“Ah, I see. Are we to judge the act of healing or the fact it was performed on Shabbat?”
“Rabban, do not bandy words with me. We have a problem and it must be addressed.”
“Yes, of course we must. Did you know that our friend the physician, here, can restore sight to the blind?”
“I don’t see what that has to do—”
“He has done it just recently. He made Jacob ben Aschi sighted again. Think of it. One of the most respected priests on the roster has regained his sight and may resume his duties. Is that not a wonderful thing?”
“What? Jacob can see? I don’t believe it. He has been blind for years. No, it cannot be.”
“But it is. Loukas healed him on a weekday, so no offense was directed toward the Lord. But I wonder, High Priest…a hypothetical if you will…how would you feel if it had happened on Shabbat? What if Jacob received his miracle on Shabbat? Is not the Lord served best with a sighted Jacob? Would the restoration of one of his priests not be pleasing to Him? Certainly he would not take offense, do you think?”
“The cripple was not a priest, the rabbi was not a physician, and the question is moot because it did not, in fact, occur on Shabbat.”
“That is quite true, but I put it to you that the cases are only dissimilar as to the day, not the effect. And that being the case, I ask again, had Loukas done his healing on Shabbat, how would you deal with it? Would you be here haranguing me, or not?”
“You are the rabban. It is your duty to define the Law. Can you excuse this or not?”
“Tsk. I see that you do not care for my question, but then, I did not think you would. Let me try something else. Blasphemy can be defined, I think, as lying about or to the Lord. I would reduce it to something like that. A man who breaches Shabbat breaches the Law, but he does not blaspheme. There is an important difference between the two, though many do not recognize it. So, has this man simply breached the Law, or has he blasphemed? Where is the falsehood?”
“You are being Greek, a sophist, Rabban. It is not your place to toy with the Law.”
“On the contrary,” Gamaliel’s voice now took on an edge, “I am being the rabban. This is exactly what I do. If you tell me this rabbi broke the law, I agree. It is within the Lord’s purview as to what punishment will befall him for that. He will be displeased or he will not. We do not presume to know His mind and there is no authority left to us to punish a breach of this sort. Now I put to you another case—”
“I will have no more of this nonsense. You are not keeping the Law, you are twisting it.”
“I am not finished. Take this case. If you know for a certainty that the man found in the Holy of Holies had been placed there by some one—a true blasphemer, in fact—and you still insist that he died at the hands of the Lord, what would you call that?”
“What?”
“It is simple enough. If blasphemy is, among other things, lying to or about the Lord, and you tell such a lie in order to advance a theory about His reaction to anyone who invades the Most Holy Place, what have you done?”
Caiaphas’ face turned several shades of red and then, as if the plug had been pulled, the color drained away and he became as white as the marble bench on which he rather abruptly collapsed.
“You cannot mean…” he gasped.
“Loukas, pour the high priest some wine. He looks poorly.”
“High Priest,” Loukas said as he stepped to his side, “Put your head between your knees and take slow but steady breaths.”
Caiaphas did as he was told and moments later he seemed better.
“Are you experiencing any pain?”
Caiaphas tapped his chest.
“Gamaliel, the high priest needs to lie down for a while. Fetch that vial of hul gil we brought from my house and mix a small, a very small amount of it with honey and water.”
Gamaliel did as he was asked. They half carried him to a couch. Loukas administered the mixture slowly. Caiaphas relaxed and closed his eyes.
“High Priest, you must rest here for an hour or so. Then have your men fetch a sedan and carry you home. Take what remains of this week to rest and I will call on you within the hour. Under no circumstances should you exert yourself.”
“I have an appointment with the prefect in an hour.”
“Not today, not this week. Send a messenger with your regrets and have him say the high priest is ill and cannot attend him.”
“He will be angry.”
“He is always angry,” Gamaliel said. “He will get over it. You should know by now that no matter what you do to please or placate him, if he feels the need, he will chop you off at the knees and not blink an eye.”
Caiaphas rolled his eyes much as he had when reporting his blasphemy. Gamaliel wondered if, in the high priest’s mind, he thought speaking against the prefect equated with speaking against the Lord.
“Now rest,” Loukas said. “I will send someone to my home for my remedy box. There is a plant I learned about from one of my colleagues from the west the leaves of which he says works wonders with this sort of complaint.”
“High Priest,” Gamaliel said, “One last question for you. If this had been Shabbat, what should Loukas have done just now?”
Caiaphas groaned, but his color returned.
Chapter XLII
Gamaliel gazed at the retreating figure of Caiaphas as he disappeared down the street in a conveyance cobbled up by his servants—not quite a sedan chair and not quite a stretcher—serviceable if not elegant. He looked miserable.
“You must be careful when you bait the high priest, Rabban. You might have killed him.”
“Loukas, surely not. The man is impervious to criticism. Half of the time he simply doesn’t listen. The rest of the time he ignores you. He will live forever. Besides it wasn’t criticism, it was a critique.”
“Enough. You want me to believe that it is your wish he live forever?”
“Of course. I hope you are not suggesting I want him dead. If the high priest were to die, it would be a tragedy…no, a national disaster.”
“A national…I think you exaggerate.”
“Not at all. As much as we abhor his snug relationship with Rome, replacing him would result in an appointment sanctioned by a crazed Caesar and certified by an obnoxious prefect. Where is Elohim in that? It is a prospect no one could possibly want.”
“Then, I repeat my warning. You must not bait the man. I have seen the signs he displayed just now many times and, as often as not, collapsing like that—a cold sweat and chest pains—will end in the person’s death, sometimes immediately, sometimes after a few days. All I am saying is be careful when you push him like that.”
“Arguing with Caiaphas is one of my few remaining pleasures. Now you will deny me even that.”
“Yes, yes, I must be off to retrieve my bag and attend to the man. Whatever you had in mind for today’s activities will have to wait, that is if they included me.”
“In truth, I had not begun to plan how to lure our killer out, but I know that before we are done with this affair, that is what we will have to do.”
“What is the problem, then? Never mind, I haven’t time to listen. You can tell me later.”
“It has to do with motive.”
“Motive?”
“Yes, I can’t think of any. We have several men whose deaths I am sure are connected, but I lack a real clue how or why they are. You said it yourself, ‘a separation, that the dead man was involved in something. Separating him from any hint as to what or who that might be renders him isolated and you with no place to start.’ Or words to that effect.”
“You have given up on the goings on in the souk then?”
“No, but I can’t quite fit that part with the Temple man. It is maddening.”
“On tha
t happy note, I will take my leave.” Loukas stepped through the door with Oren at his heels.
***
For the man who had been watching the house and Loukas and Gamaliel and now lay in wait across the street, the problem had become many times more complicated for him as well. He found himself in a deeper hole than he’d ever anticipated. While no one, or nearly no one, would miss a guard, an apothecary, or even a physician, the rabban of the Sanhedrin was a very public figure and therefore a poor subject for a murder. When public figures come to an untimely or a suspicious end, they tend to attract an excess of attention. He could only guess at what may have transpired between the rabban and the prefect the previous day, but if the two were now allied in the pursuit of the man responsible for any of the recent killings, then he was in more trouble than he’d bargained for. And if that weren’t bad enough, Loukas the physician, who he believed had no status except for his acquaintance with the rabban, now attended the high priest.
Caution urged vacating the city and his assignment. The problems begun with Hana could be addressed later, after enough time had passed and the deaths forgotten. That would be the conservative move. He rejected it. He’d come to avenge a murder, reestablish his market, and to do a job. He would not leave until he’d finished it.
He moved off down the street, eyes and ears alert to any and all around him.
***
Gamaliel sat by the slit window and watched as first Caiaphas in his ungainly carrier and then Loukas disappeared into the growing crowds on the street. He, like the man in the shadows across the street, also considered his options. Somewhere out on that same street, figuratively speaking, wandered his murderer. He would like to devise a trap, but, as he’d told Loukas, to set a trap meant having knowledge of what bait would entice a killer to step into it, and that meant he needed to know what drove him. But the connection that could stitch all these bits and pieces together flitted in space just ahead of his ability to grasp them. It was maddening.
He rose and would have turned away except a movement on the street opposite caught his eye. A man, a very familiar man, stepped cautiously into the sunlight. He looked both ways and then stared straight at Gamaliel. In fact, he stared at the house. Standing inside with the brighter light outdoors, Gamaliel could not have been seen. Nevertheless, the rabban shrank back a step. He did not, however, take his eyes off the man who now turned and shifted his attention down the street in the direction Loukas had taken. Gamaliel tried to concentrate. He felt sure he knew the man—one of the many familiar manifestations he’d run across over the past few days. The false priest? The man on the street on Shabbat eve? Both? Someone else? Maybe, with his lower face covered, the man who claimed to be in search of Ali bin Selah. Any and all of these possibilities could obtain. Which? He turned and went to his study. He needed to concentrate. Whether by instinct or Providence he would never know, but one or the other caused him to pivot back toward the window in time to see a second man move out from the wall and take a position behind the other. Now this man he did know.
He squinted his eyes against the sunlight streaming through the narrow slit and watched the two men walk away. Then, his mind made up, he grabbed his cloak from a peg by the door and yelled to Benyamin.
“Benyamin, I am going to meet with the prefect. If Loukas comes back, tell him where I am. If anyone else asks, tell them I am in the Souk searching for fabric for a new cloak. If I do not return in two hours you may assume that Pilate has had me put away.”
“Yes, sir, and which of these stories will be the truth?”
“It doesn’t matter, just be sure you tell the right one to the people I’ve identified.”
Chapter XLIII
The Roman prefect had problems of his own, not the least of which was a wife, Procula, whom not a few of his acquaintances referred to as dementis, but never to his face. She wasn’t crazy, but she did have premonitions that unfortunately or fortunately, depending on the outcome, often turned out to be true, or near enough. It had been at her insistence that he’d made this tiresome trip to Jerusalem. He confided to his friends back on the peninsula that of all the places he’d been posted, it was the most tiresome place anywhere in the Empire. This morning Procula had burst into his anteroom and informed him that he should listen to the voice of God. Her words exactly, Listen to the voice of God. Not the voice of the gods, which would be the way any normal person would have put it, but God, as if there were only one and he rated special attention. Pilate wondered if living in this benighted land with its constricting monotheism hadn’t affected her mind and if he shouldn’t petition the Emperor Tiberius for a transfer to a more salubrious posting. He’d earned it. He also knew that this Caesar had slipped out of the realm of rational thought and would as likely order his execution as his transfer. He sat with these thoughts, worrying them like a dog with a bone, when the legionnaire assigned to monitor his door announced the presence of the rabban of the Sanhedrin.
The voice of God?
“Show him in.”
Gamaliel entered and greeted him with his usual courtesy, which Pilate felt bordered on the ironic, as if excessive politeness somehow satirized the relationship of Rome to its conquered nations and its citizens to their Caesar. In his more relaxed moments, which were admittedly few, he thought the rabban had it right.
“I will not tell you why, Rabban, but I have been expecting you. I can tell you that I have been thinking over what you reported to me earlier. I have made inquiries. I selected certain of my legionnaires who admitted to having acquired a taste for the stuff you described to me, and I have experimented. Aristotle taught us that the observation of phenomena while varying the circumstances around it can be extremely informative. It cost me six otherwise good men, but I have determined that hul gil, when taken in certain doses, will make a man useless for fighting. Furthermore, once they achieve a certain level of use it seems they require more of it and cannot willingly cease craving it. They will need the stuff and become quite unreliable unless they get it.
“Then you see the problem?”
“Indeed. What I do not see is the connection between it and the dead man or men, as you insist.”
“That is the twist, to be sure. Like you, I have been considering the drug and the connection. Unlike you, however, I did not experiment with it, although my friend the physician did apply it to relieve the high priest of symptoms he said might have been fatal. I don’t believe that, by the way. For any other man, they might, but the high priest is indestructible.”
“Probably. And what did you conclude?”
“This is highly speculative, Prefect. I could be completely off the mark.”
“I have it on reliable authority that you are not.”
“Pardon?”
“Someone insisted I hear you out and, more than that I was to take you seriously. You do understand how difficult the last part is for me?”
“I suppose it must. I would apologize for your inconvenience but I doubt you would take it seriously.”
“As seriously as it is offered.”
“Yes, well then, there you are. Now, here is what I have so far. Something has changed in this material. Until this moment, it has been in the bag of every healer on earth. It sits in powders, poultices, vials, and blocks in hundreds, thousands of homes. To this point, no one has cared one way or the other about it. Some think it is a good palliative, others doubt it. Now, suddenly, it is the source of great attention. I have been reading, Prefect.”
“Stop. We are talking about hul gil are we not?”
“Exactly. Something has changed. Someone, or several someones, has cultivated a strain of poppy that produces a sap that is more heavily endowed with the active ingredient.”
“Or?”
“Sorry, what?”
“There is another possibility, you know.”
“I see, and w
hat would that be?”
“Improved processing.”
“Oh, yes, that is a possibility.”
“If the latter, we will never get on top of this except by banning its use on pain of death.”
“And if the former?”
“We burn the fields and crucify the growers.”
“If I am correct, that will not be possible.”
“Not? Tell me why the Roman Empire with its legions cannot do exactly that?”
“Because it comes from a place beyond your reach. Your influence extends far to the east, I know, and you can even make people you have not yet subjugated bend to your will, but these flowers grow far away in the northern mountains beyond Parthia in Khorasan. The people there are gathered into warlike tribes and to date no one has successfully conquered them, not even the late great Macedonian, Alexander.”
“I know the place. It is on the border of the world.”
“That might be overstating, Prefect. I have no doubt here are countries beyond it which, if I’m not mistaken, supply the rare spices and fabrics you people covet. No, the problem is, and I admit I am not a strategist or familiar with the workings of armies, but it is more a matter of vulnerable supply lines and topography, I think.”
“For a man who spends his days with his nose on sheets of holy writings, you seem to have acquired a working knowledge of logistics.”
“I attribute it to some of my days in your company, Prefect. A man is a fool if he does not know his adversary.”
“Well put. As my adversary, then, why should I take advice from you?”
“Alas, in this case you must.”
“Because?”
“This new threat to the well being of your troops is like the wind. It blows where it will and knows no favor. That is to say it will blow on Roman and Hebrew alike. The problems it creates will affect us all.”
“I take your point. Now what?”
“The souk must be cleansed, the border to that far away province sealed, and warnings issued to your people and mine.”
Holy Smoke Page 19