The Last Ember (17 page)

They intend to destroy all the archaeology that supports the Judeo-Christian history of the Temple Mount.

Professor Cianari closed his eyes and rubbed his face.

And I have helped them.

He thought again of going to the carabinieri in Rome or the authorities in Jerusalem, despite the recent consequences for Cianari’s colleague, Dr. Tik Aran, an archaeologist who assisted Salah ad-Din in Turkey. Two weeks after Dr. Aran finally refused to dig any further beneath Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, his body was found washed up along the downtown bank of the Bosphorus.

“No one has ever been closer, Professor,” Salah ad-Din said over the noise. “I financed your excavations from the wells of Avignon to the ruins beneath the Colosseum, all to find this artifact.” He pointed to the far wall across the cavern. “We need only to follow the path of the aqueduct to reach it.”

“There are two hundred feet between these cavern walls,” the professor said. “There are dozens of possibilities regarding where the aqueduct’s course would line up.”

“Not if we can extrapolate the natural slope of the aqueduct’s bridge,” Salah ad-Din replied.

“Project its slope across the cavern?” the professor objected. “That would take a week of fieldwork.”

“Not with our technology.”

Salah ad-Din motioned up to Ahmed, who still stood at the edge of the tunnel opening where they had entered the cavern. He positioned equipment that resembled a surveyor’s prism atop a yellow tripod. A four-pronged blue laser emanated from the perched device, unifying into a single braid that reached across the entire cavern like a tightrope. It settled on a precise spot on the far wall.

“And there it is, the other half of the aqueduct,” Salah ad-Din said. “Through there, the priest escaped with the object that Titus would have traded all the loot from the Second Temple to obtain.”

Salah ad-Din relayed a message in Arabic into a headset.

A bulldozer moved toward the wall, its blackened pneumatic pipes resembling the muscle sinew of a beast capable of terrible destruction.

“You cannot use that machine to plow through the wall,” Cianari said, white-faced, realizing how close Salah ad-Din was at last. “You might damage the artifact!” he shouted over the gurgle of the bulldozer’s diesel engine.

Salah ad-Din’s gaze met the professor’s. He could see that his control over the old man was unraveling. Salah ad-Din motioned to the bulldozer operator. The engine lowered to a rumble.

“It is sacred,” the professor said.

“Sacred?” Salah ad-Din answered in an even tone, but with frightening intensity. “I have come to you with archaeological research from excavations spanning four countries and sixty years, and you answer me with a child’s myth? I showed you inscriptions lost for thousands of years beneath the Colosseum.” He stood very close, and the professor smelled the raw tobacco on his breath. “Emperor Titus began this search,” Salah ad-Din said. “And I will finish it.”

“I cannot allow you to destroy what a courageous few in ancient Rome gave their lives to protect.” The professor straightened as he spoke, as though remembering the ancient heroism inspired a sudden courage within him. “Titus came to Jerusalem to defeat a god. And like him, you don’t just seek this artifact, do you? You seek the power of erasing it. I am too much a part of Jerusalem’s ruins to help you destroy them.”

“You are a part of these ruins, aren’t you?” Salah ad-Din said, his gray eyes shining in the cavern’s klieg light. He turned around and nodded to Ahmed, who had climbed down from the tunnel’s edge. Nonchalantly, Ahmed reached beneath his slack belt and retrieved an Albanian nine-millimeter pistol, its snag-free, hammerless frame allowing for a motion so swift that the professor did not react before the skinny boy fired two rounds directly into the professor’s forehead.

Cianari managed a rapid blink as his body swayed. Then his lifeless frame smacked into the dry dirt of the cavern face-first, the blood seeping through the bullet’s exit wound into the professor’s white hair, like lamb’s wool soaking up thick red dye.

Salah ad-Din stepped over the crumpled body.

“Bury him in the walls,” he said.

T
his is it,” Jonathan said. “Ten and a half Via dell’Orso.”

“Ten and a half?” Emili asked.

They approached a narrow, shabby stone building with a wooden door closed with a loop of string. “Kaballah,” said a sign in kitschy medieval font hanging from a nail above a broken buzzer.

“Are you sure about this?” Emili said. “I mean,
Chandler
?”

“The guy knows more about ancient mysticism than anyone.”

“And he’s bottled that information for sale,” Emili said.

“Be polite, okay? He’ll answer our questions.”

They entered a musty foyer with a flight of worn steps. Emili removed her overcoat, and a long-sleeve silk blouse revealed her trim waist and rounded breastline. Her hair was still pinned, but loose blond strands gathered at her neck. Jonathan’s thoughts strayed and he moved quickly toward the stairs to refocus.

“I’ll go first,” he said, clearing his throat.

The stairwell led to a frosted-glass door, which was jammed open with a doorstop. They entered a lavender-scented room that resembled a posh lounge at a hip boutique hotel: white orchids and plush velvet chairs beneath exposed wooden rafters. French doors opened into a larger room with seats arranged classroom style.

The receptionist was a pretty, young brunette with a small nose ring and a tattoo of some mystical Egyptian symbol on her clavicle. Bookcases lined the walls with texts on mysticism, along with Kaballah candles and Kaballah water for sale. Red strings were stuffed in a glass jar on the receptionist’s desk. The label read, “Six Euros Each, Good for Eight Wearings.”

Nearby, a fragrant orange candle burned in its own puddle. A sign beneath it read: “ ‘ Some only want to . . . see the garment of the Torah . . . not what lies beneath.’ Zohar Chadash,
Tikkunim
II 93b.”

And below that: “Visa Eurocard Accepted.”

The receptionist went in search of Chandler, and Jonathan scanned the books on magnetism, the philosopher’s stone, numerology. The books themselves were a reflection of Chandler, a man who could recite from memory entire passages of medieval mysticism. It didn’t take much imagination to predict Chandler would wind up in this lobby with this receptionist and that credit card machine. Years ago, it had been bar stools at the local pub, where his winding theories from the Arizal to Johannes Trithemius riveted all who would listen. The only difference now was that the seats had an admission fee.

“Our hero and heroine have surfaced at last,” said a cheerful voice from behind them. Chandler clumsily made his way across the lecture room, his arms open, as though Jonathan and Emili had been recovered from sea.

He looked at Emili. “If it isn’t the Angel of Artifacts herself,” he said. “I’ve been following your adventurings.”

“Good to see you, Chandler.” She smiled warily.

“Perfect timing. Don’t have another class until noon. Come.”

They walked through the classroom to a dusty old library reminiscent of a funeral parlor foyer. Stained glass bathed the room in amber light. Inside a set of small glass cases along the wall, waterlogged manuscripts were covered in mysterious symbols. It was as though Chandler’s encyclopedic mind of the occult had been laid out as a visual encyclopedia before them.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Chandler said.

Jonathan and Emili spread to opposite sides of the room.

“I bought this place from an eccentric purveyor of you-know-what.” Chandler scrunched his nose as though it were too distasteful to say. “I’ve left the library intact.”

“Purveyor of what?” Emili said nervously, glancing at Jonathan as though Chandler were talking about illicit drugs.

“Why, a purveyor of the occult, Kabbalah, gnosticism, you name it, baby.” Chandler sat behind a mahogany desk, cleaning his glasses with the end of his shirt.

“The old man spent a lifetime gathering obscure and out-of-print texts on neo-Platonism, alchemy, Nostradamus, the whole nine.” He sprang out of his chair and walked up to Jonathan, pointing through the glass. “Just look at these. Books on Gematria, Rosicrucian manifestos, even the Shimmush Tehilim, for the magical use of the Psalms.” He pointed at an ancient-looking, torn leather binding with a medieval bronze clasp intact. “That’s a tenth-century copy of the Zohar, brought to Italy in A.D. 917 from Babylonia.”

Jonathan leaned in, and so did Chandler. Both their faces were close against the glass, and Chandler whispered, “If it wasn’t damaged by the Venetian flood of 1583, it’d be worth more than a Ferrari.”

“What are these?” Emili wandered over to the library’s other side.

“Ancient Egyptian rites. Those documents describe the measurements of the pyramids, as documented in 1864. Did you know that their original height of one hundred forty-eight and a half meters, multiplied by ten with nine zeros, gives you the distance between the earth and the sun?” Chandler collapsed into his chair, pleased with himself. “It’s all true.”

“And, according to Umberto Eco’s measurements, take one of those public telephone booths out there in the piazza and multiply it by its width and then by ten to the fifth, and you get the circumference of the earth,” Jonathan said.

Emili laughed.

“You’ve become a tougher crowd, Aurelius,” Chandler said.

Emili handed Chandler her digital camera and pointed at the viewfinder screen. “Jon and I could use your help, Chandler. We just found this inscription.”

“A sacred tree of light,” Chandler translated aloud. “It’s remarkable,” he exhaled. “Where did you see this?”

“Beneath the Colosseum,” Jonathan said. “In the hypogeum.”

“You went
beneath
the Colosseum?” Chandler said, not attempting to disguise his envy. He wagged his finger at Jonathan. “I knew the great Marcus was out of retirement. I could see it in your eyes.”

“Someone worked hard to draw attention to that location beneath the Colosseum,” Jonathan said, removing the crumpled Alitalia napkin from his jacket pocket. “I found this message carved inside a fragment of the Forma Urbis. Its meaning seems well within your area of . . . um”—Jonathan looked around the room suspiciously—“
expertise.”

“Titus’s mistake?” Chandler said, leaning forward. He stared at the napkin, and after a moment his gaze slowly rose to meet Jonathan’s. All his glibness was gone. He seemed more comfortable when spinning theories he knew were of his own invention, as though playing the odds at a casino table where he knew the money was fake. But as he studied the inscription, his expression turned to panic, as though someone whispered into his ear that the chips were real.

“Aurelius.” Chandler lifted his eyes from the digital camera, his tone suddenly tenuous. “You have come to me with very serious business.”

C
omandante Profeta, we are arriving at the International Centre for Conservation in Rome,” Lieutenant Brandisi said, clapping his cell phone shut in the front seat of the carabinieri sedan. He turned around to face Profeta in the back. “The center’s director, Jacqueline Olivier, is waiting for you in her office.”

Profeta crossed the central courtyard of the International Centre for Conservation and checked his firearm before stepping through a UN-ISSUED metal detector. A tall guard with a blue helmet in full UN regalia tagged his firearm and gave Profeta a perforated card to reclaim it. Although the International Centre for Conservation was a separate subsidiary of UNESCO, Profeta knew various United Nations sovereignty rules applied to the building, such as no local police firearms permitted inside.

The halls bustled with staffers answering mobile phones in dozens of languages. A mounted flat-panel television displayed live news reporting on the Colosseum blast.

Profeta studied the walls, which were lined with the center’s international tributes, plaques, and awards. He stopped abruptly to read one of them.

“This seems like a prestigious award, Brandisi,” he said admiringly.

“It is, and most deserved,” Director Olivier added, standing behind them in the hall. She extended her hand to Profeta and then to Brandisi. “I am Jacqueline Olivier, the director of the International Centre for Conservation in Rome.” Director Olivier pointed at the plaque. “Dr. Travia is my deputy director. We are all quite proud of her conservation efforts in regions of conflict, from Baghdad to Jerusalem to Bosnia. She takes her role quite seriously.”

“Appears to be the case,” Profeta said.

“This way,
Comandante
,” Olivier said. She escorted them down the hall and into her corner office, which was appointed with tokens of appreciation from international preservation sites. On the windowsill sat a small Buddha head, an African ceremonial knife, a Nepalese mask. In the distance lay a sweeping view of the Aventine Hill.

“Lieutenant Brandisi and I have come regarding the explosion beneath the Colosseum.”

“The World Heritage Committee meeting opens at the Colosseum tomorrow, and the heating pipes choose now to burst.” She smiled, but Profeta could see the strain in her eyes.

“I’m afraid one of your staffers, Dr. Emili Travia, was quite near the blast.”

“She is all right?” the director said, her smile disappearing instantly.

“We can’t be certain. She was last seen on the surveillance cameras descending beneath the Colosseum minutes before the explosion.”

“It must be a mistake. Someone else,” the director spoke with the false assurance of someone in shock.

“A Colosseum staff member identified her. We have teams searching the rubble—” Profeta stopped himself. “They are searching as we speak.”