The Six Messiahs

  "Dieter. Dieter Boch, sir."

  "You're a good man to have around, Dieter."

  "Tank you, sir."

  They traced the steps up a flight of stairs to the rear deck, and through the clabbering gloom ahead Doyle thought he could make out the shape of a large man standing at the far end near the stern rail. Doyle reached for his pistol but the ship yawed severely as it dove down into the trough of a wave. Both men staggered to hold their balance; when Doyle looked up again, the figure at the rail was gone. He questioned his companion; the engineer had seen nothing. They pressed on. Lengthy gaps between their quarry's footprints indicated the man in black had continued to run; the prints led right up to the edge of the top deck and ended abruptly.

  "Er ist going overboard?"

  "So it appears," said Doyle.

  "Into dis wasser?" asked Boch, looking out anxiously at the towering crests of the waves. Like so many other seagoing men he lived in constant terror of the ocean. ' 'Why would dis man do such a thing?"

  Why, indeed? thought Doyle: Why would two men take their own lives rather than face capture?

  For the theft of a book?

  They moved the Gerona Zohar from a hidden compartment in Doyle's steamer trunk to the safety of the ship's vault and placed it under twenty-four-hour guard. His injured arm in a sling, Captain Hoffner returned to the bridge, rallied his officers, and initiated a room-by-room search. As Doyle had predicted, the ship's first lieutenant could not be accounted for, although many swore they had seen him—a young, handsome blond man—in uniform on the command deck since the storm began.

  Mechanics swarmed over the engine room, finally coaxing the emergency generator into operation; with running lights on and one quarter power restored to the screws, the Captain ruddered the Elbe into the teeth of the squall as it closed its jaws around them. While the crew redoubled efforts to repair the primary generator, passengers remained confined to cabins, rules of emergency in force, with strict instruction to lock their doors; the storm and complications posed by their loss of power were convincingly given as the rationale for these impositions. No mention made of the assassins still presumed to be at large somewhere on board the troubled ship.

  Guards posted outside the door, the corridor in either direction cordoned off-limits to passengers, Doyle, Innes, Stern, and Pinkus—with whom they were now saddled, more reluctant to let him out of their sight than to endure his company— huddled in Stern's cabin around a kerosene lamp and the body of the black-clad suicidal assailant.

  Removing his mask revealed a man of about thirty with clipped, straight black hair and a brown, broad-browed face— Javanese, perhaps Filipino, thought Doyle. A small distinctive tattoo of abraded skin discolored the hollow of the man's left elbow: a broken circle, penetrated by three jagged lines. This design matched exactly the drawing on the piece of paper in Doyle's pocket, sketched from the scratchings on the wall near Selig's body. Upon examination, Doyle realized the mark was not a tattoo but a severe burn. Of the sort one would find on branded cattle.

  The man's clothes were fashioned from plain black cotton. Six weapons concealed on his person: knives holstered up each sleeve and pant leg, the suicidally employed double-barreled derringer, and a thin length of wire around his waist—a deadly garrote. Scars crisscrossed his burled knuckles and callused palms, knife wounds; a seasoned warrior. The bruises Innes and Doyle wore from their brief engagement with him bore vivid testimony to the man's mastery of hand-to-hand combat. Conclusion: a cold, efficient killing machine. They had no compelling reason to believe his surviving accomplices would be any less deadly.

  Doyle dropped a sheet over the corpse. All four men had to continually brace themselves against the bulkhead or bunks to fight the grinding up-and-down gyrations of the storm.

  "You still haven't explained, Mr. Doyle," said Stern. "How did the Zohar end up in your cabin?"

  "Along with the pills sewn into the lining of Mr. Selig's jacket, I found this key," said Doyle, holding it up for display. "Obviously not the key to your room or any passenger cabin, although it bears the identifying stamp of the Elbe, here...." He pointed out a minute version of the ship's insignia.

  "What's it for?" asked Pinkus impatiently.

  "I applied the key to every lock I could find convenient to this room. There is a seldom-used storage closet behind the gymnasium—you'd never see it unless looking for it; its entrance is obscured every morning and night by stacks of lounge chairs and seat cushions. This key opened that door. Inside this shallow closet, I found a recessed panel in the wainscoting; a neglected and no longer serviceable fuse box. Mr. Selig moved the Zohar from its original hiding place here—a simple hole cut into his mattress, by the way; small wonder he was so reluctant to leave the room—to this other location yesterday evening, after the Captain refused your request to use the ship's safe, the conversation I overheard."

  "I had no idea ..." said Stern.

  "No. He must have made the transfer while you were attempting to reach me before the seance last night, about an hour before the murder."

  "And how did his killers manage that without laying a hand on him?" asked Innes.

  Doyle produced two small packets of paper from his pocket and opened them for the others to see. ' 'When we discovered Mr. Selig's body last night, I found a small clump of clay just inside the door. I removed this second identical sample this evening from inside one of the coffins in the hold; a good amount of it, over a pound, but only in one coffin."

  "Okay, fine, Doc. So what's a little dirt got to do with the price of beer?" asked Pinkus, with all the impartial tact of a seasoned journalist.

  "Mr. Selig was a more devoutly religious man than yourself; is that a fair statement to make, Mr. Stern?" asked Doyle.

  "Yes."

  "So am I correct in assuming as a practicing Jew he would have been conversant with aspects of Judaic history and mythology?"

  "Absolutely: Rupert studied for many years."

  "Would it also be fair to say Mr. Selig took what those studies might have given to him very close to heart; one might almost say as gospel?"

  "Definitely—what are you driving at?"

  Doyle lowered his voice and leaned in over the lantern, the light from below setting off his features in a dramatically sinister way. "Are you at all familiar, Mr. Stern, with the legend of the golem?"

  "The golem? Yes, of course, I mean, in a passing way; as a boy my father told me the story many times."

  "Golem? What's'zat?" said Pinkus, who still emitted a faint sickly greenish glow in spite of an hour's scrubbing with a stiff steel brush.

  "The word golem derives from the Hebrew for fetus, or unformed life," said Doyle. "Said to be the name that Jehovah gave Adam when he breathed life into the figure he molded from the common clay of Eden."

  "Jehovah?" asked Pinkus, popping his chewing gum. "You mean ... jumpin' Jehovah?"

  "Jehovah is the Hebrew name for God," said Stern, amazed at the depths of the man's blockheadedness.

  "But the story of the golem that is more relevant to this discussion," said Doyle, turning to Stern, "begins in the Jewish ghetto of Prague in the late sixteenth century. A campaign of bloody pogroms was brought against the Jews of Prague, as there had been throughout Eastern Europe. But the attacks in Prague were particularly vicious and bloodthirsty. One of the elders of the temple was a scholar by the name of Rabbi Judah Low Ben Bezalel, a gentle, almost saintly figure. Rabbi Low desperately sought a way to protect the Jews in the ghetto from this deadly persecution. He spent years searching through the old temple libraries looking for an answer. One day, so the story goes, buried deep in the cellar of the Great Synagogue he found an ancient book of great and mystical power...."

  "Not the Book of Zohar, by any chance," said Innes.

  "The name of this book is not specified, but a copy of the Zohar would surely have been in the synagogues of Prague; a man of Rabbi Low's learning would certainly have known of it. In any case, as he read through th
is book, the Rabbi allegedly stumbled across a passage that contained a secret coded formula that with his incredible scholarship he was able to decipher....

  "The entire Zohar, by the way, is supposedly written like that, every sentence hiding some metaphysical mystery," added Stern.

  "So like what are we talking about here, some kind a' turning lead into money-type deal?" asked a wide-eyed Pinkus.

  "This passage revealed to Rabbi Low nothing less than the formula for bringing human life out of base earth that Jehovah used for the creation of Adam, the first man."

  "You gotta be kiddin' me," said Pinkus.

  "It's ... a legend, Pinkus," said Doyle.

  "How did he allegedly do it?" asked Innes.

  "Using pure water and clay from a pit dug in sanctified ground, he crafted the limbs, head, and torso of a giant figure crudely resembling a man. Then, according to the precepts of the ritual, he connected the pieces together and wrote a sacred Hebrew word on a slip of paper which he inserted under the figure's tongue...."

  "What word was that?" said Innes.

  "You'd have to ask Lionel's father about that, I'm afraid," said Doyle.

  "So did the golem come to life?" asked Pinkus anxiously.

  ' 'The next thing he knew, the golem, as he called it, sat up and began to move. When he spoke to it, the golem did exactly as he ordered; Rabbi Low realized he had created a servant that would follow his instructions to the letter. Eight feet tall, powerful arms and legs; small rocks in place of eyes, a crudely fashioned mouth. He used the golem for household labor until his confidence about its obedience grew; then Rabbi Low began to send the golem out into the night, frightening away anyone who might come into the ghetto to harm the Jews.

  "Every evening he would insert the paper, giving life to the monster. When its work was done at dawn, the golem returned home, the Rabbi removed the paper, and the golem lay like a statue in the Rabbi's basement. And people were so terrified of this horrible being roaming through the night that violence against the Jews in the ghetto came to a halt."

  "Not a bad yarn," said Pinkus, holding on to the bunk beds for dear life. "Kind a' like that whachamacallit, that Frankenstein guy."

  "It's been suggested that Mary Shelley derived a large part of her famous work from the legend of the golem," said Doyle.

  "No kiddin'," said Pinkus, with not the slightest idea who Mary Shelley might be.

  "There's more," said Doyle. "One Sabbath morning, when Jews make their religious observances and must stop all manual labor until sunset, Rabbi Low forgot to remove the slip of paper from the golem's mouth."

  "Uh-oh," said Pinkus. "I smell trouble."

  "You would be right, Mr. Pinkus. With Rabbi Low's control over the golem lost, the monster went on a terrible rampage. Block after block of shops and houses broken and ruined; many innocent people killed, most of them Jews, crushed and trampled by its mindless fury. Nothing could stop the golem until Rabbi Low finally tracked it down and removed the paper, saving the rest of the ghetto from certain destruction."

  The others were silent, hanging on every word.

  "The myth of the golem has always seemed to me to be a perfect metaphor for the apocalyptic power of unchecked human rage, as well as a wonderful parable about the life-affirming compassion of the Judaic tradition," said Doyle.

  Innes and Pinkus glanced sideways at each other like mystified schoolboys, both drawing a total blank.

  "Well, jeez," said Pinkus.

  "So what happened to the golem?" asked Innes.

  "The body of the golem was carried by Low and his friends to the cellar of the Great Synagogue of Prague, where it supposedly lies buried to this day, waiting for its life to be restored."

  Struggling to keep his balance as the battered ship took a particularly nasty twist, Doyle took out another piece of paper. "Gentlemen, I have here the ship's copy of the agent's manifest for those five coffins in the hold. Would you like to hazard a guess as to their port of origin?"

  "Not Prague," said Innes.

  "Exactly," said Doyle.

  "You gotta be joshin' me," said Pinkus.

  "Please, Mr. Doyle. You're not seriously suggesting that the golem of the ghetto of Prague was in one of those boxes," said Stern.

  "Or that an eight-foot-tall clay monster is still roaming around somewhere on board the ship," said Innes.

  "I suggest this," said Doyle. "If you're trying to obtain something from a man on board a ship in the middle of the ocean and you wish to attract no undue attention to yourself—''

  "Eight-foot-tall clay monsters are a choice idea," said Pinkus smartly.

  "—and you're aware that the man from whom you wish to obtain this object has a history of heart trouble and that he's aware of a legend about an eight-foot-tall clay monster that may be connected to the object you're attempting to steal and that you need to kill this man in order to get it but circumstances demand that his death not appear to be an obvious murder..."

  "You scare him to death," said Innes, the pieces falling into place.

  "Smuggle four men and one coffin full of clay covering an armature of some kind on board. Label the coffins as coming originally from Prague, to support the superstition. Remember: The passenger who heard the 'ghost' shriek also saw a large gray figure roaming in the hold and these second-class cabins are only two flights of stairs away; when the knock came at Mr. Selig's door last night and he opened it as far as the chain would allow ... I believe it was the sight of this 'golem'— being held by these two men—standing outside that precipitated his fatal heart attack."

  "How about that?" said Pinkus.

  "If that was the case, then what prevented them from going right in and stealing the book?" asked Stern. "The chain wasn't even broken."

  "Our sudden arrival interrupted them," said Doyle. "And what's the harm? They waited for another opportunity: Who was going to suspect he died of anything other than what it appeared to be?

  "Except that Mr. Selig bravely marshaled his resources in the last moments of his life: Grabbing a handful of the clay from the monster—some still remained under his fingernails— he used it to trace an outline on the wall of this tattoo he had seen on one of his assailant's forearms."

  "How 'bout that?" said Pinkus, falling back again on what he always said whenever he had nothing to say.

  "I guess it all makes a kind of sense, except how could they know Rupert had a heart condition?'' said Stern. ''Even I wasn't aware of that."

  "Mr. Selig lived in London; presumably they obtained the information from his doctor's office," said Doyle. "He told you he was being followed while you were there; how difficult could it have been?"

  Stern weighed the possibilities; after the recent events he'd been through, he was hard pressed to dismiss the idea out of hand.

  "Still seems like an awful lot of bother to go to just to get an old book," said Innes, slightly petulant that his brother had failed to confide any of these conclusions to him earlier and in private.

  "As Mr. Stern has told us, the Zohar is priceless and whoever hired these men is obviously willing to go to any lengths to obtain it."

  "I'd always thought it was nothing more than a collection of superstitious nonsense," said Stern. "What if the Zohar actually does contain some secret formula about the creation of life. Or its meaning ..."

  "Then priceless isn't good enough by half," said Doyle.

  "Yeah and besides," said Pinkus, eyes squinting, snapping his gum violently while he wrestled a tremendously obscure inner line of reasoning to the ground, "if they ain't even stole the book yet, how'd they get this monster to walk around by itself anyway?"

  Try as they might, to a note sounded from such a bottomless depth of stupidity, no one could respond.

  Doyle left Innes and Pinkus to oversee removal of the assassin's body, delivered Stern into the care of officers and trudged back to his cabin alone by the feeble light of an oil lamp. Gripping hard to the rails as he fought the pitch and roll of the deck
s, Doyle realized a mid-Atlantic storm by itself would be hardship enough for most, although he had lived through many more perilous nights aboard smaller ships on the open sea. He was more deeply troubled by the lingering uncertainties he hadn't shared with the others of his company, details that no one else had lit upon and pursued.

  If one of those coffins had been carrying a large clay figure, that left room in the others for four men to steal aboard. One of those dead by his own hand; a second gone overboard; the third member of the attack team had escaped past Pinkus in the second-class passageway. The fourth had most probably killed and then assumed the place of that young lieutenant on the bridge. That left two of them still on the Elbe, unaccounted for. And their leader, the man who had called himself Father Devine.

  Five men. Four coffins.

  The question: How did this Father Devine get on board the ship? He wasn't listed as a passager, and the ship's staff could find no trace of him. Doyle had been close to him that first day on deck and again at the seance; his age and girth didn't make him for one of the men in black, and that unfortunate lieutenant had been only twenty-three years old; Devine could never have replaced him on the bridge convincingly. And Doyle had encountered the man within an hour of their departure from port, not nearly enough time to have removed himself from a coffin in the hold; the hammering sounds from belowdecks hadn't been heard until that evening.

  Think, Doyle: A priest mingling among a busy ship full of departing passengers would raise no eyebrows; suppose he drifted up the gangway amid a group of people as if to see them off, then simply removed himself from view until they'd sailed from harbor. Yes; that tracked.

  There was also the matter of the design engraved on the dead man's arm. Doyle felt almost certain it had some hidden meaning, but try as he might he couldn't crack it....

  Let the unconscious mind work on this, he counseled himself. Effort won't help; the answer may bubble up to the surface when I least expect it.

  As the ship climbed up and down the canyons of the waves, Doyle struggled to unlock and open his cabin door. Darkness inside; the door flapped back and forth with the rocking.