Requiem (38 page)

Katie,
where are you? I need you. Katie. Kelly. Mary. Sharon.

He
was bewildered. Swept along like a cork on a river, he didn't know what he was
doing in this violent crowd. He remembered going into the church armed with
petrol but couldn't recall what had happened there. He remembered running to
Damascus Gate. He knew he should get out. Go to Sharon's apartment. Sharon
would help.

A phalanx of
people was being herded along the street before him, squeezed out of the
souk
by the soldiers. Suddenly the crowd
broke into a run. To dodge them he found himself diving for cover in a narrow
recess off the main thoroughfare.

The place was familiar.
He'd been there before. A sudden chill gripped him. There it was, the scent of balsam,
the residual perfume, a blend of opal, musk and jasmine. This was the place
where he'd originally encountered Mary Magdalene, on his first day in
Jerusalem. The place he'd found the scorched map. He sensed her behind him,
waiting for him to turn. He was afraid that, if he did, it would not be the
beautiful Mary he would see, not the young, erotic Magdalene, but one who was
leprous, weighted with time and with a face as lifeless as the Dead Sea.

But when he
turned, there was nothing. No one, no woman, no
djinn
,
nothing. She was gone. Somehow he knew she'd been exorcized and that, along
with Katie, she was gone forever.

His surprise
was interrupted by the breathless appearance of two Arab youths. Palestinian
scarves were tied over their faces. They ran into his hiding place, and stopped
dead on seeing him, eyes wide with alarm. Recovering, they climbed the wall at
the back of the alley. The first swung his legs over the wall and dropped down
the other side. The second followed, but as he scrambled across the capstone of
the wall, something heavy clattered to the stones at Tom's feet. The boy looked
back in anguish. Whatever it was, he decided to abandon it.

Tom looked
down. It was a short-barrelled lightweight rifle. He picked it up.

Ahmed and
Tobie
followed Sharon away from the soldiers and crowd
pressed into the mouth of the gate and along a street loud with the cries of
excited, uncoordinated youths still looking for a focus for their anger. The
main crowd had been diverted up the channel of the
souk
and was being forced back from there down a side street. The cries and
chants were inching closer.

It seemed they'd lost
Tom. Ahmed thought the search was hopeless. He had let go of
Tobie's
hand as the older woman was determined to stay with
Sharon; then reluctantly the Arab followed behind them. He wanted to get out
of this. He wanted to go home. He sensed danger everywhere. Too often in his
younger days he had witnessed, and even helped incite, this kind of
disturbance; he had developed a nose for when something bad was going to
happen. He knew how the
djinn
could
provoke a crowd to claim their victim. And he knew how the
djinn
loved the night.

He hurried behind Sharon
and
Tobie
, who'd made twenty yards on him. Then he
saw two masked youths break from the area of the
souk
to hurl themselves down a narrow alley. He stepped off the street into the
alley, watching them run, and was astonished to see them pull up short. It was
the Englishman! Tom was there at the bottom of the alley, his back to the wall,
looking dazed and frightened. The boys ignored Tom and scrambled over the wall,
one of them losing something on the way over. Shouts and a disturbance behind
him made Ahmed look up to see two Israeli soldiers breaking from the throng in
the
souk
to chase the boys. As he
looked back, he saw Tom pick up the rifle that had clattered to his feet.

'No, Tom! No!' He
stormed down the length of the alleyway, snatching the rifle from the
bewildered Englishman. 'Get rid of it, you fool!' He raised his arm to throw the
rifle over the wall.

He didn't make it. A
barked command from one of the soldiers arriving at the mouth of the alley was
followed instantly by a shot. The bullet struck Ahmed in the midriff. Two
further rounds from the second soldier, firing from a kneeling position, ripped
through his chest and his throat. Ahmed's body slapped against the back wall of
the alley.

Tobie
and Sharon had been brought to the mouth of the alley
by Ahmed's warning shout.
Tobie
screamed in Hebrew at
one of the soldiers, pummelling at his arms. Sharon shrugged off the second
soldier to run towards Ahmed's shattered body. A black lake of blood was
beginning to soak into his clothes. She lifted up his head. He was already
dead, but she was too stunned to know it. His head fell back limply, blood and
saliva trickling from the corner of his mouth. Sharon kissed Ahmed's bloody
mouth full on the lips. She cradled his head on her lap, looking up at Tom for
the help or explanation that was beyond him.

Tom,
pressed against the wall, could only gaze on in dumbfounded horror. He looked
from Sharon's questioning eyes to the blood on the Arab's lips. As he stared,
he distinctly saw a fat bee crawl from the inside of Ahmed's mouth, conjured
from the trickle of blood. The bee was still for a moment on his lips, before
lifting itself into the air, labouring upwards in tortured, spiral flight, up
into the spice-laden night sky over Jerusalem.

Tom watched it go.

55

The sky over Jerusalem
was a spiritual blue. Ian Redhead, agent for the Anglicans, took off his
sunglasses and got to his feet as Tom approached the cafe table. He shot out a
nervous hand, too quickly it seemed, because he had to hold it in the air for a
long time before Tom was close enough to shake it. Tom sat down and Redhead
called a waiter.

Redhead had
responded to Tom's phone call, and they'd arranged to meet at the Cafe
Akrai
in the
pedestrianized
area
of the New City. Tom ordered coffee.

'I'm glad
you contacted me,' said Redhead, replacing his dark glasses. He looked hot in
his black suit. He inserted two fingers between his white collar and his neck
and leaned forward confidentially. 'Did you know this is primarily a cafe for
gays?'

'Is it?' Tom said innocently. 'Imagine!'

This
had been Sharon's suggestion. She said if Tom was going to give the Anglicans
anything, it should be done at the Cafe
Akrai
. It was
two weeks since Ahmed had been killed. She was trying hard to recover her sense
of humour.

'I'm leaving Jerusalem
this afternoon,' said Tom. I couldn't go without giving you this.' He placed a
large
manilla
envelope on the table. 'Don't get too
excited. It's only a copy. I don't want anything for it.'

Redhead
looked at the envelope without touching it. 'The Magdalene Scroll? What
happened to the original?'

'It's
like the keys to the Holy Sepulchre. They have to be kept by a Muslim family. I
can't trust the Christians with the scroll, or even the Jews, for that matter.
So I've given it to an Arab scholar. A friend of the man who was looking at it
for me.’

'Is it true he was the man who was shot?'

'Yes.'
Tom's coffee arrived. 'The scholar who has it now has promised to publish it. I
decided it was only fair to give your lot a copy. I've also given a copy to the
Hebrew Museum. I'm sure you'll all find a different way of interpreting the
thing.'

'I suppose
we should be grateful. Though we would have liked the original.'

'As I say, you're not to be trusted with
history.'

Redhead
looked at him thoughtfully from behind his dark glasses. Sunlight
starbursted
on the black lenses. 'Don't be too hard on us.
This city has a way of affecting people. Sometimes you read a holy book, then
you go back to it the next day and you swear someone has changed the words.
It's that kind of city.'

'I have an idea of what you mean.'

Redhead took
out his wallet and parked a banknote under his coffee saucer. Then he stood up,
offering another handshake. 'I have to go. I must thank you for the copy at
least. Have a safe journey home.'

'Thanks.'

'I
almost forgot. I have something here for you.' Redhead swung his leather
briefcase onto the table, flicked open its locks and withdrew something from
inside. He handed it to Tom. It was a large stamp with a gilded and perforated
edge, the kind children collect for attendance at Sunday school. It contained a
scene, macabre and ridiculous, of numerous skeletons rising from the earth and
from sundered coffins, their bones animated in an ecstatic jig.

'Hey,' said
Tom. 'The Day of Resurrection. How about that? Now I have the set.'

Redhead
smiled briefly, grabbed his case and turned to walk back in the direction of
the Old City. Tom watched him go: a hot man in an inappropriate black English suit,
walking under a baking Middle Eastern sun.     

Tom dropped
the stamp into the dregs of his coffee cup.

After
a while he left the cafe and took a slow walk towards the Old City. Sharon had
arranged to meet him outside the walls, to drive him to the airport. After the
shooting Tom had started to feel something like sane again; he stopped seeing
djinn
,
he stopped seeing demons. But he had
continued to see
Tobie
once a day at the centre
because he felt responsible, all over again, for someone's death. Neither
Sharon nor
Tobie
blamed him, and, knowing how he
staggered under his own crosses, the two women went to tender lengths to take
the burden from him.

But
he wanted to go home, back to England. He had asked Sharon to return with him. He
had even asked her to marry him, but she was too wise, and she declined on both
counts. 'You spent too long feeling you couldn't love Katie. I can't make you
do that all over again.' She promised, at least, to come to visit him in
England before Christmas.

He
made his way down the
Shekhem
, down the hill from
which he'd caught his first view of Jerusalem from a speeding taxi. At the
bottom of the road he could see Sharon's parked car. She was waiting for him,
leaning against the bonnet with her arms folded. When she saw him at the top of
the hill, she waved. Before going down to her, he stopped to take a last look
across the Old City.

The
Golden Dome bulged from amid the bustle of white-pepper buildings, all lifted
like a clamour of voices to the immaculate sky. The scent of warm, spiced dust
was in his nostrils, and for a moment he felt a surge of holy terror at the
thought of what he was leaving behind. It wasn't a city; it was a living
creature, made of blood and clay and dust and dreams.

He
was momentarily paralysed by its insane beauty. Jerusalem, waking dream,
nightmare, city of
djinn
,
truth inside
a lie, plug on the waters of the deep, threshing floor, crucible,
axis
mundi
,
fantasy and hologram, locus of slaughter and
redemption, promise of peace. The city was an emblem of the source of all
trouble, the human heart, with its limitless capacity for self-deception and
fantasy, which one day may also be its salvation.

The
sound of Sharon leaning on her car horn brought him out of his reverie. His
eyes lifted to the Mount of Olives and the skyline beyond the city. Then he
went down to where Sharon was waiting.

'14 V M