You might ask the French High Commissioner to let me know if there is anything further he would like us to do about it. Now, I’ll ring for a clerk to take you to the medical officer—under escort, so that you mayn’t be subjected to further outrage or indignity. Good evening!”
“Anything more for me?” asked Grim, as soon as Abdul Ali had been led away.
“Not tonight, Grim. Come and see me in the morning.” Grim saluted. The Administrator looked at me—smiled mischievously.
“Have a good time?” he asked. “Don’t neglect those scratches. Good evening!”
No more. Not another word. He never did say another word to me about it, although I met him afterwards a score of times. You couldn’t help but admire and like him.
Grim led the way up the tower stairs again, and we took a last look at El-Kerak. The moon was beginning to rise above the rim of the Moab Hills. The land beyond the Dead Sea was wrapped in utter silence. Over to the south-east you could make out one dot of yellow light, to prove that men lived and moved and had their being in that stillness. Otherwise, you couldn’t believe it was real country. It looked like a vision of the home of dreams.
“Got anything to do tonight?” asked Grim. “Can you stay awake? I know where some Jews are going to play Beethoven in an upper room in the ancient city. Care to come?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
“AND THE REST OF THE ACTS OF AHAZIAH—”
I have no idea what Grim did during the next few days. I spent the time studying Arabic, and saw nothing of him until he walked into my room at the hotel one afternoon, sat down and came straight to the point.
“Had enough?”
“No.”
“Got the hang of it?”
“Yes, I think so,” I answered. “Allah’s peace, as they call it, depends on the French. They intend to get Damascus and all Syria. So they sent down Abdul Ali of Damascus to make trouble for the British in Palestine; the idea being to force the British to make common cause with them. That would mean total defeat for the Arabs; and Great Britain would save France scads of men and money. But you pulled that plug. I saw you do it. I heard Abdul Ali of Damascus tell you Scharnhoff’s name. Did you go after Scharnhoff?”
“No, not yet,” he answered. “You’re no diplomat.”
I knew that. I have never wished to be one, never having met a professional one who did not, so to speak, play poker with a cold deck and at least five aces. The more frankly they seem to be telling the truth, the more sure you may be they are lying.
“Neither are you,” I answered. “You’re a sportsman. Are you allowing Scharnhoff weight for age, and a fair start—or what?”
He chuckled. “You believed old Abdul-Ali of Damascus? He’s a French secret political agent. So whatever he told us is certainly not true. Or, if it is true, or partially true, then it’s the kind of truth that is deadlier deceptive than a good clean God-damned lie. Get this: such men as Abdul Ali would face torture rather than betray an associate—unless they’re sure the associate is a traitor or about to become one. A government can’t easily punish its own spies on foreign territory. But by betraying them, it can sometimes get the other government to do it. That Abdul Ali betrayed Scharnhoff to me, proves one of two things. Abdul Ali was lying, and Scharnhoff harmless—or in some way Scharnhoff has fallen foul of his French paymasters and they want him punished. Very likely he has drawn French money, for their purposes, and has misused it for his own ends. Or perhaps they have promised him money, and wish to back down. Possibly he knows too much about their agents, and they want him silenced. They propose to have us silence him. I’m going to call on Scharnhoff.”
“You suspect him of double treachery?”
“I suspect him of being a one-track-minded, damned old visionary.”
I had met Hugo Scharnhoff. Long before the War he had been a professor of orientology at Vienna University. At the moment he was technically an “enemy alien.” But he had lived so many years in Jerusalem, and was reputed so studious and harmless, that the British let him stay there after Allenby captured the city. A man of moderate private means, he owned a stone house in the German Colony with its back to the Valley of Hinnom.
“Care to come?” Grim asked me.
“Yes.”
“Know your Bible?” He proceeded to quote from it: “And the rest of the acts of Ahaziah which he did are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the Kings of Israel?"’
“What of it?”
“That was set down in Aramaic, nowadays called Hebrew, something like three thousand years ago,” said Grim. “It’s Aramaic magic. Let’s take a look at it.”
We trudged together down the dusty Bethlehem Road, turned to the east just short of the Pool of the Sultan (where they now had a delousing station for British soldiers) and went nearly to the end of the colony of neat stone villas that the Germans built before the War, and called Rephaim. It was a prosperous colony until the Kaiser, putting two and two, made five of them and had to guess again.
The house we sought stood back from the narrow road, at a corner, surrounded by a low stone wall and a mass of rather dense shrubs that obscured the view from the windows. The front door was a thing of solid olive-wood. We had to hammer on it for several minutes. There was no bell.
A woman opened it at last—an Arab in native costume, gazelle-eyed, as they all are, and quite good looking, although hardly in her first youth. Her face struck me as haunted. She was either ashamed when her eyes met Grim’s or else afraid of him. But she smiled pleasantly enough and without asking our business led the way at once to a room at the other end of a long hall that was crowded with all sorts of curios. They were mostly stone bric-a-brac-fragments of Moabite pottery and that kind of thing, with a pretty liberal covering of ordinary house dust. In fact, the house had the depressing “feel” of a rarely visited museum.
The room she showed us into was the library—three walls lined with books, mostly with German titles—a big cupboard in one corner, reaching from floor to ceiling—a big desk by the window—three armchairs and a stool. There were no pictures, and the only thing that smacked of ornament was the Persian rug on the floor.
We waited five minutes before Scharnhoff came in, looking as if we had disturbed his nap. He was an untidy stout man with green goggles and a grayish beard, probably not yet sixty years of age, and well preserved. He kept his pants up with a belt, and his shirt bulged untidily over the top. When he sat down you could see the ends of thick combinations stuffed into his socks. He gave you the impression of not fitting into western clothes at all and of being out of sympathy with most of what they represent.
He was cordial enough—after one swift glance around the room.
“Brought a new acquaintance for you,” said Grim, introducing me. “I’ve told him how all the subalterns come to you for Palestinian lore—”
“Ach! The young Lotharios! Each man a Don Juan! All they come to me for is tales of Turkish harems,
