“Dearest Jean,” he began.
And then he lowered his head and wept.
CHAPTER 29
Meral entered his room, removed his jacket, hung it up, and then sat on the edge of his bed. The day had been longer and more tiring than usual. He’d gone fruitlessly searching for Wilson both at Wilson’s apartment and at Hadassah, and then later in the evening at the Casa Nova where Wilson had been scheduled to make a repair but unaccountably never showed up. Despondent, Meral lowered his head and shook it, and then lifted it to stare at the photos on his desk. He would have to buy a frame for one more.
A little later, while preparing for sleep, Meral thought he might read to coax slumber to his eyes and to a restless mind, but on opening a drawer of the bedside table where he kept all his paperback books, he found something on top of the stack that he couldn’t remember ever seeing before. Where had it come from? he wondered. He lifted it out and sat again on the edge of his bed as the muted strains of a violin concerto started up in the room of some nun down the hall. Meral stared at his find, a sheaf of unmailed, handwritten letters held together by a band of purple ribbon.
All of them began with the words, “Dearest Jean.”
CHAPTER 30
He moved slowly and soundlessly as a specter through a series of vaulted, shadowy avenues flanked by arched portals and massive pillars until at last he stopped at the edge of an enormous room where the letter had told him they were to meet. He was in Solomon’s Stables, a massive and cavernous hall of stone that was directly underneath the Temple Mount. A waiting silence almost deeper than God’s was broken only by the quiet cooing of a dove in one of the apertures just above the level of the streets outside that were aglow with the promises of late morning sunlight sifting down at an angle to the shadowy floor. He took a step to the side to keep his back against a wall. He waited. Listened intensely. Then he heard the soft step he’d been waiting for, the step that he knew so well. He saw her moving toward him from behind a pillar until she was captured by a column of sun, where she stopped and stood silently staring at him with deep-sunken eyes in a drug-ravaged face that, like the world, held no more than a distant memory of its beauty.
“Hello, Paul,” she said hollowly.
“Hello, Jean.”
Paul Dimiter’s gaze shifted quickly to the left as Stephen Riley stepped out from behind another pillar. Still in the priestly garb of Dennis Mooney, he was gripping a long-barreled pistol with a silencer.
“Why good morning, old buddy and mentor.”
“Why good morning to you, too. You look so different.”
“Plastic surgery. You know the drill.”
“Oh, a very nice job, Steve.”
“Fuck you, too, pal! Just don’t move! Don’t move an inch!”
“I won’t.”
“Not an inch! And put your hands up in the air. Yeah, good. And just keep them there. You know, I can’t believe you didn’t see through this, that you actually came. Is there a net about to drop from the ceiling on top of me, Paul, or am I standing right over a trapdoor? Come on, tell me. What’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch.”
“I can’t believe it. And you came here unarmed!” Riley marveled.
“No, I’m armed,” answered Dimiter quietly.
“I don’t see it.”
“No, you can’t. But it’s there.”
“Oh, well now you’ve got me thinking all those rumors might be true, mi amigo: you know, that maybe you’ve lost a few marbles? Ah, well, hell. Just too bad this has to be. I mean, crazy or sane, we’ll still miss you.”
“You’re going to kill me?”
“Now I know you’re demented! Of course, I’m going to kill you!” Riley snarled. “Jean, step over to the side. You’re in the way.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, meekly repeating, “to the side.”
But instead, she took a halting step toward Dimiter, her turned-up hand reaching out to him, imploring. “Oh, Paul, I’m so sorry,” she said. There was a tremor in her voice. “I’m . . .”
“Shut up, Jean!” Riley ordered sharply with his eyes still pinned to Dimiter. “All right, Paul-o,” he began. “So you came after us. How did you find out we were here?”
“I never came after you, Stephen.”
“Bullshit!”
“No, it’s true. Until I got here I thought you were dead.”
“ ‘Until you got here?’ ”
“Yes, I recognized you.”
“How?”
“From your step.”
“From my? . . .”
“Steve! . . .”
“Jean, shut up!” Riley savagely commanded, his stare never straying from Dimiter’s. “This is borderline hilarious,” he mocked. “I’m supposed to believe that your being here is just a coincidence?”
“There is no such thing,” Dimiter answered him quietly.
“So you admit it, then! You were coming after us!”
“No. I was hunting someone else. That’s the truth. It wasn’t you. You’re going to kill me now no matter what I say. Why would I lie?”
“Because—!
“You see? It’s all for nothing, Steve! All for fucking nothing!” Jean Dimiter shrieked at Riley. “He wasn’t after us at all!”
“I don’t believe him,” Riley answered her evenly. “Now get out of the way, Jean! Move!”
“I forgive you, Jean,” Dimiter said to her. “Remember that. Remember that always. I forgive you.”
“Sorry, Paul,” Riley told him as he aimed his weapon. “We had some really good times. I mean it. Really good. Okay, now, Jeannie, love. Move, please! Move! Move right now!”
“It’s alright, Stephen,” Dimiter told him. “Here, I’ll do it. I’ll move into the clear. Come on, Stephen. Here’s your clean shot.”
And as Dimiter moved to the side with a fond stare settled upon the face of his wife, Jean Dimiter suddenly burst into tears and raced forward toward her husband with her arms outstretched to embrace him just as grace and a bullet exploded white fire into her brain.
“Jesus Christ!” Riley uttered in shock.
Dimiter looked down at his wife’s crumpled body. And then back up at Riley. “And I forgive you, too.”
“What the hell are you talking about, you fucking psycho?”
The next two bullets were unrepentant. Dimiter fell beside the body of his wife so that their posture, when they were discovered on the following day, could have easily been taken for that of lovers who were turned aside for sleep, an impression that would not have been very far wrong.
There was no parting.
PART THREE
FINAL REPORT
June 7, 1974
CHAPTER 31
FINAL INTERVIEWS AND DISPOSITION OF MATTERS RELATING TO THE REMLE STREET INCIDENT, PAUL DIMITER, JEAN DIMITER, STEPHEN RILEY, AND COLONEL AGIM VLORA
Present: Moshe Zui, I.I.; William Sandalls, Charles Bell, American Embassy; Sgt. Major Peter Meral, Kishla Station; Shlomo Uris, Jerusalem Sub-District. Recordist: Annette Assaf.
ZUI: Alright, this is mainly for Bell and Sandalls. Bill, you’ve got copies of everything, right?
SANDALLS: No, not everything. But fine. Go ahead. I mean, that’s what this is for, not so?
ZUI: Okay. Shlomo Uris, will you start? Although, no. First I’ll run through the basics. So now posing as a Catholic Franciscan priest named Dennis Mooney, Stephen Riley and Jean, Paul Dimiter’s wife, were being blackmailed by the Russians into now and then killing certain people that the Russians wanted dead without it being traced back to them. They got them—
SANDALLS: Where are you getting this stuff?
ZUI: We have a source.
SANDALLS: Who?
ZUI: Later, Bill. Surprise. Meantime, we also sourced a stack of unmailed letters that Dimiter wrote to his wife.
SANDALLS: Where’d you get them?
ZUI: Sergeant Meral. He found them in his room.
SANDALLS: Dimiter’s room?
/> ZUI: Meral’s.
SANDALLS: Start over.
ZUI: No, you heard me correctly. Meral found them in his room at the Casa Nova and we don’t know how they got there. Now can I do this, please, fellows?
SANDALLS: Go!
ZUI: Okay, Riley and Dimiter’s wife were secret lovers. They grabbed the radar plans they were sent to get, faked their deaths, sold the plans to the Russians for a fortune, and Stephen Riley has surgery to change his appearance. After that, they come here to hide out. So far so evil. But then the Russians say, “Aha! A little blackmail is in order!” and they force them to agree to make a hit for them every now and then, first by putting salmonella in the target’s food or in our sparkling “Drink This and Remember the Camps” bottled water so the target winds up in Hadassah where friend Riley the goniff and phony Catholic priest can off them with a fatal and untraceable injection. It’s a great place to do it. People die there every day. Who’s to notice? But then Dimiter shows up here as Wilson, and not really looking around for any trouble at all. So—Off the record for a second, Annette: Look at Sandalls and Bell, how they’re smiling like they’ve won the Israeli Lotto!
SANDALLS: Drinks on us at the King David bar tonight!
ZUI: Good. We aim to please. Okay, back on. So now Riley spots Dimiter somewhere and immediately assumes that he’s tracked them down and he’s come here to kill them, so at first Riley hires some Yemeni gunman and part-time assassin to try to off Dimiter for him at the top of the Russian Church Tower where he knows he always goes on certain days around dawn, and he shows him how to set up the “wire,” and the guy strings it up on a day Dimiter usually comes, and he hides in this closet at the top of the Tower. Now Dimiter comes that day right on schedule but he spots the “wire” and the guy winds up charging him—there must have been a few things about Dimiter that Riley left out when he was briefing this putz—and he misses, of course, and he trips and falls down all those stairs and breaks his neck. Rest in Peace and fuck him and his horse. And so now Riley decides he’ll have to do the job himself and that the best way to do it is to get Dimiter’s wife to lure him into a trap.
SANDALLS: And so where is all of this coming from? Another letter?
ZUI: Yes, partly. It’s a letter that Dimiter gets from the wife that she writes to try to lure him to Solomon’s Stables. It was with the ones Meral found in his room. She tells him she’s so sorry for everything and even tells him about the hit with the “wire” just to make her contrition sound real. At least that’s my guess. Plus, as I mentioned, our unimpeachable source.
SANDALLS: Moshe, come back a sec.
ZUI: What is it?
SANDALLS: The wife. She knows that Riley’s set this up to make the hit on her ex?
ZUI: Yes, she knows it, Bill.
SANDALLS: Cold.
ZUI: I’m not so sure about that. Her body was a pincushion. Needle marks all over it. Heroin. A recent heavy dose of it showed up in the drug screen. She must have taken it—or maybe Riley injected her—just before they went to the Stables. It was how Riley was able to keep her in line.
BELL: You seem sure of that.
ZUI: Our source. Her last letter. And one other thing.
SANDALLS: What?
ZUI: Riley shot her in the back of the head.
SANDALLS: I see. We’ll be getting all these letters, by the way?
ZUI: Yes, you’ll have them. Almost everything’s in them. I just wanted you to have the big picture. We’ve even found out what his mission was.
SANDALLS: Whose? You mean Dimiter’s?
ZUI: Yes.
SANDALLS: Oh, for crying out loud! Are we back to that now? You just told us that he came here for the waters, that he had no mission!
ZUI: I said the first but not the second.
SANDALLS: I think I just stepped through the looking glass.
ZUI: You haven’t. Just wait, Bill. You’ll see. Now we’ll be moving along to the body that we found in Christ’s tomb, and then that Remle Street incident that Meral was into. We’ll be getting into all of that. And Dimiter’s mission.
SANDALLS: Yes, our mission to Andromeda.
ZUI: Can we try to move forward?
SANDALLS: I’m trying.
ZUI: Okay, first thing on the docket: I’d like Inspector Uris to recap the brilliant work he did on his end of things. Inspector?
URIS: I much prefer Shlomo.
ZUI: Then Shlomo. Tell us how you caught Riley.
SANDALLS: What, you got him?
BELL: You got Riley?!
ZUI: Yes, we got him and I hope there’ll be no fight over jurisdiction.
SANDALLS: This is wonderful! Great! How’d you get him?
URIS: Well, I take no credit. It just fell into my lap. My uncle, Moses Mayo, was a doctor at Hadassah Hospital and died for no reason that anyone could find. He just gradually wasted away. Sergeant Meral was the first to suspect it could be murder. That my uncle was on to something—or to someone. So I tried to find out where my uncle might have been just before he started going downhill. He told the med school he’d be missing a lecture one morning because he would be driving to someplace out of town. But he wouldn’t tell them where. Suspicious. So I checked incoming calls leading up to the day that he drove out of town and one of them right away made me sit up straight. It had come from a public phone in Beit Sahour, where there’s a chapel that’s run by a Franciscan priest named Dennis Mooney who lived there in a couple of rooms that were attached and with a full-time housekeeper-cook who was living in some sort of guest hut beside it.
SANDALLS: And so why would Beit Sahour make you sit up straight?
ZUI: Here we go. The real Dennis Mooney had a mother in Brooklyn, New York. Father dead, the mother old, hard of hearing. She hasn’t heard from her son in a couple of years. She writes letters and asks him to send her some pictures of him—pictures in the Chapel of the Angels, outside in Shepherd’s Fields, all of that. But she never gets an answer. No photos. Nothing. So she writes to Franciscan headquarters, right? And they write back and say they had no trouble at all getting in touch with her son and that they got back a letter from him saying he was fine and that he’d send his mother photos and also that he’d never gotten any of her letters.
Two months later, still no letter from Mooney to his mother. So she writes to the head Franciscans again, and it’s the same old bullshit all over: they write back and say they wired her son and told him, “Write to your mother right away and send her pictures!” And then Riley, he calls his HQ this time and he swears he sent pictures, and he can’t understand why she hasn’t received all the letters and the photos that he’s sent, and he was going to write to her again, right away. And then as usual, the mother gets nothing.
And so now she’s getting worried and also annoyed as holy hell, and then somebody tells her to contact the State Department, and the upshot is that finally your ambassador here passed the inquiry on to us, it lands on my desk, when I see this priest is in Beit Sahour, I’m thinking, “Aha!” and I call up the head Franciscans myself and I ask them for a photo of Mooney, which they send, and with this in my hand I make a trip to Shepherd’s Fields like a tourist, and then there I am a Jew singing Christmas Carols in this chapel full of goyim and paintings and statues of angels though, I promise you, with no disrespect in my heart—so I can see for myself that Dennis Mooney isn’t really Dennis Mooney because the real one they killed and then buried before the poor guy even makes it as far from the airport as the Casa Nova, so that no one would know what the real Mooney looked like.
So I see this and I go into the village to Beit Sahour and the local police post there and I call Tel Aviv for some serious backup and they come and we take him, this momzer, this Riley. We take him and he spills his guts. He tells us everything; things we even didn’t ask him about.
BELL: Boy, that almost surprises me more than anything else.
ZUI: You have your methods. We have ours.
SANDALLS: Are yours legal?
URIS: Absolutely not. We threaten them with readings of Jewish haiku. Of course, meantime, you know, it turns out Riley’s so-called housekeeper there in Beit Sahour was . . .
ZUI: Yes, we know. She was Dimiter’s wife.
SANDALLS: What I don’t get is how Riley killed your uncle. Did he really?
URIS: Yes, he did. He gave my uncle some figs that he’d injected with a deadly toxin that leaves no trace; it just starts the ball rolling downhill, and then it goes away.
ZUI: Many thanks, Inspector Uris.
URIS: Shlomo.
ZUI: Shlomo. Great work.
SANDALLS: Let’s have a drink sometime, Shlomo.
URIS: My pleasure.
ZUI: Alright, on to Sergeant Meral.
BELL: And so what are we doing here? Homicide cops on parade?
ZUI: Just a moment. Let me look at this note that I’ve just been handed.
[Reads note] Okay, we’ll break for fifteen.
SANDALLS: Really?
ZUI: Yes.
[BREAKS AT 0944 AND RESUMES AT 1002]
ZUI: Want to start out with Remle Street, Sergeant?
MERAL: No, with Vlora.
ZUI: Okay, Vlora.
SANDALLS: Who’s Vlora?
MERAL: He’s the man discovered dead in Christ’s Tomb who at first we thought was someone named Joseph Temescu and then mistakenly, of course, Paul Dimiter, when in fact he was an Albanian Security officer who had gotten himself attached to the Albanian contingent on the Golan Heights.
SANDALLS: My head’s spinning again. Why would Vlora want to do that?