Quest for the Ark Read online

  “Ah, that! We get graffiti, desecration, overturned tombs, neo-Nazi threats, all the time. There are so many these days a friend of mine, to feel safer, moved to Ashkelon. To put this in perspective, he has a steel-reinforced bunker in his condo, in case rockets fall on the city—a bit like having hurricane shutters in Florida or bulletproof vests in America.

  Most of our cemeteries, temples, even schools here have cameras now, precisely because of that. My own home has become like a TV studio. Fart silently, if you must.”

  “I know. But this graffito is not of that type. It is always the same symbol. It looks like a man with a bonnet bent in prayer, always oriented facing Eastern Europe.”

  “That is indeed odd, and rich at the same time. At one point the Yehudim Bavlim, the Jews of Babylon, wore pointy hats, first by choice; then, were forced to wear them, yellow or white. In Europe, your Biblical people, after the Council of Letran in 1215, forced my Biblical people to wear those as well. The Jewish hat, the pileus cornutus was worn in very catholic France since the eleventh century. I might have some history book here, on one of these shelves,” Haim said, while rummaging. “Here, these images should illustrate it. There is even Judenburg, in Austria, whose coat of arms…is quite illustrative. Wasn’t your mother from France, one of those places with splendid cathedrals and lovely châteaux? Eleventh century Crusaders, some of ‘your people’, were quite the bitches towards my Biblical people as well.”

  “Let old sleeping dogs lie, and you might not get fleas—or a bite on your ass.”

  “I would if I thought those particular dogs were dead, not sleeping. Sadly, I’m afraid they are very much alive and biting. The Crusader symbol, for one, has been coopted by neo-Nazis, bigly. But let’s go back to your…graffito.”

  “Alright. Not that I work for any secret Order of any sort, but the Vatican—who doesn’t make Jews wear pointy hats anymore—and is not into Pickelhauben revival either, doesn’t like sorcery, Nazi or otherwise, running amok and thinning the flock.”

  “But we’re not your flock: we’re people of the rock. Are you going to start drowning witches again? My neighbor is quite a bitch, and she has several black cats, if you’re interested. You could start there.”

  “I take your neighbor isn’t your best friend…”

  “Their cats think matzo bread is catnip, let’s leave it at that. So, why do you think this pointed hat graffito, this ‘stickman’ praying to some place in eastern Europe, where so many of ‘my Biblical people’ were murdered, should interest the Vatican, and/or, be of particular concern to us?”

  “Something else happens, in places where this symbol pops up,” added Tony.

  “Aside from my people cleaning up the mess and police making some arrests?”

  “Well, for one, no arrests have been made as yet,” Tony admitted, sighing.

  “Anywhere? Guess those thugs are good or your Crusader neo-Nazis have many good friends in high places.”

  “Nowhere. We have seen footage from every available place. There is no one to arrest. No one has ever been seen tracing that praying stickman with the bonnet.”

  “The royal ‘we’ suits you well. The Order has seen, I guess. Now, since I have never heard about this so far, my Biblical people are either not aware of it, or, if they are, not too concerned by it. That means you likely have seen this ‘footage’ unbeknownst to most of my people. Your Order, I mean you, are into hacking of surveillance cameras?”

  “If it can be recorded it can be hacked. My people—not all on the Biblical sense; and, please, stop it! —are very good at hacking, yes. But there is more to it, and weirder.”

  “Weirder than invisible people drawing a cartoon of Jews with a bonnet praying towards Eastern Europe on Jewish cemeteries? Does it happen in other burial grounds? Have you checked Pol Pot’s Killing Fields or S21, in Phnom Penh? Does it always face Eastern Europe? Is it Eastern Europe or a particular place in Eastern Europe?”

  “No; it doesn’t anywhere except in Jewish cemeteries and places of pogroms. And yes, it faces a particular place: Auschwitz.” Once uttered by Tony, the name lingered in the air, as if whispered by a million long-silenced voices.

  “What?” Haim almost wailed as he swerved, toppling another pile of papers. Ignoring the mess, he sat still for a long moment there, pressing his back against the chair, arms limp, rested on his thighs, mouth twisted in disbelief, tears running down his face, jaws clenched, chin vibrating, trying in vain to mumble yet unable to articulate coherent sounds.

  Tony looked at him, in silence, stirring his cup of coffee—screechy, since by now almost empty, but doing it, all the same—lazily, expectantly, waiting, letting Haim process the possible implications of what he had just told him.

  Finally, Haim slouched, rolled his eyes, shook his head and spat: “Fuck! Not again! Won’t they ever let the dead rest in peace? You’ve visited the place with me. You know the granite plate: ‘You are in a building where the SS murdered thousands of people. Please maintain silence here: remember their suffering and show respect for their memory.’ Nathan and Itzak died there. Don’t fuck with me. My cousin tattooed himself with their numbers, one on each arm. Even knowing he did it for a good reason, the entire family was quite shaken when he did. The records…we are not sure…never mind. This is an abomination, a monstrosity.”

  “It is, my friend. It definitely is! But there is more.”

  “More than psychos playing the Wizard of Auschwitz and not being caught yet? I have to laugh it off not to scream, cry and vomit. What more could there be?”

  “There is this: where this symbol appears, a group of several small whirlwinds forms. Then, winds inexplicably change direction; and something, like an invisible hand, seems to pull them out of the ground, like bad weeds ripped by one careful, invisible gardener, from the spaces between slabs in a cemetery.”

  “An invisible hand pulling small whirlwinds? That is insane. Have you gone back to heavy drinking my friend? Drugs again, like Arturo, Tony? You…still dreaming of your girlfriend? Since the Order doesn’t exist, I won’t tell them.”

  “No, I haven’t, Haim. We have put people on the grounds, installed equipment, a few times with help from your people. Since congregations are so independent, guess you didn’t find out yet. We were asked for, and provided, discretion. And we love discretion too. I said several small whirlwinds. It’s not just a few here and a few there. They are always twelve.”

  “Twelve? You’re fucking with me? The Twelve Tribes of Israel?”

  “Even we realized that. In this case we ruled out the Twelve Apostles. Since it looked like sorcery, we at first thought of the twelve signs of the zodiac. We analyzed the symbol that has some resemblance to Sagittarius or Ursa Major—but similarity is not enough. We won’t make our data fit our theory. It has to be the reverse. The Twelve Tribes of Israel seems more logical. We took the Twelve Tribes according to the Book of Joshua, Deuteronomy 33, even Revelation 7…”

  “You said you were not proselytizing…”

  “I’m not. Fuck! I’m telling you what we did, even if my bosses would not approve of this. We did all that, and mapped the Twelve Tribes, as best we could, then tried assigning each a center….”

  “The Tribe of Levi had no land, so how did you assign them ‘a center’?”

  “Work with me, Haim. I’m telling you what we did, even though I wasn’t authorized to tell you. Since the Crusaders had their good dose of Holy Land and anti-Semitism, we even checked leads following the “coat of arms” of Manasseh, by Thesouro de Nobreza, although it dates from the XVII century—because the unicorn has a sort of ‘bonnet’, and Megiddo, in Manasseh, is supposed to be the place of Armageddon.”

  “With the advent of the Moshiach, a rightful scion of King David, Micah 3:12 says Zion should be plowed as a field, not swept by twelve tornadoes. But Elijah should arrive three days before the battle between Gog and Magog, and that should precede the arrival of the Moshiach. Nobody is sure where or even what Gog and Mag
og are; and, last I checked, Elijah has not arrived. So, for now, it all helps bringing to Megiddo Christian tourists that hope to see Assyria invade Israel. Seems your trying to twist Judaism into knots won’t help with any kneeling bonneted stickman who faces Auschwitz. It has to be something else, different.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, your people perform the hagbahah, the lifting of the Torah to show the verses just read, inspired by the Book of Nehemiah, which says: “And Ezra opened the Book in the sight of all people…”

  “Indeed. Your point, Tony?”

  “It has to be something that, whoever is doing this, either wants everyone to see, or doesn’t care if everyone sees it. And, yes I have good reason to believe sorcery may be involved—Nazi sorcery, Himmler’s sorcery, to be more specific.”

  “Got my attention. How so?” asked Haim.

  2—Of Witches and Witchcraft

  “We have reason to suspect witchcraft, sorcery, call it what you will. Father Lajos had been in Budapest, digging for surviving roots of Szálasi’s “Arrow Cross Party”…”

  “The ones that killed ten thousand Jews near the end of World War II…?” asked Haim.

  “Jews and Roma. They also sent almost eighty thousand people to concentration camps in Austria. Szálasi, two of his minions, and Gera, the party ideologue, were hanged in 1946. But their ideas have survived. In the Kozma Street Cemetery, there were defacements; and, seemingly, those who did deface tombstones, surfaced, days after this happened, horribly mutilated, in the shrubbery on the side of the street, hardly three blocks from the cemetery’s main entrance. When Father Lajos went to investigate, he, again, found the symbol—again, always, pointing to Auschwitz.

  His last communication said he had found a lead, a lead about who the defacers were. He suggested they seemed terrified on the moment of their deaths, as if something sinister had attacked them. One of them had a paper in his pocket, which said: “A szél él. És megöli.”

  “The…wind…is alive? And...it kills?” asked Haim.

  “I forgot how many languages you speak,” Tony said.

  “Never mind. So, a ‘wind’ of some sort, is…alive and kills? What kind of madness is this?” Haim spat.

  “That’s what the paper said. Lajos said he would find out more, from a visitor that should arrive shortly. Then he hung up. The receptionist told him his visitor had arrived.

  Later on, Father Lajos was found dead, butchered, in a room covered in blood; the furniture, not just overturned, much of it broken; his bodyguards, two disemboweled, the others ripped to pieces, torn, like ragdolls; his closets, emptied, bottoms and sides, crisscrossed by deep scratch marks. In parts of two of the rooms, most floor tiles had been removed. The areas around those sections also had scratch marks, as if someone had been frantically digging—maybe a clawed animal, like a large bear, looking for something hidden. We also found a crumpled piece of paper inside a cushion flung from one of the sofas. Written with blood in it, “boszorkánys…” In Hungarian, “boszorkányság”…”

  “…Means witchcraft. I know,” Haim finished Tony’s sentence, shaking his head.

  “What you might not know is that, Izráel, Lajos’ rabbi friend of many years, was there with him. And he was found alive, on the hotel’s roof, unconscious, seemingly hit on the head, bludgeoned by a very hot, blunt object. When we found out, we pulled some levers and managed to have the police release Izráel, but only after questioning him for a few hours. We then contacted him. He’s terrified, badly bruised, and seems partially amnesic.

  He only knows that a dark, swirling, wind followed Lajos mystery visitor into the room; and, when Lajos tried to exorcise this ‘wind’, he and his visitor were torn to pieces. His bodyguards shot at the ‘wind’, emptying two Glock 21’s each, and were massacred all the same. One of their guns, hot from firing so many shots, flew, seemingly carried by the wind, and knocked Izráel unconscious. Since the burn marks matched, the police assumed one the guards had hit him with it, and he became a suspect, until we vouched for him.”

  “I see. And Glocks 21 have thirteen .45ACP rounds; so 52 fat bullets didn’t stop this thing. Don’t ask me how I know: I live in the USA, OK?” grunted Haim.

  “No need to get defensive. So… do you know much about witches, Haim? What do you and ‘your Biblical people’ think about witches and witchcraft?” Tony asked.

  “Cut it out. We Jews don’t really think much about witches. Now, if you want to know, Biblically speaking, Exodus 22:17, Leviticus 20:27, and, in the Talmud, Sanhedrin 45b, prescribe witches have to be stoned, killed because of their idolatry, everywhere.

  In the Bible, wizards are powerful enough to be employed by the kings of Egypt and Babylon; and witches, by the King of Manasseh. Queen Jezebel was a witch. I’ll spare you the citations. Ezekiel, 13:19, speaks about something a bit…like…voodoo. The woman of Endor is often called the “witch”, but not called such in the Bible: neither Deuteronomy nor Isaiah does clearly distinguish necromancy and witchcraft; and, again, I’ll spare you the citations. In the Alphabet of Ben Sirath, Lilith, the first woman, becomes a demon abusing the power of the Tetragrammaton, the four letters we never utter in vain.

  Mahashefah, the feminine form of the word “witchcraft” is prohibited by Exodus 22:17—so, it’s either OK for men to do it, or assumed it’s women who should not practice because only they would, in Biblical times. I say this because there is a medieval manual of witchcraft, ‘The Sword of Moses’, which obviously is intended for men—and, again, I’ll spare you the details. There are references to a sage using the “evil eye” to kill a man; but, mostly, sorcery refers to witches messing around with births, or making rivals sterile, in texts replete with all sorts of circumlocutions about seed and such. Making of talismans, on the other hand, seems quite fine, mostly.

  But witchcraft seems was usually mentioned as a tool for revenge, out of jealousy. If you like your porn, ‘my people’ even speak about witches being made to show off their witchcraft. Once their nature was thus proven, they were embroiled in an orgy to distract them—and, then, as they were busy banging, they were hanged. One has her head ‘pulled out of flax’. Talk about giving head.

  But mostly, in rabbinical texts, witchcraft seems just unseemly for women to practice. Now, when ‘my Biblical people’ got in contact with ‘your Biblical people’, things got really bad. In Sefer Hasidim there are references to witches that act like vampires and werewolves, fly, shape-shift, lust for blood, and become undead. That sounds more like ‘your people’s’ type of witch. Medieval Jews perhaps didn’t go dunking their women, tied naked to ducking stools over lakes, because it was bad enough having to wear pointy hats to make it easy for Jews to be chased or killed—mostly by people who constantly borrowed from them and couldn’t pay.

  So, there you have, it a nutshell, what we think about witches and witchcraft.

  Does it help?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t help much, except if we were dealing with vampires. After the blood-and-guts bath we found in Lajos’ hotel, and the scratch marks on the floor and the furniture, vampires would make sense.

  However, there have been no reports of any such thing in Budapest for a long while. So, no: I’m afraid it doesn’t help much.

  But the stickman points to Auschwitz, and whatever is that traces it, does it only in Jewish cemeteries or places of pogroms. And that ‘wind’—that ‘wind’ is an aberration. We are now so numb to weather anomalies, winds changing direction on a dime that…”

  “Hey, Tony, now that you mention weather anomalies: I know the perfect person, from among ‘my Biblical people’, to help you out on weather anomalies,” commented Haim, eyes widening, as he slapped his own forehead.

  “What do you mean the perfect person?”

  “David Lieb, a man of my congregation. He’s a scientist, specializing in weather anomalies. He can’t say two words without mentioning weather deregulation, climate change, global warming, greenhouse effects, weather collapse, weather em
ergency, or extinction event—depending on how worried he is that day. He convinced us to install solar panels on the temple, change every light bulb to LED, and now we’re collecting—you are welcome to contribute—to pay for new additions to our building, to make it more energy efficient, and requiring less air conditioning during SoCal’s “so cal-urosos veranos”, Spanish for…”

  “I know. Such hot summers,” replied Tony. “Cute. Check’s in the mail. So, is he a meteorologist, an activist? What is he?”

  “A PhD in atmospheric science with three post-docs, two of them in weather anomalies as predictors of overall weather patterns. I had to learn to say that without taking a breath, to explain things to other members of the congregation each time he convinces us to retrofit a building with something. He walks the walk as he talks the talk: his house is like a laboratory to test how to avoid producing greenhouse gases—if you can find it, in the midst of the rather lush forest he waters with preciously little water, somehow.

  He hasn’t been here for a few days. He said he was planning a trip to some place in Venezuela, but because the situation there is so complicated, things take much more time and effort than they used to.”

  “He wants to go to Venezuela…?”

  “Yes. Some place where there are usually lots of thunderbolts, the most in the world I think…”

  “Ah, sí! Catatumbo, en el Lago de Maracaibo! Sorry, Catatumbo is a river that provides most of the fresh water to Lake Maracaibo.”

  “Yes, that was it. I forgot who I was talking to!” chuckled Haim.

  3—David knocking at the door

  As Haim was taking long strides to the kitchen to get more coffee, he heard a familiar chime and glanced over his shoulder. The motion sensor had detected someone on his way to the front door and was issuing a stage zero warning: familiar face, alone. Indeed, David was dropping by; and, as always, he seemed rather excited about something. Maybe he had finally assembled his expedition and was ready to go to Venezuela. That could explain his glowing mood, noticeably beyond David’s unusually ebullient average.