The Jerusalem Puzzle (21 page)

He must have heard the music.

‘We need somewhere to stay. Do you know anywhere?’ I was hoping not to attract too much suspicion from the taxi driver. There was more silence. I had no idea what he was going to do. Would he turn us in?

Then he said. ‘Come to my place. I’m crazy, I know, but my mother taught me never to turn anyone away.’ He gave me his address. It was near the central bus station.

‘Leave the taxi at the bus station,’ he said.

Fifteen minutes later we were outside a four-storey apartment block that looked as if it had been designed in the ’60s by a determined modernist. There were little Stars of David on each plastic buzzer by the front door. Simon came down himself to let us in.

He put a finger to his lips to get us to stay silent as we went inside. Then he went outside to look around before showing us upstairs. His family was away, he said, but from the mugs still on the dining table I got the impression they had scarpered in the last few minutes.

He hadn’t told me he had children.

‘My wife and daughter, she’s thirteen, went away a little while ago to stay with her mother in Tel Aviv,’ he said, as if to explain the mugs.

‘We shouldn’t be here long,’ I said.

‘Is there anywhere people can stay in Jerusalem if they don’t want their details to be seen by the Israeli police in a few hours?’ I asked, as we sat down on a long brown sofa.

‘You will stay here,’ he said, matter-of-factly.

‘We can’t do that,’ I said.

He was standing in front of the door to go back out.

‘You must. You will.’

‘You’re very good,’ said Isabel. ‘Thank you.’ She stood, walked over to him and put a hand on his arm. ‘Is there somewhere I can lie down?’

‘Are you okay?’ I said.

She turned to me. She looked pale. It had crossed my mind that I should insist we leave, but now I was rethinking.

She shrugged. ‘I’m just tired. And I have a terrible headache. That’s all,’ she said.

‘This way,’ said Simon. ‘You can use my daughter’s room.’ He showed us to a room with a single bed. He got out clean sheets and soon Isabel was sleeping and I was in the front room of his apartment admiring the photographs on the walls. There was one of him and Yitzhak Rabin in dinner suits and another of him in military fatigues in the desert.

‘You get around,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t put them there,’ he said, ‘but my wife likes them.’

‘I hope we aren’t bringing problems down on top of you.’

He put a hand out in front of him, as if he was appealing to me for something.

‘So why did you come back? What do you hope to do here?’ His tone was aggrieved.

‘You know Susan Hunter is still missing?’

‘And you are the investigating team now, is that it? Are you qualified for this?’ He was clearly not going to give me any credit for coming back.

‘Nobody in the Israeli police force seems to give a damn about finding her.’

‘You seem very well-informed. Have you met all the officers working on her case?’

‘No, and I’m sure you’re right. Some of them will be doing their job properly, but that wasn’t the impression I got when I talked to the police here.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘I know things that might help find her. Do you think we should go home and sit on our hands, maybe wait until we hear they’ve found her body?’ I was getting annoyed now.

‘Because I won’t do that. You don’t know what happened to my wife, do you? You don’t know that she was murdered in a roadside bomb attack. That no one told me a goddamned thing about what really happened for a long time. You’re talking to the wrong person if you think I’m going to sit at home and wait for someone to knock on my door or to read about her death on a web page.’

He put his hands up.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know about your wife. Come on, sit down. I will make tea.’ He paused. His expression had softened.

‘My wife likes peppermint tea. Would you like to try some?’

I nodded, but I couldn’t sit down. I paced and started looking at the books on his shelves. It was difficult to wind down after what I’d seen at Kaiser’s and then having to run from our hotel.

When he came back with the teapot, a tall Ottoman-style silver thing, alongside delicate green cups and saucers, I sat opposite him. As we drank I told him about what we’d found out at Kaiser’s. He didn’t ask how I’d got in.

I told him about the stain on the floor and about the H shape. I showed him the picture of it.

There was silence in the room for a minute. Something had changed in his demeanour. If he seemed a little frightened before, it was amplified now. He went to the windows, pulled a thick brown curtain over, though it looked as if the curtain was never pulled given the trouble it took to get across.

When he was finished he went to a glass cabinet, took out a bottle of Russian vodka with a gold eagle on it and poured a good dollop into his tea.

He looked at me over the bottle.

‘You want some?’ His tone was querulous, as if he didn’t really expect me to say yes.

‘You bet. That’s just what I need.’ I held my cup out.

The tea tasted very different now, sharp, mucus-clearing. I could feel the vodka warming my insides up.

Simon went to the bookcase that lined one wall and took down a small green volume. He looked through it, opened it wide at a page, and held the page in front of me. It was covered in proto-alphabetic symbols. He pointed at an H symbol.

‘This is a very old symbol,’ he said. ‘It is an H now, but this was Heth in the Canaanite alphabet, their eighth letter. It is used to signify laughter.’ He sipped his tea.

‘I thought it was just an H,’ I said. ‘Who the hell uses Heth these days? Are you sure it’s not just an H?’ I couldn’t imagine Canaanites coming back to put their mark in a modern apartment.

‘The upward angle on the middle line gives it away. As for who uses Heth now, that’s a different question.’ He drank from his cup, finished it and put it down on the long, rough wooden coffee table that looked like an ancient door.

‘I’ve seen references to Heth in a book from the 1920s,’ he went on. He moved forward in his chair.

‘Jerusalem was going through a spiritualism fad then. This letter became a symbol for the parties that a German baron used to hold here. He and his mistress, an Austrian beauty, would invite all the expatriates who were hiding out here; ruined Russian counts, Armenian dilettantes, wealthy Lebanese apostates. Actually, they were more orgies than parties. The Mufti found out about them and the two of them were run out of town by a Muslim mob. It almost started a revolt against the British. You could say that was the seed for the Arab uprising in ’29. The Mufti thought the British weren’t clamping down hard enough on European hedonists.’

‘So it’s a symbol of hedonism?’

‘Laughter and hedonism was what it was associated with, but it was used for other purposes before that.’

‘Such as?’

‘It was an ancient curse symbol. It might have been put there to jinx any investigation.’

There was something nagging me about the symbol. I turned my phone on again and looked at the picture. There was something familiar about it. But what? I turned the phone off.

‘I’m worried about what’s happened to your friend Susan Hunter. Seeing this sign makes me fear for her even more than before,’ said Simon.

He settled back in his chair. It was my turn to move forward. I reached for the vodka bottle, poured myself an inch. I would need something strong to help me sleep after being at Kaiser’s.

‘That’s gold standard vodka from Moscow. My friend in the apartment next door brings it back. Go slow with it.’

I nodded. ‘Tell me, why does this Heth sign make you fearful for Susan?’

And then it came to me, where I’d seen the sign before. It was on the t-shirts of the young men who’d interrupted us at the dig. Underneath it had been the words
Heaven’s Legion.
Was someone trying to implicate them? I couldn’t imagine any reason why an organisation would put its own symbol at a murder site.

‘I’ll tell you, but pass me that bottle first.’

I passed him the bottle of vodka. He put it away in the glass cabinet, then turned to me. His skin looked white and sickly in the dim light from the lamp in the far corner of the room.

‘It provides an explanation for Max Kaiser’s death.’ He was staring at me, as if I’d brought a smell into the room.

I opened my hands. ‘Which is?’

‘He was a sacrifice, a human sacrifice.’

I could feel my face changing. First I felt a warm flush, then a quick coldness spread through me. I’d heard about human sacrifice, of course, but that was hundreds of years ago, wasn’t it? Such things didn’t happen anymore, did they?

‘What the hell would you sacrifice a human for?’ I blurted out.

‘There were three reasons in the early Canaanite tradition,’ said Simon slowly. ‘To ask the goddess to change the weather, for someone sick to be made whole, or for someone to be resurrected from the arms of the Queen of Darkness, and be brought back to life.’

‘The Queen of Darkness? Are you serious?’

‘Yes. She was the goddess who the Canaanites believed controlled the underworld, the land of Mot. It’s all on clay tablets from Ras Shamra in Syria. They were translated a few years ago.’

‘They believed in a Queen of Darkness?’

‘Yes, I have a picture of her.’ He went to his bookcase and took down a pile of academic papers. He spent the next few minutes leafing through them. Finally he pulled out a thin journal.

There was a black and white image of an oblong cuneiform tablet with an aluminium ruler beside it. The tablet had a series of marks on it surrounding a large image made from indented lines at its centre. The image was of a thin girl with prominent breasts. In her hands was a skull.

I handed him back the journal.

‘I need to sleep,’ I said. The day had caught up with me.

‘There’s a camp bed in the wardrobe, if you don’t want to disturb Isabel,’ he said.

‘That sounds like a good idea,’ I said. ‘She needs a proper night’s sleep.’

He told me how to open it and gave me some blankets. I set it up quietly in the darkness under the window. Isabel was sleeping soundly.

I woke at four in the morning. I wasn’t sure what had woken me. Then I heard a rumbling noise. I looked out of the window. Below was a carriageway with two lanes on each side separated by a low concrete divider and scraggy bushes. The side of the carriageway heading for the centre of Jerusalem was filled with tank transporters moving forward purposefully.

I watched them go by. They were dark green. The tanks had their barrels pointed straight ahead. One of the
transporter’s
windows was rolled down. In the half light from the street lamps a young, determined looking, female driver no more than twenty years of age was staring at the road ahead.

It looked as if a war was starting.

Arap Anach pressed the
encrypt call
app. A dial pad opened up and he pressed Lord Bidoner’s contact number. Twenty seconds later he could hear the phone ringing.

‘Do you know what time it is in London?’ said Lord Bidoner.

‘Two in the morning,’ said Anach.

‘Is this conversation secure?’

‘Your encrypt call application is open on your phone, isn’t it?’ said Anach.

‘Yes. What can I do for you?’

‘There’s been a general mobilisation of Israeli Defence Force units this morning. Everything is proceeding as planned.’

‘Just make sure you do it right this time. That fiasco in London left me out in the cold.’

‘No one from the Security Service has approached you, have they?’

‘No, but they’ve been poking around.’

‘The chances of anyone figuring out what’s going on are close to zero.’

‘Make sure you deal with that woman as we agreed, when the time comes.’

‘I know what to do. She will wish she hadn’t been born.’

The following morning I woke feeling hungover and groggy. I didn’t think I’d drunk enough to feel that way.

Isabel was already up. Sunlight was streaming through the window. Simon’s ramblings about human sacrifice and the Queen of Darkness were far away night time subjects. I lay in bed thinking about the tanks. Israel was in an almost permanent state of readiness for war, but I guessed what had happened last night was something more.

There’d been a hell of a lot of them.

One thing was clear; whatever was going on, those idiots working at that dig had to be investigated. Isabel’s idea of getting pictures of them was good. She could probably get Mark to run the images through their database to see if he could attach names to them, establish backgrounds and look for dodgy characters.

I got up and went looking for her to see if that was what she’d been planning. She wasn’t in the single bed.

Simon was in the main room. The curtains were pulled back and he had coffee and plates on the wooden dining table at the far end of the room.

‘Where’s Isabel?’ I said. I wasn’t worried at that point.

‘She went across the road to get some fresh bread. She insisted on going. I told her I could do it, but you know what women are like.’

I opened my mouth to say something, then I stopped. Something didn’t feel right.

‘Don’t worry. I watched her going into the shop only a few minutes ago.’ He must have seen anxiety in my expression.

‘It’s over there, straight across the road.’ He pointed at the door to the balcony. It looked down over the front of the building and the main road.

‘Why don’t you grab a coffee, go out onto on the balcony, and watch her coming back.’

I poured myself a cup and gulped some. Then I did as he’d suggested. The store’s name above the door was in Hebrew. It was on the corner of a block.

I waited, expecting at any moment to see her come out of the shop. I still wasn’t panicking. There was no way that anything could have happened to her. But the seconds ticked on.

And she didn’t appear. I checked my watch.