The Last Secret Of The Temple (24 page)

The phone was ringing when Ben-Roi walked into his office, which he could have done without, fuzzed as he was by the two beers he'd drunk on the way up to the station, not to mention the unbearable sense of melancholy he always experienced after visiting Galia's grave. He snatched up the receiver, cursing whoever it was at the other end of the line.

'Ken.'

'Detective Ben-Ro-eye?'

'Ben-Roi,' corrected the Israeli, scowling. Who was this
maniak?

'Forgive me. My name is Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Egyptian Police Force. Your name was given to me by Central Police Headquarters.'

Ben-Roi said nothing.

'Hello?'

'Ken.'

'Do you speak English, Mr Ben-Roi?'

'Ata medaber Ivrit?'

'Sorry?'

'Do you speak Hebrew?'

'I'm afraid I do not.'

'Then it looks like I'll
have
to speak English. What do you want?'

Khalifa puffed on his cigarette. He'd been speaking to the man for less than fifteen seconds and already he disliked him.

'I am currently investigating a case involving an Israeli national,' he said, struggling to keep his tone civil. 'A murder case.'

Ben-Roi transferred the receiver to his left hand and, with his right one, eased the hip-flask from his pocket.

'So?'

'The victim was a woman named Hannah Schlegel. She was killed in 1990.'

Ben-Roi snorted. 'And you're just investigating it now?'

'No, no, you misunderstand. We investigated it at the time. A man was convicted. But now new evidence has come to light and we are re-examining the case.'

Ben-Roi got the lid off the flask and took a swig.

'You convicted the wrong person?'

It was more an accusation than a question. An imputation of professional incompetence. Khalifa gritted his teeth.

'This is what I am now trying to find out.'

Ben-Roi took another swig.

'So what do you want from me?'

'I am trying to get . . . how do you say? . . . a little background information on the victim. Job, family, friends, interests. Anything that might help us establish a motive for the killing.'

'And?'

'Sorry?'

'Why are you phoning me?'

'Oh, I see. Well, the victim used to live at' – Khalifa glanced down again at the file in front of him – 'Ohr Ha-Chaim Street. Number forty-six, flat four. I was told this address comes within the . . . how do you say? . . . care of your station.'

Ben-Roi sat back and, reaching up his free hand, began rubbing his temples. For fuck's sake! This was the last thing he needed, getting roped into a joint investigation with some bloody rag-head. Amateurs, the lot of them. Fucking amateurs. He should never have picked up the phone.

'I'm busy at the moment,' he said gruffly. 'Can you call back?'

'Later today?'

'Next week.'

'I'm afraid it can't wait that long,' said Khalifa, sensing the fob-off and refusing to accept it. 'Perhaps one of your colleagues can help me.' Someone a bit more professional, he felt like saying. Who takes a bit of pride in his work. 'Or perhaps I should speak to your superior,' he added.

Ben-Roi's scowl tightened into a snarl. Cheeky Arab cunt! He held the phone away from him and glowered at it, tempted simply to slam it back down into its cradle, to cut the man off. He got the feeling he wasn't going to get rid of him that easily, however. Why the hell hadn't he just left the phone to ring?

'Inspector Ben-Roi?' Khalifa's voice echoed down the line.

'Yes, yes,' growled Ben-Roi, taking a final swig from the flask and screwing the cap back on. 'OK, give me the name and address again.'

He grabbed a pen and started scribbling as Khalifa repeated Schlegel's details.

'And she was killed when?'

'March the tenth 1990. I can send you the case notes, if that would help.'

'Forget it,' said Ben-Roi, aware that the more information he had, the more work he'd be obliged to do. A couple of calls, maybe a quick visit to the woman's former address – that's as far as he was prepared to go. And if that wasn't enough, well, that was the Arab's problem. It was him who'd fucked up, after all.

'One thing you should know,' Khalifa continued. 'Our main suspect in this case is someone named Piet Jansen. Any connection you can find between this man and Hannah Schlegel would be very useful. That's—'

'Yeah, yeah, I've got it,' said Ben-Roi. 'Piet Hansen.'

'Jansen,'
said Khalifa, no longer bothering to mask the annoyance in his voice. 'J . . . A . . . N . . . S . . . E . . . N. Have you got that?'

Ben-Roi's hand bunched into a fist. 'Got it,' he growled.

Khalifa took an angry drag on his cigarette, taking it right down to the butt before grinding it out in the ashtray in front of him.

'You'll need my contact details.'

'I guess I will,' responded Ben-Roi, bristling.

Khalifa gave them to him.

'Yours?' he asked.

Ben-Roi gave him his email.

'Mobile?'

'Don't have one,' said the Israeli, gazing down at his Nokia.

Khalifa knew full well he was lying, but couldn't see any point pushing the issue so he simply said he would appreciate it if Ben-Roi could treat the matter with as much urgency as possible.

'Sure,' grumbled the Israeli.

There was a silence, the line between them seeming to crackle with mutual antipathy, and then Ben-Roi said that if that was all he had work to be getting on with. Khalifa thanked him, stiffly, and both men started to lower their phones.

'One question!'

Khalifa's voice echoed back down the line. For fuck's sake, thought Ben-Roi.

'What?'

Khalifa was flicking swiftly through the file in front of him.

'Something I do not understand. On the victim's arm. There was a . . . how do you say . . . tatter?'

'Tattoo?'

'Exactly.'

Khalifa came to a black and white photograph of the dead woman's forearm and pulled it out, holding it up in front of him.

'A number. Four-six-nine-six-six. With a triangle in front of it. This is some Jewish ritual?'

Ben-Roi sat back in his chair, shaking his head. Fucking ignorant, anti-semitic Arab.

'It's a concentration camp number. The Nazis tattooed them on the arms of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust. Although seeing as you lot don't believe the Holocaust ever happened that probably won't help you much. Anything else?'

Khalifa was staring at the photo in front of him.

'Anything else?' repeated Ben-Roi, louder.

'No,' said Khalifa. 'Nothing else.'

'Then I'll be in touch.'

The line went dead. Khalifa continued gazing at the photo for a long moment, eyes dwelling on the five digits crawling across the dead woman's skin like a procession of insects emerging from the triangular mound of an ant-hill, then laid it aside and picked up Jansen's pistol. This too he stared at for some while, brow furrowed, before putting it down again, picking up his pen and, on the pad beside the phone, writing 'Nazi' and 'Holocaust', underscoring each with a double black line.

'The war between Israelis and Palestinians – and make no mistake, it is a war – is being fought on many different levels, and with many different weapons. Most obvious, of course, is the physical confrontation: rocks against Galil rifles, Molotov cocktails against Merkava tanks, car bombs and suicide attacks against Apache helicopters and F-16 jets.

'There are other elements to the conflict, however, which, if less overt, are no less significant. Diplomacy, religion, propaganda, the economy, intelligence, culture – all are arenas in which the ongoing struggle between my people and our Israeli oppressors is played out on a daily basis. In this article I shall concentrate on one of the less likely theatres of attrition, and yet in many ways the most crucial of all, one that sits at the very heart of this corrosive conflict: archaeology.'

Layla paused, fingers hovering over the keypad of her laptop, scanning what she had just written, reading the words out loud to check that they flowed smoothly, made sense. She added another sentence – 'For the Israelis, archaeology, specifically the unearthing of evidence to support the existence of a biblical State of Israel on the lands they now occupy, has from the outset been a key component of their war against the Palestinians' – then, with a sigh, pushed herself away from her desk, stood up and went through into the kitchen to make herself some coffee.

The article, for the
Palestine-Israel Journal,
was one she'd been turning over in her mind for the past week, since her meeting with the young man Yunis Abu Jish in Kalandia refugee camp. It was a good subject, and, given her usual speed of writing and the fact she'd already planned the whole thing out in her head, one she should have wrapped up in a couple of hours or less.

As it was she'd been working on it for twice that length of time, since returning from the meeting with Father Sergius, and although it was now early evening she'd still only produced a fraction of the two thousand words she intended to write. If it had been any other subject she might have concentrated better. The references to archaeology and history, however, were a constant reminder of the whole William de Relincourt thing; she would write a few words only for her mind to start drifting almost immediately, pulling her away from the job at hand and back to de Relincourt and the mysterious treasure he had supposedly found buried beneath the Holy Sepulchre. What was it, she kept asking herself? How did it tie in with al-Mulatham? Who was the mysterious correspondent who had alerted her to the story in the first place? What? How? Who? The questions echoed around her head like a constantly ringing bell, shattering her concentration.

She brewed her coffee, making it Palestinian-style, boiling water in a metal flask and adding coffee and sugar, then went up onto the roof and gazed eastwards at the darkening sky, trying to clear her head. On top of Mount Scopus the lights of the Hebrew University had come on, sharp and cold, as though the hilltop was covered in a glittering sheet of ice; to the right, on the Mount of Olives, the Church of the Ascension was just visible, enveloped in a warmer corona of illumination, like a halo. She smiled faintly to herself, recalling the time she and her father had raced all the way down the hill from the church to the Gethsemane Basilica below, her father betting her a dollar she couldn't beat him to the bottom. She had, just, and although she'd known he'd let her win, had held back deliberately, the knowledge had in no way diminished her sense of triumph as she crossed the agreed finishing line, raising her skinny arms and whooping in delight before breathlessly demanding her prize money.

It was, like so many of her memories of him, an ambivalent image, one replete with happiness, yet also a melancholy symbolism. In a way, after all, she was still running that race. Had been ever since his death, her father always at her shoulder, haunting her, pushing her, never receding, however hard she ran. The difference being that whereas once there had been a finite distance to cover, a clear end in sight, a reward for her exertions, now there was . . . what? Nothing. No expectation of triumph or delight, no enjoyment. Just the ceaseless running, the hopeless headlong sprint from emptiness into emptiness. And always her father's memory behind her, his skull shattered, his hands cuffed behind his back like an animal tethered in an abattoir. Always there. Always present. Always driving her.

She dragged her arm across her eyes, wiping away the moisture that had gathered there, and gazed out at the last faint band of twilight as it slowly dissolved into night. A breeze got up, pushing against her face, and she closed her eyes, enjoying the calming freshness of the night air. She remained like that for a long while, wishing she could just spring up above the rooftops and fly away, escape from the whole vicious thing, leave it all behind; then, with a sigh, she downed her coffee and descended once again into the study, sitting back in front of her laptop and reading through what she'd written. She added another couple of sentences, half-heartedly, then, realizing it was a waste of time, that she was too preoccupied, shut down the file she was working in, put away her notes and logged on to the internet, calling up Google and typing 'William de Relincourt' into the subject field.

She spent the next five hours going back over every relevant de Relincourt entry listed, searching for some new lead, something she might have missed on her initial trawl through the listings the previous night. William de Relincourt and the Holy Grail, William de Relincourt and the Rosicrucians, William de Relincourt and the lost scrolls of Atlantis, William de Relincourt and the Vatican conspiracy to take over the world – she waded through them all, each match seemingly that bit more bizarre than the one preceding it. Had she been researching an article on New Age oddballs, or History as the New Mysticism, she would have had a field day. As it was, she found nothing whatsoever to add to the facts she already knew.

When she'd exhausted all the William de Relincourt matches, she began typing in variations, widening the net: Guillelmus de Relincourt; Gillom of Relincar; Esclarmonde de Relincourt; De Relincourt Jews; De Relincourt France; De Relincourt Languedoc; De Relincourt C. Still nothing. Sometimes there'd be no matches at all, sometimes dozens of them but all irrelevant, sometimes matches she'd already brought up and gone through under another heading.

Only one combination proved, if not necessarily helpful, at least interesting, and that was 'Guillelmus Relincourt Hitler', which she typed in on the basis of Father Sergius's parting shot that morning. Here again she was confronted by more than a few crazy theories, including one suggesting de Relincourt had unearthed some sort of secret magical weapon capable of vaporizing the world's entire Jewish population, a weapon that, for obvious reasons, Hitler had been anxious to lay his hands on (and the author too, to judge by the anti-semitic tone of the article). Among the dross, however, were a number of more plausible-sounding pieces in which de Relincourt was name-checked as an example of the Führer's well-documented obsession with archaeology and the occult. Most of the references were brief and lacking corroborating detail, but one, in an article by a Frenchman named Jean-Michel Dupont, carried an intriguing footnote quoting from the diary of one Dietrich Eckart, a Nazi ideologue and the man to whom Hitler had, apparently, dedicated
Mein Kampf:

November 13, 1938 Thule Soc. Dinner, Wewelsburg. Spirits high after events of 9-10, with WvS making joke about the 'shattering of Jewish hopes'. DH said they'd be more than shattered if the Relincourt thing came off, after which long discussion on Cathars etc. Pheasant, champagne, cognac. Apologies from FK and WJ.

Some swift cross-referencing revealed that Wewelsburg was a castle in north-west Germany, the headquarters of Himmler's SS; the Thule Society a quasi-esoteric order devoted to the promotion of Aryan mythology; the 'events of 9-10' the mass destruction of Jewish property subsequently referred to as 'Kristallnacht'; and the Cathars, a name she had already come across in several other articles, some sort of heretical Christian sect that had flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (interestingly, they had been especially active in the Languedoc region of France). The initials WvS, FK and WJ, so far as she could make out, belonged to Wolfram von Sievers, Friedrich Krohn and Walter Jankuhn, Nazi academics and regular Thule Society members.

All of which was perfectly interesting. Unfortunately, the one part of the extract she really needed to source, namely the owner of the initials DH and the meaning of 'if the Relincourt thing came off, was the one she could find nothing about. There was no contact number or address for Jean-Michel Dupont, and after a futile half-hour zig-zagging around the net trying to clarify the issue she eventually decided the whole thing was just another red herring and gave up on it.

'For fuck's sake!' she hissed angrily, slamming her foot against the leg of the desk. 'What the fuck am I supposed to be looking for? Fuck it!'

It was by now almost midnight. She gazed at the screen, eyes swimming with weariness, then, reaching out, made to switch off the laptop, accepting that she wasn't going to get any further that night. As she did so, more for the exhausted, bloody-minded hell of it than because she thought it was going to do any good, she banged a final random combination of words into the subject field, the first that came into her head, not even thinking about it, just tapping the keyboard automatically as if it was her fingertips rather than her mind that had taken the initiative: 'Relincourt France treasure Nazis secret Jews'. She paused a fraction of a moment, staring at what she'd written, then, again more as a reflex than from any obvious rationale, replaced 'Relincourt' with 'William' and clicked on the search icon.

It was the first match listed.

St John's College History Society . . . Professor Magnus Topping, with the show-stopping title 'Little William and the Secret of Castelombres: A tale of Nazis, treasure . . .
www.joh.cam.ac.uk/historysoc/lent.html

The site, as its title suggested, belonged to the history society of St John's College, Cambridge, and consisted primarily of a long, rather flowery report of the previous term's events and activities, most of which, to judge by the accompanying j-pegs of inebriated undergraduates in togas and orange wigs, had little or nothing to do with the study of history. The report's penultimate paragraph read:

The final talk in this bumper term of talks – nay, cornucopia of talks! – was given by our very own Professor Magnus Topping, with the show-stopping title 'Little William and the Secret of Castelombres: A tale of Nazis, treasure, Cathars, and the Inquisition'. In this illuminating and typically colourful disquisition Professor Topping explained how his research into 13th Century inquisition records had revealed an unexpected link between the fabled treasure of the Cathars and the so-called 'Secret of Castelombres', the latter a castle in the Languedoc region of France where, according to medieval legend, some priceless if unspecified treasure was housed. From this starting point we were taken on a fascinating excursion into the world of Judaic mystery cults, Nazi archaeologists and the visceral horrors of the Catholic Inquisition (Little William was a particularly brutal interrogator), the overall effect being not of your usual history seminar but rather a full-on, edge-of-the-seat historical whodunnit. A truly memorable evening made doubly so by our honoured speaker's awesome demolition of an entire bottle of Lagavulin! Oh weep all ye who failed to attend!

Layla's immediate reaction, on reading through this, was one of mild amusement at the jejune pomposity of style, coupled with disappointment at the fact that, contrary to what she'd initially hoped, the William mentioned clearly had nothing to do with the one in whom she was interested. It was a sign of how exhausted and dull-headed she was, not to mention sceptical after an evening floundering around in a mire of historical hokum, that it was only on a second reading that the connections between the report and her own research started to hit home. And it was only as she went through it a third time that, like a bird springing noisily from a thicket, the word 'Castelombres' suddenly leapt out of the screen at her.

Castelombres. Languedoc. C.

For a moment she sat where she was, staring at the name, taking it in, then, with a giddy rush of adrenalin, started madly scrambling through the notes scattered across her desk, pulling out the translation of the coded letter and holding it under the lamp, eyes sprinting across the text.
I
send it to you now in the knowledge it will rest safe at C.

'Oh my God,' she whispered.

She went through the report one more time, carefully, scribbling notes to herself, then saved the website to her favourites folder and clicked back to Google, where she typed 'Castelombres' into the search box. Six matches came up. She clicked on the first, 'A Geneaology of the Comptes de Castelombres'. For a long moment the screen was blank, then, like a fog clearing before a strong gust of wind, a threadbare family tree slowly materialized, actually more of a family bush, for there were fewer than a dozen names suspended from its branches like tattered foliage. The one that caught her eye was right in the centre.