Messi@ (29 page)

“I'll level with you, Major.” Mullin put the brandy glass in Notz's hand and set the cigar box on a gold-inlaid table between them. He remained standing. “Your kid, Felicity, is a pest. She has obtained a photograph purporting to compromise me. Her hatred is quite inexplicable to me. She has demanded an unconscionably large sum of money, accompanied by ugly threats. I hesitate to use the word, but your young niece is a blackmailer.”

Mullin gambled on this disclosure because he suspected that the major was informed about Felicity's little venture of blackmail. But the major, while not letting on, did not in fact know about it. He was surprised and not entirely displeased. Felicity was coming along just fine. Her oversized sense of justice had at last found a worthy target. Mullin was indeed rich beyond anyone's guess; he had sucked the little people's money through the TV tube like a black funnel. Unfortunately, his riches were not to be tampered with. Felicity herself was their ultimate beneficiary. But she could never know it. Life was indeed ironic.

“She caught you with your pants down, Preacher,” the major said gruffly, “so you send over your goons to smash her furniture.”

“I'm sorry, Major, but I was quite willing to pay … something. Not over two million dollars—for a forgery. If it pleases you I will set straight everything that was damaged. But I do not know her whereabouts. I am as concerned about her as you are.”

“That is an unconscionable falsehood, Mullin. Not in a thousand years can you be even an iota as concerned as I am. I love my niece dearly, as much as you profess to love Jesus!”

The reverend looked stone faced. “That's blasphemy.”

“You haven't seen anything yet.”

The major took a sip of the brandy and put it down. “Don't you have any Armagnac? This is swill. And mind if I take a look at your girls? I came all this way.”

“It's yes on the first and no on the second. The girls are at the Dome; been there since sunup.”

The major started. “What in the world are they doing there?”

“It's perfectly okay, Major. They are training. We are running out of time. The schedule's been advanced.”

Major Notz considered this for a moment. “By whom?”

Mullin looked as still as a sheet of blank typing paper. “By the Lord. There have been signs and portents.”

The major looked straight at the preacher, who averted his eyes. When he spoke, he sounded commanding and severe. “I will remind you, Preacher, that the Lord is not in charge of schedules. I remind you also that time is my domain. You are to refrain, I repeat,
refrain
, from initiative.”

The heavy cypress door opened silently and an ancient black butler brought the Armagnac. The major sipped in silence.

“I will fathom your choir yet.”

“Music comes from the Lord, Major.” Mullin allowed himself the closest he ever came to a smile. “
Direct
from the Lord.”

“Yes, but what channel, Reverend?
That
is the question.”

“There are many mansions in my Father's house, sir, but the scripture makes no mention of channels.”

“It's a mistranslation, then. Some Greek mangled the Aramaic, and ‘channels' became ‘mansions.' The radio just wasn't around to serve as metaphor.”

“You lose me there, sir. I'm a fundamentalist, remember. We hold no truck with metaphors.”

Major Notz downed the brandy and rose from the settee. “We shall see, we shall see. Let your people on the street look for my niece. If even a hair on her head is disturbed, the stretch of my displeasure will be excessive.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” the preacher rejoiced, watching the teal blue Humvee disappear beyond the gatehouse. “Thank you, Jesus.” Jesus was being thanked, for surely the Lord had given the major faith in Mullin's lie. He, of course, knew where the major's niece was. Felicity, safe and sound, was studying at the School for Messiah Development in a house on Bourbon Street, less than three blocks from the major's apartment. Two large drops of sweat formed from a myriad of small ones on Mullin's forehead and headed down opposite sides of his head to his chin. There was real danger here. Had he bitten off more than he could chew? Mullin remembered now the terms of his original contract with the major, in all its stark simplicity. In the irreversible order of things established by that covenant, Mullin was in charge of the spirit, but for all practical details he had to bow to the major. Had he gone too far? And who was this Felicity? Was she his greatest trial yet? The preacher flipped open his cellular phone and ordered the party at the other end to see to the pristine restoration of Felicity's small apartment “in every detail and with quality replacements.” He then dialed another party and gave the exact opposite instructions in regard to Felicity herself, stressing that “no trace of the familiar should remain, not even the recollection of where she came from.”

Chapter Eighteen

Wherein we witness Andrea's brush with fame and her decision to flee, Yehuda ben Yehuda's devotion on her behalf, and Andrea's leave-taking from Saint Hildegard's

Rabbinical scholar Yehuda ben Yehuda, born Benjamin Redman, had been troubled by women all his life. Beginning with his mother, he had conceived violent emotions for a number of them, and each had disappointed him in a different way. Felicity, his adolescent sweetheart, had been his best friend, but their attempts at physical intimacy had ended in disappointment. Felicity had remained his friend, though, even throughout her subsequent affairs. He missed her.

In college there were girls whose names he had now forgotten, but each appeared at the time to be his preordained mate. Other women, such as Gala Keria, he loved from a distance because they possessed ideal features that harmonized with his idealism. Now there was Andrea, about whom he knew next to nothing, but for whom he felt such shattering love he would have betrayed God Almighty if she'd asked him to.

In the week following their encounter at the television station, Ben saw Felicity twice. The first was on the day of her audition, when she was offered one night as hostess of
Gal Gal Hamazal
, to prove herself on live TV. He wanted to take her out to a restaurant to celebrate, but the good sisters at Saint Hildegard's gave a feast in her honor, and Ben found himself sitting grumpily between Lama Iris Cohen and a taciturn Dr. Luna. Andrea sat in a place of honor on Mother Superior's right, flanked by Sister Maria, who was beaming with pride. Andrea glanced in Ben's direction two or three times during dinner, but her mien was enigmatic. When the meal was finally over, Ben excused himself and made a quick getaway. All those nuns and crucifixes made him uneasy and self-conscious about his curls and yarmulke. It made him angry that a Jew should taste alienation even in his spiritual home. These Christians were mere guests, but he felt like a Jew in the Vatican.

Every day he thought about going to see her, but something always prevented him. He began to feel compelled to break his teacher's injunctions. After a lengthy commentary by the rabbi on the evil of census taking, as evidenced by the terrible punishment God meted out to David when the king counted his people, Ben walked about Jerusalem obsessively counting everyone. After five hours he had counted 2,344 people and felt that God ought to strike him down without mercy. Upon learning of the dangers of assimilation, while studying the history of the Jerusalem Hellenizers during the reign of the Greek king Antiochus, Ben engaged the services of a masseuse who turned out to be a Greek prostitute, and abandoned himself to her ministrations. Warned about false messiahs, he followed a crazy woman up Via Dolorosa. This woman was a familiar sight around the Old Quarter. She had been studied at Kfar Shaul Hospital and released as harmless. She was wearing a white linen shift and talking to herself as she walked. Spotting a group of American tourist girls, she pointed her finger at them and shouted, “You have put the same trust in your clitoris you used to put in your fathers.” That set the girls insanely giggling, and Ben guffawed too. On being warned against letting fancy overtake logic, he hallucinated an ancient woman with a glass leg at the Damascus Gate. A taxi driver handed her a package. But maybe she was real. All this time, Andrea's image floated through his mind faintly, like the watermark on a banknote.

The night Andrea had her tryout as Gala's replacement, she mesmerized the land of Israel with the flourish of her arms and the intelligence of her small talk. She revealed the letters with such authority it seemed that she herself had made up the words, and each puzzle solved seemed to answer a mystery of profound importance.

The show's producers had drafted Gala's fashion adviser to dress her up. The designer found her difficult. Although she had practically the same shape as Gala, her posture was different, and she projected sadness and abandon where Gala had radiated warmth and brashness. She settled on a white, blue-trimmed sailor's suit with a short skirt, out of which Andrea's skinny legs shot out like a fawn's. She looked all at once polished, schoolgirlish, and lost.

The viewing audience at Saint Hildegard's was astonished to see the messy waif look so neat. But the larger viewing audience, which had nothing to compare her to, was seduced immediately. They perceived that the lost sailor, who had been introduced as “Andrea Isabel, Jewish Basque orphan newly arrived in Eretz Yisrael,” was an extraordinary creature indeed. She spoke nearly flawless Hebrew, with only the hint of an accent, but best of all, she projected a deep sadness coupled with sensuality. Her presence seemed to say: take my body and savor my mind. I don't care. Use me anyway you please, but you will never know me. Such a message echoed deeply with the public of a country where millions of citizens had experienced unimaginable suffering. Many of them were old and saw in Andrea their younger selves, sprung physically intact somehow from hell. Her body was new, but her suffering was ancient.

The country nearly came to a standstill as people dropped everything they were doing to watch her dance across the small screen. In cafés and bars, convents and yeshivas, mosques and motels, viewers screamed the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as if seized by ancient spirits.

The puzzles had not been in themselves remarkable. The category
PERSON
solved as
ELVIS
.
THING
turned out to be
THE FUTURE
. The
PART OF SPEECH
puzzle was
ACTIVE VERB
.
PHRASE
, one of the more difficult puzzles, was
IF I EVER FORGET JERUSALEM
. The
BOOK
was
Lord of the Flies
, and
MOVIE
was
The Ten Commandments
. The puzzles had been easy to solve. The contestants, a pediatrician from Bathsheba, a grave digger from Eliat, and a bus driver between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, all knew the answers, but only the grave digger won money, because of his luck in spinning the wheel.

But such factual description does not do justice to Andrea's performance. She herself became the focus of the words, as if all the categories—person, thing, and so on—were no more than emanations of her soul. A light appeared to come out of her, composed of all the words familiar to the viewers, but their familiarity vanished somehow, leaving huge craters of mystery within the sounds themselves.

Father Tuiredh, who had escorted Andrea to the station, saw the show from the greenroom. He had been startled, as had all the Saint Hildegard's inmates watching in the convent lounge, by the announcement that she was a Basque orphan. Was it possible that the show's producers took “Bosnian” for “Basque”? Father Tuiredh sipped his soft drink pensively. No, that was impossible. And her last name, Isabel, where did that come from? Was it a stage name?

Andrea came out of the studio followed by an overjoyed Mr. Elahu, rubbing his hands. His glasses were askew and he kept repeating the American word “hit” as if something had literally hit him. Andrea was flushed in the face, but her expression was inscrutable. Father Tuiredh helped her into her coat and escorted her out the door. Mr. Elahu followed them closely from behind.

A festive mob had gathered outside the studio. When Andrea appeared, they were led into chanting her name by a young rabbi with wild curls. “
Andrea! Andrea!
” Andrea did not look at her fans. The louder they chanted, the smaller she tried to make herself, until she nearly disappeared at Father Tuiredh's side.

“Tomorrow, then?” shouted Mr. Elahu.

Andrea responded only by walking faster. The disappointed crowd let her pass. She did not acknowledge Ben. A taxi swallowed them.

The next day there were cartoons and articles about her in all the newspapers. A columnist called her Svengali, while another wrote that she had induced a “mass hypnosis” in Israelis and that she was therefore dangerous and ought to be confined to Kfar Shaul.

Someone overnighted to the station an excerpt from the writings of the mysterious scholar loan Coulianou, believed by mystics to be an angel actively involved in preparing a great plan for the future. The station sent it to the convent with a messenger.

“It all started in the year 1274, or perhaps much earlier,” Coulianou wrote, “with the wheels of Sefir Yetsira. Its wheels, arrayed with Hebrew alphabets, would produce the sublime language of Creation, the language behind the world, seen and unseen.” Coulianou went on to explain that “the movement of the wheels was the movement of celestial bodies, and language was the whole universe … by manipulating language one can, actually and concretely, manipulate the surrounding world.” Language and world, according to the mystic, functioned like the binary structure of the computer, one engendering the other.

Mr. Elahu called the convent to ask Andrea to do the show again that evening, even though another girl's tryout had been scheduled. Andrea said no. Mr. Elahu begged and pleaded, but the more he did, the more stubborn Andrea became.