The Last Man

by P. T. Deutermann

  Ellerstein smiled. “Of course,” he said. ”Usually depicted in stone or marble as a supremely lush female figure. Ancient goddess of fertility and motherhood.”

  “And war,” David reminded him. “In my mind, Adrian was the reincarnation of Astarte, right down to that lush womanly figure and a fondness for combat. Anyway, after all the dust settled with the whistle-blowing flap, I was approached by a law firm who wanted to file a suit on my behalf for wrongful termination, for a percentage fee, of course. I was still angry with the company, Adrian was off on her trip, still treating me to hot tongue and cold shoulder, so I said yes. The company settled.”

  “How much?” Ellerstein asked. David told him, provoking a low whistle.

  “So that’s how you can afford the Dan Tel Aviv, a first-class airline ticket, and two weeks here in Israel. Well done, Mr. Hall.”

  “I’m not sure I’d claim to be proud of myself, but I did feel a certain sense of vindication. Adrian was right—as they say in Hollywood, I’ll never work in that business again.”

  “And so: Now you’re here.”

  “I am indeed.”

  Ellerstein nodded slowly, appearing to gather his thoughts. David thought he was about to ask him the obvious question: Why was he pursuing his ex-girlfriend’s obsession with Masada? Instead, he shifted subjects. “Metsadá is an important site to Israel,” he said. “A mythic shrine, in fact. A symbol of a calamity in our history that every patriotic Israeli vows never to let happen again. Do you know what the army does there?”

  “Yes, I do. They take all the new lieutenants graduating from each class of officer school up to the mountain for a night vigil, and then at dawn they retell the story, and all the new officers swear an oath that basically says, ‘Never again.’”

  Ellerstein pursed his mouth in surprised approval. “Just so. Of course, you know the history. The nine hundred sixty Jews who took their own lives rather than surrender to the Romans.”

  “Yes. It is an astonishing and sobering story. I think that’s why Adrian was so mesmerized by the place. It was more than just a hobby with her. After a while she inspired the same interest in me.”

  “You know that you are asking for a degree of access to this site that is normally granted only to professional archaeologists, and few of them at that? By your own admission you are no such thing.”

  If you only knew, David thought. Access doesn’t quite describe it. He nodded but said nothing. Ellerstein swirled his glass for a moment.

  “I agreed to put your request forward,” he said finally, “because I owed Professor Hanson a big favor.”

  David blinked. Had Ellerstein already known about Adrian’s disappearance? He realized that the answer had to be yes. On guard, boyo.

  Ellerstein sipped his drink and appeared to reflect again for a few moments. David noticed that the room was completely full, with standing room only at the bar. The ending of Shabbat apparently generated a very secular thirst.

  “To answer your unspoken question,” Ellerstein said, “yes, Professor Hanson had told me the gist of what had happened to Adrian Draper. Sorry, but I wanted to hear it directly from you.”

  “All right,” David said. Play along, he thought. Remember the objective.

  “Okay,” Ellerstein said finally. “On Monday you will go to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, where the Israel Antiquities Authority head office is located. I will meet you there. There we will hopefully finish the paperwork. Then we will go over to the Hebrew University to meet with Professor Armin Strauss, who is chairman of the Archaeology Institute, and Professor Reuven Bergmann, a specialist who has cognizance over the Metsadá site. He will put you together with some other academics who will refresh your knowledge, and—you’ve read the Yigael Yadin exploration reports?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. All of these people will discuss the current status of the site, ongoing excavations, and also explain where you may not go because of work in progress.”

  “I hope there won’t be too many restrictions. I know the public can’t go down to the lower palace terraces to see the mosaics, for instance, or to the cisterns.”

  “Only for reasons of safety. It is a four-hundred-meter fall if they make a mistake. And the cisterns, did you say? Do you have a special interest in the cisterns?”

  David felt a spike of panic. Get him off this, right now. “No, but I remember the Yadin reports said that the cisterns had never been explored.”

  “Ah, well, they have been entered, but there was nothing in any of them except dusty rock. Basically, they’re just dry holes in the side of the mountain. Cavities. No, for you, the only restrictions will be because of ongoing restoration work. Basically, we’ll simply ask that you do not interfere, and, of course, no digging.”

  “I understand—and please, I really do appreciate the help. I know this is probably, no, surely, an inconvenience for you real scholars, as Professor Hanson constantly reminded me.”

  Ellerstein showed another brief smile. “How is my colleague George Hanson?”

  “Fine and in pretty good health,” David said. “He said you were at Columbia together. Why did you emigrate, may I ask?”

  “I came over at an exciting time. I was a theoretical math mechanic and, of course, a Jew. It seemed to me that I might be a bigger fish in this pond than in the United States.”

  “I see. Did it work out that way?”

  Ellerstein smiled enigmatically. “After a fashion, Mr. Hall. Although I may have contributed to some of your country’s nonproliferation efforts.”

  David laughed out loud. Ellerstein was telling him that he had worked at Dimona, Israel’s atomic energy research facility down in the Negev Desert. He knew the old man would not elaborate, though.

  “Look,” he said, changing the subject, “I’ve engaged a car and driver. Would you like me to have him pick you up before we see the IAA people?”

  “No, no, thank you, Mr. Hall. Some of my colleagues at the IAA are already teasing me about this, ah, project. A car and driver would only add to the fun and games.”

  David, feeling a twinge of embarrassment, nodded. His visit was indeed causing some discomfort. Remember why you’re really here, he told himself. This is no time to waver.

  “I’ll try to get out of your hair as quickly as I can, then,” he said. “I’ve scheduled some diving tours after the site visit.”

  Ellerstein shrugged again, as if to say, There’s nothing for it but to get it over with. “You are established here?” he asked, indicating the hotel. “Your logistics are in order?”

  “Yes, it’s fine. I’m out of sorts with the time change, but I’ll be okay by Monday. I hope.”

  “Yes, it is difficult. Too many Americans expect to function on the very first day. You are wise to allow two days. So, what will you do tomorrow—go see the Old City in Jerusalem, perhaps?”

  “Yes, I thought I would. Any recommendations?”

  “The usual things. Begin with very comfortable shoes: The whole place is made of stone, and it’s very hard on the feet. Take a hat and some water, and first have your driver take you to the scale model of ancient Jerusalem at the time of Christ. It’s at the Holy Land Hotel. It’s worth seeing before you go into what remains of the Old City. Sets things in physical perspective.” He finished his drink and pushed back in his chair. “So,” he concluded. “Monday at the Rockefeller. Ten o’clock, yes?”

  “I’ll be there, Professor. Thanks for coming down this evening. It’s been good to meet you.”

  “And you, Mr. Hall. Monday, then. Shalom.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later the waiter who had been taking care of David and his guest stepped out the hotel’s employee entrance and made his way to Hayarkon Street. He turned left down the sidewalk and started walking north. A few moments later a large black Mercedes sedan with deeply tinted windows pulled up alongside the curb, facing the wrong way in traffic. The waiter quickly looked around and then got into the left rea
r seat of the car, which pulled away from the curb with a clack of electric door locks. In the gloom of the backseat was an elderly white-haired gentleman. He was wearing a dark coat over a business suit, with expensive-looking black leather gloves on his hands. A black homburg perched on his head.

  “Well?” the man asked. His voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper. It almost seemed to come from speakers hidden in the car’s lush upholstery.

  The waiter gave his report but did not look directly at the other man. The driver, a large, impassive young man with no apparent neck, stared straight ahead as he steered the heavy car across oncoming traffic to regain the proper lanes. The sedan’s insulation muffled a chorus of blaring horns.

  “Based on what I heard,” the waiter concluded, “I think he is what he seems to be. A successful American, very full of himself.”

  “Aren’t they all. Did he elaborate on precisely what he wants to do at Metsadá?”

  “The lounge was pretty noisy, but basically, he says he’s an amateur historian who mostly wants access to all the ruins and the time to take it all in. Says he wants to commune with the spirits.”

  “Indeed.” The old man took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. “Hall. Not a Jew, correct?” The waiter cast a quick sideways glance, but the old man’s face remained in shadow. The waiter knew who he was but had never actually seen him before. Almost no one had. “No, sir, I wouldn’t think so.”

  The old man lapsed into silence for almost a full minute. The waiter wanted another look but was almost afraid to take one. The stories were alarming.

  “Commune with the spirits of Metsadá. Don’t you just wish one or two of those bloody old Kanna’im would pop out at him with their throats gaping open. I wonder if he would survive the experience. Psychologically speaking, of course.”

  The waiter, a sergeant in the military intelligence organization known as LAKAM, swallowed. Colonel Malyuta Lukyanovitch Skuratov had an uncommon ability to evoke images of death.

  “Did he indicate interest in any specific parts of the fortress?”

  “He knew which parts are normally off-limits to tourists,” the sergeant replied. “He mentioned, for instance, the lower palaces, the mosaic remains, and the cisterns.”

  “The cisterns? He mentioned the cisterns?” The big car swung right, away from the beaches.

  The sergeant turned slightly in his seat, curious about the faint note of alarm in the colonel’s voice. “Only in the context that the Yadin report said the cisterns had never been explored. He was using them as an example, I think, not as a point of specific interest. Or to show off, to prove that he’s read Yadin. Professor Ellerstein took no particular notice, that I could see.”

  There was another long moment of silence, when the only sounds in the car came from the raucous noise of a bus momentarily alongside. They were passing through an area without streetlights, which enveloped the colonel’s face in even deeper shadow. Then there was a splash of light coming from inside the bus, and the sergeant had to suppress a wince. Spiky, brush-cut white hair showing under the famous homburg. Starkly pink skin with the seams of the grafts visible as a mosaic of fine white lines. Deeply inset, hooded eyes, with bare wisps of eyebrows below a wide, gleaming brow. Long, bony nose. Thin, bloodless lips. His tight pink skin only emphasized his skull-like appearance, but it was the eyes that gave the sergeant a jolt: pale gray with glints of amber, projecting a gleam of what most people took for repressed fury. Colonel Skuratov of the Shin Bet, Israeli military counterintelligence, also known behind his back—a long way behind his back—as Colonel Lazarus. The Russian émigré who had risen from the grave called Gulag to a position of shadowy power in Israel’s counterintelligence apparatus. With a start, the sergeant realized the colonel was looking right at him. He snapped his face away, focusing hard on the driver’s head. Skuratov leaned toward him.

  “Do not look at me, young man,” the colonel whispered in accented Hebrew. “I’m not someone you want to know.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant replied, also in a whisper, his throat suddenly dry. The car made another right, heading south now. The hotel towers were just visible a few blocks away.

  “You have done well tonight,” Skuratov said finally. “Although this all is probably about nothing. Another insouciant American with more money than manners, imposing on the goodwill of a client state.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, feeling he had to say something. His watcher briefing had been cursory. A description of the American. A description of the professor. Eavesdrop. Report. The car was slowing. They had come full circle, a block away from the hotel. The car pulled over.

  “That will be all, Sergeant,” Skuratov said.

  “Do you—?”

  “No, no, we are finished with him, this American. Be careful when you open the door, Sergeant. You are on the street side now.”

  3

  On Monday morning, David found his elderly but highly polished hired Mercedes 240D sedan waiting at the hotel entrance, right on time. His driver for the week was an intense older man named Ari, who appeared to be in his sixties. Ari was solidly built and presented the no-nonsense demeanor of an ex-military man. He spoke good English with what sounded to David like a faint German accent. He wore a loose-fitting sport coat over an open-throated white shirt and pressed khakis. Given the incipient heat, David suspected Ari was carrying. The option of having an armed driver had seemed prudent, considering the current state of tension in the country. Naturally, the hire car company had charged extra.

  They made good time for about one minute down Hayarkon, and then traffic bogged down in a noisy stew of honking cars, smoke-belching buses, and Arabs on ancient bicycles, their djellabas tucked up around their knees and their heads hidden in multipatterned kaffiyeh headdresses. There were knots of pedestrians on every corner, blocky, canvas-covered military trucks with soldiers dozing in the back, and a surprising number of ragged children darting in and out of the traffic. David had been advised by the concierge to allow an hour and forty-five minutes to get to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, and he wondered if even that would be sufficient now that he saw the traffic.

  He was not entirely over his jet lag but doing much better than on the first day. He had spent Sunday playing tourist in Jerusalem, taking a hotel van up to the city from the hotel. He had taken in the model of ancient Jerusalem at the Holy Land Hotel, its waist-high buildings and walls giving an excellent perspective on Jerusalem at the time of Christ. He then walked through the narrow streets of the old walled city, stopping on the margins of tour groups whenever he overheard an English-speaking tour guide and stumbling onto the major tourist sites more by accident than by design. He had been conscious of the strategically placed soldiers, always in pairs, strolling throughout the Old City, or perched up on rooftops. There was much too much to see in just a one-day walkabout, and every time he stopped and asked for directions, he was pointed to yet another must-see holy place. By the middle of the afternoon he was hobbling, so he had a taxi take him to the Hadassah Ein Karem hospital to see the famous Chagall windows, after which he hired a sherut, or shared van, for a ride back to Tel Aviv.

  “Are we going to make this in time, Ari?” he asked the driver.

  “Yes, of course,” the driver replied. “No problem.” David smiled inwardly. Adrian had once explained about asking yes-or-no questions in the Middle East. If any answer but yes might embarrass either the one asking or answering the question, the answer was always going to be positive. At least the car’s air-conditioning was working, keeping at bay most of the brown diesel haze that served for an atmosphere in the city’s streets. They did the stop-and-go dance for about twenty minutes before the traffic began to thin out.

  The purpose of the meeting this morning was to obtain the final written approvals from the IAA, the government bureaucracy responsible for the preservation and study of antiquities in Israel. Professor Ellerstein was going to run interference at the IAA and also be availab
le to handle any language problems. David would have to go in and sign some documents promising to respect any and all sites he visited and not to engage in any physical disturbance of them. In other words, as Ellerstein had reminded him, no digging. Well, that shouldn’t be too hard: If things worked out the way he hoped, he might have to probe a little, but not dig. He was pretty sure all the pertinent digging had been done two thousand years ago.

  Then back into the car and over to the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University for what would probably be a somewhat more ticklish session with the scholar archaeologists. He wasn’t afraid of them so much as impatient with their endless condescension, which never seemed to be satisfied by his own frank admission that he was very much an amateur. Suffer through it and humor them, he thought. Remember the objective. He sat back and dozed.

  “Almost there, Mr. Hall,” the driver announced. David woke up to see that they were climbing the twisting highway that led up to Jerusalem from the coastal plain. The highway was bordered by dramatic ravines on either side, in which he could see the rusting hulks of armored vehicles, left there presumably to remind passersby of the intense battles for Jerusalem back in the 1948 war for Israel’s independence.

  “Good deal, Ari,” he replied. He looked at his watch. They had made good time. He might actually be a few minutes early, which was probably a cultural offense in the Middle East.

  Twenty minutes later they pulled up in front of the Rockefeller Museum. He was relieved to see Professor Ellerstein sitting on a park bench in front of the building, reading a newspaper and puffing away on his pipe. David got out, told Ari to find a place to hole up, and warned him that he had no idea how long this would take.

  “Is government business? I will go for a coffee. You come out, I will see you. No problem, Mr. Hall.”

  David walked over to the park bench, where Ellerstein was folding up his newspaper and knocking pipe ashes out onto the sidewalk.

  “Good morning, Professor,” David said. “Or should I call you Dr. Ellerstein?”