Godstone

It started to pour as soon as I was out of the ferry terminal. It was also really cold, much colder than it had been in Turkey. I went to the tourist office just outside the entrance to the port, and they recommended a hotel that I found relatively easily. I checked in and slept pretty much the rest of the day.

In the evening, I went down to the hotel’s deserted bar and ordered a beer. Somehow I imagined that Gee’s spell over me would no longer work now that I was in a different country. As the barman poured the drink, I instantly recognised the smell of human excrement. The barman must have seen the disgust on my face.

“Apparently I have been hypnotised,” I told him. He looked at me in surprise and asked me what I meant.

“Hypnosis,” I replied. “It works for smoking, and it seems to work for alcohol too. It makes alcohol smell like shit. I am afraid I can’t drink this.”

“Terrible drug, alcohol. The worst of them all,” the barman told me. I thought it was a funny thing for a barman to say. He took the beer off the counter and put it behind the bar.

“So who hypnotised you?” he asked. “Some meddling girlfriend?” He must have seen from the expression on my face that he was right. “She probably decided you were an alcoholic.” Without asking me, he poured a Coke and handed it to me. “Name’s Jazz by the way,” he said, holding out his hand and flashing me a huge smile; his teeth seemed incredibly white against his black skin.

I wondered if Jazz was one of the Ethiopian Jews that I had read about who were immigrating to Israel, but he didn’t have the fine, thin features of most Ethiopians. I suspected that he was more West African by origin. I tried to guess by his accent where he was from but couldn’t—if anything, it was mid-Atlantic.

Wherever he was from, he was certainly handsome and well dressed: a charcoal-grey suit, white shirt, and dark, silk tie. He looked more like a banker than a barman.

I reached over the bar and shook Jazz’s offered hand. It was surprisingly soft. I then asked him if the bar was always this empty. He seemed to take it as a criticism and ignored my question.

“British?” he asked. “I can tell from the accent.”

I told him my name and admitted that I was English.

“Seeing as you are English, you should visit the museum in Haifa, the Museum of Clandestine Immigration.”

“Museums aren’t really for me,” I replied. “My attention span is too short. I switch off after the first few exhibits.”

“You should visit this one. After the Second World War, the British tried to limit the number of Jewish people immigrating to Israel. They set up holding camps instead in Cyprus and Madagascar. The Israelis said they were just like Nazi concentration camps.”

He then unhelpfully added that visiting the museum would make me feel guilty about British imperialism.

I wanted to change the subject, so I asked if there was anything to eat in the hotel. He said he could make me a sandwich and then disappeared into the kitchen. I was still the only person in the bar, something that I found increasingly odd. While I waited for Jazz to come back, I picked up a copy of a well-thumbed book that was lying on one of the tables: Israel on $35 a Day. I still had five days to kill before I was due to meet Gee in Bethlehem, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my time. Perhaps the book would give me some inspiration.

Jazz came back with a sandwich that was surprisingly good. He poured me another Coke.

“Do you need to use the phone?” he asked, lifting a phone up from behind the bar and putting it on the counter. “You can call home if you’d like. I won’t charge you for it.”

I took him up on his offer, even though I suspected he wouldn’t be the one paying for the call. I called Simon. He said that the young couple that had been thinking of buying the flat had changed their minds.

“They were spooked out by the beeping in the kitchen,” he explained, “and the fact that no one knows what is causing it.”

I was both disappointed and irritated and told Simon that surely it was easy enough to sort out. He told me that another electrician had come around earlier that day and was just as baffled as the first one. He had even turned the electricity off at the mains, and it still beeped. In fact, no matter what anyone did, it still beeped.

“The electrician thinks it’s a UPS built in somewhere behind the kitchen cabinets. I need your permission to dismantle a couple of the cupboards so he can take a look.”

“What’s a UPS?” I asked. “I thought they delivered parcels.”

“Uninterrupted power source,” Simon replied, obviously pleased with the term.

I told him that he had my permission to do whatever was necessary to solve the problem and that, yes, I would cover the cost of the various electricians. I gave him the number that was written on the bar telephone and told him that he could call me on that number. “If I am not in, you can leave a message,” I added.

I handed the telephone back to Jazz, and he put it away again behind the bar. He looked at me in a strange way as if trying to make his mind up about something.

“So you are here to find God?” he finally asked me.

“No,” I mumbled, embarrassed by the personal nature of his question. “I am meeting a friend in Bethlehem next week. I have a few days to kill.” Jazz looked disappointed.

“But why do you ask? Why do you ask if I am here to find God?”

“That’s why most people come to Israel,” he replied. “They come to find God.”

“Is that why you came?” I asked him, hoping to divert his attention away from me.

“No,” he replied. “Or maybe. I kind of drifted in here a year or so back. I am not really sure why or how that happened. A lot of lost souls end up coming here, hoping to find meaning in the Holy Land. Was I one of them? Maybe. Have I found God? No. But if I haven’t found God, I have found something. Maybe myself.”

“Are you Jewish?” I asked him.

“No. I’m not really anything. My parents were Evangelical Christians brought up in Nigeria. They moved to Switzerland when I was young. They were worried about the growing radicalisation of the Muslim community in Nigeria. They felt scared by what was happening.

“Well, at least that was what they told me. My father was in the oil business, and I guess that he needed to get his money out of the country and put it somewhere safe. I went to an expensive Swiss school in the Alps, along with a lot of other rich kids. My father went back to Nigeria and was murdered one night as he was walking back to his hotel. My mother lives in London.”

“And now you work in a bar in Haifa?” I asked.

“Now I work in a bar in Haifa,” he repeated. “Actually, I own the hotel. But even if I didn’t, I am very happy here. I am the happiest I have ever been in my life—thanks to Molly.”

“Is Molly your girlfriend?” I asked him. Instead of answering, Jazz reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a plastic sachet containing about a teaspoonful of dirty-white, fairly large crystals.

“William,” he said. “Meet Molly. She will change your life.” He pushed the sachet across the counter to me. “It’s on me.”

“Who or what,” I asked, “is Molly?”

“MDMA,” Jazz replied. “Some people call it Ecstasy, but Ecstasy can contain all types of shit. This is pure MDMA. This is Molly: one hundred twenty milligrams of truth.”

I had heard of Ecstasy, but I had never tried it. I knew that night clubbers used it in London, and I had been offered it in pill form a few times. I knew that it should never be mixed with alcohol, and as I had always been offered it when I was drunk, I had always somehow had the sense to refuse.

“I don’t do drugs,” I told Jazz. “I am not radically against them, and I don’t judge people who do take them. It’s just that I don’t think the risks—both health and legal—are worth it. I tried weed once when I was at school, and it had a bad effect on me; I felt paralysed and lost all sense of time and space. I hated it.”

“But you do—or rather did—alcohol,” Jazz argued. “That’s worse.”

“Yes, but it’s legal,” I replied. “And I knew I had enough trouble with alcohol that I didn’t want to add to my troubles.”

“But you don’t drink anymore,” Jazz insisted.

I didn’t reply, but I didn’t want to take his drug.

“Some people say that Molly is the gateway to God,” he continued. “I say she is the gateway to self-discovery.”

Again I didn’t comment. He was giving me the hard sell.

“I was going through a bad time after my father died,” Jazz continued. “A friend from school recommended MDMA to me; he said it would give me comfort. He told me that it worked like synthetic serotonin, causing the body to produce the chemicals that signal pleasure and well-being. He said that the effect is pretty light, much the same as the serotonin glow you get by healthy living, exercise, sunlight, sex, laughter, and so on.

“I told my school friend that I had heard some bad things about it, but he said that most of the problems with MDMA came from adulterated forms like Ecstasy. But he said he could get some pure stuff.

“He told me that in most people, it has the effect of making them very social, open, and friendly. It also tends to make you feel very loving, forgiving, and spiritually connected.

“So he convinced me, and I took it. My friend stayed with me the whole time. It was after the end of term, and there were only two of us left at school. I should have been in London with my mother, but we had never been close. And, to be honest, she had forgotten to come and pick me up or send me any money for the flight.

“My friend was right; the drug did give me a sense of comfort and connectivity. More importantly, it enabled me to talk to my father again. He came to me towards the end of my MDMA trip, when I was just on the border between sleep and consciousness. He told me many things.”

“What sort of things?” I asked. For some reason, I found Jazz’s story rather touching.

“He told me that he had learned many things since he had died, that he realised that he had done many things wrong in his life and that if I would let him be my spiritual guide, he could undo those things or at least do some offsetting good.

“I told him that I would let him be my guide in life. He said that if I wanted to contact him, I should just take the drug again but that I should never take it more than once a month. I followed his wishes.”

“And your father told you to come to Israel?” I guessed.

“Yes,” Jazz replied. “And to buy this hotel. He was right. I am happy here. Please, take this as my gift to you. I hope you find the same happiness that I have found.”

Against my better judgement, I took the drug, staying with Jazz in his empty bar until closing time. We didn’t really talk much, but he encouraged me to drink plenty of water and stay hydrated. I didn’t feel any effects from the drug apart from feeling hot and sweaty. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant feeling, and I was disappointed that I had none of the sensations of comfort and wellbeing that he had described.

At one point, he turned on the TV, and we watched an animal documentary together. We had missed the beginning of it, but it seemed to be asking the question as to whether animals had emotions—particularly whether they could feel love. The answer was a resounding yes. Various species of animals, from monkeys to birds, mated and then stayed together for life. If one partner died, then the other really suffered the loss.

“You know,” Jazz commented, “we all treat animals terribly. We have no right to breed and raise them for food. It’s a terrible injustice.”

I remembered that Mary had used virtually the same words.

I was thinking of Mary when I went up to my room. Maybe the drug was working a little because I felt very calm—not sleepy but very connected to the world. Once in my room, I took out the stone. The light from it seemed incredibly bright—much brighter than it had ever been before; it was almost too bright to look into.

But I did look into it and was disappointed that I didn’t see anything. I put the stone on the end of the bed and went into the bathroom and took a shower.

When I opened the bathroom door back into the bedroom, I saw Mary sitting on the end of the bed. She was wearing her little black dress with her black high-heeled shoes; her black handbag with the gold strap was lying on the bed beside her. She was looking straight ahead, and I could see that she had been crying—not a lot but a little. A tear rolled slowly down her left cheek, and it made me feel very sad.

I moved towards her, and she noticed me for the first time. As she turned to look at me, I could see the surprise on her face.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “How did you find me?”

I took her in my arms and felt the warmth in her body. She was no ghost.

The hotel dining room was deserted when I went down to breakfast the next morning, just as the bar had been the night before. Breakfast, a mixture of different types of cold salads and breads, had been laid out on a central table with hot coffee on a side table. I served myself and then sat down at a table by the window. It was still raining heavily.

Mary and I had made love twice the previous night: once passionately and urgently, once slowly and lovingly. In between, we had lain together in bed, her back to me, her body curled in my arms, her hair tickling my face.

As I ate my breakfast, I tried to remember everything that we had talked about. She had listened quietly when I had told her about the stone and about Gee. She asked me if Gee and I had made love and didn’t comment when I said that we had. I explained that I was going to meet Gee again in Bethlehem to find out more about how the stone worked.

“I want to learn how to use the stone to go back to that morning of the Harrods bombing,” I told her. “I will change what happened. I will arrange to meet you in a different restaurant, and I will persuade you not to see your publisher. Neither of us will go anywhere near Harrods. We will rewrite our history.”

Tears had poured down my cheeks as I talked. I didn’t know if it was from sadness at what had happened, relief at finding her again, or joy at the prospect of being together again.

Mary told me that I would have to soon make a choice. “You can use the stone to try and save me,” she said. “But you should know that if I hadn’t been killed in the bombing they would have killed me sooner or later. They didn’t like my book. I shouldn’t have written it.

“Trying to save me is your choice, but you should know that you probably won’t succeed, and, even if you did, it could have terrible consequences; saving me could condemn millions of people to death.” Her voice was so terribly sad when she said that, I felt my stomach tighten in pain. Now, sitting at breakfast, looking out at the rain, I tried to understand the significance of what she had said.

I tried to remember what else Mary and I had talked about. We had talked all night, but now, on this cold, grey morning, I had trouble remembering much of it. There was one thing she had said, however, that had stuck in my mind.

“I am sorry I hurt you,” she said, so softly that I had trouble hearing her. “But you need to know that everything I did—the work I did for the Soviets, the encounters, the lies—I did because I believed it was the right thing to do. We all did. We all believed that somehow we were working for a better world, a peaceful world. I did it for a cause.”

After we had made love for the second time, and I was halfway between sleep and wakefulness, Mary had said something else that surprised me.

“You must believe in God,” she told me softly.

“But which God?” I had asked her. “There seem to be so many of them.”

“There is only one,” she had replied. “God is rather like that stone of yours: it shows you who you are. God is who you are.”

“I’ve looked into the stone, and I’ve only ever seen you,” I replied, almost in desperation. “The stone has not shown me God nor shown me who I am.”

“And remember,” Mary continued, ignoring my comment, “the earth is sacred. God created the earth, and the earth has created you. Worship God, but cherish and protect the earth.”

Lying there with her in my arms, I had tried to make meaning of what she said, but sleep overtook me. When I woke up, Mary was gone.

I reached inside my jacket pocket and felt the reassurance of the stone. I also pulled out a slip of paper that I had torn off from the pad on the bedside table. I had asked Mary to write something on the paper so that I would know that my meeting with her hadn’t just been some drug-induced illusion. I looked at the paper now. It was a verse of a poem by T. S. Eliot, her favourite poet. She had said that I would understand it later, that it would have huge meaning for me. I reread it now, over and over again, trying to understand it:

Flesh and blood is weak and frail;

Susceptible to nervous shock;

While the True Church can never fail

For it is based upon a rock.

I failed to understand the verse, but I did recognise the handwriting—it was my own.

I finished my breakfast, and despite the terrible weather, I felt I had to get out for a walk. There was a huge clap of thunder as I left the hotel, and the rain turned into a downpour. I had borrowed an umbrella from the reception area, but it didn’t stop my shoes and trousers from being instantly soaked. Unsurprisingly, the streets were deserted.

I walked until I found a bank, where I took out some cash, and then found refuge in the Carmel Shopping Centre. A male soldier stopped me at the main entrance and asked to see my passport. He didn’t look more than fourteen years old but was carrying a machine gun.

Once I was inside, two female soldiers stopped me again when I entered a department store. They were also carrying machine guns. They asked me to open my jacket and empty my pockets. They didn’t look twice at the stone.

The two female soldiers were both about my age. One had piercing blue eyes, and she looked hard at me as I put the stone back into my pocket. I didn’t know whether she looked at me like that because she wanted to get me into bed or because she thought I was a terrorist. I realised that this was the first time I had ever been in a country at war.

I hung around the shopping centre awhile, and then, when the rain had eased off a little, I set out to visit the sites of Haifa. It was a difficult city to get around on foot, and at one point, I got lost and had to climb under a barbed-wire fence. I found the museum that Jazz had recommended, but it didn’t have the effect on me that he had predicted. I had no reason to feel guilty for the crimes that had been committed before I was born.

Later I found myself by accident at something called the Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel. My guidebook told me it was the second holiest place on earth for believers in the Bahá’í faith, which, again according to my guidebook, was “a monotheistic religion that emphasises the spiritual unity of all humankind.”

A sign at the gate said that the Bahá’í faith is based on the belief that there is only one God, the source of all creation, and that all religions have the same spiritual source and come from the same God. According to the Bahá’í faith, the human purpose is to learn to know and love God through prayer, reflection, and being of service to humanity. It struck a chord with me after what Mary had told me the previous evening.

It was still raining when I got back to the hotel, and I was completely soaked. It seemed that Israel had at least one thing in common with Turkey: the hotel was heated by solar panels, and seeing as there hadn’t been any sun, there wasn’t any heating either. It was icy cold in my room, and I had no idea how I could dry my clothes. I rang the reception desk, but there was no answer.

I put my wet clothes back on and went down to the bar, hoping to talk to Jazz about my MDMA experience the previous night. There was no sign of him, and the door to the bar was locked. I left the hotel in search of something to eat, but everything was closed. It was still raining hard, so instead I went into a cinema and had popcorn for dinner while I watched Top Gun. At least it was warm in the cinema.

Jazz was at the hotel reception when I got back. He was wearing another beautiful suit, a light-blue shirt, and a silk tie. As it seemed that I was the only one staying at his hotel, I wondered whom he was dressing to impress, but perhaps he only wanted to impress himself.

We chatted awhile, but he didn’t mention Molly. He asked me about my day and what my plans were. I told him that I didn’t have any; I reminded him that I was just killing time until I had to meet my friend in Bethlehem.

He suggested that I visit a kibbutz. I told him that I didn’t know what that was, and he explained that it was a community, a sort of agricultural cooperative where everyone worked together in a community. He said there was one forty-five minutes north of Haifa and that he would call them to say that I was going to stay there the next night. I asked if I had a choice in the matter, and he just laughed. As I said goodnight, he told me that he had just remembered that someone called Simon had called and I should call him back at his home number, no matter how late it was. Jazz handed me the telephone and left me to it.

By the way that Simon answered the phone, I knew immediately that something was wrong. His voice was deeper than usual, more uncertain.

“The electrician stopped by your flat today,” Simon told me, speaking slowly. “He took out the kitchen cabinet under the oven; he rightly guessed that that’s where the beeping was coming from.”

There was a silence at the end of the line that I thought I needed to fill. “And what did he find?” I asked. “Did he find that UPS thing—the uninterrupted power source—that you mentioned?”

“No, I am afraid he didn’t,” Simon replied even more slowly. “But he did find an IED.”

“What’s an IED when it is at home?” I asked. I found these acronyms amusing.

“An improvised exploding device.”

“A what?”

“A bomb,” Simon replied.

There was a chair by the hotel reception counter, and I sank into it. I started to say something about that being ridiculous, but Simon interrupted me.

“The electrician got out of the house as quickly as he could and then called the police from a phone booth on the corner. The police didn’t believe him at first but then sent round the bomb squad. It was definitely a bomb, rigged up to the oven. If you had ever turned on the oven, the bomb would have gone off.”

“But I’ve never used the oven,” I said stupidly.

“That’s why the bomb never went off,” Simon replied testily. “It seems that it was rigged up to a device with a battery that—just like a smoke alarm—beeped when the battery was running down. Whoever constructed the device obviously never suspected that you never cooked. He never imagined that the battery would run down.

“The police have lots of questions to ask you,” he continued. I told them that you were out of the country, but they want you to call them as soon as possible. If you have something to write with, I will give you the name of the officer who is handling this case and his phone number.”

Still in shock, I stood up and jotted down the name and number on a pad on the reception counter. I then apologised to Simon for putting him through this.

“Mate,” he said, “do you have any idea who put that bomb there?”

I thought of Salim, but he would never have put a bomb in his own house. “I have no idea,” I told him.

“Well, you be careful,” he replied. “Someone seems to want you dead.”

More than one person wants me dead, I thought as I hung up. Salim had nearly poisoned me, either by accident or on purpose, and someone else had tried to blow me up.

I called the number that Simon had given me, and, despite the late hour, I managed to speak to the police officer looking after my case. He asked me dozens of questions. I answered them as best as I could. I told him the name of the company that had installed the kitchen units and the stove, and when they had installed them. I told him that I had no idea who might have wanted to kill me or who had installed the bomb. I told him that neither my flatmate nor I ever cooked. I told him all I knew about Salim.

He then asked me something that really surprised me. “The bomb,” he said, “was disconnected. Did you disconnect it, or do you know who did?”

“What do you mean ‘disconnected’?”

“Disconnected,” he answered unhelpfully. “One of the wires was disconnected from the main unit. There was no way that could have happened by accident. Someone did it on purpose. Whoever it was didn’t want the bomb to go off, but they didn’t dismantle the bomb completely. Nor did they think of changing or disconnecting the battery. That’s why it started beeping.”

I am not sure what shocked me the most: someone putting a bomb in my kitchen or someone disconnecting the bomb that was already there.

“But if they disconnected it, why didn’t they take it away completely?”

“I have no idea,” he replied. “But you better get the first flight back here. This is a serious matter, and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

I promised the officer that I would arrange to fly back to London as soon as I could and that I would contact him again as soon as I was there.

After I hung up, I called my uncle at his home. I told him the story, and he told me that under no circumstances should I go back to England until I had delivered the stone to Gee. He said he would talk to the police and “sort it out” with them. But far from being reassuring, I found his voice anxious, urgent, and fearful. It was infectious.

“I am beginning to freak out here,” I told him honestly. “Since I left London, I have been mugged and beaten up. I’ve been threatened with a gun, and I have witnessed a double murder. I’ve been poisoned, and now I find out that for the last few months, I’ve had a bomb in my kitchen.

“You need to tell me what’s going on. Why is someone trying to kill me? And why have they been trying to kill me long before I knew anything about your bloody stone?” My voice had become shrill.

Uncle Charles took a long, deep, and audible breath. “The stone, William—or at least the half that you have—has only limited power. But if it is ever reunited with the other half—well, it will have incredible power. I believe that the people who have been trying to kill you have the other half of the stone and want to reunite the two.”

“I don’t think they have,” I replied. “I can’t explain it, but I don’t think they have the other half of the stone,” I repeated. “But what I don’t understand is why someone is trying to kill me. It makes no sense.”

I heard my uncle take another long, deep breath. “About a year ago,” he continued, “someone broke into my country estate and tried to steal the stone. They failed, but since then, I have had at least three attempts on my life.”

“Someone has tried to kill you?” I asked in disbelief.

“I am afraid so,” he replied. “And in view of our connection, I’m not surprised that someone is trying to kill you.”

I didn’t speak for a moment as I tried to absorb what he was saying. “But you didn’t think to warn me?” I asked eventually, my voice becoming even shriller. “You didn’t think to warn me that my life was in danger?”

“I thought about it, and once I even tried. But in the end, I decided that it would only scare you.”

“Thanks a million,” I replied sarcastically.

He didn’t like my sarcasm. “By my entrusting you with the stone, William, and asking you to take it to Israel, you are in no more danger than if you had stayed in London.”

I was about to answer, but there was a click, and the line went dead. I tried to call my uncle back, but the line just rang engaged. I put the phone down and went up to my room. If my uncle had been trying to reassure me, he had failed miserably.

I left Haifa the next morning to visit the kibbutz that Jazz had recommended. I didn’t enjoy the visit. Everyone in the kibbutz seemed so happy and peaceful, the complete opposite to how I felt. The workers there were all so committed to the community experience of living that they had turned their backs on the outside world. They had created a small socialist paradise that was indeed wonderful, but I couldn’t help thinking that no man is an island. The inhabitants of the kibbutz could ignore the outside world, but the outside world wasn’t going to ignore them.

Rather than go directly back to Haifa, I spent a night in a hostel in Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee. The next day, for lack of anything better to do, I took a tour of the Golan Heights that included a visit to a crusader castle that dated back to Richard the Lionheart. For some reason, the castle looked very familiar. I had a scary feeling that I had been there before, but I guessed that I must have seen a documentary about it at some stage.

When I got back to the hotel in Haifa, I didn’t recognise the place. The lobby was packed with young people, and loud music played from the bar. I pushed my way through the crowd and was surprised to see not one but two barmen working behind the bar, neither of whom was Jazz. I asked one of the barmen where Jazz was, and they pointed me to a sofa where he sat drinking champagne with two girls. I recognised the girls as the two soldiers who had been guarding the entrance to the department store two days previously and who had asked me to empty my pockets. And I think that they recognised me.

“William, how nice to see you!” Jazz called out to me from the sofa. “I want you to meet Gabby. Gabby, meet William. William is here to discover God.”

Gabby stood up and shook my hand. She was the one who had looked at me so intently at the department store.

“’Just as guardians are appointed for men who have to pass by an unsafe road,’” Jazz continued, “‘so an angel is assigned to each man as long as he is a wayfarer.’ Thomas Aquinas said that, by the way. William, are you a wayfarer? I think you are. I give you Gabby, one of my guardian angels.”

Jazz was drunk—and probably high as well. I sat down next to Gabby on the sofa. She took my hand in hers.

“William,” Jazz called out loudly, “you look so serious. You need to relax, man.” There was an edge to his voice that I did not like. He was mocking me.

Gabby squeezed my hand and smiled at me. She still hadn’t said a word, but she wanted to reassure me. Her smile told me that it would be all right, that Jazz was high and that I should ignore him.

“Here, girls and boys,” Jazz continued. “Let’s get this party going.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small glass vial. There was a little knob at one end and white powder inside it.

Jazz held the vial up to me. “William, you hold it like this with your finger over one end, and then you give this magic knob one turn, and it releases the powder into here. Then you turn it back upright and inhale the powder like this.” He inhaled the white powder into one nostril, gave the knob another turn, and then inhaled again into his other nostril. He then slapped himself on the back of his neck.

“Jesus, that is good shit. The best!” Jazz passed the glass vial to the girl on his right. I hadn’t been introduced to her, and I didn’t know her name. She took the vial and inhaled the coke into each nostril. She then passed it to Gabby, who then passed it to me without taking any.

I was going to hand the vial back to her unused, but there was something in the way that she looked at me that told me it would be all right. She squeezed my hand in encouragement and then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I took my hand from hers, turned the knob, inhaled, turned the knob again, and then inhaled through my other nostril.

The next day, I took an early bus to Jerusalem. There was no sign of Jazz as I was leaving the hotel, and no one was at the reception desk. I left what I thought was the right amount of money to pay for the room for the three nights that I had spent there.

Gabby was still asleep in the bed when I got up. I had tried to leave without waking her, but she sleepily tried to pull me back to bed. I hadn’t wanted to go back to bed, even though my body had felt as if a truck had hit me. All I had wanted to do was to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Once on the bus, I put my hand in my jacket pocket and felt the glass vial that Jazz had given me the previous evening.

“You may need this,” he had said with a smile. Now I discreetly pulled it from my pocket and saw that it was still more than half full. We had consumed a lot in the bar, so I guessed that Jazz had had more than one glass vial full of the stuff. I took my handkerchief from my trouser pocket and discretely took two sniffs of coke while pretending to blow my nose. There was no one sitting next to me, and no one noticed.

The drug gave me the jolt that I needed. My head and body aches disappeared in an instant, and I felt on top of the world. My brain raced as I thought ahead as to how I was going to use the stone. Fuck ’em, I thought. They think they are using me, but I will use them. I will use the stone myself. I will save Mary and live my life. Fuck them all.

The half-full glass vial lasted for the couple of days that I spent wandering aimlessly around Jerusalem in the never-ending rain. I didn’t like the city; everything felt so alien to me, and I am sure the rain didn’t help. Someone shouted at me at the Wailing Wall, and I shouted aggressively back at him. I don’t know what I had done wrong—or what he thought I had done wrong.

During my wanderings, I visited the mosque on the Dome on the Rock, and I walked the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Calvary. The church was a weird experience. It was divided into five different sections: Roman Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Abyssinian Coptic, and Syrian Orthodox. Priests greeted pilgrims in each of the sections, and as I walked around, I was welcomed in each one. One priest embraced me. He didn’t speak English, but I gathered he thought I was someone else, someone he knew.

It had stopped raining when I was in the church, but it began again as I was leaving. I tried to work my way up to the Armenian quarter, but I turned around, completely soaked, at the Jaffa Gate and instead returned to my small room in another unheated hotel.

There, I read a copy of the International Herald Tribune that I had picked up at the Jaffa Gate. The headline was about something the paper called the Iran Contra Affair. The newspaper article wasn’t clear, but it seemed that what the two Americans had told me in Istanbul had leaked out into the press. In contravention of their own arms embargo, the United States had been selling weapons, Hawk and TOW missiles, to Iran. In exchange, they hoped that the Iranian government would organise the release of the seven American hostages that were being held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.

What the two Americans in the bar in Istanbul hadn’t told me was that the United States was using the profits from the Iranian arms sales to finance the Contras, Nicaraguan rebels who were fighting to overthrow their own elected Sandinista government. A Lebanese magazine had revealed the scandal the previous Monday.

I couldn’t imagine that President Reagan hadn’t been aware of the deal, and I wondered whether the scandal might somehow derail the arms negotiations with the Soviet Union.

It was still raining heavily the next day when I took a shared sherut taxi to Bethlehem, ten kilometres south of Jerusalem. The driver wore an Arab headscarf and spoke English. About halfway there, the car broke down—I guess because of the incessant rain—and I waited in it while he fiddled around with the engine. I wondered if I should get out and at least make encouraging noises or offer moral support, but it was raining so hard that I stayed put.

The driver eventually got the car going again, but at one point, the road was completely flooded. He had to leave the road and drive up through a muddy field. Another car, an old Mercedes, was stuck on the road with water up to its windows. I suggested to the driver that he would soon have to sell his taxi and buy an ark. He didn’t think it was funny.

The cab dropped me off at the end of Star Street, and I walked the short distance to the Church of the Nativity. In spite of the rain, there were a lot of people around, many of whom were nuns. I queued politely for a while at the low entrance door to the church. While I waited, I finished the last of the coke. I was going to throw the empty vial into the rubbish bin by the church door but instead decided to keep it. I would find a way to fill it up again.

The queue didn’t seem to be moving, so I pushed my way through the crowd into the church. It was dark inside and not at all peaceful: the place was full of crying nuns. I wondered if it was some sort of special religious day. Or perhaps something bad had happened somewhere in the world, and the nuns had congregated in the church to pray. Strangely, there was nowhere to sit or kneel, no pews or stools. Everyone prayed standing up, something that I thought quite funny.

I followed the flow of black robes and made my way down a flight of steps by the church altar to the Grotto of the Nativity. It was difficult to make out anything amid the gloom of the cave and the sobbing nuns, but eventually my eyes adjusted, and I saw the star that marked the spot where Jesus was supposed to have been born. Gee had told me to be there at 3:00 p.m. I held my watch up to one of the lamps that cast a feeble light over the scene. I was ten minutes early.

I moved back into the shadows and waited for Gee to arrive. I imagined her dressed in black just like all the other women there, and for a brief moment, I panicked at the thought that I might miss her in the gloom. At 3:00 p.m. sharp, I stepped out of the shadows, through the congregated nuns, and onto the star.

I don’t know what I had expected to happen, perhaps some divine illumination or a sudden upsurge within me of religious fervour. In the end, nothing happened except that a few of the nuns had stopped crying and were looking at me with shocked horror. By standing on the star, I must have broken some sort of protocol. I looked around, searching with no success for Gee’s face in the crowd.

I stepped off the star and felt a small hand grasp mine. I looked down and saw a boy looking up at me. He wasn’t a local boy, or at least he didn’t seem to be. He was blond with what appeared to be blue or green eyes. His face was pale with just the suspicion of freckles. His face seemed to pick up the light from the feeble church lamps and reflect it back.

I gently tried to pull my hand away, but he held on firmly. “Come with me,” he said softly in slightly accented English, guiding me to the steps that led back up to the main church.

I followed him up the stairs. He was wearing black Turkish trousers, a mini black leather bomber jacket, and an Arab scarf around his neck. I guessed he was about eight to ten years old, perhaps younger.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

Either he didn’t hear me, or he ignored me as we pushed our way through the wailing women. Rather than head towards the entrance to the church as I had expected, he took me around behind the altar of the church to a door that was half hidden behind a small pillar. He opened it onto a narrow corridor, and I followed him down it into another church, his hand still in mine. He seemed to know where he was going.

“This is the Church of Saint Catherine,” he said, answering a question that he had thought I had asked but hadn’t. “It’s where Saint Catherine of Alexander met Jesus.”

“But where are we going?” I asked again.

“To the Franciscan monastery,” he replied, opening another door into a cloistered square.

Despite the grey clouds and the rain, the cloisters were surprisingly bright after the darkness of the church. And after the noise of the crowds in the church, this spot was beautifully peaceful.

The boy stopped walking, let go of my hand, and took a step back to look at me properly. He gave me a thorough inspection: my face, my clothes, my shoes, and my watch.

“Hello,” I said as light-heartedly as I could. “My name is William.”

“I know,” he replied, looking at me again with an innocent curiosity.

“And what is your name?” I asked.

“Adam,” he replied.

“Well, I am pleased to meet you, Adam.” I stretched out my hand, and he shook it. “What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Waiting for my mother,” he replied to what he obviously thought was a stupid question. “She will be here in a minute.”

I decided to delay my further questions until Adam’s mother turned up, whoever she was. As we waited, the sun came out, and the rain stopped for the first time in a week.

The door behind us half opened, and a figure slipped through, a woman wearing a black Arab headdress and veil. The sun shone briefly on her veil, but I couldn’t see the woman’s face.

“Come,” she said in a voice that was strangely familiar. “We must go.”

“I can’t go,” I told the woman. “I have to meet someone here.”

“Oh, William,” replied the face behind the veil. “I am disappointed that you have forgotten me so quickly.”

The woman lifted her veil, and I took a step back in surprise as Gee smiled at me. Not the Gee that I had known a few weeks before but a Gee who was much older.

“And this is our son, Adam,” she said, still smiling. “But then I think you two have already met.”