The Fury of Rachel Monette (7 page)

Calvi fumbled with the mechanism but could not manage it. He had never fastened a seat belt in his life, except in airplanes, and this seemed far more complex.

“God in heaven,” said the driver with some impatience as he switched on the interior light. Calvi thought it a mild oath when he saw the face it came out of. A face enormously broad, with a thick sweeping bony crescent of brow, two slabs of cheeks and a nose like a redoubt between them. The blond hair was thinning, the blue eyes were somewhat wide and in the mouth the teeth that weren't missing didn't match.

The blond man leaned across Calvi's body and reached for the seat belt. Calvi had never seen a thicker wrist, and the nylon fabric of his cheap jacket stretched tautly across his back. Not until the blond man had finished with the seat belt and sat straight did Calvi notice how close to the floor pedals the seat was pushed. The blond man could not have been more than a few inches over five feet. Standing, Calvi imagined, he would look like a being adapted to a much more massive planet than earth. Here he was in the wrong place. The thought was restorative.

“You're late,” Calvi said.

In answer the blond man started the motor and turned the car south, toward Mount Zion. He drove like a good citizen, obeying all the lights and signals and staying under the speed limit. Calvi patted his pockets until he found the one that held his cigars, and lit one, dropping the match on the floor. He drew smoke into his mouth and forced it out through his nose. The sting in his sinuses brought tears to his eyes. Despite the cold the blond man lowered his window two or three inches.

Outside the city, on the road to Beersheba, the blond man began to drive faster. At first there was a little traffic, but after the Bethlehem turn-off none. In the Judean hills the blond man pressed further on the accelerator, and Calvi knew that no Volkswagen could go so fast.

“What sort of motor have you got in this thing?” he asked.

“Porsche.” The blond man spoke the word as if it were the name of his baby daughter.

Calvi twisted around to see the back seat. There was no back seat; in its stead a thin metal casing had been hastily banged into place to hide the hypertrophied engine. He listened to the sounds of the spinning steel. It wasn't out of tune at all, not in the sense he had thought at first.

Calvi stared out the window as they climbed through the olive groves of Judea. The dusty leaves were silver foil in the moonlight. Calvi tried to play back in his mind the arrival of the Volkswagen at the Damascus Gate, and in this review he saw what his eyes had seen the first time, but his mind had missed: the very wide, very deep-tread tires of the car. He wondered now where they were going.

Ahead Calvi thought he could make out the round dark shapes of the bare hills of Gush Etzion. Two kibbutzim were sheltered in those hills, populated in part by descendants of the two hundred and forty Jews who had been killed on the same site in the '48 war. Fourteen, Calvi remembered, had blown themselves up in their armored car rather than be taken by the Arab Legion. In the end even the trees had been uprooted by the Arabs. It made the present inhabitants determined.

With a quick movement the blond man switched off the headlights, and slowed the car by half. He put his face almost against the windshield, squinting ahead. In the distance Calvi thought he saw a light, but he could no longer trust his eyes for that sort of thing. The blond man braked the car to a creep, and began peering into the vineyards that bordered the side of the elevated road bed. Then, with a suddenness that caught Calvi by surprise he jerked the wheel, and sent the car flying off the road. They landed with a sickening jolt that cracked the top of Calvi's head against the roof. He felt thankful for the seat belt.

The blond man drove the car in a quick circle, snapping the vine stocks beneath. He parked at the foot of the embankment which supported the road, and switched off the engine. The vines would not afford much cover at this time of year, Calvi thought. He's counting on the superior elevation of the road. But Calvi was certain the top of the car would show.

Calvi rubbed the top of his head, and realized that his mouth had a death grip on the cigar. As he puffed it back to life he felt the muscles of the blond man stiffen. Calvi too saw it—a point, no, two points of light in the south.

The blond man turned to Calvi to show him that he had his finger over his lips. Then he did something that Calvi did not like at all: with his short broad fingers he took the cigar from Calvi's mouth and put it in the ashtray. Calvi started to protest.

“Silence,” the blond man hissed.

They waited. Calvi tried to think of a credible explanation for why he was sitting in a vineyard in the middle of the night with a man whose name he didn't know. He couldn't. They watched the headlights bob up and down and sometimes slip out of sight as they moved through the hills. In about two minutes they were very close, although it seemed much longer to Calvi. He heard the throb of the engine, and mixed into that sound a metallic rattle of the kind a jeep frame might make. The yellow beams illuminated the vineyard behind them, and Calvi saw how bare it looked. For a very long moment the light flowed into the Volkswagen showing Calvi the beads of sweat on the blond man's upper lip. From six feet away the din hit their ears, the pounding pistons and the high-pitched wail of eroding rubber and asphalt. Then the Doppler effect bent the noise like a blue note and it was gone, leaving a wake of noxious fumes.

“Dear God,” said the blond man softly. But he made no move to start the car. A dark green gecko ran along the windshield, stopped, dipped up and down a few times like a push-up fanatic, and rested motionless, its reptilian feet clinging to the glass.

From very near Calvi was surprised by the faint susurrus of slow rolling tires on the road, followed by the almost undetectable purr of a lovingly treated engine. No headlights this time, no rattle. It went by like a ghost. The blond man checked the luminous dial of his wristwatch and waited exactly two minutes before he started the car. He was very good.

Before they reached Beersheba the blond man turned the car off the road, and barely slackening speed, using only the light of the moon, he began to maneuver across the rock and sand of the Negev. At first the way was very bumpy. Rocks, some big and unyielding, struck at the axles. Wiry bushes clung to the bumpers. Occasionally the fat tires lost traction in drifts of soft sand, but the blond man always slid through. Finally he found the hard-packed bed of a
wadi
winding south, and he followed it. In the distance Calvi could see the dark shape of a massive plateau rising straight off the desert floor. He had been a soldier, he had learned the soldier's art of falling instantly to sleep when there was nothing to be done. He slept.

When he awoke the moon had gone down. He could see little except the profile of the blond man, sickly green in the light from the instrument panel. Again they were on very uneven ground and the lines of strain on the blond man's forehead were etched in a deeper green. As his eyes adjusted, Calvi saw that they were beginning the climb up the massif. Around him loomed hulking twisted rocks; robbed of their yellows and pinks and browns by the night, they took on the shadowy shapes of the prehistoric monsters that once walked the earth. He guessed that they had entered the land that had made the Hebrews so fed up with Moses on the trek to the Promised Land. Cohn had told him Isaiah's description when they had toured the area once in the fifties. Cohn liked to take him on little educational trips and his hobby, which he admitted was somewhat nostalgic, was the geography of the Bible. Isaiah had called the place “a land of trouble and anguish, from whence came the young and old lion, the viper and fiery flying serpent.” Calvi saw no sign of the fauna but he didn't quarrel with the first part.

The climb was very slow. Several times rocks as tall as trees forced them to backtrack. During one stretch they crept along the edge of a deep gorge. Calvi could feel the cold wind rising in a steady current from the dark and arid plain below. One of the rear tires slipped off the sand, and it spun wildly over the abyss before the blond man could fight the car back to safety.

Calvi guessed that they had climbed only a few hundred feet when the blond man stopped the car and peered at the solid rock wall that rose to his left. He took a flashlight from under his seat and got out of the car. Calvi saw that he was even shorter than he had guessed. With his hand over the lens like a visor, the blond man shone the light for two or three seconds at a time at different sections of the rock. Calvi saw nothing but a shadow that might indicate an indentation further up. The blond man returned to the car and drove on.

When they reached the shadow in the wall the blond man stopped the car and turned off the ignition. He motioned for Calvi to get out. Calvi unfastened the seat belt—in this respect it resembled those on airplanes—climbed out and closed the door quietly.

There was no sound except the faint brushing of the wind in the whorls of his ears. The cold dry air sharpened his senses. He walked softly to the indentation in the rock face. Only when he stood right before it could he see that it was not an indentation but a narrow natural passage through the thick stone wall. At the end of the utterly black corridor he could see the deep grays of open space. He walked through.

He supposed that he had entered a small boxed canyon. On all sides he felt the vertical presence of the cliffs. He had taken two steps inside when he sensed a man behind him. He whirled, and faced a robed Bedouin, as tall as he, but not as broad. In one motion Calvi crouched and turned sideways, watching for a knife. But the Bedouin reached out his hand, and gently touched Calvi on the upper arm. Calvi relaxed slightly, and the Bedouin ran his hand softly over his arm, under it, down the side, the leg, the inside of the leg, the other side. How careless, Calvi thought. If guns were a worry the blond man should have searched him long before.

He took a cigar from his coat pocket. To hell with these people. He struck a match, and in the glow of the light saw the rifle held loosely in one hand, the bandoliers that formed an X across the man's chest, and the
keffiyeh
pulled across the lower half of the face against the wind. But above the keffiyeh, the face, although dark, looked soft, very soft for a Bedouin. And between the keffiyeh and the round neck of the robe Calvi saw the starched beige collars of a uniform. Why are they taking such chances, Calvi asked himself. Angrily the man leaned forward and blew out the match.

The hand that had been so gentle turned Calvi with surprising strength toward the end of the canyon. There in the shadow of the wall he thought he could make out the darker patch of a Bedouin tent. The hot red embers of the cigar end gave him comfort. He knew he would see the Captain tonight. It had been a long time.

As they reached Jerusalem dawn was bringing out all the right colors in the limestone. The stones that lay on the ground were ready to be chipped and shaped and piled on top of each other in buildings and walls; the ones already in piles were falling down. The battle against rubble had been fought for three thousand years, but no one was winning.

The blond man dropped him at the Jaffa Gate, under David's Tower, and drove away without a word. Calvi gazed at the tower, making sure he had memorized the license number of the car. It wasn't much of a tower—a stunted cylinder like a primitively sculpted rook. David had had nothing to do with it. It was a good place for the staging of sound and light shows in English, French, and Hebrew. David had nothing to do with them either.

Calvi walked west, into the new town. An old man was hosing the part of the sidewalk that he borrowed from the city for his outdoor café. The chairs were stacked on the tables, upside down, and there were no customers. The water ran across the sidewalk and sluiced along the street, moving a cargo of torn wrappers, yesterday's papers, used cinema tickets, banana skins, dust, and dirt. The water swept everything along its course, except a few mounds of donkey excrement which refused to budge. Calvi took a chair off one of the tables and sat down.

The old man laid down the hose and went inside the café. In a few moments the water came out of the hose in one last gurgle, and stopped. The old man returned.

“Yes?” he said. He had taken the trouble to wrap himself in a clean white apron.

“Coffee, please,” Calvi said. “Black and strong.”

“A little sugar, maybe?” the old man asked.

Calvi looked up. The old man's eyes were very clear and very blue. He was probably no older than Calvi himself.

“Yes. Sugar.”

The old man disappeared into the café, and Calvi heard the sucking sounds of the coffee machine. He came back carrying a tin tray. With hands that shook slightly he carefully arranged the cup and saucer, sugar, spoon, and paper napkin on the table. When he reached forward his white shirt sleeve slid up his forearm and Calvi saw the tattoo, bluer than any vein. S4106. Many people in this town could tell from that the name of the camp and the week he had arrived, but Calvi wasn't one of them.

He drank his coffee but he forgot about the sugar.

As he felt in an inner pocket for his wallet he touched the folded sheets of paper. He hadn't read them yet, but he knew they bore a letter from a girl named Marie to a man named Walter D.

He also knew that after the letter had been translated into the language of
Crime and Punishment
it would become a speech calling on the Oriental Jews of Israel to stage a general two-hour work shut-down one afternoon in early April. In an age when workers set fire to their factories it sounded like kid stuff.

Simon Calvi told himself that a few times but it didn't help.

7

From the soft fragrant breezes that drifted lightly through the pine trees in the cemetery and the dirty crusted snow that lay melting slowly by the gravestones, Rachel knew that winter was ending. They stood around a hole in the wet ground—her father, Andy Monteith, the Dawkinses, the bearded Henry Gates from European history, the college chaplain, Rachel. The sun shone warmly, making up for lost time.