“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, of which I know no more than any one. They are not interested in subjects of real importance. ’How many wives had Djemal Pasha? How many of them were European?’ That is what they ask me. When I discuss ancient history it is only about King Solomon’s harem that they care to know; or possibly about the modern dancing girls of El-Kerak, who are all spies. But there is no need to inform you as to that. Eh? I haven’t seen you for a long time, Major Grim. What have you been doing?”
“Nothing much. I was at the Tomb of the Kings yesterday.”
Scharnhoff smiled scornfully.
“Now you must have some whiskey to take the taste of that untruth out of your mouth! How can a man of your attainments call that obviously modern fraud by such a name? The place is not nearly two thousand years old! It is probably the tomb of a Syrian queen named Adiabene and her family. Josephus mentions it. This land is full—every square metre of it—of false antiquities with real names, and real antiquities that never have been discovered! But why should a man like you, Major Grim, lend yourself to perpetuating falsity?”
He walked over to the cupboard to get whiskey, and from where we sat we could both of us see what he was doing. The cupboard was in two parts, top and bottom, without any intervening strip of wood between the doors, which fitted tightly. When he opened the top part the lower door opened with it. He kicked it shut again at once, but I had seen inside—not that it was interesting at the moment.
He set whiskey and tumblers on the desk, poured liberally, and went on talking.
“Tomb of the Kings? Hah! Tomb of the Kings of Judah? Hah! If any one can find that, he will have something more important than Ludendorff’s memoirs! Something merkwürdig, believe me!”
He stiffened suddenly, and looked at Grim through the green goggles as if he were judging an antiquity.
“Perhaps this is not the time to make you a little suggestion, eh?”
Grim’s face wrinkled into smiles.
“This man knows enough to hang me anyhow! Fire away!”
“Ah! But I would not like him to hang me!”
“He’s as close as a clam. What’s your notion?”
“Nothing serious, but—between us three, then—you and I are both foreigners in this place, Major Grim, although I have made it my home for fifteen years. You have no more interest in this government and its ridiculous rules than I have. What do you say—shall we find the Tomb of the Kings together?”
Grim wrinkled into smiles again and glanced down at his uniform.
“Yes, exactly!” agreed Scharnhoff. “That is the whole point. They call me an enemy alien. I am to all intents and purposes a prisoner. You are a British officer—can do