The Last Ember Read online

  Jonathan held the bridge of his nose, taking scattered notes, trying to proceed as rationally as he could. “I can’t believe this,” he murmured.

  “Me neither,” Mildren snickered. “Bloody lucky testimony isn’t weighted by sex appeal, right?”

  “Would you please state your name and title?” Fiorello said.

  “Dr. Emili Travia,” she answered. “Deputy director of the International Centre for Conservation in Rome.”

  Fiorello’s direct examination of Dr. Travia developed a rhythm of question and answer, establishing her expertise—her Ph.D. at La Sapienza, her receipt of the Rome Prize, awarded to only one Italian biannually by the American Academy in Rome—her rise through the International Centre’s administrative ranks, from staff assistant to deputy director.

  Fiorello stepped away from the lectern, his line of questions turning to the events surrounding her team’s preservationist efforts in Jerusalem. He asked Dr. Travia to explain her team’s work on the ground to survey the Temple Mount.

  “In 2007 my team of preservationists from Rome arrived in Jerusalem to respond to allegations of archaeological destruction beneath the Temple Mount by the Waqf Authority.”

  “The Waqf Authority?” Fiorello said.

  “From Al Waqf, or literally ‘the preserve,’ the Waqf is a religious land trust that has administered the Temple Mount in Jerusalem since 1187. Our office heard reports of unauthorized excavation, and our initial investigation discovered mounds of rubble in the olive groves of the Kidron Valley at the foot of the Temple Mount.” Emili recounted how her team moved through the heap, picking out shards of biblical-era pottery and shattered Crusader amulets, like stunned medics surveying a smoldering battlefield with no survivors. “A local monastery confirmed that bulldozers had been dumping rubble in the middle of the night.”

  “And you contacted the Waqf Authority?”

  “Yes. And as we expected, we received no response.”

  “You expected your preservation efforts to be ignored?” Fiorello feigned surprise.

  “The Waqf Authority has been as vigilant against non-Muslims visiting certain areas of the Mount as the Manchu priests in imperial China once were in preventing the entrance of mortals to the Forbidden City. If we were to inspect beneath the Mount, Dr. Lebag and I knew it would have to be without permission.”

  “Dr. Sharif Lebag was part of your delegation?” Fiorello now approached the witness on the stand in the same way he was beginning to approach the heart of her testimony. He touched the railing as though offering his support, preparing her to broach the topic of her murdered colleague.

  “Dr. Lebag had been in Jerusalem for a few months.” Emili swallowed.

  “His spoken Arabic and traditional Islamic observance were helpful to recruit informants. A shopkeeper in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter told him of a possible illicit excavation near his stall in the spice market. Men with drills and pickaxes were using a previously abandoned rusted door located opposite his stall. Dr. Lebag and I visited the spice market and inspected the door. It looked abandoned for centuries, except for one detail.”

  “Which was?”

  “The rusted iron handle had silicon sensors to authenticate fingerprint recognition.”

  “Magistrato!” Tatton objected. “This is all fascinating background, but this case is about an artifact. Is there any relevance—”

  “Magistrato, I am demonstrating the worth of these fragments by the extravagant efforts to hide them.”

  The magistrato nodded, permitting the inquiry.

  Fiorello resumed. “If this abandoned door required fingerprint authentication, presumably you could not enter?”

  “No, but we obtained a map of Jerusalem indicating an ancient underground street that ran beneath the spice market and directly beneath the door. The next morning we entered the market.” As Emili spoke she could picture the events in her mind. “Dr. Sharif Lebag and I dressed as tourists, carrying in tattered backpacks our lithium flashlights, climbing rope, and spades. Sharif’s contact, the shopkeeper, allowed us to remove the stone drain beneath the table in his stall. The ancient street was a considerable distance below us and we roped down to it. Enormous columns supported modern Jerusalem above. Our flashlight beams could barely reach the ceiling.”

  “And that’s where you saw these fragments?”

  “Not at first. At the end of the street there was a cavern converted into a room reinforced with steel beams. The room contained high-tech archaeological equipment, including a humidity-controlled glass case for original scrolls and parchments. Digitized images of Renaissance Greek and Latin manuscript pages papered the cavern walls with labels documenting the folio year.”

  “Did the labels identify the source of the text?”

  “Yes. All the pages included passages, copied by scribes, from the works of Flavius Josephus. In the center of the room, a group of marble fragments lay on a glass table beneath a fiber-optic lamp. Both Sharif and I recognized the artifact at once. Fragments of the Forma Urbis”—she pointed at the photograph of the artifacts on the easel—“those fragments of the Forma Urbis.”

  “There were identifying markings?” Fiorello said.

  “Yes,” Emili said. “ ‘Archivio di Stato.’ ”

  “Roman State Archives,” Fiorello mused. “And you saw another inscription on the fragments?”

  “Sharif—Dr. Lebag, I’m sorry—identified the inscription running along the underside.”

  “Which was?”

  “The same inscription present on these fragments. ‘Tropaeum Josepho Illumina.’ ”

  “And then what happened, Dr. Travia?”

  “From the market above us, there was the sound of a gunshot. A single blast. Through the street grate overhead, we could see the spice market was in chaos. Sharif and I returned to where we had roped in, and, using the pulley we’d fixed to the drain, he belayed me back up to the market stall.” Emili swallowed, willing herself to stay calm. “I climbed out of the drain, and saw the shopkeeper’s legs, just as he had been, sitting at the table. I climbed out from under the table and”—Emili paused, and then continued—“saw him seated, folded over the table, eyes wide open.” Emili closed her eyes, picturing the image, how the blood from the middle of his forehead streamed down into the yellow mound of ground mustard. Emili looked up at Fiorello. “That is the last I remember before being knocked unconscious.”

  “When did you wake up?”

  “An hour later. In a Catholic hospital outside the Damascus Gate. I had suffered a severe concussion, and the attending nun would not let me leave until an official from the Israel Antiquities Authority signed me out. No one had heard from Dr. Lebag. Immediately, we returned to the Muslim Quarter in search of him.”

  “You returned to the stall?”

  “Yes, but there was no trace of the dead vendor or his table. The stall where Sharif and I descended was empty. Neighboring shopkeepers insisted it had been empty for days. I showed the official the rusted door but the silicon sensors were gone. In fact, the door now hung slightly off its hinges and you could step right through.” Emili remembered the muscles in her legs tightening as she opened the door and hurried down a long flight of steep stone steps. Fueled by a headlong rush of fear, she ran into the cavern they had entered only hours before. She remembered the shrill echo from screaming Sharif’s name.

  “And what did you find, Dr. Travia?”

  “The room was empty. The long steel tables were gone, so were the copies of manuscripts papering the walls. No cabinets. No marble fragments. It was all gone; the room was completely stripped—” Emili stopped. She remembered seeing a gruesome broom stroke of blood, thick on the floor like a brush of red paint. The street grate in the ceiling high above allowed in enough light to see a small, dice-sized fragment resembling a piece of white marble on the floor.

  “There was a small fragment,” she said, remembering the shard glistening at her feet as if it had been cleaned with a pink protectiv
e resin. Moved by a force outside herself, she picked it up and held it in her hand. Turning the piece over, she saw a tuft of black hair. She felt a stab of shock and then convulsive dry heaves seized her. Her legs gave way and she fell to the floor.

  “The UN investigation,” Emili said, breaking her silence, “concluded it was from Sharif’s skull, the back of his head and brain, carried away by the exit of a single bullet.”

  9

  The headquarters of the carabinieri’s Cultural Heritage Guard once housed an ecclesiastical college in the early 1700s, but the late-baroque building was now known to the officers of this elite unit as “the Command.” The morning sun slanted into the dim conference room on the sixth floor, and the lieutenants watched Comandante Profeta step into the blue blaze of a projector’s light. His hand was bandaged—cut by a flying wood plank in last night’s blast. The officers sat silently around the table, their uniforms still darkened from ash.

  Profeta massaged his shoulder. The paramedics had brought him to the hospital and, throughout the night, doctors X-rayed him up and down like a Greek kouros of questionable provenance. Nothing broken, but the physicians protested his departure, wanting to prod him further. Profeta ignored them and returned to the Command at dawn. He knew they were running out of time.

  The lab had not yet returned any information about the corpse. Because of much-needed emotional release, the lieutenants created their own mythology surrounding the discovery. “The Princess of the Pier,” Profeta overheard them call her. The junior officers created a betting pool, wagering on her age pending laboratory results.

  A first slide appeared on the screen: an oversized photograph of the female corpse submerged inside the viscous fluid of the ancient column. Taken from the foot of the sarcophagus, the crisp digital image made the woman’s naked figure even more lifelike.

  “Late last night, beside an unused commercial dock in Civitavecchia, our team discovered this victim, female, age estimates range in the late thirties, and the cause of death appears to be lacerations sustained across her torso. The perpetrators disguised the homicide as an ancient burial: a perfect imitation of a Corinthian maiden.”

  “Corinthian maiden?” Brandisi asked.

  “An ancient practice in which conquerors marched women prisoners of war back to their city and literally buried them inside columns. They were called Corinthian maidens.”

  “Barbaric,” another officer said.

  “It’s no coincidence that the flutes of Corinthian columns today still imitate the folds of the togas of women once buried inside them,” the comandante said, “or that our Ionic capitals emulate the hairstyle of first-century women.” Profeta knew how much of classical architecture bore hidden cultic secrets. Universities trimmed their buildings with moldings of eggs, darts, and claws, not realizing that any ancient Roman would recognize those symbols as the trappings of pagan sacrifice.

  “Could this have been a cult murder?” one of the officers asked. “An initiation rite gone too far?”

  “Could be,” Profeta said. “Someone studied the ancient practice carefully, right down to the emollients used in ancient Rome. The hoax appears better researched than any I have seen. Next slide, please.”

  Profeta nodded toward the back of the room. The next slide displayed ornately illustrated parchment pages lying scattered on the warehouse floor.

  “We found dozens of these pages. They are from manuscripts hundreds of years old. Most would have been quite valuable, particularly this fifteenth-century page”—Profeta touched the screen with his pointer—“except someone made them virtually worthless.” The slide changed, displaying a close-up of a manuscript’s text. Inked bracket markings and circled letters dotted the parchment’s ornate script. “Someone marked up the texts, conducting research of some kind. Has anyone noticed what all these pages have in common?”

  Even under pressure, the comandante never missed an opportunity to impart a historical context to improve his officers’ investigative skills. He offered a continuing education in ancient history so rigorous that his lessons became renowned across Interpol’s antiquities units.

  Profeta stepped to the side of the projector’s screen and, on the dry-erase board behind him, wrote in big block letters.

  FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS, A.D. 30 TO A.D. 100

  “Flavius Josephus,” Profeta said, pointing up at the illustrated manuscripts on the screen. “Notice how the first letter on each page is decorated with a small portrait of a city in flames, depicting the smoldering turrets of Jerusalem’s city walls after the Roman siege. It was Flavius Josephus who wrote the defining eyewitness account of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, known as Bellum Iudacium, or The Jewish War. It became an instant best seller in the ancient world, recopied by scribes throughout the ages. By the Renaissance, Josephus’s histories were the most widely read texts in the Western world after the Bible. The manuscript pages we found in the warehouse”—Profeta pointed at the screen—“were each torn out of priceless editions of Josephus, ranging from medieval manuscripts to Renaissance folios. All from different scribes, different centuries, and different languages, but they are all translations of the same first-century historian. It’s as if they were comparing versions transcribed across the centuries to find something inside the text.”

  Profeta paused a moment, surveying the room.

  “And if our targets are researching the ancient historian Flavius Josephus . . .”

  The officers knew the commandant’s method well enough to chorus, “Then so must we.”

  Profeta turned his attention back to the manuscripts on the screen. “What else do we know of this ancient author?”

  “Sorcio!” Brandisi said, inviting much-needed laughter into the room. Rat, a term unique to the organized crime families that the carabinieri battled in the rougher patches of Torre del Greco, outside Naples.

  “A turncoat.” Profeta nodded. “That’s the popular view. Josephus’s swift rise from prisoner of war to Roman citizen suggests a deal greased during his capture. Even more mysterious are the circumstances of Josephus’s surrender described in this manuscript page on the screen.”

  “You mean when all the other soldiers in Josephus’s battalion chose suicide over capture?” asked Brandisi.

  “Precisely,” said Profeta. “Imagine that Josephus was a general, leading his troops to stop the Roman advance toward Jerusalem. But when Roman forces outflanked his platoon, Josephus and his men were surrounded. The men under his command threatened to kill him if he surrendered. So Josephus suggested a mass suicide pact: pick lots to determine who would kill the next man and the one after, and so on.” Profeta pointed at the slide, running his laser pointer beneath each line, translating the text as he read:

  “Murder me,” Flavius Josephus said, “but let us first draw lots and kill each other in turn. Whoever draws the first lot shall be dispatched by number two, and so on down the whole line as luck decides . . .” Without hesitation each man offered his throat for the next man to cut. But Josephus—shall we put it down to divine providence or just to luck?—was left alive. . . .

  “And here lies the heart of the mystery of Flavius Josephus,” Profeta said. “How was he left the last man alive?”

  “Reminds me of the Josephus problem in computer science,” said Profeta’s technology director, Lieutenant Lori Copia, a woman at the long table’s far side.

  “The Josephus problem?” Profeta asked.

  “A security dilemma in computer database protection. Most firewalls are built to secure a digital perimeter by eliminating unauthorized codes. The Josephus problem arises when an unauthorized code detects the firewall’s pattern of elimination, and can constantly avoid being eliminated each time.”

  Profeta grinned. “The modern term goes to the center of the historical controversy of Josephus. How did Josephus keep drawing the right lots? The original Josephus problem.”

  The projector’s screen whirred upward, and the room’s dimmers gently returned the lights
to normal.

  “Speaking of technology, Copia, any information from the smashed computers at the warehouse?”

  “Still searching, Comandante. We managed to retrieve only one of the computers before the explosion. It had an Arabic keyboard. We are running ninhydrin tests for prints.”

  “Hard drives?”

  “There are a few intact sections of the hard drive. Likelihood of recovering anything is slim.”

  “Next, Brandisi. Have we found any activity along the pier near the warehouse? Witnesses?”

  “Not a soul, Comandante. Last reported activity on the pier was a preservation project months ago. A third-century Roman watchtower, a small circular structure adjacent to the warehouse.”

  “Next, Rufio, forensics?” Profeta said, but then paused a moment and turned back to Brandisi.

  “On second thought, get a list of everyone involved in that preservation project, Brandisi. Donors, staff members.” Profeta turned to Rufio. “Forensics?”

  “We found some burnt municipal identification tags,” Rufio said.

  “Manufactured or stolen identification tags?” Profeta asked.

  “Too early to tell,” Rufio said. “The blast gave them a pretty good scrub, Comandante.”

  “The men running that safe house were professionals,” Profeta said, returning to the dry-erase board and tapping it with the back of his marker. “And whoever was running that operation was not interested in academic history. They were studying Josephus for a very practical purpose.”

  The meeting broke, and Profeta’s ranking first lieutenant, Alessandro Rufio, left the Command, pulling hard on a hand-rolled cigarette as he walked across Piazza di Sant’Ignazio.

  Rufio was a tall, rangy young man with fair skin and red curly hair that announced his Sicilian heritage like a flag. Like many Sicilians, his light features owed to the Normans’ eleventh-century conquest of Sicily, but here in Rome he was more conspicuous. He walked rapidly now down side streets, turning frequently to ensure no one trailed him from the Command. He scanned each alleyway for a pay phone. His instructions were always to use a pay phone. He knew the reason better than anyone: the carabinieri’s random surveillance of cellular phones to monitor organized crime was vastly underreported.