A Long Way to Shiloh

by Lionel Davidson

  I relapsed into silence myself.

  2

  ‘Where is it you’re going exactly?’

  ‘Nottingham, Shrewsbury, Liverpool. Places like that.’

  ‘Alluring.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘So there won’t be much more of this.’

  ‘Alas.’

  ‘Alas indeed. Something new’s got into you.’

  ‘So long as it doesn’t into you while I’m away.’

  ‘Vulgar as well as vain, Professor.’

  ‘Vulgar, vain, virile, vital.’

  ‘Violent. Vulpine.’

  ‘Voluptuary. Vulvic-violationary.’

  ‘Vastly visible. Anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Want to do anything about it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  All going well here; assignments of the right kind, challenges of the right kind. Who wanted others?

  3

  ‘Hello,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Caspar?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Hello, Caspar.’

  ‘Hello, you old bastard.’

  ‘That’s my old friend,’ he said with relief. And a couple of days later I landed at Lod.

  3 A Spoil of Gold

  There is none end of the store. [Nahum 2.9]

  1

  I landed after dark with a Boeing-load of Zionist zealots, so a reception committee was waiting: balconies crowded, crash barriers packed, arms, flags, hats semaphoring welcome. Various kinds of bedlam were still going on as I came through Customs, enormous family groups demonstrating in Hebrew, Yiddish, German and American. One group, of bearded ancients, not apparently having come to meet anyone but only to regard another aspect of the Creation, was simply demonstrating in favour of the Almighty, reciting with enthusiasm the newly-composed prayer for air travel. (‘If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there …’)

  A mysterious people. How had it really begun for them, their affair with the invisible lover and with The Land? And why had it persisted in such love-sick detail over the centuries, when he had requited them so ill? Fidelity: a fine thing.

  ‘Dr Leng?’ A little chap, built like a monkey, had sprung from a big Plymouth parked in the warm darkness.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shalom. Give me your bag. For the King David, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What’s this – overcoats? You think it snows in Israel?’

  It does, of course, if infrequently, but I adjusted to the patter. There would be more of it. You have to love The Land, and fairly volubly, when you’re in it.

  Mercifully, the driver’s passion for his land was equalled by a desire to show what the Plymouth could do in it. Just forty minutes and thirty-seven miles later, we were in Jerusalem, bowling down the Jaffa Road to King David Street. He pulled up in the hotel forecourt.

  ‘So. How was it, Caspar?’

  ‘Very fast, Chaim.’ The relationship had blossomed.

  ‘Good roads, eh?’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘It’s been a real pleasure,’ he said, and I thought was going to add ‘to do business with you’. Any transaction in Israel, with a shoeshine, a matchseller, assumes the character of a deal, the sense of value very strong. But he was reaching for a card. ‘Here. Any time you need me.’

  ‘How much is it this time?’

  ‘Nothing. All paid.’

  The deal had been done. We shook hands. I went in.

  The King David Hotel, famed in film and story, was also jumping. I made my way to the reception desk, but hadn’t quite reached it when a character detached himself from a group and came over to me.

  He looked younger, more relaxed in his own background, moustache less military, twisted nose more genial.

  He said, ‘Shalom,’ smiling, pumping my hand. ‘It’s good to see you. I knew you’d come, my friend.’

  A clear case of second sight, if so, because I hadn’t. All through this long and boring day, I hadn’t known why I was doing it. But I’d done it now.

  2

  ‘There’s no gin left. Only this,’ Tanya Agrot said, and looked dubiously at the bottle.

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘Arak,’ Agrot said. ‘Ah, put it away. We’ve drunk enough. Who wants arak?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Maybe it will stimulate the understanding.’

  We were in his flat in the Rehavia district of Jerusalem, very select. His wife had run up to meet us from Barot. Both of them would have been at Barot, digging, if the new scroll hadn’t blown up suddenly. After an attentive hour and two socking gins my understanding was as yet so unstimulated that I hadn’t the faintest idea why it had blown up at all. I sipped the arak cautiously now, not wishing to miss a trick.

  So far as I could follow, the scroll had been found last November, a full year ago. It had been found by the Agrots at Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea where they had been working at the time. Somehow between that November and this one it had become suddenly hot. How? Agrot hadn’t said yet. He’d been filling me in on the background.

  The scroll, it seemed, purported to be the documentation of a consignment of money and valuables removed from the Temple Treasury in March 67, and deposited in Galilee. Numerous such consignments would have been on the move then – as they were from London and Paris in situations of comparable danger during the war.

  The Temple, as he pointed out, was a place of enormous wealth, the Bank of England or Fort Knox of its day. It was used as a bank, both by business houses and by individuals whose deposits in the form of bullion were stored in private vaults. But the institution had its own reserves – immense ones. Then as now the bulk of Jews lived abroad, six or seven millions of them in all in the Roman Empire and several millions more in the Parthian. Each one of them, if male and above the age of twenty, made an annual donation to the Temple.

  Nobody had ever been able to compute the size of this treasure, but it was certainly vast; enough anyway, when the Romans finally broke in and took it, for the price of gold to slump by a half on the Syrian market. By that time, of course, a good deal of it had already been dispersed – and Agrot’s document shed light on the dispersal method.

  The procedure, it seemed, was to prepare the documents in triplicate. Two would be hidden, while a third (which detailed where they were hidden) would go to Jerusalem. This copy, after its essential information had been abstracted and transferred to some master register, would then be destroyed.

  Agrot’s reason for believing that the Menorah was still ‘where it was put’ was that his copy showed where the other two were hidden, and it had manifestly not been destroyed. It was the copy, he believed, intended for Jerusalem, and it had evidently never got there. And he was equally sure that nobody else had found it in between: a small hoard of coins found with it, none minted later than 66, gave fairly adequate proof of that.

  I said, ‘Where did the Jordanians find their copy?’

  ‘At Murabba’at, a little farther up the Dead Sea, just south of Qumran.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Within a few weeks of ours. We found this out only in the past week.’

  ‘So why the excitement now?’

  Agrot reached for a manila envelope. ‘I expect you want to go to bed now, Tanya,’ he said.

  ‘You expect wrong,’ Tanya said. ‘I don’t.’

  Agrot looked at her over his reading glasses.

  ‘We have come now to a Classified area,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to be involved in it.’

  ‘Then why discuss it now? Why have you always got to do everything at once?’

  ‘Because I have planned to discuss it now,’ he said patiently. ‘Also I wish to return to Barot some time. You haven’t forgotten Teitleman?’

  ‘For tonight I have,’ Tanya said. ‘Gladly.’

  Teitleman, a baron of building (whose iniquities were known to me), had large works going forward in the Bar
ot area. The Agrots had managed to pull a forty-two day standstill order on him while they excavated the biblical tel before his bulldozers disturbed the surrounding ground. The forty-two days was going to be just enough, without interruptions, which was another reason why Agrot had called me in.

  He remained looking patiently at her and she remained looking angrily back at him. She was a handsome woman, about thirty-five, with an agreeable American accent, very tanned and lookable-at in her slacks and Sloppy Joe. The flat was done up evidently to her taste: plain but stylish, with a few good pieces, amphorae, tiles, a gilt pomegranate; and a big spotlit picture, a Mané Katz, on a blank white wall. I looked round it while the silent marital duel continued, and presently, a bit put out, she got up.

  ‘Don’t make it long, then,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow.’

  ‘All right,’ Agrot said, and waited till the door had closed. Then he took a few papers out of the envelope and sorted them out. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I expect this is going to be one of the most unintelligent things you ever heard.’

  ‘To do with Sidqui?’ I said.

  ‘To do with Sidqui. He came here, you know. He slipped across the border.’

  He’d slipped across it at a place called Gesher a few miles below Lake Tiberias, on a miserable moonless night the previous December. With a companion he’d forded the Jordan river, gone through the grounds of Kibbutz Gesher, a collective settlement, and cut across the main Tiberias road for the hill country between there and Mount Tabor.

  As it happened, Kibbutz Gesher had recently been burgled and a team of night-watchers was on duty. They’d spotted Sidqui and his friend but had let them quietly through while one of the observers telephoned the Border Police post at Ashdot Ya’acov four miles away.

  Six policemen and a couple of trackers from Ashdot Ya’acov had got on to the infiltrators an hour or so later. They’d followed them for the next three days and nights. Standard procedure for the Border Police in Israel is not to challenge or alarm infiltrators, unless detected in the commission of a crime, but to shadow them to see if they have business with local Arabs.

  Sidqui and his friend didn’t seem to have any business with local Arabs. The police couldn’t make out what their business was at all. At first they’d supposed it to be a bit of sabotage in connexion with the National Water Carrier from Lake Tiberias to the south, but it was soon obvious the men weren’t interested in that. They were digging holes in the ground and occasionally letting off a small well-blanketed explosion. Suspecting that they might be cacheing arms or signalling devices, the police had carefully examined the holes. They found nothing in them.

  The men were sleeping in undergrowth by day and travelling by night. On the third night, when they were nearing the heavily populated areas of Nazareth and Afula, the police decided to pull them in. Sidqui’s companion produced a pistol when challenged, but dropped it as a warning burst chattered over his head. Sidqui himself remained in a patch of undergrowth, and despite two further challenges would not emerge. A corporal and two men were sent to get him.

  The corporal saw Sidqui crouching with what he took to be a rifle in his hands, and accordingly put a burst over his head. Unfortunately, Sidqui had been rising at the time, and he got the burst in the chest, dying instantly. The reason for his non-emergence then became clear. He had been squatting with his trousers down. And what the corporal saw as a rifle was a length of steel piping three feet long. Three other pieces were nearby.

  At Nazareth police station, Sidqui’s companion was quickly identified. He had already served a couple of terms for illegal entry and robbery. But Sidqui remained a problem. There was no clue to his identity in his clothes, his papers or his fingerprints, and his companion refused to say anything.

  He was still refusing to say anything when he left to stand trial at Haifa seventeen days later on a charge of illegal entry and possession of explosives.

  Between the road and the entrance to the Courthouse at Haifa there is a stretch of pavement one hundred feet wide. The infiltrator was being escorted across this, handcuffed, when he was shot in the head and killed by a rifle bullet fired from the flat roof of a cinema on the corner. By the time the firing point had been identified and the building cordoned off, the gunman had escaped. He was never found.

  In due course the file on the case went to Nazareth police station, with copies to Border Police HQ at Beit Shean. And there the matter rested.

  It rested for ten months – until three weeks ago – when purely by chance a former student of Agrot’s, a specialist in Arabic who had been one of the team working on the Ein Gedi scroll, entered the Border Police service and was posted to Northern Area HQ at Beit Shean. There, to familiarize himself with the work, he was told to spend a week or two in the file room. It hadn’t taken him long to come on the file of the two infiltrators, or to recognize in the posthumous photo of one of them the features, familiar enough to him from his specialized reading, of Khalil Sidqui. Just about three days later he had a pretty good idea what Sidqui had been up to.

  In that time he’d retraced the steps of the infiltrators, found the holes in the ground, and identified the steel pipes as a contraption for collecting geological core samples. But while returning to Beit Shean in the dusk this young man had run into a booby trap: a rope stretched across the road. He’d been found still on his motor bike but with his neck broken lying at the bottom of a steep hill off the road. His notes at Beit Shean had been very explicit, however, and they’d gone to Agrot; who after some researches of his own, had set in motion the devious machinery that had brought me to sit opposite him in the Rehavia flat, arak in hand.

  *

  It was Israeli arak, rather too refined and without the coarse oily kick of the Arabic, but with the same tendency to get you bow-legged after a couple. I’d now had three.

  ‘Any comments so far?’ Agrot said.

  The one that immediately occurred was that funny things seemed to happen to people in the area where I was expected to work. He didn’t seem to be inviting that kind of comment. I said, ‘What was this with the core samples?’

  ‘The Menorah is supposed to be buried under a layer of blue marble chips. There isn’t any marble in Galilee. The presumption is they were looking for it.’

  ‘That sounds a cockeyed way of going about things.’

  ‘Very cockeyed. And very Sidqui. But not without a grain of sense,’ Agrot said. ‘At least nobody tumbled to what these pipes were for a long time.’

  ‘So the idea was to find the marble, dig up the Menorah and take it back across the Jordan?’

  ‘No, no,’ Agrot said. ‘It would be far too heavy for them. The idea would be to locate it, so it could be picked up later.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Agrot said. He looked round. There were double doors between the sitting-room and the bedroom and Tanya had left one open. He got up and closed it. ‘By a military group,’ he said. ‘At least, a para-military group. There’s always a bit of trouble of one kind or another going on up there, you know – raids, counter-raids. Where you get a full-blown military operation, a number of objectives have got to be decided for it in advance. I think the idea here would be to get the Menorah included as an objective. They’d go for it under the umbrella of whatever else was going on. And there’s a certain amount of evidence to support this. For instance we know now there must have been at least two other attempts to find the Menorah, since Sidqui’s – they left core pipes behind. And after each one, about a month after, there was a fairly heavy raid. The supposition is that the infiltrators knew the raids were being planned. It now looks as if we can expect another.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And there are some disturbing aspects. For one thing, the last mob were very cocky. They weren’t spotted coming in, but they put up a fight going out – which is unusual. And for another, they had a mine detector with them. They threw it in the river, and we recovered it. The reasoning is they wo
uldn’t have lumbered themselves with it unless somebody, earlier, had got a fix on the marble.’

  ‘In the area that Sidqui had worked?’

  ‘I don’t know. I told you, they weren’t spotted till they were going back over the border. But it looks as if they’ve located it. Of course, there are two things we can do. We can let them lead us to it, and jump them. But we don’t want any fighting going on with the Menorah. For one thing, the bastards could blow it up – we want it more than they do. Or we can find it first.’

  ‘In how long?’

  ‘I would say three weeks.’

  I finished off my arak. ‘I suppose it is the Menorah they want?’

  ‘No question of it.’

  ‘Why not the gold?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Isn’t anybody for Christ’s sake,’ came an unladylike snarl through two sets of doors, ‘ever getting to bed round here tonight?’

  Agrot rose hurriedly. ‘There are good reasons,’ he said, ‘which we can go into. But not now. It’s late now.’

  It was. It was after two. Back to the hotel and to bed I went, reeling slightly.

  3

  We went to Ein Gedi next day. We went via Barot, with Tanya in a second jeep. ‘It won’t put much on our time,’ Agrot said, ‘and there’s some trouble up there I have to deal with.’

  ‘What is it – a war?’ I said. The jeeps came with army drivers, each formidably armed.

  ‘Not at all. Teitleman has the lower road closed for blasting and we have to take an upper track that runs near the border. Do the weapons alarm you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. They did. The dull gunmetal and the hard scarred butts looked dangerously efficient.

  ‘Forget it,’ Agrot said. His eyes were sparkling, wandering nose taking in the chill morning air with relish. ‘You’ll soon get used to it. It’s second nature to us.’