He caught sight of Sigma carrying a tray to the table of the family of five, full of croissants, bread, cheese, and ham.
‘Sigma, please,’ Ben Isaac called. The Filipino came over. ‘Who gave you this envelope?’ Ben Isaac asked, trying to hide his anxiousness.
‘What envelope, Dr. Isaac? No one gave me any envelope.’
‘This…’ But he stopped. This was too much for Sigma to comprehend. ‘Forget it. I was confused. Thanks.’
‘Do you need anything else, Dr. Isaac?’
Ben Isaac took a few moments before answering no. Everything was fine.
In spite of the cool air-conditioning, Ben Isaac was sweating. He raised his napkin to his face to wipe away the film that was forming. This bothered him. He stuck his hand into the pocket of the shorts Myriam made him wear and took out the cell phone. He dialed from memory and pressed the green button to make the call. Soon he heard the beep that indicated the other phone was ringing, or vibrating, or whatever phones did these days.
‘Pick up, pick up, pick up,’ he said almost pleadingly, though his intention was only to think without speaking.
Nothing. There was no answer. Seconds later he listened to the answering machine. You called Ben Isaac Jr…
He put down the phone on the table and looked at his watch. It was eleven o’clock in Tel Aviv. Ben was working. Perhaps in some meeting about important business whose secrecy was the key to success. A tightening in his heart told him no. He got up. He needed to get his thoughts together. Take it easy, Ben Isaac. He has nothing to do with all this. They’re not going to lay a finger on little Ben. But he couldn’t help remembering the message on the cream paper. Status Quo. It made him shiver.
The past, always the past, pursuing the steps of the just man. The mistakes, obsessions, excesses of youth gave him no rest or forgetting. Like Myriam, little Ben, and Magda, the past was always with him, and this time it would all catch up to him at midnight in the swimming pool.
8
The professor stared at the students seriously with his arms crossed over his chest. The women considered him fascinating, the men respected him. He looked about forty and was in excellent physical shape. He never smiled or changed his tone of voice. Always confident. He made them think, challenged them, since this was his job as a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He cleared up doubts with new questions and another point of view. He didn’t give easy answers. Reflection and reasoning were the best weapons for surviving in the real world. They wouldn’t free them from death, but they would prolong their life.
‘The church always finds the solution in Holy Scripture. It’s all there. No one needs to wander lost, because the Bible is also a book of philosophy,’ he explained.
What a waste, the female contingent thought. Such an attractive person dedicated to the life of the church, a disciple of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a man of God.
Malicious tongues, anonymous sources, not that credible, said he was close to Pope Ratzinger. It was just a rumor, for no one could say if it was true or not.
‘Erotic also, and pornographic,’ a male voice was heard to say, coming from the door, at once revealing a much older man, with white hair, beard, and mustache. His age showed, along with a gleam of playfulness. The smile of a rebellious child who has done some mischief.
‘Jacopo, you never change,’ the professor said accusingly without altering his tone of voice.
‘Were you about to tell a lie, Rafael?’ he said, looking at the class provocatively. ‘The Bible is the first historical, fantastic, science fiction, gospel, thriller, and romance novel since the beginning of time.’
‘Do you need something, Jacopo?’ Rafael asked firmly. ‘I’m in the middle of a lecture.’
‘I beg your pardon for sticking my sensible opinion into these minds instead of what you stick in there… whatever that is,’ he joked. ‘Do you know that after all these centuries and millennia, everything we read in the Bible still has no archaeological confirmation? None. And many of the “characters”?’ — he sketched quotation marks in the air as he said the word — ‘and locations that are cited in this book, so important to so many, are not mentioned anywhere else? Only the Bible mentions them, but since it is the Bible…’ He stopped talking and assumed a serious tone. ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘Obviously not,’ and he left the classroom.
Rafael excused himself from the class and promised he’d be only a minute.
‘What’s happening?’ Rafael asked when he left and shut the door. ‘What is it that can’t wait?’
‘Yaman Zafer,’ Jacopo said.
Rafael’s eyes lit up. Now Jacopo had all his attention. ‘Yaman Zafer?’
‘Yes,’ the older man confirmed.
Rafael turned his back and sighed. Jacopo didn’t see him close his eyes. He might have cried, but he didn’t know how. Life sometimes dries up a person’s eyes, making him weep blood inside instead of water outside.
Jacopo was not the type of man who could be called sensitive. Sixty-six years had set a cloak of rationality over his feelings, shielding him from human emotions… or at least he liked to think so. Rafael couldn’t shield his feelings, but even so he was the coldest bastard Jacopo knew.
‘Do you have any more information?’ Rafael asked, turned back to him again, looking at him with sad, serious eyes.
‘Someone called him in the middle of the night to talk about a parchment. That’s what Irene said. He caught a flight the next morning, and…’ He left the rest unspoken.
‘Where?’ the priest wanted to know.
‘Paris. An old refrigerator warehouse on Saint-Ouen.’
Rafael continued to look at him steadily and then headed for the exit.
‘Paris it is.’
9
Shimon David was a conscientious old man, or at least he liked to think so. His neighbors didn’t use that word, but substituted another, less complimentary one, but he didn’t know about that, so he wasn’t hurt. For them Shimon was an old busybody, always attentive to the smallest movement on the street and in the neighborhood. If someone wanted to know if a particular person was home or arriving late, Shimon was the person to ask. He would even know whether the delay would be long or short. The limit of his knowledge stretched from one end of the street to the other, and nothing else mattered to him. A widower, he had lived there for more than two decades. All his life he had been a mailman. He could tell a lot about a person from the mail he received. Shimon knew many things about his neighbors, more than they sometimes imagined, because no one wanted to know about him.
The street was in the suburbs of the Holy City. In the distance in the midst of buildings and stores, someone who knew what to look for could make out the gold cupola of the Dome of the Rock, within the walls.
From the same window from which he kept track of his neighbors, Shimon could see his beloved city of Jerusalem, the center of the world.
This afternoon Shimon didn’t appear at his window. His neighbors came home from work tired and didn’t spare a glance to check his absence. They entered their houses as always without looking back, so they didn’t notice whether Shimon was at his window or not.
Movements inside the house of Marian, an old woman of ninety who had died two months before without heirs, caught the zealous Jew’s attention. Perhaps someone had bought the house, which was next door to his. Certainly there had not been any changes or repairs. The three men who arrived in a white van entered the house and installed themselves as if they’d always lived there. The situation didn’t inspire confidence in Shimon. Information was everything.
He knew Marian’s house well. He’d been inside many times when she was alive, crotchety and very gossipy. But he liked to talk to her. She was always someone to talk to. Shimon’s first mistake was not knocking on the front door and, instead, trying a sneaky approach. He circled the house by the first-floor patio, one step in front of the other, careful not to make a noise. The first window was for the living room, and he dared not look in. It was shared by too many people to be empty, and Shimon didn’t want to risk being discovered. Not because he felt he was doing anything wrong, but to fulfill his duty to his neighbor’s belongings that should be passed along in perfect condition to the next owners, whoever they might be. The second window was Marian’s room. She’d moved down to the first floor when she realized she would die earlier if she had to climb the stairs every night. She was worn out by the effort. Marian was a very practical woman. But now was not the time to think about her. His mission was to find out who the intruders were. If they were intruders. They could be just three nice young men to add to the list of new neighbors. It would be a change, since the neighbors were starting to disappear as they moved out or died.