The Last Ember (24 page)

“
Ancient history?
Remember the teaching of my grandfather, the grand mufti, peace be upon him.” Salah ad-Din’s eyes rose to meet the picture.
“Archaeology is politics.”
A moment of reverential silence passed. “Did my grandfather think it was ancient history when he excavated sixty years ago?”

“Your grandfather is the only reason the al-Quds fund has continued to finance your efforts outside Jerusalem.” Another slow sip of tea, his eyes not leaving Salah ad-Din’s. “Or have you forgotten how the United States Congress almost passed a law to withhold financing from the Palestinian Authority unless we halted our projects beneath the Mount?” There was a stack of paper in front of him, and he adjusted his glasses to read it more clearly. “U.S.C. Bill H.R. 2566. Do you remember how it took the careful strategy of our al-Quds fund’s business interests to silently mobilize the oil lobbies to put out that fire?”

“I cannot stop my excavations yet,” Salah ad-Din said. “I promised the grand mufti I would find it.”

“Allah will forgive your promise.”

“Allah is not my concern!” Salah ad-Din said, his voice strengthening. He stood up from his chair.

The door opened and the guard looked at the
mutwali
, who nodded paternally.
All is well.

“You did not see my grandfather at his end in Beirut,” Salah ad-Din said, stepping toward the window. “You did not hold his hand as he kneeled on the prayer carpet of the Al-Omari Mosque, watching the men assemble in the shadows. He knew who they were. The same Israelis who captured Eichmann in Argentina had come for him in Beirut. You did not see him remove a small cyanide pill from the binder of his Quran. He kept it close in case they ever found him.” Salah ad-Din’s tone softened. “You did not watch him slip it in his mouth and hold his hand as he fell onto his side, writhing on the floor. ‘Do not make Titus’s mistake,’ he told me.” Salah ad-Din’s eyes rose to the picture above him.

“Do you know why your grandfather conducted his search with such passion? He believed the lamp was still
aflame
. He believed that the Romans failed to wipe out the Jews because Titus did not extinguish it, because he was betrayed and stole an ordinary fire while the authentic flame was squirreled to safety. He sought to finish the task Titus could not complete. Is that your aim, Salah ad-Din?” The
mutwali
removed his glasses, revealing eerie pale blue eyes. “Perhaps you have your grandfather’s religious passion, after all?”

“The object is a historical symbol more powerful than any religious myth,” Salah ad-Din said. “You know the historical claims that would follow if others find it. It would endanger the Waqf’s control of the Mount overnight.”

“Your expert from Rome, Professor Cianari, might have found it, but . . .” The
mutwali
held a strange, admiring gaze that finished the thought,
but you apparently have your grandfather’s temper, too
.

Salah ad-Din looked down and noticed a small spattering of the professor’s blood on the cuff of his shirt.

“I will have additional expertise,” Salah ad-Din said. “Ramat Mansour.”

“Your cousin?” the
mutwali
said.

“Ramat Mansour is more knowledgeable about the Mount than any professor.”

“Except your cousin will not assist your efforts. He opposes your activities beneath the Mount.”

“For this effort he will assist me,” Salah ad-Din said. “I will see to it.”

“You have until the
sabah
,” the
mutwali
said, lowering his gaze to his tea.

Dawn
.

“I am sorry, Salah ad-Din,” he continued. “I cannot allow—” But the
mutwali
did not finish. When he looked up he saw that the young man was no longer standing by the window. As the consummate sign of disrespect, while the
mutwali
was mid-sentence, Salah ad-Din had walked out, leaving the door wide open.

A
n ancient dead woman,” Chandler said. “Floating in a column. Congratulations, Aurelius, we’re even. Now I think you’ve lost it. And have you any idea how much it takes for me to say that? A hell of a lot.” He turned to Emili. “I mean, is it even possible? That level of preservation after two thousand years?”

“Actually, it is,” Emili said. “In 2002, a highway construction team in eastern China uncovered a fluid-filled coffin, and a corpse just as well preserved was floating inside. Nearly perfect, except for the muscle tissue that got discolored from the alkaline fluid.”

“This old?” Chandler said.

“Older. A queen of the Han Dynasty. Early first century. I bet she has this young woman’s radio carbon numbers beat by fifty years.”

“Fine”—Chandler tilted his head back—“let’s say she’s that old, Aurelius, what does she tell us?”

“The inscription tattooed around her navel indicates a location,” Jonathan said.

“‘Phere Nike Umbilicus Orbis Terrarum,’”
Jonathan read.

“What does it mean?” Emili said.

“Well,
phere
or
pheros
refers to someone who carries or bears something, like phos
pheros
, ‘a stone that bears light,’” Jonathan said, “or Christopher, as in ‘bearer of Christ.’
Nike
, of course, means ‘victory,’
umbilicus
, as you might expect, means ‘navel,’ and
orbis terrarum
means ‘sphere of the world.’”

“Navel of the world.” Chandler stood up suddenly.

“Wait,” Emili challenged. “It says
‘orbis terrarum,’
which means a round earth. That means this inscription couldn’t have been written in the first century. The ancient scientific consensus was that the world was
flat
.”

“But it wasn’t the consensus among the ancient priests of Jerusalem,” Chandler said slowly, thinking aloud. “The Kabbalists in Jerusalem knew a great deal of astronomy. They correctly modeled the solar system two thousand years before the European philosophers realized the earth was round. In fact, it’s no coincidence that the six branches of the menorah make completely round orbits around a central fiery object. For the ancient mystics, the menorah represented the solar system, each branch embodying the revolution of visible planets around a central light, the sun.” Chandler shrugged. “The Church may have tried to lop off Galileo’s head for suggesting a heliocentric view, but Jerusalem’s priests millennia before had been quietly using the menorah’s symbolism to understand a more accurate depiction of the planetary alignment. The lamp’s central light, a
shamash
, even uses the same Hebraic letters as
shemesh
, meaning ‘sun.’ ”

“Chandler’s right, Emili,” Jonathan said. “Josephus himself says, ‘The seven lamps upon the sacred candlestick refer to the course of the planets. ’ Anyone for whom this tattoo’s message was intended knew—at the very least—that the earth was round.”

“Center of the world?” Emili said. “Still doesn’t exactly narrow it down, does it?”

“Oh, yes it does,” Chandler said, grinning. “Ancient cosmology viewed Jerusalem as the geographical center of the world, and the Temple Mount as the center of Jerusalem.”

“Of the entire world?” Emili said.

“ ‘As the land of Israel is the navel of the world,’ ” Chandler recited from memory, his eyes obligatorily closed for effect, “ ‘ Jerusalem is in the center of the land of Israel, and the sanctuary is the center of Jerusalem.’ ” He turned to Jonathan. “Even through medieval times, cartographers portrayed the continents as cloverleafs and the Temple Mount in the center of the earth.”

Emili looked suddenly skeptical. “But how do we know this woman is even connected to any of this? Maybe she was just—”

“Just what?” Chandler said, pointing at the tattoo. “Some ancient hipster, and ‘navel of the world’ was her favorite ancient punk band?”

Emili ignored him. “Jonathan, this woman may not even have been from the
same century
. Now you’re the one making assumptions.”

“No assumptions here at all,” Jonathan said. He pointed at the corpse’s abdomen in the photograph. “Look at the length of those five curved rows of gashes across the torso. They look like—”

“Claw marks,” Emili whispered.

“Yes,” Jonathan said, “and big ones, too. Perhaps a tiger. An urban woman this refined wasn’t killed in the wild. She was most likely
damnata ad bestias
.”

“Condemned to the beasts,” Emili translated.

“Right, and most likely for treason. We know Titus reserved his tigers for traitors because he felt their calculated crime merited an executioner that stalked its prey.”

“So you think she was a member of Josephus’s network, one of the prisoners executed in the Colosseum?”

“Yes, and I think we can tell
who
she was.” Jonathan looked up at Chandler. “Even without the Interpol database.” He pointed at the inscription. “They’ve written her name on her.”

“Her name?” Chandler leaned over the image. “I don’t see a ‘Hello, my name is . . .’ sticker.”

“Look at the inscription, it’s a mere combination cipher.”

“As in combining two words,” Chandler said.

“Right, the words
phere
and
nike
mean ‘bearer of victory,’ referring to whoever managed to escape from the Temple with the menorah. But in combining those words we suddenly have a Greek name,
Pherenike
, which in the Macedonian dialect was written
Bherenike
.”

“Berenice,” Emili said softly, allowing the name to echo in her head
.

“Titus’s mistress and the last princess of Jerusalem. If her real name even was Berenice,” Jonathan said. “Given its double meaning, Josephus may be revealing his plot subtly in his work, so as to avoid Roman censors, and he may—again—be using a pseudonym here to do it. Just as he gave the name Aliterius to that so-called stage actor so we could understand his true role as Jerusalem’s spy in Nero’s court, Josephus may have done the same with Titus’s mistress, giving her a name that connotes her true role as a conspirator.
Bheronike,
a ‘bearer of victory’ who helped Josephus convey the menorah to safety after Jerusalem’s sack.”

“But the problem remains,” Chandler said, “that even if her tattoo tells us
how
Josephus escaped through the Holy of Holies with the menorah, there’s no record of where it went.”

“That’s true,” Jonathan agreed. “The terms are too vague to be an archaeological guide. The slaves of Jerusalem would have needed to leave us a detailed map of first-century Jerusalem.”

Across the table, Emili was unexpectedly smiling.

“And I think I know where it is,” she said.

C
omandante Profeta had just returned to his sixth-floor office at the Command. His trip to Dulling and Pierce had been more informative than he expected. A junior officer waited silently beside his desk as the
comandante
signed a series of Interpol requests, seeking information about the Geneva corporation that had loaned the Forma Urbis fragments to the Capitoline Museum. After receiving the final page, the junior officer bolted out of the room, nearly colliding with a paunchy, middle-aged man whom Profeta recognized at once.

Dr. Stanoje Odalovi, Rome’s deputy city coroner.

“Stanoje, come in,” Profeta said.

Profeta had known Odalovi since he joined the coroner’s office as a slim Kosovar émigré with a black bushy mustache, a license in pathology from a bombed-out medical school in Prishtina, and no employment papers. In the twenty years since, Profeta had worked regularly with Dr. Odalovi—more frequently now, as the antiquities trade had turned lethal. But Profeta had never seen the man this agitated.

“
Comandante
, it’s a little early for a
pesce d’aprile
,” Dr. Odalovi said, referring to an Italian April Fool’s Day joke.

Dr. Odalovi opened the butterfly tabs of a large manila envelope and removed the photograph of the female corpse Profeta’s men discovered in the warehouse raid.

“She is”—Dr. Odalovi coughed nervously—“older than we thought.”

“How much older?”

“Well, you can tell the people in Homicide to stop their investigation,” he said. “Let’s just say the statute of limitations has run out on this one.”

“I’m not following, Stanoje.” Profeta took off his glasses.

“We just received the preliminary dating results from liquid scintillation analysis. The follicle sample you gave me was . . .” Dr. Odalovi shifted. “First century A.D. What you saw was no hoax, Jacopo. She was ancient.”

Profeta stood up from his chair and Dr. Odalovi’s eyes followed him. He walked toward the window, looking more contemplative than surprised.

“And the liquid she was in?”

“A perfect ancient embalming recipe. Cedar oil, juniper, wood tar. Each organic component dated to the same period.”

“Cause of death?” Profeta asked.

Dr. Odalovi was surprised to hear the
comandante
ask a routine question as he would for a modern victim.

“Cause of death? I just told you she was from—”

“I heard your analysis, Stanoje. Do you have a cause of death?”

Dr. Odalovi nodded and removed another slide from the manila folder.

“In the lock of hair you sent to my laboratory there was a strand that was . . .
different
. It wasn’t human.”

“What do you mean, different?”

“It was not human.”

“Not human?”

Dr. Odalovi handed Profeta an enlarged slide from the folder.

“This is a one-hundred-times-magnified picture of a single strand. Do you see those petal-like pattern rosettes? Those are from a large spotted animal. A jaguar or leopard.”

Profeta inspected the picture.

“From the gashes across the torso, and the sand crystals present in the hair, I’d say the cause and place of her death is clear,” Stanoje Odalovisaid, using the coroner’s logic that had become second nature. “This woman was mauled to death in the sand.”