Private Novelist (14 page)

“Hmm. ‘The seal you must fear, above all women. Small, gold, both skin and fingernails. The hole of the ears, the hole of the nose, precisely alike.' See?”

“How many women have you accused of being silkies?”

“I don't meet women very often.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. You'd think more women would be drawn to this kind of scholarship, but demonology seems to be very much a male thing.”

“Don't you go upstairs? Don't you go on dates?”

“I don't know, I just sit down here and read. It doesn't pay so well, so I live with my mom—”

“What have you got on Jews?”

“Oh, reams and reams. That whole wall over there.” He pointed across the station. “The roof leaks on that side, it should all be gone in ten years or so.”

“I know this is a personal question,” Mary said, “but do you ever feel you're wasting your life?”

He grinned. “Isn't that just like a minion of Satan, coming down here to tempt me—don't you know you're the woman I fear most?”

“If I were you I'd fear the bear and the squirrel more,” Mary said. “Are you sure I can't tempt you upstairs for some coffee?”

“Just a minute,” he said, loosening his tie. He pulled out a wooden crucifix on a chain and held it toward Mary.

“Ouch! Stop that!” she cried. He jumped back in terror and she began to laugh. “Come back, I was kidding.”

The librarian was still panting in fear as he led her up the stairs.

Somewhere, I won't say where but my friends know who I mean, there is someone who goes around saying that I live to torture men. Am I a sadist? Is it true that I cruelly force men to fall deeply and helplessly in love with me, and then crush them, body and soul, like bugs?

On this theory I am, like Mary, entirely ordinary looking, with what is called in Spanish a
cara de buena persona,
prompting men who would not ordinarily aspire to possess the ideal woman (which I am, all things considered, in spite of my appearance) to regard me as already practically theirs. Letting down their guard, they notice only too late the transfigurative power of the brilliance, wit, and sympathy I employ in elevating myself beyond their reach to celestial heights from which I can only look down smiling, waving, forever unattainable. If I were better looking, they would realize the danger from the beginning and take precautions. If they, on the other hand, were better looking, they would not bother with someone like me in the first place. Their own homely awkwardness becomes the snare that traps them: Fearing they'll never do any better, they are caught, like Dante's Paolo and Francesca, whirling in a vicious circle, but by themselves.

Lucky for everyone, I am divinely beautiful, and no man can look at me without becoming intimidated and depressed. Close relationships cannot flower in the atmosphere of universal self-abasement created by my very existence.

Mary, however, was not so lucky, and she was in real danger
of hurting the feelings of the homely and awkward demonologist. They sat drinking coffee together for an hour, Mary doing her best to befriend him, hoping only to learn what she could about the IDL and its possible connection to Yigal, Mr. Pickwick, and the heir to the Israeli throne. Unfortunately, he seemed to know nothing but silkie folklore and esoterica. She yawned and asked for the check.

Meanwhile Yigal knocked on the door of the Dolphin Star Temple in Mount Rainier, Maryland. The high priestess answered, clad in her steel-gray robes. She had just been perfecting a new dolphin-like movement.

“Yigal,” she said softly. She walked backward, her gray gauze streaming in the breeze from two electric fans, and knelt on a silken pillow before the altar.

“Holy one,” Yigal began, “things are getting confusing and I need your help.”

“Yes, my priestess in Tel Aviv told me of your trouble.” She nodded toward a picture of me on the back wall, decorated with kelp. “You wish to learn the meaning of the card Leviathan.”

“Yes.”

“Yet you never drew that card.”

“No, holy one.”

“How do you know it exists?”

Yigal said firmly, “I don't know the card exists. Let's just say I want to know the meaning of the entry in the book. You know why.” She nodded and beckoned him forward to the altar. He sat beside her on a cushion and raised his arms in a dolphin-like manner. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, she was holding out a different book, a very small one that looked a bit like a CIA manual. He began to read aloud:

The Leviathan is a unique futuristic prototype with no moving parts. Made almost entirely of a gelatinous substance, it is sheathed in a continuous ribbon of osmium sealed with caoutchouc and wooden dowels. Like the golem of Prague, it takes its motive power from a name—the name of Moshe Dayan.

      
The Leviathan was built for the state of Israel in 1968 with the help of a team of conservators from the Institute of Demonology Libraries, New York. Soon afterward, it was stolen. Some say the Leviathan is an all-powerful weapon, capable of spontaneously generating any amount of force conceived by its operators. The basic principle is simple: Any object mentally projected into the Leviathan will there, over a period of weeks, take actual shape until bursting forth spontaneously.

      
In the hands of a capable engineer, Leviathan could be an invincible deterrent, but there are indications that the group currently controlling Leviathan has only the vaguest notions of physics, mechanics, and weapons technology, leading the submarine to generate ineffective weapons which upon examination are found to be bereft of interior detail.

Both were silent for a long time. Yigal read the passage again, committing it to memory. Then he looked up and asked, “The dolphins?”

The high priestess shook her head. “I don't know, but I suspect them. A human group would have been controlled by now.”

“Who wrote the book?”

“Allow me a question. Who has examined the interior of weapons produced by Leviathan?”

Yigal looked upset the way he sometimes did in the presence of Dolphin Star mysteries, especially ones that seemed to involve his employers. Then he remembered happily that there was a Leviathan-generated Trident warhead on his own roof in Tel Aviv, sitting waiting for him in a rain barrel.

“Shall I go, holy one?”

She nodded. He jumped up and was on his way.

HOLDING THE EDGES OF THE RAIN
barrel, Yigal and I slowly tipped it over on its side. The water poured through holes in the battlements onto the awning above the café, and the Trident warhead rolled out.

“Here goes nothing,” Yigal said, hitting it with a hammer.

A second later we were jumping back, saying things like “Ew!” “Yuck!” “What the hell is that?!” The nose cone of the rocket, which seemed to be made of a compressed calcareous material, had broken open easily to reveal a thick, white, gooey substance that oozed all over the roof. We had no idea what it was, but we both knew what it reminded us of. I ran for the hose, and we washed it down to the awning and into the street. We could see pedestrians running.

Over coffee we discussed the possibilities.

I was sure of one thing. “This is definitely controlled by dolphins. They've seen Trident missiles go up, obviously, and being dolphins, they assumed they had a sexual function—”

“Why assume it's dolphins? It seems to me that any sexually mature, but naive, onlooker might make the same assumption about the Trident program. After all, they only see it go
up. They don't see it come down. The mode of delivery reminds me more of the sperm packets used by mollusks.”

“You mean cephalopods—octopus—that ninth arm—”

“Precisely. They're reputed to be very intelligent. The only thing I can think is that one of your undersea pals down in Eilat is in love with you, and they've been aiming at you all along, not me. They overshot you the first time, so then they tried something smaller and lighter.”

I shuddered with disgust. “Anybody could have seen me in that glass-bottomed boat, and—from below—I was out there in shorts all that time—it could be anyone, coral, or a parrot fish! Or a sea anemone! I feel violated.”

Yigal put his arm around me. “There's another possibility.”

“What?” I sniffled.

“Twelve-year-old boys. Actually, I can see this up to seventeen, eighteen—”

“No,” I said. “I refuse to believe that. I don't know anyone under forty.”

We sat in silence.

“Maybe it was something else,” I ventured. “What about the one that blew up in your office?”

He shook his head. “That was probably the candy and flowers.”

We spent the afternoon covering the roof with a double layer of plywood and a sheet of PVC.

The demonology librarian, whose name was Ian, took Mary's hand across the table. “How would you like dinner at my place?”

She smiled. “I'm tired, but before I go, there's one more thing I'd really like to ask you. Do you think, in all that Jewish material you've got, that there's anything to link anyone alive today with the biblical House of David?”

He laughed. “No way. That's what you call a loaded issue. Questions like that are fertilizer, if you'll pardon the expression. When you start to spread something like that around, you get forgeries, destructions, pages ripped out, words cut out, words written in . . .” He lowered his voice. “They also say there are some powerful curses. There's a story about the first generation of librarians, the people that worked at the institute when it started. They're gone now. Something made their bodies into a big blob of something like Jell-O. They say it blocked the G line for two days and they had to get it out with a Sikorsky Skycrane . . .”

Around five o'clock Yigal said, “I need a drink.”

“That's so unlike you. Have you really started drinking?”

He stuck the roll of tape in his pocket and said, “Come along. First we'll get a bottle of rioja, and then I'll tell you about how I started drinking.” He began in the elevator. “So, Nell, where did the dolphins get their ordnance survey map of Tel Aviv?”

“Good point.”

He told me about his visit to the Dolphin Star Temple and concluded, “I see this as a power struggle between internal and external security. Shin Bet tried to use silkies to control the dolphins, and Mossad tried to win over the dolphins directly through the Dolphin Star program. But the silkies and the Dolphin Star priestesses are wild cards. Plus, neither of them has any actual communication with the dolphins. The silkies feel nothing but contempt for them, and you, well—”

“It's true, I wouldn't know a dolphin if it bit me on the butt.” It was slightly humiliating to learn that I had been the clueless pawn of a global spy network, but I was proud to feel that my ineptitude had played a role in saving the world from the ultimate weapon of terror.

Yigal added, “I suspect that my mission isn't exactly what they told me. They had me going after Shin Bet's silkie contacts.” There was a promotion going on, so we tasted six or seven reds before taking the rioja. “Let's just go walking and drink straight from the bottle,” he said. “For confidentiality.”

We strolled to Independence Park through the gray-gold twilight. A hotel blocked our view of the port, but we could see a trio of dolphins leaping through the waves, heading south. “I'd like to see them retain control of it,” I said. “They're basically harmless, especially now that we've reinforced the roof.”

“I'd rather find and remove the name so we can forget the whole thing.” He finished the bottle and threw it down to the beach. “Now I want to tell you why I started drinking.” The story about Mary took a long time. We sat down on a bench and he kept stopping in the middle of sentences to let people pass by. He stuttered, seeming shy and ashamed, and finally claimed he couldn't go on.

“Of course you're hesitating to tell me this,” I said. “Your behavior is disgraceful.”

“Really?” He looked up, suddenly cheerful.

“Of course it is. You're a loser and a shit.”

“Then I have to take her back?”

“Absolutely.”

Yigal hugged me. “I have no choice!”

I could see that his typically Israeli need to be as masculine as possible had been wriggling under the heel of a dilemma: It's very masculine to repudiate the woman you love and suffer alone for the rest of your life for the sake of pride and vanity, but it's also very masculine to sacrifice your youth and freedom to bring up her children. It was a hard choice for Yigal, but since he was a little shaky on whether the “children” in
this case were technically “children” at all, he'd been leaning toward number one. All it took was a little light arm-twisting, and he was firmly back with option number two, which had the added advantage of confirming his common decency and securing his relationship with Mary, assuming he ever saw her again.

“She'll turn up,” I said. “She sent me something to keep for her.”

“What?”

“This little medal with a dog—or maybe it's a koala—and a wheel and some other stuff—she said she got it somewhere. Yigal?” He was crying again. “Be a man for a minute. How about this: What if they're not after me at all? What if it's someone after you who's trying to exploit someone who's after me, because he can't control Mr. Pickwick by himself? So they're working together to defend the Israeli royal family.”

“Which royal family? The Dayans?”

“No,” I said. “That can't be. I suggested it to Zohar, and he said, ‘That's just too stupid.'”

Yigal shrugged and looked out to sea. “I've spent a month in New York looking for material on the House of David and getting nowhere. There comes a time when a man has to ask himself, ‘What House of David? What are we really talking about here?' Nell, look at me, and tell me honestly, I'm not talking about nature now: Is there anything in human culture so stupid that it can't be true?”

I pondered his question. A woman walked past us, carrying a $300 Italian clutch purse made of patterned vinyl. “No,” I replied.