Damascus Gate (59 page)

On another grid of the chart was a word in Greek:
Sabazios.

"It's a chart of the Haram wall," Obermann said. "It probably marks the latest excavations."

"What about the
kaddosh?
"

"A holy site. Maybe someone's idea of where the Holy of Holies was."

"And Sabazios?"

"Sabazios is a Phrygian god. I can't remember his particulars."

"Think this is about planting a bomb?" Lucas asked.

"That," Obermann said, "would be a conceivable hypothesis. I gather from our telephone conversation that you've had some run-ins with our Linda."

"Yes indeed. I think she's involved."

"Frankly, I think you're right. She's conversion prone and over the top. When she goes, she goes."

"I spent a little time wondering what really happened to her old man," Lucas said. "If I were you, I'd wonder too."

Obermann sighed. "I thought Janusz Zimmer would occupy her questing nature. But maybe she's broken with him. Or maybe there's something about Janusz we didn't know. Anyway, she's aware of our book."

"Aware of it? She wants to fucking write it for us." He told Obermann about some of his adventures in the Strip and at Kfar Gottlieb.

Obermann picked up one of the diagrams Lucas had brought him and examined it further.

"Sure," he said. "This could be a blueprint for a bomb. Where did you get it?"

"Up in the Golan. In one of our cars."

"This is the kind of survey they did at the House of the Galilean," Obermann said. "It must have come from Linda."

"I think they're setting up De Kuff and company," Lucas said. "And they're planning to use us to do it. We're supposed to buy the package. And then sell it."

"The second coming of Willie Ludlum."

"Exactly. Well, I'm going up to the House of G. Maybe you'd like to inform the police? On the theory that they don't know about it?"

"I have a few friends," Obermann said. "I'll inquire."

"And keep trying Sonia's, will you? I think she's got Raziel and the old man over in her apartment and they may not be picking up. Lying low. But she'll need to check in before long."

"Right," said Obermann.

Before calling at the House of the Galilean, Lucas made a quick trip to his apartment to change clothes. He called Sonia's place again but reached only the machine. Then he turned on the bathtub tap and called Sylvia Chin.

"I hate to talk business on your private line," he told Sylvia when she answered. "But for your information—and the information of whoever's tapping your phone—someone's about to do a Willie Ludlum on the Haram. Very soon. Hear anything more about it?"

"I can't say what we've heard, Chris. But I can tell you this. Your friend Nuala's dead. So's her lover, Rashid. They were strung up in a ruined convent in Cyprus. According to the Cypriots, whoever killed them used rope from the days of British rule. Official imperial rope. An execution. What are you going to do?"

"Take a bath," he told her.

When he got to the bathroom, his legs went weak. He stood stunned, holding his hand under the running water, undone by the necessity of judging its temperature, incapable of that much measured consideration.

Nuala had required consuming passions. In Jerusalem she had found one and, sure enough, it had consumed her. He remembered Rashid talking about djinn. And Ericksen haunted by the force he claimed would kill him. What he was experiencing, he thought, might be described as fear of the Lord. This emotion, it was written, was the beginning of wisdom. Of course it had been rash of him to refer to the Almighty as an invisible winged paperweight. He wondered if wisdom might not be, at long last, presenting itself to him.

L
UCAS'S NEXT VISIT
was to the House of the Galilean. It seemed no longer to be associated with the cause or personality of any one specific Galilean; moreover, it was closed. Its plaques and signs were gone. Palestinian workmen were applying a conditioning coat of wash to the walls.

"House of the Galilean?" Lucas asked one of them.

The Arabs only stared at him, curious but afraid. He drove back to his downtown apartment and played the message machine. Whose hearty, authoritative tones should he hear from the device but those of his old friend Basil Thomas, the purveyor of "scheduled information." Thomas had already troubled himself to drop by Fink's once, in vain. He would be there again tonight, he declared. Lucas decided to meet him.

As the roseate Jerusalem evening came on, Lucas made for cocktail hour at Fink's. There indeed was Basil Thomas, looking every bit the genius of the receding century in his leather policeman's coat. When he saw Lucas, his features assumed a well-informed, let's-see-you-walk-away-from-this-one expression.

"This is hot," Thomas said. "Schedule A. Most secret."

Lucas bought them both a beer.

"You're going to see disturbances all over the city."

"Why's that?"

"Oh," said Thomas, "some anniversary. But don't leave them out of your account. And be prepared."

"Something about the Haram?"

"We'll meet tomorrow," Thomas said, "you and I. We'll meet here and I'll have a handout for you that you will value. Few in this city will be more informed than you."

Lucas at once realized that he had to go back across town to check his sources there. Not that his other sources were extensive. There was Lestrade, if that Christian soul was still in town. He had to remind himself, with a mixture of frustration and dread, that Pastor Ericksen was dead, like Nuala and Rashid. Thomas did not seem to be bluffing. He had been chosen as a conduit.

"This wouldn't involve an attack on the Haram, would it?"

"Mister," said Thomas, "I don't even know what I'm going to tell you. If I did, I wouldn't, if you see what I mean. It would be rash and there wouldn't be a percentage in it."

"Then what do you mean about disturbances?"

"A free prognostication," Thomas said. "Exchange for the drink."

"OK," Lucas said. "I'll be here if you will."

 

The rush of dusk was in progress at the Damascus Gate. The sky was fading; a promiscuous lingering light shone from a variety of sources, illuminating the caves and stalls of the city. He felt closely watched. Beside the moneychangers' stalls, the man selling
Al-Jihar
was in some agitation; he had a headline to chant, an Extra. He seemed ambivalent about selling the paper to Lucas. At first he said he had no English version. Eventually, it turned out, there was one. The edition looked like a throwaway, with day-old news inside. But the front page was covered with sixty-point type, green on white, and it read, "Defense of the Holy Places in the Name of God."

The words caused Lucas further theological anxiety, of the sort that could be construed as virtue. Fear of the Lord. Appropriately, it was time for prayer. Amplified up and down the darkening streets, the muezzins sounded genuinely angry.

On Tariq al-Wad, Charles Habib was closing up his café. It had been months since the Caravan had sold its last Heineken to a disoriented tourist. Charles seemed astonished to see Lucas, but for a moment Lucas thought his old acquaintance might pretend not to know him. Instead, Charles beckoned him inside and closed the shutters. They went to the rear section, which Charles maintained as his city apartment.

Charles owned a number of apartments in Jerusalem and in Nazareth. They were always occupied by groups of his relatives, who seemed to live on some updated, urbanized and intercontinental nomadic model, appearing at intervals from Austin, Edinburgh, Guadalajara. In the room farthest from the street a group of elderly Palestinian women in flowery housecoats were gathered by a television set. There was a huge unconnected bathtub on the floor in front of them, and as they watched, they were putting blankets in the water to soak. Lucas noticed that the windows were all shuttered and reinforced with stacks of wooden crates.

Among the women helping to saturate the blankets sat a pretty teenage girl in a denim jacket and a Boston Red Sox cap, reversed. When she saw Lucas come in, she separated herself from the older ladies and, over their protests, came to sit with Charles and Lucas. Charles did not discourage her.

"I thought you went back home," Charles said to Lucas. "Do you know what's going on?"

"I was hoping to ask you that," Lucas said.

Absent-mindedly, Charles introduced the teenager. "This is my niece, Bernadette Habib," he said. "My brother Mike's daughter, studying at Beir Zeit. She's from America."

"Watertown, Mass.," said Bernadette. She shook Lucas's hand in Watertown fashion.

"What do you think, Bernadette?" Lucas asked her. "What do they say at Beir Zeit?"

Recently, at Beir Zeit, the secular PLO ticket had defeated the Muslim fundamentalists in the university's student elections. It had been considered a good thing.

"The Islamic kids say the Israelis are going to trash the Haram," Bernadette said. She wore tiny earrings and a cross around her neck like Madonna's, but of course their significance would be very different in Jerusalem than in South Beach. "Did you hear the sermons all day?"

"Mr. Lucas doesn't know Arabic," Charles explained.

"Really," the young woman observed unsympathetically. "Not many Americans do."

"Did the sermons get all this started?" Lucas asked.

"
Haredim
came to the Damascus Gate in the morning. They overturned stalls. They beat people, even Europeans. They said they would destroy the Muslim holy places."

"It sounds like provocation," Lucas said, thinking the militants might want the confusion of a Palestinian riot to cover the action. Increasingly, outside, one seemed to be taking shape.

"What is America going to do?" Charles asked Lucas. "The Haram is going to be taken over. Everyone says so. It will be war."

"I don't know," Lucas said. "They don't know any more at the U.S. consulate than we do."

"No one believes that," Bernadette said.

"No one," Charles added.

"How about you?" Lucas asked Bernadette.

She shrugged. "Maybe the government thinks one thing and the CIA thinks another."

The wonders of a junior year abroad. A sophisticate, Lucas thought. "We still keep the embassy in Tel Aviv," he said. "That means something."

Bernadette gave him a look of polite indulgence. She was regularly a student at Holy Cross in Worcester, doing her year at Beir Zeit, during the periods when it was open. Lucas had discovered that there were hundreds of Arab-American students in the country, a mirror image of the young Jewish students who came.

"At school—at school here—we read, like, Noam Chomsky?" Bernadette told Lucas. "Ever heard of him?"

"Of course," Lucas said.

"Really? Because most Americans haven't. We read his book
On Power and Ideology.
It's all stuff like you never hear."

"Don't they read Chomsky at Holy Cross?"

"In poly sci, I think. About Latin America. I didn't even know he wrote about the Middle East."

"Ever talk to any of the Jewish kids over here?" Lucas asked her. He gestured, as people did, toward the other side of town.

"Sometimes. But it's all different here," she said. "Everybody's scared. A lot of their kids carry guns. They think we're bombers. Like, we're American, they're American—but nobody's American here."

It occurred to Lucas that, if it could be managed, a year spent in the Third World as a non-American might be a salutary addition to every young American's education. It might be coupled, as absurd counterpoint, with a compulsory reading of M. Bourguignon's great work of travel, sociology and armadillo observation,
L'Amérique.

"You should get to another part of the city," Charles said. To Lucas, Charles always pronounced the phrase "another part of the city" with distaste. By it he meant the Jewish part. "Otherwise, I can put you up on the floor."

"Do you really think there'll be a riot?" Lucas asked.

Charles gestured toward the tub full of blankets.

"Some people think," Bernadette told Lucas, "that they'll come down here and kill us all."

"The old women," Charles said, "they say it'll be like 1948."

"Over there," Lucas said, gesturing toward the western city, "they think you'll come and kill them."

"Sleep with your passport," Charles told his niece. "Everyone sleeps with their passport."

"Sleep?" Bernadette asked. "You've got to be kidding."

Charles walked Lucas to the street and let him out through the metal shutters.

At that point, Lucas reasoned that the most significant man in the city, the one person to see regarding scheduled information, would be the great digger himself, Gordon Lestrade.

Going farther into the Muslim Quarter, he began to hear chanting. He passed groups of young men gathered at the ends of the streets leading to the gates and walls of the Haram. There were a few Palestinian flags in sight, but most of the young men Lucas passed had rallied to large green banners. Across some of them were emblazoned the lettering of the Shahada: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.

The chanting increased as Lucas walked. Laughing children collided with him, seemingly on purpose. No one appeared to be going home to bed; the streets were crowded but the shops were closed. There were lights everywhere, but none were the sort that provided comforting illumination. The beams of cheap flashlights hovered nervously; there were camp lanterns, detached car headlights, colored spotlights, strings of lights hanging from the mosques.

Nowhere was an Israeli patrol in evidence. Lucas found himself drawing dire and threatening looks. Little missiles struck him as he walked, mostly from behind, but a few from the darkness ahead. There was nothing hurtful or sharp, only an intermittent rain of small, dirty things, invisible insults. It was like Gaza again, except that this was Jerusalem.

Through it all, the amplified calls—desperate, imploring, enraged—kept sounding from the holy places. Lucas began to feel that the moment he had so long imagined was at hand, the time of hard truth when he would have to decide whether to run, and which way. Like Herod, in his heart he hardly knew.