Vanity of Vanities
[Day 11]
There are five types of homicide in Israel:
1. Murder - The premeditated killing of a person, or the intentional killing of a person whilst committing, preparing for, or escaping from any crime, is murder. The mandatory punishment for this crime is life imprisonment. Life is usually commuted (clemency from the President) to 30 years from which a third can be deducted by the parole board for good behaviour. Arab terrorists are not usually granted pardons or parole other than as part of deals struck with Arab terrorist organisations or foreign governments and in exchange for captured Israelis or their corpses.
2. Reduced sentence murder - If the murderer did not fully understand his actions because of mental defect (but not legal insanity or imbecility), or in circumstances close to self-defence, necessity or duress or where the murderer suffered from serious mental distress because of long-term abuse, the court can give a sentence of less than life. This is a new addition to the Israeli penal code and has been rarely used.
3. Manslaughter - The deliberate killing of a person without premeditation (or the other circumstances of murder) is manslaughter for which the maximum sentence is 20 years. The sentence depends on the particular circumstances of the crime and its perpetrator.
4. Negligent killing or vehicular killing - Maximum sentence is 3 years (minimum of 11 months for the driver). The perpetrator in this situation can expect to receive some jail time of about 6 – 12 months.
5. Infanticide - The killing of a baby less than 12 months old by its mother where she can show that she was suffering from the effects of the birth or breast-feeding. Maximum sentence is 5 years. –The Israeli Penal Code
1
Mary Cosgrove awoke outside in a pool of a sticky substance. It smelled strange, tangy, coppery, with a strange hint or trace of eucalyptus.
Her head was killing her and her stomach hurt like the devil.
‘Ugh…how long has it been since I ate…?’ Cosgrove, dazed, pulled herself upright. She looked at her watch. It was eleven in the morning. She looked around. She was outside, in an alleyway.
‘Where am I…?’
Well, this was certainly strange. Almost a novelist’s idea of what happened to people going about their lives. It reminded her of a bad mystery show that ITV had aired three episodes of before cancelling a few years ago.
Her mouth was dry and sticky. There was a thin pap of whitish-yellow scum, presumably consisting mostly of saliva, coating her lips. She looked down. She was wearing her white seventies dress and mud-coated shoes.
…A-a-a-and then she saw the bodies.
‘Oh God…’ Cosgrove lurched to one side, bracing herself against the brick wall of the alleyway. ‘Oh my…oh God…’ She glanced back over her shoulder and gulped. She tasted something rank and disgustingly sour. She sank to her knees, opened her mouth again, and let slip a few spurts of light greenish-brown liquid vomit.
There were four or five bodies as far as she could see, all of which had been shot in the chest or stomach. The stomach shots were by far fouler. Cosgrove could not bring herself to look at them directly; all she could see in peripheral glimpses were great dark yawning holes amid twisted haloes of wet redness.
Two of the bodies had long hair, one short, and one almost no hair at all. The fifth, if there was a fifth and it was not just a detached part of one of the others, was partly hidden in the alleyway shadows.
Cosgrove ran.
She ran out into the street, got her bearings, and sprinted off toward Tsarfat Square. It was Thursday the eleventh of September, eleven-oh-six in the morning, and there were horrific mutilations right behind her, where she had come from, where she had got to without remembering how. The only mercy was that they had obviously been killed with a gun…Cosgrove had no gun…she had not done…done anything…
She vomited again, right in the street near Tsarfat Square. The passers-by gawked.
‘I need to…need to call the Nish…’
Cosgrove had no idea where her roommate was. She had only a vague memory of the past few days. The Nish hadn’t been at work a lot, but she hadn’t been in the flat either for great stretches of the day. Cosgrove had no idea what had happened to her explicit memory, how those people had died, or who they even were (she had not been able to bring herself to check the bodies).
Eventually she found a public phone and placed a call to the Nish’s cell phone.
‘Pick up…please, Nish, for the love of God, pick up…’
The phone rang six times. Midway through the sixth ring there was a click and a low voice saying ‘Hello?’
‘Nish? Oh, thank the L—’
‘MARY!’ shouted the Nish. ‘Where are you?!’
‘I…I don’t know!’ Cosgrove cried. Her thoughts were out of control, her feelings coming apart at the seams. ‘I’m…in Tsarfat Square, but…there was a…’
‘Mary,’ said the Nish. ‘Calm down. Calm down, and tell me what’s going on.’
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ said Cosgrove. ‘There…murder, there was…’
‘Wait,’ said the Nish. ‘What did you say?’
‘Murder,’ said Cosgrove.
Cosgrove could not describe the noise that the Nish now made or imagine how she might be making it. It sounded like a wombat in heat might have. ‘I know,’ said Cosgrove, ‘right?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There was…a…’ Cosgrove gulped. ‘I woke up in an alleyway. Four or five people are dead.’
The Nish, on the other end of the line, in Flat 17, felt a rush of cold swirling up in her abdomen and shooting up and along her back and sides. There was a tingling feeling in her chest. Dark stars exploded behind her eyes. Her mouth fell slack like a hatchetfish and her brain went numb as she fished in vain for words.
‘I…who the…’
‘I don’t know who they are,’ said Cosgrove. ‘They might be the people we’ve met and befriended, they might be strangers, I don’t know!’
‘Well, what were you doing yesterday?’ asked the Nish hoarsely.
‘I…don’t remember.’
‘FUCK!’ said the Nish. She slammed her fist against the wall and sank to the floor, dangling the phone next to her head. ‘I was hoping that one of us had some idea…’ She trailed off.
‘Some idea what?’
‘What happened…’ The Nish exhaled slowly, evenly. ‘I don’t remember either.’
‘CHRIST!’ said Cosgrove. ‘I—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to swear, but…GOD …this is some bad crime novel concept!’
‘So,’ said the Nish. ‘What are we going to do about this now?’
2
‘So what are we going to do, Mary?’
Cosgrove had returned to the flat. She sat on the barstool mutely.
‘Have the police found the bodies yet?’
Silence. Then, ‘I don’t know.’
The Nish wept softly into her hand. ‘Do you think we might try to find out?’
‘I…want to solve this.’ Cosgrove scratched an itch on her leg opposite her right hand—the most she had moved in ten minutes. ‘I want this mystery…I want it gone.’
‘A murder mystery investigation? Amateur sleuthing.’ The Nish clutched her forehead. ‘Merciful Buddha, Mary…’ She shook her head. ‘What the Hell kind of an idea is that? I mean, I can’t think of anything better…but you’ve got to really stop and think about it…’
‘I have thought about it,’ said Cosgrove.
‘For like fifteen minutes!’ shouted the Nish.
There was another spell of silence. ‘Doesn’t your family have some kind of private guard or police force?’ asked Cosgrove at last.
‘Yes. As do many zaibatsu. We prefer not to rely on them too much. I really think this is a matter for the Israeli police.’
‘Well,’ said Cosgrove, ‘we should at least see if we can independently figure out who it is that’s been killed, don’t you agree?’
‘Good point,’ said the Nish, secretly a little surprised by Cosgrove’s recovery from the shock and how canny and focussed she could be when she had to. ‘Do you think you’re in a state to go back to that alleyway?’
‘If they haven’t found the bodies yet,’ said Cosgrove. ‘I imagine they haven’t. It’s a pretty out-of-the-way place.’
‘Mary,’ said the Nish. ‘You’re being so grim. It’s strange to see you like this.’
‘Well,’ said Cosgrove, ‘grim things happened, didn’t they? Whatever bastards did this and messed up our recollections of what went down have seriously put a damper on my good mood.’
‘As is only to be expected, to be sure,’ said the Nish. She stood up and began pacing around. ‘So you really feel all right with the idea of going back and seeing again?’
Cosgrove gulped and steeled herself in her mind. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think it would not kill me to see it again.’
It was grisly.
The bodies of Salvador Hermosa, Hildegard Wildermann, Fatima Sharif, and Benedict Hayward were sprawled in the alley, their torsos blasted beyond recognition, Padre Hermosa’s leg and a large chunk of hip and pelvis lying in the shadows a little way off. The death-faces were frozen in a state between confusion, shock, and horrified acceptance. A fly was making its way across Hildy’s lips. Fatima’s tongue was hanging out, down over her cheek.
‘Oh God…’ breathed Cosgrove. ‘Oh my Lord, Lord, have mercy upon us!’ She was panting. ‘Oh God…oh God…oh God…’
‘Calm down, Mary,’ said the Nish. ‘I know you can be calm about this; you were just…’
‘Forgive us…forgive…Nish, what did we do?!’
‘We didn’t ‘do’ anything. Mary, I think that you are brave and I know that you are smart. Be calm.’
Cosgrove leaned against a wall. ‘Should we call the police?’
The Nish sighed. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think we should.’
‘Of course we should call the police, Mary! Oh, what did they teach you about the world in that seminary?’
‘Not…especially much, honestly. About the world.’
The Nish looked over the bodies. The wounds were obviously of a sort caused by gunshots, but very large and messy, almost as if the guns had fired small bombs. Forensics was not the Nish’s strong suit—this would not be a CSI- or Hero-type affair for her and Cosgrove. They could not care less exactly what sorts of guns had made these wounds except insofar as it led them to the discovery of other relevant truths. But it was unpleasant to look at. Upsetting.
And somebody had obviously gone much, much further than a normal killer to make sure that these four people were very, very dead.
‘I have no idea where to go from here,’ confessed the Nish.
‘The obvious solution involves calling the Israeli police,’ said Cosgrove, ‘but I am not certain how one is expected to go about doing that in this country.’
‘How do you call the police in any country? Usually there’s an emergency number.’
‘But we don’t know what that number is.’
‘We could ask,’ said the Nish.
‘Ask who? Some random person in the street? They’d look at us like we were mad people.’
‘Not if we made it clear that we’re tourists, they wouldn’t. Look, Mary, do you want to figure this out even if it means being a little embarrassed or don’t you?’
Cosgrove laughed without mirth. ‘Well, when you put it that way, of course I’m going to say ‘let’s just do this’.’
‘Good. So we’ll set about finding the emergency number.’ The Nish hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans. ‘While doing this we should begin to think about why somebody would kill these people.’
‘I’d…rather not think about…’
‘Look. Mary. If we’re going to play Agatha Christie we can’t afford to avoid unpleasant thoughts.’
At this point Cosgrove felt a sudden surge of religion, holy dread, as if God Himself had cast His thunder down upon her and was saying unto her, ‘Rise up, My child, to triumph in this time of trial’. Her head was rent in two, a splitting pain running up her forehead and down between her eyes.
There was a line drawn immediately downwards and all around from the bodies to the sky. The bodies had Divine light in them; the gaping wounds were the gates of Heaven. Cosgrove felt warmth swirling up in her stomach and rising into her heart.
‘Mary? What are you standing around staring at? Come ON.’
Cosgrove followed after the Nish, going forth as if a woman slain.
3
G.T. Schuster-Slatt and Victoriano Santana sat in one of the cafés in East Jerusalem near the walls of the Old City. There was a Jewish settlement a few blocks away, an Eastern Catholic church down the street, and the notes of the call to prayer wafting from somewhere in the distance. Santana’s head hurt. He had been separated from the others for several days and wondered what they were up to. He felt a sort of neurotic guilt and he was not really sure why.
‘I want to thank you for your help again, Santana,’ said Schuster-Slatt. ‘On behalf of King Catfish, that is. He says that you’re contributing to the future of America even while so far abroad, a true immigrant patriot.’
‘I have a question,’ said Santana sullenly.
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘To what extent, G.T., do you even believe in or agree with the things that King Catfish and the others have been doing?’
Schuster-Slatt furrowed his brow. ‘Uh…’ he said. ‘I’m not really sure how to answer that. Why do you ask, Santana?’
‘I ask,’ said Santana, ‘because you seem highly…ambivalent, I want to say? –or equivocal? –about much of what we have been doing here. Now, I don’t see this as a problem exactly but I’m worried that the powers that be might.’
‘So you think I’m some sort of mercenary?’ Schuster-Slatt laughed.
‘No. The Kingfisher just worries that you may not be entirely committed to—that you may not necessarily care about—the work at hand.’
‘The Kingfisher’s a smart guy,’ said Schuster-Slatt.
Santana narrowed his eyes. ‘You really do not care?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ said Schuster-Slatt.
Santana sighed and sipped his coffee. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but G.T., you can’t…it will not be a good idea for you to…’ He shook his head. ‘You know what you’re doing.’
‘Santana?’ said Schuster-Slatt.
‘What?’
‘You’re a lazy shit.’
Santana did not respond to this. Instead he started an entirely new thread of conversation. ‘G.T., I myself am not sure that I approve of some of the ideas that the Kingfisher’s adopted. King Turtle in particular tends to have highly questionable and circumspect opinions and ideas about how to handle things.’
‘You want me to try to tell the Kingfisher how he should do his job?’ Schuster-Slatt laughed. ‘Much as I’d oft love to do that, Santana, I think that if either of us were to do that the results would be very bad. For us.’
‘Can I ask you something?’ asked Santana.
‘Sure. What is it?’
‘How do you get that…?’ Santana gestured to Schuster-Slatt’s swollen, plastered lower lip and left cheek.
‘What? Oh. Somebody punched me in the face.’
‘Yes, I can tell, but…how and why were you in such a situation?’
‘I’m not sure I should tell you.’
‘Well, why the Sam Hill not?’ shouted Santana. ‘G.T., you can’t go around keeping stuff from a priest of God!’
‘You were laicised!’
‘ONCE A PRIEST, ALWAYS A PRIEST!!’ roared Santana. He sprung to his feet, upsetting table, plates, cups, and all. Several barristas ran forward. Several barristas fell down dead. Santana, panting, leaned against a wall, his eyes bloodshot.
‘Santana, you…’
‘I didn’t kill them.’ Santana gazed at the dead barristas for a moment, then looked wildly around for the shooter. If the shooter was even in eyeshot it was hopeless to find him or her in the crush of people running about, pressing their way out of the café.
Santana turned, wild-eyed, to Schuster-Slatt. ‘Did you…’
Schuster-Slatt took a gun from his coat and handed it to Santana. ‘Colt 1911,’ said Santana. ‘Heh. Classic, Schuster-Slatt. Not what I’d expect for you.’ He slid out the cartridge. It was still full. ‘Okay, so…’ Santana slid it back in and pocketed the gun.
‘Hey,’ said Schuster-Slatt, ‘that’s my…’
Santana clamped his hand over Schuster-Slatt’s mouth.
‘I talked to the Ten Kings and Four Grandsires yesterday, G.T.,’ said Santana. ‘Grandsire Cinque relayed to me a very interesting concept: that the Kingfisher is tired of your bullshit, G.T.’
‘What?!’
‘Tell me.’ Santana took out the gun and held it to Schuster-Slatt’s head. By now the café was completely deserted and the panic was spreading in the street outside. ‘Were you offended, G.T., when I suggested that you’d killed them?’ He pointed his foot at the barristas.
‘Of course I was offended! They’d done nothing wrong! I wouldn’t even have roughed them up, much less kill them!’
‘You see, this is why the Ten Kings and Four Grandsires have a problem,’ said Santana. ‘You draw all these lines in the sand. It’s that damn ‘social consciousness’ of yours, G.T.’
‘You…you think that’s a bad thing?’
‘No, I don’t. I say if you’re not going to have morals you need at least to have standards. But there’s that difference, you know? Those lines you won’t cross, they’re dangerously close to being an actual morality.’
‘…You were a priest!’
‘I was.’ Santana nodded and stepped away from Schuster-Slatt, keeping the Colt trained on him. ‘But you know, G.T., that we must sometimes make decisions about priorities and relatives in importance to decide our courses of action.’
‘So you’ve thought it meet and right to entirely reject all concept of morality because of some overriding interest? That isn’t like you, Santana. What’s come over you these past few days?’ Schuster-Slatt held out his hands as if in a peace offering. ‘Seriously, man, what happened to you? You used to be cool.’
‘The interests of Alma Mater Ecclesia aren’t going to be served by further division and conflict!’ snapped Santana. ‘This is an unfortunate thing to realise because it’s so much easier to just sit back and not do anything, but it’s true.’
‘What the Ten Kings have been proposing will just make things worse!’
‘If that’s the way you feel,’ said Santana coldly, ‘then why are you so upset about being shown the door?’
‘Because you’re pointing a gun at me. And we still don’t know why these barristas are dead, or what’s going on out in the street. We have to get out of here, Santana.’
Santana looked over his shoulder, outside, taking care to keep Schuster-Slatt in his peripheral vision. The hubbub on the street was dying down, but people were yelling about calling the police or the army.
‘You’re probably right,’ said Santana. With that he grabbed Schuster-Slatt and dragged him behind the counter, through a small maze of rooms, and out into a courtyard behind the café. The courtyard had a dumpster, some fire escapes leading up to houses and flats clustered around (including one over the café), and two alleyways exiting to the streets in opposite directions. ‘Old City or Jewish settlement?’ asked Santana.
‘What?’
Santana pointed to the right. ‘That alley will lead us up near the Old City.’ Santana pointed to the left. ‘That one will lead us to a Jewish settlement called Ramat Shlomo.’
‘Ramat Shlomo is, like, half a mile away!’
‘Don’t question me,’ said Santana. ‘I’ve been to Jerusalem before. I know these things.’
‘Fine. Old City.’
Santana and Schuster-Slatt went to the right, south towards the walled city of Herod. There was a group of Orthodox monks chanting nearby and a man in a bathrobe standing on a street corner loudly declaiming Torah. Santana felt a surge of indescribable guilt. It was not guilt at performing the will of the Kingfisher, the Ten Kings, and the Four Grandsires—it was for the best in the end. It was not guilt at having been laicised—he loved his wife and kids. It was a simultaneously vaguer and more crushingly identifiable guilt, the guilt of being here in the world.
It was not a feeling that Santana had ever had before.
It hurt.
4
‘So,’ said Nishizaki Shosetsuin, ‘this whole thing is a damned shame, eh?’
Cosgrove nodded silently. ‘Let’s just…wait for the police to get here, all right?’
They sat near the alleyway where the bodies were, on an outdoor bench in a dusty, run-down, predominantly Arab Christian neighbourhood—one of the few such left in Jerusalem. Some of these families went back to converts from the time of the Crusades, some even further, to the historical grey area surrounding the Parthians and the Eastern Romans and the Patriarchal Caliphate.
‘Of the survivors…’ said the Nish.
‘G.T. Schuster-Slatt,’ said Cosgrove, ‘Victoriano Santana, Reveka Metawi, Schlomo Toph.’
‘We’re counting Schlomo?’
‘Yes. He was with us a few days ago, remember?’
‘I think four days ago,’ said the Nish. ‘On Monday.’
‘Yes, ‘a few’ in the general sense. Now, of these people, Reveka seems a little, er, a little touched in the head, but I wouldn’t think of her as a person prone to do things like this.’
‘Keep in mind, Mary, that we don’t know a lot of what’s happened for almost the past week.’
‘Yes, I know! That’s part of the problem!’ Cosgrove fell into a very pensive spell and hung her head back, looking up at the sky and the upper walls of the buildings around them. A lone bird straggled across the heavens.
‘It is hot,’ said the Nish.
‘Yes,’ said Cosgrove.
After a few more minutes a tall red-haired woman in what looked like some kind of uniform came by.
‘Miss Cosgrove?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Cosgrove.
‘Mary Cosgrove?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Reverend Miss Mary Marguerite Cosgrove?’
‘Yes.’
The woman turned to the Nish; the Nish noted that her eyes were golden. Almost like a fox-spirit. The Nish felt cold and light-headed.
‘Miss Nishizaki?’
‘Yes,’ said the Nish.
‘Shosetsuin Nishizaki?’
‘Yes.’
‘Former Executive Vice-President and CFO of the Matsuba Group, Miss Shosetsuin ‘The Nish’ Nishizaki?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Miss Henderson. I will be your guide.’
‘Miss Henderson?’ The Nish frowned. ‘An Israeli policewoman, Miss Henderson. That’s your name? I find that hard to believe.’
‘I am not an Israeli policewoman,’ said the woman. ‘I am Miss Henderson. I will be your guide.’
The Nish wanted to ask who on Earth she was if not a policewoman but some strange force within her twisted her mouth and mind shut. She felt almost as if a new god was being born within her, a small god bound into this situation, taking sustenance from the moment for its existence.
‘Miss Henderson…’ said Cosgrove.
‘You are to come with me,’ said Miss Henderson.
‘Who are you?’
‘I am Miss Henderson. I will be your guide.’
‘Yes, but…who is Miss Henderson?’
‘Simply Miss Henderson, within the starry rudders of the mind.’
And Cosgrove did not know if this was reality any more. She looked down and saw that she was wearing a cilice, yet she did not remember putting on a cilice, did not known when or why she possibly could have, and did not feel the scratchiness, especially against her breasts, that a dress of coarse animal hair should have made her feel.
‘Judah rises,’ Miss Henderson was saying.
‘I beg your pa—’ began Cosgrove.
‘Judah rises. Consider, Mary Cosgrove, God’s desires.’
‘I, er, I consider very little but God’s desires, Miss Henderson…I may not look it, or even act it sometimes, but…I am a priest.’
‘God’s desires come down through six thousand and thirteen years.’
‘Six thousand and thirteen?’ Cosgrove thought for a moment, then laughed. ‘Are you referring to Archbishop Ussher’s calculations[1], Miss Henderson? Now, I, like many people and I hope most if not all priests, believe that God is the uncaused, almighty, spiritual Creator of the universe. But imposing upon him the same limitations in knowledge and power as James Ussher is a lite disrespectful, don’t you think?’
‘Disrespectful to Ussher otherwise,’ said Miss Henderson.
Cosgrove frowned. ‘Priests have flaws. God does not. And having happened to be alive before the earth sciences existed isn’t really a personality flaw anyway. Ussher was a pretty cool guy but just didn’t live anywhere or anytime when he could have been charitably expected to be any more accurate.’
‘Send him to Paradise,’ said the Nish. ‘Tell him to grasp the jewelled branch, all of gold with silver flowers and fruits of pearl, that grows on the mountain of Penglai, which existed before this world, which in turn is probably somewhere near the end of the first antarakalpa of the Vivartasthāyikalpa. After many more aeons the world will dissolve into nothingness, stay in nothingness, and then start again.’
‘And then?’ asked Miss Henderson.
‘And after sixty-four cycles there will be a much greater period of destruction and rebirth, in which not only the worlds of demons, ghosts, animals, and humans, but also the worlds of little deities are destroyed; but the High-Heavenly Plain of the great kami is never destroyed. And so it goes on.’
‘So there’s no millennialism in this idea of yours,’ said Cosgrove.
‘No. And in fact, if we are capable of living for something like one trillion one hundred and five billion nine hundred and nineteen million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years and three hundred and sixty days—these are American trillions and billions we’re talking, here—we should be able to observe these events again as they in fact occur, and thus actually figure out what’s going on.’
‘Presupposing not only the truth of this Hindu-Buddhist cosmology, but also the idea that every iteration of the cycle is identical,’ said Cosgrove waspishly.
‘Well, what’s your suggestion?’
‘Anything that doesn’t require us to live nine orders of magnitude longer than Methuselah,’ said Cosgrove. She did not say this in an angry or accusing or despairing or annoyed manner. She simply said it. ‘I have an idea. Who is currently in charge of the Matsuba Group?’
‘The Youth and Maiden of Multitudinous-road-forkings and Come-no-further-gate, of course,’ said the Nish as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘President and CEO Nishizaki, my father, who leaves most actual decision-making power to Executive Vice-President and CFO Kikukawa, my successor. Why?’
‘This Kikukawa woman,’ said Miss Henderson. ‘Maiden of Come-no-further-gate. You call her that?’
‘How do you know that Kikukawa’s a woman?’ asked Cosgrove.
‘Maiden of Come-no-further-gate,’ said the Nish.
‘Why do you call her that?’ asked Cosgrove.
5
Cosgrove and the Nish were slumped against each other sleeping peacefully on the bench in the sun when Reveka Metawi found them.
‘Hey,’ said Reveka. ‘Hey. Hey!’
‘Uh?’ Cosgrove blurted. She bolted upright. ‘R-Reveka! What are…?’
‘You called the police and army. So I’m here.’
‘Yes,’ said the Nish blearily, ‘but…you’re not the police or army. You’re Mossad. Intelligence isn’t police or military.’
‘The normal police were going to come,’ said Reveka. ‘The normal police aren’t going to come any more.’
‘Why?’ asked Cosgrove. ‘Why aren’t they going to come?’
Reveka bit her lip. ‘Well,’ she said, wondering how she should couch this explanation in a way that would satisfy the other two women, ‘I saw that Fatima was involved and became very sad and upset. I really liked Fatima a lot.’ She paused. Sometimes she had had (she was told) issues displaying this fact, like how she didn’t just let Fatima be wrong about Arab-Jewish issues but felt the need to try to correct her.
‘So,’ said the Nish, ‘why aren’t the police here, then?’
‘Because I told the police not to come.’
‘What?!’
‘Fatima is dead. I liked Fatima a lot and in order to honour her memory I decided that I would not let some sticky-fingered fat idiot from Bathsheba or some other such God-forsaken place handle this investigation. I heard that you were doing some investigating yourselves. I prevented the police from coming.’ Reveka’s face contorted into a horrific snarl. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’
‘Question!’ said Cosgrove.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you plan on alerting authorities or the media?’
‘Of course.’
‘Aww, man,’ said the Nish. ‘See, that’s a weak-ass plan, Reveka. If you’re just going to tell the proper channels anyway, what’s the point of killing police to investigate covertly yourself? See, this is why…’
‘My intent is not to ‘solve the murders’,’ said Reveka. ‘My intent is to save Fatima’s life.’
‘Uh…’ Cosgrove and the Nish looked back over their shoulders in the vague direction of the alleyway. ‘I think that ship has sailed, Reveka,’ said Cosgrove.
‘Liar! You lie!’
‘Unless you know more than one Fatima…’
‘Why do you care so much about her?’ asked the Nish, who seemed to Cosgrove to be judiciously weighing whether or not to put an arm around the very distraught Reveka.
‘She was…’ Reveka sat down on the bench next to Cosgrove and hung her head and arms between her legs. ‘Fatima is my best friend, really. She has been in Jerusalem for about ten months and she is the first non-Mossad person I’ve ever really been able to interact with personally in years.’ Cosgrove and the Nish both noted that she was going out of her way to use the present tense.
‘You are aware,’ said the Nish, ‘that typically the police will question those close to the victim before anyone else, right?’
‘I told you,’ Reveka hissed, ‘the police know nothing!’
‘But…you were going to alert the public.’
‘Yes! The public! Not the police!’ Reveka stood up and started walking towards the alleyway. Cosgrove and the Nish followed her. ‘The plan isn’t to keep the police from knowing that there have been murders. It’s to keep the police from investigating those murders.’
‘I really don’t think that’s wise,’ said Cosgrove. ‘I’m not sure how Israeli law works but you could be charged with any numbers of crimes if you…’
‘Defeat all comers!’ shouted Reveka, and they entered the alleyway.
Reveka Metawi showed no outward signs of emotion as she looked over the bodies of her acquaintances, except for a barely perceptible quivering of the facial muscles which Cosgrove and the Nish suspected to conceal a much deeper pain at the sight.
‘The murders appear to have been committed with explosive bullets,’ said Reveka. ‘Have either of you considered what you think ought to be done with the bodies?’
‘Well,’ said Cosgrove, ‘I for one had assumed that they’d be taken to a morgue, have a coroner, forensics…but you’ve vetoed that idea, so…’
‘You know,’ said the Nish, ‘I could easily report you for obstructing justice or covering up a crime.’
‘And I could easily snap your neck and keep on keeping on,’ said Reveka. ‘Did you have a point, Miss The Nish?’
‘What happened,’ said Cosgrove, ‘to that Henderson person who was here?’
‘What ‘Henderson’ person?’ asked the Nish.
Cosgrove raised her eyebrows. ‘The woman who came when we started talking about Hindu and Buddhist cosmology.’
‘I vaguely remember talking about Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, yes,’ said the Nish as if brushing it all off.
Reveka put a spyglass to her eye. Why did Reveka have a spyglass? The world may never know. But even so she put a spyglass to her eye and looked up at the afternoon sky while behind her Cosgrove and the Nish tried to sort out their feelings about the whole situation. The situation was indescribable. They could not even begin to describe a situation in which the current situation could have come into being. It was as if there was some terrible magic at work, or the world’s worst Divine intervention.
It was not that there was some kind of amnesia blocking off the past five or six days. It was non-amnesia but a sui generis non-amnesia—a specific ‘non-amnesia’, not just the generalised state of not having amnesia.
It was just the usual course of forgetting things, as if they had done nothing important whatsoever in that week. There were hazy memories there. They had gone to see a movie, though they couldn’t remember what. They had been to the Botanical Gardens and seen the olive-presses of Gethsemane. But it hadn’t been that important, really, and they couldn’t remember most specifics.
Except it had been important. It had been exceptionally important and now there were four dead people lying in some random alleyway that Cosgrove had no memory of having fallen asleep in.
They were clean. There couldn’t be any drugs involved in all of this. When Cosgrove had been sixteen she had tried to get into recreational drugs as seemingly everybody else her age was doing. This phase had lasted maybe six weeks before she was fully impressed with what a stupid idea it was, but that was long enough for her to know what having done drugs felt like. This felt nothing like that at all. And the Nish, contra her alleged image, did not even drink, though she kept beer on hand in case other people wanted to.
‘Do you think we should rule out supernatural possibilities?’ asked Cosgrove.
‘I don’t think we should rule anything out,’ replied the Nish, shaking her head, ‘not even the wildest theories about…angels or devils…or something. Or worse.’ She thought for a minute. ‘What’s worse than a devil in Christianity?’
‘Not much.’
‘Eh, it’s okay.’ The Nish shrugged. ‘No. No, I don’t think we should rule that out, because I’ve been having really strange dreams about kami and the inner mountain and veiled secret mirrors lately.’
Cosgrove gave a little interested peep of a sigh. ‘My dreams have been about undead horsemen and dragons eating the Sun.’
‘I see.’
6
Schuster-Slatt nodded off with Santana still, inexplicably, pointing the gun at him. Shit was SO not cash.
‘Oh,’ came a cold voice in dreaming. ‘So it’s you. Victor Jara.’
‘That’s not my name,’ said Schuster-Slatt’s mouth.
‘No, no, no. But it’s what that lazy-ass punk-folk office lady and her little lesbian Jesus-freak friend call you, do you know that?’
‘They call me Victor Jara? Really? I didn’t know they thought that highly of me.’
‘I think it’s meant to be an unfavourable comparison—as in, you want to be him but are nowhere near as good. Idiot.’
‘I don’t think personal attacks are called for, whoever you are.’
‘Go suck a dick, douche-fag.’
Being insulted with bizarre homophobic slurs annoyed [the actually straight] Schuster-Slatt, as, to be quite fair, it would most people. ‘Hey,’ said his mouth, ‘you wanna take this outside? Huh? You wanna take me?’
The cold voice laughed and Schuster-Slatt felt vaguely ill—and in a trice, he couldn’t think why, but he did not really have a problem with the voice any more.
‘Do you want to know where they are now, G.T.?’ asked the cold voice. ‘They’re in a different fragment, you see, a different quantum of existence. They’re getting sent to and fro, the winds of the worlds knock them around like prize fighters, and they’re still trying to figure out what is going on, the foolish children. You wouldn’t suffer the children to be brought unto me, would you, Giles Terence Schuster-Slatt, born 11 August 1980 in Tallahassee, Florida, to Cyrus Burghardt Slatt and Gertrude Scarlett Schuster?’
Now Schuster-Slatt felt sore afraid.
‘Do you see what I can do when we’re in this space?’ asked the voice. ‘Face it, G.T., your mental landscape doesn’t offer very much in the way of purchase—for either of us, really. You…you have principles. You have consciousness. But the funny thing about you is, G.T., it’s not fixed. Not like Fatima or Padre Hermosa. Not even like Benny or Hildy.’
‘Did…’
‘I am going to say this very clearly and I want you to believe me: I, THE ENTITY SPEAKING TO YOU, HAD NO PART IN THE DEATHS OF FATIMA SHARIF, SALVADOR HERMOSA, BENEDICT HAYWARD, AND HILDEGARD WILDERMANN. Do you believe me? I want you to believe me, G.T.’
Schuster-Slatt felt belief being injected into his head.
‘Yes. I believe you.’
‘And that’s the God’s honest truth,’ said the voice. ‘I didn’t do anything to those people.’
‘Are…are you somebody I know?’ asked Schuster-Slatt’s mouth.
‘Yes, actually,’ said the voice. ‘Not especially well, but yeah, you do know me. I could, in theory, remember Victor Jara in the Santiago stadium, just barely, but I don’t. You do know me.’
‘Are you real?’
The voice, as much as a voice could shrug, shrugged.
‘Do you know everybody’s intentions?’ asked the voice. ‘Everybody around you? –no? –I didn’t think so. Well, I don’t either. You could secretly be the lost king of Styria for all I know—for all I care. I don’t let these things get to me. Why should you?’
‘I can safely say,’ said Schuster-Slatt’s mouth, ‘that I don’t know what on Earth you’re talking about or what it’s got to do with anything.’ The voice said nothing. Schuster-Slatt’s mouth sighed. ‘Mack, if you’re going to have a conversation with someone, you can’t just run your mouth. You’ve got to actually make it so they can understand you.’
‘Understand? No, why should I care whether or not you understand? There are dreamers and madmen all over the world—schizophrenics, borderlines, sociopaths, fringe politicians and cultists. Do you understand them, Giles Schuster-Slatt? Do you care that they don’t understand you either?’
7
‘So.’
Cosgrove turned. It was the Nish. They were back in Flat 17, it was later in the afternoon, Reveka had said that she’d call back later, and Schlomo was over.
‘What is it?’ asked Cosgrove.
‘Have you and Schlomo found out anything about…?’
Schlomo nodded, crouched over the Nish’s laptop. ‘Victims?’ he said. ‘Miss Wildermann, born in Leoben, Austria in December 1988; affiliated with University of Jena. Mr Hayward, born in DeKalb, Texas in May 1964…’
‘He…seemed older than that,’ said the Nish.
‘Yes, well, stress, his life…’ Schlomo trailed off and picked up again where the Nish had interrupted. ‘Born in DeKalb, Texas in May 1964; son of an oilman, grandson of oilman, has little down-home business of some kind in East Texas. Not sure why he is in Jerusalem, actually. Miss Sharif, born in Obock, Djibouti in July 1986; graduated the Sorbonne this last May, wants get involve in Palestinian-related affairs. Mr Hermosa…’
‘Father Hermosa, if you…’ muttered Cosgrove.
‘Father Hermosa, born in Oquitoa, Sonora in November 1923; went to this really good Mexico seminary, been a priest in the same village fifty-eight years, been to Jerusalem before more than once.’
‘Thank you, Schlomo,’ said the Nish. ‘Have you got the more detailed information written down?’
Schlomo turned to her, smiled, and nodded.
‘Thank you so much for helping us with this, Schlomo,’ said Cosgrove.
‘Not a problem.’
‘To be honest, we’re a little afraid of Reveka.’
‘Understandable!’ said Schlomo. ‘But…you still want me not to tell police or public?’
‘No, Reveka doesn’t want anybody to,’ corrected the Nish. ‘To be honest, I’m a little conflicted about whether or not to do what that woman says. On one hand what she says to do is dangerous and potentially illegal; on the other hand, she’s terrifyingly intense and has probably killed for less.’
‘I am inclined to go by the law,’ said Schlomo. ‘Clean up this business. Bring it into light of day. The cleaner it gets, the simpler.’ He smiled. ‘Simple as that.’
‘I can’t think why,’ said Cosgrove morosely, ‘but I don’t think anything will be simple again, not for us.’
Mary Cosgrove saw spread out before her the unmistakable vista of an inhospitable desert horizon. What lay beyond the desert she did not know, and she was without map or compass. All that she had was the Nish, Schlomo, and arguably Reveka—those people, and her wits about her, and Jerusalem and God. As to what else was going on in the situation, what (if anything) she was up against…
No idea. Positively no idea. Murders, of course, implied a murderer or murderers. Which was the entire point of what they were doing. But had this murderer (she was going to assume one murderer until and unless it was demonstrated otherwise) allies? Had he/she schemes? –backup? –tricks up his/her sleeve?
Just what the Hell had happened in the past week?
The Nish looked round to see that Miss Henderson had come again. She stood between Cosgrove and Schlomo, peering over their shoulders; both seemed to notice her but take her in no account.
‘I wonder if you are aware,’ said the Nish, ‘of the woman behind you?’
‘Woman behind me?’ Schlomo turned around and saw Miss Henderson. ‘Oh. So it is. Hello, miss.’
‘Hello, Colonel Schlomo Toph,’ said Miss Henderson in her toneless tone of voice. She pronounced ‘colonel’ ‘KOHL-un-ell’. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘in my curiosity: it was you, was it not, who had the rather brutal profession, back in your early days?’
‘If you mean my military service,’ said Schlomo, ‘the country has universal conscription.’
‘Weren’t you in the army for something like eleven or twelve years, though?’ asked Cosgrove. ‘Your nickname was ‘Schlomo the Cleaner’, right?’
‘If you try to make me guilting for serving the country,’ said Schlomo, ‘you have failed.’
‘No, we’re not trying to…’ began the Nish, a little exasperated. ‘Mary, we’re not trying to make him guilty, right?’
Cosgrove shook her head. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Military service is…well, there’s a lot to be said about it, but I think it deserves its own conversation. And I didn’t bring it up anyway.’ She pointed to the stock-still, silent Miss Henderson. ‘She did.’ Cosgrove clapped her hands together. ‘On that note, let’s get back to the discussion of what’s actually going on.’
‘There is no normal natural way to resolve this in my view of our horizon,’ said Miss Henderson.
‘Really.’ The Nish put her hands on her hips and cocked one of her be-jeaned legs. ‘Well, what, then, do you see on this ‘our horizon’ of yours?’
‘Fires burning.’
‘Fires do tend to do that,’ said Cosgrove, and her voice was uncharacteristically droll. ‘Are the fires any particular colour?’
‘Why does that matter?’ hissed the Nish.
‘I think Miss Cosgrove trying to screw with our new friend,’ said Schlomo.
This conversation was so bizarre and unwieldy on so many levels. Many things had been said that in any ‘normal’ (for what ‘normality’ is ever worth) context would have been considered extremely unkind and potentially grounds for breaking off conversation entirely. Schlomo and Cosgrove, both typically very sweet people, had mercilessly insulted Miss Henderson, who was still just NOT explaining who she was or why she was there or saying anything that did not make her sound like an automaton.
For once, Shosetsuin ‘The Nish’ Nishizaki seemed to be the most judicious, even-handed, and soft-spoken person in the room. This bothered her a little. A large part of her identity was based upon being extremely forthright and occasionally offensive by Japanese standards, and at least a little outspoken even by Western standards. It seemed strange that she viewed this as such a major part of who she was as a person—her—but even so…
She felt a sun inside her mind and heart. There was something welling up within her, and shadowy things, just outside the realm of explicit vision, dancing all around her, whirling currents of mystery between the afternoon sunbeams, twisting around the motes of dust in the gold-lit air.
It was all leaping with life and telling her to…
‘What?’ asked the Nish.
‘What,’ asked the Nish, ‘do you want me to do?’
‘Close this fragment,’ said the room. ‘Go on to the next. With her, with him, and with them, and make it not too late.’
‘This…this ‘fragment’?’ asked Cosgrove. ‘What fragment? What are you talking about? Who are you?’
The Nish gasped. There was something creeping up her back, making her feel cold and comfortless. ‘You hear it too, Mary?’ Cosgrove nodded. ‘Kind of a low whispery whine of a voice, from between the objects and the air?’
‘Saying ‘come away, come away’,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Saying ‘empty yourself of mortal dreaming, enter the whirlpool of the sacred slaughter, to lead the lost chickens back up out of Hellfire’. Saying ‘Go then, go then, take them under your wing, bring them above the carnal whispers, over the hills and far away’.’
The Nish wrinkled her nose. ‘…That is not what the room is saying at all.’
‘Hey!’ said the spirits. ‘We did say it to her! –that is to say, I said it to her! And now—now you’ve made us all confused! I’ve never been so ashamed! I hate you, Nishizaki. I really, really hate you!’
‘—Mou, leave well enough alone!’ they said. ‘Come on, there are things that you are supposed to be doing!’
Cosgrove perceived a great net being lowered into the sea and brought back out again with a huge profusion of a catch, more fish than she had ever seen before. It looked like the North Sea or the Wash near where her family lived. A wave of homesickness came over her, and she came to hold the notion that the stones of the Old City would carry her back there in that time.
‘Hurry up, please, let’s go!’ said Cosgrove, pulling on Schlomo’s sleeve.
‘Uh…what…you are doing, Miss Cosgrove…’ murmured Schlomo.
‘Hurry up, please, let’s go!’ said the Nish.
‘Where is it we’re going?’ asked Schlomo.
‘We’re going to…we’re going to…we’re going to the junkyard,’ said the Nish dimly. ‘The junkyard near the Old City.’ She nodded. ‘Near the Old City.’
‘What ‘junkyard near the Old City’? What are you talk about?’
‘And this is Good,’ said the shadows in the room.
8
‘So,’ said Jaime Victoriano Santana Reyes. Giles Terence Schuster-Slatt lay half-dead on the bed behind him. ‘I’m glad they didn’t rough you up too horribly. Really, I am.’
‘You leave for two hours and some gorillas give me the all-over with brass knuckles and play my spine like an accordion!’ shouted Schuster-Slatt. ‘How is that not roughing me up too horribly?!’
‘Somehow I thought that you had been through worse.’ Santana shrugged. ‘Sorry if I’m wrong on that.’
‘I have been through worse!’
Santana nodded. ‘All right, still,’ he said. He fished around in the pockets of his overcoat and produced a ball-peen hammer. This he swung down and slammed into the back of Schuster-Slatt’s left hand. Something snapped within the flesh.
‘OW!’ shouted Schuster-Slatt. ‘What the…?’
‘Thou shalt chastise him with an iron hammer,’ said Santana, ‘that he may know the secret life within bodily death. Be praised, O Lord, with Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living thing can escape! Woe to those who die in mortal sin.’ He hit Schuster-Slatt’s left forearm with the hammer, bruising the bone. Schuster-Slatt yelped in pain. ‘Happy those she finds doing Your most holy will,’ said Santana. ‘The second death shall work them no harm. Praise and bless my Lord, and give Him thanks, and serve Him with great humility[2].’
‘What on Earth is wrong with you?’ shouted Schuster-Slatt.
‘Please don’t be so noisy,’ said Santana.
‘I’m only being noisy because you hit my fucking bone. My fucking bone.’
‘Is ‘fucking’ an expletive here, or is this a bone that you use to have sex?’ asked Santana with a voice of primal innocence.
Schuster-Slatt narrowed his eyes. ‘Were you dropped on the head recently?’
‘I…’ began Santana, then stopped short and stood there stock-still with an oddly intense look in his eyes. ‘No,’ he breathed. ‘No, I should not…I can’t, I’m sorry, no, I WASN’T GOING TO!! No, no, it’s just that…’
‘Are you for real?’ snapped Schuster-Slatt.
Santana frowned. ‘I’m…not really sure about the question,’ he said.
Schuster-Slatt sighed. ‘I really, really hate you people now.’
‘So I had assumed.’ Santana nodded. ‘But a starlit mantle flings its rainbow-coloured damask across the heavens. The fires dance within…’
‘The fires dance within the turning tide as the waves wash up against the deserted shore,’ said Reveka Metawi. ‘This is the culmination of witchcraft and the apotheosis of the sciences. The world has turned brown and grey and the night is starless before a dawnless day. We do these things so that the Doors of Guf may open again and the doves and sparrows fill the skies.’
‘Reveka?’ said Schuster-Slatt. ‘—What are you doing here?’
‘Mediaeval,’ said Reveka. No context, no other words, no clue to what she was referring, just ‘mediaeval’.
‘…What?’
‘Are you for real, G.T.?’ asked Victoriano Santana.
9
And then, in the junkyard near the Old City, the two young women came undone in the courses of their history.
[1] James Ussher was the seventeenth-century Irish cleric who pieced together the Biblical chronology, beginning in 4004 BC, that would later become the standard young-earth creationist interpretation of the world’s history. Other chronologies, such as the traditional Jewish one, have an even younger universe (AD 2009 is equivalent to middle and late 5769 and early 5770 in the Hebrew calendar, whose epoch, in 3761 BC, is actually a year before the ostensible creation of the world). For comparison’s sake, by 4004 BC the people of the Gangetic Plain had pretty much mastered wet-rice agriculture.
[2] Beginning with ‘Be praised, O Lord,’ Santana is here reciting the stanza of St Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun. From ‘Thou shalt chastise’ to ‘within bodily death’ came from another source.
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