Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Had he not been in such a good mood over the bracelet he might have told the fellow that he had better things to do than gossip about passing lunatics.

  ‘Do beggars get these?’ In his hand the shopkeeper held a gold sovereign stamped with the avuncular, bearded head of Edward VII, monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, Emperor of India. Weidinger picked it up and saw that it had been minted in 1905. ‘The Swedish Christ changed this last week,’ the Syrian said. ‘He was afraid that somebody might steal it, and wanted small coins for it.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Weidinger, making the coin turn little somersaults in the palm of his hand.

  There was nothing unusual in itself about a man owning an English sovereign, as long as it had not been minted after the outbreak of hostilities. Germany may have long outpaced Britain in steel production and be pushing ahead in the new chemical and electrical industries, but sterling remained the strongest currency on earth and much sought after. Thousands of the Czar’s kopecks were still in circulation in Jerusalem, as were Austrian Maria Theresas, French francs, United States dollars and German marks. Indeed, the citizens of the Ottoman Empire preferred almost anything to its own frequently devalued lire.

  All the same Weidinger was intrigued to know how a man as crazy as the Swede, with no visible means of support, could have possessed such a coin. There could, of course, be several perfectly innocent explanations. He might be a remittance man, supported by some wealthy family who preferred that he remained as far away as possible rather than embarrass them on the streets of Stockholm. Or the coin could have belonged to an ever-diminishing nest egg. He may even have sold something recently – a watch, his mother’s wedding-ring – though as the price of the bracelet only went to show, jewellery tended to lose its value in hungry cities.

  Then again, Magnus could have obtained it by committing some crime: he could have bludgeoned some wretch to death with that ridiculous staff he carried, or sneaked a purse or wallet from somewhere like Fast’s Hotel. He was always hanging about there.

  And then, thought Weidinger, he could have earned it for some service or some favour. But what? Had he persuaded some gullible young private that he really did have the ear of the Almighty and that his prayers would deflect bullets? Or had he run an errand for some blackmarket swindle, masterminded by the Jews perhaps?

  Finally there was the possibility of espionage. European neutrals were obviously the most sought-after agents, but surely the English would not be desperate enough to use a madman like Magnus – unless, of course, he was not as mad as he made out to be? If that was the case, he was a very good actor: but what was a spy if he wasn’t an actor?

  Weidinger wondered whether Krag bothered to keep a file on the Swede. He was said to have them on other neutrals remaining in Jerusalem, even on Maeltzer. Perhaps he should have a word with him about it. But it might be worth probing a little deeper before he told anybody else. One of the most efficient Turkish creations was their system of informers – as long as one remembered it was a circular affair, whereby informer informed on informer. It would cost a pittance to have Magnus followed for twenty-four hours a day. If there was anything in it, Kress should know that he was the one who uncovered it. God only knew the war owed him a little luck.

  *

  Magnus strode on, past the Lutheran church with its tall steeple, and into David Street. Here he turned left and went down to the bazaar area on the edge of the Muslim quarter, before turning right into the Jewish neighbourhood.

  A rat almost collided with his feet but if he was aware of this the Swede did not show it. Magnus was tired. Magnus was hungry, but food and rest must wait. Magnus had work to do. Wise were the ways of the Lord.

  6

  ‘Oh Lord build! Oh Lord build!’ cried the white-bearded Jew, ‘build thy house speedily.’

  Tears coursed down the old man’s cheeks. His voice broke and quavered like that of a boy reaching adolescence.

  ‘In haste! In haste!’ chanted the women standing at their section of the wall a few feet to his left: ‘even in our days.’

  Then together they all chorused: ‘Build thy house speedily. In haste! In haste!

  ‘Even in our days,’ finished the patriarch.

  They were all weeping now, old and young, men and women. They were mourning a two thousand-year-old defeat, the destruction of King Herod’s Temple by the Roman legions of the Emperor Titus in 70 AD.

  When their Muslim Syrian guide had showed them earlier in the day what he called ‘the Jews’ wailing place’, most of the British prisoners, Buchan included, had been shocked at what they saw. If they had given the matter any thought at all they had always regarded the Jews as near-as-damn-it Europeans, sometimes stinking rich bankers or merchants, but most miserly usurers or dirt-poor half-blind tailors who lived in slums where their women either worked in sweatshops or prostituted themselves. They had never imagined them behaving so demonstrably, ‘like a bunch of bleedin’ ‘eathens’, as one private put it.

  For a start, there was the bizarre costume of these Orthodox Jews – basically seventeenth-century Polish dress, consisting of a kaftan, knee breeches, buckled shoes and – despite the heat – huge round fur hats with flat tops, from below which dangled long corkscrew side-curls. The women were more conventionally attired, though all of them wore tightly wrapped head-scarves. The Syrian had smirked and told the British prisoners that underneath the women were as bald as eggs because they had shaved their hair off so as not to be attractive to other men. Some of the better-off, he had added, sometimes wore a wig over their shaved scalps, because even their husbands thought them ugly.

  Buchan found it difficult to believe that they could inspire much lust among their menfolk even with their hair. Both sexes were painfully thin and undernourished-looking, with none of the robustness of Zionists like Sarah Aaronsohn – whose attempts to rebuild the Jewish nation before the restoration of the Temple they considered an appalling blasphemy. Only the Lord could decide when He would redeem Zion for his Chosen People. Meanwhile, there was no harm in praying that it might be in their time.

  When they were not praying the men were studying the Torah or debating its more arcane teachings with various sages, so that they rarely saw the sun and their skins never lost the pallor of the European ghettos. This was often combined with myopia, and, in quite a few cases, the eyes which stared from behind thick-lensed spectacles bulged hugely, the result of a genetic hyperthyroid condition caused by inbreeding.

  The old man was one of these. He was also desperately poor, having spent his meagre resources on bringing with him from the Russian Pale sixteen members of the family so that he should not be lonely while waiting for death in King David’s city. Every day he prayed before the stones that had formed the western wall of Herod’s Temple, singing out the penitential psalms while at the same time swaying back and forth from the waist up with the sudden, jerky energy of a clockwork toy.

  During his prayers he would occasionally go up to the wall and touch the stones themselves, caressing the crevices where worshippers like himself sometimes tucked the tiny scrolls of prayerful petition they called kvitals. When he touched the stones he felt that he was in contact with a living thing. They seemed electric; it was as if the whole earth was vibrating through them. Sometimes his fingers brushed a scroll and he would feel the blood rush around his body, so that afterwards he was almost ashamed of such arousal.

  The feeling of renewal he acquired from these daily devotions usually lasted him until he got home – four rooms in the Jewish quarter, which was easily the poorest, most squalid and most pestilential area of the city. Heaps of garbage littered its unswept alleys; the Muslim and Christian communities claimed that the Jews’ rats had grown so big even the dogs fled in terror of them.

  Before the war rich Jewish benefactors had come from abroad to help their brethren and, perhaps, to atone somehow for their own success among the goyim. The Montefiores, the Sassoons, the Rothschilds, had all built new almshouses
outside the city walls, hoping to tempt the Jews out of their hovels. Montefiore had even put up a windmill for grinding corn. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong position and its sails obstinately refused to turn on a regular enough basis to make its operation worthwhile. In the end, all these benefactors despaired of ever prising the Orthodox away from their stinking poverty, and took heart instead at the achievements of the ‘new Jews’ in the Zionist settlements. There was the proof that the wind sometimes did blow in the right direction.

  Now very little money came into the Jewish quarter. That month yet another source of aid had dried up, since the United States’ entry into the war had effectively stopped the flow of dollars from New York. Only a few lucky families still received aid from beyond the walls.

  When they had finished their prayers the patriarch and his flock trudged home, careful to exert themselves as little as possible so as not to bring on hunger pangs that they could never fully assuage. And yet a careful observer might have noticed that this particular Orthodox family were not quite as thin as many of the others and that, although their demeanour was just as careworn, their eyes were a little brighter than many of their neighbours’. Some of their young women were even sufficiently nourished to be capable of menstruation.

  It was one of these, absent from prayers because she was unclean, who greeted her grandfather with a grubby white envelope from which he extracted some coins and a small roll of paper about as big as a kvital. The old Jew looked anxious, as he always did on these occasions – much to the surprise of his family, who simply delighted that this particular miracle should have repeated itself. He asked his grand-daughter if anybody had observed the arrival of the person who had brought these things and she replied, as she always did, that she thought not. They were probably the only family in their immediate neighbourhood, perhaps in the entire Jewish quarter, who still had a benefactor. It was a secret. The old man never tired of emphasising that. It was a secret, and they must never tell a living soul. His eyes bulged even larger when he said this, and the whole family gathered round to assure him of their discretion.

  7

  It was not until shortly after seven that Weidinger knocked on the door of Maeltzer’s room – by which time, despite an open window, the room was fogged from the cigarettes the journalist always preferred to cigars when he was under pressure.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said, beaming his pleasure. ‘Like some schnapps?’

  Maeltzer dived into a wardrobe for a bottle and a couple of glasses. Unlike many of his calling, he was only occasionally more than a social drinker.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t stay long,’ said Weidinger as he waited for his glass to be filled. ‘We have a mess-night this evening to honour one of our gallant allies – Mustafa Kemal, no less.’

  ‘Wouldn’t do to be late for him,’ agreed Maeltzer. ‘Not the hero of Gallipoli. Prosit!’

  ‘Prosit!’ said Weidinger, emptying the glass in a couple of gulps, and making no objection when Maeltzer refilled it. He was seriously tempted to tell him how he had just arranged for a tail, one of the headquarters’ messengers, to be put on Magnus. He resisted it. He knew Maeltzer. He would only put a damper on it, dream up some logical explanation for the sovereign. It would be marvellous to see his face if his poor mad Swede turned out to have something more on his mind than saving the world from sin. Meanwhile, he stuck to more familiar ground.

  ‘Kemal wants our guns but thinks he can do without our brains,’ he said. ‘He’s already complained to von Sanders that there are too many Germans on his staff. Personally, I think the man is getting too big for his boots, and I’m not the only one. There is a feeling that we might all be happier if he went back to the Caucasus. This is strictly between ourselves, of course.’

  ‘My lips are glued,’ promised Maeltzer. ‘But I was hoping you could tell me something about the air raid this afternoon before I sent my despatch. The English have never dared to do anything like that before. I thought it quite astonishing.’

  ‘So did the Turkish supply wagons he attacked on the Bethany road,’ said Weidinger.

  ‘Was it bad?’

  ‘A couple of dead mules and some very frightened drivers, I believe.’

  ‘A famous victory,’ said Maeltzer.

  ‘Well, it shook up our own intrepid birdmen – and not before time.’

  As a rule, Weidinger disliked all pilots regardless of nationality. He had barely tolerated Pichler’s friend at lunch. Quite apart from his suspicion of anyone who had come to terms with machinery more advanced than the magazine-loading rifle, his dislike of airmen had been exacerbated recently when he heard one brag that he had machine-gunned some cavalry. Weidinger was, in his way, a religious young man who felt that to fool around in the heavens was unnatural enough without adding to the blasphemy of slaughtering men and horses with complete impunity.

  ‘How did he get through?’ Maeltzer asked. ‘Was it just luck – God looks after drunks and fools, as the English say? I suppose everybody believed that a lone aircraft buzzing about Jerusalem couldn’t possibly be anything else but one of yours?’

  ‘Well, that explains why the anti-aircraft were so slow to get started, but I don’t think it was luck. There’s a bit of a flap going on about it.’ Weidinger looked conspiratorial. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you’re bound to hear it sooner or later. The British shot three of our planes down today. You can’t send that to your newspaper, of course. The censor would never allow it. But I think you should be aware of it, because it’s going to make things even more difficult for us.’

  Maeltzer nodded. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Apparently they’ve got a new aircraft called the Bristol Fighter. They sent some of their older ones over Hebron; we went up to chase them away, and these new machines were waiting to pounce. Then later they sent in the one you saw over Jerusalem with a couple of small bombs, but the Albatross boys thought it was another trap and wouldn’t go up. We’ve just sent a cable to Kress in Damascus telling him what’s happened. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s putting pressure on von Sanders to squeeze some Fokkers out of Berlin right now.

  ‘Some people are very excited about it – you ought to hear Krag. I can’t think why. He could have done a lot more damage – he could have bombed Djemal Pasha’s headquarters on the Mount of Olives, which would have impressed the locals more than a pair of mules.’

  Once Weidinger had left, Maeltzer went back to his work, scratching the words in fountain pen on lined paper because he preferred the authority of ink to pencil. During his last visit home he had noticed that some of the younger reporters at head office had taken to using typewriters, but if a man had an educated hand he could not see the point. Between each paragraph he left a line.

  When he had finished his despatch he turned to the diary he was keeping in an exercise book with a bright green cover. One day he intended to turn this diary into a book about the Palestine campaign, just as he had done on South Africa. In the diary he wrote the number of German aeroplanes shot down.

  Dusk fell. There were gas lights in the room but no gas in the hotel. Maeltzer lit three oil lamps made out of sardine tins in which two holes had been pierced, one for the wick and the other for the fuel.

  One lamp would have been enough. As it was, Maeltzer’s window on the top floor was the brightest in the hotel. Weidinger had once remarked on this and the journalist had told him that he needed the extra lamps because his eyes were getting dim – though he rarely bothered to use his reading spectacles.

  Outside a tall figure in the full dress uniform of a German officer was striding out from the Grand New Hotel towards Fast’s in order to be in time for the dinner with Mustafa Kemal. It was Major Krag, departing from his tryst with the Widow Shemsi.

  8

  Others did not move so easily in the night. Buchan had escaped. At first it had been ridiculously easy.

  After the photograph, the Turks had brought up a line of mules bearing steaming
dixies of stew. It was made from a mixture of captured cans of British bully beef and some other meat which the Australians informed the Poms was horse in the hope that they would leave the eating of it to them. The strategy failed. Everybody was famished. Some had not eaten more than hard tack biscuits and a little fruit since the day before they were captured – almost five days ago. Those who had lost their spoons used their hands. When the food had gone they lay around smoking the last of their tobacco with an abandon they would soon regret.

  The officers sat a little apart from the men. The senior man was the captain with the head wound from the dismounted Yeomanry, the rest all lieutenants or second-lieutenants. Buchan was enjoying his second post-prandial cigarette while the Yeomanry captain spoke about the need to ensure the men kept their boots by them at all times – otherwise the guards would steal them – when he was suddenly gripped by an appalling bout of intestinal cramps. He grabbed his stomach with both hands almost as if he had been shot and thrust his head between his knees.

  ‘Something wrong, old chap?’ the captain inquired.

  Buchan managed to bring his head up. His face had gone quite pale and his eyes were watery. ‘Cramps,’ he explained. ‘Stomach cramps. Must have been that stew.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t the Ritz,’ said the captain. ‘Doesn’t seem to have hurt the rest of us though. Then perhaps you’re not a horse-lover?’

  ‘More like dog,’ gasped Buchan. He got up and walked away with about as much dignity as a man can muster cradling his belly, hating his body’s treachery even more than their laughter.

  The truth was that he had always been prone to stomach upsets. During his first month in Egypt he was still gazing at the canvas sides of the officer’s latrines six times a day long after the other fresh subalterns had restored their bowels to normal working order. He might have ended up in a dysentery ward had his unit not had a Scots medical officer who put great faith in the cementing properties of yoghurt. ‘You’ve got to get some of the local bacteria inside you, laddie.’