Holy Smoke: A Jerusalem Mystery

by Frederick Ramsay

  For a change, Caiaphas had something other than Yeshua ben Josef on his mind this morning, and it did concern the Temple, but outrage at the circumstances was not it.

  “You have been stirring the pot,” he said without preamble or greeting.

  “Greetings in the Name to you, too, High Priest. What pot, or should I ask whose pot, have I been stirring? And why should I care?”

  “I have come from the Palace. You know how I hate that place. A filthy lair of licentious living. And the queen, well…”

  “Is it the queen’s or the king’s pot?”

  “Not the king’s, no…well, possibly. It wasn’t made clear to me. The king is still in Tiberias with the queen, unlike the prefect, who is in residence at the fortress, for some reason. Do you know why that might be?”

  “I had no idea Pontius Pilate graces our city. Does he?”

  “Yes. But to the point, not the king but his consul, minister, whatever that pompous man who curries favor with foreigners is called, took me to task. I do not like the King’s underlings scolding me, Rabban. No, I do not like it at all. And then to be summarily dismissed by the little…? I will pass a serious complaint about this rebuke along to his majesty, you can be sure of that.”

  “What problem did this court functionary feel he needed to report to you? More importantly, how does it apply to me?”

  “You have been poking into the death of the impious man, against my advice I should add. You have been asking questions. Some of the legatees from the west have reported they were displeased and discommoded by it.”

  “They were…You did say discommoded? How is it that a dead man in our Temple is the business of legatees from the west or anywhere else, for that matter? Where in the west, by the way?”

  “I am not sure—Egypt, I think.”

  “The Egyptian ambassador is upset that I am curious about a man in…Now that is strange indeed, but consistent with what I was told yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? What were you told yesterday? Never mind, I don’t want to know. For your own good, I insist you to drop your investigation. The events surrounding the man’s death are clear and the conclusion obvious.”

  “Clear to you, perhaps, but not to me. The man was not, I repeat, not a madman who burst into the Holy of Holies on some misbegotten mission to cleanse the Nation or have a few private moments with Ha Shem.”

  “Rabban, you blaspheme!”

  “I am being irreverent, perhaps, but blasphemy comes at a higher cost. A reminder, High Priest, as you noted, I am the rabban and I will be the judge of blasphemy—mine or anyone else’s. I repeat—the convenient story you have adopted will not serve. Our dead man met his end elsewhere. His killers or their accomplices brought him to the Veil subsequently. They then introduced him into the Holy of Holies as you saw that morning.” Caiaphas opened his mouth to protest. “Do not interrupt me, High Priest. We have determined that your madman had two things about him that should convince you of this if nothing else does.”

  “And they are?”

  “He was only recently circumcised and he traded as an herbalist or an apothecary.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “Ah, if it is facts you seek, ask yourself this. Why would an emissary from Egypt care a Galilean fig about a dead man in our temple? Find me the facts behind that and I will tell you the facts of the dead man. You will not find them, by the way. The Egyptian will insulate himself from inquiries by you and anyone else.”

  “Why would he?”

  “That, High Priest is precisely the point. Why ask? Why not be forthcoming and say, ‘I wish your man to cease his inquiries into the death in your Temple, which, by the way is no business of mine in the first place, because…’ because why, do you suppose?”

  “You vex me with these supposes and perhapses. The king could ask.”

  “He could, but he is, as you pointed out, not in the city and he would be wasting his time. The mode of speech among diplomats is at best, mildly dissembling and at worst, unabashed lying. Do you really believe the Egyptian will reveal to our King the reasons for his wish to suppress an investigation as I have described it?”

  “No.”

  “No, indeed. Even if he mustered the courage to do so, the emissary would not tell him.”

  “It makes no sense.” Caiaphas paced the room twice—up, turn, back, up, turn, back. “Rabban, hear my advice. Whatever you may believe to be the circumstances of the occurrence, you will be well advised to accept the evidence that a man, a gentile you now claim, entered the Holy of Holies and confronted an angry Lord of Hosts.”

  “High Priest—”

  “Hear me out. You have ruffled the feathers of the court once already and although the king seems not to mind the meddling, the queen still seethes at the very mention of your name and insists you be removed from office. The last thing you need to do now is create another reason for her to pressure her husband. The king may not be able to withstand her harping forever.”

  “There are two reasons why I cannot take your advice, excellent as it may be. On the one hand, there is, as I said before, the need to see justice done and as this murder is so intimately tied to the Temple, this need goes beyond the merely theoretical. It is absolute. On the other hand, the very fact that a foreign power has intruded into it suggests that this is no random killing, but rather one that may involve the Nation at the highest levels.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I do.”

  “You will not stop?”

  “I will not.”

  “Then I hope for your sake you survive this sally into international politics. I do not relish breaking in a new rabban, but…”

  “But?”

  “It would give me great deal of pleasure to see that officious monkey of a palace minister put in his place.”

  “We are at least agreed on something.”

  Chapter XXVI

  Caleb, a Samaritan traveling from Jericho to Jerusalem, detoured from the main path to avoid a group of obnoxious youths intent on ragging on another despised visitor from the land where the Lord was worshipped on Mount Gerizim rather than in Herod’s Temple. Even though Herod’s predecessors had destroyed Gerizim, Caleb and his coreligionists still preferred the ruins to the extravagant Temple in Jerusalem. His path took him through a narrow declivity into a wadi. At first he thought the shapes piled in its bottom must be someone’s goats which had wandered away or had been chased by a lioness and had fallen into its depths. A second look made him think otherwise. He scrambled part way down the steep bank and stopped a few cubits away from the tangle of limbs and torsos. The stench nearly knocked him over. It seemed evident that some animal, maybe several, had found and feasted on the remains since they had been deposited there. Why some had been spared this second assault and not others would be a question for someone familiar with the beasts of the wilderness to sort out, certainly not Caleb. He retreated and managed his ascent up the wadi’s steep bank considerably faster than his descent.

  He stopped the first patrol he met on the road. For all their faults, and he could think of many, the Romans did a fair job of keeping travelers safe on the roads. The patrol listened to his story and asked the location of his find and then dismissed him. They would do nothing else. They had no interest in dead men whom they assumed were just a few more Judeans foolish enough to stray from the main road and fall into the hands of the area’s bandits. They might have been more concerned had the Samaritan mentioned that two wore the garb of Temple guards. As Caleb did not frequent the Temple, he wouldn’t have recognized the uniforms even if he’d looked.

  The innkeeper where he stopped for the night listened to his story as well, nodded, and said that since the patrol had been notified, nothing more could be done. He also stated there was no room in the inn for Caleb even though the obvious lack of patrons indicated he lied. His actual words to Caleb were, he had no room for his kind. The Samaritan did not complain. Why bother? Samaritans had come to expe
ct this abuse. The citizens of Judea and Perea, as well as those up in the Galilee, looked down on him and his people, insisting their brand of Judaism, formulated as it was after the repatriation from Babylon, represented the only Way and not the bastardized version practiced in Samaria. Things never changed. Of course there was that strange woman and her story of the rabbi at the well, but who could trust someone like her?

  Satisfied he’d done his duty he settled in for the night in his sleeping blankets beside the goats. It would be pointless to speak more about those dead men.

  ***

  Had Gamaliel any knowledge of the carnage in the wilderness he might reconsidered his intention to expose the killer of the Temple man, as the murdered man had now come to be called. People who dispose of their victims in the wilderness do not do so to hide them, but rather to hide the fact of murder. Missing persons do not attract the attention bodies do. The killing of Temple guards could cause a panic in some quarters and create difficulties. Dropping them into a remote wadi or garbage heap tended to lessen the impact. What people did not know could not hurt them, the saying goes. Of course the victims and their families might disagree. And if the victims included representatives from other lands and cultures, well best let that stay hidden as well. Rome would not be bothered if a few residents of Judea thinned the population that way. But if too many visitors turned up dead, that could only spell trouble.

  As it happened, Gamaliel did not know, and it would be several more days before anyone else did, either. By that time he would have solved the mystery. The report of those multiple deaths would only confirm the outcome.

  As it played out, he left the high priest more determined to piece together the bits and pieces of the Temple man’s last days than before. He felt certain he needed to find Ali bin Selah. How to find him posed another problem entirely. Would Loukas have any ideas? The only connection he had to the self-proclaimed Assyrian would be through Loukas. Gamaliel knew Loukas, and Loukas knew Ali. What he wished to know now was the connection between the Street of the Herbalists, Ali, and the murdered man. After Ali’s odd visit, the possibility that one existed seemed strong.

  He needed to concentrate on this murder business and get it over with. And he needed to find Zach the Guards Captain again. In the light of the warnings from the high priest, Gamaliel needed to quiz him more closely. And then there was the problem of the hands on the dead man found in the apothecary’s shop. They were not the hands of an apothecary. So who was he? He left a note for his students telling them that their studies were suspended for a few days.

  ***

  Ali bin Selah’s plan to visit Loukas had been interrupted by that meddling Pharisee. He spent the remainder of the day looking for a place to hole up while he weighed his, by now, dwindling options. His search for shelter brought him to the village of Bethany and a shabby inn on its periphery where the relative lack of business between High Holy Days forced the innkeeper to ask fewer questions of potential lodgers than he might have otherwise. So Ali moved his meager possessions into a tiny room which had access to the roof, a feature the inn keeper described as limited and special. Why that should be true eluded Ali until another guest asked if he would take money for switching rooms.

  “Why would you wish to do such a thing?” he asked.

  “Why? Where else would you sleep in the heat? In the rooms a man might roast like a sheep on a spit. Don’t people sleep on their roofs where you come from?”

  Ali shrugged. The thought never occurred to him. He supposed some of the poorer citizens in Nineveh might do so. He really didn’t know. His house had a central fountain and atria designed to circulate the air throughout the various rooms and cool it. Sleeping on the roof with its minarets and finials would be difficult at best and unthinkable in any case. As much as he had learned from Loukas during his visits, Ali realized he had more to learn about this nation’s odd customs and problems. At the moment he had a bigger fish in his net that needed to be brought into the boat. Access to the roof appealed to him not so much for the chance it afforded for a cooler night’s rest, but because he saw the advantage of a second exit from the building it offered, should he need one. His funds were running low and the money would have been useful, but he declined the offer to exchange rooms. He had funds available in letters of credit, but to cash them meant coming out of hiding and presenting himself in public, which, of course, was what he did not wish to do. Not just now. Not until he had to, and not until he knew what Loukas, and by indirection, the rabban, knew.

  ***

  For his part Loukas spent the day, the portion not filled with patients, reviewing everything Gamaliel told him including the latest—the Palace’s attempt to suppress the investigation. He did not possess Gamaliel’s intuitive skills. For Loukas, problems were solved by assembling facts, arranging them in logical order, and then reading them like a scroll. The problem’s narrative would then unfold and the solution an inevitable conclusion. Accordingly, he sorted through all the facts he had, added Gamaliel’s bits and pieces that he had not heard personally, added in the odds and ends Ali had mentioned when he’d analyzed the body and, after a half hour of intense concentration, came up with exactly…nothing.

  He thought back through everything, this time more slowly and rearranging some of the parts. He asked himself, what would Gamaliel do had he been in Loukas’ place? Except for examining the body, a thing Law forbade, the two of them had done and seen nearly everything together. True, he had not accompanied Gamaliel on his first trip to the herbalists, but Loukas had seen the burned out ruins and the body in the souk. Gamaliel had not seen Ali’s reaction to the body. Did that mean anything? Could either be important? Did either matter? What had Ali’s reaction been at the sight of the Temple man’s body? Gamaliel would have noticed something, but what? An anamnesis, he thought, I will have an anamnesis.

  He was still attempting to relive the moment when his new servant, who’d been tasked to watch Draco, cried out. Draco was dead. Well, at least Ali bin Selah’s potion had made the passage easier. He covered the poor man’s body with the bed sheet and turned to leave. Arrangements had to be made. As an afterthought he picked up the vial of pain relief. Empty.

  “Draco said he could no longer stand the pain. He must have downed it all at once,” the servant said.

  Draco had indeed drained every last drop from the small flask. Loukas had warned him not to self-medicate. Apparently, he’d found the strength to reach the vial and do so anyway. Well, a blessing however you looked at it. Loukas retrieved a second vial from the shelf where he’d stored it earlier. He would add this useful elixir to his other medicines.

  Chapter XXVII

  Gamaliel woke the following morning from a dreamless sleep. He rushed through his morning prayers, ablutions, and breakfast, then set out for Loukas’ house on a bright and crystal-clear morning. He had one stop to make on his way. The night guards would be just now assembling to turn Temple security over to the larger day shift. If he hurried, he should be able to catch Zach ben Azar’el. He needed to pinpoint the source of the comments the guard made concerning the palace. Did he mean the palace as in the king, or the palace as in its many lesser functionaries? The king was not in the city and so it was difficult to assign royal annoyance to the investigation. It must have come from a lower level, but from whom? Either the high priest had it wrong or Zach misspoke. Gamaliel was hoping the high priest had made the mistake, but he needed to be sure.

  As he expected, the night guards, all looking a little worse for wear, had been just then dismissed and were headed toward the Hulda tunnels to the South Wall and the lower city. Yehudah, the captain of the guards, had dispatched the day shift to their posts.

  “Rabban, greetings in the Name. You heard then?”

  “Heard? What might I have heard? I came to talk to Zach ben Azar’el.”

  “Then you haven’t heard. The captain of the night guard has gone missing. That makes three from the night shift unaccounted for now.” />
  “I knew about the first two. Zach believed they took a bribe to turn a blind eye to the events of the other night and have fled or paid for their indiscretion with their lives.”

  “Well, he is missing. I have no idea why or where. Can I help you with anything?”

  “I am afraid not now. When was Zach reported missing?”

  “He failed to report for duty last night. His second in command roused me and I stood Zach’s watch. Now, I must stand my own.”

  “You have my sympathy. I do not think your companion missed his shift of his own will, however.”

  “You believe he is sick? Why not send word?”

  “Not sick, Yehudah. I think it is worse than that.”

  Gamaliel shook his head and hurried across the platform toward the north exits and the Sheep Gate.

  “You believe he’s dead?” Yehudah called after him.

  Gamaliel raised his arm in a parting gesture and kept walking. The sacrificial fires, which had been banked for the night, were being stoked as he strode past. Soon the hiss and sizzle of burning flesh and hide and the resultant acrid smoke would once again grace his city.

  A few of the kohanim greeted him as he passed, but he ignored them. His mind, like an overlarge wine cask, began to fill with all the pieces of his puzzle. As they fell in, everything else was forced up and out to spill over and away to wherever it is that thoughts go when they are no longer one’s immediate interest. He neither heard nor acknowledged the people who had to dodge out of his way as he bore down on them. Zach missing…probably dead. Where was Ali bin Selah? What would he have told Loukas had he stayed instead of bounding off like a frightened gazelle? More importantly, what might Loukas have told him? Gamaliel stopped abruptly in midstride. Was it possible Ali had another purpose in mind when he barged in yesterday?