to me before my murder, which I will recount later. I am as I died."
"Your father, why was it a mistake to tell him about Marduk? Why? What did all that mean? What did he do to you, Azriel?"
He shook his head. "This is the hardest part for me to tell you, Jonathan Ben Isaac, but I have never told anyone, you know. I never told any master. Does God never forget? Will God deny me forever the Stairway to Heaven?"
"Azriel, let me caution you, simply as an older human being, though my soul may be newborn. Don't be so sure of Heaven. Don't be any more sure of the face of our god than Marduk was sure."
"This means you believe in one and not the other?"
"This means I want to blunt your pain in the telling of what happened. I want to blunt your sense of fatality, and that you are destined for something terrible because of what others have done."
"Wise of you," he said. "And generous in spirit. I am a fool still in so many ways."
"I see. I understand. Let's go back to Babylon, shall we? Can you explain the plot? What did your father have to do with it in the end?"
"Oh, my father and I, what friends we were! He didn't have a better friend than me, and my best friend was Marduk.
"I was the leader on our drinking jaunts, and it was he ... it was only he who could have ever made me do what I did . . . the thing which made me the Servant of the Bones.
"Strange how it all comes together." He fell to murmuring. He was distracted. "They choose ingredients and they blend them, because the potion won't work unless you have everything. The priests alone, they could never have gotten him to do it. Cyrus the Persian? I trusted him as much as any tyrant. And old Nabonidus, what was his advice? He was only there out of some sort of kindness on the part of Cyrus, and cleverness. Everything with the Persian empire was cleverness. Perhaps it's so with all empires."
"Take your time," I said. "Catch your breath."
"Yes ... let me give you pictures of my family. My mother died when I was young. She was very sick, and she cried that she wouldn't live to see Yahweh lift His Face to us again and take us back to Zion. Her people had all been scribes. She herself was a scribe and at one time, I heard, had been something of a prophetess, but this had ceased when she had sons.
"My father missed her unbearably until the last day I ever knew him. He had two Gentile women and so did I; in fact, we shared the same two women most of the time, but this was not for having children or marriage, this was just for fun.
"And at home in the family my father was a hard worker at writing down the psalms and trying to get exact the words we remembered from Jeremiah over which we all argued night and day. My father seldom if ever led the prayers. But he had a beautiful voice, and I can still remember him singing the Lord's praises.
"When we worked in the temple, it was secret between him and me that we thought all idolaters were completely crazy, and why not work for them and humor them?
"As I was explaining, we set the meal out for the god Marduk himself from time to time with the priests. I had many, many friends among the priests, and you know, it was like any group of priests; some believed it all, and some believed nothing. But we drew the veils around the god's table, and then afterwards we took away the food, which of course the god Marduk in his own way had actually savored and fed upon-through fragrance and through the moisture that he could feel-and we helped set up that meal for the members of the royal family, the royal hostages, and the priests and the eunuchs who would eat the god's food, or eat at the King's table.
"But again, as good Hebrews we didn't eat that food ourselves. No, we would never have done that.
"We kept to the laws of Moses in every way that we could. And days ago, when I found myself pitched down into New York, and I began my journey to find the killers of Esther Belkin, when I happened upon the