The Last Secret Of The Temple

by Paul Sussman

  Again it took the Egyptian a moment to process this, to get his thoughts arranged.

  'You mean . . . ?'

  Ben-Roi's entire body had started trembling.

  'He's al-Mulatham,' he snarled. 'He's the one who's controlling it. Arab bombers, Israeli master. Butchering his own people. His own fucking people!'

  Khalifa stared aghast, the entire cavern seeming to contract around them. There was a momentary silence, then, with a shocking animal howl of loathing and fury, Ben-Roi launched himself forward. He was a powerful man, but he was also overweight, exhausted and up against professionals. Before he had even got close to his target two of Har-Zion's men stepped up and, with cool, choreographed precision, halted him in his tracks, one smashing an Uzi butt into his stomach, doubling him over, the other coming round behind him and taking him in an arm-lock, yanking him upright again. Khalifa tensed, fists clenching, but with a gun pressed into the side of his head there was nothing he could do. Layla stared down at the floor, the red on her cheeks deepening and spreading.

  'Why?' choked Ben-Roi, gasping for air, struggling against the arm-lock. 'In God's name, why?'

  Har-Zion rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the constricting clasp of his burnt skin, which was becoming increasingly tight and itchy beneath his jacket.

  'To save our people,' he replied, his voice, in contrast to Ben-Roi's, cold, measured and toneless.

  'By butchering them?'

  'By proving to them once and for all that there can never be peace with the Arabs. That their purpose is and always has been to destroy us, and that to survive we have no choice but to do the same to them.'

  Ben-Roi bucked, struggled, spat.

  'You killed her!' he choked. 'You killed her, you filthy animal!'

  Again Har-Zion rolled his shoulders. His face was empty.

  'If there was any other road I would gladly take it. But there is no other road. Our people have to see the Arabs for what they truly are.'

  'Hamas aren't doing a good enough job of it?' screamed Ben-Roi. 'Islamic Jihad?'

  'Unfortunately not.'

  'Unfortunately?'

  'Yes, unfortunately,' said Har-Zion, his tone hardening slightly, his eyes betraying the first vague flicker of emotion. 'Unfortunately because however many of us they kill, still we try to convince ourselves that if only we negotiate, concede a little, then everything will be all right, everything will be OK, they will leave us alone to bring up our children in peace and security.'

  'You're fucking mad!'

  'No,' snapped Har-Zion, the annoyance in his eyes now unmistakable, 'it is those who speak of compromise and retreat who are mad! It was compromise that fired the ovens of Auschwitz, retreat that dug the death pits at Babi Yar. And now we're intent on making the same mistake again, the mistake we have always made, year after year, century after century, the cardinal error of the Jewish people: to believe for a single moment that the goyim can ever be trusted, can ever be our friends, desire anything other than to herd us into the gas chambers and wipe us from the face of the earth!'

  His voice was starting to rise, the words barking from his mouth like bullets from the muzzle of a gun.

  'We don't need peace processes,' he spat. 'Treaties, accords, road maps, conferences – none of it. If we wish to survive we need one thing and one thing alone, and that is fury. The same fury that has been directed at us through all the long, dark night of our history. It is this alone that will protect us, give us the strength to survive. And it is this that al-Mulatham has provided. This is why we have made him. That is why he exists.'

  He broke off, his high, pale forehead beaded with sweat, little shivers running through his body from the itching of his skin, which was starting to become unbearable, as it always did when he failed to apply his balm at the appointed time. Ben-Roi stared at him, no longer bothering to struggle against the arm-lock, his eyes dull and glazed, his mouth opening and shutting as though unable to find any words appropriate to convey the depth of his loathing.

  'Moser,' he whispered eventually. 'Rodef.'

  Har-Zion's lips tightened. He held the detective's gaze, then raised a gloved hand and motioned to the man with crew-cut hair, who stepped forward and, without actually seeming to draw back his arm, slammed his fist into the base of Ben-Roi's pelvis, just a few centimetres above his groin.

  'Allah-u-akhbar' mumbled Khalifa, wincing, fists clenched impotently at his side.

  Ben-Roi let out a deep, choking gargle and slumped, his legs giving way beneath him. He was hauled up again, punched again, this time at the very top of his chest, just beneath his throat, then left to sink down onto his knees, and then his elbows, a narrow string of vomit dribbling from his mouth onto the stone floor.

  'There is only one traitor here and that is you,' said Har-Zion, standing over him, his voice back to its former cold, measured monotone. 'You and, from what I have heard of her, your fiancée too. There are deaths I regret, but hers is not one of them.'

  Ben-Roi mumbled something and tried to flail out an arm, but he was still winded from the punches and there was no power in the movement. Har-Zion signalled again and the crew-cut man slammed his heel into the side of Ben-Roi's head, splitting the top of his ear, sending him crashing into a crate.

  'Stop it!' shouted Khalifa, no longer able to contain himself, the Uzi pressing into the back of his neck forgotten in the shock of revulsion he felt at what he was witnessing. 'In God's name, stop it!'

  Har-Zion turned, slowly, stiffly. He stared at the Egyptian, a hard, unpleasant look, then said something in Hebrew. The Uzi was lowered and Khalifa suddenly found himself clasped in a suffocating neck-lock. On the floor, Ben-Roi had struggled up into a sitting position, his torn ear streaming blood.

  'Let him go, Har-Zion,' he rasped. 'He's not part of this.'

  Har-Zion let out a derisive snort. 'You hear that? Us he condemns for defending our own people while he pleads for his friend the Arab. Whatever else he is, believe me, this piece of shit most certainly isn't a Jew.'

  He nodded to the crew-cut man, who raised his boot again and crunched it down into Ben-Roi's crotch, the detective convulsing in agony. Then he crossed to Khalifa and without pausing drove his fist straight into the Egyptian's solar plexus, the blow delivered with the controlled, businesslike precision of a surgeon dissecting a cadaver. Khalifa had been hit before, numerous times – half his youth seemed to have been spent getting into fist-fights in the Giza backstreets where he'd grown up – but never anything like this. The fist seemed to sink halfway into his stomach cavity, splaying his vital organs, driving the air out of his lungs. A tangled kaleidoscope of thoughts and images swirled through his mind – Zenab, the patch of snow at the motorway service station, that strange blue-eyed man in the synagogue in Cairo – before suddenly, unexpectedly, just for a moment, the mist of pain evaporated and he found himself looking up into the eyes of Layla al-Madani.

  'Ley? he whispered. 'Why?'

  If she responded he didn't hear, because almost as soon as it had come the moment of clarity disappeared again. His mind clouded, his head dropped back, and then everything went dark.

  How long he remained unconscious he couldn't be certain, but it must have been a while because when he came to he was being dragged down the central aisle by two of the Israelis, feet trailing uselessly on the floor ('They're scuffing my nice shoes!' was his first, incoherent thought). Ben-Roi was ahead of him, limping along with an Uzi pressed into the back of his head, his neck and jacket stained with a congealed crust of blood from his torn ear; Har-Zion and Layla were now at the far end of the cavern, watching as the crew-cut man worked at the front panel of the Menorah crate with a jemmy. As they came up to it, the panel sheared off with a squeal of rending wood, revealing a dense block of straw from within which peeped tantalizing glints of gold.

  Realizing that their prisoner had regained consciousness, the Israelis hoisted Khalifa upright and pushed him roughly against one of the box stacks, a wave of nausea causing e
verything to bulge and swim around him before gradually settling down again. Ben-Roi was beside him, and for a moment their eyes met and held, each giving the faintest of nods to acknowledge the other's presence, to indicate they were OK, before turning away again and focusing their attention on the scene in front of them.

  There was a pause, the atmosphere charged suddenly, expectant; then, stepping forward, Har-Zion and his second-in-command started stripping away the protective straw. Their bodies blocked Khalifa's view so that he was only able to catch vague glimpses of the object they were revealing – a curving arm, the corner of a pedestal, fleeting flashes of gold – and it was not until the thing had been revealed in its entirety and the two men had stepped back and to the side that he was able to view it properly.

  He had seen it before, of course, in the photograph in Dieter Hoth's safe deposit box. That had been in black and white, however, and had wholly failed to convey the full, breathtaking magnificence of the artwork at which he now found himself staring. It was about the height of a man, its base made up of two hexagonal tiers from the centre of which, as though from some ornate pot, a vertical stem shot upwards, six branches curving outwards from its sides, three to the left, three to the right, one above the other, each crowned, as was the stem, by a lamp-cup cast in the shape of a small cymbal. Such was the Menorah's basic form. There was more to it than that, however, so much more. Its branches were decorated in the most exquisite manner with knops and bulbs and calices shaped like almond-blossoms; around its base were wonderfully worked images in raised relief of fruits and leaves and vines and flowers, so lifelike you almost felt you could smell their fragrance. Its gold was so deep it was almost red; its symmetry possessed of such perfect balance, such sinuous, effortless poise, that it seemed not to be cast of metal at all but rather to be something alive, something that grew, breathed and coursed with sap. Groggy, in pain and probably with not long left to live, Khalifa could still not help but be awed by it, his head shaking from side to side at the sheer glittering splendour of the thing. The Israelis' reaction was even more intense, Ben-Roi muttering 'Oy vey' over and over again; Har-Zion's granite face had softened into an almost childlike expression of rapture.

  'And God said let there be light,' he whispered, 'and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.'

  Only one person seemed unmoved by the whole thing, and that was Layla. She stood slightly apart from everyone else, barricaded inside her head, betraying no emotion whatsoever unless it was in the faint red stain that still marked her upper cheeks, and in the way her hands seemed involuntarily to clench and unclench. For the briefest of moments her eyes snagged on Khalifa's before immediately swerving away again, unable to hold his stare.

  Several minutes passed, everyone just gazing at the Lamp, its beauty, far from diminishing with familiarity, actually increasing as the full richness and subtlety of its decoration became apparent, until eventually the spell was broken by the crew-cut man.

  'We should get it out,' he said, his voice sounding harsh and crude, like a rock thrown into a pool of still water.

  For a moment Har-Zion didn't respond, just continued staring, eyes moist with emotion. Then, with a nod, he motioned to three of his men. They stepped forward, draping their Uzis round their necks, and grasped the Lamp, counting echat, shtayim, shalosh – one, two, three – before starting to lift. Fit and muscle-bound as they were, its weight was too much for them, and it was only when they were joined by a fourth man that they were able to manhandle it up onto their shoulders, faces contorting with the strain, legs buckling.

  Steiner levelled his gun at Khalifa and Ben-Roi, and, as one, the group started to move back down the aisle, stopping every twenty metres so that the Lamp-carriers could catch their breath. Eventually they reached the far end of the cavern and the Lamp was lowered onto the elevator platform, its wooden planks creaking beneath the weight. The Israelis climbed up beside it, Layla going with them, and the control lever was eased back, the detectives remaining on the cavern floor as the platform slowly ascended in front of them. Three metres up it came to a halt again, a line of Uzi muzzles pointing down.

  'This is where we part company, gentlemen,' Har-Zion called, his mouth curved into a triumphant smile. 'Us, by God's providence, to begin the rebuilding of the Temple and the inauguration of a new golden age for our people. You . . .'

  He gazed down at them for a moment, again rotating his shoulders to try to loosen the suffocating glove of burnt skin in which his body was clamped. Then he indicated that his men should fire.

  'No!'

  Layla's voice echoed shrilly around the cavern.

  'No!' she repeated. And then again: 'No!'

  Har-Zion's men looked at their leader, but he gave no signal, either to shoot or to lower the guns, so they remained as they were, fingers tight around the Uzis' triggers. Below, on the cavern floor, Ben-Roi and Khalifa exchanged a glance.

  'No!' Layla yelled for a fourth time, her tone desperate, hysterical almost, hands clenching and unclenching. She had wanted to speak out before, when they had beaten the two men, but she hadn't been able to do it, choked as she was with shame and self-loathing. Now, however, she couldn't stop herself, barely even conscious of what she was saying, just sensing that her entire existence had somehow narrowed itself to the focus of this moment, and that despite it all, despite the years of lies and betrayal, she could not just stand mute while two people were shot dead in cold blood in front of her. Pointless, of course, given how many people had been butchered over the years because of her actions, how indelibly steeped in blood she was. There could never be any redemption from what she had done. Nor was she looking for it. All she knew was that as she had stood there gazing down at the two detectives – their faces pale, resigned – her father's voice had suddenly rung out inside her head like a clear bell, stronger than it had ever rung out before. The words he had spoken on the night of his death:

  I can't leave someone to die in the dust like a dog, Lay la. Whoever they might be.

  And as soon as she had heard those words she had experienced a fierce, uncontrollable yearning to know that there was still something of her father left deep inside, some last tiny lingering vestige of his beautiful light. That she was still his daughter, however dark the world she had made for herself.

  She pushed to the front of the elevator, eyes catching Khalifa's for a fraction of a second before she turned to face the Israelis, her slim body blocking their line of fire.

  'You've won,' she cried at Har-Zion. 'Don't you see that? You've won, for God's sake. Just leave them. For once, just stop the killing and leave them.'

  There was a pause, the cavern throbbing with the roar of the generator, the Menorah glinting in the glare of the arc lamps. Then, slowly, Har-Zion nodded.

  'She is right. It is time for the killing to stop.'

  Layla's body seemed to relax slightly. Almost immediately she tensed again as she noted the cold smile spreading across Har-Zion's face.

  'Or at least some of the killing. These' – he waved stiffly towards Khalifa and Ben-Roi – 'their lives mean nothing. Al-Mulatham, however – he, I believe, has served his purpose. As Miss al-Madani says, we have won. With the Menorah on our side our cause is unstoppable. One final reckoning, and then we can dispense with the Palestinian Brotherhood altogether. And all the apparatus that goes with it. All the apparatus.'

  As he said this last phrase he glanced across at his crew-cut sidekick, at the same time tipping his head towards Layla. The man nodded in understanding and, with shocking calmness, stepped forward and slammed his palm hard into Layla's right breast, launching her backwards off the elevator platform and out into space, arms and legs flailing. For a brief moment she just seemed to hang there, hovering in mid-air as if suspended from the ceiling of the cavern by an invisible wire; then she cart-wheeled silently downwards and slammed to the floor with a sickening thud.

  'Thank you, Miss al-Madani,' called Har-Zion. 'The state of Israel will be e
ternally grateful for your efforts. Arab or not, you have indeed earned yourself the title Eshet Hayil. A woman of valour.'

  She knew immediately that her back was broken, probably a load of other things as well, although since she seemed to have no feeling from the neck down she couldn't be sure. It didn't much matter. She'd be dead in a few short moments anyway. Which was fine by her.

  Strangely, as if to compensate for the fact that she could no longer feel anything, her other senses seemed suddenly to grow much sharper. Her nostrils quivered with the rich, resinous tang of the pine planks from which the crates were made; her ears seemed almost unnaturally attuned to sounds that in normal circumstances she would never have noticed. Most curious of all, she seemed to have developed the uncanny ability to see four or five different things all at once, without even moving her head. There was Har-Zion, standing up above on the lift, laughing with his followers; Ben-Roi a little to her left, looking unexpectedly shocked given how much he must have wanted something like this to happen to her; and, kneeling right beside her holding her hand – how on earth had he got there so quickly? – Khalifa. She could even see her own face, as if she was standing above herself looking down, the very faintest of smiles twisting the corners of her mouth, although there was no humour or satisfaction in it, more a sort of infinite, despairing loneliness that could find no other expression with which to manifest itself.