The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  “It’s a tactile thing, I guess,” he said, “a physical pleasure. But it’s also mental. Like when you’ve run up against a hard case and you don’t think you can get through it—and then you do.” He thought she might understand that. “The tough part is, there’s always another one to beat.”

  “Perhaps that’s why,” she breathed out smoke. The fumes circled quickly and then raced upward, caught by the overhead fan. “Beat the enemy, keep climbing. We enjoy the fight too much to let it end. Chess. Setting up, all the feinting of the middle game. Striking the other where we couldn’t strike him before. Figuring out how to beat him—it’s better than the win itself. But it can go too far.” She tapped the cigarette into a cold cup of coffee. The ashes scuttled over the surface like sand. Then her assistant came in with a tray.

  “I’m not following. I’m sorry,” he said, half rising to go. He knew he didn’t want to watch her eat, particularly in this room with blood projected on the walls. “You said you needed me?”

  She ignored him. “What’s this?” she asked the wide-eyed assistant, who puckered his lips apologetically.

  “It’s apples and honey, ma’am. It’s a holiday snack—the only thing we have on the floor. Some of the staff brought it in this morning. All the shops are closed…”

  She looked down at the browning slices of apple and laughed incredulously.

  “Apples dipped in honey. The start of the new year, you know,” Ari said to her in defense of her slim little assistant, who turned quickly to go. He knew she was about to shout at him.

  “Let him go. I can go find you something. It won’t take a minute.” She rolled her eyes and then nodded at Ari, who was already out the door.

  Alone now, she inhaled heavily on her cigarette and exhaled, wrapping herself in a veil of smoke. It calmed her thinking, her vision. Directly above was the wall-sized portrait of the man she had been studying for the quarter hour before Ari showed up. Clearly an Arab face, despite the eyes and the geography. She wondered if they had gone too far—if their plotting had become so strikingly devious as to put a man in the highest ranks of the Church. She understood that there were many degrees of jihad: from the kind of personal struggle it took to creep out of bed at dawn for morning prayers all the way to forced conversion or the destruction of the non-Muslim world.

  Why couldn’t they be satisfied with their own religious agonies and leave the rest of us alone?

  She glanced at the world map on the wall, with Israel a tiny blue sliver on the muscular brown back of the Middle East. She knew that Islam divided the world in two: dar al-Islam, the haven of the Muslims; and dar al-Harb, the “West,” the hell of the unbelievers. To certain Muslims, Israel was harb, an unnatural growth, a cancer in the flesh of Islam that needed removal—whether by surgery or by radiation or by toxic chemicals. They referred to her country not by name but as the “Zionist Entity,” as if it were an alien disease. Such a mentality required nothing less than the eradication of Israel; the morality of destroying a whole nation didn’t interest them—others could deal with such questions after the menace was gone.

  Of course, she understood the political issues between the Israelis and the Palestinians—who did not? Those issues, as far as she was concerned, had been resolved eighty years before at the partition. Hardly anyone alive could now remember it, but the partition had been an exercise in rationality, not in faith. How small that slice of rationality on the map, she thought, how irrational the arid continent around it. One ignorant, ineffectual Western leader after another galloped in every few years, proposing that everybody just sit down, calm down, and reason together. Every American president in memory had sent an emissary to “solve the Israeli–Palestinian question” as if it were just a particularly pesky issue of policy. And every one of them had failed. They had no conception of the geological hatred in this small land, of the tectonic logic that required the burial of one people or the other.

  She remembered her private encounter in the Hammad, in the depth of the desert, at an ultra-high-tech oasis powered by oil money, with certain imams who agreed to meet a legation from Israel. For years she had studied their manifestos with disbelief. Now as an intelligence officer she would have a firsthand opportunity to hear them wind through the reasoning that led inescapably to the annihilation of the Jews. Surely they didn’t really intend that. But they had actually smiled at her while they explained it.

  “Of course, God intends that all people be at peace,” the translator said, his eyes half-shut, his grinning, obsequious face not at all disarming.

  “And that is what we want, too. We just want to live in peace…together,” the ranking member of the deputation had said to them, straightforwardly and simply. He was a Jewish-American diplomat with a porous face and a fat little body. Of course, his words masked their own kind of complexity.

  “You must understand that this is not personal,” the translator had continued after the white-bearded imams had told him what to say. “But we have a positive hatred toward your race and religion. The Jews are the killers of the prophets. The Jews received the Torah as a donkey receives a burden, to be herded and driven. And Allah be praised, he has herded you into one place. It will be easier for us at the Last Day.”

  Kristall heard little after that. The fat American kept babbling about peace; the senior imam had this response:

  “Peace? Peace comes only from submission to God; therefore, there can be no peace because the Jews, as a people, will not submit. And as for you, their supporters in the dar al-Harb, there can be no peace with us until you believe in God and in the Last Day. It is impossible.”

  “But you cannot expect us to submit to your religion,” the spongy little diplomat had said, almost apologetically. “You can’t force conversion on people. There must be another basis for peace, another foundation we can lay.”

  The clerics had smiled politely at him, at each other, and spread their hands in the universal gesture: there was nothing more to be said. For them the game was over before it started: checkmate. Chess, she remembered ruefully, was invented by them.

  This was the first time she had realized that—at least in the minds of these powerful men—the eternal war with Israel had nothing to do with land, with ethnic rights, or with fending off the cultural, economic, or political influence of the West. It had everything to do with the peculiar logic of religion. Surrounded by half a billion Muslims, Israel would face its Last Day sooner or later unless it kept up its wasteful and wearing vigilance.

  And that vigilance had to increase daily because the enemy grew daily more sophisticated and more daring. In her youth, the terror was confined mostly to the Middle East. For the last quarter century, beginning with the daring 2001 attacks on the United States, the terrorists had struck with a calculated randomness—blowing up a train in Spain, burning down a dance club in São Paulo, collapsing part of a stadium in Moscow. Inexplicably, though, many of the attacks had fallen on places far away from the great cities, out on the verges of civilization: a power plant blown up in Nova Scotia, an entire fishing fleet sunk off the Siberian coast, ranches burned in Tierra del Fuego. Attacks came in sudden bursts, and then there would be quiet for months—or years.

  Sometimes she thought the threat might be in remission. And then she would be awakened in the night by word of another atrocity. The effect was startling and the message unmistakable: every human soul in the dar al-Harb was at risk, and the entire world was becoming increasingly unnerved. Ironically, all the world’s eyes were on Israel rather than on the terrorists—those withering, accusatory eyes.

  She had hoped that the danger was subsiding, that once the clownish neighboring dictatorships had been eliminated, that once the occupied territories were shared, things would evolve peacefully—despite the imams. But terrorism is by nature unpredictable. Democracy bred new life into it, as oxygen fuels fire. And the terrorists were getting their hands on highly mobi
le, miniaturized rockets that once cost tens of thousands of dollars on the black market but were now as cheap as rifles and as easy to operate. Drones that slip across borders at high speed under radar. While states talked about peace and cooperation, terror brewed under the surface. Kristall knew as few did the power of those men in red-and-black-checked headdress and their smiling determination.

  And then, the attacks of Tisha b’Av. The Great Synagogue a blasted shell, answered within hours by a mini-rocket through the dome of Al-Aqsa. The Muslim masses shrieked and swarmed the streets from Morocco to Jakarta. The Israeli government had fallen to a choleric set of young patriots who lost no time mobilizing against their neighbors, the so called moderate Muslim states around them which had grown muscular with indulgent capital and coaching from the West. Their leaders, barely holding their people in check, simply awaited an excuse. We have armed our killers, she thought, and now we are baiting them.

  And last night? That cold corridor in Haifa?

  This blue-eyed assassin on the wall before her.…

  Suddenly her gut surged with pain. When would Davan come back?

  As if on cue, Ari opened the door and brought her a bag containing warm flatbread filled with meat from the little stand he had visited earlier. She grabbed it, bolted it down, and then went to work on the apples and honey. Davan stood over her in silence—she really looks ill now, he thought. Her face was paper white, sagging.

  “This is the position,” she murmured between bites of food. “The Institute have their hands full with Levinsky; they’re hoping we can take on this new piece of it. They’re thinking it’s a curious but unlikely course to pursue. In any case, it started with us.”

  “What started with us?” he asked patiently, fully accustomed to his chief’s method of communication, which usually consisted of quick sparks of information that appeared random but required only connecting a few circuits.

  “The Technion thing,” she said irritably. “Emanuel Shor. You’re to leave for Rome this afternoon; the staff are booking you now.”

  “Rome!”

  She sucked the honey from her hands and reached for her GeM on the table. “I’m downloading to you all the information we have, what we want you to look for, whom to contact. We’ve already been on to Interpol. Just adding here a few notes of my own. Toad and Miner will follow up here.”

  “Why on earth am I going to Rome?”

  “Read the files. Everything’s there. I haven’t time, and neither do you.”

  “What am I looking for?” He refused to be treated this way. “What’s the Technion thing? I want to know what’s inside that door at the end of the corridor.”

  “That’s not your affair.”

  “All right,” his face tightened. “Then what am I investigating?”

  “Him,” she said, gobbling a piece of apple and pointing at the frozen picture on the screen.

  “Who is he?”

  “The Reverend Monsignor Peter Chandos. Our eyelash.”

  The Nanoelectronics Institute, Technion, 1430h

  Efrem Sefardi was the most patient of policemen. He stood for a long time at the door after knocking. On the ground floor of the building he had visited the night before was a suite of offices, and this was where Nathan Levinsky had agreed to meet him. At last the door to the suite was opened by a tense young woman in a gray, expensive summer skirt and light black top, who looked at him the way virtually everyone did—without much interest.

  “You are from the Shin Bet,” she confirmed as he nodded and showed her his card. “Please come in,” she said in flat American English and took him into a small waiting room outside a glass-windowed conference area. “Father will be with you in a moment.”

  She left him there and shook her glowing black hair back at him as if in provocation. This was Levinsky’s daughter, a patent attorney from New York City. He wondered why she would be here in Haifa: a hurried flight home because of her uncle’s death? A patent issue that needed personal attention? Or just for the high holy days—not likely, he thought. Or something else? He would find out eventually.

  Finding answers was Sefardi’s sole passion in life. He had long since repressed other passions. He had no interest in rising in the force because he hated responsibility for the work of others. He had fought alcohol and food because both threatened him with disabling obesity, so he lived on little more than greens and meat sandwiches. And as for women—they had never taken the slightest interest in him. Physically, he was a nonentity: short; with colorless hairs around a balding head and a forgettable round face with the expression of a zoo reptile; and only the most utilitarian clothes. The chief had often said that Sefardi’s second-most valuable quality was his anonymity: that’s why he was known as the Toad, after the tiny ilanit native to Israel that blends into rock, tree or weed. He was ideal for his job. His tendency to be overlooked, coupled with his legendary patience, enabled him to see, hear, and take in information without being seen, heard, or taken in himself.

  But more valuable than that was Toad’s mind. His chief knew it. She kept him close to the agile, impulsive Davan precisely because of his restraint and patient intellect. While Davan could not stand still, Toad was immovable, watching, thinking, hands in pockets, clicking mentally through the possibilities. He had stood impassively before wrenching bombing scenes, in streets sprayed with blood, with human bodies battered among the rubble—to him, it was an array of data that would lead to those responsible. Once he had solved the puzzle, he was no longer very interested. He was not particularly concerned with justice; he believed it was unlikely to be found in any case.

  The door to the tiny waiting room breezed open a crack. He could hear faintly the black-haired woman’s voice behind a partition somewhere. “The Shin Bet agent is here. I left him in the waiting area. He looks like a hibernating newt.”

  Toad chuckled once. It was the involuntary vibration of a nerve that had been so irritated over the years that it was practically, if not completely, dead. Some nights that nerve awakened him, tense, throbbing to life, but in his loneliness he had learned to put it to sleep by focusing his mind on the facts of the case he was working on. Eventually, he would drop off again and wake up hours later, often with the recollected pleasure of an insight in the night that would close some troubling, wide-open mental circuit.

  Levinsky and his daughter came into the room and sat down. The scientist was a limping, boneless figure who seemed agitated by some unfelt breeze. His spice-colored hair stirred around his kippah, his eyes fluttered as if palsied, and his hands wobbled as he took Toad’s card. Despite the heat, the old man wore a brown wool cardigan under a heavy jacket, which had been ripped in mourning. He seemed exhausted.

  Toad’s unsurprising voice was calm. “Thank you for seeing me, Professor. I won’t keep you long—I know that this has been an ordeal for you, the death of your brother, the circumstances…” He trailed off; it was pointless. He knew that he sounded like a machine and that comforting crime victims was the least of his skills.

  “This is my daughter, Catriel Levine. She is visiting from New York,” the professor said. “She is an attorney.” The woman folded her long, glowing legs under her chair and nodded at him without interest.

  Toad did not mind if the “attorney” were present; she was a patent lawyer and would have little professional insight into murder. And if her presence comforted her father, it was fine with him. It saved him another trip anyway—patents would undoubtedly be worth looking into.

  “Not Levinsky?” Toad asked her.

  “I shortened it to Levine in the States—it’s a bit more manageable that way. I hope you won’t be long. My father has been with the authorities all night, all morning. We have had little chance to make arrangements.” She had switched effortlessly into Hebrew. “For the funeral.”

  Toad nodded. He had a great many questions, but they were not predictable.
Toad didn’t need to ask predictable questions. The data he already had were sufficient to cover the basics, and he didn’t like wasting time going over the obvious.

  He looked at Levinsky. “Your brother also changed his name.”

  “Yes, but for a totally different reason. He did not like his Russian name—when we came to Israel as young men, he wanted a Hebrew name.”

  “Shor—ox. An interesting choice.”

  It was a question, and Levinsky answered it. “From the first chapter of the Prophet Isaiah. ‘The ox knows his Master.’ My brother was very devout.”

  “Do you have any idea what your brother was doing here last night?” He had to ask, although he already had the basis of a theory.

  “None whatsoever,” he responded with some hesitation. The woman next to him cleared her throat almost inaudibly.

  Shor had probably let in someone who had then turned on him and killed him because he had no further use for him and didn’t want to leave a witness behind. Whatever that door concealed inside those freezing rooms had been the motivation. Toad didn’t need to know what it was. He knew only that it was something worth killing for.

  “Did your brother have any visitors recently?”

  “He always had visitors. He could have been overwhelmed with visitors, but wisely put most of them off. People came from around the world to meet with him, to learn from his work. He often put people up in his flat—particularly at this time of year.”

  “For the high holidays?”

  Catriel Levine stirred in her chair but looked impassively out the window into the empty conference room.

  Levinsky nodded. “Yes, I told you he was devout, and he sometimes had guests with him from New Year into Sukkot. But they were usually the same people year after year. A rabbi or a scholar he had met; a friend from his temple activities. But not this year. No one was staying with him, as far as I know.”