Music played in Gabriela’s ear. It didn’t sound sappy, the way she’d figured a televangelist’s hold music would. It was just…there. Then it wasn’t. “Lester Stark here, Ms. Sandoval. Jeremy says you have something on your mind that might interest me.”
Wow! That’s a hell of a voice. The thought was more reverent than not. A TV preacher had to have good pipes. But Stark’s warm baritone was better than good. He would have pulled people in reading the phone book, never mind Revelation.
His voice was so good, Gabriela needed a beat before answering, “That’s right, Reverend.” She’d dealt with a good many clerics, even if most of them came from Stark’s left. “I was wondering if you’d like to help continue and complete the work Brandon Nesbitt and I began before his untimely demise.” The filthy turdface, she added, but only to herself. Yes, you had to sit on some stories.
“I must tell you, I don’t care for much of the coverage you folks gave from Israel,” Stark said. “Mr. Nesbitt struck me as being out for his own glory first, for anything sensational after that, and for faith, which lies at the heart of everything, only as an afterthought. He might still be living had he taken faith more seriously.”
Yeah, and I might be dead instead, Gabriela thought. But you’re right the first time, and the second, and the third. She said, “Brandon was who he was. If you join me, you can help give future work the balance you feel it should have.”
“You don’t balance mistaken views, Ms. Sandoval. You correct them.” Lester Stark had his own opinions, all right.
So did Gabriela, but she was convinced reasonable people could reach reasonable compromises…most of the time, anyway. If she and Stark couldn’t here, she would try somebody else. She said, “I think we’re saying the same thing in different words, so let’s not get anti-semantic, okay?”
She also needed to know if the horrid pun would be too pungent for him. After some silence, he said, “Go on.”
“Nobody knows how this will turn out. Well, God does, but He’s not telling us ahead of time,” Gabriela said. “Brandon knew what he thought—”
“And he touched the Ark after repeated warnings not to, and paid for his transgression with his life,” Stark said.
And I would have done the same thing if the motherfucker hadn’t doped me, Gabriela thought. There but for the grace of God went I—the grace of God or a bad-odds roll in the crapshoot of life.
She wouldn’t tell Stark any of that. It still freaked her out, and likely would for years. “What you say is true. Brandon was a long way from perfect,” she said. You have no idea how far, either. More things she wouldn’t say. She did go on, “But he was right a lot of the time, and he was brave most of the time. Yes, he had an eye for the main chance. We wouldn’t have been in Israel or been able to get those great reports after the Arabs dirty-bombed Tel Aviv otherwise. He deserves credit.” And I deserve an Emmy for Best Bullshit in a Starring Role, and Gabriela and Brandon deserves a helping hand. Needs one, anyway.
“You’re right when you say no man is of a piece,” Stark replied. “I wish Mr. Nesbitt hadn’t put his talent to some of the uses he did….What do you want me to do, and what arrangements do you propose?”
For Gabriela, explaining what she had in mind was easy. How much to offer…With most people, she would have lowballed the first time. With Stark, she made her best offer right away. Sometimes you had to know when not to bullshit.
“Well,” Stark said—the number must have been bigger than he expected. While he might not crap in a solid-gold toilet like some TV preachers, he wasn’t allergic to cash. Who was? He continued, “That…does appear satisfactory. If our legal and financial people can firm up everything along those lines, discussions will definitely go forward.”
Once I’m sure you can pay what you say you’ll pay, Gabriela translated without malice. “Wonderful!” she said. “Thank you!”
“And in case of Rapture, all debts are paid,” Stark added, which wasn’t a bad comeback for anti-semantic. He added, “I was thinking about going to the Holy Land soon. I take this as a sign I should.”
“Wonderful!” Gabriela said again. She felt redeemed. Brandon was gone—to hell, with any luck—but Gabriela and Brandon would have more product.
“Come on, Shoshanah! Come on, Rosie!” a man coaxed.
Chaim Avigad watched helplessly from his apartment window as the red heifer got into her trailer. A couple of carrots were more persuasive than her Hebrew or her English name.
“She’s going to Jerusalem!” Despair filled Chaim’s voice.
“Of course she is,” his mother answered. She’d never understood what was bothering him.
“They’re going to kill her!” Chaim cried.
“They have to, sweetie.” Rivka Avigad did her best to sound consoling, but her heart wasn’t in it. Chaim could tell. She went on, “The Temple’s about to go up. We’ll be able to celebrate our religion the way God always meant us to. They need to sanctify the ground, and the workers, too. And they have to sacrifice a red heifer to do that. I know you’re fond of Shoshanah, but—”
Chaim spun away. “God is stupid!” he yelled. “If you have to kill something to make something else holy, what’s the use?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” his mother replied. “It’s in the Scriptures. It wouldn’t be if God didn’t want it. If it’s something He needs, who are we to question Him?”
“Somebody ought to,” Chaim said. “It’s silly.”
“Is it any sillier than raising children in buildings on stilts?” his mother replied. “I thought that was worthwhile, and so did your father. We never argued about that.” Her mouth twisted. They’d argued about plenty of other things; Chaim remembered the fights from when he was little. She’d raised him by herself since, and she got on a lot better with Uncle Yitzhak than she ever had with Chaim’s dad. He couldn’t remember the last time Tzvi Avigad came around. He had his own, much less pious, life now.
“Nobody ever asked me what I thought about that,” Chaim said.
Rivka Avigad sighed. “No, nobody did. So what? All of us who agreed to bring up our boys like this, we were doing God’s will. See how things are coming together? The red heifer, and the Ark, and rebuilding the Temple at last, and the miracle He worked when He stopped the rockets and killed the wicked leaders who launched them…”
“Why didn’t He keep the terrorists from setting off the dirty bomb in Tel Aviv, then, if He’s working miracles?” Chaim asked.
Down below, they were closing the trailer and hitching it up to a muscular American pickup. Armored personnel carriers belched diesel fumes into the air. They would protect Rosie all the way. Oh, boy, Chaim thought. They don’t want anybody killing her till they can do it themselves. Big deal!
He missed some of his mother’s answer. When he started paying attention again, she was saying, “—think we needed that bomb in Tel Aviv. It woke people up. It made sure Israel has the government to want to restore the Temple.”
“So God blew up a thousand people and made lots more radioactive, so He could get His temple back?” Chaim said. “Wasn’t there an easier way?”
“God doesn’t worry about easy. He does what suits Him, not what suits us.”
Brandon could have argued with her. He was weird, but Chaim didn’t think he’d been bad. God evidently had a different opinion. And He’d massacred Job’s family—or let Satan do it, which was the same thing—without blinking. Chaim had already gone ’round and ’round on that with his mother and his uncle. You couldn’t win, not against them or against God.
“You’ll be one of the boys who carry water from the Pool of Siloam for the sacrifice,” his mother said. “You’ll remember it the rest of your life. There can’t be a bigger honor.”
“Mom—” What could he say? “How is it an honor when I have to help them kill my friend?”
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“Abraham was ready to give God his son where the Holy of Holies will be again,” Rivka Avigad said. “If Abraham would do that, can’t you can spare God a cow?”
“But God didn’t take Isaac,” Chaim said.
“No. He took a ram. How is a ram different from a cow?”
Chaim knew the answer. The ram was just there. Abraham hadn’t got to know it beforehand. No wonder he didn’t feel bad sacrificing it. Whoever sacrificed Rosie wouldn’t know her the way Chaim did, either. Maybe it wouldn’t bother him. It would bother Chaim.
“It’s not right!” he said. “We haven’t sacrificed anything for all these years. Why do we need to start over now?”
“Because God wants us to. Because He knows we’re supposed to now,” his mother answered. “Why are we here, if not to fulfill His plan?”
For ourselves, Chaim thought. Brandon would have said something like that. Chaim didn’t believe it—except now he wanted to. But he believed what he’d been taught since he was old enough to understand it. How could he help believing it?
“It’s not fair to Rosie,” he muttered. “She didn’t ask to be born to get her throat cut.”
“You’re looking at it backwards,” his mother said. “God made a perfect red heifer be born now, when we need it most. Wouldn’t it be a sin to waste what He’s given us? Everything would stay impure forever if we did.”
“I guess.” But defiance died hard in Chaim. “He still should have found some other way to take care of it.”
“I can’t do anything about that, and neither can you,” Rivka Avigad replied. “It’s in the Scriptures, so that’s how God wants it. Even the sages in days gone by didn’t understand why He wants it like that, but He does. We make the sacrifice because He wants it. We don’t have to know anything else.”
“I guess,” Chaim said again. His gaze slid toward Jerusalem. You can’t do anything about it, Mom, but maybe I can.
* * *
—
How long had it been since the stone where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac (or Ishmael), on which the Ark probably rested (or above which it possibly floated), from which Muhammad ascended to heaven, the stone that carried more myth, legend, baggage than any other chunk of rock in the whole world, last saw the light of day?
Over 1,300 years: Eric had made the calculation before. How long had the baggage been piling up? Close to 4,000 years. By that reckoning, Muhammad was a recent visitor, and the time where the stone stayed under the Dome of the Rock not so long.
When he said so to Orly, she nodded. “Some people will tell you this is where God made Adam, too,” she said. “That stretches things back even further.”
“It does,” Eric agreed. He lived in a Darwinian world, where apelike things evolved into more manlike things, where life stretched back billions of years. Next to that, the 5,700-odd years the Jewish calendar reckoned since the creation of the world weren’t much. When you looked at them by themselves, though, they made a fair chunk of change.
But hadn’t God—if not the guy in the Old Testament, a mighty reasonable facsimile—struck a man dead for touching the Ark? That said nothing about more recent developments, about which your views could differ according to your religious and political prejudices. Nobody could deny that some powerfully weird shit was going down.
“Duh!” Orly said when Eric came out with that. “I’d rather believe in Mossad men who learned Aramaic to spook the Iranians, but I can’t. Where did the missiles go?”
“Into the place between the stars?” Eric suggested. Orly gave him a quizzical look. He went on, “That’s what a lot of believers are saying.”
“Those people are crazy.” Orly spoke with her usual self-assurance. It didn’t last this time. “They may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”
“I know,” Eric said. “That’s what I just figured out, and that’s what I’m worried about.”
At the southern end of the Temple Mount, saws like the one that had cut through the wall in front of the Ark were biting into Al-Aqsa Mosque. The din wasn’t the only thing that raised Eric’s hackles. Muslims from Rabat to Jakarta were screaming their heads off. But after what had happened to the Iranian rockets—and to the men who’d launched them—no one was doing anything but screaming.
The mosque’s silver dome—it suffered by comparison to the Dome of the Rock—had already come down. The handwritten Qur’ans and other exhibits in the museum next door had already been moved…by Israeli Arabs. Cooperating with the government to handle that took either courage or collaboration. Eric was damned if he knew which. He also wondered whether Munir al-Nuwayhi had been involved in any of that. He hadn’t run into the Muslim archaeologist since the last time he was up on the Temple Mount.
Yellow tape marked off a square around the sacred stone. It showed the dimensions of the Holy of Holies in the First Temple—and, presumably, those of the Holy of Holies in the Third Temple.
Eric and Orly had both stepped way inside that perimeter when they looked around in the Dome of the Rock. “How does it feel to violate religious law?” he asked.
She gave back an impish grin. “Which one?”
His answering smile was forced. She’d been shocked to find he ate pork. Lots of American Jews did. Hardly any Israelis matched them, even Jews who called themselves secular. Only the tiny Christian minority here had anything to do with pork. Jews and Muslims who agreed on nothing else joined in despising it.
Depends on what you’re used to, he thought, and laughed at himself. Talk about unoriginal! The ancient Greeks put it into a handful of words: custom is king of all. Wasn’t that the truth? And couldn’t so much tsuris have been avoided if it weren’t?
“Do they know where they’ll rebuild the Dome and Al-Aqsa?” he asked.
“Nobody’s told me,” Orly answered. “Maybe Yoram’s heard.”
“Maybe,” Eric said. “Hard to see him these days, or even talk to him.”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
He tried to be sympathetic: “If you’ve just made the biggest archaeological find ever, what do you do for an encore? What can you do? Maybe he needs time to figure that out.”
“Or maybe he’s fixing things so he and Kupferman get to publish and nobody else does,” Orly said.
“I don’t like to think he’d pull anything like that,” Eric said slowly. Not liking it didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Archaeology was as political as other academic disciplines. Who got credit and who lost it made and broke careers—and friendships. “He’s good olive oil.” The Israeli phrase meant somebody you could count on.
“Alevai,” Orly said. But she rubbed her first and second fingers against her thumb. “I just hope he isn’t slippery like oil. And Kupferman…” She didn’t go on.
She didn’t need to. Eric would have trusted Shlomo Kupferman to do all he could to give the Arabs one in the nuts and rebuild the Temple. If that involved screwing people he worked with, he would. Eric was convinced of it.
Before his gloomy reflections could go any further, Orly made a different discontented noise. “What now?” Eric asked.
“Little Miss Sunshine,” Orly answered.
Here came Barb Taylor, glistening with sunscreen but pink anyway. Her floppy hat kept her from burning worse, but only at the price of making her look even frumpier than she would have otherwise. She’s on Yoram’s list, Eric reminded himself. I wonder why. She waved to Eric and Orly.
“Isn’t it exciting?” she said. “He’s coming!”
“I thought you said He came a long time ago,” Orly said snarkily. Jews in the States didn’t mock Christians like that. It had to have something to do with growing up as a majority, not two percent of the population.
But it didn’t faze Barb. Hardly anything did. “Oh, I didn’t mean Him,” she said. “I meant Lester Stark. If he’s coming to I
srael, he must think the Last Days are close.”
“Oh, joy,” Orly said. “Another know-nothing preacher. Just what we need.”
“He is not!” Barb sounded as close to indignant as Eric had heard her. He didn’t blame her, or not too much. As televangelists went, Stark seemed fairly sane. The competition got stiffer on what looked to him like the other end of the woo-woo scale.
“He’ll probably come down with Jerusalem Syndrome,” Orly said.
Maybe the background snarl of saws ripping into Al-Aqsa Mosque kept Barb from hearing that. Or maybe she didn’t know what Jerusalem Syndrome meant. Eric did. Every year, tourists flipped out and decided they were Biblical characters—David or Samson if they were Jews, Jesus or Mary if Christians. That sort of craziness had been going on since before Israel gained independence. Usually, getting the sufferers out of town was part of the cure.
“I like the way he looks at the Bible,” Barb said.
“The Bible he looks at is too fat,” Orly retorted.
“I don’t think so,” Barb said tranquilly. “It’s all God talking. I suppose He was talking to the Muslims, too, even if they don’t hear Him the way we do.”
Where did she buy her theology? Next thing you knew, she’d be saying kind things about Hindus or Buddhists. That wasn’t the usual born-again style.
Orly didn’t want to let Barb off the hook. “You don’t hear Him the way we do.” She held Eric’s hand to show who we was. Nothing like a Christian to make a secular Jew sound Orthodox.
Barb only shrugged. “I know you don’t believe Jesus was the Messiah. That’s okay. When the Last Days come and it gets sorted out, you’ll see. God’s working this through you, after all.”
“Let it alone,” Eric said in Hebrew to Orly, who looked ready to spit rivets. “You won’t change her mind and you won’t make her mad, at least not where it shows.”
Deliberately using a language Barb didn’t speak was patronizing if not insulting. Since Orly was being more insulting in a language Barb did speak, Eric felt only a small twinge of guilt.
Alpha and Omega Page 24
