The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  “These images you sent me…I need to know what you know about them.” The images bumped along like a primitive movie on his tiny GeMscreen.

  She watched them in silence.

  “I know this ring was on Chandos’s hand. What does the engraving mean? Do you know?”

  “Half an hour ago you were terribly anxious to go home. Now that’s all changed and you’re terribly anxious about a photograph of a ring. What should I make of this terrible anxiety?” she asked, smiling at him.

  “All right. My victim wore a ring exactly like this…with the same engravings.”

  It was her turn to be startled. “You’re not serious.”

  “Look, there’s some connection between your man and mine. So, what do you know about this ring?”

  Her mouth tensed up, and he feared that she was about to go territorial on him like most of the people he’d dealt with that day.

  “I’d like to fill you in, but the flight is waiting.”

  “I’m too late now to catch my flight, and there’s not another one till morning.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not referring to your flight. I’m referring to mine. I’m leaving for Paris in a few hours.” She collected a travel bag that was sitting next to a chair in the corner of the room and took a last look at the ceiling.

  “Why do you keep staring at that ceiling?”

  She gave a little laugh. “Because I think the answer to our question may be up there.”

  His head whipped around and he squinted again into the heights of the darkening chamber, at the four glowing figures suspended in fresco high overhead. His earlier impression of animals proved correct, with one exception. Three of the figures were animals—what looked like a bull, a lion, and a bird. The fourth figure was a winged angel. A memory stirred, too remote to make out.

  “You recognize them.”

  He shook his head. “There’s something.…”

  “Solomon’s Temple. Winged images of a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. These were the guardian spirits woven into the veil of the temple to defend the way to the Holy of Holies.”

  This woman baffled him. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m an art historian. Interpol.”

  Of course. He knew that Interpol were the largest and most sophisticated tracker of art theft in the world. He had occasionally worked with them on cases involving the traffic in artifacts. What he couldn’t figure out was why the art crime division of Interpol should be investigating the assassination of a Pope. And, as always, he asked.

  She thought for a moment, then pointed to the image still flaring on his GeMscreen. “Wouldn’t you say this ring was an art object?”

  “So you’re here about the ring?”

  “Yes,” she replied, and then, more convincingly, “Yes. In part,” and she turned to leave.

  He couldn’t let her go. “I have another one like it.”

  She paused, looking him over. “You’ve said. Listen, why don’t you come with me?”

  “To Paris?”

  “Yes. As I said, I think the answer to our question is up there,” she pointed at the ceiling, “but I can’t be certain. There’s someone in France who can help.”

  “Who?

  “Are you coming?”

  And that’s why he was on this plane, banking now over the luminous clouds of Paris. She had told him little more on the taxi, the same little buzzer that had picked him up earlier outside the piazza, and talked him through the frail logic that brought him to this aisle seat in the middle of the night.

  She didn’t know what the engravings meant, but she had seen them before, years before, and had only just remembered where. Unfortunately, she said, she didn’t feel comfortable telling him more about it until she checked with her chief. But Ari could come along if he wanted. For his part, he was not about to let her out of his sight.

  She had showered him briefly with questions about Emanuel Shor, and he told her what he could, but she wasn’t satisfied with his answers—of course, neither was he.

  “So Chandos was the name on the DNA sample?” she yawned and stretched, suddenly picking up the conversation as the lights in the cabin came on. They were approaching the airport.

  “Yes,” he muttered at her across the aisle, wishing she were a little quieter. Other passengers stirred around them. Interpol seemed to him an odd mix of professional sophistication and naïve, almost childlike curiosity, as if her training were somehow partial and her experience fragmented.

  “What is this accent of yours?” he asked to change the subject.

  “Irish.” She pulled her travel bag from beneath the seat and primly set it on her lap. She sat up now, anxious, looking like a junior business executive on a big trip. They stayed silent during the noisy landing and it was not until they were nearly at the gate that Ari realized he had no idea where they were going.

  “So what will we do in Paris?” he murmured behind her as they squeezed into the aisle, waiting to deplane.

  “Nothing in Paris,” she responded. “We’re bypassing the city. We’re going to Chartres.”

  “Where?”

  SNCF 62451 Paris to Chartres, 0715h

  She saw the cathedral from the train window before he did. Of course, she had been watching for it in the receding tide of the night. Like an island mountain with two pinnacles, it rose out of the horizon each moment bigger and blacker under a watery sky.

  The Chartres Cathedral was her own peculiar treasure, hidden in plain sight from the rest of the world. The main rail line to Bordeaux passed far to the east, so it was not easy to get here by train; and the main motorway slid a few kilometers past the city, providing only the impression of a squarish hill in the distance. As many times as she had seen it, the cathedral looked different at each approach; she recalled it shining white and green in the sunlight, or glowing gray at night. In this early morning rain it rose black and indistinct, like a great undersea rock.

  The first time she had been nineteen, on a summer holiday from Cambridge, busing southward from Paris where she had spent more than she had planned just to get by. Nearly out of money, she had left the city early in hope of finding a cheap hostel. When David Kane had found out she was going on a solitary art history tour of France, he had insisted that she go to Chartres. Having seen dozens of French churches already, she was not particularly anxious to see this one but felt she owed it to David—in any case, he had lent her the money for the trip. She knew she could touch him for more but refused to. She was determined to get by.

  That bus had put her to sleep, and she had awakened just at the moment the cathedral came into view. The August wheat, about to be harvested, was waving under a brilliant monsoon sky like an ocean of gold, and growing out of it the peaked crystal towers and the sea-green roof of the greatest church she had ever seen. Thin, unwashed, with her dirty pack on her back, she had left the bus and walked through the old town up a winding street toward the cathedral. She lost sight of it in the alleys and wandered through car parks and straggling gardens until suddenly the buildings fell away and there it was—gigantic, asymmetric, solemn in its gravity, generating its own weather. Even in the heat a cool mist came from the towers and the walls.

  She had sat on the grass in front of the doors, examining the golden stone tympanum and its dozens of figures encircling the Christ, who stood in majesty between a winged ox and a winged lion, watched over by an angel and an eagle. Her hunger, her worries about where to stay fell out of her mind as she approached the church, putting her hands up to the sandy tracery and touching the corbelling left by the masons nine centuries before and the silky panels of the doors. But she was even less prepared for the interior.

  It was like standing inside a vast jewel box. She spun slowly around, gazing up at the glass flaming blue and green, ruddy and gold. The Rose Window rippled with color as if from a pris
matic sun, and ruby rays mixed with emerald flowed down from the lancets. Her head began to shake. She sat down in the last row of chairs, lowering her head between her knees and breathing in the odor of the cold stone floor.

  “Vous avez mangé?” came a low voice. “Have you eaten?” She looked up to see who had spoken: a compact, graying man in an old suit and red vest and tie and a docent’s badge on his lapel. Shaped like an apple, husky in the shoulders, firm and round elsewhere, he was obviously well fed. And he was smiling at her. After a moment she shook her head.

  “Venez,” he said. “When you’re hungry, the windows can make you…” He twirled his finger around his ear.

  “Dizzy?” she muttered in English, and he immediately switched to that language.

  In a surprising Oxonian accent, he corrected her. “Lightheaded. Perhaps unbalanced.”

  She sat up and brushed the hair from her eyes. “Are you English?”

  “English. French. European.”

  The name on his badge was a peculiar Anglo-French combination—Jean-Baptiste Mortimer. He motioned to the door.

  “Marvelous pastry shop just down the lane and to the left. You should have a sausage roll and some tea—it’s about time, you know.” And he turned abruptly to leave her, but then just as abruptly stopped, put his hand in his pocket, and produced a ten-euro bill. “For you.” He put it on the chair next to her and strode away into the darkness of the nave before she could protest. She leaped to her feet after him to return the money, but he had disappeared among the tourists straying around the vast floor.

  Then she realized she really was famished, and she could always find the man again and give back his money. So she left in search of the pastry shop and pointedly paid with her own credit card. When she returned an hour later, feeling much better, she found him easily. He was seated on a cane chair just inside the portal, addressing in his velvety Oxford hush a small crowd of tourists who hoisted their heads uncomfortably as he pointed from one jewel window to another. She stood to one side, hesitant, but when he saw her he smiled widely and motioned to her to join the group. His group, mostly heavy-set Americans in shorts and backpacking adolescents like herself, followed Mr. Mortimer obediently around the ambulatories for an hour, gazing up at the distant rows of stained glass. Maryse floated along at a distance from the crowd.

  She was not a listener—she preferred books. But soon she became aware of bafflement on the tourists’ faces: Mr. Mortimer was not the typical tour guide she had been bored by for weeks. Instead of maundering on like a robot, Mr. Mortimer was animated but strangely unfocused, rambling along in sentences that lacked verbs.

  “The Zodiac Window,” he said cheerfully, pointing up. “Window’s not right. Major problem with this window. Twins in the wrong place. Still, there’s a crab. Cancer, you know, the sign for this time of year. And it makes me quite hungry. For seafood. But it’s the wrong time of year. Quite paradoxical.” He looked expectantly at the group and chuckled. They looked back blankly at him. Then he returned his gaze to the window. “You’re familiar of course with Eliot,” he announced to the window. “‘I am a pair of ragged claws, scuttling on the bottom of a sunless sea.’ Something like that. I’m sure that’s not right.”

  The group was silent for a moment, waiting for more—the touristic kind of information about vaults and buttresses they thought they were entitled to. Some looked confused; others simply looked away and suppressed a laugh. Mortimer continued to stare at the window, muttering.

  “But then Matthew Arnold had the perfect rejoinder, you know. ‘Ah, my love, let us be true to one another.’ ”

  Sensing that the speech was finished, the crowd began to shuffle further into the ambulatory; Maryse hung back. Something glittered in the corner of her eye.

  She turned, and all at once there was a miracle. The West Rose Window above the main portal exploded with red light. Her eyes dazzled as it grew in intensity—a flash like a ruby laser filled the cathedral. Sapphire and emerald sparks flared toward her, echoed through the nave, and died as quickly as they came. She looked around at the group, expecting applause, fainting spells—anything—but nothing happened. Then she realized that only she had seen it, that the August sun had unveiled itself through the rose glass only at her particular angle of perspective. She stood there, waiting and hoping for another miracle. But now there was just a strong, steady glow from the western lancets, the arrow-shaped windows below the great Rose.

  But she had not been the only one after all. As his group lumbered past him into the dark, Mr. Mortimer turned and grinned at her, gesturing toward the Rose Window as if to introduce it to her. “It’s all in where you stand, isn’t it?” he called out.

  She stayed in Chartres at the youth hostel, unable to leave. It was the cathedral. She walked around and around it for days. Her money ran out after three days, her credit card ceased to work, and she depended on Mr. Mortimer’s little loans to get by, always telling him—and herself—that she would pay him back. He took her to lunch each day at a different place. Once it was for a special cheese, another day for a wine. And once, startlingly, it was for aubergine parmesane. Her fourth day was a Sunday, and Mr. Mortimer took her on a private tour of the cathedral. While Mortimer dropped fragments of poetry, she gazed up at the sparkling blue of the Virgin and the red fires of the Last Judgment. In the ancient Jesse Window, the lineage of the Christ rose like a magic tree adorned with the kings of Israel. The stories of forgotten saints glimmered along the margins of shadow high overhead.

  For the first time she followed him all the way through his journey—small miracles had diverted her before this from his tour groups—and the experience filled her with a quiet, unnamable yearning. She could see the builders in her mind, the men of a millennium ago, paring delicate tracery out of the stone, rivaling the antique lace in her mother’s abandoned wedding veil. The builders had known something that was now lost.

  At the end of the long walk, Mortimer cocked his head and looked at her. “Hungry?” he asked.

  “Always.”

  “There’s a fine place for lunch. La Grenouille d’Argent. The Silver Frog. Remarkable snails.”

  She wasn’t hungry for lunch, but for something else. “I can’t read it,” she said. “I can’t read the cathedral.”

  He gave her a long look, and she glanced away into the clerestory and continued.

  “It’s a book—not like a book. It is a book. Not just the Bible in pictures. That’s not what I mean. It’s pieces of a story I can’t make out. I’m looking at windows I can’t see through.”

  Mortimer smiled and looked up too.

  Just then a chorale from the organ streamed into the nave, a rush of scales and peals that drowned the conversation. It was the beginning of mass. The hyperactive organist seemed to be trying to make up for the lack of worshipers—only a handful of elderly women—by filling the church with noise.

  Mortimer turned to her and spoke in her ear. “Now you will begin your studies.”

  Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem, 0700h

  He arose from the dawn prayer and gazed up at the dome. A blast hole, black and ragged around the edges, let in a vein of light, although the latticework of a scaffold now partly enclosed the wound.

  Less than two months before, a shoulder-fired missile had pierced the dome but failed to explode, slamming harmlessly in the middle of the night into the tiled floor. Lead had boiled through the ceiling, but the ancient dome held. It was generally supposed to be a counterblow to the rocket attack that had gutted the Great Synagogue only hours before; still, the best efforts of both Israeli and Palestinian police had turned up no source for either attack. To be fair, both forces had been primarily concerned with keeping the city of Jerusalem from simply exploding in the days that followed the attacks. Tides of protesters had swept the world from Malaysia to Morocco, calling for revenge on those who had defaced the Mosque, the third holiest
on earth; and into Jerusalem howling crowds gushed from all sides.

  When it became clear that the rocket had misfired and the building was mostly intact, some of the anger receded into confusion. But there was a cold determination in the Palestinian police to find the desecrators of Al-Aqsa. Their frustration deepened by the day. Now that the affair of the Pope was over, he could turn his attention to Al-Aqsa for the first time since the attack.

  He walked out into the warming daylight. Before him, the golden Dome of the Rock rose from its turquoise pulpit; to the east, the Mount of Olives lay far away in a hot morning mist. He walked around the perimeter of Al-Aqsa, examining the hole in the leaden cupola. They were saying it was a miracle—that the holy mosque had withstood the attack of the dajjal, the force of evil, while the Jewish synagogue had been reduced to a blasted shell by a similar sort of missile. Of course, he knew that the Al-Aqsa explosive had simply failed to detonate.

  The unnaturally hot morning was like the breath of the dajjal on his face. Looking from the silver to the golden dome, he felt solemn, peculiarly stirred at the sight of the Holy Places for which he carried such an unusual burden. His father, the Sheikh, had pressed the mission on him. All his life he had known of the mission but understood little of it—now that the culmination was so close, there was wonder and fear in the well of his stomach. He knew that this place was the black hole of history, the singular point to which the terror of the world would flow and be swallowed up forever. The hour was near.

  As a little boy, he had spent evenings with his father in smoky coffee houses where old men wailed on and on about al-Nakba, the disaster of 1948, and then the compounding of the disaster in 1967. It was all anyone spoke of, all anyone could think about. The old rusty keys to their abandoned houses. The Zionists with their grip on the Holy Places. The prayers grinding day after day to Allah to redeem the land, to strike down the Jews. He remembered the arguments that suddenly flamed up—we must redeem the land. No, Allah will redeem the land. No, the Jews must die. No, the Jews are merely pawns—the American-Zionist-Bolshevik-capitalist dajjal is to blame.