The Last Secret Of The Temple (28 page)

Ben-Roi looked up, his palm covered with a scrawled cross-hatch of biro-lines.

'How do you mean?'

'Well, they were twins, weren't they? Didn't I tell you? I'm sure I did. Mrs Schlegel and her brother. And you know what they did to twins in the camps. The experiments. You must have heard.'

Ben-Roi's throat tightened. He had indeed heard: how Nazi doctors had used twins as human guinea pigs, subjected them to the most vile and excruciating genetic experiments, cutting them up, sterilizing them, stripping pieces out of them. Butchery.

'Dear God,' he managed to mumble.

'Is it any wonder the poor boy was a bit . . .' Again she tapped the side of her head. 'Not the girl though. She was tough. Strong. That's what Dr Tauber said. Thin as a matchstick, but strong as iron inside. Looked after her brother. Cared for him. Wouldn't let him out of her sight.'

She looked across at Ben-Roi.

'Do you know what she said? When they were all on the boat. "I'm going to find them." That's what Dr Tauber told me. She didn't cry, didn't complain. Just said, "If it takes me the rest of my life I'm going to find the people who did this to us. And when I find them I'm going to kill them." Sixteen years old, for God's sake. No child should have to feel those things. Isaac. That was the brother's name. Isaac Schlegel.'

She ceased her knitting and, with a sigh, laid the needles and wool aside, came to her feet and hobbled over to the bird cage, tapping at its bars with the nail of her finger. The budgerigar hopped along its perch towards her, levering its wings up and down, twittering.

'Who's a pretty, then?' she cooed. 'Who's a pretty boy?'

Ben-Roi had spread the page of notepaper taut over his thigh and was scribbling notes on whatever blank space was available.

'Do you know if this brother is still alive?' he asked, repeating his question of a couple of minutes earlier.

'I couldn't tell you,' she said, running her finger along the bars of the cage, the movement making a rhythmic tang-tang-tang sound. 'I never even met him.'

'Did he live with her?'

'Oh no. He was much too ill. Last I heard he was over at Kfar Shaul. That's what Dr Tauber told me.'

Kfar Shaul was a psychiatric clinic out on the north-western periphery of the city. Ben-Roi scribbled a note to himself.

'She used to visit him every day, apparently. Never spoke about him, though. Not to me at least. I've no idea if he's still alive. None of us are getting younger, are we?'

The budgerigar had hopped up onto a swing in the corner of the cage, rocking itself back and forth. She whistled at it tunelessly.

'And you say they were from France originally.'

'Well, that's what she told me. It was the only time we ever had a proper chat. In twenty years. Can you believe it? She came in with a load of shopping – it must have been Pesah time because she had a bag full of
matzah
boxes – and we just got talking. Right out there in the hallway. Can't remember how we got on to the subject, but she definitely said she was born in France. And there was something about a farm and a ruined castle. Or am I imagining that? I really can't remember the details. I can still see those
matzah
boxes, though, clear as if they were here in front of me now. Funny what you remember, isn't it?'

She whistled at the budgerigar again, slipping one hand into the pocket of her housecoat.

'Did she have any other family that you know of?' asked Ben-Roi. 'Husband, children, parents?'

'Not that I ever saw.' She was fiddling in the pocket, searching for something. 'Lived all on her own, poor woman. No family, no friends. Completely alone. At least I had my Teddy, God rest his soul. Forty-four years we were together, and never once a cross word. I still wake up thinking he'll be there.'

She craned her neck to one side, peering down at the pocket, hand still groping.

'What about work?' asked Ben-Roi. 'Did Mrs Schlegel have a job?'

'I think she did something up at Yad Vashem. Filing, or something like that. She used to go out early in the morning and come back late in the afternoon with arms full of papers and files and God knows what else. She dropped some once, in the hall, and I helped her pick them up. Something about Dachau, it was, with a Yad Vashem stamp on it. God knows why she'd want to bring something like that into her house after all she'd been through. Ah!'

She withdrew her hand, some sort of seed or small nut clasped within the gnarled pincer of her thumb and index finger. She waved it about in front of the cage as if to say, 'Look what I've got!' Then, clasping her wrist with her other hand to steady her arm, she pushed the seed through the bars. The budgerigar let out an excited trill and hopped down from its swing.

Ben-Roi stared at his notes, wondering if there was anything else he should cover. He noticed the name the Egyptian detective had given him.

'Does the name Piet Jansen mean anything to you?' he asked.

The old woman thought for a moment.

'I knew a Renee Jansen once,' she said. 'Lived on the next street but one to us in Tel Aviv. Had a hip replacement, and a son in the navy.'

'This is Piet Jansen.'

'Him I didn't know.'

Ben-Roi nodded and glanced down at his watch. He asked a few more questions – Did Mrs Schlegel have any enemies that she knew of? Any unusual interests? Did any of the other neighbours know her at all? – but the woman wasn't able to provide any more information and eventually, feeling he'd done as much as could reasonably be expected, he folded his sheet of notepaper, returned the biro to its vase on the dresser and said he wouldn't need to trouble her any further. She made him finish his orange juice – 'If you don't drink you get dehydrated!' – and led him back through the flat and out into the building's entrance hall.

'You know, I can't even think where they buried her,' she said as she opened the front door. 'Twenty-one years we were neighbours and I don't even know where her grave is. If you find out, will you let me know? I'd like to say a
kaddish
for her on her
yahrzeit.
Poor woman.'

Ben-Roi muttered something noncommittal and, thanking her, stepped out into the street. He took a couple of paces, then turned again.

'One final thing. You don't know what happened to Mrs Schlegel's possessions, do you?'

The old woman looked up at him, her eyebrows lifting slightly as if she was surprised by the question.

'They were burnt, of course.'

'Burnt?'

'In the fire. You must have heard about the fire.'

Ben-Roi stared down at her.

'The day after she died. Or was it two days? Some Arab kids climbed up the drainpipe at the back, covered everything in petrol and set it on fire. Destroyed the lot. If old Mr Stern hadn't raised the alarm the whole block would have gone up.' She shook her head. 'Poor woman. To have survived the camps, and then for her life to end like that, murdered, her home destroyed. What is this world we live in, I ask you? People killed, children sent into the army. What is this world?'

She sighed deeply and, raising a hand in farewell, heaved the door shut, leaving Ben-Roi standing on the street, his craggy brow cut with deep, uncertain furrows, like plough-marks grooved across a rocky hillside.

Bloody Castelombres. The night before Layla had been euphoric about the new lead, convinced it was the breakthrough she needed to solve the William de Relincourt conundrum. After a day of scratching and digging, however, she now felt almost as confused as she had before she'd even heard of the bloody place.

She'd called Cambridge first thing, hoping to speak to Professor Magnus Topping, only to be informed by a blandly officious college porter that the professor possessed neither a phone ('The ringing disturbs him, madam') nor an email address ('Prefers his typewriter, madam').

'So how the hell do I get in touch with him?' she had asked, picturing some crusty, pipe-smoking academic closeted away in a book-filled study, wholly oblivious to the outside world.

'Well, madam,' the porter had replied – he seemed to insinuate a polite-but-patronizing 'madam' into every sentence – 'you could write to him, although between you and me he's never been very good at answering his letters. Or you could simply turn up and knock on his door, which is generally the best way of getting hold of him.'

'I'm calling from Jerusalem.'

'Ah. Well, then, that's going to be a problem, isn't it? Madam.'

With the Topping option closed to her, she had gone back to the internet. Unlike William de Relincourt, Castelombres had barely figured on the web, half a day of careful searching and cross-referencing failing to add to the six brief matches she had turned up the previous night (of which the sixth had turned out to be for a Castelombres Sanitary Porcelain company in Antwerp). Of the other five, one was the truncated genealogy that had given her the Esclarmonde de Rolincoeur connection; one a rather bad translation of a French academic article on the troubadour tradition of twelfth-century Languedoc; one a site devoted to the history of the cabbala and Jewish mysticism; one a footnote to an article about a medieval Jewish scholar called Rashi; and one a passing reference in the 'Haunted Ruins' section of a site titled 'Hidden France'.

From these she had picked up various scattered shards of information, random glimmers of some wider mystery. Not, however, the revelation for which she had been hoping. On the contrary, far from helping to clarify the whole William de Relincourt thing, the Castelombres lead had only seemed to cloud the waters further, adding new and confusing angles to a picture that already resembled some obscure and muddled Braque composition – a jumble of disparate elements all hinting at something significant without ever fully resolving themselves into a form she could recognize.

She hunched forward and stared at the notepad in front of her, wondering what to make of the whole thing, where on earth it was leading her.

Castelombres

'The Castle of Shadows'. Seat of Comptes de Castelombres. Castle destroyed Cathar Crusade 1243 – only few ruins left (ghosts!) Arriege Dept. Castelombres village 3 km away. Esclarmonde de Rolincoeur (Relincourt). 'Esclarmonde the Wise' 'White Lady of Castelombres'. Married Raymond III of Castelombres c. 1097. No extant biog. details. Renowned for intelligence, beauty, charity etc. Popular figure in troubadour tradition. Bona domna Esclarmonda, Comtessa Castelombres, Era bella e entendia Esclarmonda la blanca (Good lady Esclarmonde/Countess of Castelombres/She was beautiful and she was wise/Esclarmonde the White). Jaufre Rudel (1125–48) Occitane language. C. important centre of learning. Renowned for religious tolerance. Many Jewish scholars. Cabbala. 'Lo Privat de Castelombres' – The Secret of Castelombres. References in troubadours. Esclarmonde the 'protector'. No-one certain what secret actually was.

The thing that made it so frustrating was that she knew she had made a significant leap forward. The links were too tight, the similarities too sharp, for it to be mere coincidence. In her mind there was no doubt that this Esclarmonde the White was the same Esclarmonde to whom William de Relincourt had addressed his coded letter, nor that 'C and the castle of Castelombres were one and the same. And if those pieces fitted it was a pretty fair guess that William's 'ancient thing . . . of great power and beauty' was in some way bound up with this mysterious 'Secret of Castelombres'.

Beyond that, however, she didn't seem able to progress. She had contacted a couple of experts at the Hebrew University, including the Gershom Scholem Professor of Cabbala, who added a few extra brushstrokes to the overall picture: Castelombres had not merely attracted Jewish scholars, he had informed her, but, from the mid-twelfth century, seemed to have been a specific site of Jewish pilgrimage. Why, however, and what, if anything, that had to do with William de Relincourt or the so-called 'treasure of the Cathars' remained wholly unclear. It was as though she had leapt across a chasm only to slam straight into a rock wall.

She read through her notes again and again, then picked up the print-out she had made the previous night of the St John's College History Society web page and re-read that.
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 more she thought about it the more convinced she became that Topping was the key; that she could surf the net ad infinitum, call every expert going, but without talking to him directly she was never going to move forward with this thing. And from what the college porter had said the only way she was going to be able to talk to Topping was to get on a plane and fly all the way over to England.

'No way,' she muttered. 'Absolutely no fucking way.'

Even as she said it, however, she was laying aside the print-out and starting to leaf through her address book, looking for the number of her travel-agent friend Salim.

Back in his office, Ben-Roi took a swig from his hipflask and stared at the three-quarter-page report on the computer screen in front of him. He had, he told himself, done everything that could reasonably be expected of him. He'd interviewed the old woman on Ohr Ha-Chaim; called Kfar Shaul to enquire about Schlegel's twin brother (still alive, apparently, although in a 'very disturbed' state); even contacted Yad Vashem to confirm that Schlegel had actually been an employee there (she had, part-time, in the archives department). OK, there were other avenues he could have pursued; he hadn't exactly driven himself into the ground. But then why should he? 'A little background information', that's what Khediva had asked for. And that's what he'd given him. He'd type a couple of extra lines, push the report up over a page and leave it at that. Email it across and wash his hands of the whole damned thing.

Except . . . except . . .

That bloody house fire. He couldn't get it out of his mind. The last thing the Weinberg woman had told him, about all Hannah Schlegel's possessions being destroyed in an arson attack. He just couldn't get it out of his mind. Why, he kept thinking to himself – this despite his best efforts
not
to keep thinking to himself – would a group of Arab kids risk going into the Jewish Quarter and shinning all the way up a drainpipe for the sole purpose of covering an elderly woman's flat in petrol and setting it alight? It simply didn't make sense. He'd dealt with Arab burglars before, and Arab vandals, but this didn't fit into either category.

The bellyaches. That's what his mentor, old Commander Levi, used to call them. 'The bellyaches, Arieh, are what make the difference between a good detective and a great detective. The good detective will look at the evidence and use logic to work out there's something wrong. But the great detective will
feel
there's something wrong even before he's seen the evidence. It's a gut instinct. A bellyache.'

He used to get them all the time, those bellyaches – an uncertain tremor in the pit of his stomach, a sixth sense that things weren't quite what they seemed. He'd got them on the Rehevot fraud case, when everyone had told him he was shooting at shadows until the computer expert had recovered those dumped files and proved his suspicions right after all. And he'd got them on the Shapiro settler murder, when all the evidence had pointed at the Arab kid, every bit of it, yet he'd still been convinced the kid was innocent, that there was some other angle. He'd taken a lot of flak over that case, but he'd kept digging, and of course eventually they'd found the cleaver in the rabbi's cellar and the truth had come out. 'I'm proud of you, Arieh,' Commander Levi had told him as he presented a citation for outstanding police work. 'You are a great detective. And you'll become even greater, so long as you keep listening to those bellyaches.'

But of course he'd stopped listening this last year. Stopped even having the bellyaches, aside from the whole al-Mulatham thing. He went through the motions, did what he had to, but the old fire, the passion for getting to the bottom of things, the desire to be like Al Pacino in the film – that had faded and died. He just didn't care any more. Right, wrong, truth, lies, justice, injustice – it no longer mattered. He didn't fucking care.

Until now. Because now he had one of the strongest bellyaches he'd ever experienced and it just wouldn't go away. He didn't want to have it, he was angry that he did have it, but it was there all the same, gnawing away at his insides. Kids, arson, murdered woman, Jewish Quarter. It was wrong. It was all bloody wrong.

'Damn you, Khediva,' he muttered. 'Bloody fucking damn you.'

He procrastinated a few minutes longer, desperate just to wash his hands of the whole thing, not get sucked in any further. Then, unable to stop himself, he snatched up the phone and tapped a number into the keypad.

'Feldman?' he said when it was answered. 'I need to find the file on an arson case from fifteen years ago . . . None of your fucking business. Just tell me where to look.'

It took almost two hours to track down the file, which had for some inexplicable reason ended up in the archive at Moriah, one of the city's other regional police stations. He'd had it sent over by bike, and now sat with his feet propped on the edge of his desk reading through it, taking occasional deep swigs from his hip-flask.

The thing that immediately leapt out at him, and only served to deepen his misgivings, was the date and time of the fire. Mrs Weinberg had told him it had happened a day or two after Hannah Schlegel's death; according to the notes, it had actually occurred on the very same day as her murder, just a matter of hours later, an extraordinary coincidence and one that even the most obtuse of investigators would have been pushed not to find suspicious.

Unfortunately, frustratingly, there was nothing in the rest of the file to explain this troubling synchronicity. There were statements from Schlegel's neighbours, including Mrs Weinberg; photographs of the gutted flat; and arrest forms for the three Arab kids who'd been brought in for the crime, two of whom had pleaded guilty and got eighteen months' youth detention each, while the third, the youngest, identified on his arrest sheet only as 'Ani', had been released without charge on account of his age – seven at the time – and a lack of evidence against him.

Why they had chosen that particular flat to torch on that particular day at that particular time, and what, if anything, the attack had to do with Hannah Schlegel's murder – all were questions that remained unanswered. 'We did it for a dare,' was all the boys had said, and the police interrogator, evidently satisfied with having wangled an admission of guilt out of them, seemed to have made no effort to delve any deeper into the matter.

Ben-Roi went through the notes twice, then leant his head back and drained the remaining vodka from his flask. It was all wrong. Massively, bellyachingly wrong. The question was, what could he do about it? The fire had been a decade and a half ago, the leads were all dead, the perpetrators had most likely moved or changed names, or probably both. He could spend months trying to get to the bottom of it. And for what? Some pushy, Jew-hating raghead.

'Zoobi!'
he muttered. 'Fuck it. What's the point? Bellyaches or no bellyaches.'

He closed the file, threw it on the desk and, picking up the phone, punched in the number of the Moriah archives, intending to tell them he'd finished with the notes. As he did so something caught his eye, a line scribbled on the back of the file, in faded pencil. He hadn't noticed it before. Reaching out, he pulled the folder towards him. It was barely legible, and he had to squint to read it: 'Ani – Hani al-Hajjar Hani-Jamal. Born 11/2/83. Al-Amari camp.'

He stared down at the note, eyes narrowed, then, leaning to his left – slowly, as if reluctant to do so – he fumbled through a pile of papers, pulling out the case file for the Palestinian he had chased after the Old City drugs bust. He opened it and stared down at the man's arrest form.

Name: Hani al-Hajjar Hani-Jamal
Age: 22
D.O.B. 11 February 1983
Address: 14, Ginna Lane, Al-Amari camp, Ramallah

'Shalom, archive.'

The receiver echoed in his ear. His eyes were flicking from the scribbled note to the arrest form and back again.

'Archive,' repeated the voice.

'Yes,' he said. 'It's Ben-Roi. At David.'

'Hi. You finished with that file?'

Ben-Roi bit his lip, torn.

'No,' he said after a pause. 'I think I'm going to be needing it a while longer.'