The Last Ember

by Daniel Levin

  “Jerusalem,” Orvieti said, realizing that these were loving depictions by Jewish slaves of their city before the sack by the Romans in A.D. 70. In front of the wall was a low altar of rock, covered by a threadbare swatch of embroidered cloth, its motif no longer discernible. An original fabric from two thousand years before. The chamber had remained dry for thousands of years.

  He looked up at the source of the chamber’s light. A pinhole of light shone from the ceiling of the chamber. Where was that light coming from? The ground was at least forty feet above him.

  Orvieti knew a chamber built with this level of technology and care must have been the final project of the master architects who constructed the Temple in Jerusalem. In this chamber they must have placed the menorah. But where?

  The pinhole of light from the top of the chamber descended to the middle of the chamber’s one unpainted wall. Orvieti moved toward it, feeling dizzy from exertion and the lack of oxygen. The wall pulsed as though it were breathing. He remembered the phrase he had heard only hours before.

  “ ‘ Open for me a pinhole of light and I will broaden it to a sanctuary,’ ” he said.

  He looked more closely where the hole of light from above hit the wall. He put his hand to the wall. He used the round end of his oxygen tank and knocked the wall. It was stucco, crumbling from the slightest force. With his own trembling hands he pulled away the stucco, revealing a gleaming yellow metal that reflected the light’s ray so brightly that it burned like a growing flame, larger with each piece of wall he pulled away.

  Orvieti hacked into the wall, more of it collapsing at his feet. There, behind a foot of cracked stucco, was a long branch of solid gold four feet merely along its curve, its deeply carved floral ornament in the exact biblical dimensions. “ ‘And the workmanship shall be beaten,’ ” he whispered, quoting Exodus, “ ‘ from a solid piece of gold to its base to its flowers, beaten out from a single piece.’ ”

  Wildly, he removed more of the wall, until nearly an entire branch of the giant menorah was revealed, with a muted glow like the bark of a golden trunk. Its lustrous yellow skin gleamed from the pinhole’s ray, as massive and bewildering as he had dreamed. He realized the giant artifact was perpendicular to the wall, and the rest of the menorah’s branches spread across the room that lay beyond the stucco. He removed enough stucco for him to stumble forward and crawl through the wall. He was losing his breath and although his eyelids were heavy, they flared open like a child’s.

  An eight-foot lamp of solid gold towered before him, and on the westernmost branch he saw the dim red glow of a single ember burning in the darkness.

  Orvieti wiped his eyes and for a moment did not approach, as though wanting to prolong the his wonderment at the miracle.

  The menorah’s flame had not gone out.

  Staggering closer, he realized the light above the westernmost branch was actually a small flame, flickering inches away from the rock wall where a small, square vent sprayed natural methane from an adjacent cistern of river’s silt and sewage. The flame hovered over the menorah’s last golden cup, the one closest to the wall. Of course, Orvieti realized, a natural, undying source kept the original flame of the lamp’s seventh light alive.

  He struggled up three stone steps that ascended to the menorah’s branches and raised his hands to the flame. But instead of seeing the fingers of an elderly archivist, he saw those of a young man.

  Liquid filled an ancient bowl of hammered copper on the stair’s top step.

  Oil, Orvieti knew.

  He used his remaining strength to pour it into the branch’s golden cup. The oil caught instantly beneath the flame. He moved from branch to branch, and as each cup caught fire, more of him came into the light, illuminating not him but a strong, youthful version of himself.

  Orvieti knew that hallucination was the last stage of oxygen deprivation, but it all seemed real: his dark, wavy hair from a half-century earlier and his broad frame shining in the lamp’s refulgent gleam.

  As though swallowed by the brightness, he was transported, standing no longer in a dark chamber, but in a sunlit open field in the center of the Roman Forum. He could hear children laughing. It had been sixty-six years, but he recognized the sound at once. His children. Orvieti watched his three sons dart past, their wild tufts of brown hair above tiny denim-patched overalls. His daughter trailed, wearing a small lilac-print dress. They circled around his legs, playing and laughing. Orvieti forgot how flower-filled the ruins of the Forum were before Mussolini’s excavations. He used to take his children to picnic there. His wife was there, too, young and beautiful, the sun on her round shoulders and her long hair. She slipped her smooth hand into his, but his fingers were old and wrinkled. She was young, but he was old again. Orvieti not only looked old, but he felt old, too. The field was difficult for his old legs, but his wife’s strides were long and graceful. He wanted so much to be with them, but he could not keep up. The children were in front, calling to him. Try to catch me, Papa. Try to catch me. His wife, too, had gone ahead, her expressive brown eyes looking back at him as if she had not seen him in ages.

  They stood in front of him in the shade cast by a large marble arch at the end of the ruins. The Arch of Titus. His three sons and his daughter chased one another, playing under the arch. Orvieti’s wife waited for him, beckoning him with her arm, and then the children waved their hands for him to follow, making playful imitations of their mother’s gesture.

  Orvieti stood at the base of the arch, just as he did in 1948, when the Jewish community rallied in the ruins of the Forum to walk the opposite way of the war captives depicted on the marble relief. But in 1948, Orvieti could not do it. He had walked back to the Ghetto alone.

  Now Orvieti stood again at the base of the arch. His children were there, on the other side. All he had to do was walk through. His wife put down her arm, and it was the first audible thing he heard.

  “Mosè.” The sound of her sweet voice was surprisingly close to him, although her lips did not move as she spoke.

  “It is time,” she said, smiling.

  Orvieti stepped toward the arch and took her hand. As he walked, the marble reliefs had come alive, their stone figures in motion. But they were not Roman soldiers carrying the menorah into captivity. They were young men, women, and children whom Orvieti recognized from his youth in the Ghetto. Although he last saw them huddled in cattle cars, they were now bathed and resplendent, walking in the same direction as he, carrying the menorah out of the ruins.

  When he emerged from the opposite side of the arch, he looked at his wife’s hand in his own. The skin on his hand was tight. He felt a strength in his legs that he could not remember. All of the fingers on his hand were there. Orvieti crouched down, his frame limber. His children ran to him, and he sobbed with a vigor that shook his wide shoulders. “I will never let you go again,” he said, and his daughter embraced him as a grown-up hugs a child.

  “You never did,” she said.

  101

  Outside the Great Synagogue, ambulances and police cars blocked the Lungotevere Cenci. Old women leaned out their windows at the curiosity.

  Emili’s jacket was ripped and her face was still red from the duct tape. She wore a carabinieri blanket around her shoulders. Jonathan pressed some gauze to the side of his head; the blood trickling from his hairline had stopped.

  “And all this time,” Emili finally spoke. “It was him.”

  “Emili, don’t.” Jonathan shook his head. “You couldn’t have known.”

  Profeta walked over to them.

  “We still have not found Lebag. We have circulated EU-wide arrest warrant for the murders of Officer Fiegi and Jacqueline Olivier, but it doesn’t mean we’ll find him,” Profeta said. “There are cells in the center of Rome that will give him cover.”

  “And Mosè Orvieti?” Emili asked.

  “I’m sorry, Dottoressa,” Profeta said somberly to Emili. “The divers will look for another half-hour before they must stop for t
he night. According to the experts, the entire underground street is flooded by now.”

  “Is there a way at least to recover his—”

  “The subterranean flooding this time of year is fierce, Dottoressa,” Profeta said. “His body could have washed anywhere beneath the miles of corridors beneath Rome.” Profeta knew the Roman Mafia used the very successful strategy of dumping corpses into the Tiber, where they were often made unidentifiable by the pike, perch, and carp within hours. But this the comandante kept to himself.

  Profeta disliked having to bring up paperwork at a time like this, but with Lebag still missing, Emili would be needed for extensive questioning to open an investigation.

  “Dr. Travia, the Waqf will likely suggest that Sharif Lebag’s activities were outside of their knowledge. They’ll want to suppress the investigation.”

  “On diplomatic grounds?” The question came from Jonathan as a reflex. He was only dimly conscious that he was a lawyer at that moment.

  “We’ll need your statements to build a case.”

  Emili nodded.

  “Take your time, of course,” Profeta said, bowing his head deferentially. He walked toward the patrol car and turned around. “There’s remarkably good American coffee across the piazza from the Command. Perhaps the three of us can talk more informally first.”

  “All right,” Jonathan said.

  Emili turned to Jonathan when they were alone.

  “Do you think Mosè found the menorah?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “I saw him for the last time just after you did. He disappeared into the darkness, moving in that direct—” Jonathan stopped in mid-thought, as a sudden idea took hold of him. He was looking directly in the direction of the Great Synagogue. The moonlight now coated its Assyrian dome with a white gleam.

  “What is it?” Emili said. “Are you all right?”

  “Emili,” Jonathan said quickly. “We’ve got to get inside the sanctuary of the Great Synagogue.”

  “The synagogue?”

  “I think I know where the first arch is.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Let’s go.” Jonathan grabbed Emili’s hand and they moved between the police cars and through the synagogue doors.

  In the sanctuary, Jonathan stared at the ceremonial ark. It was draped with a woven velvet cloth twenty feet in height.

  “Did Orvieti say where Pope John Paul the Second made his silent prayer during his visit here?”

  “In front of there,” Emili said, pointing at the ceremonial ark.

  Jonathan and Emili walked down the center aisle, up the velvet-clad steps of the bimah to the ark. Only the moonlight slanting through the double-height stained-glass windows illuminated the hundreds of pews. A carabinieri officer and a reluctant security guard were two silhouettes in one of the service doorways.

  “Do you notice anything strange about this sanctuary?”

  Emili looked around the dimly lit room. “Other than the fact that you told the security guard to keep the lights off? No.”

  Jonathan leaned in. “Look up.”

  Emili tilted her head backward. A massive, gilded chandelier in the Assyrian-Babylonian style dangled in the shadows above them. It was hung from a chain that attached twenty feet above, at the pediment of the ark.

  “It’s the eternal light,” she said. “Chandler said that all synagogues have them.”

  “Right, but they’re usually lit,” Jonathan said. Emili followed his arm upward. “This one isn’t.”

  “You’re saying the synagogue of the Roman Jewish community doesn’t have an eternal light?”

  “Oh, it has one,” Jonathan said. “But it’s somewhere else.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Emili, you know how close Pope John Paul the Second felt to the rabbi of this community. When he came to this synagogue in Rome, he brought a message with him. Orvieti told it to me: ‘Open for me a pinhole of light, and I will broaden it to a sanctuary.’”

  Emili looked down at her feet, as though steeling herself to see the impossible.

  “The pope didn’t come to the synagogue to return anything,” Jonathan explained. “He stood here to remind the rabbi of what the Jewish community had guarded for two thousand years beneath this synagogue, without even knowing it.”

  Emili’s gaze was now on the floor in the direction of a small inset piece of amber, a miniature representation of the menorah in its proper biblical dimensions. She suddenly realized why Jonathan asked the guard to keep the lights off.

  In the glass inset, a faint spark played in its yellow translucence, as though emanating from a place somewhere beneath the synagogue.

  “The triumphal procession ended here, along the Porticus Octaviae,” Jonathan said, “and here’s where the first Arch of Titus was built, directly beneath the Ghetto.”

  “Quae amissa salva.” Emili smiled. Lost things are safe.

  102

  The next morning, Tatton stood in the conference room of the firm’s office at Piazza Navona. He put down the newspaper.

  “You’re a celebrity, Marcus, and you made the firm look like a bastion of goodwill.”

  Mildren sat next to Tatton, preparing for an upcoming meeting. He looked at Jonathan, steaming at his success.

  “You managed to expose the UN director as complicit with looters in Jerusalem, and the Cultural Ministry has pressured the prosecutor to drop the case. A gold star, Marcus. Your future here at Dulling is as bright as the Roman sun.”

  Jonathan stared out the window. It was late in the morning and his flight to New York wasn’t for another four hours. He had tried to call Emili at the UN, but as he expected, she wasn’t in her office. The media had camped out overnight at the International Centre for Conservation to feed on the tabloid-quality twist of the UN director’s death.

  “Excuse me,” was all Jonathan said, and walked out of the office.

  He left the palazzo and made his way toward Piazza Venezia, up the stairs of the Capitoline Hill, and into the Roman Forum. The day was warmer but still overcast, and the ruins in the Forum were fairly empty. A young woman in a camel-hair overcoat with a blond ponytail stood opposite the Arch of Titus, staring at its pediment.

  Jonathan walked up and stood next to Emili. “I thought you’d be here.”

  Emili was startled, and her eyes brightened when she saw him.

  “Hi,” she said.

  After a stretch of silence, she turned to Jonathan. “Did you know that I saw you once after you left the academy? In New York, at the Metropolitan Museum.”

  Jonathan laughed uneasily. “I saw you, too. It was three months after I was thrown out of the academy. All my teaching offers had been pulled.”

  “You were giving tours of the antiquities wing.”

  “And working at Sotheby’s at night,” Jonathan said. “I was too embarrassed to say hello to you. I hoped you wouldn’t notice—”

  “I watched you give that tour for nearly ten minutes before you saw me. There you were, hanging on to the subject matter you loved with every thread of your being, even though you had every reason to walk away. I never wanted to be with you more.”

  “Well?” Jonathan said, looking into her eyes.

  “I’m afraid Sharif was right about one thing. History is fragile, written in fire. Once it’s out . . .” she trailed off. “What we had is lost, Jon”

  “But we’re quite good at finding things together.”

  “Remember how I explained to you that in preservation circles, sometimes we oppose new excavations? We’re excited about the possibility of archaeological finds like everyone else, but we also understand what it means to maintain the ruins once they are dug up. Often, they degenerate in a matter of weeks more than they did in thousands of years.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Let’s not disturb the past, Jon.”

  As Emili walked away, Jonathan realized that her feelings for him had been sewn up by the invisible layers of sediment over the last seven years. Like the ru
ins beneath that artichoke field in southern Italy, her emotions were now only faintly recognizable from the surface.

  She turned around. “Remember, Jon, in the ground at least the ruins are safe.”

  103

  After three days of heavy rain, the remains of Chandler Manning’s body washed up a half-mile down the Tiber. The carabinieri gave instructions for the body to be brought immediately to Rome’s municipal morgue for inspection. His corpse was to be used as evidence in the ongoing criminal investigation of Waqf Authority activity in Rome.

  Inside the morgue, a man posing as a pathologist ran his hands over the body. The coolness of the river water kept Chandler’s chewed flesh in better condition than it would have been had he been lost in the warmer season. Even so, the few intact portions of the body had a deep purplish hue and smelled of decay. Fungus had grown under his nails, and his ears were almost entirely eroded as a result of the aggressive pike perch that attempted to pull off what skin remained by the time the body washed into the Tiber basin. Early pathological examination could not explain the cause of the severe burns across the subject’s posterior region.

  The man posing as a pathologist wasn’t there to inspect the body. His training was in covert operations, replete with facial prosthetics, hair-pieces, and falsified documents. He was there to recover a document. The man wasn’t told of its historical importance. It was not his place to ask questions.

  Outside the morgue, a carabinieri car pulled up. Profeta got out, walked toward the front door, and displayed his credentials for the woman at the front desk.

  “We are here to see the body,” Profeta said, handing her the carabinieri’s request slip. “Manning, Chandler.”

  “One moment, the medical examiner’s office is completing their inspection.”

  “No one should be inspecting the body,” Profeta said. “There is an ongoing investigation.”