O Jerusalem (38 page)

“Why do you think the piles of soil keep coming into the Souk el-Qattanin? The new piles with old coins?”

After a moment of silence a great babble of voices burst out, which only eventually was dominated by one man, who simply had a greater lung capacity than the others.

“—the coin to my brother and we cleaned it until it shone, and then we carried it to the cousin of my brother’s wife, who has a shop on the Tarik Bab Sitti Maryam, near the place where Jesus stumbled, where many foreigners used to buy things before the war and are now beginning to return, and the cousin of my brother’s wife sold that coin to a rich Amerikani just last week for two gold
lira
, although he only gave my brother and me twenty-five
mejidis
.”

The others politely waited until he had finished to contribute their
“Wa!”
of appreciation and their own stories, which circled around the suggestion I had planted in their minds, that the rich soil was being placed there by some peculiarly subtle variety of demon. I listened with only half an ear, though, because my question had already been answered by the last speaker:
Yes, there was a rich and therefore deep vein of soil being worked somewhere beneath my feet.

“My father,” the man was saying, “blessed be his memory, found a purse of coins on the roadside, and when he was honest enough to report this, being a good Christian, the police beat him and threw him into the Old Serai for a week, saying that he had stolen some of the coins and wanted a reward for the ones he had left, although it was actually the police who stole them. Of course, they were Turks,” he added pensively.

“And my mother’s father’s second wife,” called one of the women …

The topic of archaeological discoveries was thrashed over until our sergeant reappeared and ordered us back to work, but I was well satisfied with the results of my own labours: Someone, at night, was depositing quantities of soil from deep underground onto the surface to be hauled away. Someone, perhaps, who had borrowed two baskets from the wall of a tomb/house in Silwan that he had happened to pass. Who before that had borrowed two habits, a rope, and a handful of candles, because he thought he might need them, and he was passing. Someone who—The consideration of the someone distracted my mind satisfactorily for quite some time. I queued up with the others to have my baskets filled, and followed them to dump the rubble, but was quite unaware of any of it until I felt a hand on my sleeve.

I looked down into the face of the young cook’s helper from the inn, for whom I was beginning to feel a deep affection.

“You are required back at the inn,” the boy said.

“Who requires me?”

“Your friend.”

“I have a number of friends.”

“Your long friend in the blue
kuffiyah
,” he said, and then for some reason he covered his mouth with his hand and let out a giggle.

“I will come.” I laid down my basket and went down the narrow street on his heels, picking my way over the rough surface and avoiding the holes (one of the privates had graduated to a pickaxe). On the Street of the Cotton Merchants the sergeant stopped me.

“Oi, where do you think you’re going?”

“
Effendi
, my presence is required elsewhere,” I said smoothly in English.

“You don’t say.”

“I fear that I do say.”

“There’s no pay for half days. All or nothing, that’s His Majesty’s way.” I doubted it very much, but was not inclined to argue over a pittance. I began to say something to that effect when my youthful companion nudged me to one side and began sweetly to cajole the dour sergeant. I left him to it, and threaded my way briskly through the bazaar towards the Jaffa Gate. I thought I heard the sergeant’s voice raised in shouts, but then I turned a corner and left them behind.

Only as I was passing through the vegetable market on David Street, restoring my spectacles to my nose, did it occur to me that a British soldier might find it suspicious that a native worker would leave without the better part of a day’s pay. I hesitated, and nearly turned back, but Holmes was waiting, and the cook’s boy had seemed to me quite resourceful enough to get himself out of that sticky situation. I trotted on up the steps of David Street to the inn.

With the decrease of civilisation, the land’s riches fade. In countries where springs existed in the days of civilisation, when the countries fell into ruin, the water of the springs disappeared into the ground as if they had never existed
.

—THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN

n army staff car sat in the street outside the inn’s gates. This sounds like a simple matter, but when the street in question is less than eight feet wide and the car more than five, it means that a laden donkey must be unloaded and all but the narrowest carts turned and taken another way. The driver, magnificently deaf to the shouts and curses of would-be passers-by and the pleas of beggars alike, held a cigarette in one hand and a yellow-back novel in the other. I sidled past and went through the heavy wooden gates into the inn’s yard, wondering mildly whom an army officer might be visiting in this quarter.

I did not wonder for long. My soft boots made chuffing sounds on the worn steps all the way to the top floor. I rapped on Holmes’ door, stepped inside
—and immediately bowed and scraped my panic-stricken way backwards into the hallway.

“
Effendi
, ten thousand apologies, I fear I have the wrong room, I did not intend—” I closed the door, stood and stared at it for a long, puzzled moment, before realising that even if the sergeant had his suspicions about a hastily departing labourer, he could not have arranged for this both immediate and high-ranking a response. Besides which—I reached again for the worn iron door handle and put my head back inside. “Holmes?”

The sleek figure—shiny high boots, immaculate khaki uniform, polished belt, starched hat, perfect hair, trimmed moustache, and the swagger stick he had been slapping against his elegant leg—turned with a diabolical grin on his face.

“Good Lord, Holmes, what on earth are you doing in that get-up? You’ll be arrested!” I had seen the man in any number of disguises, from paternal gipsy to ageing roué to buxom flower-seller, but none more outlandish, given his personality, than this one.

He just stood there and laughed at me. “By God, Russell,” he finally choked out, “it was worth the untold bother of this fancy dress uniform and ten thousand accursed salutes to see you cringe like that. I didn’t know you were capable of it. You were slinking, Russell. Positively slinking.”

I didn’t think it at all amusing, and told him so. “You nearly gave me heart failure, Holmes. I thought you were here to arrest me for stealing antiquities. I ought to turn you in for impersonating an officer.”

He wiped his eyes and blew his nose, and began to divest himself of hat, stick, and military belt. “I wear this uniform with the approval of the highest authorities—although it is a decidedly temporary commission,” he added. “What antiquities have you stolen?”

I took out the tiny handkerchief-wrapped object, dropped into a squat on the floor, and opened the cloth
parcel out on the floorboards. I picked up the little glass vase to examine it, rubbing the encrustations cautiously away, but the neck had a crack in it, and part of it came away in my fingers. A pity.

Still, it had spoken its message to me, even in pieces.

“This is a Roman phial, Holmes. Probably third or fourth century.”

“Yes?”

“So what was it doing among the rubbish being cleared from a Mediaeval bazaar?”

He sat down on his low pallet, a difficult manoeuvre while wearing rigid knee-high boots. “You are the historian here, Russell. What would you suggest it was doing there?”

I set the two pieces on the scrap of dirty linen and made myself comfortable on the floor. “This poor little thing was jerked forwards in time sixteen hundred years or so, and I should say it happened no earlier than the last couple of nights. Someone is clearing out an underground chamber.”

“Good. Oh, very good, Russell.”

I opened my mouth to begin the analysis of the someone’s character that I had constructed while I was working, but before I could say anything he stood up and pulled on his hat and belt.

“I shall have a car call for you at seven o’clock. It is now”—he patted his various pockets until he found the one he wanted, dipped in with his fingers, and brought out a silver watch on a chain—“three forty-five. That may even allow you time for a brief nap, although I suggest that you plan to devote considerable attention to the state of your fingernails.”

I held up my hands and looked at them. The nails were in a lamentable state, it was true, but if anything they added to the verisimilitude of my disguise.

“Why?”

“Because we are dining, of course,” he said in surprise, snapping his stick briskly under one arm. “At the
American Colony. Not formal dress, of course. After all, there has been a war on.”

“Oh, no, Holmes, you can’t mean—”

He opened the door. “I left a frock in your room. If there is any other thing I’ve forgotten, ask Suleiman the cook to arrange it. I shall see you at seven.”

I
did seriously consider an outright refusal of his peremptory summons; I wanted nothing but to strip off my turban and collapse onto my gently rustling bed. However, curiosity got the better of me—that and the challenge, which had not been voiced but which I knew had been made.

My fingernails, however, defeated me. In the end, after a hasty consultation of my Arab-English dictionary, I went through the room shared by Ali, Mahmoud, and most of our baggage (the men were not there; the door was unlocked) and called down the outside stairs to Suleiman the cook that I needed a pair of women’s gloves, quickly, and to send a boy out into the bazaar for them.

My hair, too, was in a sorry state, but I eventually combed it back into a sleek knot and examined myself critically in the mottled glass Holmes had brought to my cubicle along with frock, stockings, shoes, hairpins, earrings, and all the accoutrements of female preparation. He knew the routine, give him that: He’d even thought to include a small bottle of expensive scent, which I used rather more liberally than was my wont. Cold water does not actually cleanse.

Still, I thought I might pass, if I did not forget myself and drop to my haunches or let loose with a florid Arabic curse. The frock was of an outdated fashion, perhaps more appropriate here than in London, with a high neck, long sleeves, and low hem. It was a nicely made garment, in a dark maroon fabric with touches of white that clung and moved and distracted the eye from
the tint of my skin, which no amount of rice powder would lighten.

I examined my reflection and had to wonder uneasily if Holmes had intended for me to look quite so … exotic. The young woman looking back at me seemed, shall I say, sensuous—loose, even, like some Eurasian temptress in a bad novel. On the whole, I thought perhaps the effect was accidental; had he been deliberately aiming at the effect, he would probably have included a bottle of hair-rinse to make my blonde hair colour seem artificial.