by Jay Amberg
Now it’s finally dusk of the day after he left Saint John’s. The sky has begun to darken, and she is keeping her promise. He counts slowly to twenty-five, stands, hefts his backpack, and follows the woman at a safe distance, just as she instructed. She continues along the path as it winds through the brush and rock until, suddenly, she disappears. When he reaches the spot at which she vanished, he sees a cleft to the right. He can just squeeze through it with his backpack. Most of the light has left the small box canyon. Tall sunflowers grow at one end, and water trickles from a crack in the wall. There’s a cool breeze, but he can’t tell where it’s coming from. Standing so that she faces him, Doctor Altay slowly unveils herself. Her expression holds both exasperation and affirmation.
When he comes to her, she gazes into his eyes and says, “Abrahim.”
He sloughs his backpack and lets her hug him. He slouches so that she can hold him more tightly, then puts his arms around her shoulders and leans his head against hers. There is nothing sexual in the embrace, but the tenderness almost makes him cry. “I’m sorry,” he whispers in Turkish.
She stands back and looks at his fine features, his large brown eyes, high cheekbones, clear olive skin, and full lips. She runs her hand through his thick black hair. Contrition shows in his eyes. Her hands grip his shoulders. “Abrahim,” she says, “you should have waited for me.”
Staring at the ground, he lets his hands fall to his sides. “I know,” he says. “I could not reach you. I heard Kenan talking on the phone. He was going to…”
“He is dead.”
He flinches. “Kenan?” He steps back, grimacing. His teeth are bright in the fading light. “Dead?”
She nods.
He makes the sign of the cross. “What…? How?”
“He fell from the curtain wall last…early this morning.”
Abrahim is quaking, and only her hands again on his shoulders keep him from taking flight. “You…somebody…?”
She locks her eyes to his. “Who was he talking to on the phone?”
He shakes his head. “German. He was speaking German. And he wanted money. A lot. He kept repeating euros.”
Taking a deep breath, she looks around at the light dying on the sheer walls. “Come,” she says, leading him to a boulder. He slumps there, starting to sob and to murmur prayers as she returns for his backpack and her bag. Setting the backpack at his feet, she says, “Show me. Now, before it’s too dark.”
He nods, swipes his cheek with the back of his hand, and unties the aluminum tube. “I got this in a shop that sells posters to tourists,” he says. “I thought it would work better.”
She takes a clean white cloth from her bag and fastidiously wipes her hands. Noticing the scabs on his knuckles, she asks, “Fight?”
“Kenan…” He drops his eyes. “No… When he…” He fumbles with the tube’s lid, pops it, tilts the tube, and slides out two rolled scrolls. “I have been careful.” He looks up at her standing before him. “Kenan is…?”
“Yes.” When she takes the scrolls, she feels as if she has been touched for the first time. The scrolls are similar but not identical—the first, the color of Cappadocian sand, slightly darker than the other. The material is brittle but not flaking or worm eaten, the odor at once acrid and sweet. The scrolls feel both light and heavy, fragile and strong. Unable for a moment to believe she’s holding them, she is tingling at her core. Her hands quiver as she unrolls one of the scrolls just enough to read the first Aramaic line—Hear, O Israel. Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only…. By the second scroll, her hands are shaking furiously. I am John, the one Jesus, the Nazarean, loved….
The whole day as she was traveling she thought about these scrolls—these testaments. While she was driving to Konya, she went over in her mind the Turkish and French and English translations she was making. After she left her car parked on a side street, she took one bus to Nevşehir and another to Göreme, hoping she was covering her tracks well enough. The Pharisees would discover the car, but they would not find her until she possessed these documents and determined what to do with them. As she rode through Cappadocia, returning to the spires and caves she had loved, the scrolls’ deeper implications weighed on her—the words about rebellion and violence… If you do not have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one… and …I have come to bring fire on earth…. And now, her hands will not stop shaking. Before she drops the scrolls, she rolls the second, takes the tube, slips the scrolls in, and presses the lid down tightly.
“Did you translate them?” he asks.
“The first,” she says. “The second, not completely yet. The first is a transcription of the words of Jesus of Nazareth. Probably from the time in the Garden of Gethsemane. And it is, I believe, authentic.” She doesn’t hand back the tube. “The second is written by John the Apostle, in his hand.” She does not add, but later in his life…when he is no longer young like you.
He looks up at her. “I need to know what they say.”
“And I will tell you.” She fears the documents’ ramifications will be too much for him. “What did you do with the bones?”
He stares at the tube.
“Abrahim?”
He shakes his head.
“Abrahim!”
“The femurs were broken.”
She told him in her email what the ossuary’s inscription said, and she is sure that he has already made the intuitive leap across two thousand years. “Do not draw conclusions,” she says. “The remains must be examined. Where are they?”
“The femurs were broken,” he repeats, shaking his head again. He cannot tell her—or anyone else—where he hid the bones. The bones will fracture faith around the world. The gospel truth that not a bone in His body was broken will itself be shattered. He must protect the remains, even from her—though he trusts her more than he trusts anyone else. She understands him better and accepts who he is more than his own family does.
As she slides the tube into her bag, heat runs through her hand. The aluminum isn’t hot, but her hand radiates with warmth. She reaches up, brushes her hand through Abrahim’s hair, and cups his left ear. The juncture almost sparks, and her fingers pulse for a moment before settling on his neck. She gazes into his eyes.
He cannot look away from her. A shaft of energy passes through her hand and spreads across his skin, along his neck, and down his spine. She could shatter him this second, splinter his soul, send him spilling into a thousand shards. She could compel him to share with her where the bones are, but her eyes are not directing him to. Instead, they offer trust that wings through him like a seraph—faith in him he is certain he is unworthy of.
28
Travers stares at the message on the computer screen. It is simple, direct, and cryptic: DELIVERY CRITICAL. He sits back, rolls his neck, clicks on Reply, and types OK. Sophia Altay has bolted, he guesses, to those cave churches in Cappadocia she mentioned, and his delivering of the flash drive safely to William Glavine, Sr., is somehow even more important than it was.
Travers sends his reply and then takes a sip of his apple tea. The internet café looks like an outdated parlor replete with overstuffed chairs. It is cramped and crowded, but none of the young people hunched at the other seven computers is American. The two French girls next to him chatter quietly as they take turns keyboarding. Travers logs off the internet and opens the flash drive’s single file folder again. The folder contains eleven items, all digital photographs: two of the ossuary, one of bones, and eight of script. Nothing else. No pictures of diamonds spilling from an embroidered sack. No piles of precious stones. No trove of gilded treasure.
He clicks on the first photograph of the ossuary, almost certainly the same box that Leopold Kirchburg uncovered. Both the shape and the markings are the same, and it rests in front of a dirt wall the color of the earth at Saint John’s. The second photo
, a close-up of the cross within the circle within the star, confirms the similarity. The third shot, taken from a point directly above the ossuary, is more disturbing. The bones are arranged in the box, the skull lying on the ribcage, the femurs and humeri forming a cross, and the other bones creating the six points of a star. The femurs, unlike the other bones, are broken. But it’s all too neat, as though someone has just finished juxtaposing the bones.
He examines the photographs of the scrolls, but he can’t decipher any meaning. He can tell, though, that there are two separate documents. The opening of each is obvious, and four of the images are darker than the others. The language throughout looks like the script on the ossuary, but he can’t be sure it’s Aramaic. He squints at the incomprehensible second document one last time before closing the files and removing the flash drive from the USB port.
He puts the flash drive in his pocket, leans back, and finishes his tea. He is glad, finally, to have slipped away from the Saint John’s site. Nihat Monuglu was right—the combination of the ossuary’s discovery and Kenan Sirhan’s death knocked Selçuk on its civic ear. The Ephesus Museum’s curator and restoration specialists were at Saint John’s by early afternoon. Kirchburg is flying in his extended research team from Vienna, and Lee’s consultants from the University of Chicago are airborne. BBC and CNN correspondents as well as Turkish and German TV reporters are already encamped—and the American networks’ top guns are shooting for Selçuk. The recently leaked news that the Saint John’s site director vanished in the few hours between Sirhan’s death and the bone box’s discovery whetted the international media’s appetite for a lurid tale. Even Al Jazeera and Israeli Broadcasting are on the way.
Kirchburg is, at the moment, holding his first full-blown press conference. He and Charles Lee, who’s a whole lot less enthused about the ossuary’s discovery, were vying for airtime, with the Austrian palpably unable to resist the lights and cameras. The upside for Travers is that neither Kirchburg nor Lee wanted him around to speak to reporters. Travers himself doesn’t have anything personal against the press, but in Selçuk this particular evening it does seem to him like a case of flies to shit.
The local police, seemingly more preoccupied with the sudden influx of foreigners than with the investigation of Sirhan’s death, have disregarded Travers since the initial interviews. And Monuglu simply told him to check in at the Selçuk Municipal Building in the morning. Travers had a short, pointed, and difficult conversation with Bill Glavine. His old friend’s reaction, like Lee’s, was that the ossuary must be a fake. Travers’ news that one employee had died and that the site director and another employee had disappeared—as had the bone box’s contents—disturbed Glavine. And when Travers asked if he could speak privately to Glavine’s father, the conversation ended abruptly.
After paying the young man stationed by the door, Travers leaves the internet café. Three guys lean against a white Toyota outside the café. Smoking cigarettes, they laugh and talk and ignore Travers completely. The night is warm but not oppressive. Across the street and half a block back, a swarthy man stands in a doorway smoking.
Travers glances up at the sky, where the quarter moon is just coming up above the rooftops and a few stars glimmer through the haze of ambient light. More edgy than tired, he heads through Selçuk’s narrow backstreets. As he walks, he begins again to work through what’s happened since he first arrived in Turkey. He should have known—and at some level really did know—that he couldn’t escape thoughts about his job, his failed relationships, and, ultimately, Jason’s death. Still, he in no way could have expected to find a corpse or lose a site director. He makes a mental note to call his son, Tom, when he gets back to the hotel—he’s in New York, working in investment banking, living the life of a single Manhattanite, and they haven’t talked often enough in the last year.
Taking a circuitous route back to his hotel, Travers passes through a quiet neighborhood. Turkish music falls from an open window above a closed carpet store. The scent of something like cinnamon is in the air. As he reaches a curve in the road that bends sharply to his right toward the main road, two men round the corner ahead of him. A wiry man with short black hair steps in front of Travers and grins. His small dark eyes shine. “Travers?” he says, pronouncing it traverse.
The taller man with the cropped brown hair and thick neck circles behind Travers.
Travers instinctively grabs for the flash drive in his pocket. He looks about wildly, but no one else is in sight. The music seems distant, barely an echo. He suddenly feels as though heat is rising from the pavement. Lights are on in some of the second-story windows, but no one is peering out at the street.
The wiry man flicks a knife open.
As Travers steps back, a fist strikes the left side of his head from behind. He stumbles, his ear ringing and pain flashing across his temple. Turning, he glimpses the bigger man—the nose above the sneer is crooked, the left eyebrow scarred—swinging a second time. Aware that he’s moving too slowly to even get his hand up, Travers watches the fist. The uppercut catches his jaw, snapping his head back into darkness.
29
Kneeling on the prayer rug, Sophia Altay carefully slips the scrolls back into the aluminum tube and caps it. All around her, the faded red and gold frescoes of the saints shimmer in the dim light away from her headlamp’s beam. Before she began her work, she pushed the blocking stone across the cave church’s low, narrow entrance. The church is high up a tufa outcropping far from the town, and the only light that can escape rises to the stars through the sheered wall above the stone altar.
Her body still tingles. She has touched the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles in London, held Phoenician gold and Roman coins, worked with Hittite tools and Greek utensils, and inspected Christian relics and Islamic treasure, but nothing has ever touched her like these scrolls have. She turns off her laptop and places it next to the only two books she brought with her—a paperback Aramaic dictionary and a slim volume of Rumi’s poems. She has finished proofreading her Turkish translations. The scrolls were far better for the task than the photos Abrahim took, and she has, she believes, gotten the meaning exactly right.
Just before dawn, she will take the scrolls to the safe place she has chosen. The journey is dangerous in the dark, but she will not risk being seen in daylight. The Pharisees will do anything to destroy these documents—she is more certain of that than ever. They have killed, and they will kill again.
She looks up at the ceiling above her, the light from her headlamp creating a halo. All three symbols are there on the roof—the equal-armed cross, the circle, and the hexagram. All predate Christianity, and each attempts to present meaning—in the cross are the elements of earth, air, fire, and water; in the circle, unity and creation and the cycle of life; and in the six-pointed star, humanity’s position between sky and earth, the juxtaposition of women and men, and the reconciliation of opposites.
She brushes her hand along the aluminum tube gleaming in her headlamp’s beam. The scrolls possess her. The ossuary’s bones would herald and help verify the documents, but she does not possess them. Abrahim, sweet Abrahim, will not give up the bones because he fears their effects and because he suspects she will cast him off once she has all of the ossuary’s contents. She will not, of course; she knows a thing or two about not fitting in, having been the French girl in Istanbul and the Turkish girl in Paris and Cambridge.
Abrahim is even more of an outsider, a Christian with Aramaic roots, a homosexual with devout religious beliefs, a brilliant student who could not function in a traditional university, and a beautiful naïve boy who was preyed upon early. He was largely untrained and self-taught when he appeared at Saint John’s the previous year asking for work, but he quickly demonstrated a gift, a real genius, for both archeology and restoration, for discovery. It doesn’t surprise her at all that he was the one to first find the ossuary or that he has taken the disco
very so deeply to heart. If only he had been able to wait for her rather than, in his excitement, gone to Kenan. Though Abrahim likes nothing more than to please her, he is also a stubborn child who holds fast to whatever is most important to him. Had he known what these scrolls said, he might never have let go of them.
She stares again at the aluminum tube, her hand reaching for the molten light reflecting from it. She will hold the scrolls one more time, just once more, and then she will conceal them where the Pharisees cannot reach them. As she lifts the tube and starts to open it, her breath catches. She finds herself shaking her head and whispering, “No…no…no.” The scrolls must be preserved, protected even from her own touch. Still cradling the tube, she switches off her headlamp, lets her eyes adjust, and gazes out the cut above the altar at the night sky, the brush of stars.
30
Abrahim starts. He was fast asleep, dreaming that skeletons were chasing him across a tufa cliff. The specters kept getting closer, their bones chattering, until he could feel their brittle fingers scratching his neck. The cliff steepened, falling away into a void. They raked his back, the blood running hot. He lost his footing and began to slide, their hideous laughter trailing him down the tufa into the abyss.
Sweating under the covers, he grabs himself and curls on his side. He must confess or demons will chase him through all his days and nights. He strokes himself, stops, curls tighter, and begins again. It is not yet dawn. Outside, the birds are singing, but there is no light. The bones were not his to take, and stealing is a sin. Looting that holy box, touching those sacred remains, is sacrilege. But Kenan was going to sell them. To whom? And for what, thirty pieces of silver? Like Judas, Kenan paid with his life. Did he throw himself upon the rocks? Abrahim would have, except that suicide is the one unforgivable sin. He has sinned all too often, and he has sometimes thought that he must take his own life so that he sins no more. But damnation would follow, an eternity of hellfire. Kenan had no such scruples. He was incapable of feeling the unbearable weight of sin, and he did not fear hell. Money bought Kenan base pleasures, and he was going to trade the most venerable of relics for euros without a thought for his immortal soul. Euros! Kenan would never have taken his own life, broken his own bones, when there was money to be made from the ossuary.
