“I shall be repaying favours for twenty years,” he told Holmes. “I hope you know what you are doing.”
“Have you a better idea?” Holmes responded mildly. “Given the time at our disposal?”
Mahmoud shrugged and went down the alley into the souk. Ali followed a minute later; two minutes after that, Holmes and I were strolling towards the Haram. Our orange seller was back, I saw, the urchin with his criminally charming smile set to watch the house.
There was a stir brewing in the Haram, with British soldiers, Moslem guards, and the interested populace preparing for the entrance of the great ones. One at a time we peeled off from the crowd and took up places in two of the small buildings that lay around the great Dome—small mosques, perhaps, or classrooms. The soldiers standing near the buildings’ entrances became blind for a moment, and I reflected that Mahmoud must have appealed to whomever was responsible for managing events within the Haram; to pull off such a slick operation in a scant half hour meant going straight to the top.
Keeping well back from the arched windows, Holmes ripped lengths off the black silk Ali had thrown inside and began to tack them up over the windows. We soon had all the north and west openings covered; there were no high buildings to the south.
Then began our watch. I was aware of the movement of Allenby and his entourage of official persons, growing to the south, approaching, then going off behind us to inspect the bricked-up Golden Gate through which the Messiah is supposed to enter. All the time we searched for sign of Bey. Our conversation went something like this:
“The curtain on the third window to the left of the minaret?”
A lengthy silence.
“A woman.”
Another silence.
“I thought I saw— No. Sorry.”
Pause.
“A brown robe on the roof at nine o’clock.” (Twelve o’clock being due north.)
A long pause while Holmes found the figure in his glasses, then, “Too short.”
Silence for six minutes, aside from voices in the Haram.
“Black beard and spectacles, top floor, ten-thirty.”
“Half the population has a black beard,” I grumbled, but sought out the window, saw the man, leaning against the frame of the window, watching the unusual bustle below. Then he was joined by a small child, and when I saw him take the child up in his arms and point in our direction, I immediately discounted him, although Holmes kept an eye on him for a while.
The trouble was, the sides of buildings facing this way were now in shadow, and the buildings themselves, all of them stone, had such thick walls that the openings were often a foot or more deep, even at the upper storeys. All Bey had to do was stand back, wear dark clothing, and keep still. We ought to be beating down doors, not standing behind curtains with field glasses, I thought. Too late now. My ears registered the approach of voices, one of them Allenby’s, and I stole a glance at my pocket-watch: 1:28. They were early.
The meeting seemed to be going well, judging by the hum of voices as they passed by our doors. The translators were being kept busy.
A twitch of movement from high up, in a slapdash shed on top of a roof, one of a hundred such in sight, this one about one hundred twenty yards away on top of a large building just south of the Haram’s north-western corner.
“Holmes—”
“I see it.”
I fiddled with the sights, praying for greater clarity. There was someone there, but no face yet. If it was he, he must be feeling the tension, as the group filed into the Dome nearly five minutes early. A white smear appeared, for an instant, not enough to see, but seconds later I saw Mahmoud, his hand casually raised to scratch under his turban and incidentally cover his face, walking down towards the next set of stairs, and a moment later Ali, his face unconcealed, walked past our curtained windows.
“You saw?” he hissed, and without waiting for an answer continued briskly to the upper steps.
They waited for us at the Gate of the Custodian. I glanced at my pocket-watch before I followed them out of the Haram: 1:36. Allenby and the others were still inside of the Dome.
Once clear of the open space, we trotted after Ali and Mahmoud, who seemed to know precisely where they were heading. They turned right into el-Wad Street, then into a typical Jerusalem maze of minute passageways and stone walls and unlikely bits of garden before fetching up in an alleyway that ran along the side of a massive building.
“The Old Serai,” Ali explained briefly. “Bey has come home, but it is not his prison anymore, and he will have to come and go secretly. That door is one way. At that end of the alley is another, unless he has wings. You two stay here, and stop him if he comes out,”
The two men were gone before Ali finished the sentence, and although Holmes palpably ached to go with them, he could see the sense of it. He subsided, and we settled down beneath a tree to watch.
One-forty-two. No explosion from the depths, and no fleeing monk, only a piebald dog skulking over the stones.
One-forty-seven. Ali’s head appeared over the parapet far above us. Even at the distance, his fury and frustration was visible and Holmes, seeing it, leapt to his feet and smacked his hand against his forehead.
“Wings!” he shouted. “Of course he has wings—the rope he stole from the monastery! How could I be so stupid?” He snatched the torch from his robes, turned, and fled down the alleyway, back to el-Wad and, running now, dodging merchants and tourists, pious Jews and donkey carts, with church bells clattering in the air and me on his heels he pounded into the Souk el-Qattanin and, brushing aside the breathless excitement of the young orange seller, heaved himself up into the house and launched himself down the slick steps into the cellar. Ignoring the ladder that stood there, he dropped through the hole into the tunnel and began to run again, the torch in one hand, the revolver in the other. I started out on his heels, but without a torch I stumbled and banged into the walls and dropped farther behind. The bobbing light came to a bend and went abruptly still as, with a shout, Holmes flung himself to the ground. The echoes of his voice rang through the stone passageway, and I came up noiselessly and pressed myself against the inner curve of the wall to peer down the tunnel. Holmes lay nearly at my feet, his torch and gun both pointing steadily ahead of him at the figure of the bearded man in the monastic habit, now straightening incredulously and blinking at the light.
“You’ve lost, Karim Bey,” said Holmes.
“Who are you?” the false monk demanded, his voice imperious and shrill with fury.
“Russell, do you have your gun on him?”
“I do,” I replied, although the most dangerous weapon I possessed was my throwing knife, and Bey was both too far away and on the wrong side. The man’s head jerked at the sound of my voice, and his hand went slowly away from the front of his habit. I heard noises behind me, and ducked my head to see first Ali, then Mahmoud tumble into the tunnel and begin to run in our direction, only to slow when their torches picked me out, my hand raised in warning. The three of us moved around the corner to stand behind Holmes’ prostrate form.
Bey held his lamp up higher, and narrowed his eyes at Ali and me, whom he had never seen before. He similarly dismissed Mahmoud and was returning to Holmes when with a jolt his gaze flew back to the older man at my shoulder. I watched his wide, cruel mouth relax from the surprise of recognition into a smile distressingly close to intimacy, even affection. I could feel both of the men beside me react to that smile; I thought Ali would shoot him then and there, but Mahmoud seized his partner’s arm and the gun stayed down. The man in the habit, still smiling, allowed his attention to return to Holmes, who lay unmoving, his gun pointing unwaveringly at the man’s chest. Bey squinted down against the light of the torches, and then his eyes went wide and he took a step back.