Patience told him he would cough. “That is all I can do.”
Meral unfolded the message slip. Laboriously inscribed by Patience in pencil and in thick block letters tilting this way and that were the words:
COME SEE ME! IMPORTANT!
And below that:
. . . SHAWR . . . INAXPLIKABLE . . . DEAD.
CHAPTER 6
I’d followed you at a distance. Then I stopped and just watched when you pulled into that little Paz gasoline station, and then when I saw you getting out of your car, why then my blood began to sing in excitement! Not a passion for your death, understand: just the thrill of completing one’s duty to perfection. Then this bird with an owl chasing after it flew into the cab of my car. A mad flurry of wings and chasing and squawking. I didn’t care, though: I just had to embrace the moment’s chance and I accelerated forward and was heading right at you when the tip of a bird’s wing hit my eye and I missed you and I crashed and burned. Thank God!”
“Let me help you move a bit forward. I want to put these pillows behind you.”
Oh, thank you.”
“And the pain? More morphine?”
“No. No, I’m alright for now.”
“That’s good.”
“Who are you?”
“What?”
“Who are you?”
“Haven’t we been through this all once before?”
CHAPTER 7
20 MARCH, 4:17 A.M.
Dearest Jean,
So many things. A sort of Cyrano’s Last Gazette.
First, Moses Mayo. You remember? The funny doctor at Hadassah Hospital that I went to for a checkup the first month I was here? I’ve had drinks with him a few times and he’s finally opened up to me and now I know his whole story, the reason he gave up the job of chief physician and then suddenly started to lose so much weight. After coming to the States on a cultural grant and doing his internship at UCLA, he went back to Israel, where he worked on staff at Hadassah in general medicine and neurology and found himself in a position to play the male lead in the second most touching and transcendent love story that I honestly believe I’ve ever heard. An American film crew came into town to shoot a major motion picture, a spy thriller starring the young and very lovely Jane Ayres. She met Mayo at a cocktail party and reception at the home of the Minister of Culture. They sat in a corner and talked, I’m told, and were instantly attracted to one another despite the wide chasm between their ages. There was lots of laughter between them. Then at some point the starlet asked Mayo if Israeli medicine had made any new discoveries concerning infertility. Married and barren, unable to conceive, she told Mayo how she desperately wanted a child without which, she was certain, her marriage was destined to collapse. “You’re sure it’s you and not your husband?” Mayo had asked her. “No, they’ve ruled him out. It’s me.” Mayo called her in for a complete examination and a series of tests, and then, somehow, improbably, while the motion picture filming was proceeding, the two became romantically entwined.
“What could you possibly see in me?” Mayo once asked her at a time when it seemed to him abundantly clear that if her marriage fell apart it was likely she would instantly settle at his side. “I’m so much older and not anywhere near so good-looking.” She took his arm in hers and looked into his eyes. “Funny is forever,” she told him. But then, as the filming was nearing completion and after many weeks of tireless study and late-night hours spent in intense and unbounded thought, Moses Mayo awakened one April morning with his eyes wide and staring at the ceiling of his room and the strangeness and unpredictability of life, got out of bed, went immediately to his desk and started feverishly writing on a large yellow notepad. Many nights of pacing in his quarters followed as he struggled with an incredibly difficult decision. And then suddenly, the filming completed, there they were at Lod Airport saying good-bye: the star-crossed Mayo and the love of his life who was just about to board her flight home to the States. As they stood looking into each other’s eyes, Mayo asked, “Are you still desperate to have a child?” And when she lowered her head and said, “Yes. Yes, that would have been best,” Mayo reached into a pocket and handed her an envelope. “Don’t lose this,” he cautioned her gravely. “Give it to your doctor.” “What is it?” “Never mind,” he replied. “Just don’t lose it.”
It was a recipe for curing her infertility.
Later she conceived and gave birth to a boy.
Mayo never saw her again. Except in movies.
Mayo, Meral, and me. We have all lost the loves of our lives. Mayo tries to recapture his in healing, Meral in keeping others safe. And me? Well, that’s not for me to say. Not yet. And so let me turn the page in this final gazette to a topic that I’ve lately been reading about and that I wish I had known before. It’s so strange.
The star Sirius, you see, possesses an invisible companion that today we call “Sirius B.” Unless you view it through a telescope you can’t see it. It’s totally invisible. No one even suspected that it existed until around the middle of the nineteenth century. But the Dogon tribe of Mali has known of its existence for hundreds of years! They call it “Digitaria.” A beautiful name, don’t you think? The Dogon have known that its orbit is elliptical, that its orbital period is exactly fifty years, and that it rotates on its axis. They have also believed it is the smallest of all heavenly objects, and yet, paradoxically, also the heaviest. Well, it now turns out that this type of star is in fact the smallest that we know of and is made of a matter that is super dense, one whose kind exists nowhere on the face of the Earth. How could the Dogon have known these things? Sirius B is ten thousand times dimmer than Sirius A, and yet for centuries the Dogon have believed that it’s the most important star in the sky, which might explain why they’ve built their religion on it. Astronomy, cosmology, biochemistry—the Dogon have knowledge of all these things and insist they were taught by alien beings they refer to as “the Nommo” and whom they divide—at least according to an ancient Dogon text—into separate kinds: the Nommo Die, who is God; the Nommo Titanye, who came to the Earth in spaceships and are the Nommo Die’s messengers and deputies; and then finally there’s someone they call “O Nommo” who’s going to be sacrificed for the sake of the purification and reorganization of the universe (This made me think of my “Red Light” dream!) and will enter human form and then descend upon the Earth. And then the even more stunning thing. I’ll quote it: “The O Nommo divided his body among men to feed them, and as the universe had drunk of his body, the O Nommo also made men drink, and he gave his life principle to human beings.” A little later in the text it says he was “crucified on a kilena tree” and soon afterward rose from the dead.
Had I know of this before it might well have impacted my “special thinking” as well as my hunt for “Target X,” which by the way is the most difficult of my career, although I still have no doubt that he is here and that I will find him. Unless he finds me first. Speaking of that, something curious. Though I didn’t see the person, I did hear footsteps just a few days ago that I could have sworn were unmistakably Stephen’s. It must have been a wish. How often in my dreams have I lived it over, the explosion that took your life and his? At long last are my senses beginning to dull? Perhaps they have altered along with the rest of me. I am changing, Jean. Something is happening to me. I feel myself becoming new. I’m not sure yet what it is, but I’ve a sense—you could call it a premonition—that I might very soon be joining you in that place where we’ve been promised “every tear will be wiped away.”
Dawn is seeping through the window in front of the little wooden table where I write and my eyes sweep the watching street below. There is still another killer out there somewhere. Please don’t worry though, my darling. The worst that can happen is there’ll be no more letters.
There’ll be you.
CHAPTER 8
No, I’m not imagining it! These are facts I am giving you! Facts!”
Mayo paced back and forth behind his desk in agita
tion while Meral sat patiently listening and doubting. Eddie Shore was found dead of a cardiac arrest very early in the morning on Tuesday, 11 March.
“Myo car dial infarction,” the autopsy had concluded.
But Mayo was convinced there’d been foul play.
“For what reason?” Meral asked. He wasn’t in uniform. It was Sunday, Meral’s day off.
“I don’t know,” Mayo fretted. “But those two CIA guys at the American Embassy—everybody knows who they are—they came storming into Eddie’s room and sealed it off until forensics finally showed. Their’s. Not ours. And now they say they want his body shipped back to Langley for a second autopsy. And so why would that be? Want to tell me? Look, it stinks, Meral! Really! It stinks!”
Mayo flopped down into the chair behind his desk.
“Okay, now listen,” he said in a voice now calm and low. “Every now and then somebody comes to this hospital with the symptoms of salmonella poisoning. I’ve looked it all up. It’s in the record. They come here and then die. The last one was a year ago. Vladimir Secich. He was a high-level Soviet consul who turned out to be a spymaster. Everyone was saying he was about to defect. And then there was another one here for salmonella, a Bulgarian security official who might have had connections to the Russians. Salmonella doesn’t kill people, Meral. It’s benign.”
“But you said they died of heart attacks.”
“You remind me of my mother. No matter what disaster you told her had happened that day, she’d wave it off and say, ‘Worse things happen at sea.’ Listen, death that looks like a heart attack can be brought on at any time by injecting a person with insulin. Okay? A tiny hypo could be rigged on the bottom of a ring on the killer’s finger. He could tap the victim’s leg in a consoling way, or just a friendly good-bye kind of thing, and the victim wouldn’t feel it. Secich had security twenty-four hours, a guard inside his room and another one outside by the door, but then even the guard inside could be looking right at it and think nothing of it.”
“Wouldn’t insulin show up in the autopsy?”
“Sure it would, but only if it’s done right away: within eighteen hours, maybe less. With Secich the Russians hauled him out of here and then flew the body straight back to Moscow before there was any autopsy. Besides, the murders could be done another way. It takes a little more finesse, some basic knowledge of human physiology, but the advantage is it wouldn’t leave a trace of any kind! All you’d need is to inject a little air bubble, Meral. When the bubble hits the heart it’s instant death without a trace. Come on, I know all different ways where there’d be no suspicion, where the cause of a death wouldn’t show up in tests.”
Meral’s eyes began to narrow with concern.
“You really think that all three of these deaths were murders?”
“So what else am I to think? That they’d just seen their hospital bill?”
“You seem so emotionally invested in this, Moses.”
“Eddie Shore was a wonderful person.”
“Then if so, why would anyone want to kill him?”
“I don’t know. All I know is those CIA agents came around, and that if you want to have somebody killed, then a hospital’s the absolutely perfect place to do it. People die here. They die here all the time.” He looked off for a moment, and then back. “And then there’s this other thing.”
“What?”
“About an hour before he died someone came into Secich’s room with the lytes, his electrolytic balances. Sometimes we send down to the lab and we order them to see if the patient’s maybe losing too many nutrients from vomiting or maybe diarrhea. The ’lytes are tested, then sent up from the lab.”
“What are you getting at, Moses? That some doctor killed these people?”
“Now you’re talking like you did back in school in Ramallah when you suspected Sister Joseph had stolen your lunch. Doctors order the ’lytes, they don’t deliver them, Meral. They’re brought up by one of the attendants. Do we really need an Arabic Inspector Clouseau?”
Meral turned his head and looked out of a window.
“So now help me to figure out this one, Meral. Two days after Shore dies, I run into Dave Fuchs, Shore’s doctor, and we’re talking about how we couldn’t guess this was coming. Then Fuchs tells me something very strange: he says one of our volunteer attendants—I think you might know him from the Casa Nova. He works there part time. Name’s Wilson?”
Meral turned back to Mayo.
“Oh, yes, Wilson. Yes. Yes, I know him.”
“Well, he tells me Wilson came to him the next day and he wanted to know what had happened, and that Fuchs had called down to the lab about an hour before Shore died and ordered his ’lytes and said to send them straight up to Shore’s room, and not as usual the desk, because that’s where Fuchs said he was going to be. But when Wilson went up there the room was dark, he said, and there was only a night light on and Shore was sleeping. Fuchs told him that he didn’t know what he was talking about, he wasn’t even in the hospital that night! It’s all crazy, Meral. Weird. It’s all wrong.”
Meral stayed silent and impassive
Mayo leaned forward intently, hands flat on the top of his desk.
“I’m not delusional, Meral. Understand? I’ve got a strong instinct about this thing. You know all about instinct don’t you, boychick? You invented it. I know there’s something wrong here. I know it in my blood. Why would someone fake the ordering of ’lytes to Shore’s room?”
“I think I’ve read enough Hercule Poirot novels to guess at that one.”
“Which is what?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you. It might only feed into your paranoia.”
“Meral, where did you learn such big words? Did those mischievous sisters at Ramallah teach you that one and then told you it’s a fish with little razor-sharp teeth? Those Catholic nuns will stop at nothing to break a man’s mind. Okay, come on now! What’s your theory. Or Hercule Poirot’s. Or whoever’s.”
“Well, if Shore was really killed in the way that you imagine, it could be because the killer wants suspicion thrown on Wilson. It would be someone who wants Wilson put away or even dead.”
“Throw suspicion on Wilson for a murder?”
“I’m just entering your fantasy, habibi.”
“It’s not a fantasy, bubbi.”
Meral gave a diffident shrug.
“Why don’t you bring this up with Shlomo?”
Mayo leaned back in his chair, aghast.
“Shlomo? Shlomo Uris, my idiotic nephew and totally useless boy Inspector of Police who went tapping on the walls of the Tomb of Christ once looking for an entrance to a secret passage? Please be serious,” Mayo answered.
“I’ve heard he’s quite sharp,” Meral told him. “The point is Hadassah is Jerusalem Sub-District, Moses. That’s his province, not mine. I can’t intrude.”
“But you did with that crazy Christ killer!”
“That was personal. I did no investigation. And besides, Moses, murders are rare in my province, most especially something as exotic as this. I solve murders in novels. This is life.”
“Well, I’m not letting go of this thing. Not by a long shot. I’m going to keep digging.”
“Yes, do that. You’re good at that, Moses. You should.”
“What’s the matter with you, Meral?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your face, Meral! Look at your face! I’ve never seen such unhappiness in all my life.” Mayo stood up. “That’s the trouble with doctors these days,” he declared. “You come into the examining room and they’re flipping through pages in your file checking blood test results instead looking at the patient’s face, which is where the whole story is at times. Lots of times. Okay,” he said, moving, “come on.”
“Come on what?”
“Come on into the examining room. I want to check a few things.”
“Afraid I haven’t got the time.”
“Then make it!”
Twe
nty minutes later Meral was buttoning up his shirt while Mayo was folding up a blood-pressure sleeve. “Well, you’re healthy,” Mayo said. “Does that depress you? Look, you’ve got to start taking medication. I keep telling you to see someone. Do it, Meral. Please! And then this guilt you keep carrying around. You know, they’re saying now when somebody’s dead a few minutes and we’re able to do something right for a change and we bring them back to life, they say they saw this bright light at the end of a tunnel and it helped them review their whole lives, all the things they did wrong. You have a life review every ten minutes!”
Back in Mayo’s office, Meral plucked his policeman’s beret from a wall hook, walked over to the front of Mayo’s desk and looked down at his boyhood friend, who was sitting with his elbows propped and the sides of his head lowered into his hands.
“I’m not letting go of this,” he vowed. “I am not.”
“Take care,” the policeman said softly, and then he turned and walked slowly to the open office door where, before stepping out into the bustling hall, he stopped and turned around for a long look back.
CHAPTER 9
Where do you get these things?”
“What things?”
“You know, the morphine. Syringes.”
“Does it matter?”
“Then they’re stolen, I presume?”
“Are you interrogating me?”
“Ah, you’re smiling that archangel’s smile!”
“Let’s replace these old dressings. Come on now. Sit up.”
“You’ve changed.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s much stronger now.”
“What?”
“That light. That terrifying inner light of yours. It’s stronger and worse, much worse, than before.”
“How worse?”
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