the dark stone. He did not know why he had to do this.
It was, Magnus feared, to be a meeting with the Fallen One himself, and he shuddered and scratched angrily at the ground with his staff. Below him the bent figure of a woman in a long brown cloak was hovering over a plot. Otherwise there didn’t seem to be anyone else around. Lizards emerged from cracked graves and stalked the evening’s insects with their tongues.
Magnus gazed down upon the city whose tortured stones had been awaiting his arrival for so long. It was the city he had dreamed about during the interminable winter nights at home. It was the place he had pined for as a young man while his contemporaries shook their heads and told him that the wheat fields of Minnesota were what a Swedish farm boy should see as God’s Own Country. And sometimes they would tease him with tales about what they heard the Irish girls got up to in Chicago.
Well, he had heard the Word and he had never regretted it. Let the others have their Great Plains and their Irish whores.
The sinking sun behind the Temple Mount had set the el Aksa Mosque on fire – a nightly occurrence that for Magnus held a pleasing hint of hellfire. To the right of it he could see the other Islamic shrine, the Dome of the Rock, from where the Muslims believed the Prophet Mohammed had made a short visit to heaven on his winged steed Buyuk. And just visible beyond that were the onion domes of the Holy Sepulchre, which Magnus had vowed that he would one day purge of its Byzantine priests the same way the Lord had once cast the money-lenders out of the temple.
But Magnus loved Jerusalem because and not despite of these abominations. The unclean things were his mission. It had been decreed thus. The city awaited his purifying flame. God was already cleansing the cesspits of Europe with his fire. But this smaller war, which he did not fully understand, had made problems for His chosen agent in Jerusalem. When he first came, the fighting had not started and the authorities were far more lenient than they were now. Once the war became more serious the Turks had become suspicious of prophets and he had been thrown in jail many times.
They would have sent him home too, he knew that, but then Divine Providence had produced the Fallen One who was undoubtedly in the grip of Baal and, if his immortal soul was to be saved, required to pay penitence in gold to Magnus as well as to the old Christ-killer to whom the scrolls were delivered. Of course, he had never told him of this tax on his spiritual welfare. If he did he might not deliver his prayers to Magnus. And if that was the case he would be unable to cleanse them and then the Fallen One’s soul would undoubtedly be lost and he, Magnus, would have failed in his duty. Once he had tried to explain all this to Mrs Vester but she had bade him be quiet and drink his broth so he had not tried again.
It was almost night now. The woman in the cloak was no longer to be seen. Beyond where she had been standing Magnus could see the dull glow of the rubbish fires in the Kidron Valley, where generations of Jerusalemites had dumped their garbage. Thin spirals of dirty-coloured smoke rose above the Ottoman walls of the Old City. Something stirred on a stone immediately below him, something quick and crawling – perhaps another lizard. No doubt there were snakes in the cemetery as well. Magnus hated snakes but they did not bite at night, or so he had been told.
Magnus shivered. It was, he thought, typical of the Fallen One to demand a meeting in such a place. In any case, he hated these encounters which, he thanked the Lord, were few and far between. There was a stench, a stench of evil coming off the man like sulphur. Also these meetings were disconcerting because he tried to change his shape although Magnus knew full well who he was and he knew Magnus knew. He scratched his staff in the ground again, irritated with this creature who would keep a prophet waiting. It was getting cold and his clothes were too thin for staying out at night.
So thin that they hardly hindered for a fraction of a second the bayonet which entered his back. It came through low and in an upward direction on his left side, wrecking a kidney, piercing a lung and nicking the liver. A strong hand clamped over his mouth and pulled him down on the blade which was twisted and removed, not without difficulty, and thrust in again and yet again while Magnus summoned all his strength to tear the hand away from his mouth and turn around.
When he did so he saw a figure in the same coloured cloak as the woman who had been tending the grave. The figure stepped back, transformed itself into the Fallen One, and then jabbed him again in the solar plexus. He tried to call on the Lord to strike down this evil-doer. But it was impossible to speak. His mouth was full of blood and his eyes were full of tears, and while he was leaning on his staff sucking at the air the thing came again, this time high up in his left side. Now the creature came close enough for the Swede to smell its sulphurous stink and pushed the steel up to the hilt and left it through him with the tip emerging just below his shoulder blades.
Magnus dropped his great staff and tried to pull the seventeen-inch blade out with both hands. After a few seconds of this, the big man groaned a little, but in an uncomplaining way; it was more of a sigh. Then Magnus sat carefully down again on the edge of the grave and tried once more to pull it out and almost succeeded before he rolled slowly over on one side and twitched a little before at last becoming still.
Hands tugged at the bayonet before their owner changed his mind and left it where it was. ‘Poor Magnus,’ said a gentle voice in German when it was over. ‘Poor stupid thief.’
A hand went to the dark stone and retrieved the scrap of paper Magnus had placed faithfully underneath it.
***
Weidinger was the hero of the hour, Kress’s darling boy. He had ripped down the curtain and shown there was nothing to fear behind it. The bumps were all being made by grandpa’s walking stick. Now plans could be laid to meet the real threat. Weidinger had pulled off the big one. He had been lucky, yes, but the boy deserved a bit of luck, didn’t he?
So when the arrests started some of the people around Fast’s, including Turks, said that it was typical of Krag to try to steal Weidinger’s thunder with some third-rate show involving old Jews and a religious maniac who had disappeared. It was the third pe
rson on Krag’s list who caused something of a stir.
Maeltzer was arrested a day after Smolenskin, and ten days after he had returned from Beersheba. They came for him shortly after dawn, the decision having been taken the night before. Krag was not one of those present when the Swiss woke into his nightmare – he left the mechanics to the Ottoman soldiery. But he did visit the journalist’s room soon after its tenant had been handcuffed and removed to a cell in the Citadel.
The intelligence officer had asked the fat garrison major who organised the arrest to see that Maeltzer’s belongings were not tampered with. Indeed, he had stressed the importance of disturbing as little as possible. Yet when the nervous manager opened the door for Krag, apologising profusely for his slowness with the lock, the room looked as if it had been ransacked by a particularly desperate robber band.
Admittedly, some of this had been caused by short-lived resistance on Maeltzer’s part before rifle butts brought him to order. The bed on its side, its sheets and blankets draped across the floor, but the rest bore all the trademarks of looting. Krag guessed that his fat major felt it was beneath his dignity to make a personal appearance and that some junior NCO had been in command.
The wardrobe door was open and its contents looked suspiciously meagre. The Bedouin saddle-bag had been pulled off the top of the tin trunk, the lid of which was up. Krag was relieved to find that it still contained several bundles of seemingly undisturbed papers, mostly old letters by the look of it.
