Paul Johnston - Maps of Hell

“Stop,” I gasped, managing to twist my mouth away. “You don’t even know me.” I could have added that I didn’t know myself.

“I know this is right,” she said, getting her lips back on mine.

I was going to have to distract her. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said, after I’d slipped aside again. “I don’t want to involve your mother in this.”

“Don’t worry,” Mary said, smiling. “They won’t link her to us. No one in Sparta knows where she lives-she doesn’t go into town.”

“But they’ll find her soon enough. The FBI is after me, not just the local idiots.”

“Mom can look after herself,” Mary said.

I had a feeling she was right on that count. “Can I borrow her pickup? You can say I made you give me the keys.”

“Forget it, Matt. If you want the pickup, I’m coming too.” She nudged me in the ribs. “You’ll need me-I know the back roads.”

Shit. I didn’t really have any option but to take her. She would be a big help and there was no time to argue.

“All right, Mary. But we have to go now.”

She kissed me hard on the lips. “I take it Washington, D.C., is the final destination? You need to find out who thinks you’re a murderer.”

I nodded. “I don’t suppose there are any old clothes I could borrow?”

Mary laughed. “That’s how an Englishman asks politely, is it? Yeah, one of my old boyfriends was about your size. He left a suitcase behind.”

I wondered if Ms. Jacobsen had made him an offer he’d decided to accept, her shotgun pointed at his groin. She went out of the room and returned with a pair of jeans, a checked shirt and a padded jacket.

“Here you are. I told Mom we’re leaving.”

“What about your work?”

“I’ll call in sick.” She didn’t bother looking away while I undressed. “Won’t be the first time. Hey, you could do with a shower, English.”

She was right. I followed her to the bathroom and locked the door behind me. The hot water felt great and when I’d finished, I almost felt human again. Then I remembered how many people were on my tail.

To my surprise, instead of feeling helpless, I found that I was ready to take anyone on. I didn’t know why I was being targeted, but I was going to find out. It occurred to me that it might be the last thing I did. Too bad. I would go down fighting.

Mary was waiting for me in the hall, a cooler bag beside her. “I took the rest of the pot roast,” she said, her eyes glinting, “since you seemed to like it so much-and various other things. Where we’re going, there aren’t too many malls.”

We went out to the pickup. I transferred the rifle and other weapons from her car, stowing them under the seat.

“I’ll drive,” I said.

She pushed me out of the way. “Me first. You can look at the scenery.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“So it is.” She laughed. “You can tell me all about London, then.”

“Right.” I wondered how much I would be able to remember.

A few minutes later, we were heading up a narrow road, back into the Maine woods that I loved so much.

Abraham Singer pushed his glasses above his forehead and rubbed his eyes. He had been examining the medieval text since seven in the morning. Getting up from his office desk, he went over to the window. The lights of Georgetown spread out beneath him, those of central Washington visible in the distance.

The university had put him on the top floor of the building. At first he’d considered complaining, as there was no elevator and his knees weren’t as good as they had been, but he’d quickly realized the benefits. He got the daily exercise that Naomi had been nagging him about since the bypass operation, plus-even more important-there was very little noise up here. Not that it mattered. He’d be retiring from the department in under a year.

The elderly scholar ran his fingers through his beard and looked at his watch. He should have gone home hours ago, but the text promised some new insights into the kabbalah, and he couldn’t resist working on it to the exclusion of every other consideration. Naomi would be annoyed, but she’d have gone to bed already. He’d get an earful at breakfast.

Abraham looked at one of the photographs on his desk-him and Naomi on their wedding day all those years ago in Jerusalem. He had been doing his military service and hardly recognized his young self, his face fleshless and his body rake-thin. Naomi’s cheeks dimpled and her dark hair glowing in the sunlight, even in black and white. There weren’t many people at the celebration as both their families had been ravaged by the Holocaust. The Singers had lived in Nuremberg and had been sent to the camps early in the war. Abraham’s parents survived, but both had been taken by cancer soon after they’d arrived in the home country. Naomi’s mother had also returned from Auschwitz, but she never spoke of it. She had still managed to be the most cheerful person Abraham ever met.

He took in the shots of their children-David, a lecturer in film at Berkeley, and Judith, a journalist in Miami. They had given him great joy, as did the five grandchildren, but, if he was truthful, he would have to admit that his work had always taken priority.

Abraham Singer was that rare bird, a scholar of Jewish religion with serious misgivings about the ancient faith. The easy answer would have been that the fact of the Nazi horrors had created an entirely justifiable skepticism. He knew that wasn’t the whole story. He needed to believe, he needed to maintain a link with the past that was creative and fertile, but he found much of the ritual primitive and obscurantist. That was why he had established lines of academic debate with Christian and Muslim scholars who harbored similar attitudes about their own faiths. But it wasn’t enough. He was still haunted by the suspicion that somewhere in the mass of manuscripts and texts was hidden the key to an intellectually rigorous traditional belief. He knew that feeling was as deeply rooted in Jewish tradition as the orthodoxy he distrusted, but it was irresistible.

And so he had turned to the kabbalah. The problem was that the ancient and medieval texts contained as much contradictory information as the most dedicated controversialist could desire. Although he was a rationalist, he couldn’t resist delving into the mystic wisdom that tried to link God and the universe with the individual mind and body. To his surprise, he even found the occult text of Cornelius Agrippa fascinating in its identification of kabbalah with magic and the mystic meanings of numbers.

Abraham Singer walked across to the mirror above the disused fireplace. The building had once been a town house and he supposed that this would have been a servant’s room. The floorboards creaked and the windows, still in their original frames, were hell to open. He glanced at himself and shook his head. Sixty-five, but he looked much older. Perhaps that was the price you paid for ignoring ordinary life and burying yourself in books.

There was a soft knocking at the door. The professor was surprised. Normally he heard people coming up the stairs. Besides, who would be in the building after ten at night? It must be the cleaner.

Abraham went over to the locked door-he had taken the university’s security instructions seriously ever since one of his colleagues had been robbed at knifepoint a few months earlier.

“Yo, Professor, I gotta take your garbage,” came an accented voice.

Singer didn’t recognize it. Then again, the cleaners changed all the time. He turned the key, expecting a young Latino. Instead, what he saw made him step backward in horror, his hands raised. He was pushed hard in the chest and fell to the floor.