The policeman was a large fellow who clearly wouldn’t fit through the hole in the window. He said something into his radio, but Peter had already run across the street and onto the Papengracht.
The canopy of gold, a Jewish wedding … the thoughts screamed inside his head.
There was only one place in Leiden where he would find one.
13
Friday 20 March, 11:05pm
Judith groaned softly and rolled her head from side to side on the mattress to loosen the muscles in her neck. The collar and armpits of her blouse were soaked with sweat.
She opened her eyes wide and yawned. She no longer felt sleepy but she did feel groggy and now she had a headache.
She looked around, disoriented. There was a large candle standing in the middle of the room. The room looked like a cell. She shot upright, like someone waking from a nightmare.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She sat like that for a while, racking her brains to try to remember why she was here, where here was …
She appeared to be in a perfectly square room with a floor made of small terracotta tiles. There was something that looked like a drain in the middle of the floor, but it was tightly sealed shut with an iron cover. The walls and ceilings were roughly plastered with loamy clay. She estimated that the room was about two metres by two metres, and about three metres high.
Standing in the middle of the room was a fat candle, about fifty centimetres tall, the sort that would usually stand on the altar in a Catholic church. A translucent gold-coloured orb seemed to float around the softly glowing flame.
Against one wall was a simple wooden plank bed with a mattress so thin that it barely deserved the name. The heavy, musty blanket offered little protection from the damp cold. Her mouth was dry.
No sounds penetrated the mouldy walls of the room. She walked over to the heavy-looking door and slammed her fists into it, but it didn’t move at all.
She began to shiver uncontrollably.
‘Hey!’ she screamed, her voice catching in her throat. ‘Hey!’
The sound echoed off the walls and then instantly died away. She banged half-heartedly on the door again.
‘Hey!’ she shouted once more, but the shout came out as a sob. ‘What am I doing here?’ she whispered. She swallowed a few times, trying to resist the urge to vomit. The tightness in her chest was so great that she could barely breathe. She stumbled over to the bed, and carefully lowered herself onto it. She lay on her back with her hands folded across her stomach and focused on her breathing.
‘Where am I?’ she whispered to herself. ‘How did I get here?’
Slowly but surely, the memories began to resurface, in fragments, and the realisation of what had happened began to dawn on her like a meadow mist clearing in the morning sun.
14
Friday 20 March, 11:15pm
Peter sprinted to the end of the Papengracht and turned left onto the Gerecht, the square named for Justice where criminals were once executed. He ducked into the narrow Muskadelsteeg and then turned right to go around Pieterskerk, passing the plaque that memorialised the time the Pilgrim Fathers spent in Leiden before setting sail for the New World.
The scripture in the Song of Songs described a baldaquin, a regal canopy made of beautiful cloth supported on four poles. Jewish couples always married beneath a baldaquin or chuppah. It symbolised the home that the happy couple would soon share. Whenever possible, they got married in the open air, as evening fell. If it was dark, the stars reminded them of God’s promise to Abraham that he would have as many descendants as there were stars in heaven.
The only place in Leiden that would have a chuppah, or at least, the only place he could think of, was the synagogue next to the Jewish student dorm on the Levendaal. He assumed that most synagogues would have one. However, getting inside might be ‘a bit of a mare’, as his students would say.
He turned into the Herensteeg and passed La Bota, the little bistro where he ate so often that the staff almost treated him like family.
At the end of the alley, he went left onto the Rapenburg, the wide canal that ran through the centre of the city and was flanked by tall, stately mansions that were among some of the most expensive in Leiden.
For the second time that evening, he went over the Nieuwsteegbrug and into the Van der Werfpark where he’d met Raven earlier. He walked along the path laid with crushed shells that ran parallel to the water. He checked over his shoulder a few times, but it didn’t look like he was being followed.
A short while later, he reached the Garenmarkt and saw the synagogue on the corner. The square was full of parked cars, but it was otherwise deserted.
He couldn’t just ring the bell, especially now that the police were looking for him.
Peter walked past the Jewish student dorm and noticed lights on behind some of the windows. When he reached the synagogue’s large door, he tried to push it open, but without much conviction. What were the chances of it being unlocked?
Then he took a few steps back and peered upwards. A light burned on the first floor, but he couldn’t see any movement. He stood with his hands on his hips, unsure what he should do next.
‘Maybe this isn’t the place they meant?’ he muttered quietly to himself. There was a bandstand in the Leidse Hout city park where open air concerts were held in the summer. It was tent-like, almost a sort of baldaquin … But there was no connection between the bandstand and the Song of Songs. This had to be the place. There was nowhere else it could be.
If there was someone inside, they might know Judith, he realised. Judith had been studying her Jewish background for as long as he had known her. She had taken courses at the Centre for Jewish Studies which was in the same building as the synagogue. Leiden was a small city. He had never met anyone with whom he didn’t have an acquaintance in common.
Resolutely, he took a step forwards and pressed the doorbell. A loud buzz penetrated the silence and echoed in the hall.
This episode might end here if the person who opened the door handed him over to the police. But it would end here anyway if he didn’t get inside and find out what was waiting for him.
After a few moments, he heard a muffled voice from the other side of the door. ‘Hello?’
‘Yes, um … I’m sorry for disturbing you so late,’ Peter said, raising his voice slightly. ‘I’m … Peter de Haan, a lecturer at the university. I’m a friend of Judith’s, Judith Cherev.’
He heard the door being unlocked.
‘Ah, Judith, of course,’ the man said as he opened the door. He was heavy-set, in his fifties, with a bushy grey beard and laughter lines around his twinkling eyes. A pair of reading glasses hung from a cord around his neck. ‘You’re out rather late, aren’t you?’ He stood in the doorway, but he kept his hand on the door.
‘May I come in?’ Peter asked, putting his foot on the doorstep. The man was forced to move backwards slightly. ‘It’s a bit of an odd story,’ Peter began.
‘Is it about Judith?’ the man asked, sounding concerned.
‘Can I come in? Then I’ll tell you.’
‘Can’t you tell me here, at the door?’
‘I’m looking for her. She’s … gone.’
The man recoiled slightly, moving backwards so that he was now a metre or so away from the doorstep where Peter was still standing. He gave Peter a puzzled look, as though he was trying to process what he had just been told.
Peter took out the copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and removed the note, keeping a finger between the book’s pages. He gave the note to the man, who put on his glasses and read the text aloud.
Its posts are silver, its canopy gold; its cushions are purple.
It was decorated with love by the young women of Jerusalem.
‘The Song of Songs,’ he said wistfully. ‘The wedding day of King Solomon … I’ve devoted a great deal of study to the Song of Solomon. But what’s this all about?’
Barely twenty metres away
, a police car approached along the Korevaarstraat. Suddenly its siren started to blare.
Peter jumped and took a step forward so that he ended up standing in the hall. ‘King Solomon’s wedding day, you said?’
The man sighed irritably and motioned Peter to come further. ‘Daughters of Tziyon, come out, and gaze upon King Shlomo, wearing the crown with which his mother crowned him on his wedding day.’
Now it was Peter’s turn to look puzzled.
‘That’s the next verse,’ the man said, amused. He walked ahead of Peter, up the stairs. ‘I know the whole thing off by heart. It’s not really that much of an accomplishment, mind you. There are plenty of people who can recite the whole Koran.’
They came to a small landing with two doors. One of them was open.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I don’t live here, by the way. This is our reading room. I like to sit in here and study in the evenings. It’s quiet here.’
An overflowing bookcase covered an entire wall of the large room. A long table stood in the middle, with six chairs arranged around it. In front of the window was a computer on a desk. The screen was filled with Greek text, and a weighty-looking book lay open next to the keyboard.
‘Take a seat,’ he said.
They sat, Peter on one side of the table and the man on the other.
‘My name is Awram. You can just call me Abraham, or Ap, as they called me at high school.’ He smiled. ‘Judith is gone, you say? What’s happened?’
Peter wasn’t sure which version of the story to tell him or how much of the details he should reveal. He decided that if Awram knew Judith well enough to be worried about her, it was safe to trust him.
‘Yes, Judith is gone. That’s it in a nutshell anyway. I don’t know where she is, but I think that whoever took her set up a route for me to follow, as mad as that sounds. My hope is that I’ll find her if I follow all their clues. It started with a text message they sent me: “Follow the black raven.”’
‘Not, “follow the white rabbit”? Like in Alice in Wonderland?’
‘No, the black raven … That took me to Quintus. They have ravens on their crest. And two stuffed ravens in their boardroom. That’s where I found the clue that led me here, the one you just read. There was a clock counting down on the screen too. From twenty-four hours to zero. What time is it now?’
Awram glanced at the clock that hung on the wall behind Peter. ‘Just gone eleven thirty. So …’
‘So I have just over fourteen hours.’
‘And what is the reason for this …’ Awram hunted for the right word. ‘… for this challenge? It’s a little strange to give it to you out of the blue just to … Just to what, actually? What’s at stake here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Peter said.
‘Does Mark know about this yet?’ Awram asked. ‘Don’t look so surprised. Of course I know Mark too. Brilliant man.’
‘No, no … Mark is in Germany, off the grid.’
Awram cocked his head to the side slightly, waiting for Peter to tell him more.
‘Listen,’ Peter began. ‘A tunnel was discovered this afternoon, in town. Maybe you’ve heard about it. There was a ceremony to mark the installation of the first underground waste container. The ground subsided and a digger fell into the hole they had dug for the container. It turned out that there was a hollow space under it. I went down there with my boss, Arnold van Tiegem, and then he just mysteriously disappeared.’ He hesitated. ‘And now … Now the situation is even more complicated because they think I had something to do with his disappearance. The police are looking for me.’
Awram stared at his hands on the tabletop in silence. Then he spoke. ‘Tunnels under the city … I thought they were just rumours, stories you get in every town. There’s supposed to be a tunnel right here under the synagogue, did you know? So that the Jews could escape if there was ever a pogrom. I’ve heard about tunnels leading from the Pieterskerk, the Hooglandse Kerk, the Burcht … According to those stories there’s a whole labyrinth of tunnels beneath our feet, an underground city. Do you think it’s true?’
‘Haven’t you ever—’
‘Gone looking for them? No … I’m a man of books, not action. Words, rather than deeds, you might say.’
‘So now I was wondering,’ Peter said, thinking it was now high time for deeds rather than words, ‘if I might take a look in the synagogue, because the quote from the Song of Songs refers to a baldaquin.’
‘Oh you can take a look, certainly,’ Awram said, ‘but I shouldn’t think you’ll find anything. Our synagogue doesn’t have a chuppah, or rather I should say, it doesn’t have a permanent one. We don’t have many Jewish weddings in Leiden, so it’s not a huge problem. We do have a chuppah that we set up whenever there’s a wedding, but that’s neatly packed away elsewhere in the building. So there’s not much for you to see in the synagogue itself, I’m afraid.’
‘Can we go and have a look anyway?’ Peter insisted. ‘Even if it’s just to rule this place out as a possibility. Then I know I need to look elsewhere.’
Awram pushed his chair back and went over to his desk. He pulled a drawer open and took out a bunch of keys. ‘Then we’ll go and look. Come on.’
Downstairs in the hall, they turned left and then went down a wide passage that led to a large, brown door.
‘There were a couple of workmen from the council here this afternoon,’ Awram said, putting the key in the lock. ‘They hit a water main when they were working on the Korevaarstraat and they wanted to make sure that it hadn’t caused any damage inside this building. I let them in, but I didn’t hear them leave again, so I assumed that everything …’ He turned around. ‘Actually, now that I’m telling you about it, it does sound rather suspicious. They said they were working on those underground containers, but it’s just occurred to me that they aren’t installing them on this side of the street. Could it have …’ he turned the key, pushed open the door, and then he froze in the doorway. ‘What’s this?’ he whispered.
Peter stood on his tiptoes to look inside over Awram’s shoulder.
The synagogue was shrouded in darkness but the chuppah had been set up in the middle of it, lit by a single spotlight like an exhibit in a museum.
Peter put his hand on Awram’s shoulder and gently pushed him inside. The poor man stood gaping at the display as though he had never seen a chuppah in his life. Peter pushed past him to take a closer look at the canopy.
A sheet hung from the middle of the chuppah, gathered and knotted to the peak of the canopy. A photograph was pinned to the cloth.
Peter carefully lifted the photo away from the cloth, but it was too dark to see what was on it.
‘Can you turn the lights on?’ he asked.
Awram came out of his daze and flicked a switch, flooding the whole room in bright light.
‘I could have sworn that they really were from the council,’ Awram said apologetically. ‘The boiler suits, the logo, the casual way they went about it …’
Peter unfastened the photograph and came out from under the chuppah to take a better look at it.
It was a picture of the side of a mountain. In the middle was a rocky outcrop that rose up into a form that looked like a face.
Once again, he had the vague feeling that he knew what he was looking at but couldn’t identify it. Then he had a flash of recognition. He knew where the photo had been taken. In fact, there was a photograph in his own album that could have been a copy of this one.
While he felt relieved that he knew what he was looking at now, a sense of unease was rising inside him. How well did they know him, he wondered. How long had they been watching him?
A few summers ago, he’d taken a solo trip – he always travelled alone – along the west coast of Turkey. Naturally he had visited Ephesus, the archaeological remains of the temple to the ancient Greek fertility goddess, Artemis of Ephesus.
Did they know he had also visited the town of Manisa then, near Izmir?
Peter squinted,
partly from irritation, partly to be able to see the photo better.
He had gone there to see the House of the Virgin Mary. According to legend, Jesus’ mother had lived there after the death of her son.
The trip to the Weeping Rock had been an unexpected extra. He hadn’t heard of it before, but the old man who had given him a little guided tour in exchange for baksheesh had told him about it. Although the sun’s heat had been exhausting, the trek through the barren, rocky landscape, fragrant with the scent of herbs, had been breathtaking.
What had that been about, he asked himself, feverishly. It was Niobe, a character from Greek mythology. That much he could remember, but what was the story? It was a tragedy, obviously, she was Greek after all.
‘Sorry, I … Have you ever heard of Niobe?’ Peter asked, walking over to Awram to show him the photograph.
‘Niobe …’ Awram repeated uncertainly. ‘I’ve heard the name, but I can’t remember where from.’
Peter took out the phone to google it.
As usual, the first hit was a Wikipedia page. He read the text aloud, hoping that Awram would be able to help him in some way. As he read, he recalled snippets of information from the travel guide he’d read in Turkey.
‘Niobe … the daughter of Tantalus. Zeus invited Tantalus to eat with the gods, but he brought about his own ruin by stealing their nectar and ambrosia so that his friends could eat like gods too. He was given an eternal punishment, made to stand in a pool of water forever, with a thirst he could never quench because the water receded each time he bent to take a drink. Boughs laden with fruit dangled above him, but he could never still his hunger because each time he reached up to pluck the fruit, the branches were raised above his grasp. And to make matters worse, a rock hung over his head that could fall and crush him at any moment … the Torment of Tantalus.’
‘They had wonderful imaginations, the Greeks,’ Awram said.
‘It’s about the universal human experience … It puts it into words quite well, actually. The feeling of not quite being able to have what you want, that it’s always just out of reach.’
St Paul's Labyrinth Page 10