The Jerusalem Diamond (6 page)

“Yes,” he lied, ready to agree to anything to escape the taste of death.

They took a taxi to Della's apartment where they went to bed.

Hastily, like lovers.

“Damn you,” she gasped.

His own climax uncorked emotion. He sagged in her arms and legs.

“Harry. Harry.” She simply held him until the weeping stopped.

They lay together. Once he looked at her and saw what was in her face and hated himself. He was tired of hurting her.

They fell asleep with his hand between her thighs, the way he knew she liked. In a couple of hours he awoke and found the hand numb from the wrist down. But to pull free would be to wake her.

Finally, he did.

“Don't go.”

“Shsh.” He patted her shoulders, tucked the sheet around her.

“Will you take his place on the Two Hundred and Fifty?”

“Probably.”

“It would be more than enough for anyone,” she said.

He searched frantically in the dark for his socks.

“You could take a teaching job. Or just write. And have time for Jeff and me.”

He collected his clothes and carried them into the living room.

“What is it you want?” the voice from the bedroom asked.

He was acutely aware that she had rushed to him. She had been his wife in his trouble. “I don't know. Everything.”

In a little while he stood alone on East Eighty-sixth Street, holding the cardboard cartons by the twine, hailing a taxi. In Westchester before dawn, he sat in the workroom and undid the boxes. His father had been a saver. There were lots of receipted bills, a number of letters. Some, written in German, were from Essie. He read enough to understand that she and his father had had an affair for years before they were married. Unlike her spoken English, her written German was pure and passionate. He sat as the sky pearled outside and for the first time saw the fat old woman as a person.

There were ledgers. His father had kept careful books, now so old not even Internal Revenue would be interested. Three notebooks he half expected to be more financial records instead contained diagrams. Crystal planes and angles were carefully marked to indicate light dispersions and refractions, and detailed descriptions were written in Alfred Hopeman's spidery script. As he turned the pages Harry realized that his father had made exacting drawings and notes about every important gem that had passed through his hands. What he was holding was a legend in the diamond industry: Alfred Hopeman's fabulous memory.

He was partway through the second book before he found his father's analysis of the Inquisition Diamond. It was detailed and exacting, but it puzzled him. It made no mention of the flaw in the stone that his father had tried to describe on his death bed.

It was still too early; he took a shower and had something to eat. Then he telephoned Herzl Akiva.

“Shall I send the notebook to you?”

“Please keep it, Mr. Hopeman. As I told you, we wanted the information for your use.”

“I haven't changed my mind.”

“Would you like to study the new Copper Scroll?”

Harry hesitated and was lost. “Not enough to go to Israel for you.”

“You are willing, I suppose, to go to Cincinnati?”

“Of course.”

“Go to the office of your friend, Dr. Bronstein. He will be expecting you,” Akiva said.

5

THE COPPER SCROLL

Harry corresponded regularly with Max Bronstein but he hadn't seen him in years. They shared the memories of two Brownsville yeshiva youths who once upon a time had spent long evenings talking over coffee cups and reinforcing their rebelliousness until each was able to break with the life that had been planned for him.

It had been a strange time for Harry, who had felt like a swimmer struggling against crosscurrents. His father had torn up his very roots in his escape from Germany, but in America Alfred Hopeman knew what he was: Hitler had turned a Berlin boulevardier into a Jew who clutched at ethnicity and wanted his child to remember the Holocaust. So Harry went to a Hebrew day school instead of one of the New York day schools or the New England boarding schools most of his friends attended. A real tug-of-war for his soul took place in his senior year at the Sons of the Covenant Orthodox High School. The principal, a brisk man named Reb Label Fein, had told Alfred Hopeman that his son was a conqueror of examinations without peer. “A young
gaon
, a genius in
Gemara
. The future of such a youth is no light responsibility.”

Alfred had pondered, finally turning for advice to his best friend, Saul Netscher.

“Send him to my brother, Itzikel.”

When told, Harry had been sufficiently flattered to agree, for who at the Sons of the Covenant Orthodox High School didn't know of the awesome Rebbe Yitzhak Netscher, a spiritual leader of Chassids and director of Yeshiva Torat Moshe, one of the most prestigious religious academies in the new world?

So while others went to Amherst or Harvard or N.Y.U., he became a scholastic. Every morning except on the
Shabbat
, uniformed in a dark suit, he rode the subway from Park Avenue to Brooklyn. In a brownstone with creaking floors he had joined Max Bronstein and four other neophytes who sat with scholars and sages in unending discussion and argument about Talmud and rabbinic literature.

It was a strange world of labor for scholarship's sake, a school from which the best students never were graduated. Some of the men had been studying at the same scarred oak table for fifteen years, not to acquire wealth or honor but for the love of God. Others had been scholars even longer, having come to Brownsville with the yeshiva from Lithuania, fleeing the Nazis. Rebbe Yitzhak was empowered to confer
smicha
, ordination as a rabbi; but he did this only when extreme poverty forced a man from his contemplation into rabbinic work, or when the individual's scholarship wasn't impeccable.

In those days Bronstein had been skinny and sallow, with eyes like the ones El Greco gave Christ. After six months and a lot of cafeteria coffee, he and Harry had convinced themselves that God, like whisky and war, was an invention of man. Dazzled and fearful at his own audacity, Harry had left the Yeshiva Torat Moshe to polish diamonds in his father's shop until the next term at Columbia.

Family tradition or not, Alfred never pulled him into the diamond business, but when he came on his own accord, his father was a meticulous teacher. Although by that time Harry had absorbed a lot through his pores, Alfred started at the beginning, with a cut diamond as a primer.

“Each of these little planes, each precisely polished surface, is a facet. The octagonal facet at the top of a round stone is the table. The facet at the very bottom of the diamond is the culet. The extreme outer edge
of a fashioned stone—right where a woman's hips would be, where a fat woman wears one—is called a girdle …”

Yes, Pa.

Bronstein, whose father's piety was narrower than Alfred's, had fled stormy family scenes and moved a safe distance, to the University of Chicago. Despite having to work—ironically, in a kosher slaughterhouse—he had won a bachelor's degree in linguistics in two and one-half years; then, being perverse Max Bronstein, he took the next eight years to earn his doctorate. By that time a steady stream of papers of unrelenting distinction won him a reputation and a job with the Reform seminary, which he accepted with the same equanimity he would have shown had the school been Jesuit or Buddhist. For its part, the Reform seminary got both the best linguistic geographer in America and a genuine resident atheist, proof of its liberalism.

“There you are,” Max said, as though Harry had left him twenty minutes before. His handshake was strong. He was heavier and he had grown a mustache. “Harry, Harry.”

“Long time.”

“Damn long time.”

“How are you, Maxie?”

“Life's tolerable. And you?”

Harry smiled. “Tolerable's a good word.”

They talked amiably about the old days, compared notes on people they knew.

“It looks as if David Leslau has really fallen into it,” Harry said at last.

“You sound jealous.”

“Aren't you? This is once in a lifetime.”

“The headaches he faces are once in a lifetime, too,” Bronstein said dryly. He took from his desk drawer a heavy manila envelope and from it removed some large photographic negatives in which Harry could see Hebrew script.

Harry picked up the photographs. “I'm disappointed. I thought I was going to see the original.”

“Fat chance,” Bronstein said. “My friend David won't let his find out of his sight. Would you?”

“No. What can you tell me?”

Bronstein shrugged. “Over the centuries the copper had oxidized almost completely. David handled it very well, much the way the British treated the 1952 scroll. Instead of stabilizing it with a coating of airplane glue, as they did, he used a thin coating of a clear plastic developed for the space program. The scroll was then sawed in half lengthwise, and the segments lifted off like the layers of a piece of onion. David used a dentist's drill to brush away the loose corroded material, and there underneath it were the letters, most of them legible.”

“They had been punched into the copper with a sharp instrument?”

Bronstein nodded. “Some type of awl, struck with a hammer or a rock. The copper was almost pure, as was the copper in the 1952 scroll. The metallurgists feel the metal sheets may have come from the same source.”

“Are there any notable differences between the scrolls?” Harry asked.

“Several. The one found in '52 was made from two copper sheets crudely riveted together. David Leslau's scroll is a few inches wider than the other and was made of a single rolled sheet. And the first scroll almost certainly was enscribed by one man, while this one was the work of two people. See here.” Bronstein held up one of the photographs. “The first section of David's scroll was punched out by someone who grew increasingly feeble as he went along. Perhaps a very old man, maybe wounded or dying. Some of the letters are indistinct and all of them are shallowly incised.”

“Beginning here,” he said, showing Harry a second image, “the letters become sharp and clear. And there are syntactic differences between the two sections. Obviously the task was interrupted and then resumed by a stronger man, perhaps someone younger who took dictation from the original scribe.”

“Will you help me run through it?” Harry asked.

Bronstein placed the photographs in front of him. “Try it yourself.”

What he gleaned from the opening passage chilled him. “My God. Do you think this could be
the
Baruch of the Bible, the prophet's sidekick, writing about
his
Jeremiah?”

Bronstein smiled. “Why not?” he said. “It is as easy to believe as to disbelieve.”

The words were consonant skeletons unfleshed by vowels, as in Yiddish and in modern Hebrew writings. Harry struggled like a child who was beginning to learn the trick of reading.

“In the watering place … outside the wall on the north …”

“Splendid,” Max said.

“ … buried three cubits beneath the rock on which … sang the king, a vessel containing fifty-three talents of gold.”

“You'll have no trouble.”

“What watering place outside the north wall?” Harry said. “What rock? What king?”

“Ah.” Bronstein was grinning at him. “You're beginning to see why I feel that David Leslau is not likely to reach into the earth and pluck out the Temple treasures. The watering place is long gone. The rock perhaps is dust. One would guess that the king was David, given the reference to song. But no appropriate legend that fits David has survived the ages. We don't even know that the scroll's walled city is Jerusalem. And to make matters impossible, the priests were experts in cryptic writing. They would have disguised each reference point as thoroughly as possible, so that even in the age in which it was enscribed, most of it would have made sense only to an ‘insider.'” Bronstein picked up his briefcase and rose from his chair. “All the reference books are on my shelves. I'll be nearby if you need me.”

The scroll was a long series of passages, each stating the whereabouts of a separate
genizah
and listing in some detail the objects that had been hidden there. Harry took a long while to read through the first half-dozen passages, and the table in front of him became littered with reference volumes. Several times a missing letter forced him to guess at a word's meaning, and now and again he made note of a word or a phrase he would have to ask Max about. The place where the second scribe had taken over came as a shock. It was almost as if he could see the man, rougher and less sophisticated than the first writer, unable to spell well or even consistently, and obviously unfamiliar with his task. Many of the words ran together, and at times one line ran into another
in the middle of a word that should not have been divided, making Harry's progress slow.