The Last Ember Read online

  “Gianpaolo is dead because of you, Marcus!”

  Professor Rulen slammed his fist on a mahogany table. Rulen’s rich voice and distinguished bearing were the embodiment of the academic establishment. He wore a bow tie and thick white sideburns that seemed to spring from a nineteenth-century daguerreotype.

  “Bringing two other doctoral students with you to sneak sixty feet beneath Rome into an unexcavated catacomb? You rappelled in through a manhole!” Professor Rulen was one of four professors on one side of the table, each of them sitting in a banquet chair with carved armrests. “If the Italians had their way, you’d be in a Roman prison right now!”

  Suddenly the room was empty again. The antique bureaus glistened in the gray light through the window. On the wall, there were small portraits of the former Rome Prize winners. Chandler was right. Jonathan’s picture had been taken down, just as unpopular emperors were erased from monuments. Damnatio memoriae.

  Jonathan followed Kossi through a large door with a small brass plaque, BIBLIOTECA. The library’s dusty smell of parchments and the sherry-paneled walls released an academic scent Jonathan had nearly forgotten: the rustic, sauna-coal scent of oak and leather binding. Along the bookcases, gold script defined the categories: ancient engravings, Roman topography, and paleography. Most of the library’s shelved books would be considered rare books anywhere else, seventeenth-century copies of Ovid, calf-bound copies of Vitruvius. Only the thirty annual Rome Prize winners and library staff had access here. Trust was not an issue.

  Crosshatched daylight from the villa’s garden filtered into the reading room, illuminating a row of bronze busts of legendary archaeologists from the turn of the last century, such as Wooley and Carter, who discovered entire underground cities with no more technology than ancient maps and a bullwhip.

  Kossi flicked a switch and flat, Popsicle-sized lights in brass casings flickered to life along the bookcases.

  “Welcome back,” Kossi said, and closed the door behind him.

  Jonathan walked rapidly down the reading room’s central aisle. “Emili! Are you still here?”

  He saw large maps of subterranean Rome spread across one of the tables. There were long stretches of penciled notes written in Italian cursive in an open notebook. It was her handwriting.

  “Emili?” he called out. No answer.

  They’re gone, he thought.

  Contemplating his next step, Jonathan collapsed in a chair. He stared out the library’s louvered window. There was a bocce court with overgrown grass, and Jonathan remembered how Sharif would trounce him and Emili, throwing the ball with a bit of spin to curve it around a piece of third-century stone sticking out of the ground.

  Behind the bocce court, he saw a faint yellow light inside the Casa Rustica, a seventeenth-century farmhouse lying at the back of the grounds of the academy. The Casa Rustica, Jonathan thought. Of course. The obscurity of the old house, nestled in the shadow of the Aurelian Wall, had made it a popular spot for hidden gatherings for centuries. In 1611, local townsmen gathered there to honor one of their own, Galileo Galilei, for his recent strumento, or telescope.

  Jonathan ran across the academy’s manicured lawn between the library and the Casa Rustica. The rain had broken and the trees were still wet and bougainvillea petals lay plastered to the stucco steps. Jonathan knew that since the 1920s the Casa’s interior had been used by the academy’s fellows as an archaeological research archive for digs throughout Rome.

  As he drew closer, he saw that the Casa Rustica’s windows were frosted, completing its uncanny resemblance to a gingerbread house. Along its stone walkway, two sets of muddied footprints came sharply into view.

  34

  Lieutenant Rufio waited for Comandante Profeta in the law firm’s courtyard. He leaned against the idling carabinieri sedan, taking a last drag of a cigarette before extinguishing it in the gravel. Rufio walked toward the partners’ vintage Italian cars nestled in the palazzo’s old carriage stables and stared at a 1964 Ferrari 250 LM, feeling like a poor child shivering in the cold outside the window of a warm, glorious toy shop.

  What have they done to deserve these? he asked himself, spitting flecks of tobacco that remained on his tongue. As a boy in Sicily, he worked in his father’s mechanics shop. None of these aristocratici would ever appreciate the meaning of Enzo Ferrari’s prancing black horse insignia the way I do.

  One day I will be able to afford this.

  But until then, Rufio knew the police would continue risking their lives to make arrests, and the lawyers would be the ones to profit with their high-priced defenses.

  Crime does pay, Rufio thought, if you’re the lawyer.

  A second carabinieri car rolled into the palazzo, and Lieutenant Brandisi stepped out of the passenger seat, walking briskly toward Rufio.

  “The comandante is speaking with the partner?”

  “They’re not playing scacchi,” Rufio said dismissively, his eyes not leaving the Ferrari’s candy-apple-red finish.

  “There has been a sighting of the woman, Dr. Emili Travia,” Brandisi said. “She may be alive.”

  “Where?” Rufio said, lighting another cigarette.

  “Just outside the American Academy in Rome,” Brandisi said. “We circulated her surveillance photo, and some officers stationed on the Janiculum Hill just called it in.” He turned toward the palazzo entrance. “I’ll tell Comandante Profeta.”

  “No,” Rufio said, grabbing his arm. “I’ll go.”

  “But the comandante told me to say if—”

  “The comandante has many things on his mind. Do you know what the comandante looks for in making promotions?” Rufio pointed at Brandisi’s inferior brass rank of his lapel. “Delegazione. To delegate an investigation before bothering him with details.”

  Brandisi pursed his lips, as though comprehending a great secret.

  “Most likely a false sighting, anyway,” Rufio said. “You wait for the comandante. I’ll check it out alone.”

  35

  Jonathan knocked on the Casa Rustica’s barn-sized doors, and the gentle pressure pushed them inward.

  “Hello?” he said loudly, stepping inside.

  Photographs of archaeological fellows dating back seventy years lined the walls, along with their personal keepsakes, giving the interior of the farmhouse a museumlike, antiquated feel. A black-and-white 1928 photograph of the New York Yankees hung above a long oak table. A massive mahogany bureau with sliding drawers for maps and nineteenth-century archaeological surveys lined the entire back wall.

  A filament light blazed above the oak table, illuminating old subterranean maps of the Domus Aurea that lay beside two small paper cups of espresso and a half-eaten slice of pizza that lay on wax paper. Jonathan put a hand over the cups. They were cold.

  “Is anyone here?” Jonathan called out, moving quickly among the high wooden bookcases containing ancient pottery. He pictured the smoke of the Colosseum’s explosion. These men will not stop, Jonathan heard Profeta’s words in his head.

  There was only silence.

  “Emili!” he yelled.

  A sudden, creaking sound came from the wooden planks of the casa’s loft, which was outfitted with more bookcases.

  “Being a bit loud, aren’t you?” Emili stood on a ladder and calmly handed Jonathan a dozen maps. “Put these on the table there,” she said, not at all surprised that he was standing there. “Some of us have work to do.”

  She followed him, setting two arms’ worth of books on the table.

  “I know how he did it,” Jonathan said. “How Josephus smuggled the menorah out of the Mount while surrounded by fifty thousand Roman troops.”

  “One hour ago, you rejected the idea as . . . as conjecture, was the legal term you used, I believe.”

  “Not anymore,” Jonathan said. “I just saw a passage in the text.”

  “In Josephus?”

  Jonathan nodded. “Last night, the carabinieri raided a warehouse containing single pages of manuscripts f
rom Flavius Josephus. Someone spent years finding those rare manuscripts and ripping out those pages, and I think I know why.”

  A loud crash came from within the stacks. Then Chandler’s voice, “I’m fine! It’s okay!”

  Chandler climbed down from the second-story shelving, also with an arm full of books. He looked at Emili as though she had just won a bet.

  “Okay, you were right,” he said. He walked toward the pizza, took a bite, and turned to Jonathan, chewing. “She said you’d be back within the hour.”

  Jonathan pointed at the reading table, where a brittle manuscript lay bound with an old silk red ribbon like a long-forgotten Christmas gift. “Is that a copy of Josephus?”

  “The oldest Latin edition of Josephus in the library,” Chandler said with a hint of pride. “A 1689 folio. Just brought it over from the library.” Chandler pulled the ribbon loose, and up went a puff of dust.

  The folio resembled a large tattered dictionary and Chandler rested the book on a thick Styrofoam stand. Jonathan reached for it.

  “Here, use the pegs,” Chandler reminded him. The librarians always required fellows to use wooden pegs to turn the pages because the oil secreted by hands is the primary cause of document decomposition.

  Jonathan carefully turned the pages. “Here,” he said. “Josephus is describing how the Roman soldiers stormed the outer walls of the city of Jerusalem and made it into the Temple’s inner courtyards.” Jonathan put the peg just above the line and began to translate. “The soldiers stormed into the Holy of Holies with the expectation of treasure. But someone . . .” Jonathan stopped reading.

  “What is it?” Chandler said, anxious for the plot to thicken. “Someone what?”

  “Someone ran in before them,” Jonathan said, staring at the line. He looked up at them. “Someone got inside the innermost chamber of the Temple before Titus and his men. If there was anyone who could have betrayed Titus and smuggled out the menorah, it would have been at this moment.”

  “But Titus’s men had surrounded the Holy of Holies,” Emili said. “You can’t stuff an eight-foot lamp of solid gold under your priestly vestments and hope no one notices.”

  “Exactly,” Jonathan said, scanning down each page, his finger hovering over the text, searching a few lines down. “Which was why all the Josephus pages in the warehouse contained an additional line of text right here.” Jonathan removed a pen to write on a scrap piece of paper.

  “Pencils, please,” Chandler muttered, and handed Jonathan a short pencil from his pocket. Jonathan recalled the rule shared by all rare-parchment collections the world over. No permanent ink allowed on the tables.

  Jonathan wrote the line in the original Greek text and then translated it.

  “And he escaped through a hidden gate carrying an ember.”

  “A hidden gate?” Chandler said.

  “Yes.” Jonathan stood up. “It was most likely a tunnel or . . .”

  But Emili didn’t hear the end of Jonathan’s explanation. She stared at him, realizing this moment of redemption was not for Flavius Josephus alone. Jonathan was pacing around the table, and as he spoke she saw the passion she thought was gone forever flash in his eyes. He gestured wildly, becoming a spontaneous advocate not only for Josephus, but for himself.

  “. . . and so the priests escaped through a hidden gate, carrying a fire of some kind,” Jonathan concluded, “saving not merely the menorah but more importantly—”

  “Its flame,” Chandler said.

  “What flame?” Emili said, suddenly lost.

  “The flame, Emili. The seventh flame, to be exact,” Chandler said, “on the menorah’s westernmost branch.”

  Emili looked surprised. “I didn’t know it had a special significance.”

  “A very special significance,” Chandler said. “The Bible is explicit in the books of Exodus and Leviticus ‘to kindle the lamp continually,’ calling the flame ‘an eternal decree for your generations.’ This was the eternal flame, burning since Moses dedicated the original tabernacle after the exodus from Egypt. The light was like a witness to Israel’s covenant with God, an undying flame transferred to Solomon’s Temple, hidden during the Babylonian sack of the sixth century, passed on to Ezra’s Temple in the fifth century, and so on. It was the symbol of the eternal promise that Abraham’s descendants would number ‘like the stars of heaven and—’ ”

  “Sands on the seashore?” Emili said.

  Chandler and Jonathan looked surprised. “Sunday school,” she said with a shrug.

  “Right,” Chandler said. “It was a promise made shortly after Abraham proved his complete faith in God by passing his final test.”

  “What test?”

  “The sacrifice of Isaac,” Jonathan said. “You know the story, God commands Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice, only to have an angel restrain his arm at the last possible moment.”

  “And while three of the world’s great religions have varying interpretations—whether it’s the Islamic tradition’s substitution of Ishmael for Isaac or the Christian emphasis on a father’s sacrifice as a prefiguring for their redemption—all three religions agree that Abraham earns a divine oath at that moment, an oath embodied in the eternal flame carried by Moses through the desert. It’s why Kabbalists to this day refer to the menorah’s perpetual light as ‘Isaac’s fire.’ ”

  “And, of course, it’s no coincidence that the Bible’s topographical descriptions suggest that the precise spot where Isaac was bound to the altar stood not only on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but at the very place where the menorah’s flame burned inside the Solomonic Temple one thousand years later.”

  “But why would other empires care about the flame?”

  “Well, if you were them, wouldn’t you?” Chandler laughed. “Imagine that the year is 1290 B.C., and the Hebrews leave Egypt as a ragtag group of slaves, but suddenly they’re winning unexpected military victories against larger and better-equipped armies across the desert. By the time they settle Jerusalem a few hundred years later and Solomon fortifies his Temple to protect the flame, the once outlandish promise to grow the Hebrews like sands on the seashore is starting to worry the magicians of surrounding empires who had heard of the perpetual fire of the menorah’s lamp and feared its significance. No operation was too elaborate to attempt to extinguish the menorah’s flame. The Assyrians attacked Jerusalem in the seventh century B.C. to extinguish it, and they failed. The Babylonians made the same attempt in 586 B.C., this time capturing the Ark of the Covenant, but not the menorah’s flame. It was kept alive in a hidden location even as the Persians invaded fifty years after that.”

  “So before the Roman sack, the flame had never been extinguished?” Emili said.

  “Right, and the closest call is justifiably still the most celebrated,” Chandler answered. “Four hundred years after the Babylonians, the Greek empire attacked Jerusalem. The five sons of Mattathias, a Temple priest, repelled the Greek invasion with such force, they were called ‘the hammers, ’ or, as the word is translated in Aramaic, maccabas, and we know them as the Maccabees.”

  “As in the Maccabees?” Emili said. “Their name comes from the word for ‘hammer’?”

  “Gives the phrase ‘tough as nails’ a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?”

  “Chandler—” Jonathan rolled his eyes.

  “Fair enough, Marcus, but my point is that by the time the Maccabees regain control of the Mount, the desecrated Temple contains only enough oil to keep the hidden flame alive for one day. The problem is, preparing the sanctified oil for the menorah takes seven days. To keep the flame alive they need that little bit of oil to last seven days, or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else the flame would extinguish for the first time since its kindling by Moses in the desert tabernacle a thousand years before. Miraculously, though, the day’s worth of oil burned for not one, but eight nights, just in time for more oil to be pressed and the flame to be saved. It was the miracle of the Temple’s
rededication, or as the word is in ancient Aramaic, hanukkah, which is still celebrated by symbolically lighting the lamp that the Greeks tried to extinguish.”

  “So by the time the Romans surrounded Jerusalem in the first century A.D.,” Jonathan added, “the story of the Maccabees was well known to Josephus, as was the preeminent significance of the menorah’s fire inside the Temple.”

  “Not only that,” Chandler said, “Josephus knew it was Titus’s superstition that drove him to sack Jerusalem’s Temple. After all, Titus knew its sanctuaries were not brimming with the golden statues of neighboring pagan provinces. He was not even after the menorah’s eight feet of solid gold. What he was after”—Chandler paused dramatically—“was its fire. The menorah’s flame threatened his divinity. That’s why even after his legions stormed Jerusalem’s inner walls and set fire to the Temple, Titus still ran through its burning walls into the Holy of Holies and thrust his sword through the sacred tapestries. Both Talmudic and Roman sources report that the tapestries miraculously began bleeding on the floor. Titus pointed to them, shouting, ‘This is the blood of your god.’ ”

  “And all the while,” Emili said, shaking her head, “the authentic flame—”

  “Was smuggled out,” Chandler said, nodding solemnly. “Just think of the importance of a flame that has burned continuously since Moses tended it alongside the Ark of the Covenant during the Exodus. I mean, can you imagine?” Chandler leaned back in his chair, eyes up at the ceiling as though taking in the scale. “Even today, two thousand years later, the notion of a perpetual fire is more a part of our modern traditions than we realize. Nearly all synagogues keep an electric flame ‘ lit’ above the sanctuary’s ark at all times, often even connecting its trip wire to a separate generator in case the local electricity fails. Most Catholic and Lutheran churches display a continual fire kindled from the candles of older churches. The Daisho-in Buddhist temple’s flame in Japan has burned continuously since the eighth century.”