The Last Ember Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Acknowledgements

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by Daniel Levin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  The author gratefully acknowledges the permission to reprint the following images:

  Photographs of the sketches of Giuseppe Valadier on page 62 (drawing of an arch of the Colosseum) and 344 (architectural sketch of the Colosseum). Reprinted with permission of Professor Elisa Debenetti. Reproduction of the Forma Urbis on page 13. Reprinted with permission of the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project.

  Photograph of the Arch of Titus relief on page 337. Used with permission of Beth Hatefutsoth, the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Levin, Daniel, date.

  The last ember / Daniel Levin.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-13337-8

  1. Antiquities—Fiction. 2. Treasure troves—Fiction.

  3. Rome (Italy)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3612.E92373L

  813’.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my mother, storyteller

  All references to ancient texts in this novel are real, as is the Waqf Authority—a secretive Islamic land trust that has administered the Temple Mount in Jerusalem since 1187 A.D.

  Historians are forgers.

  —The Life of Flavius Josephus,

  first century A.D.

  1

  12:15 A.M. Fiumicino Airport. Rome

  Why have I been flown here?” Jonathan Marcus asked the chauffeur, raising his voice over the winter rain.

  The downpour of a Roman burrasca pounded the hood of a black Maserati Quattroporte sedan. The chauffeur’s shirt was soaked, his stomach blousing out like a sack of grain.

  “The partner is expecting you, Signore,” he said, taking Jonathan’s carry-on and opening the back door.

  Water streamed down Jonathan’s suit pants and gathered on his Ferra gamo shoes, but he seemed not to notice. He pointed at Fiumicino’s runway lights.

  “Underneath the runway where my plane just landed was once the largest sea harbor in imperial Rome. The Portus, it was called. Two-thousand-year-old Roman ships are still under there!”

  The chauffeur nodded politely. He laid Jonathan’s briefcase in the trunk and, when he closed it, was surprised to see the tall young man still beside the open door, elbows on the roof, the wet folds of his white dress shirt clinging to his athletic shoulders. He was staring at the runway.

  Jonathan Marcus had returned to Rome, a young corporate lawyer in a navy chalk stripe suit and a loosened Hermès tie, but just ten minutes back on terra antiqua and memories from his doctoral work in classics beckoned to him from the stones.

  “Signore?” The chauffeur gently pointed to the door.

&n
bsp; Jonathan ducked into the car’s immaculate leather backseat. In the finished-wood console, a freshly brewed cappuccino steamed in a bone china coffee cup bearing the firm’s dignified logo, DULLING AND PIERCE LLP. He was reminded of the firm’s mania for formality, and although his jacket was still sopping, he slipped his arms through its sleeves and buttoned it.

  “Still not exactly presentable,” he said softly, raking back the soaked, brown hair from his brow. Stubble accented the strong angles of his attractive face, darkening his boyish looks.

  A digital clock in the center of the console displayed the time in a cobalt blue glow: 00:17 a.m.

  Long day, Jonathan thought.

  Only twelve hours before, Jonathan was sitting at his desk on the forty-first floor of Dulling’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan, another solitary night of document review before him, when the intra-office mail cart delivered a travel itinerary with the word URGENT stamped across it like a red sash.

  The details were few, listing only the departure time of an Alitalia flight out of Kennedy Airport in three hours and his seat number in first class. This exceeded even Dulling and Pierce’s legendary standards for client secrecy. A partner’s recent toast at a firm dinner now sounded like an ominous oracle. “With your background in classics, Marcus, antiquities dealers all over the world will want you on their lawsuits, won’t they?”

  Last month, Jonathan’s representation of Dulling client and Roman antiquities dealer Andre Cavetti catapulted him into the spotlight of the antiquities world. The Italian government had brought a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan, alleging that Mr. Cavetti’s gallery on Madison Avenue displayed a twenty-inch-high nude bronze statue illegally excavated from the ancient town of Morgantina on the Sicilian coast. Jonathan’s cross-examination of the Italian government’s expert, Dr. Phillip von Bothmer, curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, left the Italians’ case a smoldering ruin.

  “And the ancient town of Morgantina, Dr. von Bothmer, the site of my client’s alleged excavation, when was that town destroyed?”

  “Beginning of the second century B.C.” Dr. von Bothmer spoke reprovingly, as though Jonathan had not been listening to his hours of testimony. “Morgantina foolishly backed Carthage against Rome in the Second Punic War. The strata of archaeological dirt is black soot, which indicates that everything in Morgantina was laid to waste at that time. Total destruction.”

  “Total destruction,” Jonathan repeated. He paused, approaching the small sculpture sitting on display in front of the witness box.

  “Tell me, Doctor, are you a breast man?” Jonathan said.

  A juror laughed out loud, then unsuccessfully disguised it as a cough.

  “I’m sorry?” Dr. von Bothmer said.

  “Breasts, Doctor.” Jonathan cupped his own chest a few inches beyond his shirt. “Aren’t the statue’s breasts a little small for you?”

  The lawyer from the Italian embassy exploded from his chair. “This is badgering, Your Honor!” The gallery came alive with laughter. At the Dulling table, the supervising partner collapsed his bald head into his hands.

  “The depiction of breasts of Roman women, Your Honor, is a helpful metric to determine the date of a relic’s origin: Whether the breasts are una manus or duae manus, Latin terms for one handful or two.” He spoke as though explaining the dullest of courtroom technicalities. “The expert’s theory that this statue is pre-first century would require a more voluptuous representation, exhibiting a pagan influence. These slender breasts betray a Christian influence more fitting of a later artifact from, say, Byzantium.”

  The District Court judge flipped up her reading glasses, turning to the witness.

  “Is that true, Dr. von Bothmer?”

  For the first time, the witness appeared uneasy.

  “Pagan imagery of a voluptuous Venus was replaced by a tamer Christian portrayal after the first century. So”—he cleared his throat—“perhaps . . .”

  “Perhaps,” Jonathan repeated, walking toward the jury. “Then how is it that a statue with a Christianized bust could come from Morgantina? According to your own testimony, Morgantina had been nothing but ashes for two hundred years before Christianity’s rise.”

  Dr. von Bothmer shifted, a nervous glance at the Italian counsel’s table. “Let me withdraw that question, Your Honor,” Jonathan said after a moment, allowing the professor off the ropes to get him squarely in the jaw.

  Jonathan used the same respectful tone but now without the smile. “Doctor, didn’t your own museum just return the Euphronios Krater to the Italian Cultural Ministry, having learned it was illegally excavated from Morgantina in 1984? Isn’t it possible that by offering your testimony here today—a testimony even you know to be academically tenuous—the Met hopes to avoid a renewed interest by the Italian embassy in other items in the museum’s collection?”*

  Dr. von Bothmer opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

  Jonathan walked back to the defense table. “Cognoscere mentem, cognoscere hominem,” he said, just loud enough for Dr. von Bothmer to hear. “Know the motive, know the man.”

  Signore,” the chauffeur said.

  The Maserati had stopped in Piazza Navona in downtown Rome. The chauffeur let the engine idle.

  Jonathan leaned forward. “I haven’t received any information where to go.”

  The chauffeur said nothing, only pointed to the floodlit Baroque façade of a sixteenth-century palazzo at the far end of the piazza.

  A line from Jonathan’s graduate work in Latin literature came back to him. “Ducunt volentem Fata, nolentem trahunt,” he murmured.

  His eyes met the chauffeur’s in the rearview mirror when, to Jonathan’s amazement, the chauffeur translated the phrase from Seneca.

  * The Euphronios Krater was in the Metropolitan’s collection for thirty years before the museum returned it to Italy in January 2008.

  “‘Follow the fates,’” the chauffeur said, “‘for they will drag you anyway.’”

  2

  After midnight in an abandoned warehouse along the Roman shipping docks of Civitavecchia, Comandante Jacopo Profeta removed a snub-nosed Tanfaglio combat pistol from its holster, drawing its trigger back to allow a cylinder rotation check. As commander of the Italian Cultural Heritage Protection, or Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale, the world’s most sophisticated antiquities crimes investigation unit, Profeta knew artifact raids had grown increasingly dangerous. He had more than 250 officers in eleven regions to assist investigations, ranging from staking out a deadly excavation site in Pompeii to conducting tonight’s raid of a portside warehouse in search of illicit antiquities.

  “The Taliban used the opium trade to finance their activities,” Comandante Profeta often reminded his officers, “but terrorists have discovered a new source of revenue: antiquities. These men are not archaeologists. They are murderers.”

  Profeta’s flashlight cut the warehouse’s blackness. The rank scent of fermented olive oil mingled with the stench of sewage and rust. Weeds had reclaimed the warehouse’s overgrown floor. He caught a glimpse of himself in a shattered windowpane. With receding silvery hair cropped close to his skull, gold spectacles framing his lumbering brown eyes, and a gray beard in need of a trim, Profeta resembled a strong but aging sailor too long at sea.

  “Watch yourself, Profeta,” he said. “Not as young as you used to be.” Lieutenant Rufio, a recent transfer from Palermo’s antiquities division and Profeta’s new primo tenente, first lieutenant, turned on a ground spotlight, flooding the warehouse in a low purple illumination.

  “What are they trying to hide?” he asked, taking in the size of the room. “The Trevi Fountain?”

  “Comandante,” the shaken voice of the squad’s youngest recruit, Lieutenant Brandisi, interrupted, “there’s something on the ground.”

  In the center of the room, an ancient marble column lay across the floor. The column had been crudely ripped from an ancient ruin and
its base was still attached to a section of pepperino, a volcanic stone on which the column had stood. It resembled a stone tree trunk pulled out of the ground with the roots still attached.

  As Profeta and his officers approached the column, a cloying woodsy scent of pine pitch and cinnamon filled the air.

  The marble column had been sawed lengthwise, the top portion removed to reveal the column’s hollow interior. A mournful silence came over Profeta’s men as the contents of the column became visible.

  The preserved corpse of a naked beautiful woman lay suspended in a yellow pool of herbal oils, her pearl-tone flesh as flexible and lithe as at the moment of death.

  Profeta’s men stared at the corpse as though it might move. In the viscous fluid, her open blue eyes and flushed cheeks preserved the colors of life. Her mouth was partly open. Her hair was rolled meticulously into two spiral volutes, large tight curls that resembled the scrolls of an Ionic capital, a hairstyle popular among ancient Roman noblewomen. Four long strands of sutures fanned up her torso from her narrow waist to her breasts. If those gashes had once ripped her open, they would have been deathblows even today.

  Profeta walked slowly around the corpse. The source of a fleeting rancid smell became apparent. The woman’s left leg had been propped up, and her kneecap broke through the surface of the pool. Decomposition had attacked with the force of an animal, eroding the flesh down to the bone. The sinew around it had decomposed to a gangrenous black seaweed. Above the liquid, a horsefly gnawed at the black cartilage. Out of respect, one of the officers waved it away.