The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  The deluge of the day’s events drained from her mind in the light of this little church. This was her reason for being in Rome at all—to protect the loveliness, the grace, and the quiet. Her God was not manifested by power, but by this sense of stillness. The news conference that had agitated her—poseurs posturing for each other—had nothing to do with her and not much to do with her mission.

  Listening to the chant, she remembered the vigils she had kept in her favorite St. Louis chapel in Notre Dame. She had worked for Interpol in Paris—the art capital, it was also the art theft capital, and she had been kept busy. Many evenings, though, she liked to walk down the Quai to the church, find her pool of shade beneath the great cliff of the altarpiece, and gaze up at the shadow of the Crucifix, and beyond it to the heights where the clef de voûte, the keystone at the center, held the vast cathedral together. All history, whatever there was of meaning to life, flowed toward this place. David Kane had come with her more than once. They would often sit together there in the dark.

  She stayed to the end of the service and the prayer for the soul of the dead pope, listened to the little organ play long after the last tearful women had left the church, and finally picked up a GeM signal from Kane. He was looking for her.

  Chapter 3

  Monday, October 4, 2027

  Grand Hotel, Piazza di Spagna, Rome, 0347h

  Maryse awoke to complete darkness. She glanced at the GeM radiating inches from her head on the nightstand—0347h. Glad that there was so much of the night left, she closed her eyes again but could not go back to sleep. Something had awakened her: a memory, a spark of golden light in her mind, an abrupt clearing of the head that clouded over again almost as quickly.

  Eventually she tired of trying to recapture the memory. Sleep would not come, so she wearily opened her eyes again and stared into the dark. She thought about the Acheropita, of its peculiarly comforting gaze, and searched again for the word that would describe it. Not tragic, not sad, not mystic, not remote nor monumental, words which would describe nine-tenths of the representations she had ever seen of the Christ figure. She had often in the last two days conjured up that face as she remembered it and wondered how to describe its appeal. She could catalog it effortlessly: Early Byzantine, probably fifth- or sixth-century, no doubt part of some important patrimony sent from the East to the See of Rome, as so many archiepiscopal gifts were exchanged in that age when the Church began to feel its wealth and power. Still, the face struck her by its simplicity, its underlying quietness. They said an angel had given it to St. Luke as a memento of his Lord—that it was not made by human hands. Acheropita.

  “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.…”

  Why take it away? For the hundredth time, she tried to put the assassination out of her mind. Perhaps the two events were not connected. Her training told her to assume the icon was taken for one of two reasons: either someone wanted to sell it, or some collector coveted it. Could be both. She scrolled through her mind the names of all the shadowy collectors of icons she had encountered over the years. Icons were usually small, easy to steal and conceal, and there was a vast black market for them. After the fall of Communism, thousands of icons had flowed illegally out of Russia and Eastern Europe into the hands of opportunistic Western collectors. And owners were often hopelessly stupid. The elegant “Our Lady of Yaroslavl” had hung unprotected in the entry of a small English church until someone had yielded to irresistible temptation. It had not been seen since.

  For a moment she had a crazy idea: suppose the Pope and his secretary had surprised the thief in the act, and the thief had turned on them and killed them both, placing the gun in the Monsignor’s hand and escaping with the artifact?

  Impossible. There were gunshot traces on the Monsignor’s hand. The building had been completely secured and surrounded by one of the best security forces in the world. No one had gone in or out. Not only the police, but a huge crowd of people had been watching. And the Acheropita was neither small nor light in its big silver frame: who could have carried it out in full view of the entire world? They had gone over the “third man” theory exhaustively yesterday in the Lateran briefing room. There was simply no evidence for such a person.

  She focused again on the possible reasons for the theft: money or sheer covetousness, perhaps both. Those were the usual reasons. Selling such an item on the underground would be risky but possible. If it were stolen for ransom, it would probably turn up again soon—that was the usual story. On the other hand, if some mad collector wanted it, some religious crank…

  Suppose it had been stolen for religious, or even political reasons? To embarrass the Church? To make some kind of statement? The Acheropita had no political significance—it was a well-known work of art, but not particularly coveted. For a private collection? For one of those wealthy madmen to install in his secret chamber of stolen rarities? If so, it may not surface for centuries. There was the famous “Scream” by Edvard Munch, valued at tens of millions of euros, which had been kidnapped and ransomed several times; but on the other hand, there was Vermeer’s fabulous “Concert.” Stolen by a couple of fake policemen from a Boston museum nearly forty years before, it had never been found.

  What about a religious motive? It was, after all, said to be a miraculous, unearthly object: not the only relic of its class—there were other acheropitae—but certainly the most prominent. She had immediately thought of those other objects and made inquiries to see if any of them had been taken. They were all safe. Did some wealthy Catholic require it for his own private chapel? Did some anti-Catholic cult want it for some awful ceremony of desecration? It was said to represent the very presence of Christ himself in a particular, mystical way: did someone, somewhere feel an overwhelming need for that visible presence?

  The curator’s people in the briefing had spent most of the day batting around the assumption that Chandos had taken it off the wall and secreted it somewhere. But where? And why? Means, opportunity, and motive were all involved in any theft; and Chandos was the only one who apparently had the means and opportunity to do it. But what was the motive? To embarrass the Church, one of the staffers had suggested, rather loudly. She had the feeling that these Curial bureaucrats had no sympathy for either Chandos or the Pope—their interest was foremost the Church and its image. She thought of her many investigations where hurt pride had been the victim’s primary pain; of course, the wealthy owners of the objects she sought usually had plenty of pride to hurt.

  Had Chandos wanted to make a statement in going to his death? His note seemed to indicate it. But anger against the Pope explained only the one crime—not the other. “Tu autem profane impie dux Israhel…Thou profane, wicked prince of Israel.” It was an apostrophe—a declamation to the tyrant about to be assassinated—she had learned that from her Classics tutor at Cambridge, although the citation was from the Bible, from Ezekiel.

  What did she know about Ezekiel? Little, except for Michelangelo’s contemplative giant in green robes enthroned on the Sistine ceiling alongside the other Old Testament prophets. Ezekiel, who had mourned the downfall of Israel and the departure of the glory of the Lord from the temple of Solomon; but—she searched her memory—hadn’t he also prophesied of a new Jerusalem and a new temple, a glorious temple with the glory of the Lord restored to it? She thought she remembered long descriptions of a building, intricate measurements, tedious details of construction.

  She knew the Bible better than most people. She had read everything in her father’s library in spurts, gathering books around her bed the way other girls gathered princess dolls and toy animals. They were alike, she and her father. He could not shave without reading a book; she could not cook without a book in one hand. One of the books was often the Bible. When she had read iconography at Cambridge, she was stunned at how ignorant the other students had been. That little square boat? Of course, that was Noah’s Ark. The eagle of Patm
os? That was John the Revelator. The winged serpent was not Satan; it was Christ. How or why she knew all of that was buried in an eleven-year-old girl’s brain somewhere—she had gathered it all at an early age.

  Yes, the citation was from Ezekiel. A prophet. A Jewish prophet. Long ago she had learned that police work sometimes required thinking backwards, turning the obvious on its head. Suppose the “profane, wicked prince of Israel” was not the Pope but the figure in the Acheropita? Some extremist Jews considered Jesus a profane, impious blasphemer. His claim to be king of the Jews, to be the prince of Israel, was anathema to them. Was this a Jewish crime? Did some radical Jewish group want to do away with Christ in the temple, with the pope on the throne?

  Fantastic. No one thought that way anymore, did they? Still, could the theft have been religiously motivated? What about Islamists? Her first thought when she heard of the assassination: Muslim terror. She had been on her Saturday outing in Paris, having a rare solitary lunch at a café near the Panthéon when she heard the news—it had raced from person to person up the street and into the restaurant like a tidal wave, leaving people paralyzed in the street. An old woman at the table next to her had whispered it loudly at her, and with a reflexive chill Maryse had looked around at her aloof Algerian waiter, the young Arab girls sulking in their headscarves at a bus stop just outside the window, the Arab man dressed in leather walking a little too quickly past on the pavement. Paris was a Muslim city. Although she had never worked with the terror squad of Interpol, she knew all the stories.

  She had paid her bill and left the café, pulling out her little GeM phone to call the convent. They must know by now, but she wanted to make sure. As she stood there, she realized that the traffic in the street was at a standstill: everyone else was doing the same as she, relating the news to each other on their phones. The convent had already heard the news, so she told them she would go on to the cathedral for the rest of the day. Then she had slowly and almost obliviously taken the short walk up the boulevard, across the bridge, and into the great church to pray where Kane had eventually found her.

  At length her edgy mind let drop imaginary mad Jews and Muslim extremists and the Arab waiter in her Paris café. There was only one madman. Chandos had done it—no one else could have done it. Chandos was insane; that was the simplest answer. And the simplest answer was usually the best. Somehow he had torn the icon from the wall and hidden it. Why? Perhaps so that God would not view the deed he was about to do. He had taken the gun into the chapel with him and shot the Pope to rid the Church of a “wicked prince.” Then he had tried to hang himself, but instead shot himself to expiate his crime.

  Chandos must have been a religious maniac. Probably sent over the edge by the books and pamphlets they had found in his rooms—attacks on the Pope, screeds written by fringe Catholic groups consigning Zacharias II to hell, bewildered Catholic women’s groups fuming with rage over the Pope’s about-face on abortion, condemnatory manifestos from dissident bishops from Africa to South America. The outraged book issued by the men who had so ostentatiously walked out of the Third Vatican Council—the book that had become a bestseller. Chandos had a copy autographed by every one of the authors. He must have been a conflicted man—deeply conflicted. They said there was no evidence that Chandos had a quarrel with his pope. What about those stacks of virulent books that crowded his cabinets? Not just a few books—dozens. And his tablet was jammed with bookmarks to similar sites. He had immersed himself in attacks on Zacharias.

  Chandos was the answer. She had to find out what he had done with the painting.

  She began to drift off again, pulling the comforter around her neck, finding a cool sweet place for her feet beneath the sheets, willing her eyes to close. It was still intensely dark in the room, although her eyes had adjusted to variations in the blackness. A flutter of light from the courtyard below was visible just above the window curtains, and her GeM clock cast a digital glow on her pillow. The tiny numbers arranged in a circle on its face could just be made out, mildly golden against the darkness of the room.

  Then at once she was truly awake, startled awake. She grabbed the GeM and barked Kane’s name into it. She knew he would already be up.

  Damascus Gate, Jerusalem, 0745h

  Hafiz al-Ayoub bent over a rich little mound of eggplants and took only three or four of the best for his basket. They were gorgeous, glowing purple in the early sunshine. He knew that they had just been picked and had grown up in a good hot summer, relishing this blinding heat that made human beings wilt. He was pleased also at the deliciously tender little squashes in the next pile. He still had an appetite for these vegetables. The country woman who presided over the little market nodded at him with unusual respect, taking his money reverently and bowing again and again as he withdrew.

  The market was open especially early today because of the heat, and Hafiz had come early for that reason. The heat was too much for him at this point. He would not have come later. But he enjoyed his walk down the road to the market and stopped to talk briefly with the vendors he knew—the maize seller with his big wagon, the man who brought a small selection of sweet melons, and the many vegetable women. The market had been here for as long as he could remember, from his childhood, worked by country people with flat, thin faces and no interest whatever in the tensions that surrounded them.

  His shopping done, Hafiz waited to cross the street and evaluated for the thousandth time the muscular, green-clad Israeli troops standing everywhere, watching everyone, their dull black guns ever present and ever ready, their faces tauter than usual. But it had been like this forever. Unlike his father, who had mourned his life away because of the land, Hafiz had never known anything else in this place, not as a child, and not since his return here.

  He crossed the street and walked slowly past the gates to Gordon’s Calvary, the place where they said that Jesus might have been crucified. The gates were heavy and locked up today. Rarely, a tour group could be seen scuttling in and out of the gates, but he had not seen anyone for months. It was now too dangerous for tourists. Or too hot. When he got to a certain vantage point halfway up the street, he turned and looked back, shading his eyes.

  There it was. The golden Qubbat al-Sakhra—the Dome of the Rock. Still there. He wished he could go up to the mosque that stood next to the shrine, the mosque of Al-Aqsa, to perform the salat, as he had done so many times. From here he could not see the mosque, its low leaden tower scaffolded, pierced and blackened by a shoulder-fired missile. But above it the golden dome still stood unbroken. He acknowledged it with a bow and uttered a prayer.

  His house stood on the side of the valley of Jehosaphat, looking down into a lane of mechanics’ shops. They were filthy, oily, junk-strewn, barricaded with corrugated tin and barbed wire. They were all Arab shops. He always felt a little ashamed looking down the lane from his house, glad that he could live above it, glad of his house made with golden stone, pleased with its airy windows and its view of the city in the morning. He could climb to the top of his house and see the dome from the upper windows, and he had positioned a chair so that at any time of the day he could sit and read the holy book and look up at the Mount from which God’s prophet, peace be upon him, had been launched into the seven heavens on the Night of Power. He sometimes watched there in the dark and imagined the golden ladder that had taken Mohammed skyward from this holy place, imagined the heavens opening one after another like the layers of a rose.

  This morning, however, he closed the curtains, put on his glasses, and activated the screen embedded in the wallpaper like an oddly shaped window. Its gray surface at once flared to life with a parade of pictures. He turned off the sound of English and Hebrew and read intently the Arabic subtext scuttling across the screen. The assassination of a Pope—massive funeral planned. Syria and Iran mobilizing in answer to Israel’s mobilization. The United States calls for restraint. Israeli geneticist a murder victim. Munching on figs in syrup
, he followed with peculiar interest the tale of Emanuel Shor’s death scrolling past. He shook his head when it was revealed that Shor had had no sons. No one to carry on after him. Certainly a man in his position should have foreseen this, should have made preparations. Perhaps he tried.

  Hafiz thought how fortunate he was to have Nasir. Jamila had insisted on adopting him despite her cancer; after that black time, Hafiz was left alone with the little boy. He had cherished him, stopped traveling, stayed home with him, and purchased this house for him, here where he needed to be. Hafiz had wanted him to grow up in Jerusalem, so he had raised him, first as a bolt of energy rattling through the streets, then as a resentful adolescent who ran off to fight alongside fools. He had at last made him see, made him understand what it meant to be Nasir bin-Hafiz al-Ayoub.

  He had sent Nasir on his first task yesterday. It had been difficult for Hafiz to hear the report. A serious, sorrowful loss, but it would have to be, as always, what God wills.

  “Father?” It was Nasir with cups of strong coffee for both of them. He came up behind his father in a flowing house robe, with only his dark face and hands visible. He looked over his father’s shoulder at a report on the screen about Emanuel Shor.

  “They’re holding back nearly everything.”

  His father nodded solemnly and took the coffee. They read the subtitles quietly together as they drank.

  “I would do the same,” Hafiz said and then gently called, “Amal! Bring more figs.”

  A tall, thin adolescent came yawning up the stone steps from the kitchen carrying a tray with bowls of figs and orange water.

  “Hurry. It is nearly time for your school.”