Year Zero (4 page)

Even from the top of the stairs, Nathan Lee could smell the fresh dirt of a dig. They descended into a room with an altar built against one wall. Next to it yawned a narrow tunnel. The floor of the subterranean chapel was piled with dirt on tarps. Sieve trays were neatly nested by a grid frame, trowels, and other tools of the trade. “After you,” said Ochs, shining his light into the tunnel.

Nathan Lee turned on his headlamp. It was his father’s headlamp, a taped, tended thing.
Get over it,
he thought.

He had to crouch to move inside. The Franciscan team had braced the sides and ceiling with scaffolding and beams. Somehow it had stood up to the tremors. His claustrophobia was not helped by Ochs looming behind him.

“Careful ahead. It goes back twelve meters, then turns right, and drops nine meters.”

“It goes down? I thought this was bedrock.”

“So did everyone else. Then they did a sonar scan from the chapel above, and the new cavity popped out at them. The old quarry ran deeper than anyone realized. Keep moving.”

A beam had sagged in the ceiling. Ochs kept talking. “When the Romans started building their Venus temple, they needed to fill in all the pits and cavities. They used whatever was at hand. Dirt, garbage, potsherds, and…”

Nathan Lee reached the pit.

The walls were studded with white and brown sticks. “Human bones,” he said.

A small ledge had been trimmed along the lip of the pit. A rope ladder fell into the depths. Ochs crowded beside him. They shined their lights on the tangle of bones jutting from the deeper walls.

“It will take years to properly excavate the cave,” said Ochs. “Years more to articulate the skeletons. So far all they’ve done is sink this exploratory shaft. What little material that’s come out has been dated and sexed, though. All are male. Most are first century or earlier. And there’s no question how they died.”

“The missing crucifixions,” murmured Nathan Lee.

“It’s one giant, compacted ossuary. The estimates run into the tens of thousands of bone fragments. They’ve even found pieces of wood, nails, rope. And tear phials left by mourners. Forget the rock of Calvary. Golgotha was here after all, right outside the old gates, alongside the road to Jaffa where every traveler could see the wrath of Rome.”

The shaft gaped up at them. “This is incredible,” said Nathan Lee. “It could change the way we read history.”

“So could the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Ochs. “But look how long the Vatican sat on them. Decades. It took a lone scholar leaking photocopies to finally let the rest of the world see them.”

“So looting is a public service?”

“That’s the spirit,” said Ochs.

“But you’ll destroy the site.”

“That’s archaeology. To dig is to destroy. Anyway, it could all be lost again in the aftershocks.”

“Someone will notice.”

“No one will notice. They don’t know what’s here. How can they know what’s not?”

Ochs handed Nathan Lee the plastic envelope containing their body bag. “Let’s get this over with. Fill it up.”

“This doesn’t make sense. Who would buy a pile of bones?”

“Who do you think pays for you to root in the dirt? The university? Where do they get their money? Foundations? What are they? The aristocracy. Wrap your head around it. Aristocracy is the engine that drives archaeological exploration. Private collectors, museums, the
cognoscenti.
Without them, artifacts would simply fall to dust.”

There was nothing more to argue. Nathan Lee climbed down the rope ladder. The braided hemp creaked under his weight. He had never seemed so heavy. Down at the bottom, he began cutting loose the dead.

I
T WAS NEARLY FOUR
in the morning when Nathan Lee finished. The bones rattled in the body bag. They backtracked through the church and up the ridge to where Nathan Lee’s cairn marked the site of the buried woman.

Her hand was gone.

He searched. It was possible an animal had torn it loose, or the stones had sealed it over. But there was no blood. To Nathan Lee it was as if she had pulled her hand back into the underworld. Away from him.

C
ORFU
I
SLAND
, G
REECE
M
ARCH

T
he two old men entered a spacious room, their wives trailing them. Nikos led them to a wall of glass. Perched upon a high cliff, the room aimed due west. From here one actually looked down into the sun as it sank into the sea. Unprepared, the Egyptian surgeon and his wife stepped back from the glassed-off precipice. The abyss was wild with pure light.

The Egyptian realized that Nikos had precisely timed their entrance for the maximum effect. Beauty, profound beauty, drove the man. That’s all you needed to know about Nikos. His merchant navy and import-export cartel and banks all had their explanation not in money or power, but in a sunset such as this.

The Egyptian glanced around the room. Nikos’s passions were on display in typically Spartan measure. There was a Koons on one wall, spectacular and obscene. A plate of oranges glittered by one window. In the corner was a priceless bronze shield said to be from the Trojan War. And then there was his wife. Perhaps a third his age, she was a woman of almost inhuman beauty. Her gray almond eyes were startling. The Egyptian could tell that his own wife, elegant herself, was shaken. She would be gossiping about this evening for a long time to come. Nikos was nothing if not memorable.

“Where are your golden death masks?” the Egyptian continued. “The steles and amphorae? Your torso of Achilles? The swords and chariot wheels?”

“I have laid aside the armor.” It was said quietly, with a modesty unlike him. “Let others see Homer’s accuracy,” Nikos said. “I have found a greater mythology to prove real.”

“Greater than Homer?” the Egyptian teased his old friend.

The Egyptian’s eyes shifted to Nikos. The man still carried the wide shoulders of a sailor, still cracked walnuts with his fingers and threw the meat at his mouth. But his scarred hands and thick forearms bore liver spots among the white hairs. There were smears of aluminum-oxide paste on the skin cancer his glorious sun had ignited. His spine tilted to the left. It was like seeing a powerful statue being eaten away.

“What new adventure have you embarked upon then?” asked the Egyptian.

Nikos glanced at him sideways. “Can you hold off your hunger for an hour more?”

The Egyptian looked at his wife. She tilted her head with mock servility. “At your pleasure,” he replied to Nikos.

“Excellent,” said Nikos. It seemed important to him. “In the meantime, perhaps the ladies might enjoy a tour. Medea?”

The young woman needed no further instruction. She linked arms with the Egyptian’s wife and gracefully guided her out through the door. Nikos went to the back wall and slid open a set of panels that reached from the floor to the ceiling. Behind them, thick glass fronted an interior chamber. The Egyptian smiled at the theatrical touch: No women allowed, this was an inner sanctum.

He touched the glass with his fingertips, and it was cold. Nikos’s secret room was refrigerated. Inside stood stainless steel cases with glass shelves lit from behind. He tried to see what the shelves held, but the windows were coated on the inside with a sheen of frost. In another setting, he would have recognized it as a storage unit for medical specimens or art objects. Here he could not say for sure what it held. Oddities of nature or man, that was sure.

Opening the door, Nikos stepped inside. He touched the switch and light cascaded through the glass and metal room. “Come,” he said.

The room was filled with relics. Christian relics. There were scores of them. The Egyptian could not help feeling cheated. These trinkets were the source of Nikos’s delight? The old pirate had simply gotten religion.

“Impressive,” he finally said. His word lingered before him, a cloud of frost.

“Say what you mean.‘Nikos, your dick has grown soft.’”

“We’re old men,” the Egyptian shrugged diplomatically. “We’re allowed our gods.”

A crafty grin restored Nikos’s air of mystery. There was something more to this.

“What?” said the Egyptian. He was relieved. “What is this all about?”

Nikos edged among the chill glass shelves. “Doubt,” he said.

Pure white light suffused the room. The effect was of a crystal forest. The glass shelves and their steel mounting gleamed. The artifacts seemed to hang in space. “You know what these are?” he asked.

“I’ve seen such things in the Coptic churches of Alexandria and Cairo. Holy relics. They hold the remains of martyrs…bone chips, pieces of mummified flesh.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not.” Nikos took down an octagonal vessel with transparent sides and handed it to his friend. “I have had to learn a whole new vocabulary. This particular type of casing is called a
monstrance
or
ostensorium.
The lockets are
tecta.
The general term is
domo
or house. Peepholes on the divine. They are often made of precious metal and studded with gems,” he said. “But the prize is within. You see that glass capsule? This pretty little house of silver was built just to hold it. But even that is beside the point. For the soul lies inside the capsule. There is the relic itself.”

Nikos had become a collector of dead souls? The Egyptian held the monstrance at eye level, peering at the ampule mounted inside. “I can see something. The bone of a saint?”

“Or a dog.” Nikos replaced the monstrance, and lifted a cross-shaped receptacle. This time the Egyptian noticed a small red sticker on the glass. The cross was numbered 127.

Nikos flipped open its hinged top like a cigar box. Inside lay a small bundle of black hair. “When the crusaders descended upon Jerusalem, they sparked a glut of forgeries. They flooded Europe with worthless junk. For that reason I depend upon science. All my specimens go to labs in Tel Aviv, Stuttgart, Paris, Tokyo, and Glasgow for dating and genotype. The Italians I no longer trust; they are so gullible. Whisper the word
martyr
and their greatest scientists begin weeping into their microscopes. Their assays are nothing but prayers. Useless.”

The Egyptian was heartened by Nikos’s irreverence. But it made the collection all the more baffling. Hagiography was a convert’s hobby, not the grand quest Nikos had boasted, his proof of a greater mythology, whatever that meant.

“The material varies.” Nikos pointed at different artifacts. “Some of it comes from bodies, human or animal, some from the place of last suffering.
Ex ossibus
means the relic comes from bone.
Ex carne,
from the flesh.
Pelle,
skin.
Praecordis,
the stomach or intestines.”

Nikos fingered the hank of black hair. “This is
ex capillis,
from the hair. It belonged to a woman of Frankish and Roman descent. She was probably twenty years old when this lock was cut. They have matched her genetic chronology to the fifteenth century.”

“But of course, a piece of Joan of Arc,” the Egyptian politely volunteered. He hoped his friend would not begin proselytizing. That would be boring.

“Joan of Arc! The fifteenth century!” Nikos snapped the box shut. “I’m after bigger game.”

The Eygptian was intrigued. They moved on among the strange fruits as Nikos explained that his idea for this collection had come to him in a dream. Ever since, he had pursued his goal with exacting perseverance.

“At first I was a babe in the woods. Every new collector is,” he said. “I wasted good money on forgeries, ancient and modern. I was fooled. My only comfort was that even the Pardoner in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
was tricked into buying pig’s bones. Now I’m more seasoned. The counterfeits are obvious to my eye. Dealers are more careful in what they offer.”

“You mean to say there is a marketplace for these bits of the graveyard?”

“Oh, a lively one,” said Nikos. “Pieces become available. Auctions are held. Very silent. Very ruthless. Prices fluctuate. My chief competitors are not churches, but the Japanese and, of late, Chinese, mostly children of the Maoist warlords. They make the auctions very expensive. I have come to prefer other methods. My agents have fanned out in Eastern Europe and Russia, where political unrest has forced Orthodox monasteries and churches to sell their holdings at cut rate. Most of the reliquaries have been picked over. Much of what’s left is rubbish: skulls or vials of the Virgin’s breast milk or amputated fingers of famous saints. My best acquisitions come via the night.”

The Egyptian grinned. Here was the freebooter of old. “You steal holy relics?”

“I acquire orphans,” Nikos admitted with a smile. “The practice is as ancient as relics themselves.
Furta sacra
it is called. The theft of sacred relics is a time honored tradition. For over a thousand years, monks and bishops and knights—and common burglars—have been “translating” relics from one place to another. In a sense, the theft renews the value of what are just tired bits of bone and tissue. It declares an object of desire.”

He went on to describe a bizarre world of corpses, skulls, shriveled hearts, and miracles, a world the Egyptian had thought ended in the Dark Ages. Nevertheless, coming from the land of mummies and bottled viscera, he was no stranger to man’s abiding fascination with the morbid. Nikos’s theory tying theft with desirability made perfect sense. For millenia, mummies had lain worthless in their tombs. Only in the last few centuries had Europeans restored their eminence, dragging them up into the sunlight to display in museums or to crush into medicinal potions.

At the end of one row, Nikos opened a file cabinet. Each artifact had its own numbered file. Nikos plucked several at random. Some files held official Church documents—”authentics”—which validated the relic as genuine and described the date and type of its enclosure in a locket or hollow cross or monstrance. Others had no authentics. The Egyptian presumed those were files for the stolen relics. Each artifact has its own story, and Nikos has conscientiously documented every anecdote and more. Also, every file contained reports from international laboratories that read like medical histories.

“The Church has developed three classes of relics,” said Nikos. “The first class is organic, from the body itself. The second class is for clothing or objects that the martyr touched. The third class is insignificant. It consists of bits of cloth that have been touched against first or second class objects.”

“Your interest,” the Egyptian guessed, “lies in the first class. The body itself.”

Nikos’s eyes twinkled. “I’m afraid that would be a heresy, given my prey.”

The Egyptian grunted with delight. Prey? A corpse as heresy? He loved riddles. “Ah, the Holy Grail.”

“There is no such thing,” Nikos firmly stated. He was demonstrating his scholarship. The Egyptian’s respect was important to him. “The Bible never mentions a grail. In fact, it was conjured up by a hermit who had a vision in 717. But the idea gained such popularity through poems and novels and now Hollywood that people take it for granted. I’ve learned to beware of legend.”

“No grails? No veils? No holy mangers?”

Nikos grinned. “My search is for the instruments of torture and death. They have terms for those, too.
Ex stipite affixionis
refers to the whipping post. The crown of thorns is called
Coronse spinse.

“The thornbush still grows in the hills of Israel and Lebanon. Botanists have identified it as
Zizyphus bulgaris lam,
a bush that grows to twenty feet. Its thorns appear in pairs. What we call a crown was probably a cap that fitted over the entire top of the head. Supposedly the one used for Jesus held sixty or seventy thorns. After it was rediscovered by Constantine’s mother, most of the thorns were broken off and given as relics. She gave them out like candy, and they were handed down through the generations. History records that the emperor Justinian gave one thorn to Germanus, bishop of Paris, in 565. Mary, Queen of Scots, gave some to an earl. Eight thorns resided in the Oviedo Cathedral until the Spanish Civil War. Only five thorns survived the destruction.” Nikos lowered his voice. “And I own two of them.”

The Egyptian tried arranging these clues. Nikos had some system here, and the system was his answer. But it eluded him. Nikos wanted his batch of sacred art and the tidbits of martyrdom to reach back to the beginning. Maybe that’s all there was to it, the antiquarian’s urge toward oldness or a prototype.

Nikos continued the tour, pointing at this or that relic. One he had obtained from a British commando who stole it from a cathedral during his tour of duty in Northern Ireland. Another came from a museum in Berlin immediately after the Wall fell. He had a number of bones looted from an Armenian church in Jerusalem following the terrible Dead Sea Rift earthquake. Several more pieces had been pilfered from the famous Year Zero collection. Disasters and man-made schisms had furnished his collection.

The Egyptian began to notice other aspects of the collection. All of the containers had been opened. Their contents had been loosely returned to the hollow interiors, like the hank of hair, or else laid beside the container. Dozens of ampules and capsules of different-colored glass had been cut open, then placed upon small squares of surgical gauze. They looked like rare cocoons. Behind every domo stood a small rack of test tubes with red or yellow or blue plastic stoppers, each labelled with lab tags. Nestled in their bellies were fragments of bone, wood, hair, dust, or splinters.