The Illumination

by Karen Tintori

  “Looks sort of like Hebrew.”

  “Hmmm . . . could be.” Natalie leaned in, trying to discern the tiny characters. “Or it could be Aramaic. The two sets of characters are very similar. Actually, the Hebrew alphabet developed from Aramaic. So if this is Aramaic . . .”

  Without finishing her sentence, Natalie jumped up and hurried to a kitchen drawer. She returned with a magnifying glass.

  “And if it is Aramaic—then what?” D’Amato prodded.

  “Then this pouch, at least, could prove to be very old.”

  “How old?”

  She raised a slim eyebrow. “Let’s just say Aramaic was the language Jesus spoke. And it was the primary language used to write the Jewish Talmud.”

  “You’re talking to a lapsed Catholic.” He grimaced. “If the nuns taught us anything about the Talmud, I probably had Penthouse hidden inside my comparative religions book that day. But it’s a compendium of Jewish laws, right?”

  She plucked the pouch from him, thinking back to some of her undergraduate course work. “That’s a fair summary. I’d describe it as an encyclopedia of Jewish civil and religious law, along with ethical teachings,” she answered. “It expounds on the Torah, recounting the sages’ debates and commentaries on its meaning. It’s actually many volumes, written by hundreds of Jewish sages over the course of four hundred years.”

  “And the time frame . . . ?”

  She met his gaze steadily. “Two thousand years ago.”

  He digested that a moment. “So, roughly the same time period as Jesus.”

  “Give or take. The sages began compiling the Talmud after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Up until then, all of the Jewish laws and traditions were passed down orally. But once the Romans destroyed the Second Temple—taking most of the Jews off to Rome as slaves—the sages decided it was high time they committed all of the oral teachings to writing.”

  “To preserve them . . . ,” D’Amato mused.

  “Exactly. For future generations. Particularly because the Jewish people was so scattered by then. Rome wasn’t the first captivity. Many Jews were carried off to Babylon when the First Temple was destroyed six hundred years earlier—and a good portion of them decided to stay on, even after the Persians eventually freed them. And, of course, there were some Jews who had never left Judea.”

  She bent over the pouch with the magnifying glass. “So it was imperative to put the laws in writing so that the Jews who were now separated from one another would remain on the same page . . . so to speak. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. She peered intently at the faded lettering swimming beneath the powerful prism. The brief handwritten inscription seemed to begin with the Hebrew letter tzadi, the alphabet’s ts sound. Still, Natalie knew from her archaeological work in Israel how similar some Aramaic letters were to Hebrew. This character could be from either alphabet.

  “Can you tell? Is it Aramaic?”

  “No, damn it.” She bit her lip. “Not without consulting someone proficient in both languages.”

  “Can you at least read what it says?”

  “I only recognize a few letters on this first line. This one looks like a resh—that’s the R of the Hebrew alphabet. But it could be either an Aramaic R or Y, because those characters are written similarly. The others here are too faded for me to make out.”

  “Faded—you mean with age?”

  “Or from the elements. But look.” Natalie’s voice hitched with excitement. “Part of the second line is darker and easier to read. I can make out a shin—and the word ends in a resh, like the one on the line above it, but the rest . . .” She shook her head in frustration.

  Suddenly she glanced up, eyeing him with new respect. “What made you think to look inside? I was so caught up in the pendant, I didn’t really focus on the pouch. The outside of it didn’t strike me as unusual, other than that it was painted to mimic the pendant. It’s so simply constructed—just a basic circle of leather with a drawstring to close it—I didn’t pay any attention to the inside.”

  “I’m a journalist.” He shrugged. “It’s my job to pay attention. To look at things from all sides. We like to turn things on their heads, and inside out. But go back a minute to what you were saying about testing the gemstones in the pendant. What were you planning to show me in that book?”

  Natalie set down the pouch, reached for the book, and forced herself to change gears. “I was starting to tell you that in the past we had to chip off a fragment of a gemstone if we wanted to check its authenticity. We’d need a piece of it to test its chemical properties in order to determine with certainty what it was. But now, with the help of powder X-ray diffraction analysis and raman spectroscopy, we’re able to define exactly what a sample is—and so much more. We can not only pinpoint the identity and age of a gem, but we can zero in on its place of origin—sometimes even the mine it came from—and all without dismounting it, or doing it any damage.”

  “In other words, you’ve got ways of peeking inside this thing without sawing it open. How do you do that? Laser scanners?”

  Natalie skimmed to a section halfway into the book before holding out the page for his perusal. “Here’s how. Check out these photos.”

  D’Amato took the book from her and studied the page. He’d changed from the sport coat and sweater he’d worn earlier into straight-legged jeans, a khaki shirt, and a light beige windbreaker. Natalie noticed the laserlike concentration with which he scrutinized the series of photos taken from various angles. They were close-ups of a primitive statue studded with tiny red gems.

  “This artifact was found five years ago in a cave in Iran.” She ran her finger below the lines of text. “The gemstones on it were dated and analyzed using ion beam techniques—particle-induced X-ray emission, or PIXE for short. PIXE determined they were definitely rubies and contained inclusions found only in certain regions in the Middle East. Archaeometry pinpointed the age and the provenance, proving this statue indeed came from ancient Mesopotamia. And—it was all done without removing a single stone or submitting the statue to the damaging effects of chemical analysis.”

  “Pretty impressive.” He picked up the pendant. “So where do we go to analyze this?”

  Where indeed . . . ?

  Natalie hesitated, chewing on her lip. How about to the police? she thought. Part of her wanted to call Detective Henderson back and simply hand the pendant over, but that meant facing ramifications from the police and her employers for having lied to him. She might even lose her job because she’d tried to protect her sister.

  “There’s an Ion Beam lab at UAlbany, but I’m not sure that’s the next step,” she said reluctantly. “If Dana was killed and Rusty is missing on account of this pendant, maybe we should go to the police instead. Although that might prove problematic. . . .”

  She explained how she’d dodged Henderson’s questions about the amulet, allowing the detective to conclude that Ski Mask hadn’t been after it. “Because at the time, I never suspected he’d broken in because of the pendant. It’s only now that I’m starting to wonder if that was his purpose all along. If he knew that Rusty had brought it to the museum . . .”

  “Forget about the police.” D’Amato snapped the book shut with a thud. His eyes darkened with purpose, like a hunting dog’s after picking up a scent. “If this pendant is linked to an international murder, and to an interstate missing persons alert, and if it is an antiquity taken from Iraq, then the scope of any investigation will go way beyond the NYPD. I’ve got a better idea.”

  She stared at him, uneasy, waiting.

  “We call a contact of mine at the FBI.”

  He began scrolling through the list of contacts in his cell phone. He paused and glanced at her, tacitly waiting for her assent.

  The FBI. Natalie felt numb. She looked at the pendant and the pouch with its tiny inscription, seeing them through bleary eyes.

  Dana died for this? Why? How? I need to know.

  “
Go ahead,” she heard herself say in a voice that sounded like a wan imitation of her own. “Call the FBI.”

  16

  FBI Special Agent Luther Tyrelle sat across from Natalie at the coffee shop, sipping his second cardboard cup of chai tea and studying her with a tiger’s caramel-colored eyes. He was a muscular black man with a receding hairline and a neck roughly the circumference of a gallon-size milk jug.

  In between sips he scribbled notes on the pages of a small, bound, government-issue notebook as Natalie outlined how she’d come to receive the pendant and her assessment of its possible value. D’Amato sat silently between them at the small round café table, barely touching his extra-large decaf, black, three sugars.

  When Natalie fell silent, D’Amato inched his chair closer to the table. “My gut says there’s a connection between Dana’s contact with this pendant and her murder in Iraq, and with Rusty Sutherland’s disappearance after he handed it off at the Devereaux.” He pushed the pendant from the center of the table to Tyrelle. “Not to mention that on the same day, presto, we have someone breaking into the Devereaux—and it turns out the only thing the thief hones in on is this.”

  “An amulet designed to ward off the evil eye,” Tyrelle mused, lifting it by the chain. “You wouldn’t believe how many of these eyes I saw in Turkey last year. They’ve got blue-eye beads hanging everywhere.” The FBI agent shook his head and set the necklace carefully down on the table. “Even their national airline has huge eyes painted on the tails of their jets. It’s wild.” He leaned forward.

  “They’re so leery of the evil eye that some villagers actually defaced ancient cave murals there—scratched the eyes right off the damn faces. They destroyed irreplaceable ancient art just to stop those eyes from staring out at them from the cave walls and maybe putting a hex on them.”

  “In Cappadocia.” Natalie nodded. “I’ve been there. But the evil eye isn’t a big deal only in Turkey, Agent Tyrelle. It’s a powerful superstition in a substantial portion of the world. The belief that the evil eye has the power to inflict harm, and the use of amulets like this pendant and those beads you saw to ward it off, dates back even to biblical times.

  “It’s the reason people began painting their eyes back in ancient Egypt. It wasn’t because Cleopatra thought it was glamorous. The Egyptians believed the curse from the evil eye entered the body through either the eyes or the mouth, so both men and women outlined their eyes with kohl for protection as a way of mirroring back the image of the eye. It’s why Egyptian women tinted their lips—to prevent evil from entering through their mouths. Fear of the evil eye permeates the entire Middle East and the Mediterranean, and on into Africa and Western Europe.”

  “I’ve got news for you,” Tyrelle said. “It reaches into South Carolina, too. I’ve seen plenty of pale turquoise window shutters down there outside of Charleston, where my grandmother and aunties live. They all paint their shutters blue, convinced that that color has the power to ward off evil spirits. I suppose that’s the same sort of thing.”

  “Well, blue’s the key color when it comes to the evil eye,” Natalie said. “In the Arabic world people with blue eyes are often suspected of possessing the evil eye, probably one reason amulets to deflect the eye are predominantly blue as well. Sort of like fighting fire with fire.”

  D’Amato lifted his coffee cup. “Well, we Italians use red to protect us. You should see how many red-ribboned horseshoes my grandmother has hanging in her house in Long Island.”

  “Jews use red for protection, too,” Natalie said. “There’s a long tradition of tying red ribbons on their babies’ cribs to protect the infants from the evil eye.”

  “Like the red kabbalah strings people wear on their wrists,” Tyrelle commented.

  There was a pause as the FBI agent drained the last of his tea. “We’re getting offtrack here. Let’s go back to this pendant. Just how valuable do you think it might be, Dr. Landau?”

  “I don’t have enough data yet to give you a figure, Agent Tyrelle. All I know is, it’s not the trinket my sister thought it was.”

  “I think it’s valuable enough that someone killed Dana because of it,” D’Amato interjected, “and then tailed Sutherland all the way from Iraq to get their hands on it.”

  Tyrelle shook his head. “Slow down, D’Amato. You’re making some pretty big leaps here.” He leaned back in his chair. “First of all, we don’t know that Sutherland has met with foul play. Maybe he’s just gone AWOL. Maybe his disappearance has nothing to do with Dr. Landau’s sister. On the other hand, maybe it does—but not because they both came in contact with this pendant. Could be the two of them made some enemies in the course of their work, or uncovered some dirt on somebody who didn’t want it exposed—”

  “Then explain why the thief in the Devereaux museum was interested in only one thing,” D’Amato countered. “Getting this away from Natalie.”

  Tyrelle threw down his pen. “You’ve got speculation, D’Amato, that’s all you’ve got. Not one shred of evidence. So I’m not clear what you’re looking for from me.”

  “Just be a sounding board, Luther. Off-the-record.”

  “Go on.”

  Natalie and D’Amato exchanged glances. “Natalie has some legal concerns about this pendant,” D’Amato told him.

  “How so?” Tyrelle’s brows drew together in a frown as Natalie hunched forward.

  “I’m worried that it might be an antiquity that shouldn’t have left Iraq. That’s only a guess,” she added quickly. “I have no idea how this necklace came into my sister’s hands. Since her death, I haven’t had a chance to check it against my museum’s database of missing antiquities, but if it does show up there, I’d appreciate your assistance in giving it back.”

  The FBI agent exhaled and folded his arms. “So you’re unofficially telling me this might be stolen property.”

  D’Amato shrugged. “More or less.”

  Frowning, Tyrelle answered him in a voice that was as smooth as honey-laced hot whiskey. “Then I’ve unofficially heard you.” He turned to Natalie. “But the instant this turns up on either your database or ours, Dr. Landau, we’re on the record.”

  Natalie breathed out a sigh of relief. “Thank you, Agent Tyrelle.”

  D’Amato tapped on Tyrelle’s small notebook. “Getting back to my theory, Luther—what if I’m right?”

  “Like I said, no evidence, D’Amato. But for argument’s sake, say the pendant is the common link. Then I’d say whoever’s after it has some pretty powerful resources and won’t give up until they get it.”

  Tyrelle squinted at the dark gold pendant, then looked at Natalie sitting silently, twisting her small paper napkin between her fingers.

  “One thing I can do—order the manifests for the flights out of Baghdad on the day Sutherland left, then check the passenger list. See if someone on it sets off any alarm bells. And until we can rule out whether this pendant is a missing antiquity, I’ll keep it secured at headquarters.”

  He was already extending a hand toward the pouch and necklace, but Natalie shook her head and scooped them up.

  “I’d rather you didn’t. It’s my final gift from my sister. Until we know whether or not it’s stolen, I want to hang onto it.”

  “You can take all the pictures you want, Luther,” D’Amato interjected, as the FBI agent frowned.

  “Your cell phone takes pictures, doesn’t it?” D’Amato pressed dryly.

  Tyrelle shot him a dark look. “Government issue. Of course it does. But on the chance your theory is right, D’Amato, I seriously recommend that Dr. Landau, for her own safety, turn this over to the bureau just until . . .”

  “No.” Natalie had to make him understand. She pushed back her chair and stood up, clutching the golden pendant even more tightly between her fingers. “Not yet. Not until we know something definitive. This is what I do, Agent Tyrelle,” she said quietly. “I have colleagues who can test and appraise the amulet, and I’d like to be in on the process. Please, until y
ou can verify that this belongs to someone else, I’d like to keep it.”

  “I have to tell you, I’m not sure you’re making the right decision,” the FBI agent countered.

  “It’s her call, Luther.” D’Amato came to his feet and shrugged into his windbreaker. “So, you planning to get a few shots of this thing before we take off, or are you going to commit it to memory?”

  Tyrelle snorted, and snapped six close-ups of the pendant from as many angles, plus three of the pouch and its inscription, then e-mailed them from his cell back to his computer at 26 Federal Plaza.

  “Sit tight until noon,” he advised Natalie as she slipped on her black leather jacket. “I should have the manifest by then. I’ll get back to you.”

  Tyrelle left the coffeehouse first, his strides long and purposeful. He seemed oblivious of the light rain that had begun to spatter the pavement. Natalie paused at the door, and her eyes met D’Amato’s troubled ones.

  “I’m not sure what to wish for here. Aside from wishing my life had a ‘restore’ command, like the one on my computer. I’d love to wipe out everything that’s gone wrong in the past two days, and go forward with Dana still alive. I feel like I’m living in a nightmare.”

  “Yeah, know that feeling.” He pushed open the door, his expression shuttered.

  They’d snagged a parking space near an art gallery down the street. As they retraced their steps through the rain-misted night, Natalie noticed D’Amato’s gaze sweeping the street. He glanced from the all-night drugstore to the parked cars gleaming beneath the streetlights, skimming the low-lit doorways, then lingering on a woman walking toward them holding an oversized umbrella. He looked tense. Shivering in the damp air, Natalie wondered just where D’Amato’s nightmares came from. Maybe the pain he suffered, the urge to pop a pill to escape it.

  Despite his friendship with Dana, Natalie knew very little about him. But Jim D’Amato struck her as a man more given to questions than answers, and for all those he’d asked her, dozens of questions—about her work, about Dana, about the pendant—he’d shared next to nothing about himself. Which is fine, Natalie thought, because my brain is on overload as it is.