People of the Book (39 page)

I fell asleep in the truck on the way to Jabiru Station. That’s how exhausted I was. It’s not what you’d call a relaxing drive. The track is a hundred clicks of washboard, when it isn’t one big sandpit. Plus there are big mobs of roos that appear from nowhere at dusk, and if you swerve to avoid them, you can wind up bogged to your manifold.

But Jim had driven on tracks like this since he could see over the top of a steering wheel, so we got there. Butcher had roasted a whole barramundi he’d caught that day, and flavored it with dried jupie, little sweet-tart berries that were a Mirarr staple. The station phone rang right as I was licking the last succulent morsel of fish off my fork.

“Yeah, she here,” Butcher said, handing me the phone.

“Dr. Sharansky? It’s Keith Lowery calling, from DFAT.”

“From where, sorry?”

“DFAT. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. You’re a hard woman to get ahold of.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Dr. Sharansky, we were hoping we might be able to get you back here, to Canberra, or Sydney if that’s easier. We’ve got a bit of a situation, and your name came up as someone who might be in a position to help.”

“Well, I’m going to be back in Sydney in two or three weeks, when Gudjewg—I mean, when the wet season really sets in….”

“Ah, right. The thing is, we were hoping you might fly down here tomorrow.”

“Mr. Lowery, I’m in the middle of a project. The mining company is breathing down these people’s neck here and the escarpment’s going to be inaccessible in about two weeks. So I’m not real keen on junketing anywhere just at the minute. Do you mind telling me what this is all about?”

“I can’t discuss it on the phone, sorry.”

“Is this something the bloody mining companies have cooked up? I mean, that’d be pretty desperate. I know that some of those characters are lower than a snake’s armpit…. But involving your mob to do their dirty work…”

“It’s nothing like that. Much as my colleagues over in Trade might lament the Sharansky Foundation’s occasionally negative impact on mining export revenues, that is not our concern here on the Near East desk. I’m not calling about your present work. It’s about a rather, ah, high-profile job you undertook six years ago. In Europe.’’

Suddenly, the barramundi wasn’t sitting too well.

“Do you mean the Sara—”

“It would be better to discuss this in person.”

Near East desk. I started to feel the onset of heartburn. “You deal with Israel, right?”

“As I said, Dr. Sharansky, better in person. Now, would you like me to arrange your flight out of Darwin tomorrow to Canberra, or to Sydney?”

The view from the DFAT office in Sydney is enough to make a diplomat turn down a foreign posting. As I waited in the tenth-floor lobby for Keith Lowery, I watched the yachts skittering across the sun-spangled harbor, heeling in the breeze as if in homage to the soaring white sails of the Opera House.

The interior decor was pretty nice, too. Foreign Affairs had its pick of art from the national collection, so the reception area had a Sidney Nolan
Ned Kelly
canvas on one wall and a fabulous Rover Thomas
Roads Crossing
on the opposite.

I was admiring the rich ochers in Rover’s painting when Lowery came up behind me.

“Sorry we don’t have one of your dad’s here—brilliant painter. We’ve got an absolute beauty down in Canberra.”

Lowery was a tall, broad, sandy-haired bloke with the easy swagger and the slightly stove-in features of a serious rugby player. Made sense. Rugby was a big sport at the elite private schools, and most Aussie dips still tended to have that background, despite all our egalitarian myths.

“Thanks for coming down here, Dr. Sharansky. I know it’s a big ask.”

“Yeah, well. Odd, isn’t it, that you can get to Sydney from London or New York in twenty-four hours, but it still takes almost twice that from some parts of the Top End.”

“Does it? Never been up there, myself.”

Typical, I thought. Probably been to every museum in Florence and yet never seen the Lightning Man at Nourlangie Rock.

“I usually work in Canberra, so I’ve borrowed an office here for our meeting. Margaret…it is Margaret, isn’t it?” He’d turned to the receptionist. “We’re in Mr. Kensington’s office. Will you make sure that we’re not disturbed?”

We walked through a metal detector and down a corridor to a large corner office. Lowery punched a code that opened the door. My eyes went straight to the windows, which offered a panorama even more spectacular than the one in the lobby, because it took in the whole sweep from the Botanic Gardens to the bridge.

“Your mate Mr. Kensington must be a big muckety muck,” I said, turning to Lowery. Because I’d been distracted by the view, I hadn’t noticed that there was someone else already in the room. He’d been sitting on the couch, but he was on his feet now, moving toward me with his hand outstretched.

“Shalom, Channa.”

His hair had thinned a bit, but he still had the tanned, muscular look that had always set him apart from everyone else in our line of work.

I took a step away from him and put my hands behind my back.

“No ‘G’day, mate’? You are still angry with me? Even after six years?”

I glanced at Lowery, wondering how much he knew about all this.

“Six years?” My voice was as cold as I could make it. “Six years is nothing, compared with five hundred years. What did you do with it?”

“Nothing. I did nothing with it.” He paused a beat, and then walked across the room to a handsome desk made of Huon pine. An archival box was sitting there. He eased the catches.

“See for yourself.”

I crossed the room, blinking hard. My hands hovered over the box. I lifted the lid, and there it was. I hesitated a moment. I didn’t have gloves, forms. I had no business touching it. But I had to be sure. As carefully as I could, I removed it from the box and set it on the desk. I turned to the Creation illuminations. And there it was. The difference between being right, and being wrong. Of knowing my craft, and not knowing it.

I blinked away tears that were partly relief, and partly self-pity for the misery I’d lived with, thinking I’d been wrong, for six long years. When I looked up at Amitai, all the uncertainty, all the self-doubt dissolved and reformed into the purest rage I think I have ever felt. “How could you?”

To my intense irritation, he smiled at me. “I didn’t.”

I slammed my hand down so hard on the desk that it hurt.

“Stop it!” I yelled. “You’re a thief and a crook and a bloody liar.” He just kept smiling slightly, a calm, infuriating, shit-eating grin. I wanted to slap him. “You’re a disgrace to the profession.”

“Dr. Sharansky.” It was Lowery, trying, I suppose, to be diplomatic. He took a step toward me and laid his hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off and stepped away from him.

“Why is this man here? He’s guilty of grand larceny. He should be in the slammer. Don’t tell me this bloody government is mixed up in this…in this…heist…this conspiracy….”

“Dr. Sharansky, you’d better sit down.”

“Don’t tell me to sit down! I don’t want anything to do with this. And why is that book here? How on
earth
can you justify bringing a five-hundred-year-old codex halfway across the world? It’s beyond unethical, it’s criminal. I’m walking out of here and I’m calling Interpol. I suppose you think you can hide this behind diplomatic immunity or some crap like that.”

I was at the door. There was no knob, no handle. Just a keypad, for which I didn’t know the combination.

“You better let me out of here or I’ll—”

“Dr. Sharansky!” Lowrey had raised his voice. He suddenly looked a lot more like a front-row forward than a smooth diplomat. “Shut up for a second, will you, and let Dr. Yomtov get a word in.”

Amitai had stopped grinning. He spread his hands as if in supplication. “It wasn’t me. If you had come to me when you spotted the forgery, together we might have stopped them.”

“Stopped who?”

His voice was very soft. Almost a whisper. “It was Dr. Heinrich.”

“Werner?” I felt all the air go out of my body. I sank down onto the couch. “Werner Heinrich?” I repeated stupidly. “Who else? You just said, ‘Stopped
them.
’”

“Ozren Karaman, I am most sorry to tell you. It would not have been possible otherwise.” My teacher and my lover. They had both of them stood there, together, and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. I felt absolutely betrayed.

“But why? And how come you’ve got it now. Here.”

“It is a bit of a long story.” Amitai sat down on the couch beside me and poured a glass of water from a decanter on the coffee table. He handed it to me and poured another for Lowery, who waved no thanks. Amitai took a sip and then he began to speak.

“A long story that starts in the winter of 1944, when Werner was just fourteen years old. He was conscripted, as all the boys and the old men were, at that time. Most of them ended up manning antiair-craft guns, things of that nature. But he was required for a different service. Werner went to work for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg—you know what that is?”

Of course I knew about the infamous arm of the Third Reich, the most efficient and methodical looters in the history of art. It had been headed by Hitler’s confidant Alfred Rosenberg, who had written a book before the war calling German abstract expressionism “syphilitic.” He’d formed the Combat League for German Culture, aimed at eradicating anything “degenerate,” which, of course, included anything written or painted by Jews.

“As the Reich was speeding up the Final Solution, so Rosenberg’s unit was rushing to finish the destruction of all the Jewish materials they had confiscated from the synagogues, from the great collections of Europe. Werner’s job was to transport the Torah scrolls and the incunabula to the incinerators and burn them. One of the collections he burned was the Sarajevo
pincus
—” He looked up at Lowery. “That’s the complete records of a Jewish community. Irreplaceable. Sarajevo’s
pincus
was very old. It contained documents that went back as far as 1565.”

“So,” I said. “That’s why he specialized in Hebrew manuscripts.”

Amitai nodded. “Exactly. It was his passion that not another book should be lost. During the early months of the Bosnian war, he approached me because the Serbs’ bombing of the Oriental Institute and the National and University Library mirrored what had happened in his own past. In particular, he wanted the Israeli government to mount a rescue mission for the haggadah. I told him we didn’t have any intelligence about where it was, whether, in fact, it still existed. He thought I was hiding the truth from him. And then, after the war, when the United Nations determined to conserve the haggadah and put it on display, he still believed it was in danger. He didn’t have faith in the peace. He told me he thought there was a very strong chance that when NATO and the UN lost interest, Bosnia could be hijacked by fanatical Islamists. He feared the influence of the Saudis, who, of course, have a terrible record of destroying ancient Jewish sites on the Arabian Peninsula. He was tormented by the idea that the haggadah would once again be at risk.”

Amitai took another sip of water. “I should have listened more carefully to what he was saying. I had no idea that his past had made him into such an extremist. You would think, an Israeli my age, I would know from extremists. But still, I missed it.”

“But what about Ozren? Surely he didn’t believe those things about Bosnia?”

“Why not? Bosnia hadn’t protected his wife. It hadn’t saved his little son. Ozren had seen too much. He had seen people shot by snipers as they tried to carry books from the burning library. He had risked his own life to save the haggadah, and he knew what a close call that had been. I think it would have been easy, at a certain time, for Werner to find Ozren most receptive to his views.”

I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Ozren would think that way. He loved his city. Loved what it stood for. I couldn’t believe he had given up on it.

The unsparing Sydney light was pouring through the huge windows, falling onto the open pages of the haggadah. I went over to the desk and picked up the book. I placed the haggadah carefully back into the protection of the archive box. I was about to close the lid, but then I paused. I felt the edges of the binding, and found the ridge where the fibers of leather—the new ones I’d placed—merged with the older work of Florien Mittl. I turned back to Amitai.

“You were the one who had the negatives.”

“Werner convinced me that he could get the German government to sponsor a better facsimile edition than the one we were planning. He was very persuasive. They were prepared to spend six times our budget, they were going to print on vellum…it was going to be a gesture of goodwill from the new Germany. What can I say? I believed him. I gave your documentation to him. Of course he used it to mimic every possible detail—even your conservation work. And since he was your teacher, he knew very well how to do that.”

“But why were you there, that night, at Ozren’s place?”

Amitai sighed. “I was there, Channa, because I, too, lost a child. My daughter. She was three.”

“Amitai.” I had no idea. I knew he was divorced. I hadn’t realized there was a child. “I’m so sorry. Was it a suicide bombing?”

He shook his head and gave a slight smile. “Everyone thinks Israelis always die in wars or bombings. Some few of us do manage to die in our beds. For her, it was a heart defect. A child lost—it is the same emptiness, I think, however it happens. I was there to bring materials donated by Israel as part of the library restoration project, and I heard the news about Ozren’s son. As a father, I felt for him.”

There was an awkward silence for a few moments. “I don’t blame you, Channa, for suspecting me. You shouldn’t think I do.”

He went on then to tell me how the book had been found and how he’d immediately suspected Werner, because of the quality of the fake that was on display in Sarajevo.

“But why did Werner choose Yad Vashem?”

“He knew it well. He’d worked there as a visiting scholar many times over the years. It was the simplest thing for him to place the haggadah there. He did not care, you see, that no one would know, that no one would study it, or celebrate it. He was only concerned that it would be safeguarded, and he told me he had decided that Yad Vashem was the safest place in the world. That even if the worst happened, and Israel was in an existential conflict, we would defend that place above all others.” Amitai looked down. “And about that, at least, he is correct.”