The Last Ember (56 page)

Emili looked down at her feet, as though steeling herself to see the impossible.

“The pope didn’t come to the synagogue to return anything,” Jonathan explained. “He stood here to remind the rabbi of what the Jewish community had guarded for two thousand years beneath this synagogue, without even knowing it.”

Emili’s gaze was now on the floor in the direction of a small inset piece of amber, a miniature representation of the menorah in its proper biblical dimensions. She suddenly realized why Jonathan asked the guard to keep the lights off.

In the glass inset, a faint spark played in its yellow translucence, as though emanating from a place somewhere beneath the synagogue.

“The triumphal procession ended
here
, along the Porticus Octaviae,” Jonathan said, “and here’s where the first Arch of Titus was built, directly beneath the Ghetto.”

“Quae amissa salva.”
Emili smiled. Lost things are safe.

T
he next morning, Tatton stood in the conference room of the firm’s office at Piazza Navona. He put down the newspaper.

“You’re a celebrity, Marcus, and you made the firm look like a bastion of goodwill.”

Mildren sat next to Tatton, preparing for an upcoming meeting. He looked at Jonathan, steaming at his success.

“You managed to expose the UN director as complicit with looters in Jerusalem, and the Cultural Ministry has pressured the prosecutor to drop the case. A gold star, Marcus. Your future here at Dulling is as bright as the Roman sun.”

Jonathan stared out the window. It was late in the morning and his flight to New York wasn’t for another four hours. He had tried to call Emili at the UN, but as he expected, she wasn’t in her office. The media had camped out overnight at the International Centre for Conservation to feed on the tabloid-quality twist of the UN director’s death.

“Excuse me,” was all Jonathan said, and walked out of the office.

He left the palazzo and made his way toward Piazza Venezia, up the stairs of the Capitoline Hill, and into the Roman Forum. The day was warmer but still overcast, and the ruins in the Forum were fairly empty. A young woman in a camel-hair overcoat with a blond ponytail stood opposite the Arch of Titus, staring at its pediment.

Jonathan walked up and stood next to Emili. “I thought you’d be here.”

Emili was startled, and her eyes brightened when she saw him.

“Hi,” she said.

After a stretch of silence, she turned to Jonathan. “Did you know that I saw you once after you left the academy? In New York, at the Metropolitan Museum.”

Jonathan laughed uneasily. “I saw you, too. It was three months after I was thrown out of the academy. All my teaching offers had been pulled.”

“You were giving tours of the antiquities wing.”

“And working at Sotheby’s at night,” Jonathan said. “I was too embarrassed to say hello to you. I hoped you wouldn’t notice—”

“I watched you give that tour for nearly ten minutes before you saw me. There you were, hanging on to the subject matter you loved with every thread of your being, even though you had every reason to walk away. I never wanted to be with you more.”

“Well?” Jonathan said, looking into her eyes.

“I’m afraid Sharif was right about one thing. History
is
fragile, written in fire. Once it’s out . . .” she trailed off. “What we had is lost, Jon”

“But we’re quite good at finding things together.”

“Remember how I explained to you that in preservation circles, sometimes we oppose new excavations? We’re excited about the possibility of archaeological finds like everyone else, but we also understand what it means to maintain the ruins once they are dug up. Often, they degenerate in a matter of weeks more than they did in thousands of years.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Let’s not disturb the past, Jon.”

As Emili walked away, Jonathan realized that her feelings for him had been sewn up by the invisible layers of sediment over the last seven years. Like the ruins beneath that artichoke field in southern Italy, her emotions were now only faintly recognizable from the surface.

She turned around. “Remember, Jon, in the ground at least the ruins are safe.”

A
fter three days of heavy rain, the remains of Chandler Manning’s body washed up a half-mile down the Tiber. The carabinieri gave instructions for the body to be brought immediately to Rome’s municipal morgue for inspection. His corpse was to be used as evidence in the ongoing criminal investigation of Waqf Authority activity in Rome.

Inside the morgue, a man posing as a pathologist ran his hands over the body. The coolness of the river water kept Chandler’s chewed flesh in better condition than it would have been had he been lost in the warmer season. Even so, the few intact portions of the body had a deep purplish hue and smelled of decay. Fungus had grown under his nails, and his ears were almost entirely eroded as a result of the aggressive pike perch that attempted to pull off what skin remained by the time the body washed into the Tiber basin. Early pathological examination could not explain the cause of the severe burns across the subject’s posterior region.

The man posing as a pathologist wasn’t there to inspect the body. His training was in covert operations, replete with facial prosthetics, hair-pieces, and falsified documents. He was there to recover a document. The man wasn’t told of its historical importance. It was not his place to ask questions.

Outside the morgue, a carabinieri car pulled up. Profeta got out, walked toward the front door, and displayed his credentials for the woman at the front desk.

“We are here to see the body,” Profeta said, handing her the carabinieri’s request slip. “Manning, Chandler.”

“One moment, the medical examiner’s office is completing their inspection.”

“No one should be inspecting the body,” Profeta said. “There is an ongoing investigation.”

“He said it was for health reasons,” the woman answered nervously, “because of the Tiber’s pollution.”

“Let’s go!” Profeta swiveled around the desk. “I want all doors blocked!” The man posing as the pathologist felt under what remained of Chandler Manning’s wetsuit and there it was, still damp and folded in fourths. A laminated map of Rome, its edges blackened from fire and chewed by pike, still displayed Josephus’s path to the original Arch of Titus as marked by Chandler’s underwater pen.

The man heard doors slam and looked up through the glass walls. Three young carabinieri officers charged the examining room. The man posing as the pathologist slid the body into the iron casement and ran toward the room’s other door, which led to an internal corridor ramp for loading and unloading bodies. The man was fully armed with a Bren Ten ten-millimeter automatic pistol beneath his lab coat and was carefully trained in urban chase warfare. Countless exercises, staged in corridors of abandoned buildings in the Negev, had imitated every possible surrounding, from hospitals to middle schools. But he took his hand off his pistol; his instructions were not to leave any trace of who sent him. A Bren ten-millimeter bullet was not offered on the black market; it would all but give away from which intelligence agency he came.

“He is in the building,” Profeta said, “and wearing a lab coat. I repeat, he is dressed as a physician.”

The door to the ramp was open and a hearse driver wearing a black cap was walking down the hallway for a pickup. The man grabbed the hearse driver, dragged him inside a utility closet, and threw his head against the metal shelving only hard enough to knock him unconscious. Within a minute, the man reappeared in the hallway, having exchanged his lab coat for the driver’s uniform. Amid the officers storming down the hallway, the man walked calmly out of the hall, down the ramp, then drove the black hearse away.

In the center of Rome, the man parked the hearse outside Piazza Venezia and ducked into an anonymous alleyway. He crossed the street to a café and placed the folded map beneath a napkin holder on an outside table. Within seconds a woman wearing a broad-brimmed sun hat approached from the opposite direction, just as the intelligence handlers had planned. She took a seat, ordered an espresso, and reached for a napkin, imperceptibly moving the sketch from beneath the napkin holder. She slipped the map into a plastic protective sheathing in her inside jacket pocket.

The woman was Eilat Segev.

T
he tour group was enraptured. In the antiquities wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Jonathan Marcus glided backward with his tie loosened, describing a statue of Protesilaos mortally wounded on the beaches of Troy. For the Elderhostel group present, Jonathan’s voice was around them like something vibrant, moisturizing. They gasped with delight, their cataract eyes ablaze.

Jonathan stopped in the hall’s center and stood up on a stool. He diagrammed the breastplate of a Greek soldier on his wrinkled light blue dress shirt.

“Ah, the fierce cuirass breastplate, most useful for . . . ?” Jonathan turned to the Elderhostel crowd. “Does anyone know what?”

“Back support?” said an old man in an untucked madras shirt. The sticker across the breast pocket read PHOENIX SENIOR TOURS, and beneath that, in handwritten cursive, Mr. Feldheim.

“Fair enough, Mr. Feldheim!” Jonathan said, broadening his grin. “You, sir, are Odysseus in your cuirass, a back as strong as ten men. Your Penelope is waiting! Ready the archers with Levitra!”

The tour group laughed, swelling and stretching around Jonathan to the size of a street performer’s crowd, three people deep. Jonathan pointed at various artifacts around him, translating the sarcophagi and funereal steles from Latin and Greek.

“Why aren’t the gods smiling?” a child’s voice asked from the crowd. Jonathan crouched to get close to the child, who looked up at the white marble gods above him. The crowd, quite large by now and spilling into the neighboring African wing, hushed at the question.

“It’s a good question.” Jonathan smiled. “Why aren’t the gods smiling?” he repeated loudly for the crowd. “Well, in Roman art, gods don’t smile because they aren’t mortal,” he said.

“But didn’t the Romans want to be gods?” said another voice from the crowd.

“Oh, no,” Jonathan said. “Without mortality, there would be no such thing as bravery or heroism. And strange as it sounds, that’s why the gods don’t smile in Roman statues and the mortals do.” Jonathan paused, opening his arms. “Mortality means the despair of loss, but it also means the redemption of—”

“Being found,” said a female voice in the middle of the gallery.

The gallery was silent. Jonathan squinted at the silhouette in the foyer’s white daylight.

And there, in the center of the museum’s vaulted corridor, wearing a camel-hair coat and a red scarf, was Emili Travia. Her eyes were bright and she appeared a bit jet-lagged, and it was precisely that touch of exhaustion that made her look more beautiful than ever.

Jonathan hopped off the stool, navigating the crowd as he moved toward her.

The tour group made a circle around them.

“They let tour guides stand on stools here in the Met?” Emili said. “I thought there’d be a liability issue.”

Jonathan grinned. “Being the one who decides that has its privileges.”

He pointed at his name tag, and Emili read aloud, “Jonathan Marcus, general counsel, Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

After a moment Jonathan whispered to her, “I thought you said some things should remain in the ground. Something about lack of proper resources to sustain the excavation.”

Emili straightened her back, a playful gesture of authority.

“As director of the International Centre for Conservation in Rome, I can allocate as many resources as an excavation needs.” She moved her face closer.

Jonathan hesitated, unexpectedly pulling his head back. “But what about the fragility of our past? In Rome, you told me that history is written in fire. That once it’s out . . .” He trailed off.

“I still do think that,” Emili said. Jonathan tilted his head warily, but her smile warmed him to the core. “But to keep it aflame, we just need an ember.”

Jonathan pulled her close and kissed her. With the sun pouring through the glass roof of the antiquity wing, they embraced as though in a spotlight, and struck exactly the pose of two ancient marble figures behind them, their lips pressed, limbs entwined, and the woman tilted back as though collapsing in his arms.

The crowd erupted with applause.

I
n Piazza San Pietro, General Eilat Segev stepped out of a sedan without diplomatic plates. Her visit was not on any Vatican schedule. This covert meeting reminded her of the times before the Vatican opened diplomatic relations with the state of Israel, fifteen years earlier. A Swiss Guard official escorted her into a grand hall, where Cardinal Ungero Scipiono, the Vatican undersecretary for diplomatic affairs, awaited her. Cardinal Scipiono was middle-aged, bald, and sat in a grand Renaissance chair that dwarfed his small frame.

“General Segev, it is an honor to finally meet you.” As was the custom, the undersecretary did not get up. “Thank you for all the work you have done in protecting Christian sites in the Holy Land. I understand your dedication is remarkable.” Undersecretary Scipiono spoke with his eyes turned toward the floor. Eilat Segev sensed his discomfort in meeting with a woman individually, but the sensitivity of the topic to be discussed precluded him from sending an administrator.

Segev nodded in gratitude. “Thank you, Your Eminence.”

He motioned for Segev to sit down.

“I have sent numerous letters to your office, concerning the rampant destruction beneath the Temple Mount. They have gone unanswered.”

The undersecretary was quiet. “As you know, no institution cares to intrude on the jurisdiction of another, General Segev. I’m afraid we will have to complete our own investigation regarding the alleged destruction beneath the Mount before responding.”