B, A, L, H, M…” Ari breathed:
עַד־בֹּא אֲשֶׁר־לֹו הַמִּשְׁפָּט
Ad-bo asher-lo ha-mishpat
“It’s Ezekiel. It’s the same. ‘Until he comes whose right it is’,” Ari translated. “Let’s go talk to Shor’s friends.”
So they had driven an hour from Jerusalem to the hills of En Gedi.
Ari held up the photo and read off the inscription.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” Halevy said, smiling. Ari had been through this before. “It’s a passage from Tanakh, you say? Echezquel?” An odd sort of accent.
Ari decided to take a back route. “What was your relationship with Emanuel Shor?”
“Long, long relationship. Friends for years now, with Emanuel and with his brother Nathan. My wife virtually raised his niece Catriel.”
“How did you meet?”
“Common interest. We both came to the Holy Land about the same time, he from Russia, myself from France, both from Orthodox families. He escaped from the nasty Soviets, I escaped from a government high-rise outside of Paris. There was a small synagogue and a kosher food store, a little Jewish island in a sea of Muslims. I was always afraid, and so was my father. Afraid of the Muslims, the Arabs. They were moving in. So we moved out.”
“And, you were saying, a common interest?”
“Oh, yes. Well. I went to university, the Technion, you know. I studied particle physics. I became a physicist. And Emanuel Shor was there too.”
“He was biology, you were physics. The common interest?”
“No, no. Not that. The common interest was…Rachel here.”
The woman seated in the corner smirked at this. She sat upright, both hands around a sweating glass of tea, her face like a tired peasant’s. She was dressed in a light sheath that echoed the intense, athletic brown of her hands and feet. “It’s not true. He likes to say that, but Emanuel Shor was not interested in me. He teased me; we were friends. No,” she said, smiling painfully, straightening even more in her chair. “No. The common interest was the Temple.”
“The Temple. You mean, the ancient Temple.”
“Yes,” she replied in a quiet, yielding voice. “We met Emanuel at meetings of the Mishmar, our group that is devoted to rebuilding the Temple. Without the Temple, we can never truly see the face of God, as Moses did. We can never welcome his Messiah.”
“Let me explain,” Halevy interrupted, smiling humorlessly at his wife. “We believe that the Messiah will not come until the Jewish nation rebuilds the Temple. It is preordained.”
Rachel spoke again. “Every year, three times a year, we gather and march to the Temple Mount. At Passover, at Shavuot, and again during the High Holy Days. We do it to show God that we have not abandoned Him, that we remember the commandment. That there are still Jews who have not bowed to Baal. We know that it is not possible to build the Temple now with the Muslim shrines in its place. But we want to show God that we are willing, that we remember. And that is why we prepare.”
“Prepare what?”
“Let me show you,” she whispered, as if sharing a secret. The three policemen stood as Rachel went to a large covered wicker basket in the corner of the room. Jules Halevy stayed in his chair as if frozen.
She opened the basket and pulled out heavy, shapeless folds of fabric. At first Ari thought it was a set of curtains, but she held up a piece. It was a large tunic, creamy white, woven in a peculiar fishbone pattern. “Pure linen. As required by the Law.”
“What is it?” Ari felt he shouldn’t touch it.
“This is the robe of the cohen gadol—the High Priest of Israel. It is the robe he will wear when he enters the Holy of Holies on the great Day of Atonement, to cleanse all of Israel. When the Temple is rebuilt.”
“Why do you have it here?”
She smiled and laid the robe carefully over the basket. “It took us years to construct it. I am a weaver—a docent at the National Museum. I show tourists how cloth was woven anciently. But even I couldn’t reproduce this. We had to study and pray and try again and again. At last we built a loom big enough to do this work, and now…Well, we have paid the price.”
“The price?”
“All things must be in readiness for the Messiah when he comes. We must prepare carefully in order to merit the blessing. Someone must do this.” She leaned into the basket again. “See? Here? The priestly cap and the shoes,” she said, holding up three amorphous pieces of the same linen fabric.
“It should be under guard,” Toad spoke suddenly. Everyone turned in surprise to look at him, but that was all he had to say.
Rachel Halevy carefully folded the priest’s wardrobe and returned it to the basket. “I keep it here. No one will take it. No one is interested in it,” she sighed.
“I am very interested in it,” Ari offered. “Mrs. Halevy, you mentioned the cohen gadol, the high priest of Israel. Was Emanuel Shor looking for such a person?”
“Looking for him?” She seemed surprised at the question. “Of course, he was looking for him. We all are. There can be no sacrifice in the Temple until an authentic cohen, a genuine descendant of Aharon ben-Amram, the brother of Moses, comes forward to take his rightful place.”
“Did Emanuel Shor find him?”
It was Jules Halevy’s turn. “Dr. Shor had a theory that he might be able to narrow down the genome of the original Aharonic family. Enough to isolate a pure haplotype. Then it would be a matter of locating an individual who fits. But I don’t see what any of this has to do with his murder.”
“It may have nothing to do with his murder, Dr. Halevy, but we have evidence that the Cohanim project might have a bearing.”
“The Cohanim project?” Halevy blustered. “I thought Shor was killed over the lattice.”
“The lattice?” Ari looked at his friends, who shrugged almost imperceptibly.
Halevy nearly choked. “You mean, you don’t know…” He rolled his eyes and collapsed back into his chair.
“The thing that was stolen from Levinsky’s lab, right?”
Halevy had no more to say on that subject. He simply stared at them. Ari turned again to his wife.
“Did Emanuel Shor find the cohen gadol?”
“I don’t know.” She pressed her lips together and looked away. “Candidly, I don’t. In all honesty, I never understood him very well. He seemed to want everything we wanted, but then…”
Ari was silent, waiting for her to continue. Suddenly she cried out, as much to her husband as to him. “Emanuel Shor was a peaceful man! Peace was all
