The Last Ember

by Daniel Levin

  The guests at the event had fallen silent in shock. Jonathan got up slowly, bruised and shaky at first, hands on his knees. And then fully upright. With almost a rehearsed suddenness, the Colosseum’s crowd roared. Even the actors were applauding.

  “Who does their choreography?” one of the actors asked.

  “We should recruit these guys,” said the other.

  Chandler hung on the railing with one arm, grunting. “Help me up, I can’t hold on!”

  Jonathan stood over Chandler. “How does Salah ad-Din know so much about me? You told him about my research seven years ago?”

  “No, he told me.” Chandler said, letting out a sound too painful to call a groan as he swung from the edge. “It was like . . . he knows you. Now help me up! My damn knee is on fire!”

  Above the cheering crowd, Jonathan heard the sounds of approaching police sirens. He turned toward the arena’s exit.

  “How am I supposed to get up from here? The carabinieri—what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Sorry, Chandler. ‘Gladiator in arena consilium capit,’” Jonathan said, turning to leave. “No lawyer’s advice in the arena.”

  91

  Jonathan ran out of the arena, and in one of the outer arches changed back into his suit. As instructed, Orvieti was waiting. Together they moved through the radial corridor, weaving among the guests, looking up at the numbers on the arches. Carabinieri officers rushed past him, and no longer with the benefit of a mask’s anonymity, Jonathan faced the walls as he walked past them. We must get down to the labyrinth beneath the arena floor.

  “This is the gate,” Jonathan said, pointing at the number XVIII above one of the arches.

  “Of course,” Orvieti said softly. All these years, how could I not have guessed? It now seemed obvious to him that the slaves of Jerusalem would have chosen to burrow an escape tunnel under the number eighteen, a number that in Hebrew, chai, had endless mystical associations with life and survival.

  They ducked into the dark apse, and Jonathan held Orvieti’s arm tightly as they moved down a steep stone stairwell to the maze beneath the arena. Kicked-up sand floated over the railing of the half-reconstructed arena floor above them. Orvieti struggled as his shoes sank in the labyrinth’s mud with each step.

  The tunnel must be here, Jonathan thought. They now stood directly beneath the eighteenth arch and Jonathan’s flashlight caught a half-height archway that resembled an abandoned mine shaft, owing to the partially buried old wooden plank that boarded it up.

  “This must be it,” he said, pointing to a scratched inscription in the stone above the arch.

  “‘Astra polumque pia cepisti mente, Rabiri,’” Jonathan read aloud and translated, “And Rabirius used the sky in his architecture.”

  “Rabirius?” Orvieti said.

  “One of the architects of the Colosseum,” Jonathan said, managing a smile. “It was a quote from Martial, the ancient satirist, and contemporary of Josephus. It now makes perfect sense. Martial appears to be complimenting Rabirius, one of the Colosseum’s architects, but really he was giving the location of a trapdoor for the prisoners.”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t just complimenting the arches?”

  “Martial was the kind of wedding guest who once stood up and toasted the groom’s love for his bride, ‘Quid ergo in illa petitur et placet? Tussit.’ He loves her even when she coughs.”

  Orvieti said nothing, but clearly did not see the insult.

  “It’s vintage Martial, Signore. Sounds romantic, but there’s a darker meaning. He is warning the assembled guests that the groom loves her not because she is beautiful, but because she is suffering from consumption, which was often fatal in ancient Rome. That’s why she coughs. And her imminent death means the groom gets his share of her father’s fortune. It’s pure Martial, throwing a right hook, and no one sees it coming. Martial’s poetry was always about the darker side of Rome. Or in this case, telling prisoners where an escape path lies in a way that the Roman secret police will never pick up. Rabirius built the arches to train sunlight or allow prisoners to ‘use the sky’ to locate the trapdoor.”

  Jonathan knelt in the dirt, digging out a foot of mud at the base of the plank in the Colosseum. Scraping away the watery clumps of mud with his hands was easier than had the floor been dry and dirt-packed.

  “By going through here, Josephus must have made it past all of the Praetorian guards,” Jonathan explained. “After he fell through the trapdoor in the arena, he went into this tunnel.”

  Jonathan bent down and, using the strength in his legs, tried to lift the wooden plank from the wall, but there was still too much dirt packed along its bottom. He scraped another inch and the plank came loose from the arch, nearly falling on its own weight.

  Jonathan stared into the blackness.

  “I’m going with you,” Orvieti said. “If there are messages from the slaves of Jerusalem, they won’t be in Latin. You need me.” He paused. “She needs me.”

  “Signore, you said the air was too thin.”

  “That is what my physician said,” Orvieti countered lightly. “And I’ll always have this fresh supply”—he pointed at his small green oxygen tank—“should I need it.”

  “Need it?” Jonathan said, smiling. “From what I’ve seen, Signore, I’m not sure you’ve ever needed that.”

  Jonathan ducked through the opening first and guided Orvieti into the tunnel’s darkness.

  This may have been the corridor Josephus used to reach the Arch of Titus, Jonathan thought.

  The entrance to the tunnel was low, but after a few feet Jonathan could fully stand. He noticed Orvieti breathing hard out of his nostrils. Occasional gusts of damp, fetid air made it difficult even for Jonathan to inhale. Jonathan marveled at his strength.

  “Do you need the oxygen yet?” Jonathan asked.

  “Not yet.” He turned to Jonathan, smiling. “Do you?”

  Jonathan touched the walls. “The stonework was coated to minimize absorption of water.”

  The ceiling of the tunnel was a high arch rather than the more common corbelled ceilings, which suggested large amounts of water moved through here at rapid speeds.

  “Was this an aqueduct?” Orvieti asked.

  “Perhaps,” Jonathan said, “but not for drinking water, because the maintenance shafts are too far apart.”

  Even more strange, Jonathan thought. The floor declined as they walked away from the Colosseum. According to Vitruvius, aqueducts usually ran at a three-percent grade decline toward the city center to accelerate water pressure and diminish debris pickup. But this tunnel appeared built at an incline to slow down water moving toward the Colosseum.

  “Of course,” Jonathan said. “This tunnel was used to bring water into the Colosseum from the river. To fill it for naval battles.”

  “Naval battles?”

  “When Titus inaugurated the Colosseum in A.D. 79, an elaborate system of aqueducts flooded the stadium arena for naval ship battles. These massive water channels already existed from Nero’s construction of a huge lake, which sat on the spot where the Colosseum was built.”

  Jonathan pointed at a source of daylight a hundred feet ahead in the tunnel.

  “Signore, if that is a manhole or a street grate, perhaps we should get you to—”

  Orvieti held up his hand, anticipating the thought.

  “You know I cannot turn back now.”

  The tunnel opened to an underground street. The asphalt of modern Rome ran ten feet above them, supported by steel pylons erected during the nineteenth-century construction of the Tiber banks. The underside of the streets stretched like a dark sky over the ravine of ancient streets between the Palatine and Capitoline hills. Compared to the tight turns of the subterranean Jewish Ghetto, this underground view provided a breathtaking vista of ancient urban planning, a ramble of half-brick walls that sprawled into darkness.

  Orvieti stared up at a small hole boring through a manhole above them. He spoke softly, rememberin
g. “‘Open for me a pinhole of light, and I will broaden it to a sanctuary.’ ”

  “You see an inscription, Signore?”

  “No, I was just remembering something that Pope John Paul the Second said when he visited the Great Synagogue.”

  Jonathan crouched at the large brown cornerstone of an ancient wall. He scraped off some caked dirt to reveal carved lettering.

  “Vicus Jugaris. It means ‘Way of the Yoke,’ ” Jonathan said.

  “Yoke?” Orvieti said.

  “As in the yoke of cattle, but for the ancient author, Livy, the street’s name also referred to the processions of war captives, walking under the yoke of their chains.” Jonathan quickly turned to Orvieti. “Do you know what this means? It means this street was the path of the triumphal processions. It will lead us to the first Arch of Titus.”

  Ancient stumps of pillars and broken brick steps lined the ancient pavement, and Jonathan explained they were probably the remains of a republican-era portico, where the senators sat streetside during the triumphal procession.

  Jonathan and Orvieti followed the street to its end, where they stood at the edge of a steep curved slope overlooking a huge semicircular basin that resembled a very deep, empty underground lake.

  “This must have been an ancient reservoir,” Jonathan said.

  Orange streetlight showered through a rain grate high overhead, illuminating the enormous size of the former reservoir. At the far end of the semicircular basin stood a seventy-foot-high stone retaining wall.

  “That’s a dam,” Jonathan said, “for the Colosseum. The wall of this basin must have served as a river intake to divert millions of gallons of water from the Tiber to flood the Colosseum for naval battles.”

  The dam wall was made of enormous travertine blocks fitted together without mortar, a building technique owing more to Jerusalem’s Herodian construction than to local Roman brickwork. The subterranean architecture suddenly made sense to him.

  “The slaves from Jerusalem must have worked for months to dam up this reservoir.”

  Given the subterranean dam’s massive size and enormous stones, the wall bore an uncanny resemblance to the Western Wall in Jerusalem with one prominent exception: seven freestanding arches supported the wall as flying buttresses, forming seven curved staircases that rose upward from the bottom of the reservoir’s basin like giant arches to converge upon a small platform high above the basin floor. The platform jutted out like a balcony from the center of the wall, and from the platform, a small door gave way to a dark corridor leading into the well. The middle staircase had partially crumbled, suggesting that someone had fallen with great violence into the deep basin below.

  Orvieti walked closer to the rim of the basin, staring down at the seven arched staircases.

  “It’s a test,” Orvieti said.

  “What is?”

  “The shape of the bridges,” Orvieti said. “It is a notaricon, an ancient precaution, usually consisting of two or three possible paths. Here the builders have made seven arched staircases leading up to the platform, but most likely only one is strong enough to withstand a person’s weight. The wrong ones are probably hollow and . . .” Orvieti did not finish the sentence, but his eyes fell downward to the chasm below.

  92

  Jonathan slid down the steep muddy slope of the basin and called back to Orvieti. “It’s too steep, wait up there!” Jonathan walked to the center of the basin’s floor, surveying each of the arched staircases. From the workmanship, he realized, the slaves must have stolen away as much time as they could from their construction of the Colosseum to design these intricately arched staircases.

  Jonathan heard the sound of footsteps echoing in the basin.

  “Hello?” Jonathan said, squinting into the darkness. In the shadows there was a figure walking toward him, and moving more awkwardly, a second person beside the figure.

  More silence and then a sudden voice, which through the subterranean acoustics sounded as close as his elbow.

  “Remarkable work, Jonathan.”

  Jonathan could faintly see a man by the steep slope of the reservoir’s edge. He stood in shadow just outside a natural spotlight from the street grate above. His face was hidden but he wore an open white shirt and dark slacks.

  “How do you know who I am?” Jonathan said.

  “Because . . .” the man said, swiveling the person at his side into the spotlight in front of him. “We have friends in common.” In the harsh light, Emili stood there, her hair strewn and eyes deeply bloodshot. Her mouth was covered with gray duct tape, but Jonathan could see her lips trembling under its surface. He could tell her wrist restraints were pulled too tightly behind her back and her blouse was sprayed with blood. The thin muzzle of a Beretta was pressed against her temple.

  Jonathan stared at Emili.

  “Okay!” Jonathan yelled into the darkness, his arms outstretched in a conciliatory gesture. “Okay,” he repeated soothingly, “just put the gun down.”

  There was silence. Emili was ripped out of the spotlight. The man’s shadow disappeared.

  “I have given you all the information I have!” Jonathan pleaded loudly. “You followed me to the Colosseum and through the tunnel beneath the arena. I am of no more use to you. Let her go.”

  Jonathan heard a slow, sarcastic clap from the shadows.

  “A brilliant closing argument,” said the voice.

  “Please,” Jonathan said, “let her go.”

  The silence was terrifying. Jonathan feared he would never forget it, as trauma victims never forget the silence just before an event that alters their life.

  In the shadow, Jonathan thought he could make out the bare teeth of a smile.

  “No journey to heroism is more unlikely than yours. For all the time I knew you, I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s quite remarkable you are standing here, isn’t it? Chalk it up to the gods of fate. Or have you wondered why it was you who was brought back to Rome to handle the law case for Dulling and Pierce?” The man raised his voice, as though proud of an elaborate scheme for which he had not been given full credit. He paced around the street grate’s spotlight in which Jonathan now stood, his shoes kicking up dust as he circled him, dragging Emili in tow. His face was still shrouded in darkness. “Or was it just coincidence that the fresco you saw in the catacomb seven years ago described Josephus’s path of escape out of the Colosseum?”

  His tone sounded eerily familiar to Jonathan: the flair for narrative, the spoken italics, but Jonathan could not place it.

  “How do you know of—”

  “Know of? I was there. I did it to you. I sent you into exile, and now I have brought you back.”

  “That’s impossible,” Jonathan said softly. “Only four of us were there.” And two of them, Gianpaolo and Sharif, are dead, Jonathan thought.

  “I had been looking for that catacomb for months,” said the voice in the darkness. “You had gotten too close.”

  “You staged that collapse,” Jonathan said, nausea rising in his stomach.

  “It was an event that changed your whole life.” The tone coming at him in the darkness was factual, unconcerned. “It was the reason you left academics.”

  “Gianpaolo was killed,” Jonathan said, awestruck. “And for what?”

  “For what!” The man laughed. “How do you think I have accomplished this? That night changed not only your life, but mine as well. It proved to even the most skeptical imams in the Waqf that I could get closer than any other man to finding the menorah since my grandfather sixty years ago! Let other people talk nonsense about religion and mythology. My grandfather understood that who controls the past controls the future. He knew that history is written in fire.”

  Jonathan froze, he had heard those words before. His mind reeled back to his time at the academy, when he was sitting outside the villa with Emili. Sharif turned to both of them, holding the map of the catacombs beneath
the Villa Torlonia in his hand. “We’ve got to go for it. History is written in fire. Once it’s extinguished, it’s gone!”

  “What did you just say?” Jonathan said.

  The man stepped forward into the spot of light, which illuminated his slim frame, his gray eyes, his square jaw and uneven teeth. His groomed, scholarly beard was missing and his once feathered black hair was now stubble-shaved. But the man was the same.

  “No,” Jonathan whispered. Salah ad-Din stood before him in the light, and Jonathan understood the whole loathsome trick.

  “In ancient myth, Jon, who creates the hero?” Sharif Lebag said, level ing the gun at Emili’s forehead. “The villain.”

  93

  I’ve often wondered,” Sharif said, “what did Titus look like at the moment he learned it was Josephus who had betrayed him?” Sharif spoke with unnerving nonchalance, raising his free arm theatrically. “There Titus was, sweating in his villa, poring over tactical routes out of the Temple Mount, to discover how the sacred relic escaped under his nose. Only his most trusted courtier sat at his side reviewing the sketches with him. Someone who was invaluable to his siege of Jerusalem. His personal historian, Flavius Josephus. I’ve imagined it over and over again. That moment Titus realized a lone historian defeated a man no army in the world could. His trusted adviser who had deceived him for years, earning greater access to the emperor with each flattering history he published.

  Sharif looked only vaguely familiar to Jonathan. This man’s eyes revealed something removed and cruel, a transfigured version of his former self.

  “But now, Jonathan, I finally know the expression on Titus’s face when the betrayal dawned on him with the force of the sun. It’s the expression on your face right now,” Sharif said with satisfaction.

  “Jerusalem was all a setup,” Jonathan said, feeling strangely little.

  Jonathan looked to Sharif’s side, where Emili struggled in shadow. “You monitored Emili’s research, but did not count on the informer in the marketplace, did you? You had to end her research there in disgrace, just as you ended mine.”