The Last Ember (44 page)

Officer Fiegi slowed his patrol car, a Fiat, its single blue light silently flashing as he pulled onto the road’s gravel shoulder behind the municipal repair truck. Three workmen surrounded a large crater along the right edge of the highway closer to the ruins.

“Spero che vi pagano lo straordinario!”
Hope they’re paying you overtime! Officer Fiegi said, stepping out of his car, squinting in the rain.

The three men replied with curious stares, and their pause suddenly put Officer Fiegi on the alert. He could sense they were making calculations far more complicated than those of mere highway repairmen.

Officer Fiegi approached one of the young men, a tall horse-faced boy; he looked scarcely older than a teenager. Sicily’s population is less Latin than the rest of the country, but this boy was clearly Arab. Officer Fiegi asked him question, and he stood there frozen.

None of these men, the officer suddenly realized, spoke a word of Italian.

“Officer!” Salah ad-Din emerged through the hole in the roadway, smiling graciously in his workman’s orange perforated vest. “Sometimes I think the roads were better in ancient Ostia!” He walked briskly toward the officer as though receiving visiting royalty. “I am glad someone finally stopped by to check up on us!” he said in fluent Italian. “Adequate drainage is of paramount importance in road design, you see. The presence of any moisture within the roadway could break through the asphalt.”

The officer looked at the road. Its rural paving was cracked in so many places, it was hard to believe drainage problems could damage it further.

“Please, allow me to show you our drainage diagrams.” Salah ad-Din pointed behind the truck. Killing the officer would present practical problems. There would be a police car to dispose of, and it would burden his tight excavation schedule. But he could take no chances. Not when he was this close.
A dim-witted policeman will not come between me and the solution to a mystery two thousand years old
.

The policeman stepped around the back of the truck. Salah ad-Din followed and removed his hard hat as a sign of respect, tightening his finger around the trigger of the Beretta beneath his workman’s uniform.

I
t looks abandoned,” Jonathan said as the driver slowed to a stop beside the shuttered ticket gazebo outside Ostia’s archaeological path.

The driver appeared to gain some satisfaction from this. He turned around, resting his chin on his arm. “I told you it was closed,” he said gruffly in Italian.

“This will be fine, thank you,” Emili said.

They stepped out of the car onto a long dirt path beneath a wet canopy of umbrella pines. Behind them in the distance, they could faintly see the Renaissance fortress of Pope Julius II, which was abandoned in 1567, when the Tiber River changed course in a flash flood. Alternating white and purple fields of cow parsley and lavender surrounded the ruins and stretched into the distance.

“In ancient Rome, the coast of the Mediterranean came to there.” Emili pointed at the fields. “Silt pushed the water’s edge four miles to the current shoreline.”

“There goes the ocean view,” Jonathan said.

Emili and Jonathan were greeted by a loud clap of thunder as they approached the closed front gate. Through the bars of the gate, they could see the long central stone-paved street of the ancient city lined with two-story buildings from first century A.D.

Jonathan hopped the fence, and his shoes scraped down a brick wall on the other side. He landed on a remarkably preserved mosaic of leaping dolphins that decorated an ancient communal bath. Emili followed, and Jonathan lowered her.

On a warm summer day, at the height of Ostia’s tourist season, these ruins would have been full of people. But now it was closed, and Jonathan felt an acute sense of alarm in its emptiness. The rain strengthened, flooding the column-lined ancient streets and creating muddy streams that sluiced between the stones.

There was a rustling in the bushes. Both of them were silent.

“Probably an animal,” Jonathan said. He reached down to pick up a thick wooden pole for protection, not sure if he believed himself.

They moved down the main thoroughfare. The remains of Ostia’s ancient storefronts and apartment buildings provided a rare snapshot of ancient life. Emili and Jonathan ducked through the low brick arch of a bakery, its ancient marble counter still intact with side seats and wall paintings of bread and fruit.

“Jon, there, the synagogue is in that direction,” Emili said, consulting the laminated map.

Jonathan started down a side street toward the ruins of the synagogue. Emili followed, her lighter body inclined into the wind. The gusts made a shearing whistle through the ancient brick.

At the end of a dirt path, they entered a ruin of half-stone walls surrounding four slender columns and a slab of granite open to the sky.

The floor of the ruin was a mosaic of rough tiles, and Jonathan moved his hand across them. “There are no human or animal pictures in these mosaics.”

“In keeping with the Old Testament’s prohibition against graven images?”

“Exactly, and look up there.” Jonathan pointed below one of the columns’ ionic capitals. There was the unmistakable carved rendering of a seven-branched lamp.

“This is it, Jon,” Emili said. “The synagogue.”

Jonathan crouched at the edge of the mosaic floor. “There is a path leading out of the sanctuary.”

“It leads there.” Emili pointed at a small, compact ruin of partial brick walls. She looked down at the map.

“That must be it, the House of Divine Fire, the
Domus Fulminata
. ”

They walked toward the brick walls that surrounded a marble well nearly buried in long stalks of grass. The curators of Ostia’s archaeological park had fastened a corrugated tin sheet on top of the wall, and the rain pelting it was deafening.

Jonathan leaned over the lip, shining his flashlight along the well shaft. He saw an inscription carved into the shaft’s rock face and wiped mud from its surface.

“A Roman-era inscription,” Jonathan called, out leaning over farther. “It’s a mix of Latin and Hebrew. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning.’ ”

Jonathan lifted himself back out of the well, and saw Emili smiling, rain streaming down her face. “Doesn’t sound pagan to me.”

J
onathan hoisted himself over the mouth of the well and rested his legs on iron pegs that formed a crude ladder into the shimmering water below. As he descended, the inclement weather above was replaced with a warm mist and an overpowering stench of mildew and rot. Jonathan touched down at the bottom of the well. Knee deep in cold water, he tilted his head to call up to Emili that he made it safely, but she was nearly beside him, having come down the rungs in half the time it took him.

“Next time, you go first, show-off,” Jonathan said at the sight of her smirk.

The well water rose above Emili’s knees and she waded slowly to a wall of the shaft, where an arch gave way to a tunnel. Inside the tunnel, the earth was dry.

“There’s no trace of drainage in here,” Jonathan said, shining his flashlight. “No staining of the tunnel’s rock that would indicate water accumulation.”

Emili crouched on the ground and wiped the dust from the floor. “These stones aren’t native to Roman quarries,” she said. “It’s Jerusalem stone.”

Along the walls faded frescoes lined the tunnel, displaying an enormous artistic effort befitting a house of worship.

“A little upscale for a drainage center, don’t you think?” Jonathan said.

A faded fresco on the wall depicted a bearded man on a Roman warship, amid swirling waves. Slaves pulled two stories of oars, while the bearded man stood with the Romans, holding a torch in the rain.

“That must be Josephus, traveling from Jerusalem to Rome,” Jonathan said. In the last frame, the same bearded man stood on a harbor dock. The dark shading of the scene was done in charcoal and suggested it was night. In the image, the men lifted an unmistakable object from the docked warship. Staring at it, Jonathan was stunned, as though seeing indisputable evidence in court. The object was a foot-tall depiction of the Tabernacle menorah, its seven branches represented in gold stucco that dwarfed the men who carried it, preserving a sense of the enormous scale of the eight-foot-tall lamp of solid gold. The fresco’s depiction of the menorah was the first patent confirmation of their search.

“It’s a depiction of Josephus smuggling the menorah from the hull of a Roman warship under the cover of night,” Jonathan said.

“It could really be here,” Emili said, moving rapidly in front of Jonathan down the corridor.

Some rocks had fallen from the ceiling, but the tunnel widened and it was possible to squeeze through.

Their flashlights revealed a rock hollow, a small, circular room. Columns carved with images of the menorah lined the wall, and in the center of the room sat a thickly hewn rectangular stone with three steps.

“Just like we found inside the vault beneath the Temple Mount,” Emili said. “The steps used by the priests to light the menorah in exile.” She pointed at the darkened ceiling of the room. It was blackened from ash.

“There’s an inscription on the top step,” Jonathan said, his adrenaline racing. “But it’s in Greek.”

“‘He retired it to the arch where the triumphal procession passed through,’ ” Jonathan translated. “The script looks like first century.”

“It’s a line from Josephus, isn’t it?” Emili asked.

“Yes, and it’s puzzled Josephus scholars for centuries. The pronoun ‘it’ has no noun to which it refers in the text.”

Emili leaned closer over the inscription. “Jon,” her hushed voice echoed in the chamber. “Do you think that this—”

“Yes,” he answered. “I think this is the line in Josephus’s text where he revealed the location of the menorah.”

“But where?”

“The ‘triumphal procession’ clearly refers to the Roman soldiers’ military parade that occurred upon their return from Jerusalem, right?”

“Of course, that was the custom. Wreathed Roman soldiers marched through the street, carrying the treasures of war.”

“Which means that Josephus is referring to the Arch of Titus as the “gate” that the triumphal procession went through.’ ” Jonathan slowly stepped away from the wall as though making a physical space for a vast realization. “I don’t believe it.”

“Believe what?”

“Em, it’s been
right here
in the text for millennia.
He retired it to the arch
. Josephus and his men put
the menorah
inside the Arch of Titus all along.”

“That’s right,” Jonathan said. “Think of how Josephus would have relished the irony. The Arch of Titus was constructed to glorify Emperor Titus’s conquest of Jerusalem, but secretly the arch”—Jonathan paused to digest the implication—“protected the very thing he meant to destroy.”

“Jon, the menorah was
huge
. How would Josephus’s network put the menorah inside the Arch of Titus?”

“It may not have been as difficult as we think. The Romans used the Hebrew slaves to build the Colosseum, the Baths of Titus, and other monuments. Where better to protect their icon than in the belly of a monument that Rome would defend for all time? It was nearly ten years after the slaves came from Rome. The arch was half constructed and the emperor was close to uncovering the spy in the imperial court. Josephus needed a place no one would ever suspect.” Jonathan paused, amazed by his own suggestion.

“We can expose them here in Rome, Jon. Salah ad-Din’s men could be excavating at the Arch of Titus at this very moment.”

An illegal excavation in the center of the Roman Forum,
Jonathan thought. A day ago, he would never have thought it possible.

They moved back through the tunnel. Emili stepped first into the well water and bumped into a large object floating on the water’s surface.

From beneath the surface, as though staring up from beneath a plate of Lucite, was the lifeless gaze of a human corpse. Brown curly hair swayed back and forth in the water like a submerged plant, his palms up in a last gesture of self-defense. Beneath the water’s surface, she saw the glint of his policeman’s badge. With some violence, she splashed back into Jonathan. A burning tide of bile rose in her throat and she retched. By now, Jonathan saw the horror as well, and he stood there silently. Emili, still bent over and red-faced, turned up to look at Jonathan.

“It’s time to notify the carabinieri,” she said through shallow breaths.

Jonathan looked at his watch. “Actually, we told the director we would call by now.”

Emili climbed the ladder and quickly reached the top of the well.

A silhouette of Emili’s head. “There’s a truck over—”

But she never finished the sentence.