Damascus Gate (27 page)

"What is it?" Lucas asked. "Hebrew?"

"Aramaic, actually," Lestrade said. He was a bit wobbly with booze. "It's Isaiah. It says, 'You shall see and your heart shall rejoice and your flesh shall flourish like the grass.'"

"Is it very old?"

"Early Byzantine. They're saying it's from the time of the emperor Julian, who favored the Jews and encouraged them to build another Temple. Which apparently was begun and then destroyed at Julian's death, and this may have been part of it. Whoops, here comes Shlomo."

"Shlomo" was a military policeman, who brusquely waved them away from the excavations. All Israeli soldiers and policemen, it turned out, were called Shlomo by Lestrade.

"What are you up to? Come have a drink."

Lestrade's apartment was in one of the Christian hospices of the Old City. His invitation was issued in a faintly contentious spirit, as though he were morally certain Lucas would be reluctant to go there after dark.

Lucas had a look at him in the floodlights around the Kotel plaza. At first glance, Lestrade gave a portly, forthright, somewhat ho-ish appearance, but his eyes had a drunken slyness.

"Sure," said Lucas. "Love to."

At night the streets of the Palestinian Old City, on the anniversary of the intifada,
were
more dangerous for foreigners—which was not really dangerous enough for Lucas to give Dr. Lestrade the satisfaction of declining his invitation. Passing through the plaza checkpoint, Lestrade showed the Israeli soldiers tending it his usual sarcastic grin. Lucas wasn't sure whether or not the grin was voluntary; either way, it annoyed the Israelis and gave their passage through the checkpoint the slightest edge of potential violence.

It was the first time Lucas had experienced Israeli soldiers as anything like adversaries, and it was not pleasant. The soldiers' English was fluent. When Lestrade addressed them in Arabic, they turned thuggy and insolent.

"Why did you assume they spoke Arabic?" Lucas asked when they had cleared the barrier.

"Because they do," Lestrade said cheerfully. "The big one is from Iraq."

"You're sure?"

"Oh, I can tell," Lestrade said.

They followed El-Wad toward the Muslim Quarter through hushed, darkened streets, along which the shops were shuttered. There had been anti-Israeli demonstrations all day.

Lestrade's small apartment off the Via Dolorosa had belonged to the caretaker of the Austrian hospice. It consisted of two rooms and a small roof garden planted in grapevines, with a potted almond tree. The larger of the two rooms had a domed ceiling. Lestrade had decorated the place with Russian icons, framed verses from the Koran and Circassian daggers. There were a great many books, in several languages.

They sat in the sandalwood-scented living room. Lestrade threw open the shutters and poured grappa for the two of them.

"How's tricks, Lukash?" Lucas was rather surprised that Lestrade had remembered his name. He found it impossible not to take the alveolar Magyar pronunciation as a patronizing insult. In any case, his father, a native Viennese, had never employed it. "How's the book coming?"

"All right, I guess." The comfortable surroundings and the drink rendered him confiding. "How's the reconfiguring of the Temple?"

"Oh, dear," Lestrade said. "Someone's been talking. Singing. Blabbing."

"I don't think your work is such a secret in town. A lot of people follow the doings at the House of the Galilean."

"Yes," Lestrade said. "Like your friend Obermann. The great Jungian. Preposterous fraud."

"We're doing the book together, actually. We're thinking of putting you in it."

"Is that a threat, Lukash?"

"I thought you'd be pleased."

"I'm not concerned with the American-Jewish press. And I have no problem about working with Brother Otis. I'm an archeologist. If a university doesn't support my work, I have to find someone who will."

"Why is it," Lucas asked, "that a university won't support your work?"

"They do," said Lestrade. "They have. However, I don't suffer fools gladly and I tend to separate myself from invincible ignorance. As a result, I take my backing where I find it. Within reason, of course."

"Within reason?"

"That's what I said," Lestrade told him.

"Do you really know the dimensions of the Holy of Holies and its location?"

"The dimensions are in the Talmud. An informed archeologist can translate them to modern terms."

"Has it been done?" Lucas asked.

"Yes. By me."

"And the location?"

"Can now be calculated. Through research of mine which I'm not prepared to share or discuss."

The Englishman went to his sixties-vintage record player, put on a side of Orff's
Carmina Burana
and turned the volume up. Then he refilled their glasses.

"The ordinary observer," Lucas said, "would wonder why you're doing your work under the sponsorship of an American fundamentalist group."

"Would he?"

"Sure. Instead of a university or the Ministry of Antiquities. Or even the Vatican."

He was nearly shouting, not out of aggressiveness but from the necessity to make himself heard above the music. Lestrade would be playing Orff for company, Lucas surmised, because the composer's work was legally forbidden in Israel. Glancing at Lestrade's record collection, Lucas saw that it seemed to lean heavily on similarly problematic music: it featured highlights from
Der Rosenkavalier
and quite a lot of Wagner.

"The people at the House of G," Lestrade said, "are quite ready to let me work unobstructed. Being American fundamentalists, they have good relations with the Likud government and they're able to smooth away certain objections. I myself have some connections with the Waqf. I'm provided with whatever I need."

"The pay is probably competitive too. By the way, I read in the paper where you lost your roommate."

"My roommate?" asked Lestrade, puzzled.

"Don't tell me you've forgotten him. The Reverend Mr. Ericksen."

"Oh," said Lestrade, "Ericksen. Of course I haven't forgotten him. I simply never thought of him as a roommate. He moved in here when that little tart threw him out."

"Is that why he killed himself?"

"He was very frightened, Lukash. He was frightened of the invisible world. Principalities and powers. He was frightened of God. He thought he was damned. That he knew too much."

"Did he know about the configuration of the Holy of Holies?"

"Oh, shit," Lestrade said in frustration. "I don't mean it in any melodramatic way. I mean he thought Yahweh was his enemy. That God despised him as an Edomite and took his wife to give to an Israelite and was about to slay him. And of course he'd always been rather fond of Yahweh. And presumably of his wife."

"But
did
he know a lot about the Temple's structure?"

"He'd been shown around. He knew more than many of them. They were going to use him as a fundraiser in America, so he had to give lectures with slides and so on."

"I see," Lucas said. "And meanwhile you get whatever you need."

"Whatever I need," Lestrade repeated slowly, over the expressionist chanting.

It seemed to Lucas that Lestrade was an unstable character, hence a journalistically desirable figure. It might also be inferred that a man who loudly professed not to suffer fools was a man who talked too much. Lucas's own strategic role, then, should be that of a fool. Insufferable enough to unbind a few inner demons, but not so insufferable as to be thrown, drinkless, into the street.

"What puzzles me," Lucas said, "is why American fundamentalists would be so interested in the Second Temple."

"Never heard of millenarianism, Lukash? Have you come so far to have the commonplaces of Yankee Bible thumping explained to you by the likes of me?"

"Guess so," said Lucas.

"Revelation," Lestrade said. "The Apocalypse. Last book of the New Testament. Heard of that?"

"Certainly," said Lucas.

"Shouldn't be in the canon. Not a grain of faith, hope or charity in the fucking thing. One long, meandering lunatic image after another but, on the whole, typical of Jewish prophetic literature at the time of J.C. And typical of early Jewish Christianity.

"Now, amid the flaming swords and sparkling whirligigs and falling stars, we have a core of prophecy so nonsensical and non sequitous as to defy interpretation by the maddest of mad monks. Actually, the monks left it alone, because Saint Augustine didn't care for it and the medieval Church didn't want the rabble reading it and going all funny."

On the record player, the swan about to be roasted for the feast lamented its fate in academic Latin.

"With the Reformation, however, every dork and yoik at every muddy crossroads read the fucker and swooned with insights meant for him alone. Nowhere so much, Lukash, as in your adopted country."

"The United States is not my adopted country, Lestrade. I was born there."

"Good for you. Anyway, in our story a time of tribulation ensues. We're talking grave tribulation—famine, pestilence, nuclear war. The forces of good battle the forces of evil. Upon which a thousand-year regnum ensues. Baddies defeated, goodies exalted. Christ comes back, the much-vaunted Second Coming."

"Does ring a bell," said Lucas.

"Only question is, does Christ come back before or after the tribulations? If you believe
before,
you're a pre-millenarian. You believe in the Rapture. Familiar with the Rapture?"

"We see it on bumper stickers. People are advised to be ready when it comes."

"Ah," said Lestrade, "sound advice. But hard to follow given the avalanche of strangeness that's going to descend."

Lucas knew something more about the Rapture than he was presently prepared to allow. He had first heard it talked up on late-night radio stations while driving through the desert. Then it began to turn up on Christian television, and there were cassettes, in several of which he had invested. They were both breathlessly sensational and boring. Then, since his conversation with Otis and Darletta, he had researched it further.

As Lucas understood it, the Rapture, when it came, would be distinctly cinematic. The returned Christ would gather up his own. The upgathering would be of a literal nature. One of these mornings, in order to be spared the final trials, the born-again would wake up singing, as it were, spread their wings and commence to fly. They would be rapted, like cosmic chipmunks in the talons of their savior, drawn irresistibly heavenward into the Everlasting Arm. Godly motorists would be wafted from the controls of their cars.

Since born-again Christians tended to be concentrated in states with high speed limits, things would get ugly. One moment Mr. Worldly Wiseman would be spouting cynical, superficial observations from the passenger seat. Then his motor-pool buddy, Christian, one of the elect, would vanish from behind the wheel and there would be nothing in the driver's seat except a pair of white loafers and plaid golf slacks and a polyester sport shirt, none of them necessary in the world to come.

Mr. W. W. would stare terrified and confused at the wildly spinning unhanded wheel beside him, like Stewart Granger beholding Pier Angeli transformed into a pillar of salt in
Sodom and Gomorrah.
Soon the car and Mr. Wiseman (or was it Weissman?) would hurl driverless into a wall of consuming flame. And that would be only the beginning.

"War," Lestrade was saying. "Armageddon up there in Megiddo. The Emperor of the North, blah blah. Well, someone's got to fight the good fight. And for the pre-mils it's going to be the Jews, operating out of the Temple. The rebuilding of the Temple is a sign of the Rapture's imminence, and it'll be GHQ for the Final Conflict. When the war is over, the surviving victorious Jews will accept Christ. The thousand-year reign of the saints will commence."

"How do the religious Jews see all this?"

"Some of them believe that if they rebuild the Temple, the Messiah may be prevailed upon to appear. The more militant would like to get all those mosques off Mount Moriah and start pouring cement."

"And relations are pretty good between what you call the pre-mils and the messianic Jews?"

"Very warm and fuzzy on the face of it. For one thing, the pre-mils are making a fortune marketing this shit in the States."

"Your employers?"

"There are a number of Jewish religious entrepreneurs as well. But primarily the Jewish extremists are building up a political constituency in the States. Until metaphysics takes over, they can work together. Raising money. Building support."

"Quite a story," said Lucas. "What if I write it?"

"Why don't you? Of course it's been written, but it never seems to take hold. Everybody knows about Jewish extremists and American Bible thumpers. No one takes them seriously."

Lestrade put on the first cut of
Götterdämmerung.

"Really, Lukash, write it. It's an American story. They're all Americans. The pre-mils, most of the Jewish Temple builders. Anglo-Saxons, the Israeli press likes to call them." His face was flushed with booze or anger or amusement.

"Someone once said," Lucas said, finishing his grappa, "that there are no antiquities here. No past. Everything is present or future." Lestrade refilled his glass. "So I suppose it's just another chapter in the ongoing story of the city."

"Part of the story now. Since you people got here."

Does he mean Americans? Lucas wondered. Or Jews? Does he mean me? He decided to ask.

"We people, Gordon? Which people?"

"Like the grappa?" Lestrade asked.

"Smashing. Do you mean Americans or Jews? Jews were always here."

"Oh, you know," Lestrade said. "It's a continuum. The one is virtually the other, if you see what I mean."

"Not exactly."

Lestrade studied him through an Italianate haze of the drink. "Oh, shit. You're going to get fucking politically correct in the American manner." A surprising measure of anger seemed to have descended on him. "You're going to turn into a special-pleading nit."

"Who," Lucas asked, "me?"

"Yes you, cock. Moralizing is your only form of discourse. That's why there are so many hypocrites among your people. Present company excepted."