— Right here, sir, although I’m not certain it’s in chronological order. The 22nd Regiment’s assault plan across the Jordan, the third of January, 1918. A roster of our brigade’s sick and wounded from the thirtieth of December, 1917, to the sixth of January, 1918. A report on discipline in the 3rd Battalion from the third week of January, bearing the signature of Captain Smogg…
— There had been many complaints, sir. A divisional list of all officers on leave as of the thirteenth of January, 1918. A draft of a battle plan for the conquest of Damascus, signed by Major Sluce, from the twenty-sixth of January, 1918. The guest list for the gala evening given by the military governor of Jerusalem on the thirtieth of January, 1918. Two signed photographs of General Allenby, no date. A list of provisions sent to the 5th Australian Battalion. The deployment of our artillery in the Jericho theater as of the first of February, 1918. Some drafts of Lieutenant Colonel Keypore’s personal correspondence with his wife.
— I’m afraid there’s more, Colonel.
— A description of the firing mechanism of our F Howitzer, unsigned and dateless. A filled-out resupply form for artillery shells. A photograph of an unidentified young woman, apparently a tart, on the Via Dolorosa. A map of Jericho with the position of all artillery pieces from the third of February, 1918. Those, Colonel, were the cannon lost earlier this month in that unfortunate battle across the Jordan. The Germans counted each round that we fired, and when they knew we had run out of ammunition, they ordered an assault. We lost one hundred and fifty men. Although I daresay the Australians were more upset about their cannon, because men are more easily replaceable.
— Just so, sir. He found it all in the wastebaskets or on his way to them.
— There already has been a jolly big scandal, sir. Officers were arrested and charges have been filed. New procedures have been instituted, and a special man was brought in from Cairo and has been on the job for a week. When you call on the general at headquarters tomorrow, you’ll notice all the wastebaskets are empty. There’s now a special sergeant with a detail of two soldiers whose assignment it is to burn the waste around the clock, which he does so industriously that I believe that some of it is already on fire before it’s been thrown away There’s a permanent pillar of smoke outside military headquarters — if you look out the window you can see it right now. I say, sir, it’s clearing again! And there’s one of those black crows I’ve been telling you about. They already know that you, the presiding judge, have arrived and that I’m in here with you, although I’ll be hanged if I know how they do.
— Yes, sir.
— Yes, sir.
— Over there, Colonel, if it’s not too hard for you to make him out.
— A black spot it is, Colonel. And such black spots, Colonel, have been following me around for the past three weeks, because they know that the noose is tightening and that it won’t be long now. Two emissaries of theirs have already been to see me, an old solicitor and a court clerk who can stammer a bit in English. They asked to look at the Handbook of Wartime Jurisprudence, and I gladly let them have it and gave them a place to sit in my room, where they spent the whole day reading and engaging in Talmudic disputations. I even had them served tea, which they wouldn’t touch; at closing time, pale and exhausted, they handed the handbook back to me with the tips of their fingers, as if Mani’s death were already inside it, and nodded sadly and looked at each other and asked if I knew the London Horowitzes. And when I confessed that I didn’t, they began to ransack the rest of the world for some Horowitz whom I was prepared to be a distant relation of and could be given regards from, only to give up with a sigh in the end. “But this Mani is mad,” said the court clerk to me in a whisper. “Is it not beneath the dignity of Great Britain to concern itself with a madman? Why, even his father took his own life; can you not show him mercy?” But I, Colonel, looked them straight in the eye and answered curtly, “You know as well as I do he’s not mad.”
— No, sir. Not even with that madness that masquerades as sanity until you sniff its sour smell in a warm room. No, there is absolutely nothing mad about him. He doesn’t have even one iota of that first, slight, hardly visible wobble that eventually throws a man out of orbit. He has all his senses, Colonel; the man’s soul may be a jungle, but neither his reason nor will are impaired, and he’s in total command of himself; he says what he wishes to say, and holds back what he doesn’t; and I happen to know that he is preparing a long political plea, not for the court’s benefit, but for the public and the press. He’s the sort of chap who likes his audience big and captive. He plans to let me say what I’m entitled to, and then to deliver a speech that will electrify Jerusalem, because it will be given by a man with a hangman’s noose around his neck. I feel it; I know it; that’s why he walked straight into that Ulsterman’s funk hole when he could have easily gone around it. He was tired of playing to crowds of Mohammedans assembled by the whips of Turks; nothing would do for him but to perform for all Jerusalem.
— That’s just it, sir. It’s only a guess, but I reckon he’s sharpening a poisoned dart for us. As much as I’ve tried drawing him out, I’ve gotten precious little out of him. He composed all the drafts of his speech in Hebrew, and when I sought to lay hands on them, he quite simply ate them. They’re safely inside him now.
— You’ll see him tomorrow, Colonel, in the dock. Don’t be fooled into thinking he’s following the proceedings, because the only thing on his mind will be his speech: about this eternal battle-field of a country that is spawning another catastrophe and about all the locusts waiting to arrive… although if you take a good look around you, Colonel, what you see here is one big wasteland with jolly few people anywhere. I told him as much, too. “Forget all that,” I told him; “Find yourself a good barrister who will tell the court about your childhood, and your poor dead father; you’re going to get yourself hung, and the more of your political balderdash, the more rope you’ll wrap around your neck.” But he just smiles at that, cool as a cucumber. A most political animal; and most politically calm! Quite certain that there’s politics in everything he does… and yet I know, sir — and the knowledge turns in me like a knife — that there’s another story here. There’s someone else lurking in the background whom he’s out to get back at, and all his politics are mere autosuggestion.
— A quite sensible thought, sir. In fact, I had it myself. I had a hook installed in the ceiling without his knowledge and a length of rope left in his cell one night, and I instructed the guards to look the other way in the hope that he would put an end to it. Well, sir, that night he pulled out the hook and coiled up the rope, and the next morning he handed them to me in a neat bundle without a word, which was his way of telling me that he meant to have his speech. And so he’s been whittling away at it — and though I haven’t a notion what’s in it, I would be most delighted to be spared it, because it can only stir up feeling against us.
— No, sir. It’s nothing that could affect the sentence. He’s as good as dead already, sir, unless one of those crows can fly to Buckingham Palace and come back with a royal pardon. The case against him is open-and-shut, sir, and you musn’t be misled by my qualms. Tomorrow morning I’ll be there like an immovable body, and your two colleagues won’t need to be convinced; Lieutenant Colonel Keypore would like nothing better than to see the man swing for those lost cannon across the Jordan, and I don’t believe he’ll relent… oh no, not him but nonetheless, sir… and now, sir, I am… I am speaking not only as a soldier, but as a British subject too… if it were possible… you see, once the trial starts, it will proceed most speedily, with a rapidity we have no… control over… and so I thought that perhaps we should consider… since there is…