O Jerusalem

by Laurie R. King

  We threaded our way among a fleet of horse-drawn carriages for hire and entered Jerusalem in the foot-steps—literally, as he had chosen to mark his pilgrim’s entrance on foot—of the conqueror Allenby. To our right rose the Citadel, somewhere to our left lay the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, before us sprawled the great labyrinth of the bazaar, and all around us swirled an informal market, a miscellany of goods and peoples. I saw none of these. I did not notice the picturesque Copts and the Armenians, did not register the toasted-sesame smell of the round bread loaves that passed beneath our noses on the panniers of a donkey, did not even hear the strange, flat clang of bells or the “bakshish” cries of the beggars or the polyglot of tongues. My whole being, my entire awareness, was taken up by a small, crudely lettered sign propped in the window of the Grand New Hotel: Baths.

  I was suddenly aware that, aside from a cold hip-bath at the kivutz, I had not properly bathed since leaving Allenby’s headquarters in Haifa a week before: my turban had glued itself to my head and my tunic to my shoulders, my hands revealed black creases where the skin bent, my face was filthy with caked-on dust, and, not to put it gently, I stank. Even Holmes, who when in disguise had the knack of appearing far more unkempt than he actually was, who possessed a catlike ability to keep his person tidy under the most unlikely of circumstances (such as the time earlier in his career when he had arranged with a local lad to bring him fresh collars along with his foodstuffs while living in a stone hut on Dartmoor), even Holmes, as I say, was showing signs of wear, both visible and olfactory. The darkness on his face was not all dye and bruises.

  “Baths, Holmes,” I breathed.

  “I can hardly take you into a bath-house,” he said absently, scanning the area around us.

  “Not a public bath-house, Holmes. A bath, in an hotel, with a door and a lock. Oh, Holmes,” I groaned.

  “Patience, Russell. Ha! This will be our man.”

  I tore my eyes from the beguiling sign and followed his gaze, to where a lad of perhaps ten or eleven years was hopping off a low wall. The child walked backwards a dozen or so steps in our direction, finishing up a spirited conversation with the handful of other urchins who remained perched on the wall, then turned his back on them, hopped over the single leg of one beggar and the leprous hand of another, scrambled beneath the belly of a camel and dodged both the rock thrown at him by the camel’s owner and the front end of an army staff car to fetch up in front of us. He was as dirty and ill clothed as any London street arab, with a grin that could only have been born out of an intimate acquaintance with illegality. He looked like a pickpocket, would no doubt grow into a thief, and I knew instantly that he was a colleague of Ali and Mahmoud.

  “You look for someone, I think?” he said in English, a cheerful conspirator.

  Holmes’ hand shot out, and seized the young imp by his collar, dragging him forward until their faces were mere inches apart. The boy’s grin vanished and he started to struggle, but Holmes just held him and hissed in furious and colloquial Arabic, “If you think I shall do any business with a donkey as stupid as you, child, you are too dumb-witted to live, and I ought to put you out of your misery. Get away from my sight.” He shook the boy, let go of him, and we watched him pick himself up from the dirty stones and flee. “Come,” said Holmes. I followed him to a niche against the wall, and there we squatted, with the dust washing over us and our bellies empty, until eventually the chastened lad reappeared, carrying a basket of oranges. He sold a few to passers-by before he reached us.

  “Oranges from Jaffa?” he offered, speaking Arabic this time. “Juicy, sweet. Three for one piastre.”

  “Six for one,” countered Holmes, looking bored.

  “Four. Large ones.”

  “Done.” The coin and the fruit changed hands; the boy faded away; we stayed seated and picked up our oranges. I rolled mine around in my hand, speculating on the chances that this particular fruit had been grown by the man I had seen bleed to death, and then I dug in my nails to peel away the rind. I grimaced at the black smears my fingers left on the damp skin, and separated the segments gingerly, trying to touch only the edges of the fruit’s flesh with the very tips of my fingernails. When we had each eaten one fruit and wiped our hands on our robes, Holmes took the other two and stowed them in the mule’s pack, then handed me the lead rope and set off in the direction in which the boy had gone. Down the narrow street, and there he was, leaning casually against the wall, the empty basket tucked under his arm and a half-eaten orange in his hand. Without looking up, he pushed away from the wall and wandered off.

  He led us a short distance down the narrow, cobbled street, then turned left and left again, a circle that brought us back to a gateway we had already passed—reluctantly on the part of the mule, which had tugged at the lead rope, knowing his partners were within. We entered through a pair of high, stout wooden doors opening into a small cobbled yard with stables, a covered cistern, some bare vines growing up the stone walls, and several windows, all of them lacking paint and most of them standing open to the flies and the smells. Against the right-hand wall an ancient wooden stairway clung precariously, leading in two stages to a doorway twenty feet above the yard. On the very top step of the stairway sat Ali.

  He watched us arrive, then dropped his attention back to the wooden figure he was working at with the long knife from his belt, the blade he used for slicing onions, carving figurines, and killing men. As the wicked steel blade caught the sun, it struck me that the reason he used one knife for such diverse and often unsuited tasks was so that his hand might know it as a natural extension of itself, carving donkeys and cleaning fingernails to make it the more accurate when the time came for violent applications. I swallowed hard and looked away.

  There was no sign of Mahmoud. Our urchin guide ran up the stairs and perched next to Ali, who ignored him and went on shaving paper-thin curls of wood from the emerging figurine. I stood with the mule’s rope in my hand, looking dull (with very little effort) while Holmes negotiated a pair of rooms. One room would have been more expected and therefore less conspicuous, but I had insisted, and he had agreed, that some risks were necessary. When I saw the rooms I was glad that at least I should not have to share the windowless cubicle and its narrow single mat on the floor: “tiny” was an understatement, and if it was a step up from squalid, one would have to be remarkably generous to call it comfortable. Still, there seemed to be little insect life, be it crawling or hopping, and the dirt on the walls and floor seemed to be mere dust and debris, not actual filth.

  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 bed-rolls 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 rather as the downstairs shower-bath had done. It was left to me to give the details.

  I was halfway through our conversation with the abbot when Mahmoud abruptly interrupted with a loud question about the price of a mare in Nablus. When I hesitated, Ali stepped in with a comment about her cracked hoof, and then I heard the footsteps on the stairs. In came fragrant rice and new bread, lamb cooked tender with onions, nuts, and some tangy green leaf, little bowls of chopped salads as garnish, with fresh tea to slake our thirst and a pot of coffee to follow. We fell silent while applying ourselves to the serious business at hand.

  Afterwards, Mahmoud poured out the coffee and set a plate of sticky sweetmeats in the middle of the carpet. He handed cups to Ali, then Holmes, and finally to me: This was the first time he had given a drink into my hand instead of laying it on the carpet in front of me. I met his eyes, nodded my acknowledgement, and sipped the tepid liquid with gratitude.

  Ali sucked the honey from his fingers, then wiped them delicately on his robe. “Why do you think all this adds up to a false monk with a bomb?” He did not bother to conceal the doubt in his voice.

  “It is the only theory which fits all the facts,” Holmes answered.

  “Which facts are those?” Mahmoud asked.

  “You’ve seen them. The Jaffa murders, Mikhail’s death and possibly that of the false mullah, Mikhail’s missing notebook, the candle in his pack and the salt smuggler’s odd customer, the attempt to torture information out of me, the widespread rumours that keep General Allenby busy, the strange visitor at Wadi Qelt, and the missing habits of the monks.”

  “They are not necessarily related,” Mahmoud objected mildly. “Strange things happen all the time here. You do not know the country, it all looks odd and probably sinister to you.”

  “The country I know marginally; the criminal mind I know very well indeed.”

  “Criminal mind,” Ali said with a snort.

  “You do not believe that there is a threat,” Holmes said coldly.

  “Threat? There is always a threat. This is a land of threats and blood feuds, your eye for mine, your brother to avenge my father.”

  “And the ambush?”

  “Oh, that was political, certainly. But Allah alone knows what the aim was.”

  “And my … interrogation?”

  “That was no interrogation,” Ali nearly shouted. “There are those in this country who do that sort of thing for pleasure, don’t you understand that, you stupid man?”

  “Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind,” Holmes said in a dangerously low voice.

  “I apologise. But I do not see—”

  “You do not, no. But you,” Holmes said, turning to Mahmoud, “you, I think, have your doubts.”

  “‘Only God is sure,’” Mahmoud said after a minute. “But you may be correct. There may indeed be some sort of bomb plot in the works. However, it is unlikely to be immediate; we have heard nothing at all while we have been in the city.”

  “What about the watchmaker, the one whose advertisement was in the papers you found?” I asked him. The ornate golden watch on Ali’s wrist was still not keeping time, but that did not mean they had not been to the watchmaker; as far as I could tell, he wore it solely as an ornament.

  “He seems merely a businessman. We are having him followed.”

  “General Allenby’s visit to Jerusalem is in little more than two weeks,” Holmes said half to himself.

  “It has been moved forward to this weekend,” answered Ali, reaching forward for the beaker of coffee to pour himself another cup.

  “What? In three days?”

  “That is correct. I believe he—”

  “But why? Why has he changed his plans?”

  “He does not inform us of his reasons; one has learnt merely to be grateful for any prior notice.”

  “Are the rest of his intentions the same?” Holmes asked. “Meeting with a few religious leaders, a tour of the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and then a gathering at Government House?”

  “I believe so, although I suppose he will also go to a church service in the morning, he usually does, and he will probably have less formal conversations with the governor, the mayor, the mufti, and any of a dozen others.” Ali blew across the top of his cup, although the coffee was now scarcely warm, and sipped deliberately. “Also, the number of men invited to the tour of the city has grown. It now includes the Anglican bishop, the Orthodox patriarch, the Armenian patriarch, Governor Storrs—”

  “A veritable gathering of the gods,” Holmes said weakly. “The only figures missing will be Feisal and Lawrence.”

  “It was suggested that the two fly in from the Paris talks for this occasion, although I do not think it will prove possible.”

  Holmes had gone pale beneath his skin dye; Mahmoud’s face was thoughtful, and his fingers slowed on the prayer beads; I felt distinctly queasy at the thought of the entire hierarchy of Palestine moving about the city with two hundred fifty pounds of high explosive unaccounted for. Ali stared at Holmes defiantly, refusing to acknowledge any cause for concern.

  “You do not care for my theory,” said Holmes, “because it is mine.”

  “I do not care for it because it is wrong. You have constructed a plot against Allenby out of air. I need to see solid objects.”

  “And if your brother Mahmoud had discovered this plot, would you believe him?”

  Ali darkened in anger. “You are not my brother, and you have no sense for this land and its ways. I have no reason to listen to you.”

  Holmes fixed him with a look from those
grey eyes that soon had the younger man shifting his eyes despite his anger. “A dog on his dunghill, a cock on his fence, and a peacock on the hat of an unclean woman,” Holmes said quietly. Like most insults in Arabic it does not translate without its cultural context, but it acted on Ali like a slap across the face: he went rigid, and pale, then the blood rushed back and his right arm moved.

  “Akhuyi,” Mahmoud murmured: My brother. Ali’s hand froze on the hilt of his knife. Mahmoud spoke again, in the language I had heard them speak back in the mud hut in Jaffa; for thirty seconds he spoke, and at the end of it Ali, who had not taken his eyes from Holmes, seemed slightly to relax.

  “My brother,” Holmes said, a deliberate echo of Mahmoud’s Arabic word, “Mycroft, would not be happy were I to allow General Allenby to be killed and another war to find its roots here. I would not wish to displease my brother.”

  Ali sat for a long moment, and then, to my astonishment, his lips twitched. His gaze slid sideways to where Mahmoud sat, then back at Holmes, and then he removed his hand from his knife, reached out to clap Holmes on the shoulder, and began to laugh. He picked up his cup and drained it, the gap in his teeth leering out from his swarthy bearded face.

  Never, never will I understand men.

  Language is the expression by a speaker of his intentions. Its origin is in the desire to convey meaning, and it must become a habit on the portion of the body that produces it: that is, the tongue.

  —THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN

  hree days until Allenby’s little party,” Holmes said thoughtfully. “I require information. The Palestine News is out-of-date before it reaches the printer, and at that it seems to be primarily home news, recipes, and advertisements. Is there any way of obtaining fresher news, in detail?”