by Joan Hess
Theo scrabbled at the knots, keeping half of his attention on the inky interior of the cave. A flashlight splashed across one wall, then whipped away. Ilana and Hershel were at most twenty feet into the cave, arguing over their cache of explosives.
Dorrie would not be able to climb up the path with her hands behind her back; it was necessary to remain long enough to free them. At the sound of intensified anger from the blackness, he tripled his efforts, but he knew it would take at least another minute before he could unravel the professional work.
“I won’t let you do this,” Hershel screeched. His voice bounced off the walls of the cave, echoing in a ghostly wail of sheer desperation. “Put down that cap, Ilana.”
“I do not care about the damned manuscripts,” she answered in an equally hollowed voice. “I’m going to rig a bomb for that rich shiksa. One more word from her and she’ll find herself under fifty feet of limestone.”
“But my manuscripts …” Hershel croaked. The light began to dance around the cave, accompanied by thuds and gasps.
Dorrie looked at Theo over her shoulder. “I would like to believe that you are hurrying, Uncle Theo.”
“I’ve almost got it,” Theo said. He flinched at a sharp crack from the cave. A slap—or a gun. “One last knot, my dear, and we’re up the hill.”
“Put down that cap,” Hershel howled.
“Give me the plasticine,” Ilana growled.
“Could you please hurry?” Dorrie whispered.
“What’s going on?” Miriam called.
“Need some help?” Sitermann drawled.
Theo looked in all the relevant directions, but before he could answer, there was a thunderous roar from within the cave. The noise grumbled and grew until it seemed to seize the sky. Clouds of suffocating white dust swept out of the cave in cottony swirls. Dorrie squeaked as he freed her wrists with a final jerk. The ledge crumbled under their feet and they began to tumble toward the wadi amidst an avalanche of rocks and dust. It was unsettling, to say the very least.
25
“Your body’s in the wadi, Bloom.”
Theo opened his eyes to a view of Sitermann’s grin. His ears reverberated in a high-pitched squeal, and the sky was filled with spiraling stars against a background of pulsating blues and reds. Patriotic but improbable, he decided as he pushed Sitermann aside and forced himself to sit up. Waves of nausea promptly struck, and it was several minutes before he dared try to speak. He passed the time with an inventory of his limbs, which were bruised but unbroken.
“Where’s Dorrie?” he whispered at last.
“She’ll be all right,” Sitermann said. He put Theo’s bifocals in place and chuckled. “You’re the one with a lump where your forehead used to be. You’re dustier than a groundhog’s ass, and your britches lost their crease halfway down the mountainside. You better just sit for a minute until the stars fade and the little cuckoo stops serenading in your ear.”
In that the analysis was accurate, Theo decided to follow the advice. He cautiously turned his head to look for Dorrie. She was leaning against a boulder, pale, coated with dust, bedraggled, and blessedly intact. She fluttered her fingers and produced a halfheartedly polite smile.
Theo did the same, then looked back at Sitermann. “I gather the explosive went off somewhere in the proximity of Ilana and Hershel. They are—buried?”
“A good fifty feet of limestone on top of them,” Sitermann agreed. The affable grin widened. “Speaking as a professional in this kind of thing, which of course I am, that was a real good one. I couldn’t have done a whole lot better myself. It was so loud they probably heard it all the way to the kibbutz, if they didn’t notice the clouds of bat dust. All in all, a damned fine production.”
“And Miriam?”
“She’s trying to get down to us, but she didn’t take the express elevator. It’ll be a few minutes, Bloom, before your lady friend arrives to hold your hand. Mine is less delicate, but it ought to suffice in the interim.”
Theo stared at him. “What did you say?”
“I said that Miriam is—”
“No, not that,” Theo said impatiently. “The comment about your hand being less delicate.”
“Why don’t you lie down for another minute or two, Bloom? I’m beginning to think you ended up with some bat dust between your ears. Maybe the paramedics can figure out how to get a stretcher down here so you won’t have to crawl up the mountainside.”
“Forget it, Sitermann; I’ll be fine.” He took out his handkerchief and did his best to tidy himself as he pondered Sitermann’s comment. It was the confirming link in his theory of Essie’s death, which had been an accident only in the sense that Essie had been unlucky enough to hear too much. She had been silenced, as had Gideon, although for another reason.
Once he had cleaned his bifocals, Theo searched the mountainside for Miriam. She was, as Sitermann had promised, climbing down as quickly as she could, and he could see the whiteness of her face and uneven, frantic pace. Behind her, centuries of dust still curled and danced in the sky like the mist on the surface of the Dead Sea.
Ignoring Sitermann’s increasingly perplexed gaze, he tugged at his beard as he continued to watch Miriam. Her son had shared her passion for the land, more so than she had realized when she had talked of the second generation’s desire for personal fulfillment. The passion had obsessed him. Ultimately, it had killed him.
“Have you decided on a concussion?” Sitermann asked.
“No,” he sighed. “How did you happen to put yourself in the thick of things, by the way? Were you merely out rounding up errant steers for a rodeo, or were you following the others?”
“You ought to know me better than that by now, Bloom. I heard a ruckus in your room, so I borrowed a jeep and wandered along to see what all was going on and to keep an avuncular-type eye on your niece. I had an idea she wasn’t real pleased about the trip out here, maybe because she was squawking louder than a prairie dog in heat. I was lurking behind a pile of rocks.”
“May I presume you intended to make your presence known if Ilana and Hershel actually threatened Dorrie with physical violence?”
Sitermann gave him a wounded look. “You honestly think I’d let them harm a hair on the pretty little filly’s head?”
The pretty little filly had been listening to the conversation. “Is this the so-called CIA agent, Uncle Theo? I find that rather hard to accept. I had always imagined the CIA to have a shade more savoir-faire, not to mention a more elegant wardrobe. And if he was there the entire time, while I was literally forced to inhale bat droppings while listening to Ilana and Hershel plot how best to persuade a mountain to drop on me—”
“You’re basically correct, but we’ll discuss it in depth on the flight home,” Theo said. “At the moment, we need to deal with the situation. Two young people have been killed—”
“And whose fault was that?” Dorrie inserted acidly.
“—and we must inform the authorities. It is, I fear, a tremendously complicated story. If you don’t mind, I’m beginning to feel faint. I’d better save my strength to get up the mountain.” He lay back and closed his eyes. It was as good a plan as any, and it proved successful.
Lieutenant Gili crossed his arms, uncrossed them, and crossed his legs. He then recrossed his arms and said (rather crossly), “Well, Mr. Bloomer, I cannot wait all day for you to explain what happened at the cave. My men have informed me that there is no possibility that the two inside the cave could have survived. Miss Caldicott refuses to speak. Mrs. Adler claims to be—to be addled.” He stopped to laugh at his joke, then forced his mustache into alignment and added, “Mr. Sitermann says you’re the only one who can explain. How long must we dilly, Mr. Bloomer?”
Theo shifted the icepack to the opposite slope of his forehead and peered around the room from under it. The lieutenant, his officers, the kibbutzniks, and the visitors were all gathered to hear what had taken place on the ledge in front of the cave. Hadassah and Naomi we
re there, no longer giggling. The bartender, the factory men, Anya, the nurse from the infirmary, and others whom he had met during the week were watching him, waiting to learn which member of the kibbutz had broken the fifth law of Moses. He could see the sorrow on their faces, sorrow that came from the knowledge that one of them had betrayed Kibbutz Mishkan and forever damaged the strong tie that kept so diverse a group of people together in a close bond.
Lieutenant Gili had ordered everyone except the children to attend the general assembly. Even Yussef had been escorted from his sickbed. He sat in a wheelchair, his drab green bathrobe nicely coordinated with his overall chlorophyllous complexion. Sara had not yet returned from her excursion to Switzerland.
“It has been difficult for me to understand how the Jews feel about Israel,” Theo began quietly. “It’s a different kind of passion, based not only on an historical precedent, but also on a God-given right to be here. Because it is the Promised Land, its citizens are willing to make whatever sacrifice is needed.”
He glanced at Miriam as he moved the ice pack to the other side. A dribble of water ran into his eye, and he hastily brushed it away. “As Miriam explained on my tour, the loyalty to the kibbutz strengthens the commitment even more. It is admirable, when tempered with reason. Miriam told me she would gladly die for the kibbutz. For someone, it became necessary to kill for it.”
“Mr. Bloomer,” Gili interrupted, his eyes rolling in a display of pained forbearance, “this is hardly earthquaking. Could you arrive at the point?”
“I shall try my best, Lieutenant Gili. The situation began when Ilana, Gideon, and Hershel returned from the university with a shared commitment to seek revenge against the Arabs. The major complication was money, but they lucked into a veritable gold mine—” he inclined his head at Sitermann—“in the desert: a cave with two ancient scrolls. A dealer in Athens traded explosives for one scroll, and they subsequently bombed the building in Hebron.”
The kibbutzniks eyed each other, some shocked and others nodding as if they’d suspected some, if not all, of Theo’s theory. Gili rose to rock on the balls of his feet. “Murder, Mr. Bloomer. The terrorism is not within my jurisdiction, or I would have solved it in a matter of days. If you don’t mind …?” He sat down with a martyred sigh.
“On the day of the bombing each one of them had a problem. Ilana, already elated with anticipation, wanted to plan another bomb immediately afterward, then trade the remaining scroll for more explosives. Boom, boom, boom. Hershel wanted to take the scroll to the university so that he could be recognized as a great archaeologist. Gideon wanted to make sure no one found out about the cave, since he knew that removing antiquities would produce more disgrace and punishment than a minor bombing incident. If Hershel took the scroll to his professor, the location of the cave would no longer be a secret, and the scroll would be confiscated. Gideon decided to hide it in a most ironic place until Hershel calmed down.
“They had a rousing argument, which Essie happened to hear. She delightedly repeated what she could remember to anyone who would listen. Dorrie did, and so did I, and that evening I told Miriam. Only later did I hear a more precise version of what Essie said to Dorrie. She had tried to say ‘Essene sect,’ although it did come out differently. She also mentioned the word ‘cheap,’ which referred to the jeep that was used to go to ‘he runs to bite,’ Hebron tonight, and the ‘trip’ to sell the ‘great manuscript.’ She even told me to take a scroll to Athens, which I erroneously interpreted as a suggestion to take a stroll at ten.”
“I knew I wasn’t cheap.” Dorrie tossed her hair back and lifted her chin to offer a view of her slender neck. “I had never in my entire life been accused of that.”
“You had no frame of reference,” Theo said. “However, Miriam did, and she deciphered the words almost immediately.”
She looked up with a bleak smile. “I had suspected something about the cave, and I did tell Gideon that Essie was mumbling to the guests. I—I didn’t want anything to happen to him. It never occurred to me that he would take such drastic steps to silence her. Afterward, it was too late to do anything.”
“It was,” Theo agreed. “By coincidence, later that day Gideon managed to gain possession of Dorrie’s locket, and he used it to lure Essie into the desert. He arranged to meet her after he returned from Hebron. Yussef heard her begging for ‘my necklace’ outside the dining hall. Ilana allowed the jeep through the gate, and later believed what Gideon told her about Essie’s fall. But I fear it was a fabrication designed to appease the other members of his group—and to avoid retribution. Gideon drove Essie to a remote site in the desert. A blow on the back of her neck and she was gone. If the fall didn’t kill her, exposure and scavengers would. His solution was effective, if psychotic.”
“Aha!” Gili said. “Now we have solved the first murder, and very neatly. I can hardly arrest the young man, can I?” He gazed around the room with a triumphant smirk, as if awaiting applause. After a moment of silence, he looked at Theo. “Then who killed Gideon? I suppose you are going to tell me that the Dead Sea is haunted, as well as the cave above the wadi? I do not believe in ghosts.”
“That was prickly,” Theo said, again finding Miriam to study her with great sympathy. “Once I determined that Gideon murdered Essie, I wondered about motives. Ilana wasn’t particularly perturbed about Essie’s death; she believed Gideon’s story. Hershel probably did, too, since he was used to being bullied. In any case, he was too busy wooing Judith for her supposed fortune. If he could persuade her to produce a hefty dowry, it could be used to purchase explosives. Then the others would allow him to take the second scroll to the university. No one would suspect the first scroll had been illegally removed from Israel, and he would be famous and respected.”
This time it was Judith who produced the bleak smile. “He was upset when I admitted that I wasn’t a typically wealthy Wellesley girl. He didn’t want to stay at the kibbutz. All he could talk about was getting a university position and supervising digs.” She hiccuped, but managed to hold back the tears. “Then I had to tell him that I would admit that I brought the explosives through customs.”
“That is, of course, what instigated the scene at the cave,” Theo said. “Hershel realized that the whole affair would be exposed. It would become known that he had smuggled an antiquity out of Israel, and he had only a small chance of avoiding professional ostracisim. He needed the remaining scroll to produce with a flourish, as if that might serve as an act of contrition. He was unable to find it, since I was innocently carrying it around with me. He decided to hold Dorrie until I agreed to return the manuscript to him—or he found another one. It was illogical, but he was panicked beyond any point of logical analysis.”
“That’s right,” Dorrie said. “I heard a dreadful thumping in your room, so I went over to see if you were having problems with my shoes. Hershel dragged me to my room and made me watch while he absolutely undid all my hours of work, then took me with him to a jeep near the beach. Ilana joined us and we drove to the cave like a little family on a Sunday-afternoon jaunt. All we needed was an old quilt and pimento cheese sandwiches.”
“But why did you agree to be kidnapped?” Gili snorted, clearly tired of a minor role. “Surely in such a situation you should voice an obstruction?”
Eyelashes aflutter, Dorrie gave him a sweetly bewildered smile. “I haven’t had your experience with these things, but I did notice that Hershel had a knife, Lieutenant Gili. I’m not mentally disabled.”
Theo opted to continue before the discussion digressed into dangerous territory. “Ilana decided to forget the scroll and demand a ransom. If she needed to blow up the cave to do so, she was willing. Hershel fell apart. There was a scuffle, a lack of prudence with the plasticine, and—well, boom.” He blinked ruefully at his choice of words. “The three terrorists paid for the deaths of the children in Hebron.”
“But you have not yet told us who is responsible for the death of Gideon Adler,” Gili said. “I th
ink you do not know.”
Theo laid the icepack on the table. “The Biblical references kept haunting me, but I’m afraid religion was never my strength. We had Ruth the loyal follower, and Jonathan and David, best friends and almost brothers. Then it seemed as if they might have been Cain and Abel. It was terribly confusing, but I kept coming back to what I was told was the essential allegory for the Jews: Abraham and Isaac. The ultimate sacrifice. The death of a child by his parent’s hand.”
Miriam met his eyes. “But God stopped Abraham before he killed his son, Theo.”
“I wish He’d done the same for you,” Theo replied gravely.
She stood up as if to leave. Several khakied officers moved behind her, and she sank back down. “I knew about the manuscripts in the cave, and I suspected that Gideon and Hershel had sold one in Athens to buy explosives. But they promised they would halt the violence. Why would I—do what you said?”
“Because you realized that Gideon killed Essie. A bomb in Hebron was disturbing, but murder was too much. The signs of his breakdown were increasingly hard to miss; he was telling everyone about the glorious defenders of Israel, and he was close to actually boasting about his involvement in the Sons of Light. You suggested a picnic at the cave because you thought he might have taken Essie there, and you had to find out how far he would go.”
“I—I did. I had to find out if he were crazed enough to leave her in the desert. I couldn’t allow her to stay there—with the animals and the heat. The very idea was so dreadful. She didn’t deserve that. He shouldn’t have let her lie there by herself.”
“Once we found Essie’s body, you realized he was out of control, willing to do anything to continue with his war against the Arabs. Murder would disgrace his father’s memory, and bring the police here to investigate and make arrests. It would all be made public: the bombing, the murder of an innocent girl, the theft from the state of Israel. He had to be stopped, for the sake of Kibbutz Mishkan.”
