“I’ve lost track of the time,” he said, a considerable admission.
I took out the old silver pocket-watch I always carried. “It’s twelve-fourteen.”
“Can we reach Mahmoud in sixteen minutes?”
“We can try.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said, half mockingly.
While Holmes swept the tools into his bag, I retrieved the lamp and then, feeling a little self-conscious, held it up so as to illuminate all the corners of the small enclosure, just in case. But there was no sign of the Ark of the Covenant, hidden deep below the sacred Rock, no indication in fact that anyone had ever been here other than Karim Bey or his accomplices. I followed my partner as fast as we could go down the slippery stones, across the moribund aqueduct and on down the tunnel to the hole in the roof that led into the Cotton Bazaar. The door set into the access hole was neither locked nor actually a door, merely a square of blackened wood, which Holmes lifted easily from below and inched gently across the floor of the house above us.
Holmes prepared to boost me up, then he paused and handed me the revolver. “They may have left a guard in the house. Be as silent as you can.”
I tucked the gun into my belt, put my booted toe into his joined hands, and was heaved up and effortlessly through the hole. I rolled instantly to one side; there was no response from the room. Taking the faltering torch from the inner pocket of my abayya, I looked around the filth of centuries that occupied the cellar, and spotted a ladder. I lowered it for Holmes, and once he was inside we brought it back up and put the covering back into place.
The house appeared empty. We picked our way up the worn stone steps, thick with the dribblings of the soil from the tunnel, and up above ground for the first time that day, into blessed daylight—though not much of it, given the architecture.
The actual door of the house was boarded over, but the windows, directly under which lay the oft-replenished piles of rubble I and the others had worked to clear, were neither glazed nor shuttered. The souk was empty of diggers today, as the soldiers took up more urgent duties elsewhere.
“Two of us in our current condition would be remarkable in the streets,” commented Holmes. “Do you wish to go for Mahmoud, or shall I?”
“I’ll go.”
I delayed my departure for thirty seconds to beat some of the encrusted mud from my robe and turn my abayya right side to, while Holmes searched for a marginally cleaner fold of the turban to pull over the rest. I went through the window, nearly bringing the rotten frame down with me, and into the pile of earth. Trailing clods of soil, I trotted away, and at the appointed corner found both Ali and Mahmoud, looking very tense. I slowed to a stroll, and as I allowed them to goggle at my condition I felt a grin grow, out of control and cracking the dirt across my face.
“Amir!” exclaimed Ali. “What in the name of—”
“Are you injured?” interrupted Mahmoud. “Where is Holmes?”
“We are both fine,” I replied, and when I came up to them I added quietly in English, “The bomb is defused. You may tell General Allenby he should proceed.”
“By Allah, you cut that close,” said Ali. “Where will you be?”
“Down the Souk el-Qattanin,” I answered, and he turned and sprinted off into the bazaar.
And they schemed, and Allah schemed, but Allah is the master schemer.
—THE QUR’AN, iii: 54
he question is,” said Holmes, “knowing what we do of Karim Bey, will he remain in the vicinity to witness his handiwork, or will he be well clear of it? Russell?”
“Why does this feel like an examination question rather than a call for an opinion?” I wondered aloud. “Of course he’s going to be where he can see the results. He’ll probably even have arranged to have a good view.”
“Would you agree?” he asked our two companions.
“Oh, yes,” said Mahmoud.
“Certainly,” said Ali. “Karim Bey would not miss a moment of suffering.”
Holmes plucked out his map and folded it to the city portion. “Allenby and the rest plan to come into the Haram by the Moor Gate. They will visit El Aqsa Mosque, come by the Cup, cross to the Golden Gate, go back up and into the Dome for a few minutes before standing together on these steps,” he tapped the map, “for speeches and photographs. Yes?”
“These things are planned carefully,” Mahmoud noted. “It is the only way to be certain not to offend anyone.”
“And Allenby being who he is, it will run to time.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Do they still expect to be in the Dome at one-thirty-five?”
“Yes.”
“The bomb timer was set for one-forty. Bey will allow perhaps ten minutes before he is certain that something has gone awry. There are a limited number of buildings from which the western side of the Dome can be seen. Therefore we ought to be able to see him as well. If, that is, you can get us four pairs of field glasses, a quantity of dark cloth, a handful of push-pins or small nails, and permission to take over these two small buildings here.” He touched the map.
Mahmoud said, “I will ask for permission. Ali will make the necessary purchases.”
Ali nodded and the two men stood up, but Holmes put out a hand.
“Oh, and Ali? While you’re in the bazaar, some food, tobacco, and another torch. Ours is finished.” Ali scowled at this menial assignment, but he left, with Mahmoud close behind him, through the window into the souk.
A hasty search of what remained of the house turned up nothing more than half a dozen worn baskets caked with soil and the few remains of meals that had not been carried away by rats. The only source of interior water was a puddle in the cellar where the rain from the street had drained—dirty, but still cleaner than our faces and hands. We wet and rinsed our handkerchiefs and scrubbed at our skin, and when that was as clean as we could make it we beat and rubbed our clothing and re-tied our head coverings. When we were through we looked like the poorest of fellahin, but at least we would not frighten the children or, more important, get ourselves evicted from the Haram.
Ali returned, with hot food, a flask of tepid coffee, four army field glasses, and a fresh torch. Holmes smoked a pipe, Ali a cigarette. Holmes cleaned the revolver again. I felt like sleeping for a week. It was 12:50.
Then Mahmoud’s head appeared in the rotting window and we were back into action.
“I shall be repaying favours for twenty years,” he told Holmes. “I hope you know what you are doing.”
“Have you a better idea?” Holmes responded mildly. “Given the time at our disposal?”
Mahmoud shrugged and went down the alley into the souk. Ali followed a minute later; two minutes after that, Holmes and I were strolling towards the Haram. Our orange seller was back, I saw, the urchin with his criminally charming smile set to watch the house.
There was a stir brewing in the Haram, with British soldiers, Moslem guards, and the interested populace preparing for the entrance of the great ones. One at a time we peeled off from the crowd and took up places in two of the small buildings that lay around the great Dome—small mosques, perhaps, or classrooms. The soldiers standing near the buildings’ entrances became blind for a moment, and I reflected that Mahmoud must have appealed to whomever was responsible for managing events within the Haram; to pull off such a slick operation in a scant half hour meant going straight to the top.
Keeping well back from the arched windows, Holmes ripped lengths off the black silk Ali had thrown inside and began to tack them up over the windows. We soon had all the north and west openings covered; there were no high buildings to the south.
Then began our watch. I was aware of the movement of Allenby and his entourage of official persons, growing to the south, approaching, then going off behind us to inspect the bricked-up Golden Gate through which the Messiah is supposed to enter. All the time we searched for sign of Bey. Our conversation went something like this:
“The curtain on the third window to the left of the minaret
?”
A lengthy silence.
“A woman.”
Another silence.
“I thought I saw—No. Sorry.”
Pause.
“A brown robe on the roof at nine o’clock.” (Twelve o’clock being due north.)
A long pause while Holmes found the figure in his glasses, then, “Too short.”
Silence for six minutes, aside from voices in the Haram.
“Black beard and spectacles, top floor, ten-thirty.”
“Half the population has a black beard,” I grumbled, but sought out the window, saw the man, leaning against the frame of the window, watching the unusual bustle below. Then he was joined by a small child, and when I saw him take the child up in his arms and point in our direction, I immediately discounted him, although Holmes kept an eye on him for a while.
The trouble was, the sides of buildings facing this way were now in shadow, and the buildings themselves, all of them stone, had such thick walls that the openings were often a foot or more deep, even at the upper storeys. All Bey had to do was stand back, wear dark clothing, and keep still. We ought to be beating down doors, not standing behind curtains with field glasses, I thought. Too late now. My ears registered the approach of voices, one of them Allenby’s, and I stole a glance at my pocket-watch: 1:28. They were early.
The meeting seemed to be going well, judging by the hum of voices as they passed by our doors. The translators were being kept busy.
A twitch of movement from high up, in a slapdash shed on top of a roof, one of a hundred such in sight, this one about one hundred twenty yards away on top of a large building just south of the Haram’s north-western corner.
“Holmes—”
“I see it.”
I fiddled with the sights, praying for greater clarity. There was someone there, but no face yet. If it was he, he must be feeling the tension, as the group filed into the Dome nearly five minutes early. A white smear appeared, for an instant, not enough to see, but seconds later I saw Mahmoud, his hand casually raised to scratch under his turban and incidentally cover his face, walking down towards the next set of stairs, and a moment later Ali, his face unconcealed, walked past our curtained windows.
“You saw?” he hissed, and without waiting for an answer continued briskly to the upper steps.
They waited for us at the Gate of the Custodian. I glanced at my pocket-watch before I followed them out of the Haram: 1:36. Allenby and the others were still inside of the Dome.
Once clear of the open space, we trotted after Ali and Mahmoud, who seemed to know precisely where they were heading. They turned right into el-Wad Street, then into a typical Jerusalem maze of minute passageways and stone walls and unlikely bits of garden before fetching up in an alleyway that ran along the side of a massive building.
“The Old Serai,” Ali explained briefly. “Bey has come home, but it is not his prison anymore, and he will have to come and go secretly. That door is one way. At that end of the alley is another, unless he has wings. You two stay here, and stop him if he comes out.”
The two men were gone before Ali finished the sentence, and although Holmes palpably ached to go with them, he could see the sense of it. He subsided, and we settled down beneath a tree to watch.
One-forty-two. No explosion from the depths, and no fleeing monk, only a piebald dog skulking over the stones.
One-forty-seven. Ali’s head appeared over the parapet far above us. Even at the distance, his fury and frustration was visible and Holmes, seeing it, leapt to his feet and smacked his hand against his forehead.
“Wings!” he shouted. “Of course he has wings—the rope he stole from the monastery! How could I be so stupid?” He snatched the torch from his robes, turned, and fled down the alleyway, back to el-Wad and, running now, dodging merchants and tourists, pious Jews and donkey carts, with church bells clattering in the air and me on his heels he pounded into the Souk el-Qattanin and, brushing aside the breathless excitement of the young orange seller, heaved himself up into the house and launched himself down the slick steps into the cellar. Ignoring the ladder that stood there, he dropped through the hole into the tunnel and began to run again, the torch in one hand, the revolver in the other. I started out on his heels, but without a torch I stumbled and banged into the walls and dropped farther behind. The bobbing light came to a bend and went abruptly still as, with a shout, Holmes flung himself to the ground. The echoes of his voice rang through the stone passageway, and I came up noiselessly and pressed myself against the inner curve of the wall to peer down the tunnel. Holmes lay nearly at my feet, his torch and gun both pointing steadily ahead of him at the figure of the bearded man in the monastic habit, now straightening incredulously and blinking at the light.
“You’ve lost, Karim Bey,” said Holmes.
“Who are you?” the false monk demanded, his voice imperious and shrill with fury.
“Russell, do you have your gun on him?”
“I do,” I replied, although the most dangerous weapon I possessed was my throwing knife, and Bey was both too far away and on the wrong side. The man’s head jerked at the sound of my voice, and his hand went slowly away from the front of his habit. I heard noises behind me, and ducked my head to see first Ali, then Mahmoud tumble into the tunnel and begin to run in our direction, only to slow when their torches picked me out, my hand raised in warning. The three of us moved around the corner to stand behind Holmes’ prostrate form.
Bey held his lamp up higher, and narrowed his eyes at Ali and me, whom he had never seen before. He similarly dismissed Mahmoud and was returning to Holmes when with a jolt his gaze flew back to the older man at my shoulder. I watched his wide, cruel mouth relax from the surprise of recognition into a smile distressingly close to intimacy, even affection. I could feel both of the men beside me react to that smile; I thought Ali would shoot him then and there, but Mahmoud seized his partner’s arm and the gun stayed down. The man in the habit, still smiling, allowed his attention to return to Holmes, who lay unmoving, his gun pointing unwaveringly at the man’s chest. Bey squinted down against the light of the torches, and then his eyes went wide and he took a step back.
“You!”
“I,” replied Holmes.
Silence fell, silence aside from the strained breathing of several people, which ended when Karim Bey seemed to make up his mind about something and gave an almost imperceptible nod. We all braced ourselves and Ali’s gun went up again, but the man moved only his eyes, first to look at Mahmoud, then Ali and me, and finally at Holmes. He held his gaze there for a long moment, studying his escaped victim, then lifted his eyes to a point over all our heads, raised his right fist, and swung it in towards his chest. I thought for a startled instant that Bey was giving some archaic form of salute until Holmes shouted “No!” and started to scramble to his feet, but he was too late. When Bey’s fist made contact with the front of his robe there was a muffled thump—not a big noise, but Bey flew backwards as if he’d been kicked by a horse. His lamp crashed to the floor and burst into flames, sending a great billow of burning paraffin down the tunnel towards us, but even as we flung ourselves around the corner, we could see the man in the monk’s robes, crumpled against the wall of the tunnel, thrown there by the force of the spare detonator he had carried in his breast.
Scholars are, of all people, those least acquainted with the methods of politics.
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
e climbed out of the depths like four wraiths leaving a tomb, every bit as dirty and nearly as lifeless. Once we had lifted ourselves up into the derelict house in the Souk el-Qattanin, we collapsed to the floor with our backs against the walls, staring unseeing at the hole at our feet. Ali cursed monotonously, in Arabic and at least two other languages, and for once I was in full agreement. It was a victory, but not a clean one, and far from complete. Holmes, I knew, might look as if he was about to fall asleep, but his brain would already be worrying away at the sizeable question of how, with Bey dea
d, we were going to lay hands on his informant, and weighing the possibilities of it being the Government House clerk Bertram Ellison.
I dropped my head into my hands and waited for the ringing in my ears to subside, the flash spot in my vision to fade; all I could see was Bey’s curious gesture, over and over again, that quasi-military salute with which he had gone to his death. That we-who-are-about-to-die-salute-you sort of gesture.
And I could not reconcile the salute with the man’s scorn for his victims, neither the intimacy with which he had run his eyes over Mahmoud’s scar nor the surprise on his face when he recognised Holmes. And surely a slap would have been a more effective way to set off the detonator, not the smaller surface of the fist. And—
I shook my head. This was sheer phantasy, akin to augury or the reading of a crystal ball. What difference did it make if he slapped or he pounded? How could I know if the gesture meant anything to him beyond proud defiance?
But he had looked up, beyond us all. And his back had straightened. And his elbow had been raised to bring the fist straight on. Drawing himself up to meet death? Or … or a last, half-humorous salute to an unseen captain?
God, I thought, I’m losing my mind. Mahmoud is going to look down his nose at me and Ali will laugh in harsh scorn, but I have to say this.
“Holmes?”
“Yes, Russell.”
“Are we certain that Bey was the leader here?”
Ali jeered and Mahmoud looked, and Holmes leant back and closed his eyes. I persisted.
“He recognised you just now, but he did not know who you really are. And he certainly did not know me for anything other than an Arab boy. He had no clue that he was facing Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell.”
“Because his information was incomplete.” He sounded so tired.
“But why? Was it because his informant didn’t know? Or could it have been because his commander didn’t care to tell him?”
“Russell …”
“It doesn’t fit, Holmes,” I continued desperately. “Everything we know about Bey makes it unlikely that he would suddenly decide to become political. He was more than satisfied with his position in the Old Serai, torturing prisoners and … well.” I thought perhaps I ought to abandon that line of argument. “He seems to be in two places at once, killing Mikhail one night and the mullah halfway across the country the next; he is both a planner and spontaneous, cautious and heedless. You said yourself that he seems to be of two minds. I merely suggest that he is that in fact.”