by Paul Sussman
'Sixteen years to the day after Carter found Tutankhamun. Ironic, when you think about it: the two greatest finds in the history of archaeology made on exactly the same date. Although ours was the more important of the two. By far the more important. Almost made all the lies and betrayal worth it, just to be there.'
There was another commotion behind them –
voices, the slap of feet on stone – and a group of tourists processed into the Rotunda, all dressed in identical yellow T-shirts. She barely registered them.
'Yes,' the old man mumbled, 'almost made the lies worth it. Almost. Not quite.'
He grunted and, raising a trembling hand, wiped at the corner of his mouth where a bulb of spittle had gathered in the angle between upper and lower lip.
'It was on a sandstone block. Oblong, about so big.' He raised his other hand to indicate the dimensions. 'Early Byzantine, about AD 336, reign of Constantine I. Tripartite text in Greek, Latin and Coptic. An imperial proclamation, to the citizens of Alexandria. It had been reused in the foundations of a later Islamic building which was why it had survived in such good condition.'
Layla could feel her heart thudding, lungs twisting, like the times as a child when she'd tried to see how long she could hold her breath. Tell me, she willed him. Come on, tell me.
'It announced the completion and dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,' he continued. 'This church. Described Constantine's conversion to Christianity, his devotion to the one true God, his rejection of all other faiths. Standard stuff. Nothing extraordinary. Except for the last part. It was the last part that was important.'
The tourists in yellow T-shirts had gathered themselves in front of the Aedicule where their guide was explaining the history of the church. One of their number, a young man with greasy, shoulder-length hair, was taking digital pictures with his mobile phone, the apparatus making a pinging sound each time he took a shot.
'At first we couldn't believe it,' the old man whispered, his head shaking from side to side. 'The lukhnos megas, the candelabrum iudaeorum. We thought we must have got it wrong, that it was referring to something else. It was just too incredible. Everyone thought it had stayed in Rome, you see. That Gaiseric and the Vandals had carried it away in 455 when they sacked the city.'
Layla bit her lip, confused. 'I don't understand. Carried what? What do you mean?'
He didn't seem to hear her.
'Two hundred and fifty years it had been there, in the Templum Pacis, the Temple of Peace. Ever since Titus brought it back from the ruins of Jerusalem. Titus took it from Jerusalem, and two and a half centuries later Constantine returned it. That's what the inscription said. That's why it was so extraordinary. It recorded how it was brought back from Rome and buried in a secret chamber beneath the floor of Constantine's new church, an offering to the one true god, a symbol of Christ's eternal light.'
He held out a shaking hand.
'Right there, it was. Right there in front of us. For eight hundred years. Hidden. Forgotten. Until William de Relincourt found it. I've tried to tell them. Told them when I turned myself in at the end of the war, told them during the interrogations, have been telling them ever since. But they won't believe me, not after what I did, not without the evidence. And there is no evidence. Hoth kept everything. Right there in front of us it was.'
Layla could barely control her desperation. He was talking in riddles!
'What was?' she hissed. 'What was right there in front of us? What did Constantine bury underneath the church?'
He opened his eyes and looked towards her. There was a ping as the lank-haired tourist snapped another shot with his mobile phone.
'I told you. The candelabrum iudaeorum. The lukhnos megas. The lukhnos iudieown?
'But I don't understand!' Her voice seemed to fill the Rotunda, causing several of the tourists to look round at her. 'What is that? I don't understand!'
The old man seemed startled by her vehemence. There was a pause, then, slowly, he explained.
'Oh God,' she whispered when he had finished. 'Oh sweet God Almighty.'
She was still for a moment, too shocked to move. Then, eyes fixing on the man with the mobile phone, she got to her feet and moved quickly towards him.
LUXOR
The safe deposit box was ready for Khalifa when he arrived at the Bank of Alexandria, sitting on a table in a room in the bank's basement. He was shown in by the assistant manager, a middle-aged woman with rouged lips and a silk headscarf, who took him through some paperwork, unlocked the box's lid and left again, telling him that if he needed anything she'd be outside.
He waited until the door had clicked shut, fingers drumming on the table, the windowless room seeming to press in all around him. Then, with a deep breath, as if he was about to leap into a pool of icy water, he leant forward, opened the box and looked in.
A purse, that was the first thing he saw. A cheap plastic lady's purse sitting on top of a thick cardboard folder. He lifted out the purse and opened it, knowing instinctively, before he'd even examined its contents, that it was Hannah Schlegel's. There were some Egyptian pound notes and Israeli shekels; a laminated, green ID card; and, tucked away in a side-pocket, two small, passport-sized photographs, black and white, their borders frayed with age. He slipped them out and laid them side by side on the table. One was of a family group, a man, a woman and two small children – Hannah and Isaac Schlegel with their parents, he guessed – the four of them standing in the doorway of a large house, smiling and waving at the camera. The other showed the same children, older now, sitting on the back of a wooden cart, laughing, their legs dangling from the tailboard, their arms round each other's shoulders.
Khalifa had only ever related to Schlegel as an old woman, a battered, blood-covered corpse lying splayed on the floor at Karnak. Somehow these images of her as a child – so beautiful, so innocent, wholly unaware of the horrors awaiting her – upset him more than anything else he had yet encountered in this investigation. He stared at them for a long moment, struck by how like his own daughter she looked with her long black hair and scrawny legs; then, with a sigh, he slid the pictures and the purse to one side and turned his attention to the cardboard folder.
Whatever he had been expecting – and over the last few days all manner of madcap ideas had been going through his head as to what Hoth's mysterious weapon might actually be – the folder's contents proved an anti-climax. Interesting, certainly, intriguing even. Not, however, the sort of dramatic revelation for which he'd been bracing himself. Photographs and documents, that's what he found when he undid the ribbon with which the folder was bound and opened it up – a bulging, miscellaneous wodge of material that on closer inspection turned out to be less concerned with weapons and terrorism than archaeology and history. There were tracings, maps, photocopies of pages from books he'd never heard of (Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum; Massaoth Schel Rabbi Benjamin), photographs of everything from excavation sites and the interiors of churches to a large triumphal arch with a frieze in raised relief depicting a crowd of toga-clad men carrying a giant seven-branched lamp (the Arch of Titus in Rome, according to a note on the back of the picture). Nothing, however, not a single thing that was in any way suggestive of any sort of armament, something that could be used, as the Gratz woman had said, to 'help destroy the Jews'.
He worked his way through the collection, bemused, skimming some things, spending longer on others: a tracing of an ancient inscription in Greek, Latin and Coptic; a blown-up photograph of a handwritten Latin sentence ('Credo id Castelombrium unde venerit relatum esse et ibi sepultum esse ne quis invenire posset'); a protective plastic sleeve containing an aged sheet of yellowed parchment with six lines of script made up of an apparently random selection of letters and signed at the bottom with the initials GR.
What it all meant he had absolutely no idea, although the more he looked at the material the more he got the feeling its constituent elements were perhaps not quite as random as he had at firs
t assumed, that on the contrary they were in fact linked in some way, part of a single research project. What that project was he couldn't even begin to guess; nor, despite his fascination with all things historical, did he intend to start trying. What was important was that the further he got through the folder's contents the more convinced he became that Hoth's boast about possessing some sort of secret weapon, some terrible force that could be unleashed against the Jews, was in fact precisely that – a boast. The hollow, last-ditch bragging of a lonely, frightened, paranoid old man desperate to persuade those around him, and perhaps himself as well, that he was still someone to be reckoned with.
'You were bluffing, weren't you?' Khalifa murmured as he approached the bottom of the pile. 'There never was any weapon. You were bluffing, you murdering old fool.'
He smiled, relieved that all his fears seemed to have come to nothing, and, lighting a cigarette, picked up the final item in the collection – a brown manila envelope on the front of which was scrawled the word 'Castelombres'. Inside were a series of photos, black and white, the first few general shots of the grass-covered remains of some long-ruined building – a tall arched window was just about the only identifiable architectural feature – the remainder charting the digging of an excavation trench right in the centre of those remains, the work carried out by a group of overall-clad men using pickaxes and mechanical diggers.
He started to flick through them, quickly at first, as if he was shuffling a deck of cards, then more slowly as, despite himself, he began to be drawn into the progress of the dig. In each shot the trench was shown a little wider and a little deeper. At about three metres some sort of box started to reveal itself – gold to judge by the metallic glint of its surface – with nearby what looked like part of a curving branch or arm. A similar arm emerged beside it, then another, and then more of the box, which seemed to have a second, smaller box sitting on top of it, only it now appeared that they weren't boxes at all but rather the tiers of some elaborate pedestal from the centre of which a thick stem projected off in the direction of the curving arms. Inch by inch the curious object was coaxed from the ground, each stage of its painstaking emergence faithfully captured on film until eventually, in the very last of the photographs, it had been completely prised from the earth's grip, lifted from the trench and set on a tarpaulin in front of the stone window, the latter's arching outline seeming to surround and enclose it like the frame of a picture.
Khalifa stared at this last image for almost a minute, his cigarette burning away unnoticed between his fingers, his eyes narrowed. Then, leaning forward, he rifled through the papers he'd already looked at, pulling out the photograph of the triumphal arch with its frieze depicting a seven-branched lamp. He held the two photographs together, comparing their subjects, the lamp in the frieze and the lamp from the excavation. They were identical.
The curious meeting in the Cairo synagogue filtered back into his mind. It is called a menorah . . . The lamp of God. A symbol of very great power for my people. The symbol. The sign of signs.
He gazed at the two pictures, eyes flicking back and forth between them; then, slowly, he stood up and crossed to the door. The assistant manager was waiting for him outside.
'Is everything OK?' she asked.
'Fine,' he said. 'Fine. I was just wondering . . . is it possible to send a fax to Jerusalem from here?'
JERUSALEM
Layla leant her head back against the wall of the holding cell and gazed up at the ceiling, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around her ankles. She needed to pee, and flicked a glance down at the seatless aluminium lavatory bowl plumbed into the corner of the room. She resisted the temptation to use it. She knew she was being watched, and didn't want to give them the satisfaction of seeing her exposed in that way. She'd have to go eventually, but for the moment she could hold out. She sighed and pressed her thighs together, trying to ignore the insidious blind rectangle of one-way glass set into the steel door opposite.
They'd picked her up the moment she'd stepped out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, four hours ago now, a whole squad of them, including the detective who'd questioned her at her flat – gun to head, spreadeagled on the ground, handcuffed. She hadn't bothered to resist, knowing it would only make things worse for her. Back at the station she'd been left to stew for a bit, then interrogated – two hours, just her and the detective. This time she'd played along, told him everything: William de Relincourt, Gastelombres, Dieter Hoth, the Menorah – everything she'd uncovered these last few days. Not because she'd been scared – although she certainly hadn't felt comfortable, the way he'd sat there staring at her, eyes seeming to bore right the way through her skull and deep into the brain behind, clawing at her deepest thoughts. No, she'd co-operated because there was simply no longer any reason to go on lying. He already seemed to know about the Lamp; all the other details he could piece together by going through her notebooks, contacting the people she'd spoken to. Evasion would have been a waste of time. Her one, slim hope now, her only hope, was that he would realize the significance of the Menorah's discovery, the appalling impact it might have if it fell into the wrong hands, and would accept the offer she had made him right at the end of the interview.
'You need me,' she had said, holding his gaze, wrestling with it. 'I don't give a shit about the Menorah. But I do give a shit about what would happen if someone like al-Mulatham got hold of it. You have to let me help you. Because if al-Mulatham gets there first . . .'
She doubted she'd convinced him, but it was the best she could have done in the circumstances. The wheels had been set in motion. Whether she'd play any further part in the whole thing, however – that, as her father used to say, was something only God and deep blue sea could tell. All she could do now was sit and wait.
She squeezed her thighs tighter together and, leaning her forehead on her knees, closed her eyes, the screen of her mind filling with a disturbing and unsolicited image of a gold menorah from whose lamps, for some reason, sprang not rays of light but viscous gloops of sticky red blood.
On the opposite side of the door Ben-Roi gazed at her through the observation window, a hazy blizzard of thoughts swirling round inside his head. The Menorah, al-Mulatham, the newspaper article, Galia, aftershave – all jostled and collided within the crucible of his skull, appearing, disappearing, merging, disintegrating. Only one thought remained fixed and clear, standing firm at the centre of the maelstrom like a lone redwood in the eye of a hurricane, and it was this: the Menorah can help me.
How, he wasn't sure. Not yet. He had no clear plan in mind. All he knew was that this was somehow the opportunity for which he had so long been waiting; the means, if not of recovering his beloved Galia, at least of avenging her. The Lamp would be his weapon. And, also, his bait. Yes, that's how he would use it. As bait. A lure to draw out his lover's murderer. To bring him to al-Mulatham. Or to bring al-Mulatham to him.
He took a swig from his hip-flask and, turning away down the corridor, went back to his office, closing and locking the door behind him, crossing to his desk and pulling out the images the Egyptian had faxed over to him earlier.
'Dear God,' he mumbled, just as he had done when he'd first seen them. 'Dear God Almighty.'
He stared at the pictures, hands trembling with the magnitude of the whole thing; then, putting them away again, he picked up the phone and dialled. Five rings, then a voice echoed at the other line.
'Shalom,' he said, keeping his voice low, fingers tweaking at the miniature silver pendant around his neck. 'Can you talk? It's just that something's come up and I think you ought to know about it.'
JERUSALEM
At the heart of the Old City's Jewish Quarter, at the southern end of the Cardo, on public display inside a thick plexiglass cabinet, there stands a gold menorah – six sinuous arms curving outwards from a central stem, three to one side and three to the other, the whole rising, tree-like, from a tiered hexagonal base. The accompanying inscription explains t
hat it is a precise replica of the original Menorah, the true Menorah, the Menorah that the great goldsmith Bezalel made, the first such replica to have been cast since the fall of the Temple two thousand years earlier.
As the day faded and evening slowly drew in around him, Baruch Har-Zion stood in front of this reproduction and, throwing back his head, laughed – a deep, long, vibrant laugh of joy and gladness, such as he had thought he would never let out again. Only last night he had been praying for a sign, some assurance that what he was doing was right, that all the blood and horror were necessary. And now it had come. Clear, sharp, unambiguous. The true Menorah. After all these centuries. And to him it had been revealed. To him, of all people. He couldn't stop laughing. Behind him, Avi his bodyguard came forward a step.
'What do we do?'
Har-Zion raised a gloved hand and touched a finger to the plexiglass screen, his laughter gradually subsiding.
'Nothing,' he replied. 'Not yet. We wait, we watch. They mustn't know that we know. Not yet.'
Avi shook his head. 'I can't believe it. I still can't believe it.'
'That's what they all say, Avi – all those who are called by God. Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Jonah – all of them doubted at first. But it is His voice. He has revealed this great thing. And He would not have revealed it had He not intended it to come to us. It is the sign. It is the time. Blessed are we, for in our day we shall see the Temple rise again.'