“Are you serious?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“Was he mentally unbalanced?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, I must say, he certainly got his wish.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t read the morning paper?”
“No.”
“The man posing as Joseph Temescu was in fact an American government assassin.”
“He was what?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“No! An assassin? Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s on the front page of The Jerusalem Post. His name was Paul Dimiter. Quite famous in his circles. You can count yourself lucky.”
“Lucky? Why lucky? He— Oh. Oh, I see. Yes, a killer. A killer in my apartment. Though I still can’t believe it. I mean, the man seemed so kind.”
“Yes, as killers often do. And so honest.”
Wilson’s head tilted to the side.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing. Less than nothing. So let’s try now to focus on what this Dimiter was doing in Jerusalem. No. No, let’s back up a bit. Tell me how you met him.”
“And you’re sure there won’t be trouble about the hospital supplies?”
That child’s look of worry had returned to Wilson’s face, and once again it disarmed Meral’s latent suspicions.
“There’s a connection?” he asked.
“Yes, there is. And I’ll tell you. But no trouble? That’s a promise?”
“That’s a promise. Now then, how did you meet him?”
“He had a terrible accident late one at night at the Paz gasoline station just below the Jaffa Gate.”
Meral’s eyes widened. “You’re the second man!” he breathed out.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind now. No, really. Go on, now. Go on. Tell me everything.”
“Well, the engine of my car was overheating and I needed some water for the radiator. So I stopped there. Late at night they put water cans out at this station. Tins of gasoline, too. Then you pay the next day.”
“Where were you coming from?”
“Ramallah. I was on my way home. So as I said, I made a stop and then all of a sudden I hear this car speeding toward me, and then it veers and it crashes into the gas pump and there’s an explosion. It was awful. I ran over and I’m hauling him out of the car and—
“Hauling who?”
“Oh, well, the driver. The man you call Dimiter. Whoever. He was all banged up. Badly burned. Unconscious. The car was on fire. I got to him as quickly as I could but he was already pretty badly burned. His face and hands it seemed, mostly. So I took him to the Arab Government Hospital. The one for the poor. It was the closest. But Hadassah’s much better equipped for burns, and so in a couple of days, when they’d done all the emergency stuff and he seemed to be pretty well stabilized, that was the place where I wanted to take him. But he didn’t want to go. He was adamant. Something about him not wanting to go into the system. About being identified. At Government they’re loose about that.”
“Yes, they are. But they try. They’re good people.”
“I could see that. Well, so after two days I checked him out of the hospital and took him to my apartment and looked after him.”
“And so here we have the explanation for the pilfered supplies,” said Meral. “The return of the ‘Good Samaritan.’ ”
“It tore me up to see someone in that kind of shape. All the burns. All the cuts on his face. And then that god-awful cancer.”
“Oh, he told you about that?”
Wilson lifted his head.
“Oh, he told me all kinds of things. He knew he was dying and so he completely opened up to me. A lot. Lots of things about his life. But all lies, though, I guess. Isn’t that right?”
“I hope not. We’ll be going into all of that, Wilson. It’s the main thing that I’m after. But for now, though, just give me the basic narrative right up until the last time you saw him.”
“Oh, well, that’s pretty much it. What I told you. I took care of him until he was able to walk. Short walks down the street. Just for air. And then one day he wanted me to take him to a church.”
“Why was that?”
“Well, I asked him but he just shook his head and wouldn’t say. But he seemed so awfully anxious we should go there.”
“And you took him?”
“No, not right away. It was raining very heavily that morning. The streets were all flooded. He kept pacing back and forth, back and forth. Very agitated. Tense. He seemed filled with some urgency I couldn’t understand. Then by late afternoon the skies cleared and I took him to the church beside the Garden of Gethsemane.”
Meral nodded. “The Church of the Agony.”
“Yes.”
“And so who chose the church, you or he?”
“Oh, it was he.”
Here Meral leaned in with sharp interest.
“And once inside the church, what did he do? Did he meet someone?”
“Well . . .” Wilson paused and looked away. “You could say that.”
“Meaning what? Who did he meet?”
Wilson turned a soft look back to Meral.
“When we entered the church it was empty, there was no one else there, and at first he just stood in the back for a time, very quiet, very still, and at first looking scared, in a way, and wary, somehow squeezed and pulled tighter protectively into himself, smaller, diminished, as he stared straight ahead through those giant stone pillars at the Rock of Agony in front of the altar. It’s the bedrock where they say Christ prayed on the night before the crucifixion.”
“Yes, I know that. I’ve been to that church.”
“Oh, good! Well, I followed his stare and then I heard a soft choking sound, a smothered sob, and I turned and saw his face was contorted with grief. And then he lurched a step forward and began to move unsteadily and slowly toward the altar with his arms outstretched, and with those white, charred hands palms up, and when he’d arrived at the metal Gate of Thorns around the Rock, he fell across it and then to his knees in a convulsion of sobs that wracked his body, his head bowed down and with those hands still clutching the top of the gate. It was then I moved forward until I was standing directly over him, and I could hear him still quietly sobbing and repeating, ‘I’m so sorry for all that I’ve done! I’m so sorry!’ again and again.”
Here Wilson fell quiet.
“And then?”
“And then nothing. I waited for whatever it was to pass, and then I helped him to his feet and took him home. The next day he took his own life. He took the venom.”
“You’re sure of that, are you?”
“Of course. I just told you I helped him to do it.”
“Yes. But there are times when one can help overmuch.”
“What do you mean?”
“I meant nothing.”
“Oh, no, wait a minute! Hold it! You suspect I might have killed him?”
“I repeat: I meant nothing.”
“Some nothing!”
“Alright, practically nothing. I’ll be honest. Why would he kill himself, Wilson? If he did, he must surely have told you the reason. Why did he do it? To stop the lingering pain of the cancer?”
Wilson looked over at the church, where two parents were dealing with the sobbing and hysterical cries of their very young pigtailed daughter who was terrified of entering the dimly lit interior. She’d been told it was the place where Jesus had been killed and buried. Wilson stared at her.
“Yes,” he answered quietly. “To stop all the pain.”
The little girl stopped crying and her father had her hand.
She looked over her shoulder at Wilson.
Meral took a last sip of coffee, placed the cup upside down on its saucer, and then started to turn it around. The faint porcelain squeaks drew Wilson’s gaz
e back to Meral.
“Yes,” Meral mused, “they say that ever since the death of his wife he was depressed and tormented by guilt.”
“He lost his wife?”
“These things happen. And sometimes the pain is so great one cannot breathe.” Meral stopped turning the cup. His faraway stare and his fingertips continued to hold it in silence. He felt Wilson’s stare and looked up to see him studying him. What was that in his eyes, Meral wondered? Fondness? Compassion? Or was it something that had no earthly name?
Wilson folded his arms across his chest and looked down. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, the man that I saved that night . . . Well, you’re mistaken. He just couldn’t have been your Dimiter. He couldn’t.”
“You must face it that he was.”
Wilson looked up.
“Are you sure about his wife being dead? I mean, he talked to me about her as if she were alive. He showed me pictures of her.”
“Really.”
“Oh, yes!”
“Well, then delirium, perhaps. The morphine.”
Meral’s Walkie Talkie radio crackled. He unhooked it from his belt and pushed TALK. “Meral,” he said crisply. And then pushed another button to receive.
“Kfar Shaul needs to talk to you,” came a voice. It was the Kishla Station commandant, Zev.
“I need to go there?”
“No, call them. But do it this morning. Talk to Doctor Waleed.”
“Acknowledged.”
Both sides signed off. Meral glanced at his watch.
“I must be leaving now,” he said. “I have a very sick friend plus some difficult Albanians to deal with, as well as a lunatic asylum and the world. Look, don’t worry about those things from the hospital. There won’t be any trouble. However, you and I have many miles yet to go. Many miles. I’ve been charged with finding out what your patient was doing here. Think about it, please. Make notes. Incidentally, I’m intrigued by your suggestion that he seemed to have a spiritual side.” The cowcatcher leaped to Meral’s mind. “Although I doubt it very strongly,” he amended. “No, I suspect that something darker was afoot with the man. But then who knows? Did he speak of such things at any time? I mean beyond the Rock of Agony incident. I’m just curious.”
“Oh, he did. And a lot about life after death.”
Meral had raised his hands to clap twice for the waiter, but now he lowered them again to his lap. “Is that so?” he said. “Really?”
“Is there going to be a burial service for him? I’d like to come.”
“No, they’re sending him home.”
Wilson turned his head and mutely stared at the entrance to the church for a moment. Then he softly said, “He’s already there.”
Something stirred in Meral’s eyes.
“We need to set a schedule for when we can continue,” he said. “We’ve just barely begun. Only barely. You don’t mind? You’ll cooperate?”
Wilson’s brows furrowed up. He looked troubled.
“Does it have to be at Kishla Station?”
“Not at all. But not here. You have someplace in mind?”
“My apartment, maybe?”
“Possibly so. Though, are you working at the hostel this evening?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Then why not come to my room when you’ve finished with your work? Anytime after seven. Can you come?”
Wilson’s smile was pleased.
“That should work out just perfectly.”
Meral met his gaze.
That ambivalence again. What does he mean?
Meral clapped for the waiter and the bill.
As they waited the policeman picked up his coffee cup and held it out to Wilson. “Look at what the sludge has done when I turned the cup upside down and around. Some tell fortunes this way. They see pictures that the coffee dregs make inside the cup. Here, take it. Take a look and then tell me what you see.”
As Wilson took the cup and bent his head to look closely at its inner white sides, suddenly Meral lost his grip on both himself and on the edges of time so that Wilson seemed frozen in motion like a single frame of a silent film with all the sounds of the world blotted out as a pulsing unearthliness seemed to seep out of him, washing over Meral in undulating waves that at first felt icy and draining, but then left him feeling warm and refreshed. Even new.
“What do you see?” he asked Wilson at last, recovered.
Wilson looked up at him and smiled. “Good news.”
The ever-cheerful and rotund Father Mancini was at Meral’s table for lunch that day and was peeling an orange when Meral, who had been pensively quiet through the meal, looked up across the table and asked, “Could this possibly be a line in the scriptures, Father?”
“What?”
“ ‘They wanted to kill him but he passed through them?’ ”
Meral had learned to trust the cleric’s opinion ever since he had given him an answer to what then was a troubling question of faith:
“You believe that Christ died for our sins?”
“What kind of a question is that? Of course I do.”
“And yet Christ said the Father wants mercy, not sacrifice.”
“I see where you’re going. An old problem of the Father as some kind of implacable Aztec god demanding suffering and blood to propitiate his delicately tuned sense of justice. Is that it?”
“Yes, that’s it, Father. How can you believe that?”
“I don’t. At least not in the way that many people understand it. Christ died for our sins. Yes, I believe that. I do. But now I’ll ask you a question. If Christ had died of cancer or a nasty flu in his eighties and then risen from the dead, do you think there’s any chance that we’d have heard about it? No. His death had to be dramatic and public and that’s why I think he had to die on the cross: it was so we would know about the resurrection without which our faith would be nothing but incense and smoke.”
“Yes, it’s Luke,” Mancini answered right away. “When Christ preached in Nazareth, the crowd got so angry over something that he said that they dragged him to a cliff intending to throw him down to his death, but he somehow ‘passed through them,’ Luke says.”
Mancini bit into another slice of the orange.
Squirts of juice spattered onto his pudgy fingers.
“What did he say that so offended them, Father?”
“He said that at a time when there were so many lepers in the land the only person that Elisha chose to cure was not a Jew. It was Naaman.”
“Who?”
“Naaman. Naaman the Syrian.”
Meral stared without expression as a sense of unreality enfolded him for the second time that day, the world suddenly seeming vague and ghostly, an artificial construct in which anything could happen and nature and its laws were as stable as a whim.
“You look so odd,” the priest said to him. “Something wrong?”
After meeting with Wilson that morning, Meral had called Kfar Shaul and spoken with Doctor Waleed.
“That Syrian soldier who murdered that other crazy Christ at Hadassah? I know it isn’t your case but I’ve heard you’ve got an interest in the guy, so I thought you’d like to hear the good news.”
“Good news?”
“Well, good and bad. The bad is someone’s going to have to put him on trial. The good is that he’s totally sane. He doesn’t think he’s Christ anymore.”
The report had stunned Meral. There was no question at Hadassah that the soldier, when admitted, was incurably mad, an opinion confirmed by the staff at Kfar Shaul. But then something had radically changed. What was new? wondered Meral.
He knew of only one possible answer: Wilson. Wilson and his visits.
Meral took a last sip of coffee, turned the cup upside down and then placed it on its saucer with a tiny click. It made a thin porcelain sound as he gently started twisting it around. “No, no, nothing,” he answered the priest. His eyes were on the cup. “Just thinking.”
“Ab
out a case that you’re on?”
“I was just pondering a very strange coincidence.”
Mancini bent his head and bit squishily into another plump slice of orange. “There is no such thing,” he murmured.
“Sergeant Meral!”
The policeman looked up at Patience.
“Telephone, Sergeant! Very urgent!”
Meral hastily stood up and hurried off, in the process jarring the table so that the demitasse coffee cup fell over on its side.
Nothing good was to be seen in its dregs
CHAPTER 23
His wide brow furrowed with worry, Meral briskly walked into Mayo’s office and went straight to the sofa where the sleeping neurologist lay on his back beneath a red-and-white checked cotton comforter, his arms resting loosely above it. The policeman stared down at an ashen, gaunt face and could hear Mayo’s breathing, irregular and shallow.
A whisper from behind him.
“Meral!”
Meral turned to see Samia. She was sitting in the chair behind Mayo’s desk. She stood up and put a finger to her lips to signal silence and then pointed to the hall where, moments later, she and Meral stood in hushed conversation.
“So what’s wrong?” Meral asked her. “What has he got?”
“No one knows. Sure, his blood count’s not so great, but there’s no other indication of anything big. Still, he’s so tired all the time and he says feels weaker and weaker every day. And he’s been sleeping so much. God, I swear, it’s like he’s dying of a broken heart. Should I wake him? Meral, someone needs to tell him he should be in a bed in one of those great big rooms in Neuro. I keep telling him myself, but does he listen? No. He’s so stubborn. But maybe you he’ll listen to, I’m thinking. You’re coming back here tonight?”
“No, not tonight. I have a meeting.”
“Then tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow. I’ll just have to make the time. See you then.”
Meral took a step away, but then stopped and turned back.
“By the way, I’d like thank you very much.”
“For what?”
“For letting me know about Wilson and that person.”
“Huh? What person?” Samia looked blank, and then, “Oh!” she said. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, that guy he was living with. Right. Oh, well, don’t be thanking me, though.”
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