The Bonaparte Secret (13 page)

“Thanks!” Francis called afer her, handing one mug to Lang. “Now, you were saying . . . ?”

Lang tested the brew before taking a full swallow. “The other day at lunch you made a remark about Saint Mark’s bones not being what was taken from his tomb in Venice. If not his, whose?”

Francis leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and making a steeple of his fingers. “You want the short answer or the long one?”

“I get a choice?”

Francis untwined his fingers to pick up his coffee. “In the mid-first century, Saint Mark served as bishop of Alexandria, then the second-largest city in the Roman Empire. He was so efficient at converting the Egyptians to Christianity, the priests of the old gods stirred up a mob that dragged him out and killed him. They intended to burn his body, thereby depriving him of the afterlife in which they believed. Legend has it a miraculous storm intervened, dousing the flames that had only partially consumed the saint’s remains. Somehow the Christians retrieved the body and buried it in their church by the sea. Subsequently the Church of Saint Mark the Evangelist was erected on the site.

“By 828 Egypt was under the rule of the Turks, Muslims. In the city of Alexandria, Christian churches were being looted, torn down for building material or converted to mosques. Fearing for the relics of their city’s patron saint, two Venetian traders stole the bones, hid them under a layer of pork to discourage Turkish customs officials from examining the basket in which they were hidden and brought them to Venice.”

Lang put his mug down on the corner of the desk. “I know. The event is memorialized in mosaics in the basilica in Venice. But so far, you haven’t explained why the bones there aren’t Saint Mark’s.”

“Gutta cavat lapidem, consumitur anulus usu
.”

Lang shifted his weight in an unsuccessful attempt to make the chair more comfortable. “I’m aware a drop hollows out stone and a ring wears away by use. The Roman proverb counsels patience, not endurance. If a church in Alexandria was built over the partially incinerated remains of Saint Mark and those bones were subsequently stolen and moved to Venice, why would they not still be there?”

Francis held up a finger. “Perhaps because they were never there in the first place. By the time the Venetians took whatever it was they stole, the church had long been destroyed. They claimed to have found the relics amid ruins of what they supposed had been the church, since the rubble was located by what had been known variously as Saint Mark’s Gate or the Pepper Gate, the entrance into the ancient part of the city from what is now Cairo. A number of ancient travelers had described the church as being located just inside this gate as late as the mid-seventh century.”

“Are you saying the relics could be anybody’s?”

A shake of the head as Francis leaned forward over the desk again, coffee forgotten. “Not at all. There was someone else of note buried in Alexandria over two centuries before Saint Mark ever set foot in Egypt.”

Lang stared at his friend. “Alexander the Great?”

“Indeed. His mummified body was hijacked on its way to Macedonia, taken to Memphis, then to Alexandria. Possession of the remains legitimized the Ptolemy dynasty’s rule of Egypt until the Romans came along.”

“But how . . . ?”

“Alexander was viewed as a god by the Egyptians, the son of Ammon. For that matter, the Greeks also deified him as a son of Zeus, and much later, he even appeared in chapter eighteen of the Koran as Zulqarnain, the two-horned lord.”

“Two horned?”

“He was depicted on coins and some statues sprouting a pair of ram’s horns.”

Lang put down his mug half-empty. “That still doesn’t explain how he got into Saint Mark’s tomb.”

“He didn’t. The Venetian grave robbers looted the wrong tomb.”

Lang started to protest when Francis waved a hand, signaling for quiet. “Both Alexander and Saint Mark were buried in the same section of the city, the palace district, which was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 365 AD. There’s no firsthand eyewitness account of Alexander’s mausoleum after that; plus, in 391 the emperor Theodosius banned paganism. The edict would have provided a perfect excuse to loot whatever was left of the building.”

“Like the golden sarcophagus?”

“One of the subsequent Ptolemys had already sold it to pay his army.”

Lang held up both hands. “OK, OK. Let’s cut to the chase. What makes you think these Venetians pinched Alexander instead of Saint Mark?”

Francis spun his swivel chair around to face the bookcase behind the desk. Studying the shelves for a moment, he pulled out an oversize paperback and held it up. “Andrew Chugg’s
The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great.
” He thumbed through the pages. “Here. In describing an account of the theft of the saint’s remains from Alexandria, the smell of embalming spices from the basket they used was overpowering. That was why they topped it off with pork. No way the Muslim Turk customs officials were going to touch pork.

“Embalming spices!
The early Christians didn’t embalm, but the Egyptians did in the mummification process. And Alexander was mummified, remember?”

“So were hundreds if not thousands of Egyptians.”

“No doubt. But the area around the Pepper Gate wasn’t a series of tombs, it was where a number of royal buildings were.”

Lang smiled. “An interesting theory, but DNA testing could easily tell a Jew from a Greek, and carbon dating might establish when the body died.”

“The church has already denied permission for such tests to be run.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

Francis put the book on his desk. “Why the interest?”

“I figure the more I know about what was really stolen from Saint Mark’s in Venice, the better chance I have of knowing who tried to kill Gurt and me. And who sent the man who broke into our house.”

“Someone broke into your home? Anything stolen?”

“The, er, security system worked beautifully.”

Francis leaned back, his chair protesting. “And you think this break-in had something to do with what happened in Venice?”

Lang saw no reason to mention the use of the listening device by the unknowns the night the priest had last visited. “It had occurred to me, yes.”

Francis tsk-tsked, slowly shaking his head. “And I thought when Manfred came along, you and Gurt were going to settle down, live like normal people.”

Lang took a final sip of coffee, noting it had gone both cold and bitter. “Trying to kill us in Venice and burglarizing my house was not my idea. Thanks for the coffee and the lecture. Interesting that you think it was Alexander’s remains that were taken from the church.”

Francis shook his head. “I didn’t say that.” He held out the book. “I said this guy Chugg postulates that Alexander’s remains were taken from Alexandria. It’s entirely possible the tomb robbers you encountered in Venice read the same book and accepted his theory. Stealing Alexander’s remains makes a lot more sense that Saint Mark’s.”

“And that would be why?”

“Ancient legend has it that whoever possesses the body of Alexander will never be defeated in battle, again according to our friend Chugg.”

“So now we not only have grave robbers, we have
superstitious
grave robbers.”

Francis placed the book back on its slot on the shelf. “That should narrow the field as to suspects somewhat.”

Ansley Park
Later that afternoon

A winter twilight was waiting on the eastern horizon by the time Lang accelerated the Porsche onto Ansley Park’s meandering streets. Streetlights were stuttering on, their bluish fluorescence painting trees, shrubbery and buildings alike a ghostly hue. There were few people to be seen on the sidewalks and the winding byways. Early evening provided the temptation to unleash a few of the horses under the car’s rear deck lid and enjoy handling capabilities daytime traffic curtailed.

With that possibility in mind, he had taken the long way around, entering not at Fifteenth Street at the park’s southern edge but Beverly Road on the north. Only in second gear, he was enjoying the throaty burble as the tachometer whisked past 5000 RPM so much he almost missed the parked car.

Lang’s house on Lafayette Drive faced one of Ansley Park’s several small parks and green spaces, a strip of sculpted trees and small waterways known as Iris Garden, a venue managed by residents rather than the city in much the same way New York residents at one time maintained private parks, of which Gramercy is the last. Unlike New York, though, Iris Garden is not fenced in. The view of its ancient oaks, babbling water and seasonal shrubbery were a primary reason he and Gurt had selected their home.

Lang had planned to round the park, passing his house on the far side across the green space, and take a left-hand sweeper at the park’s western edge, which would bring him to his driveway. Because of the narrowness of the street along the park’s northern edge, parking at the curb was for bidden, a prohibition observed by anyone not wanting to risk finding their car a victim of an anonymous collision.

But there was a car parked there, perhaps fifty yards right across the park from his house.

Lang continued past, turning right rather than left at the street’s dead end into Peachtree Circle, a wide boulevard where street parking was allowed. Pulling the Porsche over, Lang cut the engine, locked it and began to backtrack. He was careful to keep in the shadows, where the fingers of light from the street lamps did not reach.

Rounding the corner, he could see the automobile in question clearly. The lighted tip of a cigarette told him this wasn’t some careless soul who had left his vehicle in a precarious position while he ran a short errand to one of the abutting houses. Whoever was in that car was there for a more sinister purpose.

Keeping in darkness as much as possible, Lang approached until he was no more than six feet from the car’s rear bumper. Against the streetlights’ glow, he could clearly see a single person aiming some sort of device across the park. Lang didn’t have to guess. The listener was back, this time in a position not so easily observed from the house.

A dilemma: Lang could sneak away unobserved, warn Gurt the house was under audio surveillance and wait for an opportunity to find out who this snooper was. Or he could take direct action, alerting the person or persons they had been detected, and perhaps identify them.

Stooping, Lang duckwalked to the rear of the car to keep below the line of sight of the rearview mirrors. By now, he was beside the driver’s door.

His knees were already protesting his cramped posture and he was about to lose feeling in his lower legs. Nevertheless, he made himself be still. How long did it take to smoke a single cigarette, anyway?

He was rewarded when the window scrolled down. A hand with the cigarette in it appeared above his head and flipped the burning tobacco away in an arc of sparks. Like a spring suddenly uncoiling, Lang stood, grabbing the arm and twisting so the man inside was forced against the dashboard. With his free hand, Lang reached inside the car, unlocked the door and dragged the man outside, forcing him facedown on the sidewalk. He struggled and Lang wrenched the arm upward.

“Be still or it comes right out of the socket,” he snarled.

Still pushing the arm upward, Lang put a knee between the shoulders as he used his free hand to pat the man down. It took only seconds to relieve the prone man of an automatic in a shoulder holster and a wallet in a hip pocket. Lang stuffed the weapon into his belt under his suit jacket and the wallet into a pocket before dragging the man to his feet and shoving him against the car.

He ratcheted the arm up a little farther. “OK, who the hell are you and who sent you?”

The only answer was a groan of pain.

“You’ll answer me or I’ll tear it loose and beat you over the head with it.”

Lang and his opponent were suddenly bathed in light. “Hold it right there!”

Lang looked up into the headlights of a police cruiser.

Swell.

Possibly, some neighbor had witnessed what was going on, and the 911 system had experienced another of its occasional successes. More likely, it was one of the rent-a-cops Ansley Park paid to beef up the virtually nonexistent regular patrols of the neighborhood.

“Back, stand back,” the voice from the car commanded. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

By this time, porch lights were flickering on up and down the street.

Lang slowly let go of the man’s arm and stepped back, his hands held above his head. The man beneath him struggled up, took one look at the police car and bolted.

“Stop!” the cop yelled with no effect whatsoever.

It took only a nanosecond for the officer to realize he would have to abandon one potential arrestee for another in full flight. The old bird-in-the-hand theory. A bird that required no exertion to reduce to possession.

Lang pointed at the running man. “He tried to mug me. Stop him!”

The portly officer took only a glance as the fleeing man rounded a corner, before turning his attention to Lang. “You got ID?”

Lang produced his wallet, removed his driver’s license and handed it over for inspection under the beam of a flashlight.

The officer looked up. “You live around here, huh?”

“I can vouch for him, officer.”

Both Lang and the cop turned to see an elderly man in an old-fashioned smoking jacket and carpet slippers. Lang recognized him from one of the few neighborhood-association functions he had attended. He couldn’t put a name to the face, but for once he was going to benefit from the mind-your-neighbor’s-business culture of Ansley Park.

“And who’re you?” the officer demanded.

“Frank Hopkins,” the man puffed, clearly chagrined the policeman didn’t recognize him. “President of the Ansley Park Civic Association.”

The cop nodded. “Oh, yeah, Mr. Hopkins, I recall you now. I spoke about crime prevention at the meeting at your house a year or so ago.” He turned to Lang, returning the driver’s license. “You say the guy was trying to mug you?”

“That’s right,” Lang improvised, hoping Hopkins hadn’t seen all of what had happened. “He jumped out of that car right there and grabbed me. He was going for my wallet.”