“Long, long relationship. Friends for years now, with Emanuel and with his brother Nathan. My wife virtually raised his niece Catriel.”
“How did you meet?”
“Common interest. We both came to the Holy Land about the same time, he from Russia, myself from France, both from Orthodox families. He escaped from the nasty Soviets, I escaped from a government high-rise outside of Paris. There was a small synagogue and a kosher food store, a little Jewish island in a sea of Muslims. I was always afraid, and so was my father. Afraid of the Muslims, the Arabs. They were moving in. So we moved out.”
“And, you were saying, a common interest?”
“Oh, yes. Well. I went to university, the Technion, you know. I studied particle physics. I became a physicist. And Emanuel Shor was there too.”
“He was biology, you were physics. The common interest?”
“No, no. Not that. The common interest was…Rachel here.”
The woman seated in the corner smirked at this. She sat upright, both hands around a sweating glass of tea, her face like a tired peasant’s. She was dressed in a light sheath that echoed the intense, athletic brown of her hands and feet. “It’s not true. He likes to say that, but Emanuel Shor was not interested in me. He teased me; we were friends. No,” she said, smiling painfully, straightening even more in her chair. “No. The common interest was the Temple.”
“The Temple. You mean, the ancient Temple.”
“Yes,” she replied in a quiet, yielding voice. “We met Emanuel at meetings of the Mishmar, our group that is devoted to rebuilding the Temple. Without the Temple, we can never truly see the face of God, as Moses did. We can never welcome his Messiah.”
“Let me explain,” Halevy interrupted, smiling humorlessly at his wife. “We believe that the Messiah will not come until the Jewish nation rebuilds the Temple. It is preordained.”
Rachel spoke again. “Every year, three times a year, we gather and march to the Temple Mount. At Passover, at Shavuot, and again during the High Holy Days. We do it to show God that we have not abandoned Him, that we remember the commandment. That there are still Jews who have not bowed to Baal. We know that it is not possible to build the Temple now with the Muslim shrines in its place. But we want to show God that we are willing, that we remember. And that is why we prepare.”
“Prepare what?”
“Let me show you,” she whispered, as if sharing a secret. The three policemen stood as Rachel went to a large covered wicker basket in the corner of the room. Jules Halevy stayed in his chair as if frozen.
She opened the basket and pulled out heavy, shapeless folds of fabric. At first Ari thought it was a set of curtains, but she held up a piece. It was a large tunic, creamy white, woven in a peculiar fishbone pattern. “Pure linen. As required by the Law.”
“What is it?” Ari felt he shouldn’t touch it.
“This is the robe of the cohen gadol—the High Priest of Israel. It is the robe he will wear when he enters the Holy of Holies on the great Day of Atonement, to cleanse all of Israel. When the Temple is rebuilt.”
“Why do you have it here?”
She smiled and laid the robe carefully over the basket. “It took us years to construct it. I am a weaver—a docent at the National Museum. I show tourists how cloth was woven anciently. But even I couldn’t reproduce this. We had to study and pray and try again and again. At last we built a loom big enough to do this work, and now…Well, we have paid the price.”
“The price?”
“All things must be in readiness for the Messiah when he comes. We must prepare carefully in order to merit the blessing. Someone must do this.” She leaned into the basket again. “See? Here? The priestly cap and the shoes,” she said, holding up three amorphous pieces of the same linen fabric.
“It should be under guard,” Toad spoke suddenly. Everyone turned in surprise to look at him, but that was all he had to say.
Rachel Halevy carefully folded the priest’s wardrobe and returned it to the basket. “I keep it here. No one will take it. No one is interested in it,” she sighed.
“I am very interested in it,” Ari offered. “Mrs. Halevy, you mentioned the cohen gadol, the high priest of Israel. Was Emanuel Shor looking for such a person?”
“Looking for him?” She seemed surprised at the question. “Of course, he was looking for him. We all are. There can be no sacrifice in the Temple until an authentic cohen, a genuine descendant of Aharon ben-Amram, the brother of Moses, comes forward to take his rightful place.”
“Did Emanuel Shor find him?”
It was Jules Halevy’s turn. “Dr. Shor had a theory that he might be able to narrow down the genome of the original Aharonic family. Enough to isolate a pure haplotype. Then it would be a matter of locating an individual who fits. But I don’t see what any of this has to do with his murder.”
“It may have nothing to do with his murder, Dr. Halevy, but we have evidence that the Cohanim project might have a bearing.”
“The Cohanim project?” Halevy blustered. “I thought Shor was killed over the lattice.”
“The lattice?” Ari looked at his friends, who shrugged almost imperceptibly.
Halevy nearly choked. “You mean, you don’t know…” He rolled his eyes and collapsed back into his chair.
“The thing that was stolen from Levinsky’s lab, right?”
Halevy had no more to say on that subject. He simply stared at them. Ari turned again to his wife.
“Did Emanuel Shor find the cohen gadol?”
“I don’t know.” She pressed her lips together and looked away. “Candidly, I don’t. In all honesty, I never understood him very well. He seemed to want everything we wanted, but then…”
Ari was silent, waiting for her to continue. Suddenly she cried out, as much to her husband as to him. “Emanuel Shor was a peaceful man! Peace was all he really wanted. He went through the remains of dead bodies like a healer, like a saint. Then for him die as he did—it was blasphemy. A curse. Everything has gone wrong…”
Sobbing, she left the room.
Libris Café, Yavne Street, Tel Aviv, 1230h
Catriel Levine, chief patent attorney for the Technion University, sat down at a table on the pavement and ordered tea. Even in the black suit she wore, the heat did not touch her. Catriel could not remember being warm: her bones always felt cold inside, and today her thin skin bristled easily in the drafts from the sea. She checked her silvery GeM. The job would be done soon, and then she could leave for the airport.
A circle of young men stood nearby, Orthodox Jews, the threads of the tallit hanging from their white shirts, arguing playfully about something: a point of Talmud, or maybe a bus schedule. She looked at their straight, thin backs and the coils of youthful beard and wondered again at the gulf between herself and the life of the street looping around her.
That life, which she had never wanted but still watched from a distance, was now closed to her firmly and finally. What she had done about her uncle had been necessary, although no court would ever see it that way. In Tanakh, a woman named Yael lured the destroyer of Israel into her tent and hammered an iron spike through his head while he slept. Was what she had done so different? Wasn’t the Temple of God worth it? Why did she not feel the triumph of Yael? Why did she feel instead like King David after he contrived the death of Uriah—a calm despair at what she had done? And now she was about to add to the pain.
She stirred the tea and drank, longing for its warmth. This café was a refuge, an old bookstore with a tea bar, the kind of place where time meant little and there were books instead of blazing, blaring screens. A book lay open in front of her, one of those Russian novels that her uncle was always encouraging her to read. But today she hadn’t read a word.
She needed to harden herself. The events of the next hour would all take place out of her sight, but she would be there anyway—and in h
er mind she would be there from now on. This task, although unforeseen, was necessary too. Tempelman had brought it on himself. He was a sly, distasteful character with no family. He would not be missed—indeed, the world would be better without him. Still, she hoped she would not be able to visualize it, or at worst that one day other visions would crowd it out. It would be soon. Already the picture the police had given her of her uncle’s death was beginning to fade.
He had not suffered, they said. A bullet to the head, apparently—they had been vague about it. Quick and final. That night in her bathroom she had looked at herself in the mirror and, for an instant, saw a thing, not a person—a murderer. But then reason flowed over the impression. Emanuel Shor, the uncle she had loved all her life, a traitor. Not only that—he had tried to enlist her as well. For a long time, he said, his eye had been on her as his “disciple.” When she began to understand his meaning, it immobilized her heart; her kindly uncle changed into a creature with hair over his eyes and lips, with a chemical odor and an expertise in deceit. He was just another treacherous man after all.
And men did not have hearts. Certainly not her father, Nathan Levinsky—nor her Uncle Emmanuel, contrary to what she had always believed. Even Jules Halevy, their closest friend, a blustering doctrinaire who couldn’t distinguish between talk and action. She had been vague with him about the money and the Texan, and he had gone around with an inflated head ever since, delighting in the secret as if it had been his idea. And then one of the partners at Cohen Brothers had liked her—a tall, physically beautiful man named Ivan. For him, she had felt nothing but contempt. Ivan used the law miraculously, like an alchemist who could charm gold out of bare rock. He enriched himself almost effortlessly, and his methods were very useful in achieving her agreement with the Americans. But she could visualize herself manipulated by such a man and grew sick at the thought. When he looked at her, his eyes narrated the complex and tedious dance he would lead her through to its inevitable endpoint.
No, no one would best her. She would not be stopped—certainly not by a smarmy little blackmailing policeman like Shimon Tempelman.
Yet, as Talmud says, in the death of one man, all humankind dies.
Never mind. She would fly to Dallas, secure from this minor threat. Unpleasant, but necessary.
The Arab wasn’t troubled; in fact, he seemed unsurprised, even serene about it, as if he had known it was coming. Strange how much she could tell about him, even though he had never shown his face to her. She had not even tried to figure out how he managed to leave his little signals unnoticed, how she would find a crumpled envelope or a sweet wrapper near her place at the café and suddenly see a pattern in it. She knew she had passed him on the street more than once, but did not know him from any other unshaven Palestinian sulking his way to work. All that she really wanted to know was that he guaranteed results—with finality.
She remembered when she put out feelers for such a person and was surprised at how quickly she found him. Once or twice she had the vague impression that he had been looking for her, not the other way round. He wanted to be known only as “the Arab,” as if there were only one Arab in the world. He had persuaded her, although she had not thought she needed persuading, that violence was as neutral a thing as diplomacy—as useful for good ends as for evil ones. And, he insisted, he served only good ends.
They had first met at dusk on a bench in the terrace park overlooking the Baha’i monument in Haifa. She never saw his face, only his reflection in a darkened street lamp. He did not like electronic communication, he said; it was not ephemeral enough for him. There would be no phone calls, no messaging—only talks, in the shadows. He told her to watch for small wads of paper, which she should then destroy. Would there be a code of some kind, she asked? He laughed quietly and said she would understand.
And she did. Walking in the park as instructed on the afternoon of New Year, she found a rutted, crinkly note on that same bench. Unfolding it, she recognized the Hebrew word for “finished” in the creases of the paper. She would not forget the view of Haifa from that bench that afternoon. A hazy, hot October day, the park filled with picnickers, and her heart frozen.
There was more. Where to find the object, how to pay him, how to contact him again if she needed him. He was like an accommodating auto repairman, and the fees were reasonable.
The aftermath was as she had predicted. She had iced herself against the police and remained quiet, even in the face of the reptilian little man from Shin Bet who appeared to know what she was thinking. Far worse was the agony of her father. The only way to deal with her own heart was by candid refutation. Not murder but pre-emption; not a breaking of law but a carrying out of law. Her father would understand if only he were able to bear understanding.
Then Tempelman had come along with his sneering inferences. Again, she was surprised at the Arab’s promptness answering her call—it was a little chilling. A paper napkin carelessly folded under a cup of hot tea. Only two questions: Who, by When. No Why. Again, a few whispers on a warm evening in the park. Closure guaranteed.
This item of business concluded, she would be able to board the plane leaving nothing pending. First to Paris, then the long flight to Texas. There would at last be the kind of power only unlimited money can buy. Catriel felt around in her bag and was reassured at the touch of the small GeM-like device she carried. Soon the world would be flooded with such devices, and soon after that the Temple would begin to rise on the holy mount. For this, she reasoned against reason, her uncle needed to die.
She looked at her little silver GeM clock and realized that it was past time. A signal would be waiting for her in the lavatory at Cohen Brothers. She had felt it unnecessary, but the man had insisted. He always closed his accounts, he said. Catriel paid for the tea, returned the book, and walked down this street of cafés and legal offices toward her chambers. People were scarce on the pavement because of the heat. It was mid-afternoon, but the city seemed ghostly, almost deserted. It was the High Holy Days.
Cohen Brothers—New York, London, Tel Aviv. She paused and touched the brass plate in the lobby of the high-rise—surprising herself, as she had never felt anything for the firm. Still, she would not be coming back. She had left a message for her father and for the Halevys; she would not miss the jowly old men, and she didn’t believe they would miss her; only Rachel would weep a little. The cataract of money would astound them. Jules Halevy would figure out what to do with it eventually. Her father she would not be able to face. But maybe the day would come, after he was gone, when she could return to see new construction on the Temple Mount.
The lift opened into the cool glassy corridor that led to the chambers of Cohen Brothers. Catriel was relieved that everyone was at lunch and the office was quiet; she wanted to get in and out quickly. Pushing on the lavatory door, she glimpsed herself in the mirror.
It was then she realized she was not alone.
Cimitero degli Stranieri, Rome, 1200h
Only a few people were allowed into the cemetery for the committal of Monsignor Peter Chandos. It had rained intensely only minutes before, but the cold clouds opened and the sun turned the stone of the new tomb into a watery mirror. Maryse shaded her eyes. Three policemen in black uniforms and black gloves stood at a distance. The only other participants were the Commendatore of the Vatican Police, the Archpriest John Paul Stone, and Fatima Chandos, Peter’s wife. The funeral car standing nearby was unmarked, the gates of the cemetery locked.
Officially, this ceremony was not taking place.
It was a small, shallow tomb of black stone, unnamed, the lid open to receive the coffin, which the policemen had lowered inside. Stone read the service in English so that Fatima would understand it. His cavernous American voice was made for a much larger congregation than this one:
Our brother Peter has gone to his rest…May the Lord now welcome him to the table of God’s children in Heaven. With faith an
d hope in eternal life, let us assist him with our prayers. Let us pray to the Lord also for ourselves…
Maryse thought of the last funeral she had attended, and her throat constricted. Hundreds of people had come. Their shocked keening could be heard from the Priory Hall throughout the night—even after Maryse thought she had fallen asleep on her father’s bed, she could hear it. A moan filled the Vale of Glendalough that she could not distinguish from the continuing echo in her mind of her own cry at discovering her father dead.
And such a death. She had brought it on him. If he had not been with her, if he had been at home where he should be, it would not have happened.
At her father’s funeral, old boys from the Priory School brought their wives. People from town walked because of the long stream of parked cars along the lane, a persistent train of mourners in all shades of black, elderly veiled women from the farms, aged men who could hardly walk. They had all embraced her. Pure bad luck, they said, echoing the TV. Everyone said it. But it wasn’t. Only David Kane had known how she felt; only he had the cold facts of what had really happened. Strangely, he was the only one who had given her any comfort at all.
He had arrived in his helicopter, landing a mile down the road; and she watched for him walking up the lane with the others, taller and still formidable. It was the only time she had ever seen him wearing black. And it was the only time he had ever put his arms around her.
She was no further use to him, she had known that. Even if the publicity had not spun out of control, the hum of shock in her mind made her powerless to carry on. There was no strength left.
The days that followed were like a drawn-out eclipse of the sun. She had not seen Glendalough in green since then. The house belonged to the school; the head’s books were packed and donated to the school library; the only books she took were the ones her father had given her. And then she left. Every year on the anniversary of his death, she opened one of the brick-like art books just to look at it. She did not hear his voice or feel his presence, but she liked the pictures he had left her.
The Flaming Sword Page 5