by Roger Herst
"Tim didn't steal anything," Gabby insisted, constantly annoyed by the accusation.
"You know that for certain, do you?" the major responded, his tone patronizing.
"Yes, I know that for certain."
"Would you mind telling me how?"
Her eyes moved to Itamar for sympathy, but found nothing. "Tim's not the criminal type. I've known him for years to be a law-abiding, gentle human being, who, when he was a practicing minister, preached respect for the rule of law and discipline in personal affairs."
Zabronski pointed a non-threatening finger "But wouldn't his presence at Cave XII implicate him in the killing of Mumud banu-Nazeem?"
"That's preposterous," Gabby responded. "I assure you, Tim didn't shoot anybody. He doesn't go around killing people."
"Does he own a gun?" Zabronski ask, now grilling her as if she were a suspect.
"Yes, and so does just about everybody else in Israel these days. You guys can't stop all terrorists and protect the citizenry. Where's Zebulon Sonnenberg at this very moment? Debating the killing on Mount Carmel, right?" As soon as she said this, she thought of the deaths of Itamar's family in Netanya, and immediately regretted her words.
"Only licensed individuals," Zabronski said.
"And what percentage of the gun-owning population here would that be? Twenty-five percent?" Gabby rallied.
"Of course, not everybody bothers to get a license, but the figure certainly isn't that low. Do you know what kind of weapon Matternly owns?"
"He once told me he had an American army rifle from World War II."
"Is it in your apartment?" She considered lying, but that was bound to backfire. All Zabronski needed to do was demand that she produce the gun. "No. I looked for it recently. It wasn't where Tim usually stored it."
"A U.S. military rifle?" "A carbine, I think," she said, fearful of additional questions she could not answer.
"Some of our licensed guards use them because they're light to handle. But they're 30 caliber. Mumud banu-Nazeem was killed by a 9 mm Israeli Uzi. Who removed this carbine from your apartment?"
"How should I know?"
"I hope Matternly still has it. Given the trouble he's in, he's likely to need it to stay alive."
The office door suddenly flung open. The attractive female aide breezed through, leading the way for Deputy Prime Minister Zebulon Sonnenberg, a heavyset man with a thicket of wild gray hair. Long, determined strides brought him beside Dr. Navid whom he knew through mutual government contacts. He also knew less well Itamar and Zabronski, but not Gabby. After a quick introduction, his hands settled on his hips, a sign that he wanted to know what was so important to pull him from the prime minister's side at such a critical time.
Dr. Navid handed over his confidential report about the Qumran cave.
After a perusing glance at the packet, the Deputy PM laughed, "You've got the wrong man, friends. I'm afraid I'm one of the rare politicians in this country who doesn't give a duck's feather about archeology."
Itamar ignored the jibe at his profession, but admired the minister's forthrightness. He said, "Whatever was in Cave XII was plundered. We're fairly certain an American academic, Timothy Matternly from the University of Chicago, is implicated. Rabbi Lewyn happens to be Dr. Matternly's significant companion."
A finger rose to Sonnenberg's lips that opened wide before he spoke. "I heard from the army about activity in Qumran."
"Yes, sir," Itamar said. "Unfortunately, looting occurred before we knew the cave existed."
Looking to the uniformed border police officer, the deputy PM said, "And did I also hear something about foul play there?"
"A murdered Bedouin. We think he was shot in the cave, but died while trying to escape."
"Is organized crime involved in this? Sounds like their style."
"It's a good possibility."
"Oh," Sonnenberg's eyes rose to look at Gabby, hiding his curiosity about why an attractive female rabbi would be living with a man out of wedlock, and not just any man, but a Christian scholar. But on second thought, it was hard for him to imagine such an attractive woman without a partner. "So, what do we do about this? Wait until artifacts show up on the auction block? Isn't that too late? I sniff another fight with the Vatican. If what was stolen refers to early Christianity in any way or form, the bishops will accuse Israel of not properly protecting their Christian heritage. Every time we manage to calm things down in Rome, something like this pops up and I find myself in a new brawl. I don't mind telling you that I hate theological food fights." He looked impatiently at his wristwatch.
The door opened and the deputy's senior aide planted himself in the doorway. "The PM wants you back in the meeting, Zeb. Avi Krugger is on the warpath."
"I'll be right over," he snapped. "Shit, this is all we need now." He paused to stare at Gabby. "And why did my friends bring me a female rabbi? You think I need some religion?" "I beg your pardon," she said, not the least intimidated by Sonnenberg's position. "They brought me because I'm Tim Matternly's friend. He's performed a gargantuan task by compiling unread fragments from the earlier Dead Sea scrolls. And he may be useful in deciphering material coming from the new cave."
That stopped Sonnenberg in his tracks. "I wasn't aware of that." To Itamar he said, "How much of this business has leaked to the public?"
"At this point, virtually nothing."
"Then I suspect the Vatican's ambassador, Bishop Deporia, won't be visiting me soon. How did this debacle happen?"
Itamar said, "Two years ago, the Antiquities Authority commissioned the University of Pennsylvania to perform deep penetrating radar scans at Qumran, just to be sure that we had found all the repository caves. Nothing turned up."
"Did the university snooker us?"
"More likely one or two individuals on its team."
"I'll have to tell the PM." "Of course," said Itamar. "We thought you should be briefed while the matter is still under wraps."
"OK. Let's keep it that way and, in the meantime, find this fellow Matternly."
Zabronski interrupted. "We're trying. For the present, he's also high on our list of suspects in the murder of that Bedouin."
Sonnenberg asked Gabby. "Is he hiding?
"Unfortunately, I think he is."
"Oh," the deputy PM said, rubbing loose flesh beneath his chin. "You'll have to excuse me. There's an inferno raging in the cabinet and the PM looks to me as his fire marshal." He disappeared into the corridor a moment later.
A car from the Antiquities Authority was waiting outside the Knesset to ferry them back to Itamar's office. Sounding relieved that Sonnenberg had not threatened his tenure at the Antiquities Agency, Itamar said, "Not a particularly fruitful meeting, but at least we've done our duty."
They were seated in the car, driving through Kiryat Wolfson, when Itamar resumed the conversation. "This shouldn't be difficult to figure out. It's a fair assumption that fragments were removed from Cave XII. Matternly's involved because of his expertise in assembling fragmentary texts. That's why he purchased computer equipment. But where did he take it?" He looked to Gabby who remained lost in her thoughts. "Where?" he repeated, redirecting his question at her. "If he no longer has a car, then he's probably within walking distance of ha-Digital where he bought the computer."
"Or he took a taxi," added Zabronski.
Gabby tried to picture the computer store, mentally walking herself along the Jaffa Road, running northeast from central Jerusalem with a continuous string of small retail shops. One shop merged into the next, making it difficult to recall the exact location of ha-Digital. Her visual image consisted of crowds of shoppers on the street, mostly new immigrants from Eastern Europe and many Hasidim from the nearby Hasidic and Orthodox neighborhood of Mea She'arim.
Itamar kept forcing his analysis to free a new clue, demanding Gabby's input.
That Tim had purchased a computer near Mea She'arim triggered an upheaval of new ideas that she was not prepared to share. To conceal the
direction of her thinking, she asked, "Why, I'm wondering, did Tim purchase a new laptop? He almost always takes his Dell with him. Somehow, he must have gotten separated from it. Surely he knew there was a risk in having his credit card traced."
"But we don't have the Dell, or know where he parted company with it," Zabronski said.
Gabby replied, still hiding what was now paramount in her mind, "I'm thinking that if Tim had a record of what was removed from the Qumran cave on a DVD or memory chip, he wouldn't need his laptop. Any new computer would do."
***
Fragments from the Dead Sea, published before Tim and Gabby renewed their relationship, established Tim as the leading authority in compiling scattered biblical fragments. She never questioned his knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic, but knew it insufficient for the huge task of assembling disconnected texts, a pursuit she, with a superior command of these languages, would never have attempted. She had always believed his genius to have been in the proprietary software he developed to sort and assemble these texts, not his linguistic skill. It followed that to understand the complex syntax of these languages required the expertise of someone with encyclopedic understanding of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic syntax. But who that was remained a mystery. Tim failed to mention a collaborator in the Credits and Acknowledgments of his magnum opus. He was even less forthcoming when she put the question to him directly, letting her know that the subject was off-limits for reasons he was not prepared to share.
Such stonewalling only fueled her speculation. The key to identifying Tim's collaborator was to figure out who most likely possessed the required knowledge. The field narrowed immediately to students of Talmud because the Talmud, also written in Hebrew and Aramaic, had been compiled contemporaneously with the Qumran scrolls. Gabby surmised that Tim's helper was most probably a scholar first exposed to these ancient languages at the early age of three in a Jewish cheder and later trained under highly-disciplined conditions of a Talmudic yeshiva.
That Tim had purchased a new laptop on the outskirts of Mea She'arim, a Hasidic district with more Talmud scholars than any community in Jerusalem, perhaps the world, confirmed her thinking. If he had collaborated with a Talmud scholar in Mea She'arim on Fragments, he would likely return to the same person for help with new texts discovered in Cave XII. But to find this scholar and Tim in a community of several thousand souls presented formidable odds. The thought of searching for Tim on the medieval streets and alleys of Mea She'arim was daunting, yet she could think of no alternative.
Her search began with a visit to the mikvah, a ritual bathhouse Orthodox women use to purify themselves after menstruation and childbirth. She observed not one but two men tailing her from the apartment and left them outside the mikvah on Betzael Street, waiting for her to come out. The obligatory pool of natural rainwater for the mikvah was located in the basement and provided private changing rooms for the modest Orthodox clientele. Gabby took a book to kill time until she felt those tailing her would become bored and careless, then exited onto Betzael Street, no longer in her denim jeans and sweatshirt, but dressed like a devout Hasidic woman, her legs covered with thick black stockings, her arms with a loosely fitting blouse, and her head with a sheittle wig covering her hair, signifying to onlookers that she was a married woman. A bulky winter coat, quite uncomfortable in the warming air of spring, successfully concealed her figure.
On several occasions, she spun around abruptly to spot someone ducking out of sight. In her imagination, an army of ghosts followed. Anyone who appeared behind her for more than a few minutes fed suspicions. After three and a half hours visiting one yeshiva after another without spotting anyone who remotely resembling Tim, she returned home, determined to repeat the search the next day, but follow a different plan.
It was clear that changing clothes in the mikvah was a stratagem useful once but not twice. Still, the clothes of a pious woman would be helpful once in Mea She'arim. On her second expedition, she resorted to new tactics for confounding those tailing her by crossing numerous streets in the middle of the block, ducking around cars and other vehicles, followed by abrupt changes in direction, sometimes doubling back completely. Before actually entering the Orthodox district, she stopped before shop windows to spot in the reflection anyone following her, and filed mental pictures of suspicious individuals, until one picture began colliding with another. Two men attired like haredim, ultra Orthodox, with their heavy beards, braided ear locks, silk fringes hanging from their waists, their breast pockets swollen with what might be walkie-talkies, made her uncomfortable. She wrestled with a plan to become proactive and confront them directly. But by the time she fortified her resolve, they disappeared into pedestrian traffic.
After a second unsuccessful day on the streets, she ceased patrolling the yeshivas and began targeting food markets, reasoning that, if Tim had settled down to work on the Qumran fragments, he must eventually emerge for food. In these markets, frequented by both Orthodox men and women, customers abandoned the sacred tongue of Hebrew and spoke mostly in Yiddish, the preferred language of commerce. Their pallid faces and heavy bodies spoke of a generation restricted to the synagogue, school, and home, stirring in Gabby respect for their old-world dedication and discipline; however, they appeared as fossils from the distant past, chained to the traditions of their fathers who had been, in turn, chained to theirs.
As was their custom, the men of Mea She'arim avoided letting their eyes fall upon a woman other than their wives or daughters. But on occasion, a pious woman would lift an eyebrow in recognition, as if to say she saw through the disguise. Gabby would acknowledge their kindness with a gentle nod or a few disjointed words of Yiddish she had heard her parents speak.
She visited a variety of butchers and greengrocers once, but returned repeatedly to bakeries and dairies, reasoning that most shoppers might purchase meat and vegetables once a week, but require fresh bread and milk more frequently. To be thorough, it was necessary to repeat her visits to all fourteen of Mea She'arim's bakeries and eight of her dairies.
On her fifth trip and her third to a small bakery on Ein Yaakov Street, religious and non-religious Jews pressed impatiently toward the sales counter, gesturing and shouting for privileged treatment from the staff. Warm air was impregnated with the smell of fresh bread from the ovens. Gabby elbowed forward, seeking a place from which she might survey the crowd. As she angled toward the sales counter, a man with a salt-and-pepper beard and heavy, languishing eyes moved with her. On his breath was the sour odor of garlic. A flush of fear passed through her as she compared the man's features with others stored in her memory. Were all these Hasidic faces merging into a single paradigm, or had this man been following her? She was about to retreat when she noticed another man with equally suspicious features standing like a Trojan guard near the door to the street, appearing to be more interested in observing people than buying bread.
Just then, a tall man hunched in a heavy overcoat, a dark black homburg covering most of his face, turned from the counter, a large unwrapped loaf of crusty bread tucked under his arm. His ruddy beard glistened with silver and an aquiline nose distinguished him from Jews with Eastern European lineage. Had it not been for a mirthful expression indelibly forged onto his lips, she might have missed him. In her mind, there could only be a single individual with this unique expression. And in an instant, she knew without a tinge of doubt that she had found Tim.
An urge to plunge forward was countered by the thought that finding him couldn't have come at a worse time. She had hoped to make contact unnoticed and in some private manner. But the Hasid with garlic on his breath hovered nearby, while his cohort guarded the street door. She wrestled with a way to catch Tim's attention without disclosing his identity and came up empty-handed. Any attempt to make contact at this moment was certain to trigger an adverse reaction.
He passed by only a few feet from Gabby, apparently unaware of her presence. She considered following him into the street, but abandoned the idea almost immed
iately. Were she to move now, the men following her were certain to radio ahead for assistance. And once they had Tim within their sights, it wouldn't take them long to figure out where he was hiding and who was helping him. The best of a terrible choice was to let him go. In a few brief seconds, he had returned to her life, only to disappear again just as fast. If there was any consolation in this miserable turn of events, it was confirmation that Tim was alive and well, and that he was hiding among the Hasidim.
After forcing herself to visit another two bakeries and another dairy to give the impression that nothing unusual had transpired, she turned in the direction of home in Rehavia.
Lost in her thoughts, she cut diagonally across Independence Park, east of the main commercial center, its lawns speckled with ancient granite outcroppings, and had just turned toward Gershon Agron Street when a powerful hand grabbed her shoulder from behind, bringing her forward motion to a halt. A second hand swung her toward another man. While the first one pinned her arms behind her back, the second dropped a gunnysack over her Orthodox wig. Bright afternoon sunlight disappeared. She struggled to free herself from the attackers, violently kicking her feet and twisting her shoulders. Suddenly, there seemed to be a third individual, helping to upset her traction by lifting her from the pavement and dragging her toward the street. She decided on a strategy to upset this by first ceasing all resistance and going limp, then suddenly instigating a fresh fight for freedom. The trick caught one abductor off guard and he released her arm, which she immediately employed by pounding the man in the face. When he howled, the other man caught her free arm and painfully locked it behind her back. One of the abductors snatched the fanny-pack she had belted to her waist and tugged violently. It resisted until another man fumbled with the plastic coupler, eventually freeing the mechanism. Meanwhile, another attacker circled a sash around her mouth, silencing her screams and forcing her to breathe through her nose. Once again, they had her in the air, moving her in the direction of Gershon Agron Street.