“I said you were my troublesome younger brother and I would give you a beating you would never forget. Did you see our man at all? Was it Ellison?”
“I don’t know,” I said in frustration. “I’ve never met Ellison. All I saw was a glimpse of the man’s hand—his skin is light. Do you know if there are any exits back here?”
Without pausing to answer he slipped away, leaving me to press ahead into a corridor that curved around the end of the Greek church-within-a-church. Tiny chapels heavy with incense and the smell of candles lay on my left, then a set of stairs going down, where I hesitated.
Did our quarry have a gun? Almost certainly. Would he use it? Probably not, if he could avoid it. A gunshot would bring half the Christians in Jerusalem down on his head, and a handful of Moslems as well. Ali would return at any moment; until then, I just had to make certain that the enemy did not find a back way out.
I started down the stairs, my heart in my throat; when running boots skidded along the floor behind me I nearly shrieked.
Ali spoke in my ear, so low I could barely hear him over the sound of my heart and the voices from the space below. “He did not get out through the monastery.”
“Do these stairs go anywhere?” I asked.
“More chapels.”
“But no exit?”
“Not unless he removes a solid stone wall.”
“Then we—” I froze as his words hit me, and whirled to look at him in horror. “Oh, my God, you don’t think he has—I mean to say, this place is hideous, but… dynamite?”
“Holmes said two of the salt smuggler’s detonators were in the bomb, and Bey used the third.”
It was thin reassurance, but then Ali shook his head decisively. “Whoever this man is, he is far from stupid. He knows he would never escape a blast. I fear rather that he has circled ahead of us and will be out of the door. Leave me to check down here, and you go up and watch the entrance; the others will be here any moment, and we can then do this properly.” He laid his hand surreptitiously on the gun he wore under his
It had been something very like a sleek gleam of pale hair, ducking into yet another doorway.
A bare head was an unusual sight even in London; in this country, I did not think I had seen more than a handful of uncovered adult scalps the whole time I had been here. And most of those had been over breakfast in Allenby’s headquarters in—
No! In Haifa, yes, but not over breakfast, not that sleek head. Over a more intimate meal, in Allenby’s office. Over tea and crustless sandwiches. He was here, back in uniform, although he had been unable to conceal the bulky hat under his now-abandoned robes.
“Ali!” I called sharply. “Ssst!”
I could not wait for him. That pale head was a scarce thirty feet from me, racing up a set of stairs that led God knew where. I heard movement from behind me as Ali hurriedly abandoned the depths, but I was already launched. Just before I hit the stairs, Mahmoud strode around the corner coming towards me, with Holmes’ khaki hat going off in the other direction—the sight of them approaching must have been what drove our quarry back. I threw my hand up to attract Mahmoud’s eye, heard him shout to Holmes, and I raced up the stairs with them on my heels.
The ornate chapels at the top of the steps were perhaps fifteen feet above the floor level of the rest of the church, overlooking the entrance vestibule where the guards sat. I thought he intended to risk the drop and the guards for the entrance and the crowds of the bazaar just beyond, but when I burst in, I found him instead with a massive silver candlestick in one hand, a knife in the other, and a cluster of furiously protesting monks standing sensibly just beyond range of the blade. He raised the candlestick and drove it, not onto a tonsured skull, but through a screen, on the other side of which could be glimpsed a richly coloured little room. That he was not using a door could only mean one thing: the chapel on the other side of the screen had its entrance on the outside world. One more blow like that and he would be through it. I took my inadequate little knife from my boot and started hauling monks out of my way. The candlestick went up again, and I shouted his name.
“Plumbury!”
He did not stop, but it startled him enough to spoil his aim. The candlestick went up for the third and no doubt decisive blow, and I had to move or I would find myself staring again at his fast-retreating back with the blue sky above him. There were too many monks in the way to risk throwing the knife, or using the gun; instead, I dived forward, shoving my way between some very solid monastic bodies, and stabbed blindly downward into whatever portion of Plumbury’s anatomy I could reach.
It was his foot, and the heavy leather of his military boot trapped my knife. I tugged once and let it go, but before I could pull away his own blade flicked down and sliced open the back of my wrist. The press of monks that had held me from him was still there, blocking my escape, and as I scrabbled and pulled desperately at their robes, I felt more than saw the knife draw up into the air and slash down again towards my unprotected back.
A single shot rang through the sanctified expanses of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its echoes called and faded and died off into the shocked and unprecedented silence, and then the heavy candlestick clattered to the ground, followed by the knife, and finally Plumbury himself.
Had I not been so occupied with reassuring the monks that I was not bleeding to death, I would have embraced Mahmoud with all the passion in my young, rescued body, embarrassing us both forever.
EPILOGUE
—
THE
OF IBN KHALDUN
« ^
The slice on my wrist was bloody but not serious, and as he bound it for me, Ali seemed to find the wound cause for pride, a mark of honour rather than the sign of clumsiness and near disaster. It gave me no problems and eventually left the thinnest curve of a scar, but to make Ali happy I displayed it openly, with studied nonchalance. Mahmoud approved.
Late that evening, though, I did cover it when, in clean skin and a dress borrowed from Helen Bentwich (which felt more like a disguise than anything I had worn since leaving England), I ran the gauntlet of beggars and stares to take my place before the Western Wall, leaving the scrap of paper with my prayer on it between the stones. War wounds, I thought, did not belong in that setting.
After I had paid my visit to the Wall, we left Jerusalem, to travel northwards towards Acre and the boat that would take Holmes and me out of this country, back to the equally troubling case that awaited us in England. I had seen very little of the Jerusalem known to pilgrims and tourists. I did not wade up Hezekiah’s Tunnel nor venture into St Anne’s magnificent simplicity, did not walk the perimeter walls or tour the Citadel or poke among the finds of the archaeologists. I did not even go to gaze upon the ethereal beauty of the Dome or upon the Rock itself that I had helped save—not that time, at any rate.
I left the city without seeing these things, because they would not have fit. They belonged to a different
