PAUL CALLED HIM TO FIX THE photography session needed for the press and book covers. He had suggested the location should be at the new Simone de Beauvoir Bridge a footbridge that spanned the River Seine near Bercy. It was where the National Cinematheque stood; designed by Frank O.Gehry, initially the American Centre in Paris, which had collapsed under a mountain of debt and was transformed as a home dedicated to the history of the cinema.
It was a bright but sharp Sunday afternoon when Paul, accompanied by his assistant Anne-Marie, picked him up and headed over to Bercy where they parked the car under the Novotel and walked through the gardens to the recently inaugurated bridge that led over the river to the National Library.
‘So how is the book coming along?’
‘Not too bad, I hope it will be ready in the New Year.’
‘Recovered from your adventures in the Middle East?’
‘That’s the least of my worries. The problem is the Trust and de Lussac.’
‘I thought he was locked up in Cambodia?’
‘He is, but the stupid bastard bequeathed his work to the Israeli government.’
‘That’s no problem for your book?’
‘No, but it’s a problem for Laura, you know the translation.’
‘I thought he had given the rights to the Trust?’
‘He did, but as the Trust seems to be going belly-up it’s a mess. The lawyers are trying to work things out. If they come to some kind of agreement then the book could be published.’
‘An archaeological work by a defrocked Jesuit accused of paedophilia, not very good publicity.’
‘Not so quick, it turns out that the idea was not his, nor was the original work, remember our promise to Aisha.’
They climbed the steps up to the bridge. Between the towers of the Library facing them on the opposite bank of the Seine the sun hung in the sky, a brilliant globe surrounded several black clouds in the otherwise bright blue sky.
Paul stopped and unloaded his cameras.
‘Stop there, lean on the rail, like you are reading your book.’
‘Isn’t the sun a problem?’
‘Don’t worry about that, I’m the photographer, you’re the writer, keep on talking
Ennis posed and continued to talk.
‘The work was done by a young Arab Israeli Ph.D. student, a Druze, in archaeologist at the Tel-Aviv University who de Lussac met some years ago.’
‘So what happened to him.’
‘He was killed in a border clash in the Lebanon.’
‘I didn’t think there were Arabs in the Israeli army.’
‘Yes, but they are Druze and Bedouin.’
‘What’s the different?’ he said shrugging, ‘Never mind…anyway, so de Lussac stole the manuscript.’
‘Not exactly, he stole the research work, a huge mass of research work.’
‘Right, and what was so unusual in the research was being an Arab and a Muslim, he had access to the Haram and its underground.’
‘So he could verify the data.’
‘Some of it at least.
They made their way across the bridge, Paul shooting away with Anne-Marie struggling behind with his equipment.
‘How did you find this out?’
‘Ah, that’s a long story I’ll tell you another time.
Back in his apartment O’Connelly was making his last preparations, he was leaving for Tel-Aviv the next morning on the early Air France flight when his cell phone rang.
‘Hello John, Jean-Louis here,’
‘Jean-Louis?’
‘Jean-Louis Claudel!’
‘Where are you?’
‘In Paris!’
‘In Paris?’
‘Yes, I arrived this morning from Phnom Penh.’
‘On holiday?’
‘Not exactly, had to leave suddenly, I’ll tell you about it. Are you free? I’ve got something that might interest you.’
‘I’m leaving in the morning for Tel-Aviv.’
‘This is important, very important.’
‘Where are you staying?’
Claudel gave him the address of a hotel near to the Gare Saint Lazare and they agreed to meet late that afternoon.
O’Connelly had surprised the last thing he was expecting was Claudel in Paris and above all that he had something that might interest him. He hoped that it was not illegal antiquities.
The hotel was a dingy two star establishment between the station and Pigalle. They met in the lobby and went to a local bar for a coffee, where Claudel explained that his corrupt friends in the police had obtained his release against the ownership of his guest house and had helped him to flee the country overland to Thailand taking the few remaining things of value he possessed.
‘You were lucky to get me I’m leaving tomorrow.’
‘I have to be lucky once in a while.’
‘So what is it that you have that’s so interesting?’
‘It’ll cost you!’
‘Look I’m not in the market for Cambodian antiques.’
‘Something quiet different, something I think you’ll be interested in.’
‘Well let’s see.’
They returned to the room, the bed was unmade, and different pieces of baggage were lying around the small room in disorder
Claudel pointed a bulging suitcase.
‘Here,’ he said pulling it out and laying it on the floor.
Claudel pulled it open and O’Connelly immediately recognised a couple of de Lussac’s photocopied manuscripts. Claudel then started to pile the contents of the suitcase onto the floor, papers, sketches, notebooks, plans, maps and photographs and CDs.
‘Look Arabic and Hebrew if I’m right.’
O’Connelly picked up a sketch, it was clearly the plan of a cistern marked in Arabic. There were several notes on paper with the University of Tel-Aviv heading.
‘Where did you get these from?’
‘De Lussac left this with me. He’s in jail now and won’t be needing them for a while,’ Claudel said slyly.
‘How come?’
‘Someone has to carry the can and de Lussac’s bad relations with the authorities in the Department of Antiquities have ensured that the police will be needing his presence for quite some time to come.’
‘What about the French authorities, I mean he is a French citizen?’
‘Yes and no!’
‘No?’
‘He was too clever for his boots, he held an Israeli passport that he used for his residence visa, so for the Cambodians he’s an Israeli, but unfortunately for him Israel has no diplomatic relations with Cambodia.’
‘Tough shit!’
O’Connelly waded through what appeared to be the draft of a university Ph.D. thesis. Then he sported the name Assad Areyda, it was dated four years previously. There were copies of extracts from the Palestinian Survey Fund and many reference documents. Then he picked out a bundled of email copies and correspondence. Flicking through them he saw to his surprise that they were between the Ph.D. student and Isaac de Lussac.
‘Interesting eh?’
‘Yes, he asked me to take care of all this. It was in his house in Phnom Penh. He wanted me to put it into safe keeping.’
‘Have you looked through this?’
‘It’s not really my thing, but it looks as though the Israeli guy had done most of the work.’
‘How did he become involved with de Lussac?’
‘That’s not complicated, de Lussac had access to all the archaeological records in Paris or London, that’s why Assad contacted him in the first place.’
‘You mean de Lussac was not the instigator of the work?’
‘As I said it’s not my thing, but if I’m not wrong it looks that way. Our friend Isaac seems to have lifted all the work from the P.Hd student.’
‘What about the student?’
‘Dead! Killed in the Israeli army.’
‘So what are you going to do with all this?’
‘Seems it would be useful
for your book!’
‘Otherwise?’
‘I’ll see what Mann will give me for it.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘A couple of thousand euros would see me through.’
O’Connelly made him out a check for three thousand handing it to Claudel who had repacked and locked the suitcase.
‘This did not happen,’ O’Connelly told Claudel as he left carrying the suitcase.
‘We never meet,’ he replied with a satisfied smile as he fingered the check and then folded it into his wallet. That was Claudel he lived by his wits, a street wise titi Parisian through and though, ready to bounce back at the next opportunity.
O’Connelly passed the evening engrossed in the papers, the end result of which was a draft thesis that pointed to the site of the Jewish Temple destroyed in 70AD. They were without any doubt the culmination of almost four years of extensive postgraduate archaeological research on site of the Temple Mount. The abstract described the functioning of the hydraulic system and the conclusion supposed the site of the Temple of the Jews was situated to the south of the Temple Mount below the present walls on the site of the present day archaeological park. O’Connelly concluded that de Lussac had in effect been the correspondent of a certain Assad Areyda, who at the date indicated on the draft thesis was preparing for his doctorate in the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Tel-Aviv. How de Lussac came to possess Areyda’s cache of personal documents was a mystery. There were in addition a number of documents written in Arabic and Hebrew which were undecipherable for O’Connelly.
The next morning he left for Tel-Aviv with the key documents packed in his luggage, including the draft of the thesis, the plans, CDs, note books and photographs. He had not yet figured how he would use them or what his plan was, but his first job was to expose de Lussac and inform the authorities of the fraud.
O’Connelly talked with John Steiner, the senior archivist at the Israeli Archaeological Association, concerning de Lussac’s bequeathal, who gave him an understanding smile, he remembered meeting de Lussac whom he took for an unqualified and illuminated amateur, a kind of mad scientist, with one more theory as to the site of the Temple. Steiner had registered his work and consigned it to their archives for such unsolicited curiosities.
Laura then made a few discrete enquiries at the French Consulate, which confirmed de Lussac according to its records was an Israeli citizen; he had the ambiguous status of double nationality, worse he had used his Israeli passport for entry into Cambodia and was therefore an Israeli citizen for the Cambodians, beyond the jurisdiction of the French authorities.
- The End -
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book could not have been written without the data and information published by learned academics: archaeologists, historians and researchers as well as information collected on the Internet and in the daily press collected over a period of several years. I have trawled numerous British, Irish, US, Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Israeli newspapers, news blogs and specialist Internet sites, and books (authors’ cited). And of course Wikipedia.
In addition I have collected information and personal experiences during my numerous visits to Israel, Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Greece, Turkey, Jordan and Syria.
I present my thanks and excuses to all the willing and unwilling contributors to the information included in this book, the information from this information world. I have tried to verify the fictitious facts but this is an impossible task.
The story is inspired by real, present day and historical, events.
With my very sincere thanks to all contributors,
direct and indirect, knowing and unknowing,
willing and unwilling
John Francis Kinsella, Paris, August 2016
Author’s remarks
All through my life I have been fascinated by the story of the Bible and Israel and from my early youth was curious as to the historical reality of the Holy Books. For which reason it is difficult to say, perhaps because of the confusion of myths and facts, such as between Virgil and Livy, Thucydides and Homer.
After many visits to Israel and the countries of Middle East I learnt many things, though it would be more than pretentious to say I discovered anything new in the long and complex history of the Holy Land. However, by a sequence of curious events I was drawn into a reflection on the Archaeology of the Bedrock of the Haram esh-Sharif, a site shrouded by mystery and religious conflict, which finally inspired my story.
My profound excuses to serious scientific researchers and the sensibilities of believers for what may seem to be an over simplified or confused vision of history and religion.
Other books by the author
Fiction
Borneo Pulp
Offshore Islands
Cornucopia
The Prism
The Lost Forest
Death of a Financier
The Turning Point 2007-2008
The Plan 2009-2010
Non-Fiction
An Introduction to Early
20th Century Chinese Literature
Translations
Le Point de Non Retour
The Sorrow of Europe
The Temple of Solomon
Jean Sibelius - A biography
Understanding Architecture
L’Île de l’Ouest
The Legacy of Solomon Page 85