On the way out I gave Gip a description of Eris, warning him to be on the lookout for her.
I headed over to the Khyber Pass Restaurant, still feeling shaken. It took me a while to organize my thoughts. Hal had stolen an engraving from Samuel. What made it so valuable? His message referred to five antagonists, and he’d set them after me. It was his idea of a vindictive joke, I guess, to include himself as one of them. Did Eris also belong to the group, and if so, who were the other three? Why would people running an alchemy website have any interest in an Assyrian engraving? I hoped Tomas Zakar, the man I was about to meet, could give me some answers.
Still pondering this, I stepped across the street to the triangle of park facing Laurel’s building and immediately stopped short. A heavyset man lurked near a corner, his back turned to me, his fist closed around something. Eris’s strange companion? As if reading my mind, he whipped around and launched himself at me.
Eight
The man threw a tennis ball along the sidewalk, grinning as he moved past. A little dog skittered behind him to take up the chase. I cursed Hal once more for wrecking my peace of mind and left for my meeting.
St. Mark’s Place in the East Village was rambunctious as usual on a hot summer evening, crowded and slightly frenetic. A couple of uniformed cops stood next to their cruisers trading stories with two beefy men in street wear, the local undercover squad, no doubt. The Asian fusion and sushi restaurants were already busy, the smoke shops doing a brisk trade. I always got a laugh out of one store sign that read UNISEX—24 HOURS A DAY, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK. Down the sidewalk, a group of Hare Krishnas swayed toward me, bald-headed and saffron-robed, chanting the familiar mantra and beating their big drum. The sixties all over again. Some things and some places never change.
The Khyber Pass, an Afghani restaurant, was a favorite of Samuel’s. I’d never paid much heed to its name, but after my recent experiences, the fact that we were meeting here was a bit unnerving. Its name came from the famous three-mile-long pass through the treacherous Hindu Kush range—a British officer had once said that “every stone in it has been soaked in blood.” A bad sign for the encounter I was about to have? I hoped not.
I arrived late. The times I’d been there with Samuel the place had been hopping, but I’d always gone late in the evening. Today, only one customer sat at a small table on the postage-stamp-size patio out front. He pushed back his chair and rose, giving me a slight nod. Shorter than me and with a slender build, Zakar was conservatively dressed. He had a formal, ascetic look, with sharp features, dark hair and eyes, and olive skin like mine.
“You’re Tomas Zakar?” I extended my hand.
“Yes.” He returned my handshake and murmured, “Thank you for coming.” He’d obviously recognized me immediately. I felt a touch discomfited that he had an edge on me.
He gave his watch a cursory glance. “Not too late, I hope,” I said.
He waved away my remark. “You’re here. That’s the important thing.” He indicated the entrance. “Shall we go in?”
Inside, we walked down a few steps into a room redolent of the Orient. Afghani music wafted from a nearby speaker on the wall. The place was richly decorated in a cacophony of reds, from deep burgundy to scarlet. Each table was covered with a handwoven rug, a sheet of glass placed over top. The hostess directed us to a banquette beneath the bay window at the front.
“This is the best table for our discussion—the most private,” Tomas said after we were seated. “Would you care for a pipe?” He waved toward a collection of large narghile pipes in ruby-red and cobalt-blue cut glass on the bar. A menu had been placed on our table with a choice of fruit-flavored tobaccos.
“No thanks,” I said.
His dark eyes registered a hint of surprise. “Samuel loved to take the pipe.”
I’m sure he didn’t intend it that way, but his statement came out as something of a put-down. As if I couldn’t quite measure up to my brother.
“A drink then?” he said.
I passed on alcohol for the time being, wanting my wits about me, and chose instead an espresso. He ordered mint tea and smiled ruefully. “Mint tea. The only thing in America that reminds me of home.”
“Speaking of home, how did you know where to find me?”
“Oh, I’ve been to New York a couple of times before with Samuel.”
I suppose my brother had no particular reason to introduce us, but somehow this felt like another bolt from the blue. I wondered how trustworthy the guy really was. “I hate to ask, but since we’ve never met, do you have any ID?” I already knew what he looked like, but I didn’t want him to think he could take my trust for granted.
He seemed taken aback by my request but leaned down and reached into a pocket on his backpack, handing me his passport and a picture of him and Samuel at some gathering, the two of them smiling into the camera, palms and potted plants filling out the background.
He told me he’d grown up in Mosul and had received his degree from Oxford. We found a bit of common ground when I learned he’d taken some exchange courses at Columbia. Samuel had employed him as his assistant for the past three years, their work focusing on the Nineveh site. He’d come to America in search of the engraving. Hence the urgent plea to meet with me.
The waiter brought our drinks. I added sugar to my espresso and gave it a stir.
Tomas blew on his tea to cool it down. “My condolences to you,” he said.
“Thanks. It’s been hard.”
“Yes. Even now I can’t believe he’s gone. Samuel was so much more than my employer. He financed my last year at Oxford and helped out my parents when they lost their home. I can’t describe the sadness I felt when I got the news. It made me ill.”
I felt a touch of jealousy listening to this. He’d obviously grown very close to my brother, but I was also reassured to hear that his motives were genuine. The shock on his face was plain when I told him Hal had died after stealing the engraving. “Do you know anything about it? It was Neo-Assyrian and it looks like Samuel shipped it home from Iraq.”
“Exactly why I’ve come over here. To bring it home. But surely you know what it is? You must have had it assessed when you found it.”
“There’s a problem. Hal hid it, and I have no idea where.” For the time being I omitted any mention of Hal’s game. Tomas folded a napkin around the tumbler of tea and sat silently, wrapped up in his thoughts, digesting this turn of events.
I gave it another try. “The engraving. It may somehow be related to the old science of alchemy—do you know anything about that?”
He toyed with his napkin and mumbled, “I’m sorry. What you’ve told me is very upsetting.”
Was this an attempt to avoid answering me? I decided it was better not to press him too hard right away, and asked how he’d met Samuel.
“On my first job at the National Museum. As you know, your brother consulted for them regularly. The staff totally trusted him. They couldn’t afford to pay him, but he always found research money from somewhere. Did he never speak of me?”
“The last while he didn’t talk a lot about his work.”
Once again I held off plunging right in with the questions I most needed answers to, afraid of putting him off. I wanted to read the guy a little better, so I tried to come up with something to get him to open up a bit. “Were you able to get out of Iraq before the war?”
“No, we couldn’t leave until after the Americans entered Baghdad. The entire city was in a state of extreme denial. An orgy of wishful thinking that was. People bought into the delusion that last-minute diplomacy would deliver a miracle. Then the bombs started dropping. It was the most bizarre thing. Until we lost power we could actually see the buildings around us exploding on CNN. Unbelievable. I was watching a disaster happen while I was actually in it.”
I sensed a few cracks opening in his armor. An experience like that would shake anyone up.
“Once I visited Amiriyah, an air-raid shelter bombed by the American
military during the Gulf War. You could still see the bodies of the poor souls who’d been clustered in there, imprinted on the walls by the heat of the blast, like shadow people. A modern version of what we see in excavations. Forgotten battles brought to light, once-great cities destroyed, mounds of bones, broken up and burned. You’ve seen Pompeii?”
“Yes.”
“The shelter reminded me of that. Corpses frozen in time. When this war started it felt the same, as if our entire population had suddenly been vaporized. No cars on the roads, none of the usual buzz of the city. Then we’d see the sky light up. That eerie, phosphorescent green on the TV screen. We could hear the blasts from the real bombs outside and feel the floor shake, like earthquakes hitting over and over again.”
What could I say to this? War was completely alien to my own experience. I felt the same stumbling incoherence I’d shown when a friend told me he had cancer and I’d responded with only vacuous, limp-wristed reassurances.
Tomas took a hesitant sip of his tea. “At times the oxygen seemed to vanish and we breathed in soot. Our bodies were covered with it. We kept coughing it up. Without water, we had to use old cooking oil to clean it off. It was impossible to sleep. We never knew where the next missile would hit. Like an assassin waiting for you—you can’t tell from which dark doorway or hidden wall he’ll suddenly appear. We lived in perpetual fear.” He set his glass down. That sounded convincing enough. I had the strong impression of someone who kept his distance, who wasn’t one to wear his emotions on his sleeve, but a tautness around his mouth and eyes told me that talking about the experience cost him something.
I murmured some words to convey my sympathy. “You’re bringing back memories for me too—of 9/11. An artist friend of mine had a son who died in the towers. I spent a few days trying my best to console him. The impact of it spread so far. In my friend’s case, his family ruptured. He and his wife ended up getting a divorce.”
“A terrible event to be caught up in.”
“I wasn’t here. I was in Miami that day. Like everyone else, I was mesmerized by the TV, watching over and over again the planes hit, the towers crumple, people materializing out of the clouds of chalky dust, the wrecked bones of the skyscrapers jutting out of the ash. Being away when my city was under siege felt like a sin of omission.”
He grew thoughtful. “If you’ve suffered through some kind of trauma, they say you should talk about it, but that only seems to make it worse.”
“Thank God you survived the invasion. Samuel told me he was in Jordan, in Amman. Did you meet up with him there?”
“What do you mean? He was with us all the time.”
“You’re telling me he was in Iraq?”
“Didn’t you know? He came the week before the invasion because he’d learned the engraving was at risk.”
I felt a momentary surge of anger. Samuel had lied to me. Why would he do that? To keep me from worrying? “That’s why he brought the engraving to New York, then? To keep it safe?”
“Yes.”
“The minute he took it off museum premises he’d effectively stolen it. I can’t believe my brother would do something like that.”
This struck the wrong chord and Tomas bristled. “Many people did this. Antiquities are being returned now. Things people took to protect them from the looters.”
“These days all Iraqi antiquities are suspect; dealers won’t touch them. If I get my hands on the engraving, it’s going right back to the museum.”
By the look on his face I could see he believed my remark extended to him. “It’s easy for you to judge. You can’t imagine what it was like during the looting. I came close to being killed.”
So far his story sounded credible. “No criticism intended. It must have been pure chaos.”
He gave me a dark look. “It was intentional.”
“That sounds like a conspiracy theory.”
He waved his hand back and forth as if clearing away cigarette smoke. “Explain then, out of all the government buildings, why one of the very few protected buildings was the Ministry of the Interior. It housed Saddam Hussein’s secret service documents. They said the looting was impossible to stop because of Republican Guard snipers at the museum, but it carried on for two full days after they fled.”
“It generated a lot of bad publicity for us though.”
“Have you ever heard of that shocking treatment? It’s used for the mentally ill.”
I was disconcerted by this and couldn’t imagine what his question was leading to. “You mean electroconvulsive therapy?”
“Yes, that. The war planners wanted no reminders of the past. Their idea was to create a new society with no history, like a blank slate.”
Again I had the impression of a tightly wound coil ready to spring loose at the slightest pressure. I decided to cool the conversation down. I’d gain nothing by alienating the guy. “Samuel was in Iraq during the bombing and everything, then?”
“I was quite worried because of his age, but he held up surprisingly well.” Tomas paused as if unsure how much to reveal. “It was our only option, you know. You’ve heard of the treasures of Nimrud? The tombs of the three great Assyrian queens?”
“You mean the gold headdresses and necklaces?”
“Our country’s crown jewels,” Tomas said. “Only we had no Tower of London to keep them in. We were afraid they’d been stolen too, but they were eventually found in an underground vault in the Central Bank. A long time ago it had been flooded with half a million gallons of sewage water. That prevented any theft. The Baghdad batteries are missing, though, another terrible loss. Our people discovered electricity eighteen hundred years before you did. Did you ever see them?”
I shook my head.
“They were tall terracotta jars with copper rolls connected to an iron rod. When an acid like vinegar was added they produced an electric current. What a travesty that they’ve been taken.”
“A lot was saved though, I understand.”
“Thanks only to the museum staff who hid thousands of objects beforehand. They’re national heroes, those people.”
Our server interrupted to ask whether we wanted to order food. Tomas and I both declined, and I took the opportunity to switch the conversation back to the missing relic. “What does the engraving look like?”
“It’s a large tablet, oblong, two feet by fourteen inches. The words on it are in Akkadian, cuneiform chiseled into the stone. Only a few people knew about the engraving, or so we thought. Samuel, of course, me, and Hanna Jaffrey, an intern from the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s one of the problems.”
“What is?”
“Jaffrey. After we closed our camp at Nineveh she left for the town of Tell Afar near the archaeological site Tell al-Rimah. She had a boyfriend, another U of Pennsylvania intern, there. We were told she returned to America before the outbreak of the war, but I haven’t been able to contact her since. She’s simply vanished. I can’t find out if she’s really back here or still over there.”
“Surely she’d have left before war broke out?”
“Some on the archaeological team decided to remain and try to protect the sites. She may have been one of them.”
“She was at Nineveh, then, when you found the engraving?”
“Yes, last December. We were working at Kuyunjik mound.” He hesitated, in mid-sentence. “That’s—”
“I know where it is.”
It suddenly struck me that part of his stiffness had to do with nervousness about meeting me. We were circling each other like two male dogs, neither ready to trust the other.
“Nineveh is one of the legendary lost cities of Assyria,” he continued. “More than a hundred years after its discovery, there’s still an enormous amount to excavate. You’ve been on digs with Samuel, I assume.”
“Of course.” A lie. I couldn’t admit to Zakar either my lack of knowledge or my regrets. I’d begged to go on fieldwork trips with Samuel but
had always hit a stone wall of excuses. “Wait until you’re older,” he’d say. When I was a teenager he found other reasons. At some point I gave up asking. He’d been generous about trips abroad. We toured Florence, the Louvre, and Berlin’s fabulous Pergamon, but I’d never set foot in the Middle East.
“I envy you that, being so young and traveling to foreign lands. Touching the history, not just studying it in school. You were lucky. Your memories of Nineveh are probably hazy after all this time. You’ll recall there are two mounds, Kuyunjik, the principal site, and Nebi Yunus, the old armory. Excavations at Nebi Yunus presented a lot of difficulty because houses have been built on some sections.”
“A shrine to the prophet Jonah was also built there, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” Tomas replied, “another reason access to the site is limited. The shrine is sacred to Islam. But Samuel got permission to take another look at the old workings on Kuyunjik. The Antiquities Board agreed because some of the mud-brick and stone walls had become badly eroded. We had foreign financing, and part of our mission was to protect the ruins.
“For me there’s always a sense of awe when I first catch sight of the Nineveh mound. You’ll remember it’s on a flat, barren plain, and the hill rises suddenly out of nowhere. The eye can tell immediately it’s not a natural phenomenon. It has an almost spiritual presence, even now, after millennia have gone by.”
I let my mind slip back to the accounts I’d read about Nineveh, in its time the largest city in the world. Sennacherib’s magnificent palace, with massive stone statues guarding the doorways and decorative limestone panels depicting each step of the palace construction. Waterfalls, carp ponds, and eighteen canals adorned the parks where elephants, camels, and monkeys wandered free.
“What’s the condition of the excavation now?” I asked Tomas.
His thin lips turned down into something approaching a grimace. “Very poor, I’m afraid. Dirt piles and holes, mostly. It was extensively looted in the nineties. When we set up operations last year we concentrated on terrain near the Shamash and Halzi gates, areas both Layard and Hormuzd Rassam investigated.”
The Witch of Babylon Page 8
