An Accidental Messiah Read online

  She loaded the file into EPSS, the statistical analysis program she had used to simulate her expected results.

  A wheel icon circled on the screen as the processor cross-referenced the test results with the demographic data she had collected and ran the merged data through the statistical engine.

  The moment of truth. The culmination of two years of her life.

  A few agonizing seconds later, the findings displayed on the screen in graphs and bar charts.

  In her pilot experiments, the lines and bars had stood out in tidy, colorful rows, clearly supporting her hypothesis that the Cohen gene appears only in Jews of priestly descent, proving that all priestly Jews descended from a single male ancestor. For fun, she’d call him Aaron in her paper, after the biblical Aaron, son of Amram and brother of Moses.

  The actual charts from her final experiments, however, made her heart skip a beat.

  That’s strange.

  The graphs on the screen were almost identical to her pilot experiments’ results. Her main thesis still held water but there was noise, a large clump of outliers that had the Cohen genetic markers, and ninety-eight percent of them belonged to one group.

  That doesn’t make sense.

  She performed a t-test to confirm whether the outlier group had statistical significance. It did. She could not write off the noise as diagnostic errors. The rogue results were not outliers at all.

  She turned the data over in her mind. Her cheeks felt cool and the roots of her hair prickled, as though she was about to faint. The data could mean only one thing.

  No, she thought. That’s impossible!

  CHAPTER 9

  “What do we do now?” Samira asked.

  Good question. Moshe had perched on the edge of his desk and shared the bad news with the Dry Bones Society management. He had gone head-to-head with rivals before—both in business and in his private life—but the government was a different story. A collision with that unmoving continent would shatter their fledgling organization to smithereens. Moshe would have to change course.

  “The government’s doors are closed to us for now,” he said. “We’ll have to be patient.” This was his fault. He had raised their hopes and set them up for disappointment.

  “Patient?” Shmuel said. “What if those doors never open? We could all starve by then.”

  “No one’s going to starve,” Irina said.

  “That’s right,” Moshe said. “We have money for the cafeteria and dormitories so long as donations keep flowing.”

  “What about health care? Private doctors don’t come cheap. And there’s only so long we can shack up in shared housing.”

  Or support our non-resurrected families, Moshe added to himself.

  “You’re right,” he said aloud. “We need new ideas. Any suggestions?”

  Samira put up her hand first. “We could ask doctors to volunteer.”

  “And,” Irina said, “we can ask pharma companies to donate medical supplies.”

  “Good. Good. That will help.”

  Shmuel said, “I suppose we could put together a magazine, and sell advertising. It’ll be tax deductible and good PR.” He shook his head, obviously not thrilled about chasing after advertisers.

  “Excellent. Maybe an online magazine? Or a YouTube channel. We could interview the new arrivals and share their stories. We’ve had some interest in our cause overseas.”

  Rabbi Yosef had filled him in on his meeting with their new American ally before he slipped out to cash the check. Ten thousand dollars would not last forever and he did not want to pin their survival on a single donor.

  “OK, friends, let’s get to work.”

  The team dispersed to their new tasks.

  Moshe moved behind the desk and slumped over, his head in his hands.

  Begging for donations. Selling advertising. Not the sexiest ways to get by, but they’d have to work with what they had.

  In the call center, telephones rang as lost souls called in.

  Shmuel had not been entirely wrong. Each day their expenses piled up but the donations were not keeping pace. As the dead returned from the more distant past, fewer of them had the means to contribute, and living Israelis felt less connected to them. The Society would need new revenue streams to survive the long haul.

  And no matter how many donations came pouring in, Moshe was still not able to draw a salary and keep his family afloat, never mind pay for a fancy wedding. He had placed all his hopes on Minister Malkior and paid the price.

  A throat cleared and he looked up. Savta Sarah stood in the doorway, her sad eyes filling her glasses. “I saved you a plate of food,” she said. “Seeing that you were too busy to eat.”

  Moshe’s mood improved the moment the scent of stuffed cabbage and meatballs reached his nostrils. “Thank you, Savta.”

  She placed the plate on his desk along with a set of disposable cutlery, sat down, and watched him eat.

  “We moved into an abandoned apartment building after the war,” she said, slipping, as she did, into the past.

  She meant the War of Independence. Moshe had heard the tale before. He and Irina had visited the two-room apartment on Bostanai Street in Katamon, where Savta and her husband, of blessed memory, both penniless Holocaust survivors at the time of the war, had lived ever since.

  “After a while the government notified us that we could register our apartment with the Land Registry. One of the neighbors offered to go to the ministry and fill in the forms on our behalf.” She emitted a bitter laugh. “Two weeks later, Edith from the first floor came to me in tears. ‘He’s demanding rent!’ she cried. ‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘He can’t do that—it’s your apartment.’ ‘Not anymore,’ she said. ‘He registered the entire building in his own name!’ She was right. The crook had registered all eighteen apartments in his own name.” Savta Sarah shook her head at the man’s chutzpah.

  “The clerk at the ministry was no help at all. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ Nothing we can do? Ha! I found out who her boss was. I went home. I got all dressed up, put on my makeup. I waited for her lunch break and then I walked right into her manager’s office and sat down.”

  She crossed her legs, placed her hands on her knees, and spoke with her nose high in the air, reliving the moment. “‘Mr. Kramer,’ I said. ‘You are a fine gentleman. Surely you can help our neighbors, all of them poor and honest citizens.’ He said no. He said that the crook had done nothing illegal, and there was nothing more he could do. ‘Mister Kramer,’ I said. ‘You can and you will. I’m not leaving your office until you have corrected this injustice. And what’s more, I intend to have a word with Mrs. Kramer and I’m sure she will have an opinion about what you can and cannot do.’ I didn’t know Mrs. Kramer—but I would have found her. In the end, I didn’t need to. Within a half hour, Mr. Kramer had set the paperwork aright. And that crook, well,” she grinned, “he fled Jerusalem and never came back.”

  She chuckled at her own tenacity, then looked Moshe squarely in the eyes.

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Moshe dear, it’s that there is always something you can do. You just need the balls to do it.”

  With that, she got to her feet and strolled out of the office.

  Moshe chewed his stuffed cabbage in silence. As always, Savta had a good point. But how did one take on the government?

  He got to his feet, abandoning his meal, walked out of his office, and leaned on the divider wall of Shmuel’s cubicle.

  “How many members do we have?”

  Shmuel looked up from his computer screen. “Several hundred. Maybe a thousand.”

  “That will have to do.”

  A sly smile curled Shmuel’s mouth. “Why? What are you planning?”

  “We’re going to war.”

  “With the government? How?”

  “By hitting them where it hurts most.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Ahmed had expected rivers of honey and wine, a private palace,
and a seat of honor at the Heavenly banquet. After all, he had bought a ticket to Paradise. But when he had awoken in the Mount of Olives Cemetery, a gray-haired Russian called Boris had shipped him off to Hell. The angels had made a huge mistake but today Ahmed would correct that error.

  He piled gray bricks onto a wheelbarrow and wiped his brow. The damned souls around him got about their tasks. Dark skinned and light. Round eyed and squinted. He was not like them. He didn’t belong here. But every day he climbed the scaffolding with them, delivering bricks and mortar. He didn’t speak much. He didn’t step out of line. He had seen what happened to those who did.

  A tall Nigerian had argued with the foreman on Ahmed’s first day in the afterlife. When the muscular African had thrown down his hard hat and strutted off the construction site, a large demon in a gray suit had followed him. The Rottweiler, as the others called him behind his back, had arms as thick as trees and a neck to match. Two minutes later, the Rottweiler had returned, dragging the Nigerian by the scruff of his neck, and dumped him on the ground in a pile of pain. The other workers had strapped a stick to his broken arm and returned to their tasks.

  Ahmed did not belong in Hell. Hasan had promised him Paradise. Paradise and forgiveness. Ahmed’s mother had made him share his room with his cousin from Ramallah, who had visited for a few days. He’ll be a good influence, make a man of you. She was always saying that, ever since his father had moved out to live with his new wife five years ago.

  But Hasan had discovered the copies of Penthouse inside Ahmed’s mattress. A disgrace, Hasan had said, to defile himself with infidel women. A mark of shame on his family name. His father would hate him if he ever found out. There was only one way to cleanse his blemished family honor, only one way to purify his Jew-loving soul.

  Ahmed had boarded bus number eighteen, his backpack stuffed with rusty screws and ball bearings dipped in rat poison, and he had pressed the detonator button. The explosion had shredded his sinful flesh and transformed him into a shaheed. A palace awaited him, as well as a harem of virgin brides and a seat of honor at the Heavenly feast.

  Every morning, a minibus shuttled him from the bleak warehouse to the construction site. The streets through the window resembled the Jerusalem of his earthly life, the way the world of dreams mixed together memories of his waking hours, only this nightmare had lasted two months. Every night, he lay on the camping cot in his tarpaulin cubicle beneath the high tin roof of the warehouse and he prayed. He prayed that tomorrow the angels would correct this terrible mistake. Every morning, he awoke to find his prayers unanswered.

  He could bear the injustice no longer. He wheeled the barrow of bricks onto the wooden plank over a clump of steps, then made for the one they called Damas, a coal-skinned demon taskmaster. Ahmed laid the wheelbarrow at his feet, brushed dirt and dust from his calloused hands, and cleared his throat.

  “What?” the taskmaster said, aiming his constant scowl at Ahmed. The yellow hard hat made his skin look even darker.

  “Sir,” he said, in Hebrew. “There’s been a mistake.”

  “Spit it out!”

  Two Romanian workers glanced their way and Ahmed tried to ignore them. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said, speaking as softly as possible. “I was supposed to go to Paradise.”

  Damas glared at him for two seconds “Paradise?” he said. “Who told you that?”

  Ahmed felt the press of eyeballs around him. Let them stare. I am a shaheed. I am above them all. “My cousin Hasan promised me that if I—”

  “Let me guess,” Damas interrupted, “that if you killed some Jews you’d get seventy virgins?” He pulled out a worn notepad from his shirt pocket and turned the pages.

  Ahmed’s heart did a double-flip. Yes! Damas, for all his scaly ways, had to answer to the angels. He’d set things right. Ahmed should have spoken up long ago.

  “Let me see,” Damas said, scanning the notepad. “What is your name—Ahmed?”

  “Yes, I am Ahmed!”

  Damas frowned. “There is no Ahmed here,” he said. “But I have a Stupid. Is your name Stupid?”

  The taskmaster glared at him while Ahmed tried to make sense of the question. Then the Ethiopian burst out laughing. Others laughed around him too. Hot blood rose in Ahmed’s cheeks. The souls of migrants and vagabonds, lowly scum and infidels, they all laughed at the shaheed in their midst!

  Damas recovered from his fit of laughter and clapped him on the back. “Let me tell you about promises,” he said, with sudden solemnity. “When I was a little boy in Ethiopia, the wise men promised us a Jerusalem of Gold. I left the village with some older boys and we started our holy journey on foot. We walked through war and poverty, thieves and slavers. Twelve of us set out; only two survived to see the glorious State of Israel. And what did we find here? A hero’s welcome? A Jerusalem piled high with gold? A life of honor and luxury?” He spat on the ground. “A Jerusalem of trash and cat piss, of street sweepers and janitors, of people who treated me like crap and told me how they had saved me from the jungle.”

  He scowled at the gathering crowd. “What are you all looking at? Back to work!” The men scuttled away.

  “Did you see that?” he told Ahmed. “I found my promised land. I earned it the hard way.” He held up his hand. Two of his fingers ended in swollen stumps. “Now I tell them what to do and nobody messes with me.”

  He gripped Ahmed by the shoulders. “Take it from me, Stupid. Don’t believe their promises. There is no Paradise, only Hell.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Alex Altman spotted his target at the Delek gas station on the corner of Pat and Golomb.

  The thirty-something in brown chinos, a button-down shirt, and a blue crocheted kippah leaned against the side of the blue Ford Focus. Fresh meat. The car, eight years old but in good shape, matched the photo from the ad that the owner had posted on Yad2, a website for secondhand vehicles.

  Let the show begin.

  “David?” Alex said.

  David looked up and turned a paler shade of white. People reacted that way to the ponytail, the earring, and the large biceps covered in Russian tattoos, the badges of honor Alex had acquired in multiple Soviet penitentiaries. They told law-abiding citizens not to mess with him. Alex always chose a public meeting place for his magic shows to give the target a false sense of security.

  David swallowed hard. “Shalom,” he said. Hello. He had a British accent, and had probably bought the car brand new using the tax break for new immigrants.

  Alex circled the car. He ran his fingers over the fresh rubber feelers on the tires and the line of chipped paint on the back bumper. New treads and minor scratches. Nothing serious.

  “Accidents?” he asked.

  “None.”

  “Keys.”

  “Inside.”

  Alex climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Code?”

  David told him and Alex punched the numbers into the immobilizer keypad. The car started quietly. Eighty thousand kilometers on the odometer. The tachometer gauge hovered at a thousand revolutions per minute and didn’t waver. No engine issues either.

  Alex closed the door. “Get in.”

  David hurried around the car to the passenger seat and strapped on the belt.

  It’s showtime!

  Alex stepped on the accelerator, launching the car onto Golomb toward the City Center and pressing David back in his seat. The gears changed smoothly, with no audible grinding.

  Magic is five percent distraction and ninety-five percent preparation, and Alex had done his homework.

  He pressed his foot to the floor, flying past the speed limit. “How much?”

  David clung to the edge of his seat as the car sped down the thoroughfare. “Eighteen thousand,” he said.

  David had done his homework too. Eighteen thousand was the Levi Yitzchak list price for the car. A fair price, but a poor first offer. David was not much of a bargainer.

  Alex weaved between cars. Make that ten percent
distraction.

  “I’ll give you nine,” he said.

  David didn’t laugh. He didn’t tell Alex to stop the car and take a hike. In fact, he probably felt grateful for the offer, because, like all good magicians, Alex had pre-selected his target from the crowd.

  Yesterday, within minutes of posting the ad online, David had received five phone calls. Each potential buyer had offered five thousand shekels “and not an agora more.” Compared to those offers, Alex sounded generous. Alex knew this, because all five callers–including the older man and the woman with the sexy voice—were his stage assistants.

  “According to the pricelist—” David began but Alex cut him short with a laugh.

  “Forget that. Nobody pays the list price.”

  He gunned up Gaza Road. By this point, most sellers just wanted to flee the car before Alex crashed the vehicle into a pole, but David said nothing. Brave guy.

  A part of Alex pitied him. This David hadn’t done him any harm. But as far as magic tricks went, David would get off lightly. Over the years, Alex had performed many feats of magic on behalf of the Organization, and some still haunted his dreams.

  Alex swung a right onto Keren Hayesod. Time to close the deal, and David needed a little extra push. Alex knew what made people tick. These Anglo immigrants always felt that they were being screwed over by the locals. Nine times out of ten they were right, but things would go a lot smoother if Alex let him feel that he’d won the bargaining game.

  “Nine thousand and two hundred shekels,” Alex said. “Final offer.”

  David exhaled a deep breath. “B’seder.” OK.

  Alex pulled up outside the post office on Emek Refaim, and extracted a wad of two-hundred-shekel notes from his pocket. David’s eyes widened as Alex counted out the bills, but he didn’t ask any questions. He could guess what sort of person walks around with that amount of cash.

  “Registration,” Alex said.

  David opened the glove compartment and fished out the certificate.

  Alex pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket. “Sign here.” The document appointed Alex as power of attorney regarding the sale of the car. “And write down the code too. Good.” He dumped the cash in David’s hand. “I’ll take care of the transfer of ownership. Don’t let me keep you.”