Damascus Gate (63 page)

Lucas stood up and grabbed Lestrade.

"It's us they're after," he told the Englishwoman, who had stayed behind. "We have information they don't want known. They're going to kill us."

"I beg your pardon," she said.

"Come on," he said to Lestrade. "If you want to go on living. They know about you and the bomb." He took the man by the arm and began running him toward the Damascus Gate, the direction where the next set of lights burned.

"What?" Lestrade asked. "Bomb? What?" He sounded genuinely confused but he ran along with Lucas.

"Just a minute," called the English reporter behind them. "Just a minute." For a moment it looked as though she would run after them. Lucas then realized that it might be useful to have her around. Possibly fatal to her, but useful.

When they arrived at the next lighted corner, the woman had not followed. There were no reporters at this corner, and the young men in charge of it looked at Lucas with an unpleasant intensity. He began to wonder if he would actually have to utter his obverse credo: I'm not Jewish. Denying two valid identities in one night was hard even for Lucas. Nevertheless, people did such things during holy wars. It was to counter this kind of ignobility that shibboleths had been invented. Somewhere, a wakeful rooster crowed above the disorder.

On the positive side, Lestrade spoke Arabic and began to do so, volubly. Unfortunately for Lucas, there was no imagining what manner of fatally offensive absurdities such a man might blabber.

While he was waiting for the practical effects of Lestrade's narrative, he saw the young woman come up from the street where Fotheringill and his company were shooting it out with themselves in the dark. She was tall, dark-haired and rather pretty.

With her, brandishing his stick, was Ibrahim, the Palestinian guide, whom she had somehow commandeered. Lucas's first thought was that the old man would cost her employers a fortune. Afterward— if there was an afterward—he would demand at least twice what he had agreed to.

The woman was checking over her shoulder. Something more was up, at the corner, and there were lights again, lights of the army's sort.

"Golani," she said. "They're taking that street."

So Fotheringill and his ersatz troops would have to fade, and he and Lestrade were saved, for the time being. He would really have to do something nice for the Golani. A friendly feature.

"Thank God," Lucas said.
Baruch Hashem.

The English reporter turned up her nose in a disapproving manner. "Oh, thank God for Golani? You must have seen a side of them I've never. But of course you're American, right?"

No, I'm not, Lucas thought. He tried to think of something to be that was less disagreeable.

"There are Israeli terrorists down there killing people," he said. "They tried to murder us. Golani at least is under discipline."

The young woman looked unconvinced.

"If you don't believe me, ask your countryman."

But Lestrade was busy unfolding a tale that held the young Palestinians at the corner rapt. Lestrade, Lucas realized, was either an idiot of transcendent proportions or an extremely slick, if somewhat eccentric, master operator. Either would serve at times, he had come to realize, and it was possible to be both.

"I'd like very much to talk to him," the young woman said. "Where were you when this all began?"

"I was interviewing Dr. Lestrade," Lucas said. "I'm also a journalist. My name is Chris Lucas."

"Sally Conners," said the young woman. They did not shake hands.

He saw that she was going to ask a question about Lestrade, then saw her decide not to. She seemed reluctant to ask questions of a foreigner—an American admirer of the Golani Regiment, yet—about a fellow countryman. Honorable, Lucas thought, but unprofessional.

In the meantime, the Palestinian guide was visibly torn between his fear of Lucas as a possible rival and his desire to expand his fees. Yet, Lucas thought, it would be very useful to have a Palestinian around, especially one as well known as Maître Ibrahim. Among other things, the old man was selling the security of his company. For Lucas, it was annoying to have to share the eyewitness aspect of the story, especially with an Englishwoman. On the other hand, his "exclusives" were more trouble than they were worth, and beside the point now. A little collaboration and corroboration were not necessarily a bad thing. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him he would never be able to approach the Haram without the Palestinian, and someone would have to pay him off several times over.

When Dr. Lestrade had finished regaling the assembled Palestinians with his recent adventures, he allowed himself to be interviewed by Sally Conners.

"Well, I had to pack in a great hurry," he told her. "Then this man appeared"—he indicated Lucas—"and the man who had arranged to drive me turned out to be ... well, I don't know."

"Dr. Lestrade is an expert on the construction of the Haram and the holy sites beneath it," Lucas told her. "Since so many people feel the Haram's about to be blown up, he must have been leaving to avoid controversy. That was it, wasn't it, Lestrade?"

"Well, no," said Lestrade. He thought about it for a moment. "Well, yes. I mean no one's blowing up the Haram. Sensationalistic nonsense. Native rumors. It's a survey for the American Bible-thumpers."

"Blowing up?" asked Sally Conners.

Lucas left her to press Lestrade, who was awkwardly composing a narrative in which he was a marginal figure, brought in arsy-varsy. He found the old guide waiting impatiently, in fear that his clientele would evaporate amid disorder. There was more firing and, over the Armenian Quarter, like some celestial portent, a flare climbed in the sky. Someone must have shot off a flare gun because the someone owned one and the time seemed right. The people on Lucas's corner crouched warily.

Lucas spoke confidentially to Ibrahim. "All the reporters are looking for Salman Rushdie. Everyone knows he was brought here. But no one knows where he is."

Ibrahim looked at Lucas without expression; it was impossible to surprise him with any information, however improbable. He immediately appropriated to himself all intelligence of whatever kind, and his primary assessment involved not accuracy but resale value.

"He was seen at the airport," Lucas continued in his rash, over-confiding manner, "accompanied by Israeli and American bodyguards. Don't you think he must have come to witness the destruction of the holy places?"

Without doubt, the guide liked it. His faded-flannel blue eyes shone in the mixed light. His next utterance was oracular.

"He is here," Ibrahim pronounced. "I have seen him."

"I suppose," Lucas suggested, "the Israelis and the Americans will make him mufti or something. He'll approve a new construction of the Dome and the Aksa in Mecca."

"This is right," said the learned old fellow. "But more is involved." He raised his voice. "Salman Rushdie!" He shouted. "Rushdie has come!"

There was a moment of astonished restraint, and the gathered young men began to cry out and rend their garments.

"Salman Rushdie?" asked the young Sally Conners. She had grown annoyed at having constantly to revise her perception of events. "That's rubbish."

Her observation was not well received. Her own guide grew angry at her.

"He is here!" shouted Ibrahim. "He has come!"

S
ONIA TRIED
following her own sandal prints in the dust. The prints turned out to be ephemeral; there were other tracks and wet spots in the stone. She could no longer remember whether the ground she had covered was of masonry or just rocky earth. She made a slow, careful attempt at retracing her way and then a headlong series of instant intuitive decisions. Neither got her free. On the contrary, after her two attempts she felt farther away from mad George and his light than she had been when she started.

"George!"

Was she hearing laughter? Noises underwent strange distortions as they passed through the walls and passages and grottoes of the place. "George?"

In some chambers there was hardly any echo at all. In others, whatever she called out was repeated in unnatural multiples that would sometimes stop for a few seconds and then resume at a distance, diminishing as the sound was carried farther and farther away.

Not one of the cubicles she passed through was large enough for her to stretch her arms out in front of her. She felt a rush of panic in her throat. Her legs went weak; she thought it must be fear. She cried.

Already her mind was unsteady. She kept thinking that the darkness around her would consume her and turn her into the nothingness it was itself, as though she had come to some ancient order of things where chaos was in the process of being separated from time and event. Chaos was cold.

As long as the light lasted, she thought, she would probably be all right. With darkness, she imagined she would begin to come apart. The place had the kind of darkness that could get inside you and hide you from yourself.

Keep moving or stay still? She decided to keep moving, trying to guide herself by the noises she thought must be coming from outside. They were unrecognizable, ugly noises and it was impossible to tell whether their source was even human. But, she thought, they were better than silence in this darkness.

"George!"

The answer she got did not come from the Christlike youth. Something about the shape of the walls and ceilings gave it a quality like a voice at a'séance or that of a stage magician. It was a voice she vaguely recognized.

"What are you doin' down here, Sonia?" the voice wanted to know. "Not looking for us, I hope."

"I'm lost," she told the voice. The reverberations made it impossible to recognize any voice.

"Who sent you here, Sonia? Was it Lucas?"

"No," Sonia said. "Where are you?"

"Too bloody clever," the man's voice said. He was speaking to someone else. It was as if she weren't supposed to hear him.

Suddenly she heard a serpentine hiss cast its weird sibilant echo in the same room she occupied.

"Sonia!" Now she heard what sounded like the voice of Fotheringill. He spoke softly, without dentalizing, as though he were communicating in a mode of speech to which he had been trained. "Stay wi' me. Back toward the wall."

It was Fotheringill. She froze in her tracks, uncertain whether to answer.

"I'm lost," she said. The unseen Fotheringill hissed at her, demanding silence. She began to edge toward the nearest wall.

Coming under Fotheringill's mercy, she felt like the prey turned over to a predator for protection. But out of panic, fearful loneliness, unreasoning hope, she could not resist doing it.

"You're not lost," the other voice, the one from above, declared. "You're in the temple of Sabazios."

At the same distance, through the same stone filter, she heard laughter and mutterings of affirmation. There were men with him. It sounded as though there were more than a dozen, but all the clues were unreliable.

"Why are you here?" she whispered to Fotheringill. "Do you know there's a—"

Another quick, viperish rush of breath cut her off.

"Sonia?" asked the voice from overhead. "Is someone with you?"

She did not answer but only kept backing toward the wall.

"Your king has become a Muslim, Sonia," said the voice close by. "Did you know that?"

"Well," she said to the voice, "it's all the same to him."

Still hidden, Fotheringill hushed her again.

"Is it?" said the other unseen man. "You'll have to explain that."

When she felt the dusty wall behind her she edged along it, trying to find a door to the next chamber, deathly afraid of encountering Fotheringill. She was trying to keep track of both of the men's locations and figure some concept of her own. It was more than she could handle.

At last she felt a turn in the wall. It seemed to be an opening and she crouched and rushed through it.

"But you know how he thinks," she called out to the secret speaker. "That it's all the same."

She decided to repeat her technique of moving along the walls. With her flashlight off, she had to take each step into utter darkness. There were only sinister, ambiguous voices, somehow promising common humanity in that place, so far from everywhere.

"Who are you?" she called out. Another sibilant silencing from Fotheringill. Wherever he was, he was tracking her, like a cat, in the blackness.

There had to be a pattern to the maze of chambers, and someone confined here long enough, she thought, might work it out. She had no idea whether Fotheringill knew his way around the passageways or not. She knew, she realized, very little about him. She also had the feeling he was much closer now than he had been before.

Then, again from above, she made out a buzz of small curses and comments that seemed to accompany the second voice.

"I'm here to learn," she shouted. Perhaps, she thought, she was discovering something about herself—that, at any risk, she could not abandon herself to darkness and silence. This time Fotheringill did not interrupt her.

"You're nothing but a black drug addict," the voice above her said. It was just a bit clearer now. European, accented. "The country's full of people like you. In the Negev, with your fucking soul food. You're not Jews."

There was a subdued mutter of anger overhead. It was as though some kind of justice was descending on her. In that darkness, full of unseen men, she was tempted to call on Fotheringill. One of the gang.

"I've got as much right here as you," Sonia called. In this particular place, it seemed a questionable assertion. This time Fotheringill hissed at her again.

Someone was going to hurt her, Sonia reasoned. She had lost all sense of where anyone stood, what the plot had been about. She had expected the police or Shin Bet or Mossad. Someone.

"Aren't the police here?" she shouted. Shouted it at the top of her voice.

"Sonia!" she heard Fotheringill whisper at close quarters. "Don't."

It sounded as if he were offering support. But surely, she thought, he was part of Raziel's disastrous plot. He was not alone; he was doing something illegal and desperate. Most likely, she thought, he was planting the bomb.