“This is truly regrettable,” Vlora uttered sadly. “Yes, it is. It truly is. But the danger to thousands outweighs the pain of one.” He stood up, walked over to a door, and pulled it open. “Come!” he commanded into the shadows of a dimly lit ante-room, summoning Major Tsu and the creaking old doctor with the black valise. The doctor moved quickly to the nearest corner, while Tsu took Vlora’s seat at the table. “Major Tsu will take my place from here out,” announced Vlora. He was staring at the Prisoner with fatherly patience. “You have clearly grown too used to me. Yes. Much too comfortable. That’s very clear. Major Tsu will resharpen your interest. In the meantime, do not think that this boy is an actor. He is not. Should you doubt that, I now give you proof.”
With a lift of his chin Vlora gestured toward the boy, and instantly “Laugher” plucked a knife from his pocket, unclasped it, and sliced off the screaming boy’s little finger, lazily tossing it onto the table in front of the Prisoner. It landed by the basket of fruit.
The Interrogator glared at his son with fury.
“Damn you!” he flung at him, seething. “Damn you!”
Against his orders that the finger be cut from the boy’s numb hand, Vlora’s son had cut the finger from the hand that had feeling. Vlora turned and strode angrily out of the chamber, fleetingly assailed, as he was from time to time, by a stabbing flash of doubt that surcease from pain for thousands could ever be purchased with the torment of one.
Vlora’s habit was to bludgeon and strangle such thoughts.
This time he did not.
What happened after that would be carefully analyzed but never quite understood; after all, the incontestable facts were so few: As he exited, Vlora had been hastily saluted by the two armed guards who were posted at the door. From there he had proceeded directly to his office, passing many other guards in the halls along the way. But after thirty-seven minutes Vlora suddenly decided to terminate Tsu’s experiment and, bursting from his office in search of a quarrel, he strode rapidly back to the questioning room. The two armed guards were not at their posts. Vlora found them inside, both of them stripped of their uniform and weapons. They were unconscious, concussed and drugged with hypnotics that had come from the doctor’s medical bag, while the old man himself, although not touched, had apparently suffered a fatal heart attack, and inasmuch as the boy was discovered alive, this meant that the number of those who had been killed totaled only four, not five as originally thought, and included a torturer who had died from a powerful blow with the heel of a hand that had instantaneously crushed his windpipe, and another whose spine had been broken by a single smash to the nape of his neck, while the back of Tsu’s skull had cracked wide open from the force of his body being slammed against a wall. The other torturer, “Laugher,” Vlora’s son, greeted death without a noticeable change of expression except for his eyes, in which frozen forever was a faint odd glimmer of something that no one could properly identify, but more than anything resembled surprise. His neck had been broken.
The two guards who survived could tell their questioners little. On hearing a “scratching sound” on the door, one said, he had entered the chamber alone, caught a glimpse of the Prisoner for “only a flash” before feeling his hands around his throat and being rendered immediately unconscious by “something, some pressure that he put on my nerves.” The other guard, who’d gone into the chamber moments later, related an identical encounter, as did four other guards on other floors. As to why the Prisoner had spared their lives, they could offer no opinion, nor could anyone else. There were searches, questionings, crime team reports, but in the end they illuminated nothing, and as night and whispers and paranoid terrors filled the mazes of the State Security Building, no heart there beat regularly.
The Prisoner had escaped.
Three days later, on the evening of Sunday, 17 May, and beginning at precisely forty minutes after sundown, seven young men came together in a straw-strewn barn in the high craggy village of Domni, just as they had gathered every Sunday before at precisely this time for hopeless months. Rough-hewn peasants in their early twenties, they spoke little and in guarded whispers lest the dreaded Sigurimi discover their presence. When they first began to meet they were excited by their mission, at their breath-holding peril in these secret watches, but the hammer of time had blunted their edge and they felt only tedium now, the grip of habit, as they huddled in darkness on the earthen barn floor and waited for a man who never came.
“And so what do you think?”
The husky whisper pierced the silence.
“Do you think he’s been captured?” continued the speaker, a brawny smith from the village of Drishti. “Is he dead?”
“I am happy to find you all well.”
The men were startled. The voice was unfamiliar. Not one of theirs. They scrambled to their feet with sudden fear. This someone in the darkness, this stranger: Who was he? Where had he come from? They had seen and heard nothing: No creak of a door. No movement. No step.
The young smith from Drishti recovered his poise.
“God may have brought you here,” he ventured in a quietly probing, hopeful voice. He felt the pulsing of a vein in his temple as he added the words that could trigger the password:
“Tell us, did you come by the road less traveled?”
The Prisoner stepped forward and uttered the countersign:
“ ‘All of creation waits with longing.’ ”
The smith took in a quick little breath of realization.
“The Bishop! It’s you! You have come!”
The next moment the young men were kneeling all in a row on the earthen barn floor with their heads bowed down while the Prisoner moved swiftly and silently forward and, cupping his hands atop the head of the smith, began to recite with urgent speed a Catholic formula of prayer:
“ ‘We ask you, All-Powerful Father . . .” he began.
The ritual completed in less than a minute, the Prisoner moved to the next of the men, laying on his hands and repeating the prayer until, by the end of the seventh repetition, his rich, firm voice had begun to quaver and his hands, lacking fingernails, to tremble, as he sank to his knees and wept convulsively while the newly made priests looked on.
Standing, breathing above his desk in the haunted darkness of his office, Vlora inhaled the ghosts of flowers, withered and dry and dead in their glass; heard the crisp, rough click of the metal switch as he turned on the crooknecked khaki lamp and held under its beam the puzzling object, the mysterious token, whole and unmarked, found crammed into the mouth of his murdered son. It was a golden-skinned apricot.
“Dimiter,” Vlora murmured numbly.
It was the name of the agent from Hell.
Would the code of the bessa take him even that far?
PART TWO
JERUSALEM
CHAPTER 1
Doctor Moses Mayo began each day as if expecting the world would end that night. He could find no other way to endure its griefs, the quiet terror of living in a human body. Waking at dawn’s cool touch each day, by seven he was hunkered down at his desk munching poppy-seed bagels and sipping sweet tea as he greeted The Jerusalem Post’s grim headlines with a murmured, “Who cares? The world is ending tonight.” But this early March morning he found a different path. In his narrow staff quarters at Hadassah Hospital’s medical school, the neurologist awakened in the tunnels of night with a quietly pulsing sense of dread. Wide awake, he lay still, staring up into darkness while he listened to the whirring and the flurry of his thoughts. He had dreamed. Something strange. But what? He sat up, turned on a bedside tensor lamp, and squinted down at the tiny brass moonfaced clock ticking loudly in the hush of a circle of light. Mayo groaned. It was minutes after 2 A.M. The neurologist sighed, swung his feet to the floor, and was cradling his lowered head in his hands when an overwhelming sadness, a depression, fell upon him. What was it? he wondered. The dream? Dully staring at his curled-up bony white toes, Mayo moodily wriggled them up and down. One of his p
atients had died the night before. Despondency and guilt always followed, he knew. Was that it? Or was it still the mad horror in the Psychiatric Ward, the shocking murder that no one could comprehend? Mayo scratched at his scrawny chest through the flannel of a red and white striped pajama top. No, he decided: neither one. He stood up and his feet made fleshy padding sounds as he entered a white tiled bathroom where he turned on the light, gripped and twisted a spigot, and splashed cold water onto his face. In the pipes, wakened air clanged and rattled, then abated. Yes, shut up, Mayo thought, there are sick people here who are sleeping. “Not me, though,” he murmured aloud. “Not me.”
Drying off with a threadbare, faded blue towel, Mayo paused in his tentative dabbing and rubbing to meet his own gaze in the cabinet mirror, where grieving green eyes in an angular face beneath a bristling of iron gray hair stared back with the sting of recrimination. “Incompetent!” Mayo murmured bitterly. “Fraud!” He was brooding about the patient who had died. Flopping the towel back onto a hook, he stared into the mirror at a quiet birthmark, a milk white oval indentation palely nestled near the corner of his drooping right eye. “Come on, what did I dream?” once again he asked himself. Nothing came and he turned away.
And then suddenly the dream opened up its heart to him, beginning with a Christ Child aged about five. Wearing only a dhoti and brown leather sandals in addition to a stethoscope dangling from his neck, he was solemnly conducting grand rounds through the Neurology Ward as he led a procession of note-taking medical students to the bed of the blind man he had famously cured at the Pool of Bethesda. The Child’s expression was mild and sweet and his body was shrouded in a faint white glow as he nodded at the blind man reassuringly. “We meet again,” he told him with a smile. His head propped on pillows, the miracle’s recipient did not respond but lay rigidly still, his eyes wide with suspicion and apprehension. The Child unhooked his chart from the bedstead, scanned it, replaced it, and then turned to the students who lifted their clipboards and pens to take notes.
“What we have here is a genuine miracle,” announced the Child. He pointed to the patient with an index finger at the top of which an inch-high Band-Aid was wrapped, “This man was blind from birth,” he recounted, “so I applied a bit of spittle to his eyes with my fingers and then asked him if he saw anything. He said, ‘Yes. I can see. I see people. But they look like trees that are walking around.’ ” At this the formerly blind man appeared to relax, as if at last understanding that the group had not come to accuse him of some crime or perhaps a lack of adequate appreciation, and the miracle of sight was not about to be reversed. He shut his eyes peacefully and nodded as if in confirmation of what he was hearing. “So I gave him a second application,” said the Child; “but no spittle this time, just my fingertips touching his eyes. And right away he saw everything without distortion. And that, please observe, was the actual miracle: it was that second laying on of my hands.” The Child glanced around at the students who were rapidly scribbling on their clipboards and pads. “Now can someone tell me why?” he asked them benignly. A young woman with violet hair raised a tattooed hand that was clenched in a fist, and when it opened a pure white dove fluttered out. “Yes?” the Child said to her, his eyebrows curving upward expectantly.
“Oh, well, even if the blindness was psychosomatic,” she began . . .” But the formerly blind man’s eyes flared open and he cut her off.
“Are you calling me a liar?” he angrily challenged. Above the group the white dove was now circling and diving, making random, quick pecking attacks that drew blood.
“No,” the student responded; “I’m just saying that the cause wouldn’t matter. After many years of blindness, you still wouldn’t have had any depth perception or be able to synthesize shape or form. Remember how it hurt when you opened your eyes? How all you saw was just a spinning mass of lights and bright colors? Sure, your eyes were repaired but your brain still hadn’t learned how to process their data. It takes a month of hard work just to be able to distinguish a few simple objects.” Here the blind man looked mollified, lowering his gaze and mutely nodding in agreement. “No, of course you’re not lying,” the student summed up. “It’s only if you’d really had your sight restored in that first attempt at a cure that you would have seen men who looked like trees. If the whole thing was a lie you’d have said you saw perfectly the first time you were cured.”
Here suddenly the dove swooped down with stunning speed and bit the Christ Child’s pale soft cheek. A gout of blood gushed out of the puncture, splashing on the whiteness of the blind man’s bed and from there to the floor in pumping streams as the dove became a bloodstained winged hypodermic syringe flapping swiftly away to the end of the hall, where it sharply turned a corner and, gleaming, vanished. Then abruptly, and ending the dream, the violet-haired student was standing in front of Mayo dressed in Victorian widow’s weeds. She raised her arm and her hand unclasped to reveal three bright green dew-glistened fruits while her other hand held out a folded-up newspaper. “ ‘Cousin Harriet,’ ” she mournfully intoned, “ ‘here is the Boston Evening Transcript’ and some lovely poisoned figs.”
Mayo put a finger to his lips and nodded, thinking that he knew what might have triggered the dream. He’d recently pondered this very episode in the gospel of St. Mark in which the blind man cured at the Pool of Bethesda could at first see only men who looked like “trees that are walking around,” and only saw perfectly and clearly after Christ had repeated the healing action. An avowed agnostic—though the mystery of design in the human body had nagged him to belief in an amorphous intelligence at large in the world, which he would sometimes refer to as “Maurice”—Mayo found the gospel passage baffling. And unnerving. In the time of Christ, cures for blindness were medically unknown. So if the healing at Bethesda hadn’t actually happened, how could Mark have known the symptoms of post-blind syndrome? Mayo lifted a hand and looked at his fingernails as he nodded his head a little. Yes, the dream had regurgitated his musings.
But the winged syringe? The blood? Poisoned figs?
The neurologist finished his waking ablutions, dressed, and boiled water on a single-burner hot plate for the brewing of a heavily sugared tea in an oversized thick white porcelain mug which he carried with him out into the dimly lit hall where, for a time, he stood silent and still, irresolute, his head bowed down in thought and a hand in the pocket of a medical jacket that, just as with his rumpled baggy trousers, was much too large for his sticklike frame. He seemed not to wear his clothes but to inhabit them. “Miracles,” he muttered. They’d been suddenly as common in these antiseptic halls as the moans of the soldiers in the Burn Ward late at night. On Monday a nurse named Samia Maroon had reported to him breathlessly that she had seen some sort of apparition. And then there was that two-year-old boy in the Children’s Ward with rabdomial sarcoma, a rapid-spreading, always fatal cancer. For weeks the boy’s X-rays had turned up a mass in his chest growing steadily and ominously larger. Overnight the mass vanished. Examining the X-ray, “It’s that damned elusive Pimpernel,” the confounded neurologist had murmured. The boy had also suffered from dysautonomia, a mysterious crippling of the nervous system that afflicted only the Ashkenazim, the descendants of Eastern European Jews, and whose victims were unable to cry or feel pain. Like the cancer, the disease and its symptoms had vanished. Maurice! Mayo thought, The crazy goniff doesn’t play by his own damned rules! As for the nurse’s apparition: Couldn’t be!
Staring down into his tea, the neurologist sighed and looked wistful; no poppy-seed bagels to be found at this hour. They don’t drop from the sky anymore, he mourned. He lurched ahead, disconsolately slouching through the open double doors beside the barred and shuttered counters of a Bank Leumi branch, thus exiting the medical school to cross the dark stone squares of a courtyard and enter the hospital’s main reception. Two heavyset women were mopping the floor, sloshing water and suds back and forth hypnotically on the beige and black speckle of the tiles. The cavernous and echoing ha
ll that by day was filled with bustle and the chatter of life was now still and deserted except for the two charwomen. And one other person, Mayo saw with dismay. His gaunt face gray with a stubble of beard, a shriveled old Arab in a threadbare dark blue pinstriped suit was seated on one of the cedar benches where the outpatients waited their turn to see a doctor. His spindly frame drawn tightly erect, the old Arab was staring at Mayo intently with an air of hope and expectation. Meshugge, thought Mayo, in the Arabic velterrein, completely lost in space. Softly groaning, Mayo sidled to the bench and sat down.
“Good morning,” he quietly greeted the man in Arabic.
“Morning of roses.”
“Morning of gold. Tell me, why are you here again so early, my brother? We’ve gone through this once before, friend, have we not?” Mayo had recently encountered the Arab while returning from a late-night call on a patient complaining of excruciating “phantom limb” pain. The old fellow had been adamant in his conviction that because he was an Arab he might not be treated unless he was clearly the first in line.
“Uncle, didn’t you get to see the doctor last week?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And he treated you?”
“Yes.”
“So then why are we here now, uncle?”
“Why not?”
Mayo pursed his lips and looked blocked “Why not?” served a function in colloquial Arabic closely akin to the Yiddish “nu,” a vague and multifaceted response with innumerable shades and twists of meaning including no meaning whatsoever. But before the neurologist could narrow the question, the Arab touched his fingers to the side of his head, declaring woefully, “Please. This is new. I have headaches.”
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