On the Third Day

by Piers Paul Read

  Yet Yahweh, to Dagan, was not someone who spoke in the ear or even the mind of a man. To him God’s intentions were made manifest in the history of his chosen people. It was by studying the past that one could discern his will for the future; and, since the greatest evil of the age was undoubtedly Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews, so the greatest good must be the antithesis of that – the reestablishment of a Jewish nation. It was inconceivable that Yahweh could want anything different.

  Why, then, did he feel so unhappy when he thought, not just about the fate awaiting Anna, but about the murder of Father Lambert? Why had Louvish admitted that Ya’acov had killed him? Was it to test the inexorable logic of his reasoning? Did he boast of his ruthlessness to prove his patriotism? Or to draw others into complicity with what he had done?

  Again, as with Anna, Father Lambert had aroused ambivalent feelings in Michal Dagan. Certainly, he had been his friend, but also his rival. Was it not true that Dagan had asked him to come to Israel to authenticate his find, not just because he was the one archaeologist who could persuade the Christian Churches that the skeleton was that of Jesus Christ, but because Dagan had exulted in showing the Catholic monk that his beliefs about Christ’s Resurrection were now proved to be absurd?

  Had Dagan had no doubts about his own hypothesis? He could not now remember. If there had been any scepticism at the back of his mind, it had been quickly silenced by his Zionist zeal and professional ambition. What were Yadin’s discoveries at Masada or Kenyon’s at Jericho compared with Dagan’s uncovering of the body of Christ? And what were the accomplishments of those Christian archaeologists like Father de Vaux, Father Vincent and Father Lambert compared with those of the Israeli, Michal Dagan?

  Of course, when he had seen the effect of the find on Father Lambert, Dagan realized that any professional rivalry he might have felt was insignificant beside the theological significance of what had apparently been uncovered. He had noticed, too, that, despite the destructive effect of the discovery upon his own beliefs, Father Lambert had been sincerely pleased that such a triumph should crown his friend’s career. Indeed, it was perhaps this humility – this fear that his own professional pride might impede his acceptance of what Dagan had found – which had prompted Father Lambert to authenticate the find so promptly and return to London in despair.

  That would explain why, only a day later, he had telephoned Dagan to say, not just that he had changed his mind, but that he now felt that the skeleton could not be that of Jesus of Nazareth. The call, made only an hour before Father Lambert died, had been relayed by Dagan to Ya’acov in London, and then, presumably, by Ya’acov to Louvish in Israel – or, more likely, had been recorded through a tap placed on his own telephone at the Staedtler Institute, and replayed at once to Louvish. It would then have been a simple matter for Louvish to call Ya’acov in London and order the priest’s execution.

  Dagan, who until that moment only knew that he was walking away from Louvish and away from home, suddenly came in sight of the floodlit walls of the Old City. He was on Mishkenot Sha’anannim, near to the Montefiore Windmill. He sat down on a low stone wall facing the city, and forgot for a moment that he was cold, forgot, even, that he was tormented by so many contradictory emotions, and simply looked with rapture at his beloved Jerusalem. How could anyone who was not Jewish understand what the city meant to him? It was not merely the site of his people’s historical glory, nor the tangible proof, after two millennia, that they had regained what was rightfully theirs. It was rather, like the empty tomb of Christian myth, the proof that, after their crucifixion – the holocaust – the Jews had risen from the dead.

  He thought now, as he always did when he looked at the Old City, of his mother and father, and he prayed that somehow from the mysterious depths of She’ol they might see through his eyes that their suffering had not been for nothing. This time, however, the conjuring up of the image of his dead parents did not bring comfort and reassurance, but rather induced a spasm of that bad conscience which had disturbed him since parting from Louvish. However hard he might try to invest them with his own aspirations and ideas, he could not so mould his memories that the honest and amiable lawyer from Hamburg would condone what he had done. And his memory of his mother merged with the image of Rachel, and both women rebuked him with the same silent look of reproach.

  ‘But I do it for you,’ he said aloud, as if his father were standing there, confused and perplexed. ‘Do what?’ the old lawyer seemed to reply. ‘Lie? Deceive? Murder? Your friend? Your daughter? For stones and rocks and sand? No, not for me, for that is what was done to us from generation to generation – by Titus and Torquemada, by Ignatiev and Hitler. And however many of us died, they never triumphed. We triumphed because we did not put our trust in stones and rocks and sand – in castles or palaces, synagogues or even a Temple – but because we put our trust in faith and rectitude, in patience, in humility and resignation to the will of Yahweh. Remember, Michal, the man I was as you sat on my knee and I puffed at my pipe – a victim, certainly, already a victim who was to be kicked out of the park by the Brownshirts; but warm, humorous, affectionate, kind, just, decent and honest. Those qualities are better monuments than all the stones and rocks and sand you will ever cheat and kill to conquer. And what are you, Michal, my son, but cold, loveless and afraid? And what is Ya’acov, raised in your image and likeness, but ruthless, fanatical and cruel? What monument are you to my suffering, whether or not you hold Jerusalem or live in Israel; whether or not you demolish the Dome of the Rock to build a new air-conditioned Temple of marble-faced pre-stressed concrete? No, Michal, my son, I suffered and your mother suffered, and that suffering brought us close to Yahweh. If you must build a monument, build one to us in yourself so that when we meet in She’ol we may know you and love you as our son.’

  With no onlookers to inhibit him, Michal Dagan wept – sobbing not just at the rebuke implicit in the memory of his dead parents, but also and more normally because he was tired, distraught and confused. Until that day, he had been propelled through life by the clear and urgent mission to exact revenge and retribution for everything that his parents had suffered as Jews. Now, in one day, he had been forced to count the cost. In doing so, he had come to wonder not just whether the game was worth the candle, but whether it was worth playing at all.

  In seeking to punish the elusive malefactor who had persecuted his people throughout history, Dagan now recognized that he had become malign himself — conniving through the most devious logic at the sacrifice of his daughter and the murder of his friend. The shock of understanding that, unwittingly, he had become party to something so patently wrong returned strength to his conscience, which, like Samson in the court of the Philistines, pulled away the two pillars upon which the edifice of his convictions had rested.

  The tears which now trickled down his wrinkled, weather-beaten cheeks came not just from fatigue and remorse, but also, to his own astonishment, from an extraordinary sense of relief and joy, as if a spring which had been blocked for many years had suddenly been opened. What he saw for the first time was that the finest accomplishments of men and women lay not in nations and empires, wealth and culture, in palaces, temples, churches or mosques, but in those invisible and intangible thoughts and emotions which are imbued with gentleness, unselfishness and love.

  He now understood that, for fifty years, he had suffered from a misconception. His father was not a Joshua who had failed but a Job who had succeeded – a man who was defeated and humiliated in the terms of this world, but heroic and victorious by the values of the next. Though persecuted by vile men, he had not been infected by their hatred. The pity he had felt was also for them. For that reason, even in Auschwitz, he had triumphed.

  Very slowly it began to grow light. The street lamps lost their pointed brilliance and became superfluous. The moonlight evaporated, like a morning mist, as the first rays of the sun rose from behind the sparse hills of the Judaean desert.

  Michal Daga
n got to his feet. There were still traces of tears on his haggard face but the tears themselves had stopped. He shuffled out of the park and away from Mishkenot Sha’anannim – not in the direction of his home in Rehavya, but down past the almshouses into the valley of Hinnom. Already one or two cars and buses were passing as he stumbled across the road which encircled the Old City, and climbed up the path towards the Zion Gate. He reached it just as the sun had risen, and shone obliquely onto the city wall. He stood there for a moment to recover his breath. A policeman looked askance at the old, unshaven man, coming so early to the Old City, but he made no attempt to stop Dagan as he walked through the gate.

  Bent with exhaustion, he walked towards the Temple Mount. There, in a cool pool of shadow, two or three Jews were already praying at the Western Wall. He too went to the wall, putting on his yarmulka as he entered the enclosure. He did not stop to pray but passed straight through to the cavernous space below Wilson’s Arch.

  At the gate to the passage there was a sleepy guard, one of Louvish’s men, who looked surprised to see the Professor. ‘None of your people is here,’ he said to Dagan.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Dagan. ‘I can manage on my own.’

  The man looked perplexed but unlocked the gate and switched on the lights.

  The air, which usually felt cool compared to the heat outside, now seemed hot and stuffy. Dagan, already exhausted, set off down the long tunnel. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ he muttered as he stumbled along beside the massive blocks of Herod’s Western Wall. ‘What profit has a man of all his labour which he takes under the sun? One generation passes away and another generation comes but the earth abides for ever … All things are wearisome … what was will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’

  He reached the entrance to the cistern. Here, there was a switch for the lights inside and, since they had always been turned on for him by one of his assistants, it took Dagan some time to find it. When he did, he heard, through the rectangular hole in the wall, an echoing pop as the bulbs were lit. He crouched, climbed through, and then paused for a moment, standing upright on the ledge of rock, remembering the emotions which had overwhelmed him when he had stood there with Jake on the first occasion – the feelings of excitement, exaltation and triumph.

  Now, it was as if that had happened not a month before but in some other life. As he climbed down the ladder onto the shale floor, he felt an excitement, a triumph and an exaltation of quite a different kind – and a sense of vindication, too, which went far beyond his own memories and experiences or the memories and experiences of his family or his race – reaching down into the innermost kernel of his being and out to the extremities of space and time.

  Yet, while this emotion was overwhelming, it was hardly coherent, and the thoughts which went with it were jumbled. It was here, just above him, under the Dome of the Rock, that Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and had found, instead, a ram caught in a thicket. To Dagan it seemed as if the ram had fallen into the cistern and was darting in and out of the shadows made by the lamps. At the same time, the spade he found at the foot of the ladder leading down from the ledge became the knife held in Abraham’s hand as he raised it to sacrifice, not his son but the ram. But it was also a spade, a spade with which to dig a grave for his parents, and bury with them the rage and anguish which had possessed Michal since, as a child, he had seen his father humiliated in the park. And the skeleton he now saw, as he approached the contents of the broken jar laid out on the plastic sheet, became in his mind’s eye the relics of those millions who had died – relics so terrible until that moment that he had never recognized them as an enduring and indestructible monument to his parents’ quality of soul. With a great groan of final anguish, he raised the spade and brought it down, time and time again, to slaughter the sacrificial ram, to exorcize the black spirit of vengeance – and, finally, to reduce the skeleton of a crucified man to a thousand fragments of dust and bone.

  PART THREE

  Twenty-four

  It was already midday in Israel, but ten o’clock in Britain, when Jake arrived in London on the British Airways flight. He was not armed but had in his hand-baggage all the equipment that is carried by a diabetic. There was a packet of disposable syringes, indistinguishable from the kind seen in a doctor’s surgery, which would be used for the daily dose of insulin; and another, smaller, portable syringe looking something like a fountain-pen with which a diabetic could top up his dose of insulin while sitting at a table in a restaurant.

  There were four small bottles with the syringes, each labelled insulin, and all but one containing insulin – the odd one being filled instead with a poison which stopped the heart. It was easily administered, left no trace in the blood, and had been used successfully to dispose of terrorists and their mentors in different countries of the world.

  Jake passed through customs and immigration control without difficulty. The stamps on his passport showed that he had been in and out of Britain many times before. Since his only luggage was the bag he had had with him on the plane, he went straight from Terminal One to catch the Underground into central London.

  If he had been in a hurry, he would have taken a taxi, but Louvish always scrutinized his expenses on missions of this kind, and reacted to any unnecessary extravagance as if it were a blow aimed deliberately at the faltering economy of Israel. Since Jake knew that his target, Henry Nash, would already have gone from his flat to his office, and that he would have no opportunity to deal with him until he went out for lunch, he had no reason to hurry into the city. He sat reading Newsweek as the train made its way through the suburbs of Hounslow and Hammersmith. At South Kensington, he changed to the Circle Line, catching a train to Victoria. There, he went to the public lavatory, shut himself into a cubicle, took the portable syringe out of his bag and filled it with a dose of the poison. He screwed on the cap and clipped the syringe to the inside pocket of his polyester blouson. He closed the bag, used the lavatory, then left to deposit his bag in a storage locker.

  He was booked on the El Al charter flight which flew from Gatwick to Tel Aviv that evening. He studied the railway timetable to check the times of the express to the airport; then he went back to the Underground and caught a train to Piccadilly Circus. From there he walked to the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square, went into the café and sat down.

  It was here that Aron – the operative who had helped him with Father Lambert – was to bring a photograph of the target. Jake already knew a certain amount about Henry Nash, and had formed a picture of him in his mind; but that was not enough to make a positive identification, and Louvish would be angry if he killed the wrong man.

  If there was one emotion which dominated the many thoughts and feelings flitting through Jake’s restless mind, it was the desire to earn Louvish’s approval. His regard for his father amounted to nothing beside his admiration for his commander. Certainly, the Professor was a zealous Zionist who had raised his son to be brave and heroic, but the very longing had exposed him to Jake as a man who himself was neither.

  Louvish, on the other hand, was as decisive in action as he was in analysis: the logic of the thought led inexorably to the enactment of the deed. No misgivings were allowed to impede the attainment of an objective: pity, said Louvish, was merely cowardice in a pleasing disguise.

  Jake did not like to kill. The first time was supposed to be the most difficult, but in his case it had been the easiest, in the heat of battle in the Lebanon where his victim, given the chance, would have happily killed him. Later, in cold blood, on missions in Athens and Geneva, it had become harder; but even there the targets had been strangers in a crowd. The worst had been the last, Father Lambert, because he had been kind to Jake since he was a child, and because he had looked at Jake and at Aron as they had dragged him to the window, not with hate or even fear but with a pity that did not seem at all like cowardice in a pleasing disguise.

  Jake ha
d understood quite clearly why Father Lambert had to die. There was never a flaw in the logic used by Louvish. He could see, too, why it was necessary to kill Henry Nash, and he told himself over and over again that he should no more flinch from sticking a needle into the arm of this Englishman than Judith had hesitated to hack off the head of Holofernes. Time might separate the one deed from the other, but the cause remained the same.

  Only one thought worried him – that Louvish might judge it necessary to eliminate Anna too. It was unlikely that, if he did, he would involve Jake in her execution, but that did not resolve his anxiety. However much his sister had exasperated him over the years, she remained a member of his family, his people, his nation. Was not Anna one of those they were fighting to defend? Could it really be right to kill her? Or was it possible that, after all, Louvish’s logic was somehow flawed?

  He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve. Aron should have arrived by now. What if he did not turn up? Jake could find the office, but how would he identify the man? He looked for a public telephone. There was none in sight. If he left the café, Aron might arrive and miss him. In any case, he knew the habits of a man like Henry Nash: he would not leave for lunch before half-past twelve. He could afford to wait. He could even wait until the evening – these things were better done in the rush-hour – and take a later plane, but he wanted to get back as soon as possible: he was afraid about what his father might do in his agitated state of mind.

  That was why he must get back, yet Aron still had not come. It was now five to twelve. He stood up, left money for his coffee on the table, and went to look for a telephone. There was one outside in Leicester Square, but it was being used by a swarthy Lebanese. Jake could tell this from the man’s accent as he chatted in Arabic, apparently to a girl, trickling a loathsome flow of pornographic innuendo down the line, unaware that anyone around him could understand what he said.