Nina spoke again. “I’ll be totally freaked out if he’s in there asleep.”
“Where does he keep it?”
“In the dining room.”
Their feet shuffled over the carpet. Eris stepped out into the living room. “Hi,” I heard her say. “Your timing isn’t the greatest.”
Nina gasped.
I tried to yell, but the drug was still playing havoc with my vocal cords.
“Oh!” I heard Nina say. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think anyone was here. I’m John’s neighbor.”
I gathered all my strength and channeled it into my voice. “Nina, don’t listen to her. She’s lying.”
“He’s drunk,” Eris said quickly.
“I’m not. Nina, come here. In the bedroom. I’ve got to see you.”
“Hey.” The guy’s voice. “What the hell?” The front door slammed. Nina and a man materialized in the bedroom doorway. In seconds, Nina morphed from an expression of shock into an explosion of tipsy laughter. Her boyfriend wore an irritating smirk.
She put her hands up to her face to stifle her sniggers. “Oh, John. I just wanted to borrow some wine. We ran out. I really apologize.”
“Where’s Eris? The woman?”
The guy lost his smirk. “She took off. She’s gone.”
Nina had trouble suppressing another smile. “I’d never have guessed”—she gestured toward me on the bed—“that you were into this, this … sort of thing.”
“I’m not even going to try to explain. Help yourself to a whole case of wine, just cut these things off first. There’s an X-Acto knife in Samuel’s desk drawer.”
She found the knife and returned. Her escort had to do the cutting because the plastic ties were so tough. When they finished I tried to lever my legs over the side of the bed but managed only to flop around like a dying fish. A wave of dizziness and nausea hit me. Nina, finally realizing something was very wrong, asked if she should call the police.
“No, there’s no point. Would you mind just making me some coffee? Triple strong.”
Her boyfriend made a few perfunctory remarks about hoping I was okay then hightailed it back to the party. I practiced sitting up and succeeded by the time Nina returned with the coffee. She said she wanted to stay and make sure I was all right, but I insisted she go back to her guests.
I chugged the coffee down and massaged my legs, getting them to the point where I could wobble to the living room. I made sure the front door was locked and saw my keys on the hall table where I’d tossed them. I staggered into the washroom and stood under the shower for half an hour.
I heard the whine and the crash of the garbage trucks emptying metal trash containers outside. The howl of a siren trailed off into the distance. Four in the morning. I closed my eyes. What a strange hole I’d plunged into. And it didn’t seem to have a bottom.
Eleven
Abizarre nightmare woke me up. I lay face down on a city sidewalk, the concrete like molten steel in the afternoon sun. Eris was closing in. Each time I put a hand down to drag myself forward to escape her, my palm burned as if I’d just touched a hot stove.
I shuddered, coming fully awake, and got off the couch. This time my legs did everything they were ordered to. Another brutally hot shower helped to clear away the fuzziness still meandering through my head. I clipped my beard so I looked presentable again and applied some salve to my lip, the pain tapping out a constant drumbeat. I tore off the bedsheets, walked down the hall, and stuffed them into the incinerator. I thought about knocking on Nina’s door to thank her for the rescue but could hear no noise from within and assumed she was still sleeping it off.
When I contacted Joseph Reznick, the criminal lawyer Andy had recommended, his assistant told me he was in court, unreachable until later in the day.
“Could I make an appointment for this afternoon? It’s urgent.”
“Not even if you’re facing a firing squad. But I’ll tell him you called.”
The time was right, however, to call Walter Taylor in Jordan— it would be afternoon there. But when I reached his office his secretary told me he was on leave for two weeks. She’d forward a message to him but couldn’t promise anything. I had to be satisfied with that.
I put on some music, got the copy of Hal’s puzzle, and sat with a coffee at the kitchen counter trying to solve it with new eyes. The first music selection was R. Kelly’s rendition of “If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time.” A great song by a master vocalist; I once flew halfway across the country just to hear him perform live. But the music wrecked my concentration.
I turned it off and focused on the puzzle. The word pattern on the board was wrong. Two groups of words were completely separated. In these games at least one word has to bridge the two sides. If I put an
A spark went off. I reached for it but it lingered like a half-remembered dream, teasing me before it faded away altogether. I toyed with various combinations of words for another half hour and got nowhere.
I got up, stretched, and with another coffee wandered into Samuel’s study. His door was ajar. Eris had no doubt stormed through here while I was out cold. I wanted to read the Book of Nahum, but when I opened the door my eye fell on books that had been thrown in a heap on the floor. I looked up and saw that the section on his bookshelves allotted for his journals was empty. I got down on my hands and knees and combed through the books and papers scattered about the floor and found them. Thirty in all. A lifelong record of his wanderings, observations, and private thoughts.
Samuel’s journals were not diaries but rather a hodgepodge of observations, records of events or notes he’d made during his travels, personal comments, and sometimes even sketches. In bound volumes of forest- green leather, each was labeled with the time period it represented. I sorted through them, putting the nearest dates on top, and found the most recent one, from January 2001 to December 2002.
The first page surprised me. A picture he’d pasted in, an Assyrian relief from Sennacherib’s palace. I’d seen it in the British Museum. It showed soldiers flaying Hebrew prisoners of war, the quilt-like striations in the background meant to depict a forest.
Below the image were some notes he’d made based on a book called
In 722
B.C.
, Sargon II lays waste to Samaria. End of the Israelite kingship line. Samaria utterly destroyed. Israelites deported to Assyria.
The records also described how Sennacherib took revenge on Judah.
As to Hezekiah, the Judahite, he did not submit to my yoke. I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities, walled forts and countless small villages in their vicinity, and conquered them by means of well-stamped earth ramps, and battering rams. … I drove out of them 200,150 people, cattle beyond counting, and considered them booty.
Stone relief from the southwest palace of Sennacherib, 704–681 B.C.
So did all this fit in with the engraving somehow? Would Nahum’s ancestors, grandparents maybe, have come from Samaria and experienced this? The case for Nahum being deported to Assyria as tribute and forced to work as a scribe was getting stronger.
I knew Assyrian kings established the true first empire. Former vassal states like Judah were converted into
