The Bible of Clay

by Julia Navarro

  "Nothing, sefiora—it's this messenger. He insists that he has to deliver this envelope to Don Enrique personally, and I'm telling him I'll take it."

  "Let me have it," the woman told the messenger.

  "No, sefiora. I'm sorry, I can't give it to you. I either deliver it to Seiior Gomez or I take it back."

  Rocio Alvarez Gomez measured the messenger from top to bottom, seriously considering slamming the door in the young man's face. But she knew she had to be very careful when it came to anything involving her husband. Grudgingly, she sent Pepa upstairs to call Don Enrique.

  Enrique Gomez came down at once, and he, too, took the messenger's measure in one look, concluding he was just that, nothing more— a harmless courier.

  "Rocio, Pepa, no se preocupen, no es nada—I'll deal with this gentleman."

  He made sure to emphasize the word gentleman, so as to put the sweaty, impertinent young man with a toothpick between his teeth in his place.

  "Oye,jefe, I didn't mean to interrupt your siesta. I just do what they tell me to do, and they told me to put this envelope in your hands and nobody else's."

  "Who is it from?"

  "No idea, jefe. The company gave it to me and told me to bring it here. If you want any more than that, you'll have to call the company."

  Enrique didn't bother to answer. He signed the receipt, took the envelope, and closed the door. When he turned around, he found Rocio at the foot of the stairs, looking at him with concern.

  "What is it, Enrique?"

  "What's what?"

  "It's bad news, isn't it? I knew it as soon as I saw him—there's bad news in that envelope."

  "Good lord, woman! The messenger was a pack mule, nothing more; he was told to deliver this envelope directly to me, and that's what he did. Go on upstairs and lie down—with this heat, that's all anyone can do. I'll be right up." He jerked his head toward the stairs, and Rocio turned and left him without another word.

  Enrique went into his study, sat down at his desk, and with some misgiving opened the large, bulky envelope. He grimaced at the photos he found: pictures of two dead men at the side of a dirt road, both shot in the head, execution style. There was a brief typewritten report identifying them as operatives of an Italian firm, Security Investigations, and the place as a district of Baghdad. Finally, Enrique withdrew a note from the envelope and was not surprised to see the crabbed old-man handwriting of Alfred Tannenberg.

  There were just three words: Not this time.

  The hotel coffee shop overlooked the beach at Copacabana. The two men looked up from their breakfast as the bellman murmured an apology and proffered a bulky manila envelope to the older of them.

  "Excuse me, sir, this was just brought in for you, and the front desk told me you were here."

  "Thank you, Tony."

  "You're welcome, sir."

  Frank dos Santos put the envelope in his briefcase and continued his conversation with his business partner. At noon Alicia would be arriving, and they'd spend the afternoon and evening together. It had been too long since he'd been in Rio, he thought. Living on the edge of the jungle caused a man to lose all sense of time.

  A little before twelve he went up to his suite. He looked at himself in the mirror in the entry hallway: He might be an old man of eighty-five, but he still looked all right. It made no difference either way. Alicia would act like he was Robert Redford—that was what he was paying her for.

  George Wagner was about to board his private plane when he saw one of his assistants running across the landing strip. "Mister Wagner! Wait!"

  "What's wrong?" George snapped, obviously annoyed.

  "Here, sir, a messenger just brought this envelope. It arrived from Amman, and apparently it's urgent. He insisted that you should have it immediately."

  Wagner took the envelope wordlessly and continued on up the plane's boarding steps.

  He sat down in one of the plush club chairs and tore open the envelope, while his personal flight attendant poured him a whiskey.

  He examined the photos with a look of disgust and crumpled Alfred's three-word note in his fist.

  His face filled with rage, he got up and strode back to the exit, gesturing toward the attendant.

  "Tell the captain we're not leaving yet. I have to go back to the office."

  "Yes, sir."

  As he crossed the asphalt toward the private-aircraft terminal, he took out his cell phone and made a call.

  Goddamned Dorothy Miller! Robert Brown's back hurt from sitting on a blanket in the garden of the Millers' mansion. And to top it off, he still hadn't seen Wagner, who hadn't shown up at the picnic.

  Now the senator's boring wife was yammering on about his making a "generous donation" to aid the future orphans in Iraq.

  "You know, Mr. Brown, that the war will have grave consequences. Unfortunately, children suffer most from these conflicts, so I and a group of other Washington wives have organized a committee to aid the orphans."

  "And you can count on my personal contribution, Mrs. Miller. When you have a chance, tell me where to send the money, whatever amount you think appropriate."

  "Oh, how generous! But I couldn't presume to tell you how much to contribute, Mr. Brown. I'll leave that to you."

  "Ten thousand dollars, perhaps?"

  "That would be wonderful! Ten thousand dollars will help us so much!"

  Mercifully, Ralph Barry stepped in and interrupted. He was carrying a bulky manila envelope, which he handed to Robert.

  "It's just arrived from Amman. The messenger said it was urgent."

  Brown struggled up from the grass, made his excuses to the senator's wife, and went to find a quiet corner in the house. Barry came with him, smiling and relaxed. The former university professor reveled as he always did in rubbing elbows with the cream of Washington society.

  They made themselves comfortable in a small den and Brown opened the envelope. His expression morphed from boredom to shock as he examined the contents.

  "That bastard!" he exclaimed. "That son of a bitch!"

  Brown angrily rammed everything back into the envelope.

  "Find Paul Dukais for me."

  "What's wrong?"

  "We've got problems. Problems with Alfred."

  The helicopter flew over Tell Muqayyar, the site of ancient Ur, and Safran came into sight. The cloud of yellow dust and sand that billowed around the copter as it landed did justice to the village name, the Arabic word for saffron.

  Modern Safran consisted of little more than three dozen ancient-looking adobe houses that seemed frozen in time, save for the television antennae or satellite dishes sprouting from rooftops. The dig site was less than a kilometer away, surrounded by a wire fence laced with do not enter red tape and dotted with signs that read no trespassing and state property in both Arabic and English.

  The people of Safran cared little about how their ancestors had lived; it was hard enough for them to live in the present. They found it strange that a group of soldiers had set up camp alongside the nearby crater where the bomb had struck. The remains of an ancient village lay there, they were told, perhaps even a palace. There might be some treasure down there, many of them thought, but the presence of the soldiers persuaded them to keep their curiosity in check.

  The Colonel had been able to send only four soldiers to the out-of-the-way village between Ur and Basra, but it was enough to keep the nearby villagers out. Now those villagers were looking with equal amounts of curiosity and apprehension at the helicopter that had landed in their midst.

  Yves Picot was watching Clara Tannenberg out of the corner of his eye. Her steel-blue eyes, framed by olive skin and long, dark chestnut hair, made her extraordinarily exotic to him. But hers was not a beauty that one appreciated at first glance; one had to take her in little by little to see the harmony of her features and her questioning, intelligent gaze.

  He had thought her to be a capricious, high-strung young woman at first, but he might have judged too soon. Life had
treated her well, no doubt about that; all one had to do was look at how she dressed in her increasingly impoverished homeland. But the conversation they'd had the previous night over dinner together in the hotel led him to suspect that Clara was more than just spoiled and willful. She was beginning to seem a capable archaeologist, though it remained to be seen whether that judgment would prove true.

  Her husband, Ahmed Husseini, on the other hand, was unquestionably a solid archaeologist. He was not a man who spoke much, but what he did say was reasonable, judicious, and indicative of a deep knowledge of Mesopotamia, its history, and its current predicament.

  The military helicopter had landed near the tent in which the Colonel's four soldiers sheltered. Picot, Clara, and Ahmed jumped down to the ground, covering their faces as best they could. Within seconds their mouths and noses were filled with fine yellow sand.

  The place seemed virtually deserted, save for the few straggling villagers curious to see who had come.

  The village leader recognized Ahmed and came over to greet him, nodding to Clara and Picot. He and two of the soldiers accompanied the three visitors as they toured the site.

  Picot and Ahmed slid down the side of the bomb crater. Even from the top, one could see the remains of a structure. Around the hole, a bare-bones excavation had been started, estabhshing a perimeter of some two hundred meters.

  Picot listened attentively to Ahmed's explanations, interrupting him now and then with questions that the Iraqi answered fully and knowledgeably.

  The explosion had revealed a square room lined with shelves, on which the pieces of shattered tablets were heaped. Ahmed explained that the few tablets found intact had already been sent back to Baghdad.

  Clara couldn't bear waiting up on the surface while the two men poked about below. Impatient, she asked the soldiers to help her slide down.

  The three of them spent hours in the hole, looking, scraping, measuring, rescuing shards of tablets so tiny their cuneiform script was barely recognizable. When they came up again, they were covered by a fine layer of yellow sand and dust.

  Ahmed and Picot were talking animatedly. The two men seemed to be getting along despite themselves, having clearly bonded as peers.

  Ahmed gestured back to Safran. "We could set up a camp beside the village and hire some men from here to help with the basic work. But we need experts, experienced people who won't destroy the structure as they dig it out. And as you've seen for yourself, we might find more structures, even ancient Safran itself. I could get army tents, though they're not very comfortable, and maybe a few more soldiers to guard the site."

  "I don't like soldiers," Picot said flatly.

  "In this part of the world, they're necessary," Ahmed replied.

  "Ahmed, spy satellites are trained on Iraq day and night. They're going to see a military encampment, which means that when the bombing starts, this place will be wiped out. I think we ought to do things another way. No military tents, no soldiers. At least no more than these four, which will be enough to keep any of the villagers from getting too clever for their own good. If I come to excavate, it will be with civilian teams and civilian equipment."

  "Then you're coming?" Clara asked anxiously.

  "I'm not sure yet. I want to see those two tablets you told me about in Rome, plus the others that you say were found here with the signature mark of this Shamas. Until I examine them, I won't be able to form an opinion. In principle, this looks interesting. I think, as your husband does, that this is an ancient temple-palace and that we may find many artifacts, not only tablets. But I can't be certain of that. I have to be able to confirm that what I see warrants bringing twenty or thirty people here, with the equipment and supplies for an excavation of this size and the financial cost that would entail, under circumstances that are far from ideal. One of these days, Uncle Sam's F-18s are going to start flying over and dropping more bombs, and people that / bring here could all be killed. The Americans are going to practically wipe this country off the map, and there's no reason to think we'd be spared, if we're still here when it starts. So coming here now is certainly running a significant, and perhaps unnecessary, risk. After the war is another question. .. ."

  "But we can't leave this until then. It might be destroyed." Clara's voice was desperate.

  "Oui, madame, you are no doubt right. The F-18s will leave nothing, except more yellow dust. The question is whether I want to risk my money, not to mention my life, on an adventure like this. I am no Indiana Jones, and I have to think carefully about how long it would take me to put a team together and bring it here, how long it would take us to achieve some results . . .

  "The war will begin in six to eight months at the most," he continued. "Read the newspapers. So, in six months can we find something? In my opinion, no. You know that an excavation of this magnitude takes years."

  "So you've made your decision. You've come just out of curiosity," Clara stated more than asked.

  "You're right: I have come out of curiosity. But as for the decision, I have not yet made it. I was just playing devil's advocate."

  "We wanted you to have some idea of this place," Ahmed broke in. "But you've yet to see the tablets themselves, in Baghdad."

  The leader of the village invited them to come to his house, where it was cooler, for a cup of tea and something to eat. They gratefully accepted his invitation and made him a gift of the bags of food they had brought with them. Ahmed and Clara were surprised to hear Picot speak Arabic.

  "You speak Arabic well. Where did you learn?" Ahmed asked.

  "I began to study it the day I decided to become an archaeologist. I knew many of the countries I would be digging in would be in the Middle East, and I've never liked having to depend on intermediaries— interpreters and overseers and the like. I don't speak it perfectly by any means, but I can make myself understood, and I understand almost everything that's said to me."

  "Do you read and write it as well?" asked Clara.

  "Yes, both—at least a little."

  The village leader was a shrewd man, and he was delighted to be able to entertain these people who, if they decided to excavate, would bring prosperity to his people. He had met Clara and Ahmed when they began the excavations and had been disappointed when they had to call them off for lack of equipment and trained assistants—the men of the village lacked the knowledge and experience to help them without destroying, or half-destroying, what they found. He murmured softly to Ahmed, who turned back to Picot.

  "Our host has offered to let us stay in his house tonight if we'd like. Or we can stay in the tents we brought with us. Tomorrow we can visit the surrounding area, so you can get the lay of the land; we could also go to Ur. Or of course we can return to Baghdad right now. You decide."

  Picot was happy to spend the night in Safran so he could see more of the surrounding area the next day. Staying the night would add a whole new dimension to Iraq for him. The route from Baghdad by helicopter, the immense solitude of the yellow desert that opened before them, discomfort as an ingredient in the adventure—it occurred to him that if he was never going to come back here, or even if he did with twenty or more people, this was his opportunity to enjoy the silence of the landscape around him.

  They pitched two tents near the soldiers guarding the ruins. They had planned that Picot would sleep with the soldiers who had accompanied them in the helicopter, while Ahmed and Clara slept in the other tent. But the head of the village insisted that Ahmed and Clara sleep in his house, which was fine with Picot, who could then have a whole tent to himself.

  They drank tea and ate pistachios with some of the village men who had come to the chief's house and who offered to work on the excavations if they proceeded. They were eager to talk about the wages they

  would earn per day, and Ahmed, seconded by Picot, began a long session of haggling.

  By ten that night the village was utterly silent. The locals rose with the sun, so they went to bed early. Clara and Ahmed walked Picot to his t
ent. They, too, would be starting out at daybreak.

  Later, in silence, the couple wandered over toward the remains of the building that so fascinated them. They sat on the sand, leaning back against the ruined adobe walls of the ancient edifice. Ahmed lit a cigarette for Clara and another for himself.

  The canopy of stars made the night lovely. Clara half-dozed, trying to imagine what this place had been like two thousand years earlier. In the silence, she heard the voices of hundreds of women, children, men— villagers, scribes, kings; they were all there, passing before her closed eyes. They were as real as the night.

  Shamas. What had Shamas been like? She envisioned Abraham, the father of nations, as a seminomadic shepherd who wandered along the edge of the desert, living in a tent, tending his flocks of sheep and goats, sleeping sometimes in the open on starry nights such as this one.

  The Bible described him as a clever, hard man, a shepherd of men as well as of his flocks. He must have had a long gray beard and thick, tangled hair. He would have been tall—yes, she imagined him tall— with an imposing demeanor that inspired respect wherever he went.

  Clara sat and felt the coolness of the mud walls against her back, pondering why Shamas would accompany the tribe of Abraham all the way to Haran and then come back here. . . .

  11

  ili embraced shamas. the boy would be leaving with his

  tribe on a long journey to the land of Canaan, and while Ili felt sorrow, he was also relieved. Shamas was impossible to discipline. He was intelligent, yes, but incapable of concentrating on anything that didn't capture his imagination. Ili would never see him again, he was certain of that, though this was not the first time that the tribe of Terah had gone off to the north in search of pastures, carrying merchandise for trading.