The builders started work in 1886, intending to complete the structure within about three years. They found the stone box roughly eight feet below ground-level as they dug down into the hillside in preparation for creating the foundations.
Finding any kind of relic wasn’t a surprise in view of the history of the area. Jerusalem had been fought over and built on since pretty much the start of recorded history, and the builders had known that there was a better-than-even chance that they’d find something – bones or relics of some sort – as they carried out their excavations.
When they first examined what they’d turned up with their picks and shovels, they thought it was most probably an ossuary, a bone box, and that immediately meant it was old. During the time of the Second Temple, between roughly 500BC and the end of the first century AD, Jewish burial customs in and around Jerusalem had altered. They began using a system of primary and secondary burials. The corpse would first be laid to rest on a stone slab in a burial cave and then, when all the flesh had rotted from the skeleton, the bones would be removed, cleaned and then placed in an ossuary before being laid to rest again, this time permanently, in the same or sometimes another burial cave. The day of the second and final burial was an occasion which evoked both sorrow at the remembrance of the death, but also a celebration for the life of the deceased, and traditionally family members would join together and fast during the morning and then enjoy a feast in the afternoon.
For some reason, the custom of primary and secondary burials ceased to be followed in Jerusalem after about the end of the first century AD, and never gained much support among Jews living outside Israel. The foreman of the builders had been told about this, and about the other kinds of relics his men might encounter, and so he knew that if the object was an ossuary, it had to be approaching two thousand years old.
But he was far from certain that that was what he was looking at, because the stone box lacked any kind of an inscription, which most ossuaries did possess, simply to identify the deceased person whose bones had been placed inside the box. As far as the foreman could see, the stone box was devoid of markings of any sort.
And there was another odd feature. Ossuaries were normally fairly crude in their design, just an open-topped box hacked and chiselled out of fairly soft stone and topped with a stone lid that was equally simple and basic in construction. The lid of an ossuary was a covering, nothing more. Just a way of keeping the bones hidden from view.
But this stone box had obviously been fashioned with care, possibly by a trained mason, because the corners were sharp and precisely cut and the sides were flat. And the lid was a tight fit, which resisted his attempts to remove it. Not even the end of a chisel inserted into the narrow gap between the box and the lid succeeded in shifting it, and at that point he gave up trying, put the box safely to one side to show to the Russian church officials when they arrived at the site on one of their periodic inspections, and told his men to get back to their digging.
The task of overseeing the construction work on the new church had been entrusted to a local Father Superior, who in turn reported to his bishop. The Father Superior – his rank was virtually equivalent to that of a parish priest – was an elderly Ukrainian cleric named Anatoli Chenkovsky. When he arrived at the site the next afternoon, he was shown the stone box, and took it away for further examination in the privacy of his own home.
In his lodging, Chenkovsky placed the box on a table and studied it carefully. As the foreman had noted, neither the base nor the lid displayed any markings at all, and that was unusual. Then the Ukrainian took a small chisel and bent forward to stare at the thin gap between the lid and the top of the box, and saw something which he had certainly not expected.
There was a layer of some kind of sealant, a thin brown line, just visible between the body of the box and the lid, and it seemed to be that which was keeping the lid in place, not merely the tightness of the fit of the lid.
‘Now why has somebody done that?’ Chenkovsky wondered aloud, lowering the chisel to the table beside him, because the fact that the box was sealed changed everything, and especially what he would have to do about it.
Before he was sent to Jerusalem a year earlier, Chenkovsky had been given a number of instructions, orders which he was to follow in the event of certain circumstances arising. One of these sets of instructions had been given to him by his bishop in Moscow, but it had originated in a very different building elsewhere in the city.
In 1880, the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery had been replaced by a new organization with the almost equally unwieldy title of the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, in Russian the Отдѣленіе по Охраненію Общественной Безопасности и Порядка. In either language, this was something of a mouthful, and its name was quickly abbreviated to Okhrannoye Otdelenie, or the ‘guard department’, and was eventually simply referred to as the Okhrana. It was essentially the secret police force of the Russian Empire, and a part of the police department of the MVD, the interior ministry.
While most of its focus was inwards, towards the people of Russia, to counter left-wing activity and quickly suppress any forms of political dissent and terrorism, a significant number of the Okhrana’s agents operated abroad, monitoring Russian émigré groups and keeping a close watch on their activities. The most important foreign location for Moscow was probably Paris, because it was believed that the French capital was a hotbed of Russian revolutionaries, but the Okhrana had eyes and ears in every country and city where a significant number of Russians lived, and that included Jerusalem.
As soon as Chenkovsky realized that he was looking at a sealed container, which might possibly contain an object or objects of either high commercial value or cultural significance, he knew there was only one thing he could do. He had no option but to turn over the stone box, unopened, to the man who had been introduced to him as the highest-ranking Russian official in Jerusalem, and who was also the local Okhrana agent, a former surgeon named Alexei Pedachenko.
Chenkovsky had met Pedachenko on a number of occasions, and had felt an instinctive dislike towards him. There was something about the man’s eyes that spoke of a trace of madness – or at best of instability – somewhere in his soul, and Chenkovsky had never felt comfortable in his presence.
But he had no choice. He knew from past experience that Pedachenko’s watchers kept the man very well-informed, and the priest suspected that news of the find in the foundations of the new church would already have reached the Russian’s ears.
Chenkovsky had used a small donkey cart to carry the relic from the church to his home on the outskirts of the old town of Jerusalem, and he knew he would need the same or a similar form of transport to deliver the box to Pedachenko. With some difficulty, because the object was heavy and he wasn’t a strong man, he managed to wrap the box in a length of material and tuck it away inside a cupboard. Then he locked the doors of both the cupboard and his house before venturing forth into the streets of the city to obtain the help that he needed.
The air was hot and still, stirred by not even the slightest of breezes, and Chenkovsky felt the sweat beading on his forehead before he’d covered more than a dozen paces. The old city was busy at that time in the afternoon, when the heat of the sun had abated somewhat and work began again. Around him, crowds of men, and a mere handful of women, walked with the leisurely pace which Chenkovsky had come to associate with Jerusalem.
People almost never ran, or even walked briskly there, simply because to do so meant that their bodies would pump out sweat which would soak into their clothing, and most seemed to wear the same clothes day after day. That was quite obvious from the smells which assailed Chenkovsky as he walked down the street, weaving his way through the crowd. It was a sour, rank odour overlaid with a complex array of sharper and more redolent scents, a heady mix of spices, cooked food, animal dung and other pungent smells which he had never been able t
o identify properly. Or had wanted to. It simply smelt of Jerusalem. Quite unmistakable, and very unattractive.
And the other thing that the Ukrainian knew he would always associate with the city was the dust. Anything that moved on the streets of Jerusalem, even a cat – and there were plenty of those – seemed to kick up a cloud of fine white powder which slowly settled back onto the ground, and which had a faint smell all of its own.
Then there was the noise. The almost-constant hum of conversation, of voices sometimes raised in anger or excitement, but more often simply talking, the guttural and unfamiliar sounds of Hebrew – a language which Chenkovsky spoke only poorly and haltingly – meshing into a distinct background clamour which again seemed inseparable from the old city.
Jerusalem was, in short, an assault upon all of a person’s senses.
The Ukrainian eased his way through the crowds of people, his head swivelling from side to side as his eyes searched for a cart or barrow, his ears tuned for the distinctive rumbling of wooden- or metal-rimmed wheels moving over cobbles. At first, it seemed as if all the porters had deserted the area, but then, a few streets away from his house, he found a man with a handcart who had just delivered some bundles of cloth to a small shop, and hired him for an hour. That, he calculated, would be ample time for him to complete his task.
In fact, it took less time than he had expected. In just under forty minutes he was able to dismiss the labourer, as the door of a house inside the old city swung open to reveal Alexei Pedachenko’s slim frame and somewhat delicate features.
‘Come in,’ Pedachenko instructed, and gestured to somebody standing behind him.
Two bulky men with flat, Slavic faces stepped past the Russian and out into the street, where they glanced in both directions before one of them bent down and, without apparent effort, picked up the stone box, still in its cloth covering, and took it into the house. Chenkovsky and the other man followed him.
Pedachenko led the way into a small square room which was dominated by a solid old wooden table, half a dozen chairs ranged around its perimeter. He pointed at one end of the table and the man carrying the relic lowered it carefully onto the battered and scarred wooden surface.
With a flick of his fingers, he dismissed the two men, waiting until they had left the room and the door was closed behind them before turning his attention to Chenkovsky and the stone box.
‘I was about to send those two men round to your lodgings,’ Pedachenko began. ‘I was concerned that you might have decided to neglect your duty and fail to tell me that this object had been discovered.’
The Russian’s voice was soft, but sibilant with menace, and Chenkovsky felt a sudden tingle of fear. Despite Pedachenko’s slight stature and delicate, almost effeminate features, the priest had heard about his propensity for sudden and devastating violence. He shook his head.
‘No,’ Chenkovsky murmured. ‘As soon as I was able to examine it properly I knew that I would need to bring it to your attention. The only delay was finding a local man with the means of transporting the object to your house.’
Pedachenko stared at him with a kind of cold appraisal for several seconds, then nodded.
‘Very well. What do you suppose it is? An ossuary?’
Chenkovsky shook his head. ‘If it is a bone box, then it possesses some unusual features of interest and distinction. I feel it is something very different.’
As he spoke, the priest began removing the cloth which he’d wound around the box before transporting it to its present location.
‘What features?’ Pedachenko asked, as the stone box was finally revealed.
‘This object has been much more skilfully made than all the other ossuaries that I have studied. More care has gone into its construction than is normal for an object that was never intended to be seen. The second burial that these Jews practice is a simple ceremony, and the bone box is usually quite crudely fashioned, because it will be placed in a cave and is not then normally looked upon again.’
The Russian studied the relic for a second or two, then stretched out his hand and ran his fingertips along the smooth side of the object.
‘And the other features?’ he asked.
‘There is no inscription, no way of identifying the bones – if indeed there are any bones – which are inside the box. Again, the carving is normally simple and crudely done, but there is usually at least a name, and often a listing of the forebears of the departed soul. “Jacob, son of Joshua, son of Enoch”, that kind of thing.’
‘And you have never seen an ossuary without such an inscription?’
‘There are some, yes, but they are not common. Then there is the size. This box is only about half as big as most of the ossuaries I have examined. In fact, I doubt if it’s big enough to accommodate much more than the skull of an adult, or long enough to hold the leg bones.’
‘Children die as well,’ Pedachenko pointed out.
‘Of course, but I’m sure that an ossuary for a child would be inscribed by the parents. It would be the last thing they would be able to do for their dead son or daughter, a final act of love and devotion. No, I don’t believe that this is an ossuary of any description. And there is one other peculiar feature of this object that I wished to bring to your attention.’
Pedachenko looked at him keenly, and nodded for him to continue.
Chenkovsky bent forward slightly, until he could clearly see the gap between the box and the lid, and then he pointed at the grey-brown substance which sealed the space between the two components.
‘I do not know what this is, or why it has been done, but it is clear that whoever deposited this object in the ground on the Mount of Olives felt it was important that the contents of this box be protected from the elements. Some kind of material, presumably an adhesive, has been used to seal the gap, to keep out dust and moisture and the creatures that burrow and tunnel in the ground.’
‘So what do you think is inside it?’
Chenkovsky shrugged his shoulders and spread his arms wide.
‘I have no idea. But I still maintain that the contents of this box are of importance. Or at least, they were of importance when the object was buried. Until we release the lid, we have no way of knowing whether or not they have any significance today.’
‘Very well,’ Pedachenko replied. ‘Then our course is simple enough to chart. We must remove the lid and examine what lies inside this stone vessel, and then we will be able to determine our next move.’
The Russian turned away from the table and opened the top drawer on a small dresser which stood on one side of the room near the door. From inside it he removed a broad-bladed chisel and a heavy hammer, then turned back to the stone box. He slid the blade of the chisel into the gap at one end of the object and gave it a sharp rap. He withdrew the tool, changed his position slightly, and began repeating the same sequence of actions all around the perimeter of the lid.
As he drove the chisel into the narrow gap at the far end of the box, both men heard a faint sigh, like the distant breath of some animal or person, as the seal finally surrendered its millennia-old grasp on the lid.
Pedachenko produced a second chisel and handed it to Chenkovsky. Working on opposite sides of the stone box, they slowly began to lever the lid out of the recess into which it had been placed. Even without the adhesive effect of the sealant, it was a really tight fit. As soon as they were able to, they dispensed with the chisels and seized the lid with their fingers, rocking and jerking to release it from the ancient embrace of the worked stone.
With a sudden rush, the lid shifted one last time, and they were finally able to lift it away from the base and lower it to the table.
Then both men, their differences forgotten – or at least temporarily placed to one side – stood shoulder to shoulder at the end of the table and looked down into the interior of the stone box.
1886
Jerusalem
Quite obviously, neither man had had the slightest idea what to exp
ect. The box could have contained a treasure of some kind, an ancient relic fashioned from gold or silver, or studded with precious stones, but in fact it held nothing of that sort.
For the briefest of instants, Chenkovsky even thought it might be empty, but then immediately realized that made no sense at all. Nobody would go to the trouble and expense of fabricating the box and lid, sealing the container and then burying it with nothing inside it. The cause of that errant thought was that, at first sight, the stone interior of the vessel didn’t appear to contain anything; but then he looked down at the base of the box and saw a flat object lying there, almost precisely the same colour as the interior of the stone receptacle into which it had been placed centuries earlier.
‘What is it?’ Pedachenko asked, glancing at the priest.
‘I have no idea. May I?’
The Russian nodded, and Chenkovsky reached his hand down into the box and tentatively touched the object in the bottom.
He moved the very tip of his finger delicately over the surface, tracing a faint path in the thin layer of dust which had accumulated there. As he did so, a darker colour emerged from below the dust, a light brown, like tanned leather. And that, Chenkovsky realized an instant later, was exactly what they’d found. It was a piece of leather, or at least the cured skin of some animal.
‘What is it?’ Pedachenko asked again.
‘I think it’s leather, so it’s most likely a codex.’
‘A what? Do you mean some sort of code?’
Chenkovsky shook his head. ‘No. A codex is a kind of book.’
He looked at Pedachenko, wondering how much the man really wanted to know. From what he had heard about the Russian, he knew he was driven by results and wasn’t overly concerned with the details. But perhaps he should, at the very least, try and educate the man a little.
The Ripper Secret Page 3