P. Deutermann - The Last Man

At six thirty that evening, David was waiting in the bar when his guest appeared through the double doors. The attaché had told him that Dr. Yosef Ellerstein was sixty-five years old. David spotted him at once from his corner table in the lounge and got up, waving the older man over. Ellerstein, looking more like seventy, was a short, round man who wore thick glasses over a prominent nose. His unkempt grayish white hair reminded David of Albert Einstein. The professor was wearing a rumpled white short-sleeved shirt over baggy dark trousers and plain shoes. The well-chewed stem of a pipe protruded from his right pants pocket, and there was actually a scattering of ash burns down the right seam of his trousers. The perfect image of the absentminded professor, David thought.

Ellerstein made his way through the crowded room, filling now with tourists and bustling hotel staff in about equal numbers. David had learned that, besides being on the board of the IAA, Ellerstein was also a professor emeritus at Hebrew University, which gave him a foot in each of the two most important archaeological entities in Israel. David was counting on him to help him navigate the intricate and time-consuming maze of the Israeli academic bureaucracy. Once the university archaeological institute and the IAA had given their preliminary approval, Ellerstein had helped David with the paperwork. After almost a year of making arrangements, David was still not quite sure who was in charge of the site — the academics or the IAA. Ellerstein had told him that the Israelis probably didn’t know either.

The professor approached the table and offered his hand. “Mr. Hall, I presume,” he said in a gravelly smoker’s voice. “Welcome to Israel.”

“Dr. Ellerstein,” David said. “A pleasure to meet you in person after all those e-mails and letters.” They shook hands and sat down.

“You don’t look like an engineer, Mr. Hall,” Ellerstein began, “and as for the accursed e-mail: a double-edged invention, that. In the old days, one had time to digest a letter, think about it, pretend you hadn’t received it, or at least have time to formulate some elaborate excuses. Now these things come in showers, instantaneously. One loses his maneuvering room.”

David laughed. Maybe not quite so absentminded, David thought. There was a definite gleam of intelligence behind those thick glasses. “An American phenomenon, I think,” he replied, signaling a nearby waiter. “We seem to want everything instantly.”

A waiter scurried over to their table and looked inquiringly at Ellerstein. The professor peered up at him myopically. “Whisky and soda, if you please, young man. Not so heavy on the soda.”

He gave David an appraising look. “As you will soon find out, Mr. Hall, instant gratification is not the norm here in Israel. Especially when you propose to put both hands on the flypaper of our bureaucracy. Instant stasis is more like it. Everyone frozen in a tableau of earnest intentions, but doing absolutely nothing.”

David smiled, remembering the months of paperwork to get the permissions. He waited while the waiter deposited Ellerstein’s drink with a flourish. When the waiter had gone, he raised his own gin and tonic in salutation. “To Israel,” he proposed.

Ellerstein dutifully tipped his glass. “To Israel,” he grunted. He savored the Scotch for a moment and then put his glass down on the table with a clumsy thump. The waiter hovered nearby, having set up a small order stand near their table.

“You speak excellent English, Professor,” David observed. “I apologize for not knowing Hebrew.”

Ellerstein shrugged. “And why should you know Hebrew? As for my English, I was born and raised in America — New York, to be precise. Came over here supposedly to do graduate study after taking a degree in mathematics at Columbia, but mostly out of curiosity. A long time ago, it seems now. Never went back. Actually, you will find that many Israelis speak reasonably good English.”

He looked around the crowded room for a moment. “So,” he continued, examining David as if he were an interesting specimen. “What is this really all about, hah? This business at Metsadá?”

David felt a small snake of fear slip through his innards. There was absolutely no way in hell they could know, he reminded himself. No way in hell.

“It’s really no more than I’ve said all along, Professor. I’m an amateur historian, or perhaps ‘student of history’ would be a less presumptuous term to a real academic.”

“I’m a mathematician, Mr. Hall,” Ellerstein said. “Amateurs are not unknown in our world.”

“Yes, well. I want to spend some time on the mountain, actually at the site. Something more than the typical tourist’s one-day excursion to Masada, which I’ve been told results in about an hour’s stay time up on the mountain. I want to spend three or four days there, maybe even go up at night and just keep watch. I want to soak it up, to get the feel of the place, to think about the terrible things that happened there, to perhaps commune with the spirits there.”

The older man stared at him without blinking for a full minute before replying.

“Commune with the spirits,” he murmured. “There are spirits on that mountain, to be sure… but all this to satisfy, what is it, your hobby ?”

There was mild disbelief evident in Ellerstein’s voice. Time for some elaboration, David thought.

“Well, it’s a little more than that, Professor. I’ve been working in the nuclear energy world ever since college. It is, how shall I put this, a sterile existence for the most part. A total focus on the science and engineering of a nuclear reactor.”

“A well-deserved focus, I should think.”

“Yes, indeed. A reactor can be a very dangerous servant.”

“I totally agree,” Ellerstein said. “I worked in our own atomic energy program for a few years. As only a mathematician, you understand, but still. I know precisely what you are talking about. So how did you take up ancient history, then?”

“Met a very pretty girl,” David said.

“Ah,” Ellerstein said with a smile.

“I was doing a course at George Washington University,” David said. “The company sent me there for some refresher training in digital communications systems. Met Adrian at a Friday afternoon happy hour.”

“This Adrian, she was an archaeologist?”

“No, she worked at the Israeli Embassy,” David said. “Ministry of Tourism. Her name was Adrian Draper, and we became — close. Masada and its history was one of her fascinations, as she called it. Obsession was more like it, I’m afraid.”

“ Met -sa-dá, Mr. Hall. You might as well pronounce it correctly while you’re here. In Hebrew metsada means fortress.”

“ Met -sa-dá. Got it.”

“So why is Adrian Draper not here with you?”

David sighed. “Her work for the embassy required a lot of travel within the U.S. About eighteen months ago, she left on a routine trip to the West Coast and never came back.”

Ellerstein frowned. “She simply disappeared?”

“I expected her back on a Friday; when she didn’t show up I called her cell phone, but it was no longer in service. On Monday I called the embassy. They told me she’d been summoned out of the country on short notice and that she was fine. Not to worry.”

“She didn’t bother to even call you?”

“You had to know Adrian. She was a very independent woman. Our relationship was never boring. Anytime I made marriage noises, she’d go off on a trip. I assumed maybe she was sending me a message, and by then I was up to my neck in a problem of my own causing.”

Ellerstein lifted his glass at the hovering waiter, who quickly brought him a refill. He raised his eyebrows at David, who shook his head. The alcohol was already affecting his jet-lagged head.