Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel Page A

was only a backwater moment in an incomprehensible universe.
    He walked down the white stone street of the lower market, through crowds of pilgrims, priests, traders, thieves, anchorites. Jews, Greeks, Romans. A line of chanting Levites in white robes filed upward to the Temple. The smoke of the evening offering would soon rise. He passed a tailor, a worker in brass and copper, a shoemaker's shop. The shoemaker knelt before a low table in the shade of his wooden awning, pounding a piece of leather, a brass mortar in his deft hands. A letter writer with a reed pen stuck behind his ear crouched over an old-fashioned portable computer. Behind him a boy, no doubt his son, practiced writing Hebrew characters with a second reed pen.
    Outside the entrance to the Hippodrome a couple of Greek touts were taking bets on that night's baseball game between Jerusalem and Capernaum. Halam paid five asses for a ticket and headed through the turnstile. The Jerusalem squad was pathetic, the Capernaum team not much better. The players were all captives taken in war, slaves, or criminals, with a couple of impoverished freemen, coached by a retired major leaguer hired by the Saltimbanque Corporation's Cultural Improvement Office. The historicals were miserably awkward batters. The concept of the curve ball was beyond them. The heat vibrating off the artificial turf turned day games into an oven, and quite regularly somebody had to be hauled off the outfield in a dead faint. Now that the lights had been installed most games were played in the evenings. Since devout Jews would not go near such sports, let alone bet, the crowds were mostly Romans, Greeks and Syrians, but that didn't keep the Pharisees from protesting the corruption it was causing.
    It was probably a bad idea to try to introduce a modern sport into ancient Judaea, the brainchild of some PR flack with a newly minted social engineering degree who didn't bother to learn about the people he was trying to persuade. Or maybe the company wanted to cause friction, as an excuse to continue military rule.
    Halam bought a basket of fried locusts from a vendor and found his seat. His contact had not arrived, so he sat watching as the ground crew laid down the chalk around the batter's box. Behind the home team's dugout, just opposite first base, Pilate and his son were settling into their reserved box. The Roman Prefect had taken to baseball and was a regular at most home games. His son wore an absurdly large Jerusalem Scholars cap, under which his ears stuck out like two open doors on a cab.
    The game started and right away the Scholars fell behind. The pitcher walked the first two batters. The next hitter skidded a single into right center which the center fielder kicked to the wall; in the ensuing Marx Brothers routine between him and the right fielder both runners scored. The batter ended up on third. The crowd did not seem to mind, cheering every mishap wildly.
    In the top of the third, score 6-2 Capernaum, a man sat down next to Halam.
    "When we drive you invaders away we will have this place torn down."
    "It's just a game, Simon," Halam said. "Save your indignation for something that matters."
    Above the walls of the stadium, up on Herod's magnificent platform, the wall of the temple gleamed gold beneath a purple sky. "When I was a boy," Simon said, "I dreamed of escaping Galilee for Jerusalem. I longed to become a Levite, have my lot chosen to be the one, once in my life, to make the offering of incense. To walk before the great temple, to be vouchsafed a single glimpse of the Holy of Holies. That was before I saw the palaces the Sadducees built for themselves with the money collected from the poor."
    "Money draws corruption. You shouldn't expect otherwise. That's the way the world works."
    "Judaism is about purity."
    "You're not going to get rid of your conquerors by being pure."
    Simon spat onto the stone bench. "I don't know why I speak with you."
    "You speak with me because I get you