O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [105]
“I will give you one beshlik,” he offered, twice her price (and, I suspected, the smallest coin in his pocket). “For the lower of the two baskets under the chicken,” he added.
Our only answer was a movement inside, then a long silence. We sat and waited, then she was in the doorway again with a frayed, warped circle of reeds in her hand. The chicken, it appeared, lived inside with the family. She held it out to Holmes, who put it on the ground between us. As a piece of domestic equipment it left much to be desired, and had not been completely protected from the hen’s droppings by the remains of the upper basket, but in its youth it had been sturdy and closely worked, and I could see why she made use of its remnants instead of chucking it out for the neighbourhood goats to chew.
“You can see,” she told us apologetically, “there was no sense in trying to repair it.”
“No. But now you can buy yourself a new one, sitt.” He reached for his leather purse and took out the beshlik coin. The boy frowned, and the mother hesitated, but for different reasons.
“It is too much,” she admitted. “I can buy reeds to make three baskets for one metallik, and the basket was old to begin with.” The boy saw Holmes putting the coin back into his purse and began to berate his mother, but he fell silent when Holmes held out his fingers again to the woman. She looked at the silver piastre in her palm, and then at Holmes.
“For your honesty, sitt,” he told her. Looking at the son, he added pointedly, “The rewards of honesty are many.”
With blessings and best wishes we withdrew, and with the basket under one arm Holmes set off down the hill, through the evening noises and cooking odours and the tinkling of many goat bells. On the other side of the wadi I asked him, carefully in Arabic, “May we go around to the left?” We went around to the left, and came to a garden, and a stream, and at the head of the stream a rectangular pool surrounded by low buildings. The waters in the pool reflected a motionless half-moon, and looked much deeper than I thought they actually were. We leant over the railing, shoulder to shoulder.
“Did you have a look at Mahmoud’s eminently trustworthy clerk today?” I asked him.
“Of course. Bertram Ellison is a good Kentish boy who took a second-class degree at the University of London and became a government clerk. He came out to Cairo ten years ago, then followed the government legal offices here last year. He lives more or less secretly with a Russian woman three years older than he, although he also has rooms in the Christian Quarter that he uses as his official address.”
“An ordinary, fussy little office clerk with a minor secret.”
“So it would appear.”
“Who happens also to work for Joshua, and through him for the master illusionist Allenby.”
I felt him smile, and he took out a rolled cigarette and put it to his lips.
“Why are we standing looking at a pond, Russell?‘
“This is the Pool of Siloam,” I told him.
“I see it is a pool.”
“Where the man born blind was healed in John’s Gospel?”
“This is of importance?” he asked, beginning to lose patience.
“It is of interest, because this water comes from the Spring of Gihon three hundred fifty yards away, by way of an underground tunnel cut through solid rock in the time of King Hezekiah, twenty-six centuries ago. The city walls were down here then, and this miracle of engineering guaranteed water inside the city walls even during a siege. Hezekiah’s workmen cut from both ends—there was an inscription in the middle where they met. I remember reading that an American boy worked his way through the tunnel sometime in the 1880s and found the inscription. Inevitably, when word got around, thieves came down and hacked it right out of the wall. It’s now in Istanbul, I think.”
“A most compelling tale.”
“Illuminating, one might say: There is good precedence for deception and the hiding of resources in this country.”
“The study of history is always a worthwhile endeavour,” he agreed piously.
“Not that it makes it any easier to