The Memorist

Chapter 6

Vienna, Austria

Thursday, April 24^th-6:30 p.m.

David Yalom tugged the gray life raft from behind the stalagmite where he’d stowed it after coming across the subterranean lake two hours ago. Something was wrong; it was completely deflated. Flipping it over, he saw four short parallel rips on the underside. “How the hell did that happen?” He gestured to the mutilation.

Wassong bent down and inspected the slashes. “The rocks are sharp here. When you pulled it up out of the lake you must have ripped it.”

“No, I remember, I lifted it up. I didn’t drag it, precisely for that reason.” David stared at the rips. “Besides, these cuts are too clean to have been made on the ragged edges of these rocks.” Frantically, he scanned the cavern, his halogen beam flashing wild streaks of light on the rocky walls. “Someone did this. Someone is down here with us, Hans.”

“Impossible.”

“You’re sure? What if someone followed you here?”

“No one followed me,” Wassong insisted. “Me? Think about what you’re saying.”

“What’s going on then?”

“Maybe it was the rats.”

David’s light beam shined right into Wassong’s light brown eyes. In an article, he’d once described them as surprisingly kind, and he thought of that now.

“Rats, Hans?”

“There are thousands of vermin living in these tunnels, you’ve seen them for yourself. These marks certainly could have been made by a rat’s claws. There’s no reason to worry. You are overreacting-understand, I don’t blame you-the stress you are under would make anyone overreact. But we still have my raft. If this were some kind of suspicious activity, my lifeboat would have been attacked also. We have enough rope to rig my raft so that I can go across and then you can pull it back and use it.”

There was no other choice. The water was thirty percent hotter than the human body’s temperature thanks to the geothermal heat under the lake’s bed. If you tried to swim across you’d be boiled to death.

“Did you look? Are you sure your raft isn’t damaged too?”

But it wasn’t.

Wassong pulled a coil of rope out of his knapsack and knotted it through the die-cut plastic ring in the raft’s rubber edging.

“This will work fine,” he said, tugging on it to make sure the knot would hold. Done, he took his glasses off, wiped them on his bandana, then wiped the bandana across his forehead and finally put his glasses back on.

“Once I’m on the other side and give you the signal, you’ll be able to pull the boat back.” He picked up the rope and tossed it to David.

Watching Wassong paddling across the water, the steam mist shrouding him, David thought about the likelihood of a rat ripping through the PVC. As if he were attempting to reconstruct it so he could write it up for the newspaper, he ran through his and Wassong’s earlier actions once they’d reached the shore and stowed the boats. Did Hans have time to sabotage the raft? And if he had, why? Sweat dripped down David’s back. He had already taken off his jacket. Now he unbuttoned his work shirt and mopped his brow with his sleeve. Reaching into his knapsack, he grabbed his last bottle of water and drank down what little was left. They’d only brought supplies for the day, and the day was over.

He listened to the even splashing of Wassong’s oars.

When they’d come through this section earlier they hadn’t lingered. Just inflated the rafts, unfolded the oars, paddled across, stowed the boats and then continued on. No, he suddenly remembered, they had stopped. David had needed to record directions for the oral map he was keeping so he could find his way back on his own next week. What had Wassong been doing while David had made his notes?

He tried to remember. He thought back a few hours ago but what came to mind was another night. The last time he’d used the recorder before today was almost a year ago. He’d been fast-forwarding through an interview he’d taped, rushing to file a story about an uprising in the Gaza Strip, trying to find one last quote. He’d looked up at the clock. It was 6:02 p.m. and he’d thought, I’m going to be late. I’d better hurry, not imagining that by then everyone-everyone-in his family was dead. Killed when an explosive was thrown into his house during his middle son’s eighth birthday party. A gift from Ahmed Abdul in exchange for David just doing his damn job.

Two weeks earlier he’d filed a story on the PPLP-Palestinian People’s Liberation Party-breaking the news that the terrorist organization was on the verge of collapse and that the head of the group, Nadir Abdul, Ahmed’s brother, was going to be ousted. Nadir had committed suicide twenty-four hours after the story ran. Twelve hours after his burial, the threats on David’s life had started. Taking no chances, the newspaper had hired a top security firm to protect him and his family.

Only David, who was late getting home that night, survived. Sparing his life was the sadistic trick of a god he no longer believed in. What kind of life could it be, would it ever be, when every minute of every day the slow motion imagery of finding the remains of that blast ran on an endless loop in his imagination, becoming more terrible with each replaying? That wasn’t how time was supposed to work on memory. It should be smoothing the edges and filing down its rough rim.

And it wasn’t just what he’d personally lost. The endless pattern of violence, reprisals and more violence continued. Baghdad, Mogadishu, Tel Aviv, Sadr…

David had covered terrorism since the mid-1990s. As he infiltrated sleeper cells, interviewed suicide bombers and their families, chronicling their methods and madness, he’d also covered the systems in place to trap terrorists and disrupt their plans. Over the years he’d seen hundreds of new mousetraps and heard all the promises of how each was better than the system before. But that wasn’t true. And the deaths of his wife, two sons, daughter, parents, aunts, uncles, sisters and brothers were just one small fraction of the awful proof.

A fellow reporter named Louis Rene Beres had once written that facing an assault on its own survival, Israel should reject being a victim. “Instead,” he wrote, “it has the regrettable but clear corollary right to become an executioner. From the standpoint of providing security to its own citizens-” he concluded in the article “-this right has now become a distinct obligation.”

It was David’s obligation, too. Not just as a reporter. He’d seen the writing on the wall and it was written in his family’s blood: the time for building a better mousetrap was long past. There would always be a way to outsmart a new system. It wasn’t about mousetraps anymore but about changing the way both the mice and the trappers think. And it was about punishing the men who’d built the systems that failed him and his family. In five days, those men would be in the crowd, sitting a dozen meters above these caves, enjoying the gala performance of the Vienna Philharmonic at the end of their annual ISTA conference. All they’d given him was an apology, and that was so little.

The splashing ceased. Wassong had reached the opposite shore and climbed off the raft onto solid ground. As he bent over, the beam from his helmet created a spotlight around him and shined on something that glinted cold and bright in his hand.

Like every Israeli citizen, David had spent two years in the army and was trained to quickly size up dangerous situations. As soon as his mind formed questions, he searched for answers. Instantly, he knew Wassong held a knife and guessed that he planned on using it to cut the rope and leave David stranded.

Wassong had never had any intention of sending the raft back to David, had he? This was all planned. But why go through the charade of bringing him here and showing him the crypt? For the money? It had to be. David’s money first and Abdul’s money after.

Instinct took over with the kind of strength only fury provides; David jerked on the rope and started pulling it back as quickly as he could. The unexpected lurch yanked it out of Wassong’s grip before he realized what was happening. Dropping the knife, he reached out with both hands to grab hold of the raft. Wassong was trained too; he’d been a warrior all his life but David was younger and stronger and the raft was already moving away from the shore toward him.

Wassong misjudged its speed and, arms outstretched, fell forward, screaming in anticipation even before he plunged into the water. Instantly, reacting to the pain, his body recoiled, lurching up, arching back.

For a second David wondered if Wassong could somehow make it out. No, he knew that was impossible. He knew, because Wassong had warned him-no one survived the firewater. Wassong was splashing wildly, displacing a circle of water around him. He continued thrashing for fifteen seconds, thirty seconds, forty, and then all movement ceased. Hans Wassong lay still, floating facedown in the boiling lake, his glasses bobbing beside him.