Damascus Gate

by Robert Stone

  "That's right."

  "So there is a bomb. You lied to me."

  "Everything is written, Sonia. This is a spiritual struggle. A struggle without weapons. But struggle is conflict, and conflict is dangerous. It was why I used the tea on him. I was afraid he would fail us. I needed him ready to declare himself."

  "Now listen, you have to tell me everything. Everything you know about where they put it."

  "Sonia, Sonia," he said impatiently. "If we succeed, there are no weapons. Those characters think they're planting a bomb. But there are no bombs in the world to come."

  "Right," she said. "Just flowers, I suppose."

  "I said no one would get hurt. I meant it. I'm sure."

  "How come you went back on the spike?"

  "I lost my nerve. Last minute. I thought if we spiritually fail, only historical things would happen. Just more of the shitty history of the world. Instead of everything we dreamed of."

  "What's going to happen, Razz? What have you done?"

  "I don't know. More grief, more history. The process isn't moral, only the result."

  "You never should have stayed here, Razz. Why did you?"

  "Because I was the only one who knew the score. Because I found the old man. Why me? Don't ask. But he was revealed to me."

  "It must have been your music," she said.

  "Maybe that," Raziel said. "And you were with me. I'm a weak vessel," he told her, "but I had the power. And I had you. You believed me. And you loved me a little, didn't you?"

  "I loved you," she said. "Everybody loved you once, Raziel. You were our prince."

  And she could not keep from crying then because the faith, the hope, the love were draining out of her. And no one was going to save her soul but she was going to have to take care of everyone else again, as always. And it had all been nothing. A little feel good. A little dream and so good night.

  "Funny world," she said. "Where things go on repeating themselves. And how are we supposed to know?"

  "Funny world," he said.

  Then, suddenly, she could not—would not—let it go.

  "Razz?"

  "Yeah, baby."

  "Razz, maybe we can still do it. If you did everything right. The process."

  "I told you the process, kid, and you laughed at me."

  "I'm not laughing. Maybe we can make it happen. Maybe! If you did everything right."

  So Raziel himself laughed. "Sonia, you're wonderful. If you'd been with me all the way, we'd have done it."

  "I was with you," she said.

  "You're gonna save the world, Sonia." He laughed again. "You tell the girl you've blown it. She tells you maybe not. You're one crazy mixed-up chick, baby. If you'd have been with me, I swear we'd have come across. Clean out of history."

  "I got nowhere to go, Razz. I'm still here."

  "Sonia," Raziel said, "you're not kidding, are you?"

  "I'm afraid not," she told him.

  "This is how it is, Sonia. We're caught between worlds. I don't know if I can get us out."

  "Tell you what," she said. "You get us out of between worlds. I'll drive."

  "Everyone so far has failed," Raziel declared after a few miles. "But someday someone won't. The process..."

  "Right," she said. "The process."

  "I couldn't believe it," he told her. "In the old man's eyes—the way out. The world we've been waiting for."

  "Freedom?" she asked.

  "Music," Raziel told her. "It was all music."

  "All right, then," she said. "Music."

  "Drive faster, home," he begged her. "I don't want you to see me fix."

  58

  AT NIGHT, the village of Ein Kerem was surrounded by the lights of the high-rise apartments of the New City, which had drawn closer and closer around it. The inhabitants of the apartments facing the valley often did not trouble to draw their curtains after dark. Anyone looking up at the lighted windows would have a sense of good lives lived behind them, lives that were civilized and comfortable. It was possible to make out bookshelves and prints and paintings on the walls.

  The buildings themselves were not attractive, so they looked best at night, illuminated by the high-bourgeois taste and respectability of their inhabitants. There were still nightingales in the Jerusalem Forest nearby. Their flutings and repeated, intricate riffs could soothe and stir the heart. The forest was a mellow place, charged with benign possibility.

  Only a few of the lights in the nearby buildings were on when Lucas arrived at the bungalow with the Rose. The eastern horizon was tinged with a glow the color of Jerusalem stone, and the call to prayer was sounding from a loudspeaker in the village.

  He went quietly from room to room but could find no sign of De Kuff, Raziel or Sonia. The other regulars were all still in bed. Only Sister John Nepomuk van Witte was awake, reading a picture book about Sulawesi, where she had lived for many years.

  When Lucas telephoned Sonia's Rehavia apartment there was no answer.

  "I'm putting you in charge," he told Helen Henderson. "I would suggest everyone lie low until things get sorted out."

  The Rose was herself again. She had ridden south in thoughtful silence.

  "Which things?"

  "Things," Lucas said. After Helen had bathed and gone to bed, he made a few more fruitless calls to Sonia. Then he lay down on the living room floor and slept fitfully until morning. At eight A.M., still unrested, he called Obermann, who was back from Turkey, to ask if he could come over. Obermann demurred; he had rounds at Shaul Petak. They compromised by arranging to meet at the hospital. On the way out, Lucas brought one of the building plans he had found in the van.

  "You look terrible," the doctor said when Lucas was in his hospital office.

  Lucas explained that he had taken Ecstasy at the source of the Jordan, borne witness to the Messiah's First and Second Comings and visited Pan with Rat and Mole.

  "Ecstasy? How did you drive back?"

  "In fragments. But I made it." He handed Obermann one of the diagrams. "This suggest anything to you?"

  They spread the worn copy on a desktop from which Obermann had removed a pile of file folders. It still appeared, to Lucas's utterly unpracticed eye, to be a kind of blueprint, the outline of a building showing three elevations with the dimensions marked in meters.

  With one exception, the verbal indications on the sheet were in English or transliterated Arabic. There was a rectangle indicating the Bab al-Ghawanima, which Obermann identified as an ancient gate through the wall of the Haram. The single Hebrew word on the sheet was one that Lucas had deciphered as kaddosh and translated as "holy." There on the rough sheet, in the language God had spoken to Adam, its curt, fiery-tongued characters had a daunting aspect. Mysterium terribile et fascinans.

  On another grid of the chart was a word in Greek: Sabazios.

  "It's a chart of the Haram wall," Obermann said. "It probably marks the latest excavations."

  "What about the kaddosh?"

  "A holy site. Maybe someone's idea of where the Holy of Holies was."

  "And Sabazios?"

  "Sabazios is a Phrygian god. I can't remember his particulars."

  "Think this is about planting a bomb?" Lucas asked.

  "That," Obermann said, "would be a conceivable hypothesis. I gather from our telephone conversation that you've had some run-ins with our Linda."

  "Yes indeed. I think she's involved."

  "Frankly, I think you're right. She's conversion prone and over the top. When she goes, she goes."

  "I spent a little time wondering what really happened to her old man," Lucas said. "If I were you, I'd wonder too."

  Obermann sighed. "I thought Janusz Zimmer would occupy her questing nature. But maybe she's broken with him. Or maybe there's something about Janusz we didn't know. Anyway, she's aware of our book."

  "Aware of it? She wants to fucking write it for us." He told Obermann about some of his adventures in the Strip and at Kfar Gottlieb.

  Obermann
picked up one of the diagrams Lucas had brought him and examined it further.

  "Sure," he said. "This could be a blueprint for a bomb. Where did you get it?"

  "Up in the Golan. In one of our cars."

  "This is the kind of survey they did at the House of the Galilean," Obermann said. "It must have come from Linda."

  "I think they're setting up De Kuff and company," Lucas said. "And they're planning to use us to do it. We're supposed to buy the package. And then sell it."

  "The second coming of Willie Ludlum."

  "Exactly. Well, I'm going up to the House of G. Maybe you'd like to inform the police? On the theory that they don't know about it?"

  "I have a few friends," Obermann said. "I'll inquire."

  "And keep trying Sonia's, will you? I think she's got Raziel and the old man over in her apartment and they may not be picking up. Lying low. But she'll need to check in before long."

  "Right," said Obermann.

  Before calling at the House of the Galilean, Lucas made a quick trip to his apartment to change clothes. He called Sonia's place again but reached only the machine. Then he turned on the bathtub tap and called Sylvia Chin.

  "I hate to talk business on your private line," he told Sylvia when she answered. "But for your information—and the information of whoever's tapping your phone—someone's about to do a Willie Ludlum on the Haram. Very soon. Hear anything more about it?"

  "I can't say what we've heard, Chris. But I can tell you this. Your friend Nuala's dead. So's her lover, Rashid. They were strung up in a ruined convent in Cyprus. According to the Cypriots, whoever killed them used rope from the days of British rule. Official imperial rope. An execution. What are you going to do?"

  "Take a bath," he told her.

  When he got to the bathroom, his legs went weak. He stood stunned, holding his hand under the running water, undone by the necessity of judging its temperature, incapable of that much measured consideration.

  Nuala had required consuming passions. In Jerusalem she had found one and, sure enough, it had consumed her. He remembered Rashid talking about djinn. And Ericksen haunted by the force he claimed would kill him. What he was experiencing, he thought, might be described as fear of the Lord. This emotion, it was written, was the beginning of wisdom. Of course it had been rash of him to refer to the Almighty as an invisible winged paperweight. He wondered if wisdom might not be, at long last, presenting itself to him.

  59

  LUCAS'S NEXT VISIT was to the House of the Galilean. It seemed no longer to be associated with the cause or personality of any one specific Galilean; moreover, it was closed. Its plaques and signs were gone. Palestinian workmen were applying a conditioning coat of wash to the walls.

  "House of the Galilean?" Lucas asked one of them.

  The Arabs only stared at him, curious but afraid. He drove back to his downtown apartment and played the message machine. Whose hearty, authoritative tones should he hear from the device but those of his old friend Basil Thomas, the purveyor of "scheduled information." Thomas had already troubled himself to drop by Fink's once, in vain. He would be there again tonight, he declared. Lucas decided to meet him.

  As the roseate Jerusalem evening came on, Lucas made for cocktail hour at Fink's. There indeed was Basil Thomas, looking every bit the genius of the receding century in his leather policeman's coat. When he saw Lucas, his features assumed a well-informed, let's-see-you-walk-away-from-this-one expression.

  "This is hot," Thomas said. "Schedule A. Most secret."

  Lucas bought them both a beer.

  "You're going to see disturbances all over the city."

  "Why's that?"

  "Oh," said Thomas, "some anniversary. But don't leave them out of your account. And be prepared."

  "Something about the Haram?"

  "We'll meet tomorrow," Thomas said, "you and I. We'll meet here and I'll have a handout for you that you will value. Few in this city will be more informed than you."

  Lucas at once realized that he had to go back across town to check his sources there. Not that his other sources were extensive. There was Lestrade, if that Christian soul was still in town. He had to remind himself, with a mixture of frustration and dread, that Pastor Ericksen was dead, like Nuala and Rashid. Thomas did not seem to be bluffing. He had been chosen as a conduit.

  "This wouldn't involve an attack on the Haram, would it?"

  "Mister," said Thomas, "I don't even know what I'm going to tell you. If I did, I wouldn't, if you see what I mean. It would be rash and there wouldn't be a percentage in it."

  "Then what do you mean about disturbances?"

  "A free prognostication," Thomas said. "Exchange for the drink."

  "OK," Lucas said. "I'll be here if you will."

  The rush of dusk was in progress at the Damascus Gate. The sky was fading; a promiscuous lingering light shone from a variety of sources, illuminating the caves and stalls of the city. He felt closely watched. Beside the moneychangers' stalls, the man selling Al-Jihar was in some agitation; he had a headline to chant, an Extra. He seemed ambivalent about selling the paper to Lucas. At first he said he had no English version. Eventually, it turned out, there was one. The edition looked like a throwaway, with day-old news inside. But the front page was covered with sixty-point type, green on white, and it read, "Defense of the Holy Places in the Name of God."

  The words caused Lucas further theological anxiety, of the sort that could be construed as virtue. Fear of the Lord. Appropriately, it was time for prayer. Amplified up and down the darkening streets, the muezzins sounded genuinely angry.

  On Tariq al-Wad, Charles Habib was closing up his café. It had been months since the Caravan had sold its last Heineken to a disoriented tourist. Charles seemed astonished to see Lucas, but for a moment Lucas thought his old acquaintance might pretend not to know him. Instead, Charles beckoned him inside and closed the shutters. They went to the rear section, which Charles maintained as his city apartment.

  Charles owned a number of apartments in Jerusalem and in Nazareth. They were always occupied by groups of his relatives, who seemed to live on some updated, urbanized and intercontinental nomadic model, appearing at intervals from Austin, Edinburgh, Guadalajara. In the room farthest from the street a group of elderly Palestinian women in flowery housecoats were gathered by a television set. There was a huge unconnected bathtub on the floor in front of them, and as they watched, they were putting blankets in the water to soak. Lucas noticed that the windows were all shuttered and reinforced with stacks of wooden crates.

  Among the women helping to saturate the blankets sat a pretty teenage girl in a denim jacket and a Boston Red Sox cap, reversed. When she saw Lucas come in, she separated herself from the older ladies and, over their protests, came to sit with Charles and Lucas. Charles did not discourage her.

  "I thought you went back home," Charles said to Lucas. "Do you know what's going on?"

  "I was hoping to ask you that," Lucas said.

  Absent-mindedly, Charles introduced the teenager. "This is my niece, Bernadette Habib," he said. "My brother Mike's daughter, studying at Beir Zeit. She's from America."

  "Watertown, Mass.," said Bernadette. She shook Lucas's hand in Watertown fashion.

  "What do you think, Bernadette?" Lucas asked her. "What do they say at Beir Zeit?"

  Recently, at Beir Zeit, the secular PLO ticket had defeated the Muslim fundamentalists in the university's student elections. It had been considered a good thing.

  "The Islamic kids say the Israelis are going to trash the Haram," Bernadette said. She wore tiny earrings and a cross around her neck like Madonna's, but of course their significance would be very different in Jerusalem than in South Beach. "Did you hear the sermons all day?"

  "Mr. Lucas doesn't know Arabic," Charles explained.

  "Really," the young woman observed unsympathetically. "Not many Americans do."

  "Did the sermons get all this started?" Lucas asked.

  "Haredim came
to the Damascus Gate in the morning. They overturned stalls. They beat people, even Europeans. They said they would destroy the Muslim holy places."

  "It sounds like provocation," Lucas said, thinking the militants might want the confusion of a Palestinian riot to cover the action. Increasingly, outside, one seemed to be taking shape.

  "What is America going to do?" Charles asked Lucas. "The Haram is going to be taken over. Everyone says so. It will be war."

  "I don't know," Lucas said. "They don't know any more at the U.S. consulate than we do."

  "No one believes that," Bernadette said.

  "No one," Charles added.

  "How about you?" Lucas asked Bernadette.

  She shrugged. "Maybe the government thinks one thing and the CIA thinks another."

  The wonders of a junior year abroad. A sophisticate, Lucas thought. "We still keep the embassy in Tel Aviv," he said. "That means something."

  Bernadette gave him a look of polite indulgence. She was regularly a student at Holy Cross in Worcester, doing her year at Beir Zeit, during the periods when it was open. Lucas had discovered that there were hundreds of Arab-American students in the country, a mirror image of the young Jewish students who came.

  "At school—at school here—we read, like, Noam Chomsky?" Bernadette told Lucas. "Ever heard of him?"

  "Of course," Lucas said.

  "Really? Because most Americans haven't. We read his book On Power and Ideology. It's all stuff like you never hear."

  "Don't they read Chomsky at Holy Cross?"

  "In poly sci, I think. About Latin America. I didn't even know he wrote about the Middle East."

  "Ever talk to any of the Jewish kids over here?" Lucas asked her. He gestured, as people did, toward the other side of town.

  "Sometimes. But it's all different here," she said. "Everybody's scared. A lot of their kids carry guns. They think we're bombers. Like, we're American, they're American—but nobody's American here."

  It occurred to Lucas that, if it could be managed, a year spent in the Third World as a non-American might be a salutary addition to every young American's education. It might be coupled, as absurd counterpoint, with a compulsory reading of M. Bourguignon's great work of travel, sociology and armadillo observation, L'Amérique.