“If he is—and I’m not saying he is—”
“Cut to the chase, Reverend,” Lucille said irreverently.
Lester didn’t want to, not when the Israelis could throw him out. “I think Thomas à Kempis was right when he said, ‘Man proposes but God disposes.’ ”
Lucille only sniffed. “A Papist. The real truth is, ‘God helps he who helps himself.’ How do you take out the Antichrist?”
“I don’t, not till I know this boy is he, and I don’t know that now.” Stark usually admired his flock’s initiative. Once in a while, they scared the crap out of him. Lucille planned a campaign against the greatest enemy the world would ever know as if she were figuring out how to get rid of crabgrass in her yard.
If she attacked crabgrass the way she went after the Antichrist, the weeds were in trouble. “Maybe you ought to get hold of the Arabs,” she said. “They probably don’t like having a Jew maybe Messiah around, either.”
“Thank you so much, Lucille,” Stark said, which was the cue to get her off the air right now. “Who’s our next caller?”
“We’ve got Ray, from Rochester, New York.”
“Go ahead, Ray.” Lester hoped Ray had both oars in the water.
“When do we see Armageddon?” Ray asked. “When do things start blowing up?” He sounded as if he was looking forward to it.
“Satan and his hosts will try whatever they can to resist the Lord in His righteous wrath,” Lester Stark said. “But we still have some other things to go through first, I think.”
“We’re just about up to 666 years since the Black Death broke out?” Ray said. “That means something, don’t you think?”
“I hadn’t worried about it up till now,” Lester answered, which had to be up there in the understatement-of-the-year race.
“That was a calamity. And if the Antichrist is here, that’d be another calamity,” Ray said. “If you’ve got the number of the beast between ’em—just about—it seems like it ought to be important, you know?”
“Maybe it is. If it turns out to be, God will find a way to tell us. Thanks for your call.” That was another kiss-off, though less urgent than the one for Lucille. “Now who’s on the line?”
“Next up is Billie Sue. She’s calling from Tulsa.”
“Hello, Billie Sue,” Lester said. “What’s on your mind?”
“I think we should do something about the Antichrist, too? Blow him up before it’s too late, like?” Billie Sue spoke in bloodthirsty questions. “Don’t you think that would save everybody trouble?”
“We don’t know he’s the Antichrist. I doubt it, even if it’s possible,” Stark said. “He’s a boy. He doesn’t shave. He has remarkable power—I don’t think anyone would argue with that. And you want to kill him because of what he might be?”
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Billie Sue figured a cliché dealt with moral obligations. Too many people thought the same way.
“Thanks for your call,” Reverend Stark said, and that was that for Billie Sue. “We’ve got time for one more. Who’s next?”
“Here’s Henry, in Savannah, Georgia.”
“Go ahead, Henry. This is Lester Stark.”
“Pleased to talk to you, Reverend. I think I know how come the Rapture hasn’t happened.”
“What’s your theory, Henry?” Lester asked.
“Maybe God hasn’t swept up the good people ’cause there’s no good people to sweep up. Maybe we’ve got so far away from what Jesus taught, we don’t deserve to get what First Thessalonians was talking about. Maybe we all have to go through the Tribulation to get sorted out. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Stark said slowly. “That’s hard to prove or disprove. I hope you’re wrong, but we have to wait and see.”
“Reckon you’re right, sir. I thank you for your time.” Henry left the line without getting booted off.
Mechanically, Reverend Stark closed out the show. He wished he hadn’t taken that last call. Thinking the world might be unworthy of Rapture was terrifying. If it was true, it meant he’d failed, and the preachers who’d lived before him, too. I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it, he thought firmly, but not firmly enough….
Eric and Orly stood on the Temple Mount, watching Shlomo Kupferman purify earth-moving machinery, cement mixers, and the hard-hatted construction workers who used them. He dipped a hyssop branch in a bowl that held the red heifer’s ashes mixed with water from the Pool of Siloam. Then he flipped a few drops onto each man and machine, praying as he did.
“There’s something that’s never been seen before,” Eric remarked: “a ritually pure bulldozer.”
It sounded silly, like something from one of Dave Letterman’s old Top Tens. When you saw how seriously the rabbi and the hard hats took the ritual, you had second thoughts.
“They’re doing the best they can,” Orly said. “Even with the Bible and the Talmud, they can’t know just how the rituals worked in the First and Second Temples. It’s been too long.”
“Anybody would think you were an archaeology grad student or something,” Eric said. She stuck out her tongue at him.
Once the workers got shpritzed, they went at it. The Temple began supplanting the Tabernacle. Noise, dust, and diesel fumes sullied the holiest site in one religion, which was the third-holiest site in another and an object of watchful attention in a third. Christianity’s holiest sites lay inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, just a few hundred meters away.
“What gets me is how only Kupferman handles the heifer’s ashes,” Eric said. “He’s the guy who can bind and loose.”
“Wrong religion,” Orly said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Sure.” She nodded. “I think he’s already purified other rabbis, though. Now they can do purifying on their own.”
“They can—uh-huh,” Eric said. “But will Kupferman let ’em? He likes power. He likes to grab it and hang on to it.”
“So what will you do? Hit him over the head and steal the ashes?” Orly asked.
“Me? I’m the guy who has to prove he’s Jewish enough to marry you, remember? Right. Eric Katz, boy Methodist.”
Orly laughed. “I didn’t quote the New Testament a minute ago.”
“That’s been going on all through the Diaspora. Philo of Alexandria made a good Greek philosopher, only he was a Jew. In Muslim Spain, Jews wrote Arabic.”
“And when the Catholics won, Jews and Muslims got it in the neck,” Orly said, which was also true.
“Whoever’s on top gives it to whoever’s on the bottom. Jews gave it to Canaanites and Jebusites, Assyrians and Babylonians gave it to the Jews—”
“Greeks and Romans gave it to the Jews,” Orly interrupted. “Spaniards gave it to the Jews. Poles and Russians gave it. Germans gave it to the Jews and gave it and gave it.”
“And the Jews in modern Israel aren’t saints. Ask Munir—and he’s had it easy next to the Palestinians.” Eric could have said it more strongly. Israel’s neighbors had always hated her. The 1948 War of Independence saw bizarre things, like Israeli Air Force pilots flying Messerschmitt 109s (Czech-built postwar versions) against Egyptian B-17s and their Spitfire escorts. But two generations of occupying Palestinian land had proved almost as corrosive for the occupiers as for the occupied.
Orly scowled. “We’re on the bottom for 2,500 years, and people want us to be saints if we’re on top for twenty-five minutes?”
“I didn’t mean that.” Eric remembered Shylock. If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? That was human nature, boiled down to four questions more painful than the ones from the Haggadah.
“Yes, you did,” Orly replied.
They might have had a row if soldiers hadn�
�t come up, looking grim and ready for anything. Instead of snapping at his fiancée, Eric pointed to them. “What’s going on?”
“Beats me,” she said. “Maybe some VIPs looking around. They don’t turn out like this for anybody.”
Eric hadn’t heard that any foreign dignitaries had come to Israel. The Muslim countries were still screaming about the violation of the Haram al-Sharif. The only thing that stopped them from going to war was what had happened when Iran tried and the endless chaos in Syria.
Western countries also deplored Israel’s rebuilding projects. The Arabs and Iranians had oil. Countries didn’t want to bite the hand that fueled them. And so…
It was a dignitary: Chaim Avigad, maybe the Messiah, maybe the Antichrist, maybe just a kid in way over his head. He looked haunted. Who could blame him, with the ghosts following him like reps from a celestial collection agency? They wouldn’t leave him alone till they got what they wanted. By his expression, he didn’t know how to give it to them. He didn’t even know what it was. To take them up to heaven? How could anyone, even the Messiah, do that?
More soldiers followed him onto the Temple Mount. They fanned out as he walked, Rottweilers with assault rifles.
“Poor guy.” Orly sounded so maternal, Eric did a double take. She went on, “I know what he needs.”
“What?” Eric didn’t think Chaim had any idea what he needed, so how could Orly?
Her suggestion made Eric’s eyes cross. Maternal, it wasn’t. Eric didn’t know whether it would make Chaim Avigad forget the ghosts, horrify them into fleeing, or fascinate them enough so they’d leave him alone.
“Just don’t call up Lester Stark,” Eric said. “You’d short out half the pacemakers in the States.”
“Good,” Orly said. “Come on, though. He needs to be happy. He isn’t now.”
He wasn’t. He strode across the Temple Mount like a lost soul himself. The hard hats working on the Temple would have been friendly, but the guards didn’t let them get closer.
Before this started, Eric hadn’t worried about the Messiah. He’d never once imagined Him as the loneliest guy in town. Judging by Chaim Avigad, that came with the package.
If a girl wanted to do as Orly had in mind, how could she fight through the security? Eric eyed Chaim again. He’d never expected to pity the Messiah, but he did.
* * *
—
Gabriela Sandoval and Brandon Nesbitt had been on the spot when terrorists dirty-bombed Tel Aviv. The other TV, Net, and print reporters from the English-speaking world had to hop planes after the fact. They leaned on the pair who’d been there first.
Now Gabriela watched it happen again. She hadn’t imagined a story bigger than Tel Aviv. What could be bigger than a dirty bomb? The end of the world?
Now that you mentioned it, yes.
Everyone who’d flown out after Tel Aviv stopped being a big deal swarmed back. More reporters came along. People from every religious station and network and Web site in the USA came, talking about the Holy Land as if nobody’d ever used the phrase before.
But Gabriela and Lester Stark were the Johnnies-on-the-spot. Things had got more complicated this time around. Stark was an independent contractor, not part of the corporation. He had his own agenda (as if Brandon hadn’t had his!), and he got difficult if Gabriela tried to rein him in.
She didn’t try very hard. If you knew ahead of time you’d lose, why start? Stark headed a bigger enterprise than Gabriela and Brandon. He had more money and lawyers. If he got petty, he could blow off what he was doing with Gabriela. He didn’t have to bail out, just do an unusable job.
So Gabriela kept quiet about Stark’s radio show. His keeping that going had always been in the cards. The interviews with swarms of clean-cut reporters in suits out of the early years of Mad Men weren’t. They cut into the time he had to work with Gabriela. And the questions those earnest, mostly young, men asked! Not quite how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but close.
The Antichrist! Gabriela got sick of the Antichrist in a hurry. She finally hunted up the New Testament to see what the born-agains kept yattering about. She hadn’t read it for many years. The Gideons didn’t leave them in hotel rooms here, but that didn’t matter any more. As long as your WiFi worked, you could get whatever you wanted.
The more she read, the weirder it got. “Do you really think everyone will get 666 tattooed on them?” she asked Stark at breakfast. They had the table to themselves; Saul Buchbinder was already arguing with an Israeli bureaucrat, while the minister’s wife liked to sleep in.
“People who accept the Antichrist will wear a mark that shows what they’ve done,” Stark answered. “It’s in the Scriptures, so it will come true.”
“The Scriptures say the world is flat,” Gabriela remarked.
“That’s different.”
“How? Maybe the old rules don’t apply any more. Maybe they never did.” With coffee in her, Gabriela felt like arguing. It seemed more interesting than what was left of her scrambled eggs.
“It’s prophecy,” Stark said. “When God talked about the shape of the world before Jesus was born, He did it so people alive then could understand. But when He talked about prophecy, He had to talk about things that would come true. And a bunch of it already has.”
“How do you tell the difference between one kind of talking and the other?”
“That’s…part of what makes Biblical scholarship interesting,” he said with a chuckle.
“And how do you know if He did the talking in the Bible?” Gabriela persisted. “If it wasn’t just scribes and mystics and people like that?” She’d soaked up a Wikipedia article’s worth of knowledge about the Higher Criticism.
“Yes. If.” Lester Stark had a charming smile, on TV and in person. “For years, the secular humanists said there was no evidence anything in the Bible was true. Never mind all the archaeological discoveries since they started saying things like that.” He understood where she was coming from, all right. “But what about the Ark? What happened to your colleague? How about the Iranian missiles? Or the Iranian President and the Grand Ayatollah? If Chaim Avigad isn’t doing something supernatural, what is he doing?”
Those were all good questions. Gabriela didn’t like feeling on the defensive, but she felt that way now. She poured herself more strong coffee to buy time to think.
While she did, Stark found one more question: “If this is all so ordinary, what are we doing here?”
Making money from our jobs was the first thing that crossed Gabriela’s mind. It would have annoyed the preacher, not that he was working for nothing. But that wasn’t the biggest reason she kept quiet. In spite of herself, she was nervous God would be listening. And God, she felt sure, didn’t like doing something only for the sake of the almighty dollar.
She had to say something. “What are we doing here? The best we can, the same as we would anywhere else.”
Stark inclined his head. “Yes, indeed. But if this is the time of the Antichrist, we’ll go through Tribulation no matter where we are.” Gabriela could hear the capital letter. The minister went on, “Many will yield to evil, and lose their lives and souls because they do.”
“You don’t have to sound like you look forward to it,” Gabriela said.
“I do, if only in that I think it will happen,” Stark replied. “I may be one of those sinners. Their fate—which may be mine—saddens me. But that doesn’t mean they can dodge it. God said it would come, and I believe in Him and believe Him.”
“This all seems very strange to me. Too much happening too fast,” Gabriela said. “Like a movie with too many special effects, you know?”
“You mean there are movies these days without too many special effects?” Stark asked, deadpan. Gabriela snorted.
A reporter came up to the televangelist. He treated Gabriela as if she weren’t th
ere. She was only a woman, after all. “Can we get your views later this morning, Reverend?” he asked.
Gabriela had never seen him before. He talked like an American, but he sure didn’t work for any of the major news services. All the same, he spoke to Lester Stark with easy familiarity.
“Have to be tomorrow afternoon or the day after, Hank.” Stark knew him, too. The preacher nodded to Gabriela. “I’m booked solid with Ms. Sandoval and with my own work till then.” He remembered she wasn’t part of the furniture.
Hank looked nasty, almost ugly, for the moment he needed to pull his face straight. In that half-second, he reminded Gabriela chillingly of Brandon Nesbitt. “Dale will be disappointed,” he said.
“I can’t give you time I don’t have.” Stark could say no.
Hank sighed a martyred sigh. “Okay. I’ll tell him.” If he cans me, it’s your fault. Gabriela could read between the lines. So could Stark, but he didn’t waver. Off went Hank, glum in defeat.
“They’ll eat your life if you let them,” Stark observed.
“They sure will,” Gabriela said, and then, “Did you ever wonder if anybody feels that way about you?”
“Not till I met Shlomo Kupferman,” he said with a wry grin. His saving grace, if it was one, was that he didn’t take himself too seriously.
“He thinks he has the Messiah on a string,” Gabriela said.
“I know,” Stark replied. “But who’s holding it, and who’s held? And what’s on the end Kupferman doesn’t have?” That put a period to breakfast conversation.
* * *
—
How the man had got through his guards, Jamal Ashrawi didn’t know. But he had. “You need to come with me. Now,” he said in Egyptian-accented Arabic. “Somebody needs to see you.”
Ashrawi was affronted. “Who are you, to order me around?”
“I am somebody who tells you somebody else needs to see you,” the stranger said. “I am somebody who tells you you will make your last mistake if you don’t come with me right away.”
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