O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [142]
The prisoner’s gaze wavered, and slid sideways to the oldest of the other prisoners, whose face resembled his. Father? Uncle? In either case the two were blood relations. I went over to the older prisoner and pulled away his gag, too.
“Please,” I said quietly. “Don’t let my friends hurt the boy. It is a bad way to die, and why: for a firengi? Let the firengi deal with the firengi,” I suggested, nodding my chin at Holmes in his foreign uniform and hoping fervently that the man we sought, Ellison or no, was indeed British.
It was impossible to tell what the man on the floor was thinking. He just lay there looking at me, his face completely closed. He might have been stone deaf for all the impression my words made. Ali shifted restlessly behind me, and I felt a rush of despair at my failure to prevent atrocity.
Then the man’s face changed, faintly but surely. I put out my hand to signal Ali.
“He has a house over a shop in the Muristan,” the prisoner said. “The olive-wood seller’s with the lamp in front on the Street of the Christians. The entrance is through the shop. The back way is down from the roof into the New Bazaar, between the seller of brass pots and the leather worker from Kabul. He has two men with him. All have guns.”
Holmes had told me that Ellison kept a house outside the Old City as well, for his illicit woman friend. “He will be in the Muristan, not at his house in the Russian Colony?”
“I do not know that place, only this.”
“What does he plan?”
The man shrugged against his bonds. “To disappear. That is what he always does.”
“Not this time,” I declared, and rose to my feet. I looked around at Mahmoud. “Was there anything else?”
He shook his head slightly, looking as amused as Holmes was. Ali slid his knife away, then went into the next room and returned with another knife in his hand, equally vicious, and walked purposefully towards the young boy. The man at my feet gasped as if I’d kicked him in the stomach, struggled once convulsively against his bonds, and moaned softly through clenched teeth. Ali bent down to yank the boy’s gag back up, then straightened, held up the knife, and hurled it down with all the strength in his right arm. It stood quivering, two inches of its steel blade buried in the floorboards three feet away from the boy’s tied hands. When I looked down, the older prisoner’s eyes were shut in the extremity of relief.
It would take the boy a while, but he would free himself, and his family, before we returned. I stooped down to pull the older man’s gag back across his mouth, to give us a chance to get free of the quarter before an alarm was raised, but before it was in place he spoke again. “He carries a knife in his boot. Beware of it.”
I slid my own blade out of my boot top. “Like this one?”
“Ah. It is a custom, I see.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I thank you for the warning.”
Ali locked the door and we left the men there.
The Muristan was an open area just south of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that had been variously a hospice for pilgrims established by Charlemagne, a Crusader hospital, an endowment to the Mosque of Omar, and property of the Prussian crown. Now it was a part of the city that combined bazaar and offices, where church and commerce, Moslem and Christian, pilgrim and citizen rubbed shoulders and went about their business.
We nearly missed them. Had our prisoners hesitated two minutes longer, had we paused to let Holmes resume his robe and kuffiyah, the three men would have been gone.
It was twice blessed that Holmes had remained in uniform, because it was his presence that gave them away.
We came to the Muristan at a trot, half winded from the climb up David Street, slowing to a walk as we turned the corner into the Street of the Christians. The narrow way was crowded with Sunday pilgrims and shoppers, and the three men entering it from the side would have been invisible to us had one of them not looked warily around, spotted Holmes’ military cap towering above the turbans and headcloths