“Is this what you used on Hal?”
Eris frowned. “We’re not here to talk about Hal. You can still use your arms. Tell me where the engraving’s hidden or I’ll yank out a few more plugs.”
I deliberately lowered my voice even more to force her to draw nearer. If she got close enough I could try to hit her head with mine and do some damage.
She didn’t take the bait. “Talk louder. I can’t hear you.”
“I told you I don’t know. My brother, Samuel, brought it over. Hal stole it from a warehouse and stashed it somewhere. You killed him so you’ve screwed yourself.”
“Tonight you met with a man, Tomas Zakar. I believe the two of you talked about retrieving the engraving. There’s no point in lying.” She peered down at me closely but maintained enough distance that I couldn’t touch her. “Are you taking all this in?”
“I want to know what you shot into me,” I rasped.
“You’re soft, John. You have no idea what it really means to be afraid.” She was seated in a chair beside me, angled so I could see her easily. She’d taken off her cardigan. On her upper arm was a green-inked tattoo, a circle with a cross extending from the bottom like the sign for female. The symbol I’d seen for Venus on the alchemy website.
I watched as she tugged her top up to the line of her breasts. Her entire stomach was criss-crossed with a network of angry red welts and scars. Not one square inch of normal flesh was visible.
She rolled her top back down. “I know something about pain. I can teach you, if you want.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Fighting in Bosnia. Now start cooperating. You don’t have a lot of time left.”
“This is a lost cause. I told you I have no idea where it is.” I’d obviously miscalculated her age at the party. If she’d seen action in Bosnia she was much older than I’d thought.
Was some sensation crawling back into my limbs? I thought I could feel the silkiness of my bedsheets and a flare of pain running up my legs.
“You’re getting tiresome,” Eris sighed. She took a syringe filled with a milky liquid out of her bag. “This is called China Cat. It’s heroin that’s been tinkered around with to strengthen its purity. If I inject it, you’ll die.” I felt the prick of the needle tip crease my skin as she leaned toward me.
I had to give her something. “All right, I’ll tell you. Just take the needle off me.”
She pressed it deeper into my flesh. “Talk then.”
“Hal did leave an indication of where to find it.”
Eris hesitated.
“Listen, I don’t want to die over a hunk of rock. Believe me.”
I could feel the sting of the needle as it pressed even deeper. “That’s not good enough.”
A flicker of feeling stole back into my legs, a cold burn traveling from the soles of my feet into my shins. Was it my imagination or was the drug wearing off? But that wouldn’t matter if she used the needle. Fear punched through my gut. Then I thought of the copy of Hal’s game.
“You didn’t know Hal. If he had a choice between dating Beyoncé and playing board games, he’d choose the games. He left a map revealing the location in the form of a puzzle. So far I haven’t figured it out, but I will.”
“Where is it?” Her eyes lit up.
“Look in my back pocket.”
She withdrew the needle and dug inside my pocket. I was relieved when she pulled out the piece of paper—I hadn’t been entirely sure it was still there.
Eris fixated on it as if it were a map to King Solomon’s mines. “We’re going to keep this. Maybe we don’t need you after all.”
Did this mean I was free, or would I now be getting an armful of heroin? “You do need me,” I said. “Only someone who knew him well can solve it.”
“You mean it’s some kind of code?”
“Something like that. A word code. Probably a series of anagrams.”
“Show me.”
I tried to raise my head but was still too weak to hold it up for any length of time. “I can’t right now, but you’ll never find it without me. You’d be kissing a fortune goodbye.”
“We have other options …”
When I tried to look at her she kept slipping in and out of focus.
Voices registered outside my front door, followed by loud knocking. “John … John, are you in?” A volley of giggles. It was Nina, emerging from her loud party like a badger out of its nest. A male voice next. “He’s not there. Let’s just go in and get it, babe.”
Nina again. “He said he’d come to my party. What if he shows up now?” More giggling. “Maybe we shouldn’t go in.”
Nina, you have to come in. Don’t leave, I prayed.
Eris bolted up in alarm, took a few steps toward the bedroom door, and listened.
The male again. “Give me the key. I’ll go in and get it.”
Open the door. God help me, just open it.
“No, I’d better. In case he’s there—he doesn’t know you.” Scraping sounds. The crack of the door being pushed open. Whispering.
Eris glared and signaled for me to keep quiet. She tucked the puzzle into her bag, tousled her hair, and undid a couple of buttons.
Nina spoke again. “I’ll be totally freaked out if he’s in there asleep.”
“Where does he keep it?”
“In the dining room.”
Their feet shuffled over the carpet. Eris stepped out into the living room. “Hi,” I heard her say. “Your timing isn’t the greatest.”
Nina gasped.
I tried to yell, but the drug was still playing havoc with my vocal cords.
“Oh!” I heard Nina say. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think anyone was here. I’m John’s neighbor.”
I gathered all my strength and channeled it into my voice. “Nina, don’t listen to her. She’s lying.”
“He’s drunk,” Eris said quickly.
“I’m not. Nina, come here. In the bedroom. I’ve got to see you.”
“Hey.” The guy’s voice. “What the hell?” The front door slammed. Nina and a man materialized in the bedroom doorway. In seconds, Nina morphed from an expression of shock into an explosion of tipsy laughter. Her boyfriend wore an irritating smirk.
She put her hands up to her face to stifle her sniggers. “Oh, John. I just wanted to borrow some wine. We ran out. I really apologize.”
“Where’s Eris? The woman?”
The guy lost his smirk. “She took off. She’s gone.”
Nina had trouble suppressing another smile. “I’d never have guessed”—she gestured toward me on the bed—“that you were into this, this … sort of thing.”
“I’m not even going to try to explain. Help yourself to a whole case of wine, just cut these things off first. There’s an X-Acto knife in Samuel’s desk drawer.”
She found the knife and returned. Her escort had to do the cutting because the plastic ties were so tough. When they finished I tried to lever my legs over the side of the bed but managed only to flop around like a dying fish. A wave of dizziness and nausea hit me. Nina, finally realizing something was very wrong, asked if she should call the police.
“No, there’s no point. Would you mind just making me some coffee? Triple strong.”
Her boyfriend made a few perfunctory remarks about hoping I was okay then hightailed it back to the party. I practiced sitting up and succeeded by the time Nina returned with the coffee. She said she wanted to stay and make sure I was all right, but I insisted she go back to her guests.
I chugged the coffee down and massaged my legs, getting them to the point where I could wobble to the living room. I made sure the front door was locked and saw my keys on the hall table where I’d tossed them. I staggered into the washroom and stood under the shower for half an hour.
I heard the whine and the crash of the garbage trucks emptying metal trash containers outside. The howl of a siren trailed off into the distance. Four in the morning. I closed my eyes. What a strange hole I’d
plunged into. And it didn’t seem to have a bottom.
Eleven
Monday, August 4, 2003, 8:05 A.M
Abizarre nightmare woke me up. I lay face down on a city sidewalk, the concrete like molten steel in the afternoon sun. Eris was closing in. Each time I put a hand down to drag myself forward to escape her, my palm burned as if I’d just touched a hot stove.
I shuddered, coming fully awake, and got off the couch. This time my legs did everything they were ordered to. Another brutally hot shower helped to clear away the fuzziness still meandering through my head. I clipped my beard so I looked presentable again and applied some salve to my lip, the pain tapping out a constant drumbeat. I tore off the bedsheets, walked down the hall, and stuffed them into the incinerator. I thought about knocking on Nina’s door to thank her for the rescue but could hear no noise from within and assumed she was still sleeping it off.
When I contacted Joseph Reznick, the criminal lawyer Andy had recommended, his assistant told me he was in court, unreachable until later in the day.
“Could I make an appointment for this afternoon? It’s urgent.”
“Not even if you’re facing a firing squad. But I’ll tell him you called.”
The time was right, however, to call Walter Taylor in Jordan— it would be afternoon there. But when I reached his office his secretary told me he was on leave for two weeks. She’d forward a message to him but couldn’t promise anything. I had to be satisfied with that.
I put on some music, got the copy of Hal’s puzzle, and sat with a coffee at the kitchen counter trying to solve it with new eyes. The first music selection was R. Kelly’s rendition of “If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time.” A great song by a master vocalist; I once flew halfway across the country just to hear him perform live. But the music wrecked my concentration.
I turned it off and focused on the puzzle. The word pattern on the board was wrong. Two groups of words were completely separated. In these games at least one word has to bridge the two sides. If I put an s onto quest on the bottom row and an i above the s, that would create a bridge. But the completed word had to fit the thirteen squares, so that didn’t work. I scrutinized the rest of the board. The theoretical game player missed good chances to build words off a t that appeared on the eighth row from the top on the left side.
A spark went off. I reached for it but it lingered like a half-remembered dream, teasing me before it faded away altogether. I toyed with various combinations of words for another half hour and got nowhere.
I got up, stretched, and with another coffee wandered into Samuel’s study. His door was ajar. Eris had no doubt stormed through here while I was out cold. I wanted to read the Book of Nahum, but when I opened the door my eye fell on books that had been thrown in a heap on the floor. I looked up and saw that the section on his bookshelves allotted for his journals was empty. I got down on my hands and knees and combed through the books and papers scattered about the floor and found them. Thirty in all. A lifelong record of his wanderings, observations, and private thoughts.
Samuel’s journals were not diaries but rather a hodgepodge of observations, records of events or notes he’d made during his travels, personal comments, and sometimes even sketches. In bound volumes of forest-green leather, each was labeled with the time period it represented. I sorted through them, putting the nearest dates on top, and found the most recent one, from January 2001 to December 2002.
The first page surprised me. A picture he’d pasted in, an Assyrian relief from Sennacherib’s palace. I’d seen it in the British Museum. It showed soldiers flaying Hebrew prisoners of war, the quilt-like striations in the background meant to depict a forest.
Below the image were some notes he’d made based on a book called The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman:
In 722 B.C., Sargon II lays waste to Samaria. End of the Israelite kingship line. Samaria utterly destroyed. Israelites deported to Assyria.
The records also described how Sennacherib took revenge on Judah.
As to Hezekiah, the Judahite, he did not submit to my yoke. I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities, walled forts and countless small villages in their vicinity, and conquered them by means of well-stamped earth ramps, and battering rams. … I drove out of them 200,150 people, cattle beyond counting, and considered them booty.
Stone relief from the southwest palace of Sennacherib, 704–681 B.C.
So did all this fit in with the engraving somehow? Would Nahum’s ancestors, grandparents maybe, have come from Samaria and experienced this? The case for Nahum being deported to Assyria as tribute and forced to work as a scribe was getting stronger.
I knew Assyrian kings established the true first empire. Former vassal states like Judah were converted into provinces with appointed governors under direct Assyrian control. Resistant states were burned, looted, and subjected to mass deportations—the first ethnic cleansings.
In Assyria’s defense, Samuel once told me, “It’s who gets to write history that counts. Our image of Assyrians and Babylonians came from the Old Testament, and thus, their history, written by their enemies, cast them in a totally negative light. Only in the late nineteenth century when interpretation of cuneiform tablets began did a different picture emerge.”
Samuel revered the Assyrians but recognized that some kings were tyrants. Sennacherib laid waste to Babylon so thoroughly that only reed beds and thickets remained. On the other hand, his son Esarhaddon spent much of his reign restoring Babylon to its former splendor. Ashurbanipal was a great scholar who assembled the famous library of clay tablets found at Nineveh and helped the Persian Elamites stay alive by sending them food. But he had a dark side and took delight in vicious punishments. He had leashes of chain fixed into the lips of prisoners of war with a cruel iron ring. I could recall reading one account where he feasted under a tree hung with a particularly gruesome fruit. Ashurbanipal had beheaded an enemy, spit on and slashed the face, and then suspended the head from the tree.
I flipped through more of Samuel’s journal and saw that he’d identified kings of several obscure states: King Aza of Mannea and King Mitta of the Mushki. Why was he interested in these little-known rulers?
I picked up the copper plaque on his desk. My brother had had it inscribed with an Assyrian curse from King Ashurbanipal.
Whosoever shall carry off the engraving or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with mine own, may Assur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land.
Samuel used to joke that this was the first copyright and said modern publishers would love to have the power of an Assyrian king. As I looked at it now, the curse took on ominous overtones, and I wondered whether it had retained some of its power through the centuries. Nahum’s engraving had indeed been “carried off.” Twice, I had learned. And Samuel and Hal were dead because of it.
Samuel’s small collection of relics consisted almost entirely of rescued objects, items he’d culled from dealers that would have ended up in private hands anyway. His career had been set in motion by his desire to restore cultural histories. “Names are important,” he’d once said, “they shape who we are. As a boy I was intrigued by my namesake, the prophet Samuel, who recovered the Ark of the Covenant. I decided then that my life’s work would be to rescue artifacts, our reference markers for history.”
A laudable goal, but one he’d taken too far this time. And who knew what repercussions lay ahead?
I found Samuel’s Bible and looked up the prophet’s book. The rare times I’d read the Bible I’d always had difficulty with its antiquated language, but I found Nahum surprisingly easy to read.
The Book of the Vision of Nahum the Elkoshite
Chapter Two
2:1 Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that announceth peace! Keep thy feasts, O Judah, perform thy vows; for the wicked one shall no more pass through thee; he is utterly cut off.
2:2 A m
aul is come up before thy face; guard the defences, watch the way, make thy loins strong, fortify thy power mightily!—
2:3 For the Lord restoreth the pride of Jacob, as the pride of Israel; for the emptiers have emptied them out, and marred their vine-branches.—
2:4 The shield of his mighty men is made red, the valiant men are in scarlet; the chariots are fire of steel in the day of his preparation, and the cypress spears are made to quiver.
2:5 The chariots rush madly in the streets, they jostle one against another in the broad places; the appearance of them is like torches, they run to and fro like lightnings.
2:6 He bethinketh himself of his worthies; they stumble in their march; they make haste to the wall thereof, and the mantelet is prepared.
2:7 The gates of the river are opened, and the palace is dissolved.
2:8 And the queen is uncovered, she is carried away, and her handmaids moan as with the voice of doves, tabering upon their breasts.
2:9 But Nineveh hath been from of old like a pool of water; yet they flee away; ‘Stand, stand’, but none looketh back.
2:10 Take ye the spoil of silver, take the spoil of gold; for there is no end of the store, rich with all precious vessels.
2:11 She is empty, and void, and waste; and the heart melteth, and the knees smite together, and convulsion is in all loins, and the faces of them all have gathered blackness.
2:12 Where is the den of lions, which was the feeding-place of the young lions, where the lion and the lioness walked, and the lion’s whelp, and none made them afraid?
2:13 The lion did tear in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his caves with prey, and his dens with ravin.
2:14 Behold, I am against thee, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will burn her chariots in smoke, and the sword shall devour thy young lions; and I will cut off thy prey from the earth, and the voice of thy messengers shall no more be heard.
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