The Last Ember (9 page)

“Sorry?” she said, watching him carefully. “You think I hadn’t heard that you represented the Sicilian antiquities pirate Andre Cavetti? Or how you brilliantly defended a Greek sarcophagus so it could be used as a fountain in some Las Vegas hot spot? You think I didn’t know you became a lawyer defending the people from whom we protected these artifacts? You think I didn’t know you went from gamekeeper to poacher?”

Jonathan said nothing for a moment. “Emili, it’s been seven years. You’re making some assumptions that—”

“Assumptions?” She pointed to the artifact in the center of the room.

“Whoever sold your client this piece may have shot Sharif.
Sharif
, Jon. He was your friend.” She walked toward him, her air of professionalism disappearing. “Tell me,” she said, “what broke you? Was it the tunnel’s collapse? Getting suspended from the academy? Working at the Met after being a Rome Prize winner? Or was it having to take the job in the back room at Sotheby’s to help pay for law school?” She took another step toward him, securing her ground. “I can still faintly see the graduate student you once were, Jon, buried like a ruin under that expensive suit.” Another step. “And maybe with enough excavation someone could make sense of how Gianpaolo’s death buried the heroic part of you with him.”

“Heroes are for myths!” Jonathan said more loudly than he would have liked. “This is reality, and you’re still talking about heroes? My job isn’t about myths or heroism. It’s about the law.”

“This case is about something more, Jon. There is something about those fragments.”

“Emili, ancient secrets were an intriguing diversion in grad school, but—”

“Someone murdered Sharif for those fragments. Your friend. If that doesn’t take your head out of your legal briefs, nothing will.”

In her eyes Jonathan saw a passion that he recognized vaguely, but now it struck him as wild and unfamiliar. “I’m sorry, Emili, this case is not about villains or ancient messages. It’s a legal case. I hope one day you understand.
Tempus ignoscit.
” Time forgives.

“Time doesn’t forgive,” Emili said. “It doesn’t even allow a person to forgive himself.” She walked down the courtroom’s aisle and turned around just before leaving the chamber. “You, more than anyone, should know that.”

She stepped through the courtroom door and it swung shut behind her.

Alone now in the courtroom, Jonathan ran both hands through his hair.

“Okay,” he breathed, “that did not go well.”

He walked back toward the gallery rail, where an easel displayed the location of the Colosseum gate depicted on the two Forma Urbis fragments. The fragments fit along the Colosseum’s southern rim, completing the arena’s oval shape like missing puzzle pieces.

An archaeological notation was penciled above the gate:
Porta Sanavivaria.

“That was the gate for gladiators,” Jonathan murmured. Gladiators and the prisoners of war forced to fight them entered the arena through the Porta Sanavivaria, the Gate of Life. If killed, their bodies were dragged with hooks through the Porta Libertinensis, the Gate of Death, located on the arena’s other side.

The doors of the courtroom flung open again, startling Jonathan.

“What’s taking you so long?” Mildren stomped toward the gallery rail. “Tatton is waiting for you in the car.”

O
utside the Palazzo di Giustizia, Emili carried her files down the courthouse steps. She started across the Ponte Sant’Angelo, walking by the ten oversized angels overseen by Bernini and between the unlicensed sidewalk vendors. She stopped midway across the bridge and stared into the Tiber. Its water surged from the winter rain, rolling beneath the bridge like a giant gray tarp in the wind.

A souvenir vendor tapped Emili on the shoulder and she turned around. Rows of miniature statues of saints sat in tidy rows on a small concessionaire’s display hanging from his neck. He was a middle-aged man with a gray Edwardian mustache and torn wool gloves.

“Souvenir?”
he repeated.

“No, grazie,”
Emili said politely.

“Souvenir?”
the man said to her again, raising his arms thick with dangling rosary beads. The man was tired and the crowd’s current jostled his small cardboard drawer, knocking the statues over like an earthquake in a tiny museum. Vendors usually swarmed only tourists, yet this man would not leave her alone. Emili knew her light coloring and nearly ac centless English often gave local vendors reason to mistake her as a foreigner. She finally turned around to give the man a euro, when she noticed that the souvenir salesman held a note in his hand. It was a sheet of paper folded in fourths. Written on it in hurried script was her name.

“Un souvenir per te,”
he said.
A souvenir for you.
He handed her the note and Emili tore it open.

There were two words.

Il Ghetto.
The Ghetto.

Emili looked up, scanning the crowd along the bridge.

“Who gave you this?” Emili said. The tone of her Italian was harsh.

“This note, who gave you this note?” Emili showed the souvenir vendor a fifty-euro bill.

The souvenir man smiled and shook his head. He was not interested in her money.

Emili stared at the note. She had received anonymous tips before. There was even a dedicated hotline at her office to receive correspondence from antiquities dealers or illegal excavators with a sudden conscience. But she did not have time for a goose chase.

Even so, she understood the note’s possibility and walked over the bridge toward the note’s destination:
Il Ghetto.

In Italian, the word
ghetto
has a more historical meaning than in English, originating from the word for “metal factory,” or
geto
; in the fifteenth century, a Venetian church official had confined all of that city’s Jews to live in the foundry district. Within fifty years the Vatican borrowed the practice and the term, and Pope Paul IV decreed that all Roman Jews were to live within four flood-ridden city blocks along the Tiber.

The Ghetto was not far, and within minutes Emili was wandering its sooted labyrinth of winding streets. Walls of ancient Hadrianic brick supported sagging sixteenth-century town houses. From the narrow slivers of sky above the alleyways, Emili caught glimpses of the Great Synagogue of Rome. Its aluminum cupola glinted even in the overcast skies, its grand marble shoulders with Ionic pilasters on each side stretched a city block. It rose into view along the Tiber like a Turkish-style cathedral.

Outside the synagogue, an old man leaned against a high wrought-iron fence. Emili recognized him at once: the old man she had seen in the courtroom’s balcony. He wore the same dusty blazer that was two sizes too big, and his wispy hair fanned out like white threads in the wind. Cataracts had misted over his bright eyes, but the intensity of his gaze sparkled with an energy that defied his age. A small cylindrical green canvas bag hung from his shoulder by a thin strap. It held a small oxygen tank, but the tubing wrapped tightly around the canister indicated its infrequent use.

He extended his right hand to introduce himself, and Emili realized it had only two fingers extending below the knuckle. The smooth brown nubs pressed in her palm in a terrifyingly straight line, suggesting the single slash of a blade.

His grip greeted hers with unexpected strength. “I am Mosè Orvieti.”

The name was familiar to Emili. “The archivist?” She knew of Signore Orvieti from her Holocaust restitution work at the UN, but she had never met him. Few had. Fabled for his efforts to recover manuscripts and lost artifacts belonging to the Jewish Ghetto of Rome, Mosè Orvieti had been a young archivist in the Great Synagogue during the German occupation of Rome in 1943.

Emili knew of Orvieti’s past. She read his personal testimony in one Holocaust restitution case recounting the liquidation of the Ghetto. He described how, on October 13, 1943, 2,091 people, including his wife and all of his children, were deported from Rome’s Collegio Militare train station to Auschwitz. Of those 2,091, Orvieti was one of sixteen people to return.

“You received my note?” he said.

“You know every souvenir vendor in Rome?” Emili said lightly.

“The ones in Piazza San Pietro,” Orvieti said. “All of them are from the Ghetto. It’s still the law.”

“The law?”

“In 1555, the pontificate of Paul IV gave only Jews licenses to sell Catholic souvenirs in Saint Peter’s Square, as the task was beneath Christian dignity. The licenses are now quite valuable, having been passed down from one generation of Roman Jews to the next.”

“Why did you send for me?” Emili said.

“Last year, during your work in Jerusalem, you said you saw manuscript pages of Flavius Josephus.”

A declarative statement, Emili noticed. The first time someone had not said
allegedly
or
even if
regarding her experience in Jerusalem.

“Yes.”

“With your permission,” Orvieti said, “I’d like to show you the archives where they came from.”

Emili followed Orvieti past three heavily armed Roman policemen who patrolled the perimeter of the synagogue. A fourth was on break, leaning against the steel-caged window of his carabinieri jeep, smoking a cigarette. Emili knew their twenty-four-hour shifts had been an unfortunate precaution since 1982, when masked Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Jewish children exiting services.

Orvieti unlocked a Dutch oak door along the synagogue’s side and closed the door behind Emili, dropping a thick metal bar across its inside, as though fortifying a battlement.

The archivist and Emili stepped into the sanctuary. Its ceiling mural vaulted to a height of more than one hundred feet, with rainbow colors around a gilt skylight. They moved almost ceremoniously down the aisle, walking up five marble steps to the sanctuary’s bimah, an elevated platform supporting a velvet-curtained ark. Dwarfed by the double-height curtains, Orvieti unlocked a small pine door beside the ark, and Emili followed him into a narrow stairwell with curved walls of reinforced concrete.

The tight curve of steps upward to the synagogue’s cupola resembled the stairs of a lighthouse, and Orvieti’s legs moved with unexpected vigor, stopping only occasionally with labored breaths, as though waiting impatiently for his aged body to catch up to the rest of him. He ignored the small oxygen tank that hung from his shoulder. The curved walls displayed pieces of ancient tombs with Hebrew inscriptions and even medieval symbols of the zodiac. From her work at the International Centre for Conservation, Emili knew that the belfry contained the world’s finest trove of medieval folio commentary on the Old Testament, even after the 1943 looting by German professors of the Einsatzstab, an elite Nazi SS regiment that pilfered rare Jewish manuscripts and documents from countless archives throughout occupied Europe. To this day, the treasures of the synagogue’s archive were too valuable to appear in any public catalog.

The archive’s door was heavy oak with cast-iron fittings. In contrast, a technologically advanced black security keypad was embedded in the stucco wall by its side. Orvieti punched a seven-digit code, and the door’s steel bolt clicked open with a timid electronic beep. Three stories of caged books came into view, their thin balconies connected by corkscrew staircases inside the cupola.

And people think the Vatican secret archives have an exclusive access policy,
Emili thought.

“I was eighteen years old when the Josephus manuscript pages were stolen,” Orvieti began. “I was assisting the senior archivist.” Orvieti’s eyes were red and damp. He walked over to the narrow stained-glass window, his face suddenly older in the amber light, a mass of lined crevasses and bony angles.

“A man came with two German officers. It was the day of the Ghetto’s ransom.”

Emili understood immediately what Orvieti meant. In September 1943, during the Nazi occupation of Rome, the Obersturmbannführer, Herbert Kappler, demanded 110 pounds of solid gold within thirty-six hours from the Jews living in the Ghetto.

“The lines to donate stretched from the sanctuary’s door around the block. Men and women donated their wedding rings, family brooches, and other heirlooms. Some local priests lined up as well, donating their gold at great peril to their own lives. Yet we were still a few pounds short. Since many of the medieval folios were gilded in precious casings, I was sent back up to the library to strip the gold buckles and plated bindings from the library’s medieval texts.”

Orvieti gestured to a distant point in the belfry, as though someone were still standing there. “That’s where I saw him. He was dressed in exotic garb. An Islamic mullah, I could tell from his square black beard and Eastern fez. He was a small man, perhaps not even five feet tall. He wore sunglasses even inside the archive. He paced along the shelves as though he were visiting royalty, draping his hands across the book bindings. I knew he was a man of importance, flanked on either side by German soldiers and young professors from Berlin, who were fluent in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. He supervised the Nazi officers as they searched up and down the stacks.” Orvieti could still hear the man’s German with a guttural Middle Eastern accent.

“He brought the Einsatzstab here?” Emili said.

Orvieti nodded.

“Years later,” he said, “investigators from a Yugoslavian military tribunal came here to the archives. They told me the Islamic mullah was Haj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1926 to 1939. He had been convicted in abstentia for war crimes and they were searching all leads to find him.”

“ ‘ The Führer Mufti,’ he was called,” Emili said. She knew of the mufti’s notoriety as the highest-ranking Islamic cleric in British-mandate Jerusalem in the 1930s. The mufti received permission to use Gestapo forces to ransack archives throughout occupied Europe. He searched for manuscripts and artifacts relating to Jerusalem with an obsession that rivaled Himmler’s search for Atlantis.