Damascus Gate (66 page)

A
FTER AN AMOUNT
of time he could not judge or measure, Raziel came to consciousness on Sonia's sofa. He got to his feet, staggering among her photographs and Kilim rugs. It was still night. When he went into De Kuff's room, he found it empty.

Raziel's footing was unsteady. Sometimes things seemed in motion on the edge of vision, and he was not always completely certain what room he was in. But eventually he was straight enough to determine that the old man had truly taken off, simply put his covers aside and gone. He would be making for the Old City, Raziel thought. For the Bethesda Pool, the source of prophecy for him. It was the night of the bomb, of the unmaking of all their plans.

Raziel composed himself to the point where he could struggle to a public phone at a bus kiosk near the railroad station. He took a token from his pocket and called a taxi. He did not tell the dispatcher where he wanted to go. Over the shoulder of Mount Zion, he could see fires reflected in the sky and hear distant sirens and the report of weaponry. He stood beside the enclosed kiosk and stared at the lighted sky. Drivers passing on the road slowed their vehicles to look at him in suspicion and dread.

The taxi that arrived was driven by a sullen man in his twenties with a fake silk shirt, open at the neck to show his chest hair and the variety of gold-colored chains around his neck. He did not care for the appearance of his fare, and when Raziel opened the door and climbed in beside him he recoiled as though from an assault.

As they drove downtown, the driver peered fearfully at the agitated Jewish crowds in the streets. It was as if he were lost in his own city. As it happened, it was not his city: he was a Gentile from Romania.

"I would like to go to the Lions' Gate," Raziel told him.

The Romanian volubly refused. When Raziel realized that his driver's mind was not about to be changed, he got out of the taxi and set out on foot for the Old City.

At the Jaffa Gate, things seemed less tense than elsewhere. The security forces were in control there, although it was easy to hear the shots and cries and rattling canisters in other parts of the Old City.

Edging along the army's lines on David Street, he looked for a place where instinct might promise him an easy crossing. He found a few unconfident-looking young soldiers near the Muristan and showed them his American passport and let them search him. The soldiers permitted him to proceed into the deserted quarter of market cafés.

As he hurried toward the Pool, army patrols and jeeps passed him from time to time. The soldiers bellowed at him to step aside, get out of the way, stay off the street. But the soldiers were preoccupied with a fiery struggle close by that he could not see.

He could sense the inhabitants of the Christian Quarter huddled behind their massive doors and dark barred windows. There were people on the rooftops too. Several shouted down at him. Threats, warnings.

Approaching the end of the Via Dolorosa, almost at the Lions' Gate, he saw a noisy milling crowd of Palestinians. A line of policemen and soldiers stood between them and the gate. Raziel found that he had put himself on the inside: the crowd stood between him and the gate and the Jewish troops that held it.

Above the shouting, he heard a voice he knew. It was the voice of Adam De Kuff speaking from the upper quadrant of his interior universe, strong, unafraid, joyful, thoroughly delusional. Raziel shouldered his way through ranks of astonished Palestinians until he saw the man himself.

The gates to the Pool and the courtyard in front of St. Anne's Church had been forced open. De Kuff and the crowd that surrounded him all stood within it. About halfway between the crusader church and the ruined temple of Serapis, De Kuff, standing on a cement bench, addressed the enraged Palestinians.

He wore what looked like an army jacket that fitted him so badly its cuffs stopped a little past his elbows. He had hugely baggy army trousers and untied muddy boots whose laces coiled around his ankles and twisted underfoot as he shuffled passionately from one end of the bench to the other like a dancing bear. There was a kippa on his head and a white scarf tied around his forehead like a turban and he crooned at the top of his voice.

The watching Palestinians stared as though De Kuff represented a spectacle beyond imagining. All of them were men, and there were more than a hundred. Some were laughing. Others occasionally shouted at him in anger. A few seemed frozen in cold rage.

From the army line, a policeman with a bullhorn was saying something, amplified in Arabic. Overhead, a helicopter scattered its whirling lights. Because of the angle of the walls of the adjoining madrasah and the smashed gates of the church courtyard, De Kuff in the small plaza was aslant the line of vision of the soldiers and police assembled nearer the city gate.

Raziel kept trying to force his way closer to the old man. He had the notion of taking him away from there, before the thing failed utterly, before all spells and mercies were suspended, before whatever grace that had touched their pilgrimage was withdrawn and the violence and raw holiness of the place overwhelmed everyone.

The holiness was in fact gathering to strike. A man with the white turban of the
haj,
a turban like the one De Kuff's scarf might be thought to mock, came forward, beside himself.

"Perish the hands of the Father of Flame," cried the
haji,
in a language neither De Kuff nor Raziel could comprehend. "Perish he!"

De Kuff himself understood only that he was in the place he knew and loved best, the scene of his successes, the ancient Serapion and Pool of Israel. All that day he had been trying to reach the souls within himself as they weaved in and out of his consciousness. He had begun to think that everything he had ever believed about soul and mind was wrong. There was no way to exercise control.

But there at the Fountain, his souls were manifest and his heart was full, and in the completeness of his joy he had no choice but to tell about it. It was necessary to tell everyone, anyone, no matter how distressed or distracted they might be by politics or by the illusions of separateness and exile that burdened everyone. He felt elected and protected by God, ready to support the Ark in the holiest of places. He used the metaphors that were employed in this city, although, in a way, it might have been anywhere.

"Call me as you like," he explained to the angry crowd. "I am the twelfth imam. I am the Bab al-Ulema. I am Jesus, Yeshu, Issa. I am the Mahdi. I am Moshiach. I have come to restore the world. I am all of you. I am no one."

There were screams of terrible passion. "Perish he! Death!
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

Some soldiers had seen him, and a flying squad from the police lines set out, using batons and rifle butts as deemed necessary to rescue him. The squad advanced as far as the plaza gate but was stalled by the crush there and retreated. A few onlookers were left lying on the ground. There were cries of outrage and the men in the crowd closest to De Kuff seemed to blame him. People began to throw stones.

"Death to the blasphemer!"

De Kuff opened his arms to them. For a moment those who were advancing on him stopped. Raziel, shouting, shoving, tried to get through.

"You don't have to listen," Raziel said to the crowd. "It's all over. Rev," he shouted to De Kuff, "it's all over! Another time, man. Another soul. Another street."

The men who were taking hold of De Kuff, pulling him down as he tottered on his bench, also laid hands on Raziel.

"Another day!" Raziel told them. "Another mountain!"

The soldiers near the gate attempted a second charge. Savage as it was, lay about them as they did, they could not break through and penetrate the crowd to extract De Kuff and Raziel.

Then a few reserve soldiers fired live rounds. Because the area around the Fountain was Christian property, the security forces had stayed away from it at first and it belonged, for the moment, to the crowd.

"I tell you," De Kuff informed them in his restrained Louisiana drawl. "That all was once One and will be and has always remained so. That God is One. And faith in Him is One. And all belief is One. And all believers in Him, regardless of sect, are One. Only the human heart divides. So it is written.

"See? Do you see?" De Kuff asked the men who were pulling him down. "Everyone's waiting. And the separateness of things is false."

He went on declaiming, using the images, the reversals, the metaphors everyone knew, expounding the souls, raising their voices, until the great holiness turned to fire and he lost consciousness.

Z
IMMER WENT
to a former kibbutz in the desert for his debriefing, a collection of sand-colored cement rectangles near the nuclear base at Dimona. On the drive down, Fotheringill had asked him, "Who's debriefing who then?"

"Good question," Zimmer said.

The kibbutz had been converted into air force housing, equally divided between civilian technicians and their families and quarters for serving officers. The military sentries at the wire perimeter had been instructed to expect them.

Fotheringill left Zimmer off in front of the largest building and drove on to Dimona for a decent lager. Zimmer braved the fierce afternoon sun in the same shapeless seersucker suit he had worn as a reporter in central Africa, along with a white cotton shirt, a Yucate-can straw hat and dark glasses. He made his way inside the building to a lounge area, air conditioned against the desert heat, a kind of semi-civilian day room that occupants of the building could hire for special occasions, like birthday or promotion parties.

A security man in the hallway outside it asked Zimmer to remove his sunglasses, looked him over in a brusque manner before letting him pass. Two men were sitting on a sun-faded sofa in the dusty, joyless room. They both stood up when Zimmer entered and shook hands.

"Something to drink?" one said. He was a bald, squat man with a hard, pitted face. He wore khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt of the same color and sandals with beige socks.

"Water," Zimmer said.

The man who had asked took a tray from the day room's half-sized refrigerator. On it were two liter bottles of still water and a plastic dish of hummus and another of peppers and cucumbers and some Arab bread.

"You have to drink water constantly down here," the man observed. "Four gallons a day, according to Shaviv."

"Six," Shaviv, the second man, said. "Even if you're sedentary like myself."

Naphtali Shaviv was tall and thin, light-haired, with high cheekbones and a prominent nose, which looked as though he had once broken it boxing. The man who had offered the drink was Avram Lind, the former cabinet minister.

Janusz Zimmer accepted his glass of water and sat down.

"So," he asked. "Success?"

Lind started to answer. Shaviv interrupted him. "Survival. Yossi resigned. We'll hear it on the evening news."

"I'm delighted," Zimmer said. "I presume this constitutes your return to public life."

"The PM," Lind said, "has been good enough to ask me to take my former position in the cabinet. He was very sporting, as the English would say. A jolly good sport."

They all laughed quietly.

"The old man was sweating, let me tell you," Naphtali Shaviv said. He was wearing a shirt with a slim blue tie, one that he had bought in the early sixties in Stockholm. Zimmer, taking note of it, could imagine him buying six identical ties then and wearing them for the rest of his life. "You could hear him sweat on the telephone."

"It's possible to hear people sweat," Zimmer said. "Sometimes you can't see any sweat, but you can hear it."

"I like listening to the PM sweat," Lind said. "I'm not so sporting."

"I find it distressing," Shaviv said.

"Yah, well, you're a bureaucrat," Lind told him. "And let me tell you, neither is Yossi Zhidov sporting! He's beside himself, that
paskudnyak.
Slapping his poor Swiss wife. Brutalizing his little Aryan kiddies. Furious, the shmuck."

"I'm not being polite when I say I'm delighted," Shaviv told them.

Zimmer nodded. "No doubt it had to be done. But it was audacious."

"Well," said Shaviv, "
L'audace, toujours.
You did well, Pan Zimmer. Hats off to you."

"Hear, hear!" said Avram Lind.

Both Avram Lind and Naphtali Shaviv had been fighter pilots before taking up their careers in Mossad. Lind's enemies in the cabinet and in his own ministry had forced his resignation the previous spring, but they had not been able to ditch Shaviv, a permanent undersecretary and Avram Lind's wing man in the Yom Kippur War. So Lind had been able to use the resources of the intelligence liaison force in his former ministry to carry out the operation.

Thus they had acquired the services of Janusz Zimmer. Yossi Zhidov, who had replaced Lind for such a surprisingly short time, had been warned by his supporters about a Mossad—air force Mafia in the ministry. But he had not been able to do anything about it.

"The PM is going to practice damage control," Shaviv said. "So we know how this whole thing is going to be presented to the press."

Shaviv, in his understated way, refrained from saying that he himself was handling public relations for the prime minister. In handling the matter, he would be able to control what was said or not said publicly about Lind's organizing of the bomb-plot sting and Zimmer's role in it and all the rest.

"No one believes us anyway," Lind said. "They're all cynical bastards."

"Yes," said Shaviv, "so they don't deserve too much information. Information corrupts."

"Speaking of which," Zimmer said, "I have an American friend writing a book. The book is about religious mania in the country and cults and so on, but he was very close to some of the people we..." He stopped and sought an appropriate term for the individuals who had been manipulated.

"Employed," Shaviv suggested.

"He was close to some of the people we employed. No doubt his book will deal with these events. We can use him to float a few truths, as it were. In time future."