The Last Ember Read online

  49

  The head station manager of the Colosseo metro station, Carlo Pavan, had been hunkered over the pink pages of Gazzetta dello Sport when a furious carabinieri officer, his nose caked in dried blood, screamed something about two fugitives’ having entered the station. That was twenty minutes earlier. The longest twenty minutes at work he could remember since the London rail bombings in 2005 sent every Roman commuter fleeing from the station.

  Pavan’s small glass office, no larger than two conjoined phone booths, had since become its own small Termini station for the carabinieri, who rushed in and out, frantically passing around an emergency contact list of neighboring stations to set up security perimeters.

  As instructed by the carabinieri, Pavan had ordered buses to line up outside the station for transportation to the nearest metro stop, Piazza Cavour, but the crowds were defiant and few people were taking the buses. Platform security officers heard murmurs of a riot if another train was ordered to bypass the station. A riot on my watch, Pavan thought. Why couldn’t these fugitives have chosen another station?

  Comandante Profeta found Lieutenant Rufio in the station manager’s office.

  “Lieutenant, you’re certain it was Dr. Travia? You got a good look?”

  Rufio pointed at the dried blood beneath his nose. “A very good look, Comandante.”

  “And you saw her accomplice?”

  Rufio nodded solemnly. “The same one who attacked me beneath the Colosseum.”

  “We’ve submitted the images from the surveillance cameras to the Interpol. We should have him arrested within hours.”

  Not if I get to him first, Rufio thought, though he nodded obediently.

  “Go get cleaned up, Rufio,” Profeta said warmly. “Nice work out there.”

  Rufio exited the station manager’s office and stood beside the ticket-vending machines, holding a bloody tissue in one hand and his mobile phone in the other.

  Rufio turned on his phone, and his racing adrenaline made the mobile data connection seem even slower as he navigated the Internet on its small screen.

  Rufio knew the young man looked familiar when he visited Dulling’s office with Profeta. Now it all made sense. The suit he wore beneath the Colosseum, the cut on his hand in the office.

  The law firm’s website steadily uploaded, revealing a gray marbled backscreen and stately block letters that slowly materialized in the margin: DULLING AND PIERCE LLP. The background of the website sharpened: an elegant sepia photograph of a glass skyscraper. Rufio clicked on various hyperlinks, “Offices,” then “New York,” and finally “Our Attorneys.”

  As Rufio navigated the page he felt the heightened awareness of a stakeout, effortlessly drawing closer to his quarry with each click.

  Photographs. He smiled. Passport-sized photographs accompanied each name.

  His thumb wheeled along the side of the mobile device and he marveled at the sheer numbers of pictures. Una fabbrica, he thought. A factory. He scrolled further down until . . .

  There. The dignified black-and-white photograph was a cleaned-up version of the panicked young man he had just seen in the fluorescent light of a metro car. In the photograph, he was in a dark suit, head turned slightly to the side. “Jonathan Marcus,” the caption read.

  “That’s him.” But Rufio’s silent moment of triumph was interrupted by a group of approaching officers.

  “Quite a day for you, Alessandro!” one of the other lieutenants called out admiringly, as the others applauded.

  Rufio nodded. “You have no idea.”

  Comandante.” Brandisi entered the station manager’s office. “Your office just received a call from the Curia. Cardinal Inocenti has been trying to find you.”

  “About trespassing beneath the altar of San Pietro in Vincoli?” Profeta asked, looking surprised. Inocenti was not one to press him on formalities.

  “No,” Brandisi said. “He reviewed the images from the raid that we sent the Vatican Library.”

  “The Josephus manuscript pages,” Profeta said.

  “He’s requested you meet him at the Vatican Library as soon as possible.”

  50

  Emili remained seated beside Orvieti at the table.

  “And that’s why the prisoners of Jerusalem created the floor painting inside the Domus Aurea,” she continued. “They wanted a map of first-century Jerusalem to stay in the hands of Josephus’s descendants.”

  “And I believe it has,” Orvieti said.

  “But the map in the Domus Aurea was too damaged to read,” Emili said. “And you said all of the other Napoleonic-era sketches were stolen by the grand mufti.”

  “It was not passed down to us as a sketch. It was too important.”

  Jonathan and Emili exchanged looks. “Then how do you still have the map?”

  “I believe it was painted as a mural in the synagogue on the other side of the Portico di Ottavia,” Orvieti said.

  “Signore,” Emili said gently, “there are no synagogues left in the Ghetto other than this one.”

  “It is still there across the street,” Orvieti said. “Beneath the Ghetto.”

  “Beneath?” Emili and Jonathan chorused.

  “This area of Rome along the Tiber was twenty feet lower than it is today. In 1872, the pope raised the level of the Jewish Ghetto. The roofs of stores and houses became the support for a new foundation of streets and buildings. The Renaissance Ghetto, including its alleys and first story of storefronts, was never demolished. They were just built over.”

  Orvieti disappeared into the stacks and returned with a worn oversized book. Seeing the frontispiece or a red wax seal of the Vatican, both Jonathan and Emili knew it was a map of the Ghetto, as established in 1516. Orvieti’s small frame tented over the folios as he turned the pages, his arms straight against the desk on either side. The gray-blue sketches detailed the Ghetto’s narrow streets.

  “You can still access the Ghetto’s original streets.”

  “From where?” Emili asked.

  “Beneath the furnace room of this building,” Orvieti said.

  Orvieti led them down the spiral stairs from the belfry to the synagogue’s subbasement, which until the turn of the century had been a furnace room. Orvieti pulled a string, illuminating the room with a dim, swinging bulb. They stepped past some rusted flue piping and a rotted-out oil tank.

  At Orvieti’s direction, Jonathan slid his fingers through the iron mesh of a heating grate at the base of the wall and pulled it delicately, as though removing a fragile painting. The grate snapped out, and granulated concrete crumbled on his shoes. A damp breeze exited the dark square hole.

  “This is as far as I can go,” Orvieti said, smiling weakly. “My doctor tells me the air is too thin.”

  Jonathan crawled through the opening first, and Emili followed. The crossing beams of their flashlights illuminated the nineteenth-century iron pylons that raised the streets to their modern height.

  They descended a staircase leading farther underground. The odor of coal dust and rat droppings condensed around them like a mist. The underground landscape stretched out before them like a lost city, street after street winding deeper into the earth. Occasional gusts of fetid air made it difficult to breathe. It resembled an underwater street scene: rotted casks lay half buried in the silt; dust motes floated across the flashlight beams like plankton; algae-covered signs still hung outside small storefronts. The ghostly, intact streetscapes sprawled for dozens of meters. These Roman streets had been buried alive.

  “The portico,” Emili said with awe.

  Before them, giant granite columns stretched upward twenty vertical feet, a double row of columns built by Augustus for his sister, Octavia. “At the street level,” Emili said, “only the top portion of these columns are visible.”

  To the right, they saw the slouching marble lintel of a brownstone, its wooden doors collapsed and bowed, softened by the centuries.

  “Here,” Emili said, pointing above the doorway at two conj
oined, rounded tablets with lions on rear legs, flanking either side. It was an unmistakable image of the Ten Commandments. “This is it,” she said. “A house of prayer.”

  They moved through the doorway, and the darkness seemed to thicken around them. Their beams caught glimpses of the sanctuary’s grandeur, as though entering the once luxurious confines of a sunken ship.

  Above the overturned pews there appeared to be a large hole in the ceiling filled by the cement foundation of a building above it.

  “Look.” Jonathan pointed his beam at a mural along the wall. In front of them was a breathtaking replica of the painted image of Jerusalem from the Domus Aurea. They both stood silent, stunned not only by the artistic mastery of the landscape but by the foresight of its artist, who despite his role as papal architect secretly salvaged Josephus’s legacy by reproducing this ancient painting on the wall of a Ghetto synagogue in 1825.

  “Imagine the irony,” Emili mused. “Valadier’s employer, Pius the Seventh, was the very pope to reinstitute the Ghetto Napoleon had just abolished. He must have had no idea what his papal architect had done.”

  “I’m not sure anyone did,” Jonathan said. “No one inside the Ghetto would have dreamed that the mural before them illustrated the path of the menorah’s escape from the Temple Mount two thousand years before.”

  “Look at the detail of the Cardo Maximus,” Emili said, pointing at the central thoroughfare of ancient Jerusalem. “He even drew the porticos on each side leading into the Temple Mount.” The map’s detail was a precise, vibrant version of the faded mosaic they had discovered only an hour before inside the buried walls of the Domus Aurea.

  Jonathan walked to the center of the mural, dwarfed by the portrayal of the Temple Mount’s four massive retaining walls, with turrets drawn at each corner. “There’s a faint red line here,” he said, pointing at the center of the Temple Mount. “It continues where the row of gemstones stopped in the Domus Aurea’s mural.” He moved his hand along the mural, scraping off gray fungus with the face cap of his flashlight.

  “That path goes through the modern-day Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem,” Emili said. “It looks like the tunnel runs from the center of the Mount to Antonia’s Fortress.” She pointed at an ancient turreted fortress drawn along the painting’s northern edge.

  Beneath the red line leading into the fortress, a small Latin citation was written.

  Sotto Cannone Chiesa

  “Cuniculus means ‘tunnel’ or ‘subterranean passage,’” Jonathan translated. “The second word is the Latin genitive of the name Hezekiah.”

  “Hezekiah’s tunnel,” Emili said. “And below that, Valadier wrote an additional line in a modern Italian: “‘Sotto cannone chiesa,’” she read aloud.

  “‘Beneath a canonical church’?” Jonathan translated.

  “Yes, and notice how Valadier used a different font and color. He was one of the first preservationists to distinguish his modern additions from the original. When he restored the Arch of Titus in the Forum, he intentionally used a travertine distinguishable from the ancient marble.”

  “Hezekiah’s Tunnel,” Jonathan said. “What does it mean?”

  “I think it’s telling us how Josephus moved a lamp made of eight feet of solid gold out of the Temple Mount.” Emili marveled. ”Through the tunnel dug by King Hezekiah in the eighth century B.C.”

  51

  With a sense of urgency, Emili and Jonathan hurried back through the underground streetscape and climbed into the synagogue’s furnace room. By the time Jonathan put the grate back into place and followed Emili up the stairs, she was already sharing the discovery with Orvieti, showing him the flashlit photographs of the mural on the digital screen of her camera.

  “Hezekiah’s Tunnel,” Orvieti said. “Of course, it would have to be.”

  He walked to the bookshelves and reached up to pull a volume from a high shelf. Jonathan walked over to help, but Orvieti waved him off. “This is my exercise,” he said kindly.

  He opened the volume and returned to the table.

  “The Book of Chronicles,” Jonathan said.

  “Are you familiar with the story of King Hezekiah?” Orvieti asked.

  Jonathan shook his head, always somewhat guilty that his historical knowledge of the biblical era lagged behind his knowledge of pagan civilizations such as Rome and Greece.

  “The year was about 700 B.C.,” Orvieti said as he flipped through the tissue-thin pages of the text. “King Hezekiah of ancient Israel decided to stop paying the king of Assyria tangenti.” He looked up to Emili for a translation.

  “Protection money,” she said, smiling.

  “Hezekiah knew the Assyrian forces wouldn’t waste any time laying siege to Jerusalem,” Orvieti continued. “Knowing the city would be surrounded, Hezekiah designed a water supply that ran beneath the Mount to the Gihon spring, located outside the city walls.”

  “And the tunnel has been discovered?” Jonathan asked.

  “Only the southernmost tip,” Emili replied. “In the nineteenth century, a boy bathing in an Arab village near the Gihon spring discovered the tunnel along with an eighth-century-B.C. plaque describing the tunnel’s construction, just as in the biblical text. But where the rest of the tunnel runs beneath the Mount is still a mystery.”

  “But it probably wasn’t a mystery to Josephus,” Jonathan said. “That’s why he could escape from the Mount without the Romans’ hearing any digging. They used a tunnel that was already there.”

  “Unfortunately, even if this theory is correct,” Orvieti said, “there’s no way to figure out where Hezekiah’s tunnel is.”

  “Not unless Valadier told us,” Emili said. “There was another line written in modern Italian? Sotto cannone chiesa.”

  “ ‘Beneath a canonical church’?” Orvieti asked.

  “That must be referring to the modern location of the tunnel,” Jonathan said. “‘Beneath a canonical church’.”

  Emili zoomed in the image on her camera’s digital screen. “The only problem is, at least twenty churches now span the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem. Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Franciscan, Armenian. All of them are considered part of one Christian canon or another.”

  “Keep zooming,” Jonathan said, staring at the digital image from over her shoulder. “The word cannone has two n’s here. I don’t think that’s just an antiquated spelling. Like English, canone with one n means ‘tradition,’ but with two it’s a—”

  “Gun,” Emili said.

  Jonathan nodded, but then looked askance. “Wait, this inscription is telling us to look for a church with a big gun sitting on the top of it? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “But it might have when this mural was drawn in 1825. The Ottoman hold on Jerusalem was precarious,” Emili said. “A cannon could have sat on a church and pointed over the city walls of Jerusalem as a defense.”

  “We may have some maps of Jerusalem here,” Orvieti said, searching the far side of the archive.

  But Emili was too deep in her own calculations to respond. She stared at the digital image of the fresco, a mischievous glint lighting her eyes from within.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Jonathan said protractedly. “You’re not thinking of—”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Emili, we’re talking about a church in Jerusalem from nearly two hundred years ago? Even if you made it to Jerusalem, the church may not even exist anymore. You’re acting like you can just return to nineteenth-century Jerusalem by hopping on a plane.”

  “As a matter of fact, I can,” Emili said. “In the Old City, there’s an elaborate model of Jerusalem built for the 1873 World’s Fair. It depicts every small structural detail of nineteenth-century Jerusalem in beaten zinc, down to the colored flags of the consulates. It’s exactly how a nineteenth-century pilgrim would have seen Jerusalem.”

  She saw interest flash across Jonathan’s face.

  “You don’t even have a way of getting there,” Jonathan protested. “The carabinieri have p
robably identified us from the metro surveillance cameras. You’d be stopped on the first commercial flight to Jerusalem tomorrow.”

  “I’m not thinking of a commercial flight, Jon.” She stepped toward him. “There’s the World Food Programme based here in Piazza del Popolo. Cargo planes leave every week from Ciampino to Ben-Gurion, shipping food packages en route to Gaza.”

  “And that’s tonight?”

  “I’m scheduled to be on it anyway,” she said.

  “Emili, at the very least, just wait a day to see if we can speak to someone at the—”

  “Carabinieri?” she interrupted. “And tell them what? That we’ve discovered a series of embedded messages from a first-century historian whom every scholar in the world is dead wrong about? That he wasn’t a traitor at all, but really running Rome as a double agent so he could smuggle the tabernacle menorah to safety? And, by the way, just when his messages were about to be discovered by Napoleon’s megalomaniacal expeditions two hundred years ago, an eighteenth-century architect working for the pope quietly saved them by painting a copy of an ancient mural in the Jewish Ghetto?”

  Jonathan exhaled, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Then I’m going with you,” he said, feeling his chest tighten. “I won’t let you go alone.”

  “Just this morning, in the courtroom, you said you were here for a ‘legal case’—that’s it. And now because of a theory, you’ll go with me? To Jerusalem?”

  “I’m no longer worried your theory is wrong. I’m worried it’s right. There’s no telling what these men are capable of. They detonated beneath the Colosseum.”

  “And the firm?” she said tauntingly. “You said the firm needs you.”

  “Right now, you need me,” Jonathan said. “And I don’t just mean because my Latin is better than yours. I mean because I can help you make sense of all this. I can keep you grounded, keep you . . . safe.”