Vignette Collection: If I Forget Thee, Oh Jerusalem

[azander12]

So, in the spirit of Japhy's excellent vignette series "Worlds at War", and inspired by the great joy I've had in writing my own vignettes (here and here), I present to you If I Forget Thee, Oh Jerusalem. This will be a series of vignettes set in alternate cities of Jerusalem, with a wide variety of points of divergence and levels of plausibility. None will be totally ASB, but some may be more fantastical than others.

Please comment, and I hope you enjoy!

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
-Psalm 137: 5-6​

The Collection:
-Balagan Gadol

 

[azander12]

Balagan Gadol

BALAGAN GADOL​

The room was abuzz with a damp chatter, men and women mumbling to each other or to no one in particular. Despite it being the middle of summer, I was shivering slightly, my skin itching, feeling too tight for my body. I watched the attendant, a Tibetan with a face wrinkled from long exposure to a foreign sun, very closely as she lit the charcoal with a hand-torch. Touched by a blue propane flame, the coal caught immediately, sparking and spitting.

I waited several long moments, and then took a draw from the hose. The blunt, vegetal taste of cannabis smoke was complimented by the sickly-sweet, rich flavor of the opium. A familiar warm feeling spread through my body, along with a wave of beautiful exhaustion. After a few more drags and more saccharine fog, I slid another forty sterling across the table and slumped back.

“There goes another day,” said a loud, nasal voice.

Through my three-quarters closed eyes and the dope haze, I couldn’t see who it was. The voice seemed so familiar though.

A sharp kick to the shin brought me closer to reality. My eyes, still hazy, shot open. A tall, thin black woman in a khaki trenchcoat and jackboots swam into view.

“Get up, you junkie,” spat Edil Daar, chief detective of the Jerusalem Special Police and my former boss. She grabbed my arm and attempted to haul me to my feet. I resisted, although gravity did the lion’s share of the work. After a few tries, she finally managed to get me to my feet and hold me there. The itching was gone, but the comfortable day I had spent my rent money on was mostly gone. I rubbed my bloodshot eyes.

“What the fuck do you want, you crazy bitch?” I grumbled.

“We’ve got a problem, and, as much as I hate this, we need you to help out,” said Edil.

“And if I don’t want to?” I asked.

“You’ll want to,” she said. Dousing the coal of my narghile with a glass of water seemingly produced from nowhere at all, she strode out of the curtained room. With my afternoon ruined and nothing else to do, I jammed my patched porkpie on my head and followed her.

*****​

“So, what you’re saying is that you need someone to investigate a kidnapping.”

Edil nodded. As always, she had a sour look on her face. Considering the shit she’d gone through, all to end up in this clusterfuck of a place, I couldn’t blame her. That didn’t make it easier to be on the business end of her sharper edges.

“Essentially, yes. You know how it is with kidnappings. Either we’ll get a ransom note in the next twenty-four hours, or the young Rebbetzin Khorodovsky is dead already.”

“And the chief rabbi? He didn’t see a thing?” I asked. In most places, a deaf, white-bearded octogenarian marrying a nineteen-year old beauty would spark a mix of revulsion and envy, but here in Mandate Jerusalem, it was your average Tuesday type deal.

Edil sipped her espresso. Café Zeytoun was one of the city’s finest, right off of the old souk. The kaleidoscopic Jerusalem crowd, narrowly held at bay by the low patio wall, pushed by: Haredim with black hats and sidelocks; Arab women with baskets full of produce; Tibetans and Armenians and every other flavour of refugee and outcast imaginable. “Apparently not,” she said. “He was lecturing the yeshiva boys about the finer points of Sabbath law.”

“Well, the case seems clear enough,” I said, leaning back. “The question is, what do you need me for? You have a whole department of gumshoes. Even that idiot Jean-Luc could get it done, I’m sure.”

Edil made an expression somewhere between a grimace and a smirk. “I haven’t told you where we think she is yet.”

I paused, with a sinking feeling in my stomach. When she told me, I yelped. “Really? Are you sure that’s good information? That doesn’t seem like something Finley’s folk would do.”

Edil’s face shifted fully towards the smirk. “Yes, Bentov, really. You know we have a difficult relationship with them. A private detective won’t stir things up in the same way, and we know you have connections in that part of town.”

“And if I say no? What’s in it for me?”

Edil didn’t say anything. She took out a small leather satchel, and slid it across the table. I opened it. There was at least 10,000 pounds sterling in there, banknotes with Edward VIII’s languid stare peering back. There was also a manila envelope and a polished black shape I knew was a Luger.

Even with my opium-parched throat, I swallowed. That would take care of-

“Your debts. This should cover all of them.”

Edil stood up, and looked down at me, her face softened into something like sadness. “I always though you were a good detective, David. Prove it to me, and get this done.”

*****​

The traffic, as always, was sheer insanity. The chorus of horns and multilingual curses Jerusalem’s roads weren’t built for an age of cars and motor-rickshaws, and the United Nations Provisional Administration for Jerusalem had neither the money nor jurisdiction to do much about it. Their energy was spent making sure things didn’t get worse, corralling the city’s thousands of squabbling ethnic groups, political parties, cults and social clubs into something resembling order, or at least organized chaos.

“Yebacu ti sunce iz neba!” bellowed my cab driver, a burly Serb named Radovan, as someone nudged in front of him. His close-cropped hair, beard, and the picture of the former King Peter II of Yugoslavia nailed to the dashboard showed him to be a royalist exile, probably an ex-soldier. “Sorry, habibi. These Tibetan Chinese, they barely know their ass from their elbow in a car. We Serbs, on the other hand, are excellent driv- u pičku materinu!” he yelled, slamming on the brakes right before squashing a Haredi man wandering through the middle of traffic.

The near-victim seemed to be in a daze, turning slowly towards the car that had almost turned him into a human pancake. He wore tattered clothes and a yellow headband with Hebrew script. He grinned wildly. “Na Nach Nachman Nachman me’Uman!” he cried, pressing against the window with pamphlets in Hebrew. “Na Nach Nachman Nachman me’Uman!”

I leaned out the window, and said as politely as possible to the cultist of Rav Nachman of Breslov, “Anachnu lo yehudim, achi. We aren’t Jews.”

The man’s face fell, then rose again as he jumped to the next car. “Na Nach Nachman Nachman me’Uman!”

I closed the window. Radovan said, “Thanks, habibi. You always get nutters like that down here.” After a few moments, he spoke up again. “So what takes you to Wadi Joz?”

“Business,” I said.

“Ahh, business. Rough neighbourhood.”

I nodded. After a few minutes of silence, Radovan launched into another rant about the Tibetans, while I half-listened and cursed myself for even agreeing to do this foolish errand.

*****​

The sun was getting low in the sky by the time I made it to the edge of Wadi Joz. As soon as I stepped out of the taxi, Radovan sped off. Joz had an evil reputation for a reason. The area used to be an Arab neighbourhood, but most of its people had left the Mandate Zone for Palestine, or gone further afield to the Arabian Republic or Iraq for work. The same had happened to the secular Jews: only the Haredim and old, stubborn or Christian Arabs were left. Now, it was controlled by the Revered T. Patrick Finley, also known as the Brother Prophet Thomas, leader of His Holy Temple of the True Afrikan Israelites.

As I strode across the street and into Wadi Joz’s lanes, I began noticed the clear disrepair of the buildings of the district. Old Arab homes mixed with shoddy new construction, crooked towers and apartments extending up towards the heavens. The city was crammed to the brim with people, and uncooperative groups like Finley’s Temple got even less of the sparse public money for housing than their numbers would suggest. Children, too skinny for their age, played among cracking cobblestones, conversing in a singsong jumble of Amharic, English and liturgical Hebrew.

Hard-faced men with flowing dreadlocks clustered around a doorway, the bulge of sidearms clearly visible beneath their tzitzit, dyed a bright red. They glared at me suspiciously. Very few outsiders came into Joz: the Afrikan Israelites operated businesses outside of their commune to bring in income, but their district itself was largely off-limits, patrolled by a private militia with enough firepower to give even the UN’s Hammershields a run for their money. The Jerusalem Special Police had a quiet agreement with Finley that kept the JSP out of Joz in exchange for peace and quiet. Considering what the Afrikan Israelites had faced in the US of A before coming to the City of Refuge, I sympathized with their stance.

As if on cue, the men peeled away from the doorway and went in different directions. One made a beeline right for me, obstructing my path. I stopped. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“State your business, white devil,” intoned the man, a Southern American drawl escaping his lips.

“I’m looking for someone. A friend.”

The man spat. “Ain’t no white devil bitches here. The Lord won’t truck with mixing between Israelites and the Daughters of Lilith.”

I felt a presence behind me. The other men were there. Nothing I hadn’t expected. I wasn’t shooting or talking my way out of this. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with subtlety, not in here. “I need to speak with Menachem HaCohen.”

The man looked shocked. “A white devil don’t just walk in here and demand to speak with the Voice.”

“Take me to him. Tell him David needs a favour.”

*****​

The room was out of some sort of Ronald Reagan spy film. The only light in the room came from a single, hot, blindingly bright lamp extruding from the low concrete ceiling. If I wasn’t half-convinced that there was a good chance I’d be dead within the hour, I would have been laughing.

The metal door opened, and a single man walked in. He wore his hair short, with a goatee and steel-rimmed glasses. He also wore tzitzit, although his were a deep, purplish blue, contrasting with his dark suit. The man smiled.

“Shalom aleychem, Bentov. Even for a child of Lilith, you look like hell,” said Menachem HaCohen, formerly Malcolm Little of Omaha, Nebraska, and now Voice of the Prophet and primary public face of the Holy Temple of the True Afrikan Israelites.

I grinned back. “Well, you know me. Soul’s damned already, I might as well have some fun before I go down to Gehenna.”

“What can I do for you, David?”

“I’m looking for a friend.” I slid a photograph of the Rebbetzin across the desk. “Have you seen her?”

Menachem shook his head. “She couldn’t be here. We do not interact intimately with your kind, the prophet has forbidden it. If you think someone here has taken her, you are mistaken.”

I leaned forward. “Menachem, I’m getting this from the JSP-”

He cut me off. “Then the JSP is mistaken. We do not corrupt ourselves with white devils,” he said, angrily.

I pushed. “They asked me to come poke around. I know you keep things clean here, but you can’t know everything that happens. Is there a chance she was taken here?”

Menachem drew himself up. “No, David. You are wearing out your welcome rather quickly.” Menachem called out in the African Israelite patois, and two guards came up the stairs. “The Nazirites will escort you back to your kind’s part of the city. Next time you come calling, I may not be so easily available. Shalom aleychem.”

*****​

I had six missed calls on my mobile for Edil. Her phone rang four times before she picked up. “Finally! Someone calls back,” she barked.

“I seemed to have burned my only bridge into the Temple. There might something there, but accusing the Afrikan Israelites of kidnapping a pretty white woman is a sensitive topic.”

Edil sighed. “Well, it’s a good thing we found her.”

“What?! I did all that for nothing?”

“She ran off to her cousin’s house. Apparently, Rabbi Khorodovsky is a traditional husband who expects certain things from his wives, and gets testy if they don’t perform to his expectations. She’s back home now.” Edil said, bitterly.

I spoke softly. Dealing with these cases, I knew, touched a nerve for her. “I’m sorry, Edil. I wish we could do something.”

“This is Jerusalem. This is what we signed up for,” she said. After a pause, she continued. “Keep the money, David, and clean yourself up. I may have more work for you.”

I nodded. “I’ll think about it. It’s been a long day.”

“Sleep on it, and call me tomorrow.”

“I will,” I said, hanging up the phone. I wasn’t sure if I was lying or not, to her or to myself. All I knew was, I had a long trip home.

 

[St. Just]

I like it! Nice little noir, in what I have to assume is the mid-20th century if Edward VIII is on the currency... and nice re-purposing of Malcolm X as well.

 

[Japhy]

Honestly this was a great start, it was impressive how quickly you build up this story in a short time. The idea of a long term UN Jerusalem is wonderful, and you do a marvelous job at a clash of cultures aspect. I'll say from the experience with Worlds at War, that a location based concept certainly will give you more freedom of action.

Can't wait to see what follows.

 

[MrP]

Very good story! you have a knack for building atmosphere in just a few sentences.

 

[azander12]

It's been a very long time, but I've decided to revive this. Next story below.

For the mood, watch this video and listen to this song.

 

[Historyman 14]

Hopefully Jerusalem shall one day be returned to Israel and the Jewish people with full, 100% control.

 

[azander12]

Hopefully Jerusalem shall one day be returned to Israel and the Jewish people with full, 100% control.

No. I hope one day Jerusalem will be at peace, shared among all the people who live there and for whom it is a sacred place. My people have no greater claim to our city of Jerusalem than the Palestinian people in particular have to their city of al-Quds.

 

[azander12]

Sadiq Ash-Sha’ab
​

The morning fog was unusually thick even for this time of year, desperately clinging to the streets like a child too old for its ratty birth blanket. It had been like this for the past few weeks, leaving vagrants shivering and stray dogs soaked and stinking. Some in the poor sections of town said it was an ill omen, but superstitious talk like that was discouraged these days. Migrants just in from the countryside would get sneers or worse for their shabby clothes and strange folk beliefs. Rationalism and science were the creeds of the Ottoman New Order, even in the holy city.

Mahmoud stayed comfortably indoors, avoiding the damp. He had known too much pain from wet and cold. The long, fading buckled scar stretching across his abdomen and ribcage, from the jagged edges of an Armenian rebel’s bayonet, ached along with his joints, which schemed to betray him and bring him to the ground at the most inopportune moments. Mahmoud rose, knees creakily protesting. He needed to stoke the wood stove again - the men back from the desert skies prefered the cafe warm - and the day’s food wouldn’t finish preparing itself

With a few gusts, the stove flared and waves of heat drifted across the small space. Mahmoud looked out on his pride and joy. Eight worn, chipped ceramic tables, painted in earthy tones, were accompanied by inexpensive padded wrought-iron chairs. The floor was covered with a peasant-made rug, its patterns suggesting a battlefield or a sunset. Mahmoud could never tell which, perhaps the reason he loved the rug so much. A wood bar separated the kitchen - fuelled by the same wood stove - from the seating area. They served coffee and mezzes and despite city regulations to the contrary, Mahmoud did a thriving trade in arak, vodka, and hashish for his nargiles. The fat fees he could charge more than outweighed the baksheesh he paid to the police.

The bell rang, and Mahmoud, busily chopping onions, didn’t notice. “Ya, Abbi!” a hoarse female voice called out.

Mahmoud looked up. Maha, his youngest daughter and only employee, carried several large sacks of fresh pita. Just over five feet tall, dark, with green eyes and black hair loosely wound under a tarja, Maha was a pretty girl, but still lived at home. She had an independent streak, quietly rejecting the few suitors she’d had already, and Mahmoud didn’t want her leaving the house just yet. She helped him run Bayt Zeytoun, more and more important with his declining health, but most importantly she was his youngest, and he loved her dearly. She walked over and kissed him on the bearded cheek twice. “Are you hurting? I know how the damp affects you.”

Mahmoud said, “Of course. I’ll manage though.”

Maha shook her head. “No, abbi, you sit. Brew some coffee, I’ll finish the rest.”

Mahmoud started, but his daughter shushed his protestations, gently grabbing the vegetable knife and resuming cutting. He sighed. She was strong-willed like her mother. He went to heat his cezve to brew coffee. It would be a long day.

***​

The sun had eventually come to melt the fog, righteously cleansing the air of corrupt moisture. Not the metaphor that the Guardian Council used, but the jist of their rhetoric - two parts military discipline, one part socialist progress and one part pan-Islam - was the same. Still, while Jerusalem was a regional center, it was still far from Stamboul’s parade-avenues or the blood-soaked sands of Arabia. That, along with the presence of large numbers of pilgrims, foreign merchants and the Yishuv, gave them some leeway. The same old baksheesh was paid, only to police and soldiers in new formations or to the city government as fees instead of paper and coins in an envelope.

The return to decent weather meant that the cafe was busier than usual. People popped in and out for coffee, hummus and pita, bowls of pickled or grilled vegetables, and small tureens of stewed ful, chicken or goat. As the day went on, the crowds changed. Workers and pedestrians seeking breakfast, lunch or a place to get a quick coffee and read the newspaper faded as more and more uniformed men showed up. Bayt Zeytoun had become popular with off-duty soldiers, from conscripts in from searching the Palestinian countryside for the last gasps of the Fedayeen to pilots finished bombing guerrillas in the mountains of Kurdistan or the ragtag Ikhwan bands of Hedjaz and Nejd.

Today, it was pilots. They were the rowdiest and hardest drinking guests Mahmoud had. They tended to drive even other soldiers away. While the Palestinian republicans still pulled off ambushes and bombings now and again, the troops in the field here were glorified police at this point. Even Bedouin smuggling had tapered off with the new vali’s mandatory-settlement policies. The pilots were another story. The tales they told about their exploits while red-faced from liquor and the heat made Mahmoud’s blood run cold.

He hurried over to a table full of the men in their pale grey uniforms, carrying a basket of hot pita and another dish of hummus. They were officers - better paying, usually, but expectant of prompt service. One of the men, a burly Syrian with a shining cross around his neck, was finishing a story. “-and the camel-fuckers scattered! Not that it would do them much good. You can’t outrun green-yellow, especially once it starts choking you out.”

As Mahmoud set the dish down, they laughed raucously. “Hey, umm, get us another round, will you?” Mahmoud nodded. One of the men, a short light-skinned man with a close-cropped mustache and eyeglasses, began to speak. His accent, surprisingly, was Germanic, with a tone that suggested Austria or Bavaria. “Habibi, you got another smoke?”

The Syrian replied, “Not for you, yahud!” He laughed and immediately handed the German a hand-rolled cigarette from a beaten tin case. “Ever regret coming here, Adolph?”

The man shrugged. “No. Not much room to advance in the Luftfahrtruppen with my last name. Here they don’t care so much if I praise Allah on, Friday, Saturday or Sunday or not at all, just if I can get the job done. The rank bump helped too.”

The men laughed as Mahmoud retreated to the kitchen to prepare another order, asking Maha to give the men their round of drinks, clear liquor in chipped tea glasses. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath, and looked out over the restaurant. His daughter, carrying the tray, leaned over to place it down. As she did, the Syrian ran his fingers up her calf, reaching her rear. She straightened suddenly, as though zapped with an electric shock. The men laughed, and the Syrian grabbed her wrist and said something. Maha was silent, a mouse with its tail caught in the paw of a grinning cat. She bowed her head and mumbled something, and the men roared.

After a short exchange, the Syrian let her go, and she scurried back to the kitchen. Her face was red with fright and fury. She said nothing, and Mahmoud pretended to not have noticed. But notice he did.

***​

By the time the cafe closed, it was long since dark. Water drizzled from the sky, turning the paving stones into an obstacle course. Mahmoud had sent Maha home by bus a few hours prior, keeping an eye on the pilots and offering a free round of arak as she walked out to keep them in their spot. He didn’t want the Syrian - they called him Basel - to get any ideas.

Ten years prior, the streets of al-Quds would have been quiet, most shops either closed or closing and people strolling by on their way home. Now, there were still many people out. Few storefronts still glowed, but basement bars and upstairs brothels - advertised by women in makeup and loose cotton pants standing outside and offering their wares to passers-by. The placement of a military base in the eastern hills meant that the once-puritanical city had developed quite a district of ill-repute. Visitors and new migrants, especially those inclined towards sin and criminality, had found a home in cramped, hastily built apartments. Many long-time residents had fled, but Mahmoud had grown up in these streets. He’d leave in a burial shroud or not at all.

There was a commotion at the end of the street. As Mahmoud got closer, he could see its source. There was a crowd of drunk men in street clothes jostling with a couple of prostitutes and their minders, cursing slabs of meat waving crowbars and cudgels. Mahmoud scampered into a side alley to take a detour before a brawl started in earnest. People would be hurt and maybe killed, and if and when the city police showed up, they tended to beat everyone down and sort them out later.

A shadow swept over Mahmoud’s head. He looked up, and saw nothing, but heard noise on the roof. He hurried his pace, rushing to reach his home. He had heard ravings about the spirits and demons that haunted the city since he was a child. A drunken customer had raved about a masked ghost with a blade of moonlight only last week. Mahmoud had thrown him out on the sidewalk and called the police.

Mahmoud was not a superstitious man. Far from it. He hurried along nonetheless.

***​

Bayt Zaytoun was even more packed than usual. Mahmoud’s legs were screaming, but someone needed to serve the customers, and Maha was hurrying around like a woman on fire. When the bell at the door rang, signalling that yet another person or party had arrived, Mahmoud barely noticed.

He did notice though when they sat down. Their gray uniforms were freshly starched and pressed, and the Syrian’s cross gleamed as if polished for hours. A few seconds of dangerous stares and muttering from the pilots made a group of workers decide to suddenly finish their coffees and vacate their table. The men sat down. Mahmoud swallowed heavily as he approached the group. The Syrian waved him away as he tried to hand them menus. “The girl,” he barked, before lighting up a cigarette.

Mahmoud beat a hasty retreat, telling Maha to bring the men a bottle of arak before he went to the kitchen to wipe his forehead and get a few new unmarked bottles of liquor from underneath the wash basin. Suddenly, over the din of the restaurant, he heard a screech and the sound of a hand striking flesh. He hurried out to see his daughter struggling against the Syrian’s grip, a bright red hand mark on his face. “Fucking daughter of a pig!” the pilot yelled.

Mahmoud raced over. His fear and anger had collided, producing a numbness. He felt almost as though he was observing himself from the outside as he approached the table. “What the fuck is going on?”

Maha started. “This son of a whore touched me!” Her face was bright red from shame and fury.

Mahmoud had no doubt where the man had touched her. He turned to the pilot, and seethed, “Get the fuck out!”

The Syrian puffed up his chest and growled something unintelligible. The cafe had fallen nearly silent. A guest yelled out, “Shame on you!” Another voice joined. “Shame!”

The crowd began to chorus and shout. Cries of “Turks, get out!” began to spread. The Syrian looked ready to stay and fight a mob of Jerusalemites, but the others look less interested. The German in particular grimaced and grabbed the man’s tunic, half-dragging him out the door while making a hand gesture at Mahmoud that was either conciliatory or threatening. Mahmoud didn’t really care which. When they were gone, he collapsed back into his seat and wiped his head. There would be a round of free drinks, then back to work.

***​

The sky was clear tonight as Mahmoud locked up, tunelessly whistling a trench song from Armenia. He had called the police to report the incident as a good Jerusalemite would, slipping the bored-looking officers a bottle of arak to keep them off his back and push the report up their priority list. Nothing much would likely come of it, but it might keep the little gang of jumped-up air jockeys out of his cafe.

Mahmoud snapped the lock in place and pocketed the key. He turned around, and suddenly came to a halt. A gray-clad figure stood in front of him, stinking of liquor. The Syrian grinned. “So, you think you’re some sort of tough guy, huh?”

Mahmoud’s stomach sank. Before he could react, the Syrian took a swing, a haymaker right into Mahmoud’s chest. The man was drunk, and had aimed for his head. The miss saved Mahmoud’s life, but the pain of impact was unbearable. He collapsed into a heap before scrunching himself up to protect his head and neck. The Syrian started kicking him, blows ricocheting through his body. He heard a voice. “Basel! Stop! Not here!”

What sounded like the German approached, and the two began to argue, His senses heightened by violence, Mahmoud could hear the breath of three more, the rest of the crew of pilots most likely. They hung back, unsure of what to do. Mahmoud, on the other hand wasn’t. Unfolding his body, he shot to his feet and ran. He was in agony, but he didn’t seem to feel it as he scurried away, the men close behind him braying. He made a sharp turn left into an alleyway, then right, then left, aiming to lose them in the maze.

The pavement brought him to a sudden stop, as his left foot caught a broken stone. He splayed out on the ground, and the men behind him laughed. They started kicking him as he crunched up. The blows rained down. Mahmoud prayed. He had faced death before, from typhus as a child, in the Anatolian trenches of the Second Russo-Ottoman War, in military hospital wards full of infection and disease. This was not a good way to die.

As he cried out to Allah, Mahmoud barely noticed that the blows had lessened, then stopped. There was still the noise of fighting though. Mahmoud cracked open his eyes. He was sure he was delirious from pain. A man wearing billowing white robes, an embroidered kufi, and a black mask covering all but his eyes stood there. He held a pair of sticks, already covered in blood. Two of the pilots lay on the ground, unconscious. One was the Syrian, a head wound pooling blood in the street. The other three held back, cautious. “Who are you?” yelled the German, still standing, and having produced a knife.

The masked figure said nothing. The German suddenly rushed at him. The man whirled out of the way, smashing the man in the back, then the head. A sickening crack erupted as the German collapsed. The other two men broke and ran, one screaming.

Mahmoud attempted to rise to his feet, but collapsed. The masked man strode over and hauled him to his feet. His voice was a lilting whisper, with almost aristocratic accent, the voice of a merchant’s or politician’s son. “Are you okay?”

Mahmoud’s head was still spinning. “Doc-doc-doc-”

“I can’t take you to a doctor. Can you get there on your own?”

Mahmoud grabbed a wall. The spinning slowed. “I- I think so,” he stammered out.

“Good.”

The masked man turned to leave. “Who are you?” Mahmoud called out. The man didn’t answer. “What should I call you, then, bismillah?”

The man turned, and in the same whisper, answered. “Dervish”​