Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  “What kind of animal would do something like that to a woman?”

  That was a damned good question.

  Frost had spent enough time around killers to know that this kind of murder needed hatred to fuel it. It wasn’t just about killing. Using a knife made it intimate. Slashing once or twice was hard, being forced to look into the eyes of your victim while they fought you, but slashing forty or fifty times? Opening up the woman like she was some kind of medical exhibit? That was more like an autopsy than a killing. That took rage.

  “Vince,” one of the voices beneath him said. “I think you better take a look at this.”

  They moved out of his line of sight. They were in the nursery.

  The darkness above him was filled with the sound of his breathing. It was so loud in his ears he couldn’t believe they couldn’t hear it down there.

  “Now would be a really good time to give me that bloody distraction,” Frost rasped. The words came out like a prayer.

  Lethe was listening.

  15

  This Garden Then — The Testimony of Menahem ben Jair

  The boy looked up at his father, adoration in his eyes.

  Jair had never been able to look up at his own father that way. What did it feel like to look up into the face that you would grow into? It was a simple right every boy deserved. But then, Jair had never known his father. He had been murdered before Jair was born. This garden was the only place he felt close to him. Jair came here at night sometimes and imagined the sigh of the wind through the olive branches was his father’s voice. His mother had begged him time and again not to come, not to dwell in the past. It was a place for ghosts, she said. He didn’t know whether she meant the past or this garden, or both. It didn’t matter. She was a ghost herself now. When he picked up one of the scattered stones he couldn’t help but wonder if it had been the one that had killed his father. He felt out the sharp edges with his thumb. More than once he had clutched a stone and driven it against his temple, trying to feel the same pain Judas must have felt, but he couldn’t. All the stones in the world couldn’t capture his father’s pain because it wasn’t physical. He knew that better than anyone.

  Father and son walked hand in hand through the olive arch into Gethsemane.

  The garden was in bloom. All around them color rioted, the clashes ranging from the subtle to the raw. He took a deep breath and led Menahem across the garden toward a small, white stone shrine. The grass was mottled with golden spots of light where the sun filtered down through the canopy of leaves. Every fragrance imaginable surrounded them. Despite the heat, the man shivered. The shrine had seen better days. The face of the saint had mildewed. A few trinkets had been laid out around the shrine in offering: a figurine made out of olive twigs and bound with reed, a nail, a fragment of slate marked with the cross, and a coin. That was his offering, a remembrance of the second man in the garden’s tragedy. Everyone remembered the betrayal but forgot the sacrifice. His son clutched his hand tighter, as though sensing his discomfort. There was a simple affection to the gesture, but it wasn’t strong enough to save a man’s soul.

  He ruffled the boy’s hair. It was a rare moment of affection from the man. He didn’t know how to be a father. It wasn’t that his mother, Mary, had not loved him. She had. She had loved him more than enough for any child. But he wore his father’s face. Every day he grew more and more like the man she had loved, and it reminded her more and more acutely of what she had lost. He was a living ghost. Just by being close, by sitting in her lap and looking up at her, by smiling the same smile his father had smiled, he brought it all back. He was her grief as well as her joy. How could that not damage the bond between them?

  “Do as o, boy,” he said, and knelt, bowing his head in quiet reflection. He stayed that way for the longest time.

  Onlookers might have thought they were offering a prayer to the betrayed Messiah like so many others who made the pilgrimage to the garden. They weren’t. Jair was remembering the father he had never known while the boy was enjoying the closeness of his. It was the simplest of all pleasures. “The others may forget, but I will remember,” Jair promised the ghosts of the garden. “Others may hate, but I will love.” The words were more than just a promise; they were the gospel of a dead man. “Others may be blind, but I shall see.” He looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, but there were no tears. It was so strange to think that this was where love ended.

  He looked at his son then, and all he felt was sadness. The boy was growing up so quickly. He was old enough now to know truth from lie. That was why he had brought him here. “Come here,” he said, opening his arms wide. The boy scurried forward and threw himself into his father’s embrace. The hug seemed to last and last, until finally the man broke away. “It’s time I told you what happened here.”

  Jair reached into the folds of his road-stained robes and withdrew the battered leather pouch his mother had given him. He had been the same age as Menahem when she brought him here to tell him about his father. Until that day she had never talked about him. He felt the weight of silver in his hand. The coins had fascinated him when he was younger. Now he found them curiously comforting. He set the pouch on the ground between them. As best as he could remember they were sitting in the same corner, perhaps even under the same tree. She would have approved. She was one for symmetry, signs and circles.

  “This is where my father died,” he said. “Twice.”

  “I don’t understand,” the boy said.

  And why should he? Jair thought, looking for the words to explain. “He died once in spirit, and then again in flesh, blood and bone. They talk about the resurrection of Jesus, they glory in the man who lived twice, but they forget my father, the man who died twice. First they broke his soul, forcing him to honor a promise, and then, when he was reduced to a shell of a man they broke that shell, battering it with stones. But we few, we remember. My father was an agent of Sophia. Do you understand what it means to say that?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Sophia is Divine Wisdom, the Knowledge of God. So when I say Judas Iscariot was an agent of Sophia, I mean that he worked for the Divine Purpose.”

  “He was carrying out God’s will?” the boy asked.

  “Exactly. Think about the story you know, the Messiah on the cross, the resurrection-without your grandfather’s betrayal there could be no resurrection. Without the death and the resurrection the sins of man could never have been cleansed. There could be no new faith without Judas, Menahem. Don’t ever forget that truth. He gave everything, and is reviled for it.” He emptied the silver coins onto the grass and spread them out with his fingers. “All because of this.”

  “Money?”

  “Money given to him by the High Priest, Caiaphas, in return for the kiss that identified his friend, Jesus. They paint him as a villain now, because of these coins, but it was never so. Here, on the night before the kiss, Jesus drew my father aside and begged him to be strong, for already he was beginning to falter. You see, this betrayal, this agony thrust upon him, was not of his doing.” Jair had so much he wanted the boy to understand but it was so hard to find the words. “They were like brothers, their love thicker than blood. Your grandmother stood between them. She adored them both, these two great men. All these new lies have risen, but this is her truth, and from today it is yours to remember. Do not let the world forget, boy, and don’t let them convince you otherwise; they were friends into death. That is the only truth. Do not let the world forget it.”

  “I will not, father, I promise,” the boy said solemnly.

  Jair smiled gently. “I know, my son. I know.”

  “Then what happened?” Menahem asked, as though it was any other story he had heard and wanted to know the end of.

  “After the fighting in the temple Jesus was a marked man. The Pharisees could not abide this man who walked among the poor people, spreading a message of love without fear. Without fear, boy, that is the important thing here. Love without fear
. Love without avarice. Love without stricture. He took them out of the temples, bringing them back to the earth. He was their teacher. He hated what they had done to his god, how they had taken him away from the people and hid him in their huge temples and their false idols. He wanted people to worship the natural wonder, not its manmade face.” Jair picked up one of the stones and turned it over in his hand so the boy might see. “Look at this stone, see it properly, see the miracle of time and attrition and earthly forces that had to come together to press it into this final form. That, boy, is a miracle worthy of God. Putting them two by two atop one another to make a wall, that is just sense. Do you see the difference?”

  The boy thought about it for a moment. “Yes, father,” he said, eventually. “The stone was always there, whatever shape we choose for it. Like the tree. By itself it can offer comfort and shade, bear fruit and provide, or the carpenter can reshape it to match his needs.”

  Jair smiled. The boy had a sharp mind. “And which is the miracle?”

  “The first, the tree.”

  “But they are both creations, are they not?”

  “No father. One is creation, the other is recreation.”

  “Very good, Menahem. Very good.” Jair’s smile widened. He wondered if he had grasped the concept so readily when he was the boy’s age. He doubted it. “The Nazarene was recreating the god of their book, taking him out of the temples and into the fields, back to his original wonders, and reminding them that they did not need stone temples to glorify him. That frightened the Pharisees. Inside the temples they had control of the people. Strip them of their temples and you strip them of their power. Worse, change the way people think of their god, make him this caring father instead of some distant wrathful deity who purged the world with flood and plague, and you take away the fear. Without power, without fear, these men were nothing. And that more than anything frightened them.”

  “So they wanted Jesus dead?”

  “Exactly. They wanted to strip away everything that made him special, assuming that whatever remained would prove to be as craven as they themselves were. They couldn’t grasp the notion of sacrifice. It was outside of their philosophy. So to make him suffer, they made the people who followed him suffer. After his attack on the money-lenders the Pharisees turned their anger onto the people who listened to the message of this new caring god, and they hurt them.

  “So here, in this garden, Jesus turned to your grandfather and begged him to help put an end to their suffering. Even though it meant ending his own life. Judas did not want to betray his friend. What man would? But what choice did he have? The people he loved were suffering. The Pharisees were persecuting them in his name, promising that the suffering would only end when Jesus was silenced. They spread lies and hate. They used both to undermine the truth enough to have people turning back to the temple for protection. It was all about fear with them. Always fear.

  “So, together these two friends conceived of a plan that would end the tyranny of the temple once and for all. And they did it here, in this arden, the same place my father would surrender his friend to the soldiers, the same place the stones of the disciples would end his life. Here, in this garden.”

  Eyes wide, the boy looked around as though seeing the place for the first time. Where there had been trees and shrubs he saw ghosts. Jair remembered that sensation. He remembered thinking he had seen his father incline his head just slightly and smile as his mother gave him the coins. The mind had a way of giving you what you needed most. He wondered who the boy saw.

  “That promise destroyed my father. It killed the man he had been. Killed the kindness and the humor and everything mother loved him for. For the rest of his life he was a shell, a husk, a broken man. Not that there was much life left to him. Mother met him on the road here. He knew they were waiting for him. He knew they were going to kill him. She begged him to leave, to run, but he wouldn’t because he wanted to die.”

  Something bothered the boy.

  “What is it, son?”

  “Why didn’t Jesus surrender himself? Why did he need grandfather to deliver him?” Menahem asked earnestly.

  That was a question that had bothered Jair for most of his adult life. He had seen people spit at his mother, so called holy men, and curse her and call her a whore. It had cut deep. The Pharisees looking to smear her. He had asked his mother why Judas had to die for this other man with his new religion. Because she knew both men better than anyone, he thought she might have the answer. She gave him the only answer that made any sense: “Because he doubted himself. He doubted his own strength. Jesus needed someone at his side to be sure he went through with it. He wasn’t merely surrendering, he was sacrificing himself. He needed to know he wasn’t alone. So that was the sacrifice your grandfather made. He gave himself so that his friend could end the tyranny of the Pharisees.” And for that she allowed them to spit at her and call her whore.

  “Grandfather must have been brave,” the boy said.

  Jair nodded, lost again in memories that weren’t his. “Even his own friends turned on him because he couldn’t tell them the truth. Like everyone else they thought he had betrayed Jesus. They didn’t understand. There was so much they didn’t understand. They thought he had acted out of jealousy and greed. They thought it was all about these damned coins. It wasn’t. It never had been. You know that now. He lost everything because he was the best of them, the strongest, most faithful. And now they call him faithless.” Jair closed his eyes. The real betrayal was still fresh inside him.

  0" width="19" align="justify"›“He was about to become a father, yet for the sake of his friend he gave up the chance of ever knowing me.” He looked at his son, trying to imagine himself in his father’s place. All of the choices he had made in his life paled beside that single choice Judas had made in this garden. It would have been so easy to flee, to take Mary and start their new family. Again that familiar swell of bitterness rose inside him. “I can’t imagine never knowing you,” Jair said, glad he had been spared that agony at least.

  He gathered up the silver and handed the pouch to his son.

  “These are yours now. Think of them as the last reminders of your grandfather’s sacrifice. We cannot forget the truth. We owe that much to him, don’t we?”

  “I’ll never forget,” Menahem promised.

  16

  Burning Down the House Now

  The first siren blared almost immediately.

  The second and third came only a second later. In less than five seconds every alarm box in the street was wailing. Half of them might have only been for show, but the other half were doing the best to raise the dead. In thirty seconds they had joined into a single wall of noise.

  “What the hell’s that racket?” one of the uniforms said.

  “Not sure, Sarge. Sounds like burglar alarms.”

  “You trying to tell me every bastard in this street just got robbed? I don’t like this. Go and check it out, Hollis.”

  Ronan Frost listened to one set of booted footsteps clump down the stairs. That still left two uniforms upstairs. They were better numbers. He could take two, quickly, if he had to. Still, with a little bit of luck there would be no need.

  “What the hell’s going on out there?” the uniform was talking into his radio, Frost realized. He couldn’t hear what the crackling voice said in reply. He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lethe had the ability to mess with their frequencies if he wanted to. If the boy could trigger every damned burglar alarm in a square mile, he could sure as hell dampen a radio signal. “Say again?” the officer repeated, shouting to be heard over the caterwauling alarms.

  Just go down there and check it out, Frost willed the man to do his job.

  They had a corpse here, but the one indisputable thing everyone knew about the dead was that they didn’t get up and walk unless it was a Romero film. She wasn’t going anywhere. Outside, it could have been the first salvo of the Third World War if the racket was anything to go by. They were
policemen. It was their duty to go out there and investigate.

  Frost waited, counting the rhythmic dub-dub dub-dub of his heartbeats.

  Street by street more alarms sounded until they formed their own grotesque dawn chorus across the city. It was pandemonium. Still he didn’t move. His skin prickled with anticipation. He felt the tension coiling up inside him, desperate to be released in a fury of action. Still he waited, lying on his back, listening to the cacophony. It was music to his ears. He’d asked for a distraction and Lethe had delivered. He could picture people beginning to stumble out of their houses in the pajamas, rubbing their sleepy eyes and wondering what the hell was going on.

  With a bit of luck a few more minutes of this and he’d be able to slip downstairs and out of the backdoor unnoticed. He wouldn’t need to be Harry Houdini to disappear into the crowd of woken sleepers grumbling about the bloody noise.

  He heard more footsteps on the stairs.

  It was hard to tell if it was one man, or if both of them were going down.

  Frost waited until he couldn’t hear them, then whispered, “Talk to me Lethe.”

  “You can say thank you any time you like. No, no, seriously. Any time you like. I live to serve.”

  “Yeah, yeah, just tell me what you see.”

  “Five plod standing around, looking worse than useless. I think I confused them. That or all the noise is interfering with the neural relays and their brains are shutting down to protect themselves.”

  “Meaning one’s still inside the house,” Frost mused, ignoring everything after the word five.

  “No fooling you, boss.”

  “Remind me again why we keep you around?”

  “Because I’m brilliant, obviously, and because without my little bit of techno-magic you’d be spending a good chunk of the foreseeable at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Now, it’s good to talk and all that, but how about you get the hell out of there, Frosty.”