Damascus Gate (58 page)

"Oh!"

She had found a place to stand, a moss-grown root that afforded a clear view of the Panic altars in the cliff.

"Oh!" she said. "I hear it." She looked terror-stricken.

"You're really scared," Lucas said. "It's probably just the tea." He himself was becoming increasingly uneasy.

"'Afraid?'" She cried, and laughed. "'Afraid! Of
Him?
" And what was in her eyes? he wondered. She appeared thoroughly demented. "'O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!'"

Lucas at once understood. They were in
The Wind in the Willows.
She thought she was Rat encountering Pan, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Why not, he thought. What shone in her radiant cornflower eyes was unutterable love. If he tried, Lucas figured, he might hear elfin music.

Helen Henderson clasped her hands beneath her chin and recited: "'Lest the awe should dwell—And turn your frolic to fret—You shall look on my power at the helping hour—But then you shall forget!'"

She turned to Lucas. "'Forget, forget.'"

"Whatever," said Lucas.

"We sang that at camp," she explained. "We chanted it at Brownies."

"Fantastic," said Lucas. "And now you're here."

Israel had something for everybody.

As they blundered back up the wooded slope, he was amazed by the rough territory they had run across. It was a miracle neither of them had broken a leg.

An Egged tour bus was coming down the road. When it pulled to a stop beside them and the door opened, Lucas could see that it was only half full.

"Can you take us?" Lucas asked the driver. "Just up to the park entrance?"

"But the park is closed," the driver said, "for the war."

Eventually, overcoming his bureaucratic instinct toward inutility, the driver let them on. The tourists were mostly elderly Gentiles. One of them, an English speaker, found himself sitting next to Helen Henderson.

"Out in the rain, were you?" he asked. "Seeing the castles?"

"We forget," she told him.

When they left the bus at the park entrance, there was no one in sight. A line of cars stood beside the deserted concession stand, including Lucas's Taurus and Raziel's Dodge van. Lucas was surprised to see the yellow Volvo Fotheringill had been driving that morning.

When they opened the Dodge to get Helen Henderson's second backpack, Lucas found a few sheets of paper under the seat on the passenger side. In the car's overhead light, the sheets seemed imprinted with a building plan of some kind. A series of tunnels and chambers with dimensions and notes in several languages, like the working guide to an archeological dig. On each side was a single Hebrew word.

Kaddosh.
Holy.

"Know what this is?" he asked the Rose.

"I don't," she said. "That guy Fotheringill brought them."

It had gotten dark. There were lights on the road that led down the slopes to Katzrin.

A vehicle approached, a Border Police jeep. The officer in it lectured them about wandering around unescorted. The park had been secured for the emergency, and only a few authorized tour groups were permitted into the area.

"I don't know how you got in in the first place," the officer said. "There are sensors and machine guns that fire automatically. There are mine fields. We picked you up on the detectors halfway to the Litani."

One of the policemen shone a red-banded light on their passports and then into their faces. His beam lingered on Helen's eyes, which were wide, the pupils visibly dilated. She put up a hand to shield them.

They drove the rented Taurus straight down from the pitch-black peak of Mount Hermon. Lucas discovered that he was still more or less stoned. He assumed this was true of Helen as well.

"Life is a little like a children's story," he wisely advised the young Rose.

"Oh," she said, "but life is so hard on children."

And about that, he thought, she probably knew more than he did.

"Well," Lucas said, "if it's not
The Wind in the Willows,
maybe it's
Alice in Wonderland.
"

"But why
Alice in Wonderland?
"

"Well, because
Alice in Wonderland
is funny. It's funny but it has no justice. Or meaning, or mercy."

"Right," the Rose said. "But it's got logic. There's a chess game behind it."

She had him there.

T
HEY STOPPED
for coffee at Kibbutz Nikolayevich Alef. No one was waiting there for them. Gigi Prinzer had apparently taken the rest of the party down to Ein Kerem. The Rose decided that she would ride back with Lucas.

"Be careful around Jericho," the young woman in charge of the kibbutz's guest facilities warned them. "It's nighttime and you've got the wrong color plates."

Miles behind them, on the Jordan road, Sonia was driving the Dodge van southward. Raziel sat beside her. Old De Kuff slept in back. Sonia had been for putting him to bed at the kibbutz, but De Kuff had insisted on being brought to the city without delay. Now the strength was ebbing from him.

"It's almost out of our hands," Raziel told her.

"What are you telling me? That it was all some fantasy you drew us into?"

"It is not a fantasy."

"Let me ask you something awful," Sonia said. "Are you back on the spike?"

"You got it," he said.

"Oh, Razz," she said. "How long?"

"What I want you to do, baby, is I want you not to cry. You'll remind me of my mother."

"You know what's funny?" she said. "I gave up everything. Reefer. Martinis. Because of him. Because things would change."

"I did too, Sonia. I was just as clean a week ago as when I saw you in Tel Aviv."

"You know what I thought when you loaded that tea, Razz?"

"You thought I was hustling
shmeck?
"

"Like it all came to me. You had the Rev, unlimited funds. Then I find out Nuala's moving for Stanley. Then Linda Ericksen gets religion on us."

"Our own religion too," Raziel said.

"Our own religion, because she fucks religions like Nuala fucks the ghost of Che Guevara. And then I hear about the bomb and I think, Who's in the middle of this action? My man Razz, and he's been kicking the gong the whole time and we've been a pack of marks."

"But you thought wrong, Sonia. I had a miracle in my hand. I quit too. Because things would change."

"So what happened?"

"Great things, awful things were happening. It was true, baby. All true. Never let them take that from you."

"So it wasn't just a hustle?"

"Just a hustle? Maybe the universe is a hustle. What is this thing called love, you know what I'm saying? I'm telling you the doors would be opened. I'm talking about redemption."

"You said he had five mysteries to preach. Is that still so?"

"He's revealed all five. Now he has to accept his identity in the city. But we're running out of time."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I set certain events in motion. I didn't think we could fail. But now I see we're like all the others. We're trapped in history. Losers lose, kid. Story of my life. I had the power but not the strength. Know the difference?"

"The power," she repeated, trying to understand. As though it would help. "The power but not the strength?"

She picked up one of the diagrams that were lying all over the van—on the seat, plastered to the mat, behind the sunscreen. "This is your friends' diagram of the Temple Mount, right?"

"That's right."

"So there is a bomb. You lied to me."

"Everything is written, Sonia. This is a spiritual struggle. A struggle without weapons. But struggle is conflict, and conflict is dangerous. It was why I used the tea on him. I was afraid he would fail us. I needed him ready to declare himself."

"Now listen, you have to tell me everything. Everything you know about where they put it."

"Sonia, Sonia," he said impatiently. "If we succeed, there are no weapons. Those characters think they're planting a bomb. But there are no bombs in the world to come."

"Right," she said. "Just flowers, I suppose."

"I said no one would get hurt. I meant it. I'm sure."

"How come you went back on the spike?"

"I lost my nerve. Last minute. I thought if we spiritually fail, only historical things would happen. Just more of the shitty history of the world. Instead of everything we dreamed of."

"What's going to happen, Razz? What have you done?"

"I don't know. More grief, more history. The process isn't moral, only the result."

"You never should have stayed here, Razz. Why did you?"

"Because I was the only one who knew the score. Because I found the old man. Why me? Don't ask. But he was revealed to me."

"It must have been your music," she said.

"Maybe that," Raziel said. "And you were with me. I'm a weak vessel," he told her, "but I had the power. And I had you. You believed me. And you loved me a little, didn't you?"

"I loved you," she said. "Everybody loved you once, Raziel. You were our prince."

And she could not keep from crying then because the faith, the hope, the love were draining out of her. And no one was going to save her soul but she was going to have to take care of everyone else again, as always. And it had all been nothing. A little feel good. A little dream and so good night.

"Funny world," she said. "Where things go on repeating themselves. And how are we supposed to know?"

"Funny world," he said.

Then, suddenly, she could not—would not—let it go.

"Razz?"

"Yeah, baby."

"Razz, maybe we can still do it. If you did everything right. The process."

"I told you the process, kid, and you laughed at me."

"I'm not laughing. Maybe we can make it happen. Maybe! If you did everything right."

So Raziel himself laughed. "Sonia, you're wonderful. If you'd been with me all the way, we'd have done it."

"I was with you," she said.

"You're gonna save the world, Sonia." He laughed again. "You tell the girl you've blown it. She tells you maybe not. You're one crazy mixed-up chick, baby. If you'd have been with me, I swear we'd have come across. Clean out of history."

"I got nowhere to go, Razz. I'm still here."

"Sonia," Raziel said, "you're not kidding, are you?"

"I'm afraid not," she told him.

"This is how it is, Sonia. We're caught between worlds. I don't know if I can get us out."

"Tell you what," she said. "You get us out of between worlds. I'll drive."

"Everyone so far has failed," Raziel declared after a few miles. "But someday someone won't. The process..."

"Right," she said. "The process."

"I couldn't believe it," he told her. "In the old man's eyes—the way out. The world we've been waiting for."

"Freedom?" she asked.

"Music," Raziel told her. "It was all music."

"All right, then," she said. "Music."

"Drive faster, home," he begged her. "I don't want you to see me fix."

A
T NIGHT,
the village of Ein Kerem was surrounded by the lights of the high-rise apartments of the New City, which had drawn closer and closer around it. The inhabitants of the apartments facing the valley often did not trouble to draw their curtains after dark. Anyone looking up at the lighted windows would have a sense of good lives lived behind them, lives that were civilized and comfortable. It was possible to make out bookshelves and prints and paintings on the walls.

The buildings themselves were not attractive, so they looked best at night, illuminated by the high-bourgeois taste and respectability of their inhabitants. There were still nightingales in the Jerusalem Forest nearby. Their flutings and repeated, intricate riffs could soothe and stir the heart. The forest was a mellow place, charged with benign possibility.

Only a few of the lights in the nearby buildings were on when Lucas arrived at the bungalow with the Rose. The eastern horizon was tinged with a glow the color of Jerusalem stone, and the call to prayer was sounding from a loudspeaker in the village.

He went quietly from room to room but could find no sign of De Kuff, Raziel or Sonia. The other regulars were all still in bed. Only Sister John Nepomuk van Witte was awake, reading a picture book about Sulawesi, where she had lived for many years.

When Lucas telephoned Sonia's Rehavia apartment there was no answer.

"I'm putting you in charge," he told Helen Henderson. "I would suggest everyone lie low until things get sorted out."

The Rose was herself again. She had ridden south in thoughtful silence.

"Which things?"

"Things," Lucas said. After Helen had bathed and gone to bed, he made a few more fruitless calls to Sonia. Then he lay down on the living room floor and slept fitfully until morning. At eight
A.M.,
still unrested, he called Obermann, who was back from Turkey, to ask if he could come over. Obermann demurred; he had rounds at Shaul Petak. They compromised by arranging to meet at the hospital. On the way out, Lucas brought one of the building plans he had found in the van.

"You look terrible," the doctor said when Lucas was in his hospital office.

Lucas explained that he had taken Ecstasy at the source of the Jordan, borne witness to the Messiah's First and Second Comings and visited Pan with Rat and Mole.

"Ecstasy? How did you drive back?"

"In fragments. But I made it." He handed Obermann one of the diagrams. "This suggest anything to you?"

They spread the worn copy on a desktop from which Obermann had removed a pile of file folders. It still appeared, to Lucas's utterly unpracticed eye, to be a kind of blueprint, the outline of a building showing three elevations with the dimensions marked in meters.

With one exception, the verbal indications on the sheet were in English or transliterated Arabic. There was a rectangle indicating the Bab al-Ghawanima, which Obermann identified as an ancient gate through the wall of the Haram. The single Hebrew word on the sheet was one that Lucas had deciphered as
kaddosh
and translated as "holy." There on the rough sheet, in the language God had spoken to Adam, its curt, fiery-tongued characters had a daunting aspect.
Mysterium terribile et fascinans.