The Masada Complex Page 4

  With a fresh bandage on her knee, Masada strapped on the brace, put on shorts and a tank top, and grabbed a bottle of water. The urge to exert her body was irresistible. She had to sweat off the acid of old memories.

  She left through the rear patio, across the backyard, and through a small gate in the fence. Following along the drainage wash, she took the path over the lower hump of Camelback Mountain. Her body hurt, especially her right leg, but she kept going, heading east for the main Echo Canyon trail.

  The sun was high, the heat rising. She passed between two huge boulders, where the trail took a steep turn to the left, ascending over the crest of the camel’s nose. She stopped to look down at her street. A news van was advancing toward her house.

  She went on, stretching her arms, inhaling deeply. The trail split, and she took the steeper path through a deep crevice, pulling on the steel rail attached to the boulders, her arms taking the load off her aching leg.

  Midway up the crevice, an engine rattled nearby, disturbing the tranquility of the mountain. She paused and looked back down the crevice.

  A yellow motorbike entered the bottom end and stopped. The engine’s rattle was louder now, bouncing off the walls. The rider, with long limbs in black leather, revved up the engine.

  Masada stood frozen, hand gripping the railing.

  The motorbike raced up the crevice toward her.

  The ophthalmologist browsed the sign-up sheet. “Car accident. No serious injuries. Age seventy-two. Have you been drinking, Flavian?”

  “Professor Flavian Silver. My friends call me Levy. And I don’t drink.”

  The doctor dropped the papers on the desk. “Let me see your glasses.”

  “It’s only for protection. Not optical.”

  “But there is a problem with your vision, yes?”

  Silver hesitated. “A smudge. Like a shadow. It’s not too bad, but for me, limited as I am already, every little thing worries me.”

  “A smudge.” The doctor gave him a stern look, as if he’d intentionally rubbed sand into his eye. “Left or right eye?”

  “I wouldn’t see it in the left.”

  The doctor picked up the chart again and browsed it. “Of course!” He moved Silver’s face from side to side. “They matched color and shape perfectly. Excellent work. How did you lose the eye?”

  “A work accident. The current porcelain left eye was fabricated in Toronto, replacing earlier glass eye installed in Italy. I had occasional infections, treated in London, Ottawa, and Toronto.”

  “You travel a lot.”

  “My research takes me to different universities.”

  “Research?” The doctor perked up. “I do some research myself. What is your field?”

  “Jewish history. I wrote a book: The 1938 Evian Conference-Springboard to the Holocaust. Perhaps you heard of it.”

  “I don’t have time for pleasure reading. This smudge you see, where is it?”

  Professor Silver pointed at the doctor’s nose.

  “Center field.” He clucked his tongue. “Let’s not sound the alarm before finding the fire. We’ll conduct a few tests and see what’s going on.”

  Trapped between two walls of rock, Masada faced the speeding motorbike. Its front wheel tattled on the rocks, approaching her rapidly. She raised her hands to protect herself.

  It stopped just before hitting her.

  She picked up a rock.

  The rider dismounted and shut off the engine. “Hi there.” It was a female voice. She pulled a second helmet from the rear rack. “Someone wants to talk to you.”

  Masada recognized the accent. “You’re an Israeli.”

  The rider handed her the helmet. “It’s set up for videoconferencing.”

  Masada hesitated, but her journalistic curiosity was piqued. She slipped on the full-face helmet. It fit snugly, limiting her view through the open eye shield. A tiny electric motor buzzed as a miniature screen descended before her eyes.

  A picture appeared. Mountains, rocky and bare of vegetation.

  At first she thought it was somewhere nearby in Arizona. But the frame widened to show a body of water, flat as a mirror, its shoreline bleached with dried salt.

  A drop of sweat trickled down Masada’s back. She tried to retreat from the familiar sights, which she had banished from memory, but the draw was too great. She watched the salty shore her feet had once walked, the clusters of tall weeds where she had scooped black mud to smear her young body. She remembered the heavy scent of sulfur and the smothering humidity.

  The picture moved to the salt factory that had taken her parents’ lives, the long docks reaching into the thick water like skeletal fingers, the pinky still missing its middle phalanx. She thought of her dying mother, lips caked in salt, the air squeaking in and out of her destroyed lungs. Watch over Srulie!

  “Shalom, Masada.” The camera focused on a man in a wheelchair, a bouquet of flowers in his lap. “It’s been a long time.”

  Her right knee buckled. She swayed, her hip hit the steel railing. She tried to pull off the helmet.

  The lanky rider grabbed Masada’s hands with surprising strength.

  “I’m not talking to him.” Her eyes mixed the sights of the rider in her black helmet and the man in the small screen, sitting in his wheelchair on the other side of the world.

  The camera angle widened, and the sight ended Masada’s struggle.

  “I come here often,” Colonel Ness said, laying the bouquet on Srulie’s headstone. “Your brother was a gifted kid, a poet in the making.”

  Masada groaned.

  “I’d like to send you this one.” Ness pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Someone at the kibbutz gave it to me. Your brother wrote about missing his mom.”

  “What do you want?” Masada swallowed hard. Srulie had recited the poem aloud in the dining hall during a ceremony marking the sixth anniversary of their parents’ death. Miss Feldman, the kibbutz’s general secretary, had confiscated it because of the concluding, unpatriotic line: And the Dead Sea reeked.

  The camera focused on the colonel’s face. The skin had creased and weathered, yet his jaw was still square and stubborn, his expression still calm, radiating confidence. It was the same face she had once caressed and kissed with the wholeheartedness of first love.

  Colonel Ness looked down at the paper. “This morning I read this to my grandkids at breakfast. Your brother would have become another Agnon.”

  Masada was determined not to cry. “You didn’t arrange this high-tech showoff just to recite childish poetry.”

  “True.” Up close, his eyes had remained as blue as the Mediterranean on a sunny day. “That disaster wasn’t only my fault. We were soldiers, sworn to follow orders.”

  “You were the commander. You failed to act.” Masada’s voice trembled. “You practically killed him.”

  “And you practically killed the others!” Ness shut his eyes, breathing deeply. “If not for your crazy attack, the Arab wouldn’t have thrown the grenade. But you’re right. In hindsight, I should have acted despite the orders, and then even Srulie would have survived.”

  “Your only hindsight was covering your ass. You’re worse than those two Arabs. They sacrificed themselves for an idea, but you only thought of career and reputation. I despise you.”

  “Still, after all these years?” He sighed, passing a hand through his white curls. “If you knew all the facts-”

  “That won’t bring Srulie back.”

  “You have not been the only one to suffer.” The camera descended to the paper with Srulie’s poem, resting on the wool blanket that covered the colonel’s lap. “I didn’t know they sent you to jail. I was in the hospital, dealing with my own loss. When I found out, I pressed for pardon.”

  “How gracious. Why didn’t you wait outside when they released me, with red flowers and a mandolin?”

  “Listen,” he said, “we both paid a terrible price. You should not have grabbed my megaphone, and I should have ignored the orde
rs and attacked, which I would have done if I’d thought for one minute that Srulie was in danger.”

  “If. If. If. It’s too late for excuses.”

  “Always full of passion. That’s why I loved you.”

  For a moment, Masada saw him in her mind as he had been, bright and confident, the ultimate sabra.

  He smiled sadly. “It wasn’t all bad.”

  “It wasn’t bad,” she said, “for a married father of two to screw a young babe in uniform.”

  That shut him up.

  “How do I get this thing off?” Masada pushed on the bottom of the helmet.

  “In all these years,” he said quietly, “not a day passes that I don’t think of you. Not a single day that I don’t miss my beautiful-”

  “Take it off!”

  Colonel Ness leaned forward, his face filling the screen. “When you saw him crushed, you were crushed too. That night, you lost not only a brother. You lost your love for your country and for yourself. That’s the heaviest burden on my conscience.”

  Masada’s eyes welled up. For a moment, she wanted to believe him.

  “I’ve dreamt often that time rolled back, that I gave the order to attack, that we killed those two Arabs. In my dream, Srulie didn’t die, you didn’t attack the Arabs, the grenade didn’t go off, the other kids didn’t die, my legs didn’t separate from my body, and you didn’t run away to the other side of the world. In my dream I can walk, even run. And you and I? We’re happy. Together.”

  She breathed deeply, exhaled. “And your wife and kids? Are they also happy in your dream?”

  He sat back, his face turned away from the camera.

  “Stop dreaming about me,” she said. “It makes me feel dirty.”

  The camera left him and focused on the gravestone:

  Israel (“Srulie”) El-Tal

  Son of Miriam and Shlomo

  Murdered 19.8.82

  Seventeen at his death

  God Avenge His Blood

  Masada hoped the camera would linger. The grave had withered over the years, the stone no longer smooth, no longer white, no longer alone. There were many other graves under the shade of mature trees. Only the blue sky was the same, and the mountain towering over the kibbutz.

  The camera returned to Colonel Ness. “What’s happening now is bigger than us. If you think I haven’t suffered enough, then chop off my arms too. But don’t punish the State of Israel for my sins.”

  “Don’t compliment yourself. Your sins play no role in my life. Not anymore.”

  “What would Srulie think of your efforts to destroy the homeland he loved?”

  “Israel is destroying itself through infighting and lousy decisions. I’m just a writer.”

  “Just a writer? You’ve sent two Arizona governors to jail and a senator to his grave. I’ve followed your career, read your work, watched your victories-”

  “You’ve read my stuff?”

  He shrugged. “I have people for that.”

  In a flash she realized he was still in the game-the commander, staging a raid on a target, attacking with scripted maneuvers designed to weaken her defenses and bring about capitulation. “Then your people might have already told you that I didn’t seek the story. A source gave me a lead, and I followed it.”

  “Just like that, out of the blue? You believe in coincidences?”

  “Sometimes.” Masada’s back was drenched with sweat, and her scalp was itching under the helmet. “Anyway, it’s done.”

  “It’s only starting. Senator Mitchum, the new chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, just announced proposed new legislation-The Fair Aid Act. It would suspend all military aid to Israel pending Senate investigation of Mahoney’s death. Mitchum dared anyone to oppose him, implying that they were on the take too. Our people in Washington are desperate. No one is taking their calls.”

  “Pay more bribes.”

  “Once it passed the committee, a full Senate vote will take place very soon, then a protracted investigation, unless our friends on the Hill can point to new evidence that Mahoney wasn’t bribed by Israel.”

  “Fabricate something.”

  “We would,” Colonel Ness said, “but it’s got to come from you. Have you checked your source thoroughly?”

  “I’m not going to turn on my own source just to satisfy a crippled Israeli manipulator.”

  After a pause, Ness said, “You should enroll in an anger-management seminar.” He pushed his wheelchair, and the camera followed him between rows of graves. “I’m asking you to save the Jewish state.”

  “How melodramatic. Israel will survive without American aid.”

  “This aid suspension would mean a reversal in American support for Israel, a devastating change of the relationship with our only ally. All I’m asking is that you dig up further, right where your first lead came from.”

  “Forget it. I won’t risk my credibility for you people.”

  “You people?” He swiveled his wheelchair, facing the camera. Behind him, the hill side was covered with the red roofs of Kibbutz Ben-Yair. The camera opened up, letting the view widen until it showed the tomato fields in the valley below and a green tractor raising a cloud of dust into the clear sky. Above, Mount Masada cut a square block in a skyline. “Your credibility is more important than your homeland?”

  “My homeland is America.”

  “You’re an Israeli first!”

  “Not anymore.”

  His face was red. “You’ll go down in history as the woman who brought down the Jewish state.”

  “Do we need a Jewish state? Or a Christian, Muslim, or Hindu state?”

  “We have a state. It’s alive, and millions of Jews live there.”

  “Jews flourished for two thousand years without a state-maybe because they didn’t have a state.”

  “Jews died for two thousand years-pogroms, stake-burnings, mass expulsions, crusades, inquisition, a Holocaust.” Ness’s voice was rising. “America alone stands with us against an anti-Semitic world. But the people of the United States would turn against us if they believe that we paid Mahoney to rig up legislation that would force American boys to fight for Israel.”

  “The truth will set you free.” Masada inserted her hand through the open eye shield, grabbed the miniature screen, and pulled hard, ripping it from the helmet. A series of screeching sounds came through the earphones.

  The woman rider said, “She’s off video feed.”

  “Masada!” Colonel Ness’s voice came through the static noise. “Listen to me!”

  She found the buckle, released the helmet strap, and took it off, throwing it at the rocks.

  The biker picked it up. “He says he’s not done speaking with you.”

  Masada walked up the rest of the crevice and stepped into the open. Something glistened on the ground by her foot. It was a snakeskin, long, scaly, and brittle. She picked up the skin and threw it at Ness’s agent. “Tell him he can slither back into his hole.”

  “He says he doesn’t want to destroy you.”

  A realization came to her with a burst of anger. “And don’t touch my car again!”

  “What?”

  “Tell him I want payment for the tires you sliced.”

  The woman shrugged and listened to Ness’s response. “He says that we don’t bother with tires.” She paused. “He says that you’d better have someone else start your car for you.”

  Rabbi Josh lifted Raul onto the flat bed of the tow truck. The boy pulled a lever, and the dual ramps rumbled down from the rear, landing on the hot asphalt.

  The driver held Raul’s hand as he jumped down, glowing with pride. “I did it, Daddy!”

  “Super.” Rabbi Josh tugged on the visor of his son’s baseball cap. “Didn’t you forget something?”

  Raul turned to the driver. “Thank you!”

  The driver tipped his straw hat, stuffed his stained orange shirt into his jeans, and bent down to hook up steel chains to the Corvette.

  Raul fished
Masada’s key ring from his father’s pocket. “I can do it.”

  “The long one.” The driver touched the key with a callous finger. “Teeth down.”

  Rabbi Josh watched his son insert the key into the keyhole and turn it counterclockwise. The door unlocked, and Raul pulled on the handle to open it.

  “Good work,” the driver praised him. “You’re ready to have your own car.”

  Rabbi Josh followed the tow truck in his Honda. Raul waved at him through the rear window. The boy had taken off the baseball cap, his wet carrot-colored ringlets pressed down in the shape of the cap. As they drove down Camelback Road, the driver guided Raul’s hand to a string attached to an air horn, clearing traffic before them.

  “Eyes are funny.” Dr. Pablo ushered Silver back into his office. “Other essential organs are protected by ribs, bones, muscles, fat, and skin. But eyes are defenseless, like little balloons filled with liquid, nerves, and tiny blood vessels, easily damaged by any-”

  “Bad news?” Silver asked.

  “As I suspected.” The doctor seemed pleased with the validation of his premonition. “The dye we injected into your bloodstream allowed us to take a peek at your macula.” He handed Silver a pamphlet titled Age-related Macular Degeneration. “Your blotch is caused by AMD, which could be exacerbated by the accident last night.” Dr. Pablo led Professor Silver to a poster on the wall that showed the human eye. “In the front,” he said, pointing, “you have the cornea. When you look at something, the picture passes through the pupil and lens and reflects on the back of your eye, where the optic nerve transmits it to your brain. The macula is this small area.” His finger moved to the back of the eye. “Right in front of the optic nerve. It’s responsible for the most acute vision.”

  “The center,” Silver said, “where I have a blotch.”

  “It’s the beginning. Eventually, the whole center will disappear.” Dr. Pablo’s hands drew a large circle in the air. “Wet AMD appears as tiny bleeding in the retina, causing opaque deposits and scar tissue, and it’s progressive.” Dr. Pablo scribbled on a prescription pad, tore off the page, and handed it to Silver. “That’s for the police. They’ll let you drive for thirty days.”