TO DIE IN JERUSALEM

After Targov woke up he lay in bed, eyes closed, breathing in the sweet aromas. These scents, released from the terraced gardens surrounding Mishkenot, seeped into his room each morning through the barred windows he left open to the breeze. Sometimes there was another smell too, dry and ancient, that came to him from the Old City across the ravine. And occasionally a stray Jerusalem cat would jump through the window, and he would chase it around the apartment, finally corner it in the tiny kitchen, then the two of them, old sculptor and slinky cat, would bare their teeth at one another, then Targov would grin, yield, and turn away.

But this Thursday morning as he lay in bed his mind struggled with the puzzle of the earthwork. He had been astonished by what David Bar-Lev had suggested: that it was not an ideogram, not abstract, that it could be some kind of replica or map.

But a replica of what? An image of the thing, which he now wanted to recapture, had come to him in his sleep. He had seen it from the air, just as he had on his first visit; there was a terrible roar and then Sergei's markings had grown larger as he'd approached. Yes, he'd been flying toward the earthwork, soaring down upon it like a hawk. What was it then? The idea was within his grasp. Recalling a line from Macbeth, he opened his eyes: "0! full of scorpions is my mind."

Sergei had not designed it and it had nothing to do with art. But it did have a purpose, which he might have guessed if he had paid proper attention to that roaring Air Force jet. Its rush at him from off the sand, its surge and plunge could have explained the markings. But he had refused to acknowledge their significance, preferring instead the torment of a mystery.

His mind racing, he played with the shape, turning it, revolving it, looking at it from every side. He'd seen it before. Many times. Here. In Jerusalem. His was a sculptor's mind accustomed to manipulating forms. He fixed the shape in his brain, then strode across the room, opened the top drawer of his bureau, rummaged inside until he found his pocket city map, took one glance at it, and knew that he was right.

"Faster!" Targov cried. Rokovsky was racing around the Old City walls. "Faster! Faster!" Targov felt an urge to punch groggy unshaven Tola in the arm.

The road curved and swerved as they passed the Dung Gate, plunged down into the Kidron Valley, then rejoined the Jericho Road. As they turned to climb Mount Scopus a truck carrying vegetables almost ran them down. But Rokovsky drove skillfully. Eleven minutes after he'd picked up Targov at the door of Mishkenot, he deposited him, with a screeching of brakes, at the overlook on the crest of the Mount of Olives.

It was 7 A.M. The sun, which had risen an hour and a half before, hung behind them in the east. Below the city sparkled; in another hour it would begin to steam. The crenellated walls that surrounded the Temple Mount were a blinding pale beige, the trees upon the Mount were dusty green, and its two great structures, the silver dome of El Aqsa and the larger golden Dome of the Rock, shot back the sun like mirrors.

"Tola, look down there at the city."

"I'm looking," Rokovsky stared. "What am I looking for?"

"The shape out in the desert. The thing we saw. The map."

Rokovsky squinted. "I know Bar-Lev said it might be a map, but I don't see—"

"We've seen it at least a hundred times."

"Please, Sasha, help me out."

"Look at the shape of the Temple Mount—it's the same, a trapezoid. And the circle in the center." Targov pointed at the golden dome. "That circle is the Dome of the Rock. Now do you see?"

Rokovsky nodded slowly. "The shorter end faces south and . . ."

"Yes. It's a full-sized replica, oriented the same way too. And those craters we saw near the center... Think, Tola, think of what we saw out there: a map of the Temple Mount, signed by my old friend Sergei, constructed far out in the desert. So, think about it—for whom? and why?"

"They want to start a war," David said. He twisted around to watch the minister. He had awakened him and now the older man, expression still opaque, paced the living room of his villa in leather slippers and a silk floral-patterned dressing gown.

"Yes—a war. I like the shape of that," the minister said. His perfectly parted silver hair caught the early morning light. "As a man with such an extraordinary mind, I think you may be wasted in the Jerusalem Command. I could use you on my personal staff."

"I didn't come—"

"I know why you came. You have a very pretty theory. Your only problem is that you can't prove it."

"I'll do my best," David said. "Meantime, by the Jewish calendar—"

"The holiday—yes, I understand. But what does that have to do—?"

"What better day, minister, than the anniversary of the Romans' destruction of our temple? The pilot, whoever he is, flies in, drops his bomb, and blows up the Dome of the Rock now situated on our sacred ground. Then Jewish fanatics rush the place and cheerJewish sovereignty has been restored; the temple will be rebuilt, the Messianic Age has come. Meantime, of course, every Arab in Jerusalem becomes a homicidal maniac. A sacred shrine of Islam has been destroyed. The rampaging Jews must be fought off and killed. So, to defend ourselves, we shoot the rioting Arabs, blood flows in the streets, and suddenly we're up to our ass in a holy war. Considering that since sunset we've been facing that kind of threat, do you really want me out scrounging around for proof?"

The minister had stopped pacing and was examining him now with curiosity. "No need to patronize me, captain. Either you've got a case, or you've come here with a fantasy."

He was right; David knew that sarcasm was not going to help his cause. "I apologize," he said. "I understand that what I've told you must strike you as farfetched."

"Farfetched? It's outrageous! We know fanatics want to do these things. But people of such stature, whether we like them or not—it's almost too much to believe...."

"I agree, which is why it took me so long to see it." David paused. He knew now that he had the minister's attention, recognized that same narrow, somewhat skeptical, yet sympathetic gaze he'd observed in his eyes the day he'd removed him from the case. "Let me try and explain it again as simply as I can. Each of the men in that van had reason to enter into this conspiracy. Katzer because he wants a bloodbath—it will justify his plan to expel the Arabs. Stone because he believes in biblical prophecy. And Gati because the Mount's the 'high ground' and the fact that we gave it back' in '67 proves to him we're soft. So bomb the Dome, retake the high ground, and, while you're at it, redraw the map. But this time don't stop at the Jordan River—take the East Bank too!" David paused. "They make a perfect threesome: an ideologue, a moneybags, and a military genius. A year and a half ago they tried to blackmail my brother. He didn't like their scheme so he jettisoned his bombs and crashed his plane. My guess is that this year they're simply paying the pilot off. Which is why now I want to move very fast, and stop this thing before it gets off the ground."

"That's quite a little speech. What exactly do you want me to do?"

"Authorize arrests."

"Without warrants?"

"Here we have an imminent danger to human life."

The minister winced. "I'm a defense lawyer. General Gati's a national hero. Katzer, horrible as he is, is an important politician. If they were my clients I know exactly what I'd do. Threaten. Sue. Make sure the police never heard the end of it. And while I was at it I'd go straight to a judge and have them out within the hour."

"You're saying they're untouchable. I don't think so, but I'm not a lawyer—I'm a cop. Anyway it doesn't matter. The point is to expose the plot. Once it's exposed they'll have to cancel it. Exposure is what they fear the most, which is why they had the accident witnesses killed."

"And if you're wrong?"

"I'm not."

"What if you are?"

"You'll kick me off the force."

The minister stared at him, appraising. "I could do that now if I wanted to."

David met his gaze straight-on; this, he knew, was not the time to blink.

"You'll really stake your career on this?"

"I wouldn't have come here otherwise."

David sat quietly; the minister was making up his mind. He hesitated, squinted, then gave a short swift nod.

"Okay. Make your arrests." He moved toward his desk. "But you'd better make them fast. I'll phone the prime minister, recommend the grounding of military aircraft for just one hour." He turned to David. "You understand what that means? You'd better be right, captain, because if you're not, and something happens, and Israeli airspace is undefended, then you and I are going to be the biggest assholes this country's ever seen."

Targov wandered the Old City for hours. The heat was punishing. The dry dust of Jerusalem clung to his clothes. There were so many mysteries here, interstices, hidden corners, tunnels that led to bolted doors. But above the labyrinth, dominating everything, was that great and stunning golden dome.

To want to destroy beauty like this—what could be Sergei's purpose? But the moment Targov posed the question, he knew what the answer had to be. It was the classic rage of the unsuccessful artist against anything that mocked his mediocrity. If you can't create great art, then feel free to destroy it. Sergei was no better than that miserable little Dutch painter who, despairing at his own failure, had slashed out at Rembrandt's "Nightwatch" with his knife.

He phoned Rokovsky from an Arab money changer's shop just outside Herod's Gate.

"Fetch him!"

"Where are you?"

"The Old City. Bring him to David's Tower."

"When?"

When you find him."

"And what if I can't?"

"Find the bastard!" Targov hung up, then plunged back into the labyrinth.

"You bypassed me and Latsky!" Rafi was furious.

"I did what I thought I had to do."

"Send an oaf like Uri Schuster to handcuff Rabbi Katzer! Send twenty-two-year-old Shoshana Nahon to arrest General Gati!"

"They're my people, Rafi. Who else was I going to send?"

"I understand you personally hauled Ephraim Cohen out of bed in front of his wife and kids."

"So what?"

"So what! Cohen's a hard-ass. You don't make an enemy of a man like that. You must be out of your mind."

"If I am I'll pay for it, won't I?"

"Oh, you'll pay for it all right. Latsky's neck's gone purple. His blood vessels are about to burst." Rafi shook his head, tried to calm himself. "You're over-involved, David. Twisted around and riddled with guilt. This whole business about Gideon and Ephraim Cohen..."

"What about it?"

"It's taken its toll on your good sense." He picked up a pipe, knocked it against his palm. "As for Miss Stephanie Porter and her unsourced rumors about 'the ninth'—the bitch is jerking you off. She's got her own agenda and she's got you pussy-whipped, and you don't even see how you're being used."

David felt the heat rise to his cheeks and sweat break out on his brow. He felt like punching Rafi in the face.

"Oh, Rafi—what a stupid lousy thing to say...."

When she put down the phone after Rokovsky called, Anna knew this was the day that David's and Sasha's vectors were destined to converge. Each of them had been following a separate trail with obsessive intensity, and now they were both running around madly in the city, and she felt that the meeting of their trails, of which she'd dreamed the night she'd tried to dream herself inside her cello, could end in some kind of tragedy, and that she must not let them meet alone.

When David finished telling them of Rafi's doubts, all except Dov stared at the floor.

"He's wrong, David. You solved it and he's jealous." Dov smiled. "It's as simple as that."

"Screw Rafi anyway," Shoshana said. "Who wants to be in an outfit where the fucking commander doesn't know what the fuck is going on?"

Rebecca Marcus, offended by Shoshana's language, sat ramrod-straight in her typing chair.

"It felt great to arrest Katzer," Uri said. "His breath stank. He must have eaten sausage before he went to bed."

"He's already out," Micha said.

"He keeps a lawyer on tap. His thugs called the guy and he turned up all bristly with a writ."

"Gati wanted to strangle me," Shoshana said. "He gagged when I told him the charge." She made her voice severe: "Obstruction of justice and conspiracy." Then she broke down and giggled.

"Ephraim played it cool," David told them. "'So what did I do? Called a doctor for an injured American, a good friend to Israel.' He laughed in my face. But he was faking it. One side of him thinks he's immune; the other side knows he's in very deep shit."

"We did right, David," Dov's voice was steady. "Those guys play rough. They don't worry about the rules."

"Anyway, we're the Rabies Squad." Shoshana's black eyes flashed.

David loved them: They were his people, they'd done something extraordinary, and now, like a small commando unit reassembled after a dangerous operation, they were reliving the drama of it, laughing, exchanging stories, astounded by their own audacity.

Even Rebecca Marcus, normally distanced from their camaraderie, seemed excited by their tales. When the telephone rang she snapped it up.

"For you, David. It's Anna. She says it's urgent."

At 2 P.M. every Friday, tourists throng the sides of narrow Via Dolorosa while pilgrims gather near the First Station of the Cross waiting to be led along the route by priests. Church groups from Mexico, the Philippines, rural France, men, women, and children, many obsessed with martyrdom and stigmata, some even bearing huge oversized crosses on their shoulders, assemble to make the march and relive their Savior's Passion.

It was amid this throng that Targov now found himself. The procession was already in progress. He could barely push his way past the stream of pilgrims. But oh!, he thought, the faces!

Targov studied them: Haunted faces with jutting chins, and stern determined glowering eyes. Fanatical faces, otherworldly and smug. Superior scowls that said: "We Know. We are the elect. We have seen the Light. And now we own the Truth."

Suddenly Targov hated that burning look, and hated the passions, generated within this city, which powered it. He too had longed to wear it, to die intoxicated by righteousness. But now, seeing it on others, he understood the arrogant pride in which he'd spun his plan. In that same instant of awareness, he was flooded with self-contempt, for he finally understood the idiocy of the notion that a man can achieve redemption by acting out another's pain.

David entered the Old City by Jaffa Gate, then followed narrow David Street, unmarked dividing line between the Christian and Armenian Quarters, jammed that Friday afternoon with pilgrims, shoppers, tourists, and miscellaneous Jerusalemites. Pushing past people and mules, through the aromas of sewage and roasting meat, David fought his way into the tunnel that connected up with the old Roman Cardo. Recently excavated and restored, it had been turned into an underground street of fashionable Israeli shops.

Anna was waiting for him in front of Steimatsky's newsstand. He ran up to her, planted a kiss on her brow.

"What's going on?"

"It's Sasha. Rokovsky called. He said the old man's acting crazy, wandering around in here, babbling something about Sokolov being party to a plot to bomb the Dome of the Rock. Sasha demanded a confrontation at David's Tower, and Rokovsky gave Sergei the message. Now he's scared. He thinks they're both crazy and there's a real danger one or both of them will be hurt."

The Citadel, called David's Tower, was attached to the Jaffa Gate. Here Targov stood on the highest parapet awaiting Sergei Sokolov. There was no breeze this torrid August afternoon. The tower was deserted and the Old City baked. His ears took in its sounds. Shrieks, moans, and wails of Arabs, Christians, and Jews thronging below in the labyrinth, each scheming to increase his fraction of the precious space.

"I am summoned!"

Targov stared down. Sokolov was standing legs apart in the center of the courtyard while a nervous looking Rokovsky waited several meters behind.

"The Great Sculptor wants to see me. He demands my presence." Sokolov made an exaggerated bow, then began to scamper up the first flight of narrow steps. Watching him approach, Targov saw something new in his face. The deadness, the emptiness were gone, replaced now by mockery and spite.

"It's about the nose, isn't it?" Sergei's tone was bitter. Charging up the second flight, his entire face was animated by rage.

"Fuck your goddamned nose!" Targov yelled when Sergei was just one flight from the top.

Stunned, Sergei paused on the landing. "What do you mean—my goddamned nose?"

"Yours, idiot! You were the model for The Martyr, but too stupid to recognize it." Targov laughed. "You shot off your own nose, don't you see? Shot it off to spite your face!"

Sokolov reddened. His body began to shake. A perfect portrait of a vandal, Targov thought, at the moment he realizes he has inadvertently defaced himself.

"You stole my face!"

"Stop whining. I know what you've done. It would be pathetic if a masterpiece weren't at stake."

"A masterpiece! Ha! That's what you think of that big black ugly thing of yours?"

"I'm talking about the map, you fool—the map you got ten thousand dollars to sign. You hate that dome, don't you, Sergei? It's just too perfect, isn't it? Nothing you could ever make, could ever dream, could ever be compared to it. Mediocrity! Trinket carver! Impotent little man!"

Grasping hold of Anna's hand, David plunged into the mass of pilgrims, shoving, pushing, elbowing his way through. At last ahead of the procession he looked back upon it, the leading priests chanting, costumed like actors, the pilgrims following them, a delusioned mob.

As they fought their way through the Christian Quarter, he briefly explained to her the history behind the conspiracy: how the site of the original Jewish Temple was now occupied by a sacred Islamic shrine, and how several times Jewish extremist groups had tried to blow it up in order to hasten the fulfillment of the prophecy that the Messiah would appear only when the temple was rebuilt.

"They've tried with dynamite," he said, "but they've never managed to get close enough. We guard the Dome of the Rock and the El Aqsa Mosque as fiercely as the Arabs. We know the kind of tragedy that will occur if Jews ever manage to destroy it. But if a plane attacked, piloted by a skilled professional who'd practiced his run again and again on a full-scale model like the one Sergei Sokolov pretended he'd designed, then there'd be no defense—he could take it out in a single pass. When Gideon flew the Iraqi reactor mission, he and his squadron practiced for weeks against such a target. That's how I figured it out. I was thinking about Gideon, and then it came to me in a flash."

They'd reached Omar Ibn El Khatab Square. David pointed up at the Citadel. "Look!"

"Sasha!" Anna yelled. But Targov and Sokolov couldn't hear. David could see them high up on the parapet, two distant figures about to come to blows.

Anna turned to him. "This is the place," she said.

"What place?"

"Where the trails you have been following will meet. I dreamed about this, David. But I couldn't see it in my dream."

"Come!" He grasped her hand. "There's a way in around the other side." He guided her toward Jaffa Gate.

Even in his anger Targov wanted a confession. Whatever he'd done to Sergei, it was as nothing compared to this. "Admit you knew," he shouted at him. "Admit you wanted to destroy it! Confess, dammit! Confess, and redeem your wasted life!"

Sokolov rushed at him then, fueled by some new-found fount of demonic energy. The old man, supposedly broken in the Gulag, now charged up the last six steps like a savage, stood before Targov, thrust both his hands at his chest and gave him an enormous shove.

Targov stumbled back, nearly lost his balance.

"Sergei! Be careful!"

But Sokolov charged again. This time he threw his entire weight against him, driving Targov so hard against the railing that he reeled and nearly fell.

It was madness, David thought, the way the two of them were wrestling up there while he and Anna rushed to the center of the courtyard and reed-thin Rokovsky yelled: "Look out! Look out!"

Two old men, locked in combat perilously above them, one husky with a wild white mane of hair, the other bald and cadaverous. Their movements were jagged as they grasped hold of each other's shirts. Spittle shot from their mouths as they screamed obscenities and fought. They swayed together wildly, first toward the railing, then away from it, then toward it once again. Two old men out of control, like robots whose mechanisms had gone berserk. Their wild struggle was etched out against the crenellated tower and the hot Jerusalem midday sky.

Each was battling, brawling, scrambling to kill the other while struggling to maintain his balance and stay alive. Madness! Madness! David thought, as he saw the railing start to give. He stared up at them, helpless, and then turned to Anna, standing beside him, who had just let out a scream.

"Sasha..."

They were falling now, twirling together through space, and even as they did they continued to fight like animals. Targov knew that in a second they would both hit the courtyard and die. He saw Rokovsky, the detective, and Anna looking horrified. His last thought, before he hit the stones, was: I will die here in Jerusalem.