To people she judged her equals, Claire was a panther. Seductive and velvety smooth. And she didn’t hold grudges. “You never know,” she once told me, “when people can come in handy. It’s no use making enemies out of them.” This calculated social advice apparently did not apply to her staff. With them, her temper tantrums and diva-inspired put-downs were legendary. Mercurial. Hot one moment and cool when it suited her.
Once in her office she settled us in chairs of shiny plastic in white, citron, and black. I showed her a print of the Senate Seal. She scrutinized it for ten long minutes, went to her computer and tapped on the keyboard, then sat back and smiled.
“I haven’t forgotten everything I learned at Daddy’s knee. See the conical hat above the thirteen stars? It’s called a Phrygian cap. The Phrygians came from Thrace, primarily from the area known today as Bulgaria. Around 1000 B.C. Thracians migrated to the region of Anatolia in Turkey. That became the kingdom of Phrygia.”
I sneaked a look at Tomas. Last night he’d suggested the treasure stolen by King Ashurbanipal came from Anatolia, home to the Phrygian kingdom. This gave us another link.
“The Phrygian cap proved to be enduring,” Claire continued. “You can trace its history through art. It’s on a second-century Greek bust of Attis, the lover of the goddess Cybele, and you often see the Persian god Mithras wearing it. Mithras evolved into a Roman warrior god, so for Roman freedmen the cap symbolized liberty.”
Laurel said it reminded her of the hats worn by French revolutionaries.
“Of course,” Claire responded, with a touch of condescension, I thought. “Because of the association with freedom. As I’ve already explained.”
“Is this getting us anywhere?” I addressed this to the rest of our little group.
An uncomfortable silence ensued. Ari sighed. “It is complicated for me.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” Claire asked.
“We’re after a word associated with alchemy, specifically the concept of changing lead into gold. But I don’t see the relevance of a Phrygian cap.”
“I thought you told me it had something to do with Dürer.” “Phillip helped us work that out. Tomas is writing a paper on Mesopotamian origins of Hermetic thought. He came across the Senate Seal image in the course of his research.”
“How is my ex, anyway?” I was sitting closest to her. She reached out and gave my hand a squeeze. “Bet he charged you for his time,” she said.
Everyone laughed but Laurel. She clearly wasn’t impressed by Claire’s witticisms, nor by her pointed attention to the males.
“Well, you were on the right track.” Claire now threw a glittering smile in Tomas’s direction. “There’s a strong connection. Just a sec.”
She searched through more sites, then invited us to look at the screen.
“This comes from a seventeenth-century manuscript called Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier. The section of the book this image appears in is a guide to transmutation. The oddly shaped funnel over the alchemist’s head is part of the distillation apparatus where the lead is deposited to be purified. Finished gold coins lie in a basket on the stump. Descriptions of alchemical processes were common in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.”
From Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier, 1617
“He’s wearing a Phrygian cap,” Laurel remarked.
“That’s right. The cap was strongly associated with alchemy.”
Claire ran a hand through her wiry curls, the light bouncing off her hair so that it too seemed spun of copper and gold. “The Greek myth of Jason’s golden fleece originated in Phrygia, where legendary gold deposits were found. The myth arose because sheepskins washed in the gold-rich river Pactolus became saturated with tiny nuggets that adhered to the wool.”
She browsed for another page and pointed to a new image. “Here’s another famous folio from the same time period called Mutus Liber—The Silent Book. It’s French. With the exception of a few lines at the beginning, the book has no script, only pictures. Like a textbook, a manual on turning base metals into gold. Goodness knows how many poor souls paid dearly for those experiments. They ended up dying from chemical poisons, hideous burns, or worse. The Russian czar Fyodor I Ivanovich once forced two alchemists to drink mercury after they failed in their promise to make gold.”
I thought of Shim, who’d chased the same daydream and suffered horribly as a result.
“European heads of state feared alchemists because if they succeeded, large volumes of manufactured gold would devalue their currency. At the same time, they coveted that power for themselves.”
“You mean they opposed it only if the formula fell into someone else’s hands?” I broke in.
Claire smiled. “Yes. Nothing ever really changes, does it? You probably think alchemy was no more than a huge scam, but is it actually possible? The short answer is yes. Russian scientists turned lead panels into gold at a secret research facility near Lake Baikal in 1972, and ten years later an American, Glenn Seaborg, converted bismuth atoms into gold. Doing it on a large scale, though, would be outrageously expensive.” Claire was right. Looking back on those experiments from the perspective of modern science, the early chemical explorations seemed almost laughable. And no doubt a significant number of alchemists who promised an easy way to create gold or elixirs of immortality were no better than snake-oil salesmen. And yet I found myself beginning to wonder again whether some of those early practitioners really had found a formula. Many respected scholars in those times thought it possible.
Claire tapped the image on the screen. “Hermeticists believed all matter was composed of the same elements; they needed only to find the right key to shift the balance and make the change from one material form to another. My father thought alchemy was really an allegory for stages of spiritual purification.”
“Who wrote Mutus Liber?” Ari asked.
“A Huguenot,” Claire said. “The French Protestant Huguenots endured severe persecution, so the author had to hide his name. The book’s title page listed a line in Latin: ‘Cuius nomen est Altaus.’ The author’s name, Altaus, had been anagrammed to conceal his true identity. His real surname was Saulot.”
Twenty-one
After saying goodbye to Claire we headed back to Manhattan, where we found a Thai restaurant near Jacob Ward’s residence. Laurel looked up at the sky before we entered. “I wish it would just rain,” she said. “This is what my mother calls a soggy day. It’s so oppressive.”
We got a table. The waiter took our order and returned with our drinks. Tomas nursed a coffee. The rest of us had asked for ice-cold Sing Tao beers that slid beautifully down our throats. I plugged the words Phrygian cap into the spaces. A new page greeted us.
Laurel sighed. “There seems to be no end to this.”
“No,” I corrected her, “we’re close.” Underneath the squares Hal had typed You are at the finish line.
“I have no idea what the man intended. This whole thing is a colossal waste of time,” Tomas said angrily.
Ari, always the peace negotiator, broke in. “From what I remember, John, when you showed us the preceding steps there was nothing too complex.”
OWL LA MEMOIR
TRANSMUTATION
“I thought the acrobatics with the last one were pretty tricky,” Laurel said.
“Perhaps for you, Laurel. But he wasn’t thinking about you when he assembled the thing. It was all meant for John. Why didn’t he leave this for you? You’re his heir, are you not?”
Nice dig, Tomas. Divide and conquer if you can. “As you well know, the engraving didn’t belong to Hal in the first place.”
The four of us sat in silence, trying to work out what appeared to be an anagram. Ari, whose command of English was the weakest, found the exercise particularly frustrating. “I’m still thinking all the time about my work. It’s hard for me to concentrate.”
“The story you were following up in Washington?” Laurel asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s that?”
“A prison in Iraq. Occupation forces are sending interrogation squads in to torture prisoners. It’s going to happen outside the regular military command. This news is astounding. If it gets out, the whole Middle East will ignite.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“That is what I’m working on, yes.”
Tomas barged in, his impatience directed toward his brother this time. “Why are you bringing this up? We’ve got to concentrate on this damned game.”
Ari responded simply, “Not all of us can live in the past.”
Tomas flung some words back at him in Assyrian.
I broke the impasse by interrupting to ask Tomas about the accounts I’d found in Samuel’s writings. “Samuel’s journal mentioned a couple of obscure kings, one called Aza, the other, Mitta. Does that mean anything to you?”
The bad mood he’d been nursing flared into rage. He slapped the table with his hand. “You’d get a lot further if you concentrated on finding the engraving instead of sifting through every word Samuel wrote. And there’s one thing we’ve never resolved. I want it turned over to me when it’s found.”
“I’ll be taking it to the FBI,” I responded flatly.
His lips turned down in an ugly frown. “I won’t agree to that.”
What little patience I had left vanished in a blur of exasperation. “After all I’ve gone through, you expect me to hand you a stolen artifact worth millions? They’d jail me for that. All my efforts to build up my business would be destroyed.”
Tomas laughed bitterly. “From everything I’ve heard, you don’t know the meaning of hard work. You lived off Samuel. You actually killed your golden goose.”
My fist clenched and Ari clamped his hand down on my arm. “May we act like grown-ups here?” he said. “People are looking.”
The restaurant manager glanced toward our table, lifting her delicate, dark eyebrows. I notched my voice down. “Explain something. So far I’ve been carrying the heavy load. Laurel and I, our lives are in danger; my brother is dead; Laurel’s husband is dead. What exactly have you contributed? Why can’t you at least be more positive?”
Tomas threw me a look cold enough to paralyze a rattlesnake. “You think I’m getting a free ride? You don’t know the slightest thing about me. The danger we’re in now is nothing compared to the risk I’ll take to get the engraving home. Someone needs to take care of that end of things.”
Laurel scrunched up her napkin and threw it down. “That’s enough. This is getting out of hand. It’s time to see your professor, Tomas, anyway.”
Outside it felt as if the atmosphere had grown hotter. August in New York. Everybody who could had left the city. As for the rest, you could actually see steam rising out of their ears if you looked hard enough.
Jacob Ward lived on West Forty-fourth Street on a block lined with four-story brownstones, fancy black grates separating their pint-sized front gardens from the sidewalk. The Actors’ Studio, where Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg developed method acting, stood out prominently on the street. Legions of stars, Brando, De Niro, and Monroe, to name just a few, had honed their craft there.
When we arrived Ward ushered us into his generously proportioned hallway. He spoke genially to Tomas. “You’re lucky you got me at home. My kids are in Westhampton with my wife and the housekeeper. I only came back for a couple of meetings.”
“I was wondering whether you’ve heard from Hanna since we talked,” Tomas asked.
“No, I’m afraid not. But that’s not surprising. We didn’t correspond regularly.”
He shook my hand. “I’m told you’re Samuel Diakos’s brother. I knew him by reputation. I was so sorry to hear about the accident.” I mumbled my thanks. He took us downstairs to the garden level and suggested we sit outdoors.
Some people approach life with sheer energy, outshining those surrounding them. Ward, an undisputed star in the lecture hall, channeled much of this into his teaching. He looked more like a stock promoter than a professor. He had a beefy, florid face, handsome even if it carried a bit too much flesh. His suit and shirt were custom-made, ostentatious but expertly cut. He wore a Duchamp tie and a Ferragamo caramel leather belt. A rope of gold chain circled his wrist. His fingernails shone too brightly to be natural and I realized they’d been manicured.
In the garden we settled into comfortable lounge chairs, glasses of Perrier with lime twists in hand. A waterfall of ivy covered the wall of the neighboring townhouse. Overhead, a paper parrot floated in the tree branches. A cluster of large plants with broad, dark green leaves and trumpet-shaped white flowers mushroomed like jungle plants in the side beds. Two urns on either side of the kitchen doors were filled with double petunias, giving off a powdery, overly sweet scent like an old lady’s perfume.
Ward gestured toward the tree with his glass. “Would you believe we have a pair of cardinals here? Right in the heart of the city. I still think of this neighborhood as Hell’s Kitchen, even though they’ve changed the name to Clinton. A real estate promo. How wishy-washy is that?”
“After your former president?” Tomas asked.
Ward chuckled. “No, he’s hiding away in Westchester.” He leaned forward, resting his drink on his knee. “I grew up two blocks away from here. A humble third-floor flat. My wife, Miriam, got a generous inheritance. The kids were older and she wanted to do something with her time, so we took our capital and picked up a couple of these properties. We own the one immediately behind us. And one on Forty-seventh. Miriam renovated the heck out of them. In a couple of years real estate will peak and we’ll unload the other two.” He laughed. “When the cookie jar starts to look empty. But not this one. I want to hang on to it.”
It seemed overly personal information to be sharing with people he’d just met. But I sensed this was one of the ways he had of making people feel comfortable. By my estimate, the cookie jar had to be pretty full. He was talking upwards of twenty million dollars’ worth of real estate, not counting whatever they had in Westhampton.
He picked up his glass and crossed his legs. “Before we get into Nahum, may I ask why you’re interested? He’s pretty obscure. Daniel or Ezekiel, on the other hand, much juicier fodder for archaeological pursuits there.”
Tomas smiled. “I’m from Mosul. Nahum spent most of his life in that area so I have a particular interest in him.”
“I see. A word first, then, about biblical interpretation. It’s basically all guesswork. Despite that, it’s grown into a small industry. I use the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. That’s what the Christian Old Testament is based on. In addition to direct archaeological evidence, I cross-check with other accounts— Mesopotamian records, Roman and Greek historians—to verify interpretations.” Tomas nodded his assent.
“Let me give you some background. The first complete version of the Hebrew Bible wasn’t assembled until sometime around 560 B.C. in the years following the Babylonian exile. That’s a gap of at least three hundred years until the earliest text in existence today—the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls. Fragments of Nahum appear in 4Q169 of the scrolls, so I’ve been fortunate to be able to use those too as a partial guide.”
We were in the hands of a master here, and he savored an audience. “Do you know what a muraqqa is?”
“It’s a Persian album, isn’t it?” I said. “Beautiful folios in continuous sheets made of patches of paper pasted together, decorated with images, calligraphy, and intricate borders.”
“Those are the ones,” Ward replied. “I like to think of the Bible that way. Old Testament stories were originally oral; conversion to script didn’t begin until the seventh century B.C., when literacy blossomed in Judah. Like a muraqqa, the Bible is a collection of pieces; over time, sections were removed, altered, or replaced by new ones. The original wording and me
anings changed.” He laughed. “I’ve seen colleagues argue for years over the meaning of a couple of sentences.”
“In some cases, wasn’t it purposely changed?” Laurel asked.
Ward agreed. “Some of that was intentional. The Bible’s authors wanted to express a theological viewpoint, and events like the fall of Nineveh were written about to illustrate those values rather than to document history. The Christian Old Testament itself is full of editorial miscues. An eye for an eye, as an example—what do you generally think of when you hear that?”
“The punishment should fit the crime,” Ari said.
“Correct. But originally it meant no more punishment should be meted out than the crime warranted. Almost a reverse of the commonly accepted notion.”
“Like the old party joke,” I said. “You form a line and the first person whispers a sentence to his neighbor, and by the time you reach the end, the sentence totally changes.”
“You’ve got the idea. Here’s another one: Armageddon. What does that mean?”
“The end of the world?” Laurel threw in.
“No. It’s a real place, a Greek word referring to an actual location—Har Megadon, the mount and plain of Megiddo, where the final battle is supposed to take place. A more subtle shift in meaning, but it illustrates my point all the same. No story survives intact for more than a few generations. What’s old is new again. I often think that statement is an almost perfect reflection of reality.”
“You’re talking about the Mesopotamian myths,” I said.
“Exactly. Take the original tale of Cain and Abel. Have you ever wondered about its inconsistencies?”
“Can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.”
“We have Abel, the shepherd, and Cain, the farmer. Why was God so offended over Cain’s gift? Would it not be natural for Cain, a farmer, to offer the ‘fruit of the ground’? Why was that a poorer gift than Abel’s, the shepherd who gave the first of his flock?”
The Witch of Babylon Page 18
