The Jerusalem Puzzle (9 page)

Isabel was the first person I felt I could really trust. One of the comments she’d made had stuck in my mind.
You’re strong, Sean, but it’s not enough; you need love.

It was the best part of being with Isabel. I felt cared for.

I felt loved.

‘There’s something weird going on,’ said Henry. He shook his head. The social media tracking screen in front of him was blinking with the amount of data scrolling down it.

Normally he’d have let the automated systems deal with the feeds. They hunted for genuinely suspicious posts among the billions of Twitter, Facebook and forum posts, and spam ads and emails that filled the web each day. The algorithms they used were as important to the service as their best code-breaking tools.

The volume of postings on one subject was cresting like a wave. There’d been a thousand posts an hour about it yesterday. Now there was ten thousand an hour. And the rate was climbing.

Sergeant Finch looked down at him. She adjusted her glasses so they were further down her nose. She looked like a schoolmistress. A large and commanding school-mistress.

‘I hope this isn’t another one of your hunches,’ she said.

He smiled up at her. ‘This is no hunch. It’s a prophecy.’

‘You’re a prophet now?’ The smile at the corner of her mouth was either conspiratorial or from her anticipation of how she would describe this exchange to her boss over a coffee.

Henry didn’t care. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘This is about what’s been trending on Twitter and Facebook in Egypt over the last twenty-four hours.’

‘Are you going to tell me?’ Her eyes had darted to another monitoring screen operator who had raised a hand. The room was responsible for real-time monitoring about a hundred current threats to the UK’s national security.

‘All these posts are about a claim that a letter from the first Caliph of Islam has been found. Apparently, it states that Jerusalem, once captured by Islam, will remain Islamic for all time.’

‘Do we know if this letter is real?’

‘It’s being looked into.’

‘Let me know what they find, Henry. Another religious prophecy is the last thing they need in the Middle East. The place is a tinderbox right now. It could burst into flames at any moment.’

The following morning we took a taxi to the Via Dolorosa. If you imagine the Old City of Jerusalem as a roughly drawn square, a warren of narrow lanes, then the hill of the Temple Mount, with the golden Dome of the Rock floating above it to the bottom right. And the Via Dolorosa runs almost right to left across the middle, east to west that is, just above the Temple Mount. I say almost advisedly, because there’s a kink in the road as the two sides of it don’t exactly line up in the middle.

The Via Dolorosa ends inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the long venerated site of Jesus’ crucifixion and his tomb. The Holy Sepulchre was founded by Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great in 326 AD, after her son became the first Christian Roman Emperor. Miraculously, she also found the cross Jesus had died on, despite the total physical destruction of Jerusalem carried out by Titus in 70 AD.

The Via Dolorosa was first venerated in Roman times, before the city fell to Islam in April 637 AD. Later, the Franciscans kept the Christian rituals alive whenever they could. They established many of the rites that surround the route to this day. Some misinterpretations of the route still happen though. An archway of Hadrian’s lesser forum, for instance, constructed in the second century, is still believed by many pilgrims to be the place where Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd.

Myth, faith and bloody history come face to face in Jerusalem.

Our taxi let us out at the Jaffa Gate. We walked through the Old City towards the chapel of Our Lady. The streets were narrow, intense with souvenir shops and small cafes. The pavements were stone slabs. The first lane went downhill in small steps. Arches and canvas awnings blocked out the early morning sun. At the start of the Via Dolorosa we passed a group of Christian pilgrims following a tall Eastern-European man with a cross on his shoulders.

The closely packed shops were selling wooden crosses, icons, statues of the Virgin Mary, rosary beads, Bibles, pottery, glasses, t-shirts, mugs and a hundred other souvenirs. Some of them had Persian carpets and Turkish kilims hanging outside. Many had low wooden trestle tables jutting out in front.

It was 10.30 a.m. now and the street was busy. There were monks in long habits, mostly brown or black, Arabs in headdresses, women with their heads covered, and tourists with cameras as well as, at the major intersections where one busy and narrow lane crossed another, sharp-eyed Israeli soldiers with guns, watching us all.

Finally we found the chapel. We almost missed it. There was a crowd gathered at the entrance to a lane directly opposite it. They had caught my eye. The Via Dolorosa was wider here, maybe twenty feet across, and the entrance to the chapel was between two high stone buildings in that distinctive Mamluk style, which features layers of alternating light and dark stone.

The crowd on the opposite side of the street was made up mostly of Arab men, bareheaded or in keffiyehs, which flowed loosely over their shoulders. There was a camera crew filming it all.

I approached the cameraman. ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

He looked at me, spat on the ground and returned to his work.

We went over to the chapel. It had an ancient grey wooden door, which looked as if it had been new when the Crusaders were here. The door was closed and there was a plaque above it. The plaque was in Greek. Another plaque, in polished brass, simply said
Chapel of Our Lady
.

Was this the end of us chasing ghosts? I looked around. There was a group of blue-shirted policemen beyond the crowd. They were blocking the entrance to a laneway.

‘What about getting coffee? Look, there’s a place over there,’ I said. I pointed at an old-fashioned looking cafe back the way we’d come. It had a red plastic sign above its door and a menu stuck to its window.

A few minutes later we were sipping thick black coffee in a quiet corner of the coffee shop. We couldn’t get a table near the window. The rest of the tables were full of tourists looking at maps or locals huddled over tea in glass cups or yoghurt drinks. ‘There’s a police station back near the Jaffa Gate,’ said Isabel. ‘In some place called the Qishle building. Maybe we can ask them if they know anything about Susan Hunter? I’m not sure we’re getting anywhere wandering around aimlessly.’ She sounded worried.

‘We’re not wandering around aimlessly. We’re seeing the sights.’

‘What did you think we were going to find here? Kaiser’s dead. He was probably just talking about this place.’

‘So what are all those people here for?’

She looked at the menu.

A nun in a black habit had come into the cafe. She must have been in her eighties. Her skin was creased, translucent, like the cover of a book that was about to fall apart. There were blue veins around her eyes. Her habit was made of rough faded wool, and her back was bowed.

I overheard her ordering tea. Her accent was cut glass English. I stood up and went to her side.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help but overhear you.’ I smiled. ‘Do you speak English?’

She looked me up and down as if she was wondering what stupidity might come out of my mouth next.

I put my hands up. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t want anything from you.’ I hesitated deliberately, then went on. ‘Well, not anything material.’

Her eyes narrowed. I imagined she was wondering if I was one of those people who suffer from the Jerusalem syndrome when they get here, imagining they’re the Messiah, with the power to change the world.

‘It’s just that I was wondering what all those people were gathering for out there. Do you know?’

She breathed in through her nose. Her nostrils pinched together. ‘Young man, I am not a news service.’ She looked down at the ground, as if to avoid speaking anymore. A waiter put a lidded paper cup in front of her.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I need a little help.’

‘You’re a journalist, I suppose,’ she said.

I opened my mouth to deny it, but decided not to.

‘I expect you want to know about the djinn they all claim has been released at that dig.’ She sniffed again, gazed piercingly into my eyes, as if she knew what I was thinking, even if I didn’t.

‘Well, I can offer you nothing about such superstitions.’ She clutched her tea with a claw-like hand, and shot a glance over my shoulder as if checking out someone behind me.

‘That poor man was found near here, you know.’ She leaned towards me. ‘He was burnt to death. They all think it was the work of a djinn.’ She glanced out the window.

‘I hope,’ she crossed herself. ‘You’re not going to write about evil spirits on the Via Dolorosa, because there aren’t any. It’s all superstition.’

I shook my head. ‘I definitely won’t.’

‘Bless you, I hope so. It’s bad enough already here. We don’t need stories about evil spirits.’ She put her hand to her mouth, as if she’d said too much. Then she crossed herself.

‘God be with you.’ She turned away. I saw a gold cross glint at her neck. It was plain, heavy looking.

Back at the table Isabel whispered in my ear, ‘I hope you weren’t hassling her.’

‘I’ve only found out there’s a dig going on over there.’ I pointed towards the crowd. ‘And that people think a djinn has been dug up or disturbed or something. They think it has something to do with Max’s death.’

‘What the hell is a djinn?’

‘It’s a spirit, you know, a genie, if you believe in that sort of thing.’

‘You think Kaiser was working over there?’

‘Maybe.’

‘What sort of dig is it?’

I shrugged. ‘Let’s ask around, discreetly, see if anyone knows.’

It seemed such a simple idea, but it took two hours for it to sink in that we were not going to get any answers. Nothing at all, not a whisper. Four shopkeepers asked us to leave their
shops, with varying intensity, after I asked them about the
dig opposite Our Lady’s Chapel.

The only useful piece of information we gathered was from a policeman. After showing him my card, he said that I would have to put my request in through an Israeli
university
.

After we’d finished with him we went to a juice bar nearby.

‘Let’s call Simon Marcus,’ I said.

Isabel sipped her fresh orange juice. She was looking out of the window. The Via Dolorosa was almost impassable. What had been a small group was now a crowded demonstration with cheers and jeers, and young soldiers in khaki and efficient-looking policemen in blue watching everything.

I called Simon on my phone. It took three tries to get a signal.

He did not sound pleased when he answered. ‘Did you talk to the police in the lobby when you exited the hotel?’ he said, before I even had a chance to go into why I’d called him.

‘She asked where we’d been. I had to tell her.’

‘Half the people who were supposed to come yesterday didn’t turn up, Mr Ryan. I found out later that some of them were turned back at a security checkpoint in the lobby. Someone has been making stupid claims about what we’re doing.’

‘That wasn’t me. I didn’t make any claims about your work.’ I paused. ‘We need some help, Simon, please.’ There was silence for a few seconds.

‘What sort of help?’ He did not sound keen.

‘We’re trying to find out about this dig Kaiser was working on. We’re getting stonewalled.’

Isabel was motioning for me to give her the phone. ‘Isabel wants to speak to you.’ I gave the phone to her.

She spoke to him for a few minutes. It sounded as if they were getting on well. Too well.

‘That’s really nice of you to offer to meet us,’ she said, after a long gap listening to him. ‘We’re at a juice bar on the Via Dolorosa near Our Lady’s Chapel. We think this is where Kaiser was working. Do you know it?’

He said something. She thanked him again.

‘You were laying it on thick,’ I said when the call was over.

‘Do you want his help or not?’

‘Yeah, but he gets a quick put-down if he asks you for a date.’ I pointed a finger at her.

‘I’d say he’s after something else.’

I thought about that for a second. ‘You think he wants to work with the institute?’

‘Wouldn’t you? Your institute is leading the world in academic research in loads of areas. That’s what your website says anyway. Is it a lie?’

‘You were on our website?’

‘Just making sure you weren’t an imposter.’

‘Very funny.’

But she was right. He’d probably looked us up after we’d left the hotel. And he hadn’t put the phone down on me, even though he’d been angry.

I ordered another juice. We watched the people around us. There was a bunch of shaven-headed American men
at a table nearby. It looked as if they were all praying. They had their eyes closed and one of them was whispering something I couldn’t catch. There was a guy with a long beard with them. He looked like an Old Testament prophet. He was reading from a heavy gilt-edged book and muttering.

‘Djinn is a word derived from the Arabic root meaning to hide,’ said Simon an hour later, after he arrived and I’d told him what we’d learned so far.

‘It’s an interesting word,’ said Isabel.

‘It’s interesting people still believe in such things,’ I said.

Simon leant his head to one side and gave me his best condescending expression.

‘But Max’s death was evil, wasn’t it? So evil is not dead, Sean. The other words derived from the word djinn are interesting too. They are majn
u
-
n – mad – and jan
i
n – an embryo.’

‘What sort of dig’s going on over there?’ said Isabel. She was giving him one of her super-friendly smiles. I kicked her under the table. Her smile became even warmer.

‘I can do better than that,’ he said. His chest puffed up as he spoke. ‘I asked around after you told me Kaiser was probably working here. One of my archaeologist colleagues was involved in the early days of this dig. He told me all about what they claim they’ve found.’ He paused, smiled.