by Jon Land
“Ever come across a woman named Florence Daws?”
She laughed. “I should say so. She taught grades four and five, as tough as they came. We all loved the way she talked. The boys made fun of it.”
“Her British accent.”
“That’s right. We had trouble understanding her at first.”
“You didn’t keep in touch with her by any chance, did you?”
“No,” the woman said, somewhat sadly. “We lost track of a lot of people after the school closed. That was three years before the town bought the property. But Florence Daws shouldn’t be too hard to find, I’d expect, if she’s still alive. Just ask at the church.”
“Church?”
“The First Parish,” the woman acknowledged, smiling reflectively. “It’s just down the street. She was the assistant pastor there.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 73
A
t the First Parish Church, a rough stone building with the look of an ancient castle, a young paster remembered meeting Florence Daws only once. So far as he knew she had taken up permanent residence at Mountainview, a rest home located well west of Lexington amid the Berkshire Mountains. He believed she was still alive.
It was a long but pleasant drive to the Berkshires down the Massachusetts Turnpike just over the border into New York State. Danielle and Ben stopped in town and asked for directions, after which they quickly found the rest home by following the signs for the Tanglewood music community. A long gravel road led to a circular driveway adjacent to a small lot designated for nonresidents. The home’s grounds were full of flowers and trees, the lawns beautifully manicured. The air smelled of lilacs and fresh-cut grass.
It was so quiet Ben was afraid to speak above a whisper. Danielle had suggested he proceed alone at this point. Too many strangers might well startle the old woman—Ben had already concluded that Florence Daws might well be over ninety by now.
A woman sat behind a reception desk just inside the entrance, and Ben noticed the walls were all outfitted with handrails.
“May I help you?”
“I wonder if I might be able to see Florence Daws.”
The receptionist looked at him suspiciously. “You’re not a relative.”
“No.”
“A friend?”
“Ex-student,” Ben said, smiling. “I won’t say friend, based on the grades she gave me.”
“Your name?”
“Ben Kamal.”
The wariness slipped from the receptionist’s expression, replaced by a smile. “Let me buzz the floor and see if she’s able. If you’d like to sit down for just a moment...”
Ben took a seat in a small reception area and paged absently through a magazine, while the woman spoke into the phone.
“Mr. Kamal,” she called when finished.
Ben rose from his seat and approached the desk again.
“You can take the elevator to the fourth floor. Someone at the desk there will be able to help you.”
* * * *
U
pstairs, Ben was ushered to the last room on the right-hand side of the hall. The door was open and the sweet scent of just sprayed air freshener, a flowery scent, drifted into the hall.
“Pastor Florence?” the duty nurse said from the doorway. “Your visitor is here.”
The nurse smiled as Ben slipped past her. The flowery air freshener might have made a dent in the room’s staleness but couldn’t disguise all of it. Pastor Florence Daws sat in a wheelchair by the window, which was closed in spite of the radiant day beyond. A pink shawl was wrapped around her shoulders, revealing gray hair combed to thinly cover a number of bald patches.
“I never had a student named Ben Kamal,” Florence Daws said in a surprisingly strong voice, not turning from the window.
“I lied downstairs.”
“What’s the truth?”
“I’m here about your brother.”
She looked at him for the first time. One of her eyes was coated with a milky paste, the other sharp and dark blue. Her skin had the fragile texture of thin wrinkled paper. “You’re not old enough to have been a student of his either, so don’t bother lying upstairs too. How old are you?”
“Forty.”
The old woman tried to scoff at him and ended up coughing. “My brother was dead before you were even born.”
“Some of his work may have survived him.”
With great effort, Florence Daws spun her wheelchair around to face Ben. “That work cost him his life.” Her voice cracked when she tried to raise it. Her hands looked like flesh-tinted bones atop the wheel mounts. “For what? For nothing.”
“Yes, I know,” Ben said, thinking about his nephew and another dig. “He was killed in Ephesus.”
“Is that what you’ve come about?”
“Have others come?”
“Not in a long time. They were the only ones who did come for quite a while.” Her one eye widened sadly. “I wish you really were an ex-student of mine. . . .”
“So do I; I might have done better in school.”
“Where are you from?”
“Dearborn, Michigan.”
“And originally?”
“Palestine. The West Bank. I moved back there five years ago.”
Florence Daws leaned forward in her wheelchair. “You came a long way to see me about a man you never met.”
“I’m here about the film he sent you from Ephesus, just before he was killed.”
The old woman’s lower lip dropped, her mouth lingering open to reveal dentures as shiny and white as pearls that looked misplaced amid the rest of her face. “No one’s ever asked me about that before.”
Ben felt a wave of excitement wash through him. He knew there was hope now. Even with the contents of the box gone forever, the scroll reduced to fine dust, he might still uncover proof of Winston Daws’s discovery.
“It was the greatest find of his career,” he resumed. “He sent you those pictures to preserve it in case something happened to him.”
“That’s not what he said in his letter, Mr. Kamal. He said in his letter I should hide the pictures forever if something happened to him, so no one else would be hurt. He was scared. In my letter back I begged him to go home to London.” Florence Daws looked down at her lap, then up again. “He never read it.”
“Did you follow his instructions?”
“I shouldn’t be talking to you about this. . . .”
“Your brother deserves the credit long due him for this discovery. He deserves a legacy.”
“My brother studied history, Mr. Kamal. He had no desire to become a part of it.”
“He became part of it when he was murdered fifty-two years ago, Pastor Daws. Do you remember what you said to me a few minutes ago?”
The old woman’s mouth dropped a little more. Ben could hear her breathing now, a thin wheezing sound.
“You said, ‘For what? For nothing.’ Do you really believe your brother died for nothing?”
“You don’t . . . you don’t think he did?”
“I don’t think it has to be that way. I think we can still make it right.”
“How?”
“He was killed because of what he had found in Ephesus by men who’ve been protecting their secret ever since. Your brother uncovered that secret. It’s in the photographs he sent you.”
The old woman’s lips came together, trembling. “I did what he told me. It was just two rolls of film. His letter said to have it developed and hide the pictures where no one would ever find them, to forget they existed until I heard from him again.” Her voice sank. “I never did.”
“Where did you hide the pictures, sister.”
“I tried to forget,” she said dryly, the words separated by a light cracking sound in her mouth. “All these years . . .”
“For your brother, Pastor Daws. This is the last chance you’ll ever get to help him. Where are those pictures?”
Florence Daws swiped her tongue across her lips and began to
speak.
* * * *
CHAPTER 74
T
he oldest Baptist church in the country?”
“It’s actually called the First Baptist Church in America, dating back to 1638,” Ben explained to Danielle just outside the car. “That’s where Florence Daws was transferred just after she received the package from her brother. Eventually, she came back to Lexington, but the pictures stayed where she hid them.”
“And, after all these years, you think they’re still there?”
Ben shrugged.
* * * *
T
hey retraced their route down the Massachusetts Turnpike, this time heading toward Providence, Rhode Island, where the First Baptist Church in America was located. Reaching Providence an hour after nightfall, Ben and Danielle found themselves battling snarled traffic in streets congested by a festival called “WaterFire” that had drawn thousands of people to the downtown area. Danielle finally squeezed their car into a space on a steep hill not far from the church they were seeking.
Ben took over the lead once they reached the majestic white wood building. They found one side entrance open during tonight’s festival activities. Once inside, Ben led the way up a set of stairs to the auditorium, where services at the church were actually held, toward the sounds of an organ softly playing.
Originally constructed in 1775, the auditorium reflected the generally plain New England meetinghouse style. It was laid out in a simple eighty-by-eighty-foot square with white walls, clear windows, and minus any crosses, statues, or icons. The fluted columns that rose above twin aisles on either side of the pews had been carved to look like classical pillars. A balcony brought the seating capacity to over twelve hundred, a staggering number for colonial times. Of these seats, though, none were occupied.
A number of the first-floor pews were numbered and private, dating back to days when they could be rented or purchased. A simple latch held them closed and many were adorned with small hidden drawers set before cushioned bench seats where personal items like eyeglasses belonging to the original pew occupants could be conveniently stored.
Ben stopped before the pew numbered 95, as Florence Daws had instructed, and lifted the small latch to open the waist-high door. It swung inward and he entered, leaving Danielle to watch as he quickly located the drawer and crouched down before it.
The drawer slid out smoothly on its dovetail joints, and Ben lay it on the cushion behind him before working his hand into the space revealed. He felt around briefly, finally feeling the shape of the envelope Florence Daws had taped to the wood of the drawer’s ceiling. Remarkably, that tape had withstood a half century and at least one major renovation. Ben pried the envelope free and brought it to him, wiping away the dust and flecks of stray paint. The clasp was of the string-tie variety and the string broke as soon as he tugged on it. The flap came free and he eased the contents out from inside.
The snapshots looked small and simple, the colors rich and the focus sharp on section after section of the scroll archaeologist Winston Daws had unearthed in Ephesus fifty-two years before. They were neatly ordered, and Ben was careful not to disturb them as he made a rough count of just over fifty pictures.
Even if he had been able to read the Hebrew or Aramaic in which the scroll was written, the words were too small to make out to the naked eye. A magnifying glass or, more likely, a microscope would eliminate that problem, although he could only hope Daws’s ancient camera was able to capture all of the faded writings scrawled on ancient parchment that had now withered into dust.
Danielle looked on behind him but Ben barely felt her presence. In his hands, he felt certain, was the means to prove the religion he had once believed in was based on a sham. Could Christianity survive the revelation of Christ’s surviving the crucifixion? Ben didn’t know, didn’t care. But these pictures he held in his hands could explain why so many innocent people, including his nephew, had been killed by Lorenzo’s renegade faction of the church.
Ben tucked the envelope into his pocket and eased himself in front of Danielle to lead the way up the aisle. They took the staircase back to the first floor of the church, where a man and a woman had just walked outside into the night.
A scream sounded as Ben and Danielle started to follow them through the door. Ben barreled outside ahead of her, saw the man crouched over the fallen body of his companion.
“She’s bleeding,” he muttered, his hand wet with blood. “I think she’s been shot. I think somebody shot her.”
People rushed over from the sidewalk to see what had happened. In the midst of the commotion, something caught Danielle’s attention, just a flutter that was there and then gone. Wasting no time, she grabbed hold of Ben and dragged him back into the darkness cast by the shadows of the church building.
“The gunman thought it was me,” she said softly. “I was supposed to be the one shot.”
“What?”
“And you right after me.”
“Gianni Lorenzo’s assassins wouldn’t have waited until we were outside.”
“No, but Israeli assassins would.”
Ben twisted her around so he could scan the area around them. “I warned you about coming with me, I warned you!”
“Let’s just get away from here, all right?”
Ben nodded and started to retreat farther back into the shadows.
“No!” Danielle grabbed hold of his arm. “This way, where there are people!”
She took the lead down the church walk and joined the mass of strollers heading for the sounds of the nighttime festival. The air was crisp and cool and laced with the pungent aroma of woodsmoke drifting up from Providence’s downtown area, where the masses of milling people were headed.
“How could they have found us?” Ben asked her.
“I don’t know. A leak. Somewhere.”
“Impossible.”
“Is it? Asher Katz knew we were coming to America. And why.”
“But Katz is loyal to Mordecai Lev, and Lev wants the pictures as much as I do.”
“Which explains why the Israelis waited until we had the pictures in our possession before they struck. They were acting on the orders of Moshe Baruch.”
“Who is somehow connected to Lev,” Ben finished.
“Exactly. Oil, everything comes back to oil.”
“But why would Lev care?”
“I don’t know, but Moshe Baruch does and he can’t take the risk that I’ll tell the world about the secret operation he was running.”
“Lev doesn’t care about the oil and Baruch doesn’t care about the scroll.”
“That’s right.”
“So what brought them together, Pakad? What are they really after?”
“We’ll have to make it out of here to find out, Inspector.”
They continued downtown toward ever thicker masses of people strolling the streets, often, it looked like, getting stuck in logjams of pedestrian traffic. The tight clusters were trying to weave their way along a complex of trails built into the bridge of walkways that crisscrossed the downtown district. The scent of woodsmoke grew stronger while the harmonic strains of music sharpened.
“We’ve got to stay in the crowd, follow the flow to escape,” Danielle instructed.
That flow took them onto a grass-covered park toward a mass of people gathered before a troupe of mimes performing on the steps of a monolithlike war memorial statue. Ben and Danielle swept behind the crowd as they applauded.
The tightest clusters of festival patrons, offering the best camouflage, moved in both directions down a walkway at the river’s edge. Ben realized the strange and haunting strains of music had their origins down here as well and moved with Danielle to join either of the flows.
Drawing closer, they saw the black water shimmering like glass, an eerie orange glow emanating from its surface. Boaters and canoeists paddled leisurely by. A water taxi packed with seated patrons sipping wine slid past, followed in the water by what looked like a
gondola straight from Venice.
But it was the source of the orange glow reflecting off the water’s surface that claimed Ben’s attention. He could now identify the pungent scent of woodsmoke as that of pine and cedar, hearing the familiar crackle of flames as he and Danielle descended a set of steps onto a promenade that ran directly alongside the river.