without mishap, but something seemed to have delayed Holmes, and I heard a faint, drawn-out rustling sound, as of fingertips running across an uneven surface.
“Close your eyes,” he ordered. I turned away, and my lids were briefly lit by a flash of light, instantly extinguished. When he joined me at the door, he found my arm and then I felt something being pressed into my hand: a little book, heavy for its size. I smiled, for I knew that on the red spine I should see the name Baedeker.
“Won’t he miss it?”
“He has dozens. He hands them out to visitors, probably doesn’t even know how many there are. Let us go.”
I thrust the guide-book inside my robe and we went out into the garden, ghostly in the light of the waning moon. I waited while Holmes locked the door, and we slipped out of the garden gate as silently as we had come. It was now about half past two, and my skin crawled with tiredness. I had forgotten to ask where we were going, but on the street he turned to the right, back in the direction of the inn, and I allowed myself a faint hope that the night might be over. I was not to know what Holmes had intended, however, because a few paces down the street a dark figure moved out from the edge of a building, and an instant later my ears registered a footfall behind us. I whirled, and saw another shape that nonetheless seemed familiar.
“You were surely not thinking of any interesting outings without us,” said Ali. The threat in his voice did nothing towards making me relax from the stance I had taken. Holmes, however, stood briskly upright and continued on his way, brushing past Ali, who stood belligerently in the centre of the alley. Mahmoud moved up from behind us.
“Of course not.” Holmes’ voice trailed down the narrow way.
We had no option but to follow him.
TWENTY-FOUR
?
—
BAEDEKER’S
,
1912 EDITION
We were let in by the owner of the inn himself, and went to Ali and Mahmoud’s room, where we lit lamps, drank the coffee the innkeeper brought up scarcely two minutes after we had come in, and settled to business. Ali was simmering with suspicion and aggression, Mahmoud was so stony I felt I could strike a spark from him, and Holmes gave the impression that he saw nothing out of the ordinary. In the face of all this masculine antagonism, I sat back against the wall with my new Baedeker’s and opened it to the index.
Holmes tossed down three tiny cups of coffee in quick succession, reached into his robe, and brought out pipe, tobacco pouch, and map. He filled his pipe and put a match to it, allowing the other two to eye the worn, folded square, and when he had his pipe going and his audience seething, he thrust the stem between his teeth and leant forward to unfold the map onto the boards. When they had looked for a minute or two at his modifications to the printed sheet, he took the pipe stem from his teeth and tapped the paper with it.
“The good Father, all unknowing, has contributed to our knowledge of the city beneath our feet. Russell, would you be so good… ?”
I closed my little book and scooted forward, and explained the various lines, squiggles, and marks. Ali grew increasingly bewildered, Mahmoud increasingly interested. I then told them what I had learnt while working in the Souk el-Qattanin. I was amused at their expressions when I described my job. When I had finished, Ali protested.
“There are no roads beneath the city. This is not London,”
“Roads, no, but caves and tunnels, tombs and cisterns that may be connected up to form a virtual road.”
“These aqueducts,” Mahmoud spoke up. “Are they not tunnels?”
“For a man the size of a cat, perhaps. But they can be enlarged, particularly in the sections north of the Dome where the pools they once filled are obsolete.”
“And this?” Ali asked, pointing to the grey ink stain.
“Solomon’s Quarries. Also known as the Cotton Grotto.”
“They go nowhere,” said Ali dismissively.
“They go nearly a thousand feet under the city.”
“
“Have either of you been inside them?” asked Holmes.
Ali looked uncomfortable, but Mahmoud fingered his prayer beads thoughtfully. “There were rumours,” he said, “in the last days of the war, of a plan to destroy what your map calls the Antonia from underground. As I heard it, the British forbade the plot. They are sentimental about Jerusalem. However, I never paid the story much thought, since it was told me by Colonel Meinertzhagen. Do you know him? A complete madman, but a great warrior.”
“It is possible there has been a secret passage for millennia,” I said. “It is said of King Zedekiah that he and all his soldiers fled by night ‘by the way of the gate between the two walls, by the king’s garden.’ No-one knows just where they got out, although the king’s garden was at the southern part of the city. And Josephus says something about one of the sons of John Hyrcanus being killed in an underground passageway near the Temple.”
Holmes tapped the pipe stem carefully against his teeth a few times, then reached into his robe for another piece of paper, laying it on top of the map. “General Allenby’s itinerary for the coming weekend,” he said. “Meetings at Government House tomorrow; a ride into the desert in the afternoon, weather permitting; an intimate dinner with the troops followed by army amateur dramatics— the general is a brave man. But look at Sunday.”
We looked at Sunday, Holmes’ scrawl of the information given him no doubt by the general himself on their way to the American Colony: breakfast with Governor Storrs; church services with the Anglicans; then at one o’clock in the afternoon, as a public appearance of good-will, the walk through the Haram es-Sherif with Governor Storrs and an impressive list of high-ranking officers and high-ranking officials among the Christian, Jewish, and Moslem communities. No rabbis, of course, not in the Moslem compound, but a handful of secular Jews had been included, and it was possible one or two rabbis would appear at tea in Government House afterwards. Two dozen names, virtually every shred of authority in Palestine, in one place, on Sunday afternoon, in the holiest site common to three religions.
The reminder was chilling: those people, in that place, with two hundred fifty pounds of explosive in the hands of a man like Karim Bey.
“ ‘I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish,’ ” I murmured, “ ‘wiping it and turning it upside down.’ ”
Mahmoud’s lips moved soundlessly as his fingers continued to manipulate the beads, but Ali said forcefully, “They must not go. Allenby must be made to cancel the meeting.”
“Karim Bey must be caught.” To my surprise it was Mahmoud who said it. “Too, even if the men are not
