Night work (32 page)

Like most nominal Christians, and most enthusiastic believers as
well, Kate had never given much thought to what came Before Christ. Oh
sure, the Old Testament had been around before the New, which explained
its complexity and seeming lack of unifying theme, but before the Old
Testament there were what? Patriarchs and Canaanites and goatherds and
things, wandering dimly through the desert.

In Roz's hands the Bible came alive, revealing itself as a
document of the human spirit with roots reaching far back into the
history of humankind, before the stories were written down, back to an
age when high-tech weaponry was made out of bronze, and even stone.

The name Baal appeared on page three, abruptly calling to mind
Kate's long-ago Sunday School classes taught by the tightly
girdled Miss Steinlaker. The priests of Baal, it had been (and for an
instant Kate was back in that drafty church classroom with Miss
Steinlaker looming over her, smelling of chalk, perfume, menthol
cigarettes, and the musk of unwashed clothing). The priests of Baal had
lit something on fire, hadn't they? Or perhaps had failed to do
so. Kate blinked, and the classroom vanished, and Roz was explaining
that Baal was a Canaanite storm god, a young warrior deity about whom
hymns were written down on clay tablets, describing Baal as the Rider
on the Clouds. Then a thousand years later the Israelites came out from
Egypt and settled in the land, and soon they, too, were speaking of
their God as a young warrior heaving thunderbolts across the sky,
calling Him "Rider on the Clouds."

It was not stealing, Roz explained firmly, and it should not be
thought that the people Israel were trying to change their God's
nature or attach other gods to His coattails in a sort of religious
corporate takeover bid. It had to do with framing a language of
theology, using the images and descriptions of others to more richly
describe the wonder of the one true God's majesty and complexity.

If this was so, Roz then asked rhetorically, what of the images and
language that described the unique actions and characteristics of the
goddess figures so common in the ancient Near East, Anat and Asherah,
Ishtar and Inanna? Were they simply condemned as idolatry, as the
Prophets would have us believe? Or did their poetry and songs, their
epithets and personalities, resonate so strongly in the minds of the
people that, despite the goddesses' inextricable connection with
the forbidden fertility cults and their obvious antithesis to the
masculine figure of Yahweh, God of Israel, some of their nature
survived in Him, some of the goddesses' stories became adopted
and adapted by the people Israel?

This question came a bare twenty pages into the document, and
amounted to Roz's introduction, laying the groundwork for the
thesis itself.

The thesis being that Yahweh did indeed come to incorporate certain
characteristics of a group of Near Eastern goddess figures whom Roz
classified as Warrior Virgins--virginity, as Roz had mentioned the
night of
Song
but had been too distracted to explain, being
for divine beings not indicative of physical innocence but rather a
state of proud independence from males, of not being defined by their
male consort.

As role models for women set on taking back the night, these
goddesses were a fearsome bunch. Take the verses illustrating the
goddess Anat:

Heads roll about like balls,

hands fly up like locusts,

like a swarm of grasshoppers, the warriors' hands.

Anat ties the heads as a necklace,

she fastens the hands around her waist...

Her soul swells up with laughter,

her heart bursts with joy. Anat's soul is joyous

as she wades to her knees in the blood of soldiers,

to her thighs in the gore of warriors.

No, thought Kate, Miss Steinlaker had never told her Sunday School class about this.

There was the goddess Inanna, who aside from being a goddess of fertility was also a fearsome warrior:

In the mountain stronghold that holds back homage,

the very vegetation is cursed, The city's great gates,

O Inanna,

you have burnt to ash.

Its rivers run with blood,

the people cannot drink.

Then came the Indian goddess Kali, a close cousin to the virgin
warriors of the Middle East, who lived in the cremation grounds, ate
pieces of the bodies, and wore a necklace of human heads and a belt
decorated with severed hands. She was followed by a description of the
bloodthirsty Egyptian Hathor, appeased only by a great flood of red
beer poured across the land like the blood she takes it to be. The
Mesopotamian Ishtar called down a raging storm on humanity until they
floated like dead fish on the sea, and the Greek Demeter condemned the
earth to bare sterility to revenge the abduction and rape of her
daughter.

Why do people think of goddesses as wide-hipped, large-breasted,
loving bringers of fertility? Kate wondered uncomfortably. These women
were terrifying.

Kate went to pour herself a glass of wine, looked at the rich red
liquid in the glass, and dumped it down the sink, taking instead a shot
of nice safe amber brandy from the cooking supplies. She continued
reading, about revenge and wrath and the sheer joy of killing, and she
winced when she came to Roz's description of Kali:

She is young and beautiful, old and haggard, dark-skinned as a blow
in the face of the pale, high-ranking Aryan castes, savage and loving
and utterly enamored with bloodshed. Kali is created by the great
goddess Durga for the express purpose of conquering a monster able to
kill any man who comes up against him--but not, it turns out, any
woman. Kali glories in death, decorates herself with pieces of her
victims, and allows no man supremacy, not her enemies, not even her
consort, who lies beneath her in intercourse. She is the advocate and
protector of India's poor, India's acknowledgment that
inside every woman lurks a force of immense power that, when loosed,
exults in the destruction of men, that longs to trample even the most
beloved of males underfoot, to wade in his blood and eat his carcass.

Sweet Jesus, Kate reflected, taking a large gulp of the brandy, what
must Roz's thesis supervisor be making of this? And did Roz need
to be quite so graphic, even loving, in these descriptions of gore and
destruction?

Perhaps that was the point: that even an ordained minister with a
pet dog named Mutt, a weekly salary, and a mortgage could feel that
urge, primal and terrible.

With a convulsive shudder Kate shoved the entire thesis together and
back in its box. She felt trapped by a visualization of what this group
of vigilantes--selective terrorists--could do if they took
this stuff seriously. Would they begin gutting men next, instead of a
nice tidy strangulation? Hacking off body parts for Kali to wear?
or--Christ!--eat?

She drained her glass, considered and rejected a refill, and,
knowing she'd never get to sleep with those images crowding into
her mind, went in to the television. An old movie, she decided--if
she could find one without gore, abuse of women, or a woman taking
revenge. Which left out Jon's collection of Bette Davis films,
and half the suspense movies. She was faced with Jon's musicals
or Lee's science fiction, and whereas the latter often involved
wholesale slaughter, the former induced in Kate the very desire to
commit
it
that she was trying to avoid. Even
Men in Black
had a downtrodden woman whose husband gets his due. To say nothing of reminding her of Agent Marcowitz.

In the end she fed an old Peter Sellers
Pink Panther
movie into the player, and fell asleep on the sofa before it was through.

BY THE CLEAR LIGHT of a far too early morning, it was difficult to
justify the night's heebie-jeebies as anything but overwork and
an overactive imagination. After all, none of the corpses had been
mutilated and there was no sign of escalation into mass slaughter. The
Ph.D. thesis Roz was writing might have some link with the hit list
victims, but it was, as Roz herself had said and Kate had to admit, an
academic investigation, not a vigilante manifesto.

Still, Kate could not shake the image of the warrior-goddess wading
in a pool of men's blood, that "immense power that exults
in the destruction of men" loosed on the world. (How did
Song
put it? "Lovely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with
banners.") Kate did not want to read the rest of the pages, but
she knew she would, and that night, after a day spent in painstaking
and excruciatingly slow telephonic investigation, she picked up the
typescript again, warily.

It appeared, however, that the worst of Roz's flight of fancy
(if that was what it was) had been confined to the beginning, and the
author now set about demonstrating just how the worship of goddess
figures might have been transferred over to the cult of Yahweh. Roz
took a passage in the Gilgamesh epic where the goddess Ishtar
"cries out like a woman in travail" bemoaning her
destruction of her people, for "are they not my own people, whom
I brought forth?" and compared it with Yahweh's cry
"like a woman in travail" in the Book of Isaiah. She then
set about building on the common theme throughout the Old Testament
(which Roz consistently called the Hebrew Bible) of God's wrath
overflowing, the furious arm of a vengeful God turned against his
faithless people, only to be drawn back before complete destruction
could descend.

And this is the point, Roz asserted, at which God and goddess are
one, that God's love--often using a word based on the Hebrew
for womb--is love "as of a mother for the child of her
body." God could no more destroy his--or her--people
than a mother could cease to love a child she had given birth to.

All very heavy stuff, and although Kate didn't exactly feel a
headache coming on, she found herself hoping that she would, so she
would have an excuse to stop reading. It soon became obvious, however,
that the bulk of the tome's latter half was made up of the highly
technical material of pure thesis, heavily footnoted, concerned with
alternate translations, parallel meanings, the problems of something
called a
hapax legomenon
(whatever that was), and the
minutiae of dating texts and text fragments. Kate leafed through page
after page of typescript studded with what looked like three different
alphabets, one of which was Hebrew. Some of the footnotes in this
section took two or three pages to work themselves out, and Kate made
no attempt at following any of it, relieved that it was nearly over.

Then, at the very end, after the bibliography in fact, an additional
and still-rough chapter had been appended. After a moment Kate realized
that it was the result of the
Song
performance they had all
seen the other night, the interpretation of the Song of Songs that had
so excited Roz. "Pope," it seemed, was not the Roman
pontiff but one Marvin Pope, who had developed the idea of a link
between the Indian Kali and the Canaanite Anat, both of whom took vast
joy in spilling blood, both wearing belts of hands and necklaces of
skulls, both being absolutely essential, in spite of their murderous
tendencies, to the continuation of the universe. Or rather, precisely
because of their tendency to give vent to murderous bouts of rage, for
without Anat's fury, Baal the storm god could not bring the
life-giving rains and the land would go sterile; without Kali,
Shiva's dance that heralded both the end and the beginning of
time would fail.

Kate felt as if her head was about to explode. She scratched her
scalp hard with her short fingernails, wondering why she was wasting so
many hours on this airy-fairy nonsense that she hadn't a chance
of fully understanding. It was pointless--after all, wasn't
pointless
one synonym for the word
academic?
--but
she could not shake the feeling of a connection here. She could smell
it coming off the paper in front of her, faint and evocative but there.

But how? And where?

One more possible victim had been added to their list during the
day. A resident of King City, a few hours' drive into the Central
Valley south of San Francisco, had disappeared five weeks ago and been
found last week in a brushy area frequented by coyotes and half a dozen
other kinds of scavengers. About all the pathologist could tell was
that the man had been strangled. Whether he'd been zapped by a
taser or once had a candy bar in his pocket was anybody's guess.
He was, however, a wife-beater, and his name was on the hit list, along
with his address and phone number.

Quite a number of other men on the list had admitted to receiving
harassing calls and letters. The majority assumed at first that the
team's call was yet another one, so the people wielding the
phones had learned to speak fast, firmly, and with blatant if not
entirely genuine expressions of sympathy in order to avoid hang-ups.

Two men thought they were currently being stalked, one in
Huntsville, Texas, the other in Reno. Seven had been attacked already,
either personally or by something being thrown at, splashed against, or
painted onto their houses. One man had seized on the suggestion of a
taser-wielding attacker that one of the less experienced members of the
team had let slip, but further interviews made it fairly clear that he
was more than a little unbalanced and would have taken up the mention
of alien abduction with equal enthusiasm.

Five men had disappeared completely, seven had moved but been in
communication with family or friends, and three names were either
mistakes or jokes or complete fabrications--one of them
Kate's suggested addition to the list, a hardened but exceedingly
wily child-abuser by the name of Al Martini. That had appeared during
the afternoon, causing a few minutes of near-hysterical levity on the
part of the frustrated and overworked team, bent over their terminals.