The Last Ember (31 page)

She began to describe in more detail the biblical frescoes that led them to the map of Jerusalem in the Domus Aurea.

“I thought it was impossible,” he said softly, nodding as though working through a logic problem that had become solvable at last.

“You are certain the frescoes in the Domus Aurea depicted seven lean cows beside seven well-fed cows?” Orvieti asked.

Emili nodded.

“Then it all makes sense now. He was the Joseph of the Roman world,” Orvieti said.

“Who?”

“Flavius Josephus.” Orvieti paused, lost in his own thoughts. “The Roman version of the biblical Joseph.”

“You know what those frescoes mean?” Emili asked.

“Think of Joseph’s story for a moment. He was imprisoned and recruited out of jail. How? Pharaoh required an interpretation of a dream of seven well-fed cows standing beside seven lean cows. Joseph used his vision to foretell the future, working his way up from prison until he became Pharaoh’s second in charge, right?”

“Right.”

“This is also the story of Josephus. He, too, was in jail and worked his way into the royal court. How? He foretold that Vespasian would be the next caesar, which fortunately for him proved out. Like Joseph, Josephus moved from jail to the emperor’s side as prophet and interpreter. Even his
name
, Josephus, is a clue to his underlying ambition, retaining the root of his biblical namesake, Joseph.”

“But what does this have to do with Josephus’s strategy to hide the menorah?”

“Think of Pharaoh’s dream represented in those frescoes. Seven lean cows standing beside seven well-fed ones. Even Pharaoh’s magicians knew the cows represented seven years of famine and seven more of plenty.”

“If the magicians already knew that, then why was Joseph’s interpretation so important?”

“Because the magicians still had a problem of logic. If the cows represented years, Pharaoh’s magicians were stumped why the two rows of cows were standing
beside
one another.” Orvieti stood up with a spring that surprised Emili and Jonathan. From the stacks he brought a tattered copy of the Old Testament. He rifled through the pages until he finally rested on one, reading it for a moment before speaking.

He pointed at the Hebraic text. “The biblical Hebrew, here,
eytzel
means ‘beside,’ not one in front of the other. How do years of plenty stand
beside
years of famine? How do they happen simultaneously?”

“How do they?” Emili asked.

“That’s what Joseph explained. He realized that the answer was already inside the dream,” Orvieti said. “They had to begin storing the grain
now
; they had to prepare for the famine
during
the time of plenty.”

“So you’re saying that Joseph’s foresight was to store something before it was endangered,” Jonathan said.

“Yes. And like his biblical role model, Josephus foresaw a desolate time. He put a plan in motion to store the menorah before it was too late.”

T
he head station manager of the Colosseo metro station, Carlo Pavan, had been hunkered over the pink pages of
Gazzetta dello Sport
when a furious carabinieri officer, his nose caked in dried blood, screamed something about two fugitives’ having entered the station. That was twenty minutes earlier. The longest twenty minutes at work he could remember since the London rail bombings in 2005 sent every Roman commuter fleeing from the station.

Pavan’s small glass office, no larger than two conjoined phone booths, had since become its own small Termini station for the carabinieri, who rushed in and out, frantically passing around an emergency contact list of neighboring stations to set up security perimeters.

As instructed by the carabinieri, Pavan had ordered buses to line up outside the station for transportation to the nearest metro stop, Piazza Cavour, but the crowds were defiant and few people were taking the buses. Platform security officers heard murmurs of a riot if another train was ordered to bypass the station.
A riot on my watch,
Pavan thought
. Why couldn’t these fugitives have chosen another station?

Comandante Profeta found Lieutenant Rufio in the station manager’s office.

“Lieutenant, you’re certain it was Dr. Travia? You got a good look?”

Rufio pointed at the dried blood beneath his nose. “A very good look, Comandante.”

“And you saw her accomplice?”

Rufio nodded solemnly. “The same one who attacked me beneath the Colosseum.”

“We’ve submitted the images from the surveillance cameras to the Interpol. We should have him arrested within hours.”

Not if I get to him first,
Rufio thought, though he nodded obediently.

“Go get cleaned up, Rufio,” Profeta said warmly. “Nice work out there.”

Rufio exited the station manager’s office and stood beside the ticket-vending machines, holding a bloody tissue in one hand and his mobile phone in the other.

Rufio turned on his phone, and his racing adrenaline made the mobile data connection seem even slower as he navigated the Internet on its small screen.

Rufio knew the young man looked familiar when he visited Dulling’s office with Profeta. Now it all made sense. The suit he wore beneath the Colosseum, the cut on his hand in the office.

The law firm’s website steadily uploaded, revealing a gray marbled backscreen and stately block letters that slowly materialized in the margin: DULLING AND PIERCE LLP. The background of the website sharpened: an elegant sepia photograph of a glass skyscraper. Rufio clicked on various hyperlinks, “Offices,” then “New York,” and finally “Our Attorneys.”

As Rufio navigated the page he felt the heightened awareness of a stakeout, effortlessly drawing closer to his quarry with each click.

Photographs.
He smiled. Passport-sized photographs accompanied each name.

His thumb wheeled along the side of the mobile device and he marveled at the sheer numbers of pictures.
Una fabbrica,
he thought.
A factory.
He scrolled further down until . . .

There.
The dignified black-and-white photograph was a cleaned-up version of the panicked young man he had just seen in the fluorescent light of a metro car. In the photograph, he was in a dark suit, head turned slightly to the side. “Jonathan Marcus,” the caption read.

“That’s him.” But Rufio’s silent moment of triumph was interrupted by a group of approaching officers.

“Quite a day for you, Alessandro!” one of the other lieutenants called out admiringly, as the others applauded.

Rufio nodded. “You have no idea.”

 

 

 

 

Comandante.”
Brandisi entered the station manager’s office. “Your office just received a call from the Curia. Cardinal Inocenti has been trying to find you.”

“About trespassing beneath the altar of San Pietro in Vincoli?” Profeta asked, looking surprised. Inocenti was not one to press him on formalities.

“No,” Brandisi said. “He reviewed the images from the raid that we sent the Vatican Library.”

“The Josephus manuscript pages,” Profeta said.

“He’s requested you meet him at the Vatican Library as soon as possible.”

E
mili remained seated beside Orvieti at the table.

“And that’s why the prisoners of Jerusalem created the floor painting inside the Domus Aurea,” she continued. “They wanted a map of first-century Jerusalem to stay in the hands of Josephus’s descendants.”

“And I believe it has,” Orvieti said.

“But the map in the Domus Aurea was too damaged to read,” Emili said. “And you said all of the other Napoleonic-era sketches were stolen by the grand mufti.”

“It was not passed down to us as a sketch. It was too important.”

Jonathan and Emili exchanged looks. “Then how do you still have the map?”

“I believe it was painted as a mural in the synagogue on the other side of the Portico di Ottavia,” Orvieti said.

“Signore,”
Emili said gently, “there are no synagogues left in the Ghetto other than this one.”

“It is still there across the street,” Orvieti said. “Beneath the Ghetto.”

“Beneath?” Emili and Jonathan chorused.

“This area of Rome along the Tiber was twenty feet lower than it is today. In 1872, the pope raised the level of the Jewish Ghetto. The roofs of stores and houses became the support for a new foundation of streets and buildings. The Renaissance Ghetto, including its alleys and first story of storefronts, was never demolished. They were just built over.”

Orvieti disappeared into the stacks and returned with a worn oversized book. Seeing the frontispiece or a red wax seal of the Vatican, both Jonathan and Emili knew it was a map of the Ghetto, as established in 1516. Orvieti’s small frame tented over the folios as he turned the pages, his arms straight against the desk on either side. The gray-blue sketches detailed the Ghetto’s narrow streets.

“You can still access the Ghetto’s original streets.”

“From where?” Emili asked.

“Beneath the furnace room of this building,” Orvieti said.

Orvieti led them down the spiral stairs from the belfry to the synagogue’s subbasement, which until the turn of the century had been a furnace room. Orvieti pulled a string, illuminating the room with a dim, swinging bulb. They stepped past some rusted flue piping and a rotted-out oil tank.

At Orvieti’s direction, Jonathan slid his fingers through the iron mesh of a heating grate at the base of the wall and pulled it delicately, as though removing a fragile painting. The grate snapped out, and granulated concrete crumbled on his shoes. A damp breeze exited the dark square hole.

“This is as far as I can go,” Orvieti said, smiling weakly. “My doctor tells me the air is too thin.”

Jonathan crawled through the opening first, and Emili followed. The crossing beams of their flashlights illuminated the nineteenth-century iron pylons that raised the streets to their modern height.

They descended a staircase leading farther underground. The odor of coal dust and rat droppings condensed around them like a mist. The underground landscape stretched out before them like a lost city, street after street winding deeper into the earth. Occasional gusts of fetid air made it difficult to breathe. It resembled an underwater street scene: rotted casks lay half buried in the silt; dust motes floated across the flashlight beams like plankton; algae-covered signs still hung outside small storefronts. The ghostly, intact streetscapes sprawled for dozens of meters. These Roman streets had been buried alive.

“The portico,” Emili said with awe.

Before them, giant granite columns stretched upward twenty vertical feet, a double row of columns built by Augustus for his sister, Octavia. “At the street level,” Emili said, “only the top portion of these columns are visible.”

To the right, they saw the slouching marble lintel of a brownstone, its wooden doors collapsed and bowed, softened by the centuries.

“Here,” Emili said, pointing above the doorway at two conjoined, rounded tablets with lions on rear legs, flanking either side. It was an unmistakable image of the Ten Commandments. “This is it,” she said. “A house of prayer.”

They moved through the doorway, and the darkness seemed to thicken around them. Their beams caught glimpses of the sanctuary’s grandeur, as though entering the once luxurious confines of a sunken ship.

Above the overturned pews there appeared to be a large hole in the ceiling filled by the cement foundation of a building above it.

“Look.” Jonathan pointed his beam at a mural along the wall. In front of them was a breathtaking replica of the painted image of Jerusalem from the Domus Aurea. They both stood silent, stunned not only by the artistic mastery of the landscape but by the foresight of its artist, who despite his role as papal architect secretly salvaged Josephus’s legacy by reproducing this ancient painting on the wall of a Ghetto synagogue in 1825.

“Imagine the irony,” Emili mused. “Valadier’s employer, Pius the Seventh, was the very pope to reinstitute the Ghetto Napoleon had just abolished. He must have had no idea what his papal architect had done.”

“I’m not sure anyone did,” Jonathan said. “No one inside the Ghetto would have dreamed that the mural before them illustrated the path of the menorah’s escape from the Temple Mount two thousand years before.”

“Look at the detail of the Cardo Maximus,” Emili said, pointing at the central thoroughfare of ancient Jerusalem. “He even drew the porticos on each side leading into the Temple Mount.” The map’s detail was a precise, vibrant version of the faded mosaic they had discovered only an hour before inside the buried walls of the Domus Aurea.

Jonathan walked to the center of the mural, dwarfed by the portrayal of the Temple Mount’s four massive retaining walls, with turrets drawn at each corner. “There’s a faint red line here,” he said, pointing at the center of the Temple Mount. “It continues where the row of gemstones stopped in the Domus Aurea’s mural.” He moved his hand along the mural, scraping off gray fungus with the face cap of his flashlight.

“That path goes through the modern-day Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem,” Emili said. “It looks like the tunnel runs from the center of the Mount to Antonia’s Fortress.” She pointed at an ancient turreted fortress drawn along the painting’s northern edge.

Beneath the red line leading into the fortress, a small Latin citation was written.