The Last Ember

by Daniel Levin

  Jonathan’s fragile nod was almost imperceptible.

  Orvieti walked beside him and placed his hand on his shoulder. “Okay, then. We will find it.”

  “Is it in the arch?” Jonathan asked hopefully.

  “Yes, in the arch,” Orvieti replied. “The only question is where.”

  “But it’s right here,” Jonathan said, pointing at the monument in front of them. “The Arch of Titus is right here in the Forum. The line in Josephus said, ‘The gate where the triumphal procession passed through.’ ”

  “But no triumphal procession ever passed through this Arch of Titus,” Orvieti said. “That line in Josephus refers to the original Arch of Titus. This arch wasn’t built until ten years after the conquest of Jerusalem.”

  “The original Arch of Titus,” Jonathan said contemplatively. I am rusty, aren’t I? Jonathan remembered now that the Roman practice was to build two triumphal arches, one for the victorious troops to march under, and after a period of time, a grander arch for ensuing generations.

  “Signore, the location of the first Arch of Titus, has been lost now for at least a thousand years. The last historical record of it was the travel notes of an eighth-century monk who didn’t even say where it was, only that its area had become a community for the descendants of the slaves of Titus.” Jonathan pointed at the upper right-hand corner of the Arch of Titus’s relief, which depicted the procession marching under the original arch.

  “Even if Josephus put the menorah in the first Arch of Titus, there’s no way to tell where it is.”

  “Unless someone has told us,” Orvieti said, limping to the edge of the arch. He pointed upward. “There is a message up there.”

  Jonathan stepped outside the arch’s shadow, shifting his attention to the weighty attic above the opening.

  “In the dedicatory inscription?” Jonathan asked. The Latin inscription stenciled high above the arch appeared to use the same ingratiating language that all papal architects used to dedicate a restoration to the presiding pope.

  Insigne Religionis Atque Artis Monumentum Fulciri Servarique Iussit Anno Sacri Principatus Eius XXIIII

  “A badge of both religion and art . . . has been preserved,” Jonathan translated, his head tilted upward. Standard Vatican pomp, he thought. But just as he was about to look away, he noticed something strange about the inscription’s first word.

  “Insigne,” Jonathan said. “In Latin, the word insigne means ‘badge’ or ‘emblem,’ from which we get the word ‘insignia.’ ” The full meaning of the following words began to dawn on him. “An insignia remarkable in religion and art has been preserved—” Jonathan stopped translating and turned to Orvieti.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, realizing the restorer’s intent. “The ‘insignia’ is the menorah, isn’t it?” An insignia remarkable in religion and art has been preserved.

  Orvieti spoke quietly. “Pope John Paul the Second, before he died, quoted a passage from Deuteronomy to the chief rabbi of Rome. The passage referred to writing words on a doorpost.”

  “And you think the message refers to this inscription?”

  “No, I think it refers to a scroll hidden somewhere on the arch’s façade,” Orvieti said. “That is why the pope quoted that passage of Deuteronomy to the chief rabbi of Rome. The message is written in a mezuzah. It’s a clue only someone from the Ghetto would know to look for.”

  “The arch is huge, Signore,” Jonathan said, turning to the monument. “He could have put it anywhere.”

  “Look at the date.”

  Jonathan studied the pediment’s last line. “The papal architect used the pagan numeral for four, IIII, rather than ecclesiastical Latin, IV.”

  “Written on your doorposts,” Orvieti repeated. “He could be drawing attention to the last ‘I’ for a reason.”

  “Because you think there is a message of some kind behind that numeral?” Jonathan asked.

  Orvieti nodded.

  Jonathan looked at the scaffolding. It led up to the lowest line of the pediment’s inscription where the papal architect had written the date. He then looked around him. The tour groups were sparse and gathered at the other end of the Forum. Two guards sat in a sentry booth thirty feet from the other side of the arch.

  I can’t believe I’m about to do this.

  Jonathan gripped the uprights on the scaffolding and pulled himself up. The steel frame felt rickety and he looked down to see if the scaffolding was tilting upward from his weight. The pediment was higher than he anticipated and the entablature, which consisted of huge bronze letters fastened to the marble, was much larger than anyone would imagine from the ground.

  Jonathan stood on the scaffold. His shoulders reached the base of the pediment. Each bronze numeral must have been half his height.

  To his surprise, the last “I” of the roman numeral XXIIII was connected to the pediment differently from the others. Along the right side of the bronze fixture, Jonathan saw hinges and, using his back muscles, he pulled at the long, rectangular numeral. He felt the fixture budge and swing outward to the side like a slender metal door. Behind the numeral, he found a rectangular compartment, a small foot-tall closet carved into the stone. A tight scroll of thick vellum had been tucked inside. There’s actually something here.

  Jonathan leaned into the bronze numeral to keep it from swinging shut, using one hand to pull the parchment from the crevice. The parchment was dry, but the bottom of the scroll adhered to the stone. Jonathan gave it a gentle tug. Now with the scroll in his hand, he stepped back and the numeral swung back into place. Focused, Jonathan walked back across the scaffolding as though unaware of its height.

  “Signore!” he heard one of the guards shout, and startled, Jonathan nearly lost his balance. He looked down and two guards walked directly beneath the scaffolding toward Orvieti.

  “The ruins are closing!” the older guard called out.

  Offering apologies, Orvieti complied, careful not to draw any attention to Jonathan above him.

  The older guard walked past the arch and Jonathan remained motionless. If the guard looked up, he would see Jonathan in plain view. As quietly as he could, Jonathan climbed down the scaffolding two rungs at a time.

  No sooner did Jonathan’s feet touch down than the guard turned back toward the arch. Looking surprised, the guard saw the young man standing at the base of the Arch of Titus. He had appeared out of nowhere.

  “It’s three o’clock, Signore! The Forum is closed,” the guard said, scratching his antiquated white mustache. “I’ve worked here thirty years, and there is still not enough time to see these ruins!”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said, hurrying toward the exit. “Their importance is often over our heads, isn’t it?”

  87

  Emili was blindfolded and seated in an aluminum folding chair. Through the small opening beneath her blindfold, she could see the glow of computer screens in a dark room. She tried to move, but polyurethane straps restrained her wrists and ankles. A cloth gag exuded a sharp chemical taste in her mouth and it burned her throat. She could hear passing buses, but the sound was faint. There was an earthen smell, suggesting they were underground. She was beneath a bridge. Or inside a tunnel. She remained silent, with her head still hanging to one side, pretending to still be unconscious. She used the time to gather her senses.

  At the UN, she had sat through a mandatory seminar on being taken captive. Among the lifesaving imperatives were: keep your bearings, ask questions, try to determine your location, and how much time has passed.

  She heard the clicking of a keyboard, confirming her sense that she was in a high-technology environment. In the background, she heard soft voices. Arabic. The dialect was the same as what was spoken in the car.

  “You are trying to figure out where you are, aren’t you?” said a voice, eerily close to her ear. Her captor’s Italian had only a trace of an Arabic accent, detectable only by a native.

  Her gag was suddenly ripped down from her mouth by a hand
that seemed disembodied.

  “I know who you are,” Emili strained to say, her mouth and cheeks tender. “You are Salah ad-Din.”

  “Gather information, ask questions,” Salah ad-Din said. “Is that what they taught you to do in this situation? You were mumbling in your drugged sleep. Everything is in the UN manual, isn’t it?”

  Emili turned her blindfolded head inches from the source of her captor’s voice and spat point-blank in Salah ad-Din’s face.

  “That’s not in the UN manual,” she said.

  She could hear the click of his dress shoes on the stone floor.

  “You always were unpredictable, weren’t you?”

  Always. How would he know?

  “It seems our mutual respect for history has brought us together again.”

  “Respect?” Emili could not help herself. “You are destroying thousands of years of Judeo-Christian relics. You have no respect for history.”

  He slammed his fist so hard on the aluminum table that it dented in. “I respect history so much that I understand the consequences of controlling it!” The echo of his outburst carried into the darkness.

  He mumbled something in Arabic, and a man grabbed her head roughly and removed her blindfold. It was a dark cavern with no perceptible ceiling. Before her were two computers, both with complex subterranean maps overlaying cross-sectional views of Rome. Beside the aluminum table was a row of oxygen tanks, acetylene tanks, and underwater diving equipment.

  She shifted in her seat, trying to turn around to see Salah ad-Din standing behind her.

  “Ah-ah,” Salah ad-Din said disapprovingly. “Keep your eyes forward.”

  “Emili.” A different voice now, but she placed it at once. A woman stepped out of the darkness.

  Director Jacqueline Olivier.

  “Do as he says,” Jacqueline said. “Please.”

  Emili stared at her for a moment, bewildered. She did not appear kidnapped. Her hands were free and she sat down in a chair across a small table. She was wearing a winter-white pantsuit and matching pearls. Despite Emili’s dire circumstances, the director’s polished appearance reminded Emili that the UN Colosseum ceremony was today. She was on her way there.

  “Jacquie, what are you—”

  “I can help you,” Olivier said. “They are looking for the lost Arch of Titus. Not the arch in the Roman Forum, but the original one. They believe the person you were traveling with—”

  “Jonathan?” Emili said.

  “—yes, might have told you where it was. They need to know where it is, Emili. You must tell them.”

  Staring at the director, Emili suddenly felt ill. “How could you do this?”

  “I would not pass judgment about the director,” Salah ad-Din said, his voice still behind Emili. “She urged us to let you go. Even with the World Heritage Committee’s Colosseum ceremony beginning in less than an hour, she came here to save your life.” Emili heard the distinct click of a firearm loading. “And now, Dr. Travia, it is your opportunity to save hers.”

  “What are you talking about?” Emili said.

  “Don’t move, Director,” said Salah ad-Din.

  The look on the face of the UN director turned from despair to blind fear. She stared at Salah ad-Din above Emili’s shoulder.

  Salah ad-Din’s voice whispered into her ear, “Tell us where the first arch is, Dr. Travia, or I will kill her.”

  “Wait!” the UN director said suddenly frantic. “She doesn’t know!” All traces of her dignified bearing were gone.

  “I would like to be certain,” said Salah ad-Din coolly.

  Jacqueline’s eyes flickered toward Emili, registering a terror that Emili was now unsure she even could trust.

  “Dr. Travia, I am going to count to three. Where is the original Arch of Titus?” Salah ah Din said. “One.”

  “I don’t know,” Emili said, her voice quivering. “We assumed it meant the arch in the Roman Forum.”

  “Please, Emili, for both of us.” The UN director’s voice was shaking uncontrollably. “Tell him what you know.”

  “Two.”

  Emili was silent. Her entire world had been upturned. Nothing was impossible.

  “Three.”

  Jacqueline’s eyes had been fixed above her shoulder. But as Salah ad-Din said three, the director’s eyes lowered gracefully, locking with Emili’s.

  Two pops, no louder than firecracker snaps.

  At first Emili was not sure what had happened. Then she saw the blood trickling from the director’s forehead onto her pashmina scarf. The director appeared unsure as well. She was just conscious enough to feel the blood on her own forehead, and in a last gesture of almost farcical grace, began to wipe it away. As she stared at her own bloodstained fingers, Director Olivier’s eyes glazed, and the weight of her posture caused her to collapse headfirst onto the aluminum table.

  Emili stared straight ahead, frozen in terror. She could smell the smoke from the greased barrel only inches behind her head.

  “Okay,” Salah ad-Din said, his tone almost relieved, “she doesn’t know.”

  Within seconds, Salah ad-Din struck Emili on the back of her head with the butt of his gun. The pain was so intense it was visual, streaks of blackness raced across her vision until they swallowed the room and everything faded to darkness. Her last horrific vision was the blush makeup on the UN director’s cheek, bathing in a pool of blood on the table.

  88

  Jonathan hurried through the Forum’s exit turnstiles and found Orvieti standing along the Via dei Fori Imperali, beside a new glass tourist center. Jonathan handed him the scroll he had just found inside the arch’s pediment.

  “I can’t open it,” Orvieti said, awestruck. “My hands are shaking.”

  Jonathan unrolled the vellum scroll. The leather had stiffened and it cracked in two in his hands, but the pieces easily fit together and the ink had survived remarkably well. The classicist in Jonathan appreciated that the parchment had been abraded with pumice, which kept the ink dark even after centuries. It was another architectural sketch of the Colosseum. A quotation was written above the drawing. Jonathan recognized it immediately.

  Seven branches of light forge . . . on the spot where the law of Rome executes those condemned. . . .

  “It’s another line from Josephus,” Jonathan said. He stared at the parchment, his gaze fixed on the quotation. Orvieti looked not at the sketch, but at Jonathan, who looked whiter than a moment before. “Do you know what it means?” Orvieti asked.

  Jonathan nodded. “It looks like a location

  within the Colosseum: ‘The spot where the law of Rome executes those condemned.’” He stared back down at the sketch. “The seven branches of light must refer to the sunlight through the arches of the Colosseum’s upper tiers. They ‘forge’ at a place on the arena floor.” Jonathan pointed at the illustration. “Look, Valadier’s nineteenth-century sketch shows the light converging through the arches.

  “So, Josephus’s line describes a location in the arena?”

  “Right, but there was a problem. The western rim of the Colosseum had eroded long before the nineteenth century, so Valadier had to reconstruct the western arches in 1809 to allow the light to illuminate the exact location on the arena floor that Josephus was describing.” Jonathan spoke rapidly, as though hurrying to keep pace with the logical steps in his mind.

  “But what could be so important about that spot in the arena?” Orvieti asked.

  Jonathan fell silent and his eyes glazed.

  “A trapdoor,” he whispered.

  “A trapdoor?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said, shaking himself out of his daze. “Seven years ago, I saw an ancient fresco in a catacomb just before it collapsed. It was a painting of a man escaping from the Colosseum’s arena through a trapdoor.”

  Jonathan took a deep breath.

  He felt the scriptio inferior of his own past resurface again, but now old and new scripts were completing each other in a way he would
rather not have seen. Seven years ago, he may have entered a tomb with a historical significance beyond his wildest imagination. Salah ad-Din knows more than you can imagine, Jonathan had just heard in Ostia.

  “Signore, I think that trapdoor opens to a tunnel leading to the first Arch of Titus.”

  “And you think it was Josephus who escaped?”

  “Yes, Signore, which explains why the ancient historians wrote that Titus wept so bitterly when Josephus escaped. Josephus was no ordinary traitor to Titus. He was the one priest who could still keep the flame of the hidden menorah alive. Remember how Titus and his magicians feared the flame. The only way to extinguish it was to ensure there was no priest left to tend it. That is why the ancient Romans would kill all the male priests, hoping to stomp out its patrilineal descent.”

  “Which has its consequences today,” Orvieti said somberly. “Among all of Roman Jewry, there are still almost no kohanim, no priests,” Orvieti said. “As a boy, I knew no others.”

  “Others? So you are—”

  Orvieti lifted his hand, slightly, but enough for Jonathan to detect his tormented faith.

  “Whatever holiness I once had,” Orvieti said, “is gone.”

  The sun had passed over the Palatine, but its yellow stream of light flowed down Via di San Gregorio, still catching the upper lip of the Colosseum. Orvieti looked at his watch.

  “It’s three-fifteen,” he said. “The sun will set through those arches in less than twenty minutes.”

  89

  The evening’s Colosseum ceremony was to mark the invocation of the United Nations World Heritage Committee meeting in Rome and the two hundredth anniversary of the Colosseum’s first major restoration in 1809. Roman diplomats and press wearing authorization credentials on blue neck straps streamed into the Colosseum along a red carpet and through metal detectors. Parked black sedans with diplomatic plates fringed the Colosseum’s outer arches. Italian soldiers mixed with plainclothes carabinieri behind white police sawhorses cordoned off the Piazza del Colosseo.