O Jerusalem (41 page)

His eyes glittered. “Suggestive.”

“I thought it was. There’s an iron gate that may be buried in rubble—he thought the cave hadn’t been used since before the war. It’s a big cave, extending about two hundred yards underneath the city.”

“That still leaves quite a way to go to the Cotton Bazaar. Four, five hundred yards I believe.”

“Funny, the coincidence in names, though,” I said provocatively. Holmes does not believe in coincidence. He did not respond, just sat. After a minute he pulled out his pipe, which always made the thinking process go more quickly.

“We need to see some maps,” he said. I waited. “Father Demetrius is certain to have among his maps one that shows everything underground in the city.”

“Is it too late to go and knock him up?”

He scowled. “Demetrius is a fine old man, but he had some questionable dealings with the Turks.”

“Oh, surely not.”

“The welfare of his people is the only thing that matters to him. Even his passion for old stones takes second place to the Armenian community. Twice for certain, possibly several times, he gave the Turks … someone they wanted, in exchange for which they freed Armenian prisoners. One can understand it, I suppose. After all, the Turks were aiming at genocide, and when a million of one’s people are killed, it is apt to make one view outsiders with a different eye. What, after all, is an
Englishman or two compared to a trainload of your countrymen?”

“He’s not to be trusted, then?” I asked bluntly.

“He’s not to be tested. He might have the ear of the wrong man for our purposes, and we’ve shown ourselves quite enough in that quarter. There are,” he noted, “a fair number of Armenians still rotting in prisons.”

“What about Government House? The army has undoubtedly done a survey of every inch of the city, above and below ground.”

He puffed furiously on his pipe. “I am wary of Government House,” he said finally, sounding not happy.

“Ellison.”

“A good clerk is like a servant, invisible and all-seeing. Still, I find myself unconvinced about Ellison. For one thing, I cannot imagine why Haifa would have notified Jerusalem that they were reaching out for Ali and Mahmoud, allowing Ellison to overhear.”

“You think there is another informant, one in Haifa?” God, I thought; the holes in British security are like Swiss cheese. “What about the driver, was he then killed to cut the tie, or because he had outlived his usefulness?”

“That is possible. Probable, even. However …”

“You do not wish to chance bringing Government House in, even if we could keep Ellison from knowing.”

“Not until we are more certain. Not for something as important as this.”

“So what comes next?” I asked, although I thought I knew.

He held his pipe away and examined the tobacco in the bowl. “Did you notice the lock on the door of Father Demetrius’ study?” he asked.

“It is a very old lock.”

His head came around and he shot me a grin. “That’s my Russell,” he said, as if everything had been decided. But then, it had.

•    •    •

W
e let ourselves out the small door set into the inn’s heavy gates and turned down the black alleyway towards the Armenian Quarter.

“Just one thing,” Holmes breathed into my ear. “It is assumed in the city that anyone walking through the dark streets without a lantern is no better than he should be, and wants arresting. We can’t very well take a lantern, but if we are caught, you are to get away. Do you understand? They will be satisfied with one of us, and I’ll come to no harm sleeping in a cell overnight, but I’ll not see you in a man’s prison, even for a few hours. Do what you have to do, but get free.”

I had to agree that the thought was not a happy one. “All right.”

“I have your word?”

“I said so.”

“Good.” He slipped away down the alley and I followed, out to the open area in front of the Citadel, a maelstrom of activity during the day, now deserted but for rats and one scrawny cat. We skulked after the cat, around the sides of the echoing emptiness, over the entrance to the silent David Street bazaar, between the gates to the Anglican church compound and the steps of the Citadel (where the humble victor General Allenby had given his victory speech to the city), past the barracks, and into the Armenian Quarter. Twice we heard noises and plastered ourselves against the walls, but the only living things we saw had either wings or four feet. We came to the church, we went around it, and we eased our way through the gate and the garden to the door of Father Demetrius’ study.

My shiny new picklocks, a Christmas present from Holmes, were in Mycroft’s flat in London. Holmes’ old ones did the job, and in minutes we were inside the room, which smelt comfortingly of books and faintly of coffee and incense.

Holmes stretched to remove the tube of maps from its high shelf, and carried it over to a wall of books, where he seemed to be perusing the titles. He moved, and after a while I heard a click, and a bank of shelves opened. We went through, he closed the door, and only then did he turn on his electrical torch.

We were in a tiny closet of a room perhaps eight feet by four, with a thin mattress on the floor and a couple of pots. The only air came from a ventilation grid the size of a hand. I tried not to feel claustrophobic.

Holmes had the maps out and was spreading them on the floor. I held the sides flat, and he paged through them until he came to what we sought, when he removed the others from the top of the stack and let them curl up tightly.

The city walls and a few landmarks were the only familiar shapes on this map. The Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Armenian monastery were there; the Tyropoeon Valley that had once bisected the city was sketched in with a pencil, a north-south dip that cut along the edge of the Temple Mount before the city literally grew up and filled it with the rubble and debris of its earlier incarnations.

And here, drawn in clear, sweeping lines, were the aqueducts. The major one came from the south out of Bethlehem, taking a wide loop along the sides of the Hinnom Valley, around the Sultan’s Pool to the southwest of the city walls, following the topographic lines back along the walls until finally, not far from the Dung Gate, its route crossed under the walls and into the city proper, following the curve of the Tyropoeon Valley until it reached the eastern half of David Street, one of the old boundaries of the changing city. There the line ducked due east, under the Bab es-Silsileh: under the Temple Mount. According to the map, before reaching the Dome of the Rock the aqueduct divided, one arm reaching down to fill the fountain known as the Cup, the other reaching up to trickle into the Birkat Yisrael,
now a dry rubbish tip, once, perhaps, the miraculous Pool of Bethesda.

That upper arm excited my interest, for after the split at the gate to the Haram it turned due north, running between the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock, less than fifty feet from where the Souk el-Qattanin became the Bab el-Qattanin, the Gate of the Cotton Merchants, which was the Haram entrance closest to the Dome itself.

Furthermore, there was another aqueduct, coming not from Bethlehem but from the Mamilla Pool to the west of the city. It ran under the Jaffa Gate, pausing to replenish the Patriarch’s Pool near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before continuing east in the vicinity of David Street towards the Haram. It too split, the northern half joining up with the upper arm of the Bethlehem aqueduct on its way to the Birkat Yisrael, the southern half crossing the Souk el-Qattanin and debouching into a bath just below the
souk
, the Hamman es-Shifa. This too was noted as a possible candidate for the Pool of Bethesda, in Father Demetrius’ neat, tiny writing.

While I was gloating over all these riches, Holmes had whipped out his map of Palestine, which included a detailed street map of the city on the back, and was carefully duplicating the priest’s marks, the lines for the aqueducts, the slope of the valleys, square cisterns and round fountains and shaded-in patches for built-over vaults. The Cotton Grotto, looking like a patch of spilt grey ink, reached down farther than I had imagined, half again the distance Jacob had suggested. It undermined the Moslem Quarter nearly halfway to the northernmost corner of the Haram, where lay Herod’s fortress Antonia and the infamous Old Serai prison of the Turks, where the relatives of impoverished Arab diggers were beaten and Karim Bey had reigned supreme. The Old Serai, I saw from the notes Father Demetrius had made, was now being turned into a school.

I studied the jumble of signs and notations surrounding the Souk el-Qattanin, and tried to recall the details of past reading. Wilson’s Arch was at the next Haram entrance down, but surely there was a shaft here somewhere? And wasn’t there something odd about that bath? My knowledge of the city was quite good for the earlier periods, but anything more recent than the Crusades was a blank page.

“We need a Baedeker’s guide, Holmes,” I whispered. He grunted, and continued with his copying.

It took an hour before, cramped and cold, we rose, rolled the maps, and prepared to leave the cubicle. Holmes switched off the torch, and we stood in the utter darkness for several minutes to let our eyes adjust before going back out into the study.

“How did you know this place was here?” I asked him while we waited.

“Demetrius showed me it. At the time it was a bit of a joke—he used to store good wine in here, the stuff that he did not wish to share with his parishioners. No doubt since then more valuable contraband has been hidden here. Ready?”

The hidden door clicked and we stepped back out into the room of books. Holmes walked through the blackness and I heard the roll of maps hit the shelf as I patted my way slowly towards the door. I reached it without mishap, but something seemed to have delayed Holmes, and I heard a faint, drawn-out rustling sound, as of fingertips running across an uneven surface.

“Close your eyes,” he ordered. I turned away, and my lids were briefly lit by a flash of light, instantly extinguished. When he joined me at the door, he found my arm and then I felt something being pressed into my hand: a little book, heavy for its size. I smiled, for I knew that on the red spine I should see the name Baedeker.

“Won’t he miss it?”

“He has dozens. He hands them out to visitors, probably doesn’t even know how many there are. Let us go.”

I thrust the guide-book inside my robe and we went out into the garden, ghostly in the light of the waning moon. I waited while Holmes locked the door, and we slipped out of the garden gate as silently as we had come. It was now about half past two, and my skin crawled with tiredness. I had forgotten to ask where we were going, but on the street he turned to the right, back in the direction of the inn, and I allowed myself a faint hope that the night might be over. I was not to know what Holmes had intended, however, because a few paces down the street a dark figure moved out from the edge of a building, and an instant later my ears registered a footfall behind us. I whirled, and saw another shape that nonetheless seemed familiar.

“You were surely not thinking of any interesting outings without us,” said Ali. The threat in his voice did nothing towards making me relax from the stance I had taken. Holmes, however, stood briskly upright and continued on his way, brushing past Ali, who stood belligerently in the centre of the alley. Mahmoud moved up from behind us.

“Of course not.” Holmes’ voice trailed down the narrow way.

We had no option but to follow him.

Most Orientals regard the European traveller as a Croesus, and sometimes a madman
.
The traveller should be on his guard against the thievish propensities of beggars
.

—BAEDEKER’S
Palestine and Syria,

               1912 EDITION

e were let in by the owner of the inn himself, and went to Ali and Mahmoud’s room, where we lit lamps, drank the coffee the innkeeper brought up scarcely two minutes after we had come in, and settled to business. Ali was simmering with suspicion and aggression, Mahmoud was so stony I felt I could strike a spark from him, and Holmes gave the impression that he saw nothing out of the ordinary. In the face of all this masculine antagonism, I sat back against the wall with my new Baedeker’s and opened it to the index.