She smiled, though her pensive mood remained.
“What’s going to become of us?” she finally asked.
I knew what she meant; though I wanted to focus her mind on less troublesome topics for the moment.
“I sincerely hope that within forty-eight hours, we will find ourselves seated comfortably behind the first-base dugout at Fenway Park,” I replied.
This was true enough.
She chuckled quietly, though I could tell that she wouldn’t let me dodge the question indefinitely. The trouble was; I had no answer, even if we survived — an outcome I still considered problematic at best.
“I’m still working on that,” I said. “I think we all are.”
“Whatever happens, it’s going to be hard to listen to those preachers,” she said. “From what I’ve seen, the ones who jabber the loudest about remaining steadfast in the face of great peril have never been in the remotest danger of encountering it themselves.”
Except for those clowns on TV, that seemed a bit unfair, though I could sense where she was coming from.
I told her that for six months, I had the ‘privilege’ of serving as a US Army liaison to Mobutu’s forces in Zaire. The missionaries I had encountered in that country easily surpassed me both in raw courage and in their ability to navigate through exceptionally challenging circumstances.
“Did they bluster and pontificate?” she asked.
They had not, which I took to be her point.
“As they led me to Herod this morning, I thought back to a trip I had taken a few years ago,” she continued. “I had gone to Rome with my mother, in February, so we could see the sights before the hordes of summer tourists invaded the place.
“One beautiful morning, we took our coffee into the Colosseum, and just sat there on the stone benches, reflecting on the early Christians and what they had to have been thinking as they were herded into that very arena, to be torn apart by wild animals.”
I had done the same, years ago, and told her so.
“I’m sure they had all heard the story of Daniel,” she said. “Yet he was saved and they were not. Why?”
I had no answer.
“And what about the ones who were burned alive? They had to have known of the men who were rescued from Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Yet out of all the thousands, over the centuries, only three were saved. Three! The rest died screaming in agony, on the orders of the king, or the emperor.”
Or the Pope, I didn’t add. That last part was an inconvenient fact I had been brought up to ignore.
“These people had been just as faithful,” she exclaimed. “They had to be asking why; why God didn’t save them?”
She started to cry softly. I turned and slid my arm around her, and felt her warmth.
“It’s OK,” I said.
She rested her head on my chest and squeezed tight.
“I shouldn’t ask these questions, but I can’t make them go away. Can you believe it? There in the palace, I didn’t believe God would save me from Herod, even after I saw him.”
My first thought was to ask what he looked like, just to divert her mind to another subject, but the time didn’t seem right.
I also considered telling her that the Lord had sent his angels of mercy, in the unlikely form of a sympathetic Roman official and a clever, imaginative palace courtesan.
But as I looked around, I couldn’t be sure of that, either. We weren’t yet out of the woods, and that same official, over the next couple of days, might be the very man charged with hunting us down.
So I just wrapped her in my arms and spoke softly.
“It will be OK,” I repeated. “God is complicated. I’m not sure we’re meant to understand everything.”
Aside from an occasional glance around — after all we were still on guard duty — we just held onto each other and barely moved.
Some time later, I heard rustling coming up the hill. By instinct, I reached for my gladius, though I needn’t have bothered. Our interlopers were only Lavon and Naomi, arriving to give us a break.
“Relief shift,” he whispered.
I told Sharon to pick a spot down with the others and that I’d join her in a few minutes. After she had disappeared around a tree, Lavon gestured in her direction.
“I don’t think she’ll strive to chair the Emerald Charity Ball anymore,” he said.
Apparently that was the pinnacle of Dallas high society, though from the way he described it, the event sounded more like a tax deductible fashion show than a boon to the poor and downtrodden.
“No,” I replied. “I think her social-climbing days are over.”
“Assuming we make it back in one piece, I don’t see D. Percival Throckmorton, III as long for her world either,” he said.
I felt a knot tighten in my stomach. I had forgotten about D. Percival.
On our trip to the lab in Tel Aviv, Lavon had described him as a scion of Old Money Dallas, whose “job,” from what he could tell, consisted of being wined and dined by his pals at the toxic, crony-ridden cesspools we otherwise recognize as the big Wall Street banks.
The archaeologist must have noticed my strain, though I hoped he couldn’t read my true thoughts.
“What about you?” I asked, more to change the subject than to gather information.
“I’m struggling through some things myself,” he said. “Assuming we make it back, the world’s going to be different for us all.”
Of that, I was certain. I simply had no idea how.
Chapter 62
The rest of the night passed uneventfully. Markowitz returned to our shelter at dawn to wake the rest of us, after which he trudged back up the hill to resume his duties alongside the Professor at our makeshift observation post.
Once we had light enough to see, we discovered a small pool of water tucked away in an isolated corner of our rocky lair — a remnant from yesterday’s showers — though food remained an issue.
Lavon gave us a brief moment of hope in that regard.
As we had observed at the village coming in, ancient harvesting practices were remarkably inefficient. Furthermore, Mosaic Law allowed the reapers only one pass at each field. After that, the poor had the right to come in and glean anything that remained.
Since the barley harvest had just concluded, this sounded promising, although Naomi quickly discovered that any fields within striking distance of the main road had already been picked clean.
“Worth a try, anyway,” Lavon said as she returned.
She offered to venture farther out, but none of us wanted to take the chance that we could become separated.
I briefly considered slipping out and trying to nab a stray goat, but Lavon vetoed this as well. We had enough trouble as it was without bringing a posse of angry shepherds down upon our heads.
“We’ll just have to put aside thoughts of food,” he said.
In an effort to divert our minds, the four of us crept up to the crest of the ridge overlooking our shelter. In the distance, we could see a couple of boys driving a small flock of lambs, but otherwise all remained quiet. The denizens of Jerusalem took the Sabbath very seriously indeed.
“I wonder how voluntary this is?” I asked.
Lavon didn’t know, nor could he ascertain from Naomi the degree to which compliance was underpinned by an organized body of religious enforcers, like the Saudi mutaween or the Iranian basij.
“Given her situation, she has no interest in the topic, one way or the other,” he explained.
***
In truth, the enforcement of the Sabbath wasn’t our most pressing issue, either.
I glanced back to the opposite side of the ravine to verify that Bryson and Markowitz remained at their posts and then directed the others to return to our shelter.