Benyamin Klein, stinging sweat running from under the kippah pinned to the thinning hair on his crown down into the furrows on his thick neck, sideburn ringlets and long beard as wet as if he’d stepped from a shower, black suit pants and white shirt clinging to his flesh beneath the plastic coveralls, carried a body bag across a scorched and smoldering clearing the size of a city block, the dense green foliage of the jungle incinerated when the Airbus A320 had hurtled from fifteen thousand meters and exploded on impact the night before, the nearly full fuel load igniting in a huge fireball that, or so the Thais said, had been seen fifty kilometers away.
The body bag, which lay across his extended forearms like an offering and drooped on either side, appeared weightless.
The aircraft had been almost completely destroyed, with none of the fuselage remaining. The only recognizable components were the forward landing gear (a pair of huge wheels that lay upside down near the canopy of singed trees marking the perimeter of the crash site) and half of the tail section, the garish yellow and red logo of the low-cost Asian airline still visible, and such was the devastation that the first responders had found none of the one hundred and seventy-one souls aboard intact—just hands, arms, legs and heads hanging like strange fruit from the palms.
By the time Klein and his four colleagues—members of a Haredi voluntary community emergency response organization—and three secular Jews from the Magen David Adom emergency medical services had arrived late in the morning, after an eleven hour flight from Jerusalem, carrying with them DNA samples, fingerprints and dental records, charged with identifying and collecting the body parts of the sixteen teenage Israeli gymnasts and their three coaches who had been aboard the doomed flight, the larger chunks of the remains had been removed and carried to a makeshift morgue in a nearby Buddhist temple, its garish heathen pagodas grinning over the thick green bush.
The pieces of flesh were too burned for visual identification and Klein and his team set about fine-tooth-combing the wreckage for smaller body parts. This they were uniquely equipped to do.
Attending the aftermath of the intifada suicide bombings over the last twenty years he’d seen an average of thirty bodies a week.
It was his calling to do this. His sacred task to recover every part of the bodies for a Jewish burial.
As Klein walked, smoke still rising from the blackened earth, his feet crunching on metal and glass, he blinked away sweat.
He was used to heat, yes, coming from Jerusalem. But it was the humidity that stunned him and this place with its palm trees, coconuts, monkeys and small brown people who worshipped idols, was a spiritual wasteland for him.
It was his not his first visit to Thailand.
He had been here over a decade ago, in the aftermath of the tsunami in Phuket, searching for the bodies of Israelis. He and his colleagues had become known as "the team that sleeps with the dead" because they’d toiled nearly twenty-four hours a day to identify victims, the disinfectant the Thais sprayed over the mounds of corpses doing nothing to mask the stench of decomposition.
A bad time.
A hell on earth.
Klein came to a halt, getting back his breath, resting his bad knee, the plastic of the black body bag hot to his skin.
His wife, Batsheva, had tried to stop him from volunteering yesterday when he’d got the call at their small apartment in Mea She'arim, Jerusalem's ultra-orthodox enclave.
“You are old now, Benyamin,” she’d said. “Let the young men go.”
“No,” he’d said, “it is my duty. They need a man of my experience.”
“But your knee is very bad.”
He’d shrugged off her protests, even though Thailand was the last place on god’s earth he wanted to go and his knee burned as if the flames of Gehenna were licking at it.
Thirty years ago, full of faith and fire, Klein had refused to sit beside a woman on a bus in Jerusalem and had demanded that she move. Another woman, young, in the uniform of a soldier, had sworn at him, saying he was a parasite and a coward for refusing to fight in Israel’s wars, and told the woman to stay seated.
When he’d called the soldier a whore she’d punched him in the face like a man, kicked him in his private parts with her heavy boot and thrown him from the moving bus. He’d fallen to the roadway, shattering his knee, left bloody and weeping in the filth of the gutter.
He’d limped ever since and, as he’d become heavier with the years and Batsheva’s cooking, so had the discomfort increased.
One of Klein’s colleagues, prodding at a twist of buckled metal with a stick, spoke to him in Yiddish, asking him if he was unwell.
“Es geyt gut, a dank,” Klein said and limped on.
A tent had been set up beside the crash site, guarded by Thai police and military who kept back the media and a horde of chattering onlookers. Inside, poring over the remains culled by Klein and his fellow volunteers, were the secular Jews: a DNA expert, a dentist and a fingerprint man.
One of them looked up at Klein and nodded.
“What do you have?” he asked in Hebrew.
Klein deposited the body bag on the floor and the man unzipped it beneath the light of bright lamp, revealing a chunk of blackened flesh, possibly the meat of an upper thigh; a boy’s sneaker, one of those garish American ones with all the colors and the straps and buckles, with a foot still inside, the bone and flesh sheared off at the ankle; and a finger, severed just below the knuckle that, judging from the size and the well-manicured cuticle, appeared to be a woman’s fifth digit.
The flesh was charred and blackened, but when the man, using his gloved hands, turned the pinkie over the intact whorl of the fingerprint was thrown into relief by the glare of the lamp.
TWENTY
The black SUV growled up the freshly plowed driveway of a non-descript tract house in the Washington suburbs and came to a halt alongside its twin in a double garage, the motorized door clattering and thumping as it rolled down and obliterated the cold and dismal night.
The driver, a youngish man in a suit with a vivid swoosh of shaving rash on his neck and the blank face that spoke of blind obedience and an almost sexual penchant for self-abnegation—in other words, exactly the type that Philip Danvers had never recruited for his surrogate family—opened the rear door of the SUV.
Danvers stepped down from the car that was as hot and stifling as an East Village bathhouse back in the day and shivered in the unheated garage. The other SUV still pinged and creaked and Danvers felt its warmth as he brushed its gleaming flank on the way to the wooden door that was being held open by the driver.
The house, something thrown together in the sixties—stucco with a pitched roof—was remarkable only for its lack of furniture.
The driver led Danvers along a corridor with Labrador-colored fitted carpets, passing dark, bare, echoing rooms with empty walls. He stopped at a closed door at the end of the corridor, rapped on the wood and swept it open.
This room was furnished with a steel desk and two chairs. A gray-haired man in a black suit sat behind the desk in the pooled light of a lamp.
“Thank you for coming in, Philip.”
Danvers walked into the room and stood with his hands on the back of the empty chair.
“Why have I been summoned here?” he asked, although he had a very good idea why he’d received the call an hour earlier that, though it had been polite, had hardly been a request.
“Philip, please sit,” the gray-haired man said.
He was powerful—and accomplished—enough to have occupied a niche interfacing between four successive administrations and the less than savory apparatchiks of the intelligence community. He’d long been known as the Plumber and Danvers had forgotten his real name, if indeed he had ever known it.
Danvers stayed standing, drumming his fingers on the chairback’s unpleasant synthetic fabric, his fingertips itching at the touch.
“Philip, please,” the Plumber said, extending a scrubbed, blunt-fingered hand.
&
nbsp; Danvers sat, hitching up his pressed trousers and crossing his legs at the knee, the jiggling of his highly polished but magnificently creased leather brogan a barometer of his choler.
“We’re here tonight to discuss the recent developments in the Kate Swift fiasco,” the Plumber said and Danvers felt a slight, reflex retraction of his ancient scrotum.
Was that a trickle of warm urine he felt escaping into his underpants?
Dear god, had the hour of the adult diaper finally come?
“Let’s start with an irrefutable fact. For two years Kate Swift, until she single-handedly stopped that school massacre three days ago, lived in New Devon, Vermont, as Holly Brenner. DNA harvested from her home has proved this.”
The Plumber placed a plastic ziplock bag containing a blackened, severed finger on the table. “The second irrefutable fact.” He looked at Danvers. “This is the fifth digit of Kate Swift’s left hand. It was recovered from the crash site of a domestic flight in Thailand.”
Danvers was racked by a bout of nausea so powerful that he was certain he was going to spew his dinner onto the desk top. He gulped for breath, the Plumber watching him without expression.
Danvers, fighting for control, said, “How did you acquire the finger?”
The Plumber shrugged. “We back-channeled it.” He stared at Danvers. “Let’s now venture into the area where educated guessing meets speculation. We believe that Kate Swift made contact with you in Berlin two days ago. Is this true?”
Danvers sat a while, shaken, bereft, then he said, “Yes. She did.”
“And you didn’t think to inform us?”
“I felt she had been sufficiently betrayed.”
“Interesting. Some would say that she was the betrayer.”
“I was one of those, yes.”
“And yet?”
Danvers shrugged. “And yet . . .”
“What was the substance of your conversation?”
“She wanted me to tell her the whereabouts of Harry Hook.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“And where is Hook?”
“In southern Thailand.”
“What did she want with Hook?”
“She thought he could broker some sort of rapprochement between her and your masters. She knew of his formidable strategic skills.”
The Plumber stared down at the blackened finger then he looked up at Danvers. “Have you had communication with Lucien Benway about any of this?”
“Lucien and I have not spoken in years. Why?”
“The plane’s black box hasn’t yet been recovered, so this is pure speculation . . .” The Plumber paused. A pause that was so pregnant it was practically on all fours panting.
“Surely you don’t believe Lucien downed that plane?”
The Plumber shrugged. “We’re not ruling it out.”
“Not even Lucien would do that.”
“No? Benway is Benway . . .”
“Dear god, yes.”
“So we have decided to make no announcement about Kate Swift’s presumed death. Or that of her child. Not until we have more clarity.”
Danvers nodded. “Obviously. I understand.”
The Plumber stood. “Thank you for your time, Philip.”
Danvers stayed seated, staring at the ziplock. “May I take that finger?”
“Why?”
“Call me sentimental but I think Kate deserves some kind of burial. Even a symbolic one.”
The Plumber hesitated before he pushed the bag across to Danvers, who lifted it, doing his best not to look at its contents as he slipped it into his pocket.
“I’m counting on your discretion, Philip.”
“Of course.”
Danvers stood, lightheaded, and steadied himself on the back of the ugly chair.
He left the room and as he followed the young man back to the garage he thought about his own imminent death and felt the weight of a long lifetime of sins upon his narrow shoulders.
TWENTY-ONE
Maybe she had died. Died and gone to heaven.
Kate drifted out of sleep, lying in the shade of a beach umbrella, the cloth beneath her hot from the sand. The incoming tide, sea warm as tea, lapping at her toes woke her.
She heard laughter and looked across the sprawl of pristine white beach to where Suzie played at the water’s edge with the Frenchman, Jean-Philippe, he of the teak-colored tan, the sun-bronzed hair and the ridiculously ripped abdomen.
JP grabbed the girl and lifted her, beads of water from her maypoling hair catching the low sun that lay like golden ink upon the impossibly blue ocean, and ran with her into the placid waves, the two of them laughing and shouting with nobody but Kate to hear them on this island, a tiny fleck of paradise lost somewhere in the Andaman Sea.
Kate got as far as shifting her sandy hair from her face, fully intending to raise herself from the cloth and join her daughter and the Frenchman, but she closed her eyes instead. And the twinge of pain from her left hand, the stump of her little finger bandaged and wrapped in plastic to protect it, was not enough to drag her back from the sleep that took her deep and far away.
- - -
When hands shook her awake Kate’s first impulse was to fight, to protect herself and her daughter who slept beside her. She lashed out with the blade of her hand and felt something spongy—a cheekbone?—and heard an oath.
“Fuck, it’s me,” Harry Hook said.
Kate pulled the punch that she was about to throw and sat up, panting, enough gray dawn light bleeding in through the window to see Hook rubbing his face as he stood over her, a blurred shape through the mosquito net anchored to the ceiling, covering them like a shroud.
“I need to talk to you,” Hook said and retreated.
She could smell him—sweat, old booze and the sour whiff of fear, like an ashen ghost flitting through a charnel house.
He closed the door to the single bedroom in his house, the room that he’d surrendered to her and Suzie the evening before.
Kate, still dressed but shoeless, sat up and cursed herself for her lack of vigilance, for allowing herself to sleep.
She stood and felt the press of her bladder. She need to pee. Badly. Which meant going out there and facing that man. Her woefully inept would-be savior.
Yesterday, after they’d rattled away in the tuk-tuk they were almost at the junction of the gravel track and the blacktop when an old dirt bike, belching exhaust smoke, headed them off and Hook dismounted and walked to the rear of the van.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?” Kate said.
“Okay, come back to my house.”
“Why?”
“At least rest up and maybe we can figure something out.”
“Why the sudden change of heart?”
“We’re both alumni of Mrs. Danvers’s finishing school. That has to count for something.” He smiled and she glimpsed a flash of threadbare charm hiding under the sweat and the stubble.
She wanted to tell him to fuck off but sheer desperation and the knowledge of who he was—or, rather, of who he had been in his salad days—had her nodding her agreement and he spoke to the taxi driver who turned the vehicle and they went back up through the dense jungle, so green it hurt her eyes.
Hook sped by them in a cloud of dust and by the time they reached his house he was standing at the bottom of the steps, waving them up. He grabbed the bags from her and took them into the only bedroom.
The place was squalid. Rank.
He saw her face and shrugged.
“I’m not going to apologize,” he said. “I’m not big on company.”
He pushed open a door to reveal a toilet and an uncurtained shower, just a spigot and a hole in the wooden floor.
“You can wash up if you like.”
Suzie looked around and grinned and said, “Cool.”
Hook winked and crossed to the refrigerator, found a can of soda and tossed it at her.
He wagged a bottle of Ch
ang beer at Kate, his eyebrows raised. She nodded and took it. She wasn’t a beer drinker, but the cold, bitter liquid tasted good.
He cracked a can of Coke, drank and belched softly. “You hungry?”
“I am,” Suzie said.
“Okay, why don’t you two freshen up and I’ll go down to town and get us some supper.” He saw Kate’s face. “It’s okay. You’re safe here.” He shrugged. “I’ll stay if it makes you feel better.”
“No, go.”
Kate heard him kicking the bike to life—it took a while, and he encouraged it with a string of oaths—and then it roared and clattered and he was gone.
She got them showered, tepid brown water spluttering, and the waft of a fetid smell from the septic tank mingling with the heady fragrance of flowers in bloom outside the bathroom window.
They were dressed and sitting at the table when Hook returned with a dozen small bags tied at the top with rubber bands: rice, chicken curry and grilled pork. He’d also brought coffee from Starbucks and popsicles for Suzie.
He spread out the feast and took paper plates from a drawer and set them on the table and they got stuck in with their fingers. The spicy food was delicious and Kate amazed herself at how much she ate,
By the end of the meal the child was wilting and Kate lifted her and carried her through to the bedroom and dumped her on the bed. The linen smelled like it hadn’t seen a laundry in a long while.
Kate went back and joined Hook at the table. A bottle of Cutty Sark stood unopened on the counter, but he sipped from another Coke can.
“Drink if you want,” she said.
“I kicked it years ago,” he said. “Until two days back. Fell off the wagon.”
She said nothing, watching as he toyed with the can and drew on the surface of the table with some of the spilled liquid.
He looked up at her. “Did you see Mrs. Danvers?”
“Yes. Yesterday, in Berlin.”
“How is he?”
“Old.”
He took a pack of unopened Camels from his pocket and showed them to her. “Do you mind?”
The Truth Itself Page 7