Marcas said good-bye to his host and walked down the black marble staircase to the ground floor. He left the building, pulled up his coat collar against the wind, and hailed a cab.
“Palazzo Farnese, please.”
As the cab made its way through the Eternal City, Marcas’s thoughts wandered. He gazed at the Piazza Campo de Fiori, where more than five hundred years earlier, the papacy had burned philosopher Giordano Bruno at the stake. Marcas thought Bruno would have made a good “widow’s son,” which some Freemasons called themselves. The widow was the wife of Hiram Abiff, the legendary architect of King Solomon’s Temple, and the son was a reference to Hiram’s descendants, Freemasons around the world.
Things had changed a bit since Giordano was burned at the stake, although the Catholic Church still frowned on freemasonry. The Church held that freemasonry espoused a naturalistic religion — a parallel religion that rivaled the Gospel.
This didn’t bother Marcas. He hadn’t attended church in a long time, although he was still very much a seeker. He had been drawn to the Freemasons’ ethics and body of knowledge, which were based on the idea that one needed to strive continually toward self-improvement and enlightenment. He liked freemasonry’s opportunities for fellowship and education. And the Freemason rituals more than satisfied any yearnings he might have had for the church liturgies that he had left behind.
The sight of the Farnese Palace at the end of the street drew Marcas out of his thoughts. The elegant edifice was glowing, and in the courtyard, expensive cars were performing an intricate ballet as they let out well-dressed partygoers.
Marcas felt for the invitation in the inside pocket of his jacket.
A tingle of enjoyment ran up his spine. He liked the contrasts of his life. Less than a half hour earlier, he had been giving a serious speech in a solemn setting. In a few minutes, he would be mingling with the moneyed set in a luxurious palace that was now the French embassy. And in two days, he would be back at his seedy police station in Paris.
The taxi stopped behind an impressive line of limousines a few hundred feet from the palace. Marcas paid the fare.
He felt a gentle breeze from the south and looked up. The leaves in the nearby trees were quivering. Evenings were cool at this time of year, and Marcas took a moment to enjoy the fleeting springtime air before the brutal summer heat took hold.
Marcas walked up to the doorman, who was wearing a black suit, a white shirt, a black tie, and an earpiece. The guy could have a future as a bodyguard in Hollywood, Marcas thought. The man looked him up and down and let him in without saying a word.
He had barely stepped in when he spotted a hostess in a blue suit walking toward him. With her were two beautiful women who looked to be in their thirties. They offered to show him in.
The night was off to a good start.
2
When it was early May, and the wisteria plants were blossoming, Marek would work late into the night and keep the windows in the lab open to better enjoy the scent of the flowers.
Jerusalem’s Archeological Research Institute was headquartered in a sprawling brick building that the English had built. Its high ceilings were reminiscent of the lost grandeur of an empire. Marek loved its antiquated, nearly abandoned look.
He heard the sprinklers click on outside and gazed once again at two of the mementos on his large worktable: his yellowing dissertation and a hockey stick with flaking paint that he had brought back as a souvenir from the United States, where he had lived for a time.
Marek observed two birthdays every year. The first was the day he was born. The second was the day he was reborn. A walking skeleton, he had been liberated in the spring of 1945 from Dachau. He had made two oaths on that day. The first was to flee the cursed continent of Europe and start over again. He had gone to America. Then, in the nineteen fifties, he had immigrated to Israel, becoming one of the country’s top specialists in Biblical times — a kind of wiseman, he thought: old, mischievous, erudite.
Marek let his mind drift for a moment before he returned to the file on his desk. Two hundred and forty pages, single-spaced. Five test reports from distinguished geology, chemistry, and micro-archeology laboratories, with diagram after diagram and long lists of references.
When the shifty Armenian dealer Alex Perillian had brought the stone in to be authenticated, he knew right away that it was genuine. Artifacts were a big — and clandestine — business, and Marek had seen his fair share of shady characters seeking certificates of authenticity for worthless relics. But this stone was different. The Tebah Stone, Perillian had called it, bought from a family of goatherds for a hundred dollars. But worth infinitely more.
Marek set down the file and opened the linen cloth.
A fragment of a stone tablet lay there. It measured sixty-two by twenty-seven centimeters, and it vibrated with history. The bottom-left corner was chipped, and the end of the inscription was missing, but the remaining words had resisted the assault of time. Was it from pure luck? Or had someone kept it safe? This piece of stone bore a truth passed down through the centuries, a message, written by a hand whose bones had long since returned to dust.
Marek’s palms were sweaty. Original texts were extremely rare, and ever since the discovery of the Dead Sea manuscripts, the state of Israel and the major monotheistic religions had kept a close watch over all finds that could shake their foundations.
His conclusions were concise. “Based on mineralogical analyses, the Cambrian-era stone could have originated in one of three geological regions: southern Israel, the Sinai and Jordan, or south of the Dead Sea. Analysis of the surface alterations reveals the presence of silica, aluminum, calcium, magnesium, and iron, along with traces of wood, which date to 500 BCE, plus or minus forty years with carbon-14. It could very well date to the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon.”
Marek stopped. King Salomon’s temple was a mythic spot for Jews, said to hold the Arc of the Covenant and the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. It had been plundered and destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus the Great of Persia ordered the Second Temple to be built on the same site. Herod the Great embellished it under Roman occupation.
Cyrus’s temple reconstruction in 520 BCE was a key moment in Jewish history, and every artifact related to it was priceless. Marek weighed the stone in his hand. The money meant nothing to Marek. This stone was the missing link, the final element in his quest to honor Henri’s memory, to fulfill his second oath.
All he needed now were the documents from Paris. He stared at the relic and started to tremble. Was it really such a good idea to be waking the dead?
3
A flute of vintage Tattinger Champagne in hand, Antoine Marcas scanned the vast reception hall. He couldn’t help thinking of all the pomp surrounding ambassadors. Yes, France did like to strut. It was hard to get more sumptuous than the Palazzo Farnese. Even the name evoked the splendors of near-absolute magnificence: the Italian Renaissance, an era of princes, freewheeling cardinals, and courtesans skilled at damning the lords of the Church. The wealthy Farnese family had built this residence in the middle of the sixteenth century. They were nobles from Latium who boasted a pope — Paul III — in their lineage. The pontiff’s own son, however, had been excommunicated because of his taste for plundering and rape.
Laughter and voices were bouncing off the walls.
“Antoine, I hope you’re enjoying yourself. It’s quite a change from the police headquarters in Paris, isn’t it?”