Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  23

  ‘I told you,’ Baaz said, drumming the middle fingers of his right hand against his temple, ‘it’s bloody crowded in there.’

  I was sitting on the edge of his bed now. He hadn’t startled when I woke him, but he was clearly embarrassed by the situation, wrapping his hair up, struggling to make eye contact.

  ‘Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have forgotten it. It’s like …’ He struggled for a simile. ‘A worm! Just like a worm. You know when you hear a bit of a song and it goes round in your head, sometimes for days? Just like that.’

  ‘The banknote, that number on that bill, is like a song?’

  ‘Correct. But not just that number. All numbers. It’s like they have a rhythm, a tune. Lots of people can remember songs. My auntie knows hundreds of them. Always singing. My mother, too. But my father is a numbers man. Just like me. He says numbers are like the hymns of the gurus. They have patterns. And patterns have meanings. And meanings have solutions.’

  ‘And solutions …?’ Realization began to dawn on me. Baaz had figured something out. I felt a surge of adrenaline in my guts.

  ‘Solutions have applications.’ He pulled the covers up higher over his chest. ‘But only,’ he continued, ‘if you know what the problem is.’

  ‘OK.’ I spoke calmly – as much to coax him as to relax myself. It felt as if I was teetering on a cliff edge, about to find out whether or not I could fly. ‘So … what’s the answer?’

  He looked at me blankly. ‘What answer?’

  I tried again, slowly, thinking how best to frame a question I had no idea how to formulate.

  ‘What does it mean, Baaz? The number on the banknote. What does it … signify?’

  ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.’

  My shoulders sagged. He was exasperating. And I was a fool for imagining his night-time scrawling amounted to anything more than a distraction. There was no silver bullet. All he’d done was to buy himself more time. I breathed out hard and clenched my jaw, trying my best to smile through my disappointment.

  ‘So, you came here why, exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Because your friend told me to.’

  ‘My friend? What friend?’

  ‘The friend you spoke to from my flat in Paris.’

  ‘What, Ezra? He called back?’

  ‘No, I called him.’

  ‘You called Ezra?’ He was nothing if not unpredictable. ‘Why did you do that, Baaz?’

  I tried and failed to imagine how that conversation had played out. Ezra’s promised ‘surprise’ had suddenly been realized.

  ‘Because I needed to talk to you and you don’t have a phone.’

  ‘Right. And you needed to tell me what? That you really like that number, but you don’t know what it means?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And you told that to Ezra and he spoke to, uh, Talia, and that’s how you got here?’

  ‘No, I got here on easyJet.’ I stood up and slid open his wardrobe door. He looked at me warily. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Raiding your minibar.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘A drink.’

  I inspected the cabinet. Chivas Regal. Shit. I emptied one of the miniatures into his empty water glass, added some Evian from the fridge and swilled it across my teeth. It would do. I poured in a second miniature and pulled from my jeans the packet of Marlboros and book of matches that the Shabak agent had given me and shook out a smoke.

  ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘We’re going outside.’

  I needed some air. And besides, I thought, most likely the Talias can hear every word we say in here.

  ‘OK then, clever clogs. If you don’t know what the number means, why bust a gut to find me? I need clear, simple answers. No “rhythms”. No “hymns of the gurus”. Just facts, all right?’

  Three o’clock on a Wednesday morning and Tel Aviv was finally asleep. We were back on the terrace, sitting this time at a low table by the pool. The underwater lights had been switched off and the surface was inky black. It felt like we were at the edge of an abyss. Baaz had wound his hair up in a simple turban and looked more relaxed. I shifted on the cushions and felt the SIG dig into my spine. He’d come back unscathed from a journey he didn’t even know he’d undertaken. Perhaps we’d both been saved. I tore a match out of the booklet and struck it and lit a cigarette. Baaz moved away from me slightly and cleared his throat. I exhaled and waited.

  ‘The serial number,’ he said, ‘is 73939133. That’s obviously a prime number.’

  ‘Obviously,’ I nodded. I didn’t know where he was going, but I was on safe ground. Prime numbers can be divided only by one and themselves. I’d at least learned that much in school.

  ‘But it’s a special prime number,’ he continued. ‘Because it’s the largest right truncatable prime in base ten.’

  ‘Right.’ I dragged hard on the Marlboro. It had taken him less than thirty seconds to lose me. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means,’ he said, ‘that if you remove the right-hand integer’ – I cocked my head – ‘uh, number, it’s still prime. So 7393913, 739391, 73939, and so on, they’re all prime numbers, all the way down to 7. It’s really interesting because there are only eighty-three right truncatable primes in base ten, anyway.’

  ‘Fascinating.’ I blew a cloud of smoke up into the night sky. ‘Tell me,’ I asked, swallowing my pride, ‘are we at the “patterns” stage here, or the “solutions” stage? Because I can tell you how many mils to correct a scoped target at a thousand metres uphill in a stiff breeze. But I’m not exactly sure I could tell you what “base ten” is.’

  ‘Base ten is the …’

  ‘What,’ I interrupted, losing my patience, ‘does it mean, Baaz? Why is the fact the number is a “right” whatever important?’ I sucked on the cigarette. ‘Man, you have risked a lot to be here. More than you know. Much more. So please, please tell me – for my sake as well as yours – that there is more to this than a quirk of the Federal Reserve’s printing process.’

  ‘That’s it!’ He stood up, his voice rising with excitement. ‘You guessed! I knew you would!’

  ‘Jesus Christ! Would you ever sit down?’ I looked around. Except for the night lights in the bar the joint was dead. He sat again, perched on the edge of his seat. ‘Guessed what?’ He was so excited now that his fingers drummed a constant tattoo in front of him.

  ‘The Fed. That’s it. Look. Look at the bill.’

  ‘Sure. I will. Later, though.’

  ‘No, now,’ he urged. ‘Let’s look at it now. I can show you.’

  With misgivings, I stubbed out the cigarette and removed the note from my pocket. Possession of the bill was, it seemed, both a death sentence and stay of execution. If we were being watched, the location of the note would be beyond doubt. But with the high wall of the hotel behind us and the sea in front we weren’t directly overlooked and there was no obvious position for a snooper, or a sniper, to take up. I unfolded the bill and we sat closer. I struck another match and held it over the ragged slip of printed paper.

  ‘OK, what am I looking at?’

  ‘Here,’ Baaz pointed. ‘These two letters, before the serial number: LL. The first L is the series of the banknote. See, here at the bottom, 2009A.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And the second L is the Federal Reserve Bank that printed it. There are loads of them, Dallas, New York, Virginia. L stands for San Francisco. You can see here, too, under the serial number, it says L12. So it’s definitely the San Francisco Fed that printed it.’ I dropped the match before it burned my fingers and the note dissolved back into the shadows. ‘Except they didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what?’

  ‘Print it.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ It was hard to make out his expression, but the glow of the night lights in the bar caught in the corners of his eyes. ‘How could you know that? Actually,’ I lit another cigarette, ‘how do you know any of this?’

&nbs
p; ‘I asked a good friend of mine.’

  ‘I see. And who is your friend?’

  ‘Professor Google. He’s, like, totally amazing. You can ask him anything.’

  ‘Are you fucking with me?’

  ‘No! You can check it yourself, Max, seriously. Did you see the other letter, after the serial number? It’s a J. That series of bill was actually printed in 2013. Except that bill wasn’t, couldn’t have been, because the LL J notes end at LL 44800000.’

  ‘So, the numbers and the letters don’t match up?’

  He peered at me with a look that mingled pity with incredulity. ‘Correct.’

  ‘And that, combined with the fact that the serial number is a right …’ I searched for the term I’d already forgotten, ‘prime – this special number – made you get on a flight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Ezra made me get on the flight. He wanted me to come and find you.’

  ‘Ezra told you to find me?’ It was a lot to take in. ‘And why did he do that?’

  ‘Because he has a message for you that I don’t think he wants Talia or her friends to know about. He said I should tell only you.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Should I tell you now?’

  ‘Yes, Baaz.’ My own voice was rising, too. I took a deep breath. ‘You should tell me now.’

  ‘OK.’ He cleared his throat, every inch the messenger arrived from Marathon with news of victory. ‘Ezra told me to tell you that you must visit Moshe Mendel Katz in Mea She’arim.’ He paused again, and then added, less formally: ‘About the banknote, I mean. Ezra says he knows a lot about money.’

  I pinched the sleep out of my eyes with my left thumb and index finger.

  ‘And why didn’t you mention this when you arrived?’

  ‘I wanted to! But you started up with all your big man bakwaas about my auntie’s head in a box. And I haven’t even got a bloody sister! You think I’m a stupid kid, right? Well … fine. That’s bloody fine. But I’m here and I did what I was asked and …’ Tears welled up in the catchlights of his eyes. ‘And I just wanted to help.’ I put my hand on his arm and squeezed it lightly.

  ‘OK, partner,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  And I was.

  24

  ‘Good luck, brother.’

  The taxi driver gave me a broad grin as we climbed out of the white cab. We might as well have been dropped into another world. Built just outside the walls of the Old City, Mea She’arim was one of the oldest Jewish neighbourhoods in Jerusalem. Getting there had been easy: a smooth hour-and-a-half drive south-east down Highway 1. It wasn’t that hard to navigate the small, stone streets; but it was almost impossible for an outsider to understand the complexities of what it meant to live there. Sometimes maps hide more than they reveal.

  Almost the entire quarter was populated by strictly Orthodox Haredi Jews. Men wearing wide-brimmed black fedoras and long black silk coats hurried about their business. Women sporting wigs and prim skirts bustled about beside them. The entrance to the district was presided over by a sign printed in red and black block capitals warning ‘WOMEN AND GIRLS’ visiting the enclave to cover up:

  PLEASE DO NOT PASS

  THROUGH OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN

  IMMODEST CLOTHES

  Baaz and I looked each other over.

  ‘It says, No trousers,’ he pointed out nervously.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured him. ‘That’s only for women. Besides, you look gorgeous.’

  ‘I feel like a bloody Martian. Take me to your leader, huna.’

  He was right. We looked entirely out of place. Blending in simply wasn’t an option – though Baaz was making things worse by spinning three-sixty while taking in the strangeness of it all.

  ‘This is totally crazy. Usually it’s just me wearing the funny hat. But check out these guys.’ He stared unceremoniously at the passers-by. But they ignored him, us, entirely.

  ‘If only we were in East Jerusalem,’ I muttered to myself. My Arabic was good; my Hebrew almost non-existent. I grabbed Baaz’s arm and pointed him due west. ‘We need to keep moving. Let’s get this over with, then you can be on your way.’ Although where he’d be on his way to was unclear. Even he must have suspected that going back to his flat in Paris was becoming increasingly unfeasible. ‘Remind me,’ I asked, ‘what are we looking for?’

  ‘It’s on Hevrat Mishnayot,’ he said. ‘Like I said. Between Hevrat Shas Street and Ein Ya’akov Street. That’s not how Ezra pronounced it, though. He also said it was a side street.’

  ‘Yeah, I know where it is, but what’s on Hevrat Mishnayot? Are we looking for a house, a business, a shop, or what?’

  A few hours before, I’d been a fraction of a millimetre away from killing him. Now he was leading me across a city he’d never set foot in – a one-eyed king in a foreign land with a single blind subject. I had no choice but to go with it, with him, if I wanted to do anything other than stare out to sea at the hotel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Anticipating my exasperation, he added quickly: ‘He didn’t say, OK? It’s on a junction. With another street. Through the traitor’s gate.’

  ‘The what?’

  He shrugged. ‘That’s what he said. “Through the traitor’s gate.”’

  I stopped walking and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Is there anything else?’ He looked at me blankly. ‘Did Ezra say anything else to you? Anything at all?’

  He shook his head.

  We kept walking.

  Whatever kind of ‘traitor’ we were going to meet, the fact that Ezra hadn’t wanted the Israeli authorities – at least not the internal security team that had been put on our case – to know he’d introduced us would be significant. Either his source wasn’t legit as far as the Shabak was concerned, or he was trying to protect Talia from blowback.

  My reading of the meeting – interrogation, frankly – I’d had in Rachel’s office was that I’d been given carte blanche to do whatever I needed in my search for their missing scientist. They knew I was there for her, and they’d done nothing to stop me. We were on the same side in that respect, after all – and no one gives a pistol to an assassin unless they’re prepared for him to use it.

  There would be limits, though. Step off the path and the consequences would be unpredictable. Contractor, consultant, mercenary: whatever Ezra called himself, I’d never known whom he really worked for. My best guess was military intelligence and the Mossad. And despite his faith in Talia, if the Mossad and the Shabak got on as well with each other in the Holy Land as MI6 and MI5 did back in Blighty, then Baaz and I would end up being the filling for a shit sandwich faster than you could say ‘secret military tribunal’ should we piss anyone off in Israel, apart from each other.

  We headed north-west up Mea She’arim Street amid a stream of traditionally dressed Orthodox, past barred shopfronts and badly parked delivery trucks. The apartment buildings above were shabby, unloved. Everywhere walls fluttered with fly-posters printed in Hebrew, roofs bristled with scaffolding. Most of the buildings were either being renovated or looked like they ought to be. Wrought iron balconies peeling ancient paint overhung the street; many were sealed off with plastic sheeting from the rooms inside. It was a couple of degrees cooler than the coast, and bright white candyfloss clouds piled up on the horizon. I was glad of the jacket Baaz had bought me in France.

  I was glad, too, that the road signs were in English and Arabic as well as in Hebrew. Even though I’d memorized our route from a satellite image of the quarter that Baaz and I had recced that morning using a VPN on his laptop, the visual check of the street names was reassuring. We turned left on to HaRav Shmuel Salant Street and then, at a huge and what looked like newly built synagogue on the corner, wheeled off north again up an alley that disgorged us both at the sharp elbow of a junction thirty metres off the main drag. We kept walking. I kept my head down and told Baaz to do the same. A hundred metres or so further on I swung us left down Hevrat Mishnayot.

 
It was an unkempt backstreet, lined with parked cars and graffiti-stained walls, and a dozen or so metal doors leading into buildings and passageways. Dead ahead a huge stone building loomed up – two massive storeys high and fifteen metres wide, with stone arches supporting a tier of impressive, ornate windows. It dwarfed the low-rise stone and stucco boxes that opened up into a sort of plaza in front of it. On either side the road divided. Baaz and I looked around, perplexed. If this was Ezra’s idea of a joke, I struggled to see the funny side.

  ‘And he didn’t say anything else?’ Baaz shook his head. ‘Sure? I mean, really sure?’

  The whole ‘traitor’s gate’ revelation had come completely out of the blue. I shuddered to think what else Baaz had forgotten to mention. He rolled his eyes at me as if I was being unreasonable by asking again.

  ‘Sure.’

  I lit a cigarette and looked around.

  The main entrance to the large building was framed by an archway three times my height. Above it, the only sign indicating what the purpose of the building might be had been obliterated with black spray paint. It looked like a synagogue, maybe, or a religious school – though it could just as easily have been an apartment block. Two young men in smart black hats chatted on the corner opposite. Long skeins of white wool dangled from their shirts, hanging down their thighs. Laundry strung out on the balconies above rippled in the breeze.

  But of anything that could have been a traitor’s gate, there was no obvious indication.

  ‘These jokers love their spray paint. Shame you can’t speak Hebrew,’ Baaz said. ‘All this graffiti might mean something.’

  He had a point. I tried and failed to read the slogans daubed on practically every flat surface and marvelled at how anyone had managed to get up high enough to deface the upper storey.

  ‘Like, what does that mean?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You see there? On the far left-hand wall, on the other side of the main entrance.’

  I followed Baaz’s gaze. Stencilled on to the yellow stone wall between a metal gate and a wooden door were the black outlines of an oblong divided into three horizontal stripes. On the left-hand side a triangle cut into the middle stripe. There was no colour, no tag line, no explanation – but the meaning was clear.