Silver

by Steven Savile

  Instead of shooting the final lock she tested the integrity of the boards on the windows. They were flimsy at best. She looked around the little grocery store for something she could use. Back by the till she found one of three old shopping carts. They were buckled and twisted where the heat from the mortar fire had warped them, but they'd be fine for what she had in mind. Orla wrestled one of the carts free of the others. The wheels were buckled and it didn't want to roll on them. It didn't matter. She dragged it back far enough to give her a run at the boarded-up window, then launched herself at it, running full-tilt forward with the cart out in front of her like a battering ram.

  The cart hit the boards and kept on going through them as she ran.

  She heard screaming.

  It sounded like a mad banshee inside her head.

  It took her a moment to realize it was her.

  And then the boards tore free and daylight came flooding in.

  Head down, Orla staggered out onto the street, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  She breathed in the hot morning air.

  She was alive.

  Sokol was dead.

  That was all that mattered to her.

  She stumbled barefoot toward the side of the road. She needed to get as far away from this place as she could.

  Cars passed her on the street. She held out her hand, trying to hitch a ride. A few slowed, then accelerated, seeing the gun and the mess she was in. Just when she was beginning to think there were no good Samaritans on the road to Tel Aviv a white SUV slowed. She tensed, expecting to see the toad behind the wheel. If it had been Gavrel Schnur driving she would have shot him through the windshield without a second thought. It wasn't. It was a middleaged man with his wife in the seat beside him. Orla stumbled toward the passenger door as the car slowed to a stop at the side of the road.

  The woman rolled down her window, took one look at Orla half-naked, battered and bruised and holding the Jericho 941 as though it were a snake, and seemed to understand. She was young, maybe twenty-five herself, but she had grown up in the conflicts of Palestine and Israel; and in Orla she saw a victim. It was as simple as that. Orla guessed the woman had made her husband pull over. The stranger didn't ask what happened, she simply said, "Get in." And when Orla was inside the SUV, she said, "Drive."

  They peeled away from the curb and into the traffic.

  There was a blonde-haired doll on the backseat. They had a daughter. She wasn't in the car with them. Orla's stomach tightened at the realization that the Barbie-ideal of womanhood transcended state and nation. In the passenger seat the woman turned to look at Orla in the back. Orla could see a dozen questions behind her eyes, not least of which was, what have we done? It was natural. People didn't want to interpose themselves into situations where trouble was rife. But thankfully, her first instinct had been maternal, to protect. Questions were fine now; they were out of there and getting further and further away from the abandoned grocery store by the minute.

  "Thank," Orla said, for the second time in a few short minutes. This time she really meant it.

  "What happened to you?"

  It was the biggest of all of the potential questions. Too big for her to answer in the back of the car. Orla shook her head. She knew it would look like she was in shock. She looked at the woman and told her, "I thought I was going to die. You saved my life." It wasn't much of an answer, but it seemed to appease the woman for the moment at least. She had more questions, practical ones: Where are you from? Where are you staying? Do you want us to take you to the police station?

  That was the last thing she wanted. She fended the constant barrage of questions with one of her own. "Do you have a cell phone?" The woman nodded. Of course they did. Everyone in the world had cell phones these days. "Do you mind if I make a call? I need to tell people I am okay."

  "Of course," the woman fumbled about in her purse and handed a small gold D&G Motorola. Orla took it and flipped it open. She dialed in the +44 for England and prayed the dial tone wouldn't cut off into the operator's voice telling her that her service plan didn't cover international calls. It didn't. She punched in the rest of the numbers for Nonesuch.

  Lethe picked up on the second ring. He sounded like he was in the car beside her as he said, "Go for Lethe."

  She breathed out a long shaky sigh. She hadn't realized just how good it would be to hear a familiar voice. She closed her eyes and smiled. "Hey Jude."

  He answered her with the rest of the famous lyric, then said, "Are you okay? Ah, hell, stupid question, I know. I mean . . . are you . . . did they hurt you?"

  "Yes," she said, meaning yes she was okay, yes she was out of there, and yes they had hurt her, but not as much as she was going to hurt them. "I want an address, Jude. Gavrel Schnur. It should be in the Ramat district, North Tel Aviv. He's with the IDF."

  "I'm on it, gimme a sec. It's good to hear your voice, Orla. I thought I'd never . . ." He let the thought hang. He didn't need to finish it. She'd had the thought often enough from the other side while she was down there in the dark cellar.

  "I know," she said. "Tell the old man I am coming home. I've just got one thing to clean up first."

  "You know what he's going to say," Lethe told her.

  "I know. That's why I am telling you, not him. Have you got that address for me?"

  It was off the 481, close to the water. She knew the area. It wasn't an area a young politician could afford, even if he was a rising star in the Likud party and favored of Menachem Begin, Shamir and Netanyahu. It was old money. Lots and lots of filthy old money. That should have been her first clue all the way back when she had been looking at the photograph of Schnur and his wife, Dassah. Schnur had to have got his money somehow, and that offshore account in Hottinger & Cie and all of those Silverthorn deposits were making an awful lot of sense to her now. The money came from Caspi. That was the joke wasn't it? Made of Silver. And what was more Christian in terms of iconography than the crown of thorns? She stared out of the window, watching the streets go by.

  "Who is he?"

  "Mabus," she said, grateful that the conversation only made sense to the pair of them. She smiled at the woman. It was meant to assure her that everything was fine. She was sure she looked mad.

  "Be careful, Orla. Promise me."

  "I'll be home soon," she said. It wasn't the promise he'd wanted, but it was the only one she was prepared to give him. She wasn't about to be careful. The time for care had passed. She was hunting the man who had made her last few days a living hell. She hung up the phone on him and gave it back to the woman. "Thank you," she said again. "I can't pay for the call, I'm sorry. My money is all back at the hotel."

  "That's okay, honey, don't worry. Where are you staying?"

  She gave them Gavrel Schnur's address, the big house off the 481, down by the water.

  She watched her good Samaritans drive off into the blue sky of the coast road.

  Staying in Tel Avivwas counter-intuitive. They would expect her to run, to get as far away from them as she could. Schnur wouldn't expect her to go to his home and wait for him. It made no logical sense. But revenge wasn't about logic.

  There was no security gate, and no cameras that she could see. That didn't mean they weren't there.

  She had so many questions. She wanted to ask him to his face why he had done it. Why had he plotted with Solomon and Devere to cause so much pain. She wanted to hear him justify himself? Was he going to blame the murder of his wife? The death of his son? And did it even matter what he said? It could never be justification enough. Hearing it might humanize the toad, but it could never make him human. Nothing could ever do that again.

  She walked toward the house.

  It was odd that he had never moved, given what had happened to his wife in the driveway, but she reasoned, perhaps he needed the constant reminder to fuel his hatred?

  It was the middle of the day, broad daylight, so most likely the toad was at work, or heading to the grocery store basement to
finish her. He wouldn't be home until later. Which would give her time to break in and cover her tracks so that when he finally came home she would be waiting for him.

  There wouldn't be any questions, she decided.

  She didn't want to hear his answers.

  The toad didn't come home for three hours.

  It gave her time.

  She sat at his desk, breathing in his lingering smell. Everything in the

  place reeked of Gavrel Schnur. Orla sat back in his high-backed leather chair, wearing one of his wife's dresses. They were a similar size, if not exactly the same. Schnur had maintained her wardrobes as a shrine. Every garment still hung on its hanger, immaculately pressed. Her death really had affected him. She found a photograph of Dassah and styled her hair so that at first glance the toad might think there was an old ghost in his chair. She went through his things, looking for the name Solomon. She wanted a surname. She wanted a place. Something. Anything. She wanted to link Schnur and Solomon and Devere and work out which one was the idealist, which one the fanatic and which one the opportunist. She assumed it was Solomon, Schnur and Devere, in that order, but she wasn't about to bet her life on it.

  She rifled his drawers and searched the place for a safe. She couldn't find one, but that didn't mean the toad didn't have his hiding places. Everyone had their hiding places. She tried his computer, but it was password protected; and she wasn't remotely as tech-savvy as Lethe, so she simply pulled the hard drive out of the machine. She'd let Lethe play with it when she got home. She'd tell him it was a coming home present.

  Orla swiveled the chair so it turned away from the door. He wouldn't see her as he came into the room. She sat there alone, waiting. She remembered something he had said in his office. He'd told her that Judas Iscariot wasn't mentioned anywhere in the Gospel of Peter and asked her what she thought of that. Now, thinking about it, she realized how odd that was. There was Peter, the rock on which the Church was founded, the first Apostle, and he didn't have a word for the betrayal of his Lord? According to John, Peter was the swordsman who cut off the ear of Malchus when they came to arrest Christ. How could he have not written about Judas, then, if Judas really had been the great betrayer?

  Then it occurred to her that perhaps Judas and Peter had in fact been one and the same, that Judas had written the Gospel accredited to Peter. It was a passion, one of the most prominent in early Christianity but denounced as heretical because it blamed Herod Antipas and not Pilate for the crucifixion. The resurrection and the ascension weren't separate events, either. Where Matthew claimed Christ's cry from the cross was "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? Peter claimed Christ was not calling to God but asking, "My power, my power, why hast thou forsaken me?" and when he had said it he was taken up. There was no death. The other thing she recalled was that there was no disloyalty in Peter's story. The disciples were arrested for plotting to burn the temple. Could those have been Judas' thoughts? Judas' truths?

  Peter was the rock the Church was founded upon. Judas' was the sacrifice the Church was founded upon. Could they be one and the same? Did it even matter, or was Schnur just playing with her, running theosophical rings around her?

  The one thing she could understand was that if the Disciples of Judas didn't believe the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, then there was no need for them to believe in redemption from man's sins by the suffering on the cross. It was all propaganda and lies, after all, wasn't it? Made up to sell this new ministry and creying with faith in retrospect. What was it the toad had said? All of these random acts of violence, hate, war and death made him think we weren't redeemed at all, we were damned. She wondered if he actually believed the stuff he said, or if it was a convenient excuse to strike back at the people he believed had hurt him, the people behind his wife's murder? Attacking an entire system of faith seemed a little extreme for that.

  No, surely in Acts, Peter, Prince of the Apostles, stood up and decried Judas as a traitor? In the same passage he described Judas' death in gory detail, his guts rupturing in the field of blood as he collapsed. Didn't the Apostles welcome Matthias in Judas' place? She could almost hear Schnur's counter argument in her head: the Gospel of Luke names Jude for Thaddeus; John doesn't name any of the twelve and adds his own Nathanael. All these testimonies and they can't keep their key players straight? Peter being described alongside Judas in these other texts and not in his own? Was it revisionist history, trying to erase the sinner from the course of history? Or was it a case of trying to hide something else?

  These other gospels were the ones that promised the miracles, the healing of the sick, the driving out demons, even raising the dead. There was nothing like that in Peter's passion. The story of Akeldama was preposterous, Judas rupturing and exploding was like something out of a bad movie. It's not even a convincing lie. And of course there were the problems of language. In the original texts the vocabulary was quite limited, meaning that the translations could be very easily made more explicitly divine should the translator wish. For instance, the prepositions on and by were often the same word in Aramaic, which would completely change the whole walking on water thing. Walking by water was far less impressive a feat. So what was Peter hiding? What truth did he not want recorded? If he wasn't Judas, then perhaps he knew the truth about Judas?

  It came back to the word messiah, didn't it?

  And if a messiah really was no more divine or god-touched than the one who brings peace and restoration to Israel, well then it couldn't exactly be claimed that Judas' kiss brought peace. For almost a century after either Christ or Judas the Romans were still suppressing the names Judaea and Jerusalem. The Jews were still exiles.

  Israel was in her blood. She knew its history and its pains as well as any Jew. She had studied the Diaspora and the destruction of the First Temple. She understood the effect the destruction of the Second Temple had on the people. And she understood the hope Simon bar Kokhba had represented. Bar Kokhba had reestablished a Jewish state of Israel seven centuries after the Diaspora began, a state which he ruled as Nasri for three years, bringing the scattered Jews home. Surely, by Schnur's definition this made Kokhba more effectively a messiah than either Judas or Jesus? For two of those years he fought tooth and naifont>

  That was the way of the world though, was it not? History was written by the winners, not the valiant losers.

  She didn't have the answer.

  Two millennia on no one did.

  She didn't think they were meant to.

  It came down to faith. That was what all these contradictions came down to in the end. Some people needed to believe that Jesus suffered on the cross to redeem mankind's sins. They needed to believe that there was a point, that the sacrifice of his earthly body meant something.

  These words that so many clung to, so many drew faith from and believed in, could be twisted to say almost anything, and there was no way of knowing one way or the other what the truth was.

  In the end it didn't matter what she believed, what Schnur believed, what any of them believed. However improbable it was, Judas could be Peter, or he could be the Messiah, or a messiah; or he could be both or neither. It didn't matter. People would find a way to twist the truth into whatever they wanted it to be.

  That was the only truth.

  And then it hit her, all of the messages, the prophecy of the Popes, the quatrains of Nostradamus, the lectures on the meaning of the word messiah, all of it. It wasn't about Mabus ushering in the Antichrist, as Nostradamus had said, it was about a new messiah. Mabus was Caspi's herald. He had said Caspi's real name was Solomon. One sign of the Messiah was the restoration of Israel as a homeland for the Jews, and another was the rebuilding of the Temple. Who had built the First Temple?

  Solomon.

  It was Solomon's Temple.

  That was it. Caspi didn't see himself as the Antichrist at al, he saw himself as the new Messiah. He was the man who was going to bring peace to Israel by creating a Jewish sta
te. She didn't believe for a minute that his real name was Solomon any more than it was Caspi.

  Suddenly it all made sense. She saw how Gavrel Schnur had been recruited by Solomon to his cause. Dassah. It really had all been about his wife. That explained the shrine in his office and the shrine upstairs. She still dominated his life. Dassah Schnur had been murdered because of his vocal support of the Jewish presence on the West Bank and Gaza. He had never changed that position. He lived his entire life to that one fundamental truth. He wanted a homeland for the Jewish settlers. The PLO had murdered his wife because of it, which only made him want it more.

  She understood Schnur's role in her little triptych. He was the idealist who had been offered the one thing he always wanted.

  Orla almost pitied him.

  If Schnur was the idealist, the other roles were very easily defined. Miles Devere was the opportunist. There was money in death--there always had been

  -and he had started in Israel, in the very areas Schnur wanted to see a Jewish homeland. He understood the people and the politics and the needs of the region. Who better to help rebuild the infrastructure after the fallout? And, who better to be the grand architect and help build the new monument to Solomon's messiah? Was that what he had offered Devere, the Last Temple? Surely it would be the most iconographic building of modern times. That would appeal to a man like Devere, even if the money and power didn't.

  The more she thought about it, the more she realized she was underestimating Miles Devere. There was a sinister undertone to his involvement. She recalled the payments into the Swiss bank made by Silverthorn and withdrawn by Caspi or Solomon or whatever his real name was. She remembered Humanity Capital and its modus operandi, how it stimulated unrest and promoted war for financial gain, and the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place. Devere wasn't some innocent attracted by Solomon, he was the money man. He was financing this war for a New Israel, pumping money into the Shrieks' coffers, knowing that every dollar spent would in time be reaped five, six, eight, tenfold. It was what he did, he traded in human suffering and disaster.