Promised Land

by Robert Whitlow

  Hana was checking email on her phone and sipping hot tea when she glanced up and saw Jakob hurriedly enter. He was alone. Like Hana, Jakob was in his early thirties. Tall and slender, he had short, curly black hair and dark eyes.

  “Sorry I’m late. Mr. Ivanov went to the wrong Indian restaurant and won’t be here for at least fifteen minutes. I know you’re always on a tight schedule, but is it okay if we wait for him before eating?”

  “Of course.”

  Jakob ordered hot tea. “What’s the latest news for you and Daud?” he asked.

  “Not much for me, but Daud’s out of the country on business.”

  “How long?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Jakob raised his eyebrows. “What kind of business?”

  “For the government,” Hana replied, lowering her voice. “I don’t know where he is except that it’s not Israel.”

  The waitress arrived with his tea. Jakob took a sip. “I thought Daud was going to spend all his time developing his consulting business,” he said.

  “He is, but he doesn’t have a website, so that business is based entirely on referrals. This other job was something he believed he should do.”

  “How are you holding up?” he asked.

  “Struggling. I mean, after what all of us went through in Jerusalem, it’s hard not to worry about something unexpected happening.”

  “Absolutely. I’ll be praying for him and you.”

  Hana managed a weak smile. Formerly a secular Jew, Jakob immigrated to the US as a child with his Russian parents. He’d welcomed Jesus Christ as his Messiah the previous year while standing in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. To hear him mention prayer was like fresh water splashed on Hana’s troubled soul.

  “No one knows how to pray better about this sort of situation than you,” she said.

  “I don’t know about that, but I took your advice and have been spending a lot of time reading the Psalms. They contain plenty of material that’s relevant to life regardless of what’s happening.”

  For several minutes Hana listened to Jakob talk about what he’d been reading.

  “Here’s Vladimir,” Jakob said, raising his hand in the air.

  Hana turned in her chair and saw a short, balding man with dark-framed glasses coming toward them. He was wearing a white shirt and black pants. She and Jakob stood.

  “No, no,” the man said in Russian-accented English as he motioned for them to sit down.

  “This is Vladimir Ivanov,” Jakob said.

  Ivanov bowed slightly when he shook Hana’s hand. Jakob spoke to him in Russian.

  “Vladimir’s English is improving,” Jakob said, “but I’m going to have to tell you most of his story.”

  “Eat?” Ivanov interjected, pointing toward the buffet line.

  Jakob nodded. “Yes.”

  Hana led the way. The restaurant had mastered the art of keeping food fresh on a steam table. It helped that the place was crowded with lunchtime diners. Hana selected lamb and vegetable root curry along with saffron rice. Jakob took longer and came back with his plate piled high with multiple dishes. Ivanov took a much smaller portion of the lamb and curry. Jakob spoke to him. Ivanov smiled broadly and returned to the buffet.

  “He didn’t understand that it was all-you-can-eat,” Jakob said to Hana. “A place like this wouldn’t last long in Belarus where the economy isn’t doing so well.”

  “Does he have relatives in Atlanta?”

  “Yes. They bought him a plane ticket. He’s been here for over a month.”

  Ivanov returned with a much fuller plate.

  Jakob turned to Hana. “I’ll pray,” he said and then spoke to Ivanov, who immediately bowed his head.

  Hana closed her eyes and waited.

  “God, thank you for Hana and Daud,” Jakob said. “Watch over him while he’s gone and bring him safely home. Bless Vladimir and his family and what we’re here to talk about today. Thank you for this food. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

  “Amen!” Ivanov repeated in a boisterous voice.

  Hana ate a bite of lamb marinated the perfect amount of time in the sauce so that it didn’t become tough or lose its own flavor profile. Ivanov sampled the same dish from the food on his plate and closed his eyes for a moment as if savoring it.

  “Good?” Hana asked him when he opened his eyes.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “More.”

  The main selection on Jakob’s plate was vegetable root curry with oven-roasted carrots, parsnips, turnips, and red onions. Roasting the vegetables brought out their natural sweetness before adding the other seasonings. They ate in silence for a few moments.

  “What did you think about the article I sent?” Jakob asked Hana.

  “I’m familiar with Metula,” she said, wiping her lips with a napkin. “It’s very close to the Lebanese border. When Hezbollah fires a mortar round at the village, the residents have about ten seconds to reach shelter. Metula is in a very fertile region, so people have lived in the area for thousands of years. It’s not surprising that archaeologists discovered the ceramic head of a nobleman or king who lived in the Iron Age. But the quality of the craftsmanship was amazing. Most of the things I’ve seen in museums from that time period are much simpler and more primitive. The detail and coloring were also stunning.”

  Jakob leaned forward in his seat. “There’s a queen to go along with the king.”

  “The article didn’t mention another piece.”

  “Because the archaeologists don’t know about it,” Jakob said with excitement in his eyes. “At least not yet.”

  Ivanov said something to Jakob in Russian. Jakob replied, and Ivanov nodded his head vigorously.

  “He heard the word ‘Metula’ and wanted to make sure I told you about his great-grandfather who discovered a similar fragment of a statue a hundred years ago at a place called Eyon. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes, it’s near Metula. There’s an ancient mound or tell there.”

  “Which makes sense.”

  “But fraud with archaeological artifacts is rampant across the entire Middle East, and there are a lot of fakes,” Hana cautioned. “Proving something to be genuine is hard.”

  “I’m not naive. Establishing the authenticity of an artifact is like documenting the provenance of a famous painting, only there’s less to go on. But Vladimir has a fascinating story, and when he contacted me for help, I didn’t have the heart to show him the door without digging a little.”

  Hana gave him a wry smile. “Is that a pun?” she asked.

  “Uh, no,” Jakob replied sheepishly. “But I could pretend it was.”

  Hana laughed. “The first step is obvious,” she said. “Has a reputable expert examined the item owned by Mr. Ivanov?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe I can help you locate someone in Israel who—”

  “Vladimir doesn’t have the female head in his possession,” Jakob interrupted.

  Hana was about to take a bite of food. She lowered her fork. “Where is it?” she asked.

  Jakob took a sip of tea before answering. “Vladimir and his family have lived for generations in Belarus. His background is a mixture of Russian, Belarus, and Polish, but he claims to be predominantly Jewish. He grew up in Minsk, the biggest city, and he has a niece who lives in Atlanta with her husband and kids. She’s the one who contacted me because my new website mentions that I speak Russian. Vladimir’s great-grandfather lived on a kibbutz on the south side of the Sea of Galilee in the early 1900s. I can’t remember the name of the place, but it was one of the first kibbutzim.”

  “Degania,” Hana said.

  “Yes,” Vladimir interjected with a smile. “Degania. Good.”

  Jakob continued. “After spending several years on the kibbutz, the great-grandfather returned to Minsk to get married. He was an amateur archaeologist and brought back artifacts that he either found himself or bought locally, including a small figurine of a woman’s head and shoulders t
hat looks a lot like the male figure in the article I sent you. The great-grandfather’s wife didn’t want to immigrate to Palestine, so he never returned.”

  “What proof exists for all this?”

  “Vladimir has twenty old black-and-white photographs that he’s transferred onto his niece’s laptop. I’ve seen them. The pictures show several coins minted during the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans, some pottery items, and the queen’s head. Vladimir claims the family always believed the woman’s head was special. The great-grandfather kept a diary and recorded that he found it himself while digging at Eyon. There’s a decent sketch of the head in the diary.”

  “Does Mr. Ivanov have any idea where the artifacts are now?”

  Jakob glanced at Vladimir before answering. “They were lost during World War II when most of the family was murdered in the Holocaust. Vladimir says two-thirds of the Jews in Belarus were killed by the Germans or the Ukrainians who worked for them. Vladimir’s father and a male cousin were the only ones out of a large family who survived. They fought as partisans and were able to hide the collection in an old barn to save it from the Nazis. Unfortunately, toward the end of the war the Soviets found the cache and confiscated it.”

  “That’s a different twist. Usually it was the Nazis who stole works of art.”

  “True, but theft is theft. Since all this came up about the discovery at Metula, Vladimir and his family have done some preliminary research.”

  “What sort of research?”

  “They know the name of the Soviet colonel who raided the barn. He was a famous guy with so many medals on his chest that he could barely stand up without falling over. After the war, he lived in a big château outside Moscow where he displayed some of the collection, including the woman’s head. Vladimir has a newspaper article about it from the 1950s. The article falsely claims the colonel purchased the items during multiple trips to the Middle East.”

  “If the Russian man’s family still has the collection, any lawsuit would be filed there, not here.”

  “There’s more. The colonel fell out of favor when Stalin died and Khrushchev took over. Shortly thereafter, the colonel disappeared into the Gulag and died at a logging camp in Siberia. The artifacts disappeared with him.”

  * * *

  Rahal stood at the end of the flat field and waited for the young boy to remove three arrows from the target and run back to him. As he grew older, Rahal had decreased the draw on the competition bow and now pulled at thirty-seven pounds. He still practiced regularly. To him, archery was the most honorable sport on earth. Muhammad was an archer, and a bamboo recurve bow supposedly used by the prophet himself was on display at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. One of Rahal’s most prized possessions was an ancient decorative bow adorned with gold calligraphy that extolled the virtues of the archer as warrior in Islamic history.

  The boy returned with the arrows. Rahal had landed one shot in the second ring from the bull’s-eye and two other shots in the fifth ring from the center. Three other arrows missed the target altogether and were discarded. Rahal never reused an arrow that failed to find its mark. Khalil stood beside him. Another servant opened a bottle of water and handed it to Rahal, who took a long drink.

  “Let’s step up to sixty meters,” he said to Khalil.

  While they walked forward, Khalil answered his cell phone. They reached the sixty-meter mark and stopped. Khalil ended the phone call.

  “What were the names of the prophet’s six bows?” Rahal asked the boy who’d retrieved the arrows.

  The young man was the son of the chauffeur who’d driven them to the private archery field on the outskirts of Doha.

  “Az-Zawra, al-Bayda, and as-Safra,” the boy said and paused. “But I don’t remember the others. His quiver was named al-Kafur.”

  “Not bad,” Rahal answered. “How old are you?”

  “Twelve years old, sir.”

  Rahal looked directly in the boy’s face. “What is your name?”

  “Yanis, sir.”

  “When you can name all the prophet’s bows, I’ll give you a gift.”

  “Next time, sir. I’ll be ready.”

  Khalil stepped closer to Rahal. “Sir, I’d like to have a word with you in private.”

  “After this round.”

  Rahal placed an arrow against the string and looked across the field at the target. He smoothly drew the bow and released the arrow. Rahal’s technique was flawless. The symmetrical flight of the arrow was a thing of beauty enjoyed in the moment but never exactly replicated. It penetrated the target toward the middle.

  “It’s touching the yellow, sir,” the boy said.

  “Your eyesight is better than mine,” Rahal replied.

  Rahal shot five more arrows, all of which hit the target and would survive to fly another day.

  A different servant handed Rahal a pair of Russian-made binoculars. Rahal raised them to his eyes.

  “You’re right,” Rahal said to the boy. “What is the score if the arrow lands on the line between two colors?”

  “You receive the higher score.”

  “Correct. Go!”

  As the boy ran across the field, Rahal and Khalil stepped away from the other servants.

  “Proceed,” Rahal said.

  “Mustafa is in Sharm el-Sheikh and has located the resort where Kolisnyk is staying. The information you received about him leaving Ukraine was correct. He’s traveling under a false name with a woman companion. They’ve rented a villa on the beach. The woman is an Arab.”

  Rahal raised his eyebrows. “An Arab? With an infidel?”

  “Yes. Mustafa believes they married while in Sharm el-Sheikh.”

  “The heart of darkness widens,” Rahal said. “I only wish we could recover the money we wasted on Kolisnyk. He has many enemies and is likely seeking sanctuary from them. We can’t let that happen.”

  Rahal removed an arrow from his quiver and lightly touched the razor-sharp point. “Just revenge will be my payment. Mustafa has my blessing.”

  Chapter 4

  Daud followed Artem Kolisnyk to the table where the Ukrainian’s wife waited. Artem motioned for her to get up and follow him.

  “We have to go now?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied and turned to Daud. “Whoever you are, leave us alone or I will call the police.”

  The waiter, a different man from the one who served Daud, hurried up and spoke to Kolisnyk in Arabic.

  “Was there something wrong with the food?” the man asked.

  Artem reached into his pocket and took out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills. He peeled off three and thrust them in the waiter’s hand.

  “This should pay for the meal,” he said. “And ask the manager to call the police so they can arrest this man for harassing us. That’s why we’re leaving.”

  The waiter gave Daud an apprehensive look. Daud stepped back and lifted his hands.

  “I haven’t raised my voice or threatened anyone,” he said.

  Esma glanced at Daud and spoke. “Artem, I’m scared. I’m not sure you should ignore what this man told you. Remember, Uri sent him.”

  “He didn’t say Uri sent him, and I don’t believe Uri is here in Sharm el-Sheikh. He’s waiting for us in Cairo.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  Artem didn’t answer. Several people at nearby tables were watching them. Daud saw a woman take out her cell phone and begin taking pictures. The Kolisnyks continued toward the exit. Daud waited until they were four or five meters in front of him before following. Artem spoke to the maître d’ as he passed by but didn’t stop.

  “Please, sir,” the maître d’ said, holding up his hand as Daud approached. “We do not want any disturbances.”

  A security guard stepped forward. Daud shook his head. “Do not touch me,” he warned.

  The young man hesitated. Daud moved past him, then immediately felt a hand seize his right shoulder. With one quick movement, Daud grabbed the man’s wrist and twisted his
arm so that the security guard ended up bent over with his face toward the floor. When he tried to move, Daud increased the pressure on the man’s arm. The maître d’ watched wide-eyed. The light on a cell phone flashed as someone took a picture. Daud released the security guard and pushed him away.

  “I’m leaving,” Daud said. “Peacefully.”

  Outside, he glanced up and down the sidewalk. It was dark, but lights from nearby shops and restaurants illuminated the street. A block to the east, Daud saw Artem and Esma Kolisnyk get into a taxi. There wasn’t another cab in sight. Daud jogged down the sidewalk as the vehicle pulled away from the curb. It turned down a street toward the part of town where most of the expensive hotels were located. Daud waited almost a minute before another taxi from the same company appeared. He waved it down and opened the passenger-side door.

  “Do you know who drives taxi number 467?” he asked the driver, who looked barely old enough to have a license.

  “Uh, no, sir, but I can check with my dispatcher. Did you have a problem with him?”

  “No, but I need to talk to the man he just picked up at this corner.”

  The driver hesitated. Daud took out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to him. The young man immediately picked up his cell phone.

  “He’s on his way to the Four Seasons Resort,” the young driver said.

  “Get there fast and there’s another fifty dollars in it for you,” Daud replied, getting into the front seat.

  The driver turned down a side street. The tires on the vehicle squealed.

  “I know a shortcut,” the young man said.

  In less than five minutes they reached the hotel.

  “Let me out here, not at the main entrance,” Daud said.

  The driver pulled to the curb and received another fifty-dollar bill. He handed Daud an index card on which he’d written his contact information.

  “Call me if you need me during your stay,” the young man offered eagerly. “I haven’t printed any business cards yet.”