Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (14 page)

He laughed without humor. "A refuge for the
emotionally crippled. No one with a sane mind would choose to live
there."

"Why is that?"

"The good old times were as lousy as the
present. No, they were worse."

They were drinking coffee at the end of the
meal when Itamar came around to questions he had wanted to ask her
at the beginning, but had postponed. "Once I had breakfast with Tim
in Jerusalem and we had lunch together in London. I have a hard
time understanding what would make him into a thief, other than the
usual explanation of greed. Enlighten me."

"I can't," she said.

"So why protect him? When I left you in the
cave this morning, you had a choice to crawl into Chamber A on the
left, or B on the right. Which did you choose?"

She wondered where he was going with this,
but answered, "I didn't want to miss anything so I went first into
B, then A. Why do you ask?"

He leaned forward with his elbows on the
table and studied Gabby's eyes as if peering behind them into her
brain. After an awkward silence, he said, "Did you notice on the
floorboard of Tim's Hyundai a plastic Ziploc bag?"

She wagged her head negatively, searching her
pockets in which to bury her hands and counter the tremor that was
certain to come.

"We found a Ziploc like it in Chamber B and
concluded that just as he had left a Ziploc in his car, he dropped
one in the cave. That's damning evidence against him."

She said nothing, trying to conceal
alarm.

"I had one of my team plant a replacement
Ziploc in Chamber B for you to find. Why didn't you tell me about
it?"

"Isn't it obvious. I know it looks bad. And I
can't explain what's happened. But I know something about Tim you
apparently don't."

"Neu? Tell me."

"However terrible things look, Tim is no
criminal. Someday you'll learn that I'm right."

"Very noble, but stupid. Harboring a criminal
is a serious crime in this country. Stealing historical artifacts
as bad as high treason. You'd better start thinking of Gabrielle
Lewyn and not Tim Matternly."

"Easy for you to say."

"No, God damn it, it isn't easy for me to say
at all, Gabrielle. First, I'm going to lose my job over this, one
of the few things in my life I've really enjoyed. But I'm
pragmatic. Antiquities directors come and go, and I've had a good
run at the job. You say it's easy. No, it isn't. I've lost my wife
and child, the most precious people in my life. In my gut, there's
an empty space that refuses to stop aching. And now I'm sitting
here enjoying dinner with an attractive, accomplished woman,
knowing that soon she's about to lose someone she loves. And I
don't seem capable of preventing it. Make no mistake, friend, it
isn't easy at all."

To help settle their emotions, they took an
after-dinner stroll through the medieval artisans' district of
Yemin Moshe where streetlamps cast enchanting shadows on the walls
of limestone apartments surrounded by flowering bougainvillea and
oleander. For a brief moment, their differences succumbed to the
charm of this mystical enclave. When they later arrived at the
Ussishkin Street apartment, she thanked him for the dinner and more
importantly, his concern for her, then turned to mount stairs to
her front door. Itamar stopped her with a gentle tug, saying, "I
can see how you worry."

"Yes," she responded.

"You have beautiful eyes that lie to me when
you talk."

She said nothing, embarrassed by her
transparency.

"I told you before that I must soon report on
Qumran to my boss to set in motion my downfall. You can imagine how
I dread this. Tomorrow morning Major Zabronski and I will meet an
important government official. I'd like you to come along. It might
put you into a more cooperative mood."

"If I can be helpful," she said. "Are we
seeing the prime minister?" she made a bad joke from nerves, not
wit.

"No," he said in a tone lacking all humor.
"Before Ezra Raviv became prime minister, I pressed an antiquities
indictment against his son. He's never forgiven me. Everybody knows
that once on Raviv's shit list you stay there for life."

CHAPTER FIVE

From Jerusalem's Damascus Gate, it was an
easy walk for Tim to the Orthodox district of Mea She'arim, a
crowded cluster of dilapidated two and three-story apartment
structures with facades of hand-chipped Jerusalem limestone. Its
streets were crowded with thickly bearded Hasidim shuffling along
in heavy dark coats and corpulent, unstylish women, many pushing
baby carriages while pregnant. In Tim's imagination, this scene
that could be from Eastern Europe, not modern Israel, belonged to
the Seventeenth not the Twenty-First century. He followed Haneviim
to Straus Street, praying that he would remember how to find Rabbi
Zechariah Schreiber's apartment house. Since the publication of his
book on fragments from the Dead Sea six years before, he had had no
reason to visit the aging Talmud scholar. Suddenly, Rabbi Schreiber
was once again essential.

Tim's memory played games with him. One
building in Mea She'arim looked like another. The old fascia
blended into a continuum, clouding his recall. Still, he knew the
exact address, 46 Haydam Street, Apartment Gimel. A question to a
young yeshiva student, with an adolescent beard and a wide-brimmed
homburg too large for his head, identified the street. Addresses
were poorly marked, if at all. Tim had to backtrack to find number
46.

After several knocks, he was about to give
up. A final rap brought Zechariah Schreiber to the door. The old
man cautiously opened it only a crack. It took him a few long
moments to recognize Tim through moist eyes that could barely focus
behind thick glasses. The door closed to free a chain bolt. In the
doorway, Tim observed his old friend, dramatically aged over the
intervening years. A warm smile lit up the bearded face as the
rabbi tugged Tim's arm, ushering him into the vestibule heavy with
stagnant air. When he failed to release his hold, it seemed at
first a gesture of affection. But Tim soon realized the rabbi was
relying upon him for balance. Schreiber led him through an
apartment so crowded it was nearly impossible to move. Books were
everywhere except on the floor, which, to a devout student of
Torah, would have been sacrilegious. Tim also came to understand
that Schreiber leaned on him for more than his balance. The man
could barely see.

A musty stench of mildew and book rot
emanating from thousands of leather bound Talmudic commentaries
filled Schreiber's five-room apartment. Awareness that the rabbi
seemed to be decaying along with his books engendered in Tim a
profound nostalgia. The scholar and his sacred volumes, probably
older than he, were relics from a lost age few had reason to
remember in modern times.

The rabbi's soft voice was barely audible.
While he admitted that his days were coming to an end, what life he
had left he attributed to a gift from the Almighty. The death of
his lifelong spouse, Micah, had dramatically altered his daily
routine. His eldest son, Ariel, lived in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv,
but, in Schreiber's words, had abandoned the faith, which Tim
assumed meant not that he had lost his belief in a heavenly power,
but something more modest—that he had abandoned the strict
observance of the Sabbath and a kosher diet. A daughter lived in
Crown Heights, New York, and his youngest son, whom he had not seen
for more than two decades, in Montevideo, halfway around the world.
During Micah's decline before death, she had prevailed on Ariel to
keep in touch with his father. For a few years, he made obligatory
visits to the Schreiber residence, but after his mother's death, no
longer bothered.

Tim and Rav Schreiber had originally met nine
years before. At the time, Tim had become bored with conducting
seminars at the University and searched for a new challenge. He
found this in the cult of the Essenes, left-wingers who abandoned
life in Roman-occupied Judea for a simpler, purer existence in the
nearby mountains.

Whether Jesus was an actual member of this
Essene society or simply an onlooker, the similarity between their
philosophies could not be ignored. The collection of fragmentary
material taken from Caves IV and V at Qumran in the mid-1950s and
previously unstudied and untranslated provided just the challenge
Tim was looking for. Unfortunately, these fragments and all copies
of them were under lock and key in the Huntington Library in
Pasadena, California. The only scholars authorized to work on them
were men in their mid-sixties, academics from a previous
generation, by then lazy with tenure in their endowed university
chairs. Those who controlled the documents were as adamant about
denying others access to their unstudied treasures as they were
lethargic about their work.

Tim, a computer geek since his first days as
a Berkeley undergraduate, took advantage of something that other
historians failed to appreciate. In exchange for taking the
fragments out of circulation, the handful of privileged scholars
agreed to have their material catalogued and organized into a
concordance. That gave Tim just the opening he needed. With his
computer skills, he could write code for a program to assemble and
process these word fragments into readable form. If you could
distinguish separate subjects and predicates, adverbs and
adjectives, you could then reconstitute them into understandable
phrases, and from phrases, you could build complete verses.

From the outset, Tim had been brutally honest
about lacking the linguistic skill sufficient for this gargantuan
task. The key, he recognized was to find someone help him, someone
who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Hebrew and
Aramaic syntax.

It took five trips to Israel to identify that
Zechariah Schreiber was the man he was looking for. In terms of
sheer knowledge, there were four potential candidates. But only one
proved open-minded enough to work on material dealing with the
Essenes, generally regarded by more conventional Talmudists as
mshumadim
, fallen Jews who had voluntarily
rejected Judaism and therefore an unworthy subject for Jewish
scholarship. Tim's boldness to tackle what had hitherto been an
insuperable problem for Qumran scholarship intrigued Schreiber,
then in his seventy-sixth year. For his invaluable contribution to
Tim's book, he asked for nothing but absolute anonymity.

Literate at the age of three, young Zechariah
had escaped into the forest in December 1941 when an SS company
decimated his family's shtetl in eastern Poland. Later captured
with Polish partisans, he toiled as a slave laborer in a German
brick factory, managing to conceal his Jewish identity, no easy
task since, as a circumcised Jew, he could never bathe with his
compatriots. When Soviet troops entered Germany four years later,
he fled to Paris in hopes of getting to Palestine. Once in his
people's ancestral land, he fought in the 1947-8 War of
Independence, received ordination as a rabbi in the Great Jerusalem
Yeshiva, then, without a single hour of formal instruction in
Greek, earned a doctorate in classics at the Hebrew University.
Books written in nine languages shaped both his professional and
personal life.

Now an eighty-two year old widower in failing
health and all but forgotten by younger scholars, he was less
confident than in his earlier days. Still, he admitted to Tim that
he was dying faster from boredom than from physical degeneration.
The elderly pensioner further confessed that he could use any
stipend offered. Tim made it clear that at the moment he was unable
to pay for his services, but he would do so generously as soon as
he could tap his investments in the United States.

"Do you want to know how I got electronic
copies of these fragments?" Tim asked.

The old man's eyes, clouded by cataracts,
could still sparkle through thick lens. At this moment, they glowed
with conspiratorial understanding. "I wouldn't think they fell from
the heavens. I'm told there's a thriving market in antiquities
these days."

"They're worthless unless we can assemble
them into a meaningful text. I must buy a computer and server."

"Are the authorities looking for you?" the
rabbi asked.

Tim thought about lying, but didn't. "Perhaps
not right now. But they will soon."

Schreiber glanced at his already overcrowded
apartment, breathing heavily. "Then stay here. My eyes are weaker
than when we worked together. Somebody must read the words and
letters to me. Can you?"

"What I can't read, I can spell. It will keep
me off the streets where I might be recognized. Do you have
domestic help?"

"A Sephardic woman comes once a week. My
neighbors drop off food. On Shabbos, a few old friends who are
still alive invite me to their homes."

When Tim left Mea She'arim to purchase a
computer near the commercial market of Mahane Yehuda on Jaffa
Street, he dressed in an ankle-long frock coat and a broad-brimmed
homburg covering the upper portion of his face. That he had failed
to shave during the past weeks at St. George completed his
disguise.

***

Finding the unexpected sent a chill through
Father Benoit Matteau as he paused just inside the entrance to the
synagogue at the Hadassah Medical Center. Because he anticipated
this cavernous, high-ceiling sanctuary showcasing Marc Chagall's
twelve stained-glass windows to be filled with gawking spectators,
he was not surprised by the crowd. Above their heads were
larger-than-life panels back-lit by bright Jerusalem sunlight in
blue, scarlet, and purple, each representing one of Jacob's sons
who, at the dawning of Hebrew history, had come to lead Israel's
Twelve Tribes. Benoit's eyes searched the spectators near the panel
depicting Naphtali for clues to identify someone he had never seen
before. The woman spotted wore a khaki fishing vest with multiple
pockets, with Apple iPod earphones plugged into her ears. On the
phone with Tel Aviv, he had prearranged for someone to wear a khaki
shirt and listen to an iPod, but nothing was said about sending a
woman.