O Jerusalem

by Laurie R. King

  “What Amir says makes a good deal of sense,” said Mahmoud. I turned and stared at him in disbelief.

  “So you suggest that instead of merely cleaning up the rest of the gang,” Holmes said, “we should be looking out for the other head. Perhaps the—if I may use the word—mastermind.”

  “It is a valid hypothesis, Holmes,” I said. To my relief, he smiled.

  “Very well. In which case, I think we ought to move quickly. In my experience, master criminals, political or otherwise, tend not to wait about for one to catch them up.”

  The one glaring unexplored strand in this tangle was the house in the Moslem Quarter that had been used by Bey and his men to bring in the larger pieces of equipment, the tools and explosives that they had not dared carry through the Souk el-Qattanin. That heavy, iron-studded door in the roof of the Cotton Grotto opened into a house, and the occupants of that house had to have some part in the plot.

  Unfortunately, there was no way of matching our knowledge of the grotto with the map of the streets overhead, not with any precision. Holmes took out the thin, damp, much-abused map and spread it out delicately on the floor. With purpose, a degree of energy returned to our little band.

  After some thought, we decided that the house must be on the south side of Haret es-Saadiyeh, possibly in the vicinity of a cul-de-sac alley that cut into the block of buildings. We could, of course, turn the entire search over to Allenby, leaving his soldiers and police to seal off the area and do a house-by-house search, but none of us seriously considered that option; in that we were agreed.

  We did need an authority figure, however, to keep us from being arrested for loitering or house invasion by an over-zealous soldier. All three of us looked at Holmes.

  “Do you still have that uniform, Holmes?” I asked.

  He sighed. “I regret to say I do.”

  “Then you can be responsible for keeping the police off our backs.”

  “While you …?”

  It was my turn to sigh. “While I get into the grotto and knock on that door. Loudly.”

  “Very, very loudly,” said Mahmoud. He and Ali (particularly Ali) looked pleased at this division of labour, and I reflected that I, too, would much prefer to be assigned the task of standing on a street corner or roof top, waiting to catch the fleeing rats that my subterranean pounding would, with any luck, dislodge.

  “Why do men always get the fun jobs?” I complained, and took out my pocket-watch. “What time should I begin?” I looked at the timepiece, then held it unbelieving up to my ear. It had not stopped; it was barely 2:30. Allenby would still be at the Haram, talking.

  “Forty minutes if I run,” Holmes answered.

  Even considering the diminutive nature of the Old City, I thought that forty minutes would have him shedding kuffiyahs and doing up uniform buttons as he trotted down the steps of the David Street bazaar.

  “Shall we say fifty?”

  “Forty-five, Russell.”

  “Very well.” As we all stood to go, I added pointedly, “I trust that one of you will let me know when I can stop pounding.”

  “Insh’allah,” said Holmes demurely. If God wills it.

  “Damnation,” I said aloud, startling two black-shrouded women balancing jugs on their heads. The gate to the grotto that Holmes and I had locked behind us now stood wide open, and I could see movement within the entrance. I touched the handle of the gun Holmes had given to me, and went forward.

  It was not exactly relief I felt when I saw the archaeological Jacob occupying the cave mouth, but at least I would not have to shoot anyone to be allowed inside. Although I soon began to wonder if it would not have been simpler for all concerned if I had just drawn my weapon and ordered them out of my way. It might well have been kinder.

  “Hello, Jacob,” I said, when I had reached the entrance. “Terribly sorry, but I was never introduced to you properly, and I don’t know your surname.”

  That good gentleman just gaped at me, blinking furiously with the effort of reconciling an educated English voice with the visage before him, and wondering where on earth he had seen it before.

  “Mary Russell,” I suggested. “We met the other evening over the dinner table. Dressed rather differently.” I tugged off my turban to allow him the clue of my blonde hair, and he stepped back violently. I could only pray that he did not suffer from a heart condition, and I laughed as if it was all a great joke. “I know, I know—it’s going to take some explaining, but there is an explanation, I promise you. Only not just now. It’s urgent that I go into the grotto and make some noise, to show some friends above the location of the access door. Do you know the door I mean? No? Then perhaps you’d like to see? And—might I borrow that ladder?”

  The accent, the femininity, and the appeal to his curiosity disarmed him, to the extent that he trailed along after me, mouthing frail objections. He even offered to carry the stout cudgel I had brought along for the purpose of noisy pounding. His men, three highly entertained Christian Arabs, followed in a procession, carrying the ladder across the uneven floor of the grotto.

  I looked at my pocket-watch, and up at the concealed door with the ladder propped beside it, and wished, not for the first time, that I smoked. Cigarettes do give one something to do while one waits, instead of reviewing grammar or making conversation. I decided that Jacob deserved some slightly more detailed explanation of events, if for nothing else than to reward him for not flinging me to the police, so in the seven minutes left before I could begin my rat-flushing racket, I told him a much-abridged and quite misleading tale with the essential goal intact: to bash away at that door up there until someone came to stop me. I stretched out the embroidery until it was time to begin, so as to avoid his no doubt pressing questions, and then stood up, seized the cudgel, and rammed it up over my head into the sturdy wooden door.

  The boom was satisfying; the spray of dust and flakes of rusted iron that settled over me less so. I coughed, sneezed furiously, and squeezed my eyelids together, continuing to hammer away blindly. It was a strain, and about one blow in three missed the wood and bashed into solid rock, sending a jolt along my spine that rattled my teeth. After about a minute of this lunacy I felt something patting my boot, and Jacob’s voice raised above the echoing din. He was offering to take my place.

  In the end we all took turns, perched on the creaking ladder, walloping away at the iron-hard door. Jacob the gentleman obviously thought me insane and was waiting for me to tire so he might lead me away and put a cool cloth on my fevered brow, but the three Arabs were having a fine time.

  I was taking a turn on the ladder, and beginning to think Jacob might be right about my mental state, when between one blow and the next the door suddenly went hollow. I nearly dropped the cudgel onto the heads below, fumbling to exchange it for the gun in my belt. The door scraped open, my audience gasped, and I was looking over the sights of the revolver at: Ali. A grinning, blood-streaked Ali who had patently succeeded in conquering the house above.

  “So, you wish to shoot me this time?” he asked politely, and I reflected that each time I nearly killed him, he became increasingly friendly towards me. His broad hand reached down. I let the battering ram fall onto an unoccupied patch of floor, stuck the revolver back into my belt, and reached up to take his hand and be hauled bodily through the hole. He kicked at the door, and I could only call a hasty “Thank you!” through the gap before it was down and bolted again. I agreed: This was no place for introducing Irregulars.

  Ali caught up his lamp from the floor and made for a stairway.

  “How many did you get?” I asked him.

  “Four,” he answered cheerfully. “All alive, none talking yet. By God, that Holmes of yours is a good fighter.”

  That Holmes of mine was nursing a set of swollen knuckles and a reddened eye, and looked immensely pleased with himself. He and Mahmoud were dragging the fourth trussed and gagged body back into the building, where they tossed him down with his companions, looking like
so many rolled-up carpets. Holmes shut the door authoritatively on the curious crowd outside, and we stood looking at our haul.

  Then, slowly and dramatically, Ali drew forth his wicked blade, and four sets of eyes went wide, four foreheads went instantly damp with sweat. No: five. I too had no desire for that blade to be applied to digging out secrets. I put out a hand to touch Ali’s arm, studying the men at my feet. Four dark-skinned men in Arab dress, not the clothing of the poorest inhabitants, but none of them was wealthy. One was young, scarcely my age, and he looked near to passing out with terror. I squeezed Ali’s rock-like forearm once again for good measure, and went over to kneel beside the young man.

  “I will not hurt you,” I said to him. His eyes flickered to my face, then glued themselves back on Ali. I shifted, to remove Ali’s knife from the prisoner’s vision, and then leant forward to untie his gag. He watched me settle back on my heels, waiting warily for my trick.

  “We must know where your leader has gone,” I told him. “Not Karim Bey. Bey is dead.” All four went still against their bonds, and the young man’s eyes rose to Ali’s figure standing behind me. I did not disabuse them of their belief that Ali had killed Bey, merely said, “We must have the other. These men will kill you in order to find him. Slowly, and with great pain. Tell me now where the other man is, and you will not be hurt.” I waited while the young man thought about it, then added, “He is not one of you. He paid you for the use of this house and for your silence; you have no cause to give your lives for him. He would not give his for you.”

  The prisoner’s gaze wavered, and slid sideways to the oldest of the other prisoners, whose face resembled his. Father? Uncle? In either case the two were blood relations. I went over to the older prisoner and pulled away his gag, too.

  “Please,” I said quietly. “Don’t let my friends hurt the boy. It is a bad way to die, and why: for a firengi? Let the firengi deal with the firengi,” I suggested, nodding my chin at Holmes in his foreign uniform and hoping fervently that the man we sought, Ellison or no, was indeed British.

  It was impossible to tell what the man on the floor was thinking. He just lay there looking at me, his face completely closed. He might have been stone deaf for all the impression my words made. Ali shifted restlessly behind me, and I felt a rush of despair at my failure to prevent atrocity.

  Then the man’s face changed, faintly but surely. I put out my hand to signal Ali.

  “He has a house over a shop in the Muristan,” the prisoner said. “The olive-wood seller’s with the lamp in front on the Street of the Christians. The entrance is through the shop. The back way is down from the roof into the New Bazaar, between the seller of brass pots and the leather worker from Kabul. He has two men with him. All have guns.”

  Holmes had told me that Ellison kept a house outside the Old City as well, for his illicit woman friend. “He will be in the Muristan, not at his house in the Russian Colony?”

  “I do not know that place, only this.”

  “What does he plan?”

  The man shrugged against his bonds. “To disappear. That is what he always does.”

  “Not this time,” I declared, and rose to my feet. I looked around at Mahmoud. “Was there anything else?”

  He shook his head slightly, looking as amused as Holmes was. Ali slid his knife away, then went into the next room and returned with another knife in his hand, equally vicious, and walked purposefully towards the young boy. The man at my feet gasped as if I’d kicked him in the stomach, struggled once convulsively against his bonds, and moaned softly through clenched teeth. Ali bent down to yank the boy’s gag back up, then straightened, held up the knife, and hurled it down with all the strength in his right arm. It stood quivering, two inches of its steel blade buried in the floorboards three feet away from the boy’s tied hands. When I looked down, the older prisoner’s eyes were shut in the extremity of relief.

  It would take the boy a while, but he would free himself, and his family, before we returned. I stooped down to pull the older man’s gag back across his mouth, to give us a chance to get free of the quarter before an alarm was raised, but before it was in place he spoke again. “He carries a knife in his boot. Beware of it.”

  I slid my own blade out of my boot top. “Like this one?”

  “Ah. It is a custom, I see.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I thank you for the warning.”

  Ali locked the door and we left the men there.

  The Muristan was an open area just south of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that had been variously a hospice for pilgrims established by Charlemagne, a Crusader hospital, an endowment to the Mosque of Omar, and property of the Prussian crown. Now it was a part of the city that combined bazaar and offices, where church and commerce, Moslem and Christian, pilgrim and citizen rubbed shoulders and went about their business.

  We nearly missed them. Had our prisoners hesitated two minutes longer, had we paused to let Holmes resume his robe and kuffiyah, the three men would have been gone.

  It was twice blessed that Holmes had remained in uniform, because it was his presence that gave them away.

  We came to the Muristan at a trot, half winded from the climb up David Street, slowing to a walk as we turned the corner into the Street of the Christians. The narrow way was crowded with Sunday pilgrims and shoppers, and the three men entering it from the side would have been invisible to us had one of them not looked warily around, spotted Holmes’ military cap towering above the turbans and headcloths of the shorter populace, and turned to run. The abrupt movement caught our eye, and we were after them, pounding down the busy street, shouting since all pretence was gone. Passers-by stopped to watch, but made no attempt to interfere.

  We caught them up in the courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. One of them whirled around with a gun in his hand and pulled the trigger wildly. The bullet missed Holmes by inches, and then Ali and Mahmoud were on him. One of the remaining pair sprinted up the path to the right, with Holmes fast on his heels; the other dived through the mighty doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—from which, thanks be to God, Allenby and his notables were long gone. By the time I was past the startled Moslem guards and inside the dim, echoing space, he had vanished into the recesses.

  And the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is nothing but recesses, one chapel after another, galleries up the walls, every square inch of floor space in this holy of holies heavily used and bitterly contested (hence the Moslem guards, who can be depended upon to treat each division of Christianity with equal scorn). Candles and incense, sparkling gilt and dark shadows, prayers in all languages and people shifting about—it was a confusion of the senses.

  I stood for an instant, searching desperately for the robe and kuffiyah I had followed in, but they were not in sight—and worse, the guards had decided I did not belong here and were coming out of their station to do something about it. I had no choice but to plunge towards the more populous left side, hoping both to lose them and to find my quarry.

  I found instead his robe, kicked into the corner of a small unoccupied chapel off of the main rotunda. I muttered a phrase most unsuited to the setting, popped out of the chapel, and was spotted by an irate guard, but before I could turn and dive into the crowd, a familiar figure loomed up from the darkness behind him and seized his arm.

  Ali—and by God he’d never been a more welcome sight. I stepped behind a pair of high-hatted priests and continued my search, but for what, or whom, I did not know. What had the man—was it Ellison?—been wearing under his shed robe? The second habit stolen from Wadi Qelt? The habit of a nun? A city suit? I continued slowly, searching every cranny and every face for anything at all that seemed not to fit.

  I had cleared the rotunda and was coming out of its adjoining Greek church when Ali joined me.

  “He dropped his robe,” I told him. “How did you get rid of the guard?”

  “I said you were my troublesome younger brother and I would give you a b
eating you would never forget. Did you see our man at all? Was it Ellison?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in frustration. “I’ve never met Ellison. All I saw was a glimpse of the man’s hand—his skin is light. Do you know if there are any exits back here?”

  Without pausing to answer he slipped away, leaving me to press ahead into a corridor that curved around the end of the Greek church-within-a-church. Tiny chapels heavy with incense and the smell of candles lay on my left, then a set of stairs going down, where I hesitated.

  Did our quarry have a gun? Almost certainly. Would he use it? Probably not, if he could avoid it. A gunshot would bring half the Christians in Jerusalem down on his head, and a handful of Moslems as well. Ali would return at any moment; until then, I just had to make certain that the enemy did not find a back way out.

  I started down the stairs, my heart in my throat; when running boots skidded along the floor behind me I nearly shrieked.

  Ali spoke in my ear, so low I could barely hear him over the sound of my heart and the voices from the space below. “He did not get out through the monastery.”

  “Do these stairs go anywhere?” I asked.

  “More chapels.”

  “But no exit?”

  “Not unless he removes a solid stone wall.”

  “Then we—” I froze as his words hit me, and whirled to look at him in horror. “Oh, my God, you don’t think he has—I mean to say, this place is hideous, but … dynamite?”

  “Holmes said two of the salt smuggler’s detonators were in the bomb, and Bey used the third.”