Bloodline by Alan Gold Read Free Book Online Page B

publicity hounds. Amateur mamzer s!” He motioned with a theatrical gesture for Yael to come over to the light of the window. On the sill, there was a magnifying glass. Holding the stone, he turned it slowly, lowered his voice to a reverential whisper, and said softly, “It’s a seal, of a mason from Solomon’s Temple, when he was building the underground walls. It’s perfect. It’s intact. It’s wonderful . . . I’ve never . . . didn’t even think that in my life . . .”
    â€œThat’s it? A seal? You’ve got to get out more often, Shalman, and get some perspective.” It might have been a casual joke, but again the words were harsher from her lips than she intended them to be. She turned away from the window.
    Yael turned suddenly when she heard a gasp from the doorway. Shalman also turned and saw Miriam still standing there, looking on in rapt attention.
    â€œGo! Now! Bring them all.”
    He turned back to Yael, and calmed himself down. “It says, ‘ I, Matanyahu, son of Naboth, son of Gamaliel, have built this tunnel for the glory of my king, Solomon the Wise, in the twenty-second year of his reign. ’ ”
    Yael turned back to face her grandfather; she’d never seen his face so luminous. He’d always been a lovely old man to her, but now he looked zealous, electrified.
    â€œI have to get Zvi to give an exact translation—not just the words, but their meaning, the nuance, but I’m pretty sure  . . .”
    Yael stared at him lovingly, the significance of what he had just said not lost on her. Shalman’s thin voice shifted register into his “lecture voice.”
    â€œLet me try to explain . . . The tunnel builder, Matanyahu, son of Naboth, son of Gamaliel, mounted it somehow onto the wall so that everybody who passed by climbing up the tunnel would see it and know who’d built it. And God would know that he built it.” Shalman stopped and faced Yael directly with a smile. “Or something like that.” He lowered the object. “Over the millennia it must have got covered up by dirt or mud or something. But after three thousand years, to know the name of the man who built the tunnel under David’s city . . .”
    Suddenly there was the sound of footsteps approaching quickly. The door flew open, and two elderly archaeologists rushed into the room.
    â€œA seal!” shouted one.
    â€œFrom the First Temple,” said the other.
    Furious at being upstaged, Shalman yelled in fury, “Miriam, why did the Almighty give you such a big mouth?”
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    I T WAS ALWAYS DANGEROUS, but Yael’s life was so pressured that the moment she felt the vibration, she picked up her phone, one eye on the frenetic traffic ahead of her, the other eye on the illuminated screen, and quickly read the words of the text message.
    It was a request that she return to the hospital as quickly as possible. That meant one of three things, or maybe all three at the same time: one, an urgent new case, somebody who needed surgery immediately; two, one of her patients was in postoperative trouble; or three, the chief surgeon was being pressured by the hospital administration to achieve some sort of new efficiency and he needed Yael’s help to frame a response telling them to go to hell but without upsetting them too much.
    She was on her way back from the Israel Museum anyway; she always returned, even for half an hour, to check personally on the recovery of all her patients before quitting for the night. Pulling into the parking lot, she wondered which of the three usual summonses it would be this time—or maybe there’d be a fourth that the bureaucrats had suddenly invented to ensure that the doctors knew who was running the hospital and who was paying the salaries. It was all so infantile, and so typical of Israeli bureaucracy—another reason why Yael had