“It is not my right to protect her,” I said as she returned to the living room.
“I hope you’re not talking about me,” she said as she handed Marino his briefcase.
“Yeah, we were talking about you,” he said, “because I don’t think you should be looking at this.”
Clasps sprang open.
“It’s your case.” Her eyes were calm as they turned to me. “I am interested in it and would like to help in even the smallest way, if I can. But I’ll leave the room, if you want me to.”
Oddly, the decision was one of the hardest ones I’d had to make, because my allowing her to look at evidence I wanted to protect her from was my concession to her professional accomplishment. As wind shook windows and rushed around the roof, sounding like spirits in distress, I moved over on the couch.
“You can sit next to me, Lucy,” I said. “We’ll look at it together.”
The New Zionist bible was actually titled the Book of Hand, for its author had been inspired by God and had modestly named the manuscript after himself. Written in Renaissance script on India paper, it was bound in tooled black leather that was scuffed and stained and lettered with the name of someone I did not know. For more than an hour, Lucy leaned against me and we read while Marino prowled about, carrying in more wood and smoking, his restlessness as palpable as the fire’s wavering light.
Like the Christian Bible, much of what the manuscript had to say was conveyed in parables, and prophesies and proverbs, thus making the text illustrative and human. This was one of many reasons why reading it was so hard. Pages were populated with people and images that penetrated to deeper layers of the brain. The Book, as we came to call it during the beginning of this new year, showed in exquisite detail how to kill and maim, frighten, brainwash and torture. The explicit section on the necessity of pogroms, including illustrations, made me quake.
I found the violence reminiscent of’ the Inquisition, and it was, in fact, explained that the New Zionists were here on earth to effect a new Inquisition, of sorts.
“We are in an age when the wrongful ones must be purged from our midst,” Hand had written, “and in doing so we must be loud and obvious like cymbals. We must feel their weak blood cool on our bare skin as we wallow in their annihilation. We must follow the One into glory, and even unto death.”
I read other ruinations and runes, and perused strange preoccupations with fusion and fuels that could be used to change the balance of the land. By the Book’s end, a terrible darkness seemed to have enveloped me and the entire cottage. I felt sullied and sickened by the reminder that there were people in our midst who might think like this.
It was Lucy who finally spoke, for our silence had been unbroken for more than an hour. “It speaks of the One and their loyalty to him,” she said. “Is this a person or a deity of some sort?”
“It’s Hand, who probably thinks he’s Jesus friggin’ Christ,” Marino said, pouring more champagne. “Remember that time we saw him in court?” He glanced up at me.
“That I’m not likely to forget any time soon,” I said.
“He came in with this entourage, including a Washington attorney who has this big gold pocket watch and a silver-topped cane,” he said to Lucy. “Hand is wearing some fancy designer suit, and he’s got long blond hair in a ponytail, and women are waiting outside the courthouse to get a peek at him like he’s Michael Bolton or something, if you can believe that.”
“What was he in court for?” Lucy looked at me.
“He’d filed a petition for disclosure, which the attorney general had denied, so it went before a judge.”
“What did he want?” she asked.
“Basically, he was trying to force me to turn over copies of Senator Len Cooper’s death records.”
“Why?”
“He was alleging that the late senator was poisoned by political enemies. In fact, Cooper died of an acute hemorrhage into a brain tumor. The judge granted Hand nothing.”