The Illumination (10 page)

“No. I want to deal with this now. This passed from Dana's hands to Rusty's. Now she's dead and he's disappeared. If it's because of this pendant, I owe it to Dana to find out.” She sat up, staring at D'Amato.

“The other night, when I first looked it over, I had the impression there could be something hidden inside.”

D'Amato shifted it from hand to hand. “It does have quite a bit of heft to it.” He studied it more closely. “I don't see any way to open it.”

“I know. And there's no obvious seam of solder, either, which would seem to indicate there's nothing inside.”

“So how can we find out for certain? X-rays? Do you have some kind of equipment at the museum?”

Natalie shook her head. “Not the kind of equipment we'd need. The only way I can think of to peek inside is with the help of archaeometry.”

“Archaeometry?”

She focused her gaze on him, forcing herself deliberately to set aside her grief, to use her brain and her training to help make sense of what had happened to Dana. “Archaeometry is where science meets archaeology,” she said quietly.

She pushed herself to her feet and crossed the room to the coffee table. D'Amato watched as she tugged a thick volume from the pile of books stacked on its bottom ledge. Her smooth dark hair swung across her face as she bent over the pages, momentarily hiding the sorrow he'd seen burning in her eyes.

“Just to warn you, science isn't my strong suit,” he told her, setting the amulet on the coffee table beside an antique bronze tray crudely embossed with elephants. She was a collector of small objects, he noticed. Mostly Middle Eastern items. There were more elephants—of varied sizes and composition—marching single file along the tall, narrow table flanking the back of her sofa. Every one of them had a raised trunk, signifying good luck, he knew, in the same way as the glasses stored mouth up in his grandmother's cupboard.

The two-tiered shelf on her living room wall was brimming with an assortment of small objects, all made of what looked to him like ancient, iridescent Roman glass. He'd seen plenty of it in Israeli gift shops. Among the items, he noted, was a chipped cruet, a shallow bowl that in its day might have held salt or spices, a cracked flask that might once have contained olive oil or perfume—each cast from the opaque glass and shimmering in varied shades of pale blue and sea-foam green.

On the long wall behind the desk she'd strung an assortment of unusual necklaces—some thick with dangling silver coins, others aflame with brightly colored beads threaded onto thin gold hoops. One with tightly coiled golden wires reminded him of the
elaborate jewelry he'd once seen adorning a Yemenite bride back when he was in Jerusalem as bureau chief for MSNBC.

The bright, exotic items were an interesting contrast to the overstuffed shabby chic sofa and the floral, chintz-covered, oversized chair she'd positioned across from the coffee table. And to the bookcase filled with an eclectic collage of reading material. Graphic novels butted up against archaeology texts, collections of Norse mythology, a half dozen Stephen King novels, folktales from around the world, and the complete Jane Austen. Natalie Landau appeared to have a foot in each world—the ancient and the modern—and the ability to move between them with the same assurance with which she was searching the pages of her book.

“Think of archaeometry as the equivalent of MRI, CT, and PET scan—but for rocks and gems,” she told him, finally looking up. He could see her pushing through her fatigue and grief, focused now on her area of expertise. “I gather you've heard of carbon dating?” She didn't wait for him to reply. “Since every living organism emits carbon-14, scientists are able to date that organism by measuring how long it has been emitting carbon.”

“So this leather . . . ?” He plucked up the pouch. “It's possible to pinpoint how long ago this animal skin was tanned?”

“Definitely, except we'd have to destroy a portion of it in the process.” She broke off, waiting as he probed inside the pouch with a finger.

“A few grains of sand in here . . . ,” he muttered.

Natalie turned back to the book, quickly flipping through the pages once more. “But carbon dating is just one example—the most commonly known—of numerous scientific tests we can apply to archaeological finds . . .”

“Take a look at this,” D'Amato interrupted.

She tore her attention from the book to look at him. He had turned the pouch inside out and was peering at something along the bottom seam.

Why didn't I think to turn it inside out?

Intrigued, she set the book aside and moved closer for a better look at the suede interior.

“It looks like an inscription.” He was squinting at two tiny rows of script.

“Let me see. It could be an ancient stamp . . . or a trademark . . .” Natalie felt a surge of energy.

“Looks sort of like Hebrew.”

“Hmmm . . . could be.” Natalie leaned in, trying to discern the tiny characters. “Or it could be Aramaic. The two sets of characters are very similar. Actually, the Hebrew alphabet developed from Aramaic. So if this
is
Aramaic . . .”

Without finishing her sentence, Natalie jumped up and hurried to a kitchen drawer. She returned with a magnifying glass.

“And if it is Aramaic—then what?” D'Amato prodded.

“Then this pouch, at least, could prove to be very old.”

“How old?”

She raised a slim eyebrow. “Let's just say Aramaic was the language Jesus spoke. And it was the primary language used to write the Jewish Talmud.”

“You're talking to a lapsed Catholic.” He grimaced. “If the nuns taught us anything about the Talmud, I probably had
Penthouse
hidden inside my comparative religions book that day. But it's a compendium of Jewish laws, right?”

She plucked the pouch from him, thinking back to some of her undergraduate course work. “That's a fair summary. I'd describe it as an encyclopedia of Jewish civil and religious law, along with ethical teachings,” she answered. “It expounds on the Torah, recounting the sages' debates and commentaries on its meaning. It's actually many volumes, written by hundreds of Jewish sages over the course of four hundred years.”

“And the time frame . . . ?”

She met his gaze steadily. “Two thousand years ago.”

He digested that a moment. “So, roughly the same time period as Jesus.”

“Give or take. The sages began compiling the Talmud after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in
A.D
. 70. Up until then, all of the Jewish laws and traditions were passed down orally. But once the Romans destroyed the Second Temple—taking most of the Jews off to Rome as slaves—the
sages decided it was high time they committed all of the oral teachings to writing.”

“To preserve them . . . ,” D'Amato mused.

“Exactly. For future generations. Particularly because the Jewish people was so scattered by then. Rome wasn't the first captivity. Many Jews were carried off to Babylon when the First Temple was destroyed six hundred years earlier—and a good portion of them decided to stay on, even after the Persians eventually freed them. And, of course, there were some Jews who had never left Judea.”

She bent over the pouch with the magnifying glass. “So it was imperative to put the laws in writing so that the Jews who were now separated from one another would remain on the same page . . . so to speak. . . .”

Her voice trailed off. She peered intently at the faded lettering swimming beneath the powerful prism. The brief handwritten inscription seemed to begin with the Hebrew letter
tzadi,
the alphabet's
ts
sound. Still, Natalie knew from her archaeological work in Israel how similar some Aramaic letters were to Hebrew. This character could be from either alphabet.

“Can you tell? Is it Aramaic?”

“No, damn it.” She bit her lip. “Not without consulting someone proficient in both languages.”

“Can you at least read what it says?”

“I only recognize a few letters on this first line. This one looks like a
resh
—that's the
R
of the Hebrew alphabet. But it could be either an Aramaic
R
or
Y
, because those characters are written similarly. The others here are too faded for me to make out.”

“Faded—you mean with age?”

“Or from the elements. But look.” Natalie's voice hitched with excitement. “Part of the second line is darker and easier to read. I can make out a
shin
—and the word ends in a
resh,
like the one on the line above it, but the rest . . .” She shook her head in frustration.

Suddenly she glanced up, eyeing him with new respect. “What made you think to look inside? I was so caught up in the pendant, I didn't really focus on the pouch. The outside of it
didn't strike me as unusual, other than that it was painted to mimic the pendant. It's so simply constructed—just a basic circle of leather with a drawstring to close it—I didn't pay any attention to the inside.”

“I'm a journalist.” He shrugged. “It's my job to pay attention. To look at things from all sides. We like to turn things on their heads, and inside out. But go back a minute to what you were saying about testing the gemstones in the pendant. What were you planning to show me in that book?”

Natalie set down the pouch, reached for the book, and forced herself to change gears. “I was starting to tell you that in the past we had to chip off a fragment of a gemstone if we wanted to check its authenticity. We'd need a piece of it to test its chemical properties in order to determine with certainty what it was. But now, with the help of powder X-ray diffraction analysis and raman spectroscopy, we're able to define exactly what a sample is—and so much more. We can not only pinpoint the identity and age of a gem, but we can zero in on its place of origin—sometimes even the mine it came from—and all without dismounting it, or doing it any damage.”

“In other words, you've got ways of peeking inside this thing without sawing it open. How do you do that? Laser scanners?”

Natalie skimmed to a section halfway into the book before holding out the page for his perusal. “Here's how. Check out these photos.”

D'Amato took the book from her and studied the page. He'd changed from the sport coat and sweater he'd worn earlier into straight-legged jeans, a khaki shirt, and a light beige windbreaker. Natalie noticed the laserlike concentration with which he scrutinized the series of photos taken from various angles. They were close-ups of a primitive statue studded with tiny red gems.

“This artifact was found five years ago in a cave in Iran.” She ran her finger below the lines of text. “The gemstones on it were dated and analyzed using ion beam techniques—particle-induced X-ray emission, or PIXE for short. PIXE determined they were definitely rubies and contained inclusions found only
in certain regions in the Middle East. Archaeometry pinpointed the age and the provenance, proving this statue indeed came from ancient Mesopotamia. And—it was all done without removing a single stone or submitting the statue to the damaging effects of chemical analysis.”

“Pretty impressive.” He picked up the pendant. “So where do we go to analyze this?”

Where indeed . . . ?

Natalie hesitated, chewing on her lip.
How about to the police?
she thought. Part of her wanted to call Detective Henderson back and simply hand the pendant over, but that meant facing ramifications from the police and her employers for having lied to him. She might even lose her job because she'd tried to protect her sister.

“There's an Ion Beam lab at UAlbany, but I'm not sure that's the next step,” she said reluctantly. “If Dana was
killed
and Rusty is
missing
on account of this pendant, maybe we should go to the police instead. Although that might prove problematic. . . .”

She explained how she'd dodged Henderson's questions about the amulet, allowing the detective to conclude that Ski Mask hadn't been after it. “Because at the time, I never suspected he'd broken in because of the pendant. It's only now that I'm starting to wonder if that was his purpose all along. If he knew that Rusty had brought it to the museum . . .”

“Forget about the police.” D'Amato snapped the book shut with a thud. His eyes darkened with purpose, like a hunting dog's after picking up a scent. “If this pendant is linked to an international murder, and to an interstate missing persons alert, and if it
is
an antiquity taken from Iraq, then the scope of any investigation will go way beyond the NYPD. I've got a better idea.”

She stared at him, uneasy, waiting.

“We call a contact of mine at the FBI.”

He began scrolling through the list of contacts in his cell phone. He paused and glanced at her, tacitly waiting for her assent.

The FBI.
Natalie felt numb. She looked at the pendant and
the pouch with its tiny inscription, seeing them through bleary eyes.

Dana died for this? Why? How? I need to know.

“Go ahead,” she heard herself say in a voice that sounded like a wan imitation of her own. “Call the FBI.”

 

 

 

FBI Special Agent Luther Tyrelle sat across from Natalie at the coffee shop, sipping his second cardboard cup of chai tea and studying her with a tiger's caramel-colored eyes. He was a muscular black man with a receding hairline and a neck roughly the circumference of a gallon-size milk jug.

In between sips he scribbled notes on the pages of a small, bound, government-issue notebook as Natalie outlined how she'd come to receive the pendant and her assessment of its possible value. D'Amato sat silently between them at the small round café table, barely touching his extra-large decaf, black, three sugars.