The Last Ember Page 22

  Jonathan held up his hand. “Do you hear that?”

  The unmistakable sound of rushing feet emerged from the darkness around them.

  Before they could react, a high-powered LED floodlight shined through the archway and trained side to side like a prison searchlight casting for fugitives.

  “Carabinieri!” Profeta yelled. “Do not move!”

  Jonathan stood in the carabinieri’s bluish light, as though frozen in ice. Emili grabbed his arm and pulled him into an adjacent corridor.

  “Jon, up there!” She pointed to a rock scarp ten feet off the ground. There was a steep but climbable face of packed dirt. As they clambered up, the sound of the policemen increased with every second. Just as the flashlights turned the corner and flooded the niche, Jonathan and Emili were lying on top of each other on a narrow rock shelf ten feet above the frantic rays of the flashlights.

  The beams raced past them, and again they were in total darkness, fitting so compactly on the ledge that their lips nearly touched. Jonathan caught an alluring scent from Emili’s neck and would not have minded being trapped on the ledge a little longer.

  “There must be a way out,” she whispered.

  “Way out?” Jonathan whispered back. “They must have twenty guards at the exit. We’re a quarter-mile inside the Domus Aurea! No, there’s not a way—” The distant rumble of a metro train interrupted him. “Wait a minute,” he said, the flicker of an idea taking shape.

  “What?” Emili said eagerly.

  “The room with the map of Jerusalem,” he said. “There was a manhole above the vault.”

  “What about it?”

  “I think it opens up to the train station.”

  “There are usually a dozen carabinieri outside the station.”

  “From the sound of those trains, I think that manhole opens inside the station.”

  “Let’s go,” Emili said, rolling her body off his.

  The carabinieri had taken their search deeper into the ruin, and Jonathan and Emili quietly reentered the vault where they had discovered the giant fresco. Jonathan pointed at the manhole above them. Five feet beneath the manhole was a metal grate suspended by with iron girders.

  “Must be a maintenance platform to repair the tracks,” Jonathan said. “We can get close to the ladder hanging from the bottom of the grate if we climb up the scaffolding, but it may be too high for us—”

  Emili ran to the wall and began climbing up the scaffold.

  “—to reach.” Jonathan shook his head and followed her up the aluminum pipes. They were more than twenty feet above the ground when a carabinieri officer made his way back into the cavern beneath them. They both froze to stop the creaking sound of the swaying scaffold.

  Beneath them, the officer walked slowly across the cavern. He took a few steps, his footfalls echoing as his flashlight swept the floor. He un-snapped his leather holster, and they could hear the sound of metal against leather. He unsheathed his gun.

  Jonathan recognized him. Lieutenant Rufio.

  Jonathan and Emili remained motionless on the wall. If he pointed his beam upward forty-five degrees, they would be exposed. As he walked around the scaffolding, the hard-packed stucco floor crackled under his feet.

  Lieutenant Rufio beamed his flashlight inside the deep statuary niches that surrounded the room. He searched the perimeter of the cavern, clearly growing more frustrated. Jonathan realized he was not looking for them, but rather for something else. From inside his jacket, Rufio removed a pair of white carabinieri gloves, quickly slipped them on, and removed two plastic jugs from a dark niche in the wall. Gray dust covered the cartons; they appeared to have been there for some time. He unscrewed the tops of both cartons and began pouring the liquid contents onto the fresco, coating the floor. Within seconds, fumes carrying the strong odor of gasoline wafted up to where Emili and Jonathan remained still in the darkness.

  No, Emili whispered.

  Rufio pulled a lighter from his inside jacket pocket, lit a small piece of paper, and threw it onto the center of the floor. Like a flood of fire, the flames spread across the floor. Plumes of smoke billowed upward.

  “Go!” Jonathan yelled, shoving Emili up the scaffolding to reach the service ladder that hung from the maintenance grate. She jumped and grabbed the bottom rung and lifted herself up.

  “Keep going!” he shouted. The fire spread across the floor and Jonathan looked down, his panic dredging up the imagery of Homer, a pouring fire sweeping the earth beneath it.

  Rufio heard the shouting and cast his beam upward. Through the smoke, he could faintly see Jonathan on the maintenance grate desperately trying to push up the manhole in the ceiling. Rufio sprinted around the burning fresco and began climbing up the scaffold. The aluminum had become hot, even beneath his white officer’s gloves.

  Now crouching on the grate beside Emili, Jonathan pushed the manhole up with all his strength from below. Smoke sieved upward through the grate, and he could feel the heat of the steel through his shoes. He managed to scrape the manhole aside far enough for their bodies to slide through. The sudden sound of an oncoming train was deafening. The grate shook uncontrollably.

  “Jon! There’s a train coming!”

  Jonathan saw Rufio, now only ten feet beneath them. He lifted himself through the hole and found himself in the middle of the subway tracks. The train was closing in with such speed he could feel its push of tunnel air.

  “Shit,” Jonathan said.

  45

  At the end of the hall, Profeta saw smoke billowing. He ran toward the smoke-filled vault, covering his mouth with his sleeve. Brandisi emerged from the room, coughing.

  “Someone set the room on fire, Comandante!” Brandisi yelled.

  “Get extinguishers from the museum!” Profeta yelled at the surrounding officers. “Where’s Rufio?”

  Brandisi pointed upward. “There’s a service grate beneath a manhole in the ceiling. I saw Rufio climbing up the scaffold, chasing a man in the smoke.”

  “What’s above the manhole?” Profeta asked.

  In his shaking flashlight’s beam, Brandisi unfolded a large urban map big as a tent. “Aspetti, Comandante,” he stammered. “It must be the metro station! The Colosseo station!”

  Profeta whipped the radio from his belt. Static. There was no reception. “Brandisi, get out of here and radio for backup in the Colosseo station. Stop all trains.”

  46

  Jonathan knew they could not wait for the train to pass. The metal service ladder rattled as Rufio rapidly climbed up after them. There was no time.

  “Give me your hand!” he shouted to Emili.

  Inside the oncoming Linea A train, the aging capotreno blinked. He could see a young man on the tracks in a billowing circle of steam—or smoke? He seemed to have appeared from nowhere. The capotreno laid on the blaring horn, knowing in moments the train would plow through the young man.

  In that final second, the capotreno, blasting his horn and flashing the train’s headlight, feared it was too late. He had seen similar tragedies before in his long tenure on the metro; the violent shudder from the body smacking the front of the train, the blood smearing the tracks for a hundred meters. But those cases had been suicides. This was different. There was no peace about this. The young man was desperately trying to pull someone out of a manhole. The conductor could see the ferocity of his will to live.

  The train’s horn was now a continuous bray, and just as the grille skirt of the train was about to plow over the manhole, Jonathan lifted Emili with an adrenaline born only from the fear of death. He clasped her forearms, managing in a single throw to heave her frame upward to a metal platform along the metro tunnel wall and propel himself, landing squarely on top of her.

  The train roared past without even slowing, a chain of subway cars, deafeningly loud, and so close that their metal siding touched the fabric of Jonathan’s suit.

  Lying beneath him, Emili could feel Jonathan’s heart pounding so hard it seemed to pulse thr
ough her. She looked into Jonathan’s eyes, wide with terror, and rubbed his back.

  “No wonder Nero built his palace here,” she said with a relieved smile. “Good access to public transportation.”

  Pulling herself to her feet, Emili spotted an electrical pipe soldered to the wall. She found the switch and a string of caged lightbulbs flickered on, one after the other, running along the tunnel wall. They could see the white lights of the metro Colosseo station at the tunnel’s end. They walked toward it and climbed over the orange “Passaggio Vietato!” sign, entering the bright white fluorescence of the station. Amid the bustle and the occasional odd glance at their faces, which were blackened from the smoke, they both relaxed in the anonymity of moving through the torrent of commuters on the platform.

  They were walking briskly toward the exit stairwell, when Jonathan felt a sudden force in the crowd grab his arm. He whirled around and saw Rufio’s blackened face only inches in front of him, his gun pressed hard against Jonathan’s stomach.

  “So that’s who you are,” Rufio said. “Quell’avvocato.” That lawyer. The rush of commuters swarmed around them, hurrying to catch the train.

  Jonathan could hear Emili up ahead, calling his name in the crowd.

  A ring tone over the loudspeaker announced the closing of the subway doors.

  “I’d like to speak with someone from the American embassy,” Jonathan responded in a formal tone.

  “Embassy?” Rufio laughed. “I don’t plan to arrest you.” Rufio jammed his pistol even harder into Jonathan’s side. He pointed at the stairs leading up from the platform. “Walk toward that exit.”

  A commuter stepped between them to ask Rufio for directions, giving Jonathan a half-second to free himself. He bolted into the crowd, following the sound of Emili’s voice.

  “Jon! Where have you—”

  “Keep moving,” Jonathan said, walking tightly near her alongside the train. “He’s here, on the platform.”

  The subway doors were about to close when Emili unexpectedly threw out her leg, catching the doors with her foot, keeping them open momentarily as she slid through.

  “Get in!” Emili yelled. Jonathan stared at the gap between the platform and the subway. This six-inch space of air was the point of no return. This was his Rubicon. Two surveillance cameras were directly overhead. He would be identified, that was without question. With an ease that suggested it took no great deliberation at all, he joined Emili on the train. Rufio lurched toward the door, managing to get a hand between the black rubberized padding to muscle the doors open. The strained look on Rufio’s face faded as he pushed them apart with a malevolent smile.

  “Did you really expect to—”

  Emili wheeled a right fist through the door’s sliver and hit him square in the face. Rufio hurled back onto the platform as the door exhaled shut.

  47

  Ramat Mansour stood in the doorway of his house at the top of Silwan, an Arab village on a dry white hillside in the shadow of the walls of the Temple Mount. Mansour was a neat, thin man with a well-trimmed black mustache. After an afternoon nap, his kaffiyeh and black coil were still unfurled and draped around his neck as he passed his youngest child, a baby boy, back into his wife’s arms. Reluctantly, he buttoned his cotton dishdasha and fastened his sandals. Walking across a loose-gravel path, he passed his small shop of ancient coins and pottery, and checked the corrugated steel door padlocked to a bolt in the stone.

  He lit a Parliament cigarette and scratched his mustache where his first hairs of gray were beginning to show.

  He continued up the gravel slope of the Bab Huttah road to the Dome of the Rock. The ascent used to be a journey of immense joy for Mansour. He remembered making the pilgrimage with his father at the start of every day from their home in Silwan. But now Mansour was scarcely able to look at the al-Aqsa’s minaret without regretting the so-called excavations of the Waqf.

  It had been more than a year since a man from the Waqf came into the shop and said Mansour’s graduate work in archaeology at Birzeit University could be useful. Mansour had naively hoped the Waqf was interviewing for an archaeologist’s position. He quickly closed up his shop and ran home to get his academic recommendations, kissing his new wife and newborn son for bet-tawfee inshallah, good luck.

  But when he returned home to them that next morning, he was dazed, his face caked in gray mud. It was as though he had been forced unwittingly to commit a crime greater than he could have imagined.

  “They said it was for excavation,” Mansour told his wife in a frightened whisper. “But they had bulldozers and dozens of men with pickaxes.” Fists clenched, he described how they instructed the men to rip up delicate Herodian mosaic floors and Byzantine glass, how they bulldozed through an ornately designed dome in the anteroom of Solomon’s stables. They were told to mix up the strata to make certain no one could sift through the piles and determine a useful archaeological record. Mansour had been raised by his father with the Islamic virtue of respecting the remains of the two Temples that once stood on the Mount.

  When he was finished speaking he opened his hand and his wife gasped, for Mansour held the one piece of antiquity he had been able to save. Shimmering in the morning light, it was a beautiful piece of Roman glass, green as jade with an inset carving of the Temple columns on its bottom. The next day, Mansour anonymously left it at the door of the Bible Lands Museum in West Jerusalem. Months later, he brought his wife and children to the museum. He was proud to see the glass safely resting in a shaft of light in the center of a display case.

  It did not surprise Mansour that most of the destruction beneath the Temple Mount was done without the knowledge of many religious clerics who pray on the Mount. Respecting other cultures and their heritage was the highest calling of the noble religion he knew. Did Muhammad himself not seek to pray there because of the holiness created by the Jews? Did Suleiman the Magnificent not take on the very name Solomon because of the deep impression left upon him by the ancient leader? Did Suleiman not order the Temple Mount to be cleaned of all the Roman rubble to honor the Temples that stood there before his time?

  One year had passed since Mansour had been approached, and Mansour now found himself returning to the Waqf’s offices in East Jerusalem.

  The Waqf assistant who called an hour earlier knew better than to ask him to “excavate.” Instead he asked Mansour to inspect an excavation that was already completed. The man offered more shekels than Mansour had seen in half a year. His antiquities shop had been empty since last week. Christian tours were down since the violence in Gaza had increased a year earlier, and that meant fewer customers.

  The man from the Waqf could sense Ramat’s hesitation over the phone and asked him to come to the office as a personal favor, as well.

  “Your cousin, Salah ad-Din, would like to speak with you immediately.”

  Don’t go,” Mansour’s wife had said as he left the house. She spoke to him from the doorway of their bedroom, wearing a dark robe and a hijab over her hair. “I don’t care that your mothers were sisters, I don’t care you were like brothers once. You don’t have to go. What if something should—” She broke off, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “Who would protect us?”

  “I must go,” Mansour said. “He is still family.” Mansour remembered the day his parents took in the little boy as one of their own after the death of his grandfather, who had been the boy’s only remaining guardian. An unbathed, twice-orphaned six-year-old, smuggled in from Beirut. Mansour’s father quickly made a rule that no one ask a single question about the boy’s past.

  From their prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque, his father would take both boys to his small antiquities shop at the base of the Pool of Siloam. Ramat played with his younger cousin in the shop, both of them darting among the shabby glass cases. They spent hours studying the ancient coins in the shop, repositioning them like a game to be more attractive to the tourists who emerged from their tours of the Pool of Siloam. A devoutly religiou
s man, Ramat’s father had a deep respect for the archaeology of the Judeo-Christian tradition still beneath Jerusalem’s stones. The pool located immediately beneath the shop was the wellspring in which, according to the Christian Gospel, Jesus once cured the blind. The site was heavily trafficked by Christian tours, and Mansour’s father would encourage both boys to follow the tours to practice their English.

  Looking back, Mansour realized he should have known. The boyhood innocence that can ignore a horrific past cannot erase it. As early teenagers, Ramat and his cousin shared a room, and he would find his cousin gone from his bed in the middle of the night, sneaking to the basement to study their grandfather’s drawings, which Mansour’s father forbade them to see. Ramat pretended to sleep as his cousin returned and mumbled, as though speaking to someone else. The only word Ramat could make out was jeddih. Grandfather. Years later, they both entered graduate school for archaeology, Ramat at Birzeit University and his cousin at various schools in Europe. They had lost touch, but he knew his cousin had become dangerously involved in the political aspects of archaeology. Even in those days, close friends had begun calling him Salah ad-Din because of his extreme views.

  Two guards now escorted Mansour upstairs, into the open-air plaza of Haram al-Sharif and into the dusky light of the Islamic Museum. The guards waited at the museum door and Mansour walked in alone. A wide Templar-era corridor housed the museum’s main gallery inside the Mount. Mansour walked past a collection of seventeenth-century decorated swords and daggers, as well as a rare eighth-century version of the Quran, ascribed to the Prophet’s great-grandson.