Bloodline (6 page)

Yael looked at the old man with a depth of affection, part granddaughterly, part maternal; she loved him so much, but his loneliness was of his own choosing.

“Why didn't you marry again after Judit was killed? You were a young man. You had a young daughter. Yet you never married.”

He looked at her mischievously. “I had lots of good times with ladies. Why should I upset so many by choosing just one?”

“C'mon, Zaida. We all know about your affairs. But why didn't you marry? Seriously!”

The old man shrugged. “After your grandmother . . .”

He shook his head sadly. There was no need for him to finish the thought. It was eloquent testimony to Judit's extraordinary qualities. Yael only wished she could have known her as she knew Shalman.

Then the twinkle came back into his eye, and he said, “Yael, darling, love is blind, but marriage is an eye-opener. Why get married again when I was looking after your mother and dozens of women felt sorry for me?”

Yael burst out laughing. She loved his irreverence with all her heart. But there was always something in his eyes when he made such jokes, and Yael had often found herself wondering if it wasn't a façade hiding some deeper, long-forgotten event. From the time she'd first begun inquiring about her family's history, her mother's mother, Judit, had always been spoken of with reverence—too much reverence—and to her young and inquisitive mind it always seemed as though her grandfather and her mother were trying to hide something from her.

Miriam reentered with a tray of tea and chocolate cookies and set it down on the coffee table.

“I think I can make up for your disappointment in me. I have a gift for you. I think it's very old, but I'm not sure it's anything important . . .”

“Oh, yes?” Shalman said with a raised eyebrow.

Yael drew the object from her coat pocket and placed it unceremoniously
on the table, wrapped as it was in a bandage taken casually from the hospital. Shalman wrinkled his nose as if fearing the swaddled object might be some macabre hospital souvenir or practical joke—a severed finger, or worse . . .

“What's this?” he asked quizzically.

“Not sure. Probably nothing. Something for your collection of historical tidbits. Maybe just a peace offering,” replied Yael with a smile.

Shalman gingerly began to unwrap the object, his curiosity piqued. Yael turned her gaze to the window and unconsciously changed topic.

“So I thought we might go out for lunch. I can make time. Beautiful day outside . . .”

Shalman suddenly cut her off. “Where did you get this?”

Yael turned back to see the small object unwrapped on the table and Shalman's eyes wide and staring at her.

“It was in the hands of a Palestinian kid who tried to blow up the Haredi at the Kotel. The police shot him, arm and leg, and—”

“Where?” Shalman cut her off sharply. “Where did he find it?”

“He tried to explode a bomb underground, near to the entrance to Warren's Shaft—King David's tunnel.”

Shalman leapt to his feet, holding the object tenderly in his hands, retreating to his desk to examine the stone more carefully. Yael continued the story, although she doubted that her grandfather was still listening.

“Only the detonator cap went off, thank God. But it must have brought down some masonry. Anyway, he was brought in unconscious for me to operate on, and I found that in his hand.”

Shalman studied the object methodically yet held it like a newly delivered granddaughter. He read the inscription, turned it over, turned it back again to reread. Then he viewed the sides, then the reverse, then the obverse; then he reread the inscription, then he turned it over and then over again.

Yael realized that she'd been holding her breath and was surprised at herself. She wanted to ask what he was thinking, but knew to keep silent.

Finally Shalman looked up at her and smiled. “You have . . .” He couldn't continue. She was surprised by the emotion in his voice.

Holding the object, he stood from his desk and walked over to his library, taking one book, then another, flicking over some pages but not really looking. Instead, energized, he walked to the window and continued to look at the object that the Palestinian boy had grasped with a handful of dirt just before he blacked out.

Yael sat there in fascination, wondering whether it was her grandfather's usual sense of exaggeration or something else.

“Well?” she asked after what seemed like minutes of silence.

Instead of answering, Shalman bellowed, “Miriam!”

Suddenly the door flew open. “Fetch Mordecai. And Zvi. And Sheila. And fetch Mustafa . . . he'd be fascinated by this. And . . . oh, hell. Fetch everybody! Now! Immediately! Go! I don't care if they're in a meeting. Go! You're still there. Why? Go!”

“What?” asked Yael.

Shalman shrugged, suddenly coy. “What do you think it is?”

“Don't play games, Shalman.”

“No game. I want to know. What do you think it is?”

“If you don't tell me what it is, I'll take it to the Bible Museum.”

“Don't even joke! Treasure hunters and publicity hounds. Amateur
mamzer
s!” He motioned with a theatrical gesture for Yael to come over to the light of the window. On the sill, there was a magnifying glass. Holding the stone, he turned it slowly, lowered his voice to a reverential whisper, and said softly, “It's a seal, of a mason from Solomon's Temple, when he was building the underground walls. It's perfect. It's intact. It's wonderful . . . I've never . . . didn't even think that in my life . . .”

“That's it? A seal? You've got to get out more often, Shalman, and get some perspective.” It might have been a casual joke, but again the words were harsher from her lips than she intended them to be. She turned away from the window.

Yael turned suddenly when she heard a gasp from the doorway. Shalman also turned and saw Miriam still standing there, looking on in rapt attention.

“Go! Now! Bring them all.”

He turned back to Yael, and calmed himself down. “It says, ‘
I, Matanyahu, son of Naboth, son of Gamaliel, have built this tunnel for the glory of my king, Solomon the Wise, in the twenty-second year of his reign.
' ”

Yael turned back to face her grandfather; she'd never seen his face so luminous. He'd always been a lovely old man to her, but now he looked zealous, electrified.

“I have to get Zvi to give an exact translation—not just the words, but their meaning, the nuance, but I'm pretty sure
 . . .”

Yael stared at him lovingly, the significance of what he had just said not lost on her. Shalman's thin voice shifted register into his “lecture voice.”

“Let me try to explain . . . The tunnel builder, Matanyahu, son of Naboth, son of Gamaliel, mounted it somehow onto the wall so that everybody who passed by climbing up the tunnel would see it and know who'd built it. And God would know that he built it.” Shalman stopped and faced Yael directly with a smile. “Or something like that.” He lowered the object. “Over the millennia it must have got covered up by dirt or mud or something. But after three thousand years, to know the name of the man who built the tunnel under David's city . . .”

Suddenly there was the sound of footsteps approaching quickly. The door flew open, and two elderly archaeologists rushed into the room.

“A seal!” shouted one.

“From the First Temple,” said the other.

Furious at being upstaged, Shalman yelled in fury, “Miriam, why did the Almighty give you such a big mouth?”

I
T WAS ALWAYS DANGEROUS,
but Yael's life was so pressured that the moment she felt the vibration, she picked up her phone, one eye on the frenetic traffic ahead of her, the other eye on the illuminated screen, and quickly read the words of the text message.

It was a request that she return to the hospital as quickly as possible. That meant one of three things, or maybe all three at the same time: one, an urgent new case, somebody who needed surgery immediately; two, one of her patients was in postoperative trouble; or three, the chief surgeon was being pressured by the hospital administration to achieve some sort of new efficiency and he needed Yael's help to frame a response telling them to go to hell but without upsetting them too much.

She was on her way back from the Israel Museum anyway; she always returned, even for half an hour, to check personally on the recovery of all her patients before quitting for the night. Pulling into the parking lot, she wondered which of the three usual summonses it would be this time—or maybe there'd be a fourth that the bureaucrats had suddenly invented to ensure that the doctors knew who was running the hospital and who was paying the salaries. It was all so infantile, and so typical of Israeli bureaucracy—another reason why Yael had declined the past two promotions she'd been offered from the hospital, preferring instead to do what she loved most and not accepting more money for a new level of administrative responsibility.

Walking quickly toward her boss's office, she nodded to the secretary and went straight in.

“So, what's up?”

Pinkus Harber was only ten years older than Yael but looked as if he could be her grandfather. Like Yael, he had no life outside of
the hospital. Twice divorced, with four kids who lived elsewhere, he was the archetypal obsessive personality who'd driven himself into the ground. She adored him, as he adored her, and once, in a reception at the hospital, he'd tried to get too friendly and she'd deflected any hope he may once have harbored about a relationship. But it hadn't affected their professional or personal bond, and they remained both valued colleagues and dear friends.

“Your last patient, the Palestinian kid . . .”

Yael waited for the bad news.

“We have to go in again. He was doing fine in recovery, but then an hour after we took him back into the ward, his BP suddenly dropped massively and we had to pump him full of adrenaline. We nearly lost him. One of his major arteries must have bled.”

Yael frowned and recalled every moment of the four hours she'd spent repairing his body. She shook her head in surprise. “No, not possible. There were no major arteries. He was incredibly lucky. The bullets missed all the biggies and only minor ones were lacerated. I fixed them up. I checked his BP after the closure, and it was fine and rising. It's something else—gotta be.”

Pinkus shrugged. “What?”

“Dunno, but it couldn't be from surgery. I didn't miss anything. I didn't go into his body cavity or his chest or anything like that. I don't think we should reopen him—not yet. Let's just observe him for the next twenty-four hours and keep him on meds and support and see what happens. I suppose you've ordered close observations,” she said. “Have we got a reading on his iron yet?”

“Very low. Probably thalassemia. He's got a huge hemoglobin count and a low red cell count, so I've ordered a profile.”

“Do you think it could be something else?” she asked.

“He wouldn't have gone into shock after the operation because of his thalassemia. Half of the Arabs suffer from it. No, it's something else. But I agree that we can afford observations for twenty-four hours rather than schlep him back into surgery. Oh, and there's one more thing . . .”

The look on his face told her that it wasn't good news. She waited for him to speak again.

“His blood group . . . AB negative . . . very rare, of course. We have a supply shortage. Donations are almost impossible. I know that we can use a negative, but . . . what I mean is . . .”

Yael shook her head, knowing exactly where this was going. AB negative blood types accounted for only one percent of the Israeli population. She herself was one of the very, very few in the country, which was why she was always called upon, every four months, to donate some of her blood.

“No way. No damn way. I sweated blood for him for four hours. I'm not giving him any more, especially my actual blood. Anyway, fill him up with universal O neg. He'll be fine.”

“Not sure if I want to risk it if he's suffering from thalassemia. He's been through trauma, and I'm concerned about an adverse reaction. Better for him to have AB negative. And that's where we have a problem, because of supply shortages.”

“Isn't there . . .”

Pinkus shook his head slowly.

“Anywhere?” she asked.

Again he shook his head. “We've phoned Tel Aviv, Haifa, everywhere. It's in such short supply.”

Yael sighed. “My damn
mazel
. That's all I need. An Arab with my blood group.”

Pinkus grinned. “Israel is the land of coincidence.”

By the time she returned to the intensive care unit, Bilal was stabilized, but she knew just by looking at him that the pallor of his skin and the deflated nature of his body meant that he was on life support. Again she searched her mind for something she'd missed when she was operating inside his body. But after she'd repaired the damage to his blood vessels and his muscles, and pumped him full of a cocktail of intravenous antibiotics, he should already have started to recover. Nor did it seem to be a severe adverse reaction to the medicines she'd prescribed. A young
man in full strength shouldn't be behaving like an old man grasping at staying alive.

She checked his charts and was worried by his vital signs. But she had no idea what it could be. Still, now that he was stabilized, even though on virtual life support, she had the time to check other things. He could have had a problem with his liver, his kidneys, his gut; something outside of her operation must have happened to have caused such a massive blood pressure drop. If he was suffering from thalassemia, then he'd be anemic, but after the operation his blood pressure had been normal.