Book of Judas--A Novel

by Linda Stasi

  He said it would work to our advantage. Right.

  We were able to skirt around on the bike, cutting in and out illegally. When we made it onto route 424, the traffic was much better—mostly because we were heading into the desert and you could count the settlements and houses on one hand.

  “Where are we going?” I screamed as we sped along.

  “Like you’d know? We’re headed to Karmei Yosef. It’s near the Tel Gezer.” He was right; I had no idea what he was talking about.

  After an hour of endless nothing, punctuated by the occasional something, we entered an area with a sign reading TEL GEZER, which led into some kind of an upscale development in the desert. I’m referring to it as a development, but it’s a development in the desert in the same way that say, Palm Springs, is a development in the desert. Most of us can’t even begin to think about affording to live in such a desert.

  We drove around the back where the houses were concentrated, across the dry, sandy, rocky soil that was freckled with wild cacti and sprinkled with lazy, feral cats.

  Beautiful, tasteful houses—in the middle of some kind an archeological dig!

  He steered the motorcyle down into a valley. It was completely dark now, and the dig, closed off to prying eyes, spies, and thieves, was shuttered for the day, or actually, shuttered until sundown on Saturday.

  We pulled up behind one of the digs, Pantera turned off the bike, and we dismounted. There was just one guard posted in a uniform that looked vaguely military outside a tiny guard shack. He immediately started approaching.

  “Walk with me,” Pantera instructed as he took off his helmet, revealing his yarmulke. He opened his jacket and I saw he even had tzitzit hanging down (the white tassels worn by Orthodox Jewish men, which remind them to obey the commandments).

  “Like hell I will,” I answered. “That guy’s carrying a machine gun!”

  He just looked at me in that exasperated way he had down to a science, grabbed my hand, pulled me toward the guard, and spoke to him in Hebrew. The guard kept shaking his head and saying what in any language sounded like, “Get your asses out of here or I’ll kill you with my large gun.”

  I tugged on Pantera’s sleeve and he brushed me away. “Do you speak English?” I begged.

  “Your client, she wants me to speak in English? Yes?” The guard mocked me in his heavy Israeli accent. “Yes, I can speak English and this is what I say: lady, you hired here a guide who doesn’t know the rules, and he’s wearing a yarmulke but wants to enter a site after sundown.”

  Pantera started to protest, but the guard cut him off. “And this part of the dig is not open to tourists in any case. The whole area is closed for thirty minutes already.”

  “But my friend,” Pantera continued like a cheeseball in English with an astoundingly good, thick Israeli accent, “this lady came all the way from the United States. Here, let me show you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out my fake passport. “Look, look for yourself,” he said, handing it to him. I gasped. It had a couple hundred shekels lying inside it.

  The guard, taken off guard, literally, was aghast. “Is this a bribe?” he said, straightening up with indignation.

  “No, no bribe, my friend,” Pantera said, meaning, “Yes, yes bribe, my friend.”

  Pantera then reached into his inside jacket pocket like he was reaching for a gun, causing the guard to turn his gun on us. Pantera, in a move so quick and so smooth, neither of us saw it coming, kicked the guard in the throat. The poor schmuck fell, out cold on the hot, desert sand.

  “They should have posted two guards,” he said casually to me, reaching into his pocket once again, and this time pulling out a hypodermic needle, which he stuck into the unconscious man’s thigh.

  “Oh my God! Oh dear God! Did you just kill him, too? A man in the army, yet? What have you done?”

  “No, I didn’t kill him. He will wake up—tomorrow—with a helluva headache.”

  “He’s in the Israeli army, for God’s sake!”

  “No, this one’s not army, just a rent-a-guard. Grab his weapon, will you?”

  “No, I will not steal a gun. And excuse me, but how stupid was that move—knocking the guy out? When he doesn’t check in on schedule—just like that other one in the prison—they’ll come looking!”

  “No, it’s Shabbat so they won’t be calling him tonight. It’s not like this is a military installation. It’s just another one of fifty million digs going on in Israel all the time.”

  “And the other?”

  “Who knows? My guess is the real monk in charge will figure that another monk locked up before him. Now, please, grab his damned weapon.”

  “No, I won’t. What did you do to him?” I demanded.

  “Brazilian jujitsu. Unexpected, no matter how well trained,” he said, reaching for the weapon himself. “Not that this guy is trained well. He’s not even Israeli-born. Or Jewish.”

  “And you know that—how?”

  “Too dumb to be Israeli-trained. And real Jews don’t work on Shabbat for nonessential, nondefense jobs.”

  “Maybe his shift was just ending!” I was looking every which way for cops to come barreling our way to kill us on the spot.

  Pantera just pointed to his own watch. “Jeesus, Russo!”

  “I want to call home. See if Terry’s home with my folks yet.”

  “No can do. Even though this is an untraceable satellite phone, they managed to find us before. So it’s off and staying that way.”

  “They…”

  “They. The guys who killed Paulo, the guys who know about Terry, the ones who tracked us to prison. This will serve you better,” he said. He handed me the guard’s machine gun, grabbed a hard hat with a light on it that was sitting inside the small guard shack, and we walked right into the dig site.

  The site was deserted, but there had clearly been plenty of activity earlier, which was centered about five hundred yards away. We walked over the dusty desert grounds and reached the area where the equipment had been left for safekeeping until work resumed after the Sabbath. There wasn’t anything above ground, just the mouth to a hole in the ground with a wooden platform.

  Pantera put the hard hat on, took the machine gun from me and strapped it on his back, stuffed his pistol into my backpack, and shone the hat’s light down into the hole.

  I could see the cave was more like a stone tunnel—something dug out by human hands—with uneven, primitive steps carved into it. Pantera descended, advising me to keep a lookout.

  “Don’t do anything foolish,” he warned, looking back up at me as he started down.

  Now it was my turn to look exasperated. He was the one going into a black hole after knocking out a guard, and he was telling me not to do anything foolish?

  “I think you’ve taken care of that for both of us,” I said as he reached the bottom step. I could see his shadow from the light as he looked around and then walked out of my line of vision.

  Where did he go? What if the guard stirs? What if he wakes and calls the authorities? What if…?

  I was alternately looking back for the guard and looking down into the hole. I didn’t know which was more anxiety-producing—expecting the guard or not seeing Pantera reemerging. I was perspiring so heavily that the sweat was rolling down into my eyes. I grabbed an old bandana out of my bag and tied it around my forehead. It also seemed to be getting hotter instead of the other way around as day progressed into evening.

  After five minutes, I gave up waiting and tried calling in the softest voice possible, “Pantera! You there? Yusef, where are you?”

  Nothing.

  Should I climb down? Should I run away? Did he get hurt? Oh shit. Time is running out. This is the last thing I need!

  “Pantera!” I called out again, this time somewhat more stridently. Nothing.

  I began pacing and then covering up my tracks for no reason whatsoever. Why weren’t any emergency lights or the dig’s nighttime lights on? Suddenly I found myself standing in
the blackness of the desert under the same stars where the ancients had stood contemplating heaven. Me? I was contemplating hell. Alone. And so I began a panicky personal argument with myself. Anything to keep from going mad.

  Should I climb into the hole? Are you insane? Go down into a dig, a black hole, with the penlight attached to your key ring for light? No! Yes. It’s the only choice. He might be hurt. What do you care—you hate him—remember? Yes, but you’re in the middle of the desert with a knocked-out guard.

  There wasn’t a choice. I switched on the penlight, should have grabbed a hard hat, but didn’t. Immediately spotlights came on in the distance, around the guard shack. I switched the penlight off, realizing that it might have been too late and I might have alerted the authorities, so I began to climb down backward into the hole, step by slippery, uneven makeshift step.

  The crunching under my feet belied the fact that the steps were incredibly slimy. What the hell? I slipped down two of the steps and barely caught myself. It wasn’t like the archeological site exactly had a railing.

  “Pantera! Where the hell are you?”

  27

  The hand-dug tunnel wasn’t high enough to stand in, so I got down on all fours with the penlight in my mouth. I could see another light coming toward me, also at the same height.

  I took the light out of my mouth. “Yusef!” I called out.

  “Shh,” came the reply. Has to be him! Only an arrogant ass like him would say that at a time like this.

  As the crawling figure with a shining light approached, I could see it was. “Quickly! Follow me,” he said.

  “I may have alerted the authorities to our location when I turned on my penlight.”

  “Just follow me.”

  “I thought no one would check up on the guard on Shabbat.”

  “The lights come on automatically at a set time, I would think. So I wouldn’t worry about them coming down here.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  I began to follow him, the walls of the tunnel closing in on me like a tomb. Then I understood why they really might not want to come searching in this tunnel. The sound began as flapping wings, followed by a high-pitched chirping like injured birds—or God, even mice—screaming in the tunnel.

  The flapping, light at first, kept increasing in intensity until it became the deafening flailing of a million wings. The horrible chirping, too, magnified until it sounded like a giant ship being scraped against a metal pier. Neither sound was the kind I had heard when flocks of birds were flying overhead.

  “There are birds in here? In a tunnel?” I whispered, trying to overcome a sudden feeling of revulsion.

  “No.” Then, “Duck!”

  “Ducks?”

  Out of the blackness, the flapping of wings and chirping engulfed us in sound, and then enveloped us in a horrifying, suffocating animal stench. Something brushed my face and I jumped, trying not to scream. It happened again, then again and again. My face, arms, legs, and torso were being slammed by wings and my ears by high-pitched squeals, while from above a bombardment of sticky globs hit my head, my face, my everywhere.

  These aren’t birds! I’m being hit with leather wings!

  “What are they?” I screamed.

  “Bat swarm! Duck down! Cover your face!”

  I realized there were now hundreds of flying, screeching, swooping, swarming rodents, seeking to get out of the cave and into the night—all at once.

  “What is dropping down on us?” I cried, trying frantically to get the horrible sticky stuff out of my eyes and nostrils.

  “Guano! Stop talking, and keep your mouth closed,” he warned. “Get down.”

  “Bat shit? Oh shit!”

  I threw my body down flat right on top of the slippery, disgusting, guano-covered stone ground, and stuffed my hand in my mouth to keep from screaming.

  Pantera crawled over and climbed on top of me, his entire body covering mine. He put his hands over my head as a shield. “Just bats. Just bats. Shhh. Just bats, let them pass…”

  “Oh God! Oh God!”

  “Bats … that’s all. Israel is full of them. Nothing to be frightened of…” Maybe nothing for him, but I was terrified.

  Even with Pantera on top of me, I began to heave, the bile splashing on the tunnel floor. How much worse could this get? Answer: Much. Perhaps it was better that I didn’t know the horror yet to come.

  I tried to catch my breath but as soon as I did, I gagged again.

  “OK, OK, it’s OK,” he tried to soothe.

  No, it was definitely not OK.

  With the bats still swarming, brushing and splashing us, Pantera said, “I’m going to slide off of you now. Stay down. But we need to start moving forward when you can. I’ll be right here. Just let me know when you can move.”

  “I can move. I want to move on … to wherever.”

  He crouched beside me. “You need answers. I know you need answers. All I can tell you is that … well, that information I was given by the ah, gold coin man, along with the key led us first to the Prison of Christ and consequently, here.”

  “What is this place?”

  “A burial cave.”

  “What?”

  “A mile-long burial tunnel. It leads to tombs.”

  “Tombs,” I said, more of a statement than a question.

  “Tombs from the time of Jesus.”

  He shone the light and I could see shelves cut into the rock. “In ancient Israel, tombs and catacombs were like homes for the dead,” he said as I crawled on my belly. He was clearly trying to refocus this city girl. “Homes for the dead,” he repeated, “as opposed to burial chambers. These areas held the body until it decomposed, and then the bones were stored in an ossuary—a bone box.”

  “Right, I’ve heard of that.”

  “The tombs were cut into the rock, like here,” he said, shining his light onto what might have been a shelf cut into the rough rock wall. “They laid the bodies on these shelves until they decomposed.”

  I heaved again. And again. “Pretty.”

  When I got my rhythm back, I managed to sit up a bit and croak out, “Did that gold-coin guy tell you the other key was down here?”

  “No, well, not exactly. What we have to do is crawl to the end.”

  “Then?”

  “Then. Well, then we’ll see. Can you crawl now?” he asked, handing me a flask from his backpack and offering me some water. “Here, clean your mouth out. Then sip. Not too much or too quickly. You’re probably beginning to get dehydrated.”

  I rinsed, spat, and then took a sip of the cool, clean water. I’ve never even had a martini taste that wonderful. “Whew. Thanks. Yes, I think I’m good to go now.”

  He shone the light on my face. “Really, I’m OK.” He wiped my face with his fingers, and then rubbed his hands on his pants. I could see bat guano. I heaved again. He tried to take it out of my hair, but it was stuck and I yelped.

  “Just leave it, just leave it!”

  “Bats may be the least of it, unfortunately,” he said. “There are reptiles and all kinds of things living down here.”

  “Oy. Let’s go, please. Get this over with.”

  I got back up on all fours and began to crawl. A snake—or what seemed like a snake in the dark—passed over my hand and I jumped up so fast I hit my head. I touched my head, and yes, it was bleeding. “Shit! I’m an idiot!” I seethed under my breath.

  We kept crawling. Rodents, maybe smelling the blood, came around and we batted them away although three were attached to my back. Bugs, spiders, and all manner of underground life came to life to feast upon us as we steadily crawled forward, the light on Pantera’s hard hat guiding the way. Sort of.

  After an hour, we came to the end of the tunnel. I was bitten, scratched, bleeding, and covered in bat shit. But there was the metaphoric light at the end of the tunnel: a door.

  “What the hell?”

  Pantera shone the light and illuminated an ancient wooden door with a hu
ge handle. He tried it.

  “Locked. I don’t want to create any noise, but I have to open it.” He reached for his gun.

  “Wait!”

  He looked at me curiously, and I reached inside my T-shirt and pulled out the giant glittered key on the key chain, and pointed it toward the keyhole.

  “Maybe nuts, but try this before you go shooting your way in. And by the way, you are not just bat shit, but you’re covered in it too.”

  He grinned. “You should see what you look like. A bat shit facial.”

  “You’re a regular laugh riot.” I slipped the chain off my neck, and with shaking hands, attempted to put the glittered key into the keyhole, but I couldn’t get it in. I pulled it back and rubbed the glops of excess glue and glitter off and onto my jacket and tried again. Nothing. Then it hit me. I rubbed the key on my guano-covered pants and then smeared it all around the key and into the keyhole with my bare fingers—without retching this time.

  The old key was so slippery I could hardly hold onto it, but it went into the lock more easily. I could hardly contain my excitement and joy—yes, joy—when I felt the equally old bolt budge a tiny bit inside the mechanism. “Aggh,” I strained, “I think it’s beginning to move.”

  Pantera reached to take over.

  “Don’t even think about it, bub. This one’s all mine,” I gritted, rubbing guano into the lock itself.

  He stepped back and I kept straining until it began to turn micrometer by micrometer, finally clanging into place and disengaging the bolt. I pulled back, looked at my handiwork, and did a happy dance like a kid, guano falling out of my hair.

  He just shook his head and grinned again, the space between his teeth showing even in the darkness.

  “Never doubt the power of briller and guano!”

  “Briller and guano.” He laughed back, practically admitting defeat. “It could replace WD-40.”

  I tried, but couldn’t help suppress a grin, too. He reached over and wiped more guano from the corner of my eye.

  The small triumph of conquering the cave crawl, the bats, the vermin, and having the key open the door made us giddy. For a moment. And for a moment—just a moment—despite being in a tomb, covered in bat droppings, with a gash on my head and a patch of my hair singed off, I felt like I was deep into some great news story instead of being smack in the middle of a nightmare.