An Accidental Messiah

by Dan Sofer

  Alex sat down on the edge of the couch.

  Large, intelligent eyes studied Alex over a huge sensitive nose. The shaved head glowed beneath sunken spotlights.

  “A drink?” Mandrake nodded toward a bar cabinet of polished wood. “A smoke?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Mandrake cut to the chase. “So what have we learned about this Dry Bones Society and their magic tricks?”

  Alex leaned forward on the couch. “No magic tricks,” he said. “They’re for real.”

  The intelligent eyes scanned his own. “Sasha,” he said, a note of disappointment in his voice. He was the only man who called him by that name. “You surprise me. Dead men returning to life? We have been magicians too long to believe in magic or miracles.”

  Alex felt his stomach tighten. He hadn’t expected the news to go over easily. “Call it what you like. It’s real.”

  Mandrake laughed, leaned over, and tapped ash into a tray on a side table. “I did some homework too, I hope you don’t mind. This Moshe Karlin threw together a demonstration last week, and got locked up for his efforts. Now he’s playing politics. He’s a clever trickster, but he’s a trickster still.” The eyes locked on Alex. “Has he tricked you as well?”

  “There are signs,” Alex said. “Physical signs. They have no belly button.”

  Mandrake dragged on the cigar, still staring.

  “Like I said,” Alex continued, “this is no trick. We should keep clear of them. My work is done here.”

  Mandrake blew a smoke ring in the air. “You’re so sure of this. Why?”

  Alex swallowed. There was no avoiding it. “The girl is with them,” he said. “I met her. That’s how I know.”

  The eyes didn’t blink. “And how did she take to your reunion?”

  “She doesn’t remember a thing, not even her name. Goes by Irina now. She works at the Society.”

  “Could this Irina be another girl?”

  Alex stared at his hands. “It’s her.”

  Mandrake took another long drag. “If her memory comes back…”

  “I doubt it. We spoke for a long time and I used my real name. They’re no threat for now, unless we draw their attention.”

  Mandrake blew another ring and watched it disappear into thin air. “We cannot take that chance, Sasha. Take her to the Doctor.”

  Alex shifted on his seat. “I told you, she doesn’t remember anything.” His attempt at keeping her safe had backfired.

  Mandrake stubbed out the cigar in the ashtray. “Take her to the Doctor, and we’ll know for sure.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Monday morning, Avi marched down Jaffa Road, propelled by indignation. The time had come to take matters into his own hands.

  Pedestrians rushed along the sidewalks of downtown Jerusalem, as waiters arranged chairs and tables outside cafés.

  “We can help each other,” Boris had said. The Russian Mafioso had drilled him about Moshe Karlin and his plans. He had given Avi a cell phone and pocket money, and told him to pass on any new information. Together they would destroy Moshe Karlin. Five days since that promise, Moshe Karlin’s star had risen only higher.

  On the fuzzy television in his dingy downtown studio apartment, his old nemesis had shaken hands with politicians and fielded questions from reporters. The event gave Moshe and his undead friends new rights and influence, pushing Avi’s revenge further away than ever.

  With a valid identity card, nothing would stop Moshe from marrying Galit and shutting Avi out for good, and so he had sprung out of bed that morning with renewed purpose. He could wait no longer for Boris to deliver. Time was running out.

  A crowd of people blocked the sidewalk, so he stepped into the road to walk around them, then froze to the spot. What the hell? The human line stretched all the way to Queen Shlomzion Street.

  He turned to a man at the edge of the crowd. “Is this the line for the Ministry of the Interior?”

  “Yes,” the man said, “But it’s moving.” He had a strange accent and wore a T-shirt that fell to his knees. He was one of them. The man smiled and put out his hand. “My name is Nikita. Are you also a returnee?”

  “No,” Avi snapped, wiping the smile off the man’s face.

  Avi trudged to the end of the line. Bloody freaks. He had set out early to avoid the crowds, planning to get inside the Ministry and cause havoc by shredding application forms and cutting computer cables. If he had to, he’d start a fire. That’d show them. The next news broadcast would have Moshe Karlin apologizing for the violent behavior of his followers.

  The line inched forward.

  This is ridiculous. At this rate, he’d wait an hour before he even entered the building. The undead had spawned like tadpoles. Another twenty stood in line behind him now. Their gleeful smiles made him want to retch.

  Enough! He stepped into the road, abandoning his spot in the line, and marched to the head of the human python.

  A mustachioed security guard raised his hand for him to wait while a young woman berated him. “What do you mean I can’t go in?” she said. “I need to renew my passport.”

  “Ma’am,” the guard said. “Today we’re open only for resurrected.”

  “But this is urgent. I want to talk to your superior.”

  “You’re welcome to,” he said, “but this comes all the way from the top. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.” He glanced past Avi at the growing line. “Or next week, by the look of it.”

  “This is pathetic,” the girl yelled.

  “Yeah,” Avi joined in. “We have rights too.” The girl glanced at him and smiled.

  “Sorry, friends,” the guard said. “Please move along.”

  The girl stepped aside. “The country’s gone mad,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Avi said. He gave her a wide grin. He’d like to take her out for breakfast. Judging by her fancy skirt and collared blouse, she’d pick up the tab.

  She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “These resurrected are taking over.”

  “Oh, no they won’t,” he said. “Not if I have anything to do with it.”

  A light bulb flared in his head. That’s it! All thoughts of romantic breakfasts evaporated. He walked off, leaving the girl standing there, and pulled out his phone.

  “Boris,” he said, when the call connected. “I know how to take down Karlin.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Yosef snuck into the corner office at the Dry Bones Society and glanced out the large windows to make sure no one was eavesdropping. The Society headquarters had been unusually quiet the last few days, the members busy with the press conference at the Ministry of the Interior and now with the issuing of identity cards, and Yosef took advantage of the situation to work on his own private mission.

  He opened his laptop on Moshe’s desk and loaded the spreadsheet he had created. The first worksheet contained a list of names he had gleaned from the Talmud and Midrash. He connected to the Internet, browsed to the Bezeq Online Directory, and searched for the first name on the spreadsheet: Menachem. A blue ball traced circles on the screen while he waited.

  A table of results displayed. Twenty thousand six hundred and thirteen matches. Yosef swallowed hard. He would have to narrow his search. He typed “Rabbi Menachem,” hit the Search button, and the table updated. Three hundred and sixty-five matches.

  Still too many. He narrowed the geographic region to Jerusalem. Thirty-six results. Thirty-six! The number restored his enthusiasm. Thirty-six names, like the Thirty-Six Hidden Saints of Jewish legend.

  The mission might succeed sooner than he had expected.

  He exported the search results, pasted them into a new worksheet, and selected the first row.

  Although the Talmud discouraged Calculating the End—attempts at predicting the onset of the End of Days—many sages had succumbed to the temptation. The dates often fell only a few years hence. The Redeemer would arrive in the year 1034. No—1043 is the appointed time. Or perhaps 1111? Surely by 1204.
Just a little longer, a few more years. The dates came and went, but the Messiah remained as bashful as ever. 1646—last call! The Hind of Dawn pranced forever just beyond the rise of the next hill.

  Theologians speculated about his chronic tardiness. The Redeemer would appear once all of the souls in the Divine Store had incarnated, or when all sinners repented their evil ways. If all Israel kept two Sabbaths, the Messiah would arrive. If only the students of the saintly Baal Shem Tov had joined him in prayer, the Messiah would have revealed himself. If all the great sages of the generation had only met, their joint holiness would have forced the Son of David from hiding.

  The Messiah would appear as a king, a leper, a lowly beggar. He would possess wondrous knowledge and insight. Hidden since the Six Days of Creation, he yearned for the Deliverance and suffered with each passing moment. The ninth day of Av, the day of the Temple’s destruction, would be his birthday, and Menachem his name. No, Efraim. Or David. Nehorai!

  Yosef dialed the first number on the phone on Moshe’s desk. He had to start somewhere. The receiver trembled in his hand as the number rang. Would this call kick off the Redemption? He imagined the fateful conversation. “Reb Yosef,” a sonorous voice would say. “What took you so long? The appointed time has arrived! We have much work to do.”

  With each ring his heart palpitated.

  “Allo,” said a woman’s voice, high-pitched and frail.

  “Is that the home of Rabbi Menachem Azulai?”

  “May his name be a blessing,” said the woman with not a little agitation.

  “My apologies,” Yosef said. “And condolences. Goodbye.”

  Yosef put down the phone and marked the row in the spreadsheet with an X. One Rabbi Menachem down, thirty-five to go. He dialed the next number.

  A smattering of guilt marred his anticipation. There would be hundreds of Davids, though not quite as many Yannais and Nehorais. Each call nibbled at Dry Bones Society funds, and each minute on the phone was a minute stolen from his duties as the Society’s first full-time salaried employee. But he had to try. The resources invested in this quest would yield dividends infinitely valuable for the Society and for humanity as a whole. The Messiah was out there somewhere, and Yosef must find him.

  “Yes?” The man on the phone sounded young and energetic.

  Yosef’s heart skipped a beat. “Rabbi Menahem Azriel?”

  “This is he.” The voice turned suspicious.

  “My name is Rabbi Yosef Lev of the Dry Bones Society. Have you heard of us?”

  “I study full time,” said the voice of Rabbi Menachem Azriel, a note of evasion sneaking into his voice. “I don’t have money to spare.”

  Many career Torah scholars lived off government stipends. If they were caught working off the books, they were likely to lose their stipend and receive draft papers from the IDF.

  “I’m not collecting donations. I just want to ask you—”

  “Whatever you’re selling,” the voice interrupted, “I’m not interested.”

  “I’m not selling anything. Please, just listen. The Resurrection has started. You might have heard about us on the news.”

  A silent, pregnant pause. “Ahh, yes,” said the voice. “I’m glad you called.”

  Yosef’s heart threatened to stop beating. God had guided his hand, like Abraham’s servant at the well of Haran, and led him to the young Redeemer on only his second attempt!

  “I have a message for you,” the man continued. Yosef stopped breathing too. Then the voice on the phone yelled and Yosef jumped. “Go to Azazel, you satanic bastards, and don’t call me ever again!”

  The line went dead.

  Yosef rubbed his ear, which still rang with abuse. He marked the second row of the spreadsheet with an X and moved the cursor to the next.

  The door of the office opened, and Yosef froze at the laptop, a criminal caught red-handed. “Yes?”

  Samira smiled at him from the doorway, wearing a green hijab. Although eligible for an identity card, she had remained behind to man the call center. Members of her former family worked at the Ministry and she feared their wrath should they spot her.

  “Rabbi Yosef. A man is here to see you.”

  Had Reverend Adams returned to check on his investment? Yosef had hoped to hand over their dealings with the Flesh and Blood Fund to Moshe. How did the reverend always know when Yosef was alone in the office?

  The man who stepped up beside Samira, however, was not Reverend Adams. He wore an impeccable suit, a spotless bowler, and a well-trimmed, stately beard. “Reb Yosef,” Rabbi Emden said. “Hello, my old friend.” His pearly teeth sparkled. “How good it is to see you again.”

  CHAPTER 30

  That morning, Noga feared for her life. The old, beaten-up car barreled down a bumpy, winding road at breakneck speed. Through the dusty window of the backseat, stony hills rose and fell as the vehicle snaked through Samaria, the Wild West north of Jerusalem.

  A storefront with Arabic signage whizzed by, then a donkey led by a man wearing a kaffiyeh. A sign at a crossroads pointed right to Ramallah. Were the holes in the signpost the work of rust or bullets?

  The Arab in the driver’s seat had a thicket of black hair and stubble on his cheek. He had not bothered with a seat belt and drove as though he had not yet discovered the brake pedal.

  Hannah sat beside her and gripped the armrest. She had picked up Noga that morning on Jaffa Road and driven north past French Hill. Passing the army checkpoint, she had pulled up on the side of the road where the old car with blue Palestinian plates waited. After Hannah introduced the Arab driver to Noga as Khalid, her “new friend,” the two Israeli women had climbed into the backseat.

  The car rounded another bend in the road that tied Noga’s stomach in a knot.

  A few years ago, three Israeli teenagers—Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel—had hitchhiked home from the Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem. The car had yellow Israeli plates, but when the driver veered from his declared destination of Ashkelon, Gilad called the police hotline on his mobile phone. The tape of the call ended with shouting in Arabic and automatic gunfire. Three weeks later, a search team located the boys’ corpses in an open field north of Hebron.

  Noga gripped the torn upholstery of the backseat. She hoped that Hannah knew what she was doing.

  “Here,” said Hannah. She handed her a piece of black cloth with a large hole at the bottom and a smaller one at the front. A hijab. She had got to be kidding.

  “Put it on,” she said. She had already donned her own black headdress, which covered her head and shoulders and exposed only her face. The secular academic and bra-burning feminist looked like an old beggar woman. “If anyone sees that we’re Jewish,” she added, “people could get killed.”

  Yes, Noga thought. Us!

  She put the hijab on, which felt lighter than it looked and created a very frail sense of security.

  A hilltop with the tidy red roofs of a Jewish settlement rose in the distance and then disappeared as they turned right. The car climbed a dirt road among scattered stone houses and then halted in a cloud of dust inches from a large olive tree.

  Khalid got out and strolled into the Arab village, and the women followed.

  A little Arab girl chased a hula hoop, barefoot in the dust. Three Arab men glared at the two women from a cement porch. A number of shanties of corrugated iron leaned between the houses. Noga’s theory about the Jewish roots of Palestinian Arabs seemed even more ridiculous on the ground. Nothing seemed farther removed from the Jewish city blocks and suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv than this primitive village community. She wanted to leave the place right away.

  “Hannah,” she whispered. “I think I might have misread the data.”

  “Shh. We’re there.”

  Khalid stood at the threshold of an old stone hovel. Hannah pushed through the door of overlapping curtains and disappeared within. Noga glanced at their Arab guide, who scanned the surrounding hills, his mouth tight. Was he gua
rding them against hostile Palestinians or making sure there were no witnesses to alert the authorities as to the whereabouts of two abducted Israeli women?

  With no choice but to follow Hannah, she pulled the curtains apart and stepped inside. The interior looked more like a tent than a stone house. Carpets covered the floor and walls and formed a low canopy overhead. In the corner, a young Arab woman in a burqa tended a tin pot on a gas burner, which filled the air with the aromas of lentils and onions. Noga almost didn’t notice the old man on the rickety chair. He sat very still in a thin hand-spun gown, his eyes closed, gnarled hands on his lap, a brown length of cloth wrapped around his head.

  She joined Hannah on a low bench at the old man’s feet. Khalid crouched beside the old man, touched his shoulder, and whispered in his ear. The old man stirred and glanced at the visitors through rheumy eyes.

  “He’s the patriarch of the village,” Hannah whispered in Noga’s ear. “That’s his great-granddaughter in the corner. Khalid,” she said to their guide. “Please ask him to tell us what you told me.”

  The Arab whispered in the old man’s ear again. The old man spoke in a soft frail voice, his thin lips trembling. Noga didn’t understand the man’s Arabic, but she didn’t need to.

  “My mother,” Khalid translated, “would light candles every Friday at dusk. I never knew why. One day, when I was a young man and already a leader of the clan, my grandfather became very ill. He called me to his bedside. ‘Khalid,’ he said. ‘The time has come for you to learn the truth. Pass this secret to your grandson, as my grandfather did to me.’”

  The old man’s breath came in short, quick gasps as he relived the memory.

  “He asked me to come close so he could whisper in my ear. ‘Our clan,’ he said. ‘All of us. We are Jews!’”

  CHAPTER 31

  Ahmed staggered down a dirt road in Silwan. A woman in a hijab grasped the hand of her young son and crossed to the other side of the street. He must look like a monster: his hair gray with dust, his clothes rigid with dirt and dried sweat, and reeking of garbage.