to find out what might be locked in the human codes that controlled the temperature of the heart—from cold looks to flaming fanaticism.
But Manny had shown little interest in the monoamine project that now funded most of the laboratory’s work. The Cohanim thing brought in a big donation now and then from an American Jew who wanted to know if his ancestors were priests. Rappaport wondered why Americans, so proud of their independence and individualism, still needed to make these links. Leaving America for Israel had caused him no concern at all—it didn’t matter to him where he lived, so long as the project he worked on was interesting. He felt no more connected to Haifa, Israel, than he did to his old neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This linkage others felt to a land or to a people or to a story—or to a God—was a mystery to him. He looked around his desk at the photos of Ernst Schrödinger, of Watson and Crick, of Stanley Cohen—these were his heroes, the people who explained life instead of romanticizing it. As a boy, he had read Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? and knew that he would spend his life answering that question.
He had once asked Manny how he envisioned the world to come, and Manny had told him that, for a Jew, Heaven would be to sit peacefully in a garden with a minyan of brothers who love one another, learning and discussing Torah for eternity. Although the agnostic Rappaport had smiled at this, the vision suggested something to him. He would not admit it to anyone, but it moved him in the same way as the still meadows and waters of the Twenty-Third Psalm, which was the only part of the Bible he remembered.
Although Rappaport did not believe in the world to come, he began to envision a world here and now where people would no long fear each other, but would sit down in peace and put their minds to work instead of their hatreds. To gain dominion over those old foes—prejudice and violence—surely that was worth his life’s work. Rappaport was not one of those geneticists who looked for more and more specialized diseases to conquer; he was interested in the universal disease of hate.
Thus, the monoamine project. As a young scientist, he had read about a dozen men from the same Dutch family sent to prison because they were uncontrollably violent. One was a notorious street bully, and another had raped and knifed his own sister. All the men had a mutation on MAO-A1, a monoamine oxidase gene. He began to wonder: could violence and hate be genetically conditioned? Could a few manipulations of the human genome put an end to prejudice, terror, crime—perhaps even war? Could the very nature of humanity be changed?
His goal was never articulated that way, but Rappaport spent the next twenty years working on it. The best work was being done at Technion; thus, he had come to Technion. He had reduced herds of animals to docility, tracked and manipulated the DNA of hundreds of criminals, and was reasonably sure that he knew how to proceed. As usual, however, the ethicists got in the way of the kind of experiments he wanted to do. He was more bemused than disappointed; after all, even the great James Watson had at one time called for a moratorium on DNA research out of fear that plagues might be accidentally unleashed. Still, he found it ironic that the Ethics Committee should stand in the way of making people more peaceful.
Manny had laughed at his ideas. “Peace is not just the lack of violence,” he had said. Rappaport had not known how to respond to this; to him, the elimination of violence seemed contribution enough. The director’s lack of interest in the monoamine project had hampered progress, but now Rappaport saw his way clear. A tragic death—in Rappaport’s world, Manny would not have died this way—but the past was Manny’s business, the future Rappaport’s.
There would be no more excursions to Jerusalem to wait alongside Manny Shor while he stared at King David’s Tomb. Many times the old man had coaxed him into coming up to the city with him, primarily because Manny was not a confident driver. He would chatter about Moshiach ben David and the world to come, about the royal priesthood and lineage, about the ludicrous prospect of digging for King David’s DNA. Long meetings with puzzled officials always ended with a pilgrimage to the Tomb, a marble monolith jammed into a little building on the south end of the city. It did no good to tell him again that it was not the Tomb of King David, that it was a Christian monument dating to the Crusades. He knew that as well as anyone; he went over and over the dilettantish archeological diagrams that pretended to show the location of the real tomb, needling the historic-preservation people about this or that possibility, checking to see who was digging where.
Rappaport always held back at these meetings, pretending as hard as he could to be the chauffeur, staring deliberately at his fingers. The officials he met, wary but respectful of Manny’s reputation, bit their lips and tried to listen. “The Messiah of David will carry the DNA of David,” Manny would explain. “We need those bones. Nothing is more important than isolating this strain. If the genome were available, the Messiah’s lineage would be immediately recognizable. Don’t you understand the urgency…the importance…?” And then he would trail off in realization that the officials he spoke to wanted nothing more than to see the back of him. His campaign to get the Israeli government to crack open the marble sarcophagus in the Crusader church—in the desperate hope that everyone might be wrong—went nowhere. Still, he would beg Rappaport to take him there.
The old man always stood covered before the Tomb and always prayed the same prayer, over and over—“May he come into his kingship in my lifetime and in my days and in the lifetime of the whole family of Israel swiftly and soon.”
The drives back to Haifa were long and dispiriting. Uncharacteristically quiet, Manny would sit behind him poring over worn-out maps of Mount Zion or reading some new article that promised a breakthrough. But the remains of King David remained undisturbed—wherever they were.
In the final few months, Rappaport had noticed a new energy in his colleague. Even though he rarely came to the lab, Manny was excited about the prospect of triangulating on the Aharonic genome—the genetic profile of the first great high priest of Israel, Aaron, brother of Moses. Of course, without a bone or two, there could never be certainty. But mathematical possibilities became probabilities as Manny studied and compared the profiles of thousands of Cohanic descendants. Rappaport cooperated politely, waiting for the opportunity that would inevitably come.
And now the old fool was gone and he was at last Director of the Centre—even if temporarily. It would soon be permanent, he was sure. He stood up and looked around at the lab through his glass office walls; with the past taken care of, he would spend the afternoon planning the future. He hoped that, if Heaven existed, Manny had found his discussion group.
A lanky young woman, one of the lab technicians, was crossing toward his office with an electronic notepad in hand. She was an intriguing case—a carrier of Tay-Sachs, she had joined the lab hoping to work on a therapy for it and turned out to be quite competent. He had come to rely on her, and in fact had just given her a highly confidential assignment.
“What do you have for me, Sarah?”
“We finished running the profiles the police wanted. Here are the results.”
Rappaport glanced at the data. “What’s the story?”
“We compared the sample we got from Rome with the Cohanic profile. It’s a very pure strain—95 percent match.”
“Hm. But nothing on sample 3111.”
“Sorry. As you know, we don’t keep printouts of the Cohanics—that one’s gone. Unless it’s in one of the old control studies. Still, there’s something else I thought you’d find interesting.” She scrolled quickly to a stop on the luminous blue screen of her handheld. “Here,” she pointed. “And here. Mutation at this point…this point…”
“MAO-A1 defect—severe, too. Whoever our Roman is, you wouldn’t want to get on his wrong side. Thanks, Sarah.”
She turned to leave.
