The Last Ember

by Daniel Levin

  “I let her live!” Sharif said. “After she saw my research beneath Jerusalem. Have you any idea how many wanted her dead?”

  “How long have you been leading this double life? How long ago did those imams at the Temple Mount brainwash you into conducting this search for the menorah?”

  “Those imams understand nothing of my task! Do you know why they destroy relics under the Temple Mount? It is because they believe those Jewish and Christian relics have power. They believe in that hocus-pocus of impurity.” Sharif spoke evenly, exhibiting an uncanny ease at having a gun in his hand.

  “I am not so naive. The relic must be destroyed to erase the history of a Temple on the Mount. The al-Quds fund agreed to support my research if my first excavation seven years ago went undetected.”

  “You knew the truth of my Josephus thesis even before I did. It’s why you convinced us to enter the catacombs in the middle of the night. . . .”

  Jonathan could see the three of them, Emili, Jonathan, and Gianpaolo, being lowered into the catacomb. And who encouraged them, who volunteered to work the pulley above the manhole rather than descend into the ruin? The fourth young graduate student, Sharif Lebag. How selfless it seemed at the time, to have put in all that research, diagramming the subterranean corridors, only to sit by the manhole, like a trained astronaut remaining at ground control. But Sharif’s decision was inevitable. He knew the ruin was going to crumble. He had arranged the entire thing.

  “You can’t win, Sharif,” Jonathan said. “You cannot manipulate history.”

  “Do you believe that, Marcus? Or don’t you lawyers manipulate history just as I do? Looking for documents to support your clients’ version of the past. If you unearth a relic that supports the other side’s case, what do you do? You shred it. Or you bury it in one of those document rooms where it will never see the light of day. It’s rather like destroying some artifacts and not others. You think I’m driven by childish religious belief ? I’m a political realist. Like Titus. Strength is the author of history, Jon, not truth.”

  Sharif had so completely become this persona that only small pieces of his former self were visible. His understated air and small gesticulations had vanished.

  “Just let her go, and I will help you,” Jonathan said.

  “Let her go?” Salah ad-Din said mockingly. He pulled Emili’s hair violently, burrowing the gun’s barrel deeper into her temple. “Do you understand the lengths I went to bring both of you here? Orchestrating the fragment of the Forma Urbis so that she would bring this case and you would return to Rome.” Sharif stepped toward Jonathan, joining him in the single shaft of light pouring down from the street drain above them.

  “I knew you would unlock Josephus’s messages. I needed you to.” He stared at Jonathan with an eerie mixture of familiarity and ruthlessness.

  Salah ad-Din inched closer. “Does the shape of these arched stairways surprise you?” A ray of light glinted off the barrel of the gun in his hand. “Seven staircases in the shape of the menorah itself, each joining to reach a single platform, where an archway through the dam leads to the lost Arch of Titus. Of course, only one bridge is structurally strong enough. All you have to do is choose the correct staircase.” He pulled Emili’s hair, her bloodshot eyes beaded with tears, silently pleading.

  “Which one is it?” Sharif asked, motioning to the stairs leading up to the wall. “You have until the count of three.”

  “I don’t know!” Jonathan said softly, and then louder, stammering. “How—There’s no way to know!”

  “Then there’s no sense in counting, is there?” He stood back from Emili, straightening his arm to shoot her.

  “No!” a shout came out of the darkness. Salah ad-Din’s flashlight beam searched the ridge of the basin, and there Mosè Orvieti stood, holding his slender green oxygen tank with both hands, his pants caked in dried blood.

  Orvieti managed to slide down to the basin’s floor and walked past them to the base of the seven stairwells. He turned around, glaring at Sharif, his voice fueled with disdain.

  “I know which one it is,” Orvieti said. He leaned over the first step of the middle staircase and rubbed its stone with the sole of his shoe. The inscribed letters revealed themselves in large block Hebrew print.

  “Each staircase represents a different sefirah, a divine attribute through which the world was created,” he said. “The branches of the menorah represent seven of them.” He walked to the next staircase, knelt against the first step, and uncovered another inscription. “Gevurah,” Orvieti read.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Strength.”

  One by one, Orvieti cleared the first step of each stairwell, calling out each sefirah: “Tipheret, splendor. Chesed, kindness. Malchut, majesty. Hod, glory.”

  “Which is it?” Jonathan said. “What attribute would Josephus have most associated with the menorah? Splendor?”

  “None of these,” Orvieti said. He walked toward the one remaining arched staircase, which rose along the western wall of the basin. He rubbed the first step and there was no inscription.

  Orvieti looked at Jonathan. “This is the one. The seventh branch,” he said.

  “There is no inscription,” Jonathan said.

  “The remaining sefirah is netzach, eternity. The seventh branch was the eternal light, the ne’er tamid,” Orvieti said. “The enduring light that Josephus fought to save.”

  “You’re sure,” Jonathan asked softly.

  “Not at all,” Orvieti said.

  “Go!” Sharif yelled, flicking his head toward the stairs. He turned to Jonathan. “And you go with him.”

  “Those stairs are thousands of years old,” Orvieti said. “They cannot hold more than—”

  “Take him!” Sharif yelled. “Perhaps you’ll choose more carefully.”

  Jonathan walked forward, standing beside Orvieti. Both of them looked at the seven flanking arches of staircases.

  Swinging his small oxygen tank in front of him, Orvieti ascended the first ancient step of the arched stairway. Jonathan followed, feeling the stones tremble beneath their weight. Orvieti walked up the arch’s steps rather unceremoniously and Jonathan was surprised at his pace. His legs climbed swiftly, as though propelled by the same adrenaline that moved Jonathan rapidly behind him. Moving quickly helped them with their balance on the narrow beam of the staircase, and as they neared the apex of the arch, Jonathan tried not to look down into the blackness of the abyss below. Suddenly, the stone arch made a cracking sound beneath their feet, and Jonathan stopped.

  “Keep moving,” Orvieti said.

  As they neared the platform at the top of the stairs, the enormous size of the retaining wall became apparent. The stones were each twenty feet in length, bearing an unmistakable similarity to the construction of Jerusalem’s Temple walls. They stepped onto the platform, and noticed that the small archway leading into the wall from the platform was bricked up with smaller stones.

  “The arch is bricked up!” Jonathan yelled down to Salah ad-Din.

  On the platform, Orvieti stood motionless in front of the bricked-up arch. He stared at a short Hebraic inscription that had been carved above.

  “Dry Land in the Midst of the Sea,” Orvieti translated. He looked up in Jonathan’s direction. “It’s a passage from Exodus. When the Red Sea split, the Israelites walked on dry land in the middle of the sea.”

  “What does it mean?”

  As if to answer, the platform on which Jonathan and Orvieti stood began to tremble and slowly lowered a half-foot. Jonathan thought the platform could not hold them both when suddenly it stopped, as though fitted to a ratchet. A loud cracking sound reverberated throughout the cavern, and one of the arched staircases snapped backward, its heavy stones careening toward the basin floor. The structural instability spread like a contagion, as the wall before them began to shake.

  “The stairs were not the test,” Orvieti said. “This is the test.”

  The wall’s enormous sto
nes began to buckle outward. Jonathan watched small trickles of water bleed through the cracks, as though in slow motion, navigating the contours of the stones. The streaming water gathered force as boulder-sized stones shuddered and loosened. “The wall is going to burst!” Jonathan screamed. “We have to get—”

  “This is the only safe place,” Orvieti said.

  You’ve gone mad, Jonathan thought. “We’re right in front of the wall, Mosè! The river! This whole basin will be—”

  “The Red Sea,” Orvieti said calmly.

  “What!” Jonathan screamed over the breaking rocks.

  “You must believe in the splitting of the sea,” Orvieti said.

  The water began to flow into the center of the cavern. Sharif lifted his gun, preparing to fire at Jonathan and Orvieti on the platform. He cocked his elbows, using both hands to steady the pistol’s aim.

  He’s going to shoot them both, Emili thought.

  Emili slid behind Salah ad-Din and, throwing her arms over his head, yanked her wrists’ plastic restraints against his throat. Unable to point his gun behind him, Salah ad-Din threw himself backward, sending them both beneath the surface of the rising waters in the cavern. Emili managed to remain fastened around Sharif’s neck, keeping him underwater, but his stubble-short hair was slippery and he managed to corkscrew his head out of her grip.

  Without use of her arms, Emili was unable to get up and could barely keep her mouth above the rising water.

  Sharif now stood over her, aimed his black pistol at her forehead. He ripped off the duct tape from her mouth.

  “Parting words?”

  “You know, Sharif,” Emili said, stretching her neck above the water, “you turned out to be a real asshole.”

  Sharif pressed the barrel below her hairline and pulled the trigger.

  The pistol’s hammer hit the barrel’s firing contact with the deadened sound of a water-flooded gun.

  Salah ad-Din appeared amused. “Luck does favor the brave.”

  At that moment, a sudden force bowled Sharif into the rising water of the cavern. Jonathan had run back down the staircase and blindsided him, tackling Sharif from the side. They landed in the churning green-gray water a foot from the reservoir’s rock wall. Jonathan noticed Sharif’s frame floating beneath him, lifeless, facedown. Red clouds gathered in the water, and Jonathan rolled him over to see a large jagged rock protruding from the surface of the water where his head had collided. As though moved by a force outside him, he lifted Sharif’s head out of the water and let it fall again with a grotesque thud against the protruding rock. Another red cloud mushroomed in the water.

  “That’s for Gianpaolo.”

  Jonathan staggered up and waded through the water to Emili.

  Emili remained kneeling in the rising water, which was already up to her waist. A bright red rectangle around her lips indicated where the duct tape had been. She blinked rapidly, her eyes moving over his face, as though inspecting an artifact.

  “It’s me,” Jonathan said, attempting his most reassuring smile. He tried, unsuccessfully, to release the plastic restraints around her wrists.

  “Where’s Orvieti?”

  Jonathan looked to the other side of the cavern, where Orvieti still stood on the platform, fifty feet above the basin floor. The stone retaining wall around him looked as tall as a skyscraper. The giant stones undulated; some erupted from their place, allowing huge pockets of river water to pour into the cavern.

  “He says this is a test! Something about the Red Sea!” Jonathan shook his head. “We have to get out of here. There isn’t time.”

  “The Red Sea?” Emili surveyed the collapsing basin. She saw Orvieti standing alone on the platform. She recalled her conversation with him the day before. You must believe in the splitting of the Red Sea. “We’ve got to get up there!” Emili screamed over the roar of the water.

  “What?”

  “That’s the safest place in the cavern!” Emili said. “Trust me! I think he’s right!”

  The water rose past their knees, and Jonathan led Emili up the only staircase. The smooth stones were slippery from the water gushing out of the wall twenty feet in front of them. Jonathan struggled to keep his balance.

  As they moved closer to the wall, jets of water burst forth on both sides of the stairs. Jonathan ducked as he climbed, lowering his center of gravity. Finally they reached the platform. Orvieti remained staring at the wall in front of him.

  “The stairs were not the test!” Orvieti repeated, his eyes ablaze. One must believe in the splitting of the Red Sea. “Move closer to the wall!”

  “Closer to the wall?” Jonathan yelled. “The whole river is going to—”

  It was then that the entire wall in front of them began to shake. No longer did particular sections give way, but the entire structure of the wall seemed on the verge of collapse. The three of them stood at its center, as though seeking safety from a collapsing skyscraper by standing at its foot.

  The limestone blocks, weighing hundreds of tons, burst outward on either side of the platform as two great hillsides of water—each fifty feet high—poured forth into the basin around them. Sunlight through the broken dam streamed into the basin, illuminating the fish and enormous logs of driftwood that curled over on both sides of them. The platform on which they stood had been carefully engineered to remain bone dry, lying in front of the one intact piece of wall.

  Inside the archway before them, the small stones that blocked up the opening began to crumble and give way to a dark corridor that resembled a tunnel inside the curl of a towering wave.

  “The Red Sea!” Emili shouted in disbelief. All three of them watched the walls of water on either side of them. “The corridor leads under the Tiber!” She shined her flashlight through the archway in front of them. They helped Orvieti step over the bricks, and the three of them entered the dark tunnel in the wall. The tunnel ceiling was high enough for them to stand, and its walls were made of very ancient brickwork made from crushed lime and sand.

  94

  The materials from the International Centre for Conservation in Rome had been couriered to Profeta’s office. Brandisi spread them across the small conference table and studied them.

  “I think you should see this, Comandante,” Brandisi said.

  Profeta looked up and noticed that the lieutenant had turned white. Brandisi pointed at one of the photographs of Dr. Emili Travia’s team, standing in the Valley of Kidron adjacent to the Temple Mount, picking through huge mounds of rubble. It was a candid photograph with Drs. Emili Travia and Sharif Lebag crouching to pick up pieces of pottery. Brandisi leaned over the photograph.

  “Him, without the beard.”

  “What about him?”

  “That’s who I saw in the archives of the Great Synagogue,” Brandisi said.

  “My God, Alessandro,” Profeta said, and at first Brandisi did not look up, unsure the comandante even knew his Christian name.

  “What is it, Comandante?”

  Profeta remembered the director’s assurance. The DNA results confirmed Dr. Lebag’s remains. I oversaw the investigation myself. Profeta swayed for a moment, swept away by the vastness of the conspiracy. He pointed at the picture. “Lieutenant, I think you just identified Salah ad-Din.”

  Lieutenant Copia opened the door to Profeta’s office and found the comandante and Brandisi standing over the photograph in a moment of apparent serenity. Although all four of Profeta’s desk phone lines had lit up, ringing in an uneven chorus, neither of them seemed to notice.

  “Comandante,” she said, “there’s some kind of . . . flood in the Colosseum.”

  Profeta slowly looked up.

  “What do you mean, flood?” Profeta looked out the window. “The rain has stopped.”

  “The entire subterranean portion of the ruin is submerged,” Copia said. “That’s all we’ve been told. In the middle of the United Nations ceremony, water began gathering beneath the arena.”

  “That would have to be t
housands of gallons of water,” Brandisi said.

  Copia nodded. “A bank along the Tiber near the Piazza Bocca della Verità appears to have given way. The city engineers say a water main has burst, but investigators have not ruled out an intentional act.”

  “Brandisi, take three cars to the Colosseum to investigate,” Profeta said. He stood up from his chair and grabbed his coat. “And send this photograph of Sharif Lebag to Interpol immediately.”

  Profeta turned to Copia. “Any word on the evidence found at the Villa Torlonia?”

  “The results of preliminary fingerprints from the cigarette-rolling paper are almost ready. As you requested, the evidence is being processed outside our lab, so it will take another hour.”

  “What evidence?” Rufio said abruptly from the doorway.

  “We found some rolling paper around the illegally excavated tomb,” Profeta said.

  “I’d be happy to pick up the lab results, Comandante,” Rufio said.

  “I’m sure you would, Lieutenant,” Profeta said. The expression of Profeta’s face gave Rufio an uneasy feeling. “But I’ll pick them up myself.”

  95

  Where are we?” Emili asked, her voice echoing in the tight corridor.

  “Must be the Cloaca Maxima,” Jonathan said. “The sewer from republican Rome, probably dating to the third century B.C. It was probably forgotten by the time the Colosseum was built.”

  “Which is why the slaves of Jerusalem could have used it to reach a part of the city no longer accessible even in their own day,” Orvieti said.

  They waded through the dark corridor’s waters, which now rose to their waists. The only sounds were the rushing current and Orvieti’s oxygen tank clanking against the walls.

  “How’s he doing?” Jonathan said to Emili.

  “His teeth are chattering,” she said. “We need to move faster.”