Lepidopt had a wife and an eleven-year-old son in Tel Aviv. His son, Louis, would be envious if he knew his father was working in Hollywood. And Deborah would worry that he'd be seduced by a starlet.
All katsas, Mossad gathering officers, were married men with wives back in Israel; the theory was that married men would be immune to sex traps abroad. Broad traps a-sex, he thought. To preserve you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adventuress, as the Psalmist said.
Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get there, he thought, then shuddered.
In that war twenty years ago, Lepidopt's battalion had stormed the Lion's Gate again at 8:30 the following morning. Israeli artillery and jet fighters had pounded the Jordanian defense forces within the city, but Lepidopt and his fellow soldiers had had to fight for every narrow street, and the morning was an eternity of dust exploding from ancient walls, hot shell casings flying in brassy ribbons from the Uzi in his aching hands, blood spattering on jeep windshields and pooling between paving stones, and the shaky effort of changing magazines while crouched in one or another of the drainage ditches.
I see a headstone, a tombstone.
Lepidopt recalled noticing that the bridges propped over the narrow ditches had been Jewish gravestones, and he had learned later that they had been scavenged from the cemetery on Mount Zion; and now he wondered if, in the subsequent gathering and burial of hundreds of dead Israeli and Jordanian soldiers, anyone had thought to restore the stones to those older graves.
By midmorning the city had fallen to the Israeli forces; sniper fire still echoed among the ancient buildings, but Jordanians were lined up by the gate with their hands in the air while Israeli soldiers scrutinized their identity papers to see if any were soldiers who had changed into civilian clothing; dead bodies were already being carried out on stretchers, with handkerchiefs over the faces so that medics would not mistake them for the many wounded.
Lepidopt had fought his way through the Moghrabi Quarter, and he was one of the first to reach the Kotel ha-Ma-aravi, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.
At first he didn't realize what it was — just a very high ancient wall along the left side of an alley; clumps of weeds, far too high to be pulled out, patched its rows of weathered stones. It wasn't until he noticed other Israeli soldiers hesitantly touching the uneven old masonry that it dawned on him what it must be.
This wall was all that remained of the Second Temple, built on the site of Solomon's Temple, its construction completed by Herod at around the time of Christ and then destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. This was the place of the Shekinah, the earthly presence of God, to which Jewish pilgrims had come for nearly two thousand years until Jordan's borders had enclosed it and excluded them in 1948.
Soldiers were on their knees, weeping, oblivious to the sniper fire; and Lepidopt shuffled up to the craggy, eroded white masonry, absently unstrapping his helmet and feeling the breeze in his wet hair as he pulled it off. He wiped one shaky hand down the front of his camouflage jacket and then reached out and touched the wall.
He pulled his hand back — and powerfully in his mind had come the conviction that he would never touch the wall again.
He had stepped back in confusion at this sudden, intrusive certainty; and then, defiantly, had reached his hand out toward the wall again — and a blow that seemed to come from nowhere punched his hand away and spun him around to kneel on the street, staring at blood jetting from the ragged edge of his right hand where his little finger and knuckle had been.
Several of the other soldiers were firing short bursts at the source of the shot, and a couple more of them dragged Lepidopt away. His wound was a minor one on that day, but within an hour he had been taken to the Hadassah Hospital, and for him the Six-Day War was over.
Four days later it was over for Israel too — Israel had beaten the hostile nations to the north, east, and south, and had taken the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Sinai desert.
And eleven times — twelve times now, thank you, Bert! — in the twenty years since then, Lepidopt had again experienced that certainty about something he had just done: You will never do this again. In 1970, three years after he had touched the Western Wall for the first and last time, he had attended a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, and as the last notes of the Allegro Molto echoed away, he had suddenly been positive that he would not ever hear Scheherazade again.
Two years after that he had visited Paris for the last time; not long afterward he had discovered that he would never again swim in the ocean. After having part of his hand shot off in testing the premonition about the Western Wall, he was reluctant to test any of these subsequent ones.
Just during this last year he had, for the last time, changed a tire, eaten a tuna sandwich, petted a cat, and seen a movie in a theater — and now he knew that he would never again hear the name John Wayne spoken. How soon, he wondered bleakly, until I've started a car for the last time, closed a door, brushed my teeth, coughed?
Lepidopt had gone to the Anshe Emet Synagogue on Robertson at dawn today for recitation of the Sh'ma and the Shachrit Tefilah prayer, as usual, but clearly he was not going to be able to get there for the afternoon prayers, nor probably the evening ones either. He might as well say the afternoon Mincha prayer alone, here; he stood up to go into the other bedroom, where he kept the velvet bag that contained his tallit shawl and the little leather tefillin boxes. Every day he shaved the top of his head so that a toupee could be his head covering, and the one he wore to pray was in the bedroom too. He never kept his yarmulke-toupee in the bathroom.
Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashi had written that a man whose mind is conflicted should not pray; Lepidopt hoped God would forgive him for that too.
Three
The truck cab smelled like book paper and tobacco. "When we do go," Daphne said, cheerfully enough, "we can go to Grammar's house again too, and pull up the bricks. A-zoo-sa," she added derisively, seeing the Azusa exit through the windshield. And Clairmont and Montclair were coming up.
She used to think Azusa was an interesting name for a city, but recently she had heard that it meant "A-to-Z USA," and now she classed it with other ridiculous words, like brouhaha and patty melt.
She also disapproved of a city called Claremont being right next to one named Montclair. She thought there should be a third one, Mairn-Clot.
Traffic was heavy on the eastbound 10, and an hour after they had left Pasadena their six-year-old Ford pickup truck was still west of the 15, with San Bernardino and their house still twenty miles ahead. The afternoon sunlight glittered fiercely on the chrome all around them; brake lights glowed like coals. Daphne knew the traffic justified her father's decision not to go look at the Chinese Theater today, and she had stopped sulking about it.
"We'd have to split it with Bennett and Moira," her father said absently, his right foot gunning the accelerator while his left foot let the clutch out every few seconds in little surges. The gearshift lever was on the steering column, and it didn't seem likely that he'd be reaching up to shift out of first gear anytime soon. "If there's really gold under the bricks," he added.