Damascus Gate (60 page)

Arriving at the Austrian hospice, where the Via Dolorosa entered the Muslim Quarter, he heard, to his uneasy satisfaction, the shimmer of Richard Strauss drifting down into the disorderly streets from Gordon Lestrade's rooftop apartment next door.

The main entrance of the hospice had been barred, along with the ground- and first-floor shutters. But the wooden door of the alley that led up to Dr. Lestrade's quarters, though locked, did not yet have its shutters in place. Lucas began to pound on it, trying for a rhythm at once emphatic and discreet. The streets were getting out of hand. Bands of martyrs in search of dispatch raced past, shouting at the top of their lungs.

After a moment—out of prearrangement, curiosity or rashness—a Palestinian porter opened the door.

"You are for Dr. Lestrade?"

"That's right," Lucas said.

"You must hurry," said the porter, stepping aside.

Up in the apartment, Lestrade was rushing about, in a mood more evocative of
Till Eulenspiegel
than
Rosenkavalier,
which was in the player.

"My fucking plants!" he cried. "Can I count on the hospice to water my plants?"

"Sure," Lucas said. "They're Austrians."

Lestrade turned, startled. Whoever he had been expecting, it was not Lucas.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Well, I'm covering the story."

"Are you bloody mad or what? By the way, get out of my house."

Dr. Lestrade's possessions, of which there were a great many, had been gathered in the living room for transporting. He had suitcases and ancient steamer trunks that looked as though they should read "Port Out, Starboard Home." There were many wooden boxes of books and some cardboard ones.

"I can't believe you're leaving Jerusalem," Lucas said. "I thought it was home."

"It was," Lestrade said. He looked at Lucas in utter frustration. "Listen, old man, would you mind leaving? I'm in a terrible rush. And I'm not in the mood to answer questions."

"Sorry," Lucas said. "But what happened to the House of the Galilean?"

"Closed, gone, kaput. I arrive for work in the morning only to be told by this bloody native that I'm redundant. They've got my files, my work. I wasn't allowed to make copies on the job."

"You don't get to keep copies?"

"Oh, I've got a few copies, all right. And I'm not the only one. But the rights to publish belong to the House of the Galilean. I mean, they were my publishers."

"Why'd you sign the rights away?"

"Christ, man! They have this huge publishing house! A television channel! They were going to make it a bestseller over there. And worldwide! 'Secrets of the Temple' thing. Millions of videos."

"Well, you can sue in America."

"Which means I'll have to go there," Lestrade said bitterly.

"It's not so bad now," Lucas assured him. "Thousands of English people live in New York and they hardly ever see an American."

"Anyhow," Lestrade said, his outrage gathering, "none of your business. I'm off."

"Where to?"

"Look, Lucas," Lestrade said, "do you mind?"

The commotion in the streets seemed to be increasing in volume. Lestrade went to his rooftop garden and looked over the side of the building.

"Shit," he said. His spite and impatience gave the word a special, nasty excrementality. "Hello, goodbye, fuck off and Bob's your uncle. That's what I got from the bastards."

"You did better than Ericksen."

"What are you talking about?" said Lestrade with a sneer. "Bloody Ericksen's dead."

There was a knock on the door leading to Lestrade's quarters and the Palestinian attendant appeared, looking unhappy and frightened. He spoke to Lestrade in Arabic, whereupon the professor stepped aside to let two men pass into his apartment. Lucas saw that one of them was the hawk-faced Ian Fotheringill.

"Hullo," said Fotheringill to Lucas.

"Hello," said Lucas. The little greetings covered their mutual distress at meeting. Lestrade seemed disturbed that the two knew each other. Increasingly, everything seemed to disturb him, which was understandable, given the sounds from the street below.

The man with Fotheringill was broad-chested and mustachioed, a Middle Easterner of indistinct nationality. Nothing about his features or his dress bespoke his loyalties. Looking at him, Lucas wondered if he had not seen him before, in the Gaza Strip.

"Bloody lot here," Fotheringill said, looking indifferently at Dr. Lestrade's luggage. "Never get all that down."

"Never get it down?" Lestrade retorted in outrage. "Never get it down? Never get my luggage down? I should bloody think you would."

But Fotheringill was staring at Lucas.

"I've got to ask," he said. "It's tormenting me. Ever sort out that poem about
rillons
and
rillettes?
"

"Oh," Lucas said, "right." He scratched his chin. "
'Rillettes, Rillons
,'" he recited, "
'Rillons, Rillettes...
The dishes are the same, and yet...'"

But it was still gone. He had forgotten it.

A
FEW HOURS
after Pinchas Obermann finished his rounds at Shaul Petak, he succeeded in reaching Sonia at her apartment in Rehavia. She sounded as if he had wakened her from sleep.

"Just stay there," he told her. "I'm coming over." He brought with him the curious diagram Lucas had picked up in the Golan. When Sonia saw it, she matched it with one of the sheets she had found in the van.

"It's a diagram of the chambers of the Temple Mount," Obermann told her. "There's probably a bomb in place now."

Raziel was sprawled on her sofa. He tried to rise but could only pull himself upright against the arm of the sofa.

"Where's Chris?" Sonia asked Obermann.

"He went looking for Dr. Lestrade at the House of the Galilean. He's trying to find out where the bomb is."

"Linda!" Sonia exclaimed.

"Yes," said Obermann, "we think so."

"Who's Sabazios?" she asked him.

"Sabazios Sabaoth. Yet another syncretic god. Like the one you and De Kuff and your friends were creating. A golden calf, if you like."

"Might someone put a bomb on him?"

"Someone might. Where's your perfect master?"

Sonia indicated a bedroom. Obermann went in to see the old man.

"Are you Moshiach, Mr. De Kuff?" he asked.

"I never thought so," De Kuff said. "Raziel saw my
tikkun.
I thought what must be, must be."

"Yes or no, please. Moshiach? Not Moshiach?"

"If I am not," De Kuff said, "if I cannot succeed in discharging my responsibilities, I'm going to die."

"Do you think you're ill?"

"The souls in me are suffering. They force their way through my body. They cry and scream. They demand that I take my place among them."

"Who are the souls?"

"Yeshu, who was the Christ. Sabbatai of Smyrna. Elisha ben Abouya. There are others."

"Do you see them?"

"I hear them. Above all, I feel them."

"And when they force their way through your body, does it hurt?"

"Yes," De Kuff said. "Great pain."

He made a note of the last time De Kuff had taken lithium: it had been six months.

"Don't you think Ralph Melker—Raziel—abused your confidence?"

"He's young for the responsibilities thrust on him."

"You're very concerned with responsibilities," Obermann observed.

"There is no more to life," said De Kuff.

Obermann decided to put the old man in the hospital until some more permanent provision could be made for him.

"I'm going to give you something to help you sleep longer. You're still very fatigued. I'll get you some liquid and then I'll give you a sleeping pill."

When he went out to get some juice from the refrigerator, he found Sonia on the phone. Her Danish friend Inge Rikker, the NGOnik, was calling from Tel Aviv to tell her about the deaths of Nuala and Rashid. Obermann poured out some canned tomato juice while Sonia told him about the executions.

"They must blame them for a death," Obermann declared.

"They might as well blame me," Sonia said.

"They will have enough blame left for you," he told her.

In the bedroom, De Kuff took his pill with the juice and soon passed into sleep.

Dr. Obermann went into the living room and had a look at Raziel.

"His pupils are dilated. He's on heroin."

"He's been back on it for a week or so," Sonia said.

"Maybe longer than that, eh?"

"No," she said. "Only the last week."

"You knew?"

"No. Not until yesterday."

"Excuse me for asking, but," Obermann said, "you attended his every word. He brought you messages from the gardens of the cherubim. You're a New York musician—and you couldn't tell he was on
shmeck?
"

"I wasn't looking for it, Doc," she said.

"No," Obermann said. "You were looking for magic."

"That's about it."

"The new moon you were looking for."

"The new moon," Sonia said. "That was it."

Obermann called Shaul Petak to make arrangements for De Kuff's admission and quickly prepared to leave.

"If there is a bomb and it does go off, better stay inside." When Sonia failed to answer, he looked at her and shook his head. "But of course that's not what you'd do, is it? You'd be out on the streets. I'm talking to the wrong person."

"Is the Rev all right?" she asked.

"De Kuff? I think he's physically all right. I want him in the hospital. If you people are quite finished with him."

 

"Don't nod out on me," Sonia said to Raziel after Obermann had left. "I thought this was a struggle without weapons."

He had found his works and done up again. He told her that a red heifer without blemish had been born in Galilee—the Temple sacrifice required for the purification ritual.

"I don't know anything about the bomb," he said. "I don't know where it is. I didn't care."

"Why not, Raziel? How could you not care?"

Because, it turned out, he had not believed the bomb would go off, not really. Not literally. A power would prevent it.

At the same time, creation was wrought in smash. Only in chaos could the balance be restored. An explosion that mirrored the accident at the beginning of time.

So he had taken it upon himself to surrender the city to the agency of destruction, to the prevailing of Din, the Left Hand. He had trusted in the transubstantiation of all form, in all things returning to the substance of the first Adam.

There would be no death, only change, a liberation from appearances through the power of love. All categories would be obviated. Human nature and the world that had formed around it would lose all but their divine aspect. Without knowing it, the destroyers of matter would transform matter into light and liberate all things from their fallen imperfection. All the unheard music would be heard, everything holy, everyone redeemed. It would end as it had begun, in praise and rapture.

"Rapture," Sonia said. "That sounds like those fundamentalist missionaries."

"A catastrophe," he answered. "A catastrophe without victims."

A struggle without weapons, a sacrifice without blood, a storm without rain. The vision had endured for centuries. It was promised. It was foretold.

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes," Raziel said. "There shall be an end of death, and to mourning and crying and pain, for the old order will have passed away. Behold, I am making all things new. All things new," he said. "Tell me you never heard that before. Tell me the heart that believed this was not a Jewish heart!"

"I wouldn't know, Razz. Sounds like it."

"I couldn't wait," Raziel said. "I recognized him, then I failed him. I went to the tarot. To conjury. Finally I needed the drugs. I couldn't pull him through. So I left him to fail. But I wasn't wrong about him, Sonia. Only about myself."

"I could forgive you the tarot and the conjury," she said. "Even the drugs. But why the people with the bomb?"

"I thought I had to let them use me. I thought they would provide the negative force. And I would provide the rest. A scheme in free fall."

"Old story," she said.

"The story of the century," Raziel said. "The story of our lives. Life into art. Art into something more."

"Will it happen again?" she asked.

"Until we get it right."

"The violence is the hard part," she said.

"You need it," Raziel declared. "But it's the step that's hardest to finesse."

It turned out that he was essentially ignorant of the details. He knew next to nothing about the gelignite, the assembling. He told her as much as he knew or could remember. Doubt had terrified him back to opiates. Everyone had been using each other. Zimmer. The boy, Lenny. Linda.

"And Nuala," Sonia said. "And me. We never knew what we were doing. We've been seen crossing. How could you have done that to us?"

"I agreed that the blame could be placed on us. As before it was placed on Willie Ludlum."

"You mean Willie Ludlum didn't burn the mosques?"

"Sure he did," Raziel said. "No question about it. But there have been other bombs since then. Not everyone who went away was necessarily involved. Not everyone involved went away. I thought I knew what would happen this time. I let the ones who were planting it think we'd take the fall. It was our last chance."

He lay on his back, his works beside him, and literally beat his breast. The penitent junkie, she thought, watching him. The stuff of a stained-glass window somewhere, in the great ecumenical temple to come, a figure from the twentieth century's martyrology.

She kept looking at the diagram Obermann had brought and the one she had found on the ride down. She was almost certain she knew of the Bab al-Ghawanima; it was an old name for one of the Haram gates near the madrasah that housed Berger's apartment. It had been next to the section of the building that had been torn down to enlarge the Kotel plaza.

The militant friends of Linda Ericksen had been anxious to take it over, and perhaps not only because it was loose real estate. It was just possible that there was an approach to the foundations of the Haram from that area. Possibly through one of the building's layers beneath the street.