The Last Man Read online

  4

  Judith Ressner sat at her cluttered desk, quietly fuming. She thought she had been fairly civil, considering the imposition this idiot American was causing. Well, not idiot, perhaps, but certainly inconsiderate. As for his girlfriend’s stupid theory? Well. Insult to injury. If Hall had learned anything at all about Roman siege warfare, he should know that no Jew would have escaped the final morning on the mountain, not after pinning the Tenth Legion for two and a half dusty years down on the Dead Sea, Lake Asphaltites to the ancients, and certainly not after the colossal bloodletting in Jerusalem. The besieged ones at Masada had only to look across the Dead Sea at the moldering knob that had been the fortress of Machaerus, still aswarm with wheeling cones of vultures, to know what was coming.

  Machaerus, another of King Herod’s bolt-holes, had actually surrendered. The Romans, unimpressed, summarily put thousands to the sword, making them kneel in yoked ranks on the hot sand while two centurions came behind, one to place a knee in the victim’s back while grabbing a handful of hair, the other to slice open the prisoner’s throat. Four-footed scavengers came from miles around to fight carrion birds for the bloody bones, not to mention the plain fact that, had Jewish warriors escaped in any numbers, they would have immediately formed factions and turned to fighting each other, making them easy prey for the inevitable Roman mopping-up operation. This American had no concept of the ruthless Roman Empire. He should study what happened to Carthage: Once the Romans finally took the city, they dismantled it, stone by stone, and then forced the remaining inhabitants to sow bags of salt across the entire area so that nothing could ever grow there again. To this day, nothing did.

  She felt her pulse pounding in her temples and spun her chair around to look out the window into the courtyard, where the gray-greenery of a dozen ancient olive trees softened all those hard, modern angles of the academic buildings. Thirty-eight years old and already worried about high blood pressure. Five years now since Dov had been killed in the accident at Dimona. Five years of emotional and intellectual stasis. Five long years.

  A knock on the door produced Professor Ellerstein, shambling as usual, his shirt decorated with a few stray bread crumbs from lunch and his hands already fumbling around with that wretched pipe.

  “Do not ignite that abomination in here, Yossi,” she warned, speaking in Hebrew.

  “I know, I know, no smoking, anywhere, forever. Although I have this wonderful new Dutch tobacco—”

  She silenced him with a glare. He regretfully stowed the pipe in his front pants pocket before dropping into the single visitor’s chair. He looked around her cramped office, littered with papers and books. An oversized computer screen presided over the clutter on her desk.

  “So, Yehudit,” he began. “Fire away.” He hunched himself down in the chair as if preparing to absorb a verbal fusillade.

  She did not disappoint him. “What the hell is this, this charade, Yossi? And why me? This man is no more than a tourist, of zero academic consequence, and three days at Metsadá I do not need just now, thank you very much. Especially as a babysitter to some American with idiotic theories about the Kanna’im.”

  “As you say, Yehudit,” Ellerstein replied. “It is not a serious matter. Still, the IAA has—”

  “Sod the IAA. I googled this man’s name. He caused an uproar in his profession when he disclosed what his own company was doing. Then he sues them and is awarded a fat settlement? And now we’re accommodating him because his girlfriend left him? Come on, Yossi.”

  “I owed a favor,” Ellerstein said. “To an American professor, George Hanson. He asked me to intercede with IAA and the university, and I did. This whole thing is harmless. I never expected Strauss to require a minder. Your involvement is my fault, not Mr. Hall’s.”

  Judith gave him a long, hostile look. “You’re not telling me everything,” she said.

  Ellerstein squirmed in his chair. “That is always possible.”

  “Well?”

  Ellerstein shrugged. “That’s a pointless question, Yehudit, as you well know.”

  “The ministry.”

  Ellerstein shrugged again and reached for his pipe.

  Her mouth snapped shut. She had her answer. The university was being played. The government was behind this situation.

  “Why, pray God, am I stuck with this babysitting mission?” she asked. “Strauss would not explain himself.”

  Ellerstein stopped shifting around in his chair and fixed her with an intent look. Suddenly gone was the shambling, absentminded professor. In his place sat a man with the grim visage of a judge. “Because it is time for you to end this self-destructive, self-serving so-called life you have been leading since Dov died. For one thing.”

  She felt a rush of fury. “How dare you,” she hissed, but he silenced her with an abrupt gesture.

  “Self-indulgent, self-centered, self-fixated, self, self, self! Dov is dead, Yehudit. You are not. You have been widowing now for what, five years? Believe it or not, your colleagues are worried about you. You fit the profile of someone suffering from clinical depression, and yet no one can get near you, talk to you, or help you.”

  “Rubbish,” she spat. “Besides, if I wish to grieve, that’s my business.”

  “Not when your work is not as good as it could be, even if no one here is willing to tell you that to your face.”

  “What?”

  “Because if anyone presumed to try, you would wrap your widow’s cape around you and stiffen your spine. From what I hear, Yehudit, you are becoming a royal pain in the academic ass.”

  “From what you hear? ‘Not as good’? My work is substandard? This is the first I’ve heard about it.” Even as she said it, she could hear the note of shrill hysteria in her voice.

  “My point, exactly,” Ellerstein said.

  She looked away from him, back out at the olive grove. No comfort there now; suddenly they were just trees. “So maybe I should just leave academia to fend for itself, then?” she asked. “It’s not as if I had to work, especially for the fabulous salary.”

  “Then why do you work, Yehudit?”

  “Because—because—”

  “Because being a full-time academic fills your days, doesn’t it, which means you only have to contend with the nights. If you quit, you get both the days and the nights to wrestle with, and still all alone, yes? No. You need to stop with the Lazarus routine and come back to life, Yehudit Ressner.”

  She twisted all the way around in her chair, turning her back on him. Damn his eyes. God damn them all. Damn Dov for leaving her alone like this. She wanted to scream at him, scream at them all. What did all these men know of the hole in her heart? Dov had been perfect for her—loving, bright, principled. The litany of if-onlys began to parade through her head, and she fought back tears. I will not cry, she thought, gritting her teeth.

  Ellerstein was speaking again, his voice more gentle now. “Yehudit. We’ve known each other for a long time. This is friendly fire.”

  “I wish Dov had never become involved with you and that—that damned group.”

  “But he did. He believed as we did. He was a man of principle.”

  She sniffed but said nothing.

  Ellerstein leaned forward. “Take this little side trip, Yehudit. Go with the American—he’s inconsequential. He wants to see Metsadá, spend some time up there on the mountain, and think about things. Possibly even honor his missing lover. You should do the same. Let him poke around in the stones; you go find yourself a window in the battlements and examine your life, Yehudit. The Judaean desert has always been a good place for that.”

  Go find a window in the battlements and jump out is more like it, she thought. She turned back around. “Why is it necessary for anyone to go with him? If he’s so innocuous, that is.”

  Ellerstein sat back in his chair. “Well. It is Metsadá, after all. If he was one of those treasure hunters, started digging or something, it would be a major insult to one of our most important shrines.”<
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  “Digging, at Metsadá? I’ve tried that, Yossi. You break your intellectual teeth and your shovel. Yigael Yadin went to bedrock at every important feature at the site. Now there’s nothing but rocks and scorpions. Digging is the least of your worries.”

  “You know what I mean. Me, I’m just a glorified number cruncher, but you are an archaeologist. You know what can happen when amateurs interfere with a site. Plus, Metsadá is not the safest site in Israel: You can fall four hundred meters from three sides of that fortress if you misstep.”

  “That prospect is not all that unappealing sometimes,” she muttered. “Perhaps I should do this thing.”

  “Yehudit, Yehudit, don’t talk like that. Three and a half days. Time to reflect. Then you’ll come back here, prepared to talk about it.”

  “Talk about it? Talk about what, my summer camp at Metsadá, or my future here at the university?”

  “The latter, of course.” Ellerstein got up, giving her a moment to absorb what he had just said. His voice became formal again. “Because the chairman has told me he wants to conduct a board of academic review, Yehudit. If you will not seek professional counseling, if you will not open up to the people who want to bring you back into the human fold, they will probably terminate you here.”

  She just stared at him. “My God, what have I ever done to that man? And why did he send you to tell me this instead of coming himself?”

  “Come on, Yehudit, that’s a silly question. He knows we go back, you and me. Officially, he sent me because I am emeritus here in another department, and thus not directly involved, and I’m on the advisory board of the IAA.” He fixed her with that intense stare. “It’s what you are doing to yourself, Yehudit, that is the issue. So stop your complaining. Accompany the idiot American, as you call him. Then come back next Monday prepared to deal with this matter, because the time has come.”

  Only when Ellerstein closed the door behind her did she let the tears come. In her mind she stepped aside as two parts of her personality argued: He’s right, all this blackness and wailing is just self-pity. Dancing with the demons, as Dov would have called it. And what, do you think you’re the only widow in Israel? You don’t read the papers every day? You’re just afraid to face life again. The bastards never would tell me what happened. He just disappeared. I said Kaddish over a letter on the kitchen table, for God’s sake. They said it was a radiation accident, but how do I know? No one knows what goes on in that awful place, Dimona: atomic bombs and possibly worse things. Israel’s world-famous, worst-kept secret.

  Dov would not have been a part of the bomb making: He had signed on to work only on the peaceful nuclear engineering projects. Power stations. Radiation against cancers. Safer X-rays. Someday, the ultimate dream: nuclear fusion for electrical power. He had made that clear to the whole damn government when he took part in the LaBaG protest that year. The headlines had been sensational: Government physicist joins anti-nuclear-weapons protest.

  She took a deep breath as she remembered those tense weeks. For a while they both thought he might lose his security clearance, and thus his job, but slowly it blew over. Dov had kept his contacts with LaBaG but stopped throwing it in his bosses’ faces. Yosef Ellerstein, whom he had met in the secret meetings of LaBaG, had counseled him to lie low, to subdue his activist profile. He was of more value to them inside the gates than outside in the protest marches. A year later Dov was dead. Snuffed out by a sudden pulse of energy that man had no business fooling with. She had never said it out loud but had always wondered if there had been a connection.

  She stared into the olive trees, their foliage blurring now into a green mist, wishing not for the first time that she could just float out through the windows and merge with all that ancient greenness. Supposedly the trees were incredibly old, so old that the builders had carefully planned around the grove when they laid out the new university buildings on Mount Scopus. The olives were one of the spiritual hallmarks of this tortured land. Olives and blood. Everything, the stones, the trees, the warring religions, was incredibly old and drenched in the blood of forty centuries, if not more.

  Masada was no exception, of course. Built as a palatial retreat by Herod the Great on the remains of a Maccabean fort, Masada had been both a desert villa and a place of refuge stocked with water, grain, and oil enough for years if the need ever arose. Herod, an Idumean appointed by Rome to rule the ungovernable Jews, had lived in dangerous times. Cleopatra VII of Egypt watched with acquisitive eyes from the Nile, and Rome, whose military power had spread over the known world, was engrossed with the transition from republic to imperium. Many of Herod’s own subjects hated him with a passion he returned whenever the occasion permitted. Technically Rome’s vassal in Judaea and a politician with no illusions, he built fortresses at strategic points all over ancient Judaea for both defense and personal refuge. All of the silly theories this American might conjure up would never disguise the fact that Masada was ultimately just like the rest of Israel—one more ancient killing ground.

  She sighed, wiped her eyes, and gathered some papers into a dilapidated briefcase. She decided to go home early. After all, she had to pack for her great expedition. As for the meeting next Monday? That was serious—of this there was no doubt, not with Yosef Ellerstein being the messenger, which was a message in itself. So: for Monday? She sighed again. She would deal with Monday on Monday.

  5

  David dozed during the ride back down to Tel Aviv. Professor Ellerstein was beyond dozing: He was sound asleep and snoring forcefully. It had been an interesting afternoon, especially when David had had a better look at his minder. Tallish, maybe five eight in her stocking feet, athletically slim, and dark: black hair; pronounced, arching eyebrows; dark brown, almond-shaped eyes. He thought her forbears must have been Sephardic Jews, for she bore their ancestral features: elongated oval face, high cheekbones, dusky olive complexion, and full lips. All of it under a rigid control, emphasized by her stern demeanor and signs of a quick if impatient intelligence. Properly decorated, she would have been strikingly beautiful, but she appeared to have eschewed makeup of any kind. There had been a brittle edge to her that fairly shouted: This is a man-free zone; back off.

  She had not attended the afternoon discussions conducted by Professor Strauss’s two assistants but did appear briefly toward the end of the session to set up their rendezvous for the following morning. He had made a casual comment to the two assistants about her, and they both rolled their eyes. Very beautiful, yes, but a walled city, Mr. Hall. Which had not dissuaded a few of their more adventurous academic colleagues from making a run on The Ressner, as she was known in certain male circles. There was now an informal club of eligible males who called themselves the Shot-downs, after having made a pass with a singular lack of success. Okay, so she’s exotic, if not exactly Miss Personality. A widow of five years, they said. Something going on there, but the two young assistants declined to elaborate.

  The briefings had allowed David to focus on something besides academic politics as the two research assistants reviewed the Yigael Yadin expedition report and more recent excavations and analysis, then walked him through extensive maps and diagrams of the fortress. David had been secretly edified to find out that they had nothing new to tell him: His own research had been thorough and current, and Adrian had told him more than he wanted to know about the place. Even so, he had been careful to remain in the listening mode, not wanting to reveal just how much he knew about Masada. Professor Ellerstein had eased out of the briefing session after about twenty minutes, returning two hours later at five thirty when the assistants were finishing up. By then David was satisfied that any concerns the academics might have had about his project had long since evaporated. That had been his primary objective for the day’s meetings. The only wild card in his plan now was Judith Ressner. He mentally kicked himself again for not having expected an escort.

  When his hired car finally made it through the dense midtown traffic to the hotel, David woke
Ellerstein, who looked around in momentary confusion.

  “We’re in Tel Aviv?” the old man protested. “I left my car at the Rockefeller.”

  David had forgotten that. He invited Ellerstein in for a drink. “What’s the hurry?” he asked. “In rush hour traffic you won’t get anywhere fast. Ari can take you back, and it’s been a long day. A Scotch will make it go away.”

  “Okay.” Ellerstein laughed. “You have convinced me. Difficult, wasn’t it?”

  The lobby bar was much less crowded, and they took the same table they had shared Saturday night. After the waiter brought their drinks, David decided to probe a little about Judith Ressner.

  “The briefings this afternoon were very useful,” he began. “I think that the university is perhaps a little less apprehensive about my project now.”

  “Yes, I think so. You were clever to defuse their concerns about time and not to object to having an escort. Their whole tone was much different from just a week ago. Then they were trying to decide what to do with you and if they would even permit it.”

  “Yes. They seemed quite friendly when we left. Except for Miss Ressner, or is it Mrs.? I’m not sure I have her figured out.”

  Ellerstein chuckled. “Figuring Yehudit Ressner out, as you say, is not something that will be accomplished in a single afternoon, Mr. Hall. There is some background there you should probably know.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Well, she is a widow. Her husband was a physicist, working for the government. He died in some kind of accident—the circumstances are unclear—while working on a classified government project, about five years ago.”

  Ellerstein paused to see if David would make the connection between physicist and classified government project.

  “Dimona?” David asked.

  “Just so. Judith had recently completed her doctorate in archaeology when this happened, and it was naturally a very difficult time for her. She got an appointment to the HU faculty a few months later. The government may have had something to do with that, perhaps a form of compensation, yes? Well, never mind: She is very bright and entirely qualified.”