The Last Ember (45 page)

From inside the well, Jonathan saw a thick arm grab Emili and whip her from his view.

“No!” he yelled.

Jonathan climbed faster, pumping his legs up the iron rungs. He could hear Emili screaming. He reached the top of the well and vaulted himself out, landing in a deep puddle of mud.

“Emili!” he yelled again.

On brute instinct he picked up the wooden pole that still lay at the foot of the well and spun around in the mist. She was gone.

L
ieutenant Brandisi awoke on a stretcher, which tilted as the paramedics carried him above the cobbles toward an ambulance along the Via del Portico d’Ottavia. He felt an icy sensation over his heart, and for a moment feared he’d been shot in the chest. His vision was hazy, but he made out a paramedic stooped over him and realized the icy sensation was the disk of a stethoscope over his heart. He touched his forehead where he had been struck, and felt an elastic cold press.

“Brandisi?” Profeta stood over him.

“
Comandante!
” Brandisi said, startled.

“You’ve got quite a welt there, Lieutenant, but considering that someone was firing an automatic Beretta up there, I’d consider us pretty fortunate. Did you see who hit you?”

“A man who claimed to be Orvieti’s assistant. Young and dark-skinned, might have been Middle Eastern. Silver spectacles. Black hair cropped quite short, shaved really.”

Profeta turned to another officer. “Put a twenty-block-radius AP on that description.”

“Did they find Orvieti?” Brandisi asked.

“You were the only one found in the archives.” Profeta paused. “But there is a possibility Orvieti made it to the ledge of the cupola and smashed the stained glass of the sanctuary to escape.”

“I’d like to see it,” Brandisi said. Despite the paramedics’ protests, Brandisi sat up and another officer helped him onto the cobble.

Profeta led him back to the synagogue and they climbed the steps to the highest of the sanctuary’s velvet rows, where the air had the smell of a musty attic. Profeta stood beside a broken pane of stained glass. The shards of colored glass lay near a trail of fresh blood on the sanctuary’s carpet.

“Orvieti’s,” Profeta said.

“Are you sure,
Comandante
?” Brandisi said, removing the cold press from the back of his head to check if the bleeding had stopped. “An eighty-eight-year-old could scale the curve of the cupola and kick in this stained glass?”

Another officer walked up the stairs. “There is no sign of the man,
Comandante
. The guards are adamant that there was no one besides Lieutenant Brandisi and Signore Orvieti admitted to the synagogue since it opened this morning.”

“Well, someone was here,” Profeta said. “Those three bullet holes in the archive shelving weren’t fired by Orvieti or Brandisi. And Orvieti didn’t climb out on that ledge and break through this stained glass simply because he wanted to. Someone was trying to kill him.”

“Someone that age climbing out on the ledge in a windstorm.” Brandisi shook his head, marveling. “And then lowering himself through a shattered window.”

“I’m not surprised,” Profeta said. “Mosè Orvieti has survived the impossible before.”

J
onathan ran into Ostia’s streets, searching behind the ruin’s half-brick walls in desperation.

“Emili!” he screamed.

There was nothing but the rain and the mud. Jonathan stood motionless as the horror settled in. Although it was midday, the cloud cover was so heavy that the skies were dim as dusk. Jonathan ran at some rustling bushes, only to find a cat eating from a littered candy wrapper.

From one of the empty streets he heard sounds of struggle. He could not place its direction, and stumbled down a street at random, running into the sprawling ruins of an ancient warehouse.

A muffled yell sounded closer. It came from inside the neighboring ancient theater. The theater’s stone arches were closed off by gates, and Jonathan tried each of them, rattling their bars, until he found a small rusted side gate with the lock missing. He ran into the theater, which during summer festivals was packed but now, in winter, looked as dark and abandoned as if the theater were still buried in the earth.

The voice sounded harrowingly close, but Jonathan saw no one. The theater’s open air acoustics made it impossible to tell from which direction it came. The words were spoken in English, but in a tone soft enough that the accent was undetectable.

“Hello?” Jonathan called out, his own echo filling the empty theater.

“
Please
find it,” the voice said again. The tone was human. More pleading than ominous, as though asking for a favor.

“Who are you!” Jonathan yelled. He ran up the
cavea
—the theater’s tiered stone seating. He saw no one.

And then, at the far end of the semicircular stone seating, a woman’s figure materialized in the mist.

“Emili!” Jonathan sprinted, rounding the theater’s curve.

But as he drew close, he saw it was not Emili. The woman looked just as frantic as he did. She had been standing in the rain, and neglected streaks of mascara ink-stained her face.

“He will kill you if you don’t cooperate,” Director Jacqueline Olivier said.

“What?” Jonathan whispered and held up his hands, as though the deception were a physical force he could somehow stop.

Slowly, the depth of betrayal registered, and Jonathan snapped his head back, angrily. “You’ve got to be
kidding
me! You’re involved in this?”

“I didn’t think it would go this far.” The director’s voice was unsteady.

Even in his rising fury, he could see panic in her eyes.

“Where have they taken her?” Jonathan asked, his voice tremoring with rage.

“I don’t know. They contact me.” She looked away. “That’s how it works.”

“That’s how it
works
?” Jonathan asked, controlling himself. Everything became vivid, and not just the scope of Salah ad-Din’s operation. The texture of the mud in the theater, the stones’ sheen in the rain, the monochrome gray sky.

“You’ve been cooperating with Salah ad-Din since Emili and Sharif were in Jerusalem, haven’t you?” Jonathan’s voice strengthened. “That’s how the Waqf knew about their research beneath the Old City, isn’t it?”

“They agreed to
limit
their excavations beneath the Mount if I gave them information! You think I
knew
Sharif would get killed?” She stopped. “It was supposed to be harmless.” Olivier’s tone shook along with the rest of her. She held the seating railing for support; her ankles buckling on the uneven stones.

“You betrayed her. . . . How could you—?”

“How could I?” the director said, her tone on the firmer ground of self-justification. “Have you any idea the influence of the twenty-one Arab nations in the UN? My organization has to work with
reality.
” Anger had rushed to her defense.
“
You want to protect palm leaf manuscripts in Kazakhstan, you don’t just raise money for humidity controllers, you raise money to bribe the Timri rebels not to come at midnight and burn the library down. You’re not going to stop the Taliban from blowing up Buddhas, but you can get their thugs to tell you where they are shipping the remains to Kabul en route to the auction markets in London. You play the game!”

“This man, Salah ad-Din, is a killer,” Jonathan said plainly.

“I know,” Olivier said, swallowing. “Which means you must do what he says. If you tell anyone they have taken her, he
will
kill her. Please
,
” she said, gripping the railing as she walked down the theater’s stone steps. “Just find what they want.”

Jonathan watched the director hobble down the stone tiers. He knew better than to try to follow her.

“How will Salah ad-Din even know if I find it?”

“He’ll know,” she said, turning around. Even with the distance between them Jonathan saw the terror in her eyes. “Salah ad-Din knows more than you can possibly imagine.”

She reached the bottom of the theater seats and stepped into an arch’s darkness.

“What does that mean?” Jonathan called after her.

But the wet trees’ unraveling branches were his only answer.

Instantly, Jonathan knew he was alone.

He sprinted up the rows of stone seating. The muscles in his legs felt stripped raw.

“What does that mean!” he screamed, standing in the highest row of the theater. From his vantage point in the ruins, ferns and vines seemed like a carpet over the ruin’s labyrinth of ancient alleyways. There was no sign of life anywhere. He heard only his own winded rasp.

Jonathan ran to a pay phone outside the park’s shuttered snack bar. His leather wallet was still sopping from the Temple Mount’s cistern and the ink on Chandler’s card had run, but it was still legible. With his hands shaking, he could barely press the numbers of the international dialing code of his credit card. He knew the transaction would reveal his location to the carabinieri, but that was the least of his concerns.

“Hello?” Chandler said. The reception crackled loudly.

“Chandler, thank God you’re there,” Jonathan said.

“Aurelius, where the hell have you been? They’re after you!”

“Who?”

“Everyone, man!” Chandler said. “The carabinieri, the reporters—even Interpol, I’m sure!” Jonathan could barely hear him, unsure if it was because of the storm or the age of the pay phone.

“Chandler, listen to me,” Jonathan said. “I’m calling you from Ostia.”

“Ostia? What the hell’s in Ostia?”

“Chandler, just listen. You need to meet me in the Roman Forum in twenty minutes.”

“The line was almost pure static and he couldn’t make out Chandler’s answer.

“I need to get inside the Arch of Titus!” Jonathan said.

“What?”

“I need to get inside the arch!”

“You broke up there for a sec!” Chandler spoke louder. “Sounded like you said you needed to get inside an arch?”

“Chandler, I think that’s where it is, inside the arch!”

“Holy shit,” Chandler said quite clearly.

“There’s probably a door. I’ll need your help with the lock!” Jonathan said over the rain.

“Okay, okay,” Chandler said, calming himself. “I can meet you in twenty minutes. Hang on, there’s someone at the door. Who is—”

Chandler cut out.

“Hello?” Jonathan said, but there was no answer. The line was dead.

M
osè Orvieti, his left leg bleeding beneath his torn pants, limped along the massive colonnade of Saint Peter’s, moving toward the Vatican palace. He recognized the young Jewish men selling plaster sculptures and rosaries in Piazza San Pietro. Pope Paul IV may have discriminated against Jews by having them sell Catholic souvenirs in Vatican City, but now, four hundred years later, his intentions had been reversed. These young men were as proud to inherit their fathers’ souvenir licenses as they would a noble title.

Orvieti remembered the last time he crossed through this piazza. It also was an unpublicized trip. A cardinal had summoned him to inquire whether a priceless Renaissance incunabulum, an illustrated Bible, had been taken from the Jewish archives during the war. Orvieti described its gilded leaf work before seeing it. The Vatican quietly returned the piece without ceremony or further questions.

At the gate to the papal apartments, a member of the Corpo Vigilanza was advised to admit Orvieti immediately, even though the man had no appointment. The guard led Orvieti through wood-paneled doors and slowly up a grand stairway into the papal apartments. He moved slowly, leaning against the balustrade, and the guard noticed a trail of blood on the white marble behind him. Along a frescoed corridor, the guard stopped, knocked, and opened the door. Cardinal Francesco Inocenti sat in a gilt chair beside a large marble hearth. He wore his choir dress for Mass: a white lace rochet beneath a red cassock, and a pectoral cross on a cord. His white damask miter rested on a side table. A fire roared in the oversized fireplace.

“I’ve been expecting you, old friend,” Cardinal Inocenti said, walking toward him.

Orvieti emerged from the room’s shadows, a limping old man soaked from the rain. He resembled the patriarch Jacob himself after wrestling with the angel until dawn in the wilderness, Inocenti thought.

“Who has done this to you?” Inocenti said, taking his arm and guiding him to his chair by the fire.

“I have never before asked a favor of you, Francesco,” Orvieti said. “But I am about to.”

There was no denying the deep respect Francesco Inocenti and Mosè Orvieti had for each other. “An elder brother in faith” was how Pope John Paul II once described the Jews across the Tiber, and it was an accurate portrayal of the relationship between these two men. For all the acrimony that had transpired over the centuries between their two communities, these two men were inextricably tied together by their personal pasts.

Even so, Orvieti knew his request would strain even the tightest bonds of trust. Prime ministers, museums, and governments had asked for the Church to volunteer information about the menorah, and the Vatican had refused, preferring to remain silent. But the time had come for Mosè Orvieti to pose the question directly to one of his oldest friends. Orvieti would not have come to Cardinal Inocenti had he not remembered that day sixty years ago when the Nazis capriciously demanded that the Jews of Rome collect 110 pounds of gold within thirty-six hours, and hours before the deadline they were three pounds short. As the congregation debated what to do, there was a knock on the synagogue’s back door. A slimmer version of Francesco Inocenti, then just a young priest, opened a bag that was slung over his shoulder. It contained dozens of solid gold cups with Hebrew engravings. “These belong to you, I believe,” was all the young priest said to Orvieti before he slipped into the darkness.