The Last Secret Of The Temple (35 page)

'I can't prove it, sadly. From the outset the Castelombres excavation was shrouded in a degree of secrecy that was intense even by Nazi standards. All we know is that Hoth arrived there in mid-September 1943, bringing with him heavy digging equipment and a crack unit of the Sonderkommando Jankuhn, an SS division specializing in excavation and looting. And he left three weeks later taking with him some sort of mysterious box or crate.'

Layla leant forward, her chest tight with excitement.

'Do we know what was in it?'

Dupont shook his head. 'Unfortunately not. We do know where it was taken, though, because three days after they left Castelombres, Hoth and the crate turned up at Wewelsburg Castle in north-west Germany where they were met by no less a welcoming party than Heinrich Himmler and the Führer himself.'

'No!'

'It was certainly most unusual,' concurred Dupont, puffing on his cigarillo. 'We have a diary entry from one of Himmler's adjutants recording how the moment he arrived Hoth was presented with the Knight's Cross you saw earlier, after which Hitler made a speech in which he declared that the contents of the crate were a clear sign that what Titus had started he, the Führer, was destined to finish.'

Layla's eyes narrowed.

'Meaning?'

'Well, the diary entry is somewhat short on detail, but I'd say it's almost certainly a reference to the Holocaust. Titus was the man who in AD 70 conquered Jerusalem and expelled the Jews from the Holy Land, and in a sense the concentration camps and gas chambers were the logical extension of that act. How precisely Hoth's discovery was relevant to the Final Solution . . .' He threw up his hands as if to say 'I have absolutely no idea'. 'One of the many fascinating elements of Hoth's five-year excursion into the world of medieval arcana, however, is the sudden interest he starts to show in Judaism and Jewish history. He even taught himself to read Hebrew. This from a man renowned for his virulent anti-semitism.'

There was a click behind him as the kettle came to the boil.

'More coffee?'

Layla shook her head, leaving him to spoon Nescafe into a cup for himself while she stared down at her pad, spooling everything she'd just heard through her mind, trying to fit it into the framework of what she had already discovered over the last few days. Hitler's Wewelsburg speech struck her as particularly significant. If the object at the centre of this whole mystery was in some albeit obscure way tied up with the expulsion of the Jews from the Holy Land and their subsequent persecution by the Nazis, then that would explain something that had been perplexing her from the very outset – why it should be of any interest to someone such as al-Mulatham. She was still no closer to discovering what the damn thing was, however.

'So what happened then?' she asked. 'After Hoth arrived at Wewelsburg?'

Dupont was pouring water into his mug, cigarillo clamped between his teeth.

'So far as we can tell, nothing. The mysterious crate disappears into the depths of the castle; Hoth returns to Berlin where he takes up a desk job with the Ahnenerbe; the whole strange affair seems to come to a rather abrupt end.'

He stirred the cup, removed the cigarillo, took a sip.

'Although there is one rather curious coda, which may or may not be linked. It occurred just over a year after Hoth arrived at Wewelsburg, at the end of 1944. By this point the tide of war had turned well and truly against the Nazis. The Americans and British were pushing into Germany from the west, the Russians from the east, and although the Führer was still insisting they could recover the situation, deep down the Nazi high command knew the Third Reich's days were numbered. They started moving gold and looted art treasures out of the path of the advancing Allied armies and either spiriting them abroad or else hiding them in secret locations within Germany, usually inside abandoned mines.'

He took another slurp of his coffee and returned to his swivel stool, cup in one hand, cigarillo in the other.

'In the middle of all this, in December 1944, Dieter Hoth suddenly appears at Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, bringing with him, according to a deposition given by the deputy camp commandant Heinz Detmers, two trucks, one containing some sort of large wooden crate.'

Layla's eyes widened. 'The—'

'Maybe, maybe not,' said Dupont, anticipating the question. 'It must have been something pretty important for Hoth to have come all that way in person, but whether it was the same crate he brought back from Castelombres . . .' He shrugged. 'All we know is that he commandeered a work party of six prisoners and left again. It's possible he was taking the crate to hide it somewhere nearby, or maybe to have it shipped abroad. Then again, he might have had some wholly different purpose. We simply don't know. The following day he was back at his desk in Berlin. The crate is never heard of again.'

'And he was killed at the end of the war? Is that right?'

Dupont nodded. 'He and a group of other SS officials were trying to get out of Berlin before it fell to the Russians. Got hit by a
katusha
rocket as they tried to sneak across the Weidendammer Bridge. Wasn't much left of him, by all accounts – head blown off, both legs. They only managed to identify him because he was wearing his Knight's Cross and was carrying a number of artefacts from a site he was known to have looted in Egypt.'

He took a final puff on the cigarillo and ground it out in the ashtray.

'No more than he deserved, I imagine. Fascinating man, brilliant scholar, but a deeply flawed human being. Tragic, when you think about it – such a great mind harnessed to such terrible ends.'

He sighed and, clasping his hands behind his neck, gazed up at the skylight overhead. Layla sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, suddenly overcome with weariness. Whatever William de Relincourt had found in Jerusalem, whatever he had sent to his sister at Castelombres, whatever had been taken to Montségur for safekeeping, whatever Dieter Hoth had subsequently dug up and carried back to Germany, it now seemed to be lost again. So near and yet so far.

'If you've got time you really should visit the St Sernin,' Dupont was saying. 'Parts of it date all the way back to the time of the First Crusade, you know.'

Layla mumbled a distant 'yes' but wasn't really listening. All she could think of was where the hell she should go from here.

After leaving the Gratzes' apartment block Khalifa wandered around El-Maadi for a while, gazing at the plush houses, stopping to peruse a street vendor's stall where, on a whim, he bought a carved wooden statue of the hawk-god Horus, thinking it would make a nice present for his wife Zenab. Then, still with the best part of four hours to kill, he turned his feet back to the Metro station and took a train towards the centre of town.

Whenever he found himself in Cairo with time to spare he invariably gravitated towards the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on Midan Tahrir, and it was where he thought he'd go now, hoping to lose himself, if only for a while, in its wondrous collection of ancient artefacts. His old friend and mentor Professor Mohammed al-Habibi, the museum's chief curator, was away lecturing in Europe, which was a shame, because there were few things in the world he enjoyed more than wandering around the museum's galleries in the professor's company. Even without him, though, it was still a magical place, and as his train rattled its way northwards through the dusty suburbs he felt an excited tingle of expectation at the prospect of the distractions ahead.

It was eight stops from El-Maadi to Sadat, the station closest to the museum. Precisely why he got out four stops short of his intended destination he had no idea. One minute he was swaying back and forth in the packed carriage, staring at the higgledy-piggledy tenements juddering past outside the window, the next, without any conscious awareness of having actually left the train, he was on a deserted street outside Mar Girgus Metro station, clutching his wooden Horus statue and gazing across at a neatly dressed stone wall behind which were corralled an asymmetrical jumble of houses, monasteries and churches – Masr al-Qadimah, the Old City of Cairo.

Although he knew most of the capital like the back of his hand, this was one quarter he had never visited before – a curious gap in his geography given his fascination with history, since, as its name implied, it was the most antiquated section of the metropolis, with buildings, or parts of buildings, dating right the way back to the Roman era (there had been no town here in ancient Egyptian times, when the capital had been further south, at Memphis).

For almost a minute Khalifa stood where he was, blinking, disorientated, as if he had woken from a heavy slumber to find himself in a wholly different location from that in which he had originally gone to sleep. Then, propelled by an imperative he could neither explain nor resist, he crossed the street and descended a set of worn stone steps that led him beneath the enclosure's perimeter wall and into the tight honeycomb of buildings within.

It was silent in here, unnaturally so, and very still, the air dense and musty, timeless, as if the physical laws that held sway throughout the rest of the city had in this particular corner of it somehow fallen into abeyance, leaving everything suspended in a sort of hushed, immutable vacuum. He stopped, uncertain what on earth he was doing there, yet at the same time struck by a sudden curious sense that his presence was perhaps after all not entirely random, that rather it had some underlying purpose to it. Then he started forward again, following a narrow paved street that ran away in front of him like a deep scalpel-stroke cut through the quarter's tangled entrails. Crumbling brick and stone buildings rose in walls on either side of him, punctuated here and there with thick wooden doors, like leathery mouths, most of them closed tight but a few slightly ajar, affording fleeting glimpses into secret worlds beyond – a neatly tended courtyard garden; a room piled high with lumber; a shadowy Coptic chapel, its fluted pillars wound round with soft skeins of candlelight.

Every now and then other streets opened up to his left or right, silent, deserted, inviting him to divert to some other part of the quarter. He held his course, following the paved avenue as it dog-legged back and forth until eventually, like a stream issuing into a large pool, it emerged into a dusty open space at the centre of which stood a square, two-storey building in yellow stone, with arched windows and a band of carved cornicing around the edge of its flat roof. A sign outside read BEN EZRA SYNAGOGUE – PROPERTY OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF CAIRO.

He had never seen a synagogue before, let alone been inside one, and for a moment he hesitated, part of him wanting to turn right round and go back the way he had come. The feeling that he was somehow meant to be there, however, that he had, in some inexplicable manner, been
called,
was by now so strong that it overcame whatever doubts he had. Clasping his wooden statuette, he walked up to the building and passed through its arched entrance.

The interior was cool and softly lit, silent, with a grey-white marble floor, a row of brass lamps suspended from the ceiling and, to either side, a procession of pillars supporting a low wooden gallery. The walls were painted with geometric patterns in green, gold, red and white, while at the far end of the room, beyond an octagonal marble pulpit, a set of five steps led up to an exquisitely decorated wooden shrine, its surface inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, its doors inscribed with lines of Hebrew lettering.

Again he hesitated, a curious sense of expectation swelling in the pit of his stomach; then, slowly, he started forward, walking the length of the synagogue until he was standing at the foot of the steps leading up to the shrine. A pair of curiously shaped brass lamps, almost as tall as he was, stood to either side, each with a long vertical stem from which six branches curved gracefully outwards and upwards, three on one side, three on the other, each crowned, as was the stem, with a flame-shaped light-bulb. Despite the magnificence of the building's other ornaments it was for some reason these lamps that most compelled his attention, that were somehow the focus of his sense of expectation. Stepping up to one of them, he reached out a hand and clasped it around the smooth stem.

'And you shall make a lampstand of pure gold, and there shall be six branches going out of its sides, and its cups, its capitals and its flowers shall be one piece with it.'

Khalifa wheeled round, startled. He had thought he was alone, had been certain he was alone. Now, however, he saw that away to his right, half-hidden in the gloom beneath the gallery, a man was sitting on one of the wooden benches that ran along the synagogue's walls. He was wearing a dark blue robe and skullcap that seemed to blend with the shadows – the reason, probably, why he hadn't noticed him before. As well as a long white beard that came down almost to the level of his chest, he had the most extraordinarily bright blue eyes, which seemed to glow in the darkness like stars against a night sky.

'It's called a menorah,' said the stranger, his voice soft, faintly musical.

'Sorry?'

'The lamp you are holding. It is called a menorah.'

Khalifa realized that his hand was still clasped around the light's spiralling stem. He withdrew it, embarrassed, as if he had been caught touching something he wasn't supposed to.

'I'm sorry,' he repeated. 'I shouldn't have . . .'

The stranger waved a hand, smiling.

'It is good that you are interested. Most people, they walk past without noticing. If you want to touch, please, be my guest.'

He remained where he was for a moment, staring at Khalifa – the detective had never seen such bright blue eyes – then got to his feet and walked over to him, his movements curiously fluid and effortless, almost as if he was floating. Although his hair and beard were white as ice, now that he was in the light Khalifa could see that his skin was smooth and taut, unlined, his body erect, so that it was impossible to guess his age. There was something faintly disconcerting about him. Not threatening, just . . . strange. Unworldly, as if he was not actually there in real time, but rather part of a dream.

'You are the . . . imam here?' asked the detective, his voice sounding strangely thick and unfamiliar, as though he was talking underwater.

'The rabbi?' Again the man smiled, his eyes lingering momentarily on the Horus-statue clasped in Khalifa's left fist. 'No, no. There has been no full-time rabbi here for over thirty years. I am simply a . . . caretaker. Just as my father was before me, and his father before him, and his before him. We . . . look after things.'

His tone was matter of fact, conversational. There was something about his choice of words, however, the way his gaze held and enveloped Khalifa, flooded right into him, that seemed to hint at some deeper meaning, some level of mutual understanding beyond what was being openly expressed. Although he had always been disdainful of those who believed in the paranormal – 'hunkum-funkum' as Professor al-Habibi called it – the detective could not escape a sudden, unsettling conviction that not only did the man know exactly who he was, but that he was in some indeterminable manner responsible for his presence here today. He shook his head, flummoxed, and moved backwards half a step. There was a long silence.

'It means something, the word "menorah"?' he asked eventually, trying to make conversation, to ease the air of intensity that seemed to have wrapped itself around them.

The stranger stared down at him – he was almost a head taller – then, with a faint, knowing smile, as if he had been expecting the question, turned towards the lamp, his sapphire eyes sparkling in the glare of its flame-shaped bulbs.

'It is the Hebrew for candelabrum,' he said quietly. 'The lamp of God. A symbol of very great power for my people.
The
symbol. The sign of signs.'

Far from easing the atmosphere, Khalifa sensed that his question had only served to thicken it. Despite that, despite himself, he couldn't help but be drawn in by the man's words, as if he was listening to some sort of incantation.

'It's . . . beautiful,' he mumbled, his gaze climbing up the lamp's stem and along the smooth, curving arc of its branches.

'In its own way,' said the man. 'Although like all reproductions it is but a shadow compared to the original – the first lamp, the true lamp, the lamp that the great goldsmith Bezalel made, way back in the mists of time, in the days of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt.' He touched his fingertips to the outermost of the lamp's curving arms. '
That
was very beautiful,' he said, eyes flickering as though a pair of bright-blue butterflies had settled to either side of the bridge of his nose. 'Seven branches, capitals shaped like flowers, cups like almonds, the whole of it beaten from a single block of solid gold – the most beautiful thing that ever was. It stood in the desert tabernacle, and in the First Temple that Solomon built, and in the Second Temple too, until the Romans came and it was lost to the world. Almost two thousand years ago, that was. Whether it shall ever be seen again . . .' He shrugged. 'Who knows. Maybe one day.'

He was silent for a moment, gazing at the lamp, a strange, distant look in his eyes as if he was recalling times long past. Then he dropped his hand and turned back towards Khalifa.

'In Babylon,' he said, 'that is what the prophecy tells us. In Babylon the true Menorah will be found, in the house of Abner. When the time is right.'

Again, for no reason he could explain, the detective was struck by an unsettling sense of subtext to the man's words, a feeling that, although he didn't fully understand what was being said, it was nonetheless in some way significant. He held the man's gaze for a moment, then looked away, eyes roving around the interior of the synagogue until they came to rest on a clock hanging above the entrance.

'Dammit!'

He was certain he had only been there for fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside. Yet according to the clock it was nearly five, which meant he had been in the synagogue for well over three hours. He checked his own watch, which confirmed the time, and with a bewildered shake of his head, said that he had to be going.

'I completely lost track of time.'

The man smiled. 'The menorah can have that effect. It is a very mysterious force.'

The two of them stared at each other – Khalifa experiencing a momentary, giddy sensation of falling, as if he was plummeting from a great height into a clear blue pool – then, with a nod, the detective stepped past the lamp and started back across the synagogue.

'Might I ask your name?' the man called after him when he was almost at the entrance.

Khalifa turned. 'Yusuf,' he replied. There was a beat, then, more out of politeness than genuine interest, he asked, 'Yours?'

The man smiled. 'I am Shomer Ha-Or. Just as my father was before me, and his father before him. I hope I will see you again, Yusuf. In fact, I know I will.'

Before the detective could ask what he meant by this the man waved and, again with that curious floating motion, walked back into the shadows at the side of the synagogue, disappearing from view as if he had stepped right out of this world.