The Jerusalem Diamond (19 page)

He told her about Monsignor Harrington. “The people who asked you to work with me—would you ask them to watch him for us?”

“Yes, I will.”

“I'm beginning to think I need every edge,” he said. “You a divorced lady?”

“He died,” she said, and sipped her coffee.

Dear Mr. Hopeman:

Please go to Masada and wait there until we contact you
.

Let me thank you for your admirable patience and cooperation. I regret that it has been necessary to delay our transaction, but I am certain you understand
.

I look forward to meeting you
.

Sincerely yours,
Yosef Mehdi

She didn't appear surprised. “Masada is in the desert, away from people. Tour buses bring groups, but fewer will come during the summer heat. And there would be no soldiers to frighten our friends.”

“Will we have to camp out?”

She considered. “On the Dead Sea side of the mountain there is a hostel where we could stay. But usually young tourists are there, and Mehdi might not want to approach you in their presence. On the desert side there is a cabin, used occasionally by a ranger from the National Parks and Nature Reserves. If it is empty, perhaps I can get permission to use it.”

Half an hour later, she telephoned his room.

“All set,” she said.

They drove again to Arad. While she shopped, he took the rented car to a filling station and made certain of the water, oil and fuel. As an afterthought, he bought a bottle of Israeli brandy. Then he picked her up with the provisions.

Not far from Arad they turned off the blacktop highway and the road became loose stones and sand that shifted under the wheels. They passed two motionless camels and he asked if the desert supported other living things. Lots of them, she told him: gazelles and vipers, hyenas and packs of jackals. Recently a black leopard had been sighted not far from where they were driving.

“Stop over the next rise,” she said. They crested a small hill and he pulled up. Perhaps eight or nine kilometers away, Masada rose cleanly out of windswept nothing.

“See the terraces cut into the top? There, on the left? That is where old King Herod sat on warm nights with a fat
chatichah
on each knee.”

“A fat what?”

“
Chatichah
. Let me see …” She grinned. “What you Americans call a beautiful piece.”

He grinned back and shifted. The car lurched down the bad, twisting road. Masada grew. Soon he could see, with a rising expectancy, that it was honeycombed with the dark mouths of caves; who knew how deep? For the first time, he felt that coming here wasn't a stupid thing.

The cabin contained a refrigerator that was old but working, a two-burner range, a toilet that flushed weakly and a shower with a rusty head. The furniture was either shabby or broken. The bed was a single army cot.

“It's lovely,” he said. “We'll take it.”

He was emptying the car of the provisions when he looked up and saw a file of soldiers carrying weapons. He lugged the box of supplies into the cabin and set it on the floor. “I assume they're Israelis?”

She looked through the window and went to the door. There were
about twenty soldiers, including two women. Harry had done his military service in the American infantry, and he watched with sympathy as they settled into the shade of the cabin, feeling again the aching legs, the burning lungs, the heavy pack clinging to the wet shirt on his back. The two Chen were attractive despite the sweat stains and the five stocking-covered canteens thickening their waistlines. He went to the car and took out his camera.

The officer turned from Tamar and shouted in Hebrew and then in English: “No pictures! No pictures!”

He put the camera away, but the man continued to tongue-lash him.

Harry returned his look. “Take it easy.”

Tamar spoke sharply.

The officer issued a command that drew groans. A few minutes later, the soldiers went away.

When they returned to the cabin they worked in silence, putting away the supplies.

“It wasn't exactly a lesson in democracy, was it?”

“I promised him I would get your film,” she said.

“I didn't even snap the shutter.”

“I shall need the film.”

“Jesus Christ.”

He went outside and got the camera. She watched while he rewound the film and took out the spool.

“I'm sorry to waste it,” she said.

He went through his bag, looking for fresh film. Finally he dumped everything out onto the floor—underwear, shirts, wintergreen Life Savers, socks, paperback books, film and several laundry bags addressed to Della.

She read the labels and stared at him. “You send your laundry to America?”

He couldn't think of a very good reply.

“My God.”

“She doesn't do it. She sends it out for me.”

She took the frying pan and kettle to the sink and began to scrub them. “The floor is filthy. There's a broom.”

“I'm used to a little disorder. My wife and I live apart.”

“Who gives a bloody damn how you live, Mr. Hopeman?” she said, scrubbing with vigor.

“Up your ear,” he said brilliantly. He took one of the army blankets that were folded on the cot. He put two loaves of pita and some bananas in his bag, feeling more than ever like a husband running away from home, and went outside and got the brandy from the car. Then he walked up the trail leading to the top of Masada.

He knew the path was called the Roman Ramp because it had been built by the Tenth Legion to enable them to get at the small band of Jews who were Judea's last armed resistance to Rome.

The wooden beams used by the Romans to shore up the trail were supposed to be visible still; without any difficulty at all he saw some of them when he was about one third of the way to the top.

He stopped and examined the timbers. They were bleached silver but otherwise they looked sound. Preserved by the salt and the dry air for two thousand years.

It stunned him. Real wood, set there by hands like his own, connecting him with what had happened here twenty centuries ago.

Nearby were red-gray cliffs, truncated mountains whose tops looked as if they had been sheared away by some natural scimitar. Each was studded with caves.

The scene was similar when he toiled to the plateau at the top. There was sky and stone. Semi-structures squatted like the cellars of bombedout buildings, with here and there a stone roof intact. The wind blew hot and dry, and, whether because of the wind or the climb, he found it difficult to breathe. When he carried his things into one of the small stone structures, it was dark and cool.

Something small rustled past him and he started.

“Sorry.
Shalom, shalom
, whatever you are.”

He sat to catch his breath and as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw that the walls and the ceiling were thickly plastered, a plaster worn smooth and interesting to touch, obviously ancient. The floor was hard-packed earth, cool but dry. He spread the blanket to take possession.

When he emerged to explore, he experienced an unfamiliar sensation.
He felt as though he were being watched.

Ridiculous, he told himself.

But in a few minutes he looked up and saw that it wasn't ridiculous. A very black goat stood on a ruin outlined against the sky, observing him with cocked head.

He clapped his hands, thinking it would flee, but it neither moved nor uttered a bleat. Or was it a
baa
, just what did goats do? He continued to walk. When he looked back, the goat was gone.

The hut he had commandeered was one of a number of similar stone structures set on the rim of a cliff. Far below, a jagged, boulder-strewn gorge spilled toward the youth hostel, a shedlike building about half a mile away.

Beyond, the melted lead of the Dead Sea shimmered.

He saw no sign of life at the hostel. Near it, a cable rose to the top of Masada, the cable car abandoned at the bottom. The operator had gone home, no doubt to Dimona or Arad.

He was fixed in a burnt-orange solitary silence except for the wind. Alone with Masada.

He wandered. What at first seemed to be similar structures actually were different. Some of the stone buildings were long and low, probably the storehouses. Others were like the one in which he had left his things, each with a small open hearth set in a corner or against a wall; still others had stairs running down into what obviously had been ritual baths, now dry. He would have no need of the
mikves
for washing. There were two modern stone structures, a ladies' and a men's, identified by the ludicrous oo lavatory sign. He went inside and turned one of the faucets, running cool water over his hands and face and dousing his head against the heat.

At the northern tip of the small plateau was the palace ruin. Some of the floors were mosaics, simple geometric patterns. He went down a stairway to the middle terrace and saw at once why Herod had had it built. It was the one place on Masada protected from both the sun and the searing wind.

He stood in the cool calm that had been provided for him by a dead king and looked out over miles of shore and countryside. An enemy
would be seen hours before he neared.

From here Harry could see three—no, four—of the square ruins of Roman camps. There were eight camps in all, built all around Masada and connected by several miles of stone wall, which he could also make out easily.

Seventy years after King Herod's death, a Roman garrison on Masada had been annihilated in a commandolike strike by a small Jewish raiding party. Four years after they had taken the fortress, the Masada Jews were the last stubborn holdouts against the might of Rome. The Roman governor, Flavius Silva, had marched to Masada at the head of the Tenth Legion and thousands of auxiliary troops and laborers. He had ringed the mountain with the camps and the wall, shutting off every avenue of escape.

Even so, it had taken fifteen thousand besiegers three more bloody years to conquer the defenders, who had numbered 960 with their women and children. When finally the Roman Ramp was completed and the end was near, the Jews had killed themselves rather than become Roman slaves.

Harry looked down upon the camps. There was no sign of life. They were occupied, if at all, by small animals and insects. But he was uneasy as he left Herod's cool terrace and made his way back to the hot surface of Masada.

The sun had set by the time he reached the hut that he thought of as his. Dusk carried a cooler breeze. The small bananas Tamar had bought green that afternoon already were speckling, and he peeled one and found it sweet.

The black goat appeared.

It ambled near and he tossed it the peels, which it swallowed, delighting him. Just as he took another bite from the banana the animal farted.

“Pig, away from here!” he shouted.

But the goat settled on its belly. Harry's sensibilities were overcome by his sense of the ridiculous and he was laughing. The animal's digestion continued to be bad; that was what goats did, he realized. His hunger outweighed fastidiousness and he and the bilious animal shared a pita as the light failed.

The breeze blew little dust devils.

All around him stone turned gradually to black iron.

But not for long. An incredible moon floated sluggishly out of the horizon and he felt like a shepherd. It shed light so strong that soon he could see almost as well as by day. The soft illumination gentled the surface of the stone. He broke out the bottle of Israeli brandy and swallowed a reckless wallop, finding it so good that when he got his breath back he took another. The shimmer on the Dead Sea looked solid enough to walk on. On the far side, in Jordan, he saw moving double sparks, headlights. He wondered what kind of man the distant Arab driver was.

He took the bottle into the hut and lay on the blanket and drank some more, until the cool, hard floor gradually felt softer but warmer. He sat up to yank off the T-shirt and then kicked away his sneakers and pulled free of the Bermudas and Jockey shorts, and eased himself naked and comfortable into sleep.

What woke him was his own coughing. His throat was dry, and he was hotter than he could remember. When he went outside, the moon was obscured by a thin cloud of dust that seemed to come from the east on a weak wind. It was pervasive. He took his shirt to the faucet and soaked it to wrap around his head. By the time he got back to the hut it had begun to dry.

“Harry!”

“Over here.” He pulled on his shorts.

She was coughing. He led her into the hut and gave her the brandy, which made her shudder when she sipped it, but the coughing stopped.

“What is it?”

“It's called a
sharav
. A barometric high from Egypt.”

“Why the hell didn't you stay below?”

“I was afraid you would wander down the mountain. Not far from here an American clergyman became lost and died.”

He took her face and kissed her. Their tongues touched. Once he had read a newspaper in which a youthful reader had asked, “Is French kissing a mortal sin?” The middle-aged columnist had answered, “No, it is not a mortal sin. But it is a clear invitation to sexual activity.”
When they kissed again his tongue explained the question and answer. She made no protest as he helped her out of her clothes except for the shirt.

“What was his name, the American clergyman?” she asked dreamily. “A bishop?”

Did he care, as his shorts fell to the blanket? He unbuttoned her, and tried her breasts first on one cheek, then on the other. Her nipples were soft until he tongued them. Then they were larger between his lips than he had expected.

Both of them were gasping, as much from the
sharav
as from passion. There was dust in the hut now and everything was dry. The only moisture was in the very center of her fur and when he touched it, she jumped. He took her into his arms and bore her down, stroking her flanks, discovering an incredible mole.