The Last Ember (54 page)

B
ringing me back to Rome isn’t just about finding the menorah, is it?” Jonathan yelled at Sharif. He walked closer to him, crossing over some wild ferns covering the top of the bridge. “You’ve lured Emili and I back into your life in order to destroy the last vestiges of who you once were. This is about eradicating your own past, isn’t it?”

“You think you know my past?” Sharif was unnervingly casual. “You were the lone scholar willing to suggest Josephus was not Titus’s loyal historian, but a sleeper in his midst. How fitting that the same principle was at work in the very graduate student who sat beside you. Groomed for a mission beyond your wildest imagination.”

“You’re insane,” Jonathan said.

“Am I?” Sharif tapped his bleeding forehead with his fingers and, seeing blood, wiped it on his shirt. “My grandfather believed the menorah remained aflame for two thousand years. My search has no such illusions of grandeur. I seek no mystical power from the thing. I seek power from destroying it.”

“They will find you, Sharif.”

“No one will believe you, Jon. Allegations against Sharif Lebag, the dead UN staffer? Do you think it is a coincidence I chose
her
to identify the fragments of the Forma Urbis? Don’t come any closer,” Sharif said. “Not until you tell me which corridor the old man took.”

“I didn’t see,” Jonathan said.

“Which corridor did the old man take!” Sharif screamed, leaning Emili farther over the edge, gripping her shirt with one hand. Jonathan saw Sharif’s arm was shaking and it was not even clear he could keep holding her.

“I told you I don’t know!”

“Fair enough,” Sharif said, and he let go.

“No!” Jonathan screamed, watching Emili plummet over the edge. He ran across the bridge, but Sharif picked up a plank of wood and swung at Jonathan, catching him in the stomach. A searing pain shot through the center of his body, and Jonathan lost his balance and fell into the wild ferns.

“Jonathan!” he heard Emili yelling from beyond the edge. He could see she was holding on to roots along the side of the bridge. Sharif lunged again, swinging the wood plank, but Jonathan ducked and thrust his knee into Sharif’s pelvic bone. Sharif fell backward and landed so close to the edge that his head hung over the side. Jonathan grabbed his throat, but as he looked over the side of the arch, the scenic floodlights below blinded him for a moment. Sharif swung his head forward into Jonathan’s nose, plunging him to the edge of consciousness. Jonathan’s hold on Sharif’s shirt gave way, and a strange, moist heat gathered above his eyebrows. With blurred vision, he saw Salah ad-Din kneeling above him, lifting a rock the size of a volleyball.

“Beneath that corporate suit,” Sharif said, smiling, “there’s just not enough of a gladiator still in you, is there, Jon?”

Jonathan slowly brought up his left ankle and slipped his hand beneath his suit pant to remove the cheap switchblade from its costumed plastic gladiatorial handle, still tied to his shin. As Sharif lifted the rock, Jonathan swung the switchblade upward as hard as he could, sending it clean through the underside of Sharif’s palm, ripping through the tendons between his thumb and index finger and emerging glistening pink through the back of his hand. Sharif’s agony was so sudden and intense, he froze, mustering only a gasp. His left hand fell, suddenly lifeless, and the rock dropped inches from Jonathan’s head. Jonathan sliced the blade upward and turned it inside Sharif’s hand, severing muscle and scratching bone. As Sharif screamed, Jonathan yanked him closer by the hair and whispered in his ear, “I suppose there is.”

Jonathan pulled the blade out of Sharif’s hand and held it to his neck. He dragged Sharif up to his knees and felt him shuddering in pain. He could smell the Tiber water in Sharif’s hair, the smell of his Turkish cigarettes.

The sudden sound of a bullhorn came from the Ponte Palatino.

“Riponga l’arma!”
a voice screamed at Jonathan in Italian. Lower your weapon. It was the police.

“He’s right here!” Jonathan yelled, pointing at Sharif.

“Giù a terra!”
On the ground! The officer yelled through the bullhorn, raising his gun.

“
È qui!
He is right here!”

Jonathan squinted into the wind, recognizing the officer holding the bullhorn. It was Lieutenant Rufio.

He watched Rufio put down the bullhorn and fasten both his hands on his pistol. Jonathan released Sharif, knelt on the ground beside him, and put his hands above his head. Kneeling there, his perspective sharpened. He watched Rufio lift his pistol and close one eye to mark his aim at him.

The crack of a gunshot echoed against the stone walls of the Tiber’s banks. Rufio had a point-blank shot, but Jonathan found himself intact. On the bridge, he saw Rufio clutch his own shoulder and an older, bearded man in a brown overcoat run toward him from the other side of the Ponte Palatino. Two officers pinned Rufio to the sidewalk and handcuffed his hands behind his back. Jonathan realized the bearded man had intentionally shot Rufio in the shoulder before he could fire.

The man picked up Rufio’s bullhorn.

“This is Comandante Jacopo Profeta,” he called out. “Sharif Lebag, you are under arrest! Do not move!” Jonathan heard a boat motor beneath them. He looked down and saw two police boats fighting the currents to moor against the ruin. Countless officers screamed over one another in Italian, one louder than the next.

Sharif sat up next to Jonathan, semiconscious, his bloodied hand jammed into his shirt to stem the bleeding. Jonathan saw that his thumb was nearly severed, dangling from its fibrous sheath.

“Your days as Salah ad-Din are over, Sharif,” Jonathan said, kneeling next to him. “
Done. History.
”

“What’d we say at the academy?” Sharif rasped through a grisly smile. Jonathan noticed too late that he had inched toward the edge of the bridge. “History is unpredictable.”

As though carried by a gust of wind, Sharif tumbled over the edge of the ruins, his body turning sideways and over itself until splashing into the raging white pleats of water thirty feet below.

W
ho are you?” Orvieti asked.

Chandler stepped toward the center of the arch’s attic. He pushed up his dive mask. “Thirty feet in length, I presume,” Chandler grinned. “A precise replica of the Temple sanctuary.”

“If you seek to destroy it—”

“I would hardly call melting down a few hundred pounds of solid gold
destroying
anything,” Chandler said. He pointed the beam into the doorway on the far left of the attic.

“Young man, this is more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” Orvieti said, inhaling from his oxygen tank. “It is protected.”

“Protected? Damn right it is protected. Have you any idea what I just swam through to get to this bloody arch? The fact that you’re still alive, old man, is a miracle big enough to make a believer out of me.” Chandler pulled a long drag from his mouthpiece. “Air down here is nearly all methane rising from the river’s silt.” Chandler’s flashlight traced the columns on either side of the doorway. “Two columns on either side,” he said in confirmation. “It’s just as Josephus said.”

“It is dangerous to pass through there,” Orvieti warned.

“Of course it is,” Chandler said. He removed from his pocket a small Ziploc bag with an old Josephus manuscript inside it. “Which is why I’ve got the tricks of the priestly trade right here. It’s long been a puzzle to me why Josephus describes in such detail the priestly ascent to the sanctuary. Who would have thought he was giving
instructions
?”

Chandler walked past Orvieti through the open doorway that led beyond the wall of the arch’s attic. His underwater lantern revealed a long, rectangular chamber. From the doorway a thin bridge extended to a twenty-foot-square platform that was surrounded by air on all other sides. In the center of the platform was a raised stone altar, accessible by five steps from the front and a ramp leading up either side. The sloshing sounds of water echoed from the darkness below, and Chandler turned his flashlight downward to see writhing eels in an even greater concentration than he encountered before.

Chandler pointed to a square gold object glistening on the altar in the middle of the platform.

“What is that? In the center of the altar there?” Orvieti said nothing, watching from the doorway. Chandler was quick to answer his own question. “The breastplate of the high priest, isn’t it?” His tone heightened with excitement. “Containing the gemstones of the twelve tribes.”

“The inscription,” Orvieti said, “it says you must not go or else—”

“Or else what?” Chandler said dismissively. “Some magical cherubs with flaming swords will smite me?” He smiled and walked across the bridge, hunched over, supporting the oxygen tank on his back.

Chandler reached the platform. “There are dozens of holes in the platform,” he called out.

“Vents,” Orvieti said softly. Already in first-century Rome, he knew, lifetimes of sewage had created dangerous levels of methane exhaust. Ancient street plans included elaborate chutes to channel flammable gases away from the streets below.

Chandler stood only feet away from the breastplate. He looked at the small open text of Josephus.

“The priests ascended by way of a ramp,” Chandler said. He walked forward, avoiding the steps to walk up the ramp. He shone his flashlight on the gold rectangular breastplate, its twelve carefully arranged gemstones refracting the beam of his flashlight into hundreds of flecks of color prisming through the stones.

“Each of these gems must be nearly two dozen carats.” Chandler’s eyes greedily surveyed the twelve large stones, moving quickly over the deep red ruby, purple amethyst, blue sapphire, green emerald, until he found it in the second row—exactly where the chapter in Exodus described—a
yahalom:
a large rough-cut diamond. He crouched down and tried to lift the breastplate but it was fastened to the stone.

“Do not touch it,” Orvieti called out, remembering the sacred object’s description in Exodus:
The Breastplate of Judgment.

Chandler leaned nearer to the rows of stones. “They seem loose in the fittings.” His fingers pulled at the diamond, trying to pry it off.

“Please,” Orvieti said.

“I almost have it,”
Chandler said. He pulled harder on the stone. He grunted, leaning back. The stone suddenly came loose from its setting.

A grayish plume emanated from the hole in the breastplate, which was still anchored to the rock.

“It’s just steam!” Chandler laughed. He turned back to Orvieti exhilarated. “Where are the angels to smite me?”

That steam is heating the methane,
Orvieti thought.

But Chandler was oblivious. Using both hands to hold the stone, he let the mouthpiece dangle from his oxygen tank.

A sudden odor of burning filled the attic and Orvieti noticed a small flame jumping at Chandler’s feet. Chandler looked down and leaped back, but this only jerked the flame closer to him, as if it were somehow tethered to his body. Orvieti realized that the flame was emanating from the dangling mouthpiece of Chandler’s oxygen tank, ignited by the heated methane vent at his feet. Chandler grabbed the hose and shook it wildly in a vain effort to extinguish the fire. But the methane traveled up the hose, and with a horrific screeching sound, the plastic tube expanded like a balloon. As Chandler scrambled desperately to get his tank off his back, the tube burst into a small fireball. Chandler began to scream and Orvieti could see him grasp at his neck where the valve of the oxygen tank was emitting a direct spray of fire onto his bare skin.

Chandler’s shrieks filled the chamber as he alternated between trying to remove the flaming tank and putting out the fire that snaked along the back of his legs. Orvieti could see the bubbling skin on Chandler’s neck and back as he spasmed, a tangled marionette, not yet collapsing as he spun toward the black abyss off the sides of the platform. At that moment, the oxygen tank erupted and the heat from the fire blew the bottom of the tank like shrapnel into the back of his calves. Chandler screamed again and Orvieti could see blood spurting from the back of his legs as he tumbled into the darkness, splashing into the black water below.

Orvieti heard a sudden flurry of thrashing in the water. With a shudder, he remembered the practice of the eel fishermen to increase their catch:
burn the flesh
. From the darkness below, the young man’s shrieks rose until there was no other sound than that of the thrashing eels.

Orvieti closed his eyes, falling against the wall. He spoke softly to himself, remembering the biblical warning of the horrific death awaiting intruders who enter the sanctuary.

Consumed by fire,
Orvieti thought.

Orvieti edged out of the chamber into the attic, escaping the smell of burned flesh. The platform was an elaborate decoy, Orviete had known, because that chamber was beyond the western wall of the arch not the eastern wall, which was closer to Jerusalem. Orvieti stumbled across the attic to the eastern solid stone wall. At his feet, beside a hatch in the floor, was another inscription. Except this one was in ancient Aramaic.

Orvieti looked into the hatch and saw a black pool of water. But shining his flashlight into it, he realized the water was different, purer than the raging tide outside the arch, and in Orvieti’s beam the water inside the opening emanated a crystal blue color. He saw a set of stairs beneath the water, leading downward.
Only purified priests past here.

Priests, Orvieti thought, considering his own status. He recalled his father’s stories regarding papal persecution of his family on account of their priestly, kohenite lineage.
Mosè, tell no one at school you are a kohen,
his mother would say, her finger shaking with panic. Emboldened, Orvieti stepped into the cold water of the open hatch, and walked down the stairs until he was nearly submerged.