Nile Shadows (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 3)

by Edward Whittemore

  Combined with my love for Ted was a certain brutality which I tried to keep in check. I tried not to push him too hard. I tried not to let my disappointment show on the phone when he said he was just too tired from the pain, too sick from the drugs, to be able to write.

  There was one section in the book that I really wanted him to revise. It was the scene where Sally and Billy fall in love. The woman in this novel was nothing like the women he’d written about before, who quite frankly had always struck me as a little pale. Sally was a real powerhouse, a force, a tragic mess. One day he called me at the office and told me he’d spent three hours writing the day before, and he felt like hell but he’d revised that scene, which was central to the love story, the scene I was sure he had inside him. He told me—but I did not see the pages. I did not see the fix.

  Of course, it is dangerous when an editor has a favorite fix. It’s not your book.

  Because there was so little time, however, I let myself want it. In part, I just wanted what I wanted, and used the drama of death to cover up my presumptuousness and greed—but in part, I felt unconsciously that my desire for the fix would encourage Ted to fight harder, to slow down the illness for the sake of the writing.

  Underneath this I must have believed that writing was more important to Ted than everything else, that he had no more powerful motive for staying alive. Was I crazy?

  Meanwhile, he was in and out of the hospital. Annie left to go to Italy, alone, to get some time away from cancer, on a holiday Ted told her she needed to take. Carol came to take care of Ted.

  Years back, Carol had been with Ted, longer than anyone else. She had ridden motorcycles all around Crete with Ted. She had been with him the day when, discouraged about ever writing anything worthwhile, he spotted a scarab in a dusty British glass case in the British Museum and the whole idea of the Quartet was born. Carol showed up when things took a turn for the worse. From early until late, she moved hospital beds and nurses in and out of Annie’s house, not sleeping much if at all.

  One night, when I hadn’t been able to talk to Ted for ten days—I had been out of the country—I called him from my younger brother’s house, where I was visiting.

  Ted told me that he felt, suddenly, he had enough energy to really finish the book. Carol would read it, too, and Ted would mark places to cut, which I would then execute, leaving him the time to write the revisions he wanted to do.

  My brother came into his bedroom where I was using the phone. So did my sister-in-law, so I moved out to the unfinished porch out their bedroom, carrying the portable phone, which was taped together with gaffer’s tape from the results of abuse by children. As my brother and his wife lay together, sleeping, preparing for another day of work and family, I stood on the deck in the black night and schemed with Ted.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes you can do it. Yes,” I said. “We’ve had some great breaks already. You finished the draft before you went out of remission. Remember? Now we have another big break.”

  The night was wide. “This is what you can fix,” I said. “With the time left. I’ll come to New York. We’ll talk about the cuts.”

  “Isn’t it marvelous,” said Ted to Carol, “that just when we need her, just like magic, Miss Judy appears. I hadn’t heard from her. Wondered where she was. And here she appears. Stage Left. Enter Miss Judy.”

  “Yes,” agreed Carol, wanly. “It’s a good sign.” I could hear the humoring in her tone, although I did not know, I could not see what she could see.

  Instead, I egged him on. One more piece of luck, I said. One more good break. When so much has gone badly, one more piece of good luck. It’s a wonder I didn’t ask him to sit down at the desk then and there and write me a scene.

  I never knew whether I was important to him for anything but the books. And I never knew if he would have been important to me if it weren’t for the books. That was where we connected.

  Ted had his own brutality. He had his ambition, which resulted in modest living and ruthlessness. He told me once that women were simply more generous than men, that they were better people, and although I never doubted that Ted had deeply loved the women in his life, and made them feel deeply loved, I wondered if that was an excuse for his bad behavior. He had two daughters, who didn’t speak to him for years, although they visited him during his final illness. He said he had been a very bad husband, and a very selfish man. He knew what he was and he knew that as a result of how he had behaved, he had lost his daughters. But he had written his books. Ted had two granddaughters; one is named after his sister, as though his family got his children, but he didn’t.

  Six days after I returned from my brother’s house to Washington, at 6:20 on a Sunday morning, my phone rang.

  “Judy. It’s Ted. Listen,” he said, speaking urgently, “I’m in terrible trouble and you have to help me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I don’t know where I am. And you have to come and find me.”

  “Of course,” I replied. I paused.

  Ted didn’t know where he was, but I knew. He was lying in a hospital bed in his bedroom. He was too sick to be anywhere else. He was there, he just didn’t know he was there. So I had to get him to bring himself back.

  Suddenly my bedroom seemed very big and empty and the telephone cord a slender tie to the voice at the other end.

  “Can you tell me where you might be, Ted?” I asked. “Can you tell me where you think you are?”

  “Certainly,” said Ted, practical, sure of himself. “I seem to be somewhere near Annie’s. So you can start looking there.”

  We talked for a while, and got into a conversation about other things that were going on where he was. Some things confused him, like the workmen who were lifting big sections of pipe onto the roof of a nearby building (they might have been there or might not have been there). When we talked about it, he thought of some reasons why they were there and seemed to grow easier in his mind. And so we said goodbye.

  One or two minutes later, the phone rang again.

  “Judy, it’s Ted.” He seemed in a hurry. Or anxious. It was hard to tell.

  “I just looked at the clock. It’s six thirty in the morning. You must think I’m crazy.” He sounded a little frightened.

  “No,” I answered honestly. “I don’t think you’re crazy. I just think you’re on a lot of drugs, Ted. You’re probably on a lot of morphine. That can mess you up. Besides,” I added, looking out at the pale summer morning sky, “it’s already light here. You probably looked out the window and saw how light it was and figured it was okay to call. Is it light where you are?”

  Ted was reassured, and again we talked for a few minutes before he became tired and distracted. I couldn’t go back to sleep after we hung up the phone, so I made some coffee and tried to read the Sunday papers. But he was much on my mind.

  That evening, I came home around nine thirty or ten from a family picnic at the house of one of my older brothers, in Baltimore. I was afraid for the blinking light on my answering machine. My machine tells callers to wait for the famous beep. Ted had waited and left this message. I listened.

  “Judy. It’s Ted.” He spoke very fast, slurring one or two words. “Calling on your famous number that you can’t make a call since you’re waiting for my beep.

  “Judy. I’ve got some great news from you today. For you today. With you today. And the news is: is that I’m no longer mad! And don’t you think that it would be nice to know that Ted Whittemore is no longer mad? Wouldn’t that be fun! I hope it would be! Nice for a change anyway.

  “Your number is still the change. Change. Still hasn’t changed. My number hasn’t either. What changed is that I’m no longer crazy!

  “So listen. If you could call me sometime. At that number you know all about. And we could talk on that number.

  “There are a lot of things … that are going to become clear—which never were!”

  At this moment, Ted’s voice, rising in ex
citement and joy, is abruptly cut off as though he simply went spinning off the face of the world. I think I knew then that I would never talk to him again, never hear his voice again.

  Of course he did not go, spinning. It was not that simple, that easy, or that much fun. He continued for another month, increasingly disoriented, consumed by pain, pumped with drugs. He soon had nurses around the clock at home, he went in and out of the hospital, and finally went into a hospice. Several years earlier, I had helped to care for someone through the end of a terminal illness, so when my phone calls to New York were not returned by family and by the two women who, at different times, had shared his life and now had the honor and burden of seeing him through his final passage, I knew what this meant. They had too much on their hands to bother calling back concerned but peripheral friends. They were doing the hard work, and the least I could do was stay out of the way.

  When it was all over, I knew, I would be handed the manuscript, for Tom was one of the literary executors and he would vouch for me. I would see if Ted had revised that love scene. I would make sure that all the changes in his hand were faithfully entered. I would see if any of the cuts we’d discussed were possible, but be cautious in my acts, just cleaning things up.

  Then I would pass the pages to Tom and he would try to sell the story. Tom, however, never was able to make that sale. The novel felt unfinished.

  The family held a memorial service in Dorset on August 12th. I flew to Hartford, rented a car, and drove north.

  The day alternated between brilliant sun and showers. Dorset, in rain or shine, was as beautiful as ever. Tom spoke at the service. He said that Ted had compartmentalized his life, that different parts of Ted’s life didn’t touch. The parts that were represented in Dorset—his family, his true and good friends from Yale, who had supported him during his illness, who spoke of the powerful love they had felt from Ted during that time—were strangers to me.

  After the service we were all invited back to the house. It had been renovated, but some parts of it were as I remembered. It was strange to stand there and see those same rooms. Time passed and the house emptied of visitors. Even the family disappeared, for a family meeting that may or may not have had to do with Ted; maybe they were burying him in the old graveyard with the other family members. The house was empty, except for a woman who went from room to room, clearing away food and drink.

  I sat in a rocker on the back veranda and had a glass of wine. The rain came and went, yet again, spattering the tall meadow grasses behind the house. And then the sun shone bright. I took my empty glass to the kitchen and then I went to an upstairs bathroom, put on my bathing suit, and headed to the Dorset Quarry.

  It was as ever. Young men went screaming over the high cliffs, cannon balling into the water. Two women paddled at the shallower end, near where I had found all the money. Children dabbled their feet, sitting on the ledge.

  The water was cool. The birches tossed their leafy arms in the sky. Life contains these perfect afternoons. I swam from one end of the quarry to the other. And then I put on my goggles and dove down, deep.

  The rain had left the depths murky, however, so there was nothing I could see.

  Judy Karasik

  Silver Spring, Maryland and Vitolini, Italy, 2002

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Jerusalem Quartet

  INTRODUCTION

  IT LOOKS AND FEELS like a book, I know, but I promise you that what you hold in your hand is an axe. A paper axe, it’s true, but an axe nonetheless.

  I’ll explain.

  Jericho Mosaic is the capstone of Ted Whittemore’s Jerusalem Quartet, one of the most ambitious literary endeavors of the 20th Century. Like Robert Musil’s Man of Qualities and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Whittemore’s magnum opus explores the great themes of this and every other age. War and peace, friendship and death, loss and betrayal. Dreams.

  An historical novel of subtle and ferocious dimensions, Jericho Mosaic is, above all else, a tale of espionage inspired by the tragic heroism of a spy named Eli Cohen.

  A Syrian Jew and native Arab-speaker raised in Egypt, Cohen was taken up by the Mossad when he and his family emigrated to Israel in the 1950s. Like Whittemore’s protagonist, Yossi-Halim, Cohen was given training and sent to Argentina with a false identity, there to build a legend for himself as a prelude to his real mission: posing as a businessman while ferreting out the secrets of the Syrian Army’s general staff in Damascus.

  For Halim, as for Cohen, nothing could have been more dangerous or more likely to end in a dusty square, with a tortured man at the end of a rope. And yet, knowing the dangers, Cohen left everything behind—family, country and identity—to risk his life for a dream.

  Forty years later, Syria and Israel are still arguing over his bones.

  For Whittemore, the spy was the quintessential figure of his time. And why not? Whittemore was born into an era of assassination and conspiracy, conflict and coup, world wars and Cold War. Spies like Richard Sorge, whose espionage operations provided the framework for Whittemore’s first novel, were men whose lives became the secret fulcrums of their age.

  A graduate of Yale, that great incubator of spooks, Whittemore was himself an intelligence agent for many years. Entering the CIA in the 1950s—the very apex of the Cold War—he became a spy in the truest sense. Not an espionage bureaucrat on the 9-to-5 shift in suburban Langley, but a NOC—a field agent under Non-Official Cover working against unforgiving adversaries. It is the spook’s equivalent of a trapeze-artist working without a net. Slip, and the embassy won’t save you.

  So he had an inkling, at least, of the slow-motion heart attack that must have been Eli Cohen’s daily life. It is not an existence that is easily imagined. Immured within a fiction, a man such as Cohen lives in an atmosphere of secret and unremitting anxiety. Like background radiation from the Big Bang, it is everywhere and nowhere, suffusing the very air he breathes. Surveillance is presumed, spontaneity forbidden. Exposure waits like a tick in the tall grass, biding its time for a single, careless gesture. Under such circumstances, life is reduced to a series of desperate and lonely calculations, even as the spy plays a gregarious and carefree role.

  And yet … as Whittemore knew so well, there are moments—still and timeless instants in which the world is suddenly, briefly, apprehended as a God-given fact, a reality that transcends even the most frightening circumstances. One such moment occurs on the Syrian-Lebanese border, after Halim has been taken for an unexpected ride by a Syrian intel-officer who may, or may not, mean him well. Standing on the terrace of a small stone house overlooking the Bekaa valley,

  Halim was struck by the … stillness and the sweeping beauty of the view. Goats’ bells tinkled from some distant crevice in the hills. A thin line of smoke rose far away in the clear sky. The terrace was blissfully remote, rich with the smell of earth and sunshine. Colonel Jundi smiled, gesturing toward the valley.

  Syria. he said.

  Well, Lebanon, anyway.

  Whittemore gets it right. He gets all of it right. His grasp of the Middle East, its history, customs and geopolitics, is deep and unerring. As deep, almost, as his grasp of human nature, and its primacy over borders and maps, the abstractions of generals and politicians. At one point, when Halim’s game has been run, an Israeli general opines that he was “the most valuable agent Israel ever had.” To which Halim’s handler, Tajar—himself the founder of the Mossad and the “grand rabbi of espionage”—replies, “Oh yes … he was that too.”

  Nor is it only the natures of great men that Whittemore reveals. Like Dickens, he understands the tragedy of great souls with small destinies. And so we’re given Halim’s closest friend, Ziad, the hack-journalist and Baath party hanger-on, of whom Tajar remarks, “I wouldn’t imagine he’ll go very far. But then most people don’t … anywhere, do they?”

  The ellipses are Whittemore’s—and Tajar’s.

  The simple truth is that Ted Whittemore was one of the best and l
east-known writers of a lowdown, dark, and dishonest age. The books that he’s given us, beginning with Quin’s Shanghai Circus, are among the great “war novels” of our time as luminous as The Red Badge of Courage, as chastening as The Naked and the Dead. That the wars are fought without “lines” or uniforms hardly matters: the wounds go just as deep, and sometimes deeper than, bullets.

  Kafka understood:

  I think we ought to read only the kinds of books that wound and stab us …We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

  Here then, reader, is an axe Ted Whittemore made.

  Jim Hougan

  Charlottesville, 2002

  Jim Hougan, a former editor of Harper’s magazine, novelist and journalist, has written extensively about the U.S. intelligence community. His most recent novel, Kingdom Come, was published by Ballantine in the summer of 1999.

  Part 1

  ONE

  JERUSALEM IN THE EARLY twentieth century was a vibrant little city only newly awakened from medieval obscurity by the coming of the British at the end of the First World War—a dream from antiquity suddenly stirring to life after four hundred years of slumber under the stupefying decadence of the Ottoman Empire. With their penchant for order and proper hygiene, the British briskly built hydraulic works and piped fresh water up to Jerusalem, but many people in the walled Old City still drank from the cisterns of the past, those underground reservoirs from other ages which never saw the light of day. For Jerusalem was a place where many eras still crowded together, and where no event from history was too remote for a morning’s gossip, since the very ruins of that event might well be providing shade for the day’s transactions of commerce and hope.