The Einstein Prophecy (9 page)

“Simone, where are you?” she heard her father call. “You’re going to get lost out there.”

She could smell the fire that Mustafa must have started, and hear the crackling of the wood. The sounds and scents were carried like gifts on the desert wind.

It was then, just as she was turning back toward the camp, that the light revealed an opening in the ground—the entrance to a cave, with jagged stones that looked like teeth, but big enough that a man could pass through it if he took the precaution of ducking his head. She slowly raised the beam of her flashlight, and even as she did so, she saw what resembled the coils of a giant snake and, rising above them, as if in keeping with the joy rising in her breast, a spindly neck topped with a broad, flat head shaped like a spade. Where there might have been a flicking tongue, there was even a sharp protuberance of stone.

If this was not the spitting cobra, nothing was.

She tried to cry out, but her throat was so parched that only a croak emerged. She took a swig from her canteen, wiped the dust from her face with another splash, then shouted, “Here! It’s here!”

But they must not have heard her.

She had to stumble back toward the camp, guided by the smell of the burning wood as much as by the flickering glow of the small fire. She dropped beside the tent in which her father was lighting the kerosene lamp.

“I found it!” she said. “I found it.”

“Where?” he asked, just as Mustafa came back from feeding the camels.

“She found it?” Mustafa exclaimed. “A girl? I don’t believe it.”

Simone nodded vigorously, and it was decided that they would eat some goat stew and drink some tea, get a good night’s sleep, and explore the cave first thing in the morning.

It was the longest night she had ever spent.

By dawn, Simone was dressed and ready, hurrying Mustafa and her father through their rudimentary breakfast, and leading them back to the gigantic cobra rock. In the first light of day, the white stone took on a golden hue, while the entrance at its base, still in shadow, remained as black as pitch. Crouching down, though she hardly needed to, Simone entered first, playing her flashlight beam around the immediate interior.

There was a narrow slope, easily navigable, leading down to a floor of smooth white sand. Mustafa followed right behind her, and her father, holding the lantern aloft, brought up the rear. Once they had all arrived at the bottom, Dr. Rashid held up the lamp, turning slowly in place, and the whole cavern suddenly resembled the mouth of some monstrous beast, with thousands upon thousands of stalactites, some small and needle-sharp, others blunt and wide, hanging like teeth from the ceiling.

“My God,” Simone said, “I feel like Jonah.”

“Allah be with us,” Mustafa murmured. For a kid more given to wisecracks than reverence, it was a testament to the power of their surroundings.

“More proof,” Dr. Rashid intoned, his words echoing around the limestone walls, “that an ocean was here many millions of years ago.”

Simone didn’t know where to look first—everywhere the stone had been carved into preposterous configurations, rippling waves and swirling spirals. The amber walls resembled folded draperies, in some places vertically lined and striated, and in others laid horizontally so that the flowstone looked like sheets stacked in a linen closet. But even a quick survey of the vast interior revealed one troubling thing: there was no sign of a proper sepulcher, much less a sarcophagus.

Could the genizah fragments have been right about so much, but wrong about this? Or was it possible that the tomb had been discovered, and plundered, a thousand years ago?

Simone made a grand circuit of the cavern, aiming her flashlight into every nook and cranny, in search of a passageway that might lead to a chamber beyond. She had just about given up, when a slight gust of air—cooler even than the air in the cave—brushed across her cheek. She stepped back, felt the breeze again ruffle the hair of her brow, and examined the spot more closely.

The countless ages of seepage and erosion had lent the wall the appearance of a waterfall, a veiled cascade behind which she could now see that there was a space, invisible from the front, but opening behind amply wide to admit passage. Best of all, she could see, at the very limit of the flashlight beam, traces of a figure incised against the far wall.

“It is very beautiful,” Mustafa was saying, “but I think we have come a long way on a fool’s errand. Ali Baba never lived here.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Simone said, waving them over. “Look at this!”

The two men joined her, Dr. Rashid extending the lantern into the tunnel. The walls here had been planed smooth, and either the stone had been exceptionally pale to begin with, or it had been whitewashed long ago. Simone dug a fingernail into it, and a flake of paint crumbled away. The stone beneath was more of a dull yellow.

Her heart sang.

Though the roof of the tunnel was low, it had been scoured almost entirely clean of the dangling stalactites—only a few had grown back to the length of daggers—and its width was more than sufficient to admit any kind of altar, sarcophagus, or ornament the builders of a tomb might have wanted to install. She moved carefully, stopping to examine the figure she had seen incised in the rock. Though much eroded by time, it was unmistakably a pig.

The saint’s patron animal.

If she had found a diamond necklace there, she could not have been any happier.

“Is there still any doubt?” she crowed, letting the flashlight linger on the image.

The tunnel made an elbow turn to the right, and then another, sharply to the left, before it debouched into a vaulted chamber with a high roof, carved like a cupola, and smooth, sloping walls, which had also been whitewashed. Though large patches of the paint had long since fallen away or discolored, there were pictures daubed all around the rim of the ceiling, in blue and gold, depicting in rudimentary fashion events from the life of the saint. In one, he led, with his distinctive staff, a herd of swine; in another, he appeared with a halo before a figure on a throne, no doubt depicting his intercession with the Roman Emperor Diocletian, in defense of the early Christian martyrs. Behind the emperor’s head, almost as if it were whispering in his ear, hovered a winged black insect. Simone had never seen an image quite so strange.

As for the rest of the artwork, it was almost as if another hand had interceded. These pictures were more crudely drawn and rendered only in black and red; the people and animals were drawn like a child’s stick figures, and some of the scenes were even superimposed upon the others. All of them shared, however, a theme of violence and horror. Writhing pigs roasting on spits; the saint himself being torn to pieces by horned demons; skeletons with blood erupting from their bones. Was this last conceit a way of depicting death by a virulent skin disease? If so, it was odd, as the ministrations of Saint Anthony were supposed to be proof
against
such ailments.

“It’s in the corner,” she heard her father say, his voice filled with awe. “There. The ossuary.”

Tearing her eyes away from the troubling scenes above, Simone followed the glow of the lantern light to the farthest reach of the chamber, where a deep niche had been carved into the stone. In the ancient Hebrew tradition, kept by the Christians to come, these niches were called a
kokh
; in Latin a
loculus
. This one was arched, and held, on its ledge, a pair of red clay urns. One of them had lost its top, and Simone could make out the tip of a tightly rolled papyrus scroll inside. Her fingers itched to open it.

The real prize—an alabaster chest, with iron chains securing its ponderous lid to its lower portion—lay between the urns. It was no surprise she hadn’t seen it at first. The box was not only nestled as far into the niche as it could go, it seemed also to reside in a deeper and darker pool of shadow than was natural. It was almost as if it could disappear before one’s very eyes.

Even for someone accustomed to the mysteries of ancient artifacts, the ossuary cast a spell all its own. For the first time in her life, Simone felt an involuntary shudder run down her spine.

But Mustafa was plainly unaffected. Sensing there might still be some loot here, he scurried toward the urns, knocked the top off the sealed one, and glanced inside.

“More papers!” he declared in disgust. Then he went for the box. “What’s inside it?” he cried out enthusiastically, his voice booming around the otherwise empty chamber. Tugging at the chains, he said, “How do we get it open?”

“We don’t,” Simone replied. “Stop trying.”

“This is not a treasure hunt,” Dr. Rashid declared, bringing the lantern closer. “It’s an archaeological expedition.”

The distinction seemed to be lost on the young guide, who looked from Simone to her father, desperately awaiting a better explanation.

“We’re not in the Valley of the Kings,” Simone said. “This casket won’t hold golden masks or silver goblets. It holds bones.”

“That’s all?” Mustafa said. “Papers and bones? And we came all this way?” He stalked off, muttering, “The worst jobs—I always get the worst jobs.”

Simone bent her head toward the ossuary, where she could see in the lantern light a host of markings and inscriptions. It would be the work of many months—happy months, and maybe even longer—to decipher them all. Of one thing she was confident—she had found the tomb of Saint Anthony of Egypt, the reputed father of Christian monasticism, and battler of the demonic hordes sent to torture him and test his faith. Who knew what else the scrolls might be able to tell her?

Glancing up again at the pictures on the ceiling, she could almost believe that the cruder, crueler scenes had been scrawled there by those demons themselves.

Something else struck her as odd, too.

She could swear that in the picture of the saint being rent limb from limb, Anthony had been standing; now, he was prone on the ground, and a gibbering creature, like a monkey with a forked tail, was leaping on his back.

Instead of the Emperor Diocletian sitting on the throne, the seat was occupied by a grinning dog—or maybe it was meant to be a hyena—wearing a crown and holding a scepter.

Even stranger were the birds—flocks of little black birds—painted all across the white walls, and even the ceiling, of the chamber. Before she could ask her father, she saw that he, too, was staring at the birds, perturbed.

“Were they there,” Simone said, “before?”

Then they moved—not flying, but crawling, like insects more than sparrows. Creeping out from the crevices in the flowstone. Emerging from the sand.

Scorpions.

Dozens of them—hundreds—their lethal stinging tails quivering and erect. The single greatest scorpion colony Simone could ever have imagined—lying here, perhaps undisturbed for millennia.

A scream reverberated from the antechamber. Mustafa shouted, “Get them off of me! Help me! Get them off!”

Simone straightened up and ran back toward the tunnel, feeling the crunch of brittle carapaces under her boots. She could hear her father right behind her, but then he stumbled and fell, nearly knocking her over, too. He had gashed his leg on a jagged rock, and even as she helped him to his feet, Mustafa’s screams got louder.

Something dropped from the ceiling onto Simone’s hair, and a pincer nipped at her fingers as she brushed it off.

Grabbing the lantern with one hand and using the other to hold her hobbled father by his elbow, she moved down the tunnel, first right, then left, then into the front cavern, where Mustafa was all but unrecognizable. He rolled around on the floor of the cave beneath a seething swarm of scorpions. His arms flailed, his legs kicked out, and one of his sandals flew off his foot and over her head.

“Stop them! Stop them!” Mustafa screamed, but Simone couldn’t do anything to help him without letting go of her father, who was already leaning hard against her shoulder, and breathing even harder; she needed to get him out of the cave before he collapsed. She swung the lantern over Mustafa’s body as she passed by, hoping to knock loose at least a few of the creatures, and she stamped her boots on several more, but her father’s feet were dragging in the sand, and his weight was becoming too much for her to bear.

Mustafa’s hand lashed out and clutched at her ankle, but another scorpion promptly plunged its stinger into his wrist, and he yanked it away.

Dropping the lantern at the bottom of the ramp, she crawled up toward the mouth of the cave, pulling her father alongside. It was like dragging a bag of wet cement. The entrance was filled with the golden light of the morning sun, and Simone forced herself to stare into the blinding light—willed herself, step by step, to move toward it—until she suddenly emerged from the cave, feeling like some small fish that had wriggled free from the jaws of a crocodile. Her father fell in a heap on the sand, croaking for water. Blood was running down his leg.

She put her canteen to his lips. And then she turned back toward the entrance.

“No, no,” Dr. Rashid said, alarmed, the brackish water dribbling down his chin. “It’s too late.”

She had to try. She ducked back into the grotto, and aimed her flashlight into the antechamber of the tomb. She did not need to go any farther to see that Mustafa was lying dead—no one could have survived such a monstrous attack. The sight was obscene, and she knew she would never be able to forget it, or forgive herself. His body lay sprawled facedown on the sand, as dozens of the scorpions, some with their tails still coiled and pincers extended, roamed around on top of him, for all the world as if they were dancing in celebration of their kill.

One, still in attack mode, scuttled threateningly toward the toe of Simone’s boot, and she smashed it underfoot, grinding its hard shell into dust; she had to scrape her sole against a rock to get rid of its sticky residue, and even then, the deadly tail shook in a final reflex of fury.

When she came back for the sarcophagus and the urns—as she knew she would do—she would bring a flame thrower.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Even though it was the dead of night, a light was on across the street, on the first floor of Einstein’s house. Lucas lit another cigarette and wondered if someone else simply had insomnia, or if some great breakthrough in humanity’s fundamental understanding of the universe was unfolding in there instead.

Here, on the porch steps of Mrs. Caputo’s house, he had his own, if less earthshaking, problems to wrestle with.

He had gone to bed earlier, but given up on sleep after a couple of hours of restless tossing and turning. His room under the eaves was stuffy, and he’d come outside to enjoy what might be the last breeze of an Indian summer. In the faint glow of the lone streetlamp at the corner, he could see the leaves falling from the boughs and rustling along the otherwise silent street. He took a drag on his Camel, leaned back on his elbows, and for the hundredth time, replayed his encounter at the bar with the woman named Simone.

What had she meant by her parting shot, the one about how he’d regret opening the box without her help? Who was she, really? And what did she know?

Even more to the point, why had he been so quick to dismiss her? Was it from an abundance of natural caution, an all-important consideration these days? Loose lips sink ships, and all that. Or was it for some less noble reason? Was it because something he’d been trying to deny or stifle for years now, ever since he had been inducted and sent overseas, had been inadvertently stirred? Was it really as elementary as that?

A black De Soto drove by slowly, its headlights illuminating a tabby cat skittering across the road.

The cat reminded him of a figure etched into the stone of the sarcophagus. A typical depiction of the feline Egyptian deity, Bast. Did that confirm his own suspicion that the box had originated in Egypt, as Simone claimed? He might have agreed, were it not for the other inscriptions chiseled into the alabaster. They were a total hodgepodge of hieroglyphics, Greek and Latin letters, and arcane symbols, including the faint shape of a diamond tilted on its axis. He had never seen, or heard of, such a composite.

Nor had he ever encountered a collection of such curious figurative representations. There was a shepherd with his staff, but his flock, if that’s what it was, looked less like sheep than a bunch of frolicking apes. What were they doing there? There were even a couple of dozen scratches—long grooves—that looked as if they must have been left by some careless artisan, or else by some wild animal that had been trying to claw its way into the box. But as ossuaries never contained fresh meat, only barren bones, why would any animal have tried such a thing?

Across the street, Lucas saw a pair of muslin draperies billow out of the open window and the silhouette of a man drawing them back inside, then lowering the sash. The breeze carried the screech from the old wooden frame.

The light went out, and another one went on over the porch.

The De Soto he had seen before—judging from its distinctive waterfall grille, a ’41, the last year American cars were manufactured before all the assembly lines had gone over to the war effort—doubled back, and then parked, motor still running, outside Einstein’s house.

Before he could wonder what was going on at this hour of the night, he heard the sound of footsteps approaching, and saw a man in work clothes and a Windbreaker turning up the short cement walkway to the boardinghouse. His head was down, and his feet dragged.

“You must be Mr. Taylor,” Lucas said, keeping his voice down.

The man, startled, stopped in his tracks and looked up. “Who’re you?” he asked, though Lucas had the feeling he was feigning ignorance.

“Lucas Athan,” he said, leaning forward and extending his hand. “I live up in the attic.”

“Oh, right,” Taylor said, though he still didn’t shake, and Lucas let his hand drop.

“Working the night shift?”

For a second, Taylor—a guy about forty, with bad teeth—looked like he wasn’t sure how to answer that one. “Yeah, exactly. No rest for the weary.”

“You work in Trenton?”

“Yeah.”

“At the airplane plant?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Sorry,” Lucas said. “Our landlady must have mentioned it.”

“She shouldn’t have.”

“Your secret’s safe with me.”

“What do you do?”

“I teach at the university.” But Lucas had the feeling that the guy already knew that, too; surely, Mrs. Caputo had filled him in.

“What do you teach?”

“Art history.”

From Taylor’s expression, this made little sense. “You lose that in the war?” he asked, tilting his chin at the black patch.

“Yes.”

Taylor snorted and sucked his teeth, but didn’t follow up with any of the customary blather, for which Lucas was grateful. “What are you doing out here?” he asked instead.

For a guy who was so chary with his own answers, he sure had no trouble asking questions. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, I’m not gonna have any trouble.” Taylor stepped around him and reached for the doorknob.

“ ’Night.”

“Yeah. Right.”

He shut the door behind him.

Some guy, Lucas thought. No wonder even Amy hadn’t been able to befriend him. Not wanting to bump into him again on the way upstairs, Lucas waited on the porch for a few more minutes, thinking about the work he’d have to do on the sarcophagus—and once or twice, about less practical matters. In the morning, for the hell of it, he’d call the Nassau Inn to check up on that woman’s story.

Standing up, he brushed off the back of his trousers, ready to stub out his cigarette and go inside, when the front door opened across the street, and two men—one of them the professor—came down the steps. The other one—younger, in a dark brown hat and suit—was carrying a suitcase in one hand, a briefcase in the other. The driver popped out of the car, quickly took the suitcase from him and stashed it in the trunk.

The two men spoke together softly for another minute or two, then clasped hands. The driver opened the back door of the car, and once his passenger had ducked inside, slipped the car into gear and pulled away. Einstein stood, watching it go, before raising his eyes to the night sky. Stars twinkled overhead, and when the professor returned his gaze to earth, he must have noticed the orange glow from the tip of Lucas’s cigarette, and raised a hand, palm up, by way of greeting. Lucas returned the salute with a silent wave of his Camel, and then Einstein shuffled back up his stairs and into the house. The porch light went off, and as it did, the light in Taylor’s room, just overhead, went on.

Strange night, Lucas thought, watching the tabby cat scoot under the fence of the professor’s house. Something was in the air tonight, and whatever it might be, it was keeping sleep at bay.