The Last Ember

by Daniel Levin

  “He said it was for health reasons,” the woman answered nervously, “because of the Tiber’s pollution.”

  “Let’s go!” Profeta swiveled around the desk. “I want all doors blocked!” The man posing as the pathologist felt under what remained of Chandler Manning’s wetsuit and there it was, still damp and folded in fourths. A laminated map of Rome, its edges blackened from fire and chewed by pike, still displayed Josephus’s path to the original Arch of Titus as marked by Chandler’s underwater pen.

  The man heard doors slam and looked up through the glass walls. Three young carabinieri officers charged the examining room. The man posing as the pathologist slid the body into the iron casement and ran toward the room’s other door, which led to an internal corridor ramp for loading and unloading bodies. The man was fully armed with a Bren Ten ten-millimeter automatic pistol beneath his lab coat and was carefully trained in urban chase warfare. Countless exercises, staged in corridors of abandoned buildings in the Negev, had imitated every possible surrounding, from hospitals to middle schools. But he took his hand off his pistol; his instructions were not to leave any trace of who sent him. A Bren ten-millimeter bullet was not offered on the black market; it would all but give away from which intelligence agency he came.

  “He is in the building,” Profeta said, “and wearing a lab coat. I repeat, he is dressed as a physician.”

  The door to the ramp was open and a hearse driver wearing a black cap was walking down the hallway for a pickup. The man grabbed the hearse driver, dragged him inside a utility closet, and threw his head against the metal shelving only hard enough to knock him unconscious. Within a minute, the man reappeared in the hallway, having exchanged his lab coat for the driver’s uniform. Amid the officers storming down the hallway, the man walked calmly out of the hall, down the ramp, then drove the black hearse away.

  In the center of Rome, the man parked the hearse outside Piazza Venezia and ducked into an anonymous alleyway. He crossed the street to a café and placed the folded map beneath a napkin holder on an outside table. Within seconds a woman wearing a broad-brimmed sun hat approached from the opposite direction, just as the intelligence handlers had planned. She took a seat, ordered an espresso, and reached for a napkin, imperceptibly moving the sketch from beneath the napkin holder. She slipped the map into a plastic protective sheathing in her inside jacket pocket.

  The woman was Eilat Segev.

  104

  Two Months Later

  The tour group was enraptured. In the antiquities wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Jonathan Marcus glided backward with his tie loosened, describing a statue of Protesilaos mortally wounded on the beaches of Troy. For the Elderhostel group present, Jonathan’s voice was around them like something vibrant, moisturizing. They gasped with delight, their cataract eyes ablaze.

  Jonathan stopped in the hall’s center and stood up on a stool. He diagrammed the breastplate of a Greek soldier on his wrinkled light blue dress shirt.

  “Ah, the fierce cuirass breastplate, most useful for . . . ?” Jonathan turned to the Elderhostel crowd. “Does anyone know what?”

  “Back support?” said an old man in an untucked madras shirt. The sticker across the breast pocket read PHOENIX SENIOR TOURS, and beneath that, in handwritten cursive, Mr. Feldheim.

  “Fair enough, Mr. Feldheim!” Jonathan said, broadening his grin. “You, sir, are Odysseus in your cuirass, a back as strong as ten men. Your Penelope is waiting! Ready the archers with Levitra!”

  The tour group laughed, swelling and stretching around Jonathan to the size of a street performer’s crowd, three people deep. Jonathan pointed at various artifacts around him, translating the sarcophagi and funereal steles from Latin and Greek.

  “Why aren’t the gods smiling?” a child’s voice asked from the crowd. Jonathan crouched to get close to the child, who looked up at the white marble gods above him. The crowd, quite large by now and spilling into the neighboring African wing, hushed at the question.

  “It’s a good question.” Jonathan smiled. “Why aren’t the gods smiling?” he repeated loudly for the crowd. “Well, in Roman art, gods don’t smile because they aren’t mortal,” he said.

  “But didn’t the Romans want to be gods?” said another voice from the crowd.

  “Oh, no,” Jonathan said. “Without mortality, there would be no such thing as bravery or heroism. And strange as it sounds, that’s why the gods don’t smile in Roman statues and the mortals do.” Jonathan paused, opening his arms. “Mortality means the despair of loss, but it also means the redemption of—”

  “Being found,” said a female voice in the middle of the gallery.

  The gallery was silent. Jonathan squinted at the silhouette in the foyer’s white daylight.

  And there, in the center of the museum’s vaulted corridor, wearing a camel-hair coat and a red scarf, was Emili Travia. Her eyes were bright and she appeared a bit jet-lagged, and it was precisely that touch of exhaustion that made her look more beautiful than ever.

  Jonathan hopped off the stool, navigating the crowd as he moved toward her.

  The tour group made a circle around them.

  “They let tour guides stand on stools here in the Met?” Emili said. “I thought there’d be a liability issue.”

  Jonathan grinned. “Being the one who decides that has its privileges.”

  He pointed at his name tag, and Emili read aloud, “Jonathan Marcus, general counsel, Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  After a moment Jonathan whispered to her, “I thought you said some things should remain in the ground. Something about lack of proper resources to sustain the excavation.”

  Emili straightened her back, a playful gesture of authority.

  “As director of the International Centre for Conservation in Rome, I can allocate as many resources as an excavation needs.” She moved her face closer.

  Jonathan hesitated, unexpectedly pulling his head back. “But what about the fragility of our past? In Rome, you told me that history is written in fire. That once it’s out . . .” He trailed off.

  “I still do think that,” Emili said. Jonathan tilted his head warily, but her smile warmed him to the core. “But to keep it aflame, we just need an ember.”

  Jonathan pulled her close and kissed her. With the sun pouring through the glass roof of the antiquity wing, they embraced as though in a spotlight, and struck exactly the pose of two ancient marble figures behind them, their lips pressed, limbs entwined, and the woman tilted back as though collapsing in his arms.

  The crowd erupted with applause.

  105

  In Piazza San Pietro, General Eilat Segev stepped out of a sedan without diplomatic plates. Her visit was not on any Vatican schedule. This covert meeting reminded her of the times before the Vatican opened diplomatic relations with the state of Israel, fifteen years earlier. A Swiss Guard official escorted her into a grand hall, where Cardinal Ungero Scipiono, the Vatican undersecretary for diplomatic affairs, awaited her. Cardinal Scipiono was middle-aged, bald, and sat in a grand Renaissance chair that dwarfed his small frame.

  “General Segev, it is an honor to finally meet you.” As was the custom, the undersecretary did not get up. “Thank you for all the work you have done in protecting Christian sites in the Holy Land. I understand your dedication is remarkable.” Undersecretary Scipiono spoke with his eyes turned toward the floor. Eilat Segev sensed his discomfort in meeting with a woman individually, but the sensitivity of the topic to be discussed precluded him from sending an administrator.

  Segev nodded in gratitude. “Thank you, Your Eminence.”

  He motioned for Segev to sit down.

  “I have sent numerous letters to your office, concerning the rampant destruction beneath the Temple Mount. They have gone unanswered.”

  The undersecretary was quiet. “As you know, no institution cares to intrude on the jurisdiction of another, General Segev. I’m afraid we will have to complete our own investigati
on regarding the alleged destruction beneath the Mount before responding.”

  “Your Eminence, we understand that all subterranean sites beneath the Jewish Ghetto of Rome are still within the Vatican jurisdiction, per the 1943 Concordat. Our archaeologists’ permits now have been denied repeatedly to excavate beneath the Porticus Octaviae and the Great Synagogue.”

  “General”—the undersecretary stood up—“as you know, all subterranean religious sites in Rome are within the sole discretion of the Vatican. Is that all?”

  “They are not Christian sites, Your Eminence.”

  “They are religious sites.”

  “You will not grant our researchers access beneath the Ghetto’s own synagogue?”

  “Such exploration would be exceedingly dangerous. Two months ago, the death of Mosè Orvieti, lost in the Tiber, tragically proved that. The subterranean corridors—even if they exist—are available for exploration at low tide only, and even then for short periods of time.” Undersecretary Scipiono tugged on his robe’s cincture and headed for the door. “There is unlikely anything of value beneath the Ghetto.”

  Segev stood up as he headed out of the room. “Then why over the last month has your security office installed high-technology surveillance over every manhole in the Ghetto, complete with motion detectors in the furnace room of the Great Synagogue to detect any unauthorized access to the subterranean passages?”

  The undersecretary turned around, smiling politely. “You are a determined people, General Segev. You have excavated a national identity for yourselves buried for more than two thousand years.” He stopped smiling. In his eyes flashed something dark. “But some things are meant to stay buried.”

  “We are merely asking for the Vatican’s assistance, Your Eminence.”

  “General, every nation—including the Vatican—understands what it must do to protect its own history.” With that he turned his back and stepped through a private door.

  Once in the anterior room, he turned to an assistant. “Follow her.”

  A plainclothes Swiss Guard known as a Vatican watcher trailed Segev as she walked across the piazza and down the Via della Conciliazione toward the Tiber. Segev turned the corner into a narrow alley. A half-minute later, the watcher rounded the corner to follow when he collided with a large man carrying a stack of books. The books scattered across the cobblestones. “Oh, my apologies!” the heavyset clergyman said. “Could you give me a hand?” The watcher looked up and it was too late. Segev was gone. The clergyman, Cardinal Francesco Inocenti, walked off, the books back in his arms.

  Undersecretary Scipiono flew into a rage when he heard the watcher lost Eilat Segev. A cheerful collision around a corner, a stack of books scattered on the street. It was a countersurveillance tactic older than Methuselah.

  “It is a coincidence,” one of his assistants said, trying to assuage him.

  “It is not a coincidence!” he said. “We are dealing with the Israelis here!”

  The undersecretary walked briskly across the hallway of the papal apartments to the Vatican surveillance room, where three Swiss Guard officers sat in front of their respective screens. “Were you able to pick her up on the cameras?” From the surveillance room, the undersecretary could observe every piece of cobble in Vatican City. A young guard nodded, zooming in the cameras of the quadrant, the block, and the square meter where General Segev was shown winding down the serpentine alleyways.

  Segev removed a map from her pocket. The one recovered from Chandler Manning’s body. About one thing, Segev thought, the undersecretary and I agree. Sometimes in protecting its own history, a nation must act alone. It was the reason Segev’s team had spent two months planning this operation.

  She whispered in Hebrew into her lapel, “I am heading down the steps of the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele.”

  A voice echoed back, “One minute twenty seconds until you intersect with the team, General.”

  The undersecretary watched this on the screen. “Why is she speaking into her lapel? Zoom in.”

  The camera frames zoomed in on Segev. The screen captured her turning a tight corner and walking briskly down a side street. Suddenly the screen went completely black.

  “What is that?” the undersecretary screamed. He wheeled around to one of his assistants. “Is that a coincidence?” The young guard frantically flipped buttons, trying to find the technological reason. Just as suddenly, the picture returned.

  “It must have been litter in the wind. Perhaps a plastic bag, Your Eminence,” said the young guard, his eyes returning to the screen. Eilat Segev was not there. The young guard shook his head. “Excellency, we’ve lost her.”

  High above the alleyways, where the camera mysteriously malfunctioned, the nun from the Sisters of Zion Monastery in Jerusalem moved along the roof, reentering the top-floor staff quarters for nuns who run the papal household. She had thrown her shawl over the surveillance camera for a moment, and now rewrapped it around her shoulders. Proudly, she watched Segev from the rooftop, helping her to do something the Church should have done a long time ago.

  Segev approached the riverbank. An old fishing boat, a gozzo, slowed and an intelligence operative threw a bowline to the shore as Segev stepped on the boat. “When you have a chance, please thank Cardinal Inocenti and the sister for their help. If only all men and women of faith were such friends to us.”

  Traveling down the Tiber, Segev could see on her right the synagogue in the dusky light. The undersecretary was right; the tide was low enough to explore beneath the Ghetto for only a few hours a day. That was precisely why this operation required two months of preparation. Segev’s team had planned to execute the extraction at high tide, rather than low tide, in order to use divers with propellered underwater platforms to move the object through the full pipes of the Cloaca Maxima directly into the river.

  Segev walked toward the cabin of the boat.

  “What is the progress of the Shayetet?” The Shayetet were the Israeli version of Navy SEALS, Israel’s most elite commandos.

  “They are through drilling, and the divers are ready to extract the artifact from the bottom of the arch.”

  As she spoke, Segev stepped into the boat’s cabin, which had been converted into a state-of-the-art control room. Flat-screen monitors displayed the progress of three divers drilling beneath the giant underwater arch. “All the logistics are going as planned,” a young technician said in Hebrew.

  Another man hurried down the metal rungs leading into the control room.

  “General,” he said, “we have just received word that the Vatican has mobilized their Swiss Guard. They are searching the riverbanks. It will only be minutes before they discover this boat. We must go.”

  “We are not going anywhere,” Segev said. On the screen, she could see underwater sparks from the divers sawing through the bottom of the arch.

  “We’re inside the arch, General. It’s dry in here,” said one of the divers. On the screen, Segev watched the diver’s helmet light pierce the blackness.

  She watched the divers lower the enormous glittering lamp from the bottom of the arch onto the propeller-driven platforms. As carefully rehearsed by these men in dive tanks on an Israeli military base, the lamp’s rightmost branch had been fitted with a Lucite orb, pressure-proofed to a hundred meters and custom-fitted to create a continuous flammable atmosphere underwater for up to three minutes. With waterproof silicon, they sealed the orb to the last branch of the menorah. Inside the Lucite, the flame flickered, but continued to burn.

  “The fire has been transferred successfully, General.”

  Within the gozzo’s cabin, all activity ceased and the technicians gathered behind Segev to watch the history being made. Segev touched the screen. That flame has been guarded for over two thousand years. In the blue-black water she could see the shadowy contours of the menorah’s seven golden branches being lowered onto the underwater vehicle specially crafted for this extraction, a vehicle just wide enough for its propellers to naviga
te the pipes leading into the Tiber.

  Segev knew this was the only operation she would ever run where the commandos were selected not only for their operational skills, but their kohenite lineage.

  “Is Orvieti there?” Segev said.

  “His body is right here, General. It was in the chamber, lying right beside the menorah,” said another diver into his headset. “We cannot put Orvieti’s body on the propeller platform. It is too much weight.”

  But Eilat Segev was a military woman at heart and the Israeli Defense Force’s reverence for the remains of the fallen was unparalleled.

  “Then carry him,” Segev said, “but do not leave him behind.”

  “General,” a technician in the control room said, “we must leave the body. We have only another two minutes for the flame to survive in the Lucite case.”

  “Work faster,” Segev said into the microphone. “Mosè Orvieti traced his lineage back to the slaves of Titus. His ancestors have been in Rome since Jerusalem was sacked two thousand years ago. We’re not leaving him behind.”

  The loud sound of gearshifts filled the control room. A portion of the hull had been refitted with a large hatch that now opened beneath the boat, allowing the divers to enter invisibly from the depths of the Tiber. Everyone in the control room fell silent, gathering around the open hatch. The lights lining the underwater hatch reflected off the menorah’s golden surface with the incandescence of a rising sun. Segev knew that no one other than her and her team would ever know of this operation.

  Beneath the surface of the water lapping inside the hull, she saw the limp frame of Mosè Orvieti being carried by two divers, as well as the enormous gleaming artifact beside him.

  “Two thousand years you both have been in exile,” she whispered.

  Segev’s eyes glanced at Mosè Orvieti’s body and then focused back to the menorah’s last branch, its flame glowing inside the Lucite orb as it rose out of the Tiber’s blackness. The menorah’s sheer scale became visible as its massive golden branches broke through the water’s surface.