you.”
“Not at all,” she said in a way that convinced him she meant it. She stood. “It's about time to get up anyway. Why don't you go ahead and shower. I've laid out some clean towels for you, and I'll fix you some breakfast.”
Feldman agreed, threw baek his covers and rose, only to realize that all his clothes were in a pile on the floor. He promptly retrieved the sheets, embarrassed once more in front of this disorienting woman.
Anke turned to go as if nothing had happened. But he heard that sweet, soft laugh of hers as she descended the stairwell.
He sighed. She always seemed to catch him in an awkward moment.
It was growing lighter outside when, after a rejuvenating shower, he sat down in his same wrinkled clothes to a superb breakfast of ham and eggs.
She sat across from him with some toast and juice and poured him more coffee. “So what do you really think happened last night, Jon?”
“You tell me.” He avoided answering her, wanting to shrug off this topic right now. Ever since he'd abandoned religion in his youth, blaming it for his parents’ divorce, he'd felt an emptiness inside him. A hole in his soul. Assuming he had a soul. Consequently, he found it difficult to confront the underlying question of what might or might not have occurred the previous evening.
Anke leaned back in her chair and deliberated for a moment. “Well,” she ventured, “I honestly don't know what I think right now. But what if God-that is, if you believe in God-really is communicating something to us?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, there's just too much coincidence to what happened last night for it all to be simply a natural occurrence, wouldn't you agree? Whether I like it or not, that's a very real possibility. What if, after all these centuries of silence, God is finally talking to us again? Maybe there's a message in this. Or the beginnings of a message. Maybe last night was a wake-up call.”
“So, God was just clearing His throat?” Feldman needed to lighten this up, but not yet knowing Anke's sensibilities, he feared he might have come across as sacrilegious.
She wasn't offended, she smiled. “Maybe. All I know is that I've never been so scared in my life. And I can't simply disregard what happened. Can you?”
Feldman surrendered to his real feelings. “Hell, I'm not sure what to think, Anke. For a while there, I thought maybe all those millenarians, whom I'd always considered idiots, might end up being right after all. Meaning that I, this lost, ignorant soul, would be doomed to eternal damnation for having no religious underpinnings.”
He suddenly understood the roots of his nightmare, and the realization hit him full force. Never before had he attached any relevance to his dreams. Finding a significance now presented an overtone that disturbed him.
Anke screwed up her face. “I don't know that I'd go so far as to accept any of those millenarian theologies,” she said. “But you can't just dismiss last night out of hand, can you?”
“Maybe not,” he replied slowly, still somewhat distracted by his new awareness, “but I find it hard to believe that any intelligent deity would mark His return by terrorizing His public. I guess I'll do as Bollinger suggested. I'll just wait and see how it all looks in the light of day.”
His wait was over. The dawn was breaking. Feldman glanced at his watch and realized that, with the streets in such poor shape, he might be hard pressed to drop by his apartment for a change of clothes.
Anke was already on her feet. “I understand you'll be leaving Israel soon, permanently?”
Feldman shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, I'm afraid so. This was just a temporary assignment with WNN. I've got a new job waiting for me back in the States.” As he stared into her eyes, his promising new position was losing some of its allure.
She nodded, a fleeting look of disappointment showing on her face. “Well, Mr. Feldman”-she smiled again-”this was one New Year's Eve I don't suppose we'll soon forget!”
Feldman rose and walked toward her. This time he wasn't thwarted in his designs. The kiss was long, and long overdue. He felt the earth moving again. And left feeling more reinvigorated than his hour and a half of sleep warranted.
Driving was tedious, hampered by toppled walls, fallen utility poles and electrical lines. He stopped briefly at his apartment for fresh clothes. There was no newspaper on his porch. He opened his door and noted with dismay his slovenly, unkempt quarters, which compared poorly with Anke's tidy, well-appointed town home. He shrugged and made a firm commitment to purge the place at the earliest opportunity.
Peeling off his shirt, he tossed it near a laundry basket in the corner and pulled on a fresh shirt from a pile of clean clothes near his bed. As he picked up his shoulder bag, his cellular phone rang. It was Hunter. Bad reception, but no disguising the excitement in his voice.
“Goddamn, I've been trying to get through to you for an hour!”
“Well, my phone's been open,” Feldman confirmed. “The cells in the area are probably overloaded.”
“Listen carefully in case I lose you,” Hunter said, panting. “This is incredible! One of the WNN Cairo teams came in early this morning and we all drove down to Bethlehem. You got to get down here right now! We missed it, pal!”
“Bethlehem? What's going on in Bethlehem?”
“This is where the epicenter of the quake was. The same place where we saw the lightning storm hit last night. There's some really weird shit going on down here and I'll tell you all about it, but get here quick before we lose this scoop.”
“Okay, okay, but what about Bollinger and our meeting?”
“I couldn't get through to him. Tell him we got him one hell of a follow-up story to last night. Get everybody and everything down here,
Bethlehem was ordinarily a very short drive from Jerusalem, virtually in the suburbs, only about ten kilometers south. But in the aftermath of the earthquake, the trip today was prolonged. Feldman had ample time to work the redial button of his cellular phone. Finally, he got through to Cissy.
“Where are you?” she wanted to know. “We've been trying to reach you all morning!”
“I'm on my way to Bethlehem,” he told her.
“Where? Have you heard from Hunter?”
“Yeah, he's in Bethlehem now.”
“What the hell's he doing there? Jimmy said he took off with one of the new Cairo mobile unit teams early this morning. He's got my car and he was supposed to pick me up for the meeting, the bastard!”
Feldman heard Cissy talking off-phone with someone and Bollinger jumped on the line. “Jon, what's going on?”
“Arnie, Hunter called me a while ago from Bethlehem. He's down there with one of the teams from Cairo. He wants the entire crew and equipment down there right now. Says we've got the chance for a real scoop if we hurry.”
“What's the story?”
“He didn't have time to give me details, but he said Bethlehem was the center of last night's quake and that thunderstorm. He said there's some really weird shit going on down there.”
That seemed to have Bollinger's attention, but he sounded irritated at the last-second fire drill. “This had better be good, Feldman,” he warned. “I'd like a little more detail to go on than ‘some really weird shit’ before we all just haul ass out of here in the middle of a story.”
“That's all I know, Arnie, but he was pretty insistent.”
