Water To Burn Part 11

"No, probably because they left early on, before Fearless Leader's great disappearance. Do you know about that?"

"Zeke's month in the country?" I said.

He laughed. "Yeah, just that. When Ari's mother left, it hit everyone hard. She was one of the inner circle, after all, privy to the old boy's secrets and all that."

Ari looked up from his blackened catfish. "She was?"

"You didn't know?" I said.

"She never talks about those years, not to me anyway." Ari paused for a swallow of water. "Except she did apologize to me once, for staying so long and subjecting me to the place. I told her she needn't apologize. I understood how much it meant to her. She couldn't have foreseen how it would all turn out."

Ari's mother began to sound like someone I should know.

"Makes sense," Itzak said. "My folks call their stint on the kibbutz their romance with Israel, the whole idea of Israel." He looked my way. "A lot of American Jews go through that."

"I take it you don't share the feeling," I said.

"No." Itzak considered for a moment. "I'm a typical Re-form guy, go to temple on the big holidays and when I feel I need to remember what I am."

"I have Catholic relatives who do the same with church," I said.

He grinned at me. "Yeah, I bet."

"You belong to a congregation?" Ari said to him. "I'm surprised. I can't stand the thought of going to temple after all of Reb Ezekiel's claptrap."

"It was claptrap, yeah. Not Judaism, Ari, but bulls.h.i.t. That's why I can't reject the ceremonies and the observances wholesale. He was a raving lunatic, and what he taught us had nothing to do with the Torah."

"Well, there you have a point. Maybe two."

"What I'm wondering," I said, "is why you both hate Reb Zeke so much. Still, I mean, after all these years. Did he beat you or something?"

"No way!" Itzak said. "Our mothers would never have put up with that."

"I don't know if I'd say I hate him," Ari said. "But he disrupted my parents' lives and mine." He nodded at Itzak. "It was even worse for you."

"'Fraid so," Itzak said. "I was just old enough to be aware we were moving when my folks sold up everything and moved to Israel. When we came back, they were broke and depressed. It took them a couple of years to get back on their feet. That's probably what I can't forgive the rebbe for-the disruption, like Ari called it."

I nodded. I could understand that.

"It wasn't so bad, really, when we were all believers," Itzak continued. "I liked learning to shoot, and Ari here was incredible at it. A natural sure shot, I think the term is."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I've seen him in action."

I felt cold, remembering. Ari raised an eyebrow in my direction. I managed to smile, but I laid down my fork.

"Too spicy for you?" Itzak said with a nod at my plate.

"Oh, no," I said. "I'm just not very hungry. But go on, this is fascinating, hearing about your lives."

"The work wasn't bad, either, for the children," Ari said. "Tzaki and I took care of the goats."

"Let me guess," I said. "Tzaki's the nickname for Itzak."

"Right," Ari said. "I'm regressing, I suppose. But they're surprisingly intelligent, goats. I got to be rather fond of them."

"So I've heard," I said. "It's funny, but I've never thought of you as a farm boy before."

"Only for those first few years." Ari suddenly smiled. "Tzaki, do you know what I remember as the best part of the day?"

"Let me guess," Itzak said. "Blowing away targets with six different kinds of rifle?"

"No, not that! The showers at the end of the day." Ari turned to me. "After school, you'd do your ch.o.r.es and have your weapons practice and all that, and it was hot. It was a good kind of heat, Nola, a dry heat, but still, you'd be sweaty and covered with dust, a layer of mud, really."

"Right!" Itzak broke in. "And then you had a shower, cool water just pouring down."

For a few minutes they ate in silence, as if in tribute to the glory of being clean at the end of a hard day. I found myself remembering how Kathleen and I used to whine about having to clear the table and load the dishwasher after my mother and Maureen had cooked the dinner. Little did we know how good we had it!

"But anyway," I said, "something must have left scars."

"It was what happened after," Itzak said, "once we returned to normal life, or that's how I think of it, anyway, normal American life in my case, normal Israeli life in Ari's. The other kids thought we were weird, and you know how kids treat someone they think is weird. We learned real fast to keep our mouths shut about where we'd been."

"Not fast enough in my case," Ari said. "I ended up expelled from the first school my father put me in."

"For what?" I said.

"Fighting."

"So, what else would it be for Ari?" Itzak said. "I was too much of a coward to hit first. I only hit in self-defense, and so the teachers cut me some slack."

The waiters returned and began to clear. Itzak ordered dessert for all of us, including a bourbon-laced pudding that looked as if it contained two days' worth of calories. The men dug in. I had a bite of each kind and left the rest to them.

"So, anyway," Itzak said after some minutes. "It took me a long time to come to terms with my charming childhood years."

"I can see why," I said.

"And coming to terms with the formalities of Judaism was part of that." Itzak glanced at Ari. "I take it you never have."

Ari shrugged and looked sour.

"But, you see," Itzak waved a fork at him, "you don't have my problem, because you're Israeli. You can be as secular as all h.e.l.l, and it doesn't matter. I'm an American first and a Jew second, and sometimes the Jewish part threatens to fade away. Temple's important to me."

Ari said nothing, but he nodded, thinking it over.

"You're a hard-core sabra," Itzak went on. "Or more than that, even. You were raised to die for Israel."

"True," Ari said. "And someday I will, I suppose."

The blood in my body threatened to freeze. No, I wanted to scream. No way, not if I can help it, no, no, and no. My reaction shocked me so badly that I tried to keep it to myself, but since Itzak looked stricken, he must have noticed. He fumbled around and made a weak joke, while Ari calmly went on eating pecan pie. Itzak came up with a better joke, and I managed to laugh, which changed the mood back to pleasant for the remainder of the meal.

We drove back home through traffic spa.r.s.e enough to let me mull over the things Stein had told us. That Reb Zeke had kept an inner circle intrigued me. This talk of secret knowledge opened a line of investigation that I wanted to pursue. When we stopped for a red light, I glanced Ari's way.

"One thing that really interested me," I said, "is the news that your mother ranked high in the organization. I'd love to find out if she knew things Reb Zeke kept from the others. Your agency's report mentioned that she lives in London. Do you think I could videoconference with her?"

Ari couldn't have looked more horrified if he'd found Cthulhu floating in our bathtub.

"You don't want me to talk with your mother," I said.

"Nothing of the sort." He paused to compose himself. "But she's already been interviewed, several times, in fact, for the report you have."

The light changed, and I let the matter drop. The Agency had other operatives in London. They could get the information I wanted more easily than I could pry it out of Ari.

When we went to bed, Ari fell asleep right away, but I lay awake for a long time, listening to the voices of the night. They only come to me sometimes, these voices, the m.u.f.fled sounds of people talking in a distant room. I've heard them ever since I was a teenager, though at first I thought they meant that I was crazy or going that way. Eventually, I learned to stop worrying and start listening. Sometimes I hear music, too, but not like those songs that play inside your head, earworms some people call them. No, this music I hear outside my head, as it were, though it plays softly, and the songs have muddled words.

Once I realized what being an O'Grady means, I saw that the voices and the music were usually instances of the IOI procedure, images that objectify the odd bits of insight and intuitions that every person collects throughout a day, though few know they're doing it. Every now and then, though, the voices replay memories. A couple of times, I've heard my parents fighting in that mysterious other room. Despite what my mother wanted everyone to believe, their marriage was no paradise.

That night, something different came along. The voices spoke to me about buried treasure, Spanish gold and Inca silver, and emeralds the size of robins' eggs, torn out of the earth but buried there again, somewhere close, somewhere just out of human reach. I heard waves washing up on sandy beaches or muttering on graveled ones. The waves were searching for treasure, too, but not eagerly, unlike all the human beings who'd dreamed of treasure for centuries. Uncover it and be rid of it, they seemed to say.

The voices formed into a single voice. I began to hear a man speaking. Another psychic, I realized suddenly, was thinking about treasure, obsessing about that Spanish gold, the emeralds as green as the depths of the sea. Caleb? The name formed in my mind before I could block my thought. The voice abruptly stopped. I picked up a trace of fear, then nothing from that source.

I got out of bed without waking Ari and padded naked and barefoot into the living room. The curtains over the bay window turned a faint lavender, then dark again, then lavender, as the sign from the Persian restaurant across the street blinked on and off. I switched on the desk lamp by my computer, found a pad of sticky notes, and scribbled a few words about Caleb. I had no worries about forgetting what I'd just experienced; I merely wanted to ground it so I could go to sleep.

When I turned off the light, I stood by the desk for a moment to listen to the inner world. The treasure hunter had definitely signed off, but someone else, or some thing-I felt a distant mind, but not a human mind, unless it was a human mind so twisted that it no longer felt human. At first I turned cold, thinking it was hunting for me. Yet as I listened, Caleb-or whoever the treasure hunter was-returned. I could hear nothing as concrete as a voice or even a m.u.f.fled sound of voices, but I could feel the Other Thing's satisfaction. A curtain of silence fell and covered both of them. I'll admit it, I was glad.

I heard Ari get up and go into the bathroom. I scurried back to bed and slid under the warm covers. When he came back, I turned into his arms and stayed there for the rest of the night.

In the morning, though, he got up before I did. I was dimly aware of his leaving the bedroom before I fell back asleep. The smell of coffee brewing finally jerked me awake enough to take a shower. I put on a pair of jeans and a white Giants T-shirt, then followed the scent of coffee into the kitchen.

Ari was sitting at the table reading a fat book. When he saw me, he smiled and shut it with a paper napkin for a bookmark. I recognized the cover-a "learn Latin" text for adults.

"You want to crack the family code, huh?" I said.

"Yes. Do you mind?"

I hesitated. In a way I did mind, but only because it was another symptom of how serious he was about our relationship. I remembered how cold I'd been over the gold pin he'd given me, and how my behavior had hurt him. I never wanted to do that again.

"No, of course I don't," I said. "If you need help-"

"So far it all seems perfectly clear, especially compared to English."

"Just about any language is clear compared to English."

He smiled at that. I got myself a mug of coffee and sat down at the table. He continued reading for a few minutes with a self-absorbed seriousness that surprised me. Twice, he flipped a couple of pages back to check some point, then returned to his original place in the text with a little nod. At what looked like the end of a chapter, he shut the book again.

"It's about as complicated as the Hebrew of the oldest parts of the Tanakh," Ari said. "I'm not surprised. So many ancient languages are."

"I take it that modern Hebrew's a lot simpler."

"Oh, yes. We couldn't run a modern society otherwise."

The "we" came so easily that it reminded me of a truth I tended to forget. He wasn't British; he wasn't even European, much less American, despite his perfect accent and his jeans and leather jacket. He came from a country so different that I had trouble conceptualizing what it would be like, to live under siege in a place that ancient Romans had once claimed to own, even though it had a history old before the Romans ever got there.

And I found myself wondering if it was really Ari I wanted to keep at a distance, or Israel.

CHAPTER 6.

WHEN IT WAS TIME TO LEAVE FOR KATHLEEN'S PARTY, I changed into a flowered skirt in blues and rusts and a teal silk top with a draped neckline. I put my ID and a lipstick into a small beaded bag with a strap long enough to sling across my body bandolier style. I considered taking a swimsuit, but even though the pool would be heated, the weather outside looked so gray and grim that I decided to skip the water. Ari, it turned out, could swim but had absolutely no interest in doing so. He wore jeans and a blue shirt and carried his gray pullover sweater over his shoulders.

"Once we've moved, though," he said, "I do need to find a gym to join. Something near the new flats, a.s.suming we get them, of course."

Even on Sundays, which lacked an official rush hour, traffic swarmed on the Golden Gate Bridge. Marin folks drove in to sample the delights of the city, while city folks drove out to the country and suburbs to get away from the same. We had some slow going through the rainbow tunnel. Still, we reached Kathleen and Jack's around four o'clock.

The Donovans' house had originally been a Victorian farmhouse. Although the farm was long gone, it sat on four acres of prime San Anselmo land a couple of miles beyond and behind Red Hill. Thanks to Kathleen's menagerie, Jack had surrounded the entire plot with an eighteen-foot-high chain-link fence, which he kept securely locked. We parked on the graveled strip out in front, then rang the electronic buzzer on the gate.

Jack trotted down the flagstone walk through rhododendron bushes to let us in and to meet Ari. He was a tall man, Jack, with a shock of wavy dark hair and pale blue eyes. In his early thirties, he was still handsome, but he had the fleshy neck and stippling of broken capillaries across his cheeks that announced a very Irish drinking habit. Eventually, I supposed, he'd look like Uncle Jim. That night, he was wearing his usual jeans and a heavy red cotton canvas shirt.

"It's going to be chilly later," he remarked. "I'll get the heaters going out back near the pool."

I introduced him to Ari, and Ari to him, and they shook hands companionably. Still, I noticed how the two men sized each other up. Jack had good reason to be suspicious of my new partner's job with Interpol. The British accent wouldn't sweeten Jack's mood, either. Ari smiled so pleasantly that I was sure he was up to something.

"So," Jack said to Ari. "You're another guy who's gotten involved with an O'Grady girl. I don't know if we're brave or stupid."

"Probably both," Ari said. "But she has her compensations."

Jack laughed, Ari smiled, and I considered mayhem.

"Ah, come on, Nola," Jack said. "We only tease you because you're usually right." He glanced Ari's way. "She saved my dad's life a while ago. She insisted he needed to see a doctor, and d.a.m.n, she was right about that! A couple more weeks, the doc said, and the cancer would have spread. Lights out."

Ari winced. Both men turned solemn.

"How's he doing these days?" I said.

"Pretty good!" Jack brightened again. "The doc says he's in remission, all right. It's been a year now since he finished the chemo. We're going up to the vineyard next week to celebrate with him. The real problem is getting him to rest enough. You know what he's like."

"I sure do. He's too used to storming around in charge of everything, flinging orders right and left."

Jack laughed again. "That's it, yeah. Well, come on in. Everyone's out back."

The house metaphorically smelled of money, with its hardwood floors, Persian rugs, wood paneling, antique furniture, and original paintings by American Impressionists. It also literally smelled like cat boxes, no matter how often Kathleen and her housekeeper changed them. Kathleen had acquired two more strays, bringing her cat collection up to twenty. We tromped down the long hallway in a cloud of scattering felines, some diving into side rooms, others darting up the long staircase to the second floor. While they could go outside at will, in chilly weather they stuck to the central heating.

"Out back" at the Donovan house was not your usual backyard. Kathleen loved to swim, she loved to cook, and she loved to be outside. Jack had accommodated these three loves with a fifty-foot-long swimming pool and its surroundings. Off to the left side stood the cabana, as they called it, which was actually a small cottage with a bathroom and all the necessaries. To the right stood what amounted to an outdoor kitchen, with a gas-powered grill and a portable bar and refrigerator unit powered by electricity from underground cables. Fruit trees, shrubs, and flowers grew thick and lush all around.