The Last Ember (43 page)

“My contacts inside the Vatican say that the previous pope, John Paul the Second, bequeathed information to the rabbi of the Ghetto.”

“I know nothing of this,” Orvieti said truthfully, but a sense of dread rose inside him. The depth of the friendship between the two spiritual leaders was remarkable. Orvieti knew how pained the pope had been by the Church’s history of anti-Semitism, and that he often spoke with the rabbi of his own
teshuva
, or repentance, that led to his historic visit to the Great Synagogue in 1986. The rabbi of the Jewish Ghetto was one of only three people mentioned in the pope’s last will and testament.

“They said the pope gave him a slip of paper with one line written on it,” Salah ad-Din said. “What was the line from Josephus?”

“If it is papal information you seek,” Orvieti said, “your inquiries are best taken across the river.”

Salah ad-Din reached inside his overcoat, and with a single motion of his, a Beretta was touching Orvieti’s face, the loose flesh of his forehead gathering around the barrel of the silencer.

“You have until the count of three to tell me the line in Josephus that reveals the location of the menorah,” Salah ad-Din said. He could feel Orvieti’s frail skull against the metal. “One.”

Orvieti said nothing. He saw the desperation in the young man’s eyes.

“Two.”

Orvieti stiffened, his back straight. “I have died once before. You cannot kill me again.”

“We’ll see about that, won’t we?” Salah ad-Din said. His finger tightened around the gun’s trigger. “Thr—”

“Hello?” Lieutenant Brandisi called out, his voice echoing from the bottom of the stairwell. Salah ad-Din relaxed his finger and pulled up his gun. His eyes flashed to the stairwell.

“Don’t make a sound,” Salah ad-Din told Orvieti, stepping backward toward the archive’s door.

“
Signore?
I need just a few moments of your time!” Brandisi called up, resting on the stairs, panting.
How does the old man do this every day
?

Salah ad-Din turned to the door and when he looked back, Orvieti was gone. The old man was halfway up the corkscrew stairwell to the archive’s second story.

Salah ad-Din ran to the bottom of the stairwell. There was no clear shot. The wrought-iron bars of the stack’s balcony formed a protective sheath around Orvieti.

“You cannot escape,” Salah ad-Din seethed, not loud enough for his voice to travel out the door. “You expect to outrun me?” He started up the ladder rungs, taking them two at a stride, steadying his gun for aim. Salah ad-Din reached the stacks’ first balcony when, beyond all expectation, a leg flew out, kicking him squarely in the face and sending him sliding down a dozen rungs. Salah ad-Din blinked, stunned, as he tasted blood from his lip. His gun spit three licks of fire into the leather-bound books inches from where Orvieti had climbed. His fury redoubled, Salah ad-Din charged upward, now only a few rungs below Orvieti.

“Hello? Signor Orvieti?”

Brandisi sounded winded as he made it up the last turn of stairs. He already had walked six blocks to reach the synagogue. Comandante Profeta instructed him to park the patrol car outside the Ghetto.
This was the Jewish Ghetto of Rome,
Profeta had told him.
Any community that watched Aurelius build his wall, Constantine build his church, and Mussolini build his empire had a good reason to be suspicious of authority.

Orvieti made it to the top of the corkscrew staircase and opened the pane of a large stained-glass window. The rain lashed against the glass and Orvieti wondered whether his small frame could withstand the wind. He slipped through the open window and climbed onto the ledge that circled the synagogue’s cupola. Salah ad-Din’s desperate grasp reached through the window and missed his leg by inches.

The sky was dark gray and the swirling wind and rain hit Orvieti like a solid sheet. He leaned against the curve of the temple’s dome fearing that the wind could catch his clothing and carry him off the ledge. It was as though God himself had seen the terrible storm inside the cupola and manifested it outside.

As Orvieti sidestepped along the ledge around the dome’s curve, he saw Salah ad-Din lean out the window and take aim. Another bullet from Salah ad-Din’s silencer whizzed past, missing him only because of the dome’s curve.

“Hello?” Brandisi stood at the belfry door, breathing hard. He saw Salah ad-Din’s back at the top of the bookcase’s ladder, leaning out the window.

Salah ad-Din pivoted around, calculating. He slid his Beretta back inside his overcoat and padded his bleeding lip with his sleeve. He hurried down the stairs and crossed the archive toward the policeman with a large smile.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. I slipped trying to close the window,” Salah ad-Din said, pointing at his bleeding lip with a shrug. “In the rain, the sparrows fly through the open pane.”

“I am looking for Signore Orvieti,” Brandisi said with an official sense of urgency. “The security guards said he was in here.”

“No, I am his assistant,” Salah ad-Din said in Italian, without a trace of accent. “Is there something I can help you with, Officer?”

But the guard said he was here alone
, Brandisi thought.

“We’ll need to speak with Signore Orvieti personally,” Brandisi said. “It pertains to an ongoing investigation.”

“I see.” Salah ad-Din looked concerned. “Then let me look for him right away.”

“But I was just downstairs. They said he was up here.”

“He could be up in the stacks.”

“Up there?”

“His legs are quite strong, Officer,” Salah ad-Din said, feeling his lip swell. “Trust me.”

Orvieti was outside, shivering. A wet nest of huddled pigeons exploded from behind him, nearly knocking him off the ledge. His arms were shaking as he lowered himself below the travertine lip of the synagogue’s cupola and tried to kick in a stained-glass pane to climb into the sanctuary. But the glass was wet, and with each attempt his feet merely glanced off the pane. He used every muscle in his thin arms to hang on to the building’s cornice, but his feet were not hitting the pane with enough force to break it. Each effort was loosening his grip. Sixty feet below, the young policemen were oblivious under their umbrellas. The archivist knew he had only one more chance. At one point in his life he might have said a prayer for strength. But no longer. It had been sixty years since he had said a personal prayer of any kind. He simply closed his eyes and summoned all his remaining strength into one last kick. The stained-glass window smashed in.

“What was that sound?” Brandisi asked, peering up the stairwell. From behind, Salah ad-Din grabbed him by the neck and slammed his head against the iron railing of the staircase. Brandisi fell to the floor, unconscious. Salah ad-Din removed his Beretta and, standing over Brandisi, pulled the trigger from point-blank range. The hollow click of the hammer against the polymer frame answered.
No bullets.
Salah ad-Din never expected to waste seven rounds on that old man. He slid out the ammunition cartridge to reload, pushing the breechblock from the gun’s frame.

“Signore Orvieti!” another anxious voice echoed up the stairwell.

Salah ad-Din slipped behind the belfry’s door. A heavyset security guard lumbered in, having heard the smashing glass. As the guard passed through the door, Salah ad-Din stepped out silently behind him, descending the spiral staircase. Reaching the basement, undetected, he slid through the heating vent in the floor and fastened the grate back into place.

T
he director nodded confidently to passing security personnel at Fiumicino airport as Jonathan and Emili followed her through a carpeted diplomatic staging area. The stacked benches on the wall were presumably for press to cover dignitary arrivals. The director spoke to Emili out of the corner of her wooden smile.

“Have you considered how you’ve endangered your career if you’re wrong about this?” Olivier said.

“A better question, Director, is what’s endangered if I’m right.”

They moved past the baggage-claim area and to a separate overhead walkway for diplomats. The director showed more airport personnel her credentials and waved Jonathan and Emili through. Jonathan was again surprised at how easily he could move between two countries within the UN world, although part of him was horrified at the gap in Interpol’s surveillance of international travel.

Once in the parking lot, they ducked into the director’s idling UN-ISSUED sedan, which displayed a government medallion across the license plate. Jonathan took the front seat next to the driver. Emili and the UN director sat in the back.

Once out of the public eye, the director stepped out of her professional character, becoming an irate parent. “Will someone please tell me what is going on?”

Emili turned to her. “We’ve done it, Jacquie.”

“Done what?”

Emili spoke quickly, “We can expose the Waqf’s illegal excavations beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. We saw it ourselves.”

“You went beneath the Temple Mount?” The director looked even more agitated. “Have you any idea how many international laws you’ve broken?”

“Their activity beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is more destructive than we ever thought. They are trying to erase two millennia of Judeo-Christian heritage.” Emili handed the director a thin blue stamp-sized piece of plastic. “The memory card from my camera. It’s more than enough physical evidence to present at the plenary session of the World Heritage Committee. Just make sure this gets back to the office safely. It’s footage of the Waqf’s destruction fifty feet beneath Jerusalem.”

The director stared at the chip. “I’ll do the best I can,” she said, taking it. “But, even if any of this is true, how is there a connection to the ancient port of Ostia?”

“Two thousand years ago one of the artifacts escaped,” Emili said. “If it’s discovered, it would unravel their campaign of historical revisionism in Jerusalem . . .”

“Historical revisionism?”
The director shook her head, her eyes closed in disbelief. She took care to restrain her reaction as Emili spoke, appearing to remind herself that for the last two years she had trusted Dr. Travia with the most difficult missions of her organization.

“Emili,” the director said, “you’re saying that this man that you’ve told me about, Salah ad-Din—even if he exists—has followed a piece of archaeology from Jerusalem to Rome on the
theory
that it traveled here two thousand years ago?”

“That’s right, to Ostia,” Emili answered. “Did you bring what we discussed?”

The director reached down in the backseat and reluctantly handed Emili a plastic bag. “Two flashlights and a map of Ostia, just as you asked,” Jacqueline said, “but that means you will agree to my one condition?”

“Yes,” Emili said.

“What condition?” Jonathan said.

Emili turned to him. “That we call the carabinieri within the hour.”

Jonathan was surprised how far the law had drifted from his mind. The American embassy or the carabinieri had not entered his thoughts since he had left Italy ten hours before. As though he were a graduate student again, Jonathan had begun to view laws as he did then: inconvenient rules that underestimated the historical significance of their chase.

“I’m already sticking my neck out a long way on this one, Emili. No more playing the outlaw, is that clear? And
please
, remember to call the carabinieri. They can protect you, do you understand?”

“Yes, and thank you, Jacqueline,” she said.

The UN director said nothing, throwing a warning look to both Emili and Jonathan as she got out of the car and closed the door behind her. Her eyes sent a single message very clearly to Emili.
I hope you know what you’re doing.

S
alah ad-Din parked a highway repair truck just outside the archaeological parts of ancient Ostia, twenty miles from Rome. He wore the orange perforated vest of a roadway repairman, pretending to supervise his team outside the ruins’ wire fence. His excavations beneath the Colosseum in Rome had been extensive, but this project had already removed a three-foot section of highway asphalt to get his equipment inside.
He was here,
Salah ad-Din thought, staring at the ruins through the fence. Flavius Josephus smuggled the menorah to this coastal town rather than risk moving it deeper into Rome. Fog headlights of passing cars intermittently whizzed past. Just as the rest of Salah ad-Din’s efforts, this excavation was hidden in plain view.

After five years on Ostia’s police force, Officer Roberto Fiegi had never seen street repairmen work in so much as a drizzle, which was why, through the rain on his patrol car’s windshield, he considered whether he was hallucinating. As he completed the first lap of his afternoon patrol around the perimeter of Ostia’s ancient ruins, four men in highway construction outfits labored in the rain alongside the ancient ruins’ outer fence. They were dark as Sicilians, but their work ethic could not have been further from the Sicilian lifestyle. Not only were they braving a cold drizzle that usually suspended street work, but they were working through the
riposo
. Fiegi looked at his watch. One p.m.