Dimiter (30 page)

[BREAKS AT 0944 AND RESUMES AT 1002]

ZUI:
Want to start out with Remle Street, Sergeant?

MERAL:
No, with Vlora.

ZUI:
Okay, Vlora.

SANDALLS:
Who’s Vlora?

MERAL:
He’s the man discovered dead in Christ’s Tomb who at first we thought was someone named Joseph Temescu and then mistakenly, of course, Paul Dimiter, when in fact he
was an Albanian Security officer who had gotten himself attached to the Albanian contingent on the Golan Heights.

SANDALLS:
My head’s spinning again. Why would Vlora want to do that?

MERAL:
To be able to kill Dimiter.

SANDALLS:
Why?

MERAL:
Because Dimiter killed his son.

SANDALLS:
Good reason.

MERAL:
Quite. But not in the way you and I would understand it. Vlora despised his son. Vlora ordered men tortured in the name of what he thought was a greater good, whereas the son inflicted pain for the pleasure it gave him. Albanians have something called the “code of the
bessa
:” Someone murders your blood and you have to murder theirs. Any male. If he’s the only one available it could even be a child. It’s something like a moral imperative with them. There wasn’t any passion in Vlora’s hunt for Dimiter. It was all principle. Honor. Duty.

BELL:
When did Dimiter kill his son?

MERAL:
While on his mission to ordain the new priests in Albania. He was captured for a time and tortured and interrogated by Vlora, and then in making his escape he killed Vlora’s son. Up to here are we clear?

SANDALLS:
We’ll see.

MERAL:
Well, then, things took a strange and extraordinary turn. After rescuing Vlora from a car crash that without his intervention would most certainly have killed him, Dimiter had him treated at the Government Hospital in Jerusalem and then took him from there to his apartment in Jerusalem Heights where he slowly brought him back to
some semblance of health: you know, feeding him, nursing him, reading to him, keeping up his spirits; at times, it seems, just by his presence alone, and that’s something that I know about at first hand.

SANDALLS:
What do you mean “first hand?”

MERAL:
I mean that just being in his company changes you.

SANDALLS:
Changes you how?

ZUI:
That’s not important. Back to Vlora, please, Sergeant. You were saying?

MERAL:
Colonel Vlora was stunned. I mean, this from a man that he’d ordered tortured for endless days and in the most unendurable and horrifying ways and whom he’d just tried to kill. It was the code of the
bessa
turned on its head! Vlora changed. He was overcome. Made new. In its way this was Vlora’s own mystical experience. And then the truly amazing thing happened.

SANDALLS:
We’re talking letters again?

MERAL:
Yes, that’s right.

SANDALLS:
Are we getting our hands on those letters?

ZUI:
Yes, we’re sending you the batch. You have my word.

SANDALLS:
Moshe, thanks. And now what’s this “amazing thing,” Meral?

MERAL:
It truly is! Vlora knew that someone else was targeting Dimiter. Dimiter had told him that. Then a few weeks later he asked Dimiter to walk with him to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and when they were almost there he revealed his intention, telling Dimiter that if a staging of Dimiter’s “death” were made known in some extremely dramatic and public way, it might cause the would-be killer to believe that he’d made a mistake, that Wilson wasn’t Dimiter after all and that he had targeted
the wrong man. Dimiter had so many different looks, after all. Vlora’s plan was to die and to be taken for Dimiter, and so early on the morning he was to execute the plan he went over to the apartment he had rented, but in fact never occupied, and salted it with all of those documents that led us to think that Vlora was Dimiter. When Vlora told him his intention, Dimiter was appalled. He didn’t want this. No. Not at first. Though of course it made no difference since the venom was already in Vlora’s system. And that brings me to the second part of Vlora’s thinking. Who could possibly think this was a suicide, he thought. Who would choose to end his life with the incredibly painful Deathstalker venom when a handful of sleeping pills would do the job as well? To a mind like Vlora’s that had been trained to view the world with the remorseless squint of the
bessa,
it was this, he believed, that would likely persuade any would-be assailant that Dimiter had indeed been killed and by someone who had hated him intensely.

SANDALLS:
Maybe yes, maybe no.

MERAL:
Precisely. And that’s what’s even more remarkable about it: that there was no guarantee his plan would work and that Vlora chose extraordinary pain just on the chance of it.

SANDALLS:
I think I get your point. So what came next?

MERAL:
Well, there was nothing now that Dimiter could do and so he went into the Tomb with Vlora, who as soon as the others in the chamber had left took another massive dose of chloral hydrate, lay down on the burial slab, folded his arms across his chest, and then closed his eyes and waited to die.

BELL:
The crossed arms? What was that? Some Albanian thing?

MERAL:
No. It was just something that would add to the aura of mystery intended to capture the attention of the press and the public. Dimiter promised Vlora he would stay to the end, and when it came he slipped out of the Tomb and then the church. End of story.

SANDALLS:
Who salted Vlora’s apartment with Dimiter’s I.D.? Was it Vlora?

MERAL:
Yes, Vlora. All except the juggling balls and the clown things. Vlora didn’t know their significance so Dimiter added them to the items that Vlora had salted. He didn’t want his sacrifice to be in vain.

SANDALLS:
Okay, thanks.

MERAL:
You’re very welcome. Inspector?

ZUI:
Okay, let’s get into Dimiter’s mission.

SANDALLS:
I’m going to say this until I’m blue in the face. He was here on his own.

ZUI:
But he did have a mission.

SANDALLS:
Oh, for Christ’s sake, Moshe!

ZUI:
I think you’ve just hit the nail on the head.

SANDALLS:
What do you mean?

ZUI:
If you’ll listen for a minute you’ll find out.

SANDALLS:
Okay, I’m listening. I’m listening intently.

ZUI:
Good. It has something to do with your St. Paul, who was originally our Saul and like Dimiter a legendary assassin. He hunted down Christians and killed them mercilessly. Then one day on the road to Damascus along with a number of companions all determined to annihilate the Christian community there, he had a mystical experience in
which he was knocked to the ground by some force, by some brilliant white light in the sky, and he also heard a voice, and soon after our Saul became your St. Paul. Something similar happened to Dimiter. He had a mystical experience that stunned him, something to do with Jesus Christ. And like Saul, at first he didn’t understand what had hit him. But being Dimiter, what does he do? Why of course! He comes to Jerusalem to find out what it was that just knocked him to the ground. Or off his horse, as some people seem to think.

BELL:
I still don’t get it. Why Jerusalem?

ZUI:
He loved the sound of people constantly arguing. Sergeant Meral? Would you take it from here, please?

MERAL:
Yes. Now you’ll recall that Paul Dimiter’s preparation whenever he was tasked with a high-level hit had him spending many weeks, sometimes months, researching personal data about the target he’d been assigned to hunt down and kill: what the target ate, how he walked, how he dressed, what he read, what made him laugh, what made him cry, what made him angry, and so on and so on—every possible fact that could be gathered about him, but above all else how the target thought, so that when he had finished with his preparation Dimiter virtually
was
the target.

SANDALLS:
Listen, maybe I’m just thick, but what’s this all got to do with his coming to Jerusalem? Why here? And didn’t we agree he was hunting an
idea
here and not some person?

MERAL:
No, there was a “Target X.” It was a person.

SANDALLS:
Are you kidding me, Sergeant? You’re sure of that?

MERAL:
Yes. Absolutely.

SANDALLS:
And so who was he hunting?

MERAL:
Christ.

[10:55: INTERVIEW TERMINATED
ABRUPTLY
]

I
n the tense exchange that followed, Bell and Sandalls asked for copies of the “Dimiter Letters” and left hastily, edgy and somehow flustered, refusing Zui’s request that they stay behind to discuss a “very new and unsettling development.” When they and Sergeant Meral had left, Zui sighed, picked up the note he’d been handed much earlier and then slowly shook his head as he numbly reread it.

“Wait until they hear,” he murmured. “Wait!”

H
is large hands gripping the black iron railing at the top of the Russian Church Tower, Meral stood and looked eastward at the reddish brown twists of the forbidding and precipitous Mountains of Moab, with their salt sides bleached and sloping whitened in the sun, while before and below them sweeping fields of yellow dandelions bright in tall grass shone like promises of rain and redemption. When he’d arrived there were several other tourists at the top, but now they were leaving and Meral was grateful. He wanted
to be here alone, as he had at dawn on many mornings before when he had come to hear the echo of Dimiter’s footsteps, to inhale the last lingering traces of his presence. It was different at dawn when the world was hushed and the sun was slipping up from behind its rim like a shimmering benediction; but after the Final Report had concluded, some mysterious and irresistible impulse had drawn Meral here despite the less favorable time of day. And now he waited. But for what? Then something crossed his mind. Had he come here for a sign? he wondered. He thought of Dimiter’s letter about seeing the “wire” and his “special thinking,” his only letter about his visits here. Would something appear? Meral stayed and was alone for a while, and when he looked at his watch and was about to leave, from out of nowhere a sudden fierce wind sprang up that was so strong it pinned his back to the tower wall until, just as it had arisen, it abruptly died into absolute stillness. Meral started his descent still not knowing what had drawn him there in so unquiet a time of the day.