The Last Ember (33 page)

Comandante Profeta reached for his two-way radio. “Brandisi, get me Eilat Segev at the Israel Antiquities Authority, immediately.”

O
n the outskirts of Rome, Emili’s motorcycle approached a ramshackle postwar apartment building. The building’s rust-stained concrete walls rose six stories, and the chipping around the first-floor windows indicated where security bars had been ripped off.

“I’m guessing this isn’t on most tourist maps,” Jonathan said.

A sign in the shape of a heraldic symbol was glued to the door. RAOUL FRADELI, MASTERPIECES, PORTRAITURE.

“Here we are,” Emili said.

“Fradeli?” Jonathan said. “That name seems familiar.”

“You’ll be UN personnel in no time.”

Jonathan looked at the hand-painted sign.

“Masterpieces?” Jonathan shook his head. “Please don’t tell me he’s a forger.”

“Look at the bright side, you’re about to have one of the best imitation UN passports in the world.”

Jonathan knew that for most forgers, with their steady hand and eye for signatures, it was more lucrative to imitate green cards and EU passports than to spend months repainting a Monet only to compete with the poster shop down the street.

“The name, it just sounds so familiar,” Jonathan said.

She pressed the apartment number.

“
Quem é?
” said a gruff voice in Portuguese.

“Raoul, it’s Emili.”

The metallic sound of a buzzer answered. They walked up creaking steps, each one worn into a trough-shaped plank. The grainy sound of an opera playing on an old phonograph echoed in the stairwell. There was a sharp odor of mildew.

“Wait a minute . . . Raoul Fradeli,” Jonathan whispered. He remembered a case three years before, in which Dulling and Pierce represented a museum in Detroit against a small Italian dealer. The museum’s insurance company investigated a piece and traced it back to the studio of a Raoul Fradeli. Fradeli claimed to have just restored the painting for the dealer, but it was clear he painted the thing from scratch.

Jonathan stopped on the staircase landing. “Emili, I know this guy from a
case
.”

“I wouldn’t mention that if I were you,” Emili said.

“What if he recognizes me?” Jonathan whispered.

Jonathan pictured himself in a New York office conference room at Dulling and Pierce. He sat directly across from Raoul Fradeli, watching the firm’s senior lawyers grill him with questions about his restoration. The expert witnesses could not agree which quadrants of the canvas were original.

“The case against him was dismissed,” Jonathan said.

As Emili was about to knock, she turned around and smiled. “I told you he was good.”

Raoul opened the door, the collar of his white coat upturned, a beret tilted to one side, three days’ scruff of beard on his face. He looked the consummate bohemian artist. His demeanor immediately changed when he saw Jonathan.

“Who the fuck is this?” Raoul said in Portuguese-flavored English.

Emili stepped past him. “A friend who needs a favor.”

Raoul stared at Jonathan uneasily, narrowing his eyes, as though faintly recognizing him.

“And who is willing to pay handsomely for it,” she added.

Raoul grinned suddenly. “In which case, any friend of yours is a friend of mine.
Benvenuto
.”

Behind him, replica paintings of Goya, Picasso, and a half-finished Jack-son Pollock lined the walls. In a sink, a small penciled sketch soaked in soapsuds, a technique used to age parchment a few hundred years in a matter of hours.

Emili pulled Raoul aside, showing him her
laissez-passer
, issued to international civil servants of the United Nations. He nodded reluctantly and took the papers from Emili’s hand. He whispered to her in Italian, “Do I know this guy?”

“No, Raoul, you don’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll pay you what you want, and get out of your life,” Jonathan said with an abrupt confidence as false as the art around him.

“I like him,” Raoul said to Emili. He turned to Jonathan. “I like you, so I give you discount.” He took the papers from Emili and walked over to his stove, and stirred the boiling water where he was making pasta. He walked back over to the table where Jonathan was sitting.

“For
le bleu
?” Raoul said, looking at Jonathan.

“What’s
le bleu
?”

“The most coveted,” Raoul said. He held up Emili’s small blue UN passport. “The UN
laissez-passer
.” He lowered his voice reverently. “It unlocks every border in the world.”

“How much?” Emili asked.

“
Mille
.”

A thousand euros!
Jonathan yelled, but only to himself. Emili nodded that the price was fair.

“Reasonable enough,” Jonathan heard himself say, counting out the bills. It was nearly all the cash he had withdrawn before leaving for Rome.

Raoul went to snatch the money, but Jonathan pulled back his hand as he glanced at the stove. “That pasta?”

Raoul nodded.

Jonathan handed him the money, remembering they had not eaten all day.

“Then this better include dinner.”

Raoul grinned, leading them into a back room, where lamination and scanner equipment lined the walls. The rest of the flat was a dusty artisan’s studio, and Jonathan was stunned by the contrast of this room’s technology. Emili took in the equipment, shrugging, “At least he’s a professional,” she whispered.

“It’ll be a real person,” Raoul said, putting on glasses with jeweler’s loupes flipped up. “Even if they run the passport through a scanner, it’ll correspond to one of the UN’s fifteen thousand passports currently issued.” He pulled out a blank shell of the UN’s light blue passport backing, and a straight-edge razor and fine-point marker; he flipped down the magnifying lenses of his glasses and got to work.

Emili and Jonathan waited at a small table beside the stacked dirty dishes in the sink. They heard the cutting of a board and the sound of a scanner. Half-drawn Chagall sketches lined the kitchen wall, emitting an inky smell of ash and chalk. When the pasta was cooked, Emili returned with two steaming bowls.

“I have a question for you,” Emili said.

“If it’s whether I remember how to twirl the pasta like you once taught me,” Jonathan winced, “prepare to be disappointed.”

“About your work at the firm.” Emili sat back down at the table. “I’m still surprised you represented that antiquities dealer a couple of months ago.”

“Which?”

“Andre Cavetti. You knew the guy wasn’t clean,” Emili said. “He’s running illegal excavations just outside Naples bigger than a soccer stadium.”

“But that bronze nude statue wasn’t illegally excavated. And it certainly didn’t belong in some museum in Italy.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because it was a fake.”

“What?” Emili’s eyes widened.

“The Latin inscription used grammar that wasn’t invented until the tenth century, and her hairstyle looked like a Renaissance pinup girl’s.”

“None of the other experts saw it?”

Jonathan shrugged. “Someone will. Eventually.”

“So you managed to prevent the Italians from embarrassing themselves by having a fake on display in their museum, Cavetti saves face in the art world, and Dulling wins again.”

“Not exactly the heroic solution, but justice isn’t done by heroes with swords anymore,” Jonathan said. “It’s done by lawyers.”

“Coming with me to Jerusalem is the heroic solution.” Emili’s tone softened. “So how do you explain that choice, Counselor?”

“We’re talking about one of the greatest treasures of the ancient world here, Emili.”

But both of them knew that the answer was a placeholder for one that couldn’t be spoken, although it hung thick in the air of the kitchen.
Because I nearly lost you down there. Because I’ve pictured you a hundred times, lying in the catacomb’s rubble, blood seeping out the side of your lips. Because I remember grabbing your wrist, frantically searching for a pulse, whispering in your ear, “Just stay with me. . . . Just stay with me.”

“Did you say something, Jon?” Emili asked, sitting in the kitchen. “You just said, ‘Stay with me.’ ”

“I meant,
stay with you,
” Jonathan said, fumbling. “I’d like to stay with you.”

“I need your real passport.” Raoul’s voice from the other room was a welcome interruption.

“Why?” Jonathan said.

“Just going to borrow the picture, image it, then put it back.” Raoul flipped down his loupes again. “The picture’s lamination must look creased and matted. New picture is a dead giveaway.”

Jonathan watched Raoul cannibalize his real passport, peeling back his current identity. He remembered how ancient Romans scraped and washed leather parchments to reuse them, but often the underwriting, the
scriptio inferior,
resurfaced years later as the animal hide aged. As Emili took Jonathan’s hand, rebuking him to properly wrap the pasta around the fork, he realized just how much the
scriptio inferior
of his own past had resurfaced with a startling legibility.

“And
please
don’t get any tomato sauce on the Chagall lying on the countertop,” Raoul said, looking up at them. Through the magnifying lenses of the loupes, his eyes looked comically large. “The British Museum just bought it.”

I
n East Jerusalem, General Eilat Segev sat in her office at the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Rockefeller Museum, a nineteenth-century Byzantine-style building that looked etched from a solid piece of sandstone. In the hallways outside her office, priceless Greek sculpture and Roman-era capitals were propped against wooden crates as though in a storage depot. Whether or not the Israel Antiquities Authority intentionally decided to preserve the ascetic habits of tent-housed British archaeology of the 1920s, or whether the Israeli government was simply reluctant to invest in a public building so deep inside Arab Jerusalem, the no-frills classical ambience of the Rockefeller Museum could not have better matched the strength and simplicity of General Eilat Segev: the woman in charge of Israel’s only organization to prevent illicit excavations and the illegal trafficking of ancient artifacts.

General Segev leaned over her desk, her long gray hair pulled back from her face, which was tanned and creased from thirty years of fieldwork. She still wore the same dust-covered white blouse and trim olive pants from her site work earlier in the day. Her outfit had a vaguely military appearance, and the image of her leaning over her maps with such intensity resembled her days in the military, when, as the commander of an elite team, she studied Syrian troop movements along the border late into the night.

Archaeology for her was a first love, but a second career, not realized until her military role as a high-ranking officer of foreign dignitary security details came to an abrupt end in Sharm el-Sheikh, when a bullet meant for the Israeli foreign minister found her abdomen instead. Her passion for archaeology, coupled with obvious praise from the foreign minister’s office, allowed Segev to transfer with commendation to the ranks of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

She thought pursuing her passion for archaeology would mean a milder career. But Segev found herself running an organization that had begun to more closely resemble the Mossad than an archaeological parks department. Almost daily her undercover agents in the Israel Antiquities Authority were discovering new tunnels that were used to smuggle antiquities and arms from Egypt to Gaza. And her department now fielded Hasidic informants to keep tabs on fringe religious groups looking to harm historical Islamic sites. Segev may have fought in every war for Israel since 1967, but as far as her professional dedication was concerned, she protected Islamic minarets with the same vigor that she did the Western Wall.

Her desk phone rang.

“Segev,” she answered

“
Generale Segev?”
Profeta’s thick Italian accent and raspy voice were immediately identifiable. Not to mention his insistence on still using her military title.

“Jacopo,” Segev said. She spoke in English, their best shared language.

Under different circumstances they would have traded memories of their younger days, when the Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale cooperated with the Israel Antiquities Authority to bust a geniza scroll ring in Amman. But Profeta knew the increasing demands, and dangers, of Segev’s schedule. She had recently stunned an audience during a panel discussion with Profeta in Rome’s Palazzo dei Conservatori. She was asked to describe the difference between the ruins of Rome and those of Israel.

“Simple,” she told the crowd. “In Rome, the ruins are dead.”

“Generale,”
Profeta began, “our team here in Rome has uncovered a series of illegal excavations that we believe may be related to excavations beneath the Temple Mount. Have you detected any unusual activity?”

“Jacopo, I can’t send a single officer up there, but we’ve been receiving reports of massive demolition inside it.”

“Demolition?”

“In the Islamic political world, the idea has gained traction to remove any Judeo-Christian archaeology from the Mount. On a daily basis, Yasser Arafat would deny that there were any Temples ever there.”

“And you can’t send archaeologists up there even for a brief UNESCO review of their activity?”

“Ariel Sharon went up to the Mount for ten minutes and we were putting out riots for six months. Of course, many think that his stepping foot on the Mount gave him mystical power to revive his political aspirations. He became prime minister less than two months after setting foot on the Mount. We were worried we’d have politicians lined up, waiting their turn to touch the soil of the Temple Mount.”

Their laughter died and Profeta’s tone turned serious. “General Segev, these are not mere
tombaroli
. Our investigation has turned up the name Salah ad-Din.”