The Last Ember (19 page)

“A dragon,” Chandler confirmed, “which we all know is a
pagan
symbol that made it impossible for this to have been the
original
menorah. And scholars have long puzzled over why Josephus’s detailed passages about the pillage of the Temple do not tell us about the capture of the sacred menorah.” Chandler sat back down, clasping his hands together. “Perhaps that’s because Josephus is telling us that the menorah was not captured at all.”

“You’re saying the Romans stole a fake, then,” Emili said. “That the menorah on the Arch of Titus is a copy?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Talmudic sources indicate the branches of the golden lamp were not necessarily curved, as illustrated on the Arch of Titus’s relief, but rather straight and diagonal—an inaccuracy that may have lived on in nearly all subsequent renditions of the relic. Moreover, the menorah on the arch isn’t
tall
enough. The priest tending the flame had to ascend three large steps to light its lamps.”

Emili leaned forward, her eyes riveted on Chandler. “So all the conquerors who fought for this relic for a thousand years—Titus, who sacked Jerusalem, the Vandals, who sacked Rome, the Byzantines, who sacked Carthage, the Crusaders, who sacked Constantinople—all made the same error?”

Chandler nodded as he picked up the lock on his desk. “The menorah stolen from Jerusalem two thousand years ago wasn’t the original in the first place,” he said. “
That
, my friends, was Titus’s mistake.” At that, the rusted padlock popped open.

S
itting in the conference room adjacent to the UN director’s office, Profeta lowered into his lap the UN investigation report of Dr. Sharif Lebag’s death in Jerusalem the previous year. Profeta finished reading and stood up from the vinyl conference room chair.

“So two years ago UNESCO summoned Dr. Travia’s team to investigate reports of illegal excavation beneath the Temple Mount. She stumbled into a research laboratory beneath Jerusalem where—to her amazement—fragments of Forma Urbis were being closely examined with sophisticated equipment. Various manuscript pages of Josephus papered the walls, but she never learned why.”

Olivier replied with a dignified nod.

“And now the same fragments of the Forma Urbis have resurfaced, here in Rome. The Cultural Ministry is happy to use her testimony to debunk the artifact’s provenance, but she has a different motivation altogether—to unlock the archaeological mystery of these pieces.”

“
If
there is a mystery,
Comandante
.”

“An illicit excavation discovered beneath the Colosseum at the exact location etched on these fragments? Sounds like a mystery to me, Director.” Profeta paced, thinking. “Dr. Olivier, are you familiar with the al-Quds fund?”

“Yes, of course. Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem. The fund supports cultural projects in the Old City.”

“What sort of cultural projects?”

“Mainly the administration of the Temple Mount’s two religious shrines, the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Although the Mount is a World Heritage Site, the financial support by al-Quds allows the administering Islamic trust known as the Waqf Authority to operate without funds from our organization, an arrangement that presents its share of problems, I assure you.”

“Because your organization holds no supervisory role over the site?”

“Precisely,” the director said. “The Waqf has denied all UN attempts to investigate alleged construction beneath the Temple Mount for a decade.”

“Including Dr. Travia’s requests?”

The director nodded. “At this point, the Waqf regime just cites precedent. Non-Muslims have been denied access beneath the Mount for more than one hundred fifty years.

“As usual, though, Dr. Travia has been persistent. Last year she lobbied the General Assembly to suspend cultural moneys to the Waqf until all unauthorized excavation and construction stops beneath the Temple Mount, but the motion was easily defeated by the Arab nations voting as a bloc. Since Dr. Lebag’s death, she has tried to persuade the World Heritage Committee to open a full investigation of their activities.”

“She was scheduled to present at the conference tomorrow?” Profeta wrote again in his notepad. The director waited to answer, respectfully observing his investigator’s method.

“No, she is not scheduled to present. Her evidence was insufficient to make a case for intervention on the Temple Mount.”

“Isn’t that a decision for the World Heritage Committee to make?” Profeta looked up.

“We can only use the committee’s time to address a few sites across the world,
Comandante
. Our office’s teams in China and Malaysia have concrete evidence of irreparable damage to Buddhist shrines. Because of the Waqf’s lack of cooperation in Jerusalem, Dr. Travia’s research failed to identify even a single illegal excavation beneath the Mount. Indeed, it makes Dr. Lebag’s loss all the more painful.”

“The remains of Dr. Lebag,” he said. “They were found?”

“There was a sample of skull tissue from the crime scene. Two weeks later in Gaza”—the director lapsed into a solemn silence—“his body was found burned beyond recognition.”

“DNA?”

The director nodded. “I worked with the local authorities’ investigation directly.”

Profeta detected a wound still open. Dr. Travia was not the only one who felt responsible for Dr. Lebag’s death.

Regaining her composure, the director slipped back into character. “
Comandante
, as soon as our office hears from Dr. Travia we will notify your department immediately.”

“Of course, and thank you, Director.” Profeta stood up to leave. “One more question, Director.”

“Please,
Comandante
.”

“If an illicit excavation is burrowing beneath the Temple Mount, as Dr. Travia suggests, what help to them is a fragment of the Forma Urbis? Why research an ancient map of
Rome
?”

“That is precisely the question Dr. Travia hopes to answer.”

Brandisi appeared in the doorway. “
Comandante
, I have interviewed the lawyer from this morning’s trial, Maurizio Fiorello. The Forma Urbis fragments were loaned to the museum anonymously. The anonymous donors are being represented by”—Brandisi looked at the spiral notepad in his hand—“Dulling and Pierce.”

“Tell them to expect us,” Profeta said.

E
mili looked out the window, dazed.

“That’s why Salah ad-Din is digging here,” she said. “Because there is information in Rome that he cannot find beneath the Mount. Jon, you have no idea how”—she searched for the English word—“
vast
all this is.”

“Vast?” Chandler asked eagerly.

“When Sharif and I were in Jerusalem, his informants told us that Salah ad-Din was searching for a relic. It would make perfect sense that it’s the menorah. If war prisoners from Jerusalem hid the menorah, and left messages in Rome about its location, Salah ad-Din’s team would have to dig here first to learn where it was.”

“Emili, have you any idea the kind of operation it would have taken to have accomplished what Chandler is suggesting? Eight feet of solid gold smuggled out of the Temple Mount on the eve of Jerusalem’s destruction? None of the names we saw beneath the Colosseum had the kind of access it would have taken to smuggle the menorah out from under Titus’s siege. Berenice infiltrated the court too late, seducing Titus after the destruction. Clemens, Aliterius, and Epaphroditus never left Rome during the conflict. None of them knew the exact moment of Titus’s invasion of the Temple’s Holy of Holies.”

“Except Josephus,” Emili rebutted. “You said yourself he was inside General Titus’s tent. He could have used Roman military information to learn perimeter weaknesses in their siege, all to smuggle out the one treasure sought by countless empires before Rome. It makes perfect sense of your theory, Jon. After the war, Josephus developed a network to hide the menorah in Jerusalem, and with that line beneath the Colosseum may have been trying to tell someone where.”

“There must be another message in the Domus Aurea,” Chandler said, his eyes returning to the inscription in the digital camera’s view finder. “The inscription beneath the Colosseum singled out Nero’s buried palace for a reason. We can get maps of that ruin from the academy library.”

“The academy library?”
Jonathan threw his hands up. “Okay, that about does it for me. This isn’t graduate school!” He grabbed his dust-covered suit jacket from the chair.

“Seven years ago, you spent day and night researching Josephus to find out why he would have forsaken his reputation for all of time,” Emili said. “Down there in the Colosseum, we may have finally found the answer, and you are going to walk away?”

Jonathan put his coat under his arm. “In case you’ve forgotten, I already ruined one career seven years ago. I don’t intend to do it again.” His BlackBerry rattled, and he looked down. It was a message from Mildren, marked “Urgent.”

“What is it?” Emili said.

“The firm. A meeting.”

“A meeting?” Chandler looked at Jonathan incredulously. “We’re talking about the most precious war treasure of the Roman world, and you’re talking about a meeting?”

“I am not going to jeopardize my entire career at the firm on the basis of some hunch. They may need me at the meeting,” Jonathan said, heading toward the library’s door. He looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty a.m. I have been in Rome for less than twelve hours. I spent this morning in court as a lawyer and, in the hour since then, have narrowly escaped an
explosion
in the Colosseum and had to duck down side alleys to avoid the police. That’s quite enough for one day.” He turned to Emili. “Go to the carabinieri. They can help you sort this out.”

“Like they helped you seven years ago?” Emili shot back. “They blamed you for Gianpaolo’s accident the minute they got you in that office. And you shouldered the blame without a single protest.”

Her directness stunned Jonathan. He remembered sitting in a small interrogation room inside the embassy’s compound on the Via Veneto hours after the catacomb collapsed. A nameless, plainclothed American officer and an equally mysterious Italian counterpart drilled him with questions, their polite tone alternating with fits of rage alleging the accident had been his fault. He remembered feeling removed from his body, a spectator to his own silence. At dawn, the men escorted him to the academy, where his room was already packed up, his luggage waiting for him by the front gate. If only Emili knew why he accepted the academy’s terms forbidding him to speak with her before leaving. It was to protect her from being banished, just as he was.

“Okay, easy now,” Chandler said, sensing the depth of the accusation. He stepped between them. “The ol’ barrister just needs some time to think about this—”

“What I need is some kind of
evidence
,” Jonathan said, running a hand through his hair. “I mean, for God’s sake, I’m a lawyer now.”

“That’s your own fault,” Emili said.

Jonathan turned toward the door.

Emili stood on the other side of the room, not looking at him. The seven years had crept between them again, and Jonathan felt the permanence of what he was leaving behind.

“I won’t go to the carabinieri,” Jonathan said, “but I just can’t be a part of this. Not anymore.”

“C’mon, Jon,” Chandler said. “You can’t possibly turn back. This is your Rubicon, man.”

The Rubicon
. It was vintage Chandler. For any student of classics, the Rubicon was more than a river that served as a border for the ancient Roman Empire. Along its banks, in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar gathered his troops, and as in any heroic legend, faced his inner torment about whether to submit to the law or defy it.
Chandler’s right,
Jonathan thought. Not going to the meeting meant forging across his own Rubicon into a territory beyond his self-interest. He had only to throw his coat back on the armrest of the chair and help her. It was the heroic thing to do.

“You’re right, Chandler. This is my Rubicon,” Jonathan said, imagining himself, like Caesar, a general atop his horse with thousands of infantrymen waiting for him to sound the charge. But Jonathan knew there would be no charge. He pictured himself pulling his horse back from the water’s edge and, to the disappointment of countless troops, retreating without a word.

“Good luck to both of you,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

A
t the Hotel Exedra, Jonathan changed into the only other suit he had brought to Rome: a gray worsted-wool suit that he kept as a spare in his office closet in New York and that he luckily grabbed before his flight. He did not have time to shower, but the suit, his combed hair, and two overlapping Band-Aids on his left hand restored his physical appearance. He dabbed on some cheap aftershave he had gotten from a street kiosk along Via Pasquino, around the corner from the firm.

Returning to the calm of Dulling and Pierce’s palazzo had a hallucinatory quality, the aging secretaries at their baroque desks, the Italian businessmen smoking outside negotiating rooms along the palazzo’s second floor. One attorney directed two aristocratic-looking Italian women in large-brimmed hats, both carrying lapdogs, to a conference room. Jonathan recognized trusts and estates clients when he saw them, no matter the country.

On the landing of the palazzo’s staircase stood a statue of a young Hercules cleaning the stables of King Augeas. Jonathan thought back to his first years at Dulling and Pierce, when during months of document review he had to purge every memo from the desktops, laptops, and mobile devices of executive clients who had been indicted for every white-collar crime imaginable.
A young hero cleaning the mythical stables.
Jonathan, too, had cleaned the shit of the gods.