Oh shit. That’s what was in the safe deposit box.
“I see where this is leading,” Uzi said. “You had the pages. That’s what the bank robbery was all about.”
“How did al Humat know?” Vail said.
“There were rumors for years they were in Brooklyn,” Yakov said. “A fragment was found in a rabbi’s wallet when he died. His daughter didn’t know what it was but when she met with a reporter she talked about seeing me bring a sheaf of pages to their home when she was a child. That innocent comment spread through the community like a contagious disease. It wasn’t a secret any longer that I had most of the missing pages.” He shrugged. “I thought it was a secret within the Aleppo community. I was wrong.
“We moved to Borough Park, away from the other Aleppo Jews. But it didn’t matter. A few weeks later I was approached by a man who said he was an Israeli antiquities dealer. Sometimes you can’t tell if they’re Jews or Arabs. If they speak Hebrew, know Israel, it’s hard to trip them up. I asked some questions, he seemed legitimate … but now thinking about it … who knows.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to buy the missing pages for $100 million. I didn’t deny having them — I told him I wasn’t in a position to sell them. And I might’ve told him they have no business being bought and sold on a black market. If they went anywhere, they’d go to the Israel Museum, where the other half is kept.”
Uzi snorted. “You basically told him you had them.”
“I suddenly had visitors from the government, scholars, the Israel Antiquities Authority, journalists from the New York Times. Even a man who was writing a book about the codex.”
“Forgive me for asking,” Vail said, “but why didn’t you turn them over to the Israeli government?”
“The pages weren’t yours,” Uzi said. “They belonged to the Jewish people. It’s one of the most important artifacts of our religion — of all religions that grew out of the Torah — what some call the Old Testament.”
Halevi sank back in his chair. He finished the Arak in his glass and stared into its empty bottom. “The Aleppo community was given the codex for safekeeping. We protected it for six hundred years. We were never supposed to let it out of our sight. And as soon as it left our hands, the most important part of it — the first two hundred pages — were stolen. We’re talking about almost the entire Torah, the foundational narrative of the Jewish people. The Five Books of Moses. Genesis all the way to Deuteronomy.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Uzi said.
Yakov looked at his son, who nodded vigorously, silently urging him to come clean. But the old man sat there a long moment, staring at the carpet.
The sounds of the children playing in the other room wormed their way into Vail’s thoughts. Cars honked outside. And in the back of her mind, an internal clock was going off like an alarm, telling her she needed to figure out how this fit with the terror attacks.
Yakov said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “I was protecting us from ourselves. What’s in those pages would make it impossible for Israel to ever have peace with the Palestinians.”
25
Uzi sat forward on the couch. “Say what? How could a tenth-century book affect a peace process in the twenty-first century?”
Yakov licked his lips, then took another glass and poured more Arak. He offered the bottle to Uzi and Vail. Both declined.
“The codex consists of beautifully handwritten, perfect Hebrew. Almost 3 million characters, all impeccably drawn on parchment that measures 10 inches by 13 ½ inches, 28 lines to a column, three columns to a page. But …” He stopped, took a drink. “There are also tiny notes in the margins. Most of them describe how the Torah should be read. Some point out when a certain word appears for the first time or when a word’s not to be spoken aloud, that sort of thing. But a few of the notes are different. They give the location of an ancient structure in Bethlehem. And that could make a peace agreement next to impossible.”
“Just a guess here,” Vail said, “But this is the part you mentioned earlier that I would not understand.”
“I’m not sure Agent Uziel fully understands it. But he has an idea, no?”
Uzi nodded. “The geopolitics of the West Bank land are complex.”
“There comes a time,” Vail said, “when you have to seek peace and accept a two-state solution, even if you have a valid claim to all of the land.”
Uzi chuckled. “And therein lies the problem. The two-state solution is a western construct, a foreign concept to Middle Eastern culture. It arose because the west wanted to do something to break the impasse, to solve the problem. The Middle East is such a screwed up region, it’s easy to point to Israel, a democratic and moral society, and think, ‘Now, there’s something we can fix. We just need to carve out two countries and make peace.’ But if you understand the mind-set of the region, you know that it’s largely a problem without a solution.”
“And what is this mind-set?” Vail asked.
Uzi held up a hand. “Let’s first approach the issue from a western point of view. Two states make sense because Arabs lived on some of that land too, at times, so that’d be a fair compromise. Except that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al Humat, al Qaeda, and ISIL are on Israel’s doorstep. To the north and east there’s ISIL in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, ISIL and an al Qaeda affiliate near the Golan Heights — and in Iraq. To the south, the Sinai’s a terrorist breeding ground. Not to mention a nuclear Iran nine hundred miles away — kind of like the distance from Manhattan to Chicago. All these things need to be dealt with in a negotiated deal.
“Question is, with Iran supplying missiles to its proxies and allies in Hamas, al Humat, and Hezbollah, is a true peace possible? Even if most Palestinians are in favor of the Israel Defense Force pulling out of the West Bank, they know the Palestinian Authority can’t control the extremists. Within a year, black-masked Hamas or ISIL fighters will overrun the West Bank, which is smack dab in the middle of Israel. You think Syria’s a mess? Just wait. Like I said, it’s complicated — but despite all the obstacles, it’s worth pursuing. If you have a valid partner to negotiate with.”
“The codex adds another complication,” Yakov said. “Those notes in the margins, they were written eleven centuries ago. Ben Asher and Ben Buya and their scholars weren’t concerned about the land claims of the present day — because the dispute didn’t exist back then. So you basically have an unadulterated truth about rights to the land. Indisputable fact.”
Halevi had gotten fidgety, shifting his weight and pulling on his black beard: visibly uncomfortable. “Father, we have been through this.”
Yakov shook his head. “And I disagree with you.”
“There is no such thing as truth,” Halevi said. “There is no such thing as fact.”
Whoa, hold on a second. Vail cocked her head. “As an officer of the law, I can tell you that there absolutely is truth. Facts are just that — truths, events that happened.”