The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  “Yes,” was all Toad said. Although the room had several comfortable chairs, Jules and Rachel Halevy sat silent on the floor, leaning against the wall and staring straight ahead, apparently emotionless. Both were dressed entirely in dull black linen. The collar of Jules’ shirt lay open, ripped from his neck to his shoulder, while Rachel’s shirtwaist was torn in a mourning gesture. She wore over her hair a black batiste so faded it was nearly blue.

  Without waiting for an invitation, Toad selected a cane chair and sat down in front of them. “I’m Inspector Sefardi. Thank you for letting us know about the theft,” Toad said. Jules Halevy turned his head curtly; he was clearly tired of dealing with the police.

  “And I’m very sorry about your loss.” For once, this was more than pro forma. Toad nodded at the photograph of Catriel that dominated the opposite wall between two shaded windows; these were words he had used many times without meaning them, but this time was different.

  And he understood why they sat on the floor—they were performing shiva, the seven days of mourning. Rachel Halevy glanced up at him with a tiny sign of thanks, then went on rocking back and forth slowly, almost imperceptibly. She was in deepest sorrow, and Toad respected it. But he needed answers.

  “I understand the funeral was…quite moving,” he said, uncharacteristically.

  Rachel stiffened. “Yes, it was. I dressed her in my own white shroud…the one I had woven for myself.” She was quiet for a moment, then looked up at Toad, almost as if he were a friend. “We buried her facing east—to greet the Messiah, you know, when he comes.”

  Toad nodded. From the picture on the wall, the limitless black eyes of Catriel Levine stared out into nothing. He forced his thoughts back to the job. “I know you’ve told the officer here about the theft, but would you mind telling me again…when did you notice the items were missing?”

  Rachel spoke absently. “Not until this morning. I don’t know why—I felt like looking at them, opened the basket, and they were gone.”

  “And the last time you saw them?”

  “Was when you were here with the other men.”

  “So someone could have taken them…”

  “That night while we were at a kibbutz meeting? Perhaps during the funeral.”

  “Nothing else missing?”

  She slowly shook her head.

  Toad stood and walked out the open door, where he found the policeman examining the windows. “What do you think?”

  The officer seemed bored. “Simple. No force needed. Nobody on the kibbutz locks up. You want something, you waltz through the door and take it.” Then he cocked his head. “Why is Shin Bet interested in this?”

  Toad gave the man a half-smile and asked, “Did anyone notice anything?”

  “They were all at the weekly meeting—about harvests, prices, all that. I’m surprised there aren’t more burglaries here.”

  Toad called up on his GeMscreen a picture of Peter Chandos’ face. “Have you seen this man in the area?”

  The officer grunted. “You’re joking, right? The man who shot the Pope?” He started to laugh and then realized Toad was not smiling. “I’m off now,” he said, edging toward his car.

  “Thanks,” said Toad, and walked back into the house as the police car raced away.

  Jules Halevy came out of the house, shading his eyes from the sun. He stopped as if to say something, then appeared to change his mind. “I’m going to the guest bungalow to sit shiva with Nathan Levinsky,” he announced. “Any questions you have, my wife can answer.”

  Toad went inside to talk to Rachel.

  “Do you have an idea who might have wanted to take the garments?” Toad asked her.

  She looked up, startled that he was still there. “No. No one. They have no value except…”

  “To the high priest of the Temple.”

  “Yes. They were made for his purpose only. It will be difficult to replace them,” she said, rising painfully from the floor, “but perhaps others can be made in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  The woman was taller than Toad, her body erect and strong under the folds of black linen. “In time for the consecration of the Temple. It must be done.”

  “How?” he asked quietly. “How could the Temple be built without taking down the Muslim shrines?”

  “The Temple will be rebuilt. It must be rebuilt,” she responded in a frozen whisper.

  “Why must it be rebuilt?”

  “Are you observant, Inspector?”

  “I’m a secular Jew.”

  “Then perhaps you don’t realize that the salvation of Israel is not in your bombs, your guns, and your secret police. It is not in playing appeaser. The only salvation of Israel is faith in Ha-Shem and in his covenant, in the command to rebuild his House. For a hundred generations we have mourned the Temple, we have stood before God an impure and an unholy people, unable to redeem ourselves from our sins. Only when the Temple is rebuilt can the Messiah come and redeem Israel at last.”

  “Is it up to the Jews to rebuild it—or to God?”

  “The Rambam taught that we must rebuild it ourselves; it is one of the Thirteen Articles.”

  “But Maimonides also taught that the Messiah would build the Temple. In fact, it is by rebuilding the Temple that he will prove he is the Messiah.”

  “You know the Rambam? You—a secular Jew?”

  Toad waved this aside. “Mrs. Halevy, was Catriel involved in any kind of…plan to remove the Muslim shrines?”

  “Do you mean to destroy them? To blow them up?” Rachel replied acidly. “No.” She paced around the table, holding onto chairs as if to support herself. “But she thought perhaps they could be bought. Not officially, not openly. Still, there are Islamic powers that are venal enough to betray their faith.”

  “And where would your movement have got the kind of money that would be needed to try something like that?”

  “You should ask her father that question.”

  “Thank you, I will. Does the name Lambert Sable mean anything to you?”

  Rachel looked confused, then shook her head.

  “Again, I feel sorry for your loss.” Toad turned to go. It was all he knew how to say.

  As he left, Rachel Halevy stared at him as if wondering how such a nonentity—and a secular one at that—could feel anything at all.

  ***

  Toad wandered down the little lane into the kibbutz until he found a sign pointing to the cemetery. All around him, the settlement was utterly silent, except for the cry of birds in the sulky heat. Willows shaded the lane, tall, brown, and limp for lack of water; a great terebinth tree stood inside the gate of the cemetery, its distressed branches sagging with drought, its roots pushing off to odd angles the gravestones beneath it.

  Impressed by the quiet, Toad sat down on a bench in the shade of the terebinth and fanned himself with his notebook. It was years since he had felt the peace of the Sabbath, the only thing about the yeshivah he missed, and the welcome escape, one day a week, from the noise of the world. He listened—no farm machinery, no cars, no voices even in the distance. Utter stillness.

  He remembered the Sabbath hours staring at the sterile white brick walls of the yeshivah where he had grown up and been schooled after the death of his parents—killed by a terrorist attack on a pizza restaurant. They had died for pizza, he had often thought, laughing shortly and bitterly to himself, leaving him alone to make his anonymous way through school, through the military where, having done poorly on the physical, he was relegated to the criminal investigation division, and then through a slow, humiliating life. His mother and father were buried in a cemetery like this one; he had visited it one time.

  But once a week, after the gesticulations of the synagogue, the Sabbath meant he could stay in his room, tidy his bed, and read all day from his small, select collection of
books. He read everything—the Tanakh, the Talmud, the Zohar—not because he loved wisdom, but because he read everything in reach. And the holy books were there, available. He read them many times. No one at the yeshivah ever noticed him, no one ever came looking for him, so he was content—and safe. It felt good to lie on his bed reading. He missed that.

  At age twelve, he had picked up some books thrown away behind the library. It didn’t matter to him what they were; they were new to him. One of them was a romance novel, as he later learned. It was filled with vague descriptions of passion that raised a grotesque feeling in him. He read again and again. To him, real women were unimaginably remote, as alien as some extinct and gorgeous reptile, and he had developed his acute power of observation because of his enthrallment with them. He had no interest in pornography; it was overkill. Instead, he was hypnotized by a breath or an eyelash or the tilt of a neck.

  He had studied Catriel Levine microscopically—her thin temper, her olive hands, her eyes with their complex agenda of fanaticism mixed with cold control. Like a gemstone, she was hard but vulnerable, too. A rich man had found the flaw in her. A rich American with his hand on her.

  But your riches shall fall into the sea in the day of your ruin.

  In the middle of the cemetery he caught sight of a fresh hill of dry white earth topped by a pile of stones. This would be the new grave. He got up and walked around it. There was no name on the grave, but he knew whose it was. She had died alone and cruelly, and now that she was dead matter under the gravel of this desert, he found it harder than ever to coax up any kind of faith in human connections—they were all but impossible to make, and doomed anyway. But he ached nevertheless, and though he could not say why, he wished he could have spoken to this woman and raised a smile from her. Just once in his life.

  He found a small gray stone on the ground, picked it up, and gently laid it on the pile that marked the place where she rested.

  “Inspector.”

  Toad was startled by the voice. He turned; in the mottled shadow of the terebinth, barely visible, stood Jules Halevy.

  “There is something I must discuss with you.”

  The Sistine Chapel, Rome, 1400h

  The hymn had been sung, the vows taken, and the doors closed and locked. The preacher climbed up to the lectern and looked over the assembled cardinals, who sat in hastily constructed ranks of seats on both sides of the chapel. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment soared up the wall behind the lectern, its devils with bile-colored faces herding the damned into the sulfur of Hell, while the righteous slipped heavenward through golden air as if magnetized by the colossal bronze hand of the Christ. Before this spectacle the young preacher stood, all in white like a miniature angel. Cardinal Estades had nominated him, both supporters and opponents of In Salutem Ecclesiae had signed off on him, and everyone was curious to hear him.

  By custom, the homily that began the conclave laid out the challenges facing the Church so that the college could consider them in choosing the Pope. The honor of reading the homily was traditionally highly sought after, but there had been no time for the usual wrangling. In fact, most of the logical candidates had decided to be unavailable; the divisions in the room were so deep, it would be a mortal stroke to a career to take one side or another. The earnest young priest who agreed to do it, a teacher of homiletics in the Papal university, was to some a brave man and to others a sacrificial lamb.

  “Brothers, the glorious city of God is my theme,” he began in English, the language most of the cardinals understood, in a voice nervous but determined, “and the promise of the Church of Christ to the faithful in the earth. It is a surer hope than anything the tottering world can hold out. As the Prophet Isaias taught, every one that shall be left in Sion, and that shall remain in Jerusalem, shall be called holy.

  “Before the Church today is the great question: What does it mean to ‘remain in Jerusalem’?”

  “Some passionately argue that the citizens of Jerusalem have been given over to Sodom and Gomorrah, that the rupture of ancient canons brings down the gates of the temple, inviting corruption into the holy place.”

  Seated near the lectern, Cardinal Tyrell nodded, turned his massive head, and raised his eyes to look directly into the eyes of John Paul Stone across the aisle. Stone stared back at him. Tyrell listened with satisfied surprise as the preacher went on to enumerate the abominations that Zacharias II had forced on the Church: divorce, “gender equity” in the priesthood, perversions of marriage, the abandonment of celibacy. Around him, he noted, heads were nodding in agreement.

  “These measures, in their view, taken in the name of compassion and inclusiveness, threaten the very foundations of the Church Militant, the Church founded to war against these very evils. So, as the prophet Isaias warned, in taking these measures we might have been as Sodom, and should have been like Gomorrah.”

  The preacher stopped and drank from a glass of water.

  “Others speak with an utterly different voice. For them, the great challenge to the Church is not in these canonical deviations but, as the prophet Ezechiel said, ‘the iniquity of Sodom is pride…neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.’ God has a controversy with a Church and a hierarchy, they say, who have sold their souls for material gain and look with proud disdain on the marginal, the different, and the outcast. In the words of the prophet Isaias, ‘The spoil of the poor is in your house. Why do you consume my people and grind the faces of the poor?’ We must eternally ask ourselves, was he speaking of us?”

  It was Cardinal Stone’s turn to stare down Tyrell. Why, he asked himself, did these old men strain at a few liberating changes made by Zacharias and continue to swallow the cruel ideologies of capitalism? Saving a world immersed in poverty both material and spiritual—that was the proper work of the Church.

  The preacher took a long breath, as if suddenly uncertain what to say next. But he pushed on.

  “These two parties threaten the Church, our Holy Mother Church, with schism. Some bishops have already declared with haughty outrage that they will not bow to the See of Peter in the matter of In Salutem Ecclesiam. Now, through an act of treachery, that See is vacant, and the proponents of the late Pope are in their turn threatening defections of their own if a new Pope should recant on the measures taken by the Council. We hear every day of unimaginable things—a new African-Latin American federation of Catholic dioceses on one hand; on the other, the archbishoprics of Canada threaten to break communion with Rome.

  “It is my task to raise a warning voice. If we prove unable to maintain

  our unity in Christ, if we elect a Pope out of anger at each other, the

  Church will tear itself in two and fall under the interdict of God, as He

  has said in holy scripture: ‘Cursed be their fury, because it is stubborn: and their wrath because it is cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and will scatter them in Israel.’ ”

  “What is he saying?” the little African bishop, growing indignant, asked in Tyrell’s ear. “Shush,” he replied. Tyrell had heard convocation sermons before, but never one like this—so much scripture, so much candor. Regardless of where the preacher was going with this, he admired his courage. He reminded Tyrell of Peter Chandos—the zeal, the candor, the physical beauty of the strong youth in pure white.

  “We must humble our lofty eyes, we must stoop from our haughtiness as men, and exalt the Lord alone, as in the day when He will come again and put an end to our contentions.

  “Because that day will come, and as the prophet Isaias says, that day shall fall upon every one that is proud and high minded, and upon every one that is arrogant, and he shall be humbled.”

  Stone was growing resentful; he disliked the insinuation that his fervor for change was arrogance. The need for change went far beyond what had been achieved; the reforms of Zacharias merely laid the foundation for future revolutions. Stone had been studying the tool
s of the papacy and was fascinated by the Medieval practice of the papal interdict—the equivalent of excommunicating entire nations for disobedience to papal command. Although in the twenty-first century the interdict would have nothing like the impact it had in the Middle Ages, it would still make an enormously important statement to rich countries that refused to do more to help poor countries. He could envision laying an interdict on Britain and the USA—what a prospect! Tens of millions of Catholics putting furious pressure on their governments. What a tool for forcing change…But the election needed winning first. Stone looked around in dismay at the empty seats of the Canadian delegation, who had boycotted the conclave because of its haste. They would have been valuable votes.

  “This week our brothers of the Jewish faith will set aside a day, one day of the year that is devoted solely to reconciliation, as commanded by Leviticus: ‘Upon the tenth day of the seventh month shall be the day of atonement; it shall be most solemn, and shall be called holy.’ The Jews call this holiest day of the year Yom Kippur. In the English language it is called the Day of Atonement—the day when all debts are forgiven, all differences are put aside, and the people become ‘at one’ with each other and with God.

  “Might it be possible for the day of this conclave to become a Day of Atonement, a day of forgiveness, of understanding, of embracing one another’s differences—not in sacrifice of principle, but in upholding of brotherhood? Not with an unyielding mind, but in remembrance of the yielding knees of Our Lord, who Himself knelt to wash the feet of Peter and your Apostolic predecessors?”

  Tyrell caught the eye of Manolo Estades, who was beaming beatifically up at the preacher, and smiled and nodded at him. The boy had been a good choice. Tyrell resolved to approach the election with humility; he would not be cavalier about revoking the acts of the previous Pope. It would be done with care.