Damascus Gate (65 page)

"Have you really?" Zimmer asked. "You saw that as the right thing to do?"

"That's right," she said. She was looking around the chamber to see if Fotheringill was still with them, if she could make out any sign of him.

Within seconds there sounded through the chambers a tremendous clash of metal and a tumbling of stones like a wave receding over a rocky shore.

"That's them, mister," Sonia said. "You call it."

Except she did not really believe that it was Shin Bet or the Border Police. She found herself thinking, of all things, about "The Fall of the House of Usher," which she had once read Poe had based on something he had read about an Egyptian temple-tomb situated on an island in a swamp.

"The tunnel's collapsing," one of the men in the group said, without much interest.

"No it's not," Zimmer told him. "You—you are fucking collapsing."

Then came a mighty voice, one without the faintest transcendent quality. It was plainly a police bullhorn. It had two messages, one in Hebrew, the other in English.

Sonia was too astonished to speak.

"Shabak," one of Fotheringill's band said. "She did it."

"She did it," Zimmer said calmly.

"Jew fighting Jew," one of the men in the group said. "Jew killing Jew. This is what we feared."

"No one's killing anyone," Zimmer shouted. "Put your weapons down." He shone the beam around the chamber and called off eight or nine names. "Walk toward the tunnel entrance."

The men hesitated.

Fotheringill appeared behind a flashlight as though he had spirited himself through the wall.

"Do it," he called out in a military manner. "You heard the man."

"How about Lestrade?" Zimmer asked him.

The men he had brought down into the chamber milled about in some confusion.

"Lestrade's provided fer," Fotheringill told him. "We didn't drive him out. But the town's bagged. He'll be with Lucas and the press."

"So you thought you'd pop over?"

"Aye. Thought I might be useful like."

"All of you take cover," Zimmer said to the men who had come down with him. "The army is nearly through. Watch out for ricochets. We don't want any misfortunes."

Most of the men in his company did as they were told.

"We're betrayed," said one of the men. It was the junior-college football coach from New England. "You're a traitor," he told Zimmer. "A Christian—Christians, all of you."

"Not really," Zimmer said. "She's a Sufi. And this gentleman," he said, indicating Fotheringill, "works for me."

"The soldiers of Ahab," the football coach said. "The soldiers of Manasseh." He put the light on Sonia. "The soldiers of our Jezebel here."

"You're the soldiers of Saul," Sonia proclaimed. "And I'm the Witch of Endor, how's that? I think she was black like me. And I can call up the prophet Samuel like she did, and the prophet Samuel would call you traitors against God and the Jewish people and the land of Israel. I come from a long line of rabbis."

Fotheringill laughed. "She's barmy," he told his boss, Zimmer. "But I love her."

D
ODGING
searchlights, stones and the odd stray bullet, the crowd of
shebab,
followed by Lucas and Sally Conners and Ibrahim the guide, made their way over the dark rooftops of the Muslim Quarter toward the Bab al-Hadid. Some of the roofs sustained fragrant gardens, some were derelict. There were accordion rails for the protection of children and sometimes lines of broken bottles set in cement, to pierce the flesh of evildoers. The streets below were swarming with an increasingly excited crowd.

Approaching the Bab al-Hadid above a narrow street, they encountered a charge of mounted police who turned a crowd headed for the Haram into a Pamplona-like stampede, with young buckos running before the horses or crowding against doorways. At the end of the street, the mounted police turned smartly to avoid being separated from their own lines and rode back up the same alleyway, administering baton whacks to some of the kids they had missed the first time through. At another point, a force of soldiers had a contingent of
shebab
trapped in an alley and were amusing themselves firing gas canisters into it. Now and again an empty canister would come flying back, but the rioters seemed to have picked themselves an unlucky refuge.

At this point, against Lucas's inchoate advice, the young men with whom they were traversing the rooftops were unable to refrain from tossing everything loose and handy down onto the ranks of soldiers below them. This in turn provoked an enraged charge by a flying squad from the far end of the street, who smashed through the doors of the street-level dwellings and made for the roofs. Everyone scattered, including Lucas and Sally, who were now operating in a kind of uncoordinated alliance, Ibrahim in pursuit of his fee, and Dr. Lestrade, who obviously preferred not to be the solitary representative of Western Christendom among an angry crowd prepared to drink the wine of paradise.

Not all the soldiers found their way immediately to the rooftops, so it was possible for the four of them to maneuver across several roofs and across the souk on the arching roof that covered its stalls. Lucas had a look over the edge of the first building they came to on the east side of the souk and found it full of soldiers and police, apparently being held in reserve.

For better or worse, they had put the hot side of the riot behind them and were back of the Israeli lines. But in every direction from the lighted vital center the army and police were holding, a huge crowd, partly visible through its own mixed media of homespun light and powerfully audible in its chanting, was pressing dangerously against them. The shots, the rattle of stones and the popping of canisters continued.

Discovering himself where he was, Ibrahim expressed his unhappiness. He was good at being unpleasant—as became a man used to raising his prices after a deal was made—but the talent gave him little comfort at this time and in this place.

"They are destroying the Haram," he declared. "You must pay me."

Sally Conners winced at this non sequitur. Crouched beside a potted pomegranate tree, she searched her fanny pack and came up with about a hundred dollars in shekels.

Ibrahim screeched imprecations.

Lucas gave him three American twenties. Like a baby bird, he chirped for more.

"I don't know if I should let you do that," Sally said. "I hired him."

"Good," Lucas said. "I'm firing him, and it's worth every penny." He turned to Lestrade. "Would you like to give him something?"

"I?" asked Lestrade. "What? What? I give him something?"

Ibrahim immediately homed in on Lestrade. They quarreled in high-flown Arabic until Lucas physically removed the professor from the rooftop. Pushing open a door, they found themselves in a room full of crying children. A dozen, Lucas thought, and not one of them over four years old. They huddled together on huge mattresses placed on the floor.

A woman swathed in layers of cloth was hiding, not very successfully, behind a curtain at one end of the room, ostrich fashion, keeping her face averted. Lucas, Sally and Lestrade headed for the street. They were not far from the Bab al-Hadid. The Border Police squads ran past them, paying no attention. From the roof, Ibrahim hissed down at them like an animated, alienated gargoyle.

"Salman Rushdie is not here!" he croaked malevolently, as though to disappoint them. There was a large Palestinian crowd not far away.

"Do you know where you're going?" Sally Conners asked Lucas.

"The professor here knows," Lucas told her.

Suddenly, they knew not how, the Palestinian crowd had broken through and they were now part of it. The mob's purpose seemed to be to penetrate the barriers at the Bab al-Hadid, make an end run around the police lines and hurl itself against the Haram wall.

In a burst of youthful athleticism, Sally Conners took off with the rioters. Lucas, with Lestrade following, raced after her. Sally had a volatile effect on the mob. Some of the young men looked delighted with her, others infuriated, many appeared to register both reactions, by turn or in combination. In any case, the Palestinian charge was contained by soldiers who waded into it, using their rifle butts liberally.

Lestrade, Lucas and Sally were shoved to one side. Lucas cowered, protecting his head with his arms. Lestrade, breathless, panted and crossed himself. Sally Conners stood tall, like Nurse Edith Cavell before the Hun, ready to take her medicine.

An angry officer accompanied by two troopers approached them. Perhaps because of Sally, no blows were struck.

"Who are you? Where do you think you're going?"

Farther down the street, protected by metal barricades and under massive white lights, soldiers were operating Michigan loaders under the guidance of gray-haired men in civilian clothes. They seemed to be digging up the cobbled street close to the Haram wall.

"Press," Lucas said.

"Press? You're engaging in disorder. I saw you. Staging riots to write about?"

Then the officer stalked off, leaving them in custody of the two soldiers, who stared at them in slack-jawed menace. In a moment, the officer returned with a civilian.

"No press here!" the civilian declared. "The area is closed. How did you get here in the first place?"

The officer spoke to him in Hebrew.

"You led that crowd in here. You could be responsible for deaths. You're under arrest."

"Wait," Lucas said. "Is there a bomb under the Temple Mount?"

The Shabak man looked at him closely. "Who told you this?"

"We think there is," Lucas said. "This man," he said, indicating Lestrade, "is an archeologist. He thinks he knows where it's planted."

The representative of Shin Bet looked doubtfully at Lestrade.

"Well," Lestrade said. "I've an idea."

"An idea," the Shin Bet agent repeated.

"A good idea," Lestrade said.

"Basically," Lucas told them helpfully, "he knows where the thing is. He can take you to it."

"Well, yes," Lestrade said. "The chamber of Sabazios. That would be my guess."

The Shabak man went away without a word.

"That is all nonsense, isn't it?" Sally Conners asked. "About Salman Rushdie?"

"I have to tell you," Lucas said, "I don't see him."

"Do you really know where there's a bomb under the Temple Mount?" she asked Lestrade.

"Yes, I think so," the professor said.

"Crikey," said Sally Conners. As discreetly as possible, she hugged herself with joy.

T
HE BOMB
that lay at the feet of Sabazios was one that looked vaguely familiar to Sonia. She once had a boyfriend, a dropout from Long Beach State and a Maoist militant, who had quit school to organize the shipyard workers at the San Diego Navy Yard. At the time, it had become the most radical and Maoist-influenced shipyard in the country. But Bob Kellerman, the militant, had given it all up for nitrous oxide and drowned in his own bathtub.

Bob Kellerman had showed her how bombs were made, with gelignite and acid batteries and telephone wire. She had sat together with several other adepts to assist in, or at least to watch, the process, and somehow they had not blown themselves to kingdom come like the comrades in Greenwich Village some years earlier.

It was a similar bomb. Its timer was an alarm clock that did not show the correct time.

"Who made the device?" she asked Fotheringill.

"Never mind," Zimmer said.

"And the statue is Sabazios?"

"Correct."

"So you thought that was a good place to put it," she said. "One of the American
chaverim
make it? Ex-cop or something?"

"Doesn't matter now, does it?" Zimmer looked at the clock timer in the rucksack.

The sound of earth-moving machines grew louder and closer. Shots were fired inside the foundation, the reports echoing endlessly. Something that might have been a tear-gas canister rattled over the stone.

Zimmer took Sonia by the arm and led her in the direction of the noise. Fotheringill was crouched with his Galil, covering the men in the chamber.

"What about the bomb squad?" Sonia asked. "What about the soldiers who come in here?"

"What about the Temple rising again?" Zimmer said. "Don't worry about a thing."

He shouted something in Hebrew down the tunnel. The noises stopped abruptly, all at once. Zimmer shouted again.

In the next few seconds the chamber was full of light and helmeted policemen. The men who had come down with Zimmer backed away from their piled weapons. Then Sonia saw Lestrade and Lucas in the glare of floodlights.

"This is the place," Lestrade said. "Now for God's sake, don't harm that statue."

"Get back!" the soldiers ordered. They shoved Lucas and Lestrade aside and began to shout at Sonia and Zimmer's captured band.

Lucas saw Fotheringill in a shaft of light.

"Jesus," he said. "I remember it.

 

"
Rillons, Rillettes,
they taste the same,
And would by any other name,
And are, if I may risk a joke,
Alike as two pigs in a poke."

 

"What the bloody hell are you talking about?" Sally Conners asked him.

Lucas was entranced:

 

"The dishes are the same, and yet
While Tours provides the best
Rillettes
The best
Rillons
are made in Blois."

 

"Fotheringill!" he called. "Did you get that?"

But then he, and Sonia, saw that Zimmer and Fotheringill were gone, vanished from the chamber, and though she probed every corner with her feeble light, there was no sign of them. What she did see, just before turning off the redundant flashlight, was the football coach making a run for the pile of weapons.

One of the soldiers took off to intercept him. Before the soldier could stop him, the coach seized an Uzi, pointed it at Sabazios's feet and, diving forward, fired a burst into the packed rucksack.

There was a dazzling eruption of white flame, and the room filled with chemical smoke. Everyone hit the deck. When the flash came, it mocked the soldiers' lights and blinded everyone.