"All right. These conspirators meet at Djemal's coffee shop on
David Street. They talk to one another in French, because the
proprietor and the other frequenters of the place only know
Arabic. You know French and Arabic enough to understand a
sentence here and there, so keep your ears wide open. I shan't
show up until a Sikh named Narayan Singh tells me that a certain
Noureddin Ali is in there. He's the bird I'm after. He's a
dirty little murderer, and I'm going to be right pleasant to him.
"You may have to sit in the place all day waiting for me; but
wait until after midnight if you must. Sooner or later Noureddin
Ali is bound to show up. I shall be hard after him. If they
offer you food, take it. Eat with your fingers. Eat like a pig.
Lick the plate, if you like. The nearer mad you seem to be, the
safer you are. After I get there, hang around until I give you
money. Then beat it."
"Where to? I can't go to my room at the hotel in this disguise."
"I've thought of that. You know Cosmopolitan Oil Davey, of
course? He lives at the hotel. I'll get word to him that he may
expect a messenger from me after dark tonight. He'll leave word
with the porter downstairs, who'll take you to Davey's room. You
can tell Davey absolutely anything. He's white."
"Well, I think I can execute that maneuver. What's task
number two?"
"To sit on the TNT! But one thing at a time is enough. Let's
attend to this one first. Ah! Here comes Templeton!"
"Damn you, Grim!" said a calm voice in the doorway. A tall, lean
man in major's uniform with the blue tabs of the medical staff
strode in. He had the dried-out look of the Sudan, added to the
self-reliance that comes of deciding life and death issues at a
moment's notice.
"The hospital is crowded with patients, and here you immobilize
me for half a morning. I can't pretend to set a compound
fracture in ten minutes, you know! Why couldn't you break your
neck and have me sign a death certificate?"
"Didn't occur to me," said Grim. "But never mind, doc. You need
a rest. Here's tobacco, lots to read, and an armchair. Lock
yourself in and be happy."
"Who's this?" asked Templeton, looking down at me.
"Deaf and dumb poor devil, earning a few piastres by working for
the Intelligence."
"Spy, eh? He looks fit for honest work if he had all his
faculties. Is he dumb as well as deaf, or because he's deaf?"
"Dunno," said Grim. "He never speaks."
"Perhaps I can do something for him. Suppose you leave him here
with me. I can give him a thorough examination instead of
wasting my time here."
"He's got a job of work to do right now," said Grim.
"Does he know the sign language? Have you any way of telling him
to come and see me at the hospital?"
"I give him written instructions in Arabic."
"That so? I'll look at his ears--tell you in a minute whether
it's worth while to come to me."
He took my head between strong, authoritative hands and tilted
it sidewise.
"Hello! What's this?"
The Arab head-dress I was wearing shifted and showed
non-Arab symptoms.
"Open that bag of mine, will you, Grim, and pass me that big pair
of forceps you'll find wrapped in oiled paper on top of
everything. There's something I can attend to here at once."
It was an uncomfortable moment. Grim never cracked a smile. He
dug out the instrument of torture and gave it to Templeton. But
there were two points that occurred to me, in addition to the
knowledge that nothing whatever was the matter with my ear.
Doctors in good standing, who are usually gentlemen, don't
operate without permission; and the forceps were much too big
for any such purpose. So I sat still.
"Um-m-m! What he really needs is a red-hot needle run down close
to the ear-drum. It wouldn't take five minutes, or hurt him--
much. After that I think he'd be able to hear perfectly.
Suppose we try."
"I can wait ten minutes yet," Grim answered.
"Very well. I've a platinum needle in the bag. I'll get out the
spirit-lamp and we'll soon see. To be candid with you, I don't
believe the man's any more deaf than you or I."
"If you run a hot needle through the lobe of his ear well
find out whether he can really talk or not," said Grim in
his pleasantest voice. "If he's shamming I don't mind.
What we need in this service is a man who can endure without
betraying himself."
"Well, we'll soon see."
I began to hate Grim pretty cordially. I hated him more when
Suliman came in, dressed for the street in a rather dirty cotton
smock, with a turban in place of his fez. He told the boy to
hold the wooden handle of a paper-knife behind my ear to prevent
the hot needle from going too far on its sizzling journey.
It didn't seem to me the way to reciprocate volunteer secret
service. Suliman's grin at the prospect of seeing a man
tortured was enough to provoke murder. I brushed the boy aside,
fly-fashion, got up, crossed the room, and sat down again in
the corner.
"Good enough!" laughed Grim. "You'll do."
"Yes, I think he'll do," agreed Templeton.
But I took no notice. I had seen too many games lost and won
with the last card. Templeton looked down at Suliman:
"Tell him the game's over. He may talk now."
"Mafish mukhkh!" [No brains!] the boy answered, grinning and
tapping his own forehead. "Magnoon!" [Mad!]
"I think I can trust them both," said Grim, smiling in my
direction. "All right, old man; time out! If you'd spoken once
there'd have been nothing more between you and a life of safety
and respectability!"
"Whereas," said Templeton, "you may now be unsafe and an outlaw
and enjoy yourself! Are you sure they haven't marked him?" he
asked Grim.
"Sure! Why should they suspect a tourist? But I've taken
precautions. Word is on the way to the hotel to forward all his
mail to Jaffa until further notice." He laughed at me again. "I
hope you're not expecting important letters!"
Suliman had evidently been well schooled in advance, for at a nod
from Grim he came over and took my hand, as if I were blind in
addition to the other supposed infirmities. He led me out by a
back-door, across a yard into an alley, which we followed as far
as a main road and then turned toward the Jaffa Gate. Looking
back once I saw Grim in his Shereefian uniform striding along
behind us; but where the road forked he took the other turning.
There is contentment in walking disguised through crowded
streets, even when you are in tow of eight-year-old iniquity that
regards you as a lump of baggage to be pushed this and that way.
Suliman plainly considered me a rank outsider, only admitted into
the game on sufferance. Having said I was "magnoon" he lived up
to the assertion, and warned people to make way for me if they
did not want to be bitten and go mad, too; so as a general rule
I received a pretty wide berth. But it was fun, in spite of
Suliman. It was like seeing the world through a peep-hole. Men
and women you knew went by without suspecting they were
recognized, and in a puzzling sort of way the world, that had
been your world yesterday, seemed now to belong wholly to other
people, while you lived in a new sphere of your own.
We had to go slowly as we approached the Jaffa Gate, for the
crowd was dense there, and a line of Sikhs was drawn across the
gap where the street passes through the city wall. It was the
gap the Turks once made by tearing down the wall to let the
Kaiser through, when he made that famous meek and humble
pilgrimage of his. The Sikhs were searching all comers for
weapons, and we had to wait our turn.
Outside the gate, on the left-hand as you faced it, was the usual
line of boot-blacks--the only cheap thing left in Jerusalem--a
motley two dozen of ex-Turkish soldiers, recently fighting the
British gamely in the last ditch, and now blacking their boots
with equal gusto, for rather higher pay. Some of them still wore
Turkish uniforms. Two or three were redheaded and blue-eyed, and
almost certainly descended from Scotch crusaders. (The whole
wide world bears witness that when the Scots went soldiering they
were efficient in more ways than one.)
The rest of the crowd were mainly peasantry with basket-loads of
stuff for market; but there was a liberal sprinkling among them
of all the odds and ends of the Levant, with a Jew here and
there, the inevitable Russian priest, and a dozen odd lots,
of as many nationalities, whom it would have been difficult
to classify.
And there was Police Constable Bedreddin Shah. You could not
have missed noticing him, although I did not learn his name until
afterwards. He came swaggering down the Jaffa Road with all the
bullying arrogance of the newly enlisted Arab policeman. He
shoved me aside, calling me a name that a drunken donkey-driver
would hesitate to apply to a dog in the gutter. He was on his
way to the lock-up that stands just inside the gate, and I wished
him a year in it.
As he plunged into the crowd that checked and surged immediately
in front of the line of Sikhs, a small man in Arab costume with
the lower part of his face well covered by the kaffiyi,* rushed
out from the corner behind the bootblacks and drove a long knife
home to the hilt between the policeman's shoulder-blades. I
wasn't shocked. I wasn't even sorry. [*Head-dress that hangs
down over the shoulders.]
Bedreddin Shah shrieked and fell forward. Blood gushed from the
wound. The crowd surged in curiously, and then fell back before
the advancing Sikhs. A British officer who had heard the
victim's cry came spurring his horse into the crowd from inside
the gate. In his effort to get near the victim he only added to
the confusion.
The murderer, who seemed in no particular hurry, dodged quietly
in and out among the swarm of bewildered peasants, and in thirty
seconds had utterly disappeared. A minute later I saw Grim
offering his services as interpreter and stooping over the dying
man to try to catch the one word he was struggling to repeat.