Saving Grace (39 page)

“Then how come his lawyer never heard it before?” Buscaglio said triumphantly. “I saw Leeds’s face when Fleishman pulled that final rabbit out of his hat. He was flabbergasted.”

* * *

“Is it true?” Christopher Leeds was asking at that moment. “Is it possible?”

“It’s true.”

“Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me? I could have gotten a postponement. I could have used this in the hearing on freezing your assets. I can still—”

“No, you can’t. We’re not using Lily’s illness as capital. I’m not dragging her into this, and I’m not hiding behind her skirts.”

“Jonathan, you’re upset, and God knows you have cause. You’re carrying enough of a load. Let me do my job.”

“I’m not stopping you—but you’re not using Lily.”

* * *

Jane Buscaglio hung up the phone in her office and shrugged. “He confirmed it, the cancer, the surgery.”

Lucas rubbed his eyes. “Did he say what her prognosis is?”

“I didn’t ask. You realize that when the press gets hold of this, Fleishman’s going to drown in sympathy. Not to mention what happens if the daughter really does turn up missing. We’ll need a change of venue to Alaska just to get an impartial jury.”

“That’s your concern? You think Lily got brain cancer just to fuck with us?”

“Easy, Lucas.”

“I’ve known Lily Fleishman half my life. She’s a fine woman.”

“She can afford to be, on what he rakes in.”

“She was the same when they had nothing. Given the situation, what’s your call on the passport?”

She stared. “Frankly, it scares the shit out of me that you’re even asking that question.”

“He’s not going to walk out on Lily now.”

“For all we know, she put him up to it. For the children’s sake, naturally.’“

“You’re a hard woman, Jane.”

She drew herself up to her full height. “Hey. I’m sorry she’s sick, but basically I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the lady, okay? Because as far as I’m concerned, either she knew what he was up to or she deliberately closed her eyes. Either way, she had no problem spending the loot. And, just ‘cause someone obviously has to say it, we’d be crazy to let Fleishman go abroad.”

“He’s not going to run. He won’t desert Lily.”

“You’re the boss,” Buscaglio said. “But if he jumps….Think about it, Lucas. Do you really want to put your career in that man’s hands?”

* * *

They returned to the conference room. Lucas went around the table and sat down beside Jonathan. “I know you don’t want my sympathy, but that’s all I can offer.”

“What’s it going to take,” Jonathan said, “to get that passport?” Christopher gave him a sharp look, which Jonathan ignored.

“No deals,” Buscaglio interjected. “What good is a deal once you’re over there?”

Jonathan ignored her, directing his words to Lucas. “You want me to plead guilty? I’ll do it unconditionally. I’ll sign a confession here and now.”

“The hell you will.” Christopher jumped up and tugged Jonathan’s arm. “Come on, we’re leaving.”

“Listen to your lawyer,” Lucas said. “Go home.”

Jonathan turned to Buscaglio. “A full and complete confession. An admission of all my sins, in return for permission to go find my daughter and bring her home.”

“Worthless,” Leeds said quickly. “I’d have it thrown out in a minute,”
 

“Would you name your accomplices?” Buscaglio asked.

“I said
my
sins,” Jonathan said. “No names, but I’ll plead guilty to every count of every charge.”

“No, you won’t.” Christopher looked past him at Lucas. “If you have any decency, Rayburn, you’ll put a stop to this now.”

“Forget it, Jonathan,” Lucas said. “The passport’s not on offer, and anyway, you know as well as we do that a confession under these circumstances would be worthless. But you know,”—he leaned in toward Jonathan, holding his eyes—”I’ve got this crazy feeling that maybe you really
want
to confess. I’m wondering if somewhere inside you, the principled man I once knew is buried alive, fighting to get out.”

“Shame on you,” Christopher
 
cried. “You’re telling a depressed, traumatized man to go ahead and jump.”

“No, sir, I’m telling him it’s okay to do the right thing. I’m saying it’s the only way to salvage anything from a career that was once exemplary. You’re advising him to squander his last shred of dignity on a desperate effort to deny the truth, and I hate that. I don’t blame you; I know your job is to get him off, not to save his soul. But he still has choices. And you know that, Jonathan.
 
Somewhere inside, you know that.”

28

HALF THE GODDAMN MORNING WASTED waiting for you prima donnas to get your tutus on,” Micha said disgustedly, “then a fucking drop of rain falls and you’re afraid to go out.”

“A drop of rain?” the other said. Sheets of gray rain curtained the window of the dining hall, whose atmosphere was dense with smoke and steaming bodies.

Micha was getting a civilian’s brush-off from an old comrade, currently the commander of the army’s search team. Lieutenant Mordecai Rachamim, called Motke, came from a small development town in the Negev. His parents were Tunisian immigrants, and Motke had been a fanatic Likud supporter since he was big enough to sling a tomato. Micha was a third-generation Labor man. They had nothing but the army in common, and outside, their paths would never have crossed; the friendship dated back to the first push northward through Lebanon, where the two young officers argued politics by night and fought grueling house-by-house battles by day.

Micha said, “If you’d gotten the fucking dogs here on time, we’d have had her by now.”

“Too late now, that’s for sure. Which reminds me: Yossi, cancel the dogs,” Motke said into his radio.

“I just want to know one thing. Is this personal? Are you sitting on your ass because this girl’s my cousin?”

“Fuck you, Kimchi. It’s not her fault she’s related to you. She’ll find shelter, and we’ll find her as soon as the weather breaks,
if
she’s out there.”

“What if she’s hurt? What if she can’t reach shelter? It’s been nearly 36 hours. She could die of exposure.”

Motke lit a new cigarette from the butt of the old. “Those trails could wash out any minute. The wadis are flooding already. Plus, for all we know she’s drinking coffee in a Tel Aviv café.”

“With no money and no clothes.”

“Maybe she met someone. She’s an American, right? Look, I don’t give a shit how much heat I get from headquarters. It’s my call, and I’m not risking my men’s lives for nothing. It’s a question”—he blew smoke in Micha’s face—”of loyalty toward our men.”

“So that’s what it comes down to.”

“You got it.”

“How much loyalty, Motke? Enough to close your eyes to murder?”

“It wasn’t murder.”

“Why not? Because he was an Arab?”

“Goddamn kibbutzniks. Who set you to be a light to the nations?”

“It’s as much my army as yours.”

“Not for long,” Motke said.

* * *

“Well?” Tamar said as Micha entered her house on a gust of wind and rain.

“Nothing. They’re waiting for the rain to end.”

“Bastards,” Yaacov said, pacing back and forth on his gimpy leg.

“Same with Udi,” Tamar said. Udi Heskel was chief ranger on the Ein Gedi nature reserve and head of the regional search team. “They’ve pulled everyone back for fear of floods.”

“I don’t understand how you could let her go off like that,” Yaacov said. “Such terrible news, and then you just let her go.”

Micha sprang to his mother’s defense. “No one could have anticipated this. Gracie should have known better.”

Tamar passed a hand over her eyes. Yaacov was right, she thought. She never should have left the girl alone.

“And then to run and tell Jonathan before we even get her back. What will they think of us?”

“I didn’t tell him,” Tamar said wearily. “He found out somehow.”

“Clara will never forgive me.”

“Dad, the woman hasn’t spoken to you in twenty years. How’re you going to know the difference?”

“I’ll know.”

“I’m off, then,” said Micha.

Tamar looked from him to the window, blasted by rain. “I’ll go with you.”

“You’d only slow me down. And I need someone to man the radio in case I get lucky.”

“Yaacov can do that.”

“You’re not coming,” Micha said flatly.

They locked eyes. Finally Tamar nodded. “Take my medical kit. Where will you go?”

“Nachal Arugot,” he said. He’d been over it again and again in his head. Nachal David was the most accessible of her haunts, the hills above the kibbutz the most dangerous; but both areas had been thoroughly searched the day before, without result. That left Nachal Arugot, where Grace had hiked with Tamar.

Yaacov said, “Udi’s already been there.”

“Only along the upper trail. Udi doesn’t really believe she’s out there. He thinks she’s holed up somewhere, giggling at all the fuss.”

“I took her down to the hidden waterfall. She loved it.” Tamar’s voice was full of dread. No one needed to say what they all knew. When the first rain fell as early and hard as this unseasonal deluge, flash floods were sure to follow. Six years ago, two young boys hiking through Nachal Arugot had been caught by a flash flood. They’d drowned in the wadi.

Micha slipped Tamar’s medical kit into his knapsack and shouldered the pack. He nodded good-bye.

“Be careful,” Tamar said.

“I’m always careful.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He paused at the door, looking back.

“Be careful with Gracie,” she said. “How is it with you and your cousin?”

Her son stared at her. “Really, Ema? Is this the time?”

“Precisely the time. If you find her, she’ll be a very grateful girl.”

“As well she should be.”

“Don’t hurt this child, Micha.”

“Whatever Gracie is, she’s not a child. And if you’re going to worry about someone, worry about me.”

* * *

The Greek philosopher Zeno said that one can never step in the same river twice, for the river flows and changes constantly, sweeping all with it. Toss a stone into moving water and both the stone and its impression vanish instantly; excavate a river and all you’ll find is silt and more silt. Not so the desert, whose nature is to desiccate and thus preserve. Excavate a desert and layer upon layer of human and natural history is revealed, indelibly inscribed in rock; press your ear to the ground and hear, beneath the thrumming of everything that moves, the faint temporal echoes of those who came before.

When these two elemental forces meet, rushing water and impermeable rock, the potential for destruction transcends the present. Not only all that is, but all that was is swept away; time itself is stripped to the bone. Thus it was that when God chose to undo the world, his instrument was flood.

This was the sight that greeted Micha when he left his jeep at the beginning of Nachal Arugot and embarked on the path that snaked along its northern wall: a stream that should have been a mere trickle, swollen into a raging river, flooding the wadi floor and surging toward the Dead Sea. Micha, who knew the wadi intimately in all its moods and seasons, had never seen it so distempered.

On ordinary days it was possible to stand at one end of Nachal Arugot and holler, and the sound would echo and reecho down kilometers of canyon, loosening rocks and sending the skittish ibex flying. Micha cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed Gracie’s name, but could not even hear himself over the pounding of the rain and the roar of the stream below. Beneath the hood of his slicker he wore an army cap with a visor, but the wind spiraled through the gorge, blinding him with rain. His anger at Motke abruptly disintegrated. If Micha had commanded the search team, he, too, would have sent his men home to wait out the storm.

He took the walkie-talkie from his backpack. “Ema, can you hear me?”

There was a loud crackle of static, then Tamar’s voice: “...
 
are you?”

“I’m just entering the wadi now. It’s badly flooded. Let them know—they’re going to have to close the road.”

The radio crackled but he couldn’t make out the words.

“There’s zero visibility and the noise is tremendous. I’ll try the path first, then cut down lower.”

“Be careful.” Her voice was suddenly clear.

Micha hunched his shoulders and set off. He hated worrying Tamar, who had the harder part of waiting, but it couldn’t be helped. They had to know where to look in case of accident.

As he walked, he searched the ground. It told him nothing, all sign of human passage washed away. Frequently he stopped, looked about, and called Gracie’s name. No answer came. Micha passed groups of ibex huddled motionlessly beneath stone overhangs. They lowered their heads at him but did not flee. Twice the trail was blocked by rockslides; he had to pick his way around the obstructions.