—
THE
OF IBN KHALDUN
Abbot Mattias was a true creature of the desert, as hard, prickly, and unyielding as any bit of rock-rooted scrub we had avoided in the past weeks. Holmes took one look at him and abandoned all thought of pretence. The telling of our story, in which I played no individual role and which sounded more and more unlikely with each successive twist and turn, appeared to make absolutely no impression on the religious. He sat back in his heavy carved chair with his hands threaded together over the front of his habit, his eyes on Holmes, his only movement the occasional drowsy blink of his eyelids, like a lizard. The two candles on his table burnt down. Holmes talked. I sat. The abbot listened.
Holmes told him more or less everything, omitting only our true names and skirting around the details of what had happened to him at the villa north of Ram Allah. Eventually he had brought us from England up to the present, to our arrival at the monastery and the confirmation that Mikhail’s candle stub had almost certainly originated here. He then stopped talking. The abbot blinked slowly, waited for a moment as if to be certain that his guest had finished, and then unthreaded his clasped fingers and wrapped his hands instead along the fronts of the arm rests. The seat was transformed into a place of judgement.
“May I see your back, please,” he said.
Whatever Holmes had expected, it was not this. His face grew dark. There was no reading the abbot, absolutely no way of telling if he sought confirmation of Holmes’ story, wished to see if the injuries needed medical attention, or was simply curious. Perhaps he even thought to put Holmes to a test. If the last, he was remarkably perceptive: Holmes was not one to display willingly any signs of weakness or failure. I do not know what Abbot Mattias wanted, and I never asked Holmes how he perceived the request. I believe, however, that he saw it as a challenge, by a man in a superior position, and he responded the only way possible: He stood up and pulled his robe over his head.
I averted my eyes to study an age-dark painting of Virgin and Child, the maternal figure gazing out with the weight of the world’s suffering on her accepting shoulders. After what seemed a very long time, the rustle of Holmes’ clothing ceased and I heard the creak of leather that indicated Holmes’ weight settling back onto his chair. When I looked back at the abbot I had the shock of finding his eyes on me. And very discerning eyes they were.
“What of your companion?” he asked Holmes.
“He—”
“I am a woman,” I said. I thought this came as no surprise to the good father, and indeed, for a brief instant I imagined a gleam in the back of his dark eyes. He leant forward over his knees for a moment, then pushed himself upright and moved across the room to an ancient, worm-eaten cabinet of time-blackened wood. The moment he moved I realised how much older he was than I had thought. Eighty? Ninety? His voice, speaking English with a light Russian accent, was that of a man half his age.
He opened the cabinet and took out a bottle that had no label and had, judging by the scratches and wear, been re-used any number of times. His gnarled hands eased up the cork and he poured the thick, black-red wine into three squat and equally abraded glasses. One he placed on the desk next to me, the second near Holmes. The third he carried back to his chair and cupped in his hands, looking into it as if consulting an oracle.
“That you were maltreated by a man who uses the methods of our late oppressors, I take as a sign in your favour,” he said without preliminary. “That you were befriended by Dorothy Ruskin, the mad archaeologist of Jericho, I take as another indication of goodwill. That you walk with the men known as Ali and Mahmoud Hazr confirms the impression. And last, that you act as champion for Mikhail the Druse, whose death has left this world a lesser place, leaves no question.” He looked up, and his face cracked into a thousand wrinkles that took me a moment to recognise as a wry smile. “A monastery may not be of the world, but it most assuredly is in it. Particularly its abbot. What can I do for you?”
Holmes swallowed his wine, with more speed than manners, and began to speak; the abbot rose and went to his cabinet, bringing the wine back with him. He filled Holmes’ empty glass, and sat down again with the bottle close at hand.
“Sometime between Christmas and the New Year you had a visitor here,” Holmes was saying. “I do not know if he appeared as a brother from one of your other houses, or if he stole a habit from you, but I do know that when he left, he had a monk’s habit in his bag. He also helped himself to the candles from your chapel. Do you know this man?”
“What makes you think such a thing happened, my son?”
“I have spent the last three weeks tracing his footsteps, ever since three men were killed near Jaffa: a farmer who helped the English during the war and his two field hands. The person who came here distanced himself from the murders, which he, shall I say, encouraged, if not arranged, but did not actually commit.
“On the night of the new moon this man was down at the Salt Sea buying a shipment of explosives from a salt smuggler. The smuggler’s son happened to see a monk’s robe in the man’s packs. Sometime that evening the man stuck one of your chapel’s candles on a stone, blew it out when it was down to the last inch, and left it.
“Mikhail the Druse found it. Mikhail was following this man, very probably saw his transaction with the smuggler, scraped off the candle when he came across it, and dropped it into his pack—not as evidence, I dare say, but for its intrinsic usefulness to a thrifty man like Mikhail, as a source of light or as a fire starter.
“Unfortunately for Mikhail, the man discovered him. He and his assistant turned and chased Mikhail into the Wadi Estemoa. There they murdered him, removing from his belongings a small notebook. They then left him for the jackals, and took themselves and their load of dynamite off into the countryside, or into Jerusalem, to hide it.
“I fear that Mikhail the Druse was not a man naturally gifted at espionage. I believe that when he recorded information in his notebook he either did not bother to encode it, or else used a code easily broken, because when the man we seek laid his hands on the notebook, he discovered that Mikhail’s master was a man called Joshua, and that Mikhail had something to do with a pair of wandering scribes named Ali and Mahmoud.
“Between the night of the new moon, when Mikhail the Druse was murdered, and the night of the full moon, when the man arranged a motorcar accident, he sought out information from within the British camp, most likely using a source he had used before—a partner, even. This source revealed that the two scribes would be with General Allenby in Haifa on Wednesday, and were to return by motorcar to Jericho the following morning. He even knew the route to be taken.
“No doubt the central man would have preferred to seize one of the Hazr brothers, but as chance would have it, they were thrown free and I was thrown into the arms of the men laying the trap.
“This is what I know of him,” Holmes concluded. “I ask you again: Do you know the man?”
“He is not a man.”
Holmes and I looked at each other, startled.
“Surely you can’t mean—” Holmes began.
“He is a demon.”
“Ah.” Holmes subsided, and did not glance at me this time.
“But perhaps your vision of the world does not allow for the existence of evil creatures,” the abbot said.
“Well,” said Holmes slowly, “yes. I should say that I have met evil, true evil. Not many times, but often enough to recognise it.”
“And you would agree that it is different from mere wickedness?” I thought perhaps the good abbot had a modicum of Jesuitical training somewhere in his past, or perhaps he came by it naturally.
“Oh, yes.”
“Then you agree that evil walks in human guise. I call that a demon. You call it what you may. And yes, he came here, three days after the Western celebration of Christmas.”
