Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Let’s go back,” she said, and when they entered the main room of the Arab house the others began to giggle, and Cullinane gained reassurance for his theory when Dr. Eliav said lightly, not as an outraged lover but as a boy in college might have spoken to his roommate, “Looks to me, Cullinane, as if you’ve been kissing my fiancée.”

The Irishman wiped his lips, looked at his fingertips and said, “I thought Israeli girls had forsworn salonim and lipstick.”

“They sometimes do,” Eliav said, “but later they reconsider.”

Cullinane decided to play along with the make-believe and extended his hand. “In later years, Eliav, your wife can truthfully taunt you: ‘If I hadn’t married you I could have gone to Chicago with a real man!’”

“I’m sure I’ll hear about it,” the tall Jew said, and the two archaeologists shook hands.

“If it’s a formal engagement,” the English photographer cried, “we’ll celebrate all night,” and somebody jumped into a jeep to dash into Akko for some bottles of arrack; but for John Cullinane the songs and dances were tedious, for watching Vered and her man he knew that this was a spurious engagement party. More important, he had admitted to her and to himself how much he needed her and he wondered what their relationship could be during the remainder of the dig.

Next morning, as Cullinane was sketching the first object so far uncovered which might date from before the Christian Era, Dr. Eliav received a phone call from the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem advising him that Paul J. Zodman, of Chicago, was arriving at the airport that afternoon and was to be extended every courtesy becoming a man who had contributed generously to the establishment of Israel. A few minutes later a cablegram reached Cullinane advising him of Zodman’s arrival, and a few minutes after that the Tel Aviv agent of the United Jewish Appeal called to say, “Is this the Zodman dig? I want the director. Zodman’s arriving this afternoon, and for God’s sake keep him happy.” Cullinane finished his sketch and called in to the other room, “Now we can all begin to sweat.”

Two cars drove down from Makor, Tabari and Eliav in one, Mrs. Bar-El and Cullinane in the other. It was Eliav who had insisted upon this arrangement, sensing that the potential unpleasantness of the night before must be thoroughly dispersed if the dig was to function properly. “Furthermore,” he added, “I’ve found that it never hurts when you’re meeting a millionaire to have a good-looking girl around. Makes him feel the operation is first-class.”

“This girl’s not good-looking,” Cullinane said. “She’s beautiful.” Vered kissed him lightly before the others, and any tension that might have persisted was relaxed.

On the long trip to the airport Vered said, “We’ve heard a lot about Paul Zodman. What kind of man is he?”

Cullinane reflected. “He’s three times more intelligent than you’re going to think. And three times more stupid.”

“Has he ever been to Israel?”

“No.”

“I’ve read about his gifts. Fifty thousand for planting trees. Half a million for the school of business administration. How much for the dig? Third of a million?”

“He’s not altogether ungenerous, as the British might say.”

“Why has he done it? If he’s never been here?”

“He’s typical of many American Jews. One day he said, ‘In Germany I’d be dead. In America I own seven stores. If I didn’t give to Israel I’d be a jerk.’”

“Strictly charity?” Vered asked. “He has no particular sense of partnership with us?”

Cullinane laughed. “When he sees how successful this country is … roads, hospitals … he’s going to feel let down. He thinks he’s been feeding outcasts in a ghetto.”

“What does he look like?”

“What do you think?”

“How old is he?”

“That I’ll tell you. He’s forty-four.”

“Married?”

“Yes.”

“He get his money from his father?”

“Four of his stores he inherited. The rest he’s done himself.”

“I see him as a big man,” Vered said, “aggressive, never read a book but respects college professors like you. He must be liberal or he wouldn’t have hired a Catholic for your job.”

“Did you mean it when you said you’d never marry a non-Jew?” Cullinane asked abruptly.

“I certainly did. Our family has a story which sums it all up. When we moved from Russia to Germany my aunt wanted to marry an Aryan.”

“Whatever that means.”

“In her case it meant a blond-haired, blue-eyed Prussian with a good university education. Our family raised hell, but it was Grandmother who delivered the telling blow. She said, ‘For any man being married is difficult, and no man should be tempted later in life to get rid of his wife merely because she’s a Jewess. He’ll have enough other reasons.’ My father said that everyone laughed at the old woman’s reasoning, and my aunt wept, ‘Why would Otto be tempted to get rid of me because I’m a Jewess?’ and the old woman explained, ‘The day may come when Germany will make its men give up their Jewish wives,’ and my aunt cried a good deal, but she didn’t marry Otto. He married another Jewish girl, and in 1938 he was forced to get rid of her, and the poor girl was sent to an extermination camp. Of course, my aunt went to the same camp, but she went with her husband.”

“You think the time could come in America when I would be commanded to get rid of you because you are Jewish?”

“I don’t bother about specific cases,” Vered replied. “I only know that the wise old grandmothers were right.”

When the jet landed, there could be no mistake as to who Paul Zod-man was. The first passengers to alight were ordinary French and American businessmen, bearing no marks of distinction. The next were some elderly men weighed down with cameras, and one could not think of Zodman as bothering to collect visual records of where he had been, for he was mostly concerned with where he would go next. Two powerfully built men descended, but they lacked any intellectual quality, and they were followed by three or four who might have been Zodman except that they were sloppily dressed and careless in manner, Then came a man about five-feet-eight, underweight, dressed in a dark blue English suit conservatively tailored, sunburned not from the sun but from a barber’s quartz lamp, eager, bouncy, liking all that he saw and running down the stairs to greet Cullinane.

“John! You didn’t need to drive all the way down to meet me”—but God help John if as an employee he hadn’t been there!

“This is Dr. Bar-El, our pottery expert,” Cullinane said. He knew how impressed businessmen were with the title “doctor”; they cursed professors but they wanted their help to have doctorates. “This is Dr. Ilan Eliav. And this is the top expert of them all, Jemail Tabari, Oxford University.” Businessmen felt the same way about Oxford.

Paul Zodman stepped back, surveyed his team—three good-looking sunburned men and a beautiful woman—and said, “You’ve got yourself a fine-looking group. I hope they know something.”

“You cross-question them while I get your bags.”

“One bag,” Zodman explained, throwing Cullinane the ticket. “A small overnighter.” That also proved that he was Paul Zodman; he had learned that most travelers load themselves with preposterous amounts of luggage. When Cullinane got to the bag he found it to be one of those super-expensive fiberglas-and-magnesium jobs that weighed practically nothing. As a matter of interest he asked the El-Al man to put it on the scales, and fully loaded it hit just under nineteen pounds. Two Jews from New York struggled by with seven bags weighing nearly two hundred pounds.