“‘We sit alone and weep,’” I recited, tomorrow’s Shabbos prayer. “‘Because of the palace which is deserted. Because of the Temple which is destroyed.’”
“Russell.” Holmes spoke sharply in my ear. A pair of men walking by us, dark shapes in their black caftans and fur hats, stopped dead to stare at the phenomenon of an Arab boy reciting a Hebrew prayer. I politely wished them in Hebrew a good evening, and they looked at each other and scuttled off.
“That was not wise,” Holmes commented.
“‘Let peace and joy return to Jerusalem,’” I told him a bit giddily. “‘Let the branch put forth and blossom.’”
“That is precisely what we are attempting to achieve,” Holmes said, and took my elbow to march me away from there.
“Where are we going, Holmes?”
“To see a Moslem woman whose baskets were returned to her, and then an Armenian priest with an interest in archaeology.”
Why was it, I wondered silently, that the only time Holmes gave me a ready answer to a simple question was when the response was cryptic to the point of being oracular?
“Will we have time to eat?” I asked hopefully.
“Probably not.”
Either cryptic or disheartening.
Muhammad said: “Every infant is born in the natural state. It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a heathen.”
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
olmes’ mysterious Moslem woman with the reappearing baskets lived in the village of Silwan, or Siloah, across the Kidron Valley from the Old City. We went out through the Dung Gate near the southern end of the Haram es-Sherîf and walked along the outer wall of the city for a space, then dropped down onto a rutted track leading across the valley (which was usually dry, although at the moment it had a trickle at the bottom) and up the other side. There we found a village of tombs, taken over and added to by the living. The inhabitants looked as rough as their setting, and I could only hope that we appeared too poor to bother assaulting.
Holmes seemed to know more or less where we were going, and only at the far end of the village did he stop to ask a child for the house of “the widow of Abdul the Ugly.”
The widow lived in one of the tombs, it seemed. A boy answered our salutation, a child of about ten who eyed us with all the suspicion we deserved, two strange men calling on a widowed woman after dark. However, either Holmes’ gentle but firm manner, his reassurance that we were only wishing a few words and would happily remain outside for the exchange, or his mention of copper coins, softened the lad’s manly role, and in a few moments the mother was there, swathed to her eyebrows and crouching nervously just inside the entrance to the erstwhile tomb while we remained outside to preserve the proprieties.
“Madam, we are interested in the tale of your baskets,” Holmes began. When the silence within was broken 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 reward
s 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.”
“And treachery being what it is, it is always the person closest to one’s heart who can wield a dagger with impunity.”
“I’d have said, however, that Mahmoud would be among the hardest to deceive, and he says he trusts this man Ellison.”
“True.” He drew a last lungful from his cigarette and before I could stop his hand, sent the burning end out into the pond where it hissed sharply and died.
“May we go now?” he asked.
I pushed myself away from the railing and took a last look at the pitch-black hole at the top end of the pool. “It is said to be dangerous to go through the tunnel. The water in the Gihon tends to rise suddenly, and wash down the tunnel.”
“I regret that we lack the leisure to mount an expedition, Russell. Attractive as it may be to risk drowning several hundred feet underground.” This time he did not ask but set off up the steep road to the Dung Gate.
Once inside the city walls we turned left, through the jungle of cactuses and builders’ rubbish and away from the Haram and the Western Wall, towards the city quarter traditionally claimed by the Armenian community, swollen now with refugees fleeing the Turkish massacres of four years earlier that had left more than a million dead. The lights here were sparse and the streets tortuous, but Holmes’ sense of direction was as efficient as ever and in a few minutes we were, to put a cap on the evening’s events, inside of a church.
It was a little jewel box of a church, strung with a thousand gleaming lamps on chains overhead and fragrant with the incense of ages. We were apparently between services, because there were only a handful of people in the building, all of whom turned to stare disapprovingly at our persons. One of them went through a door in the back, returning after a minute with a formidable priest, a bear of a man with black cassock, black beard, black eyes, and greying black hair, who bore down on us and herded us out onto the street again. To my surprise, however, he did not leave us there. Rather, he followed us out, then took Holmes’ elbow and drew us around the corner of the church and through a small gate into a private garden, at which point he turned and threw his arms around Holmes, clapping my partner to his breast with an enthusiasm that must have been excruciating to Holmes’ half-healed back. The priest’s greeting on being introduced to me was less effusive, which was just as well, but then he and Holmes were obviously old acquaintances.
“My old friend,” he cried. “I was so pleased to have your message. It has been half a lifetime! Come, we will drink tea. But first you may like to wash your hands.” He did not even look at my clothes when he said this, and perhaps I imagined the twitch of his nostrils.
“This is my companion and student, Amir. Amir, Father Demetrius. Amir is a clumsy lad; he fell down in the bazaar,” Holmes told the priest. His half-truth and the use of my false identity warned me that there were limits to their camaraderie.
I was grateful even for the icy water and rock-like bar of soap, but nothing was to be done about my garments, except hope that they were dry enough not to leave deposits on our host’s furniture.
We drank tea in his tiny, crowded study, and ate Armenian pastries until I thought I should burst, while the two talked about men and events of the past. In the midst of all this catching up on old news it dawned on me that the reason Holmes could find his way around the city so readily was not that he had committed the map in his bosom instantly to memory, but because he had been here before. Somehow, it had never occurred to me.
“So,” said the priest finally with an air of slapping his knees, “what brings you to my door again after all these years? Something to do with the object beneath your chair, perhaps?”
Holmes kicked at the frayed basket that he had dropped under his seat. “This? No, this is another matter.”
“And if it were the same thing you would not tell me, I think.” I raised a mental eyebrow: This priest did indeed know Holmes. “I thought it might be one of your little puzzles—a hat worn by a missing friend, perhaps? That is what brought you to me, oh those many years ago. But no. It is something else that interests my old friend.”
The basket did look rather like a straw hat, one that had been thoroughly run down by a lorry, and though the priest remained intrigued by the object beneath his guest’s chair, he politely did not mention it again. Neither did Holmes. Instead he began what sounded like another round of catching up on local gossip, but I soon realised was not.
“What is happening in archaeology these days?” he asked. “I know everything stopped during the war, but has it begun again?”
“Preliminary work only, my friend. Surveys and explorations. The Germans, of course, were doing so much a few years ago, and now?” Father Demetrius gave an expressive shrug and pursed his bearded lips. “The English are in charge of it now, and they are not about to hurry.”
“Where in the Jerusalem area?”
The priest began to smile slowly. “We are interested in the active sites, are we?”
“I have always been interested in archaeology, as you may remember.”
The priest’s eyes flicked down to the thing under Holmes’ chair, then away, and it occurred to me that no-one in Jerusalem, and certainly no-one who had gone anywhere near a building site or an archaeological dig, could mistake that basket for a hat.
“He wants to know where the digs are,” F
ather Demetrius told the ceiling. He stood up and went to the wall of books behind the desk, taking down a long tube from the top shelf. He slipped his big fingers into the tube and, striking it smartly at one end, pulled at the roll of maps that emerged from the other. Deftly, as if he’d done it a thousand times, he put his fingertips under the top sheet and, rolling the remainder briskly, allowed the outside map to unscroll onto the desk, then popped the remainder back halfway into the protective tube to keep the whole bundle from unrolling.
We were looking at a very large-scale map of the city and its surroundings. He had used a pen to keep it up-to-date as buildings came and went and streets were added outside the wall in the New City. It was a wealth of information. He set weights on the corners, and stood stroking his beard.
“Here,” he said, touching a spot on the map. “Here. Here. Here. And for a short time last summer, here. Nothing much at this very moment, of course. It’s too wet.”
Holmes studied the map, saying nothing but radiating displeasure. Eventually he asked, “Nothing near the Haram?”
“The south wall, but again, not at the moment.”
“Then it must be a construction site.”
“Near the Haram?”
“Do you know of any?”
“Hundreds,” the priest replied with a laugh that rattled the cups. “The British are rebuilding the city, don’t you know? The bazaars are clean, there is a vast new supply of water, new roads in all directions, the police no longer seize men and beat them bloody in the Old Serai—not as often, at any rate. Cesspools are being cleaned that haven’t been emptied since the days of Jesus Christ. General Allenby wields a mighty broom.”
“Is there a project in particular that involves taking away a considerable amount of rubble?”
“Ah.” The priest smiled as if he’d tricked Holmes into admitting something, which in a way he had. “There are several. But perhaps you are thinking of the Souk el-Qattanin.” The Cotton Bazaar.