Gospel, page 87
(Lucy.)
Just kidding. But I am going to tell him. He’s good and level-headed. I can’t tell Dr. O’Hanrahan—the shame, the ridicule! No, really, even he would be good about it. He would, after the fireworks, be fatherly, authoritative. And I bet he’d cover for me, let me spend the last months hiding out with him or something, help me lie to my folks … but offsetting this avuncular fantasy, I would never in his eyes be the young bright scholar again, the girl who read Lampridius. I would be the craven little repressed Catholic girl, slattern at the first opportunity—
“Lucy Dantan?”
At the tent flap there was a mechanic she’d seen around the camp.
“There are some doctors here to see you.”
Lucy stood, surprised that David and his friends had made it so soon. She panicked! She scurried toward the coffee pot, which gave her a dim fun house–mirror reflection, and pathetically she attempted to arrange her hair and prettify herself … Hopeless! She then went to the tent flap and peeked out.
There he was.
David McCall in a pith helmet, accompanied by a long-haired youngish man in medical sweats, and a sunburned, officious-looking woman in a long white skirt like a 1920s tennis player. David was telling a story and had them both laughing. Lucy committed herself and walked to meet them, waiting for him to turn around, recognize her, and—what? Sweep her up in his arms, whirl her around?
“Lucy!” David shook his head in disbelief, not quite over the novelty of seeing her in Ethiopia. He did run to greet her. He did hug her and give her a slight lift off the ground. “Where’s Patrick?”
“Somewhere nearby, chasing a bottle of Ethiopian moonshine,” she laughed, happier than she thought she’d be to see him. He was everything! A familiar face, a calming voice, now leaner and burnished by the sun.
“Aw damn, I wanted to lay me eyes on the man!”
“David, I’m so glad to see you. I have something to talk over with you…”
All smiles, he snatched the pith helmet from his head and temporarily put it on Lucy’s. “Gotta getcha one of these, Lucy. It’ll fry your brains out here, the sun will.”
“I hope I’m not staying long enough. You know—”
David interrupted her so as not to be rude to his traveling companions: “Ah, you must first meet me mates.”
Lucy was led by his strong hand to stand before the somewhat hippie-ish young man in an aquamarine orderly’s shirt. David introduced him as, “This is Bobby O’Connell from Cork—a fact that we overlook.”
Bobby took a tube of stacked plastic cups in a plastic bag and bopped David on the head for revenge. “Lucy, pleased to meetcha,” he said. “Look, I’ll catch you later, Davey. I’ve got to set out for Addis Zemen and fetch the supplies. Don’t anyone go away now, ‘cause I wish to be around when you open the you-know-what.”
David explained he had an unopened bottle of Bushmills, previously saved for the farewell week, but this was special!
“He’s told me lots about you,” said Bobby, pointing a finger at Lucy.
“I’m goin’ to move in, back in Connecticut on her sofa,” said David.
“Chicago,” reminded Lucy. She noticed Bobby had a camera round his neck. “Going to see the castles in Gonder?” she asked.
“Ah yes, play tourist a wee bit,” he said, putting himself in the driver’s seat of the Jeep. “Nothin’ back in the camp fit to take a picture of, all the poor little buggers…” He didn’t have to elaborate.
“I’m Georgie Shelton,” said the woman, putting out her hand, “since Davey can’t bring hisself to own up to me.”
Lucy tried to place her accent. “English or…”
“Australian,” she supplied. “From Perth.”
David: “Oh, say g’day for Lucy, Georgie! Don’t deny the lass.”
Relenting, she said an archetypical Aussie g’day.
While Lucy laughed, David sidled up to Georgie and gave her a squeeze. “I guess Lucy here’ll be the first in the outside world to know. Georgie and I are engaged!”
* * *
The driver of the 1988 Ford Tempo stopped for a shepherd and his flock of sheep spread across the dirt road to Addis Ababa.
“I promise,” said Mr. Conrad Thorn of the U.S. State Department and diplomatic mission to Ethiopia, a forty-year-old man, sandy hair, a cross lapel pin. “Promise, that once we get to Debra Markos the road gets better. Paved all the way to the capital.”
O’Hanrahan, in the backseat with Lucy, was content. “I’m just happy to be in one piece after the plane went down.”
“That happens all the time,” said Thorn, beeping the horn lightly to scatter the sheep, inching the car forward. “Local planes land in Lake Tana, on the highways—seems everywhere but at the airports. By the grace of God, I think, these planes stay in one piece.”
O’Hanrahan laughed politely. He glanced at Lucy, who looked ill. “You all right?” he asked quietly.
“Something I ate,” she said huskily.
“I guess David can eat what the locals eat by this time, after five weeks, huh?”
“I guess.”
“Didn’t he look good?”
Yep, thought Lucy.
Their State Department friend spoke again. “You two have a file on you this thick.”
This kind of thing fed O’Hanrahan’s ego. “Really?”
“There’s a special directive issued by a Colonel Westin—”
“Ah, good old Colonel Westin,” said O’Hanrahan, leaning forward. “He’s not too happy with me, I’m sure.” Go on, O’Hanrahan seemed to be saying, tell me more of my own legend!
“It’s my job … uh, this is awkward, I guess I better just come out and say it…”
“Please.”
“To obligate Miss Dantan to return at once to the United States and out of danger. And you, sir, to a predetermined location…”
“That’s right. Go and set up a shop for you boys in Teheran.”
Mr. Thorn shook his head. “That’s extraordinary, sir.”
It was really extraordinary when said out loud so simply. O’Hanrahan couldn’t leave it alone! “I suspect I’m the first Westerner to be offered a post. Perhaps, in my way, I could help restore our diplomatic ties with our long-lost Persian friends.”
Lucy sneered to herself: what’s this about a post in Teheran?
“You know I envy you, sir,” said Thorn, now back to full speed after the obstacle of the sheep. “We poor civil servants spend a lifetime in these places and never get an opportunity to really further our country’s cause.”
O’Hanrahan was suffused with self-congratulation.
“What’s this about Teheran, Dr. O’Hanrahan?”
He looked to the floor, managing a weak air of pleasantry. “Well. I’ve been recruited to go to Iran, it seems.”
Lucy turned away to the window. “And I’m to go home, huh?”
“Oh, I’m gonna join you right away, after I check out Teheran, you see. We’ll get right back to the Gospel of Matthias like we’d planned. But they’ve got ‘Q,’ Luce! I have to go check it out!”
She felt tears in her eyes. Of course, this was the ending. Anyone could have seen it coming, really. He’s tired of this little dalliance with the scroll, and is moving on to some other adventure, and you, Lucy Dantan, have exhausted your usefulness. You were just someone to talk to, keep him from getting bored. But now it’s time to shuffle on along, dump the dead weight.
“It’ll just be a month or so,” he said, laughing insincerely the next minute, passing it off as nothing.
Lucy stared out her window feeling betrayed in every sense, no less by her talent for believing what she wanted to believe, about Stavros, about David, about Dr. O’Hanrahan, about her own life and future. She was not fit for this world where people lied and fooled you. Yes, others got the hang of living, but not her. She should never have left Kimbark Street, never have put before herself any more complex issue than what flavor yogurt Judy and she should have for dinner before they put on the aerobics video, fed the cats …
Soon the outskirts of Addis lay outside Lucy’s window.
Shacks and fires and slums gave way to boarded-up shops, crumbling tenements, a city rotting from the top down. Troops were everywhere, 20,000 Cubans, according to Mr. Thorn. Most of the downtown was spread out illogically over a number of hills in no grid pattern, sort of an African Washington, D.C., with circles and monuments now torn down or defaced. There was a glimpse of the ravaged Presidential Palace, Haile Selassie’s looted pleasure dome, and throughout, as in Eastern Europe or Maoist China or Iraq, the large five-story mural of People’s Art: a smiling Mengistu beside a smiling Gorbachev beside a fierce, saintly Lenin happily waving to the adoring Africans over a tableau of tanks parading through the streets. Famine, natural disasters, endless civil wars, a ruined economy, over a quarter of a million killed by this regime, but never fear, Marxists of Ethiopia, your future has been assured: $12 billion in Cuban and Russian arms!
O’Hanrahan and Lucy were taken to the Hilton Hotel, where the State Department strongly insisted they remain, since the capital was in a bout of improvised curfew and the population of drunken soldiers out after dark was not to be underestimated. The Cubans, said Mr. Thorn, of whom a fresh shipment had just come in from Angola, were drug addicts and drunkards—not to be wondered at since they were losing this civil war and utter annihilation awaited them. If Americans and their diplomats had any ease of mobility at all, it was because the government realized that Americans, not their Soviet patrons, were instrumental in famine relief and as long as there were Americans around, the government wouldn’t have to lift a finger to help its own people.
The Hilton had seen its best days, as had Addis Ababa, in the 1960s.
O’Hanrahan exchanged his 400 Sudanese pounds for Ethiopian birrs, paid for the two rooms, and made empty conversation with the receptionist, fearing that moment that he and Lucy would be alone. Mr. Thorn, scurrying back to the safety of the embassy before dark, wished them Christ’s blessings—it paid to advertise his Christianity down here, Lucy figured, given the Muslim insurgencies—and hoped to see them tomorrow.
Lucy was silent in the elevator.
“What are you thinking?” the professor risked.
“How you’ve been lying to me.”
“Now, Luce, I am just as excited as ever about finishing the Gospel of Matthias, but Teheran is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was offered a position back when we were in Jerusalem—”
Lucy was bitter as she left the elevator. “Thanks for telling me! So what was Khartoum and Degoma? Just a little vacation before you dropped all this, dumped me on a plane with Colonel Westin and headed off for Teheran on another adventure?” She slammed her key in the lock. “That’s great for you, isn’t it? You don’t even intend to finish the Gospel of Matthias project, do you?”
“Of course I do—”
“No you don’t. You’re not a finisher of things, I see that now.” She spun around to accuse him to his face: “You dabble. You stand beside the people who do things and get your picture taken with them, but you don’t…”
O’Hanrahan shamefacedly put a hand consolingly on her arm—
“Let go of me,” she pulled back.
“I just want you to hear me out—”
She rushed into her room and slammed the door in his face.
Lucy, near tears, paced before the mirror, checking her flustered appearance, which seemed to increase her anger. She went back to the door, hearing that O’Hanrahan was right outside. She turned the lock. She had been ready to endanger herself for this man who would lie to her, steal from her, use her however he would just to distract himself from his … his own mortality. She leaned against her door and heard the professor go to his room, unlock his door, and gently retire within. I hope he’s disappointed in himself, she thought. I don’t care if I’ve hurt him.
Lucy flopped down on the bed.
She was, as she had always been, alone. Patrick O’Hanrahan had never really been an ally. She was part of his life’s dream, she hitched a ride for a while. For a time it seemed it was hers too but no more. And David McCall. How so much hope was wagered—what an edifice, what a St. Peter’s and the Pyramids and Holy Sepulcher was built upon so little information! As in most of my life, I saw what I wanted to see, heard what I wanted to hear. What a fool, what a colossal embarrassment I am to myself.
All the more reason it should be me in those refugee camps near Gonder dishing out food, doing what I can for those people whose needs are so obvious, so painful—me, the woman whose life doesn’t count with anybody else.
Outside in the streets, ten stories below, she heard gunfire.
Curious, she went to the window. Few streetlights worked anymore; she could only make out some scattered people below, ragged, running in packs. There was a truck filled with fruit, followed by another with more people in the back than she had thought possible, countless skinny arms and legs wrangling and bouncing over the broken asphalt of once-fine Addis Ababa, the 1960s showplace of the New Africa, birthplace of the OAS, jewel in the crown of black nationalism and African independence, now a Soviet client state overrun with terror and evil and Cuban drunks shooting out windows for fun at eight P.M., longing for Havana.
She lay back on her bed: much of this world is a terrible place.
AUGUST 26TH
Lucy awoke and gave thanks briefly for this modern, luxurious, clean bed at the Hilton, her island of the Western World. Slowly her old life crept up on her. Deserted by O’Hanrahan. Pregnant. Thesis due. Parents ready to kill me for having a life. I need an ally, she figured coolly. I’ll call Rabbi Hersch at his home and see if he can advise me—I’ll tell him everything. Maybe there’s still a chance I can have this kid in Jerusalem out of public view.
“Can I make an international call?” she asked the woman who picked up the phone at the reception desk. “It’s to Israel, but I don’t know the home number of the person I’m calling.”
The woman informed her she would have to come downstairs to their bank of phone booths and meters.
Lucy picked up her key from the bedside table. Quietly she turned the doorknob and peered into the hall. Stealthily, she closed and locked her door, barely breathing lest O’Hanrahan discover her, and she skipped quickly to the elevator bank.
The lady at reception greeted her with a smile. It was 10:30 A.M. and the few guests were in a spare breakfast room off the lobby, drinking coffee and choosing with tongs from a mountain of croissants.
“We spoke about an international phone call,” Lucy announced.
The receptionist, the woman who’d registered O’Hanrahan and Lucy last night, was a tall woman of Somalian features, with a perfectly oval head with large circular eyes. She knelt beside a stubborn drawer that opened with difficulty. Inside were numerous phone books from various African capitals, a few European cities, New York, Los Angeles …
Lucy: “Do you have Jerusalem?”
“Oh yes,” she said, rummaging.
“Your English is very good,” said Lucy, feeling the urge to make friends with this woman of such striking beauty.
“I studied in America, Michigan State University.”
“East Lansing, sure,” Lucy said, having never been there.
“Last night was a night of Americans at the hotel.”
Lucy glanced up at the hundreds of keys dangling at the boxes, few venturing to travel to Ethiopia amid the war. Or perhaps, those who did come to Ethiopia—aid-workers and volunteers and returning expatriates—would not stay at such an expensive place. “No businessmen stay here?” asked Lucy.
“No one comes anymore,” she said, setting aside Athens and Paris. “That is why it is odd, three Americans last night. We do not get many Americans these days. You, the doctor…” She meant O’Hanrahan, who had registered himself as Dr. O’Hanrahan. “… and the monk.”
“The monk.”
“An American monk…” The woman unearthed the Jerusalem phone book, tattered and coverless. “It had no front, see? Impossible to find,” she laughed.
“A monk, you say.”
“Yes, he checked to see if your friend…” Her eyes glanced down to the guest register for the name she wanted, “… to see if Dr. O’Hanrahan was staying at this hotel but when he asked you had not arrived. The monk is with your party, yes?”
Lucy’s heart beat faster. “Yes.”
“Axum is closed to tourists because of the war. But Lalibela sometimes, sometimes is open.” She plopped the book on the counter and kicked the bottom drawer closed. “Many Christians used to travel to Ethiopia—it is sad.”
“The monk is my uncle,” invented Lucy. “What room did you put him in, again? I’ll go call on him for breakfast.”
The woman’s lovely face looked to her register with heavy lids, perfect arcs. “Oh yes, 416.”
Lucy opened the Jerusalem phone directory and looked up Mordechai Hersch’s home number, then copied it down. Then she excused herself, promising to be right back to make her phone call. The woman said Lucy would have to deal with Rashawn, who was coming on duty in five minutes.
In the elevator Lucy pushed “4.”
When it opened on the fourth floor, Lucy stepped out into the empty corridor. What did she have in mind to say? Was this man their Mad Monk who had been following them? She would pretend she had the wrong room, but she’d get a good look. She went a few doors in the wrong direction, then backtracked counting down the rooms, 420, 419, 418, 417 …
She stood before the door.
Which was ajar.
“Hello?” she tried.
Nothing. Lucy pushed the door foward ever so gently.
“Hello? Uh, maid service, excuse me.”
Still nothing. Lucy leaned in and looked into the room. It was a shambles. A suitcase on the bed lay in shreds, the sides and bottoms ripped apart by some rough blade. Papers were scattered everywhere, a black robe was in tatters. Her heart was beating quickly as she surveyed the mess. There was an airline tag hanging from the remains of the suitcase, El Al, and the name on the luggage was Mordechai Hersch.
