Washington, D.C., appeared suddenly with the reassuring assertion:
"There is no reason at all to fear the Temple or its grandiose schemes. Every single location has been either raided by police, burned during the raid by its own members, or thoroughly cleared, with all members under lock and key. As for the mysterious man, we have no eyewitnesses to him at all after the night of Rachel Belkin's death, and he may very well have perished in the New York Temple along with hundreds of others during the fire that lasted a full twenty-four hours before police could get it under control."
Another man, even more authoritarian and perhaps angry, took the microphone. "The Temple is neutralized; the Temple has been stopped; even as we speak, banking connections are being investigated and arrests have already been made in the financial communities of Paris, London, and New York."
There was a crash of static, of glittering white lights on the little screen. I shook the tiny television. The voice talked again, but this time it was about a terrorist bomb in South America, about drug lords, about trade sanctions against Japan. I put down the little thing. I turned it off. I might have cruised a while for another channel, but I had had enough.
I coughed a couple of times, caught off guard by how deep the cough sounded and by how much it hurt me, and then I tried to remember: Rachel Belkin. Rachel Belkin murdered. That had happened only days after Esther Belkin. Rachel Belkin in Miami. Murdered.
Twins. I remembered the picture Azriel had shown to me-the Hasid with the beard and locks and the silk hat.
From some giant filing system in my mind it came to me that Rachel Belkin had been the socialite wife of Gregory, a conspicuous critic of his Temple, and the only time I had even noticed the woman's name, reputation, or existence is when I'd caught a fragment of the funeral of Esther. And the cameras had followed her mother to a black car, voices clamoring for her opinions. Had Belkin's enemies killed her daughter? Was it a Middle Eastern terrorist plot?
A wave of dizziness came over me. It threatened to get worse. I put down the television and went back to the bed. I lay down. I was tired and thirsty. I covered up, then sat up enough to drink more of the water. I drank it and drank it and drank it and then lay back and I thought.
What seemed real was not the television set and its cryptic reports.
What seemed real was this room, and the way the fire danced, and that he had been here. And what seemed real was the image of the cauldron filled with boiling liquid and the unspeakable, unimaginable idea of being cast into such a thing. Cast into boiling liquid. I closed my eyes.
Then I heard him singing again:
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion."
I heard myself singing it.
"Come back, Azriel, come back! Tell me what else happened!" I said, and then I slept.
The sound of the door opening woke me. It was completely dark outside now, and it was deliciously warm in the room. All the chill was gone out of my bones.
I saw a figure standing by the hearth looking down at the flames. I let out a little cry before I could catch myself. Not exactly manly or courageous.
But a steam rose from the figure, or a mist, and the figure appeared to be Gregory Belkin, to have that man's head at least and hair, and then to be shifting back into the massive curls of Azriel, and Azriel's scowl. Another attempt was made. A putrid smell filled the room, as foul as the smell in a morgue. Then it grew faint.
Azriel, restored to himself, was there, with his back to me. He spread out his arms and he said something that was probably Sumerian but I don't know. He called for something, and the something was a sweet fragrance.
I blinked. I could see rose petals in the air. I felt them fall on my face. The morgue smell was gone.
Before the fire, he stretched out his arms again and he changed; it was a pale image of Gregory Belkin; it flickered, and at once his own form swallowed it. And he let down his arms with a sigh.
I climbed out of bed and went to the tape recorder.
"May I turn it on?" I said.
I