O Jerusalem (31 page)

Holmes swallowed his wine, with more speed than manners, and began to speak; the abbot rose and went to his cabinet, bringing the wine back with him. He filled Holmes’ empty glass, and sat down again with the bottle close at hand.

“Sometime between Christmas and the New Year you had a visitor here,” Holmes was saying. “I do not know if he appeared as a brother from one of your other houses, or if he stole a habit from you, but I do know
that when he left, he had a monk’s habit in his bag. He also helped himself to the candles from your chapel. Do you know this man?”

“What makes you think such a thing happened, my son?”

“I have spent the last three weeks tracing his footsteps, ever since three men were killed near Jaffa: a farmer who helped the English during the war and his two field hands. The person who came here distanced himself from the murders, which he, shall I say, encouraged, if not arranged, but did not actually commit.

“On the night of the new moon this man was down at the Salt Sea buying a shipment of explosives from a salt smuggler. The smuggler’s son happened to see a monk’s robe in the man’s packs. Sometime that evening the man stuck one of your chapel’s candles on a stone, blew it out when it was down to the last inch, and left it.

“Mikhail the Druse found it. Mikhail was following this man, very probably saw his transaction with the smuggler, scraped off the candle when he came across it, and dropped it into his pack—not as evidence, I dare say, but for its intrinsic usefulness to a thrifty man like Mikhail, as a source of light or as a fire starter.

“Unfortunately for Mikhail, the man discovered him. He and his assistant turned and chased Mikhail into the Wadi Estemoa. There they murdered him, removing from his belongings a small notebook. They then left him for the jackals, and took themselves and their load of dynamite off into the countryside, or into Jerusalem, to hide it.

“I fear that Mikhail the Druse was not a man naturally gifted at espionage. I believe that when he recorded information in his notebook he either did not bother to encode it, or else used a code easily broken, because when the man we seek laid his hands on the notebook, he discovered that Mikhail’s master was a man called Joshua, and that Mikhail had something to
do with a pair of wandering scribes named Ali and Mahmoud.

“Between the night of the new moon, when Mikhail the Druse was murdered, and the night of the full moon, when the man arranged a motorcar accident, he sought out information from within the British camp, most likely using a source he had used before—a partner, even. This source revealed that the two scribes would be with General Allenby in Haifa on Wednesday, and were to return by motorcar to Jericho the following morning. He even knew the route to be taken.

“No doubt the central man would have preferred to seize one of the Hazr brothers, but as chance would have it, they were thrown free and I was thrown into the arms of the men laying the trap.
Maalesh
,” he commented with a crooked smile. The abbot picked up the bottle and filled Holmes’ glass again without speaking.

“This is what I know of him,” Holmes concluded. “I ask you again: Do you know the man?”

“He is not a man.”

Holmes and I looked at each other, startled.

“Surely you can’t mean—” Holmes began.

“He is a demon.”

“Ah.” Holmes subsided, and did not glance at me this time.

“But perhaps your vision of the world does not allow for the existence of evil creatures,” the abbot said.

“Well,” said Holmes slowly, “yes. I should say that I have met evil, true evil. Not many times, but often enough to recognise it.”

“And you would agree that it is different from mere wickedness?” I thought perhaps the good abbot had a modicum of Jesuitical training somewhere in his past, or perhaps he came by it naturally.

“Oh, yes.”

“Then you agree that evil walks in human guise. I call that a demon. You call it what you may. And yes, he
came here, three days after the Western celebration of Christmas.”

“How did you … know what he was? What did he do?”

“I did not know at first meeting him. A holy man might have done; ordinary human beings are not given such a degree of insight. I watched him.

“A … being such as he lives for the discomfort of others. He feeds off any degree of pain. He probably grew up pulling the wings off butterflies and graduated to hurting small animals. Under a regime such as our past rulers oversaw, such a tendency would be a useful thing. It would have been fostered, put to work. Under the guise of promoting order, keeping disruption and revolt in its place, he was without a doubt one of those men allowed to feed his urges while serving his masters: politics and pleasure intertwined. I have seen other backs like yours, Mr Holmes. I have seen far worse. His sort is adept at inflicting torment; one might even call him a connoisseur of pain—both physical and, through the body, the spiritual agony of guilt and shame. Certainly he understands that injuries to the spirit tend to be longer lasting than those of the body.

“Now, after years of freedom to do as he wished under official sanction, he can no longer control his need for causing hurt as once he undoubtedly could. It is a compulsion. When he came here, he could not resist reaching for the hand of Brother Antoninus, twisted by arthritis, and squeezing it firmly. He had to seek out one of our younger brothers who is going through a period of doubt, and suggest further things for the young man to worry about. Similar events, little things, but, in a small community, potentially deadly. After the second day I had to let him know I was watching him. He left the next morning. I considered it fortunate that we only lost a few possessions, most of them easily replaced.”

“What did you lose, Abbot?”

“As you said, two habits, a dozen large candles and some small ones.”

“Two habits?”

“Two. Also one of our climbing ropes—”

“Climbing ropes?” I interrupted. It was only the second time I had spoken, but the image of mountaineering monks was too incongruous for silence.

“We live on a cliff,” Abbot Mattias pointed out with a smile. “There are times when we need to rescue the straying kid of a Bedouin flock or remove a boulder that threatens our heads or our roof tiles. Some of the younger brothers enjoy the task. I know I did when I was younger. Also a small amount of money,” he said, returning to Holmes’ question. “We never keep much. Our needs are met by our mother monastery in Jerusalem.”

“Does that house also dress in the same habits?”

“Of course.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. And one other thing. A small ikon. Not valuable monetarily outside the community, but of historical significance and of great value to us. A painting, six inches by eight, of the Holy Virgin Mother.”

“Have you reported any of this?”

The abbot just smiled sadly. This land had a long way to go before it could think of the police as either friendly or helpful.

“Father Abbot, may I suggest that your house in Jerusalem be warned to watch for any strangers who might be trying to pass themselves off as monks?”

“I shall write to them, yes. However, Jerusalem is filled with strangers in monastic dress, from all the corners of the earth.”

“One last thing.” My head came around involuntarily at the tightness in Holmes’ voice. “Can you give me a description of the man?”

The question surprised the abbot enough to cause
his eyes to narrow. “I understood that you had met him.”

“I … encountered him. I should know his voice if I heard it again, his smell, possibly his step, but I never laid eyes upon him.” Holmes’ face was shut up, rock hard but for a tiny spasm of tension in his jaw. I looked back up at the Virgin, who seemed to tell me that she had seen it all before, but I did not find the thought comforting.

“I see,” said the abbot.

“I do know a great deal about him. I know that he was born in the vicinity of Istanbul approximately forty years ago. I know that he went to university in Germany and spent time in Buda-Pest. I know he is highly educated, thinks of himself as cultured, is near my own height, and right-handed. He is missing two or three teeth in the back of his mouth, and he prefers Western-style trousers and boots with soft heels. He bathes twice a day, uses a French hair pomade, and smokes expensive Turkish cigarettes. I know that he has read widely in European philosophy, that he speaks German, English, Turkish, and three dialects of Arabic fluently, and other tongues with a lesser degree of comfort. I know that he controls his subordinates with a combination of reward and fear, that they are terrified of his temper, which is cold and vicious rather than violent. I know that he enjoys causing pain in the innocent. I know he is a dangerous man. I do not, however, know what he looks like, because he never … approached me to my face.”

He was, I think, telling me what he had been through as much as he was answering the abbot, and my stomach turned at the picture. To be strung up with one’s arms together so as to make turning the head impossible; to stare at a blank wall and have pain inflicted without even seeing it coming, by a person—no, the abbot was right, this was not a person—by a creature
who was no more than an accented voice, an elusive drift of odours, a step of shoes, and a rustle of clothing.

The abbot blinked his lizard blink. “Your ears and nose told you all this?”

“My mind told me this,” Holmes replied coldly.

“God has given you a great gift, my son.” It was Holmes’ turn to blink. “The man is, as you say, tall, perhaps an inch less tall than you, and heavier, but not fat. His hair is black and beginning to thin, his skin slightly swarthy, his eyes dark. His beard was full but neatly trimmed. Not a distinctive face, but his mouth betrays him. His lips are too heavy. His is a greedy mouth, never satisfied.”

“Would he appear European, if he had no beard?”

“No,” the abbot replied. “Not the least bit.”

So, this was not the man who had spoken with the
mullah
in Jaffa.

“Any scars, marks, features that stand out?”

The abbot thought. “A small scar, here.” He laid his finger at the outside edge of his left eye. “And a mark, a mole, just past his beard here.” He raised his chin and tapped the right side of his throat. “Also, I believe he was accustomed to wearing a ring on his right hand, although he did not have it on while he was here. There was a light patch on the finger,” he said.

“Abbot Mattias, you would have made a good detective,” said Holmes.

“And you, my son, in very different circumstances, might have made a good abbot.”

I had not thought to hear Holmes laugh for a long time. The sound cheered me a great deal.

The half-moon lit our way as we followed a sleepy brother up a path to a pair of cells—enlarged caves, in the hillside. The night was cold, but heavy wraps made it bearable, and I fell asleep quickly.

During the night a noise outside my monastic cell woke me: Holmes moving past, outlined against the moonlit sky. I slid from my pallet and went out onto the
pathway, where I watched him make his way down from our quarters to the central portion of the monastery. He stopped outside the abbot’s door, and must have tapped or called quietly, because after a minute the door opened and Holmes went inside. He was still there an hour later when I went back to sleep.

I did not awaken until the sun crept through the cave entrance. I knocked a scorpion out of my boots, fixed my turban firmly in place, and came out to find Holmes sitting on the ground in front of his cell, watching the small signs of life in the wadi before us. He looked rested: the bruises were fading, his eyes were clear again. I sat down ten feet away from him, and considered asking him about his midnight visit to the abbot. If it was about information, it clearly had no urgency about it, but there was also the distinct possibility that he had gone to the man for what could only be called pastoral care. In that case it would be best to pretend I had slept through his nocturnal excursion. We sat together in the morning sun and meditated on the life of the Wadi Qelt.

The sun heated the rocks around us, causing a smell of warm dust to rise up and mingle with the crisp odour of the wet stones of the stream below. Our clothing smelt, too, although I was becoming accustomed to that, and the air moving down the valley brought with it a hint of incense from the chapel, accompanied now and then by the rhythm of chanted prayer. Bells had sounded earlier, the dull clatter so different from the resonant English bells; now I heard a tiny scuffle coming from beneath a bare shrub, which proved to be a small brown bird scratching in the dry leaf fall for its breakfast. Other birds squabbled and gossipped in the fronds of a palm tree, an eagle rode the heating air high over our heads, a pair of lizards came out to bask on the rocks, and once I caught a glimpse of a turbanned head passing by on the track on the opposite rim of the wadi. I could begin to understand the appeal of a monk’s cell
in the desert. If only the vow did not include obedience.…

Breakfast was bread and sour milk and dried apricots, and afterwards we went for a final interview with the abbot. He greeted us by holding out a letter.

“This is to my brethren in the monastery in Jerusalem. Would you please see that the abbot there receives it?”

“Certainly,” said Holmes, tucking it inside his robe.

“In it I mention the two of you. As you appear, shall I say, rather than as you are. It is possible you may need assistance in the city. That letter will ensure that you receive it.”

“Thank you, Abbot.”

“I wish you good hunting, my son. I shall pray for you.”

“Thank you.”

“And you, my silent daughter. Uncharacteristically silent, I suspect.” The gleam in the old man’s eyes was unmistakable now; it was nearly a twinkle. “I give you my blessing.”

I hated to disappoint him, but I had to tell him gently, “I am not a Christian, Abbot Mattias.”

“God does not mind, my child. He was, after all, your God before He was ours.”

“In that case I accept your blessing, with thanks.”

“And now you have before you a long and dusty walk. I have arranged safe passage for you. Not, I fear, an armoured vehicle; you will have to walk. However, you need not worry about being seen by your enemy. Gasim!” he called.