O Jerusalem (19 page)

“The men I was with were all soldiers for the Turk during the first three years of the war. They deserted when the Arab independence movement began to make real headway.”

“Do not call it desertion,” Ali objected, also using English. “They were slaves reaching for their freedom, not traitors.”

Holmes waved aside the niceties of definition. “That is not important. What matters is that the three conscripts, even as long ago as 1917, were aware that within the Turkish Army, certain men were laying plans for what was to happen in this country if Turkey lost.”

“But in 1917, Turkey was winning,” protested Ali.

“So it appeared, but to a small group of officers, it was far from decided. One of these three was a member of a work party hiding supplies in a remote cave: food, clothing, weapons and ammunition, medical supplies, and detailed maps. Some of the maps, he remembers, were of El Quds. Jerusalem.”

“Wallah,”
Ali breathed. Mahmoud smoothed his beard thoughtfully and dug his prayer beads from his robe.

“The supplies are no longer there—having been, shall we say, liberated by the men on their way home.”

“But if there was one cache …” Ali did not bother finishing the thought.

“Who were the officers?” I asked Holmes.

“These men knew the names, but said that, having had such a personal interest in the fates of their former superior officers, they made a point of hunting them out after the war. Of the half dozen they knew were in on it, all were either dead or in the custody of the British. Now all are dead.”

“Unfortunate,” commented Mahmoud laconically.

“Yes. They did say, however, that the six officers were not acting on their own, that orders came to them. And not from Damascus but from Jerusalem.”

We meditated on this for some time, and then Mahmoud asked, “You have the names of the Turkish officers?”

“I do. Perhaps they will have left administrative tracks that could lead to their superior. Had the Germans actually been in charge of the army rather than merely advising, we could certainly depend on records having been kept. The Turks, however, were less concerned with order. I suppose Joshua is the one to follow that particular lead; can a message be got to him?”

“It can,” Mahmoud replied.

Ali shifted slightly, but before he could rise and signal that the day’s events were ended, I stopped him with two questions aimed at Mahmoud.

“Are you suggesting,” I said carefully, because I wanted this quite clear, “that what we are looking for is a group of Turkish officers who have escaped capture and gone underground? And that these officers are plotting to take the country back from the British?”

Mahmoud clearly disliked being put on the spot, but
after a moment he answered. “It is not so simple. It may be more a matter of encouraging the disorder and dissatisfaction that already exist here, hidden beneath the British rule of order. A dust cloud hides all.’ Think of a man stirring up a cloud of dust so as to move around without being observed. When the dust settles, the man is where he wishes to be, with no-one the wiser.”

It was a picturesque image, if inaccurate (would not a stirred-up dust cloud attract suspicion?) and not terribly informative.

“His purpose being …?” I prodded.

This time it was Holmes who responded. “Joshua appears to believe that the unrest is intended to, shall we say, encourage the British government to withdraw at all haste from the expensive and unpleasant business of governing an intractable province. I think that with tonight’s evidence, we may assume that the architect of the unrest further intends to be in a position to occupy the vacuum of power when the British depart. It is a plan both complex and simple, well suited to a patient man with a taste for manipulation.”

“You think there is such a man, then?”

“Or as Mahmoud suggests, a small coalition. As an hypothesis it wants testing, but yes, it is a strong possibility.”

“And he or they direct the
mullah
whose safe we robbed, and murder harmless farmers, and shoot men in wadis, and—”

“Russell, Russell. Joshua all but told us that the good Yitzak was not just a farmer. Am I right, Mahmoud?”

“A spy, yes, during the war.”

Great, I thought; yet another thing that had passed me by. “Still,” I persisted, “this is a fairly ruthless approach to politics. Why hasn’t your man Joshua heard of him, or them, before this?”

Mahmoud answered me in Arabic. “‘When the cat looks at the feathers and says he knows nothing of the bird, does that mean the cat’s belly is not full?’”

It took me a while to sort that one out, first the syntax, then the meaning. Eventually, though, I thought I had it. “You’re saying that Joshua does know that there is an actual plot to take over the country. That his vague maunderings about wolves in the sheepfold and his attempts to put Holmes off the scent were a ruse. My God, the man is more devious than Mycroft. So what we’re searching for is a Turkish Machiavelli with the morals of a snake. Where do we look? Out here in the desert? In the Sinai? Jerusalem?”

Mahmoud answered with yet another aphorism, a long Arabic growl that translated something along the lines of, “Jerusalem is a golden bowl full of scorpions.” Ali chuckled in appreciation, and without warning I was hit by a bolt of fury at Mahmoud and everything he represented. It was an accumulation of things, some of them to do with him—his flat assumption of command and his aloofness, the shadowy Joshua behind his shoulder and the patronising air with which he tended to answer my ignorance, his endless proverbs and convoluted epigrams and rawest of all the ease with which he had forced me to help him fleece the poorest of villagers. There were other vexations for which he could not be blamed, but in the blink of an eye, all the irritations that plagued me welded themselves together and pushed out a question I had not intended to ask.

“Tell me, Mahmoud, how did you come by that scar?”

The instant the words left my mouth I regretted them. Ali looked ready to succumb to an attack of apoplexy, and even Holmes let out a small grunt of reaction at my thoughtlessness. I rubbed at my forehead in a gesture of tiredness and self-disgust.

“I am sorry, Mahmoud. It is none of my business, and even if—”

“I was captured,” he said flatly, his eyes glittering across the dim room at me. “I was questioned. I was rescued. I was brought here.” He shifted to Arabic. “Ali
and Mikhail the Druse brought me to this village. The
mukhtar’s
family cared for me and hid me from the Turks. That was two years ago. Since that day they have been my mother and my father.”

I was struck dumb with remorse; I wished he had hit me instead of answering, or shot me dead. All I could think of was a gesture that left my English self far, far behind. I went onto my knees and put out my hand to touch his dusty boot. It was a strange thing to do, and where in my psyche it came from I do not know, but it was an eloquent plea for forgiveness in ways that words were not, and it reached him. After a moment I felt his hand on my shoulder, squeezing briefly.

“Don’t worry, Mary,” he said, using English.

“I had no right—”

“Amir,” he interrupted, in Arabic now. “Be at peace.”

And strangely enough, I was.

The greatest number of marauders are found on the borders of the cultivated districts. The desert itself is safer
.

—BAEDEKER’S
Palestine and Syria,

               1912 EDITION

n the morning we made our farewells to the village and turned east. Before we left, I saw Ali take Farash aside, no doubt to press into the man’s hand a piece of paper containing the names of six Turkish officers to be delivered to the spymaster Joshua. Heaven only knew where the answer would catch up with us. When the last of the children dropped, or was driven, from our tail, I turned to Holmes.

“Why do we go in this direction?” I demanded, in Arabic.

“You heard the talk last night, when Ali asked about the Wadi Estemoa. We are continuing to investigate the death of Mikhail the Druse.”

“I did catch the word
haramiyeh
, did I not? Bandits? To the south-east?”

“You heard correctly.”

“You think bandits murdered Mikhail?” I asked doubtfully. “But he wasn’t robbed.”

“They may or may not have been responsible, but if there are bandits, they will surely know who was moving through their territory at the time Mikhail was shot. Bandits are territorial creatures. They take careful note of who moves through their land.”

“They may know, but will they tell us?” I wondered.

He did not reply.

As soon as we were out of sight of the village we shifted direction, heading due south. That whole day we saw only innocent forms of life: women tending goats, a few clusters of black tents, once on the horizon a long caravan of camels wavering in the heat, going north towards Jerusalem. In the afternoon we dropped into a wadi to return to the lowlands, on the theory that robbers must eventually go where there are people to rob, and half an hour later a piece of rock in front of my feet popped into the air, followed in an instant by the crack of a rifle echoing hugely down the canyon walls.

The mules squealed in terror and sent me flying as they shot away down the wadi, and would have trampled the men in front of me had they not already leapt as one for the protection of boulders.

I followed their example with alacrity, and we all cowered in silence, except for Ali, who cursed the mules bitterly until Mahmoud shouted at him to shut his mouth. Another bullet pinged off a rock and another gunshot boomed through the wadi. A few minutes later a third one came, with no result other than to keep us pinned down.

I began to hear voices then, and thought at first that they came from above our heads, which would have meant real trouble, until I identified the lower tones as those of Mahmoud. I inched around to the back of my rock and could see the two Arabs arguing around the backs of their respective boulders. Actually, they did not seem to be arguing so much as Ali pleading for something and Mahmoud refusing to give permission. After six or eight minutes of this, punctuated by the odd bullet
from above, Ali wore his partner down; Mahmoud, with the incongruous air of a parent giving in to a child’s peremptory demands, flipped the back of his hand in the direction in which the mules had fled, then reached into his robe and pulled out his authoritative American pistol. He rose, pointed the long barrel in the general direction of our assailant, and commenced to fire.

Ali took off, racing down the rough wadi floor in the wake of our mules, his robes and
kuffiyah
whipping around him. However, the ploy was only marginally successful. After Mahmoud’s fourth round, the man above must have risked a look and seen the fleeing Ali. Fortunately he was a terrible shot: None of his rounds came anywhere near the fleet-footed Arab.

After Ali had disappeared and the excitement died down, I wondered how long we had before the man above summoned reinforcements. One rifle we could hide from; two or three could prove uncomfortable. I could only hope Ali found the mules quickly and returned with our Lee Enfield, or else darkness fell, before the bandits regrouped.