The Last Ember (10 page)

Emili knew that the grand mufti’s deep anti-Semitism had become indelible in the Arab world. During her restoration work of a Byzantine church in Gaza in 2000, Emili was surprised to learn that Sheikh al-Husseini’s Arabic translation of
Mein Kampf
was still the sixth-best seller in the Palestinian-controlled territories. She had never heard of an archivist or a librarian who had seen the mufti and survived.

“He demanded that I bring him the archive’s oldest Josephus manuscripts and lay them on a table, which I did. The German professors began searching through them for particular pages and ripping them out. But the mufti was searching for something else, demanding to see all of the archive’s sketches of the Colosseum.” Orvieti could still hear the small man’s fit of outrage. “Each time he found a folio of architectural sketches that was not what he was looking for, he ripped it to shreds, repeating the words, ‘I will not make Titus’s mistake,’ as if it were a kind of mantra.” Orvieti walked to a large book of sketches lying on a table in the center of the room. The leather cover was cracked like driftwood, and in profile it resembled a bound stack of dried leaves. He carefully turned the brittle pages until he arrived at a certain sketch. “I believe he was looking for this.”

The drawing depicted the Colosseum from the exterior, one of its arches crumbling and overgrown with brush, as it was in the nineteenth century. “It is a drawing from Napoleon’s archaeological excavations of the Colosseum in 1809,” he said.

“I wouldn’t call what Napoleon did to Rome
archaeology
,” Emili said, controlling her preservationist’s ire. “During his occupation of Rome, that man’s archaeological excavations did more damage to Rome’s ruins than his cannons did.”

Delicately, almost reverently, Emili held the drawing above the desk lamp, illuminating the parchment’s thick weave. Humidity had damaged the center of the sketch, but the rest was in good condition.

“I found this during a renovation years after the war, hidden inside one of the sanctuary’s wooden pews. Only then did I remember that the previous archivist once said that a member of Napoleon’s excavation team bequeathed his drawings to the archive. It was the papal architect, Giuseppe Valadier.”

“The
architetto camerale
?” Emili knew that Giuseppe Valadier, as papal architect, had completed dozens of archaeological restorations in the early 1800s. “Why wouldn’t he leave all his sketches to the Vatican?”

“I think he found something during his excavation of the Colosseum,” Orvieti said. “Something he wanted to keep from Napoleon, and even from the Church. Something important enough to bring the Mufti from Jerusalem two centuries later looking for it.”

“But after all these years”—Orvieti shrugged—“I don’t know which arch is drawn here.”

Emili inspected the drawing. “Just a minute,” she said. “Look at the top, above the keystone. What do you see written there,
Signore
?”

“Nothing,” Orvieti said.

“
Exactly
. This arch,
Signore
, has no number. Nearly all of the eighty arches of the Colosseum were numbered.” Emili recalled her recent preservation work inside the arena. “But not the gladiator gates used by prisoners sent to their death. If we could search beneath—”

“I’m sorry, Dottoressa Travia,” Orvieti interrupted her, lifting his hand, “but I gave up searching long ago. To understand the drawing’s full meaning, the previous archivist claimed one must”—he paused—“believe.” Orvieti averted his eyes ashamedly. “He said one must still believe.”

“In what?” Emili asked.

“The splitting of the Red Sea,” Orvieti responded without hesitating. “And that is the reason I want someone else to have this sketch, Dottoressa Travia. I am afraid I no longer qualify.”

 

 

 

Walking back across the Ponte Palatino to Trastevere, Dr. Emili Travia returned to her office in the renovated seventeenth-century convent that housed the International Centre for Conservation. She sat at her desk beneath a small brick-domed ceiling that was once a granary roof. The late-morning sun sifted through a high window, illuminating photographs of preservation projects tacked above her UN-issued Formica desk: A ninth-century Buddhist temple damaged in the 2004 tsunami. A Shiite mosque in downtown Baghdad. She tried not to think about the morning’s trial, but the
Herald Tribune
article she had stared at all night still sat in front of her.

A museum display,
Emili thought. Over the last two years she had researched the black markets in London and the auction houses of Shanghai, trying to locate these pieces of the Forma Urbis that she believed were responsible for Sharif’s death. And they turned up in a museum. Emili massaged her temples in exhaustion.

“Dottoressa Travia?”

Emili was startled by a voice in the doorway. Dr. Jacqueline Olivier, the director general of the International Centre, carried a thin black briefcase and a black-and-tan-checkered coat over her arm. As usual, she arrived at the UN offices after a breakfast meeting and was neatly turned out in a double-breasted suit and French-knotted scarf, her charcoal-colored hair cut to feathered perfection. With her fine aristocratic features and quiet air of erudition, and born into Parisian nobility, Director Olivier was the very personification of the prestigious organization that conserved priceless monuments of civilization. In contrast, Emili had loose strands of blond hair strewn across her exhausted face. She sat up abruptly, embarrassed to have such an elegant and accomplished figure discover her lost in reflection.

But in the director’s eyes there was not the least bit of judgment, only concern.

“I heard about your testimony today,” she said.

“I know your thoughts on the strength of our evidence, Director.”

“Or the lack of it,” Director Olivier said, stopping her. “Emili, I know what this artifact means to you, especially with the World Heritage Committee meeting this week. You hoped this artifact would rescue your efforts to show illicit excavations beneath Jerusalem.”

“They confirm what Dr. Lebag and I saw.”

Olivier leaned against the doorway, tucking her gloves into the front pocket of her overcoat. “But are we
really
to believe that someone began a riot in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem to stop your investigation? That to protect their research they were willing to take Sharif’s life?”

Emili answered quietly. “They were willing to take many more lives than Sharif’s. He was just the only one down there.”

Olivier offered her a consoling smile, an expression meant to soothe. Instead, it so clearly revealed her own administrator’s agenda of wanting to let this go, of wanting the office staff to move on, that it had just the opposite effect. It emboldened Emili. The political expediency that made the director want to believe Sharif’s death was accidental had fostered exactly the kind of revision of history that Emili, as a preservationist, was trained to guard against.

“Emili, I wish I could convince you to stay for the World Heritage Committee opening ceremony tomorrow.”

“Not unless you allow me to present our findings about the illegal excavations beneath the Temple Mount at the plenary conference. Otherwise, I’ll be returning to Jerusalem this evening.”

“On the World Food Programme charter, I suppose?” the director stepped out of her office, wagging her finger maternally. “You’re deputy director now, Dr. Travia. You should start traveling like one.”

The director’s footsteps faded down the hallway, and Emili stood up. She unhooked her herringbone overcoat from the back of the door, tightened her scarf, and carefully picked up the Napoleonic sketch Orvieti had entrusted to her. If answers about those fragments of the Forma Urbis lay in the Colosseum, she would find them.

C
omandante Profeta, followed by Lieutenant Rufio, swiped his access card outside the Command’s computer forensic laboratory and stepped through its glass doors. The preserved ceiling of the laboratory reflected the building’s original purpose as a Jesuit college, and domed frescoes vaulted over tables of confiscated computer servers from the midnight raid. The computers were dissected; their exposed wires resembled electronic open-heart surgery.

“We salvaged a digital image,
Comandante,
” Lieutenant Copia said proudly. She handed Profeta a computer printout. “Came from the one LCD monitor we removed before the explosion.”

“But you said there was a bullet hole directly through the screen,” Profeta said.

“Correct,” Copia responded, “but the bullet through this screen shortcircuited the LCD display, burning the last image onto the screen’s hyper-compressed pixels.” The technician pointed at the printout in Profeta’s hands. “That was the last picture on the screen.”

The image was a black-and-white sketch, prismed in shards as though the sketch had been photocopied behind a sheet of shattered glass. The imprint of a bullet hole lay at the center of the image.

“These are Forma Urbis fragments,” Profeta said. “Looks like they are assembling pieces of the ancient map to reconstruct an image of the Colosseum.”

“Comandante!”
Brandisi said. He charged into the room, holding clenched pages in his right hand, as he would a torch. “I have information about the restoration project adjacent to the dockside warehouse in Civitavecchia.”

“The restoration project?” Profeta said.

“Yes, you said to research the restoration effort of a small Roman ruin located on the same dock as the warehouse we raided last night. As expected, the restoration was sponsored by the Cultural Ministry of Civitavecchia and the local tourist bureau, but there was a private donor. A Saudi-based cultural heritage fund called the al-Quds fund.” Brandisi looked down at the wrinkled pages in front of him. “A UNESCO-subsidized fund incorporated in Morocco in 1998 to ‘preserve the Islamic cultural heritage of Jerusalem.’”

“Jerusalem?” Profeta said. “What does Jerusalem have to do with a ruin on an abandoned pier twenty minutes outside Rome?”

“Could be a cultural-exchange project,” Rufio said, referring to the pairing of foreign preservation projects for reciprocal donations. “Helps with publicity. It’s probably nothing unusual.”

“I searched for other local restoration projects with contributions from this same fund, and I found one. It’s a restoration project for a ruin downtown.”

“Where?” Profeta asked, his eyes shifting to the printout of the shattered screen depicting the Forma Urbis.

“Just outside the Piazza del Colosseo.”

“Along the northeastern gate of the Colosseum, along the Via del Colosseo?” Profeta asked.

Brandisi glanced again at the wrinkled pages in front of him. “Yes,” he said, stunned. “A restoration of the gladiatorial barracks, just outside that area of the Colosseum. How did you know?”

Profeta pointed at the shattered image. “It’s the location of the gate on these fragments of the Forma Urbis.” Profeta turned to Rufio. “Rufio, I want four squad cars surrounding the Colosseum. These antiquity thieves could be beneath the ruin even as we speak.”

“
Comandante
, are you sure about this?” Rufio said, his cheek twitching. But he knew Profeta had not heard the voice that haunted him since he had hung up the pay phone in the alleyway only an hour before.

“If they discover the excavations near the Colosseum, you realize the measures Salah ad-Din will have to take,” the hushed voice had said.

“But there are hundreds of tourists in the piazza around the Colosseum!” Rufio protested. “It’s not some abandoned commercial pier you can just blow—”

But by then, the line was dead. A recorded operator’s voice had interrupted Rufio in rapid Arabic, presumably asking the caller to try again.

T
atton and Mildren returned to the firm like a triumphal procession victorious in battle. Jonathan walked behind them, seeing the palazzo’s façade glisten in a sudden burst of winter sun, much like his future career at Dulling. Seven years ago, he would have burned with excitement at the discovery of hidden writing inside a piece of the Forma Urbis and probably presented a scholarly paper on the concealed letters. Now Mildren’s suggestion about taking a power sander to their underside made terrifying sense.

Tatton’s voice echoed in his mind.
Mysteries of the ancient world do not concern us, Marcus.
And he could hear Emili’s counterpoint as if to answer,
“Sharif knew these fragments meant something more, Jon. It’s why he stayed behind.”