The Last Ember (36 page)

They made a turn around a mountainside, and there it was, the panoramic view of the Old City of Jerusalem suspended over the Valley of Kidron like a storybook image, the parapets of its stone walls laced with turrets like giant rooks from a chessboard. The enormous city walls, especially in the dawn light, looked transported from medieval legend, as they were still being thick enough for ten archers to stand one behind another. Beneath the defensive walls, the lower ridges were terraced with vibrant rivers of wildflowers. When the grade of the road steepened, Yusef threw the diesel limo into second gear.

The car passed the whitewashed Monastery of the Dormition, where, according to most Christian traditions, the Last Supper was held, and now traced the circumference of the Old City’s walls. Jonathan pointed at a curious site, where one of the monumental ancient gates to the Temple Mount had been blocked up with sixteenth-century stones.

“The Golden Gate,” Emili explained. “It was walled up in the sixteenth century by Suleiman the Magnificent, who publicly dismissed all religions other than Islam but, after learning that it was prophesied in the Bible that the Messiah would one day enter through that gate, became secretly terrified and ordered his masons to brick it up. He even surrounded the arch with cemeteries, on the off chance that the Messiah would be from the priestly caste, whose members are forbidden by Jewish law to tread over human graves.”

“A good way to cover your bets,” Jonathan said.

As the car made its final ascent, along the narrow road above the Valley of Kidron, the road’s shoulder gave way to a two-hundred-foot drop, and the dawn’s morning mist created the momentary illusion that the Old City’s walls presided over the edge of the earth.

“Here we are,” Yusef said, slowing the car to a stop. “The Jaffa Gate.”

Yusef had parked directly in front of a wonder of pure Turkish architecture, one of the city wall’s oldest gates, its delicate stone turrets resting atop a pointed arch.

Jonathan stepped out of the car, and the mountain air of Jerusalem was unexpectedly cool. Jonathan followed Emili through the gate. An old taxi driver wearing a kaffiyeh watched them with curiosity, his idling taxi taking up the entire width of an ancient stone street. Emili thought of how even learning to drive in the center of Rome wouldn’t prepare her for managing the Old City’s labyrinth of streets.

A group of shops lined the interior of the gate, each inside its own shuttered stone archway. The Emmanuel Messianic Bookshop, the Franciscan Corner, Hali’s Kabob. Above the shops was the Petra Hotel, its cracked beige stone and crooked wooden shutters looking as dilapidated as when Mark Twain described it during his stay in 1871.

They approached a dark stone fortress, built like a castle and surrounded by a grass moat. Its sloping stone façade and the turrets of its battlements dated back centuries, but the building looked as though it could survive another medieval siege, its walls still outfitted with slits for archers.

“We’re going in
there
?”

“It’s a museum,” Emili said.

“The building looks older than the artifacts.”

“It is,” Emili said, smiling. “This citadel was built as the Tower of Phasael in Herodian times, then became a Roman temple to Jupiter in the third century, an Umayyad fortress in the seventh century, a Crusader camp in the eleventh century, Salah ad-Din’s stronghold in the twelfth century, a Turkish mosque in the sixteenth century, and even a British social club in the 1920s.”

“In other words,” Jonathan replied dryly, “this museum belongs in a museum.”

Emili led the way up the high stone steps of the citadel, reaching a thin wooden bridge that crossed a fifty-foot-deep moat, which at this hour was a well of darkness. The museum’s front doors were two sleek frosted panels of glass inside a stone Gothic arch, an interesting fusion of modern and ancient architecture. Emili reached for the door’s handle.

“Emili, it’s not even six a.m. The museum
can’t
be—”

The handle turned easily and the door pushed open.

“—um, open,” Jonathan said.

“We’re meeting my contact inside.”

Inside the museum’s entryway, Jonathan could make out the figure of a woman beneath the dim halogen lights of the stone foyer. As they drew near, he realized she was older than her athletic silhouette suggested. From her gray hair and creased face, he put her somewhere in her early sixties. In a relaxed pose, she leaned against the wall.

“Emili, what have you gotten yourself into?” Eilat Segev said.

Y
ou wanted to see me, Comandante Profeta?” Lieutenant Rufio said, standing in the threshold of Profeta’s office.

“Yes,” Profeta said. “We have an image of the male suspect from the train station.”

Profeta pushed a grainy surveillance image across his desk. It was a photograph from inside the Colosseo metro station, a still of a young man in a gray suit. The image caught the young man in profile, but his face was visible beneath his dark windblown hair. The image to Lieutenant Rufio was clear: Jonathan Marcus.

“Does this man look familiar to you?”

“Yes,” Lieutenant Rufio said reluctantly. “That’s him, the one from the Colosseum.”

“The image is from a security camera above the platform,” Profeta said. He stared at the subject of the photograph. Then Profeta turned his gaze out the window, toward the dome of the Pantheon, a block away. “He has escaped us three times now.”

“Three times?” Rufio asked, hoping Profeta had not made the identification yet. “Even if he was the suspect in the Colosseum, that’s twice,
Comandante
. Once in the Colosseum and once there in the metro station. When was the third time?”

“When I sat across from him at the law firm of Dulling and Pierce,” Profeta said. “Jonathan Marcus. An American lawyer who arrived in Rome last night at eleven-fifty p.m. and checked into the Hotel Exedra at four-fourteen a.m.”

He placed the black-and-white photograph of Jonathan Marcus from the Dulling and Pierce website beside the surveillance shot.

“An American lawyer was involved in the Colosseum explosion?” Rufio asked, acting surprised.

“Not just any American lawyer,” Profeta said. “Seven years ago, he was a Rome Prize winner here at the American Academy, conducting research on Flavius Josephus. It’s all right here,” Profeta said, handing Lieutenant Rufio a red file. Rufio knew the color codings of the files. Red indicated a prior arrest.

“He has a police record?” Rufio raised his eyebrows, his surprise now genuine. He opened the file and lifted a clipped Italian newspaper article. He read the headline aloud: “ ‘ Late-Night Excavation Takes Tragic Turn.’ ” Rufio flipped through the file’s pages and looked up at the
comandante
.

“For trespassing?” Rufio asked, his eyes still in the file.

“He was lucky to escape without a charge of
omicidio
,” Profeta said.

“Homicide?”

“It seems we’ve underestimated Mr. Marcus’s knowledge of the ancient world,” Profeta responded. “He brought three other graduate students to the outskirts of Rome, seeking a tomb of some kind. They climbed a fence onto the grounds of an abandoned eighteenth-century villa called the Villa Torlonia and roped into an ancient catacomb.”

“According to the carabinieri investigators, they rappelled into the ruin at twelve-thirty a.m.,” Rufio read from the file. “The ruins collapsed shortly after one a.m.”

“Killing one of the graduate students,” Profeta added factually. “A Roman native, Gianpaolo Narcusi, was pronounced dead on arrival at Rome’s San Pietro Fatebenfratelli at one forty-one a.m.,” Profeta continued from memory. “But more important for our purposes were the other two graduate students present that evening.”

Lieutenant Rufio read aloud the first name, typed on the police report in courier print.

“Emili Travia, sir,” Rufio said. “That’s the UN official from the Colosseum.”

Profeta nodded. “And the fourth graduate student?”

“I don’t believe this,” muttered Rufio. “ ‘ Member of the International Center and former fellow of the Palazzo Conservatori’ . . .” Rufio looked up. “It was Sharif Lebag.”

“But even more relevant to our investigation is not
who
joined him last night, but
where
they excavated.”

Profeta handed Rufio another photograph of a crude excavation. A chain saw lay beside a sawed-open column.

“It’s a photograph recovered from Professor Cianari’s office earlier today. We suspect Cianari realized the importance of his discovery, and documented its location across the catacomb wall in spray paint.”

“It’s too dark to read.”

“The quality is poor,” Profeta agreed, handling another version to Rufio. “Copia’s team managed to digitally lighten it.”

In the zoomed image, the scrawled words became instantly legible.

“Villa Torlonia,” Rufio said.

“That’s right, Lieutenant, the column we discovered in the warehouse was found—”

“Precisely where Jonathan Marcus was illegally excavating seven years ago,” Rufio completed.

“I don’t know what research Mr. Marcus began seven years ago, but it looks like someone is trying to finish it.”

Rufio stood up to leave.

“One more thing, Lieutenant.”

“Yes,
Comandante
?”

“I’d like you to head up the manhunt for the suspect. Use whatever force is necessary to bring him here for questioning.”

“Yes, sir,” Rufio said honorifically. “Whatever force is necessary.”

E
ilat Segev led Emili and Jonathan into the ancient citadel’s museum courtyard, still floodlit from the night before. They climbed a flight of outdoor metal stairs to the parapets of the Old City’s wall. A gauzy morning mist settled along the bottom of an adjoining valley and the sun was still low over the Judean Hills’ haze in the distance.

For Segev, the view was different. She remembered battling the Jordanians for control of this ancient citadel in 1967, before it was repurposed as a museum. On these high ancient walls, Jordanian snipers lay in wait between the parapets like medieval archers, hurling back Israeli battalions as they scaled the citadel at night. To this day, Segev watched families and their children on these ramparts. She watched them linger at picture points on the afternoon museum tours, secretly remembering all the men who gave their lives for that view.

Segev punched a code into a keypad in the stone and the lattice gate slid open silently. They entered a large hall, where models of ancient Jerusalem lined the corridors. The Solomonic period, tenth to the sixth century B.C.; the Second Temple period, sixth century B.C. to the first century A.D. Display cases contained silver coins from Hadrian’s reign of Jerusalem; an ancient sword excavated from ruins near the Temple Mount. Along another wall of the foyer, stood a brass replica of Verrocchio’s David, a gift by the city of Florence on the occasion of the Israeli recapture of the Old City from the Jordanians.

“Did you tell Comandante Profeta of our conversation?” Emili said.

“Of course not. I couldn’t expect him to understand. I am not sure anyone in Europe, or the UN for that matter, understands the situation beneath the Temple Mount,” Segev said. “Our infrared film taken from a helicopter above the Mount indicates there are bulldozers and dump trucks inside the Mount, raking the walls as we speak.”

“But Israel is a UNESCO-compliant nation,” Jonathan said. “Isn’t there something that—”

“No.” Segev slowly shook her head. “The Waqf Authority has claimed continuous jurisdiction over the Temple Mount for nearly eight hundred years. Well, the last eight hundred years, except for a couple of hours.”

“A couple of
hours
?” Jonathan said.

“In 1967, we repelled an invasion by Jordan and captured East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, unifying Jerusalem for the first time in two thousand years. You can still see the bullet holes in the Zion Gate where we shot our way into the Old City. I remember the ranking colonel’s voice crackling through the army wireless. ‘The Temple Mount is in our hands! The Temple Mount is in our hands!’ But within days, the military ceded sovereignty of the Mount back to the Waqf.”

“Why return control of the Temple Mount to the Waqf ?”

“Some historians say the Israeli politicians at the time were wary of the Mount’s religious poignancy. They wanted to prevent ideas of messianic redemption from disrupting the building of a practical, modern society in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”

“So they let the Mount stay in the hands of the Waqf?” Jonathan said.

“Well, technically, the administration of the Mount was to return to the Jordanian king, who controlled the Mount nominally under Jordanian occupation before 1967. At that time the king delegated to the Waqf only the most ministerial tasks of its daily administration. But after the Oslo Peace Accords, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, under Yasser Arafat, tried to reinvent itself as more than a terrorist organization. In order to imitate an actual government and demonstrate some organizational capacity, Arafat encouraged some members within the Waqf to wrest control from the Jordanians. Even the Jordanians do not know the level of archaeological activity beneath the Mount for the last fifteen years. The Waqf has descended into a secrecy not known since Ottoman times. To this day, the Temple Mount remains an island of the Waqf’s sovereignty, its funding routed through clandestine Saudi cultural groups and obscure corporate funds.”

“The grand mufti’s legacy continues.” Emili shook her head. “And to think they are close to finding—”

“Emili,” Segev said, “the Israel Antiquities Authority has spent years researching possible locations for artifacts from the Roman sack of Jerusalem. I just listened to your entire theory on the phone. There is no hard evidence that Flavius Josephus or any other historical figure managed to escape with the menorah of the Temple. After exhaustive research in France, the Israel Antiquities Authority decided to stop excavating for the relic.”