Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (18 page)

"More likely one or two individuals on its
team."

"I'll have to tell the PM."
"Of course," said
Itamar. "We thought you should be briefed while the matter is still
under wraps."

"OK. Let's keep it that way and, in the
meantime, find this fellow Matternly."

Zabronski interrupted. "We're trying. For the
present, he's also high on our list of suspects in the murder of
that Bedouin."

Sonnenberg asked Gabby. "Is he hiding?

"Unfortunately, I think he is."

"Oh," the deputy PM said, rubbing loose flesh
beneath his chin. "You'll have to excuse me. There's an inferno
raging in the cabinet and the PM looks to me as his fire marshal."
He disappeared into the corridor a moment later.

A car from the Antiquities Authority was waiting
outside the Knesset to ferry them back to Itamar's office. Sounding
relieved that Sonnenberg had not threatened his tenure at the
Antiquities Agency, Itamar said, "Not a particularly fruitful
meeting, but at least we've done our duty."

They were seated in the car, driving through
Kiryat Wolfson, when Itamar resumed the conversation. "This
shouldn't be difficult to figure out. It's a fair assumption that
fragments were removed from Cave XII. Matternly's involved because
of his expertise in assembling fragmentary texts. That's why he
purchased computer equipment. But where did he take it?" He looked
to Gabby who remained lost in her thoughts. "Where?" he repeated,
redirecting his question at her. "If he no longer has a car, then
he's probably within walking distance of ha-Digital where he bought
the computer."

"Or he took a taxi," added Zabronski.

Gabby tried to picture the computer store,
mentally walking herself along the Jaffa Road, running northeast
from central Jerusalem with a continuous string of small retail
shops. One shop merged into the next, making it difficult to recall
the exact location of ha-Digital. Her visual image consisted of
crowds of shoppers on the street, mostly new immigrants from
Eastern Europe and many Hasidim from the nearby Hasidic and
Orthodox neighborhood of Mea She'arim.

Itamar kept forcing his analysis to free a
new clue, demanding Gabby's input.

That Tim had purchased a computer near Mea
She'arim triggered an upheaval of new ideas that she was not
prepared to share. To conceal the direction of her thinking, she
asked, "Why, I'm wondering, did Tim purchase a new laptop? He
almost always takes his Dell with him. Somehow, he must have gotten
separated from it. Surely he knew there was a risk in having his
credit card traced."

"But we don't have the Dell, or know where he
parted company with it," Zabronski said.

Gabby replied, still hiding what was now
paramount in her mind, "I'm thinking that if Tim had a record of
what was removed from the Qumran cave on a DVD or memory chip, he
wouldn't need his laptop. Any new computer would do."

***

Fragments from the Dead
Sea,
published before Tim and Gabby renewed their
relationship, established Tim as the leading authority in compiling
scattered biblical fragments. She never questioned his knowledge of
Hebrew and Aramaic, but knew it insufficient for the huge task of
assembling disconnected texts, a pursuit she, with a superior
command of these languages, would never have attempted. She had
always believed his genius to have been in the proprietary software
he developed to sort and assemble these texts, not his linguistic
skill. It followed that to understand the complex syntax of these
languages required the expertise of someone with encyclopedic
understanding of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic syntax. But who that
was remained a mystery. Tim failed to mention a collaborator in the
Credits and Acknowledgments of his magnum opus. He was even less
forthcoming when she put the question to him directly, letting her
know that the subject was off-limits for reasons he was not
prepared to share.

Such stonewalling only fueled her
speculation. The key to identifying Tim's collaborator was to
figure out who most likely possessed the required knowledge. The
field narrowed immediately to students of Talmud because the
Talmud, also written in Hebrew and Aramaic, had been compiled
contemporaneously with the Qumran scrolls. Gabby surmised that
Tim's helper was most probably a scholar first exposed to these
ancient languages at the early age of three in a Jewish
cheder
and later trained under
highly-disciplined conditions of a Talmudic yeshiva.

That Tim had purchased a new laptop on the
outskirts of Mea She'arim, a Hasidic district with more Talmud
scholars than any community in Jerusalem, perhaps the world,
confirmed her thinking. If he had collaborated with a Talmud
scholar in Mea She'arim on
Fragments
, he
would likely return to the same person for help with new texts
discovered in Cave XII. But to find this scholar and Tim in a
community of several thousand souls presented formidable odds. The
thought of searching for Tim on the medieval streets and alleys of
Mea She'arim was daunting, yet she could think of no
alternative.

Her search began with a visit to the
mikvah
, a ritual bathhouse Orthodox women use to
purify themselves after menstruation and childbirth. She observed
not one but two men tailing her from the apartment and left them
outside the
mikvah
on Betzael Street,
waiting for her to come out. The obligatory pool of natural
rainwater for the
mikvah
was located in
the basement and provided private changing rooms for the modest
Orthodox clientele. Gabby took a book to kill time until she felt
those tailing her would become bored and careless, then exited onto
Betzael Street, no longer in her denim jeans and sweatshirt, but
dressed like a devout Hasidic woman, her legs covered with thick
black stockings, her arms with a loosely fitting blouse, and her
head with a
sheittle
wig covering her
hair, signifying to onlookers that she was a married woman. A bulky
winter coat, quite uncomfortable in the warming air of spring,
successfully concealed her figure.

On several occasions, she spun around
abruptly to spot someone ducking out of sight. In her imagination,
an army of ghosts followed. Anyone who appeared behind her for more
than a few minutes fed suspicions. After three and a half hours
visiting one yeshiva after another without spotting anyone who
remotely resembling Tim, she returned home, determined to repeat
the search the next day, but follow a different plan.

It was clear that changing clothes in the
mikvah
was a stratagem useful once but not
twice. Still, the clothes of a pious woman would be helpful once in
Mea She'arim. On her second expedition, she resorted to new tactics
for confounding those tailing her by crossing numerous streets in
the middle of the block, ducking around cars and other vehicles,
followed by abrupt changes in direction, sometimes doubling back
completely. Before actually entering the Orthodox district, she
stopped before shop windows to spot in the reflection anyone
following her, and filed mental pictures of suspicious individuals,
until one picture began colliding with another. Two men attired
like
haredim
, ultra Orthodox, with their
heavy beards, braided ear locks, silk fringes hanging from their
waists, their breast pockets swollen with what might be
walkie-talkies, made her uncomfortable. She wrestled with a plan to
become proactive and confront them directly. But by the time she
fortified her resolve, they disappeared into pedestrian
traffic.

After a second unsuccessful day on the
streets, she ceased patrolling the yeshivas and began targeting
food markets, reasoning that, if Tim had settled down to work on
the Qumran fragments, he must eventually emerge for food. In these
markets, frequented by both Orthodox men and women, customers
abandoned the sacred tongue of Hebrew and spoke mostly in Yiddish,
the preferred language of commerce. Their pallid faces and heavy
bodies spoke of a generation restricted to the synagogue, school,
and home, stirring in Gabby respect for their old-world dedication
and discipline; however, they appeared as fossils from the distant
past, chained to the traditions of their fathers who had been, in
turn, chained to theirs.

As was their custom, the men of Mea She'arim
avoided letting their eyes fall upon a woman other than their wives
or daughters. But on occasion, a pious woman would lift an eyebrow
in recognition, as if to say she saw through the disguise. Gabby
would acknowledge their kindness with a gentle nod or a few
disjointed words of Yiddish she had heard her parents speak.

She visited a variety of butchers and
greengrocers once, but returned repeatedly to bakeries and dairies,
reasoning that most shoppers might purchase meat and vegetables
once a week, but require fresh bread and milk more frequently. To
be thorough, it was necessary to repeat her visits to all fourteen
of Mea She'arim's bakeries and eight of her dairies.

On her fifth trip and her third to a small
bakery on Ein Yaakov Street, religious and non-religious Jews
pressed impatiently toward the sales counter, gesturing and
shouting for privileged treatment from the staff. Warm air was
impregnated with the smell of fresh bread from the ovens. Gabby
elbowed forward, seeking a place from which she might survey the
crowd. As she angled toward the sales counter, a man with a
salt-and-pepper beard and heavy, languishing eyes moved with her.
On his breath was the sour odor of garlic. A flush of fear passed
through her as she compared the man's features with others stored
in her memory. Were all these Hasidic faces merging into a single
paradigm, or had this man been following her? She was about to
retreat when she noticed another man with equally suspicious
features standing like a Trojan guard near the door to the street,
appearing to be more interested in observing people than buying
bread.

Just then, a tall man hunched in a heavy
overcoat, a dark black homburg covering most of his face, turned
from the counter, a large unwrapped loaf of crusty bread tucked
under his arm. His ruddy beard glistened with silver and an
aquiline nose distinguished him from Jews with Eastern European
lineage. Had it not been for a mirthful expression indelibly forged
onto his lips, she might have missed him. In her mind, there could
only be a single individual with this unique expression. And in an
instant, she knew without a tinge of doubt that she had found
Tim.

An urge to plunge forward was countered by
the thought that finding him couldn't have come at a worse time.
She had hoped to make contact unnoticed and in some private manner.
But the Hasid with garlic on his breath hovered nearby, while his
cohort guarded the street door. She wrestled with a way to catch
Tim's attention without disclosing his identity and came up
empty-handed. Any attempt to make contact at this moment was
certain to trigger an adverse reaction.

He passed by only a few feet from Gabby,
apparently unaware of her presence. She considered following him
into the street, but abandoned the idea almost immediately. Were
she to move now, the men following her were certain to radio ahead
for assistance. And once they had Tim within their sights, it
wouldn't take them long to figure out where he was hiding and who
was helping him. The best of a terrible choice was to let him go.
In a few brief seconds, he had returned to her life, only to
disappear again just as fast. If there was any consolation in this
miserable turn of events, it was confirmation that Tim was alive
and well, and that he was hiding among the Hasidim.

After forcing herself to visit another two
bakeries and another dairy to give the impression that nothing
unusual had transpired, she turned in the direction of home in
Rehavia.

Lost in her thoughts, she cut diagonally
across Independence Park, east of the main commercial center, its
lawns speckled with ancient granite outcroppings, and had just
turned toward Gershon Agron Street when a powerful hand grabbed her
shoulder from behind, bringing her forward motion to a halt. A
second hand swung her toward another man. While the first one
pinned her arms behind her back, the second dropped a gunnysack
over her Orthodox wig. Bright afternoon sunlight disappeared. She
struggled to free herself from the attackers, violently kicking her
feet and twisting her shoulders. Suddenly, there seemed to be a
third individual, helping to upset her traction by lifting her from
the pavement and dragging her toward the street. She decided on a
strategy to upset this by first ceasing all resistance and going
limp, then suddenly instigating a fresh fight for freedom. The
trick caught one abductor off guard and he released her arm, which
she immediately employed by pounding the man in the face. When he
howled, the other man caught her free arm and painfully locked it
behind her back. One of the abductors snatched the fanny-pack she
had belted to her waist and tugged violently. It resisted until
another man fumbled with the plastic coupler, eventually freeing
the mechanism. Meanwhile, another attacker circled a sash around
her mouth, silencing her screams and forcing her to breathe through
her nose. Once again, they had her in the air, moving her in the
direction of Gershon Agron Street.

It couldn't have been more than a dozen
meters until she felt herself being shoved into a car as a heavy
hand shielded her head. Anger and determination fueled new
resistance as she violently kicked her legs. She found herself
being wedged between heavy bodies belonging to men, shouting
instructions to each other in Russian. The engine of the vehicle
was running; the driver put it into gear and inched from the curb
into oncoming traffic. Gabby attempted to lift her head to be seen
by other motorists, but a fierce hand cuffed her, compelling her to
remain hunched below the window line out of sight. Each time she
tried to straighten up, the hand, which remained heavy on the crown
of her head, pumped down, and provided a punishing slap.