A Palestine Affair Read online

  “I tried to warn him,” Alice continued. “The families, you know, are very protective, and sometimes vengeful. And as to the boy himself, who knew if he could be trusted not to steal, not to . . . ?”

  “Not to?”

  “Not to stab.”

  Alice buried her face in her hands.

  “Did you know the boy?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see him?”

  “Once, but from a distance. I came to the house. I wasn’t supposed to. Jacob said he didn’t want his lessons interrupted. He opened the door; there was a boy in the far room sitting at a desk. Jacob sent me away.”

  “Do you know the boy’s name?”

  Alice pulled her hands from her face and stared across at Kirsch.

  “I didn’t,” she said, “until your roundup. Everybody in Jerusalem knows it now.”

  Kirsch thanked Alice, paid the bill and hurried from the café. His path was blocked by a procession of priests in long, girdled white gowns, all wearing identical sun hats and talking animatedly to one another in Italian. Kirsch pushed his way through. The boy must be picked up as soon as possible. Kirsch had ordered Harlap to keep an eye on him, but on Friday night, while Kirsch and Joyce were lowering themselves into the abyss of infidelity, Saud had apparently slipped away. In the meantime, until Harlap caught up with the suspect again, Kirsch needed to let Ross know of the breakthrough. Or perhaps he should wait until Saud was in custody.

  The decision was made for him. Ross’s fawn Bentley was parked outside Jaffa Gate. The governor stood beside the car, resplendent in his white uniform. He was deep in conversation with a tall, fair-haired, well-dressed young man whom Kirsch did not know. The two of them were poring over a map that was spread out on the car’s bonnet. At the moment that Kirsch emerged from the Old City, Ross looked up. He gestured toward the crenellated walls, pointing out something to his companion, and then he caught sight of Kirsch. Ross began to address Kirsch when he was still only halfway across the road.

  “Yes, I know. You expect me to be in church. And by rights I should be. Nobby Briant’s reading the lesson over at St. George’s this morning. Promised him I’d be there, but I’m afraid, like everyone else, I’ve been sucked in by the movies.”

  A look of utter bafflement crossed Kirsch’s face.

  “I’m sorry, Captain. I’m being obtuse. This is Mr. Peter Frumkin from the Metropolis Film Corporation.”

  Ross turned to his companion to complete his introductions.

  “Mr. Frumkin, this is Captain Robert Kirsch. You may, I believe, find that you need his assistance on your enterprise even more than mine.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “Mr. Frumkin here would like to use these ancient walls to stage and then screen Titus’s capture of the city. He’d also like to borrow a large number of our British Regiment legionaires, dress ’em up in palliums and helmets and have them stage the assault. What do you think? Shall we let Hollywood come to Jerusalem?”

  “It sounds as if you’ve already decided to go ahead, sir.”

  “Governor Ross has been telling me all about the Pro-Jerusalem Society. The work sounds remarkable, precisely the kind of organization that we like to get behind. And I can assure you, Captain Kirsch, that by the time we’ve finished filming here not a stone will be out of place or a paint mark left where it shouldn’t be.”

  “I believe you.”

  “We’d like to shoot in Jerusalem all next week. Right now we’re down in the desert and we should be done with the camel charge by Thursday. I’ve got three hundred bedouin suited up and ready to go.”

  Kirsch nodded. The stupidity of it! When he turned to face Ross his heart was beating fast.

  “A word, sir, if I may?”

  “Ah.”

  There was an awkward pause and then Frumkin began to roll up his map.

  “My apologies, Mr. Frumkin,” Ross began, “but I’m afraid the captain’s ominous tone suggests this is something that cannot wait.”

  Frumkin waved the rolled map above his head, and a car that had been parked waiting farther down the hill accelerated smoothly toward him. The driver halted, got out and came around to open the door for his boss. Frumkin hesitated, then turned to Kirsch.

  “You’re one of us? Right?” He winked broadly.

  Kirsch, walking a couple of steps behind Ross, pretended that he hadn’t heard.

  16.

  “I’m going away,” Bloomberg said.

  He tugged at his straw hat and pulled the frayed brim down over his eyes.

  “Away from me? Away for good? Or just away?”

  They were outside in the garden, seated at the rusted round table that had been bequeathed to them, along with four rickety wooden chairs, by the house’s former inhabitants. Early in the morning, walking alone, horribly confused but unreasonably happy, as if she couldn’t resist the honeyed new beginning that the warm, lissome day seemed to offer, Joyce had plucked a bunch of wildflowers at the path side. Now, set in a cracked white enamel jar at the table’s center, the purple and yellow blooms drooped like a cluster of tiny bruises.

  “To paint. It has nothing to do with Friday night. Keep seeing him if you want to.”

  She didn’t need his permission—didn’t want it, in fact. She preferred his drunken rage of the previous night to this return to indifference; at least his anger had passion. Perhaps her behavior had surprised him, although she knew that he liked to think of himself as unshockable. He had told her to leave him, but she expected he had never imagined that she would follow through.

  A lizard, not more than two inches long, scuttled up one of the table legs. There was a bowl of ripe figs on the table next to the flowers. Aubrey Harrison had brought them over the previous day, arriving in the middle of Joyce and Bloomberg’s worst argument. Bloomberg’s shouting, if not Joyce’s less histrionic responses, must have been audible halfway down the hillside; even so, Aubrey, out on a morning stroll in the neighborhood, had soldiered on, oblivious. However, by the time he reached the painter’s door, the enormity of what he had somehow contrived to ignore had set in, and he had been too embarrassed to enter. He had set the figs on the doorstep. Joyce glimpsed him through the window, retreating down the path.

  Bloomberg stretched his arm across the table, took Joyce’s hand and stroked the freckled skin just above her wrist.

  “Do you remember that boat we took up the Thames?”

  “The posters-of-London idea? I rowed and you sketched.”

  “Yes, exactly. Well you’ve rowed enough. You shouldn’t have to put up with me anymore.”

  Joyce remembered a cool breeze on the river, no one else in sight, on one bank a tangle of green and on the other cows grazing in a muddy field.

  “I’ll be gone by the end of the week. It’s a money job. ‘The Lost Temples of Petra’ as executed by Sir Mark Bloomberg L.J.C.”

  “Latter-day Jesus Christ?”

  “Lost Jewish Cause.”

  “How long will you be there?”

  “Two, three months, maybe longer.”

  “And I am supposed to remain here?”

  “If you want to go back to London, no one will try to prevent you, except perhaps your ardent Captain Kirsch.”

  Bloomberg tugged at the high collar of his pullover, then wiped his perspiring hands on his corduroy trousers. Why was he wearing such warm clothes on a day like this? It was simply a mark of his perversity, and of their ultimate incompatibility. Joyce could list a half dozen more off the top of her head. She liked to dance, he didn’t. He was tidy, she liked to spread things everywhere. She loved to drive, he said he never wanted to. He hated opera. He hated museums, though she could wander through the long rooms for hours; and yet he would accompany her, if only to tell her continuously how little he was enjoying himself. He found her beloved English countryside too noisy. She was an America
n naïf, taken in by picturesque poverty: “All those damn ducks quacking.” She had no understanding of class.

  A year ago none of these differences would have mattered, but now, she thought, they all contributed to pushing them apart. For five years she’d never doubted once that she loved him, but a year of bitterness, resentment and, worst of all, inattention and unresponsiveness, had disturbed her certainty. Even so, it was possible that she still loved him, love being the resilient commodity that it was.

  But if so, then why had she slept with Robert Kirsch? That, of course, was the one question that Mark hadn’t asked her during yesterday’s explosion. No doubt he thought he knew the answer, even if she didn’t. He would have liked to consider himself one hundred percent responsible for her actions. His self-hatred worked better that way. But there was something else to be recognized, her own autonomous choice, her independent desire, and seeing it in action troubled her even more than Mark’s confidence that it was absent.

  “I’ll stay on in this house,” Joyce said. “I’ve taken to Jerusalem. I’m expecting to get a job.” Surely it couldn’t be long, she thought, before one of Leo Cohn’s friends contacted her.

  Bloomberg appeared relieved.

  “That’s good,” he replied.

  17.

  When night fell, its hostile moon unreasonably bright, Saud hid behind a screen of asbestos sheets that leaned against his uncle’s bakery wall. Peeking out, he glimpsed the face of the policeman who had followed him on Friday, and he shivered with fear. Saud had given him the slip and managed to reach the place where Yaakov had died, but here, only two days later, was the policeman again, a thick-armed squat figure, searching down the empty alleyways. He must have been to Saud’s home, banged on the door, brought his mother, terrified, out of her sleep, then lined his brothers up to confirm once again that Saud was not among them.

  In the end they would arrest him. He would be back in the interrogation room with the English officer, or perhaps he would not make it that far. He knew now how swift his death could be. One knife thrust in the heart, or his throat slit. Saud held his breath, the policeman passed, his boots ringing on the stone steps as he descended the Cardo. Saud waited for silence, and then he entered the bakery through its side door. In darkness, he felt his way past the open mouth of the oven, then crouched on rough stone in a narrow passage between two huge vats, one filled with sesame oil, the other awaiting a new consignment. Among the dark shapes in the corners of the room he thought he saw De Groot stumble and groan, the knife still plunged into his heart. Saud closed his eyes and De Groot was beside him, whispering in his ear as they embraced, murmuring his name, stroking his hair.

  There was nothing to be done. Uncle Kamel would find him when he came to work. The policeman would return and sit in the café opposite, drinking cup after cup of sweet coffee, watching and waiting while his uncle’s flour-whitened hands piled rounds of bread and spilled zaatar into paper twists.

  18.

  It was early on Sunday evening before Kirsh caught up with Ross. Now, they were being driven in Ross’s car down Bethlehem Road, past the Protestant Cemetery and Bishop Gobat’s School, on Mount Zion, and out, away from the Old City, toward North Talpiot. The stars were sprinkled like grains of light, handfuls flung into the face of the night.

  “We have him,” Kirsch said. He sounded blasé. Whenever he was with Ross he found himself involuntarily imitating the governor’s studied nonchalance.

  “Ah.” Ross removed his glasses, produced a folded white handkerchief from the pocket of his tunic, and began to clean the lenses. “Things have speeded up, then?”

  “Absolutely, sir. I believe we know the culprit and I’ve sent Sergeant Harlap to pick him up.”

  “Then you don’t quite ‘have him.’ ”

  “Correct.”

  “And who is our murderer?”

  “The suspect is an Arab boy, sir. Saud al-Sayyid. He was seen in De Groot’s home. We’re searching the area around the house again now. It’s possible that al-Sayyid was De Groot’s lover.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Sixteen. I interrogated him on Friday and let him go, but under watch. Then some new evidence emerged. It’s circumstantial in nature but I think we’ll make fast headway.”

  “Do you now?”

  Ross reached to the breast pocket of his tunic. The space in the back of the car, insulated by a glass screen that partitioned the driver from his passengers, had filled with dead, fetid air. Kirsch thought Ross was about to produce the handkerchief again, this time to wipe his brow, but instead he flourished an envelope.

  “Would you mind very much if I read you something I received this morning from one of our police posts—not your district, I hasten to add?”

  Kirsch smiled thinly.

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “Fine, then.” Ross took off his glasses, removed the letter, and began to read:

  Dear Sir Gerald,

  I beg to thank you in the name of the District Police Force for your very much appreciated gift of a football, which you presented on Friday last at a match, which was arranged for the purpose, on the Barracks Square. The teams were composed of Moslems, Christians, and Jews, captained by (a) Sgt. Schwili (Jew), and (b) P. C. Badawi (Moslem), and it is of interest to note that utmost harmony prevailed through 50 minutes of play. A knowledge of the rules of the game is not a strong point with the District Force at present, but the spirit of fair play and a keenness to be taught is abounding, and instruction in the art of football is being undertaken. Yours etc. etc.

  “ ‘Utmost harmony,’ you see, Robert, and it can sometimes be achieved with a modicum of effort, cheaply and efficiently. That’s the good news. Now, when we light this tinderbox after the arrest of young Saud is announced, the ensuing conflagration could burn down the city. We had better be prepared. Sergeant Schwili and P. C. Badawi may not be shaking hands at the end of the match. A supposedly homosexual Arab boy murders a supposedly homosexual Orthodox Jew who just happens to be the Agudat’s most powerful anti-Zionist spokesman—for money (De Groot’s or somebody else’s), for love, for who-knows-what—and everybody goes home quietly for dinner and a prayer? I don’t think so, old chap.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And to be quite honest, if things really blow here I’m not sure that we’ve got the forces to contain them. Here we are on our ‘sacred mission,’ mandated to bring those less fortunate than ourselves up to scratch, but it can only work if we maintain the illusion that we are in control. An illusion that rests as much upon our well-deserved reputation for fairness as anything else. We are not the Turks. There will be no public hangings. The sad truth is, however, that Palestine is a rather unimportant and neglected outpost of our empire. Although not entirely unimportant. We are not, for example, going to pull out and let the French come in and start hanging around Suez; and in the meantime, while we are here, we can try to stop the Arabs and Jews from slaughtering one another. Nevertheless, as I say, there are, I assure you, positions of far greater authority and renown than my own both within and without the British Empire. What is our garrison here compared to that in India? What have I got in military and police? A handful of aircraft, six armored cars, a gendarmerie of seven thousand men to cover the entire country, and only two hundred of your chaps—that’s not including the Schwilis and the Badawis, who can’t be entirely trusted. And I shall soon run out of footballs. So, lecture over, what do you propose?”

  “Propose?”

  Ross looked down exasperated, as if he were dealing with the dullest boy in class. “About al-Sayyid.”

  Kirsch, in fact, had understood Ross’s poisonous intentions perfectly well from halfway through the letter.

  “Well?”

  “I propose, sir, to have Saud al-Sayyid arrested.”

  “And if someone should tell you that was not a good idea?”

  “Then I might find it necessary to speak to the high commissioner.”

  Kirsch had pla
yed his trump card. It was a dangerous move. Only Lord Samuel had power over Ross. And would he take Kirsch’s side? There was no telling.

  Ross smiled. “Jolly good, Robert. You’re quite right. Stick to your guns. Justice above all.”

  Kirsch, feeling claustrophobic, rolled down his window. The car turned left toward Government House, where, in the moonlight, Kirsch could see the Union Jack on its high pole.

  Ross changed the subject.

  “I’ve asked Mark Bloomberg to go down to Petra for me. I want him to see the temples. I’m not sure that they have ever been represented in oils by an artist of his stature and talent. It’s a major undertaking. He could be away several months.”

  Kirsch felt the blood rush to his cheeks, but there was nothing he could do about that.

  “His wife will accompany him, of course,” Ross continued, “unless . . .”

  The car approached the gates of Government House. Ross tapped on the glass panel.

  “Just one moment,” he told the driver.

  “Unless finances forbid. In addition, the hardships of the Transjordan desert are perhaps unadvisable for a young woman, especially at this time of year. I was thinking, however, that Bloomberg might, well certainly if his wife doesn’t go, need an assistant. Someone to carry his paints and easel, a general dogsbody. Al-Sayyid would be an excellent candidate for the job. And there will be an Arab Legion N.C.O. and four men from the Camel Corps along, in case there’s trouble along the way, or the boy gets a notion to stab someone else. All this, of course, if Bloomberg is agreeable to making the trip at all, and absolutely to travel without—what is Mrs. Bloomberg’s Christian name? Jane. No, Joyce. Contrary chap isn’t he, Bloomberg? Hard to figure. Although I believe I can persuade him. He’s done rather well from our little circle of friends, and the work is truly, truly remarkable. To be honest I’m quite in awe of him, and I’m willing to foot the bill for this rather extravagant excursion. So we’re in accord here?”