Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  He had not thought about consulting with Janusz Zimmer. Suddenly it seemed a salutary notion, providing he could manage a little strategic probing and keep a few secrets at the same time. Then he was startled to recall that Zimmer had been keeping company with Linda Ericksen.

  "Best leave him in peace," Ernest said. "Jan and I—sometimes we get into it."

  "Really? Is he critical of your work?"

  "I don't think he's really against us. I always thought of him as a left-winger. Lately we seem to get into arguments about what the country's about."

  "I thought that was the national pastime."

  "It is," Ernest said, and no more.

  "What about Linda Ericksen?" Lucas asked. "She's volunteering for you. She's seeing Zimmer. And she has some very ... odd friends."

  "What sort of odd friends?"

  "Well," Lucas considered, "what's the word? Militant? Reactionary? Fascistoid?"

  "I knew she was spying on us for someone," Ernest said. "And by the way, she passed the word about Sonia and you and the alleged drug smuggling."

  "She was with Lenny in the Strip. She claimed to be there on behalf of your organization."

  "If she's doing that," Ernest said, "I'll have to give her the heave-ho. I can't have that false-flag shit. But I hate to, in a way. One conduit less—if you see what I mean."

  "Do you think Zimmer might be behind her?"

  "Behind her or not, I think he's just fucking her, frankly. But who knows? It's a shifting political landscape. Janusz is ambitious. And very political."

  "Tell me," said Lucas, "when you and Janusz argue over what the country's about—who says what?"

  Ernest only shrugged. Clearly, he did not care to talk about it, at least not then and there.

  "Let me ask you this. If I say 'bombing the Temple Mount,' what do you say?"

  "I say it's an ongoing fantasy. Ongoing plot. People scheme to do it. The government—at least all the governments so far—scheme to stop them."

  "Janusz wouldn't be into something like that, would he?"

  "Janusz," Ernest said, "isn't a bit religious."

  "And that takes care of the question?"

  "Well, it should," Ernest said.

  They both watched Janusz Zimmer drink his vodka across the room and stare out to sea.

  "What about you?" Ernest asked Lucas. "Why did you come here?"

  "I don't know," Lucas said. "Maybe because I was a religion major."

  "Like it?"

  "Do I like it?" He had never, ever thought in such terms. "I don't know. It's a workout."

  "You may find it difficult to live anywhere else," Ernest said. "Wait and see."

  Outside, where the twilight teemed with riddles, the sun had disappeared beneath the Philistine Sea. A woman in the middle of the floor, the same woman of timeless seductiveness who had sung Piaf, was singing a song in Spanish about a Moor with a grenade.

  "Out of the eater came forth meat," Lucas found himself reciting silently, "and out of the strong came forth sweetness."

  "I know a few people with intelligence connections," Ernest told him. "We try and make ourselves useful to each other. In a good cause. I'll put in a word with them about you and Sonia. In the meantime, in case there are plans afoot of which we know not, you might have a trip out of town. Go diving. Walk in the desert."

  "Funny," Lucas said, "I've just had a walk there."

  When they left, the chanteuse was singing "Golden Earrings" in Yiddish. Every man in the Vercors shed thirty years.

  48

  SONIA WAS WALKING along Allenby Street toward the seafront when a shiny black Saab hung a U-turn from the oncoming lane and pulled up beside her. Janusz Zimmer was at the wheel.

  "Like a lift?"

  "OK," she said. "I'm going to Stanley's."

  "Mister Stanley's," Zimmer said with amused scorn. "Get in." When she climbed in beside him, he asked, "Singing tonight?"

  "Well, I'm billed," she said, "but I can't do it. Thought I'd break the news to the boss and throw myself on his mercy."

  At Ein Kerem she had gotten a call from Raziel. De Kuff's retreat to the mountains of Galilee was to take place at once. The disciples would rendezvous at the hotel in Herzliya where Fotheringill cooked, proceed the next day to a guest kibbutz near the Lake of Kinneret, and go northward from there.

  "Why is it," Janusz Zimmer asked her as they drove up Hayarkon beside the sea, "that you never take my advice? I told you to stay out of the Strip."

  "And I didn't," she said. "And now I'm in trouble. Any connection?"

  "It's all right," Janusz said. "You shouldn't worry. You've been useful anyway."

  "Useful to who?"

  "Useful to the country. To its higher interests."

  "I don't know how you figure that, Jan."

  "Why can't you sing tonight? I was hoping I'd get to hear you."

  "We're going to Galilee. To look at the mountains."

  "It'll be cold in those mountains. De Kuff going up there?"

  "For a while."

  "I'll give you another piece of advice. Let's see if you've gotten any smarter. Stay up in Galilee. If Mr. De Kuff wants to come back, let him come back himself. Stay and pick wildflowers."

  "Listen, Jan. I want you to tell me something. I keep thinking about that sort of weird conversation we had. When you told me to stay out of the Strip. And about an ... orchestra."

  "What about it?"

  "You don't know anything about a scheme to blow the Temple Mount, do you? So the religious types can build the Temple?"

  "Do you?" Zimmer asked.

  "Not a thing," she said. "That's why I'm asking."

  They pulled up by the alley that led to the second street from the water, where Mister Stanley's was located.

  "Enjoy Galilee," Jan Zimmer told her. "Take a long, well-earned rest."

  Then his car pulled away, turned the corner of Hayarkon and disappeared.

  49

  WHEN LUCAS ARRIVED at Stanley's, a man whose hair fell in cascades of salt-and-pepper curls around his shoulders was playing Monk's "Bolivar Blues" for a half-filled room. Stanley was standing unhappily at the bar, nursing a vodka and tonic, eating pistachio nuts.

  "Hey, book writer," he said to Lucas. "What you're doing to my Sonia? She won't sing for me."

  "She got religion, Stanley. Didn't she tell you?"

  "Got to get her back," he said. "Maria Clara's coming in from Colombia. She has a present for her. And every time Sonia leaves, the customers go crazy. Sonia! Sonia!"

  "I can imagine."

  "You know something?" he confided to Lucas, "the Americans are buying people. They send a detective around, they want to find Razz Melker, guy used to play clarinet for me. Then they want this old man from New York, Marshall. They got reward."

  "Big reward?"

  "Big reward for Razz. For the old man..." He shrugged. "Peanuts."

  "I don't suppose," Lucas said, "anyone wants to buy me?"

  Stanley regarded him with quickened interest.

  "Just a joke," Lucas said.

  "The world is full of things and people the Americans are paying for," Stanley observed. "Someday they'll run out of money."

  "And it will all stop," Lucas said. "The end of history."

  Nuala Rice was sitting just outside the door of Stanley's office. Lucas took a seat at the same table.

  "Christopher!" she exclaimed when she saw him. "I've been trying you and trying you. We have to be out of here, the lot of us."

  "Where's Sonia?"

  "She won't be here tonight. She went to see her friends in Herzliya. She left a note for you."

  On the slip of paper Nuala handed him there was only the name of a kibbutz and two dates, that of the next day and the day following that. The kibbutz was called Nikolayevich Alef. It was on Yar-mouk Road, the note said, south of Tiberias.

  "Thanks," Lucas said, and put it in his pocket. Kibbutz Nikolayevich was where Tsililla and Gigi Prinzer had both grown up.


  "What about you?" he asked Nuala. "Is Rashid with you?"

  "He's sleeping," she said. "You know," she told him, "we went to the U.S. consulate yesterday. They didn't want to know us."

  "Is that surprising?"

  "I don't know," she said, a little helplessly for Nuala. "Our control sort of implied the Americans would give us a visa." She lowered her voice. "We got the word from him to clear out. He said he'd help us."

  "Good," said Lucas. "But where is he now?"

  "He's getting us the proper documents. They'll get us out."

  "What did the American consulate say?"

  "They said we'd have to wait for visas. Like everyone else."

  "The State Department doesn't like giving visas to PLO people," Lucas explained. "It's politically incorrect."

  "Shabak can fix it," she said.

  For a revolutionary, he thought, she had a moving confidence in the goodwill and capabilities of the secret police.

  "Just out of curiosity," he asked her, "how do you justify working with them?"

  "How can they justify working with us? Sometimes there are coincidences of interest."

  Coincidences of interest in that corner of the world, he thought, were ropes of sand. But he had to assume she knew that as well as he did.

  50

  THEY STOPPED at the four-star hotel in Herzliya where Fotheringill worked as a chef. Raziel conducted them across the lobby under the stares of elderly diamond dealers.

  First Raziel himself, in his dark slacks, black shirt and wraparound sunglasses, supporting the Rev by the arm. Then Miss van Witte, the former nun, in prim seersucker. The two slope-shouldered Walsing brothers. The Marshalls, father and son, in their increasingly tattered two-thousand-dollar suits. Sonia, in sandals and jeans. Helen Henderson, the Rose of Saskatoon, in khaki shorts, hiking boots and a short-sleeved shirt that matched the shorts, carrying a backpack on a metal frame. She was obviously determined to share Sonia's fortunes, come what might. And Gigi Prinzer had come out to join them, finding accommodation up the coast with friends in Ein Hod.

  "A circus," a guest in the lobby muttered.

  They were given a shabby but extensive suite in the back, so that De Kuff, as usual, had a small bedroom to himself. Their view was not of the ocean but of a juice-processing plant and the misty fields of grapefruit trees around it.

  Shortly after they arrived, the two Marshalls fell to quarreling over a set of black ledgers, such as might keep the records of a basement moving company or a New York bodega. Finally the younger Marshall prevailed by brute force, seizing the books from the older man's grasp.

  The Walsings changed into their bathing suits and set out for the swimming pool, where they would be sure to astonish the reclining diamond merchants further. They looked like a pair of hulking, pale Teutonic ghosts dispatched from Valhalla on a mission of atonement or revenge.

  Helen Henderson, who had caught a cold, dealt with it by downing vitamin pills and attempting meditation.

  Later, while his son was sleeping, the older Mr. Marshall crept across the carpet of their suite and rescued one of his ledgers. One aspect of the older Mr. Marshall's religious obsessions centered on the number thirty-six, along with its variants and multiples. Sitting with the ledger on his lap, his eyes showing white, he tried to connect the name of De Kuff with the year, and the date of the year with the ninth day of Av, so that the ninth might be seen to occur out of season. His ledger was the abstraction of loving discourse on thirty-six, and his encoded notes the digest of reflections on the mystical properties of the Hebrew thirty-six, lamed-vav, and also of three, nine, and eighteen.

  On other pages he had copied or summarized incantations, the names of the firmaments, encampments, thrones and presiding angels whose powers might be brought to bear against his enemies and persecutors. One of the spells, which he had had frequent occasion to use against various officials and auditors in the Southern District of New York, was an imprecation against creditors:

  "That you will plug," it asked of the deadly angels, "his mouth and make his planning vain, and he will not think of me nor speak of me, and when I pass in front of him he will not see me."

  The elder Mr. Marshall—and his son as well—could do complex calculations in their heads. They could also count cards in blackjack and had been banned from several casinos. The younger Mr. Marshall had created several computer programs.

  In the tiny kitchen area, the former Sister Maria John Nepomuk van Witte was brewing herbal tea, her copy of Elaine Pagels's Gnostic Gospels folded face down on a stool. Below her was a letter from her former companion in the Sisters of the Common Life, who was now a member of the Netherlands parliament and an open lesbian.

  "In that forest they wear strange shoes," said the letter—a proverb from her province meant to apply to both of them.

  Sonia leaned against the window, singing to herself and looking out over the misted citrus fields. Was the mist ground fog or pesticide? Did it matter, in the condition to which the world had come?

  Raziel spent the day with a word for each of the Rev's followers. He read to Helen Henderson from the Zohar, taught her to meditate on the letters of the Tetragrammaton. Yod-hei-vav-hei. To visualize black fire against white fire and fix the sacred characters in mind, silently breathing in the yod, exhaling the hei, taking in the vav, letting out the final hei, creating the deepest of silences, a space in which nothing intervened between the devotee and the ineffable object of devotion. He disputed points of Torah with the younger Marshall, predicting new, unexpected interpretations in the world to come. He talked of the works of Hildegard von Bingen with Maria van Witte.

  "Yo, Sonia," he said, finding her sad at the window. "Wassup, home?"

  "You tired, Razz?" she said.

  "We're almost there, kid."

  "I hope so," she said. She looked at him. "I still believe. Am I thinking straight?"

  "Sonia," Raziel said, "don't worry. Very shortly the world will be unrecognizable. The world as we know it will pass from history."

  She closed her eyes and opened them again.

  "Must be the child in me," she said. "I have to believe you."

  Then he left her to go in to the old man. De Kuff lay on a sofa bed, in his stocking feet, his overcoat draped over his frame. Under the coat, his arms were crossed at his chest.

  "How are you, Adam?" Raziel asked.

  "Losing my strength," De Kuff said. "I think I may be dying. I think I might like to die."

  "I understand," Raziel said. "Better than you think. But we have a ways to walk. We have one final mystery to impart."

  "Do you really believe?" De Kuff asked him. "Don't you think we might have been wrong?"

  Raziel smiled. "We've given our lives over to it, Adam. We have nothing else."

  "That doesn't mean we were right," De Kuff said. "Only that we ourselves are lost."

  "Don't give up, Rev. Wait for the time of the final mystery. Remember, wait for the tav."

  "How I wish we could have been spared," the old man said.

  Raziel went over and took his hand.

  "Do you wish it for me, too? You're kind, Adam. But we weren't spared, and you really are who you are. Wait yet a while."

  De Kuff closed his eyes and nodded.

  The doorbell rang and the people scattered about the suite froze and looked at one another. Raziel went and opened the door. Ian Fotheringill stood in the hall, in his white chef's tunic and toque. Raziel left the door ajar and stepped out into the hall to join him.

  "You have it?" he asked the Scot.

  Fotheringill handed him a package wrapped in butcher paper and Raziel put it in his pocket. Then the two of them stepped into the suite.

  "We'll only be staying a few hours," Raziel announced. "Anyone want to wait here while we go up the mountain?"

  No one did. Each of them wanted to go as far up as they could manage.

  Raziel approached Sonia. "He needs somebody. He needs you for a change. Tell him what he has t
o hear."

  "I wish I knew what that was."

  "You do, Sonia. You always have."

  Sonia got up and went into the room where De Kuff was resting. He was lying on his side, weeping.

  "Are you suffering?" she asked, taking his old, cold hand as Raziel had.

  "Very much," he said.

  "This is the struggle without weapons," she told him.

  "I may fail. If I fail, I'll die. But it's all right." He turned onto his back and looked anxiously up at her. "You have to take care of all these children." It really seemed, she thought, that there was not much life left in him.

  "Sure," she said. She sat down on the bed beside him.

  "Among Sufis," Sonia said, "the struggle without weapons is called jihad. It's not the jihad of Hamas or what the shebab call jihad. But it's jihad all the same."

  She saw his eyes come alight.

  "Is there anything we can do for you?"

  "We have to go," he said with sudden urgency. "To Galilee, to the mountain. And then to Jerusalem. You see, I'll do everything that is required. If it doesn't happen..."

  "If it doesn't happen, it doesn't," she said. "One day it will."

  In his own room, Raziel locked his door, cooked up the heroin Fotheringill had brought him, tied off and found a vein. He felt a childlike rush of gratitude; creation in that instant became again a place of comfort, and he had found some quarter of a caring, providing world.

  The necessities of his task had brought him back to drugs. Every day he lived in fear that De Kuff would be lost to him, that he would have no place in the process that he had made himself believe in. The process, his perfectionism, had brought him to drugs for relief again, just as, once, music had.

  He had not been able to take the contradictions, the intersections he had been compelled to negotiate, connecting the pious routines of orthodoxy to conspiracy with swindlers and men of violence. Unaided, he had not had the strength.

  Every day he had been casting formulaic prayers into the void of the unknowable. Every minute of each day had been shadowed in paradox. He had sought out forbidden Sabbataian texts that reversed the meanings of Torah, to force it from its traditional interpretations. He had traced the memory palaces of the ancient min and meditated on the sidereal tables and astral metaphors of Elisha ben Abouya, the accursed Gnostic Pharisee. He had consulted tarot and the I Ching in search of Kabbalist parallels. His motto, alibi, guiding text, had been the words written on a scroll of Qumran, the words of the Teacher of Righteousness: Depravity is the mystery of creation. To liberate into the world the ultimate goodness of God and man, it was necessary to walk deep into the labyrinth.