The Jerusalem Diamond (10 page)

“Contraband?”

“His family smuggled. He says they brought tobacco across the border to sell to the British soldiers. The British could buy all the tobacco they wanted, so we can safely assume the family was smuggling hashish. He doesn't remember the year. But he says the Turks had just left Palestine and the British hadn't been there very long. We guess at 1919. At any rate, he says that when he dug a deep hole to bury his contraband, he uncovered objects in the floor of the cave.”

“What sort of objects?”

“He doesn't remember clearly. He knows there were heavy metal utensils that he sensed were very old, and stones of colored crystal in a small bag of rotten leather. His father brought everything to Amman and sold it to an antique dealer for sixty-eight pounds sterling. He remembers the amount. It was the most money the family had ever had at one time.”

“Has anyone talked with the antique dealer?”

“The antique dealer has been dead for thirty-two years.”

“You believe the Bedouin?”

“He has no reason to lie. Without being asked he said that sometimes,
if the soldiers had no money, his father would trade for the copper buttons from their uniforms.” Leslau snapped off the flashlight. “Come on,” he said.

But Harry sat in the darkness. He reached out and rested his palm on the warm, stony clay, unwilling to leave.

“Come on, come on,” Leslau called.

Reluctantly, Harry followed him outside the cave.

“This land,” Leslau said. “You have to get used to it. Yesterdays keep overlapping today. The ground, so many peoples have lived and died on it. You can't scratch the dirt to plant a tree without finding their traces. The Highway Ministry digs a roadbed and uncovers sarcophagi of princes. An Arab farmer decides to deepen his cellar and finds a mosaic that turns his house into a museum.”

They had stopped for coffee in Jericho at an outdoor café. On the other side of a stone wall, an elderly Arab wearing a dark suit and a fez walked among his orange trees.

They sat and sipped the coffee. Harry thought about the men who had scurried in the face of doom, seeking to sequester their religion in holes in the ground. “They hid well,” he observed. “One hiding lasted almost a thousand years, and the deeper one almost made it all the way.”

“Very little has been recovered,” Leslau said. “I've spent months studying the scroll. Nine years ago, some superb bronze-and-silver vessels were discovered in a Jerusalem cave. I'm certain one of the passages, in a convoluted and cryptic manner, refers to this burying. But I believe the truly important objects—the Ark, the Tabernacle, perhaps the Tablets of Law themselves—lie somewhere beneath the earth not far from us, waiting to be found.”

Driving back to Jerusalem, each was occupied with his thoughts.

“I want to work with you,” Harry said.

“No.” Leslau shifted gears savagely. “I don't need you. I have access to the best scholars in Israel. I'm depending on you to buy the diamond.

“Perhaps we'll unscramble the scroll tomorrow and find every object it describes. Almost certainly we won't. Maybe we'll never find anything concrete. But the excitement over the second Copper Scroll will
ensure renewal of my grant for some years, and I'm prepared to spend my life in the search.” He hunched over the wheel, looked from the road to fix Harry with his eyes. “The diamond is worth an enormous sum. But I don't give a damn about that. I want you to get it because it came from the Temple. The Temple, man! Think of it.”

Harry thought, and stared. “If you don't find the things listed in the scroll, you'll stay here, continuing to search?”

Leslau nodded.

“You've done such important work. In the event of failure, why not move on to something else?”

“When you were at the Vatican, did you perhaps have an opportunity to observe the conveying of saintly relics?”

Harry smiled and shook his head.

“A room in the Apostolic Palace is lined with shelves filled with containers of ashes, slivers of bone and other remains of early Christian saints and martyrs. A librarian places pinches of dust from these containers in envelopes that go out as registered letters to new churches all over the world. According to canon law, a relic must be enclosed in the altar of every church.”

Harry grunted.

Leslau brushed aside his squeamishness. “You see earthly remains. I see the reason for the law. The Church recognized the absolute need of modern man for direct contact with the beginnings of his faith.”

“What had that to do with you?”

“I have acknowledged the value of dust,” Leslau said. “But I am not talking of spending my life searching for dust. What I intend to find is the very framework on which the Old Testament rests.”

Harry paused as he got out of the car. “I'd like to study the original scroll.”

Leslau looked annoyed. “I think not,” he said. “
Shalom
.” He pulled the door closed and the car moved away, motor skipping.

Harry stared after it, depressed by the rudeness. He was aware suddenly of jet lag. Nearby, an old man rhythmically tugged on a rope, moving a fan to keep the flies from his pushcart, which was heaped with dates. Harry bought half a kilo of the fruit and stood there, contemplating the prospect of his lonely room.

Akiva had instructed him to wait at the hotel until Yosef Mehdi
contacted him, but instead he walked west, eating dates. He ventured into the narrow side streets, gradually losing the tension. Behind the tourism propaganda and the commercial hype about Jerusalem the Golden was a kernel of truth that boggled his soul.

The city was beautiful.

8

JERUSALEM

Harry went slowly, sampling the neighborhoods, looking at the faces. He soon lost his way and wandered, but then things became familiar; he realized he was near the University and he had a destination, the Israel Museum.

He went at once to a painting he had seen three times before, and sat on a bench and stared at “Harvest in Provence” as he would look at a diamond: first as a whole, then a small area at a time. The colors were almost an assault, the yellow field, the orange shocks of grain, the blue-green sky like a lowering fate under which one small man struggled. He could almost walk into the field and touch the insanity that had brought suicide to Vincent Van Gogh two years after it was painted.

Finally he moved away, to an exhibit of ancient copper treasure found in 1960, in a cave in a steep cliff wall three hundred meters high, by an archeologist who had been searching for more Dead Sea Scrolls in the Judaean Desert. The objects were axes, mace-heads, and crowns and scepters, superbly worked. They were from the Chalcolithic Period,
a pre-Hebrew era, but looking at them he felt a deep resentment for David Leslau, and a yearning.

Prowling the museum, he saw and recognized his own mortal sin. He ached to find all the wonderful buried things. He coveted as his own the creative madness of Van Gogh. He hungered after every interesting woman in the world. He was the supreme glutton, he wanted everything beautiful.

The sun was down by the time he had walked from the museum to King George V Street. Like night moths, prostitutes in summer dresses were already patrolling in pairs. Harry felt at home; it could have been Eighth Avenue. He ate in a hole-in-the-wall off Jaffa Road, in which the cook spoke Russian—four blinis and then a small sea of cold borscht containing islands of hot potato. Outside, as he hailed a cab, two of the hookers approached.

“
Chaver
,” one of them said, “you've got us a taxi?” They were attractive and young, one blond, one dark. Their eyes danced, daring him.

He thought of the lonely room and held wide the door. “
Bona achayot
Come on, sisters,” he said.

The blond was Therese, short and plump. Kochava, the swarthy one, was skinny and wiry-looking. They walked through the hotel lobby with great dignity and composure.

In his room, they smiled at him. “Well,” he said.

There was a knock on the door. But it was not an Israeli house detective. There was no one.

The knock sounded again.

It came from the door to the adjoining room. When he unlocked and opened it he saw that a tall woman stood there.

“Mr. Harry Hopeman?”

“Yes?”

“I am Tamar Strauss. I have been assigned to work with you.” Her English had the Israeli semi-British accent. Her skin was so dark that at first glance he had believed her black; perhaps from Iran or Morocco, he thought. She was about twenty-seven, full-bodied, in a light-blue,
simply cut dress. Her mouth was slightly large, her nose was a bony curve, cruel and beautiful. He became aware that he was staring.

“May I come in?” she asked. Therese, or perhaps Kochava, whispered and giggled. The woman looked past him for the first time. “Ah, I intrude,” she said politely. Her expression did not change.

He felt like a fifteen-year-old caught behind the barn. “Not at all.” But she had already begun to withdraw.

“As you can see, I am staying here. Let us talk tomorrow morning. Good night.”

“Good night,” he said to the closing door.

When he turned back to Therese and Kochava, the party was over before it began. It took him a long time to make them understand he wanted them to depart. He paid them generously and led them to the door. “
Shalom
,” Kochava said, doing her best to look regretful.

“
Shalom
, Therese.
Shalom
, Kochava.
Shalom, shalom
,” he said, like a beginning lesson in a mad Hebrew primer: See Therese and Kochava leave. See Harry knock on the door to the adjoining room, see the door swing open.

The woman had changed. The blue dress was on a hanger in the open closet, and now she wore a dark-blue peignoir, severely cut. She was holding a hairbrush. Her hair, which had been worn in a tight bun, hung from her shoulders like a pelt, thick and black.

“I can talk now.”

“One moment, please.” The door swung shut. When it opened, the closet was closed, the hairbrush out of sight. Her feet, narrow and brown, with nails like shells, now wore slippers.

“Come in.”

“Thank you.” He sat in the chair, she on the bed. “Miss … Strauss, you said?”

She nodded. “Strauss.”

“Why have you been assigned to work with me?”

“It is believed that I may be of use.”

“Whose belief might that be?”

She ignored the question. “I am an antiquarian at the Israel Museum.”

“Why do I need an antiquarian?”

“My specialty is disproving the authenticity of modern objects which have been made to look old.”

“We are talking about gems, my specialty. All gems are old.” Suddenly he understood how David Leslau felt. “I don't want you.”

“I'm afraid my instructions did not include offering you a choice,” she said calmly.

“I have come here to do what I agreed to do. I did not agree to work with anyone.”

“Sleep on it,” she suggested. “We can discuss it in the morning.”

He felt a reluctance to leave. “I was at your museum all afternoon,” he said. To his annoyance, he had to force himself to walk to the door. He had been ready to discuss Van Gogh with her.

For the first time he saw amusement in her eyes. “I trust you enjoyed it. Good night, Mr. Hopeman.”

“Good night, Miss Strauss.”

“Actually, it is
Mrs
. Strauss,” she said as her door closed.

An hour later there was another knocking. This time, however, it was the front door of her room. He heard her admit someone, a man with a deep voice. They spoke Hebrew, but Harry couldn't determine what they were saying.

Both of them laughed a lot.

In a little while they switched on the television.

He was lying on his bed, listening to her loud TV, when his telephone rang.

“Front desk, Mr. Hopeman. We have a package for you.”

“Mail?”

“I believe it was hand delivered a short time ago. By taxi.”

“I'll call you back,” he said, and hung up. But the same voice answered when he dialed the desk. “Will you send it up?”

“Yes, sir.”

In a few minutes a bellman handed him a five-inch cube, wrapped in brown paper, with his name and hotel written in spidery script on two sides. When the man left, Harry placed the package in the middle of the table.

He showered and put on pajamas. When he came out of the bathroom,
the television suddenly went off in the next room and it was very quiet.

He held the package to his ear but heard nothing. Three weeks before, a motorcycle packed with explosives had gone off on Jaffa Road, killing people; he had seen the scarred pavement that afternoon. Here, bombs came in dolls, in books, in coffee cans. In small brown packages and in plain white envelopes.

He placed the package in a bureau drawer and covered it with underwear and shirts. He moved a heavy leather chair in front of the bureau.