The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  “Davan,” the chief snapped. “Give us your view of the scene last night.”

  Ari stood and replied immediately. “The victim was shot three times at close range. In my judgment the shooter was a professional—stopped the victim instantaneously, I would say. The shooter was also forensically aware; we didn’t encounter anything useful that I know of.”

  “Thank you. Put up Kara’s download.”

  The screen at once took on the look of the digital dashboard of an airliner. Electronic graphs and charts danced on the wall against a black background—humidity, temperature, trace readings of various chemicals, digital images of fingerprints. None of the charts indicated anything of interest, except for the temperature bar which was far below normal.

  “We have already seen this data, Davan, but you were there when it was collected. Do you have anything to add to these pictures?”

  “Nothing, except it was very cold. The air-conditioning seemed to be too strong.”

  “Neither is there anything unusual in that,” sparked the angry man at the table. “The entire suite is kept at a low temperature at all times.”

  In the dimmed room the man was hard to see, but he looked like a younger version of the victim, shorter with a darker border of cinnamon hair under a kippah. A rip in the lapel of his jacket indicated that he was in mourning. This was undoubtedly the victim’s brother, Nathan Levinsky.

  “As you have said, Professor,” another voice cut him off abruptly, a deeper voice, from a man at the head of the table whom Ari recognized even in the dark. This was the Prime Minister—the owner of the voice he had heard last night over the earphone. “I’m told that the data from the investigation team is now complete and ready to be viewed.”

  The screen changed, and it was immediately clear to Ari that the scene investigators had been extremely busy all night. Fingerprints flashed past with pictures, names, and contact information for each individual identified—faces of a handful of technicians, scientists, and maintenance workers—the only people apparently allowed into the area. Ari recognized only one face: Tempelman’s.

  Tiny bits of fluff and fiber were microscopically displayed with a whole spectrum of analyses for each—but nothing out of place, nothing out of the ordinary. Every individual print had been explained, every alibi checked. No one had left traces of any kind in that corridor who did not have a perfect right to be there and strong and well-documented explanations for why they were elsewhere at the time of the murder. Every mote of fluff could be accounted for.

  With one exception.

  Miner had noted and photographed it, but left it carefully in its place on a tile near the victim’s head. Under a long string of fiber evidence, a tiny curved hair, perhaps an eyelash, shimmered on the screen next to a blinking red indicator: unknown provenance.

  “Any way of telling how fresh it is?” asked one of the onlookers.

  The head of the investigation team spoke up, a weary blond man still wearing his white overall. “It’s not old, but then none of the fiber evidence in the area is old. The entire suite seems well-maintained; supposedly it was cleaned only the day before the murder.”

  “I insist on that,” Levinsky said, emphatically. “It is cleaned at the end of every day. I assume you have typed this hair.”

  “Well, that’s how we know it doesn’t belong there,” the tired man snapped back. “Every human environment contains some traces, usually hairs, secretions, or dead skin cells, all of which can potentially be typed. It’s difficult to leave no traces at all. But this shooter—assuming he or she comes from the outside—seems to have left nothing, except perhaps this eyelash. Unfortunately, it cannot be identified.”

  “Or rather,” the chief’s voice grated, “this hair belongs to an individual whose DNA is not in our database.”

  “Not in our database nor in any other,” the investigator continued. “Interpol, Homeland Security in America, the Chinese and Construction Information Service (CIS) databases—nothing matches.”

  “Nothing they will tell you about,” Levinsky snorted. He turned his tired wrath on the group. “How is it that a murderer can roam at will through the Institute on a holiday afternoon? How could he breach security without leaving a trace—not a photograph, not a tripped alarm, not a whisper in all this elaborate claptrap of a system you have devised? I demand to know who can explain this.”

  “I can explain it quite easily, Professor.” It was Tempelman’s calm, mordant voice; he was sitting in the dark near the end of the table. “We’re equipped to detect any intruder, except for those who are welcomed in and spirited through the system by our own people. As for the security of your rooms, Professor, you are responsible for that, and for the obvious fact that you gave your own brother access where he had no business to be.”

  Trembling, Levinsky stood. “How dare he speak to me this way?” he nearly choked with anger. But it was clear that everyone in the room shared Tempelman’s opinion. It was the obvious explanation. Levinsky seemed to realize this, suddenly calmed, and sat down hopelessly in his chair.

  The lights came up on the uncomfortable group. The chief asked Levinsky without sympathy in her voice, “Did you do that, Professor? Did you provide your brother access to the project area?”

  “Yes, I did, God help me. He was interested in our work. We were both scientists. I kept nothing from him. He was my brother. We came from Russia together, God help us,” Levinsky rambled, staring ahead at nothing.

  “He might have been forced,” Tempelman suggested, almost apologetically.

  At this the Prime Minister stood and politely asked everyone to leave except for the chief, Levinsky, and a few others. As Ari left the room, he saw his chief pointing at him and then at her ear, her signal that he should stay in contact. As he walked to his office he inserted the inescapable earpiece.

  The office was, as usual, the last place on earth any work could be done. Restlessly, he looked at the news on his GeM. There was no mention yet of the Technion murder—it was full of the death of the Pope. A tabloid-size photograph of the accused assassin covered his white desk space, and Ari examined the picture for a long moment. It was a formal photograph, professionally lit, of a youngish man in the robes of a hierarchy Ari knew nothing about—red skullcap, black tunic with red piping around the buttons, a glimpse of a red satin sash. The face itself was remarkable—muscular but sensitive, tanned dark, blue-eyed and intelligent. What was there in this serene face that could break and turn murderous?

  Yet from the start of his career Ari had known innocent-faced people who were capable of any atrocity. He had come to accept it, sitting in court looking down at the many terror suspects he had dealt with—mostly boys with wide eyes and trembling mouths, children who had no compunction about carrying nail bombs into a crowd or dropping rocks from a bridge on passing cars.

  That’s what happened to Elena. A Palestinian boy had thrown a rock from behind a bridge pylon onto the windscreen of her car, shattering it, and she had lost control and wrenched the car into the path of a cement truck. Ari put his hand to his mouth as he recalled the face of that boy in the courtroom.

  He shut down the projection and walked outside into the sunshine. It was hot and dusty, nearly lunchtime; perhaps something would be open in Ben Yehuda Street. He thought back to the times when he and Elena walked these streets, he from his office, she from the King David Hotel where she worked, meeting for lunch in the busy Ben Yehuda square. The plaza was always a target; the terror that hung forever over the crowd had long since dissipated from the sheer fatigue of living with it. And in the three years since losing her, he had felt no fear at all—about anything.

  Today the plaza was nearly empty, with only a small shawarma stand open. He bought a handful of fried potatoes and a bottle of water and sauntered on through the hot streets. Elena appeared in a corner, by a traffic light, under a store sign where he used to meet h
er, her dark eyes smiling and the black net of her hair catching the wind. It was odd that his memories ran ahead of his feelings—whenever he caught a glimpse of a certain street sign or café, that smile rose again before his eyes. But then pain like cold water doused the memory, and he would go on walking.

  Near Beit El Street he heard singing and walked toward the old synagogue of Elijah the Prophet there. It was hidden behind a wall of yellowed stone, the entryway a tiny narrow slot on the street. Two Eastern Jews wearing caftans disappeared through the door, and Ari followed them. He suddenly felt like touching the mezuzah, the walls of the synagogue, the clean roughness of a prayer shawl, and listening to the prayers.

  This synagogue had obtained its name as the result of a miracle. The story went that a group of nine Jewish men had once come together there on the Day of Atonement; but nine men could not make up the minyan of ten required for the service. Then a stranger had come through the door and joined them, an indescribably old, heavy-bearded man clothed in hard wool; after the prayers he had disappeared just as he had come. The story spread that Elijah the Prophet had completed the circle that day, and from then on the synagogue bore his name.

  Ari stepped into the cool darkness, feeling terribly out of place and blinded by the fragrant fog of the candles that were the only source of light in the chamber. The room was jammed with men invisible except for the graying drapery of dozens of shawls, echoing with voices hoarsened by prayer. Ari took a tallit from one of the pegs near the door, awkwardly veiled himself with the shawl, and found a place with some men standing against a near wall.

  He liked the anonymity of this place—the dimness, the low mournful singing he could barely hear—much better than the holiday services in the Great Synagogue where his father had taken him as a child. Although he had liked looking at the stained glass, the enormous crowd and the blaring electronic voice of the chazzan, the cantor, had reminded him of a bus station, and he had hated standing there hour upon hour, his father constantly pulling at him, elevating him, trying to render him taller and more visible. His father had been a part-time rabbi and an official of the Netanyahu government, and it was important to him to be seen doing his pious best on the holy days—and for his son to be doing the same. He did not question his father’s devotion, but he also knew that it did him no political harm to make this appearance.

  Still, in this modest place the prayers resounded with millennia of longing, pleading for fire from heaven, illuminated by the yellow flickering of the menorah, mourning in the middle of the day as if at darkest midnight. Ari began to recall fragments of the prayer as the voice of the chazzan rose higher. It was the ending of the third benediction of Rosh Ha-Shanah—he was imploring God to send the fire of the sacrifice once more, to restore the temple to its ancient glory, to let the trumpets resound with strength. Then he held the black coil of the shofar to his lips.

  Above the cry of the ram’s horn Ari heard a voice in his ear. “We have a new development. I need you now.”

  Lateran Palace, Rome, 1150h

  Maryse was beginning to wonder if it was possible to have too much evidence. For nearly three hours the briefing had continued, and it had become increasingly clear that no one could have taken the relic.

  A parade of video testimonies crossed the screen as they became available. One after another the guards, maintenance people, the Passionist supervisor of the building in her severe black robes—all testified as if in a documentary film. Each had been interviewed alone. The details of their accounts matched precisely. Two thorough security sweeps had been conducted under the direction of Signor Bevo, one completed at 2200 hours Friday night, and another only two hours before the papal visit. The building had been taped off and guarded as of 0700 Saturday morning. No one but Monsignor Chandos had accessed the chapels after that, and then only to see to last-minute details in preparation for the service.

  A working lunch was brought in, sausage and cheese sandwiches and hot coffee, and Maryse ate hungrily.

  “This is all necessary, but it doesn’t mean much,” Kane spoke low between gulps of coffee. “Security people are trained to look for the extraordinary, and the ironic result is that everything looks ordinary to them. They’re like professional magicians—the last people in the world to concede to magic.”

  “You mean, the thief could have removed the relic without drawing any notice at all?”

  “And there are lots of ways to do it. Once you know why it was done, you can take your choice.”

  Her investigational instincts were reawakening. She too was suspicious of the impossible precision of the evidence.

  “When you have gathered everything you can about what happened, it’s time to start asking why it happened,” he murmured, then turned back to the group. The room was now full of people. The ancient Vatican curator had brought his staff, and a few Italian government investigators had come in for a basic orientation about the artifact.

  The curator’s nervous young assistant came forward. His round glasses and faded black cassock made him look like an old-fashioned curial cleric; his sharply cut hair added to the impression. He was obviously one of those clergymen who wore ultraconservatism as protection against his superior, the curator who frightened him so much that he giggled inadvertently whenever he looked at him. He seemed deadly afraid the old man might blame him for the loss of the Acheropita.

  He took the remote control in his hand and a picture of the sacred icon glowed on the screen. Painted on a silken tablet was the expressionless face of the Christ, only a sketch really, buried under layers of smoky varnish and overwrought with silver. It looked to be Early Medieval at its most primitive, gazing out from a world no longer Greek nor Roman, but not yet European.

  “This is the holy icon known as the Acheropita,” he began in a high-pitched and histrionic Italian. “The term is Greek and literally means ‘unmade by hand.’ The legend says it was a gift from an angel to St. Luke the Evangelist. According to our best research, it seems to be of Byzantine origin and has been part of the patrimony of St. John Lateran at least since the seventh century, if not earlier. It is the oldest representation of God the Son in the possession of the Church.”

  The little priest stopped to pad off the sweat from his face. In the momentary silence, Maryse contemplated the image on the wall. It spoke to her of the unknowable, of the enigma at the heart of God, of His resistance to being known. The face of Christ was neither loving nor forbidding, neither merciful nor wrathful, and she tried to capture the quality of it in some other word but could not.

  The scene changed to an engraving of a medieval parade in the Lateran square around the obelisk lying on the ground and not yet resurrected by the Renaissance popes. “In former days, the image was carried about Rome on important days of observance by the Archconfraternity of the Most Holy Savior, but it has been installed in the chapel called Sancta Sanctorum since the papacy of Leo X in the sixteenth century. For five hundred years it has not been moved from its place…until now.”

  He stammered almost hysterically at these last words and panted for a moment, fumbling again with the miniature remote. A large perspective of the altarpiece in the Sancta Sanctorum came into view, showing the icon imprisoned inside the grillwork over the altar, almost invisible under the fantastic mask of metal and the cherubic silver wings sweeping up from the face.

  “It belongs to a class of objects so sacred—those made without human hands—that it is said to be the very presence of Christ. Because of it and other relics, now mostly relocated, the oratory is traditionally called the Sancta Sanctorum—the Holy of Holies, the holiest place on earth.”

  The priest sat down with a kind of nervous dignity, and the room was momentarily silent. One of the harder-looking investigators then asked him, “What’s it worth?”

  “I’m sorry?” he stammered, half rising from his chair.

  “I mean, what’s it worth on the mark
et? How many grams of silver, for example?”

  The old curator suddenly came to life. “You’re suggesting someone would trade on this sacred image merely for the silver frame?”

  “There are precedents,” Kane announced and then turned to the group. “The specifications on this object are in your download. I don’t need to emphasize to you the importance of confidentiality about this case. You each have your assignments.”

  He stood, and the meeting was dismissed, leaving only Kane, Maryse, and the curator around the ornate table. At this point, a policeman opened the door and let in a middle-aged man in raincoat and clerical dress, a man with whitish, even skin except for a peculiar puckering around his eyes. He nodded to the curator, pulled a tablet computer from a satchel, and laid it open on the table without sitting down.

  The policeman said, “Excuse me, Mr. Kane, Signorina, this is Dr. Della Genga, one of the librarians. He has the document for you.”

  “What document?” Maryse asked.

  “There was a note in the inner pocket of the Monsignor’s robe,” Kane replied.

  The curator looked stunned. “You mean, he left a suicide note?”

  “He left a note,” Kane stared the man down. “For now, we’re keeping it among ourselves at the request of the Vatican police.”

  The librarian pointed questioningly at the projector on the table, but Kane shook his head. “Let’s not project this. We’ll look at the small screen.”

  Maryse, Kane, and the others crowded around a flat tablet. They saw the scanned image of a handwritten document, its folds still clear and the ink vivid. It was all in capital letters, like a Roman inscription:

  tu autem profane impie dux israhel

  cuius venit dies in tempore iniquitatis praefinita

  haec dicit dominus deus aufer cidarim tolle coronam

  “I tranzlate for you?” the librarian offered in a nearly impenetrable Italian accent.

  “No need.” Kane nudged at Maryse, and she read aloud fluently: “Thou also, profane and impious prince of Israel, whose day is come and whose times of iniquity are finished, this said the Lord God, off with the, um, diadem…take off the crown.”