The Tel Aviv Dossier

by Lavie Tidhar

  “Steam!” someone shouted at the back. I found that I couldn’t distinguish the various cat-calls. They were all elderly, querulous, and slightly absent: they sounded like university lecturers. I said, “Steam?”

  “It’s a steam engine,” Dganit said, and you could smear that pride over bread and call it butter — “a marvel of engineering and ingenuity.”

  “But, but — but what do you feed it with?” I said, perplexed.

  She looked at me in surprise. “Well, books,” she said.

  “Books?”

  “Of course. Do you know how many books there are in Tel Aviv? It’s a great untapped natural resource!”

  “Books,” I said.

  “We — that is, the Faculty, of which I am Head, hold every branch of Steimatzky’s in town! Not to mention the Book Junction, the independents, and the warehouses of the all the major publishers!”

  “I . . . see,” I said.

  “Right now we’re powering the engine with as much Amos Oz to get us to the moon and back! And when we run out — ”

  “You never run out of Amos Oz!” someone shouted at the back.

  “We will use A.B. Yehoshua! Meir Shalev! Giants in their field! Mines to be, well — mined!”

  “Well said!”

  “And if that ever runs out, there’s always The Da Vinci Code,” Dganit said. “Excellent book. Many pages. Burns well. There are tons of copies waiting in the warehouse.”

  Murmurs of approval from the back seats.

  I had a bad feeling about all this. About the bus, its elderly passengers, their clearly deranged leader — but most of all, about their destination. “Where are we going?” I said, trying to sound as polite and harmless as possible.

  Dganit looked at me in surprise. “Well, we’re going to the War, of course,” she said.

  I said, “The War?” I was beginning to sound like an echo.

  She slapped me on the shoulder in a comradely sort of way. It hurt. “The War!” she said. “The Last and Final War. You know, like in the song? And you’ll be glad to know you’ve just signed up on the side of Right.”

  I had a sinking, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  The War. The Last, Final War. From the song that said, “I promise you, little child of mine, that this will be the last, the final war of our times.” The various members of the faculty began to sing, not very harmoniously. The driver nodded her head and the bus zigzagged this way and that in time with the music.

  The Last and Final War.

  Right.

  I N T E R L U D E

  A war is coming. We have known it for some time. We are prepared. A war is coming. A war to end all wars. We are ready. We are armed.

  Truth is on our side.

  He who has gone shall return again today. This is the time of no-time, the moment of no-moment, the stillness that comes after everything and before nothing. We are the Firemen. We have waited long. We are ready now. Come.

  Come to us. Come all you infidels, you non-believers, you who were spared by the one who dwells high up on the sacred mountain.

  We have heard the words of truth come from that which should not be alive. Our priests have interrogated the aberration, have divined the signs, have read the map of the world. We who know the mappa mundi, we who channel the spiritus mundi, we are strong, and we are prepared.

  With blood he will come. Sing of us, daughters of Tel Aviv! On the banks of the Yarkon sit ye and weep, and remember what has gone before, for it is gone forever. This is the new age. This is the time of the return. This is the time of our deliverance.

  MORDECHAI: SIX

  I left the Templar lying where he was, whimpering, the donkey watching him with a bemused expression, and ran, and didn’t stop until I saw the station.

  The front of the central bus station of Tel Aviv, the largest building of its kind in the Mediterranean, maybe in the world, looked as if a leviathan just broke free out of it. There was a huge hole in the building through which one could clearly see the gnawed support beams of floors 3 and 4. Constant fire was coming out of that hole, and was returned in kind from various points around the perimetre — the windows of surrounding buildings, trenches dug where the road’s asphalt was already broken, and, for some reason, people on small scooters. It looked, in short, like a combination of Die Hard, Platoon and an animated version of Easy Rider.

  Not my style at all.

  I took a long detour around the building, keeping at a safe distance. The whole of the main, long, north-facing front was one constant firestorm. Nothing to do about that. The west side wasn’t much better — a tank was trying to break in by brute force, its cannon already twisted like a melted candle. Usually it shouldn’t have had any problem doing so, but someone made sure that the whole length of the west wall was covered with boulders and chunks of cement which seemed like the remains of other buildings, creating an uneven slope that the people within the tank were finding difficult to cross. Everything looked so . . . deliberate. As if those people inside had been getting ready for this almost since the day of the event.

  The southern side was totally inaccessible. Everything was so twisted and ruined there, on ground level, that the only way in would have been to be shot out of a cannon. I heard some cannons around me, but they, alas, weren’t of the right kind.

  It took me twenty minutes to get around to the eastern side. There was much rubble there, where the small taxi stand used to be, but there seemed to be some spaces between the stones. What’s more — it was relatively quiet.

  A slab of concrete from one of the bridges leading to the upper levels of the station fell on the road below, hitting three scooters and raising a cloud of dust. For a moment in the confusion nobody was shooting. I took the opportunity and ran straight into the biggest space I could see, between two sections of what once was the station’s eastern wall.

  It was cool and quiet inside. I still heard shooting and explosions, but dimly, like a neighbour’s television set showing a late-night war film. I relaxed and sat down on the floor for a moment, trying to settle my breath. On one side I saw the dimming daylight. On the other, into the station, there was only blackness.

  After a minute of resting I walked inside and, taking special care to see where I was going, immediately bumped my head on a support beam of some sort. I bent down but the space got narrower and narrower, and soon I was reduced to crawling in the dust, cursing this unacceptable war, which was getting in the way of my finding the truth behind all this. The thought of said truth was the only thing keeping me going. That, and the certain knowledge that if not for me, the secrets of the catastrophe would never be revealed.

  Not by professional historians of the occult, anyway.

  Shudder.

  I was making good progress, I thought, and even getting used to the situation, avoiding all sorts of sharp obstacles like broken pipes and metal wires and such stuff as can generally be found inside walls, when suddenly all the background noise — which up until then was audible even inside the tunnel — disappeared. No guns, no explosions, nothing. Nothing but an uneasy silence, accompanied only by groan of the stones around me.

  I froze, and that probably saved my life.

  There was a low rumble, the ground shook, and something huge crashed just in front of me narrowly missing me. If I was only one metre ahead, I would have been squashed like a bug. I was thinking that to myself, in relief, when the rest of the tunnel fell on me.

  That’s it, I’m dead, I thought to myself. At least now I’ll know for sure what heaven looks like. And, come to think of it, the actual meaning of all those clues in the lost writings of Rabbi Shimon of the Miracle — revealed by myself merely two years ago — whose solution I had hoped to uncover as soon as I was done with the Tel Aviv investigation. Such an interesting experience, death. I wonder why I never thought of it before.

  Well, mostly because being dead makes it impossible to get proper recognition while being alive.

  But no m
atter, I thought. No matter. I’m ready. Take me, swift death, quietly and majestically, no more riddles for old Mordechai — only solutions. And what is more dignified than dying in the middle of an investigation?

  At which point there came the sound of a tremendous tuba being played by an angry elephant, and the tunnel, the stones, the broken pipes, the wires and myself were shot forward like a brick on ice, and something fell on my head.

  *

  Someone was shaking me awake. It took my eyes some time to get back to focus, my head was spinning and I was coughing, but finally I managed to see that it was a rather thin man, dressed in an overcoat and a broad-brimmed hat. He looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember where from.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said, looking at me with distaste. “I wondered when you’d get here, you idiot.”

  I N T E R L U D E

  Hiya, Nicky! It’s Shell. I hope you still remember me . . . I don’t know if you’ll ever get this letter. This is the thirty-first letter I’ve written. Recently I’ve taken to depositing them in post boxes all around the city. Maybe one day the post will work again, and postmen will come in trucks and empty the mail, and send it to you. Like those letters that come back from Everest after thirty years.

  I am sad today. I’m sorry. It was a silly thing to write. I hope we see each other soon. Life here is not so bad any more. I am even learning Hebrew — shalom, ma nishma? Beseder, ha’kol beseder . . .

  It means, kind of — how’s it going? Fine, everything’s fine . . . everyone says that. Ha’kol beseder, ha’kol beseder! But ha’kol isn’t beseder!

  I was so afraid after the . . . when it happened. I think Jason . . . I think he was . . . I never saw him again. For a long time I lived on the beach, we had a small commune going, we shared firewood and food — there are other tourists here, like me, I even hooked up with a Brazilian guy for a while but he disappeared one day, and we thought one of the scooter clans might have got him. You get used to it. There are places in the city you can’t go at all. Places where you disappear, forever. You have to watch out for the scooter clans, the feral children, the slavers, the people who are just crazy, even normal people who staked out a territory and would kill you as soon as you stepped over this invisible border.

  And now I’m scared. I’m really scared. Nicky, I . . .

  I miss . . .

  SAM: SIX

  There was a huge explosion and a piece of cement the size of a boulder shot out of the building and landed on the asphalt right in front of us.

  There were guns going off everywhere. Tracer bullets arced through the sky, many emanating from the upper floors of the giant station. The structure was huge: a white, organic-looking facade glaring down at the army below it. I wasn’t sure what was going on: it had something to do with an MP3 player. Partially, at least.

  There were two primary competing beliefs, or so Dganit told me. One spoke of a fireman who went up to heaven in a chariot of fire, a modern-day Elijah, and his followers believed that soon he would return. The other spoke of a couple who went up to the mountain, and told that their child would one day return to Tel Aviv; it read like a badly translated version of the Adam and Eve story.

  “Where are you in all this?” I’d asked Dganit. She looked at me. Her feelers moved though there was no wind. “We are scholars,” she said. “Our position is that the truth must be determined objectively, dispassionately, and logically. Just like we treated the question of unidentified flying objects at the Israeli UFO Research Society.”

  I thought the logic of that was a bit suspect, but I let it go. “And have you established the truth?” I asked. Dganit nodded and her eyes changed, their colour draining, and a strange, faraway, disturbingly alien look came into her eyes. “I have been shown a great truth,” she said.

  Aha.

  “I have spoken to the minds of the gods,” she said. “I have seen deeper into the spectrum of non-human greatness that resides up there, in the heavens of the mountains. I know much that has been hidden.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  She glared at me. Behind us her elderly coterie made gasping sounds. “Nothing your merely mortal mind could comprehend!”

  I backed down. She was clutching the Uzi with fingers white with tension. “Fair enough,” I said.

  “Silence!”

  As we approached the station I saw the rising smoke ahead and heard the sounds of warfare. The war was already in progress. I sat next to the old guy, Menachem. He had a window seat now and was levelling a heavy machine-gun through the open window. “Scientists,” he told me, “need what we call empirical proof. Rumour has it that an object of great importance to the Firemen is secured inside the citadel.”

  “The citadel?”

  “The station. The black tower. Haw haw.” It was a strange sound. “You know Childe Roland?”

  “Was he the British Foreign Office Minister during the Suez Crisis?” I said.

  Menachem shook his head. “Never mind,” he said.

  “So what is this object?”

  He told me about the MP3 player. And the rumours of a head. And I realized then that, whatever happened, I would have to go deeper yet, into the station itself if I had to, find for myself what was true and what was only story. And then try to report back to Jerusalem . . . I wondered if that was possible. I wondered what was happening in Jerusalem, in the rest of the world. I wondered if I’d ever be able to go back. I didn’t have much of a plan, but neither, it seemed, did anyone else.

  When we began the final approach to the station I saw the multitudes outside. Everyone who had survived the great event must have been there. I saw flags waving in the air, and recognized none of them. There were jeeps and four-by-fours, two buses, even a wounded tank that somehow still worked and was firing lethargically at the building. I saw scooters and three horses and bicycles with strange firing mechanisms welded to their fronts. There were tents and barricades made of rubbish and bits of houses. The elderly members of the Faculty began to sing again about the last and final war, setting my teeth on edge. Then Dganit said, “Let’s go.”

  On the ground it was worse. There was firing from inside the building, and I saw a woman collapse ahead of me with an arrow through her neck.

  An arrow?

  Dganit said, “We must meet the Council of Associated Factions before launching the attack — ” when a rocket coming from the fifth or sixth floor of the station took out one of the four-by-fours and an explosion lit up the sky. Then everything went crazy.

  Dganit’s feelers shook, and she raised her Uzi in the air and then let out a burst of bullets, and she shouted, “Back on the bus! We’re going to charge!” and from all around the station people surged forward, a mass wave of insane humanity.

  And the war began.

  I N T E R L U D E

  Soon it will end. They have come, they are coming still, and the final preparations are under way. Death will call to him, as the bodies pile up he will hear our cry. Two have been called from outside, but more will come, and their fresh blood will sing to the mountain. Let the blood flow: the blood flows, will flow, is flowing. Sing the song of the blood.

  The mountain rises above us. We stand on top of a great expanse. The whole of the city is below us. They are drawn to us, like flies to a carcass. They are coming. They have come. they are coming still.

  And we are ready for them.

  MORDECHAI: SEVEN

  “So,” said the thin man with the broad-brimmed hat, “Mordechai Abir, I presume?” He laughed to himself. “In all his glory.”

  This was rather unfair. I was still trying to get over the blow to my head, the ground was shaking, the air was filled with smoke and somewhere too near to us people were shooting at each other.

  “Who the hell are you?” I said. Then I realized he was pointing a gun at me.

  “I’d have thought someone with your fine eye for detail, not to mention your exquisite research skills, wouldn’t n
eed to see a person more than once in order to recognize him.”

  I examined him more closely. Nothing memorable in the face, except maybe for the general thinness and the hungry look in his eyes. He was carrying a nylon backpack over one shoulder. Nothing familiar about that. But the clothes, the hat . . . where had I . . .

  “You’re the man from the train,” I said. “You’re the one who told me not to stand near the front door of the car.”

  Something nasty blew up somewhere above us, sending a thin drizzle of rubble on our heads. The thin man didn’t seem to care.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Not that it made any difference. I should’ve known you wouldn’t listen.”

  “But I have listened to you!” I said. “Wait a moment, how do you know me, anyway? No, wait — how did you get out of that train?”

  “I jumped out of the window,” he said. “Which was just as planned. Your own survival, however, was a freak accident.”

  I didn’t have any ready answer for that, so I just stared at him. There was a sound just like a neighbour hammering a nail into the other side of your apartment’s wall, only very loud and horribly fast. Bullets were hitting the outer side of the building above us.

  “If you would have done what you were told, your remains would still be inside that train,” the thin man added. “I should’ve known better than to try.”

  “Who are you? How do you know me?”

  “Who in the field doesn’t know the world-famous historian of the occult, Mordechai Abir?” His words, while being utterly correct, weren’t spoken in the tone I’d expect from a serious historian. Which could lead to only one conclusion. A nonserious historian.