The Jerusalem Diamond (30 page)

The Rabbi smiled. “That makes your errand a bigger
mitzvah
, a stronger deed.”

They drove through quiet streets. Harry remembered a different view of the town on the television news. “The place where the terrorists killed all those children. Is it near here?”

“Not far,” Rabbi Goldenberg said. “There's nothing to see. An apartment building. The bullet holes have been filled and the building is painted. It is very important to let go of the dead.”

“I agree,” he said eagerly. “Can one help somebody to do that, do you think?”

The rabbi smiled. “Another
mitzvah
?”

“No. Strictly a selfish act.”

“I think it's something we all have to do for ourselves.”

They were at the shabby green house. “Will you ever take a New York congregation?”

“I am home, Mr. Hopeman,” the rabbi said. He got out of the car and shook Harry's hand. “Go in good health.”

“Remain in good health, Rabbi Goldenberg.”

He drove only a few blocks, to the post office. There was a public telephone, but it was a type he hadn't experienced. He had to pay for the long-distance call with slugs purchased at the stamp cage. When he dropped them into the slot, through a little glass window he could watch each slug fall into the coin box. Still, somehow he put in the wrong amount and there was no signal. He had to ask for help.

Finally, it buzzed. When they answered at the field school, there was little need for explanation.
Here's your call, professor
, someone said in Hebrew.

“Hello, David?” He found that it was an effort to keep from shouting. “Mazel Tov!” he said.

By the time he was able to reach the American Express office in Jerusalem it was late afternoon. A woman was just locking the glass door.

“No. You're not closing?”

“We are closed. We can't stay open forever.”

“I am expecting a letter.”

“So? Come tomorrow.”

“Please, my name is Hopeman, can't you look? It's terribly important.”

She sighed and nodded. “I remember the name. It is here.” She unlocked the door. In a moment she was back with the envelope. She refused his tip. “Just let me go home to cook our dinner, okay?”

“Okay.” It was the same cramped handwriting. He opened it and read it there, on the sidewalk. It said only that at eight
P.M
. the next day a gray car would pick him up near the Yemin-Moshe windmill. He found a telephone in a restaurant and called Tamar. “I got the letter.”

“Oh? When shall you meet him?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Good.”

“Yes. Will you stay with me tonight?”

“I would like to.”

“Why not pack enough things to stay with me for a while?”

She was silent.

“I'll have to leave as soon as my business is done, Tamar. I only have a few days in Israel.”

“All right. Come in half an hour,” she said.

That night he lay on his bed and watched her applying colorless polish to her toenails with great concentration. The first thing he had noticed about her had been how well she kept her person.

He told her of the painted-over bullet holes at Kiryat-Shemona. And what the young rabbi had said about letting go of the dead.

She stopped what she was doing. “So?”

“That's all.”

“You're telling me I never let go of Yoel? I said goodbye to him a long time ago. And it is none of your business.”

He looked at her.

“My God. I have just had sex with you,” she said.

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Of course,” she said triumphantly.

“But you won't allow yourself to feel anything else. There were three of us in the bed.”

She threw the polish. The small bottle caught him on the cheekbone and then hit the wall. She came at him with her nails and he put his arms around her and bore her down, pinning her hands.

She was weeping furiously. “Let me up, you bastard!” But he was afraid she would tear out his eyes or leave. His cheek began to hurt.

“I simply don't want you. Can't you understand?”

“That's not the point. Give yourself a chance to feel. Then tell me to go away and you'll never see me again.”

“You're a crazy person. You don't know me at all. Why are you doing this to me?”

“I think that since he died there have been a lot of men. Probably too many for someone like you.”

She glared incredulously.

“I want you to say something out loud. I want you to say, ‘Harry will never do anything to hurt me.'”

“I hate you! Fuck you!” she shouted.

Welcome to my culture, he thought sadly. Her clenched eyelids were
wet. He kissed them. As she twisted her head, he had sudden self-doubts. It was incomprehensible that she didn't share what was shaking him. He didn't move; he didn't touch her except for holding her hands. He made no attempt to make love to her, or to have sex, or to speak. He concentrated on what he was experiencing, wanting to transmit it to her. Still, it was a kind of attempted rape, he realized, as he lay next to her rigid body and tried—with his mind, with his will, with ESP or prayer—to thrust his own feelings deep inside her.

18

THE GRAY CAR

As soon as he released her she dressed quickly and left him without a word. He lay awake all night and by morning he felt terrible. It was a stupid way to prepare for an important negotiation.

He went out and ran until he was exhausted. There was no springy place to run, Jerusalem was mostly paving or stones, and he was beginning to get shin splints. When he returned to the hotel he soaked in a hot bath and then sent down for soft-boiled eggs and toast. Before getting into bed, he left a call for four
P.M
.

He managed to sleep until then, so perhaps all the effort had been worth it. He was forced to shave very carefully; there was an ugly purple lump on his cheek.

At five-thirty, someone knocked on his door, and when he opened it, Tamar was there.

“Come in.”

She sat in a chair and took a book from her bag.

“I'm glad you came back.”

“I had promised to go with you.”

“You don't have to.”

“It was not you I promised.”

He nodded.

They both sat and read.

“Have you had your dinner?”

“I am not hungry.”

Neither was he. “Still, I think it would be a good idea if we ate something.”

“I'd rather not, thank you.”

He went down to the dining room alone. He forced himself to finish a chicken sandwich without pleasure, as if he were stoking a furnace.

Then he went upstairs and read some more. The room still smelled slightly of sex, but now they sat as though they were in a public library.

It was only a short walk from the hotel to the neighborhood known as Yemin-Moshe in honor of Moses Montefiore, the founder of New Jerusalem. The windmill looked as if it belonged in the European lowlands. During the bitter prestatehood fighting it was used as a snipers' post and finally the British blew away the upper section, a maneuver the Jews jeeringly labeled Operation Don Quixote. Since then, in addition to appearing merely unlikely, the windmill has been flat-topped, an especially strange landmark.

It stands in the middle of a small open area bordered by three different streets.

“He didn't say which street to wait on,” Harry said worriedly.

They stood on the Hebron Road. Cars went by. It was becoming dark, and soon it was difficult to see the traffic clearly.

A Peugot came toward them.

“I think it is blue,” she said.

It was gray, but it passed them by. So did several others.

A few minutes after eight o'clock, a car came out of the darkness like an apparition. He knew what it was when he saw the ram's-horn manifolds, but he found it difficult to believe. It stopped at the curb. There were two men in the front seat. One of them, small and mustached, got out.

“Mistair Hopeman?”

“Yes.”

The man looked at Tamar. “Sair. We were told you would be alone.”

“It's all right. She's coming with me.”

“Yes, sair,” the man said doubtfully. He held open the rear door. Harry thought the exterior color could be best described as pearl. He let Tamar precede him and then settled into soft upholstery, some kind of tanned deerskin.

The door shut with a good thunk and they were moved away by the quiet power he had heard so much about. There was a refrigerated cabinet within easy reach. It contained charged water but no liquor or wine; perhaps Mehdi was a practicing Moslem. There was fruit and cheese, and he regretted the dry chicken sandwich he had forced himself to eat at the hotel.

He picked up the speaking tube. Through the glass between the seats he saw the man next to the driver straighten attentively. “Sair?”

They didn't look like Arabs. “What's your name?” Harry said.

“My name? I am Tresca, sair.”

“Tresca? That's a Greek name?”

The man stared at him. “Perhaps it is a Jewish name,” he said. His companion laughed.

Harry smiled. “Tresca. Am I wrong or is this automobile an SJ model Duesenberg?”

His teeth flashed white. “You are not wrong, sair,” he said.

Harry thought they were driving south and then he became certain, recognizing places as they flashed by. It was the highway he had driven over to visit Leslau's dig, the same road they had traveled in the tour bus.

“A beautiful car,” Tamar said.

He grunted. The automobile bothered him. The man who owned it had done something he hadn't been able to do. It reshaped his entire attitude about Mehdi.

They passed within a few miles of Ein Gedi. The highway stopped curving like a river and became arrow straight, with black desert on both sides. Never slowing, they drove through a couple of villages separated by miles of wasteland—low facades, splashes of yellow light, a few people, always Arabs, barely glimpsed.

Twice they went past Israeli army trucks, once a Jeep. The two men in the front seat showed no reaction. Harry was sure they had papers that were in order.

As they approached another village, the driver braked hard but held the wheel well and the deceleration was smooth. Tresca opened the glove compartment and Harry caught a glimpse of a fat, dark barrel as he took out the gun.

A one-ton truck was stopped at an angle at the side of the road, which was blocked by a crowd of shouting men. Tresca opened the door and slid out.

He returned and put the gun away. “The truck killed a goat. Now the trucker and the goatherd argue about the price.”

The driver leaned on his horn. The crowd parted. The beautiful car rolled past the bloody carcass, and through the rear window Harry watched the village disappear. Nobody was following them.

The longer they traveled, the hotter it became. They had been riding less than two hours but his clothing was plastered to his skin. Tamar slept in the far corner of the seat. He studied her face and saw that the previous night had left dark places under her eyes.

Just after the lights of Eilat appeared in the distance, the driver slowed the car. He turned left onto a bumpy track. The Duesenberg lurched forward until it was hidden behind some high dunes, then it stopped.

Tresca reached into the glove compartment again and Harry's heart banged crazily, but he took out only a screwdriver and a license plate mossed with Arabic script. He got out of the car and changed the plates. In a few minutes he was back, wiping his face with his handkerchief. He put the blue registration plates of the Israeli-occupied territories into the glove compartment.

“Welcome to Jordan, Mistair Hopeman,” he said.

Mehdi's house was twenty minutes away, over bad roads. The living room was blessedly air-conditioned but furnished sparsely by Western standards. Rush brooms and copper trays augmented the fabric hangings on the plastered walls. There was a bowl of fruit on a low table, next to a long-spouted pot heating over a charcoal brazier.

Mehdi waited for them, despite the hour. He didn't appear to see
anything unusual in Tamar's presence. Beaming, he plied her with tiny cups of black, bitter coffee. The cups were refilled three times before he would accept their protestations that they had had enough.

“You will rest, eh, before examining the stone?”

Let me see it, Harry wanted to demand. “Oh, if you don't mind. I need daylight.”

“I know,” Mehdi said. He clapped his hands. Tresca led them through the rear of the house to a wing, which was not air-conditioned. Tamar's room adjoined his.

She said goodnight and closed the door.

The bathroom was off the hall. There was no hot water for his shower but the cold water was tepid. He was a bad guest, using too much water until he remembered. As he toweled, through the open window he saw the lights of a ship in the Red Sea.

The mattress was far from new, hollowed in the center. He lay in the dark, naked and sweating, thinking about the yellow diamond. He was almost asleep when he became aware that a door was opening.