The Devil in Jerusalem (33 page)

“Hod made him eat the piss and doody,” Gabriel blurted out.

The other children went silent, nodding in horror at the memory.

Bina saw Johnny blanch.

Amalya took Shoshana into her arms, kissing the little girl's lovely, bright curls. “They never let Eli eat. If the Messiah was in a good mood, he'd throw Eli some scraps from his plate. Once, he decided to do Eli a ‘favor' and got Hod to force a lot of food into his mouth and pour arak down his throat. When he threw up, he told Goldschmidt to feed him his vomit.”

The children were all nodding in agreement, looking at each other. They seemed strangely relieved, as if they, too, were throwing up poison and were glad to have it out of their systems.

Morris shifted in his seat, his hands gripped in fists.

Amalya looked around questioningly.

“Go on.” Bina nodded to her encouragingly. “We are upset, but not at you, at how much you've all suffered. You were victims. You are all very brave.”

“Once, I heard a noise in one of the suitcases underneath the playpen in the children's room. I opened it, and I found Eli, tied up like a chicken, a kippah shoved inside his mouth. I wanted to take him out, but they wouldn't let me. The next day, I saw Eli walking with a limp,” Amalya said, almost choking on the words.

“The Messiah hated Eli even more than Menchie!” Yossie declared. “He made the rest of us keep away from him.”

Gabriel nodded. “He told us we should also hate him and called him Stinky.”

“He even said a few times that in the end, he'd kill him,” Amalya whispered, suddenly overcome. “I wanted to help Eli! I wanted to help Menchie, too, but they wouldn't let me!” She sobbed as if her heart would break.

Bina put her arms around the girl. “You are helping them both right now, this very minute, Amalya. Remember that.”

“But you haven't told us what he did to you, Amalya,” Johnny said gently. “Won't you tell us about yourself?”

Her pretty face drained of color. “It was nothing like he did to Menchie and Eli. Sometimes, though, he'd hit my back with a whip. He said he liked the sound it made against me.” She closed her lips, trembling.

There was more, Bina felt. Much more. A beautiful fourteen-year-old girl in that house among those beastly men. But she didn't press. Truthfully, she had heard all she could stand for one day. And it was certainly enough to issue an arrest warrant through Interpol to have Shem Tov extradited. But was it enough to get a conviction?

 

29

Detective Tzedek walked in through her front door, kicking off her shoes, then reaching for the remote. She just wanted there to be some normal voices in the room, something to drown out the incessant repetition of words and phrases going through her head along with unbearable, nightmarish images. She made herself a cup of hot green tea, sitting on the couch and staring at the screen without seeing or hearing anything.

This was taking over her life, she thought helplessly, spreading evil and darkness over all the good things she believed in: marriage, motherhood, faith. She picked up the phone and called her mother.

“I came home early. I'll pick up the kids today.”

Both Ronnie and Lilach's kindergarten and nursery school were in walking distance of Bina's house, but it was her mother who usually picked them up, caring for them until Daniella got home from work.

“Hard day, honey?” her mother said with sympathy.

A child survivor of Auschwitz, her mother was one of the kindest people she knew. All that horror, all that evil, had just washed over her, never touching her essential being. Daniella often thought it strange that she, a second-generation survivor, probably felt more hatred for those responsible, people she would never forgive or forget. At a very young age, she told her mother that after the Holocaust every Jew needed a gun and to know how to use it. But her mother had simply smiled and shaken her head. “Not everyone,” her mother disagreed. “That is why we have Jewish soldiers and Jewish policemen,” she'd say. “Why we live in a Jewish country.” It was one of the reasons Bina had gone straight from the army to the police, starting out as a policewoman and working her way up to detective.

“How can you tell how hard my day was, Mom?”

“You never come home early.”

Bina smiled to herself as she hung up. No one knew her better than her mother. The bond between them was so strong, so intimate, so protective and caring. She'd never imagined the word “mother” could mean anything else, until now.

As she set out to fetch her children, she breathed deeply, exhaling her stress. It was a beautiful spring day in May, the smell of blooming jasmine and honeysuckle perfuming the streets of Talbiya. Once she retrieved her children, she walked along slowly, holding Ronnie by the hand and pushing Lilach in her stroller. Their childish voices rose and fell, tinkling with innocent laughter and incessant sweet chatter. They sang songs and told her stories about the pictures they had drawn and the new tunes they were learning for Shavuot, the harvest festival. Once home, they ate their usual pre-dinner snacks of fruit and cold chocolate milk. And when she bathed them that night, she took a long time drying off their childish bodies, unable to stop herself from kissing Lilach's little chubby wrists and ankles over and over again, until the child finally wiggled out of her grasp, begging her to stop.

She had been brought up to believe in God. To believe in people. To believe that evil didn't really exist, that it was simply an absence of good, the way darkness is an absence of light.

She couldn't believe that anymore.

Evil was real, a force in the world. The Holocaust had proven that. A million and a half children tortured and murdered by mass killers who considered themselves idealists, pioneers, visionaries of a new master race. It had happened in her own century, not in the Middle Ages, at a time when people went to the movies and spoke on the telephone.

And now, terrorists claiming loyalty to Allah slaughtered and kidnapped children in schools, used them as human shields to hide rocket launchers, sanctioned the sexual abuse of little girls by old men, calling it “marriage.” The Internet was flooded with thousands of images of child pornography, each one a horrific murder of some innocent child's soul. And these images were uploaded by people all over the world of every race and religion. It was a war against children, and many of the people involved called themselves religious idealists or strict fundamentalists.

Of one thing she had no doubt: if you hurt a child, you could not be a God-fearing person of any religion, certainly not of the Jewish religion. She took out a Bible, flipping through the pages. There it was, the passage she'd been looking for, Leviticus 18, verse 21:
And you may not make any of your children go through the fire as an offering to Molech, and you may not put shame on the name of your God: I am the Lord
. And those who did were to be ostracized, condemned, stoned.

She tried to imagine the Jews of biblical times, people who had seen and heard God in the desert, laying their precious babies on the outstretched arms of a cruel stone statue, watching as the fire in its belly consumed their children. It had happened around the corner from her, in the Valley of Hinnom, where people now picnicked. What irresistible force was it that could make a person go against everything decent, everything human, allowing him to hurt a child, his own child?

Perhaps it was the other side of the same yearning that urged him to connect to love, goodness, and the Divine? The devil, whoever he was, needed that yearning, needed that idealism to produce the opposite. Perhaps even a Shem Tov must have once sincerely hungered to reach God, a longing that had taken a 180-degree turn to the opposite. Certainly Daniella and Shlomie Goodman had been pursuing goodness when they had been seduced to pursue the opposite.

She went to her computer and Googled the word “devil.”

In kabbalah, he was called the Sitra Achra, literally, “the other side,” the side opposed to the sacred and divine, the side of impurity and darkness. In Islam, he was Shaytan, the “whisperer,” who speaks into the chests of men and women, urging them to commit sin. To Catholics he was the fallen angel, Lucifer, the great seducer, who destroys man's desire to be good out of envy. The Hindus actually consecrated temples to the worship of Kali, the all-devouring, who delights in destruction, perdition, and murder in any form.

Bina thought of the years stretching ahead and the never-ending war she was involved in, the infinite stream of criminals causing havoc in the world. Did she have the strength for it? And would the little she could do actually matter in the larger picture? It was like using a teaspoon to bail water out of a sinking ship.

Noah came in at eight.

“What's up? You look wasted!” he said cheerfully, kissing her cheek and sitting down next to her on the couch.

She leaned her head against his strong shoulder.

They had met in the army. He was a young corporal and she was assigned to Intelligence. She remembered the first time she'd seen him from afar, standing on a hill in the Golan peering through binoculars at a Hezbollah terrorist outpost. He looked so tall and manly, his back straight, his arms and face chiseled with strength and youth and determination, his knitted skullcap sloping at a jaunty angle. Before she even met him, she'd fallen in love with the firmness of his stance, his calm, business-like demeanor as he faced the unknown. There had been an attempted Hezbollah terrorist kidnapping just weeks before, two soldiers killed and a third wounded. The enemy was always there, always waiting for the slightest lapse in vigilance.

“I think I'm in the wrong business,” she whispered.

“What's up?” he repeated, stroking her forehead.

“I'm just … I don't know anymore.” She shook her head.

“Don't know what, honey?”

“This Shem Tov, the things he and his Hassidim did to those helpless kids while the mother stood by hypnotized and the father was off in Wonderland…”

“So, you'll put him and his cronies behind bars for a long, long time so they can't do it again.” He shrugged. “And you'll teach the parents a lesson they won't forget.”

“And then what? This Shem Tov will just be replaced by another Shem Tov. The parents by other brainwashed, naïvely religious morons. And the children … the children…” She felt herself suddenly sobbing. She buried her head in her husband's clean, warm shirt, listening to the steady beat of his reliable heart.

He stroked her head. “You remember that passage in the Torah? The one that has your name in it?”

“My name?” She took the tissue he handed her, blowing her nose. She was embarrassed. She never cried.

“Our name,” he corrected himself. “‘
Tzedek, tzedek tirdof
,'” he quoted.

“‘Pursue justice'?”

“Right. Did you ever wonder why the Torah doesn't say, ‘Justice, justice, do it'? Why ‘pursue it'?”

She shrugged, mystified.

“I'll tell you why. Because you can never really catch justice. You can run after it, but it will always be just beyond you. But that doesn't absolve us from trying. Bina, keep running after it. That is all God asks of us.”

“But how can I bring another child into such a world? I feel my whole body has been tainted. My soul feels polluted.”

He pulled her closer, squeezing her shoulder. “Then we'll wait. This, too, shall pass, my love. Consider it a war wound, shell shock. Take the time you need to heal.”

She gathered him in her arms and held him to her, the incarnation of all that was good in the world, she thought, of all she loved and would fight to keep safe.

She thought about the coming meeting with Daniella Goodman. How,
how
was she going to break through to that soul so long encased in permafrost? On a whim, Bina went to the computer and searched for “mothers in cults.” What she read astonished her, changing completely how she viewed not only the entire case but Daniella Goodman herself.

That night, when she lit the Sabbath candles, shutting her eyes as was customary before reciting the prayer ushering in the holy day of rest, she pressed her fingers against her eyelids a little harder than usual as she peered into the thick, heavy darkness. God, she prayed silently, may it be Your will that evil be wiped from the face of the earth. And in the meantime, please make me understand how to put Menachem Shem Tov and his accomplices behind bars for a very, very long time. Please, God, show me the way!

When she was done, a sudden image lit up in her brain. The image of Daniella Goodman.

That, she understood, was God's answer.

 

30

He was the president and the prime minister. He was Aaron the High Priest and Elijah the Prophet. He was Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney. He was an angel on a platform so high above the earth, she could barely see his outline. It was as if Moses had climbed down off Mount Sinai, the tablets of Law in his hands, and instead of talking to the wise elders, he had inexplicably pointed to some obscure woman in the throngs, choosing her alone out of the minions.

He was the Messiah. And he had chosen her.

Daniella's head swirled with amazement and incomprehension and joy and pride.
He
had chosen her!

How was it possible? She was nothing, no one. And yet, the miracle had happened. He could see things in her soul that she herself could not even imagine. Great things! He, the all-seeing, all-wise, closer to God than the angels themselves, had chosen her!

He loved her. He wanted her.

Oh, the miracle of it!

When Shlomie returned from the Ukraine, she hardly noticed him. Nothing changed. The Messiah and his boys had, more or less, moved into her home, helping her with the children. At Shem Tov's insistence, she no longer allowed Shlomie to sleep in her bed.