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Meral took a long look at Temescu’s driver’s license. There was something about it. While the photo generally agreed with the description by the car rental salesman and the mechanic, it was so blurry and indistinct that if one were to stare at it long enough it would seem to somehow change. Meral checked the time, put the driver’s license back into the case folder, closed it, returned it to its place in the File Room, then went out again into the hall where he walked past a kitchen and the station’s Sleep Room with its multiple cots for weary patrolmen, and then turned in his Webley-Smith revolver at the Gun Room for it now was the end of his duty day. On his way to check out at reception and leave, as he passed the open door to the office of Ari Zev, the fortyish but white-haired Station Commander, Zev called out to him loudly, “Meral!”

The Arab policeman stopped and took a step inside a blue-walled office where Zev was at his desk. Behind him on the wall was a large detailed map of the Old City’s quarters, plus a trophy case containing, among other things, an arm patch of
the Maplewood, New Jersey police force, the gift of a visiting American policeman in Israel to study Israeli methods. Zev had been writing on a notepad and still gripped a sharpened yellow pencil in his hand.

“Couple of things,” he began. “The Albanians keep calling about that chap of theirs who’s gone missing. Next time I’m putting them straight through to you. They’re a pain. Any news on this guy?”

“No, none at all. We need a photo. I’ve now asked for one three times. When it comes perhaps we’ll have some better luck.”

“
If
it comes.”

“Yes, ‘if.’ ”

Zev’s eyebrows rose.

“And Remle Street, Meral?”

“Nothing new.”

“As I pretty much expected. So I’m thinking that maybe you should drop it. It could be nothing but a whole lot of smoke.”

“No, something’s there. I feel sure of it.”

Zev turned to look thoughtfully out a window for a moment, the point of the pencil still in his hand lightly tapping on the desktop in desultory spurts.

He turned back to Meral.

“Okay, Sergeant, keep on it. Your instincts have always been terrific.”

Meral nodded, turned and exited the office. As he walked down the hall Zev watched him through the open door. “Poor bastard,” he murmured. Then he grasped the pencil firmly and returned to his work, making summarizing notes of the inconclusive coroner’s report on Yusef Tamal, a Yemeni immigrant who lived in Beit Sahour and was suspected of various criminal
activities. He was the man found dead with a broken neck at the bottom of the Russian Church Tower.

. . . fractured skull and neck, as well as numerous lacerations, abrasions, and contusions; shearing of platysma, splenius, trapezius, and various smaller muscles of the neck, with fracture of the spine and of the vertebrae . . .

Broken in the fall,
Zev wrote,
or before?
Then he added, “
Inconclusive.”

Outside the station Meral stood with his back to its creamy beige dolomite walls. The gusting wind and drizzling rain had stopped and he stared at its glisten on the cobbles of the street with his thoughts still entangled in the Remle Street case: the sound of something heavy being dragged. What was it? Who was Joseph Temescu? And then the strangest thing of all: discovered in the Land Rover after the crash were the charred remains of a large black owl and that of another much smaller bird that could not be identified, perhaps a finch or a common house sparrow, both the favorite prey of the Southern Little Owl that frequented the city and hunted at night. Meral couldn’t fathom it. He shook his head and moved his thoughts to a matter more prosaic. The Walk. Every Kishla policeman was required by the Commandant to make walks through the Christian Quarter for five after-duty hours each week for the purpose of “keeping in touch,” as Zev had explained, “to bond with the people and hear their complaints.” Three more hours, Meral mused, would fill his quota for the week and still put him at the Casa Nova, the ninety-room hostel where he lived, just in time for the communal evening meal that would be served by Italian Franciscan nuns.

Now decided, he adjusted the tilt of his black beret and stepped into the street, the Orthodox Armenian Patriarch Road, on which he took a quick left and then later a right on David Street to its teeming covered bazaars drenched in sights and sounds that always made Meral feel that he had just left the flatness of a colorless dream and awakened into real and vivid life, into a place where he was jostled by slender old porters bent by enormous loads on their backs, and by pedestrians in every conceivable dress—Arab workmen on donkeys and tourists with shopping bags; Kurdish women with trays on their heads filled with freshly baked sesame crusted bagels, pita bread, and cooked spotted breakfast eggs; ultra-orthodox Jews with long beards and curled side locks wearing black caftans and black fur hats; Muslim women and dignified Christian prelates—all bustling past souvenir stalls and shops, past huge wheels of baklava moist with honey and stood up on end in metal pans, past spice bins brimming with khaki-colored cumin, almonds, walnuts and powdered red pepper, dried apricot paste and figs, shredded coconut and bright yellow-orange lentils; past the younger male shopkeepers hawking their wares with loud voices and cajolements while their fathers, wearing tasseled fezzes or keffiyehs, sat in chairs mutely watching with placid faces while the Arabic music blaring out from their shops shouted up to the vaulted roof of the bazaar where it mingled in a strange and haunting counterpoint with the Angelus bells from Gethsemane and a muezzin’s call to prayer.

Everywhere Meral was greeted warmly, very often with affection and always with trust, so that at times he was asked for personal advice. On this walk it was an eighteen-year-old girl who approached him complaining of a marriage arranged by her parents with a man whom she neither loved nor even liked,
and then later, on The Street of the Chain where the air was thick with the smell of new leather and of stagnant water, coffee, and smoke, and beneath the baleful watch of a goat staring down through the black iron bars of a window in a second-floor apartment, Meral’s counsel was sought by an elderly unofficial mayor, a
mukhtar
, expressing worry about the raucous behavior and “repugnant” blue-jean attire of the longhaired teenaged Arab “Teddy Boys” copying the latest British fad. Farther along, on the Via Dolorosa, Meral stopped and gave a coin to a beggar, a middle-aged, stubble-bearded man who was crouched against a wall with a transistor radio pressed to his ear raptly listening to the latest pop tunes of Greece underneath a Station of the Cross. Meral looked up at a plaque on the wall that marked it.

JESUS FALLS FOR THE SECOND TIME.

Abruptly the music stopped for an announcement. Meral guessed it was the weather and time. He glanced at his watch. Yes, time to head back, he decided. On his way an aging nun on a motorized bicycle, a wraith in white garments that flapped up behind her, like a withered old Valkyrie late for the battle, came suddenly varooming out of an aqabat narrowly missing him as she passed. Behind her chugged a dusty and battered blue Fiat that was hauling a flatcar with a donkey aboard, sitting up on its haunches and facing backward, in its eyes a look of mild incomprehension.

Even at this Meral could not smile.

As he strode toward the Casa Nova and his dinner, Meral paused for a moment as he rounded a corner of the Via Dolorosa and entered the street called Khan el Zeit. He had seen
something odd. A youngish, blond-haired and fair-complected woman wearing oversized sunglasses and a colorful “Souvenir of Jericho” babushka was standing in the doorway of a seedy hostel called The Shalom in what seemed a heated argument with a tall and stocky Franciscan priest, when suddenly the woman turned her head and looked at Meral, said something to the priest, who also quickly turned and looked. The woman then clutched the Franciscan’s arm and pulled him quickly out of sight and into the hotel. For some moments before moving on Meral stared at the hostel door as he sifted for the meaning of the strange vignette. How very curious, he thought.

Not curious, actually.

Lethal.

8 MARCH, 2:11 A.M.

Dearest Jean,

Last night an odd dream. It was vivid. I had died and now a bright red light was confronting me. It was painful and I tried to turn away. I was aware that the light was completely responsible for the government of the universe. Two of its ministers had been put in charge of space and of seeing it was kept in good working order. But these creatures
had failed, and space was like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle. I wanted to extinguish this piercing red light that was trying to tell me that space was all awry when I suddenly realized with dismay that I had been chosen to put things aright, all the jarringly chaotic, inconsistent laws of nature. And some mysterious mission beyond.

What could it mean?

Now, something I’ve been hesitant to tell you. While my once-deadly “visitor” is healing, it would seem that someone other than he has tried to kill me. Several days ago, a Sunday, in the soft air of dawn, I made the puttering drive in my little Topolino to the Russian Church Tower, a spiraling column of Jerusalem stone jutting up from a hill above the Garden of Gethsemane. I go regularly to the top of the Tower, where I’m able to travel backward in time. To the west, behind Herod’s block stone walls glowing faintly rose in the waking light, you see the Old City’s clustered jumble of churches, minarets, courtyards, steeples, and spires squeezing breath from the cluttered sprawl of its homes with their white domed roofs huddled tightly together and still shivering in fear of the God of Job. But then circle to the opposite side of the tower and abruptly you’re in another dimension, stunned and engulfed by the hushed immensity of the burnished Judean Desert; by the Mountains of Moab and, beyond, the Dead Sea and the River Jordan’s mud-brown torrent whispering remembrances of the Baptist: all as they have looked for thousands of years.

On this Sunday I had made the twisting climb to the top and then ambled around to the eastern side where the sun was slipping up from behind the dry mountains to dapple the beige and barren land with that incredible light of
the earth’s first day when, barely before I could take a breath of the sweet sharp scent of Jerusalem pine, from out of nowhere a wind arose with such force that it pushed me back hard against the brittle stone wall. I was pinned. I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe. Then the shockingly powerful gust subsided with the suddenness with which it had arisen, and I thought about ghosts and Christ walking on the water: that recounting in the gospel of St. Mark of a violent squall that rose up out of nowhere only to just as suddenly fade and die. Afterward I lingered, as I always do, for an hour-long session of my “special thinking,” this time placing myself in Galilee when the wild wheat swayed on the slopes in shining stands in cloudless May. But my thoughts were soon shattered by the rumbling of nearby diesel-fueled buses that were starting up their engines. The spell broken, it was useless to go on and so I turned away to leave, walking slowly to the opposite side of the tower and the top of those winding slippery steps plunging down to the rock-strewn road below. But as I started my descent I glimpsed a sudden flash of light. I stopped and looked closely. It was a “wire.” It was strung above the seventh step down from the top and as I bent to remove it I was suddenly aware of someone rapidly approaching me from behind.

And then the problem was solved.

Now I find myself anxious to say, “Please don’t worry, I am always on my guard, always watchful.” What is this need that I have to protect you, to hold you in my care even though you are dead?

There is no parting.

Your Paul