“No?”
“No, it wasn’t my idea. It was Wilson’s.”
Meral stared with incredulity.
“Wilson’s?” he said.
Samia nodded.
That night after dinner Wilson came to Meral’s room.
“You told Samia to come to me, Wilson?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I wanted to help you.”
“Then why didn’t you just come to me yourself?”
“That isn’t how it works. It’s you who has to come to me.”
His brow furrowed. “I’m lost,” Meral said.
“Not yet.”
Meral met Wilson’s cool blue gaze and immediately felt a faintly throbbing panic flowing through him as he sensed that he had entered a maze of thought with twists and turns that he neither could follow nor even guess where they might lead. He dropped the line of questioning immediately and turned to his main concern. “Never mind that now,” he said brusquely. “Please focus your thoughts on anything the man now identified as Dimiter might have said or confided to you in the weeks before his death, in particular concerning the reason for his presence in Jerusalem.” This shift brought results, with Wilson’s answers proving far from enigmatic. He seemed eager, in fact, to tell Meral every word, every action of the man whose life he had saved, so that these after-dinner meetings would go on for eleven more nights with Meral’s eyes growing wider with every session. At the end, when he was making his written report, he had no doubt that it might daze as many minds as it enlightened.
Some things he thought best to hold back
Meral’s Sundays during that time were taken up with day-long visits with Mayo, who now had a bed in the Neurology Ward in the grasp of an illness that had no name, or at least not a name that it wished to give. He grew feebler and more listless with each passing day. Samia tried to spend as much time with him as she could, and on her free time practically never left him, sometimes even sleeping on the chair in his room with Mayo’s red-and-white comforter over her. She began to notice a strangeness in Meral’s demeanor, for as day by day the neurologist deteriorated, the more alive and refreshed Meral seemed. Would the process now stop? she tearfully wondered early on the morning of May seventeenth? For it was on that day that everyone realized there would be no more Sunday visitations.
No, this cannot be true,” breathed Meral numbly. “It’s not real.”
His blue winter uniform had just given way to summery “silvertans” that looked somehow grotesquely out of place as he pulled back the sheet and looked down at the body of his boyhood friend. Samia had called him at the Station to tell him that Mayo was dying, and he’d sped to Mayo’s bedside too late for much of anything but grief.
Meral turned to Samia.
“What happened?” She was standing beside him with a tear-sodden handkerchief balled up in her hand and held close against her chest.
“No one knows. He just died.”
“Just like that?”
“He stopped breathing. That’s all. Yeah, just like that.”
Meral looked sadly down at Mayo again.
“My last good friend,” he huskily murmured.
“No. Not your last.”
Meral turned and met Samia’s brimming stare.
“Thank you,” he told her. “Thank you.”
Then he pulled a chair over to the bedside where he sat for a time in grieving silence until at last racing thoughts of insidious intent began infiltrating his brain. “I know all different ways where there’d be no suspicion; where it wouldn’t show up in tests . . . show up in tests . . . show up in—”
Meral looked up at Samia.
“Do you know what he was doing just before he got sick?”
“Just the usual.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary?”
“No. No, not really. Oh, well, one thing, maybe.”
“What?”
“He said wanted me to look up some spy stuff for him.”
“Spy stuff?”
“Yeah, spy stuff. Lifting fingerprints with tape.”
“Whatever for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he ever say anything about what might be wrong with him?”
“No. Not to me. He didn’t know.”
“Was he asleep when he died?”
“Sort of dozing. And then I saw his eyelids starting to flutter, and I heard him say “Samia” in this really weak voice. I could barely hear it. I said, ‘Yes, I’m here, Moses. I’m here.’ And I leaned—” There was a catch in her throat, and for a moment she stopped. Then she went on. “And I leaned over with my ear down close to his mouth and he said something, just a few words. And then he died.”
“Could you make out what he said?”
Samia nodded. Her eyes were welling up.
“ ‘So I’ll eat the soup and leave the noodles.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s that saying on the wall. Over there.”
Meral followed her pointed finger to the plaque on the wall with the Kishon quotation on it. “And then—and then,” the nurse tremulously began, but a choking sob broke it off and she bolted from the room and then away down the antiseptic halls. Meral listened to the patter of her quick cushioned steps until they’d faded away into that silence where all of Mayo’s heartbeats now were stored. For a moment he lowered his head, and then he walked to the door where he turned for one last long look good-bye, less astonished by the puzzle of inexplicable death than he was by the fact that he was capable of tears.
Something had been chipping at “The Wall.”
Samia’s return almost startled him.
“Meral!”
The policeman turned around.
“Yeah, he said something else,” Samia said. “At the end.”
“And what was that?” Meral asked.
“He said, ‘The priest.’ ”
CHAPTER 24
INTERVIEW WITH SERGEANT MAJOR PETER V. MERAL
17 MAY, 1974, HEADQUARTERS, ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE
Interviewer: Moshe Zui.
Q. So okay, it’s just us this time, Sergeant. The Americans seem to have lost interest.
A. So I see.
Q. Something wrong?
A. What do you mean?
Q. You seem preoccupied, Meral. Thinking hard about something.
A. Yes, I’m sorry.
Q. Moses Mayo?
A. Yes, Mayo.
Q. What’s happening there? You’ve had suspicions, I hear.
A. An intuition. It’s in the works.
Q. Want to wait a bit?
A. No. Let’s begin.
Q. Well, okay. And so we got your last interim report. Fascinating. Remle Street. The crash. All of that. This fellow Wilson looking after Temescu—that is, Dimiter—and then helping with his suicide. Are you going to press a charge here, by the way?
A. I don’t believe so. Wilson is a naïf. Not stupid, mind you. Very far from that. Very far. He’s just simple. But simple in a good way, not a bad one.
Q. Let me look at this. [Consults file] Been in Israel seven months?
A. Wilson?
Q. Yes.
A. No, now eight.
Q. Okay, eight. So now Temescu was in fact Paul Dimiter. Fine. But the question still is, what was he doing here? It had to be a mission and the fact that the Americans are lying through their teeth means it must have been bloody important. And so Wilson is the key. He took care of him, lived with him for weeks. He must know something, no? You’ve had—What? Maybe ten or so sessions with Wilson?
A. More or less.
Q. So I’m guessing they were fruitful, these meetings? He was really that helpful? I mean about finding out Dimiter’s mission.
A. Yes, he was.
Q. He was? Oh, well, that’s great, Meral! Tell me!
A. Well, it’s complicated.
Q. Complicated how?
A. Well, no really hard facts tha
t might bear on that question came up. Very few on any other topic either. And then some of the so-called facts turned out to be not factual at all. I’m talking about Dimiter’s statements to Wilson. I think some were either lies or a result of all the morphine in his system. I tend to think it was the latter. He was dying. What advantage could there be for him in lies? Quite the opposite, I would think.
Q. You want to give me an example of what you’re talking about?
A. Well, alright. When Wilson asked Dimiter his age he said he really wasn’t sure; that he started out life as an aborted fetus that a hospital nurse found in medical trash. A tracheotomy was done and he was put in an incubator from which he was snatched and then smuggled away to her home by the nurse. She was unmarried and of Albanian descent, he said, and so she gave him her name and then raised him until she died.
Q. Why do you think that isn’t true?
A. Oh, well, “Snatched? Smuggled?” Sounds like fantasy to me.
Q. Except there is that tracheotomy scar.
A. One can build a house of cards on a base that is real.
Q. You’re a hard man, Meral.
A. I try not to be.
Q. True. Yes, you do. Any other examples of the lies?
A. Telling Wilson that his wife was alive.
Q. Yes, we talked about that. The wife who died. His wife Jean.
A. That isn’t the name he gave Wilson.
Q. Really? Oh, well, maybe you’re right, then. The morphine, perhaps.
A. Yes, perhaps.
Q. Well, then Dimiter’s mission here. You were saying?
A. Yes. As no reliable facts are in evidence, I thought it might be best to pursue a much more general path toward uncovering what that mission might have been.
Q. What kind of path?
A. Well, religion, if you can believe it. Or rather Dimiter’s deep interest in religion. Wilson said he was obsessed with it. Why are we here? Where are we going?
Q. Yes, precisely my question at this point. Where are we going?
A. Well, in a way, to Dimiter’s mission. What a man believes colors his purposes.
Q. But aren’t we just spinning our wheels here, Sergeant? The world’s deadliest government assassin finds God?
A. There is some precedent.
Q. Fine. But is it reasonable, I’m asking.
A. Not at all. But truth and reason are two different things. Something happened to this man that changed him.
Q. Ah, the mystical experience!
A. Exactly. Should I go on?
Q. Perhaps you’d like to take a break first.
A. A break?
Q. You’ve got that Mayo look again. Come on, we’ll take a little break.
A. No, never mind. It’s much better if I go on. May I go on?
Q. You’ll stay with me?
A. Yes, of course.
Q. Please continue.
A. Dimiter was haunted all his life, Wilson told me, by The Problem of Evil. “A heart-stabbing mystery,” he called it. But he came to believe there was a mystery much deeper that he spoke of as the “mystery of goodness.”
Q. Now you’re losing me.
A. I’m leading up to something.
Q. I hope so.
A. Well, he said if we’re reducible to senseless matter, then why aren’t we constantly rushing about blindly trying to serve our own selfish ends? Yet what we see is people who give up their lives for someone else. We see self-sacrifice in ordinary lives, not just in heroes. Or so he believed.
Q. And that’s it? That’s what you think might have colored his motives?
A. Only somewhat. And then there was the mystical experience.
Q. He told Wilson about that?
A. To a point. He said it happened near the end of the Albanian mission. The second one. He’d been feeling something coming on even earlier, Wilson told me: a reluctance to kill if he could possibly avoid it. But as soon as he had finished ordaining those young men—You know the incident I’m talking about?
Q. Yes, I do.
A. Well at that moment some “force” filled him up, he said. Something “bigger than the universe but smaller than a pea.” His words.
Q. I see you’re looking at notes.
A. Yes, I wrote them right after each meeting with Wilson.
Q. Didn’t mean to interrupt.
A. Well, then Dimiter talked about a time he was on mission in Somalia. There was famine in the land, people starving and dying by the tens of thousands. Well, one morning he heard singing, many voices, and then he came upon these Sudanese tribes people, scores of them, all in circle clasping hands and swaying side to side while they sang, their bodies skeletal, emaciated. They were dying. And yet they were smiling, he said. Their singing and their faces were happy. Full of joy. And sweeping through them, and from them and then into him, into Dimiter, was an overwhelming sense of the rightness and the glory of things. And that feeling, he said, was not even one-hundredth of what he’d felt in Albania right after he’d finished ordaining those priests.
Q. What, he heard the voice of God or something?
A. No. No, he never said anything like that. Wilson said he couldn’t explain it or describe it any more. It was ineffable.
Q. I think now I’m getting it. Finally. Your point. Where you’ve been going. It’s that the man was so changed for the better that whatever he was doing here it couldn’t have been bad. Is that it?
A. That’s it exactly. Yes. Yes, that’s all I was trying to convey.
Q. Well, who knows. Maybe so. It would make Bell and Sandalls damn happy. But then the morphine and the fantasies. Maybe lies. Which reminds me. Temescu’s wife. I mean, Dimiter’s. Wilson told you that her name wasn’t Jean?
A. Yes, that’s right.
Q. And so what did he say that it was?
A. Moricani.
Q. Really? My wife had a friend with that name.
A. Sounds Rumanian. Is it?
Q. Albanian. So you’re all through with Wilson?
A. Not yet. He says he knows precisely what Dimiter’s mission was here and he’s promised that he’s going to tell me.
Q. Fantastic, Meral! When?
A. When I’m ready, he said.
Q. Meaning what?
A. God knows.
Q. Shouldn’t we put some security on him?
A. To protect him, you mean?
Q. Well, sure.
A. I don’t think that will be necessary.
Q. Why?
A. Just a feeling.
Q. Well, okay, then. We’re done. Good thing. I see that Mayo look again. You’re going to have to get some closure on that, Meral.
A. I intend to.
Immediately after leaving Zui, Meral drove his police car up the Sheikh Garrah Quarter’s French Hill Road and then steeply downhill a little farther until he was in sight of the six-story beige-colored limestone cube that housed the National Police Headquarters. Once past the electric gate and the guard station, he parked and soon was pushing on a steel revolving door that placed him in a cool and quiet lobby with mirror-shined white marble floors and a reception desk with uniformed men behind it. Just past them was a bomb display and a burglary prevention exhibit.
There is a tribe on Mount Elgon in East Africa who believe that men have two souls and that one of them exists because the other is dreaming it. In a dream of the night before, Meral thought that he might have encountered his dreamer. Standing in the burial chamber of Christ, Meral’s double was staring into his eyes while at the same time pointing at Mayo’s nephew Shlomo, who was frowning in concentration as he softly rapped his knuckles on the chamber’s stone wall, an ear pressed against it, listening intently, when a perfectly formed blue rose bloomed forth from the spot where he was rapping. Shlomo plucked it from the wall with a triumphant cry of “Aha!” Then a grating, rumbling sound filled the crypt as large sections of the wall slid away and out of sight to reveal a narrow secret room in which Moses Mayo stood staring out at Meral. Wrapped com
pletely in white burial cloths underneath, Mayo wore a slouch hat and a belted trench coat that resembled Humphrey Bogart’s in the film Casablanca. He softly blew out cigarette smoke and drawled, “I know all different ways where there’d be no suspicion. Now you know why I never make plans that far ahead.” Then lifting an arm and pointing at Shlomo, Mayo uttered cryptically, “Follow the gazelle!”
There the dream ended.
“You’re here to see who, sir?”
“Inspector Shlomo Uris.”
“Six twenty-two. Go on up.”
From the chair behind his desk, Mayo’s nephew looked up at his visitor. Tieless, his shirt collar open, he wore wide and aggressively red suspenders over a short-sleeved pale blue shirt. As Meral came in he had his feet up on his desk and was tossing balls of crumpled crime report forms at a green metal wastepaper basket set on top of a filing cabinet in a corner.
“Oh, hi, Meral! Three more shots and that’s it. Come on, sit down.”
Meral took a seat by the desk and looked around. A little of Mayo’s blood was showing: one wall of the office was totally covered with posters, most of rock concerts played all around the world, and all built around a super-sized poster in the center of the comic book superhero “Captain Marvel.”
“So.”
Meral turned his gaze back to Uris. Finished tossing balls of paper, he had now swung his feet to the floor and was intently leaning forward with his hands clasped in front of him on the desk in an effort to look sorrowful and grave. On the wall behind the desk there was a panoramic black-and-white photographic map of the Jerusalem Sub-District.
“My condolences,” said Meral.
“My condolences to you. You were so close to him. Like brothers.”
Meral’s gaze came to rest on a symbol on the side of the telephone on Uris’s desk. It was a leaping gazelle.
“Yes, like brothers,” Meral answered Uris softly.
“And so, what can I do for you today?”
Meral lifted his gaze back to Uris.
“Find the person who murdered your uncle.”
CHAPTER 25
A pattering of rain from a moody morning sky fell in dots on the dust of yellowed windowpanes looking out to a street in Brooklyn, New York. A series of trucks rumbled by over manhole covers with loud and clanging thumps that were barely heard by the elderly woman in a pale pink nightgown and brown woolly slippers. She picked up a photo from the little round table in her tiny living room where she was sitting with a friend, a woman slightly younger by perhaps a few years and whose flowered blue dress and cardigan sweater had the scent and weary look of a thrift shop. “My little boy,” the older woman forlornly murmured. The photo was of a tall and brawny young man with blond hair in the garb of a Franciscan priest.