The Kabbalist (14 page)

L
uria and Jeanne
climbed the stairs and entered a long corridor. On one of the doors, a small
plaque with a handwritten inscription said ‘Yuval Eldad’. Luria knocked.

“Come in,” called
someone inside and Luria opened the door.

Professor Yuval Eldad’s
office at the University of Haifa was the same unimpressive small chamber that
Luria remembered from his previous encounter with the professor. Now, as
before, it looked as if it had recently sustained a mid-range earthquake. Every
available surface in the room, including the professor’s desk, carried stacks
of books, dossiers and sheets of paper.

The small room looked
unoccupied but, presently, Professor Eldad rose from behind one of the book
piles and hurried to greet them. He was about forty, a bespectacled man of
average height with disheveled, sparse hair. “Yuval Eldad,” he introduced
himself to Jeanne.

“Jeanne de Charney,” Jeanne
shook his hand and smiled warmly.

Eldad looked around him
in bewilderment, wondering where he could seat his guests. “Just a minute,” he said,
“I used to have a couple of chairs around here somewhere… I wonder…”

Jeanne was doing her
best not to laugh.

“Aha!” exclaimed the
professor triumphantly. “Here they are.” He started moving books and dossiers that
were hiding two shabby chairs opposite his desk. For a moment he froze,
wondering where to place the stuff, and then managed somehow to arrange the
piles clumsily against the wall. “Sorry about the mess,” he apologized. “I was
immersed in something and totally forgot I was expecting visitors.” He then
acknowledged Luria’s presence for the first time. “Yossi Luria,” he said and
shook Luria’s hand with surprising violence, switching to Hebrew. “We have not
met since… since that incident… How long has it been?”

“Four years,” replied
Luria, somewhat dryly.

“I understand that you
have left the police force since, and that you are now a private investigator.”

“Yes.” Luria replied tersely,
clearly uninterested in expanding on the subject.

“By the way, I never really
understood what happened that night when father Diaz died. If someone should
know, I guess it is you.”

Luria felt the fury
that had never really left him starting to rise again. The four year old scars
have not yet healed. He felt a lump in his throat. “By the time the
investigation ended, I was no longer involved,” he said, “but the findings were
made public. It was a breaking and entering incident which evolved into homicide.
The burglar ran away and was later liquidated in an internal underworld strife.
That’s all there was to it.”

“Is that all? Ella did
not think so. She told me you never believed that story.”

Luria shrugged,
displaying indifference, but the mere mention of Ella’s name sent a pulse of
physical pain through his body.

Ella, Where are you?

“You know, I was so
sorry to hear that you two separated. I always thought you made a great
couple,” said Eldad, inadvertently driving another stab.

Luria felt another throb
of pain. “It was my fault. I was going through bad times and was totally
intolerable.” He tried to sound cool about it. “What is she doing these days?”
he asked in a strange, strained voice.

“She is working on her
doctorate at Cambridge,” replied Eldad. “It took her some time to recover after
you had broken her heart, but she is fine now.”

Jeanne was looking at
both of them bewildered, obviously annoyed, and Luria switched to English.
“Well, Professor, let’s move on to the business we have come here for. I am
trying to help Jeanne in a case which is more a historical research than a
regular investigation, and I thought that your knowledge of the local history
could help us.”

For some reason, Eldad
found this amusing. “So, you are a history detective now,”’ he grinned.
“Perhaps you are in the wrong profession. I could use a good research assistant.”

“Well,” said Luria, “Jeanne
is a student of history. Perhaps you’ll be able to convince her to come and
work for you.”

“Is that a fact?” Eldad
was surprised. He turned to Jeanne. “Where do you study?”

“Caen University,” replied
Jeanne. “Unités de formation et de recherche d'histoire.”

“History at Caen?”
cried Eldad enthusiastically. “Professor Henry Piquét?”

“Professor Piquét is
heading the unit.”

“Well, what do you know!”
exclaimed Eldad. “Professor Piquét and I studied together for our master’s
degree at the Sorbonne. You must give him my regards! What a small world this
is!” he beamed. “So, what can I do for you?”

“I am working on a
research based on a few documents I found, concerning a family member who died
in Acre in 1799.”

“1799. Napoleon’s
doomed visit to the Holy Land,” said Eldad. “Indeed an interesting topic, which
could use some more attention. And what are these documents, may I ask?”

Jeanne fumbled through
her purse, produced a copy of the condolence letter that had been sent to
Roland de Charney more than 200 years before, and handed it to Eldad. The
professor started searching his desk, and then went on to slap his pants and shirt,
eventually retrieving from his shirt pocket a pair of reading glasses, which he
ceremoniously put on. Next, he proceeded to gaze at the document inquisitively.
“What is this?” he wondered. “This is not an original… and in English?”

“I have the original,” said
Jeanne apologetically, “but I did not want to bring it with me, and I assumed
an English translation would be easier to understand in Israel. I did translate
it myself, and the translation is true to the original.”

Professor Eldad shook
his head in obvious disappointment but went on reviewing the document. Within seconds,
his eyebrows arched in wonder. “Well, well… what do you say about that… a
letter from the emperor,” he cried excitedly. “But, of course, he was not yet
emperor when he wrote it. I assume Pascal de Charney is the family member you
have referred to.”

“Yes, Professor. We are
the de Charneys of Normandy.”

“De Charney of
Normandy…” mumbled Eldad. “It strikes a bell…” He passed his hand through his
fair and thinning hair, an action which probably represented an effort at
recall but resulted mainly in making an even a bigger mess of his hair. Jeanne
did not make any effort to help him, and he exerted himself for a while before
giving up. “I don’t know…” he muttered at last, as if waking from a dream, and went
back to his reading.

Having finished, he
raised his head, removed his glasses and looked at Jeanne. “An interesting
letter,” he said. “It is a pity that the poor fellow died that way. It was a pointless
death in an unnecessary campaign that turned out to be a fiasco. During this campaign,
Napoleon occasionally demonstrated his rare military genius, but some
significant flaws as well. Napoleon had no rival in managing battles on the
move, but he seemed to be less adept at a static kind of warfare like a siege.
In Acre, he met a sophisticated and cruel opponent. The whole management of the
siege was problematic. Napoleon was pressed for time. He did not have a worthy
naval force, which is mandatory for laying siege to a peninsula city. He also lacked
a component that he usually had in abundance – luck.”

“Why had he come here
in the first place?” asked Luria and immediately regretted it.

“Good question!” cried
Eldad and immediately assumed the role of a lecturer. He cleared his throat and
rose from his chair behind the desk. He started wandering around the small
room, maneuvering among the piles of documents that populated the floor. “This question
has a few possible answers. First, we must understand the historical
background. About ten years after the bloody revolution, France was governed by
a directory of five members. Napoleon was a brilliant artillery officer, who
came from nowhere and in just a few years rose to the rank of General, defeated
the Austrian Empire and became the darling of the nation. In fact, he became so
popular, that the directory, threatened by his popularity, preferred having him
as far away from Paris as possible. However, this went well with Napoleon’s
plans. He wanted a big and flashy campaign in order to stay in the public’s
eye. He might have also seen himself as a kind of modern Alexander and the East
beckoned him. Another reason for this undertaking was the concern that if
France did not take over Mamluk-governed Egypt, France’s arch enemy, Britain,
would, in order to secure another path to India, which it intended to colonize.

The professor paused
for a moment. “You are familiar with the term ‘Mamluk’, aren’t you?” he
inquired. Jeanne nodded, but Luria looked embarrassed. Eldad explained shortly
who the Mamluks were, before resuming his lecture.

“In May 1798, Napoleon
left the port of Toulon with 400 ships at the head of his expeditionary force
of 30,000 soldiers. By July, he had already defeated the Mamluk army in Egypt
and established French rule in Cairo. He then suffered a blow. Nelson, the
British Admiral, completely annihilated the French fleet at Abukir, not far
from Alexandria. At one fell swoop, the British won total control of the
Mediterranean and Napoleon was cut off from supplies and reinforcements. And
here,” Eldad raised his voice dramatically, “we must ask, why did Napoleon decide,
in such a complicated situation, to invade the Holy Land?”

He did not wait for a
reply. “Well, Napoleon was aware of the British-Ottoman coalition forming
against him and, rather than wait for his opponents to make their move, he chose
to go north and strike at the Turkish forces first.”

Eldad would have
undoubtedly gone on forever, but Jeanne stopped him by handing over to him a
second document. It was the letter of Gaston de Chateau-Renault.

“Another letter?”
exclaimed the professor in surprise and delight. Again, he went through the
ritual of desperately searching for his glasses, this time discovering them on
his forehead.

Having read the first
few sentences, he raised his head, casting a perplexed look at them over the
rims of his glasses. “De Chateau-Renault… de Chateau-Renault…” he mumbled, once
more trying to recall a name that sounded familiar to him. He gave up and
resumed his reading, but after a few more sentences he suddenly slapped his
knee. “Of course,” he cried aloud. “The poor de Chateau-Renault brothers!” He then
continued reading quietly till the end of the letter. Having finished, he
removed his glasses and mused for a while. “Fascinating document!” he finally said.
“Young Gaston was extraordinarily perceptive. The sly old fox did indeed trick
the French into a trap he had set for them and then had them shot like sitting
ducks.”

“The sly old fox?”
wondered Luria.

“Ahmed El-Jazzar, of
course,” explained Eldad.

“Who was he?”

“Jazzar Pasha was the
ruler of the precinct, who fought Napoleon from inside Acre,” explained Jeanne.

“That is correct,” said
the professor. “Ahmed Pasha of Acre was nicknamed ‘El-Jazzar’ – ‘The Butcher’
in Arabic. Born in Bosnia, he was sold in childhood as a Mamluk to Egypt, where
he climbed the ladder to serve the Turkish Sultan. He was a capable architect
and engineer, but also a suspicious and vindictive tyrant, whose cruelty became
a local legend. People were scared to death of him. Many people in Acre,
including his most senior advisors walked around missing an eye, a nose or an
ear, as a reminder of faults the governor had found in them. El-Jazzar managed
the defense of Acre, even though he was approaching eighty at the time.

“A few months before his
invasion, Napoleon tried to get in touch with El-Jazzar. He sent him an
emissary with a rather arrogant letter, which infuriated the old man. The poor
emissary was one of the de Chateau-Renault brothers mentioned in the letter you
have just given me. He paid with his head.”

“Professor Eldad,” said
Luria. “I admit I never meant to attend such a comprehensive history lesson,
but now I am intrigued. As I seem to be the most ignorant among the three of
us, can I ask you to summarize for me, in a nutshell, the story of this expedition,
which ended with the Acre fiasco?”

“Gladly.” Eldad did not
waste a second. “In February 1799, Napoleon left Cairo at the head of 13,000
soldiers. He took with him light field cannons and sent the big guns and most
of his siege equipment with a small flotilla, which sailed along the shores as
the army moved on. His intelligence indicated that a British-Turkish invasion of
Egypt was due in June, and he had to have a decisive victory over the Turks by
then. He hoped such a victory would break up the British-Turkish coalition, and
gambled that the three months he had would be enough. By the end of February,
he conquered Gaza and turned north. The next big offensive was directed against
Jaffa, with 6,000 Muslim soldiers and civilians within its walls. A small
delegation was sent to offer terms to the besieged. Its members were promptly
executed and their severed heads were displayed upon the walls, for all the
French to see. The infuriated French then stormed the city. Wholesale massacre,
rape and looting ensued. Thousands of people died, and the French took more
than 3,000 soldiers as prisoners. Most of these soldiers were marched on the
next day to the Jaffa shore, where they were killed with bayonets to save
ammunition, in a massacre which is considered to this day a major blight on
Napoleon’s name. The General then continued north. He entered Haifa, which El-Jazzar’s
men had deserted without a fight, ordered by the old man back to Acre for the
last stand. Napoleon climbed Mount Carmel to the location of the Stella Maris
Monastery, which was prepared by his men as a rear hospital for his troops.”