P. Deutermann - The Last Man

Judith was suddenly weary of all this personal exposure. Bring her back to what? “As always, I appreciate your support, Yossi,” she replied, a little more formally than she intended. Ellerstein smiled.

“If you need more advice, you call me,” he said. “My advice is always free, and thus probably worth exactly what it costs you. By the way, what about the American?”

She just looked at him. “What about the American? Surely you don’t think—”

He put up his hands. “New things, Yehudit. New directions. If he calls to apologize, don’t just cut him dead is what I’m saying.”

“No, I won’t,” she said. “I’ll yell at him again.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, “but have a drink with him first. Then yell at him.”

She smiled dutifully over her shoulder and went on down to her office, where she shut the door, dropped into her elderly leather chair, and then let out a big sigh. Yossi was precisely correct: It was one thing to announce that she was back among the land of the interested living. It was quite another to actually plunge back in. Go through the motions. Date some attractive men. Sleep with some. Really! An image of David Hall crossed her mind, and she felt herself blushing. Ridiculous. She decided a good place to start was with her messages. There was one: from the university parking office, reminding her that her campus sticker was expiring in three days. Ah, she thought. The important stuff.

David returned to the hotel at three o’clock Monday afternoon, tired but exhilarated by the morning dive at Caesarea. It had been two months since he had been in the water, and it had been a joy to dive again.

He dumped his diving gear bag on the floor, extracted the wet suit, and went in to take a shower. His individual tour had turned into a group dive at the last minute, but he hadn’t minded. The undersea scenery had been spectacular, and there had been enough sunlight to really see. Besides, he would have happily followed their dive guide anywhere she wanted to take him. The submerged Roman port had been made into one of the world’s first underwater museums, with numbered sites marked across the entire area. Divers were given a tablet that had a map explaining the numbered sites. They had seen the base of Herod’s enormous seawall ashlars, immense stones weighing hundreds of tons and submerged by a third-century earthquake, extending in a great curve out into the dim sea. There were columns and statuary fragments everywhere and other evidence that many artifacts still lay beneath the swirling sands below. After the tour they had lunched in the restaurant called Herod’s Palace, with its second-story terrace and views of the sea and the walled Crusader city. The sea had been sparkling and lively enough to keep everything underwater moving.

It won’t be like that in the cistern, he realized, a thought that diluted some of his enthusiasm.

He cleaned all his gear with freshwater and then flopped down on the bed in a big sprawl and relaxed. Then he remembered to check the computer for signs of intrusion.

He had put the laptop, stored in its briefcase, in the second drawer of the hotel room’s chest of drawers, nested in his underwear. Besides setting the counter to zero in the boot files, he had placed three grains of beach sand on a top corner of the outside case and then very carefully closed the drawer. When he opened the drawer, the grains were gone. Well, well, well, he thought. The maid snooping, or somebody else?

He pulled the case out of the drawer, extracted the computer, and fired it up. He interrupted the boot sequence by pressing a function code key while the cursor was still blinking on the right side of the screen, then commanded the counter to display the count: 002. Once for this boot up, and once for the previous boot.

Bingo. Someone had indeed taken a look.

I wonder, he thought. Maybe the security people at Masada had found out that he had been into the rim cistern. If so, this wasn’t going to work at all. How could he find that out?

Judith Ressner.

Judith would certainly know something about a development like that. So call her — and ask her what? For that matter, would she even talk to him? You are no longer welcome in official Israel, Mr. Hall. Well, how about unofficial Israel? He thought it over.

So maybe call her and just ask her to meet him for a drink. Don’t even bring up Masada. If there was a shit storm brewing, she wouldn’t return his call, or she might just to yell at him. Even if nothing was happening, she still might say no.

Or she might say yes.

Damn. More false pretenses.

He got up and placed the call to her office. The department secretary, whose English was apparently limited, got the general idea of his name and the hotel number, but David didn’t hold out much hope for the rest of his message: Would she care to join him for a drink at the hotel this evening? He would send a car.

When he hung up he felt even guiltier. Yet the part of his plan where he summoned her to the site and let her take over the discovery process made more and more sense. He had come here to make a discovery. He was halfway there. After that, he knew, he wasn’t qualified to exploit it properly from an archaeological standpoint. He remembered the pictures of the human remains found by the Yadin expedition. Scraps of bone and hair and disintegrated sandals embedded in the dirt and dust of centuries. A vital find that an amateur like himself might have trampled in his ignorance.

Calling her in would be a dicey move, because somewhere along the line he was going to have to confess what he had been doing all along, since the very first day. She would be more than angry with him. All he could hope for was that the excitement of the discovery might overwhelm all that anger. By taking over, she would become the archaeologist who had discovered the secret of the mountain, at least within the fiercely competitive context of professional archaeology. It would be like the Dead Sea Scrolls: The shepherd boy who actually found the scrolls was rarely named in all the books about them.

Or she might just call in the Israeli police. Accuse him of violating one of Israel’s most treasured monuments and pack his ass off to jail. Wahoo.

Judith was surprised to find David’s message when she came back to her office after a seminar with three Ph.D. candidate hopefuls, none of whom showed much promise. She wondered immediately if Mr. Hall was familiar with the Jewish concept of chutzpah, then marveled at Yossi Ellerstein’s clairvoyance. She turned the message note over and over in her hands, thinking about it. Six o’clock. His hotel was down in Tel Aviv, and she lived in Jerusalem. If she was going to do it, she had to leave now to get home and change. First, though, there was a second message, this one from the hostel manager down at Masada.

She decided to return the Masada call first.

“Dr. Ressner, Assad Ghanin. This concerns your friend, the American. The site security people confirm no signs of unauthorized activity on the part of your Mr. Hall.”

“He’s not my Mr. Hall,” she said acidly.

“He was under your charge,” the manager responded primly. “Not ours.”

“Now you listen,” she began, but he interrupted her.

“I’ve also checked with the army border patrol district headquarters at Ein Gedi — they’re the ones who supervise the patrols out here — and they said the incident report just says that the American was walking about in the desert at night. So I think this matter is closed, yes?” She could picture the fat little man wiping beads of perspiration off his face. On the other hand, this was good news.

“Very well, Mr. Ghanin. That was our impression all along. I will pass this information to the IAA and to the institute.”