The Last Ember (30 page)

“Yes, one that would allow you the rare opportunity to preserve the Temple Mount platform, rather than destroy it,” Salah ad-Din said. He walked over to one of the display cases and unrolled a structural map of the Temple Mount over its glass.

“You are the best archaeological dig foreman in Jerusalem. I will require your assistance.”

“I am sorry, cousin,” Mansour said, turning to walk out of the gallery. “Digging some giant cistern to contain well water from the Zamzam in Mecca is not archaeology.”

“That little project is the Waqf’s, not mine.”

Little project?
Mansour thought.
The day laborers have probably removed thousands of tons of archaeologically rich soil.

“The work I am suggesting for you is strictly archaeological. I have discovered the ancient tunnel in Josephus,” Salah ad-Din said. “The one sought for a lifetime by your grandfather.”

Mansour stopped, but did not turn around.

“It runs from beneath the Foundation Stone to the Royal Cavern, but we must find where it continues. We thought it would extend directly across the cavern, following the path of an aqueduct, but our most recent excavation revealed just solid rock. Our archaeological expert is unavailable.
Buried
with work, I’m afraid. We need your expertise, cousin. Our grandfather, Haj Amin al-Husseini, dedicated his life to this.”

“My father forbade you from seeing the mufti’s research.”

“As boys, he forbade us. Times have changed, Ramat. The Waqf waited until your father died to remove the mufti’s research from the basement. Our grandfather researched for decades to locate this tunnel. His archaeology—”

“It was not archaeology,” Mansour said, his back still turned. “It was revisionism.”

Salah ad-Din winced. “As children, I followed you up streams from the Pool of Siloam to the legendary subterranean reservoirs beneath the Mount. You hiked in the blackness for hours before lighting a candle to show me the Fountain Gate mentioned in Isaiah or the Serpent’s Pool in Josephus. By the time you were eleven, cousin, you could reconstruct ancient Jerusalem better than almost any archaeologist.”

Mansour remained silent.

“Tell me, cousin,” Salah ad-Din said, noticing that Mansour had become suddenly contemplative. “How much rent do you owe on your shop?” He again began pacing, this time circling around Mansour. “My sources say you have not been able to pay for twelve months. I can wipe clean
half
of that debt.”

Mansour’s eyes closed, searching his own morality. The back rent of the shop overwhelmed him every day, and his wife was expecting, yet again. . . .

“You grew up running through the tunnels beneath the Mount. You know them better than anyone.”

Mansour could see their grandfather’s drawings in the dusty cardboard boxes beneath their childhood home. He knew of their grandfather’s obsession with Flavius Josephus, searching his works to locate a secret tunnel that led to some kind of
hidden gate
.

“I will ask for your assistance one more time. In exchange for which I will wipe clean the
entire
debt of your shop’s rent. The entire year.” Like a bargainer of the souk, Salah ad-Din watched Mansour’s eyes. “I have consulted nearly every historical source to find where the aqueduct exits the Royal Cavern, and cannot find it.”

“That is because the aqueduct’s direction is described in the one historical source you would never read,” Mansour said, his softened tone reflecting his moral defeat. “The Old Testament.”

E
mili and Jonathan slipped out of a service exit at the next metro stop, the Circus Maximus station. They crossed the street to the shadows of a tree-lined field, and looking back, were surprised to see only a few uniformed officers outside the station. Emili expected to find officers combing the station, hurdling the turnstiles in pursuit, searching every subway car. As they walked farther down the street, they watched the headlights of cars flash past, each one presenting the fear that it was a carabinieri car.

“Why didn’t that officer stop the train?” Emili said. “Or alert the next station?”

“Because Lieutenant Rufio doesn’t want us arrested,” Jonathan said. “If I end up in an interrogation room, he’s afraid I’ll expose what he said beneath the Colosseum.”

“Then maybe he won’t circulate your picture,” Emili said.

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Jonathan stopped walking. “That I have a ruthless carabinieri officer probably by now in my hotel room waiting to kill me?”

“At least we both agree that there’s no going to the carabinieri now,” Emili said, her face determined. “And we’re now a step closer to proving a connection between the illegal excavations in Jerusalem and Rome. That map in the Domus must be the reason Salah ad-Din was digging here. He was trying to piece together Josephus’s escape.”

For a moment, Jonathan said nothing. Like the merits of a strong legal case, the vast ancient effort to protect the menorah had further unfolded in the Domus Aurea.
Inscriptions beneath the Colosseum. An illuminated path beneath a mural of Jerusalem
. He felt a sudden weight of responsibility, as though history itself had become critical evidence that someone was trying to destroy.

“Remember that old drawing I showed you of the unnumbered gate in the Colosseum? Valadier sketched it while excavating for Napoleon in 1809. He must have found the prisoners’ inscriptions just as we did, and followed them to Domus.”

“But whatever that floor painting revealed,” Jonathan said, “there’s no way to reconstruct it. It’s ashes by now.”

They walked past teenagers playing guitar around bonfires in the grassy ruins of the Circus Maximus.

“We might be able to get a better view of that mural,” Emili said, quickening her pace. “Remember that papal excavation we just saw in the Domus? It was led by Giuseppe Valadier. The same nineteenth-century restorer who drew that sketch of the unnumbered gate I showed you a couple of hours ago. He must have found the prisoners’ inscriptions and followed them to the Domus, just was we did.”

“You’re going
back
to the Domus Aurea?” Jonathan stopped walking.
Then you’re going alone.

“We don’t have to.”

“And you think Valadier may have drawn a sketch of that mural just as he drew a sketch of the Colosseum?”

“Certainly possible,” Emili said. “And if he did, he would have left the sketch there.”

She pointed in front of them at the Great Synagogue’s square aluminum cupola rising against the purple dusk.

“The Great Synagogue?” Jonathan looked incredulous. “You’re saying a restorer leading a
papal
excavation of the Domus Aurea bequeathed his sketches to the Jews?”

“Valadier probably realized that the gladiators’ gate in the Colosseum contained messages revealing the menorah’s location. He left all related sketches to the Ghetto in an attempt to restore the sacred relic to its rightful heirs.”

“Without telling
the pope
?”

“He wouldn’t have been the first well-known artisan in the employ of the pope to secretly leave his sketches to the Jews,” Emili said. “In 1480, after falling out with Julius the Second, Michelangelo stopped all his work here and went back to Florence, telling his assistant, ‘Sell all my belongings to the Jews.’ ”

Across the street from the synagogue, they walked in the shadow of a small Renaissance-era church with Hebrew and Latin passages inscribed boldly above its large double doors, the Latin translation above the other. Jonathan glanced up at the Latin as they passed beneath it.

“Not a very welcoming passage from Isaiah,” Jonathan said. “ ‘ You are a people that provoketh Me to anger continually to My face.’ ”

“For four hundred years, this church’s walls served as one of the Ghetto’s entrance gates,” Emili said. “In the 1990s, the pastor of San Gregorio petitioned the municipality of Rome to alter the façade, embarrassed by the Church’s history of intolerance. Our office opposed the change, and we had an unlikely ally: the archivist of the Great Synagogue, Mosè Orvieti. Orvieti took issue with the Church’s desire to remove a lasting remnant of Jewish persecution.” She pointed upward. “And there it remains.”

From across the street, Jonathan could see the high window beneath the cupola of the synagogue. Its crosshatched yellow light resembled the top window of a lighthouse, or a prisoners’ tower.

“Orvieti still works up there?”

“Signore Orvieti has worked in the belfry for more than sixty years.”

“During the war?”

“Yes.” Emili turned her jacket collar down as they walked through the courtyard toward the synagogue’s back steps. “He has been an invaluable source for the Holocaust restitution suits brought by the International Centre for Conservation. He possesses a near-encyclopedic memory of the archive’s collection before the war.”

“Sounds like his life’s work.”

“That archive is all he has left.” She pointed to a public square outside the synagogue and bordered by the moldering brick arches of an ancient amphitheater. “The Nazis rounded up two thousand ninety-one Jews in that square and took them away. He lost his wife and his five children.”

Jonathan said nothing.

“Years later, in 1948,” Emili said, “many of the Holocaust survivors held a rally in the Roman Forum to show support for the establishment of the state of Israel. The local Jewish community lined up in front of the Arch of Titus, beneath the relief depicting the procession of the prisoners of Jerusalem being marched as slaves through the Roman Forum. “Do you know what they did then?” Emili paused.

“They marched the other way. Not into the Forum, as their ancestors did, but out of the Forum, like free men, women, and children. Eighteen hundred years later, they made a single file and marched right back through the arch. For many of the Roman Jewish families it was not merely symbolic. Many left Rome and emigrated to Israel.”

“Orvieti was there?”

“Yes, he was in the procession. As the story goes, he approached the arch, but the thought of his wife and his five children all incinerated at Auschwitz overwhelmed him. He just stood there, watching the children and their parents walk through the arch, until he was the only one left.The crowd hushed and people gathered on the other side of the arch, waiting for him.”

“And what did he do?” Jonathan asked.

“They say he stared at the arch for a long time and turned around and walked back to the Ghetto. To the synagogue.”

Somberly, Emili led the way through the heavy iron gate of the synagogue to the Dutch oak doors, where Orvieti stood waiting for them in response to Emili’s hurried phone call.

He closed the door behind Emili and Jonathan, lowering the thick metal bar across the inside of the synagogue’s huge doors. Emili introduced Jonathan and they followed Orvieti up the stairs into the archives. They entered the octagonal belfry, where the skylight in the square dome ceiling illuminated the walls’ oak cases. Jonathan stared at hundreds of clothbound volumes that lined one wall.

“That’s correspondence,” Orvieti said, sitting down to rest.

“Long correspondence,” Jonathan said, turning around. “Between?”

“Roman Jews and the Catholic Church from 1555 to 1843. Thousands of letters from parents pleading with the Church to return children who had been kidnapped and forcibly baptized.”

Emili walked over to the table and sat beside Orvieti.

“I think I’ve discovered why the grand mufti was searching for this sketch, along with the manuscripts of Josephus,” she said.

“Then I’ve waited sixty years for this moment,” Orvieti said.

“The drawing of the Colosseum you gave me this morning depicts the arch in the Colosseum where prisoners awaited their execution. Beneath the Colosseum this morning, Jonathan and I saw many of their names still carved on the wall. One of the names was Joseph ben Matthias.”

“Josephus,” Orvieti whispered.

“Right,” Emili said. “He was apparently one of the accused spies executed as part of a blown network inside Titus’s imperial court. Berenice, Epaphroditus, and Aliterius were among the other names.”

“You saw their
names
?”

“Not only their names, but a nearby inscription that suggests the reason for their conspiracy in Titus’s court: ‘A sacred tree of light.’ ”

“Are you certain those were the words?” Orvieti said, his eyes widening.

“You know its meaning?”

“Yes, but it’s just a
myth
. The ramblings of the previous archivist, who said those words described . . .” Orvieti’s voice trailed off.

“The menorah?” Emili said.

“Yes, the menorah of Herod’s Temple,” Orvieti said, smiling wistfully. “But legends have been a part of this Ghetto for centuries.”

“
Signore,
there may be more history here than legend,” Emili said. “Which may explain why the grand mufti was looking for Josephus’s manuscript.”

“But he only took certain pages,” Orvieti said.

“They were the only ones he needed. Those pages in Josephus’s medieval manuscripts included an additional line of text describing a hidden gate inside the Temple Mount. We think Josephus smuggled out the original menorah moments before Titus and his men infiltrated the Holy of Holies. The inscriptions beneath the gladiators’ gate led us to a vault inside the Domus Aurea, where we saw an enormous mural of Jerusalem that may indicate where the menorah was laid to rest.”

“The slaves of Jerusalem left messages,” Orvieti whispered.

“Concealed ones,” Jonathan said, “so that the Roman censors would not detect them.”

“And when, eighteen hundred years later, a member of Napoleon’s excavation team found the names of the spies in Josephus’s network beneath the Colosseum in 1809, he realized their importance, and left a sketch of their location—”

“Here, to this archive,” Orvieti finished, the wrinkles in his forehead lifting like a great curtain. Emili knew such archaeological discoveries would have sent anyone’s head spinning, let alone someone who had spent his life turning over the pieces of this puzzle.