“Let’s hurry, Papa. I don’t think mother should be out in this. It’s too hot.”
His father gazed at the water as if he hadn’t heard. His head was bent from years of study, his lips moving in a prayer that Ari had once known but long since forgotten. A few words came back to him, fragments only. Instinctively he took his white cotton kippah from his back pocket and put it on. Alongside his father he muttered what he could remember.
“Who is like God?…he will return…he will conquer…he will cast our sins into the depths of the sea…”
The praying did not last long. Then his father put his hands in his coat pockets, removed some old coins, and tossed them toward the river. The coins clattered on the rocks—one of them rolled into the green water. After a moment, Ari realized he had forgotten to bring coins to throw. He had nothing to represent the sins of the old year, nothing to cast off into the river at the beginning of a new year. His mother pulled at his sleeve. She filled his hand with coins from her coin purse; he gave her a thankful look and threw them into the water. One by one they shot into the current with a satisfying splash, and Ari’s mother clapped delightedly.
“So we start again, clean again. Perhaps this will be the year…the last year,” the old man murmured as the three of them struggled back to the car. Behind them, a couple of Arab boys emerged quietly from the brush, already on their knees in the ditch retrieving the coins.
Ari’s little hybrid car strained up the hills out of the Jordan valley toward the city. It would take much longer to return, even though the petrol engine had fired up. Afraid of overheating the engine, he switched off the air conditioner and hoped the fan would do the job.
“You will destroy us.” His father spoke again, this time more quietly than before, and more gently. Ari wasn’t sure if he was trying to reason with him or just trying to spare his mother by taking a milder tone. “You don’t see. People died for this land, for God, for Israel. You go to parties on the Sabbath, Israel will die. God will close his eyes to us again while they fire their bombs at us. The Muslim says to himself, ‘Israel does not believe. Israel does not observe the law,’ but some of us are still believers and we will see Israel cast into the sea because we have lost our roots.”
He had been quiet for a moment, then even more insistent: “You are my son. You must do what must be done. Repentance. Prayer. A deed of charity. These are your duties now, to prepare yourself for the high holy day. To purify yourself.”
The car was stifling, and his father’s voice heated in its softness; but then the old man stiffened and fell silent for the rest of the journey. Ari knew he had been a long disappointment to his father. Ari was to be a scholar, a rabbi. But although he learned the books, they didn’t interest him. So then Ari was to be a doctor. “Study your chemistry. A doctor must know chemistry.” Actually, chemistry had intrigued him—much of it he still remembered—but it had led him not to medical school but to a crime laboratory where he worked for a summer. And from the lab to the school of criminology and the detective force. His father thought of him as soiled.
Ari was glad to climb out of the car at last in front of his parents’ small house in West Jerusalem, the house where he had grown up. The air here was cooler after the journey up from Jericho.
All at once he felt the GeM droning in his shirt pocket. The sensation brought him back to the moment. The crowd had calmed as the Maccabi victory was assured, but there was still too much noise to hear clearly. Ari popped a wireless earpiece in one ear and covered both ears with his hands. Miner and Toad looked at him apprehensively.
“Now?” he called. “Yes. They’re here. I’ll bring them with me.”
“We’ve got to go,” he said, replacing the GeM in his pocket.
“Where?” Toad asked.
“Haifa.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it,” Miner groaned.
They made their way along the benches and up to the stadium exit, blocked by delirious boys and girls dancing up the aisle dressed in various shades of blue and yellow. Star of David flags were flung high in the stadium—a gesture Ari had not seen in a long time. One dark little woman in blue tights threw her arms around Ari as he fought past her. His white kippah came off, and he stopped only long enough to retrieve it. Behind them air horns signaled the victory of Israel over Spain. The match was over. The horns reminded Ari uncomfortably of the shofar, the New Year’s trumpet.
Outside the stadium a circle of ultra-Orthodox Jews chanted and waved protest signs as the crowd flowed from the exits. One of the Orthodox blocked Ari, shouting at him about desecrating the holy day, inviting the judgment of God upon Israel. Suddenly angry, Ari nearly struck him, but when the pale, meager face filled with fear, he shouldered the man aside and went for his car.
Leonardo da Vinci Airport, Rome, 2250h
An official limousine was waiting at the curb, and the driver leaped to open the door for the head of Interpol and his guest as they came out of the terminal. Police stood everywhere like grim Roman statues, bulky in their bulletproof parkas; security ribbons fluttered and travelers waited everywhere, immobile and despairing in long queues that led nowhere. It was the typical official response to a disaster: a futile, after-the-fact show of force.
Maryse Mandelyn slipped into the back seat and sat erect against the opposite door. Kane took off his overcoat despite the cold and watched out the window the rows of police checking passengers.
“Stupid waste of time,” he muttered.
Maryse had learned little more on the plane trip from Paris to Rome. Kane did not like to talk in public, nor did his blue-suited bulk and stern face invite conversation. Intelligence poured through his barely visible wireless earpiece every hour of the day with only a few terse responses from him to his sources. To her, as ever, he revealed nearly nothing. It was not so much from self-importance nor the need for secrecy that he kept silent; it was a kind of economy—a dislike of wasted breath, wasted thought, wasted energy. And intense impatience—what one of his colleagues once called Kane’s “inner commando.” Maryse looked out the window and smiled at the darkness.
He took out his tiny silver GeM, snapped it open and waited for the pinging noise that indicated no surveillance. A tinted window separated them from the driver. They were alone.
“Let me give you a little more background,” he began, briskly. She covered her smile.
“A little more might be helpful.”
He ignored this and went on, talking as though reading from a dossier. “We’ve been called in on this, as I said, because of the theft of the Acheropita. The painting was secured behind a steel mesh grill and mounted on steel braces on the wall above the main altar. When the Vatican people got into the chapel, it was gone. It had been carefully detached.”
“When did they notice it missing?”
“Almost at once, apparently. The timeframe for removing it was nil. It had to have been taken down before the assassination.”
“Do you think there’s any link between the theft and the murder?”
“It looks obvious, but you never know.”
His answer disturbed a wound within her. Theft and murder disconnected again, inexplicably. She looked at him, and into a cold, painful past where once there had been warmth.
Kane had fallen silent. She watched his profile against the window. In the space between them he had set his overcoat as a kind of barrier. The old worry about him surfaced, about his loneliness, which she knew was as stringent as hers. Although that empty place could not now be crossed, she remembered when things had been different.
Kane had been friend, teacher, mentor…but now, away from all that, she could do work that satisfied her and live without the old fear. A formless melding of art and the church had a grasp on her mind that she could not define in words—rather, she saw pictures. The North Rose of Chartres. Giotto’s earnest angels. The Murillo Madonnas in the Louvr
e. The Pietà of Bruges by Michelangelo. And the Acheropita. She had always lived under the warm shadow of these images, and the past few years had gradually taken the tang of death from them.
To think of the Acheropita lost brought back the taste of fear. So she had surprised herself by coming along. It was partly the pull of duty—Kane’s “resource” logic was correct. Hundreds of scholars knew more than she, but few had her experience, or her will. There was, of course, more to it than that—a quiet, childhood reverence for the Church that still lived in her and which she had been trying to coax back to life like a forgotten plant still too tender to bear disruption. The Christ and his Vicar taken at once? She felt a cold wind on her private religion.
Abruptly, Kane resumed his briefing. “The security sweep last night were the last people to see the icon in place. They’ve been questioned and noticed nothing out of order. Everything was locked up after that. The chapel is equipped with motion sensors and a standard alarm system, but there were no alarms of any kind during the night. This morning, the staff opened the chapel for the Monsignor, who went in to prepare the altar for mass—which he did alone, by the way.
“Apparently access to the chapel is limited. It’s called the Sancta Sanctorum—Holy of Holies in English—and has functioned as the Pope’s private chapel since the Middle Ages. That’s why only Chandos went inside this morning. The security lines around the building were up by then, so the Vatican assume no one else went in or out.”
Maryse began to relax. The late hour usually brought no slackening in the mad Roman traffic, but tonight it was suppressed—the only vehicles they passed belonged to the police. The quiet of Kane’s voice and the soft hum of the hybrid motor combined to make her sleepy. She didn’t protest that she knew all about the famous icon and its medieval setting—she had seen it once on a visit arranged by the Vatican.
As she closed her eyes she tried to see again the face of Jesus, benignly pleading from within the radiant silverwork of the frame, glistening as though still living in the wood. No human hand had made it, the story went—its origin was lost—but medieval artists had encased it in silver and curators had entombed it under iron bars. Although Romans had for centuries paraded it once a year through the city, the icon had long since been permanently joined to the altarpiece of the Pope’s chapel as the holiest relic in all the Christian world. It was said to be the face of Christ himself, drawn spontaneously by an angel’s hand. Now gone, empty, and the Pope shot to death at the altar. An uneasy vision came to her of the glory of God departing the temple. Her eyes fluttered momentarily open at this thought.
Then she closed her eyes again and let sleep overtake her—she would need energy for what would undoubtedly be an all-night ordeal. Kane was not a man to let time or criminals escape.
The Marine Highway near Haifa, Israel, 2300h
The electric engine of Ari’s little hybrid whirred along at nearly 150 kilometers an hour, quickly covering the distance from Tel-Aviv to Haifa. There was little traffic to slow him as he sped past invisible Crusader ruins and Roman bridges in the late darkness. The lights of Haifa already pooled around the great shadow of Mount Carmel. His two friends snored lightly, unconcerned—they had worked impossible hours for years together and this midnight assignment was nothing new.
But Ari was listening to the intel buzzing in his ear. The thing had gone from a nuisance to an intrigue. What puzzled him was what was not being said—there were uncharacteristically long spaces and hesitations in his chief’s voice. She was usually a garrulous woman; four or five times a day her smoked-out voice scoured his ear at high speed and without interruption. But tonight she halted, seemed to be waiting for signals from someone else. The fact that names and specific details were left out of the conversation was not surprising—such things weren’t mentioned on air. Still, why the long pauses?
The basic facts were simple. There had been a break-in at Technion, Israel’s center for the advanced study of science and medicine, and a faculty member had been shot to death. The maintenance staff had discovered the crime only after opening the center at sunset, at the end of the religious holiday. The electronic register showed the individual had entered the building early in the evening but had not left it. No one else appeared on the board.
“That’s no mystery,” Ari said. “That just means the subject went in with him, and he didn’t register him…or her.” Ari was quick; that was why the woman with the acrid voice sent him into situations like this—that and the peculiar intelligence of his team.
“The Technion people have secured the site and they’re waiting for you.” Then the voice hesitated.
“Right. What have the District Police done?”
“Nothing,” she spoke sharply. “We haven’t called them in, and neither will you.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Anything else?” After a silence, he again heard a faint murmur, a voice he thought he recognized. From the morning meetings?
“Yes. This individual was found in an area he was not supposed to have access to. I want you to check this area thoroughly and let me know immediately if you find anything at all out of order.”
“You mean, other than the corpse.”
“I mean that the corpse may be the least of our worries.”
“What am I supposed to be looking for?”
“At this point I just want a report of what you see at the scene.”
This was unlike her, Ari thought. She had always told him far more about a case than he needed to know. He had never been simply a pair of eyes for her.
“You want me to tell you what I see.”
He knew she could hear the puzzled irritation in his voice, and he hoped whoever else was in the room with her could hear it too.
“Exactly. You have your eyes with you, no?” and she rang off.
He had gone just a bit far, but he also understood what she meant. He never went anywhere without the tiny buttonhole camera that kept him safe and her informed. He pictured her in that blue and white room where wall screens flashed dizzying video images all day, where she sat smoking and watching, managing the daily horrors as best she could.
“What does she say?” Miner was stirring next to him as they rounded the base of Mount Carmel and sped into the city. To the west, the beaches glowed golden under the lights of the seafront hotels along the coast.
“No police.”
“No police? What does she want us to do—tag it and drag it off to the morgue ourselves?”
“For now, she just wants us to have a look.”
“Just look?”
“She says Technion security are standing by for us, but they’ve been ordered to do nothing until we get there.”
Toad, still buried invisibly in the back seat, yawned, “Sounds like easy duty.”
Palazzo Fontana, Rome, 2330h
Maryse roused herself as the car stopped. She was conscious of a soft blue light settling over the car, on the buildings outside, and on the people who flitted past and into the dark. They were all uniformed, some in heavy vinyl overalls, some in police-style clean suits. She knew that they wore bright colors of orange and yellow, but in this light everyone looked as though they were dressed in lightning blue, like angels ascending and descending the stairs.
She got out of the car with Kane, who was immediately taken in hand by an officious policeman, and she strode along behind them, still trying to wake up. She knew there would be no sleep until Kane was satisfied with the investigation, so the sooner done the better.
Large lamps blazed around the three staircases leading into the palazzo. Workers wearing white gloves were carefully photographing, vacuuming, and measuring the central staircase, the Scala Santa, while clots of journalists gathered just outside the police tape eager for the story that remained to be told.
Kane stopped to talk to someone, so Maryse stood and breathed in the bitter air while
she waited. Night had calmed the wind, but it was still a cold October in Rome. She looked up at the mountainous cathedral across the square and the engraving around the pediment of the archways—translating the Latin easily, she read, “mother of all the churches of the city and the world.” Above the pediment the apostles stood like petrified giants, heavy-muscled under their robes of stone.
Kane reached for Maryse and introduced her around to a group of officials whose names she promptly registered in her mind. They looked at her skeptically, but she was far from caring about their opinions of her. It was too late and she was too tired. Still, the prospect of examining the room at the top of the stairs intrigued her.
They walked to the foot of the Scala Santa and looked up for a moment. Wooden slats silvered with age and use covered the marble steps, visible only through glass-enclosed holes in the wood. It was said that under the glass were drops of the blood of Christ shed as he climbed to the throne of Pontius Pilate. Twenty-eight steps, she counted. Here Christ ascended and Zacharias fell.
After a moment’s awkward respect, the group moved up one of the adjacent stairways leading to the Pope’s private oratory. At the chapel entrance, a police officer warned them not to touch anything and handed each of them a small plastic bag containing the protection they were to wear inside. They each put on white gloves and elastic white coverings over their shoes and hair. Maryse smiled at Kane, who looked grave and priestly in his white cap.
They moved into the chapel, staring around like tourists. At first she could see only the glare of strobe lamps lighting the interior and bright veils of dust hanging in the air. The colorful swirls of the Cosmatesque floor now looked snaky and black.
“Here…the Monsignor,” the Vatican officer was explaining, outlining with his hands the tape on the floor. He was a little balding man in sunglasses. “And here the Pope stood when he was shot.” He indicated pools of blood on the floor that had been carefully set off with checkered ribbons, while police technicians moved reverently around, calculating the trajectory of the spray with electronic tape measures. “It appears that His Holiness made his way to the gate and to the stairs before losing consciousness. The Monsignor was already dead when the police broke into this room moments afterward.”
The Day of Atonement Page 4