Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (28 page)

***

On the phone, she expected Itamar to be more
annoyed with her than he sounded. In their conversation, he
mentioned, but did not dwell on, the e-mails sent from Chicago,
leading him to believe that she was still in the States. But
contrary to her expectations, he seemed genuinely happy to have her
back. Instead of a rebuke, he said, "To tell you the truth,
Gabrielle, I wasn't sure I'd see you before autumn, if then.
Jerusalem must be filled with unpleasant memories."

"And many pleasant ones as well," she
replied. Then, making a peace offering, she added, "Like our
friendship, Iti. You've helped me deal with a terrible loss. And
that couldn't have been easy. I appreciate how our friendship
presents a conflict of interest with your work. I've forced you to
walk a delicate line."

"If you had trusted me, we might have
arrested Tim before he was murdered."

"We've been through this station before. I
couldn't tell you because I knew Tim wasn't a thief, much less a
murderer."

"Very noble, but as a result, he's dead, the
government doesn't have the stolen documents from Cave XII, and the
academic community has lost a giant. To add insult to injury, the
Ministry is now on my tail, big time. If I don't make some progress
very soon, you may be dealing with a new antiquities director."

"That makes me feel more like a louse than I
am," Gabby said. "I made bad decisions."

Itamar didn't like the direction of their
conversation and changed the subject. "I know that you're not
staying at your apartment on Ussishkin Street. Are you with
friends?"

"No. I've taken a room at the American Colony
Hotel."

"That's just great!" he said caustically.
"You're an intelligent woman, but sometimes you lack common sense.
By last count, the American Colony houses a dozen spies from at
least six countries. You still don't seem to understand the danger
you're in. Tim’s killer obviously wanted something he believes you
have. I can't trust you because you've given me at least a
half-dozen reasons not to. But while you were gone, I gambled that
you might return and converted my daughter's bedroom into a guest
room. I'd rather you stayed in my home than the American
Colony."

"So you can keep watch over me?"

"Well, yes. Somebody has to. You can come and
go as you please. The kitchen is yours because I'm hopeless with
anything more complicated than scrambled eggs."

"No, Iti. I can't do that. And you can't
afford to let me. I've screwed things up enough here. But I'm not
going to give your bosses reason to fire you. Those kind of friends
you don't need."

"If I'm going to be terminated anyway, it
won't matter. You can't stay at the American Colony. Is there
another place?"

"On the sixth day of creation, God created
hotels for vagabonds like me."

The following morning, Gabby moved from the American
Colony to the King's Hotel. Itamar stopped by that evening for a
drink. In the lobby bar, over a glass of Claret from a small winery
on the Golan Heights, she added details to her e-mails from the
States, narrating Tim’s funeral in New Bedford and conversations
with her advisors at the University of Chicago. The excellent wine
helped them bridge their difference until she volunteered,

"Tim e-mailed me in Chicago before I came
looking for him here in Jerusalem to say he had made
the discovery of a lifetime
."

"Have you an idea what he referred to?"

"No. I assume it was something found in Cave
XII."

"Some of us are old enough to remember what
happened in the Christian world when scrolls from Cave IV were
first published. E. B. White predicted in
The
New Yorker
that the
Essenes meant the beginning of the end for modern Christianity. He
thought historians would prove that Jesus was a member of this
monastic sect, not a living god. White was wrong. Archeology will
never erase two thousand years of church doctrine. Nothing we dig
up will ever uproot Christian faith. It's too strong and too
embedded. What else haven't you told me?"

"Something important, but it's so sensitive
that I must ask you to promise not to tell anyone. You'll just have
to trust me that it won't help you find the stolen artifacts. Or
further Major Zabronski's murder investigation."

"What investigation?" he snapped.
"Zabronski's department is dragging its feet. Tell me what's so
important."

"Do I have your pledge?"

"That depends, now doesn't it? The day you
arrived from Chicago, I asked for an unconditional pact of secrecy.
You declined because you didn't know the nature of the secret. The
same with me now. Tell me, and I'll do my best, but this is no
absolute pledge."

That gave her pause for thought until she
blurted out, "I know who Tim's collaborator is. The same person who
helped him on his book
.
I always believed
it would be someone with a profound understanding of ancient Hebrew
and Aramaic."

"Who?"

"I can't reveal his name. He approached me
before Tim's memorial service. He's a Torah scholar here in
Jerusalem. A deeply religious man. I give you my word he's neither
seen nor touched an original text. According to him, Tim never had
any original documents. They worked together entirely from computer
scans. I'm not sure if Tim ever paid him more than pocket money. As
far as I can tell, it's simply a labor of love. All he's asked of
me in return for his help is anonymity."

"So you want me to believe that Tim didn't
possess original documents and he was working solely from digital
copies?"

"Yes. That's what I understand."

"Then someone else has the originals?"

"That's a logical conclusion."

Gabby paused to let her disclosure settle in
before excusing herself to retrieve something from her room. She
returned a few minutes later with the modern Hebrew translation of
the Ein Arugot scroll and presented it to Itamar. He snatched a
pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket and, when they were
perched low on his nose, read the document slowly, saying nothing.
Before rereading it, he exhaled air that he had inadvertently held
in his lungs during the initial perusal.

To fill the silence, Gabby said, "This is
from the scans from Cave XII. Tim's collaborator told me that this
is the only scroll Tim had intact. All other texts are fragments.
Over four thousand of them. And this is the only Greek one in the
entire lot. I was told that Tim went to look for Ein Arugot in a
VW. There's a chance he left behind some maps. If I can find them,
I want you to take me there."

Itamar stripped off his reading glasses,
folded them carefully before returning them to his shirt pocket,
and taking his time before saying, "You never cease to amaze me.
Why would you want to go into the desert? It's hot and rugged. And
if there's any truth to this scroll, there certainly nothing worth
seeing."

"Wouldn't you want to know where your lover
died? Didn't you visit the Palace Hotel after your family was
murdered?"

"That's a low blow and you know it."

"Well, didn't you?"
"Of course I did. And
when I'm in Tel Aviv, I still drive north to say Kaddish on the
beach nearby. But that's a lot different from traveling in the
central Negev these days."

"How about getting a military
escort?"
"That's possible, but it would take time to organize."

She knew how to smile so dimples in her
cheeks deepened. "Good, because I haven't figured out exactly where
Ein Arugot is."

"Tell me, Gabrielle, what would stop me from
letting you lead us to Tim's Torah scholar?"

She released a short giggle of amusement.
"Because I trust you, Iti," she said.

"Why?" he shot back.

"Because, you're not as duplicitous as I
am."

***

Rabbi Zechariah Schreiber was still uneasy
about an unmarried woman visiting him. In a neighborhood where
daily life was governed by a strict code of behavior in which
extramarital sex was a major offense, not against fellow humans,
but against God, neighbors appointed themselves policemen for the
Almighty and zealously spied on each other. No matter that
Schreiber was elderly, he was still a widower, presumably with a
sex drive, and she was an eligible woman.

To make him more comfortable, she assumed the
identity of Devorah Stencil Schreiber, a distant cousin by marriage
from Crown Heights in Brooklyn and a friend of his daughter whom he
had not seen in fourteen years. Along with this new identity came
the unstylish clothing of an Orthodox woman, heavy cotton
stockings, a long skirt, blouses with long sleeves, and a
sheitle
wig
.

Tim's HP laptop was only marginally different
from her own, and its Windows operating system, identical. But the
software he used to decipher fragmentary documents taxed her
skills. Essential keystrokes, whether codes or identity passwords,
remained hidden. Why Tim had not left them in his final
instructions for Schreiber was a mystery. Had he really believed he
would return from the Negev? She allotted herself a week to become
familiar with the software; that was if she could manage to open
his program.

To offset her problems with the code,
entering Tim's unsecured database of fragments was easy. Schreiber
helped by describing the steps Tim had followed. With his
assistance, she remained optimistic that sooner or later she would
learn to duplicate Tim's method of combining fragmented text into
word clusters, perhaps leading to full verses.

As she worked her way through one computer
screen after another, testing and retesting, Schreiber used his
magnifying glass to read from
Baba Metiza
,
a tractate of the Talmud. His trembling hand could barely hold the
glass steady, but without it reading was impossible. Several times,
she was distracted when the glass slipped and fell on the reading
table. To keep himself awake, he had become addicted to his
high-octane Italian coffee. And that prompted frequent toilet
breaks. Far too much caffeine, she thought, but said nothing.

When she began experimenting with program
files on the standard C-drive, she discovered an unsecured file Tim
had labeled "Proper Names." This seemed like an opportune time to
see if her assumptions about the software would prove true. She
went to Tim's Master File, containing fragments he had already
worked on with Rav Schreiber. To this file, she applied the
program, "Proper Names," and clicked.

The laptop's speed was impressive. The Master
File, with what Tim had completed to date, represented no more than
twenty percent of the fragments, so extracting proper names was
nearly instantaneous. Thirteen immediately appeared on the screen,
two of which she recognized as female:

Zarepheth bat (an
unreadable family name) Ishimaris, Urias bar Nathan, Simon bar
Amos, Ananus ben-Jonathan, Alcyon, a physician, Jochanan Gaddis,
Judas bar Jairus, Joseph bar Daleu, Yahonatan, (unknown family),
Netir of the Galilee, Noami bat Nadab, Shmiel ben Gera, Tephtus
(unknown family), David, the Pharisee.

Why, she asked herself, were these names
recorded among the Qumran fragments? And how were they related to
the destruction of the yeshiva at Ein Arugot? Her compulsion to
learn more made the barriers embedded in Tim's sorting all the more
exasperating.

Still, the more she pondered what these names
signified, the more she was driven to believe they were related to
the yeshiva. Because the Roman government was so determined to
obliterate the colony at Ein Arugot, clearly this was no ordinary
school. Could it be that here was a roster of students or faculty?
"Okay," she said to herself, as she often did when speculating;
"now there's evidence of a remote yeshiva and perhaps a list of
students. So why did they withdraw from society? And more
importantly, what were they studying? Was the curriculum a threat
to the government in Jerusalem?

Insight, she had found, comes at unexpected
moments. While walking from Mea She'arim to catch a bus to the
Kings Hotel late early that evening, something clicked in her
brain. Had Tim inadvertently found what she had long been searching
for to support her thesis? If these names represented a list of
students, perhaps they had taken refuge at Ein Arugot to live
monastic lives and communicate with God. Could this be the crucial
evidence needed to confirm what she had long believed but had yet
to prove? Was it possible that the students at Ein Arugot were
learning to become prophets?

Instead of returning to her hotel, she took a
bus to the Hebrew University where one could look past Arab
villages nestling on the hillside bordering the Jordan Valley. A
warm, easterly breeze tousled a series of flags surrounding the
university's amphitheater. Urban noises from the busy city faded
from her consciousness. She imagined, in the distant rift valley
before her, a wilderness school where the students were caucusing
in seminars. Their soft voices echoed in a Siren wail, beckoning
her to leap over two thousands years and visit them in their
wilderness home.

The next day, Rav Schreiber produced a map of
the Negev that Tim had left behind. Unfortunately, on this
particular chart, he had failed to mark the suspected location of
Ein Arugot.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Major Zabronski followed Israeli archeology
with the passion of a dedicated sports fan. From the beginning, he
assumed that Tim Matternly had been engaged in something to do with
archeology when he was murdered, but until he was informed about a
yeshiva at Ein Arugot, he had no evidence to back his hunch. Now,
he was thrilled to be part of the discovery of such a school, even
if it meant mounting a three-vehicle expedition and paying for it
from his department's budget. Two of these vehicles were armed with
30 caliber machine-guns, and manned by nine of his security
officers. The tenth man was Ahamd banu Badawi, a Dhullam Bedouin
tracker with a nose as keen as a jackal and the eyes of an Egyptian
hawk.