The Bible of Clay

by Julia Navarro

  "What a great day," Picot said. "Everything's really coming together."

  "That's good," Fabian replied, "because I'm up to my neck in customs paperwork. You'd think we were bringing in tanks instead of tents. And the visas are driving me crazy."

  "Not to worry. Everything will be all right, you'll see. Listen to this—I'm about to close a deal with Scientific Archaeology to publish the findings of the expedition in all their editions—English, French, Greek, Spanish, all of them. We'll have the support of the most prestigious journal in the field. I hope by the end of the year we'll have something to report. Either way, we'll write articles as we go along and send them in. I know it's a lot of work, but it'll be worth it." "That's great! How'd you do it?"

  "The London editor called me. He was at the conference in Rome and heard Clara Tannenberg speak. He's intrigued by the idea that Abraham dictated a version of Genesis to a scribe, and he figured if I was going to lead the expedition it ought to be on the up and up. He wants the exclusive; he'll publish whatever we send him."

  "I'm not sure I like working with the press breathing down our necks."

  "Me either, but given the circumstances, I think it will work to our advantage. I'm not totally sure what we're getting into." "Now you tell me!"

  "There's something strange about this dig, Fabian, beyond the obvious risks. I don't know what it is, but something's off." "What do you mean?"

  "I've yet to meet this mysterious grandfather of Clara Tannenberg's. And they've never told me how he found those first two mysterious tablets, what expedition he was on, even what year it was. They're an odd couple."

  "Who? Clara and her husband?"

  "Yes. He strikes me as a solid man who knows what he's doing. But there's a lot he's not saying."

  "And you haven't liked her from the first day." There was nothing Picot could say to that.

  "Well," said Fabian, "I'm dying to meet her. I suspect she's much more interesting than you paint her."

  "You won't have to wait long—when you get there, you'll be working with her. Her husband has informed me he won't be on the expedition itself. What I don't know is why."

  "Intriguing—why would he jump ship at this late date?"

  "I just don't know."

  Fabian shrugged. Not knowing Ahmed, there was nothing he could add. "Oh! I forgot. Magda, the graduate student who's been helping us recruit, called. There's a Bosnian kid who's been recommended, a teacher who's come to the Complutense to take a course in Spanish for foreigners. Apparently he's short of money and would be willing to go with us, to do whatever needs doing. He speaks English."

  "What about the Spanish class?"

  "I have no idea. I'm just telling you because we could still use a couple of people, although I don't know whether this guy is good for anything we need."

  "Let me think about it. We can't take people who aren't useful for something concrete. The Croatian is different; we need a computer geek."

  "I also thought that maybe a Bosnian and a Croatian ... It could be a problem. But I told Magda we'd consider him."

  "Okay. Listen, of those we have so far, is any of them a decent photographer?"

  "For what?"

  "For the journal! They're not sending us anybody; we'll have to do our own photography."

  "I thought you said they were all hot about this project."

  "They are, but we're going to do all the work. They aren't going to send a team, or even a lone reporter, assuming they had one, to a war zone. Scientific Archaeology isn't Time magazine."

  "As though we didn't have enough work to do!"

  "No whining, my friend. So—when are you leaving?"

  "In three days—if I don't have any more fights with customs officials. But there's still some paperwork to finish, so there's no guarantee."

  "Who have you decided to take with you?" "Marta Gomez."

  "Oh? Marta, huh?" Yves nudged his friend.

  "There's nothing between Marta and me."

  "But you wouldn't mind it if there was, would you?"

  "Marta's a friend, that's it. We've known each other since university, and believe it or not, there's never been any 'thing' between us."

  "Well, she's far and away the most interesting woman of all your friends. She strikes me as really intelligent and capable."

  "She is, and she's got a gift for dealing with people—whether it's the president of the university or a ditchdigger."

  "But we're talking about Iraq."

  "Marta's been to Iraq, and on expeditions to Syria and Jordan too. She knows the country—a few years ago she was a guest archaeologist attached to an expedition financed by some Iraqi bank. She stayed on for a couple of months and knows the area of what used to be Haran, where you said this mysterious grandfather found the tablets. And she speaks Arabic. She'll be able to talk to the customs people, the head of the village, the workers. ..."

  "You speak a little Arabic yourself."

  "A very little. Marta and you speak it. I misspeak it."

  "Well, she seems like a great choice to me. I don't know her as an archaeologist, but if you say she's good . . ."

  "I don't think there's anyone anywhere better for the job."

  "Fabian, in a job like ours it's important to choose your team and work as comfortably as possible. Things are not going to be easy over there, and Marta is fine with me."

  "You can tell her that in person. She's coming over now."

  "Wonderful. We've got a thousand things to finish."

  19

  franz zieris, the commander of mauthausen, was

  reserved in his greeting of the two young men sent from Berlin, especially Alfred Tannenberg. Tannenberg had been sent from headquarters; he was a protege of Fritz Hermann, whose daughter, Greta, he had just married. No one had to tell Zieris that Tannenberg's career was going to be meteoric. Both Alfred and Heinrich represented a category of the SS reserved for university graduates. Zieris had been a carpenter before the war.

  Tannenberg, however, over time turned out to be a more competent officer than Commander Zieris had expected. While effectively achieving the Reichfiihrer's work objectives for the prisoners by driving them until they were human ruins, he also exhibited an unprecedented creativity in his methods of ultimately disposing of the non-Aryan pigs.

  Life in that village in the heart of the Danube valley—dotted with farms among the abundant fir and spruce trees—was as pleasant as the two friends could have hoped for. The serene landscape, however, stood in macabre contrast to the machine of death that was the Mauthausen work camp and the others that had been built to accommodate the growing volume of prisoners being brought in week after week. There were now over two dozen work camps scattered throughout the area.

  The organization of Mauthausen was similar to that of other camps. There was a political bureau, a department of custody, the "health service," the administrative offices for record-keeping, and the headquarters of the military detachment.

  Zieris accompanied Alfred and Heinrich during their first tour of the camp, then turned them over to one of his subordinates, Commander Schmidt, for a fuller explanation of their operations.

  Schmidt was succinct as he took them through the procedures. "All prisoners wear a triangle that indicates the crime for which they are interned. Green for common criminals; black for antisocial elements such as gypsies, beggars, thieves, and so on; pink for homosexuals; red for political criminals; yellow for the Jewish pigs; and brown for the conscientious objectors."

  "Have there been attempts to escape?" Heinrich asked.

  "Would you like to see one?" Commander Schmidt asked in reply.

  "I don't understand. . . ."

  "Come, both of you, I will show you an escape. Down here, at the quarry; come."

  Heinrich and Alfred looked at each other in puzzlement, but they followed the commander. After descending the one hundred eighty-six steps—known as the "stairway of death"—that led down into the quarry, Schmidt called over one
of the prisoners charged with overseeing the others. He wore a green triangle; the commander told the two new officers that he was imprisoned for murder. Tall, muscular, and lacking one eye, the prisoner-guard inspired true fear in the other prisoners, who had experienced his brutality on many occasions.

  "Choose one of these wretches," Commander Schmidt told him.

  The murderer did not hesitate a second; he strode off toward a little white-haired man whose hands were tattered and bloody. He was so thin that it was difficult to believe he had the strength to move. He was wearing a red triangle.

  "A damned Communist," the guard said as he pushed him toward the commander and the two new SS officers.

  Commander Schmidt spoke not a word; he snatched off the prisoner's cap and sailed it off toward the barbed-wire fence that enclosed the quarry.

  "Go get it," he ordered the prisoner.

  The old man began to tremble, unsure whether to obey the order, although he knew he had no choice.

  "Go and fetch your cap!" the commander shouted.

  The little man began to walk, slowly, toward the fence, until once again the commander's imperious voice rang out, ordering him to run.

  At that, the wretched creature began to shuffle wearily, his steps a bit quicker. When he came near the barbed-wire fence, where his cap had landed, he did not even have time to stoop down and pick it up. A burst of submachine-gun fire from one of the watchtowers cut him down.

  "Sometimes the cap falls right on the barbed wire, and when the prisoner tries to pick it up, the high voltage kills him. One less mouth to feed."

  "Impressive," said Heinrich.

  "Too easy," said Alfred, clucking slightly.

  "Too easy?" asked Commander Schmidt, puzzled. "Well. . . we also have other methods."

  "Show us," asked Heinrich.

  It appeared to be a large room lined with showers, but the smell that impregnated the walls indicated that it was not water that emerged from the pipes.

  "We use Zyklon B, which is a most effective organic compound—a poison that acts very quickly," Commander Schmidt informed them.

  "And you bathe the prisoners in that?" Heinrich asked with a loud laugh.

  "Correct. We bring them here, and by the time they realize what's happening, they're dead. Here we eliminate the newly arrived. When the high command sends more prisoners than we can handle, we eliminate them immediately—they are sent into the showers, and they never come out again.

  "The other prisoners have no idea what happens here; if they did, they might be tempted to riot when we bring them in. After they've stayed in the camp awhile and are no longer fit to work, we send them to Hartheim. Of course, we also have other showers—very efficient ones."

  "Other showers?" Heinrich didn't immediately understand.

  "Yes, we are experimenting with a new system for eliminating the undesirables. When they are done working the quarry, we send them to that pool at the end of the field. They take off their clothes and for half an hour are made to stand in the freezing water while the showers are turned on. Most of them simply fall dead; the doctor says it is due to circulatory problems."

  The tour continued that afternoon. Schmidt accompanied them to Hartheim Castle. The place was lovely, and the service in the castle was most pleasant and efficient.

  The commander led them down into the old dungeons and subter

  ranean passageways, through heavy iron doors set at intervals throughout the castle's underground. Within the dungeons was another gas chamber, for prisoners who had worked in Mauthausen for several months.

  "When they become very ill, we tell them that we are transferring them here, to this castle, which we explain to them is a sanatorium. They climb very obligingly up into the trucks. When they arrive, we order them to strip, we photograph them, and we bring them down here into this cellar. After they have been gassed, they are taken to the crematorium. Before that, though, we have an excellent group of dentists, both here and down below, in Mauthausen, who remove their gold teeth.

  "Hartheim is also the destination of other creatures who debase our society. We have done away with more than fifteen thousand mentally ill persons from all over Austria."

  "Impressive," Alfred declared.

  "We simply carry out the Fuhrer's orders."

  20

  robert brown drove through the gates and up the

  winding entrance toward a neoclassical mansion hidden among a forest of oaks and beeches. A fine rain was falling. When he got out of the car, a butler was waiting for him with an open umbrella.

  He was not the first to arrive. The murmur of conversation, punctuated from time to time by laughter and the tinkle of glasses, reached him as he walked up the steps to the house.

  George Wagner was at the door, greeting the guests.

  Tall, thin, with blue eyes as cold as ice and white hair that must once have been the color of gold straw, he was an imposing figure. No one could doubt that the man held a great deal of power in his hands, despite his years. How old is he? Brown wondered, not for the first time, though he calculated he must be well into his eighties.

  Inside, past and present cabinet members, almost the entire upper-ranking staff of the White House, senators, congressmen and congress-women, judges, and prosecutors were rubbing elbows with bankers and presidents of multinationals, oilmen, and stockbrokers. The crowd ebbed and flowed through the house's beautifully decorated rooms, exquisite spaces housing scores of paintings by great masters.

  Brown's favorite was a Pink Period Picasso, a tragic-looking harlequin that hung above the mantel in the drawing room, which also held a Manet and a Gauguin. In a sitting room nearby hung a Caravaggio and three paintings from the quattrocento.

  Indeed, the mansion was a small museum. There were paintings by the greatest artists of Impressionism as well as canvases by El Greco, Raphael, and Giotto. In cases and on stands and tables stood small marble figures, tablets from the Babylonian Empire, two striking Egyptian bas-reliefs from the New Kingdom, an Assyrian winged lion . . . Wherever one's eyes turned, there was a work of art, a figure from antiquity that showcased the sophistication of the house's owner.

  Paul Dukais, carrying a glass of champagne, joined Robert.

  "So, I see the gang's all here!"

  "Hello, Paul."

  "Quite a party! I don't know if I've ever seen so many powerful people in one place. All that's missing is the president." "I hadn't noticed." "Can we talk, do you think?"

  "Of course; in fact, this is the best place to talk. Nobody'll notice us—everybody is talking, doing business. As long as you've got a glass in your hand ..."

  They flagged down a waiter, and Robert asked for a whiskey and soda; then they went off into a corner, just two old friends catching up.

  "Alfred is going to be a problem," Dukais said.

  "So what's new?"

  "I did what you asked me to. One of my best men, an ex-Green Beret colonel, Mike Fernandez, is going to Cairo with Yasir to meet with Alfred. I trust Mike; he's got a good head on his shoulders."

  Robert grimaced. "I'm not sure Alfred will be so willing to work with a Hispanic, being who he is."

  "He'll have to get along. And I'm sure he'll like Mike."

  "This Mike—he's Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican . . . ?"

  "He's a third-generation Chicano. He was born here, and his parents were too. It was his grandparents who crossed the Rio Grande. You've got nothing to fear."

  "I just don't like Hispanics, Paul."

  "Robert—let's not waste time with this shit. Tell me how far Mike can go with Alfred."

  "What do you mean?"

  "If Alfred decides not to cooperate or if he's not being straight with us, what do we do?"

  "For the time being, I just want them to get to know each other and get the operation started. We'll see how things go—your man will let us know—and I especially want to know what Yasir says."

  "What about the granddaughter?"

  "If she finds
the Bible of Clay, you and your men will take it away from her, but be sure the tablets aren't damaged. They're not worth anything if they're smashed to hell. The mission is to get them and bring them back here in one piece."

  "And what if she doesn't cooperate?"

  "Paul, if Clara doesn't cooperate, then it'll go badly for her. Your men are to follow orders—she can give up the tablets the easy way or the hard way."

  "Closing the deal?" Both men jumped when they realized George Wagner was standing beside them. On his face was a smile that looked more like a sneer.

  "Just tidying up the last few details of the operation. Paul wants to know how far we're willing to go in dealing with Alfred and his granddaughter," Robert managed.

  "It's not easy to find a balance," George said, looking off into space.

  "Yeah," Paul said. "Which is why I want clear instructions on the rules of engagement. I don't want this to come back and bite me on the ass, or to get sucked into a 'misunderstanding,' if you know what I mean. I'm glad you're here to lay out exactly what the limits are."

  The old man looked him up and down, his eyes glittering with contempt.

  "There are no limits in war, my friend. Winning is all that matters."

  Frank dos Santos and George Wagner shook hands without much show of emotion. The party was at its peak, with a string quartet as background for the guests' conversation.

  "The only one missing is Enrique," said George.

  "And Alfred. Let's not be so hard on him."