“Jacopo, are you near your fax machine?”
Profeta immediately understood the reason for the low-technology request.
Too sensitive for electronic transmittal. Read and shred,
her tone implied.
Beside Profeta’s desk in Rome, his secure office fax came to life, un-spooling a black-and-white photograph.
In the image, four men stood on a restoration scaffolding outside the Dome of the Rock.
“Have you received it?”
“A photograph of a restoration?” Profeta asked.
“A front,” Segev said. “A restoration effort that is merely a means to gain entry beneath the Mount.”
Profeta noticed that one of the men on the scaffolding had his back turned to the camera. Only the back of his head, its stubble-length black hair, was visible.
“The one with his back turned,” Profeta said. “He knows the camera is there.”
“We believe that’s him. That’s Salah ad-Din.”
“Does Interpol have a better photograph we could circulate?”
“In five years of surveillance, this is the only picture. But our intelligence inside the Waqf reports that many imans believe Salah ad-Din has gone too far. Whatever he is looking for, he is running out of time to find it.”
“Which has apparently made him only more dangerous,
Generale.
There are reports of him smuggling nitrocellulouse explosives from Syria. He may detonate.”
“What other data have you learned, Jacopo?”
“Only that.”
“He’s had one hell of a classical education,” Profeta said. “His team was able to excavate a female corpse in ancient garb and preserved in oils that perfectly matched Pliny’s embalming techniques.”
Segev was silent. “Jacopo, was there an inscription tattooed on her torso?” All trace of exhaustion disappeared from her voice.
“Yes, combining Greek and Latin. ‘Through the navel of the world.’ ”
“Those were the words?” Segev asked, the awe in her voice detectable even over the phone. “You are certain?”
Profeta felt he had stumbled into particularly sensitive territory. A sudden barrier of information rose between them.
“Something tells me I have wandered into waters deeper than I imagined.”
Eilat Segev was silent another moment. “Jacopo, they call you the Prophet for a reason.”
55
A
lthough it was midnight, Rome’s Ciampino Airport was crowded with passengers delayed because of the daylong rain. Jonathan pulled a Roma soccer-team cap farther down over his face and they walked toward the
imbarchi
, or gates, blending in with a church group from Devonshire. “For a thousand euros, he could have let me pick my native country.” Jonathan turned to Emili, holding the faux-leather UN passport in his hands. “I don’t know a thing about
Canada
.”
Unlike Rome’s larger international airport in Fiumicino, which offered strictly commercial flights, Ciampino was a joint civilian and military airport, and the dozens of soldiers in full regalia milling through the duty-free shops did nothing to calm Jonathan’s bristling nerves.
He followed Emili through the crowd to a small flight of stairs that led to a mezzanine floor housing the Plexiglas cubicles of airline corporate offices, customer service, and UN agencies.
The UN agency was immediately next to airport security. The security officers sat around eating panini, watching an episode of
Law
&
Order
dubbed in Italian. None of them looked up as Jonathan and Emili walked past.
“Ciao, Andre,” Emili said to the UN administrator sitting behind his desk. He was clad in the UN’s powder-blue uniform, his tie was undone and pulled to one side, and one of his epaulets was hanging off his shoulder. Apparently, no one from the main office was coming by for an inspection anytime soon.
“Could you walk us through customs? We’re trying to make the 12:00 a.m. charter to Ben-Gurion.”
Andre shook his head, laughing, “That’s in forty minutes! When will you ever learn?” He put down his sandwich. “As usual, it’ll be tight. No promises.”
Emili introduced Jonathan, who couldn’t help thinking that on the other side of this piece of drywall, eight carabinieri watched American television dubbed into Italian. Jonathan heard gunshots and jumped. The bass guitar theme music of
Law
&
Order
reminded him it was the show.
“Too much coffee?” Andre smiled.
Andre walked Emili and Jonathan through the airport’s brick-walled employee corridors. Excited to practice his broken English, Andre shared with Jonathan meaningless trivia about the airport. “Airport of the most age!” he said proudly.
“He’s trying to say Ciampino’s the oldest commercial airport in the world,” Emili said in Jonathan’s ear. “From 1916.”
Jonathan nodded politely.
Hope the planes are more recent.
They stepped through automatic doors onto a stadium-lit tarmac and walked to a roped-off area behind a row of generators. Faint green lights stretched into the darkness, and Lufthansa Sky Chef trucks with orange blinking lights whizzed past them. They approached the UN plane, a Russian-made Antonov AN-30 turboprop cargo aircraft with a fat, pill-shaped front and archaic circular windows that looked vaguely nautical. Emili was talking to Jonathan, but her voice was completely inaudible under the roaring noise of the revving engines. The faded emblem of a Croatian flag on the tail suggested the plane had been retired from military service and refitted years before to make small UN cargo runs across the Mediterranean.
Jonathan pointed at the bright red insignia. “UNFAO?”
“The plane belongs to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. The one with their headquarters here in Piazza del Popolo.”
Two pilots stood underneath the belly of the plane, chatting with the mechanics like two cabdrivers catching up at dispatch before moving along for the day.
Emili and Jonathan climbed an orange ladder to the hatch door. The inside of the plane was thinly carpeted aluminum siding. In the electric glow of the cockpit’s buttons, the contents of the airplane’s hull revealed itself: long rows of stacked freeze-dried meals. In front of the cargo, two single jump seats faced each other.
After the pilots boarded and Emili and Jonathan took their places, the plane moved unexpectedly, accelerating without a word from the pilots.
“I guess there’s no safety demonstration, then,” Jonathan said.
Shaking under its own weight, the plane’s contracting metal groaned like a rusty fairground ride. The engines shrieked, loud as teakettles, and every joint in the metal hull made a snapping sound, as if the whole plane would split apart at any second. Emili flipped through the maps of Jerusalem in her lap, immune to it all. The wheels went up, there was a sudden tranquillity. Rome’s nighttime shoreline was dotted with lights beneath them.
“That’s right,” Emili said, as though soothing a large animal, her eyes resting on the metal ceiling of the plane, “you’re just a little rusty, that’s all.” As her gaze fell, it rested squarely on Jonathan, and he realized her last comment wasn’t about the plane at all, but about him.
The plane banked over the blackness of the Mediterranean. In the slender shaft of light from above her seat, Emili circled various convents on a map of Jerusalem.
She looked up. “What did you see down there, Jon?”
“Down where?”
“That night seven years ago in the catacomb before it collapsed,” she said. “You saw something, didn’t you? A fresco, an inscription.”
Jonathan averted his eyes. They had never spoken so directly of the tragedy. She knew how carefully he guarded the memory, trying to keep it in some distant chamber of his mind.
“After you roped down into the catacomb, Gianpaolo and I were a few feet ahead of you,” Jonathan said. He remembered walking through the tomb’s low-ceilinged corridors with Gianpaolo. As usual, the memory was intermittently hazy, like poor analog reception on a television and, by turns, was startlingly vivid.
“Gianpaolo and I entered a large cavern, and all three walls of the tomb were covered with a large ancient mural. The first wall’s painting depicted a large arena and an elderly bearded man standing in its center,
damnatio ad bestias
.”
“Condemned to be executed by beasts.”
“Exactly,” Jonathan said, his eyes distant, as though still seeing the paintings before him on the tomb’s wall. “On the next frame, the man escaped, dropping through the floor of the arena.”
“Like a trapdoor?”
“Yes,” Jonathan said. “And on the third wall, he carried a torch through an underground tunnel exiting the Colosseum. The man wore an aristocratic toga, which suggested a role in the emperor’s court.”
“And now you think the man in the painting was Flavius Josephus, don’t you?”
Jonathan nodded. “Beneath the painting was Suetonius’s famous quote.
‘
After a certain prisoner escaped the Colosseum, Titus wept bitterly
.
’ From what we’ve seen today, Titus’s despair seems not only because of Josephus’s betrayal, but because Titus realized that the authentic menorah had eluded him.”
Jonathan’s face was set with concentration, as though he were trying to prevent the memory from overrunning its banks.
“Gianpaolo then radioed up to Sharif that we had found wall paintings, and that’s when the tomb began to collapse.”
Jonathan stared out the window at the wing’s fog light, and in the blackness outside the plane, the fateful night felt as real to him as seven years earlier.
In the cloud of debris, Jonathan slung Emili’s unconscious body over his shoulder and ran one step ahead of the catacomb’s collapsing roof. They reached the cavern where they had climbed down. The rope ladder dangled a foot from the floor, reaching up to a manhole where Sharif’s head was visible.
“What the hell happened down there!” Sharif screamed down to them. “Sounded like a bomb!”
“The catacomb collapsed!” Jonathan shouted. “Gianpaolo’s coming up first!” He turned to Gianpaolo. “You go first, then I’ll bring her up!”
“She needs help!” Gianpaolo said. “Take her up first!”
Jonathan grabbed the first rung of the rope ladder, shifting Emili over his shoulders to use both hands.
“Oh, Jesus,” Gianpaolo said.
“We’ll be all right, Gianpaolo,” Jonathan grunted, stepping up another rung of the rope ladder. “We’ll all be fine, I promise.” Just at that moment, a large piece of ceiling fell, sending chunks of stucco splashing against the walls of the cavern.
Jonathan continued to climb, feeling the strain of their combined weight in his thighs as he moved one foot above the other. Jonathan could feel his veins nearly explode through his forearms with each haul upward. He neared the manhole and Sharif reached down, pulling Emili up and laying her limp frame on the grass.
Sharif stood up, hands on his head. “What the hell happened, Jon!”
“Get help, Sharif. There are policemen near the villa’s front gate.”
“But we’re not supposed to be—”
“Go, now! She needs to get to a hospital!”
Sharif disappeared down the rain-slicked path.
“Gianpaolo, can you hear me?”
“Yes, I tried to climb, Jon. I can’t do it.” Jonathan could hear the tremble in his voice. He was crying.
“Listen to me, Gianpaolo, I just need you to hang on to the rope ladder. Just hang on and I will pull you up!”
A huge piece of ceiling fell, and there was a raw shriek from inside the catacomb.
“GP, are you okay!”
“It’s all coming down in here, Jon!”
Jonathan stared into the manhole. He could see only gray dust.
“Just hold on to the ladder, okay?”
There was silence, but Jonathan felt the resistance of Gianpaolo’s weight. Slowly, with agonizing deliberateness, Jonathan pulled up the ladder carrying Gianpaolo. After four or five hauls, Gianpaolo’s face emerged from the gray dust, covered in powdered stucco. He squinted at the street-lamp behind Jonathan as though he had never seen a light.
“Stay right there!” Jonathan screamed.
Jonathan moved toward the hole, managing not to lose any slack on the rope ladder, and swung his arm down, gripping Gianpaolo’s hand.
“Your other hand, Gianpaolo,” Jonathan said, grunting. “I can’t hold you!”
In Gianpaolo’s other hand, he held a piece of notebook paper clenched in a tight fist. Before the tomb’s collapse, they found a paragraph of Latin text painted on the wall, and Gianpaolo had written it down.
“Drop the paper and give me your hand!”
“I . . . I can’t.” Gianpaolo’s eyes widened, confused that his own muscles were working against him. “My hand won’t open, Jon.”
“You’re slipping, GP! Please,” Jonathan said, feeling the popping of his arm socket. “Just let go and take—”
But the emotion in Gianpaolo’s face had already changed into something strangly tranquil, an expression that would recur often enough in Jonathan’s nightmares that he at least thought one day he would make sense of it—the sudden transformation of a tight grimace to a portrait of someone sleepy, unconcerned, at peace.
“Jon?” was all Gianpaolo said.
It was the last word he ever spoke. He said it softly and phrased it like a question, as though recognizing someone he did not expect to see. Or more haunting, as though expressing surprise that someone he had so completely trusted could let this happen.
Jonathan felt Gianpaolo’s fingers slip through his one by one. He remembered the feeling of the last fingertip as Gianpaolo began to free-fall, his head tilted like a confused child just before he was eclipsed by the cloud of dust.
Jonathan knelt there, quivering over the manhole, still reaching through the manhole as though hanging on.
“Get back from her!” The carabinieri now surrounded him, screaming instructions at Jonathan, who remained kneeling by the manhole with Emili’s unconscious body in front of him like an offering.
Jonathan Marcus, Rome Prize winner in classical studies, used his last bit of strength to place his hands behind his head.
“She needs a hospital,” he rasped, looking down at Emili. “Please.”