“So,” said the thin man with the broad-brimmed hat, “Mordechai Abir, I presume?” He laughed to himself. “In all his glory.”
This was rather unfair. I was still trying to get over the blow to my head, the ground was shaking, the air was filled with smoke and somewhere too near to us people were shooting at each other.
“Who the hell are you?” I said. Then I realized he was pointing a gun at me.
“I’d have thought someone with your fine eye for detail, not to mention your exquisite research skills, wouldn’t need to see a person more than once in order to recognize him.”
I examined him more closely. Nothing memorable in the face, except maybe for the general thinness and the hungry look in his eyes. He was carrying a nylon backpack over one shoulder. Nothing familiar about that. But the clothes, the hat . . . where had I . . .
“You’re the man from the train,” I said. “You’re the one who told me not to stand near the front door of the car.”
Something nasty blew up somewhere above us, sending a thin drizzle of rubble on our heads. The thin man didn’t seem to care.
“Indeed,” he said. “Not that it made any difference. I should’ve known you wouldn’t listen.”
“But I have listened to you!” I said. “Wait a moment, how do you know me, anyway? No, wait — how did you get out of that train?”
“I jumped out of the window,” he said. “Which was just as planned. Your own survival, however, was a freak accident.”
I didn’t have any ready answer for that, so I just stared at him. There was a sound just like a neighbour hammering a nail into the other side of your apartment’s wall, only very loud and horribly fast. Bullets were hitting the outer side of the building above us.
“If you would have done what you were told, your remains would still be inside that train,” the thin man added. “I should’ve known better than to try.”
“Who are you? How do you know me?”
“Who in the field doesn’t know the world-famous historian of the occult, Mordechai Abir?” His words, while being utterly correct, weren’t spoken in the tone I’d expect from a serious historian. Which could lead to only one conclusion. A nonserious historian.
“I know who you are!” I said, picking a name at random. “You must be . . .”
The thin man smiled. “Aharon Reueli, at your service.”
How lucky for me that he didn’t let me finish the sentence. I was about to say, “Meir Sassoon.”
“I should have known,” I said. “The stupid Indiana Jones hat is a dead giveaway.”
“I wouldn’t mention stupidity if I were you,” Aharon said, and I could have sworn that he turned a little red, though it was hard to be sure under the hat. “Not after that pathetic article of yours, on the findings on Mount Sinai. Stupid indeed!”
“I have proof, you ignoramus! I have unquestionable proof, and I can — ”
“You have a twig and some antique documents that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. I bet you haven’t even checked them for watermarks.”
Now we could hear shouts, both from inside and outside the huge building we were in.
“Those documents date back from before the invention of watermarks, you buffoon!” I said. The man, unsurprisingly for anyone who’s ever read any of his articles, was completely out of his depth.
“Which is exactly why you should have checked them,” he said, still with that same thin smile. The gun was now trained directly at my head. “Since I estimate your current life expectancy at about, oh, let’s say, a minute, I’ll just tell you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. The gun didn’t waver. I kept quiet and he smirked. “If you’d have checked,” Reueli said, “you would have found, watermarked in plain sight on all of your precious ‘antique’ documents for everyone to see . . .”
“What?” I said, with more bravery than I felt. “What would I have found? A photograph of you and your grandmother?”
“No,” he said pleasantly. “Just my name and my autograph.”
Everything stopped.
There was no fight, no shooting, no smoke, no explosions: There was no sound. Aharon’s face was frozen. His mocking smile was frozen. The world was frozen. I heard my heart pumping, very slowly and deliberately. Other than that — no movement. The world. His face. His mocking smile.
Slowly, gently, everything turned grey again.
“How did you know I would be here?” I said.
“You bastard,” he whispered. He was lying on the floor with both his legs broken. Blood streamed out of his nose, and there were teeth on the ground.
“Tell me,” I said. “You like to talk, don’t you? Tell me or I’ll kill you.”
“After the train,” he said, forcing the words out, “I waited. I saw you getting out of there. Nobody else did. I thought of getting rid of you right there, but instead . . . I went away, I knew where I could start my investigation. And I was right!” he coughed. “By the time I was done I knew this would be the focal point. I got here early on, and waited. I figured that you’d come along sometime. All I had to do was kill you too, and then stay for the final act of my book.”
This short speech took its toll, I could see. Aharon’s eyes were closed now, and he was taking quick and shallow breaths.
“Your book?” I said. “My book, you thief!”
He didn’t reply.
“How did you find me when I got in, then?” I said. “That was no coincidence, was it?”
“Not at all,” he breathed. “I used . . . I used the same way to get in myself.”
He coughed.
“You waited for me,” I said. “You wanted to tell me, to my face, how you ruined my life’s work, and then, with me out of the way, you would have gotten all the credit for researching the Tel Aviv Apocalypse . . .” and then something he said finally registered and I said, “All you had to do was kill me too?” and I saw the hint of a smile in his eyes.
“Remember Meir Sassoon?” he said. “The guy who wrote The Secret History of Ein-Harod?”
Of course I did. That idiot. That, as I was being told, dead idiot?
“He stayed here,” Aharon said. “He collected all this crazy stuff, you wouldn’t believe it. Recordings, writings, video, digital, it’s a treasure. It’s all here . . . I had to kill him. I couldn’t let him . . .”
“You would have done it yourself,” he said.
His eyes closed.
I nodded. Then I took his backpack, strapped it over my shoulders, and walked away from the gunfire and explosions, inwards: towards the centre of the station, into the heart of the awaiting darkness.