On the Third Day

by Piers Paul Read

  He looked confused. ‘Yes, it was me, or Ya’acov. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Jake?’

  ‘Or me. Or Mordecai.’

  She leaned forward and looked straight into her father’s eyes. ‘Dad, why did Jake get leave from the IDF?’

  ‘It wasn’t so much that he was given leave from the IDF, as that the IDF, for reasons of security, wished to go beneath the Temple Mount, and, quite rightly, Ya’acov persuaded his superiors that it should not be done without an archaeologist in charge.’

  ‘Do you know why they wanted to dig beneath the Temple Mount?’

  ‘Yes. It was to lay listening devices to eavesdrop on the organizers of the intifada.’

  ‘Did Jake ever tell you who ordered the project?’

  ‘He never told me precisely …’

  ‘Was it Yehuda Louvish?’

  ‘Louvish, certainly, is the officer in command of the department.’

  ‘Do you know Louvish?’

  ‘I have met him. He lives in Rehavya.’

  ‘Did it occur to you, Dad, that Jake and Louvish might have faked your find?’

  Never before had Anna seen her father look both so frightened and so ashamed. ‘You must understand, Anna,’ he said in a voice little louder than a whisper, ‘that there are sometimes lines of thought which we cannot follow.’

  ‘Because of where they might lead?’

  ‘Yes. Because they might lead where you cannot go.’

  ‘So it did occur to you.’

  ‘Listen, Anna. You do not understand – you have never understood – what Israel means to me. It is everything, my dear, everything – not just a nation like any other nation, but the land of God’s consecrated people. We have suffered for so long – for so very long – despised, humiliated, exterminated like vermin – until now, in this generation, we have won back what God gave us so long ago.’

  ‘Dad, that’s …’

  ‘Let me finish. Anna, I know that you cannot see this, and for that I blame myself; and I am not asking you to see it now, but only to understand how I feel when, for the sake of Israel, I am asked simply to suspend for a moment my disbelief, to restrain certain thoughts, to let certain suspicions escape without pursuing them, to leave a few questions unanswered.’

  ‘To perpetrate a fraud.’

  His eyes widened with anger. ‘A fraud? Is it a fraud? Or is the Christian religion a fraud? We know that the body of Jesus of Nazareth must have been buried somewhere, and I have found what I have found. It may or may not be the body of the Nazarene. That is not for me to say, and I have never said anything, one way or the other. I present my evidence to the Christians. It is for them to decide.’

  ‘Christians like Father Lambert?’

  He lowered his eyes. ‘Yes. Like Father Lambert.’

  ‘But you will be exposed, Dad, and ridiculed. We already know about Louvish …’

  ‘Who knows about Louvish?’ asked a voice behind her.

  She turned and saw Jake standing by the open door.

  ‘I do.’

  He closed the door and came into the room. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Enough.’

  Jake smiled. ‘Would you like to meet him?’

  ‘Ya’acov …’ Michal Dagan began.

  He ignored his father but said to Anna: ‘I am sure he would be happy to answer your questions.’

  ‘I know enough,’ said Anna.

  ‘He could tell you more.’

  She hesitated, curiosity struggling with her mistrust of her brother. ‘When could I meet him?’

  ‘Right now.’

  She looked uncertainly towards her father, but his eyes, still afraid, were on his son. ‘Ya’acov …’ he began again.

  ‘We’ll see you later, Dad,’ said Jake and, with an ironic bow towards his sister, he escorted her out of the room.

  He drove her in his Subaru from the Staedtler Institute up through Me’a She’arim, across the old Green Line, and out of Jerusalem on the Ramallah Road. For a while neither of them spoke. Then Jake said, in just the same sneering tone with which he had put down his sister as a child: ‘You should have kept out of all this, you know. You’re way out of your depth.’

  ‘You got me involved.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In London. You asked me to ask Andrew to lay on a Catholic archaeologist to authenticate the find.’

  ‘That didn’t mean you had to fuck him.’

  She turned to him, her face flushed with anger. ‘Do you have bugs in every bedroom in Israel?’

  ‘Knowledge is power.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jake, what’s happened to you? You were never nice, but now you’re despicable.’

  ‘Look who’s talking.’

  ‘I happen to love Andrew,’ she said with as much dignity as she could muster.

  ‘Last week you loved his brother.’

  ‘Things sometimes happen that way.’

  ‘What’s so special about Catholics? Do they fuck better than Jews?’

  ‘Henry isn’t a Catholic. He’s an atheist.’

  ‘But Andrew’s not just a Catholic, he’s a Catholic priest.’

  She blushed. ‘He’s not a priest. He’s a monk. And he hasn’t taken his final vows, and he still thinks Dad’s dug up Jesus.’

  ‘You haven’t told him about Louvish?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lucky for him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there are things it’s better not to know.’

  He slowed down as the road ran parallel to the wire fence of a military compound, the top festooned with coils of barbed wire.

  ‘Do you really think you can get away with this thing?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s crazy.’

  He stopped the car at the steel gates to the compound. ‘You don’t live here,’ he said, showing his ID to a guard with a machine-gun. ‘You don’t know what we’re up against.’

  ‘Nothing’s worth destroying Dad’s reputation.’

  ‘It won’t destroy his reputation, it’ll make it.’

  The gates were opened. ‘Not when the world knows it’s a fraud.’

  ‘The world won’t know.’

  ‘It will if I tell it.’

  ‘And how will you tell the world?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll tell a journalist, I guess.’

  The gates closed behind them. Jake smiled.

  Twenty-one

  The building they entered, though superficially like a courthouse or a school, had the narrow windows of a fortress and the thick steel doors of a prison. They went up one flight of stairs, along a corridor, and came to a door which Jake opened with the familiarity of someone who knew his way around. They entered a small ante-room where a girl in uniform sat typing at a desk.

  ‘Is the Colonel busy?’ Jake asked her in Hebrew.

  She shook her head. ‘No. Go in.’

  They went through into a much larger room, with a table and some chairs at one end and a large desk at the other. Blinds covered the windows, dissipating the light from the sun. There was no air-conditioning. One of the blinds flapped in front of an open window. On the desk there was a fan, and behind it, on the wall, a large map of Greater Israel.

  As they came in, a man in uniform rose from his seat at the desk. He was aged around fifty, but looked vigorous and fit. His greying hair was shaved close at the back of his neck. His face and his hands were brown but, at the open neck of his khaki shirt, there were the blurred margins of a whiter skin.

  As he crossed the room to meet them, he looked at Jake with a mildly puzzled expression.

  ‘Colonel,’ said Jake. ‘This is my sister Anna.’

  Louvish smiled and greeted her in Hebrew.

  ‘My Hebrew isn’t too good,’ said Anna.

  He nodded and pointed towards the sofa and chairs. ‘Then let us speak English.’ Jake and Anna sat down while Louvish looked into the ante-room and asked his secretary to bring some cof
fee. Then he too sat down, and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, ready to hear what they had come to say.

  ‘I brought her to meet you,’ said Jake slowly, ‘because she had lunch with Abramovicz, that journalist on the Post, and then went to my father to ask about you.’

  He nodded, his expression unchanged. ‘What did Ambramovicz tell you?’ he asked Anna.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Anna. ‘It wasn’t him who gave me your name.’

  ‘She had a call from London this morning,’ said Jake, ‘from the brother of the monk. He has been making enquiries about the Vilnius Codex.’

  Louvish nodded. ‘Has he made the connection?’

  ‘Not yet, but he suspects it.’

  ‘Has he spoken to the monk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So he is still convinced?’

  Jake looked at his sister. ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘And the Cardinal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So the leak is not yet large – simply the brother, Abramovicz and this young lady.’ He turned to Anna with cold eyes but a benevolent smile.

  ‘Joel knows nothing,’ said Anna, ‘and Henry – well, I don’t know what he knows or how he knows it, but if the cat’s out of the bag in London, you can’t put it back in here in Jerusalem.’

  Louvish seemed to ponder this for a moment. He then turned to Jake. ‘Have you any idea how the brother in London came up with my name?’

  ‘He has a friend with contacts through the British Secret Service with Lithuanian émigrés in London.’

  ‘Will he have told them what he is after?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘So we have only to deal with him, with Abramovicz and with you’ – he turned to Anna – ‘to have a good chance of putting the cat back in the bag.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jake, ‘but we must think of my father.’

  ‘Of course.’ He continued to look at Anna like a headmaster pondering the problem of a troublesome child.

  ‘The best solution,’ said Jake, ‘would be for Anna to persuade the monk’s brother that you don’t exist, or at any rate have nothing to do with the find.’

  ‘Why should I?’ asked Anna.

  ‘To save your ass,’ said Jake.

  ‘To save Israel,’ said Louvish.

  ‘How does it save Israel to involve my father in some half-baked hoax which sooner or later is bound to be exposed?’

  Louvish frowned, but his tone remained calm. ‘I think you are wrong to say it would be exposed, because people believe what they want to believe and at this moment there are very many people who would like someone to dig up the body of Christ – and these people are not atheists or Muslims or Jews, who know quite well that he did not rise from the dead, but liberal Christian theologians who want to adapt their faith to the modern world.’

  ‘So you’re in the business of helping out Christian theologians?’

  Louvish did not smile. ‘No, I am in the business of helping my people, the Jews.’

  ‘How does it help the Jews to dig up the body of Jesus?’

  ‘I will tell you because I believe that, when you understand what we are trying to achieve, you will help us to achieve it.’

  ‘Don’t count on it.’

  ‘No, I won’t count on it. But I would ask you for a moment to be patient and listen. You see, I know, from what Jake has told me, that you have never felt you belonged here, but you have the intelligence to understand that there are others, like your father, your mother and your brother, who love Israel and would willingly die to protect her.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘The problem is that dying is often not enough. If there is a lesson to be learned from our revolt against the Romans and the consequent obliteration of the ancient state of Israel – ending, as you know, when Masada was taken – if there is a lesson to be learned from all they suffered, it is that courage and determination are not enough. There are times when brute force wins.

  ‘Now, however you may feel about Zionism, we do have a state of Israel which has survived for forty years – and survived despite the enmity of all the countries which surround us. We have fought three wars against them, and we were obliged to act in Lebanon, where – you may or may not know – I was captured and taken to Damascus. For some months, I was held in solitary confinement. I had time to think – to consider the position of Israel, and compare the dangers which face us now with the dangers which faced us in ancient times. In both periods, we have shown courage and determination in pursuing our independence, but none of the countries now wishing to destroy Israel has anything like the power of Rome. The only nation in the modern era which can be compared to Rome is the United States, the champion, not the enemy, of Israel. If we have survived, it is because might as much as right has been on our side.’

  ‘I don’t suppose even Arafat would disagree with that,’ said Anna.

  ‘Of course,’ said Louvish. ‘All this may seem fairly obvious, but, when you are in solitary confinement, some of your thoughts are inevitably obvious. However, they proceeded to less obvious territory – namely the future. When I looked into the future, I became afraid. The support of this great power, on the other side of the world, for a small band of Jews clinging to the edge of Asia, arose from a set of quite fortuitous circumstances. The pogroms in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century drove hundreds of thousands of our people to emigrate to America. The descendants of these refugees, in the most populous states of the Union, ensure political support for Israel.

  ‘What alarmed me, as I sat in my cell, was the realization that these fortuitous circumstances would change. There were, in the United States, only six million Jews. They could not hold the balance of power indefinitely, in California or New York. The growth of other states in America – Texas, for example, or Florida, with their large populations of Catholic Hispanics, or the Southern states, with their Baptists – could alter the balance of power. Even if it did not, the chances of the United States continuing to dominate the world as it has done since the end of the Second World War, seem small. Already, the economies of the East are growing more vigorously than the economies of the West. With economic strength comes political power. And why should the Koreans or the Japanese care about the fate of the Jews? Why should they jeopardize supplies of oil from the Arab countries to satisfy the aspirations of a small sect in the West?

  ‘Of course, if things in Palestine were to stabilize, if our Muslim neighbours were to accept the state of Israel, the danger would recede with the passage of time. But, as I looked into the future, alone in my cell, I could only see further struggle and further bloodshed. Sooner or later, I knew, there would be an intifada of the kind we see today, particularly if we were to exercise our rights over the land we had reclaimed.

  ‘Israel, after all, was only half-completed. Sure, we had won back the territory we believed was ours, but were we masters in our own land? We had Jerusalem, and we had surrounded the city with Jewish settlements. In the city itself, however, there remain the towers and domes and minarets of other religions; and, most blasphemous of all, there, where our Temple should be, on the site of the Holy of Holies, is the golden dome of a mosque. Clearly, Israel can never be Israel – can never believe in her inalienable right to return – until we remove the mosque and rebuild our Temple on its rightful site on the Temple Mount.’

  ‘But that …’ Anna began.

  ‘Of course,’ Louvish interrupted. ‘It will double the number of our enemies. It will enrage the world. Yet how can we ever say that we have really returned – how can we prove that we have a God-given right to this land – if we dare not demolish a mosque and rebuild the very symbol of God’s Covenant with our people?’

  Anna glanced sideways at Jake, to see if he too realized that this man was mad; but the eyes of her brother were fixed on the lips of his superior officer with an expression of exhilaration and awe. She turned back to Louvish. ‘Are you really serious?’ she asked. ‘You really want to
pull down the Dome of the Rock and rebuild the Temple?’

  ‘Don’t you see,’ said Louvish, ‘that it has to be done – not as an exercise in archaeological reconstruction but as the tangible proof that our nation is reborn?’

  ‘But that’s crazy,’ said Anna. ‘You can’t just pretend that nineteen hundred years haven’t happened.’

  ‘But you can,’ said Louvish. ‘Look at our language. Who spoke Hebrew a hundred years ago? A few old rabbis – and, even for them, it was not their mother tongue. Now we all speak it.’

  ‘I know …’

  ‘It was the vision of a few men that achieved it, and it is their work that is only half-completed. Israel still has some way to go before she is truly in possession of the promised land, and, as we proceed, we are certain to make still more enemies. That is why it is so important to consider how to make useful friends – or, at least, to keep the friends we have, particularly the United States, in a period when the influence of the Jews in America is likely to diminish.’

  ‘And is digging up Jesus going to make you friends?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Yes.’ He hissed out the word. ‘Because, in America, besides the six million Jews, there are two hundred million Christians, and in South America there are millions more. In India, the Philippines, South Korea, China and Japan, the Christians are an influential minority. The whole of Western Europe is Christian, and so, beneath the surface, are the countries of Eastern Europe – even the Soviet Union itself. The one thing they all have in common is their belief that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead – a belief which is incompatible with any fundamental sympathy with Israel, because, at the root of Christian teaching, is the certainty that God’s Covenant with us, his chosen people, ended with the death of Christ. He was the son of God. He abrogated the old Covenant and brought in a new one, replacing us Jews as his chosen people with all those who accepted that he was the promised Messiah.

  ‘What struck me in Damascus, as I sat in my cell, was that, if these hundreds of millions of Christians could somehow be convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was not the son of God, but just one among other Jewish prophets, like his cousin John the Baptist, then they would have to accept that he was in no position either to make a new Covenant or to abrogate the old one. I understood, too, that the one article of Christian belief which confirms him as a superhuman being is his resurrection from the dead. If it could be shown that he had not risen, then it would have to be accepted that the old Covenant still stands.’