O Jerusalem

only by an exchange of harsh whispers between mother and son, he added, “Sitt, I assure you I am not a madman. I too have had a thing taken and replaced, and when I heard your tale in the souk today, my interest was great. I believe it is merely boys who have done this, but if a boy is creating mischief, it is best to know this early, while he is still young, do you not agree? These are hard times to raise boys in. The temptations are many, and they have no respect for their elders.”

How on earth Holmes, whose closest approximation to being a parent had been in hiring hungry street urchins to run his errands back in the Baker Street days, knew that this would lay down a firm common ground with an illiterate Arab woman, I do not know, but it did. She immediately launched into a mournful recitation of the difficulties in raising children today, using phrases I have heard in twentieth-century drawing rooms and read in the hieroglyphic epistles of ancient Egyptian parents. She had just used the phrase “He’s a good boy” for the fifth time when Holmes cut her off.

“Sitt, I wish to know also about your baskets. You lost them?”

“They were stolen,” she replied, her indignation fresh and showing no wear after what must, judging by the rolling of her son’s eyes, have been much telling. “Stolen from my wall, my front wall, over where the good gentleman is even now sitting.” A hand reached out from the burkah and pointed upwards. We looked up and saw a twisted nail driven between the stones of the wall above my head.

“Why did you leave them outside in the street?”

“They were very dirty, and I did not want them in the house. I like a clean house, effendi, though it is difficult, what with two children and being gone from the house all day.”

“What work do you do?”

“What I can find,” she said simply. “I wash clothes for Miriam the ghassaleh, I pick rags, I break stone.”

“Were these baskets for your work with Miriam the laundress?”

“No! Wallah! These were dirty baskets, old and worn and without any beauty, sufficient only to carry rock and soil. I did not imagine anyone would steal such ugly things.”

“So you carried stones and soil in them?”

“The son of Daoud the stonemason was a friend of my husband. Old man Daoud gives me work when I wish it. It is hard work, and my hands and shoulders ache when I have done a day’s work, but it pays well, and my children must eat.”

“But the baskets were returned. How long were they gone?”

“Oh, one month? Perhaps more.” She consulted with her son, but he was uncertain. “One month or six weeks perhaps.”

“And they were just returned.”

“Thrown down against the door,” she agreed.

“In the same condition as when they were taken?”

“Oh, no,” she said scornfully. “They were barely threads clinging to each other.”

“Did you throw them away, then, sitt?” Holmes’ voice remained as casual as before, but I could hear the tension coiling tighter in his questions.

“I was going to, but I did need a new nest for the chicken. The two baskets together were hardly as good as one, but better than twigs alone.”

“Sitt, I would like to buy one of these baskets.”

There was a long silence, then a suspicious, “Why?”

“To use it to accuse these prank-playing boys, if ever I find them,” he said promptly.

The next silence was shorter and punctuated by whispers.

“How much would you pay for the old basket beneath my chicken?”

“How much would a new basket cost you?” asked Holmes in return.

“One… two metallik,” she said after a brief hesitation.

“I will give you one beshlik,” he offered, twice her price (and, I suspected, the smallest coin in his pocket). “For the lower of the two baskets under the chicken,” he added.

Our only answer was a movement inside, then a long silence. We sat and waited, then she was in the doorway again with a frayed, warped circle of reeds in her hand. The chicken, it appeared, lived inside with the family. She held it out to Holmes, who put it on the ground between us. As a piece of domestic equipment it left much to be desired, and had not been completely protected from the hen’s droppings by the remains of the upper basket, but in its youth it had been sturdy and closely worked, and I could see why she made use of its remnants instead of chucking it out for the neighbourhood goats to chew.

“You can see,” she told us apologetically, “there was no sense in trying to repair it.”

“No. But now you can buy yourself a new one, sitt.” He reached for his leather purse and took out the beshlik coin. The boy frowned, and the mother hesitated, but for different reasons.

“It is too much,” she admitted. “I can buy reeds to make three baskets for one metallik, and the basket was old to begin with.” The boy saw Holmes putting the coin back into his purse and began to berate his mother, but he fell silent when Holmes held out his fingers again to the woman. She looked at the silver piastre in her palm, and then at Holmes.

“For your honesty, sitt,” he told her. Looking at the son, he added pointedly, “The rewards of honesty are many.”

With blessings and best wishes we withdrew, and with the basket under one arm Holmes set off down the hill, through the evening noises and cooking odours and the tinkling of many goat bells. On the other side of the wadi I asked him, carefully in Arabic, “May we go around to the left?” We went around to the left, and came to a garden, and a stream, and at the head of the stream a rectangular pool surrounded by low buildings. The waters in the pool reflected a motionless half-moon, and looked much deeper than I thought they actually were. We leant over the railing, shoulder to shoulder.

“Did you have a look at Mahmoud’s eminently trustworthy clerk today?” I asked him.

“Of course. Bertram Ellison is a good Kentish boy who took a second-class degree at the University of London and became a government clerk. He came out to Cairo ten years ago, then followed the government legal offices here last year. He lives more or less secretly with a Russian woman three years older than he, although he also has rooms in the Christian Quarter that he uses as his official address.”

“An ordinary, fussy little office clerk with a minor secret.”

“So it would appear.”

“Who happens also to work for Joshua, and through him for the master illusionist Allenby.”

I felt him smile, and he took out a rolled cigarette and put it to his lips.

“Why are we standing looking at a pond, Russell?‘

“This is the Pool of Siloam,” I told him.

“I see it is a pool.”

“Where the man born blind was healed in John’s Gospel?”

“This is of importance?” he asked, beginning to lose patience.

“It is of interest, because this water comes from the Spring of Gihon three hundred fifty yards away, by way of an underground tunnel cut through solid rock in the time of King Hezekiah, twenty-six centuries ago. The city walls were down here then, and this miracle of engineering guaranteed water inside the city walls even during a siege. Hezekiah’s workmen cut from both ends—there was an inscription in the middle where they met. I remember reading that an American boy worked his way through the tunnel sometime in the 1880s and found the inscription. Inevitably, when word got around, thieves came down and hacked it right out of the wall. It’s now in Istanbul, I think.”

“A most compelling tale.”

“Illuminating, one might say: There is good precedence for deception and the hiding of resources in this country.”

“The study of history is always a worthwhile endeavour,” he agreed piously.

“Not that it makes it any easier to pick a traitor out of a crowd, one ‘man in Western dress’ from a thousand.”