‘Igor, stop this nonsense,’ Ham said. ‘Let’s talk.’
There was a flatness about his voice. He wasn’t talking in my direction.
‘You aren’t going anywhere, Igor,’ Ham said. ‘I can see you.’
He was a liar, because he couldn’t.
I saw him. He was looking the other way.
He was one of the statues with a head on. He was standing about a couple of hundred yards away, on what seemed to be a street corner. He was standing on a plinth. I edged forward and looked where he was looking. A long way off, a good half-mile off, a cluster of lights twinkled. They were the lights of Foka Hirsch and his neighbors. I suddenly realized what he thought I was up to. You didn’t have to lose yourself among the sand dunes. From here you could simply keep to the coast and turn inland at the lights.
I turned and looked the other way. The other way was good, too. The jetty was the other way. People were still walking up and down it; mosque floodlit, restaurants and galleries apparently open …
I began to move the other way, sideways, watching him. There was a basilisk quality about him as he stood on the plinth. I suddenly remembered this quality of stillness. He’d always been very economical in his movements; except that when he moved he moved fast. He only had to turn for an instant and he’d see me. A moving cat would have been visible enough in this dead city. He stood so still it was hard to keep an eye on him. I had to blink to see him. Presently I couldn’t see him. The ground level seemed to be changing alarmingly. I was going downhill. This area was evidently only partly excavated; there were shafts about and newly dug holes. I shuffled cautiously about and skirted them. The glow of the floodlighting was no use here. It hadn’t been much use, anyway, in revealing the ground, or more importantly the parts of it that had been removed.
I came quite suddenly on a part that had been removed. My foot went in it, and fractionally later my behind, sharply, on a spike of rock – fortunately without sound. I was sitting in a long shelf that had been sliced out, and I remained there, watching and listening. Nothing. I waited a little longer and got moving again. Between me and the jetty I could see a low building. It gave the appearance of a solid huddle that one could hide in or about while investigating the scene further. As I drew nearer I saw excavation work had evidently been going on recently, the ground pitted with holes. There were planks across the deeper ones. I crossed a plank and looked in through the doorway of the building. It was roofless but inside was a maze of rooms; corridors, a flight of steps going down, plenty of window spaces to watch from. Not a good idea to be stuck in a building, though. I needed one good look to see that the coast was clear before sprinting for the jetty. It had to be a careful look; so I went out again, and took a bearing on the main street, and decided to get in the lee of the building to view it more thoroughly.
This meant crossing another plank, and then a larger one, a square sheet of wood with a large stone on the edge of it. I began to do this, except that the sheet wasn’t of wood, and I didn’t cross it. The sheet folded and fell with me and the stone, and a shower of smaller stones, down the shaft that it was covering.
I fell and fell, like Alice in Wonderland, and landed at the bottom, right way up, with a bone-jarring thud. The large stone and the sheet of cardboard had landed ahead of me, but the smaller ones continued cascading down for some seconds afterward. The moon was shining brightly down the shaft, and my arms were weirdly raised to it as if in supplication. There was an open space ahead of me. I got my arms down and felt about in it, and then poked a foot out. There didn’t seem to be any ground beyond. I must be on a platform of some kind. I looked up at the moon again, and found that my mouth was open, and closed it, and licked sand off my lips.
My wits were so scattered I remained looking at the moon for some moments, and then into the darkness round me; then slowly lowered myself to a sitting position, poked about further with my feet, and found ground. I didn’t trust it too much after what had happened, so I put weight warily on it, and found more of it, and stood up and looked at the shaft again. In the moonlight the lower bit of it was streaked with soot. So was the platform I’d landed on.
I felt in my pocket for a lighter, flicked it, and looked about in the little flame. I seemed to be in somebody’s kitchen, most probably a Crusader lady’s, hurriedly vacated in 1265. The fireplace was set in the wall; it seemed to be the business section of a cooking range, and the stone platform was the rest of it. It extended for a few feet on either side.
In the flame of the lighter I saw that the backs of my hands were bleeding; I’d evidently held them up to slow the fall down the shaft. My hair was full of sand and grit. The cardboard had fallen on the ground, also right way up, and painted on it were the words ‘DANGER – KEEP OFF.’ The stone had been there to keep it down; I remembered the sound of it as it fell down the shaft, a bouncing and booming sound, with a double thump at the bottom. Accompanied by the percussion of my own arrival, it must have sounded like a landslide above.
Out of here, fast! I looked about to see how the ladies had managed in 1265. There was a corridor, with heaps of rubble in it, and a few openings off, all blocked by fallen masonry. The stairs weren’t blocked, thank God, the rubble evidently cleared from them.
I looked up and saw a suggestion of chalky moonlight at the top. Then I looked more closely at the stairs to see that they were all there, put out the lighter, and went up.
I emerged into a small hall with an opening into a corridor and a maze of rooms; and with a little sigh I recognized the old place. It was the one I’d first looked in, that I didn’t want to be caught in, and the flight of stairs I’d just come up had been the ones I’d seen going down. Ah, well, it seemed to have been intended that I should view the kitchen, even if by the shorter route – by no means an out-of-the-way route on this grotesque evening – so I gritted my teeth and gibbered a little and waggled sandy eyebrows, did all this in a northerly direction through the window opening there, while looking to see if anything was doing.
I looked just long enough to establish that something was definitely doing. A black object was bobbing and weaving in my direction. Still gibbering, I looked about and decided against the door and in favour of the opposite window, and exited through it. This brought me to the open shaft, and I spat in it before leaving it briskly behind. With the house solidly in between there was no need for concealment, so I made good speed, till my nerve ran out, and then I crouched and looked for him.
I couldn’t see him. He wouldn’t have reached the house yet. Panting quietly in the darkness, I suddenly realized that there was no reason why he should. Nothing to pinpoint where the sound had come from; only that it had come from near the jetty. It might have given him ideas about the jetty, of course; and this was quite right, because it had.
He showed up presently – not by the way he’d approached. He’d swung round the house. He was making no attempt at concealment. He was talking to himself, quite loudly, and flapping his arms. He was walking in an odd, stumping fashion, without particular haste.
There was an area of light before the jetty and he got to it and stood looking about. He was rubbing his face, rubbing it all over. He began patrolling up and down, covering the approach to the jetty. He came gradually out of the light, and stopped, to my relief.
He called, ‘Igor! You are making a terrible mistake, Igor.’
There was a bleating quality to his voice as if he were giving an unaccustomed public address, and his arms were still flapping.
‘Do you want to destroy a life, Igor? Do you want to do that?’
I looked about and wondered what to do if he came on. The immediate locality offered some leeway. A number of small walls and stumps stood about. It would be possible to crawl out of it, if one did it slowly: sideways, in the direction from which he had come, the direction of Foka Hirsch’s …
If it not a life without merit, Igor. You don’t have all the facts. Let me explain the facts, Igor. Only, for God’s
sake, I can’t stand yelling here all night! ‘he said, with something like a return to normality.’ Look, you have had a shock. I understand that. You don’t want to talk with me. But at least answer, so I know you are there.’
Quite. And so would he be, moments later.
I’d been outthinking the wrong man. This was no Patel, by no means so fertile or subtle in plan or suggestion. He rarely suggested anything. He waited for things to happen. I recalled Michael Sassoon telling me of a similar pattern in his career. There had been no flights of intuition – just slogging work and some luck. He had never predicted snags. As snags showed up, he had demolished them, and moved on to the next. His experimental initiatives had been similarly simple, with plenty of loopholes. When loopholes showed up, he had covered them.
As this evening: I remembered him opening the door to me. He’d had a towel on. Well, he’d just had a shower, and probably needed one after his cruise through the orange groves (and so did I; I could smell myself sweating in the unpleasantly humid night). He must have been as shaken as I, but he’d let me do all the work, blinking slowly as I came out with the heaven-sent scenario featuring Patel.
He’d gone on letting me do it. With only the slightest nudge here and there, I’d convinced myself I’d be better off with him at the concert than running about Rehovot telling my story to security men. He’d let me cleverly box Patel out of the ring; had responded to all my initiatives calmly and cautiously, awaiting what God might send next. Except that the news of Patel at the Wix had shaken him. A very nasty loophole. I remembered him laboriously working out the implications. Patel had by-passed his house; had gone from the Wix to the Sassoons’; had seen him, then. Well, it was a loophole, and it needed covering. Perhaps it was while worrying how to do it that he had slipped into his rash disclosure.
And this was much worse. The Patel problem was capable of solution. (He could claim, after all, that he was doing what Patel was doing: following somebody who was following me – an insane enough spectacle but not impossible.) What he had told me offered no loophole. This was a cast-iron snag of the kind requiring obliteration.
I watched the strange tanklike figure flinging his arms as he continued to harangue me. ‘Igor, please answer me. I know you’ll regret it otherwise. I need your help. I need advice! How could I harm you? You surely know me well enough. Believe me, Igor!’
It was hard to know what to believe. It was hard to believe that this enormously distinguished man could have got himself in such a mad position, anyway. But distinguished men were getting themselves in mad positions everywhere. President Nixon was in one at the moment. Willy Brandt, a wiser and better-conditioned man (they’d even given him a Nobel Prize for being so good and kind), was in another: a trusted adviser had turned out to be a spy. In a world where the wise so ludicrously stumbled and the beggars were buying the banks, it seemed as well to keep all options open. So I thought Ham had better tell me about his elsewhere. I was already moving elsewhere, past a low wall and a pedestal and a fallen pillar. After about fifty yards, I looked back and saw him still haranguing me in the darkness, and continued forward, on my stomach.
2
I crossed the main street at its darkest point and cut across to the north of the town. Plain sailing here: hardly anything excavated. I came to hummocky land that wasn’t excavated at all, grass still bushy from the winter rains, and went briskly across it. There was a ruined watchtower on the skyline, which looked a useful observation point. I made for it.
A sickening but ovious enough fact hit me at the watchtower. The watchtower was set in the wall. The wall continued round, as did the moat. The Crusader town was enclosed on three sides; the sea was on the fourth, and the Crusaders had controlled the sea (which accounted for so many of them being under slabs in the West instead of the East). There was no way out in this direction.
I remembered Ham having said as much: ‘You’re not going anywhere Igor.’ But wait. He’d been here and I hadn’t; on the other hand, I was the historian and he wasn’t. I knew enough to recall that Crusader strongholds had more than one gate. They had gates in all walls: postern gates at the least, for surprise sorties. I set out to look for one.
The watchtower was a shade to seaward; no need for sorties this way, so I beat to landward and, to my satisfaction, within minutes came on a finger post, which read clearly in the moonlight, ‘TO NORTH POSTERN.’ This was where the knowledge came in, and what put the historians that touch ahead at the post.
The finger post pointed farther east, and I scurried along there, peering at the wall. Its character changed presently: the ground dipped away and the keying of the masonry altered to accommodate the arch and the steps down. At the same moment, I saw another sign, fingering directly at it – also clear, but not quite so clear. This was because there were more words on it, and they were smaller. It took some time to decipher all the small words: ‘NORTH POSTERN – NOTE SORTIE EXIT COMPLETELY BLOCKED, PROBABLY DURING ASSAULT OF BAYBARS I (1265).’
Well, bugger Baybars, and also Louis IX, the bungling fool. He deserved to have lost, and I was glad he had. Getting his sortie exit blocked. He’d blocked me, anyway. It was true I wasn’t going anywhere. Also, where the devil was Ham?
In the last excited minutes I hadn’t thought about him, but he surely wouldn’t still be haranguing me in the darkness. I came out of the dip in the ground and looked about. There was an arrow slit in the wall above the postern, and the remains of a little guard position; the rest of it was on the ground amid other debris from the wall.
I climbed up it, keeping in the shadow of the wall, and had a good look all round. Nothing was moving in the Crusader town. I watched for several minutes, perfectly still, and then inched cautiously higher and looked along the wall.
It sloped away several hundred yards toward the sea. Bits of it had broken off, and through the gaps I could glimpse the floodlit moat below – a good forty feet below, flat and dry and hard-looking. I couldn’t see the end of the moat. I could see where the wall ended. A hump of masonry loomed distantly, evidently the remains of a tower. It took some moments of peering to see that it probably was in the water; a faint luminescence indicated foam in that direction.
Hope began to swell. Of course. The whole lot ended in the water: tower, wall, moat. All Louis’s works ended in the water. The water didn’t even seem far below. It ought to be possible to get to the tower and either clamber down or swim round to the beach on the other side – the Foka Hirsch side …
I came down off the wall and set off there briskly. I found I was going downhill, which made sense. Everything made sense now. I’d had to march uphill to the North Postern. From on top I’d seen the wall going downhill. It followed the lie of the land. It was possible that the whole thing sloped gently into the water, without cliffs or obstructions or further nonsense out of Louis; also without the need to climb anywhere. I’d done enough climbing for one night, also crawling, skiing and free-falling, not to speak of probably mile upon mile of steady running.
I came cautiously out to land’s end and saw it didn’t quite slope gently into the sea. There was a cliff of sorts, twenty feet or so, well-bouldered, nothing to a man of my experience. The beach looked trickier. It was boulder-studded, too. The boulders were set in a continuous drift of cobbles, huge ones, like giant sugared almonds, pale in the moonlight and dappled with tar; it was evidently on the tanker route from Ashkelon. Not easy to teeter, probably slither, along to where I could see lights twinkling from the Foka Hirsch belt to northward. It could take an hour. Where would he be in an hour?
Not continuing to harangue me in the darkness, anyway. Distraught he might be, but stupid he wasn’t. It wouldn’t take an age for him to review the options open to me. How long after that before he spied me delicately picking a way along this ankle-twisting and slimy beach?
Not a good idea. On the whole such a lousy one that I cudgeled my tired brains and tried to think of others. I could creep back the way I’d come, retracing my
footsteps in the dark – except that there was no way of telling precisely where he was in it. The basilisk could wait a long time. Time was not one of the things working for me. The night seemed to be getting lighter.
I was suddenly aware that it didn’t only seem to be getting lighter. It was getting lighter. You could see more in it. The moon was coming into its own as other lights went off. Three went off simultaneously on the jetty, and I looked there. People and cars were still moving on it. Not so many now, of course. Still. The jetty. If he had given up the notion of the jetty …
In much confusion, not knowing if it made sense to be stuck on the beach, I began clambering down to it. I got there and waited a moment at the bottom, looking back in case he might be clambering down, too, and put myself behind a boulder twenty or thirty yards away. The journey there convinced me right away that the beach was out. The ankle I’d wrenched hours earlier – only hours earlier? – came signaling back strongly. I felt it grinding away as I crouched and looked about.
There was a mutter of water all around as it washed gently over the shingle. A calm swell, very calm – possible even for me to swim. I was a poor swimmer, had a horror of the sea, of getting swept out in it. I’d been swept out once at Sochi, on the Black Sea, had had to be dragged out. But it was no distance to the jetty: barely ten minutes. There was an obstruction on the way and I peered at it. A long line of stone columns, toppled over, were lying in the sea, glittering in the moon. The remains of Herod’s V.I.P. jetty – which had in some way offended Baybars?
I followed the line of it to the beach. There was a tiny crescent of white sand there, evidently a result of the breakwater effect of the fallen columns. Something moved on the sand, and my heart missed a beat. Was it moving? It was. While moving, it stayed in one place. A dog pawing at something? Prolonged peering revealed not a dog, but two people intent on becoming one. They became two presently, and kneeled, holding each other’s shoulders and laughing: a girl and a boy. She gave him a quick kiss and angled herself into a bikini, and he into a pair of shorts, and I poised there, anxious to spread the good news of my presence but held back by a certain ticklishness in the situation. While I hesitated, they ran into the sea.
The Sun Chemist Page 27