Bloodline
Page 28
“Hey, you!” he shouted. He knew their preferred language was Yiddish, but he didn’t speak it, so he continued in Hebrew. “Leave her alone. Get away from her.”
One of the young men, surprised by the sight of the tall, athletic man running at them, called to him, “Mind your own business. You don’t understand. God commands women to dress modestly. He said to Eve to cover up her nakedness. But this girl . . .”
It had never left him; it was buried deep in his muscle memory, still strong and potent. Yaniv moved toward them like a soldier on a mission. The boys, all of whom came from yeshivot, the religious schools where students studied morning, noon, and night, knew nothing of confrontation short of nonphysical harassment, and they immediately drew back.
“I don’t give a fuck what God commands. You live your lives and let everyone else get on with theirs,” Yaniv said, moving closer to the girl to shield her.
One of the boys, braver than the others though a head shorter than Yaniv, walked closer to him and said, “People like you call yourselves Jews, yet you have no understanding of what God has comman—”
Suddenly, a shock wave of boiling air, like an oven door opening, enveloped them; then the roar of the explosion, then a massive invisible hand pushed them toward the wall. It was a colossal blast from the other side of the road. Yaniv turned in horror to look across the street and saw his car catapulted into the air, high off the road, as though some giant had hoisted it off the ground. Then a ball of yellow flame and black smoke erupted from the panels, blowing off the hood and the front and back doors. The car flipped over onto its side, landing with a scream of metal, just clipping a taxi heading northward, the driver swerving to avoid being crushed by the falling metal. But the taxi hit another car traveling in the opposite direction head-on.
In all the chaos, when the blast wave hit the group, the boys screamed and the girl was pushed to the ground, covering her face. The explosion was too distant to hurt them because the heat and force of the blast dissipated in all directions, but the effects shocked and immobilized them. The three boys, shaken but still alert, recovered quickly and ran away for all they were worth. Yaniv looked at his car, now on its roof, with a massive hole where the driver’s door had once been, surrounded by snakes of twisted metal. The taxi and the car with which it had collided came to a halt amid broken glass and columns of steam from ruptured radiators, hoods raised, horns screeching. The girl on the pavement burst into tears and moved across to hug Yaniv’s legs for security. But all Yaniv could think about was the motorcyclist and the click he’d heard at the traffic lights minutes earlier.
* * *
PROFESSOR SHALMAN ETZION was driving out of the museum’s parking lot toward the road that led south and east to the Dead Sea. Because he was in his car with his iPod playing Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at full volume, he didn’t hear the distant explosion of Yaniv’s car from the other side of Jerusalem.
He drove quickly toward the east for his appointment with the director of antiquities at Masada, the winter palace of King Herod. But before he arrived there, he’d pop in and visit some friends at the ancient archaeological site of Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea.
Like many Israelis of German origin, he adored Wagner’s operas, even though he knew that he was an anti-Semite and a favorite of the Nazis. And like many Germans, when he listened to Wagner in the privacy of his car, he drove too fast, but he was a busy man, and there were places he had to get to.
In his haste, he didn’t see that he was being followed by a large black Mercedes four-wheel-drive. He accelerated to beat traffic lights, the Mercedes following; drove too quickly around bends, the Mercedes in his wake.
Negotiating one of the sharp twists in the road, a precipitous drop descending from the heights of Jerusalem to the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea, Shalman glimpsed the Mercedes close beside him—too close. Why so close? Why was he driving like a meshuggeneh on a road notorious for its crashes? What? Was he a maniac?
The car behind flashed its lights; Shalman was momentarily distracted from concentrating on the road, glancing up into his rearview mirror.
Foot on the brake, Shalman tried to slow his descent before taking the long right-hand bend, but the Mercedes suddenly accelerated and overtook him, and just as he was about to correct his wheel, the four-wheel-drive swerved just enough to nudge the front of Shalman’s aging Ford. The other driver knew the pressure point of Shalman’s car. The old man yelped as the wheel was wrested from his hands from the jolt of the car beside him. He grabbed it back, correcting the steering from his right-hand turn to negotiate the bend, but the front of the car was shoved by the much more agile Mercedes on its right. It was an almost imperceptible move, unnoticed by other drivers coming up the hill, but with the wheel wrenched out of Shalman’s hands, the old man was unable to steer, and the car headed toward the barrier.
The Mercedes accelerated past the old Ford, which veered with a life of its own. Shalman tried to wrestle it back, but the steering wheel stubbornly stayed to the left. He lost his grip on the wheel a second time and struggled to retain control. But it was bucking out of his hands as the car’s front suddenly veered in a different direction, the front tires fighting against the direction of the curve.
He instinctively slammed his foot on the brake—precisely what he shouldn’t have done—and the rear wheels skidded around, turning his car full circle. The elderly man screamed “No!” as his car crashed into the barrier, turned around again, and hit the barrier once more, two wheels leaving the road and tipping it onto its roof. The old car rolled over once and then vaulted the barrier. In horror, Shalman looked into the depths of the valley three hundred feet below as his car careened downward.
He screamed a single name: “Judit!” In that second, he saw her face as his car smashed into the rocks and dirt at the bottom of the cliff.
Drivers behind him saw what was happening, and when they got out of their cars, they looked in horror at the old Ford far below, upside down on its roof, crushed, with steam and smoke rising up the rock face. There was utter silence, broken only by the music that rose up the cliff face. It was Wagner’s Brünnhilde swearing eternal vengeance. A shocked American tourist screamed as the car suddenly burst into flames. The music stopped.
Nobody noticed the big black Mercedes continuing to drive sedately toward the Dead Sea. Soon the driver would turn the car around using an exit road and climb the hill toward Jerusalem. The driver didn’t even look at the four cars that had stopped, their occupants standing on the edge of the road, looking downward, but he was gratified to see smoke billowing upward in a satisfying column. He had to drive quickly to a private garage and have the dented front fender fixed. Then he’d return to his office in Shin Bet.
* * *
“I DON’T BELIEVE YOU,” she said, sitting down on the tiny bed of the dingy hotel room. Still shaken, Yaniv stood there, shocked by what had happened to him.
“He tried to kill you? You? Why? This is unbelievable. How does he know about you? This is ridiculous. Enough! You . . . we . . . have to go to the police. You have to go to Shin Bet and call this bastard to account. You have to . . .” She was too stupefied to continue for a moment. “You have to . . . do something.”
“You don’t get it, Yael. We’ve stumbled right into a shitstorm. They’ve been tracking us. They know who I am now. They know who you are.”
“I don’t believe the whole Israeli security force is in on some conspiracy!” said Yael.
“No. But we have no idea who Eliahu Spitzer is in contact with or who he controls or who reports to him. We can’t tell the police, the Shin Bet, Mossad, the army, or anybody else.”
“Bullshit! This isn’t Iran. This is Israel. Only religious madmen would be part of this. Nobody else. We have to go to the authorities. The police, surely!”
“And that’s half the problem: because if we go to the police, it’ll be in a report, and reports are seen by people. We can’t take the risk.”
“And you’d risk your life on something being kept secret? In Israel? I’m a reporter, Yael. I can get to see most everything. I’m not going to take that risk. We have no idea how wide or deep this bastard’s contacts go.”
“So who can we tell? Who can we go to?” asked Yael in frustration. “Christ, Yaniv, this is Israel, not some Arab country. We’re a democracy. We’ve got separation of powers. Jesus, we’ve got a fucking ombudsman.”
“We can’t tell anyone until we have a way out” was Yaniv’s flat reply.
“Bullshit. There must be somebody we can get to help us.” In her frustration, she repeated quietly to herself: “This isn’t Syria or Iran or Egypt. Nobody’s that powerful.”
Yaniv looked at her in concern. And his silence was eloquent testament that they were indeed on their own.
“Then how can we fight him?” asked Yael.
“You’re a doctor. Not a soldier,” replied Yaniv.
“In Israel, everyone’s a soldier.”
It might have seemed a mock retort, but in a country with compulsory national service for men and women alike, and besieged on all sides by hostile armies, it was not an empty boast. Yaniv just shook his head and flopped into a chair.
Yael reached into her handbag and drew out a small black object. She held it up for Yaniv to see. It was a black smartphone with a wide reflective screen.
“I’m not sure I want to see what’s on this,” she said.
Yaniv stood from the chair and grabbed the phone from Yael’s hand. “Where was it?”
“In the secure bag with Bilal’s belongings at the hospital,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“And you were just able to go and get it?”
“He was my patient, so I told the security guy at the hospital that I was looking for some pills that Bilal had in his pockets. I said I needed them for analysis. And then I just slipped it into my pocket when the security guy wasn’t looking. He was too busy with the soccer game on TV to notice.”
Yaniv’s eyes told her that he wasn’t elated.
“Something’s not right. Why wouldn’t Shin Bet take the phone? Why wouldn’t they confiscate all his belongings as evidence?” He let the question hang in the air as he contemplated all possible answers. His gaze returned to the room and he looked at Yael. “The only reason Spitzer wasn’t bothered with it is if he didn’t need it.”
He fiddled with the phone until a tiny drawer opened in its side. “They’ve removed the SIM card; they must have thought . . .”
Yael looked at him quizzically, not following his train of thought.
“Most people think that all the information is stored on the SIM card, but it’s not. Lots of good stuff is stored on the phone, even with the memory card removed. The goons thought that by removing the SIM card, they had all the evidence it contained. They obviously think that they don’t need the evidence if they—” His eyes opened wide, and then in a sudden flurry of energy he quickly depressed the switch and brought the phone to life. Swiping fingers briskly across the touch screen, he found his way to the phone’s folder of video clips and photos.
Banal photos of feet and a steering wheel, the accidental images of a new user of a new technology. He flicked past them. A video of a pretty, young Arab girl smiling shyly at the camera. He flicked past once more to a grainy image pixelating in the near darkness of a dimly lit street. The shuffling staccato movement and rattling as the phone camera was repositioned in the hand of the user. Finally it came to rest, moving in a gentle arc to survey a street, a wall, a window . . .
As the camera changed its auto exposure, three silhouetted figures came into view. The camera jerked up and then forward before settling again. The silhouettes became more distinct, more in focus. And the light changed again, the dark image brightening as the camera adjusted.
Yaniv’s finger tapped the pause button on the screen, freezeframing the image. Yael wondered why he was smiling.
He turned the camera around so Yael could see. She leaned forward.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“That’s him. That’s the imam who came to the hospital,” said Yael. “And the guy with the white hair next to him is Spitzer.” She looked closer at the screen and nodded. “But who’s the other man? The Hasid.”
“Rabbi Shmuel Telushkin of Neturei Karta,” replied Yaniv. “I interviewed him in Tehran at that Holocaust denial conference.”
Stunned, she looked at him and said softly, “Dear God.”
Yaniv repeated his question from earlier, holding up the phone as if the answer was the phone itself. “Why didn’t Shin Bet take this phone? Why haven’t they confiscated all Bilal’s belongings as evidence? Because they didn’t need to. Because they knew everything that he was going to do—the bombs, the Wailing Wall . . .”
Yaniv pointed at the three men on the phone screen. “They set it up.”
Yael wanted to protest the absurdity of it all, but the events of the past few days made the words stick in her throat. After what she had been through, anything was now possible.
“I think I know how to stop them coming for us.”
Yael didn’t respond; she just stared at him.
“But to do it, to draw them out, we have to get Bilal out of prison.”
PART THREE
In the 18th year of the Reign of Herod (Known as the Great), 19 BCE
MARCELLUS GRATUS SECUNDUS lay facedown on a towel while a Nubian slave woman carefully scraped the dead skin and aromatic oil from his back, arms, buttocks, legs, and the soles of his feet. Once she had finished, she picked up a sponge from the bucket of warm water, wrung it out so that it was not more than damp, and wiped the noble Roman knight’s body from his balding head to his ankles. It was a delicious feeling, and Marcellus Gratus was aroused by the heat of her naked body so close to his and the way in which she paid attention to the small of his back, his bottom, and his thighs.
Marcellus Gratus glanced over to where his wife, Aurelia Juliana, lay facedown on a nearby couch, being scraped by a tall, muscular naked Nubian. He noted with a smile that her slave had been ordered to spend an extra amount of time in massaging her buttocks and all of her that lay within reach of his fingers. He also noted with some disquiet that her slave had the biggest male appendage he’d ever seen. Not even erect, it was twice the size of that which belonged to his employer. Noticing what he was looking at, his slave girl smiled and whispered in his ear, “I have had that thing inside me, master, and it hurt me. Very badly.”
Marcellus Gratus decided not to tell his wife; she could find out for herself. He looked around at his slave girl and saw that she was very beautiful, her shining black skin reflecting the light of the candle. If he had the time, he would enjoy her body before the evening meal, because he knew for certain that while he was engaged on official duties in this backward region of the empire, Aurelia Juliana would be taking full advantage of her Nubian.
He still didn’t understand why Rome needed to control this regressive part of the world. He’d advised senators that Rome should be looking toward Gaul and Britannia, which were rich in ores and minerals, in wood and tin and slaves. But because of the wealth of Egypt and the grain it produced for bread, the Romans looked south and east, and so Marcellus Gratus had been asked to come take charge of the provincial capital of Jerusalem.
He shuddered when he thought of where he was and how different this land was from the epicenter of Rome’s life and culture. Hundreds of years ago, the Jews had been exiled in Babylon but had returned to rebuild Jerusalem; then they’d been conquered by Alexander of the Greeks, at the same time as the Gauls again threatened Rome but were destroyed by the greatness of the Roman legions. And now he was in Jerusalem, the city that the Jews called their capital!
Marcellus Gratus Secundus could barely stop himself from laughing. Com
pared with Rome or Alexandria, Jerusalem was a hovel. Since the return of the Jews from their exile in Babylon, it had had many conquerors and kings. He’d been told the history since the Persians had released the Jews from their Babylonian exile, but it was all too complicated. Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire, and that meant that Jerusalem and Judea came under his control; but the Greeks wanted to place one of their gods in the Jewish temple, and that had caused some war or other and the land fell to the Ptolemies. But they lost it, and it fell to the Seleucids and Antiochus the Great; but the Jews objected for some reason he couldn’t understand, and so they revolted and it fell to the Maccabees. But the offspring had quarreled and asked Rome to intervene, and now . . . oh, it was all too confusing, and he couldn’t be bothered remembering what had happened in the past. All he was concerned about was ruling for today, handing over tributes to the Senate in Rome, and returning to a higher office in a civilized land.
Shortly after Marcellus Gratus arrived in Judea with Aurelia Juliana, they had come to an easy accommodation with each other. In Rome, it would have been unthinkable for a knight to have indulged his carnal desires with a slave woman in the knowledge of his wife, and unimaginable for a male slave to have access to the body of a Roman matron of rank. These trysts were usually carried out in discreet lupanaria, where men and women clients entered the brothels through a series of guarded alleys to avoid a scandal. But in these far provinces, where the eyes of Rome couldn’t see and gossiping voices couldn’t be heard, things became much easier, and the desires of Marcellus and Aurelia were openly gratified as many times as they wished.
As his slave was rubbing down his body with a warm towel, Marcellus Gratus pondered, as he often did, the differences between this place, Judea, the most extreme region of the eastern Roman Empire, and Rome itself. This hot, fractious, empty, and miserable desert of a land held a few charms, but compared with Rome it was the land of the barbarians. The people were warlike and fanatical in their allegiance to their absurdly invisible god, simple in their needs, their cities little more than hovels, without any great civic buildings or baths or forums or temples; nor was there a single hippodrome of any decent size for the amusement of the soldiers, and the roads between places were nothing more than tracks hewn out of the ground by the feet of countless camels and asses.