“Smith sent word of your mission, so I can offer temporary lodging and time-tested advice: any foreigner who pretends to understand the politics of Jerusalem is a fool.”
I remained my affable self. “So my job might be brief. I ask, don’t understand the answer, and go home. Like any pilgrim.” He looked me up and down. “You prefer Arab dress?”
“It’s comfortable, anonymous, and I thought it might help in the souk and the coffee shop. I speak a little Arabic.” I was determined to keep trying. “As for you, Jericho, I don’t see you falling down anytime soon.”
I’d merely puzzled him.
“The biblical story, about the walls of Jericho coming down? Solid as a rock, you seem to be. Good man to have on one’s side, I hope?”
“My home village. There are no walls now.”
“And I didn’t expect to find blue eyes in Palestine,” I stumbled on.
“Crusader blood. The roots of my family go far back. We should be a paintbox mix, but in our generation the paleness came out. Every race comes through Jerusalem: Crusaders, Persians, Mongols, Ethio-pians. Every creed, opinion, and nation. And you?”
“American, ancestry brief and best forgotten, which is one of the advantages of the United States. I understand you learned your English through their navy?”
“Miriam and I were orphaned by the plague. The Catholic fathers who took us in told us something of the world, and at Tyre I signed onto an English frigate and learned ironwork repairs. The sailors gave me my nickname, I apprenticed to a smith in Portsmouth, and sent for her. I felt obligated.”
“But didn’t stay, obviously.”
t h e
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3 3
“We missed the sun; the British are white as worms. I’d met Smith while in the navy. For passage back and some pay, I agreed to keep my ears open here. I host his friends. They do his bidding. Little useful is ever learned. My neighbors think I’m simply capitalizing on my English to take in the occasional lodger, and they’re not far wrong.”
Bright and blunt, this blacksmith. “Sidney Smith thinks he and I can help each other. I got caught up with Bonaparte in Egypt. Now the French are planning to come this way.”
“And Smith wants to know what the Christians and the Jews and the Druze and the Matuwelli might do.”
“Exactly. He’s trying to help Djezzar mount resistance to the French.”
“With people who hate Djezzar, a tyrant who keeps his slipper on their neck. More than a few will regard the French as liberators.”
“If that’s the message, I’ll take it back. But I also need help for my own cause. I met a woman in Egypt who disappeared. Fell into the Nile, actually. I want to learn if she’s dead or alive and, if alive, how to rescue her. I’m told you may have contacts in Egypt.”
“A woman? Close to you?” He seemed reassured by my interest in someone other than his sister. “That kind of inquiry is more costly than listening to political gossip in Jerusalem.”
“How much more costly?”
He looked me up and down. “More, I suspect, than you can afford to pay.”
“So you won’t help me?”
“It’s my contacts in Egypt who won’t help you, not without coin.” I judged he wasn’t trying to cheat me, just tell me the truth. I needed a partner if I was going to get anywhere in my quest, and who better than this blue-eyed blacksmith? So I gave him a hint of what else I was after. “Maybe
“A secret. But it could make a man a king.”
“Ah. And where might this treasure be?” 3 4
w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
“Right under our noses in Jerusalem, I hope.”
“Do you know how many fools have hoped to find treasure in Jerusalem?”
“It’s not the fools who will find it.”
“You want me to spend
“I want you to invest in your future.”
He licked his lips. “Smith found a bold, impudent, rascal, didn’t he?”
“And you are a judge of character!” He might be skeptical, but he was also curious. Paying for word of Astiza would not really cost him much, I bet. And he had the same avarice as all of us: Everyone dreams of buried treasure.
“I could see if it’s affordable.”
I’d hooked him. “There’s another thing I need as well. A good rifle.”
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