Fly Has a Hundred Eyes A, page 6
In the courtyard the polite murmur of voices and quiet sounds of china and silverware moving gently on linen tablecloths were punctuated by the peaceful splash of the fountain in the center.
Dame Margaret waited at a table in the corner, beyond two tall palms that wavered above the flagstone pavement, beyond the blooming roses, near the bright masses of red and orange and purple bougainvillea tumbling against the stone walls. Dame Margaret had already shed her hat.
Lily took the chair across from her. “You wanted to see me?”
Dame Margaret didn’t look up. She rearranged the spoon and fork in front of her. Lily expected her to express some sort of half-hearted condolence, to say something like, “Sorry about Eastbourne.”
Instead, Dame Margaret asked, “Why were you working with Geoffrey?”
Is that what she wanted to know?
“He was willing to put me on the staff.”
“Why not Megiddo? That’s a Chicago dig.”
Lily was startled. She knows more about me than I thought, knows I’m from the University of Chicago. “They don’t mix the sexes on American excavations, say it’s bad for morale.”
“Nonsense. Sex has nothing to do with gender. Wooley and Lawrence always dug together, and the British Empire survived.”
“The Turkish Empire didn’t,” Lily said. So the stories about them were true?
An enormous brass key lay on the table in front of Dame Margaret. She moved it aside. “You’re thinking of Ned Lawrence’s friend, that little Saudi sheik? It had nothing to do with archaeology.”
“He became king of Iraq.”
“Political obligation, that’s all. Ned had to make promises.”
“Balfour made promises too,” Lily said.
Dame Margaret shrugged. “All’s fair in love and war. Without promises, Turks would still control the area. I ordered tea for you.”
“Thank you.”
“You could have worked with Hetty Goldman at Tarsus.” Dame Margaret straightened her fork again, ran her finger along the handle of the spoon. “Kathleen Kenyon and John Crowfoot worked together at Samaria without any trouble. We’ve come a long way since the twenties. You have Fendley to thank for that. As long as students put up with his field conditions, he took them on. Cordelia ran the camp and mothered them all, men and women alike.”
“I have to thank him for more than that. He’s responsible for my being on Eastbourne’s staff. I came to Palestine on my own, used my fellowship money. When they turned me away at Megiddo, Sir William found me moping in the library at the American School and called Eastbourne.”
We should be talking about Eastbourne, Lily thought, should be lamenting his untimely death. “Eastbourne’s murder is a terrible shock to me,” Lily said.
They sat in silence, Dame Margaret glancing from table to table around the courtyard. Lily waited.
“What did you mean when you said you weren’t surprised?” Lily finally said.
“At what?”
“That Eastbourne was killed,” Lily said.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. He may have made enemies. The workmen or other archaeologists may have resented him. He was not a pleasant man.”
“Unpleasant enough to be killed?”
“He was secretive and bad tempered.”
“He had good points too, you know,” Lily said, surprised that she felt forced to defend him.
“De mortuus nil nisi bonum? Speak only good of the dead? No, my dear. Quite the contrary. The dead are beyond hurting. It’s the living who deserve kindness.”
Dame Margaret picked up the key and put it down again in front of her. “I have that room over there.” She pointed to double doors heavy with paint that led from the courtyard. “They tell me it was Lawrence’s room. When he died, he was working on a survey of Crusader castles.”
Most of the castles were in the north—on either side of the Palestine border, like Monfort in the upper Galilee and Nimrod in the Golan. Some were along the coast, Caesarea, Atlit; or in the Judean hills, like the ones at Latrun and Ramie.
“You’re smiling,” Dame Margaret said. “What’s so funny?”
“I was picturing Lawrence, getting into that role. Lumbering around the countryside in costume, clattering in medieval armor, mapping a castle keep.”
“Ned was an unhappy man,” Dame Margaret said. “Maybe a little insane. But he was no buffoon.” She paused and fingered the key again. “He worked with Eliot and me at Ur.” She looked away at the fountain, watching the water splay and whisper as if it held some secret, and then looked back to Lily. “How did Eastbourne get on with Kate?”
“All right, I suppose.” Lily said. “Well, I’m not sure.”
Dame Margaret shook out her napkin and laid it in her lap. “Tea is here.” She moved the brass key to the side and sat silently while the waiter arranged plates and cups. He poured with an elaborate show of arcs and dips. She waited until he left before she spoke again. “When did you last see her?”
“Kate? Yesterday, when we came in from the field for lunch. I left the tel early. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. There was a time when they had a problem, that’s all. I know her well. We worked with her once. You didn’t see him leave or know who drove up with him?”
“No. I took off too early for that.”
“You’ll be going back after the funeral? Will you continue digging?”
“It all depends on Beacon Pharmaceutical. They sponsored the dig.”
“By the way, is anything missing from the excavation?”
The question seemed offhand, almost an afterthought. So this is what she’s after, Lily thought. “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. With the situation in Palestine now, the British police are helpless. You might need the protection of your own consulate.”
“You think things will get worse?”
“Who knows? For the past two years, with this awful general strike, there’s been nothing but violence—a thousand people killed in the last two months alone.” Dame Margaret seemed more impassioned than Lily expected. “The whole thing is orchestrated by the Grand Mufti, you know. Inspired by the Nazi forte—to magnify small fears and disagreements. They tease at wounds until they fester, nurture hatred until it erupts.”
“Divide and conquer?” asked Lily.
Dame Margaret took a sip of her tea and put the cup down carefully. “The British are the bastion of civilization in the Near East.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
Dame Margaret narrowed her eyes. “You were in Jerusalem with him that day.” Another casual statement that seemed to come out of nowhere.
“What day was that?”
“July tenth.”
“The day of the riot? We were working on pottery at the YMCA.”
Dame Margaret paused, wiped the spoon with her napkin, and put it down again. “Both of you disappeared that day from the YMCA.”
What is she trying to say? Is she accusing me of something?
“See anyone else?” Dame Margaret asked.
“Just…” Lily hesitated. What was Dame Margaret after?
“Just what?”
“Just a tourist,” Lily said. “Sir William thinks the whole thing, the riots, the general strike, is a plot to sabotage Suez and destroy the empire.”
“He may not be far off. Where do you think the poor fellah gets guns and ammunition? We know the Mufti gets his money from Hitler.” She picked up the brass key and held it in her hand, idly polishing it with the napkin. “You know Henderson, the new American military attache?”
“I met him yesterday.”
“He’s just arrived.” Dame Margaret seemed surprised. “His predecessor was killed in an accident near the Kastel on the road up to Jerusalem.”
“I know that curve. It’s dangerous. The road is narrow there and slippery when it’s wet.”
“Wasn’t raining when he skidded off the road.”
“Henderson’s a nice-looking man,” Lily said.
Dame Margaret shrugged. “There’s no accounting for tastes.” She put the key on the table next to her spoon and picked it up again. “I’m concerned for your safety, my dear. What will you do now?”
“I don’t know. I thought I might do a survey. Iron Age fortresses, maybe. And then write up some proposals for my own excavations.”
Still holding the key, Dame Margaret stood up. “Will you excuse me? I’m very tired.”
She headed toward Lawrence’s room. Lily was dismissed.
The murder made the front page of the Palestine Post the next morning, right under the headline “Eleven Separate Incidents within Seventy-Two Hours.” Lily read it at breakfast.
BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGIST MURDERED NEAR HEBRON
Geoffrey Gorton Eastbourne, distinguished British archaeologist and director of the Beacon Research Foundation excavations at Tel al-Kharub, was killed Saturday morning on the Beit Jibrin track northwest of Hebron. Eastbourne was shot in the back and sustained a crushing blow to his head.
Eyewitnesses, including his driver and a member of the excavation staff who witnessed the shooting, say that armed bandits stopped their car two kilometers from the main highway and ordered Eastbourne out of the car. The driver was told to continue on to Hebron. Two shots were heard as they drove away.
The car was intercepted as Eastbourne was on his way to the opening of the new Palestine Archaeological Museum.
According to a spokesman from the British Archaeological School, “Eastbourne demonstrated his usual rash courage and conscientious attention to his professional responsibilities” by insisting that work on the tel be completed before leaving camp. The director of the British School said that Eastbourne had no known enemies but had often been warned against traveling unarmed in the present political climate.
The body was brought to Jerusalem by ambulance late Saturday. Funeral services are scheduled for 2:30 p.m. today at the Protestant Cemetery on Mt. Zion.
* * *
When Lily finished breakfast, she brought the newspaper inside to the telephone table in the alcove next to the Common Room and put it on top of the stack of old papers. She remembered the morning of the riots, when Eastbourne had folded the paper and put it in his pocket, and searched through the stack for July 10, wondering what he had been hiding, and where he had gone that day.
She scanned the headlines from twenty days ago. Air raids in Canton; Spanish insurgents thirty miles from Valencia; Haifa curfew in force after yesterday’s bomb; Nazis demand self-determination for Sudeten Germans; arrival of the Italian steamship Marco Polo in Haifa port; record New York-Paris flight by Howard Hughes; Aspro tablets cure hay fever, nervous exhaustion, neuralgia, colds, malaria, asthma, sleeplessness.
Nothing there.
She remembered Sir William’s joke about a lonely heart’s notice in the personal columns. Flats for rent; English-speaking secretary wanted; shipment from the Marco Polo to arrive at the King David this morning; new dresses at Rosenthal’s Clothing Emporium.
Nothing there.
Lady Fendley came into the Common Room and Lily handed her the morning paper. “The funeral is at 2:30.”
“It’s so sad,” said Lady Fendley, sighing. “Geoffrey was a fine young man, really. He did it all on his own, you know.
With scholarships and hard work. His father was just a clerk in a haberdashery.“
“You really liked him.”
Lady Fendley nodded. “It wasn’t just that. He had responsibilities that would have distracted another man who wasn’t that dedicated. People laughed at him for being stingy. But the truth is, he was just squeaking by financially. He was sympathetic and helpful to all his workmen, seeing to their health and comfort. And he was good with children.” Lady Fendley looked down at the paper and then at Lily. “Village children adored him.”
“De mortuus nil nisi bonum?” asked Lily.
“Of course.”
EIGHT
The High Commissioner himself delivered the eulogy. Lily, drowsy from the sun, listened to his voice drifting in and out with the breeze that floated through the tall cypress and gently shifted their branches back and forth.
Snatches of his words reached her. “Brutally shot down in mid-career… outstanding discoveries… a scientist and a leader of men… inestimable loss.”
The whole British community was there—the Anglican Bishop who read the service; the Chief Justice; Dominicans from the Ecole Biblique, dressed in their light linen summer robes; the Attorney General; the Special Commissioner; members of the British School; bearded scholars from the Hebrew University. They crowded around the open grave and coffin draped with the Union Jack. Perspiration beaded on upper lips and ran down temples.
Jamal was there, watching from the verge of the path. Kate, buttoned into an ill-fitting black dress, her face puffed and blotched with tears, lingered on the edge of the crowd. A child sat near her in the shade of a tree.
Sir William stood in front, erect and resolute, looking toward the tawny desert hills and the Dead Sea, the water clear and blue as the sky and rimmed with white patches of salt crystals floating like miniature icebergs. Lady Fendley held his arm. Dame Margaret stood next to them, wearing the hat with the astonished feather.
“Gave his life for this land…” the High Commissioner was saying. Bees and butterflies hovered among wreaths that separated the funeral from tombstones that grew like broken teeth out of the dry weeds. Fresh graves, decked with faded flowers, were scattered here and there under soft and irregular ground.
Dame Margaret approached Lily. The breeze straightened her feather into a point, trembling a moment at apogee and then subsiding.
Lily heard whispers behind her, “… that’s not what I heard. I heard he was killed by some dissatisfied workmen.”
Before Lily could turn around to see who was talking, Dame Margaret reached her. The pleasant scent of vanilla mingled with the pungent odor of cypress and the fragrance from lavender growing on the side of the hill.
“We have to talk,” Dame Margaret said. “Not tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Tuesday. Let’s make it Wednesday, for lunch. At the American Colony.” What is it this time, Lily wondered? Dame Margaret left without saying goodbye, her feather rising again, the smell of vanilla wafting in her wake.
Sir William tossed the first shovel of dirt into the grave after the coffin was lowered. He turned away to take his wife’s arm and they walked down the path to a waiting taxi before Lily could reach them. Kate had vanished before the group dispersed. Only Jamal remained.
Lily left the cemetery. Weeds brushed against her sandals, releasing the pungent aroma of wormwood. She scrambled past the Church of the Dormition at the crest of the hill, past its turrets and conical dome. Jamal followed her down the hill to Zion Gate.
They went through the great double doors, heavy with iron hinges. Jamal strolled by Lily’s side, silent and watchful, through the crowded lanes—past donkeys and camels that blocked the way; Jewish men with fur hats and black, belted suits; women with head scarves and shapeless, long-sleeved dresses.
Jamal stayed with her as she maneuvered through the swarming bazaar of the Khan ez Zeit, through the slippery streets, past butcher shops redolent with flyspecked legs of lamb. The ruddy-faced woman behind her, wheezing garlic, had her ample belly caught in the small of Lily’s back. A man wearing a kefiya and a long, loose abaya jostled her. For a moment, the crush was so dense that Lily could barely breath.
Jamal was still with her.
Through the stifling throng snaked priests in long black robes and thin-lipped Protestant missionaries in dark suits leading their pale wives in baggy print dresses with dainty lace collars. Jamal glanced at Lily with his hooded eyes and smiled.
Somewhere near the Via Dolorosa, he disappeared.
Lily arrived at the American school hot and tired. She went to the kitchen and reached into the icebox for the water pitcher. The telephone rang. It was Henderson.
“Can you meet me at Samir’s Patisserie inside Damascus Gate in half an hour? Something urgent we must talk about.”
“Make it forty-five minutes.”
“Forty-five minutes then.”
She washed her face and took the glass of water outside into the garden, pressing its cool surface against her cheek and temples. She sat in the quiet of the garden with her feet up, her eyes closed, under the shade of the cedar tree until the lift of the late afternoon breeze revived her. Then she went back to the Old City.
She elbowed her way through Damascus Gate, avoiding beggars with swollen legs lying on the pavement in the shadow of the gate; beggars with pitiful faces and outreached hands; beggars sitting cross-legged on the ground, praying, their copper begging bowls silent reminders; beggars with accusing eyes who babbled and reeked of old urine. Assailed by a swarm of the destitute—by urchins and greedy children snatching at her— she reached into her pocket for a mil, a penny, a dime, anything to ease the guilt, to counteract the curses of their eyes. There but for the grace of God…
“Don’t give them anything.” It was Henderson who came up behind her. “Only encourages them.”
He led her to Samir’s Patisserie at the corner. “European Pastries,” the sign said. “We deliver tarts to your home for your pleasure.” The window was banked with sticky cakes and pastries mounded in geometric patterns, like three-dimensional optical illusions. A boy stood near the cakes with a whisk, beating back the flies drawn by the redolence of clarified butter and sugar syrup.
The proprietor smiled, with a sweeping bow. “Ahlan wa sablan.” He waved them to a table. “Welcome in peace.”
“Fiq,” Henderson answered. “Minfadlak, please, just some coffee.” He sat down at the table and pointed to the seat across from him.
He waited until she was seated. “Have you thought about the survey of Iron Age fortresses”
“It depends on whether we continue digging at Tel al-Kharub.”
