O Jerusalem

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?”