Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "Don't you think they'll close the Strip?" he asked Fotheringill.

  "Why should they do that?"

  "Haven't you noticed? There's something of a riot in progress."

  "Then we go through Negev," said Omar. "Cross at Nitzana. Or Taba."

  "Taba," said Fotheringill. "That would be a bonny drive." He turned to Lucas. "Professor Lestrade can continue his studies in Cairo. He has arrangements there."

  "Myself," Lucas said, "I wasn't planning a trip to Cairo."

  "Weren't ya?" Fotheringill asked. "Well, you can ride with us partway. Out of the trouble, see. Maybe you'll remember the words of that poem."

  "Maybe," Lucas said.

  He was trying to think of a way out. In the streets around him, a virtual jihad was starting up, which meant that someone had already spread the words that were meant to start the war—the holy one, the war at the end of the world.

  It also appeared to him that Fotheringill and Omar were about to dispose of Lestrade, who probably knew as much as anyone about the planting of the bomb. They would be armed. And he had walked into it.

  "I'd better use the phone," he said cheerfully.

  "You'd better fookin' nae," Fotheringill told him. "I mean," he added, more politely and in standard English, "it would be unwise."

  "I hope we don't have to go through bloody Taba," Lestrade said. "If there's one place I despise, it's Eilat."

  "Don't you have something stored in the hospice?" Lucas asked. "Equipment? Shouldn't we check with the porter?" Fotheringill and Omar watched him stand up.

  Lestrade was unhelpful. "I don't think so, Lucas. Everything's right here."

  Having got as far as the roof, Lucas called across the narrow space that separated the two buildings. During their exchange, Lucas was fairly sure he had heard Lestrade address the porter as Boutros.

  "Boutros!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. The noise in the street had not abated. "Boutros, can you help us, please?"

  Over the street cries, he was pleased to detect a surly answer. Fotheringill and Omar looked at each other.

  "It can be done here," Fotheringill said very slowly, probably to accommodate Omar's English. "Right here, understand?"

  But by the time Omar had translated it all in his head, Boutros, the Austrians' Palestinian porter, was at the door.

  "How about helping us get some of this gear downstairs, Boutros? There's so much of it. And I'll get the car."

  Boutros, who had plainly been asleep, looked horrified. Then his expression changed from astonishment to rage.

  "Look," said Lestrade, again unhelpfully, "that's not his job."

  "Sure it is," Lucas said. He assumed a colonialist stance. "Omar, you and Boutros get the bags. The professor and I will get the car." He nearly lifted Lestrade off his feet.

  "But I don't know where the car is," Lestrade protested. When Omar and Fotheringill stood up, Lucas shoved Lestrade out on his rooftop. A broken bottle landed a few feet from them. There were police klaxons sounding from the streets beyond the walls.

  "They aren't going to take you to Cairo, Lestrade," Lucas told him. "They're going to kill you. Either at Kfar Gottlieb or in the desert."

  Fotheringill stood watching with some amusement while Lucas conveyed the news.

  "What?" Lestrade asked. "Kill me? Kill me? What?"

  Omar and Boutros were arguing over something. It might even have been over who would carry the luggage.

  "Kill you," Lucas continued. "And me. The way they killed Ericksen. Ericksen and I are Americans, Lestrade. You're only a Brit. Brits die all the time, like ordinary foreigners. Killing an American is heavy shit. So you can reason that if they've already got Ericksen and they're going to get me—you've had it."

  Of course, Lucas was bluffing. Americans were beginning to get killed all the time now too, just like all the other ordinary foreigners.

  "What?" Professor Lestrade kept demanding. "What?"

  Lucas noticed that Fotheringill, who was now standing beside them, appeared increasingly amused. He was either a glutton for entertainment or extremely stupid. Perhaps, Lucas thought, he was crazy. Or perhaps his amusement was derived from the ease and speed with which, as an ex-SAS man, he could dispatch them all. There was no time to waste.

  Above all, Lucas was concerned with saving himself. But it would be a good idea, he thought, if he could get Lestrade out with him. For one thing, Lestrade would know where the bomb had been set and might be able to help unset it. For another, although Lestrade was a prick, a fascist and an anti-Semite, it would be the Christian thing to save him. Or the Jewish thing. The Judeo-Christian thing.

  From where he stood on Lestrade's roof, Lucas could not make out the regular Border Police post over the Damascus Gate. It was probably manned, he thought, but blacked out. If things had gotten bad enough, it was possible that the IDF had pulled back temporarily from the Palestinian parts of town, to secure Jewish residential areas.

  But IDF doctrine was not defensive even in the short run. It was likely that regardless of the riot's extent, the Army would shortly be taking up positions inside the walls, in Palestinian areas. There were also scattered Jewish enclaves in the Muslim Quarter, yeshivas and flag-showing oddments like General Sharon's apartment. They would shortly come under siege, and the IDF, being the IDF, would risk a great deal to prevent any loss of Jewish life if Palestinians attacked them.

  "How do you propose to get to your car?" Lucas asked Fotheringill. A tissue of fiction remained around the idea of Fotheringill's driving them to safety, and Lucas decided to keep it in play.

  "You let me worry about that, laddie."

  Omar had gotten rid of Boutros, harried him back to the Austrian hospice. But where, wondered Lucas, could Fotheringill's car be? It was impossible to drive the Old City streets as far as the hospice. They would have to walk through the mob. And even then, driving would not be easy.

  The thing was to keep Fotheringill and Omar from killing them right in Lestrade's apartment. They had that option, should they decide it necessary. The riot would cover untoward events.

  "Well," Lestrade said, "I suppose there's no hope for my poor plants. So I'm ready, what?"

  The Old City walls, thought Lucas. The IDF would surely have secured them. There would be spotters along the length of them, unseen. In the distance, he heard the chant of the IDF's Golani Regiment.

  From the direction of the sound, the elite Golani troops were coming through Herod's Gate. They would either be securing a strong point or getting someone out. They might also be the opening wedge of a major attack on the rioters. If anyone was using rubber bullets that night, it would be the reserve units in the rear. The Golani favored bullets of the full-metal-jacketed variety.

  "Golani," Omar said to Fotheringill. Fotheringill looked at his watch.

  What, Lucas wondered, if the commandos came within earshot and he called for help? It might get them out, free of Fotheringill. It would also alert the rioters of their presence. But the rioters were a lesser evil. Then he thought of what had happened to Hal Morris in Nuseirat.

  Suddenly there was a crashing of wood and glass downstairs, and for a moment Lucas thought the crowds might be rushing Christian hospices, the Austrian one included. But the shouts of the men who came charging up the hospice steps and across the landing to Lestrade's were in Hebrew. And the men who rushed into the apartment were in uniform.

  Golani, Lucas thought. He would never think badly of them again. At least for publication.

  The soldiers filled the apartment and crisply took up positions on the roof. Neither Fotheringill nor Omar seemed disturbed or even surprised by the arrival of the IDF.

  "See here," said Dr. Lestrade, "this is Christian property."

  He's going to do it, thought Lucas. He's going to formally protest having his ass saved. Lucas could still hear the cadences of troops a few blocks away. There were shots. Then he noticed there was something slightly askew about the conduct of the soldiers in the flat.
r />   For one thing, although at least one of the men wore a Golani patch, they did not have the squared-away look of the paratroopers. They must, he thought, be an outfit that had been called in to support the general offensive, a kind of rescue squad. Some of the men were wearing tzitzit. Others looked incurably civilian, even by IDF standards. They seemed defeated by their own equipment, its snaps and buckles, and held their weapons haphazardly. They might be volunteers, Lucas thought, scholars and urban settlers from outside the Jewish Quarter, on a mission to rescue their brothers and colleagues. In which case, Lucas wondered, what were they doing here? He counted ten of them.

  "Car secure, then?" Fotheringill asked one of the soldiers.

  "Follow us," one of the men answered in North American English.

  So they were, Lucas saw, not regulars but reserves and guerrillas.

  "Watch these two," Fotheringill said. He meant Lucas and the deeply confused Dr. Lestrade. "They're the passengers."

  One of the military men took Lucas by the sleeve.

  "And this bastard," Fotheringill said, pointing to Lestrade.

  Something occurred to Lucas. "Surely," he asked Lestrade, "you knew about the bomb?"

  "Bomb?" asked Lestrade, inflecting the very pinnacle of irritated outrage that was his inheritance. " Bomb? A bomb? Certainly not."

  It was difficult not to believe him.

  62

  WITH RAZIEL passed out on her sofa, Sonia had another look at the diagram she had found, tracing the passages marked on it.

  "Kaddosh!" she said aloud. Then she found herself thinking of the stairway that led down from the madrasah where Berger had lived. It struck her as altogether possible that the passages marked a connection between the cellars under Berger's and under the Haram. The apartments once belonged to the grand mufti, after all.

  And Berger had said something, it seemed to her, about connecting passages. Then, of course, the two intrusive young militants, presumably the people with whom Raziel had involved them, had shown a particular interest in that building, an interest that might have had its technical side.

  She might, she thought, add her intuition to what the police knew about the bomb plot. But if she simply picked up the telephone and started telling a voice on duty what she suspected, she might succeed in doing no more than getting arrested. And although she really believed in the complicity of Shin Bet with the bombers, it was never clear whom one was talking to. She decided to get to the madrasah and see what could be done there.

  On Sonia's television set, the evening news was reporting disturbances in the Old City. It was also announcing curfews in sections of town and ordering the members of certain security units to duty. Sonia knew that if she was going to go, she had better get moving before the police closed off the streets completely.

  She changed into the clothes that gave her the run of the eastern city and drove the Dodge van into the center. She parked illegally at a construction site at the Old City end of Jaffa Road and set out for the Jaffa Gate. It might, she knew, be the last she saw of the van; civil disturbances consumed automobiles as Moloch had devoured infants in his day. She slid open the side door, took from the van's utility chest a flashlight, a wrench and a hammer, and carried them beneath her djellaba. Hurrying by the police post at the wall, she passed unhindered and turned right toward the Armenian Quarter.

  The gates of the quarter were secured by the time Sonia arrived—the Armenians hunkering down for trouble. From every mosque in the city, loudspeakers gave forth sacred rage. There were rifle shots, cries of grief and anger, the ululations of women.

  At the passageway's turning near Zion Gate was an IDF checkpoint. Sonia had a Palestinian identity card she had bought from a moneychanger near the Damascus Gate, but she spoke both Hebrew and Arabic haltingly. The card identified her as a resident of the Old City.

  The soldier who searched her bag was a fair-haired Ashkenazi who took her bad Hebrew for granted. She told him she was going home from her hotel maid's job in the western city, and he let her pass. In the squares and spotless plazas of the Jewish Quarter, married couples had gathered, listening to the growing roar of the riot. Here and there, groups sang patriotic songs. It was "Never Again" in tableau vivant—quiet, armed determination. Everyone more or less faced the Western Wall and the Haram beyond it, the enemy's shrine and temple, whence he would come with his heart full of murder.

  There were not many children in sight. One of them, a boy of about ten with a crew cut and sidelocks, spat toward Sonia's skirts as she hurried past him.

  The next checkpoint she had to pass was in the tunnel that led from the Western Wall plaza to the bazaar of El-Wad. It had been strongly reinforced with busloads of soldiers; a line of armored personnel carriers were pulled up against one wall of the tunnel.

  A middle-aged bearded reservist who looked like a rabbi quickly checked her card and directed her into the deserted labyrinth. Its length was full of echoing, threatening noises, and when she emerged from it, she saw flames. For no reason she could imagine, someone concealed in the shadows of the burning building threw a fist-sized chunk of metal at her; it hit a wall, ricocheted and rolled over the cobblestones. Perhaps because she was a lone woman, coming from the Jewish Quarter.

  El-Wad in the Muslim Quarter was crowded, lit by flashlights and camp lanterns. She heard unpleasant laughter and the frightened boastfulness of young men. A helicopter appeared overhead, its beam illuminating the pale, contorted faces of the youthful rioters, taking them by surprise. A whirl of curses like winged insects flew up toward where it had passed, as though drawn by the rotors.

  The wooden street door of the building where she had lived with Berger was bolted. Some time before, the place had been taken over by Israeli militants, who had connected it by a series of walkways with a street off Jewish Quarter Lane, and as far as she knew the militants still occupied it. A Star of David had flown from one of the interior balconies, visible from the street. Now it was gone.

  There seemed a deserted quality to the place, which made her wonder whether anyone at all had found a purpose for it. She tried sounding the ornate Ottoman-style knocker on the carriage gate. When she had knocked for a minute or so, she heard the bolt sliding free.

  The door opened and a tall, thin young man of Christlike aspect stood before her. It was not likely that the young man would soon come in glory to judge the quick and the dead; rather, his slack smile and purple mantle suggested contemporary, vulgar notions of the Christian savior. His mantle appeared to have been appropriated from the window of a no-star hotel, its curtain rings still in place. His smile, though genuinely welcoming, gave evidence of lax oral hygiene.

  "Praise Jesus," he told Sonia.

  "Right," she said, and passed inside. There was no sign of the Sudanese children who lived in the madrasah before. It seemed to have become a refuge for the homeless: all along the courtyard, pallets and bindles were stashed, sometimes attended by their owners, who variously wept, prayed or slept. It seemed an odd use for the militants to find for their Muslim Quarter property.

  "What happened to the young Israelis who took the building over?" she asked him.

  They had gone, the youth said. Scientists excavating the ancient foundations of the buildings across the street had replaced them. Now these savants too were gone.

  "What are you people doing here?"

  The young transcendentalist explained that his friends were being paid to watch the tunnel entrances until such time as the scientists might want to use them again.

  "Tunnel entrances?" Sonia asked.

  The young man led her to the foyer she had passed a hundred times when Berger was in residence. Three narrow rising steps followed the base of one of the building's columns, forming a little alcove the local children had used in games of hide-and-seek. But now there was a rectangle of burlap over the opening. When Sonia brushed it aside she saw that the aboveground steps were only the top of a flight that curved down into the damp darkness beneath the qu
arter's streets.

  Ten steps down was another wooden door, and it was locked fast. Any number of attempts on her part, assisted by the young pseudo-Christus, failed to shake it. Finally, with more assistance from the young man and his friends, she succeeded in forcing it open. An intoxicating smell of ancient stone ascended from the spiral passage.

  The street that led to the Bab al-Ghawanima was about fifty yards away. She shone her flashlight on the diagram and saw that any tunnels branching out from the old madrasah might well lead to the foundation of one or another of the Haram's bordering buildings.

  The property had belonged to al-Husseini during the British mandate; there was every reason to think he had found a network of passageways useful during the strife of that period. And if the militants who had seized the madrasah had finished their work, it made sense to conceal their access to the Haram in what appeared to be a derelict gathering place for the religiously deluded, behind a series of locked doors.

  Following the beam of her light, she set out. After a dozen steps or so, she realized that the squatters of the madrasah intended to follow her down.

  "Beat it," she told them. "Fuck off. Not you," she told the Jesus look-alike when, chastened, he started back with the rest. "You come with me."

  The steps, their well narrowing, descended for what seemed a hundred feet, deep enough for Sonia to feel the pressure in her ears. A utility lantern was burning at the mouth of a passage that seemed to descend gradually from the foot of the stairs. From somewhere not far away, but distorted by the hollows and vaults, came a sound like the cries of a crowd and what might be gunfire.

  Sonia entered the passageway, humming "Makin' Whoopie" as she went. She had not gone thirty feet when the passage divided again. She had a look left and right in the flashlight beams, but it was little help. To follow the line of the Bab al-Ghawanima, it seemed that she ought to bear right.

  "What's your name, sir?" she asked the imitation of Christ behind her.

  His name turned out to be George.