ON THE MORNING AFTER THE MEETING WITH VO RAU, AS SOON AS IT was light, Patchen and Wolkowicz took off from Da Nang in an Outfit plane and headed out to sea. It was Wolkowicz’s aircraft. In Outfit terms, Vietnam was Wolkowicz’s country because he was in charge of operations there. Christopher had been kidnapped—if that was what had happened—in Vietnam, on Wolkowicz’s territory: “On my watch,” he had told Patchen, mocking the naval slang affected by some who had gone from the quarantine of Yale to the quarantine of Headquarters, bypassing what Wolkowicz regarded as real life.
Patchen looked out the window. Below the wings of the aircraft, in the South China Sea, junks and other unwieldy sailing vessels moved so slowly over the water that they left no wakes. Wolkowicz had told him that he wanted to talk about Christopher. What more was there to say? He was gone; he was beyond the Outfit’s reach. There were some things Patchen was not prepared to say on this subject, especially to Wolkowicz. Patchen had never really believed Christopher’s theory about the assassination of the President. It was too symmetrical. It was too much like Christopher himself: poetic, intelligent, subtle, logical. It was a morality tale in which the sin of pride is punished by a terrible act of vengeance. But these were not the only reasons why Patchen doubted the theory. He knew things Christopher had not known; he suspected people Christopher had trusted. He thought that someone had led Christopher in the direction of his strengths and virtues to a false but irresistible conclusion. There could be only one reason for such a dazzling act of intellectual jujitsu: to create a diversion, to lead investigators away from the true explanation, away from the real reason, away from the people truly responsible. Only someone who knew Christopher intimately, who understood the way his mind worked, could have deceived him in this way.
“We’re here,” Wolkowicz said. He knocked on the bulkhead, opened the cockpit door, and ordered the pilot to fly in circles.
From an inside pocket Wolkowicz produced a wad of paper and photographs, separated them, and handed them over to Patchen one by one: a marked aircraft map of the Chinese island of Hainan, a dozen black-and-white snapshots of a large villa surrounded by a wall, and a sheet of foolscap on which a floor plan had been drawn and labeled in Vietnamese. These documents were slightly damp with Wolkowicz’s sweat.
Wolkowicz took the floor plan out of Patchen’s hand and pressed his blunt finger onto the penciled square that represented a windowless storeroom off the villa’s kitchen. “This is the room where Christopher is being held—for the moment,” he said. “He’ll be moved somewhere else in China tomorrow night.”
Patchen lifted his eye to Wolkowicz’s face. “What’s the source of all this gossip?” he asked.
“We try to keep our eyes and ears open,” Wolkowicz said. They were whispering; it was more efficient than shouting, and the bulkhead between them and the pilot was very thin. Patchen said, “What is the source?”
Wolkowicz opened his eyes wide. “If I didn’t trust the source I wouldn’t believe the report. But I do. Don’t worry about it. I want to talk to you about Christopher.”
“You’re already doing that.”
“Not yet I’m not. I want to go in and get him. Unmarked helicopters, shooters in civilian clothes.” He pointed to the documents. “We know the exact location of the house. We know exactly where Christopher is inside the house. We know there are six guards on duty—one at the front door, one at the back, one on the roof, three on the gate. I’ve got a team on full alert. I’ve got two black helicopters standing by, no markings, extra fuel tanks. Hainan is close—two hundred miles from Da Nang. We can go in the dark, be in and out in fifteen minutes. We can bring him back alive. Tonight. Tomorrow is too late.”
Listening to this, Patchen’s expression did not change. “Let me understand this,” he said. “You want to carry out a hostile military operation inside China.”
“Correction. I want to carry out a clandestine operation to extract a captured agent.”
“Christopher’s not an agent.”
“You’re absolutely right—he’s been off the payroll for three weeks. But what was he doing for fifteen years before that? Do you realize what he’s going to spill?”
“I realize what the Chinese could do if they captured a U. S. assault team on their territory. No.”
“No? You’re saying no? Why not?”
“You know why not. What’s the matter with you?”
Wolkowicz’s face, already flushed, grew angrier. “You’re asking me?” he said. “This guy is supposed to be your best friend.” “That’s right. At least he’s alive. You don’t think one of those six guards is going to shoot him rather than give him back?” “How do you know he’s alive? How do you know there are six guards?”
“You say your information is correct. I’m being polite.” “Don’t be. Just tell me your answer.”
“No,” Patchen replied. “The answer is no.”
Wolkowicz gave, him a look of deep contempt, but he did not argue. Then he pounded on the cockpit door.
“Home, James,” he said.
The plane stopped circling and headed back for Saigon.
As if nothing had happened, Wolkowicz got drinks out of the cooler—mineral water for Patchen, another beer for himself. “This is pretty goddamn funny when you think about it,” he said. Patchen did not ask what was so funny. He knew Wolkowicz’s techniques too well.
“You know what I think?” Wolkowicz asked.
“No,” Patchen said. “I don’t.”
They were still whispering.
“Then I’ll tell you,” Wolkowicz said. “I think you’ve got the idea that one of us put Christopher on ice.”
Patchen regarded him with calm interest.
“One of us?” he said. “You mean somebody in the Outfit or somebody in this airplane?”
“Take your choice.”
“Does that worry you, Barney?”
Wolkowicz grinned. “Me? Naw. Why should it? Whoever the villain is, he’s safe as long as Christopher is locked up in China.”
“Is he? How do you figure that?”
“Because whoever got him in can get him killed,” Wolkowicz replied. “And we both love him too much to take a chance on that happening.”
It was a confession; it was a threat. Or was it an accusation? Wolkowicz drank the last swallow of his beer and grinned again. “What’s the matter, kid?” he asked. “Airsick?”
WHEN HE RETURNED TO HEADQUARTERS FROM VIETNAM PATCHEN locked himself in his cell with the Outfit’s complete files on Wolkowicz. These archives contained no arguments for or against Wolkowicz’s guilt, no conclusions, no judgments, only the raw facts of his life and operations. If you believed what Patchen believed, if you could look behind the files and perceive what their bland surface concealed, the evidence of his treason was plain to see. But Patchen knew that nobody—not even Christopher if he came back—would see what he saw, believe what he believed. Wolkowicz was a hero who had bled for the Outfit and carried out some of its most famous operations. Patchen kept his own counsel, but for the next decade he had two fixations that were really a single, indivisible passion: the rescue of Christopher and the destruction of Wolkowicz. Nobody else was interested in either; Patchen was like the only sane man in an asylum; if he described what he knew he would destroy any chance he might have of being believed. Reality was poison. Too many people, over too many years, had failed to see the truth to be able to recognize it now.
In due course, Wolkowicz completed his tour in Saigon and came back to Washington for routine reassignment. He realized almost at once that Patchen was hunting him. The signs were unmistakable: he had nothing to do, and although no one could tell him why, he was treated at Headquarters with a cordiality that was subtly, almost unnoticeably, more intense. To Wolkowicz, the manners of the Ivy Leaguers who ran Headquarters had always been something like a shortwave broadcast: a wavering signal, obscured by static, emanating from a far-distant point. Now someone who understood the equipment had turned the dial a fraction of a millimeter to right or left and the announcer’s voice was easier to hear.
“What the fuck is going on?” he asked Patchen, having surprised him and his Doberman pinscher by appearing on the deserted towpath beside the C & O Canal at one o’clock in the morning.
Wolkowicz fell to his knees to greet the Doberman. The dog licked his face and whined happily. It loved Wolkowicz.
Patchen said, “I’m not sure I understand the question.” He was tired; he had left his cell only an hour before, at the end of a day that began at six-thirty in the morning.
“You’re freezing me out. Why?”
“It isn’t easy to find the right slot for a man of your experience and qualifications, Barney. You’re a legend.”
“You’re right,” Wolkowicz said. “And you’re also pissed off at me. Ever since I came back from Saigon, ever since Christopher got his ass in a sling, I’ve been a leper.” Wolkowicz stood up and rang an invisible bell. “Unclean! Unclean!”
“Oh. And why am I doing this to you, Barney?”
“Because I wanted to go in and get Christopher. In your book, that makes me a madman.”
“You’re not a madman,” Patchen said. “Just a romantic.”
“It would have worked. Two choppers, two squads of killers, in and out. We would have brought him home.”
“With World War III as an encore.”
“Ratshit. We would’ve brought him back alive and the Chinks would have swallowed it and kept their mouths shut. I’ve got to be honest with you, fella. I think you’ve got some deep, dark reason for wanting your best friend to be just exactly where he is.”
Wolkowicz had waited until they were under a light to speak these words. He wanted to observe Patchen’s reaction. Now, peering into his shadowy features, he saw the flash of surprise, the glint of anger that might be expected from an innocent man who has just been accused of a crime he did not commit. Wolkowicz saw something else also, and this was the thing he was looking for: a flicker of admiration. Patchen knew—knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Wolkowicz had delivered Christopher to the Chinese. There was admiration in his expression because nobody but Wolkowicz would have been brilliant enough, or crude enough, or foolhardy enough, to drag Patchen’s deepest suspicions into the open and fling them into his face, pretending that the suspect was the accuser and the accuser was the suspect.
“What’s the matter?” Wolkowicz said. “Don’t you like my theory?”
“I love it,” Patchen said. He snorted in amusement, shook his head. “You have no shame, Barney, but nobody can say you haven’t got balls.”
“That’s how I got to be such a fucking legend,” Wolkowicz said. “But that’s history. How about a job, Boss?”
Patchen was still shaking his head, trying not to laugh. He knew he had given himself away to Wolkowicz. Now what? The two of them were alone in the middle of an urban American woods, one of the most dangerous environments on earth. Wolkowicz was capable of anything. He knew how to murder another man in a dozen silent ways. He could kill Patchen and throw his body into the canal: “SPYMASTER SLAIN.” Or carry it away: “OUTFIT CHIEF TAIN VANISHES.” Never to be found. Wolkowicz was fondling the dog again, baby-talking to it in German. Patchen laughed out loud.
“Have you ever killed a dog, Barney?”
Wolkowicz shook his head, staring fixedly into Patchen’s face as if he wanted to avoid eye contact with the Doberman. “No,” he said, “and if that’s the kind of job you’re going to offer me, forget it.” He put a hand on Patchen’s shoulder, the good one, and gave it a reassuring shake. “In fact,” he said, “forget the whole fucking thing. We’re just not meant for each other, kid, are we?”
“Well,” Patchen said, “your ways are not my ways, Barney, but it’s hard to argue with the results you get. In fact, I was going to ask you to have dinner with me tomorrow night to talk about your future.”
Wolkowicz feigned astonishment, covering his mouth with his hand. “No shit? What an impatient fool I am. I hope I haven’t spoiled everything.”
“Far from it. You’ve saved me the price of a meal. How would you like to play Christopher for a while?”
Wolkowicz registered suspicion, not surprise. “What’s that sup posed to mean?”
“You’re more like Christopher than you think. You know the work, you speak a lot of languages, you have a wide acquaintance among the misfits of the world. You’d be a singleton like him, under deep cover.”
“What cover? I don’t look like a poet.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“The arrangement would be the same as the one he had? I’d be on my own in the field and drive everybody else crazy?”
“And I’d report to you, and only you?”
Patchen nodded. “To the Director, through me. What do you think?”
Wolkowicz laughed. He understood exactly what Patchen was doing: isolating him from everybody in the Outfit except himself, putting him out in the open where his every move could be observed, rendering him meaningless and friendless.
“Considering how Christopher ended up,” Wolkowicz said, “I think it’s fucking brilliant.”
UNTIL WOLKOWICZ CALLED ON OTTO AND MARIA ROTHCHILD IN THEIR house on Lake Leman, he had not heard Cathy Christopher’s name pronounced in more than ten years. Even then it came up by indirection when Maria chided Wolkowicz for neglecting his food. She had served poached trout, the Geneva delicacy, for lunch.
“You didn’t eat the best part,” Maria said. “The cheeks.”
Wolkowicz picked up the skeleton of the fish by the tail and draped it over her plate. “Be my guest,” he said.
Maria dug the tiny morsels of flesh from the head and ate them. “You’re only the second person ever to make me a present of their trout cheeks, Barney,” she said. “The other was Cathy Christopher. That was the only thing she ever gave anybody.”
“She had her generous moments,” Wolkowicz said. “What about all those Wops she banged in Rome when she was still married to her husband?”
Maria’s face, slightly flushed by the wine she had drunk with her trout, lit up at the prospect of Outfit gossip, captured by hidden microphones, described by watchers in the shadows.
“How do you know about that?” she asked, as if she already knew all the details and was merely testing the extent of Wolkowicz’s knowledge.
Wolkowicz went along. “I saw the pictures,” he replied. Maria drank more wine. “How did you get hold of those?” “Patchen was handing them around.”
“What a bastard. Did Paul see them?”
“I don’t know. He might have felt better if he had. She didn’t look like she was enjoying it very much.”
“God, but that’s awful,” Maria said. “Patchen is such a shit.” “He stays in character,” Wolkowicz said.
“So do we all,” said Otto. “Look at poor Paul.”
Although the weather was chilly, they were seated in the garden. Otto shivered and looked across the lake at the Mole, the snowy Alpine peak closest to Geneva and the only one visible today. He shivered again and fell asleep. Maria wrapped another blanket around him.
“Poor, poor Paul,” he said.
Minutes before, Otto had received the news of Christopher’s captivity with outward calm, but afterward his hands shook so badly that he was unable to use his knife and fork. After a brief outburst—sparkling eyes, a bark of laughter, a clap of the hands—Maria had mimicked his detachment, but she had been drinking wine recklessly ever since. After telling them about Christopher, Wolkowicz moved on to his real purpose. He had not come to Switzerland to discuss Christopher’s fate, but to plant the idea in Otto Rothchild’s mind that Patchen was responsible for it.
Otto could be counted on to spread the rumor throughout the half-world of people who worked secretly for the Americans. Even in disgrace he was in touch with dozens of the Outfit’s assets in Europe, Africa, and Asia. They were his old friends, his circle. At one time, before he made them what they were today by plugging them in to easy American money and silly American secrets, he had been the shark and they had been his pilot fish. In a sense, they still were. Otto’s disgrace, in the eyes of his friends, was the disgrace of the school prankster expelled by a slow-witted headmaster who detects the thousandth joke on himself and mistakes it for the first. They would all laugh about it at future reunions; they snickered about it now.
Maria opened a third bottle of Mont-stir-Rolle. It had been cooling in the running water of the mossy fountain, and the label came off with her hand when she set the bottle down.
“This is the only Swiss white Otto will allow in the house, even though he doesn’t drink alcohol,” Maria said. “We can’t afford French wine, thanks to mutual friends. How many Italians did Cathy go to bed with, exactly? Is there an official Outfit count?”
“I don’t remember. Half a dozen. One of them beat her up because she was such a lousy piece of ass.”
“So that was it! She wouldn’t tell me a thing.”
He was interested in this news. Maria, happier than she had been in a long time, leaned back in her chair and sipped her wine. She missed the Work tremendously.
“She stayed with us,” she said. “That beautiful face was all smashed in. She wouldn’t say who did it to her. I knew it couldn’t be Paul.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Paul would never have let her see he cared that much. He never left a mark on his victims. Look at Otto. Look at me. No, it wasn’t Paul. I figured she must have decided to make Paul jealous and picked out a psychopath to have an affair with. It would have been just like her. She had the brains of a chicken.”
Wolkowicz watched Maria pour herself more wine. “You sound like you didn’t like her,” he said. “I thought you two were old school chums. The Daisy Chain, all that crap.”
“Cathy went to Bryn Mawr not Vassar,” Maria said, annoyed at his mistake. “But if they had a daisy chain, Cathy would have been voted Queen of the May. How could anybody like somebody who looked like her and had all that money? She used to carry ten thousand dollars in cash around in her pocketbook.”
“Do you think Christopher married her for her money?” “No. That was hound dog lust. You could see it in his eyes.” Otto woke up and joined the conversation.
“That’s not what Lla Kahina said,” he said, clearing his throat. “Maria, water.”
She came around the table and held the glass while he drank, then wiped his lips with his napkin.
“Lla Kahina?” Wolkowicz asked. “Who’s that?”
“The Queen of the Berbers,” Maria said.
Otto made a face of displeasure and pushed her away. “In vino stupiditas,” he said. “Lla Kahina is an old friend from North Africa who happened to be visiting when Cathy came.”
“An amazing woman,” Maria said. “She’s a clairvoyant.” “She’s a what?” Wolkowicz said.
“A clairvoyant,” Otto said. “She sees into the future.”
Maria said, “She said what happened between Christopher and Cathy was fate, that it had some hidden purpose.”
“No shit?” Wolkowicz said. “What would that be?”
Rothchild made a weak gesture and cleared his throat again. Maria, still standing by, held the glass for him again and he drank.
“According to Lla Kahina,” Otto said, “hound dog lust, as Maria calls it, is always a signal from the invisible powers that the two people who feel it for each other have been chosen to conceive an amazing child.”
“The maculate conception,” Maria said. “So to speak.”
Otto ignored her again. “No matter how unsuited to each other the couple are in every other way, no matter how unhappy it makes them, they must do what is necessary to conceive the child.” “It is owed to the world from another life,” Maria said. “That was Lla Kahina’s theory,” Otto said.
Wolkowicz leaned back in his metal chair. “You go along with that?” he asked.
“Why not?” Otto said. “It certainly fits the case of Paul and Cathy. She said the same thing about Hubbard and Lori way back when, and look at the result. Paul.”
“This clairvoyant was in Berlin in the twenties?”
Rothchild nodded. “Appeared from nowhere, this little golden girl from Africa with teardrops tattooed on her cheeks. Everyone, Barney, wanted to fuck her. Everyone.”
“Did many succeed?”
“Nobody. She had ideas about racial purity.”
“What was she, a Nazi?”
“No. She thought Aryans were inferior stock—it was the purity of her own tribe she was trying to preserve. The Ja’wabi, they were called. She wouldn’t even consider other Berbers worthy of her favors. Ja’wabi or nothing was her motto.”
Wolkowicz held out his glass for more wine. “The Ja’wabi, eh?” he said. “You’ve got quite a memory, Otto.”
“She was a memorable female. She was called Meryem in those days. Hubbard quoted a charming poem about her in his novel The Rose and the Lotus. Maria, go fetch my copy.”
Maria went into the house.
“Forgive my wife, she’s a little drunk, we don’t serve much wine in our circumstances,” Otto said to Wolkowicz. “Brecht used to say Meryem came from the Mountains of the Moon. He was a great fornicator, you know, he bred half the heifers in Berlin, no conscience whatever, unlike poor Hubbard. Actually Meryem came from the Mountains of Mountains, the Idáren Dráren, as she called them. Ah!”
Maria returned with the book, already open to the right page. Otto read the lines in a dry, quavering voice:
She is worth five hundred mares
She is worth five hundred she-camels. Her saliva, I have tasted it,
It is the sugar of dried grapes.
How could I forget Meryem,
Meryem with her black lashes.’ “
“Hubbard tasted her saliva?” Wolkowicz asked.
“Certainly not,” Otto replied. “Hubbard tasted only one woman’s saliva in his whole life, and I’ve told you about Meryem’s principles. The poem’s a translation from Arabic, something he found in a book by some French general who served in North Africa. Hubbard had no imagination. His novels are really just diaries. He just wrote down what happened every day.”
“You mean it’s non-fiction?”
“Not exactly,” Otto said. “But it’s not exactly fiction, either. It’s Hubbard’s version of the truth. Not because he was a liar—we both know he wasn’t—but because he was an American. He didn’t quite understand the world he was living in, but he thought he did, so he recorded his misconceptions. It gave his work a certain Dadaesque charm. Of course infantilism was all the rage in those days.”
Wolkowicz listened without apparent interest. “Tell me more about this girlfriend of Christopher’s mother,” he said. “Was she like the Meryem in the poem?”
“She was exquisite. Zaentz—the man who made that nude drawing of Lori when she was pregnant with Paul—painted a sensational picture of her and Lori together. Here, look.”
The frontispiece of Hubbard’s novel was a tinted reproduction of a painting of two female heads, one fair, the other dark, gazing directly at the painter. The picture was as glossy and realistic as a photograph, but something was hidden in it.
Wolkowicz could not quite get it into focus. “There’s something wrong with this,” he said.
Otto was pleased by his confusion. “Do you see what it is?” he asked. “It’s right there, in plain sight. Look again.”
“I give up.”
“Zaentz gave them each other’s eyes. That’s how close they were.”
Wolkowicz looked again: the blonde had emerald eyes, the brunette enormous gray ones.
“In a way they were the same person,” Maria said. “That’s how Lla Kahina knew; that’s why she came here.”
“Knew what?” Wolkowicz said.
“That Cathy was pregnant with Paul Christopher’s child.”
Even Wolkowicz’s natural cunning and long years of training were not strong enough to overcome the look of surprise that burst out on his broad face.
“Cathy was knocked up?” he said. “How did she know it was Paul’s kid?”
“She knew,” Maria said. “I advised her to get rid of it but she wouldn’t do it. If it had belonged to some casual lover she would have gone straight to the abortionist.”
“So where did she go?”
“With Lla Kahina,” Otto said.
“Where to?” Wolkowicz said.
Otto shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “They just vanished. Our letters came back. Even Cathy’s parents don’t know. It broke their hearts, as they say over there in Kentucky, across the water.”
He smiled. So did Maria. Wolkowicz closed his eyes for a moment, then picked up Hubbard’s novel and began to read.
WOLKOWICZ FOUND CATHY IN TIFAWT, LLA KAHINA’S VILLAGE HIGH in the Idáren Dráren. No roads led to this place, and the journey through the mountains by donkey had taken nearly a week. He arrived in the afternoon, and viewed from a distance in westerly sunlight, Tifawt glittered as if fragments of broken mirrors had been mortared by the thousands onto its walls and minarets. According to his French-Berber dictionary, which Wolkowicz consulted while sitting astride his donkey, the name meant “light.”
Asking directions at the gate, Wolkowicz went directly to the house where Cathy lived. A servant opened the gate, admitting him to a courtyard.
Cathy found him kneeling beside the fountain, washing his face. He still smelled of donkey. His clothes, his hair, and his bushy black eyebrows were powdered with red dust.
“I’d forgotten how much you look like Beelzebub,” she said. “Well, you haven’t seen me in a long time,” said Wolkowicz.
“That’s a rude question.”
“Seeing you washing up in my fountain is a rude shock. I thought I was getting away from people like you. How did you find this place?”
“I heard this legend about a beautiful white goddess living in a city that sparkled like diamonds,” Wolkowicz said. “So here I am. Can I come in? I bring news.”
Cathy turned in a swirl of Berber skirts and led him inside, away from the midday sun. The house was very grand, with marble floors and magnificent gold-and-vermilion doors like pages from an illuminated manuscript. It was furnished in the Arab style, with car pets, low tables of hammered brass, and cushions on the floor, filigree screens instead of glass in the windows.
As they settled down on pillows to drink the tea that had been laid out on one of the tables, a muezzin called the noon prayer. The voice, an effortless bel canto baritone, came from quite nearby. Wolkowicz jerked his head in the direction of the sound and raised his eyebrows in inquiry.
“The minaret is right next door,” Cathy said.
“How often does he come outside and warble?”
“Five times a day,” Cathy said. “Sunrise, noon, afternoon, sun set, and bedtime. That’s the salat az-zuhr, the noontime prayer. It’s performed when the shadow of a stick driven vertically into the ground falls shortest. Next comes the afternoon prayer, salat al-asr, when the shadow is equal to the length of the stick, plus the length of the shadow at noon.”
Wolkowicz swallowed a mouthful of very hot, very sweet mint tea. “What happens if you’re at the North Pole?”
“Then you pray according to shadows at Mecca.”
“How would you know?”
“Allah would provide.”
“What are you, a convert?”
“No,” Cathy said. “Who did tell you where I was?”
“Nobody. I just sort of figured it out.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“Okay,” Wolkowicz said. “The truth is, Otto Rothchild told me you ran off with Lla Kahina. So all I had to do was find out where she was to know where you’d be.”
“You know Lla Kahina?”
Wolkowicz shrugged. “Never had the pleasure. But we’ve got lots of mutual friends.”
“Why did you want to know where I was? David Patchen told me I’d never see any of you people again.”
“He lied. Look, I’ve got something to tell you.”
Cathy rose to her feet. “If it’s about Paul I don’t want to hear it,” she said.
“It’s about Paul,” Wolkowicz said. He told her where Christopher was now, leaving out none of the details. Her eyes widened and filled with tears.
“But how?” she said. “He was smarter than anybody else.”
“In some ways, yes, he was,” Wolkowicz said. “But he had a weakness for cripples.”
Cathy had stopped crying. She said, “Cripples? Are you saying that David Patchen is responsible for this?”
“That’s only my opinion. Don’t be too hard on him. It’s just his way of taking care of his friend.”
“But good God,” Cathy said. “ ‘Death with twenty years suspension of execution at solitary forced labor with observation of results?’ What does a sentence like that mean?”
“It means they may or may not shoot him twenty years from now.” “Shoot who?” asked a voice.
A girl of about ten—Wolkowicz was not good at guessing the ages of children—had come into the room, unnoticed by Cathy, and listened to everything Wolkowicz had said. She was blond and slender, with steady gray eyes and the deeply calm demeanor of an exceptionally self-confident adult. There was no mistaking whose child she was.
“Your father,” Wolkowicz said.
ZARAH CHRISTOPHER WAS NOT A FLAWLESS BEAUTY LIKE HER MOTHER, but Wolkowicz thought her the most ravishing child he had ever seen. Her comeliness lay not in the shape of her face and body, but in the calm intelligence that lit up her features. She had her father’s gestures, his facial expressions, his faint voice, his quietude. It was strange to recognize these qualities in a child her age—not the promise of them, the fully realized qualities themselves—knowing that she had never met her father, had never even seen a photograph of him. All she knew about Christopher, until Wolkowicz arrived, was that she resembled him. As he later discovered, even this much knowledge was accidental. One day, standing outside a door, she had overheard Lla Kahina and her mother discussing the resemblance: “How can she hold her head like that, how can she have that look in her eyes? She doesn’t know he exists.”
“But Zarah doesn’t really look like her father,” Lla Kahina told Wolkowicz. “The likeness is deeper than that—both she and her father look like a third person.”
“Who?” Wolkowicz asked.
“Her grandmother,” Lla Kahina replied. “She’s the image of Lori Christopher. Zarah should have been named for Lori, but she named herself.”
“What do you mean, she named herself?”
“She was a twin. During labor she thrust her arm out of her mother’s body, then drew it back inside. The midwife tied a scarlet thread around her wrist to show she was the firstborn.”
“So?”
“So when she was born with the scarlet thread on her wrist we called her Zarah. The word means ‘scarlet.’ “
“Like Judah’s harlot daughter-in-law.”
“What?” Lla Kahina said.
Wolkowicz smiled merrily, pleased that he had surprised her. After Waddy Jessup abandoned him in Burma, he had spent two years in the jungle with no book to read but the Bible. He had virtually memorized it.
“The story of Judah and Tamar, in Genesis,” he said. “Tamar was a widow. Her husband’s brother, Onan, wouldn’t give her a child, he spilled his seed on the ground to keep her from getting pregnant, so she veiled herself and posed as a prostitute when she saw her father-in-law coming to shear the sheep. Judah succumbed, and got her pregnant with twins. When they were born the same thing happened—one of the twins stuck its hand out and the midwife tied a red thread around it to show it was first out of the womb.”
Lla Kahina gave him a deeply thoughtful look. “That’s right. That child was named Zerah.”
“So the kid’s got a Hebrew name?”
Lla Kahina shrugged. She was in control of her expressions again. “A name from the Bible. So does her father. So do you.”
That evening, by the running fountain in the courtyard, Wolkowicz pressed Cathy for more details about her life since she ran away from Christopher. Why had she come to this place? Why was she hiding Christopher’s child from him?
“Why should I trust you?” she asked.
“You shouldn’t trust anybody,” Wolkowicz said. “But I already know your big secret. Maybe if you tell me a few little ones I’ll understand what’s going on in your head. I may even sympathize.”
“You’re offering me your friendship?”
“We’ve got a lot in common.”
“We do? What?”
“What did the beauty and the beast have in common until they got to know each other?”
Wolkowicz grinned his crockery grin. Cathy smiled back in spite of herself. She had always sympathized with him, because of his grotesque physical being. Wolkowicz understood this. He had been inducing people to confess to him for most of his life. Gazing into Cathy’s face, he thought that she was better looking now than before and much more interesting, like a portrait an artist had begun in youth and repainted in old age. The huge wisteria eyes, which used to be so empty and unfocused that she seemed to need glasses, were now filled with those distant cousins of intelligence, wariness and disdain.
“I’ll tell you what,” Wolkowicz said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere out here. There are no witnesses. What say I tell you my biggest secret? Are you ready?”
Wolkowicz was clowning. Cathy nodded, amused in spite of herself.
“Okay,” he said. “Here it is: I work for the Russians.” “You do what?”
“Surprise! I spy on the Outfit for the opposition, Always have. Patchen has figured it out, he thinks. He just can’t prove it yet, but I’m sort of on the run.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. If I lie to you, I blow the friendship. I’m an enemy agent. No shit.”
Wolkowicz had Cathy’s entire attention now. As she looked at him, a squat figure with black chest hair visible through the thin white fabric of his shirt, she began to smile. It was a slow smile that began in her eyes and spread gradually over her face. Wolkowicz knew that she believed him, that he had made the seduction.
“My God, but that’s funny,” she said. “Did Paul know?”
“He may have guessed. He was a great guesser. He never said anything.”
“He never said anything about anything. But why?”
“I’m a Russian.”
“You are? You mean you’re one of those people they select in childhood and send to the States like time bombs? What are they called?”
“Sleepers. No. My father was an old Bolshevik, but a Trotskyist. When Stalin took over he had to leave Russia.”
“What about your mother?”
“Dead, according to my father. I don’t remember anything about her.”
“Your father carried you all the way to China on his back, Paul told me.”
“That’s right.”
“How old were you when all this took place?”
“Six, seven.”
“Do you remember anything about it?”
“I remember riding on the old man’s back, sleeping,” Wolkowicz said. “We always traveled at night to avoid the soldiers. Stalin was trying to collectivize agriculture by shooting all the peasants. During the day guns were going off all over the place, villages were burning, people were yelling and screaming. There was no food, there was a big famine in Russia that winter. The peasants burned their crops and killed their horses and cows and sheep and pigs and chickens to keep Stalin from getting them. We ate dead animals. Millions of farm animals were rotting in the fields everywhere we went. The stink was unbelievable, but some of them froze. We’d find one that wasn’t too bad, cut off a leg, and cook it. Tasted pretty good if you were hungry. Horses, cows, anything.”
“Horses?” Cathy said, shuddering. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“What doesn’t?” Wolkowicz said.
“The whole thing. That you’re a Communist because you ate dead horses when you were six years old. What sense does that make?”
“What sense does anything make?” Wolkowicz asked. “Why did you decide to screw all those Wops when you were married to somebody like Christopher?”
“What do you know about that?”
He named her lovers, counting them off on his fingers. “Patchen showed me the pictures. Don’t worry. Your husband never saw them.”
“He’s not my husband. Not anymore.”
“He’s not? That’s good. Now it’s your turn to tell me your secret. Why did you do this? Why is a girl like you hiding out with a bunch of natives in the middle of nowhere?”
“The reason is simple,” she said. “Paul held out on me.” “Held out what?” Wolkowicz asked.
“Himself,” she said. “He’d never let me see who he was. He never let me touch him, not the real Paul. I couldn’t stand it.” “So now what have you got?”
“A part of him that he doesn’t even know exists. That’s pretty good revenge, don’t you think?”
Cathy smiled triumphantly. Wolkowicz smiled back. He knew exactly what he was dealing with, exactly how to handle it.
CATHY’S DETERMINATION TO KEEP CHRISTOPHER AND EVERYTHING about him a secret from Zarah had only made him more real to the child. She had always known that her father must exist, and now Wolkowicz had confirmed it. She followed him everywhere, wanting to know more—her father’s name, whether he resembled the father she had invented, whether he knew that she. existed. Wolkowicz, however, was sworn to secrecy.
“Sorry,” he told her when she asked questions. “I’m not allowed to talk about him.”
“Why?”
“Because I promised I would never reveal his name or anything about him.”
“Then tell me why he’s in prison in China.”
“How much did you hear the other day when I was talking to your mother?”
“Everything. I followed the two of you into the house.”
“Good for you,” Wolkowicz said. “He’s in prison because a friend betrayed him.” “Why?”
“Because his friend was afraid that he’d be killed by enemies if he stayed outside. He thought he’d be safe if he was in prison.”
“Everyone was his enemy.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew the truth about them. Don’t ask me what the truth was.”
“But you said the Chinese might shoot him twenty years from now.”
“Better twenty years from now than right away. At least that’s what his friend thought.”
“But he’s in solitary confinement, all alone.”
“That won’t bother your father. He’s always been alone.” “But he had my mother.”
“For a while, yes. What I meant was, he’s different from everybody else. He’s one of a kind. Nobody ever understood him.” “Am I like him?”
“Yes, you are,” Wolkowicz said. “In fact, the resemblance is amazing. If the two of you ever get together, he won’t have to worry about being alone anymore. Neither will you.”
Zarah asked the name of the friend who had betrayed her father. “I’ve heard it was his best friend, the man he trusted most in the world,” Wolkowicz said.
“What is his name?”
“David Patchen. But don’t hold it against him. He thought he was doing the right thing.”
“How could it be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you can ask Patchen when you grow up.” Zarah asked questions about the prison where her father was confined. Where was it?
“Nobody knows,” Wolkowicz said. “Manchuria, probably. Very bleak, very cold.”
“What is solitary forced labor?”
“Hard work, like chopping down trees or digging with a pick and shovel, all by yourself except for the guards. Do you want to read about it?”
Wolkowicz had brought a satchel full of books with him over the mountains. He brought it into the courtyard, where he and Zarah always met, and spilled them out onto the marble pavement. Some of the books were very valuable, and these were wrapped in cloth. In his new identity under deep cover, he was posing as a rare book dealer. He rummaged through the rest.
“Here it is,” he said, handing Zarah a memoir written by a man who had served a sentence for political offenses in a Chinese prison. “Take this, too.” The second book was a volume of Paul Christopher’s poems. “Tell me what you think of the poems,” he said, dropping volumes back into the canvas bag.
It never occurred to Wolkowicz to wonder whether Zarah would be able to understand the books he gave her or the things he told her. He knew that his words would lodge in her mind forever.
Cathy found the book of Christopher’s poems in Zarah’s room and confronted Wolkowicz with it.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said, whispering.
“It’s just a book,” Wolkowicz said in his usual voice.
“Lower your voice. She’s overheard enough.”
“What are you so worried about? He’s gone forever. She’ll never lay eyes on him.”
“You’re sure of that? You know damn well they’ll find each other if they know about each other. Nothing ever stopped Paul, and she’s just like him.”
“She could do worse.”
“You’re right. She could fall in love with him, and that’s exactly what would happen the first moment she saw him. I don’t want you giving her any more of your rotten clues.”
“It won’t do any good. If you didn’t want her wondering about her father you should have told her he was dead.”
“I’ve never lied to her.”
“Then why are you so afraid of telling her the real truth?”
“There’s a curse on the Christophers, that’s why.”
“That’s horseshit. They’ve just had a little bad luck.”
“Is that what you call disappearance and murder and prison generation after generation? I want Zarah to be happy, that’s all. I want her to be free. I want her not to be a Christopher. Just keep your mouth shut about Paul. I don’t know why you came here. I don’t know why I don’t throw you out.”
“Why don’t you?”
Cathy, who had been staring furiously into Wolkowicz’s eyes until now, averted her gaze.
“Because then you would tell her.”
“Okay, from now on I’ll keep it impersonal,” Wolkowicz said.
“But it won’t do any good. She’s already in love with him, thanks to you.”
Wolkowicz kept his word, as he always did in unimportant matters, but it was impossible to keep Zarah off the subject that fascinated her. She spent as much time as possible with Wolkowicz, asking questions.
“Why is my father in prison?” she asked.
“I told you,” Wolkowicz said. “His best friend did it.” “I don’t mean that. What crime was he charged with?” “Espionage.”
“You mean he’s a spy.”
“That’s what the Chinese think. But they’re wrong.”
“Then he was never a spy.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then he was a spy at one time?”
“Let me tell you something,” Wolkowicz said. “You’re asking questions that nobody should ever ask and nobody would ever answer. People lie. You can’t just ask for the truth and expect other people to tell it to you. It’s too valuable. You have to watch, listen, read, remember, put things together. You have to keep quiet. For example, look at that old guy.”
Wolkowicz and Zarah had gone for a walk in the village in the late afternoon. The narrow streets, barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, were half in shadow, half suffused in the dusty light of the sinking sun. There were no wheeled vehicles of any kind in the village, only donkeys with loads lashed to pack saddles. The man Barney was talking about was an old Ja’wabi in a white caftan and turban who walked ahead of them through the sparse crowd.
“That’s Suleyman,” Zarah said. “He’s going to the mosque.”
“Let’s follow him.”
“We’re already following him.”
“I mean like spies. You go ahead, keep him in sight. I’ll fall back, like I’m not with you. Count your steps. When you’ve taken two hundred steps, stop. Do something natural, like go into a shop for a minute. As soon as you stop, I’ll take over and you’ll fall back. I’ll follow him for two hundred steps, then stop and do something natural. Then you take over and I fall back again. Got it?”
Zarah’s solemn face broke into a smile. “It’s like a game.”
“That’s right. Remember everything he does and says while you’re on his tail—everything. No detail is too small. You’re going to have to report. We’ll go back to the house separately and meet in the courtyard. Go.”
They followed old Suleyman for twenty minutes as he loitered through the streets, greeting friends, buying spices in a spice shop, and finally sauntering into the mosque just as the salat al-maghrib, the sunset prayer, was being called by the muezzin. Zarah was in the lead position, and although Wolkowicz had not instructed her to do so, she walked on, as if she were headed for some other place and had no interest in the man she was following.
“I think you’re a natural, kid,” Wolkowicz told her when they joined up later in the courtyard of her mother’s house. “Give me your report.”
Zarah recited detail after detail: the names of the spices Suleyman had bought and what he had paid for them, the words he had spoken, the identities of the men and women he had greeted.
“Okay,” Wolkowicz said. “Was there anything he didn’t do that he should have done?”
Zarah thought. She did this quietly, without changing the calm expression on her small face.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“What about just before he went into the mosque?”
“He was just walking along.”
“Right. Picture the mosque. As you walk toward it, what do you see?”
“The minaret, the square, the tree, the door.”
“What’s right beside the door?”
“The fountain.”
“Now think again What did the old guy fail to do before he went into the mosque?”
Zarah remembered, but she was reluctant to say what she had missed.
“I know you know,” Wolkowicz said. “Spit it out.”
Zarah said, “He didn’t wash.”
“Right,” Wolkowicz said. “Wasn’t he supposed to wash his hands, face, and feet before going inside to pray? Isn’t every good Moslem supposed to do that? What’s it called?”
“Wudu.”
“Why didn’t he do his wudu?”
Zarah’s face flushed slightly but she did not answer.
“You’re holding out on me,” Wolkowicz said. “What’s the big secret?”
Zarah did not answer. Was she embarrassed to have missed this detail? Wolkowicz didn’t think so; he thought there was another reason for her silence. But he pressed on as if he suspected nothing.
“There were half a dozen other old men inside the mosque,” he said, “but the ground around the fountain was dry. No splashes. I guess they, didn’t perform their wudu either. Isn’t that kind of funny?”
Zarah made no reply at all, not even a shrug or a smile. “I have to go now,” she said.
“Keep thinking about it,” Wolkowicz said. “Why didn’t they wash? Don’t tell anybody else what we found out. Tomorrow I’ll show you how to write with invisible ink.”
AT PRAYER TIMES FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS WOLKOWICZ DROPPED BY the mosque to observe the worshippers as they went inside. Only old men seemed to attend, and like Suleyman most neglected to perform their ablutions before entering. Once inside, their prayers were too faint to be heard. In the cool of the morning he read the books he had brought with him—Hubbard Christopher’s The Rose and the Lotus; histories of the Berbers in French and English; The Jerusalem Bible in plain English translated directly from the even plainer Hebrew of the Old Testament; the Koran.
One morning while Zarah was at her lessons he went next door to call on Lla Kahina.
“I’ve got something for you,” he said. “Remember this?”
Wolkowicz produced the novel, open to the frontispiece.
Lla Kahina glanced at the picture of Lori and herself without surprise. “Zaentz’s painting,” she said.
“Otto told me about the eyes. I didn’t see it at first.”
“Nobody did, until they saw it. Then they saw nothing else. It caused a sensation—it’s all there, in Hubbard’s book. Zaentz was very clever.”
“So was Hubbard. Did you know he was writing everything down like that?”
“He had our permission,” she said.
“You mean the three of you faked the whole book?”
“No, lived it. Everyone thought we were a ménage à trois, so we played a joke on them. Hubbard called it ‘the Experiment.’ Every one was experimenting in Berlin in those days. One day Lori was criticizing Hubbard because one of the characters in a story he was writing did something foolish or stupid. He defended himself by saying, ‘My characters do whatever they like. I can’t control them.’ Lori was annoyed—she could be very Prussian, very exclamatory, especially about art, and she truly believed that Hubbard was an artist. She said, ‘But you must control them! Otherwise there is no art!’ Hubbard said, ‘I can’t, unless I lie about them.’ Lori said, ‘But they don’t exist!’ Hubbard said, ‘They exist, all right. All I do is make them visible when they come into my head. Did Meryem exist for you, or you for her, until you met? Did you foresee what’s happened because you did meet? Would either of you be what you are now if you hadn’t met?’ And Lori said, ‘My God, you’re right, you must write about us. We’ll be your characters.’ That’s how the Experiment began.”
“So what did you do then?”
“We went around Berlin as usual, seeing people, doing things, making conversation, and Hubbard watched and listened and wrote it all down.”
“You mean he spied on you.”
“With our permission. Anyway, all writers are spies.” “Did he tell you what to do?”
“He made suggestions, but we did as we liked. He said we were just like his other characters, rebellious. But he had more control than he thought. We soon became possessed by the Experiment, more like the beings he was writing about, less like ourselves. Lori said the book should have been called 
Which is Which?”
“How did you know what he was writing about?”
“He read it to us every day. What he wrote was never exactly what had happened.”
“Was it close?”
“Very close, but not stenography. He used our real names, but he didn’t write what he already knew about us, only what we did and said, and what that revealed. He could improve on our speech, simplify it or make it more eloquent, as long as he respected the meaning. Those were the rules of the Experiment. He was scrupulous about the rules.”
“There’s nothing about Paul in the book.”
“No. He wasn’t part of the Experiment. But he was there.”
“He must have been very small.”
“Five or six.”
“So there were Nazis already.”
“The book is full of them. So was Berlin.”
Wolkowicz said, “In the book you play the part of a Jew.”
“That was Hubbard. Lori told him the Nazis would think what he wrote was the truth. He published it anyway.”
Wolkowicz reclaimed the book from her hand. “What about this?” he asked, then read aloud from a marked page:
“An Aryan followed the girls down the Kurfürstendamm and into the Adlon Hotel. While they had their tea and the string quartet played a song written for saxophones on violins, he stared at them with eyes the color of rainwater from a table where he sat all alone. They thought he had fallen for Lori, like for like, but no he had exotic tastes and then he came over and bowed CLICK! CLICK! and asked Meryem to dance. Meryem? Meryem? he said, making her foxtrot, that’s a Jew name but you look like a nigger and smell like one. Delicious! The Aryan looked like a boy who tortures cats. His breath smelled of Black Forest cake. Why do you wear purple tassels? he asked. Because Yahweh commanded us always to wear them, Numbers 15:37, Meryem said. Commanded who? Heydrich said, Jewesses? Yes, Meryem said, I confess I am from the Lost Tribe of Israel. Count for me, are you counting? I am the great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great
How many is that? Seventeen, the Aryan said. Meryem continued,
great great great great great great
great great great great great.
How many is that? Eleven more, twenty-eight altogether, the Aryan said. That’s not enough, Meryem said, but this lovely song will be over if I go on, anyway we’ve been lost since Solomon was chosen by Yahweh to ascend the throne of Israel after the death of David, three thousand years ago more or less, that’s how Jewish I am, I am a hundred times the granddaughter of Joab, the commander of the armies of Israel and Judah and the conscience of the king. And you don’t have any eyebrows or eyelashes. Wie heiβlen Sie? what’s your name, Aryan? Heydrich! the Aryan replied, and I am going to lick those tears off your face before I’m done, you delicious little nigger!”
Wolkowicz closed the book. “Did you really dance with Heydrich? Did you really say those things to him?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t the real Heydrich at that time,” Lla Kahina said, “There was no SS yet.”
“How about afterward?”
“Afterward he knew about the Experiment.”
“And then what?”
“Then he was the real Heydrich.”
EVEN BEFORE HE FOUND CATHY AND ZARAH, WOLKOWICZ SENSED that he had stumbled onto some great secret about Lla Kahina and the Ja’wabi. Ordinarily he would have watched and waited as his suspicions matured, but he had very little time to waste. He had been out of touch with the Outfit for almost two weeks, and if he did not report his whereabouts and account for his movements soon, he would have to invent explanations. This was always dangerous; in his circumstances it might be fatal.
In the few days left to him, he made a head-on assault on Lla Kahina, calling on her every morning. He approached her through The Rose and the Lotus. “What did you mean,” he asked, “when you told Heydrich that you were one hundred times the granddaughter of Joab?”
The two of them sat together beside a fountain in the shade of a dusty olive tree.
“Heydrich?” Lla Kahina said.
“In Hubbard’s book.”
“Ah, we’re back to the Experiment. Did I tell Heydrich that?” “The Meryem in the book did.”
“It sounds like something she’d say,” Lla Kahina said. “So what is the topic for today?”
“Joab.”
“Why Joab?”
“Because of what Meryem said to Heydrich. I don’t want to repeat old questions, but why did you say that?”
“Who knows if I even said it?” Lla Kahina said. “Hubbard wrote what we told him, not what actually happened. He was fascinated by anything having to do with Jews, and that’s why you should be careful .what you believe when you read his books.”
“Why Jews? He was a New England Yankee. What did he know about Jews?”
“He saw what was coming. He knew it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Jews had been slaughtered before. He wanted to protect his friends, save them, defend them against slander.”
“Lori felt the same?”
“Stronger.”
“She was a Prussian.”
“I don’t know why she felt as she did; it’s just the way she was. She hated stupidity and the Nazis were stupid. She loved intelligence and talent and Jews were the brightest people in Berlin.”
Wolkowicz produced his copy of The Rose and the Lotus from the pocket of his rumpled jacket. “Listen,” he said:
“When the violins started to play again the Aryan approached, smiling in time to the music, and bowed to Meryem. May I have the honor, gnädige Frädulein? Oh, dear, I’m sorry, no thank you, Meryem said. The Aryan said, What! are you going to hold a little joke against me? It isn’t the joke that disgusts me when it’s held against me, Meryem said, you are too susceptible to niggers; that is what offends me, that your mind and body go their own ways, the one so noble and anti-Semitic and the other so beastly. The Aryan said, On the contrary my mind and body are one and the same, everybody will be like that in the new Germany; we are going to kill all the gods other people have brought into Germany, the one the Jews gave us and the one the Christians gave us, both of which came from the Romans who had lost their original gods and therefore their reason for being. We are going to go back to our own German gods, back into the wonderful unified nature of our ancestors who lived in harmony with the German forest. Meryem said, Then you should go to the Grunewald since you are all tree worshipers and rub up against a tree, gnädiger Herr, good afternoon. The Aryan escorted her to the table. Smiling brilliantly and shouting Herr Ober! Schaumwein! the Aryan sat down at the table and said, If you will not dance with me then you must talk to me, it will be a strictly intellectual conversation: What do you think about killing gods? Meryem said, We Jews have a lot of experience with that: When Yahweh chose the Hebrews as his people he caused nations to fall before us but he always insisted that we destroy the gods of our enemies, showing no pity, he was very particular about that. The Schaumwein came. Gallantly lifting his glass filled with the sweet sparkling piss he had ordered the Aryan said, Prosit! Who is this Yahweh? I’ve never heard of any god by that name. Meryem said, You will if you go around trying to kill gods. That’s his specialty. My tribe slew dozens for him. The Aryan said, Wonderful! The Berbers will be our shock troops. Lori said, Look, he behaves with the joyous conviction of the hopelessly insane; they all do.”
“What tribe was Meryem talking about?” Wolkowicz asked. “The Jerawa?”
Lla Kahina laughed, genuinely surprised by his knowledge. “You know about the Jerawa?”
“I’ve been reading about them in Ibn Khaldfün. They were Jews, and they beat the Arab army on the Al Meskyana River in A. D. 688.”
“Quite correct,” Lla Kahina said.
“What interested me was the leader of the Jerawa,” Wolkowicz said. “She was a woman, a prophetess who could see into the future. Her name was Kahina, just like you.”
“It’s a well-known story,” Lla Kahina said. “Kahina called herself Queen of the Maghrib until the Arabs came back with a bigger army and defeated her. She was beheaded and the whole tribe converted to Islam.”
“The whole tribe? I heard that some didn’t convert, that they split off from the others and wandered away into the desert.”
Outside the walls of the house, the village was quiet. Because of the absence of machines and outsiders and the Prophet Mohammed’s supposed prohibition on the lute, the harp, and the flute, this was a deeply quiet place altogether, the quietest Wolkowicz had ever known except for the Burmese jungle.
He took an orange from the plate, slit the skin with his fingernail, and smelled it. “I’ve been wondering,” he said. “Do you think any of the Berbers are still Jews who just pretend to be Moslems?”
Lla Kahina watched his eyes for a moment before replying. “Anything is possible,” she said.
“I read an interesting fact in one of the books about the Berbers. All through the desert of the Maghrib, from Tunisia to the Atlas Mountains, inscriptions have been found, all saying the same thing: ‘Up to here, I, Joab, son of Zeruiah, pursued the Philistines.’ “
“What language are these inscriptions written in?”
“Hebrew. What if some of the Philistines escaped to Africa, and suppose that Joab, great soldier and Philistine killer that he was, raised an army of Jews and took out after them to finish them off?”
“How could he do that if Solomon had him assassinated?”
“He couldn’t. But the first book of Kings doesn’t say that Solomon actually saw the body. He relied on the word of the assassin, who happened to be one of Joab’s officers. What if he wasn’t assassinated? What if Yahweh saved him at the last minute for this African operation and didn’t tell Solomon? What if the inscriptions in the desert are factual? What if ‘Joab’ and ‘Ja’wab’ are two ways of writing the same name in two different languages?”
Lla Kahina gave him a long look. “What if they are?” she asked.
“Then it’s a hell of a story,” Wolkowicz said. “Because if any of Queen Kahina’s Jerawa still survive, hidden somewhere in these mountains under another name, like Ja’wabi, then God Almighty entrusted them, and them alone, with a secret that they’ve kept for three thousand years.”