At the end of the corridor a young black woman, her hair in cornrows, smiled up at him from the screen of her computer’s monitor. “Yes?”
“Father Francis, is he in?”
She nodded, reaching for the phone. “Who shall I say is here?”
“His favorite heretic.”
Her eyes narrowed, thinking she was being ridiculed. The door behind her opened and Father Francis stared out in obvious surprise.
“Praise be to heaven! The apostate has come to salvation!”
“More likely for a cup of coffee,” Lang said.
The priest nodded to the young woman. “Tawanna, would you be so kind…? One black, one sweetener only.”
Lang settled into one of two wooden chairs facing the priest’s desk. “Any particular reason you have such uncomfortable furniture?”
Francis sat behind a desk cluttered with books and papers, the sort of thing Lang would have expected to see had he been calling on a professor of English at one of the local colleges. “You’d have to ask whoever at the diocese provided them. My guess is that the furniture was perceived as a bargain.” He picked up a printed bulletin, scanned it and returned it to the pile already in front of him. “What can I do for you today? I’m betting it has nothing to do with your spiritual side… if you have one.”
There was a gentle tap on the door just as it opened. Tawanna pushed it wide with a hip, a steaming mug in each hand. She set them down on what little empty space the desktop had and left without speaking.
“Thanks!” Francis called afer her, handing one mug to Lang. “Now, you were saying…?”
Lang tested the brew before taking a full swallow. “The other day at lunch you made a remark about Saint Mark’s bones not being what was taken from his tomb in Venice. If not his, whose?”
Francis leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and making a steeple of his fingers. “You want the short answer or the long one?”
“I get a choice?”
Francis untwined his fingers to pick up his coffee. “In the mid-first century, Saint Mark served as bishop of Alexandria, then the second-largest city in the Roman Empire. He was so efficient at converting the Egyptians to Christianity, the priests of the old gods stirred up a mob that dragged him out and killed him. They intended to burn his body, thereby depriving him of the afterlife in which they believed. Legend has it a miraculous storm intervened, dousing the flames that had only partially consumed the saint’s remains. Somehow the Christians retrieved the body and buried it in their church by the sea. Subsequently the Church of Saint Mark the Evangelist was erected on the site.
“By 828 Egypt was under the rule of the Turks, Muslims. In the city of Alexandria, Christian churches were being looted, torn down for building material or converted to mosques. Fearing for the relics of their city’s patron saint, two Venetian traders stole the bones, hid them under a layer of pork to discourage Turkish customs officials from examining the basket in which they were hidden and brought them to Venice.”
Lang put his mug down on the corner of the desk. “I know. The event is memorialized in mosaics in the basilica in Venice. But so far, you haven’t explained why the bones there aren’t Saint Mark’s.”
“Gutta cavat lapidem, consumitur anulus usu.”
Lang shifted his weight in an unsuccessful attempt to make the chair more comfortable. “I’m aware a drop hollows out stone and a ring wears away by use. The Roman proverb counsels patience, not endurance. If a church in Alexandria was built over the partially incinerated remains of Saint Mark and those bones were subsequently stolen and moved to Venice, why would they not still be there?”
Francis held up a finger. “Perhaps because they were never there in the first place. By the time the Venetians took whatever it was they stole, the church had long been destroyed. They claimed to have found the relics amid ruins of what they supposed had been the church, since the rubble was located by what had been known variously as Saint Mark’s Gate or the Pepper Gate, the entrance into the ancient part of the city from what is now Cairo. A number of ancient travelers had described the church as being located just inside this gate as late as the mid-seventh century.”
“Are you saying the relics could be anybody’s?”
A shake of the head as Francis leaned forward over the desk again, coffee forgotten. “Not at all. There was someone else of note buried in Alexandria over two centuries before Saint Mark ever set foot in Egypt.”
Lang stared at his friend. “Alexander the Great?”
“Indeed. His mummified body was hijacked on its way to Macedonia, taken to Memphis, then to Alexandria. Possession of the remains legitimized the Ptolemy dynasty’s rule of Egypt until the Romans came along.”
“But how…?”
“Alexander was viewed as a god by the Egyptians, the son of Ammon. For that matter, the Greeks also deified him as a son of Zeus, and much later, he even appeared in chapter eighteen of the Koran as Zulqarnain, the two-horned lord.”
“Two horned?”
“He was depicted on coins and some statues sprouting a pair of ram’s horns.”
Lang put down his mug half-empty. “That still doesn’t explain how he got into Saint Mark’s tomb.”
“He didn’t. The Venetian grave robbers looted the wrong tomb.”
Lang started to protest when Francis waved a hand, signaling for quiet. “Both Alexander and Saint Mark were buried in the same section of the city, the palace district, which was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 365 AD. There’s no firsthand eyewitness account of Alexander’s mausoleum after that; plus, in 391 the emperor Theodosius banned paganism. The edict would have provided a perfect excuse to loot whatever was left of the building.”
“Like the golden sarcophagus?”
“One of the subsequent Ptolemys had already sold it to pay his army.”
Lang held up both hands. “OK, OK. Let’s cut to the chase. What makes you think these Venetians pinched Alexander instead of Saint Mark?”
Francis spun his swivel chair around to face the bookcase behind the desk. Studying the shelves for a moment, he pulled out an oversize paperback and held it up. “Andrew Chugg’s The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great. ” He thumbed through the pages. “Here. In describing an account of the theft of the saint’s remains from Alexandria, the smell of embalming spices from the basket they used was overpowering. That was why they topped it off with pork. No way the Muslim Turk customs officials were going to touch pork.
“Embalming spices! The early Christians didn’t embalm, but the Egyptians did in the mummification process. And Alexander was mummified, remember?”
“So were hundreds if not thousands of Egyptians.”
“No doubt. But the area around the Pepper Gate wasn’t a series of tombs, it was where a number of royal buildings were.”
Lang smiled. “An interesting theory, but DNA testing could easily tell a Jew from a Greek, and carbon dating might establish when the body died.”
“The church has already denied permission for such tests to be run.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
Francis put the book on his desk. “Why the interest?”
“I figure the more I know about what was really stolen from Saint Mark’s in Venice, the better chance I have of knowing who tried to kill Gurt and me. And who sent the man who broke into our house.”
“Someone broke into your home? Anything stolen?”
“The, er, security system worked beautifully.”
Francis leaned back, his chair protesting. “And you think this break-in had something to do with what happened in Venice?”
Lang saw no reason to mention the use of the listening device by the unknowns the night the priest had last visited. “It had occurred to me, yes.”
Francis tsk-tsked, slowly shaking his head. “And I thought when Manfred came along, you and Gurt were going to settle down, live like normal people.”