The Flaming Sword Read online

  The shopkeeper, not a quick man, considered this and replied. “They told me to say nothing to anyone.”

  “About what?”

  “They said they would shut down my shop, intern me.”

  “They told you to say nothing to anyone about what?”

  “Please. They are watching me. Perhaps listening…”

  “I am watching you, too. And listening.”

  “I would not betray Talal.”

  “You would betray your mother for a shekel. What did they want to know?”

  “They asked me if I knew a man named Ayoub.”

  “Who?”

  “Nasir, I think it was. Nasir al-Ayoub.”

  “Do you know such a man?”

  “No. I don’t know him.”

  “Why did they ask you about Nasir al-Ayoub?”

  “They say he killed Talal.”

  “You know that I am Nasir al-Ayoub.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me. They showed you my picture.”

  The shopkeeper blinked at the sweat in his eyes, as if willing himself not to see.

  Nasir smiled grimly at him. “I think you killed Talal. I think you stuffed him in that hole.”

  “No, no. I had no reason.”

  “You owed him money.”

  “No!”

  “He wanted you to pay him. You thought no one would miss him, so you killed him.”

  “No!” The shopkeeper stared miserably at the gun as Nasir held it a little higher. “You are his friend? I was his friend, too. I gave him a place to live. A place to hide.”

  “He gave you money.”

  “He gave me some money, yes.”

  “So you killed him rather than paying him back. You lured him here and left him dead inside that hole where he would never be found.”

  “No! He came here by himself.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “You know. He wanted to use your shop. You told him about the tunnels. Why did he come here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know. He came to meet someone. Who?”

  “I don’t know who.”

  “What did he tell you? He didn’t crawl through that filth for nothing. He wanted to get into your shop. Why?” For the first time Nasir raised his voice.

  The shopkeeper trembled as if with cold. He wiped his face again and again; the hair on his forearm was like mud.

  “All right. He was angry. He said someone had betrayed him, and he was going to make him pay.”

  “Who?”

  “Who?”

  “Please. The man who betrayed him. Who was he? Did Talal say it was me?”

  “No! I don’t know. I don’t know.” The shopkeeper moaned over and over.

  Nasir was satisfied. He knew it wasn’t likely that Bukmun would have confided much to this sopping jelly of a man.

  But then the jelly surprised him.

  “I think it must have been the man who bought the rockets from him. But I don’t know who he was,” the shopkeeper whispered. “It was the man in Rome, he said. The man in Rome.”

  “What man in Rome?”

  “A man he saw on the television.”

  Seconds later, the shutter was open to the cooler air from outside and Nasir was gone.

  ***

  Down the street, in the white van, Toad watched Nasir walk briskly from the shop. “He’s had quite a discussion with the shopkeeper,” Toad reported from the driver’s seat.

  “What’s the story?”

  Toad was relieved to hear Ari’s voice from the other end. “You’re back?”

  “Came in last night. I’ll put you in the picture when you come in. What’s the story?”

  “He was drilling the shopkeeper to find out how much he knew, how much he might have told us.”

  “And?”

  “He talked. He told Ayoub that we had his picture. Said Bukmun was in a stew over a ‘man in Rome’ who betrayed him, a man he saw on television.”

  “So Ayoub and the shopkeeper don’t know each other?”

  “Apparently not—only from the photo. At least that’s what we’re meant to believe.”

  Ari chuckled. “Not everything people do is a ruse.”

  “It’s possible that Ayoub didn’t know we were listening…or didn’t care,” Toad replied dryly. “It’s also possible Ayoub did not kill Bukmun and is really trying to find out who did. But start multiplying possibilities and the product is less and less certainty.”

  Back in the headquarters building, Ari smiled at this; he knew that Toad thrived on low levels of certainty. He was the only man Ari knew who could keep a thousand possibilities in his mind at once without paralyzing himself. Most of his colleagues were too quick with theories—Toad, on the other hand, very slow coming up with a certainty. With Toad, it was partly that he had been trained in the severest tradition of the yeshiva, and partly that he believed in nothing.

  “So if Ayoub did kill Bukmun, he was just trying to find out how much the shopkeeper knew. But what’s the connection with a ‘man in Rome’?”

  Toad thought for a moment. “Pictures of Ayoub’s meeting in Rome have been on TV for days. Bukmun may have caught sight of Ayoub and realized he was the man who bought the Hawkeyes. The man who betrayed him.”

  “Betrayed him?”

  “I haven’t worked that out. It’s new. Shop Man was a little more open with Ayoub than he was with us.”

  “Could Ayoub have entered the shop Tuesday night through the tunnels and got out fast enough to show up at the front door?”

  “Yesterday we found a tunnel grate in the next street that showed evidence of recent entry. A person could crawl through that tunnel from the shop, get out into the street, and walk around the corner to the front door of the shop in about five minutes.”

  “Where’s Ayoub now?”

  Toad checked with the agent following Ayoub. “He just walked through the Damascus Gate. Looks like he’s making for home.”

  Salah-eddin Street, Jerusalem, 1000h

  “After today,” Hafiz al-Ayoub thought, as he lay on his couch and rubbed the ring with his thumb. Its worn gold felt like part of his body. “There will be no more heat, no more blood. Only a green and quiet peace.”

  For a second day, the old sheikh had eaten no breakfast. He felt he would never eat again. He wished only to lie quietly and enjoy for as long as possible the diminishing breeze that came through the window of his room. From the table by his couch, he picked up his book of Shirazi’s poems. Hafiz did not believe in the legend that this book could be used for divination, but he enjoyed the game; he would ask himself a question and then open the book to find the answer. These days his question was always the same.

  He opened the book at random and read:

  Dim, drunk, I crawled the years along

  Until, wiser, I locked away my passion;

  Then I rose a Phoenix from my dust;

  I closed my story with the bird of Suleiman.

  Satisfied as always, he closed the book again and contemplated the verses he had read. Outside his window the morning birds had gone quiet from the heat; they would not be heard again until sunset. Tonight, the sword would pass into his son’s hand and then he could rest.

  For forty years he had guarded the sword with its streak of fire, although he had seldom taken it from the hiding place and the tapestry sheath. He had carried it in his heart along with Jamila—perhaps that was why he had lost her—and he had carried it through the long legal wars in courts from The Hague to Jerusalem. For a long time he had carried it in trust for Nasir and perhaps for his son after him, although he now had no hope of seeing Nasir’s children. People who thought the sanctuaries were safe for all time were as
deluded as those who expected that the Israelis at any moment would take it in their heads to do the worst they were capable of. He had walked the careful path of Suleiman, refusing to acquiesce to the inner rage, staying watchful in the courts—at times even revealing a glimpse of the blade—until the day when the Rightful One would claim his own.

  His duty was ended now. After tonight, he could sleep.

  Nasir came into the room. “I got Amal to school.”

  Hafiz stirred, pulling himself up on his couch. “You should have a word with the teacher in the madrassah,” he said wearily. “Amal is likely to hit him one day.”

  Nasir gave a loud chuckle. He wanted to keep things light while he scanned the news on TV. With the sound on mute, the screen would not bother Hafiz, who was becoming noticeably less wakeful the last few mornings.

  “Why are you watching television in the middle of the day?” his father asked from the couch.

  “I want to see the news.”

  Hafiz settled back motionless again. Using his GeM to control the flatscreen, Nasir scrolled quickly through frozen images from a dozen news broadcasts of the last few days. Like train windows, the images flashed past of the dead Pope sprawled on a staircase, of suitably solemn world leaders, of authorities both PA and Israeli deploring what had happened; and then of lesser figures and lesser stories.

  There it was. He had paid little attention to it. The others at the station had made fun of him. Tuesday, 1000 hours—the item’s first appearance. He scrolled through several more appearances during the day and stopped to study one of them.

  When Hafiz awoke again, Nasir was gone. It was not right to say he had been sleeping—only dozing. He had been thinking of Nasir’s mother, of Jamila; he had locked her away in his heart so long before. His uncle had questioned the wisdom of the marriage, of the passion Hafiz felt for Jamila, in light of the work Hafiz was to do. But his uncle needn’t have worried, because Hafiz did his work strictly and seriously. When a child was not forthcoming, he had adopted one, reared him, and trained him. He had now added forty years to the eight centuries of peace on the holy mount: no new Crusade had been allowed to form, even in the worst of times, even amid worldwide jihad.

  He had managed the repercussions of the attack on al-Aqsa, which had nearly brought him to the grave. In truth, Hafiz smiled to himself, it had brought him to the grave. Drunken with rage, the others were demanding the worst. The practice of diplomatic delicacy had exhausted him to the point where the carrion birds in his blood freed themselves and now preyed steadily on him.

  It was martyrdom of a sort, he smiled to himself.

  One day his uncle Haytham had made the ultimate sacrifice, which he had expected to do. Consumed by two wars, worn out by the insistent pull of martyrdom, he died in the first Intifada. After the one-eyed Zionist general in 1967, Munich in 1972, the disastrous Egyptian attack in 1973—but the Intifada was a new thing. Haytham was exhausted by the frenzy, the stones in the air, the decapitations, and the red craters in the mud. One day he had collapsed in the street and died under the wheels of an IDF van—an accident, they said.

  That was the beginning of the forty years. From that day, he had carried the weight of the gold ring on his hand.

  The world continued, a cancer in remission one day and fulminating the next. A Jewish dentist murdered worshipers in the mosque at Hebron. Palestinian children blew themselves up in the markets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Rabin was assassinated. Rockets flew over Gaza and Israel. Between outbreaks, Hafiz struggled to keep a lock on his anger. It was beyond comprehension. The Americans lavished money on the Zionists, moved their embassy to Jerusalem, and refused to open their eyes. The Zionists talked themselves deaf about their liberty and their security. It was as the Prophet had said—God might as well have given the precious treasures of the Torah and the Gospel to an ass. In time, there was the excursion to Norway—on a private airplane—and at last Jamila awaiting him as he floated to the ground at Amman. It was compensation enough.

  Jamila’s father kept a peacock in his garden in East Jerusalem, and Hafiz had heard the peacock’s cry many mornings from his house. The families had long known each other; it was only natural for Jamila’s father to agree to the marriage, even though Hafiz’s father had lost his property. Among the leading families there was an understanding about Hafiz, and the family of Jamila welcomed him. Although she had traveled widely, had attended university in New York City, the instinct for home was strong in her. The peacock, the bird of Suleiman, had brought them back together, he joked.

  He took walks with Jamila in the evenings among the sedative trees of the Mount of Olives, and she came to understand hazily why he wore the ring and why he kept his eye on the Qubbet. Above them, the Dome receded into the sunset; at these times, the oath he had sworn melted from his memory with the last rays of day. Then, on a blue afternoon in the fall, when he was walking there with Jamila, an explosion slashed the air from the direction of the city. The Israelis had decided to open an ancient tunnel along the base of the Temple Mount, and there was rioting in the Muslim quarter. Many bombs followed that one; for months, he worked harder than ever before, but then the Second Intifada began, and with it his wife’s long decline and the painfully sweet adoption of Nasir. She could not have children, but she had desperately wanted Nasir—if only to fill the emptiness that was coming for Hafiz.

  For forty years, he had worn the ring while the darkness gathered and deepened around him. King Suleiman had used his ring to summon the jinn, enslaving them to build his great mosque. The cry of the bird of Suleiman would announce the Last Day, it was said. It was time now, thought Hafiz. It was past time. Martyrs prepare themselves for forty days; surely forty years was more than enough.

  Hafiz had put on his uncle’s ring just before he buried him and had never taken it off. But he had wanted Nasir to have a new ring. There was too much blood on the old one. He had told Nasir to bury him with the old ring and thus bury the old blood. Hafiz had hoped to wear it until the Day—now that hope was in his son.

  Simon Winter Centre for Genetic Research, Technion, Haifa, Israel, 1015h

  Joseph Rappaport closed his eyes for a few moments. At last the chaos caused by Emanuel Shor’s death was settling—files closed, police gone, himself appointed temporary Director. He had spent the morning putting his electronic signature on documents, including dozens of applications for information from the Cohanim database, all from America. As soon as possible, he would shunt this duty off on the assistant directors. The whole thing bored him.

  Rappaport had never understood Manny Shor’s obsession with the old Cohanim database. It had been well picked over for years by snobs, genealogists, and medical people researching obscure diseases.

  To Rappaport, the monoamine oxidase project was so much more compelling. To experiment with the genes that made people violent, that moved them to hatred—monoamine research promised to get at the root of this ancient curse. Some of Rappaport’s distant cousins from Venice had been transported and exterminated in the closing days of the Holocaust. Even growing up near New York, he himself had felt from some people an occasional coolness, the barest hint of disapproval of his face, of his name. Then, late one day in the time of Trump, he had gone from the lab to his tiny office in the Life Sciences building to find a drawing of a swastika hanging on the door. At first he felt afraid—he had looked around in terror at the darkening corridors—but then curiously fascinated. From that hour he was determined to find out what might be locked in the human codes that controlled the temperature of the heart—from cold looks to flaming fanaticism.

  But Manny had shown little interest in the monoamine project that now funded most of the laboratory’s work. The Cohanim thing brought in a big donation now and then from an American Jew who wanted to know if his ancestors were priests. Rappaport wondered why Americans, so proud of their independence and individualism, still needed to make these li
nks. Leaving America for Israel had caused him no concern at all—it didn’t matter to him where he lived, so long as the project he worked on was interesting. He felt no more connected to Haifa, Israel, than he did to his old neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This linkage others felt to a land or to a people or to a story—or to a God—was a mystery to him. He looked around his desk at the photos of Ernst Schrödinger, of Watson and Crick, of Stanley Cohen—these were his heroes, the people who explained life instead of romanticizing it. As a boy, he had read Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? and knew that he would spend his life answering that question.

  He had once asked Manny how he envisioned the world to come, and Manny had told him that, for a Jew, Heaven would be to sit peacefully in a garden with a minyan of brothers who love one another, learning and discussing Torah for eternity. Although the agnostic Rappaport had smiled at this, the vision suggested something to him. He would not admit it to anyone, but it moved him in the same way as the still meadows and waters of the Twenty-Third Psalm, which was the only part of the Bible he remembered.

  Although Rappaport did not believe in the world to come, he began to envision a world here and now where people would no long fear each other, but would sit down in peace and put their minds to work instead of their hatreds. To gain dominion over those old foes—prejudice and violence—surely that was worth his life’s work. Rappaport was not one of those geneticists who looked for more and more specialized diseases to conquer; he was interested in the universal disease of hate.

  Thus, the monoamine project. As a young scientist, he had read about a dozen men from the same Dutch family sent to prison because they were uncontrollably violent. One was a notorious street bully, and another had raped and knifed his own sister. All the men had a mutation on MAO-A1, a monoamine oxidase gene. He began to wonder: could violence and hate be genetically conditioned? Could a few manipulations of the human genome put an end to prejudice, terror, crime—perhaps even war? Could the very nature of humanity be changed?

  His goal was never articulated that way, but Rappaport spent the next twenty years working on it. The best work was being done at Technion; thus, he had come to Technion. He had reduced herds of animals to docility, tracked and manipulated the DNA of hundreds of criminals, and was reasonably sure that he knew how to proceed. As usual, however, the ethicists got in the way of the kind of experiments he wanted to do. He was more bemused than disappointed; after all, even the great James Watson had at one time called for a moratorium on DNA research out of fear that plagues might be accidentally unleashed. Still, he found it ironic that the Ethics Committee should stand in the way of making people more peaceful.