The Last Ember (42 page)

“You’re suggesting that the ceremony’s preparation has provided a cover to access the illegal excavations we discovered?” Profeta put down his pen. “Have you identified any of the personnel?”

“Not yet, but we are searching.”

 

 

 

Comandante?
Lieutenant Copia said from the doorway. “We just discovered additional evidence in one of the Josephus pages from the warehouse raid.”

“Something inside the text?”

“No. A word written in faded pencil on the reverse side of the parchment. According to forensics, the graphite powder is a type from sixty years ago.”

“What word?”

“
Orvieti
,” Copia said. “We just discovered it’s a name. We cross-referenced it with the carabinieri’s parochial database for clergy and it matched the name of an elderly archivist living here in Rome.”

“He works in Saint Peter’s, then?”

“Not Saint Peter’s, sir,” Lieutenant Copia said. “Mosè Orvieti apparently has a different boss.”

A
t Ben-Gurion Airport, Eilat Segev led Jonathan and Emili through restricted back corridors packed with Israeli customs officials in powder-blue shirts and navy slacks. In the accordion-walled hallways, high-level diplomatic personnel whisked past, escorting Arab sheikhs from their private planes to meet with Israeli government officials in conferences that never occurred—officially.

For appearance’s sake, Jonathan tried to button his shrunken suit jacket; the sleeves had retreated to his forearms.

“I still can’t believe she put
my suit
in the washing machine.”

“The algae didn’t match your tie,” Emili said, smiling. She glanced at his shrunken sleeves. “And it’s fashionable to show some cuff.”

Segev abruptly clipped her mobile phone shut and turned around.

“The carabinieri in Rome have issued EU-wide rapid arrest warrants for both of you. It’s going to be nearly impossible to get you back into Italy. All I can do is put you on an El Al plane to Rome. If I were so much as to help you through the doors at Fiumicino, it could strain relations between Israel and Italy for months. There are probably forty uniforms looking for you in the airport right now.”

“But the carabinieri are probably monitoring only departures, not arrivals,” Emili countered.

“Why?” Jonathan asked.

“Because the carabinieri officers at Fiumicino are looking for us in
outbound
traffic. The police would never imagine that either of us—even if we already left the country—are planning to
return
.”

Israeli guards nodded respectfully to Segev as she walked Jonathan and Emili through the diplomatic passport check. The procedure was even more cursory than usual. Jonathan did not even remember stepping through a metal detector. A senior airport official handed them tickets. Seats had been reserved for him and Emili as visiting UN scholars of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Jonathan was surprised at how professional-looking the documents were. A door at the bottom of a metal stairwell opened and they stepped onto the tarmac.

“Once this plane touches down at Fiumicino, you are on your own.

You might not even make it to Ostia!” Segev leaned in and spoke over the tarmac’s din. “To give you the most lead time in deplaning, your seats are at the front of the aircraft! Remember, once at Fiumicino, you are—”

“Yes, I know!” Emili said loudly over the engines. “On our own!”

Segev nodded. Without looking back, she turned and walked away.
In the eerie quiet of the El Al first-class cabin, the tarmac’s blaring noise still rang in Jonathan’s ears.

“Look at the bright side”—Emili leaned over, whispering—“this take-off ought to be smoother than the last one.”

Jonathan spread the maps of Ostia over the tray table, and Emili studied them beside him. Watching her study the map, Jonathan remembered their first excavation together, along the southern Italian coast. It was the middle of summer, and he remembered them sitting after dinner, alone in the empty restaurant of their ramshackle pensione, studying aerial photographs of the village farmland where their dig team was surveying for a buried pagan temple. From the images, Jonathan had noticed that the rows of artichoke plants surrounding the pensione had grown in an irregular pattern, suggesting some large object beneath the ground that obstructed their root work. Filled with enthusiasm and too much local wine, they ran into the artichoke fields with flashlights. It wasn’t long before they noticed a circular piece of white stone jutting out from the earth shining in the moonlight. They got on their knees, scraping away some of the dirt around the smooth stone, revealing a carved marble acanthus leaf.

“It’s a Corinthian capital,” Emili said, exhilarated, crouching in the dirt. He remembered the sudden, transcendent vision they shared of that huge marble temple slumbering beneath the moonlit artichoke field. She leaned in to brush more dirt from the exposed marble, and their faces accidentally touched. Her curtain of long blond hair enveloped them both, creating a secret moment of intimacy. She was the first to open her lips. In Emili’s room back at the pensione, Jonathan lavished great attention in removing her sweat-stained blouse, her khaki shorts, her underwear, as though uncovering archaeological strata that required great study and attention. He knew it was more than the dinner’s grappa that had taken them past the breaking point, it was the addiction of discovery, of unearthing the unknown. And afterward, as they lay there naked on the thin cot, her arm flung across his chest, the cool night air intruding on the warmth of their moist skin, she opened her eyes, twinkly and bright, as though remembering something.

“We found something remarkable tonight,” she said, pointing through the window in the direction of the artichoke field.

“Yes,” Jonathan said, not moving his eyes from her, “we have.”

 

 

 

The El Al plane neared its approach to Fiumicino and it banked low over the Mediterranean. Small fishing boats,
gozzi,
chugged along a jagged coastline of small Italian towns rimmed with honey-colored cliffs. Flocks of migrating birds circled an abandoned tuna fishery.

The airplane taxied down the runway, and Jonathan and Emili descended the long ramp toward the gate with the rest of the commercial travelers. To their right, a group of airport security officers lounged outside the duty-free shops. A carabinieri officer flirted shamelessly with a young flight attendant.

“How are we going to get through passport control?” Jonathan said.

“With some help,” Emili said.

“From whom?”

“Her.” Emili pointed at the end of the Jetway, where beyond the streams of people Jonathan made out a distinguished-looking woman.

The woman was shaking her head as Emili walked up, smiling thinly. In a formal tone, she welcomed them both, mainly for the benefit of the diplomatic-passport-check representatives who stood beside her.

“I take it neither of you has any luggage, then,” Director Jacqueline Olivier said.

I
n the back of a Lancia sedan with Moroccan diplomatic plates, Salah ad-Din approached the Aurelian Wall, which surrounded downtown Rome. He knew the third-century brick fortification once defended Rome from the invading Germanic tribes from the north, and he felt the quiet victory of his own personal invasion as the car pierced the wall, through an archway now paved for a two-lane street. The sedan traveled along the Lungotevere dei Sangallo and stopped alongside the Ponte Fabricio.

Salah ad-Din stepped into the rain across the street from the Great Synagogue of Rome. He crossed the cobbles, walking leisurely past the police officers who chatted under umbrellas outside the synagogue’s main gate. He turned away from the synagogue and slipped down a small side street off the Piazza delle Cinque Scole. His men, during their reconnaissance of the Ghetto the week before, had loosened a sewer grate in the cobbles. Salah ad-Din lifted it and lowered himself into the steel hull of a drainage tunnel—a point of entry to the Great Synagogue that none of the four policemen surrounding the structure knew to protect.

One line in Josephus,
Salah ad-Din thought, adrenaline quickening his pace down the tunnel.
One line in Josephus will tell me where the menorah is in Ostia.

For months, one of Salah ad-Din’s local operatives had rented a flat in one of the few remaining decrepit buildings across from the synagogue. Only minutes before, he relayed to Salah ad-Din that the most valuable artifact in the Ghetto had just entered the archives: the archivist himself, Mosè Orvieti.

From the drainage tunnel, Salah ad-Din entered the synagogue’s subbasement and noticed some fresh footprints in the dust near the oil tank. He followed them through a door to the spiral staircase leading up to the synagogue’s cupola. He checked the clip of his gun beneath his coat.

Quietly, he moved up the staircase to the synagogue’s belfry, feeling a sense of return. He had never entered this structure himself, but for him, the sense of return was more
metaphysical
. He had so fully identified himself with his grandfather’s mission, so deeply internalized the stories told by the grand mufti’s assistants, who had escaped the war crime trials of Nuremberg by moving to Baghdad with his grandfather, that Salah ad-Din felt it was
he
who climbed these stairs more than sixty-five years earlier and confronted Orvieti in 1943. The old men in Baghdad had often told him how much he reminded them of their deceased leader. His intensity, even his facial features, recalled the grand mufti.

Salah ad-Din reached the top of the staircase and stood in the archive’s open doorway. For a moment, Salah ad-Din went unnoticed. It was then that he could truly appreciate, even respect, the sight of this old man sitting at the center table, perhaps just where his grandfather had found him a lifetime ago. Orvieti, sensing a visitor in the doorway, gestured without looking up from his text. He would need a moment to mark his place and slowly push back his chair to stand up.

Orvieti finally lifted his head, taking in the visitor. Over the years he had visions of the grand mufti—remembering him draping his hands across the books, flanked by the Berlin professors. As a result, Orvieti’s first reaction at seeing Salah ad-Din was none at all. He lived with the memory daily. But then, as though roused from a nightmare to find its monster at the foot of the bed, he wiped his eyes. The man standing before him was no trick of his mind. He was flesh and blood.

Orvieti’s voice began evenly, the flat tone of a man who had prepared for this moment all his life. He finally spoke.

“Why have you not aged?”

S
alah ad-Din took in the scope of the archives. He turned to Orvieti.

“You have something I need.”

Orvieti stood up. He felt strangely unafraid, defiant, as though the sight of this ghost reversed his own aging half a century. This man wore Western clothing—black slacks, an open white shirt, and a full-length gray overcoat—not the religious garb of the mufti. But the face was unmistakably the same.

“I seek the passage in Josephus my grandfather could not find.”

Your grandfather,
Orvieti thought, watching the young man pace the room with the same lordly arrogance he remembered from more than half a century before.

Even the tone, the thinly veiled instability—it was all the same.

“
Signore
, do not act startled,” Salah ad-Din said curtly. “You know, as well as I do, that Josephus revealed the menorah’s location in a single line of his text. My grandfather believed the menorah was in Jerusalem, so he spent his life searching passages in Josephus’s text that described the Temple Mount. It’s why he researched all those pages describing the ‘hid den gate.’ ”

“
Researched
those pages?” Orvieti asked.
He stole them, ripped them right out of our manuscripts, like limbs from a living animal.

“But he had the wrong line, didn’t he?” Salah ad-Din said. “The menorah is not in Jerusalem, but near Rome. And now you are going to tell me exactly where. Which line in Josephus reveals the menorah’s location?”

“I don’t know.”

“Signore”
—Salah ad-Din stepped toward him—“believe me, I would have preferred to find the answer in an ancient source myself. It’s why you have not seen me until now. After all, Titus’s mistake was in taking other people’s word for it that he had captured the authentic menorah.”

“Whatever information you seek about Flavius Josephus, the grand mufti stole it from this archive years ago,” Orvieti said. “You know that.”

“He took all the information in this archive
at the time
.” Salah ad-Din stepped forward. “But you were given more information about Josephus rather recently, were you not?”

“From whom?” Orvieti asked, standing very still.