The Last Secret Of The Temple (31 page)

BOOK: The Last Secret Of The Temple
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J
ERUSALEM

'Come on, you stupid Arab schmuck, where the fuck are you?'

Ben-Roi sat at his desk, scowling and drumming his fingers impatiently on its surface, the telephone receiver jammed to his ear. He was already in a foul mood after what had happened in the camp, and was in an even worse one now having listened to the four messages the Egyptian had left on his office answerphone. 'Inspector Ben-Roi, could you kindly give me a call.' 'Inspector Ben-Roi, I was hoping to have heard back from you by now.' 'Inspector Ben-Roi, can you please let me know how your investigations are going.' 'Inspector Ben-Roi, have you even started looking into the matter we discussed?'

He'd just risked his fucking life for the man and all he got by way of thanks were messages like that! He shouldn't even have bothered to ring him back; should have just let him stew for a few days. Teach him some manners. In fact, now he thought about it, that's exactly what he was going to do. Hang up and let the little tosser wait.

The line clicked into life.

'Sabah el-khir.'

'Khediva?'

A fractional pause.

'Khalifa. Kal-ee-far. I take it that's you, Inspector Ben-Roi.'

'Yes, it's me,' said the Israeli, resisting the urge to add 'you pushy little Muslim cunt' and instead taking a swift nip from his hip-flask.

At the other end of the line Khalifa lit a cigarette and bit hard onto the filter, disliking the man even more than he had the first time they'd spoken, not least because, by catching him unawares like this, he had made him feel disorganized and incompetent.

'I was hoping to have heard from you sooner,' he said, trying to reassert himself.

'Well, you're hearing from me now,' growled Ben-Roi. 'Which is as soon as I could manage.'

They lapsed into silence, each somehow sensing that to make the next move would be a sign of weakness. I mustn't sound like I need him, thought Khalifa, puffing on his cigarette. I mustn't seem too interested, thought Ben-Roi, taking another swig of vodka.

It was the Egyptian who cracked first.

'So?' he asked, his attempt at nonchalance not quite coming off. 'Have you found anything?'

Ben-Roi gave a satisfied nod, sensing that he had somehow gained the upper hand. Yes, he replied, he had found something. Several things. He let the statement hang a moment, lifting his legs and crossing them on the corner of the desk, enjoying the thought of Khalifa clenching his fists impatiently at the other end of the line, then launched in.

He started with all the personal stuff about Hannah Schlegel: France, Auschwitz, the filing job at Yad Vashem, the twin brother, everything the Weinberg woman had told him the previous day. The receiver echoed to the soft rasp of pen on paper as Khalifa scribbled notes at the other end of the line. He butted in with constant questions – Where in France? Filing what? Have you spoken to this brother? – which brought increasingly curt, monosyllabic responses from Ben-Roi, partly because he didn't like being interrupted, mainly because, deep down, he knew he hadn't covered the ground as well as he should have, and by failing to provide adequate answers was being made to look sloppy.

'Look, I don't fucking know!' he snapped at one point after yet again being forced to admit he hadn't followed something up. 'I've only had two fucking days.'

At the other end of the line Khalifa smirked, perversely glad at having something to criticize, each unanswered question seeming to shift the balance of power a little further his way.

'I quite understand,' he said in the most sympathetic-yet-patronizing tone he could muster. 'Two days is really not very long at all. Especially if you have other things to do.'

'Bollocks,' thought Ben-Roi, holding the receiver away from his ear and giving it the finger.

He stumbled to the end of the background stuff, then moved on to the house fire, and here he was on firmer ground because, although he said it himself, he'd actually done a pretty good job. He took it slowly, starting with what Mrs Weinberg had told him and then going through it step by step – Hani Hani-Jamal, the trip to Al-Amari, Majdi's admission that he'd been paid to burn the apartment, the description of the flat's interior – building the story up piece by piece. Again Khalifa interrupted with numerous questions, but this time Ben-Roi had the answers and, despite himself, the Egyptian was forced to acknowledge it was a pretty good piece of detective work, one with which he himself would have been happy.

'Maybe he's not as stupid as I thought,' he conceded to himself. 'Rude, crass, objectionable. But not stupid.'

The Israeli ordered his narrative in such a way that the crowning piece of information, the revelation of who had actually commissioned the arson attack, came right at the end of the story. By this point Khalifa had become so absorbed in what was being said that he wasn't even bothering to ask questions any more; he was just listening and taking notes. When the Israeli finally mentioned the name the young Palestinian man had given him – Gad, Getz – he let out a low whistle.

'You know him?' asked Ben-Roi, trying, and failing, to mask his own interest.

'Maybe, maybe not,' replied Khalifa. 'Piet Jansen had a close friend named Anton Gratz, who also lives in Cairo. It's certainly a strange coincidence.'

He pondered a moment, wondering why on earth Gratz should have wanted to destroy Hannah Schlegel's flat, then, with a shake of the head, he sat back and stared down at the pad in front of him, scanning the notes he had just taken.

'I am interested in this incident on the boat,' he said after a long pause. 'When Mrs Schlegel first came to Israel. When she said . . .' He ran his pen down his notes, searching for the relevant quote.

' "I'm going to find them," ' put in Ben-Roi, helping him out. ' "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." '

'Exactly. Who is she talking about?'

'The ones who did whatever they did to her in Auschwitz, I guess,' grunted the Israeli. 'The doctors, the scientists. From what the Weinberg woman said, she had a pretty fucking bad time there.'

Khalifa pulled deeply on his cigarette. Before his search on the internet the previous afternoon he'd known almost nothing about Auschwitz save the name. Even now he found it hard to believe such a place could have existed. Gas chambers, ovens, medical experiments . . . He took another deep drag, thinking about the scar he'd seen on Hannah Schlegel's abdomen, thick, zig-zagging, like some squirming reptile. Was that a legacy of the camp, he wondered? Had they cut her open, poked around inside her, torn bits out? An image flashed momentarily through his mind of a young girl strapped to a hospital gurney, naked, shaved, weeping, terrified, calling for her mother. He grimaced and shook his head, trying to dislodge the vision.

'You think Jansen could maybe have been one of these doctors?' he asked. 'That he could have been involved in these experiments in some way?'

He knew it was a long-shot, explaining as it did some pieces of evidence but leaving most dangling unresolved. Ben-Roi dismissed it immediately.

'All the Auschwitz doctors were either executed or imprisoned at the end of the war. Mengele escaped to South America, but he died thirty years ago. Whatever else your Mr Jansen was involved in, I don't think it was Nazi medical experiments.'

Khalifa nodded, disappointed but not particularly surprised, and sat back in his chair, exhaling a long, undulating ribbon of smoke and flicking through his notes one more time. There was some good stuff here. No blinding revelations, admittedly, but some important new pieces to add to the jigsaw. Schlegel's wartime experiences, the 'archive' in her flat, her twin brother, the arson attack – taken with what he himself had already dug up these were significant new leads. For the first time since the start of the investigation he felt the vaguest flicker of optimism, a rumbling sense that, despite the fog of uncertainty in which everything still seemed to be shrouded, he was at least starting to move forward, to get closer to the heart of the thing.

There was still a long way to go, however, and to cover that extra distance he needed more – more facts, more background, more information, more angles. Some, to be sure, he could ferret out himself; he'd already decided his next move would be to travel north to Cairo to confront the mysterious Mr Anton Gratz. But there were other leads that he couldn't chase up on his own, or at least not easily. Whether he liked it or not he still needed Ben-Roi. Which was frustrating, because if he was grudgingly impressed with some of the work the Israeli had done, that didn't mean he found him any more amenable as a person.

Ben-Roi, for his part, was grappling with much the same problem, albeit from the opposite direction: how to admit that he wanted to stay involved in the case without coming across as overly eager. OK, maybe the Egyptian wasn't quite as incompetent as he'd at first thought; some of the questions he'd asked and the comments he'd made had actually been pretty astute. He was still an irksome, pushy little towel-head, though, and he was fucked if he was going to go crawling to him asking for favours.

There was once more a long, charged silence, neither man wanting to make the move, to say what was on his mind, for fear of giving the other some invisible advantage. This time it was Ben-Roi who caved in first.

'I'll see what else I can turn up,' he said, gruffly, swiftly, as though downing a drink he didn't like.

'Right,' said Khalifa, relieved and slightly surprised. He sat down behind his desk again and screwed his cigarette out into an ashtray. 'I'll fax you a picture of Jansen. And a report of what I've found so far.'

'Do that. And you'd better take my mobile number.'

Khalifa distinctly recalled the Israeli saying he didn't have a mobile. Given that he was being so unexpectedly helpful, he didn't want to risk provoking him, so he just grabbed a pen and made a note of the number. Once he'd got it down there was another silence, neither man quite knowing how to end the conversation.

'I'll be in touch then,' said Ben-Roi eventually.

'Right,' said Khalifa. 'I will wait to hear from you.'

He quarter-lowered the receiver, then lifted it again.

'Ben-Roi?'

'What?'

'One thing . . . it may or may not be significant.'

'Yes?'

Khalifa paused.

'Piet Jansen . . . it seems he was trying to make contact with al-Mulatham. He said he had something that would be useful to him in his fight against Israel. I thought you ought to know.'

After he had put down the phone Ben-Roi sat for several minutes doing nothing, just staring into space, fingers playing with the menorah around his neck. Then he got to his feet and crossed to a metal cabinet in the corner of the office. Pulling a set of keys from his pocket, he unlocked it and, squatting, removed a chunky cardboard file crammed with papers. He kicked the cabinet door shut, went back to his desk, sat down and opened the file. Right at the top was a photo of a young woman with short-cropped black hair. Scrawled on a fix-it note stuck to the bottom of the photo was the name Layla al-Madani.

C
AMBRIDGE,
E
NGLAND

It was past five o'clock when Layla eventually arrived in Cambridge, an unseasonably warm, hazy evening with a high, powdery sky and wafts of cherry blossom and mown grass in the air. She had come up from London by train, and under other circumstances would probably have walked the mile and a half from the station into the centre of town – it was years since she had last been in this part of the world and it would have been nice to take in some of the old sights again, from the days she had lived here with her grandparents, after she and her mother had fled from Palestine. As it was, time was pressing, and she was anxious to track down the elusive Professor Topping.

Emerging from the station building, therefore, she hailed a taxi and ten minutes later was walking through the arched gateway of St John's. A porter in the lodge informed her that Professor Topping's study was on I-Staircase Second Court and, thanking him, she set off through the college, crossing one large, silent court – neatly clipped lawns, red-brick Tudor buildings, an ornate, arch-windowed chapel – and passing into a second.

I-Staircase was in the far left-hand corner, with an in-out board screwed to the wall just inside its entrance bearing the names of all those with rooms above. The shutter beside Professor Topping's name was pushed firmly to the 'out' setting, causing her a moment of panic – Christ, she thought, have I come all this way for nothing? – before a burly student in a red-and-white hooped rugby shirt came clumping down the stairs and, in response to her query as to the professor's whereabouts, assured her that he was definitely in his rooms.

'I heard him shouting,' he explained. 'Don't take any notice of the board. I've lived below him for two years and he's never once had his name on "in".'

Relieved, although not exactly reassured – the professor didn't sound at all like the sort of person who would welcome unexpected callers – she started up the stairway, the wooden boards creaking and groaning beneath her feet, continuing right to the top of the building where she found a door with PROFESSOR M. TOPPING painted onto the wall beside it.

She hesitated, picturing, as she had done the previous afternoon, a crusty old academic with half-moon spectacles, tweed jacket and whiskers sprouting from his ears, then stepped forward and knocked. No response. She knocked again.

'Not now!'

'Professor Topping?'

'Not now!'

His tone was angry, harassed. She wondered if perhaps she should go away and get a cup of coffee, come back later when he was in a better mood. But she hadn't come all this way to pussy-foot around so, gritting her teeth, she raised her hand and knocked a third time, knuckles rapping insistently on the wooden door.

'I would appreciate a moment of your time, Professor Topping,' she called.

There was a brief, threatening pause – the calm before the storm – then the sound of rapidly approaching feet. An inner door was yanked open, then the outer one on which she had knocked.

'Don't you bloody understand English? I said not now! What the hell's wrong with you?'

For a moment Layla was too taken aback to speak, for rather than the fusty old scholar she had been expecting she found herself confronted by a tall, handsome, dark-haired man, early to mid-forties, in Bermuda shorts and a denim shirt, a fuzz of black chest-hair exploding from the shirt's open neck. Her surprise lasted only an instant, then, riled, she launched into him.

'Fuck you, you pompous arsehole! I've come all the way from Jerusalem because you haven't got a fucking telephone like any normal human being, so you just show me a bit of fucking respect.'

She fully expected the door to be slammed in her face. As it was, the professor merely stared at her, a mildly impressed look in his eyes, then, with an arching of his eyebrows, turned and padded back into his room. She remained in the doorway, uncertain what to do.

'Well, come on,' he called over his shoulder. 'I might be a pompous arsehole, but at least I know when to back down gracefully. And close the door behind you. Both doors. I don't want this setting a precedent.'

Too surprised to debate the matter she did as she was told, pulling the outer and then inner door shut, and following him into the study.

The place was a shambles, every available inch of space – floor, mantelpiece, windowsill, desk – subsumed beneath teetering drifts of papers and books, as if the room had been hit by a particularly violent tornado. Such was the all-enveloping chaos it was a moment before she realized that two chair-shaped mounds over by the window were in fact exactly that – a pair of armchairs encased in a barrow of discarded clothes and heavily thumbed volumes of the
Cambridge Medieval History.
Topping picked his way over to them and started clearing a space for her to sit down.

'I don't think I caught your name.'

'Layla,' she replied. 'Layla al-Madani.'

'And you're a . . . ?'

'Journalist.'

'Didn't think you were an academic,' he said, stepping back and indicating the chair, now stripped of its camouflage of books and dirty laundry. 'Far too good-looking.'

His tone was so ingenuously matter-of-fact he managed to carry this off without it sounding like a bad chat-up line. She came over and sat down while he got to work clearing himself a space on the other chair.

'Coffee?' he asked, nodding to a small doorway in the corner of the room through which Layla glimpsed a cramped galley kitchen. She declined the offer.

'Drink?'

'It's a bit early for me.'

He seemed faintly surprised by this response, as if the idea of a connection between drink and the time of day had never occurred to him. He didn't push the point, just finished clearing his own armchair, then went through into the kitchen and fetched himself a bottle of Budwar from the fridge, banging the bottle's cap off on the edge of the sideboard.

'And you've really come all the way from Jerusalem?' he called. 'Or were you just trying to make me feel bad?'

She assured him she had been telling the truth.

'I suppose I ought to feel flattered,' he said, coming back in and sitting down opposite her. 'Half my students can't even make it here from the other side of college.'

He took a swig of his beer and stretched out his legs, staring at her.

'So?'

Their eyes held a moment – he really was very good-looking – then she leant down and started rummaging in her bag.

'I wanted to ask you about a talk you gave a few weeks ago,' she said.' "Little William and the Secret of Castelombres".' She straightened, clutching her notepad, pen and the print-out she'd made of the St John's College History Society web page. 'I've been trying to look into this whole Castelombres thing for an article I'm doing, but I don't seem to be getting anywhere. I've managed to pick up a few vague pieces of information from the internet, but. . . well, from the description of your talk it sounded like you might be able to give me something a bit more detailed.'

He raised his eyebrows, surprised. 'And you've come all this way for that?'

'Well, it obviously would have been easier if you'd been on phone or email. . .'

He gave a half-smile, acknowledging her point, and, hunching forward, took another swig of beer.

'I should say straight out that the talk was more by way of light relief than serious academia,' he said. 'Cultural identity in medieval Languedoc, that's my area of interest, with a specialism in thirteenth-century Inquisition registers, so all this stuff about secrets and buried treasure and mysterious goings-on with Nazi archaeologists – I take it all with a slight pinch of salt.' He stared down at his bottle. 'Although it
was
interesting. Very interesting. Important, maybe.'

There was a brief pause, the professor momentarily seeming to sink into his own thoughts. Then, with a shake of his head, he held out a hand.

'What have you got so far?'

She pulled out the page of notes she'd taken the previous day and passed it over. He ran his eyes over it.

'To be honest, I'm not sure there's really an awful lot I can add to this. As I told you, it's not my specialist field. And even if it was . . .' He shrugged, handing the page back to her. He must have noticed the disappointed look on her face, however, because he added almost immediately, 'Still, I dare say I can fill in a bit of the background. Give you the context and all that. It's the least I can do given that you've come all this way. Whether it's any use or not . . . well, you'll have to be the judge of that.'

He heaved himself up and picked his way over to his desk where he began burrowing into a huge mound of papers.

'Have you ever been there?' he asked as he worked his way through the papers. 'To Castelombres?'

She admitted that she hadn't.

'It's worth a visit. Not much to see, admittedly. A stone window, a few tumbled walls. All completely overgrown. Atmospheric, though. Has a curiously melancholy feel to it. The Castle of Shadows. That's what the name means. Appropriate. Aha!'

He yanked a sheaf of papers out of the pile.

'The notes for my talk,' he explained.

He flicked through them, perching himself on the edge of the desk, the movement causing the paper pile behind him, already rendered unstable by his rooting, to slump and cascade to the floor. He ignored it.

'OK,' he said, 'let's start at the beginning. So far as we can tell from the contemporary sources, and those are sparse to non-existent – just a couple of incomplete genealogies, a few extant land charters, wills, that sort of thing – there was, at least until the end of the eleventh century, nothing remotely out of the ordinary about Castelombres. It was just a typical minor Languedoc estate. Its lords owned land and property, intermarried with other local gentry, made bequests to religious institutions, owed allegiance to the Counts of Foix. Consummately normal. Then, some time around 1100, things suddenly seem to change. Quite dramatically.'

Layla came forward onto the edge of her seat, a ripple of excitement echoing down her spine. If her research was correct, and she had no reason to think it wasn't, some time around 1100 would have been exactly when William de Relincourt discovered his mysterious treasure beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and sent it away to his sister at Castelombres.

'Again, the sources are scanty in the extreme,' continued Topping. 'Just a few troubadour poems, a couple of fleeting references in contemporary chronicles, and, most importantly, two fragments of letters written by the contemporary Jewish scholar Rashi. They all seem to agree, though, that from the early twelfth century onwards Gastelombres starts to attract an increasing amount of attention. And the reason for this is that rumours start flying around that it's the repository of some extraordinary treasure of unparalleled power and beauty.'

Another, stronger, ripple reverberated through Layla's body. 'Power and beauty' were exactly the words de Relincourt used in his letter.

'Do we know what it was?' she asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

Topping shook his head. 'No idea. Even the sources don't seem to be entirely sure. Some refer to it as "Lo Tresor" – the treasure – others simply call it a secret or a mystery, which implies some sort of allegorical or symbolic meaning. It just isn't made clear.'

He downed the last of his beer and launched the bottle into a bin five feet away, where it landed with a loud clatter.

'If we don't know precise details, however, two things at least do seem to be certain. Firstly, whatever this mysterious object or secret was, it was intimately associated with Esclarmonde of Castelombres, wife of Count Raymond III, who from the outset seems to be regarded as some sort of guardian or protector figure. Secondly, it appears to have had some profound significance for the Jewish faith. As early as 1104, according to Rashi, we have the leaders of Languedoc's main Jewish communities in Toulouse, Beziers, Narbonne and Carcassonne – visiting the castle. By 1120 you've got Jews coming from as far afield as Cordoba and Sicily. And by 1150 the place seems to be well established as a centre of Jewish pilgrimage and cabbala study. Again, I have to stress how meagre the sources are. Even bearing that in mind, however, it's clear that something very unusual was going on at Castelombres during this period.'

Layla was sitting right forward on the edge of her chair.

'Go on.'

Topping shook his head. 'Unfortunately, from the mid-twelfth century the sources go completely silent. The next thing we hear of Castelombres, the last thing we hear, is in something called the Chronicle of Guillaume Pelhisson which records how in 1243, during the Cathar Crusade, the castle was razed to the ground by the forces of the Catholic Church, its lands redistributed and the House of Castelombres wiped out. Of the mysterious treasure or secret or whatever the hell it was, nothing is ever heard again.'

He paused a moment, then looked up at her over the top of his notes.

'Or at least it wasn't until I found a rather curious reference to it a few months ago in an Inquisition register I was studying at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Which is how this whole thing got started in the first place.'

There was a dull clank as, outside, a bell chimed the half-hour.

'Do you know about the Cathars?' he asked.

She had skim-read a book on the subject during the journey over which, along with the stuff she had already picked up from the internet, had given her the basic background.

'A bit,' she said. 'I know they were a heretical Christian sect that flourished in Languedoc in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That they believed' – she glanced down at the brief notes she had scribbled on the plane – 'the universe was ruled by a God of Light and a God of Darkness, and that everything in the material world was the work of the evil God. That the Catholic Church launched a crusade against them, the Cathar Crusade. That they made their last stand at the Castle of Montségur and that just before the castle fell they were supposed to have smuggled some fabulous treasure out past the besieging army.' She looked up at him. 'That's about it, I'm afraid.'

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