Baal

Chapter 15

WHILE HE WAS PACKING Virga came across the copy of Time magazine that had arrived in the mail some days before. He had read it cover to cover, concentrating on the article that had first attracted his interest. Now he took the magazine and walked through the gray-carpeted hallway into his study. He switched on the lights and sat at his desk to reread the article because in the space of a few days it had become more meaningful than he could have imagined.
It was under the heading Religion. Two words, in the magazine's bold typeface, began the article: The Messiah? There was a picture of ragged men and women huddled around a fire, leering and gesturing toward the camera. And another picture, enlarged and very grainy, showed a figure standing on the balcony of a great turreted palace. The caption read "Baal."
Virga reached for a pipe from the rack on his desk and lit it thoughtfully. The article contained a piecemeal picture of the swarm of people who had flooded into Kuwait and gathered at a religious shrine erected in the desert. The correspondent had evidently been able to work only with secondhand sources and thus the philosophy of the "Baalism movement" was not clear; the article indicated that "Baalism" sought to reinstate individual power. But the primary figure, this mysterious man who called himself Baal, granted no interviews and gave out no public relations material. Kuwait City and its surrounding desert villages, said the article, "are on the verge of an uncontained religious hysteria due to the very presence of this man, whom some recognize as the living Muhammad, the chosen one, the Messiah." Virga closed the magazine and pushed it across the desk.
He sat motionless. This was certainly a madman who had taken the name of an ancient Canaanite god of sexuality and sacrifice. But why? For what purpose? The worship of Baal, some fifteen hundred years before Christ, involved extravagant and loathsome orgies, child sacrifice, and the transformation of the temple into a house of sodomy and prostitution. It was unbelievable to Virga that any sane man should hope to identify himself with a figure whom Jehovah had ordered banished from the land of Canaan. Under the worship of Baal, primarily a god of fertility, Canaan became a marketplace of flesh and savagery; Virga knew that archaeologists who dug the ruined Canaanite cities at Hazor and Megiddo found abominations shocking to a modern world: skeletons of infants stuffed into rude earthen jars for sacrificial burial, idols with warriorlike features and hugely exaggerated sexual organs. There were other times and places, as well, in which the name Baal had surfaced: about three thousand years before Christ he was the "storm-god" of the Amorites; in the sixteenth century, having fallen from grace by the hand of Jehovah so long before, he preferred to cast his lot with the darker fates and was identified by demonologist Jean Wier as a demon prince with three heads: of a man, a toad, and a cat.
And this man, this "Baal," was the one whom Naughton had gone to find.
Judith Naughton had telephoned Virga one afternoon at his office.
"I was wondering," she said calmly, "if you had heard anything from Donald in the last week or so?"
"No, I haven't," said Virga. "I expected him to be back by now. He isn't?"
"No."
Virga waited for her to say something more. When she didn't he said, uncomfortably, "Well, he's probably all wrapped up in his project. You know how we so-called men of learning act like children when we're working. We lose all sense of time. By the way, wasn't Timmy's birthday last week? What is he now? Seven?"
"Yes. Seven. Donald bought him a present before he left."
"Oh. Anyway, I really expected to hear more from Donald by now. I received a few letters, just general information on how he was progressing. But nothing in the last three weeks. Actually I need him back to give me an idea of the content of his courses for next semester. Any notion when he's returning?"
"No," she said. Virga heard her suddenly choke.
"Judith?" he asked. "Is anything wrong?"
And when he met her at lunch the following afternoon he noticed her trembling hands and the swollen pouches beneath her eyes. He ordered a drink for her and said, "Now. You haven't told me what the problem is. Here I am doing my best to cheer you and you won't give me an inch." He smiled gently. "I don't understand the modern woman. I suppose I should give up trying."
She returned his smile, awkwardly, and Virga saw that she was extremely disturbed. He leaned forward slightly and said, "I'd like to help you if I can."
Judith looked into her drink; Virga knew she was deliberately avoiding his gaze. She toyed with the stem of the glass and said, "I did receive a letter from Donald. A week or so ago. I didn't know what to do; I didn't know whom to talk to. I thought maybe it was some kind of joke or something; I don't know what I thought." She reached into her handbag. The letter was folded and refolded and bore the stains of a long journey. She slid it across the table to Virga. "Here," she said.
He opened the envelope and carefully unfolded a piece of tattered paper. There was only one word on it, scribbled in an almost illegible handwriting. The word Goodbye.
Virga said, "This isn't Donald's handwriting. He didn't send this."
"Yes," she said. "I recognize the handwriting except it's distorted and hurried." She put a hand to her face. "I don't know what I've done." She began to tremble and caught back a sob.
"Did he tell you where he was staying?"
"Yes. I called them but they told me he'd left all his clothes and suitcases and just... gone." She looked up, suddenly pleading with him. "We never had any trouble. Honestly. Just, you know, arguments over little things. But never anything to make him just decide to leave me with no warning. This is not like him..." She dropped her eyes, ashamed at having dragged him into this. "What am I going to do?"
Virga sat with his hands folded beneath his chin. The Time magazine lay on the desk beside him. Judith's eyes, lost and hopeless, had forced his decision. He had discussed with Dr. Landon the possibilities of his assuming the duties of department head for a week or so; he had made his airline connections and hotel reservations in advance.
Judith had been correct; such an action was not in line with Naughton's cool, restrained character. And Virga remembered the handwriting, like the mad scratching of an animal's claw on paper. And now this... this madman who called himself Baal and who was perhaps responsible, directly or indirectly, for Naughton's letter. He felt the heat of challenge course through his blood. A madman, a false messiah who had encouraged thousands to pay homage to him there on the desert. A man of reason and intelligence suddenly throwing away with a scrawled word his wife, his work, his life. Was there a connection? Virga stood up, filled with new resolve, and went back to his bedroom to finish packing.
On the following day Virga was flying into the rising sun in a TWA Boeing bound for Lisbon, still hours away. From there would be a connection to Cairo, then across the jutting triangle of Saudi Arabia to Kuwait. He drank two scotches and tried to concentrate on The God-Myths, a book he had brought along, to sharpen his recall of the pre-Christ Canaan fertility rites and the significance of the warrior-god Baal. Baal, as he'd remembered from his own education on pre-Christ cults, was vanquished from the land by Jehovah, in that period of history called Yahweh. From that time the people of Yahweh grew to despise the memory of Baal.
It interested Virga how the god Baal had become the demon Baal. Perhaps it was only man's memory, reacting to the vile orgies and sacrifices of children performed in Baal's temple; perhaps it was the memory of Yahweh's destruction of Canaan, passed down from mouth to mouth over tribal campfires and finally depicted in Joshua in the Old Testament. But a question haunted him: was Baal only a myth? If Jehovah was a true entity, as Virga believed, then what about the minor gods, like Baal and Seth, Mot and Mithras? But in any event, this man had taken the name Baal for a purpose and Virga was intrigued to find out why.
He was unprepared for the pandemonium at Kuwait's International Airport. Bone-weary and afflicted with jet lag, he took his suitcases and hailed a taxi to get away as soon as possible from the crush of journalists with their cameras and sound rigs. On the highway into the city the sun shimmered in hot waves that rolled and broke across the barren flats. He had visited the Middle East many times before and was well-versed in both customs and language; he found always that the land looked either very old or very new, either ravaged by time or just awakening from a sleep that had spanned the centuries. He reached into his coat and from a tube spread a balm over his forehead and the bridge of his nose to prevent sunburn. The highway seemed congested with all manner of vehicles from limousine on down, and Virga saw scattered accidents here and there. On each side of the highway wrecked and abandoned car hulks had been set afire. In the distance the towers of the city undulated in the heat and, south of them, smoke rose up to the sky in a thousand dark banners. Virga knew it was the encampment Naughton had described.
As they neared the city Virga saw that ramshackle tenements had been constructed to handle an overflow of people. Prefabricated houses and goatskin tents simmered side by side on the flat landscape. And in the sky there was always a slow whirl of smoke that at times drifted across the concrete and made the driver skitter into the sand to avoid heaps of rotting food and bundles of clothing.
In the city Virga felt he had finally caught up with the war; he was appalled. Groups of angry-eyed beggars heaved stones through car windows and uniformed Kuwaiti police officers, armed with revolvers and batons, surged into them to force them away from the roadway. The beggars rocked parked automobiles back and forth, flipped them over on their sides. Fires burned through tenement sections; in the midst of the city several buildings had been set afire. Twice Virga's driver cursed and swerved to miss a body sprawled in the car's path.
The driver put his foot to the floor and roared through a group of Arabs expecting him to slow. They leaped back, cursing, and one of them threw a stone that glanced off the fender. Virga knew that he had entered the land of the insane. Here the insanity was brother to the smoke. Blown by the wind off the gulf, it was everywhere, and he was fearful that if he inhaled it too deeply it would bring on madness.
They arrived at his hotel. Virga took his suitcases in through the shattered glass doors of the lobby. Fragments glittered on the rich dark carpets. One wall, he noted, was punctured by two neat round bulletholes.
The Kuwaiti at the reception desk, a young man in a cream-colored suit, rang for a boy to carry the cases. "Dr. Virga, yes? It's good you reserved a suite. The Americans have landed, yes?"
"I was unaware there was a war on," he said, motioning to the smashed windows.
"Last night the scum overflowed the streets. The Holiday Inn and the Hilton were set afire. Nothing left now but hulks. There's not much we can do."
"I see the police are out."
"They have to be," said the Kuwaiti, shrugging. "If they weren't we'd have no order at all. And three-fourths of the officers have deserted their jobs. Military units are stationed in the city and there are curfews, but there's not much that can be done to stop the property destruction. The jails and hospitals are crowded. What can be done with these people? I've even started carrying a gun."
Virga looked around the lobby. It was deserted. Chairs were overturned, mirrors broken, ornamental pottery ground into bits. A gold and green tapestry had been ripped down from the ceiling. A small fountain, now drained of water, was filled with glass.
"I apologize for the condition of our vestibule," the man said. "Too many stones and no one able to control these people."
"No," Virga said, "that's all right. I understand."
"You have come, of course," he said, "to seek Baal?"
Virga raised his brow. Beside him a slim young man bent to pick up his suitcases.
"All the rest of them have. The airport has been jammed; the highways are almost impassable. I understand the airport will be closed by military order soon. They've come here from all over: Greece, Italy, Spain. The wealthy ones arrived early. They moored their yachts in the harbor or brought their own aircraft; the poor got here anyway they could. Of course no one stays in the city. They're all out... there."
"Have you seen this man yourself?" Virga asked.
"Oh no. Not myself. But I know people who have. And of course the place is packed with journalists seeking interviews."
Virga reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and unfolded the Time magazine page with its photograph of the man standing on a balcony. "Do you know this place?"
The Kuwaiti leaned over and looked at it carefully. In the far distance Virga heard gunfire that seemed to go on and on, then stopped with disturbing suddenness. The man said, "In the ancient section. The estate of Haiber Talat Musallim. You've heard of him?"
"No."
"Ah. The new prophet and disciple of Baal. I'm surprised at this photograph. I didn't know the sentries allowed cameras near the walls." He looked up from the photograph. "So. You are here to seek him."
Virga said, "Yes," and took the key he was offered. "And now I want to take a hot bath and wash this smell of smoke off me."
"The flow of water is erratic," the man called. "Something's wrong with the pipes."
Virga followed the young man across the lobby to the elevators. He stopped suddenly, staring at a dark wide crust of blood that spread out in a circle on the smooth marble floor. The young man carrying the suitcases looked back at him incuriously.
"Please forgive us," said the Kuwaiti behind the reception desk. "We haven't been able to be as clean as we would like. I was forced to shoot a man last night. That is where he bled to death."
Virga looked up. "Bled to death?"
"There was no need to call an ambulance. As I told you, the hospitals are crowded." Virga blinked, suddenly sick to his stomach. "If it offends you, we'll clean it up," the man said. Behind Virga the elevator doors opened.