The Last Ember

by Daniel Levin

  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.”

  82

  Jonathan 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.”

  “Inside?”

  “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.

  From inside the well, Jonathan saw a thick arm grab Emili and whip her from his view.

  “No!” he yelled.

  Jonathan climbed faster, pumping his legs up the iron rungs. He could hear Emili screaming. He reached the top of the well and vaulted himself out, landing in a deep puddle of mud.

  “Emili!” he yelled again.

  On brute instinct he picked up the wooden pole that still lay at the foot of the well and spun around in the mist. She was gone.

  83

  Lieutenant Brandisi awoke on a stretcher, which tilted as the paramedics carried him above the cobbles toward an ambulance along the Via del Portico d’Ottavia. He felt an icy sensation over his heart, and for a moment feared he’d been shot in the chest. His vision was hazy, but he made out a paramedic stooped over him and realized the icy sensation was the disk of a stethoscope over his heart. He touched his forehead where he had been struck, and felt an elastic cold press.

  “Brandisi?” Profeta stood over him.

  “Comandante!” Brandisi said, startled.

  “You’ve got quite a welt there, Lieutenant, but considering that someone was firing an automatic Beretta up there, I’d consider us pretty fortunate. Did you see who hit you?”

  “A man who claimed to be Orvieti’s assistant. Young and dark-skinned, might have been Middle Eastern. Silver spectacles. Black hair cropped quite short, shaved really.”

  Profeta turned to another officer. “Put a twenty-block-radius AP on that description.”

  “Did they find Orvieti?” Brandisi asked.

  “You were the only one found in the archives.” Profeta paused. “But there is a possibility Orvieti made it to the ledge of the cupola and smashed the stained glass of the sanctuary to escape.”

  “I’d like to see it,” Brandisi said. Despite the paramedics’ protests, Brandisi sat up and another officer helped him onto the cobble.

  Profeta led him back to the synagogue and they climbed the steps to the highest of the sanctuary’s velvet rows, where the air had the smell of a musty attic. Profeta stood beside a broken pane of stained glass. The shards of colored glass lay near a trail of fresh blood on the sanctuary’s carpet.

  “Orvieti’s,” Profeta said.

  “Are you sure, Comandante?” Brandisi said, removing the cold press from the back of his head to check if the bleeding had stopped. “An eighty-eight-year-old could scale the curve of the cupola and kick in this stained glass?”

  Another officer walked up the stairs. “There is no sign of the man, Comandante. The guards are adamant that there was no one besides Lieutenant Brandisi and Signore Orvieti admitted to the synagogue since it opened this morning.”

  “Well, someone was here,” Profeta said. “Those three bullet holes in the archive shelving weren’t fired by Orvieti or Brandisi. And Orvieti didn’t climb out on that ledge and break through this stained glass simply because he wanted to. Someone was trying to kill him.”

  “Someone that age climbing out on the ledge in a windstorm.” Brandisi shook his head, marveling. “And then lowering himself through a shattered window.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Profeta said. “Mosè Orvieti has survived the impossible before.”

  84

  Jonathan ran into Ostia’s streets, searching behind the ruin’s half-brick walls in desperation.

  “Emili!” he screamed.

  There was nothing but the rain and the mud. Jonathan stood motionless as the horror settled in. Although it was midday, the cloud cover was so heavy that the skies were dim as dusk. Jonathan ran at some rustling bushes, only to find a cat eating from a littered candy wrapper.

  From one of the empty streets he heard sounds of struggle. He could not place its direction, and stumbled down a street at random, running into the sprawling ruins of an ancient warehouse.

  A muffled yell sounded closer. It came from inside the neighboring ancient theater. The theater’s stone arches were closed off by gates, and Jonathan tried each of them, rattling their bars, until he found a small rusted side gate with the lock missing. He ran into the theater, which during summer festivals was packed but now, in winter, looked as dark and abandoned as if the theater were still buried in the earth.

  “Please find it.”

  The voice sounded harrowingly close, but Jonathan saw no one. The theater’s open air acoustics made it impossible to tell from which direction it came. The words were spoken in English, but in a tone soft enough that the accent was undetectable.

  “Hello?” Jonathan called out, his own echo filling the empty theater.

  “Please find it,” the voice said again. The tone was human. More pleading than ominous, as though asking for a favor.

  “Who are you!” Jonathan yelled. He ran up the cavea—the theater’s tiered stone seating. He saw no one.

  And then, at the far end of the semicircular stone seating, a woman’s figure materialized in the mist.

  “Emili!” Jonathan sprinted, rounding the theater’s curve.

  But as he drew close, he saw it was not Emili. The woman looked just as frantic as he did. She had been standing in the rain, and neglected streaks of mascara ink-stained her face.

  “He will kill you if you don’t cooperate,” Director Jacqueline Olivier said.

  “What?” Jonathan whispered and held up his hands, as though the deception were a physical force he could somehow stop.

  Slowly, the depth of betrayal registered, and Jonathan snapped his head back, angrily. “You’ve got to be kidding me! You’re involved in this?”

  “I didn’t think it would go this far.” The director’s voice was unsteady.

  Even in his rising fury, he could see panic in her eyes.

  “Where have they taken her?” Jonathan asked, his voice tremoring with rage.

  “I don’t know. They contact me.” She looked away. “That’s how it works.”

  “That’s how it works?” Jonathan asked, controlling himself. Everything became vivid, and not just the scope of Salah ad-Din’s operation. The texture of the mud in the theater, the stones’ sheen in the rain, the monochrome gray sky.

  “You’ve been cooperating with Salah ad-Din since Emili and Sharif were in Jerusalem, haven’t you?” Jonathan’s voice strengthened. “That’s how the Waqf knew about their research beneath the Old City, isn’t it?”

  “They agreed to limit their excavations beneath the Mount if I gave them information! You think I knew Sharif would get killed?” She stopped. “It was supposed to be harmless.” Olivier’s tone shook along with the rest of her. She held the seating railing for support; her ankles buckling on the uneven stones.

  “You betrayed her. . . . How could you—?”

  “How could I?” the director said, her tone on the firmer ground of self-justification. “Have you any idea the influence of the twenty-one Arab nations in the UN? My organization has to work with reality.” Anger had rushed to her defense. “You want to protect palm leaf manuscripts in Kazakhstan, you don’t just raise money for humidity controllers, you raise money to bribe the Timri rebels not to come at midnight and burn the library down. You’re not going to stop the Taliban from blowing up Buddhas, but you can get their thugs to tell you where they are shipping the remains to Kabul en route to the auction markets in London. You play the game!”

  “This man, Salah ad-Din, is a killer,” Jonathan said plainly.

  “I know,” Olivier said, swallowing. “Which means you must do what he says. If you tell anyone they have taken her, he will kill her. Please,” she said, gripping the railing as she walked down the theater’s stone steps. “Just find what they want.”

&nb
sp; Jonathan watched the director hobble down the stone tiers. He knew better than to try to follow her.

  “How will Salah ad-Din even know if I find it?”

  “He’ll know,” she said, turning around. Even with the distance between them Jonathan saw the terror in her eyes. “Salah ad-Din knows more than you can possibly imagine.”

  She reached the bottom of the theater seats and stepped into an arch’s darkness.

  “What does that mean?” Jonathan called after her.

  But the wet trees’ unraveling branches were his only answer.

  Instantly, Jonathan knew he was alone.

  He sprinted up the rows of stone seating. The muscles in his legs felt stripped raw.

  “What does that mean!” he screamed, standing in the highest row of the theater. From his vantage point in the ruins, ferns and vines seemed like a carpet over the ruin’s labyrinth of ancient alleyways. There was no sign of life anywhere. He heard only his own winded rasp.

  Jonathan ran to a pay phone outside the park’s shuttered snack bar. His leather wallet was still sopping from the Temple Mount’s cistern and the ink on Chandler’s card had run, but it was still legible. With his hands shaking, he could barely press the numbers of the international dialing code of his credit card. He knew the transaction would reveal his location to the carabinieri, but that was the least of his concerns.

  “Hello?” Chandler said. The reception crackled loudly.

  “Chandler, thank God you’re there,” Jonathan said.

  “Aurelius, where the hell have you been? They’re after you!”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone, man!” Chandler said. “The carabinieri, the reporters—even Interpol, I’m sure!” Jonathan could barely hear him, unsure if it was because of the storm or the age of the pay phone.

  “Chandler, listen to me,” Jonathan said. “I’m calling you from Ostia.”

  “Ostia? What the hell’s in Ostia?”

  “Chandler, just listen. You need to meet me in the Roman Forum in twenty minutes.”