CHAPTER 23

The dock creaks and groans. Light waves rock the gigantic anchored ships, nothing compared with the powerful sounds produced crossing the Pacific, but then the churn and purr of the engine had covered the clash of ocean and steel.

The man with the beard and the backpack crouches. So much of his life is spent crouching. Hiding, scurrying, the posture of the Lord’s work is not a proud one, not in the era of heretics. In this case, he crouches behind containers at the Port of Oakland. Not far to his left, he can see the ship he stowed away on, which landed hours ago, and now he’s watching the police hustle about.

They’ve found the young man whose neck he broke, whom he ushered into the next life. He had no choice.

And his righteous certitude has been reinforced by the ease with which he escaped the ship onto the dock — safely and with his deadly backpack by his side. God must be here or he’d be in handcuffs right now.

He pulls the backpack close, waiting for the Guardians to find him.

He hears a policeman “comb the place,” and the words take him back to the beginning. He pulls close to the shipping container and thinks about the story, how long his people have been hiding while heretics comb the world for them.

“Your grandfather, Fishl, he knelt and he waited,” his father’s story would begin.

Always the kneeling, always the waiting. He could imagine his grandfather’s beard, and see his father’s own commanding beard, a towering upside-down cone, wisdom in the form of facial hair. The story was always the same. His grandfather knelt, and waited, and listened to the onrush of furious Russian villagers, literally wielding pitchforks, literally on horseback, like a cliché of the horsemen of the apocalypse. If only the world could’ve been so lucky. It wasn’t the end of days, just the end of another poor Jewish village, its inhabitants persecuted because they did exactly as they were told: helped the nobility tax and manage the peasants. Jews, wanting only to be left alone to pursue their beliefs, by happenstance gained middle-class status, upward mobility.

But the Russian peasants didn’t understand that. And finally fed up with the inequities that governed their society, they turned on the Jews, the partners of a noble class that were themselves untouchable with pitchforks. Just another deadly ebb in the ebb and flow of the Jews in European culture. A boatload of pious refugees subject to the waves of change, awaiting final redemption.

His grandfather could hear the wails of the murders on the edges of the village, the shouts and cries of the mothers begging for their babies’ lives. And then, his father tells him, his grandfather heard another voice telling him what he must do.

“Was it …?” the boy would ask. He’d know he couldn’t say “God,” but how could he ask if his grandfather had heard a divine voice?

“No, Moshe,” his father said, understanding the unspoken. “It was the rebbe,” in his devout sect, a divine intermediary, a prophet. “He said, ‘Go that we might live.’ Your grandfather begged to stay. But he was commanded.”

And so, the story went, his grandfather leaped from the window, escaped and eventually became a seedling planted in the verdant valleys in the north of Palestine. And from him sprouted the bloodline, his father, like his great-grandfather a pious man, committed to the word and the ancient code, the Talmud, and not wayward convenience. And certainly not to Israel.

Israel, a heretical concept. At least a secular Israel. In fact, little could be more heretical. Its establishment would, in effect, institutionalize, formalize godlessness. The Messiah might well never come.

“So it is bad that Grandfather came here?” the boy would ask.

“Quite the opposite.” Of course, his father always had the answer. “We are here for a reason, an important reason.”

His father tells him, again, about the Guardians. In ancient times, Rabbi Judah the Prince sent emissaries to inspect pastoral towns. In one, these rabbi emissaries asked to see the city guardian and they were shown a municipal guard. The emissaries said this was not a guard, but a city destroyer. The townspeople asked who should be considered a guard, and the rabbis said: “The scribes and the scholars.”

The Guardians of the City. Neturei-Karta. From Aramaic. The Jews who would keep this land pure, who would not allow a secular weed to take root. His father, among their leaders, was hunted for seeking to disrupt the Zionists in 1947 and 1948. So hunted that he was forced to disappear, or maybe the hunters got him.

“Our own people,” his father told him before he packed up a small sack of belongings. It was the last time he saw his father, and that majestic beard. “Tracked down by our own people so that they might do the work of Satan and create a goyish land. Take care of your mother, Moshe. Guard the city.”

The boy thinks of the old words; the Zionists combed the northern valleys for his father, as these heretics surely will comb the belly of the ship for him, the boy, the grandson, now bearded himself, carrying the mission. Neturei Karta. And the stakes so magnified. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be called to such purpose.

And, as always, such risk, and uncertainty. Seeming happenstance that left him with his half of this deadly suitcase, a treasure bestowed by unlikely authorities, inert though it is in its current state.

And then a contact from the Old City, and another contact, calling his tiny cell to action. Giving him clear but incomplete directions, codes, instructions to find an unlikely — even impossible ally — a woman, a Syrian, a Christian. The Guardians, he’s told, are no longer merely Jews, as the world’s mythology heralds. They are Christians, Rastafarians, a secret network, zealots, in the best sense of the word. A simple, abiding, core belief: for the Messiah to come, they must cleanse Jerusalem of the infidels. The nonbelievers.

And the nonbelievers have become so powerful. They hold the key to forever undoing the eternal peace.

Can it be that he and a Christian from Syria, and white men from America, are not enemies but share a common enemy?

These are, anyhow, the rumors. He will believe it when he sees it.

And then he does — he sees it. Rather, he sees her.

A woman like a shadow moves through the open platform, unnoticed, and then scurries between two containers. She is dark-haired and dark-skinned. And soon, she is nearly beside him. How did she find him?

He pulls the backpack tight as she inches near.

She whispers: “Have no fear of atomic energy.”

“Shalom,” he says.

“Salam,” she says, then repeats: “Have no fear of atomic energy.”

The bearded man keeps his back to the voice. “None of them can-a stop-a the time.”

“Redemption Song,” by Bob Marley, the code.

The man looks directly into her face and sees her bright eyes, breaking into a smile.

He recoils. Her smile, it is not joy, but tightly controlled fury, the look of a bloodthirsty animal before a fight, anxious to kill, and eat what it has killed.

“You are Janine,” he stammers.

“That works.”

“The Guardian.”

“No, I am not the Guardian. Merely a guardian, as it were, a foot soldier, like you. You will meet him soon. Come. We are in a hurry.”

“There’s a problem?”

By way of an answer, she ushers him with a gentle hand on his elbow. Moments later, undetected, they’ve made their way into the port parking lot. She opens the door to a dark blue van, loosing from the inside stale air. She gestures him inside.

She eyes his backpack.

“You have done a wonderful thing. Now we have our divine tool.”

“How long before …”

“Mere hours.” She guns the engine, accelerating the van out of the lot. “But, first, we have urgent work.”

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