The Fallen Angel

House of God. The fact that Rivka’s remains lie amid the stones rather than under them suggests she was thrown over the wall at the same time. So do the fractures all over her body.”
    Lavon gazed respectfully at the remains for a moment without speaking. “According to Josephus, our only source for what happened that night, several thousand Jews rushed into the Temple after the Romans set it ablaze. I suspect Rivka was one of them. Who knows?” he added with a sigh. “It’s possible she saw Titus himself entering the Holy of Holies to claim his sacred loot. After that . . . it was hell on earth.”
    “Titus wasn’t the world’s first looter,” Gabriel said. “And, unfortunately, he wasn’t the last.”
    “So I hear.” Lavon looked up. “I also hear someone tried to take a shot at you the other night in Rome.”
    “Actually, I think he was aiming for my wife.”
    “That was rather unwise. Is he still alive?”
    “For the moment.”
    “Any idea who sent him?”
    Gabriel dropped the shard of Greek pottery into the excavation pit. Lavon snatched it deftly out of the air before it could shatter on the stones of the Temple and examined it in the glow of his work lamps.
    “Red-figure Attic, fifth century BC , probably by the Menelaos Painter.”
    “Very impressive.”
    “Thank you,” replied Lavon. “But don’t ever drop it again.”
     
     
    The Old City of Jerusalem was once again connected to the new by a footbridge. It stretched from the Jaffa Gate to the sparkling Mamilla Mall, one of the few places in the country where Arab and Jew mingled with relatively little tension. As usual, Gabriel and Lavon bickered over where to eat before finally settling on a fashionable European-style café. The Israel of their youth had been a land without television. Now it had all the creature comforts of the West, everything except peace.
    The volume of the techno-pop music made conversation impossible inside, so they sat on the sunlit terrace at a table with a gunner’s view of the Old City walls. Lavon’s wispy hair moved in the breeze. He popped an antacid tablet before touching his food.
    “Still?” asked Gabriel.
    “It’s eternal, just like Jerusalem.”
    Gabriel smiled. Sometimes even he found it hard to imagine that the bookish, hypochondriacal figure seated before him was regarded as the finest street surveillance specialist the Office had ever produced. He had worked with Lavon for the first time during Operation Wrath of God. For three years, they had been near-constant companions, killing both at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they would be arrested by European police. When the unit finally disbanded, Lavon was afflicted with numerous stress disorders, including a notoriously fickle stomach. He settled in Vienna, where he opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets and played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. But when a bomb destroyed his office and killed two of his employees, Lavon returned to Israel to pursue his first love, archaeology. He now served as an adjunct professor of biblical archaeology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and regularly took part in digs around the country, such as the one in the Western Wall Tunnel.
    “It’s almost hard to remember what this place was like before the Six-Day War,” Lavon said, gesturing toward the valley beneath the terrace. “My parents used to bring me here to see the barbed wire and the Jordanian gun emplacements along the ’forty-nine armistice line. Jews weren’t allowed to pray at the Western Wall or visit the cemetery on the Mount of Olives. Even Christians had to present proof of baptism before they were allowed to visit their holy sites. And now our friends in the West would like us to surrender sovereignty over the Wall to the Palestinians.” Lavon shook his head slowly. “For the sake of peace, of course.”
    “It’s a pile of stones, Eli.”
    “Those stones are drenched in the blood of your ancestors. And it’s because of those stones that we have a right to a homeland here. The Palestinians understand that, which explains why they like to pretend the Temple never existed.”
    “Temple Denial,” said Gabriel.
    Lavon nodded thoughtfully. “It’s a first cousin to Holocaust Denial, and