by Alex Archer
Annja leaned forward. Her pulse spiked again. “So it’s true? The real jar has been found?”
“What are we doing here, sweetie? You tell me. I’m not going to tell you to trust me. You do know never, ever to trust anybody who tells you to, right?”
Annja smirked.
“Good—thought so. But look at the circumstances. Here you are. Here I am. How did we happen to come together, anyway?” Tsipporah asked.
Annja looked at her for a moment. “All right,” she asked, “how?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I just know why. We were supposed to.” She stubbed out her cigarette in a little flat tin that looked to Annja like a tuna can she’d picked up from the floor beneath the table. She immediately lit another.
Annja frowned slightly but resolved not to be a smoking prude. Lots of people smoked here anyway. Almost everybody, in fact.
“I might have hired those big, strapping men to chase you here,” Tsipporah said through the smoke, “even if they are a bit sweaty for my tastes. But then how would I know those things I do about you? I didn’t know your name before you came here. Didn’t really know what you looked like, beyond some fairly broad outlines. But I knew you were good. And that you seek the jar.”
Tsipporah smiled. “Put another way, it’s destiny, sweetie. Get used to it. You’ll find yourself being in the right place at the right time a lot. Or the wrong place at the worst possible time. All a matter of perspective.”
“So what do you get out of this, anyway, Tsipporah?” Annja asked.
The older woman tipped her head back, let smoke trail toward the ceiling, laughed. “If more people remembered to ask that question the world would be a happier place. Let’s just say that I regard myself, in my own small and studious way, as a servant of good.”
“Does that mean God?” Annja asked
Tsipporah smiled a crooked smile. “The Creator is served in many ways, some of which would curl your hair. We all serve the Creator, dear. The worst no less than the best. Let’s just say that you and I both choose to serve the good and leave off splitting those particular hairs. Fair?”
After a moment Annja nodded. “Fair.” She didn’t sound any more convinced than she felt.
“Let’s also just say I enjoy a vicarious thrill as much as the next person,” Tsipporah said. “You’re embroiled in a mission that has three parts. It’s of the mind, of the spirit and of the body. Let’s just say I’m not up to the run-and-jump part these days. In fact, being a kabbalist is about as bookish a pastime as there is. Sedentary, you know. So I get a kick out of being involved, at whatever remove, in your adventures.”
Annja smiled. It seemed to her a little silly that anyone else might envy her the indecision and inconvenience and the not infrequent terror that went with her new life.
“Speaking of kabbalists—I know that’s kind of a clumsy segue—but that reminds me about Mark Stern. What’s he doing up there, anyway, with his megaphone by the wall?”
“He’s associated with the settlers’ movement. The government wants to close down some of the settlements in occupied territory. Some of the residents object pretty vehemently.” Tsipporah sighed. “There’s a good reason I decided to immerse myself in the study of the Tree of Life, and put such worldly political concerns behind me.”
With a sudden flash of insight, Annja said, “You were a political activist?”
“What else?’ The older woman drew on her cigarette. “I’m still a devoted Marxist, of course.”
“I didn’t know they believed in kabbalah.”
“Groucho’s my favorite,” Tsipporah went on laughing. “You probably figured that out already. Never really cared for Harpo, though.”
10
“Mark Peter Stern positions himself as a voice of peace and reason between the government and the settlers,” Tsipporah said. “Me, I’m not so sure.”
“How good a kabbalist is he?” Annja asked.
Tsipporah compressed her lips to a line and sat back in her chair with her chin sunk toward her sternum. “Kabbalah is infinite,” she said at last, “and to know who’s really wise in its ways would therefore take infinite understanding, it seems to me. Not something I pretend to, egotistical as I am in my dotage. And then again, there are plenty of pious Jews rather more than Gentiles, I expect, who’d tell you there is no such thing as a good kabbalist.”
She looked up sharply. “So I reckon what you really want me to tell you is how good a man Mark Stern is. Right?”
“All right. You caught me. But don’t expect me to buy any of that ‘dotage’ nonsense from you,” Annja said.
“Allow me my little conceits. One of the worst consequences of a culture that overvalues youth is that eventually it comes to overvalue age. Big mistake—experience is a wonderful teacher, but she has some real schmucks for pupils. Also making a big deal of my age gives me license to spew random drive-by aphorisms like that. Anyway, before I disappoint you with my pop-psych assessment of the man, why do you ask?”
“Aside from the fact he happened to be in the same place at the same time as we were, functionally?”
“Right. There’s no such thing as coincidence. But that doesn’t imply everything is about us,” Tsipporah said.
“I found a number for the Malkuth Foundation’s New York offices on the caller ID of a murdered woman’s phone,” Annja said, “in a shop that may have had possession of the jar.”
Tsipporah sat upright. “Tell me.”
Annja did. She felt no more than the slightest tug of reluctance. She sensed no taint of evil in this woman or in this place. And even if she was wrong, it seemed unlikely she was telling her mysterious hostess anything she couldn’t find out by some means of her own. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing again, she thought wryly.
“Hoo.” Tsipporah let her breath slip out between pursed lips when Annja concluded. “That is quite the story. I’m caught up in more of an adventure than I even realized.”
“I’ve been wondering, though,” Annja said. “The jar on Highsmith’s mantel. Was that the real jar?”
“What does your heart tell you?” Tsipporah asked.
Annja shook her head. “It told me it wasn’t.”
“In cases like this that’s probably as good a test as any. A person in your position could feel the presence of power like that. Trust yourself.”
“Not always as easy as it sounds,” Annja said.
“Whoever promised you easy?”
“Something about the jar that was there puzzles me,” Annja said. “Of course, I’m not sure it has any significance.”
“Tell me,” Tsipporah said. “Gratify my curiosity, if nothing else.”
“It was covered with symbols. Small, crabbed, hard to read—at first I thought they were just scratch marks.”
“What kind of symbols?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve never really seen anything like them before. Convoluted. The closest thing I can compare them to is symbols on an electronic-circuit diagram.”
“Sigils,” Tsipporah said.
“What are those?”
“Personal symbols for each demon that had been confined within the jar. Like seals—a king’s signet ring, that sort of thing.” She looked thoughtful in the wavering orange light. “That’s highly significant. It may not have been the real jar—I’m sure it wasn’t—but it sounds like an awfully good copy.”
“Why would anybody make a copy of Solomon’s Jar? For that matter, why would anybody want an empty jar badly enough to kill over it?” Annja asked, still unsure of what to believe.
“Because it has power. By use of the proper magics the demons might be forced to enter it again. Or it might be used to compel demons to obedience.” She dipped her head briefly to the side. “It might even be destroyed—this being the preferred outcome of the demons themselves, I expect.”
“Tsipporah,” Annja said, “what are demons, anyway?”
“Bad. Powerful forces. Pretty much as advertised.”
“Look, if there are demons, why don’t we see them more?”
“I could give you the canned, expected answers about all the nasty things people do to each other,” Tsipporah said, “except most of those are just that: we do them to each other. No demons need apply. A demon can get you to do nasty things. Things you’d never do on your own—that’s what possession’s all about. They can even boot you out of your own body for good and take over. That’s what the Catholic Church calls obsession. But the bad urges that give rise to the bad things we do, demons don’t cause them. They make use of them. They don’t start the fire. But they do spray gas on it.”
She took a hit from her cigarette. “And that’s the reason you don’t see them walking down the street. Under normal circumstances, at least. For various reasons—partly constraints imposed by the nature of reality, partly preference—they do the vast amount of their work indirectly. Influencing our thoughts and emotions. Their actions are almost exclusively in the realm of the psychological. Although to dismiss them as purely psychological phenomena is a very bad mistake indeed.”
For a moment they sat in silence. The lamp flame flickered low. Annja realized she’d lost count of how many cigarettes Tsipporah had gone through. She was too caught up in what the older woman was telling her to be much bothered by the smoke, though it did make her throat scratchy.
“So what about Stern?” she asked at length. “Is he a charlatan?”
“That depends. By charlatan, do you mean someone who pretends to mystical powers he doesn’t have? Or one who has no mystical powers, but pretends to?”
“I don’t see the distinction, I’m afraid,” Annja said.
“Then look again, sweetie. Stern has powers, make no mistake. Just not necessarily the ones he tells his followers he has. He may not even believe he really has any power, in which case he’s the most deluded of all. What’s most painfully apparent is that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing.”
She ran a hand through her silver-streaked hair, then laughed. “But then, why should he be any different from anybody else, hey? And like all of us, he doesn’t let the fact he doesn’t know what he’s doing slow him down.”
Annja chewed her lower lip, trying to not let Tsipporah see the schoolgirlish gesture. She was thinking glumly about how much that aphorism applied to her.
I’m the champion of good, she thought, and I don’t really know what that means. Nor what good actually is, for that matter. Am I the schmuck here?
“You seem troubled,” Tsipporah said gently.
The words broke the surface tension of Annja’s reverie. She realized her own head had drooped toward her chest. She lifted it and looked at Tsipporah. The vague glow of the lamp no doubt softened and flattered the older woman’s features, but she looked agelessly beautiful and wise. Like some sort of archetype, Annja thought.
“Well—I don’t know if I should talk to you about this,” Annja said. “But I need to talk to somebody. And you seem, well, wise.”
Tsipporah held up a weary hand, cigarette clipped between two fingers, and drew a zigzag in the air, like Zorro. “I’m just somebody who dragged you in off the street, sweetie. Don’t impute more to me than I even pretend to claim for myself.” She took a drag. “Bring wisdom into it, how wise are you to trust somebody you met like this? Huh?”
“Humor me, then. You’re the closest thing to a sage I’ve come across in a while.” Annja wasn’t sure if Roux counted, or to what extent. She wasn’t sure how wise it was to trust him, for that matter. The more so since he kept hinting she shouldn’t, necessarily.
“I wonder if I am worthy. I have shed blood,” Annja said.
“In defense of innocence?”
“Yes. And of myself as well.”
The older woman laughed. “‘If someone comes to kill you, kill him first,’ as the great commentator Rashi interprets the Torah. That’s the common right of all humans. Do you think you have fewer rights than the meanest goatherd when fighting for good?”
Annja looked at her through wide eyes. “Do you—” There’s no tactful way to say this, she realized with a sinking heart “Do you believe in my mission, too?”
“You think I’d be here talking to you if I didn’t?” Tsipporah rolled her eyes.
“But I thought—”
I’m not sure what I thought, Annja realized. In spite—or perhaps because—of the ferocious ministrations of the nuns at the orphanage in New Orleans, she did not think of herself as conventionally Christian at all, much less Catholic. To her amazement Roux had assured her, when she’d finally confessed the fact to him, that it didn’t matter. She still wasn’t sure she believed him….
“You thought Christians had a monopoly on the good, maybe?”
“No—God, no. I mean—that didn’t come out right— I mean I’d never…”
Tsipporah reached out and took her hand with one hand and patted it with the other. “Ease up, dearie. I’m only messing with you. Of course you don’t. Guess what? Neither do we, chosen people or not.
“Which do you think is more likely? That a given religion is bigger than the Creator, or that the Creator is bigger than any and all religions? Which vessel is the larger, do you reckon, my dear?”
“The Creator, I guess. I don’t pretend to know for sure, though.”
Tsipporah laughed again. “Right answer, dearie! If you could truly know the Creator, you’d be the Creator, yes? Who less could understand such a One? Not to mention such a Nothing.”
She shook her head. “But enough of my goofy wordplay. We humans cannot really understand the Creator. But it falls to some of us to try, anyway. Some of us call ourselves kabbalists. I don’t know which of us has the worse job, my child. Yours is the more athletic, in any event.
“But I do think you’re right on track with that concern. You’re called on to defend others, as well as yourself, of course. And that’s righteous—being given a sword only you can wield is what I’d call pretty clear evidence of some kind of mandate.”
Annja felt her eyes widen. “You know?”
Tsipporah patted her cheek. “Of course, dearie. Goes with the territory. And now the word of warning. You need to watch for any tendencies to, ah, freelance.”
“Meaning?”
“If you go looking for dragons to slay, it’s surprising what’ll soon look like a dragon to you. Be always alert to the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness.”
Annja smiled a bit tentatively. “I’ve been told that while saving the world is my job description, I need to prioritize.”
“That’s true. But it’s only part of the truth,” Tsipporah stated.
She leaned forward and caught Annja’s hands in both of hers. “Listen to me on this. Hear me. Demons do their deadliest work through our virtues.”
“How do you mean?”
“Even as the strong are more dangerous than the weak,” Tsipporah said, “the best are more potentially destructive than the worst. Only those who consider themselves the most selfless are capable of conceiving a notion like cleansing the world by exterminating all the people of a certain race, just to pluck an example out of the air.”
“Isn’t selfishness wrong?”
“You already know better than that, girl,” Tsipporah said, letting go and leaning back. “All things that live are selfish. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying right there—and don’t you think it’s worse if they don’t know they’re lying? The merely self-interested are far less destructive than the convinced selfless.
“And that’s why Mark Peter Stern might be a very dangerous man, my dear. Not because he’s a bad man. But because he’s so good—and so invincibly convinced of it. Such a man is capable of anything. For the good, of course.”
Annja felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. “What you’re really warning me against,” she said quietly, “is myself.”
“Both, honey. That said, have faith in yourself.” Tsipporah patted her cheek. “You just always have to guard
against the temptation to cross the line from defender of the innocent to attacker of the wicked.”
Annja sighed. Her burden seemed heavier than the weight of all the masonry above—than the weight of all the noble sanctuary, up there on that mount, that was so drenched in holiness that half the world’s people seemed ready to kill each other over it.
“What do I do now?” she asked.
“Sweetie, you know how this mystic-guide shtick works. I can help you find out where you are, and clarify where you’ve been. I can drop a hint or two about the paths that lie open to you. But you have to choose. Only you.”
Annja grimaced. “You can’t even give me a hint?”
Tsipporah laughed. “I wish I had a mirror! Didn’t your parents teach you not to make faces like that?”
“My parents died when I was small,” Annja said in a level voice.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay. Not about my parents, of course. That’ll never be okay. I thought I’d get used to it for a long time. But it’s never happened. The best I can do is put it away and not think about it.
“But what you said—no harm done, Tsipporah. And as for making faces, the nuns at the orphanage where I was raised used to crack me on the knuckles with a ruler when I made them.”
Tsipporah roared with laughter, surprisingly robust, ringing in the womb-like confines of the room. “So naturally you kept doing it! Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! Now that I know you, I feel a lot more optimistic about the cause of good than I have in years.”