“It’s possible. Or maybe the parchment from a mezuzah.”
“But why would he have fibres under his fingernails?”
“Well, let’s not forget he was killed by some one — quite possibly over the parchment. Maybe there was some sort of fight… a struggle for the parchment. Costa must have tried to hold on to it and the other person killed him.”
Sarit nodded.
“That makes sense.”
“And now the manuscript is gone and our only hope of finding out what it was is if your boffins at the Mossad managed to enhance the image sufficiently to make the writing legible.”
Sarit perked up at these words.
“You’re right. They should have finished the image enhancement by now. I’ll check.”
She logged on from the tablet and a smile lit up her face.
“Take a look at this,” she said, handing him the tablet.
He looked at it and what he saw amazed him. The letters had assumed a new clarity under the skilled hand — and computer software — of the experts who had worked on the digital image enhancement and what he found himself looking upon was a page of a manuscript in the form of the Hebrew alphabet that was used in Judea circa the first century. But the language was Aramaic. And as he started translating it, it dawned on him what he was reading.
“Holy shit!”
Chapter 41
“Come in, quickly,” called Bar-Tikva from the top of the stairs after buzzing him in.
Bar-Tikva had rented a one-room bed-sit over a shop in Stamford Hill, but he had no desire to let anyone see a goy entering his home. Who knows what gossip, what lashon hara — “evil tongue” — it would lead to. Sam Morgan closed the door quickly behind him and began climbing the stairs.
“I have a letter from your father,” said Morgan when he reached the top. He handed Bar Tikva the letter in the sealed white envelope.
Morgan had arrived from Israel and taken a black taxi here right away. As soon as he had told the driver that his destination was Stamford Hill, the taxi driver had regaled him with tales of life in London’s East End in the nineteen fifties. The driver was a war baby, now pushing retirement age. But he was the kind of man who wanted to die with his boots on.
Although not Jewish himself, the cabbie assumed, erroneously, that Sam Morgan was, and spent the entire journey rabbiting on about his “nice Jewish neighbours” including “the booby” who used to give him and his brother “lockshen soup” when they got home from school while their parents were both out working.
It amused Morgan to listen to the driver. Presumably he was hoping for a big tip at the end. Morgan obliged him, on the pragmatic grounds that in a worst case scenario, he didn’t want this man talking about him to the police and the best way to ensure a man’s silence was to make him your friend. If subsequently there was a report on Crimewatch in which his description came up, Morgan didn’t want the taxi driver rushing to the nearest phone and grassing him up.
Morgan looked around at the sparsely furnished room. The furniture was old and the atmosphere musty and smelly — with odours from the past that had accumulated in the poorly ventilated room. The room itself was over a shop and had a view of the high street.
While Morgan stood looking around, Bar-Tikva tore open the letter and read it. In fact, Morgan had steamed it open to try and find out what it said. But it was in Hebrew — or Yiddish, using the Hebrew alphabet at any rate — and he couldn’t make head or tail of it. So he re-sealed it, hoping that Bar-Tikva wouldn’t notice. Given the enthusiasm with which Bar-Tikva tore the envelope open — determined to get to the contents — Morgan suspected that he didn’t.
The only thing that Morgan didn’t understand was why HaTzadik had given him a letter in the first place. Why not a phone call. HaTzadik had a mobile phone after all — even if it didn’t have internet connectivity. Then again perhaps he was afraid of being monitored. Shomrei Ha’ir were not too popular in Israel, because of their virulent anti-Zionism. One of their former leaders had once said that if he had a nuclear bomb, he would use it on Israel. In the eyes of some ultra-Orthodox Jews, this had put him beyond the pale — even some of those who were themselves anti-Zionist.
Casting a brief glance at Bar-Tikva now, Morgan noticed him smile as he read the letter. It was so unusual to see Baruch Tikva smile — he was usually such a misery-guts — that Morgan couldn’t help but wander what had brought this mirth to his face.
“Okay,” said Bar-Tikva after he finished reading the letter. “My father wants us to work together. He says that you know this country better than I do, so you are in a better position to avoid mistakes than I am.”
What Bar-Tikva didn’t tell Morgan was that the letter also cautioned his son not to trust Sam Morgan because there was evidently a traitor in the camp and until they knew who it was, he should be very wary of “that greedy Englishman.” But in any case, Morgan was no longer thinking about the letter. He was thinking about his own plans to take this matter further.
“That’s right. And I’ve been thinking about what we need to do. The way I see it, it also starts at the dig. That’s where Martin Costa found the parchment and that’s where Daniel Klein is bound to go sooner or later of he wants to get any more information. So that’s where we have to be to intercept him and to find out what he’s up to.”
“You mean… what.. we just turn up at the dig site?”
“No obviously we need a cover story. We need to find a way to worm our way in. But it isn’t going to work if you turn up there dressed like that. You’re going to have to ditch the religious garb.”
Chapter 42
“ ‘On the day Third of the week, the 28th day of the month Iyar in the year three thousand eight hundred and twenty one since the creation of the world according to the reckoning which we are accustomed to use here in the city of Verulamium in the land of Brittania…’ ”
Daniel was reading in his mind and translating slowly, as Sarit listened in amazement.
“And this is in Aramaic?” asked Sarit.
“This is in Aramaic. And the script is right for the time.”
“And what time is that?”
“By my reckoning some time in the first century of the Common Era?”
Daniel was an atheist rather than a practicing Jew. His insistence on “Common Era” and “Before the Common Era” — rather than AD and BC — was based on academic rigour, not theology.
“Can we work it out exactly?”
“Sure, but we’ll have to go online.”
Daniel minimized the image and did a search for an app or website that could convert from the Jewish calendar to the civil calendar. The first few that he came up with could only go back as far as the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar. Eventually he found one that worked and entered the information, while Sarit went into the kitchen to make coffee.
“Good God!”
“What?” Sarit called out.
“It’s from the year 61.”
Sarit had come rushing in, holding a mug that she had just rinsed out.”
“What date?”
“May… May the forth.”
“Anything particular about that day?”
“No, but the year’s particular enough. Wasn’t that the year that Boudicca fought with the Romans?”
“Wait a minute. Didn’t Professor Hynds say that the site had something to do with that?”
“Not exactly. All he said was that it was a Romano-British site. That covers a five hundred year period.”
Daniel minimized the calendar conversion app to get on with the translation. Sarit stood there, realizing that the coffee could wait.
“ ‘Simon son of Giora said to this maiden Lanevshiah daughter of Farashotagesh ‘Be thou my wife according to the law of Moses and Israel.’ ”