The Last Secret Of The Temple

by Paul Sussman

  There was a momentary silence, uneasy, broken by Chaim, who started into a story about how they'd found a rat in the toilets at their local swimming pool and the lifeguard had killed it with a broom.

  'Good for him,' said Ben-Roi, finishing his soup and throwing a glance across the table at Sarah. 'That's the only way to deal with vermin. Crush the bastards.'

  He didn't say much for the rest of the meal, eating in near silence while the others chatted among themselves, mainly, inevitably, about ha-matzav, the current political situation. Once they had finished eating they sang a couple of zemirot, Ben-Roi mumbling along tunelessly, then retired to the living room for coffee. At ten o'clock he said he ought to be going.

  'Me too,' said Sarah, standing. 'It's been a lovely evening, Chava. Thank you so much.'

  The two of them made their farewells, Ben-Roi annoyed that he couldn't get away alone, and descended in the lift together in embarrassed silence. When they came out onto the street he asked Sarah which way she was going.

  'Right,' she said. 'You?'

  He also needed to turn right.

  'Left,' he muttered.

  There was an awkward pause.

  'Oh well,' she muttered eventually. 'It was nice meeting you.'

  She smiled and held out her hand. He looked down at it, nodded, then turned and started walking away. After he'd gone a few metres she called after him.

  'I'm sorry about what happened, Arieh. Chava told me. I'm so very sorry. It must be terrible for you.'

  He slowed. 'You're not fucking sorry,' he wanted to yell at her. 'You're a dirty fucking Arab-lover. They murdered the only woman I ever loved and now you're playing games with their children. You're a stupid ignorant fucking zonah. Whore.'

  He said nothing, just half-raised a hand in farewell and, picking up his pace, continued to the end of the street, disappearing round the corner onto Ha-Melekh George.

  Later, much later, having spent three hours drinking alone in Champs Pub on Jaffa Street, Ben-Roi stumbled back to his flat, banged on a Schlomo Artzi CD and collapsed onto his sofa, head swimming.

  There'd been a hooker in the bar, young, blonde, Russian, with mascara-stained eyes and the transparent, punctured arms of a regular smack user. He'd thought of bringing her back with him, fucking away a bit of his anger and loneliness, but decided against it. He was too pissed, wouldn't be able to get a hard-on, would end up despising himself even more than he already did, if such a thing were possible. The woman had made a play for him, but he'd told her to fuck off and carried on drinking alone, staring at his reflection in the mirrors behind the bar, his huge, craggy face bisected by the vertical join between two glass panels so that it looked as if his skull had been neatly split in half and the two halves eased apart, leaving a heavy black strip running right the way through his centre.

  He lay back on the sofa and closed his eyes, but was overcome by a wave of nausea and opened them again almost immediately, his gaze veering around the room, trying to find something to focus on. He stared at his CD-player, a crack in the ceiling, a Batya Gur whodunnit, before eventually his eyes swooped down on a row of framed photographs sitting on a shelf opposite. Taking deep breaths, he worked his way along the line, using the images to steady himself, as though his eyes were hands and the photos a solid iron rail keeping him upright: him and his sister hanging upside down from the branch of an apricot tree on the family farm; his greatgrandfather, old Ezekiel Ben-Roi, a stern, heavily bearded Russian who had emigrated to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1882, making the Ben-Rois one of the longest-settled Jewish families in the region; him on his graduation from police school; him and Al Pacino, whose film Serpico was what had inspired him to become a policeman in the first place. And of course last of all, right at the end of the row, the largest photo of all, him and Galia, laughing into the camera, the rippled silken sheet of the Sea of Galilee behind them, at Ginosar, on the night of his thirtieth birthday, when she had given him his silver hip-flask and the menorah-shaped pendant he still wore on a chain around his neck.

  He stared at the photo, the fingers of his left hand tweaking helplessly at the pendant, then, heaving himself up onto his feet, he staggered through into the bedroom. Sellotaped to the wall beside his bed was a photocopied newspaper article, the print enlarged to three times its original size, nooses of thick red ink circling certain words and phrases – Jericho and the Dead Sea Plain; Manio; a tall, slim man; way too sophisticated for a renegade Palestinian cell; the impetus has to be external. He leant against the wall with one hand to either side of the article and scanned the text, reading right the way through it, as he had done a thousand times this last year, before eventually slumping backwards onto the bed, where he lay staring at a bottle of aftershave on the bedside cabinet.

  'Bellyache,' he mumbled drunkenly. 'You give me a fucking bellyache.'

  And then his eyes folded shut and he was asleep, snoring heavily, his right hand bunched into a half-fist as though he was clutching the handle of a parachute ripcord.

  JERUSALEM

  It was the same dream she always had, every night, without fail. She was in an underground cell, very small and cramped, pitch dark, with a damp, slime-covered floor and sweaty concrete walls. There was something in there with her; she couldn't tell what – a snake, maybe, or a rat, or a large scorpion. Something dangerous, malevolent. She was naked, pressing her frail body into one corner of the cell, trying to keep out of the thing's way, terrified of any contact with it, of being bitten or stung. As she did so, there was a distant rumble of machinery, like huge iron wheels slowly revolving, and the walls began to inch together, driving her and the creature towards each other. She started screaming, calling for her daddy, insisting she wasn't a traitor, she was a good Palestinian. The walls kept coming, somehow pushing her legs up and open so that her private parts were exposed. She could feel the creature moving around down there between her thighs, crawling across her skin, exploring, moving steadily upwards. She tried to stay still, not to breathe, but it felt so disgusting she couldn't help but jerk, whereupon it tore into her crotch, biting and slashing and stinging, ripping her open, pushing right up inside her.

  'No!' she screamed, snapping awake, arms and legs flailing. 'Please, God, no!'

  She continued to convulse for several seconds, then collapsed back onto the bed, trembling, a distant ringing sound in her ears. Gradually her breathing calmed and her body relaxed, but the ringing continued, and as her mind cleared she suddenly realized the phone was going. She glanced across at the luminous dial of her clock – 1.30 a.m. – then swung her legs off the bed and, rubbing her eyes, went through into the study where she picked up the receiver.

  'Layla?'

  It was Tom Roberts.

  'It's one-thirty,' she said, her voice groggy, annoyed.

  'What? Oh sod, Layla! I'm so sorry. I had no idea it was so late. I just wanted to tell you . . . Forget it, forget it. I'll call back tomorrow.'

  He sounded excited. Worked up.

  'Wanted to tell me what?'

  'It doesn't matter. I'll call you tomorrow.'

  'I'm awake now, Tom. What do you want?'

  She was still on edge from the nightmare and her tone was sharp, suspicious. She had a nasty feeling he was going to come out with something embarrassing, tell her he was in love with her or something.

  'It's just that I've been turning things over in my mind since I left this afternoon . . .'

  Oh God, she thought.

  'And I think I might have an idea what GR stands for.'

  It took a moment for the words to sink in, and then, suddenly, she was wide awake. She leant forward and switched on a lamp, fumbling for a pen and paper.

  'Go on.'

  'I don't know why it didn't occur to me at the time,' he said, 'what with the reference to Jerusalem and secret hiding places. It's certainly an amazing coincidence. Anyway, I think it might be someone called William de Relincourt.'

  She frowned, her pen poised above the sheet of pa
per.

  'The initials are GR, Tom, not WR.'

  'I know,' he said. 'That's probably why it didn't leap out at me immediately. The thing is, in medieval Latin the name William was rendered Guillelmus, with a "G".'

  She scribbled down the name, underlining it.

  'Who is he?'

  'Well, this is what's so fascinating,' said Roberts. 'So far as I remember – and like I said this afternoon, I'm not great on this period – he was the guy who built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Or rather rebuilt it. The original church was Byzantine, I think. Or was it Roman? I can't remember. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is that during the crusader era the church was completely rebuilt, and while they were digging the foundations this William de Relincourt was supposed to have unearthed some amazing treasure.'

  Layla felt goose-bumps prickling her arms.

  'What treasure?'

  'I don't know. I don't think anybody knows. The story appears in one of the crusader chronicles. William of Tyre, I think, although I could be wrong. It just seems an extraordinary coincidence. Two people with the same initials, in Jerusalem at roughly the same time, finding some mysterious hidden object. Extraordinary.'

  Layla scribbled a couple of notes to herself, then picked up the translation they had done earlier that afternoon and read through it.

  'Layla?'

  'Yes, I'm still here. I'm just going through the letter again.'

  She finished reading and laid the sheet back down, running a hand through her close-cropped hair.

  'I'm out of my depth here, Tom. If it's politics I've got an address book full of contacts, but medieval history . . . I just don't know anything about it. It's never interested me.'

  There was a momentary pause.

  'If you like we could—'

  She knew what he was going to say and cut him off immediately.

  'I prefer to research on my own, Tom. I'm sorry, it's just the way I work. Nothing personal.'

  She sounded tough, cold. Under other circumstances she would have apologized – he'd done her a huge favour, after all – but tonight she wasn't in the mood.

  'Of course, of course,' he mumbled, taken aback by her abruptness. 'I quite understand. I'm the same actually.'

  'I just need a steer, Tom. A lead. Someone who knows about this stuff. Can you help me?'

  She could hear him breathing at the other end of the line.

  'Please?' she added.

  There was another pause.

  'There's a guy down in the Holy Sepulchre,' he said eventually, an edge of hurt in his voice. 'One of the Greek Orthodox priests. Father Sergius, I think his name is. Big fat man. Knows everything there is to know about the history of the church. He's written books on it. He might be a good starting point.'

  She wrote down the name.

  'Thank you, Tom,' she said. 'I owe you.'

  She sensed that he needed more than that from her. That he was waiting for some kind word, some reassurance. She wasn't in the mood. William de Relincourt – that's all she could think about.

  'Thank you,' she said again. 'I'll call you.'

  She put down the phone, sat for a moment staring at the name in front of her, then plugged her laptop into the phone-line, logged on to Google and started searching.

  LUXOR

  The banana fields were still blanketed in early-morning mist when Khalifa arrived at Jansen's Karnak villa, unlocking its front gate and crunching along the gravel path towards the low, single-storey building ahead, with its wooden porch and shuttered windows.

  He had spent the previous afternoon and evening working his way through the Schlegel file, scribbling notes, re-familiarizing himself with the case. As Hassani had suspected, it hadn't proved much help. It had furnished him with a few forgotten details – photographs of Schlegel's corpse, statements from witnesses who had seen her before her death, copies of correspondence with the Israeli Embassy arranging for the transport of the body back to Israel – but nothing that could realistically be considered new information. He had tried to re-establish contact with the two key witnesses – the housekeeper who had heard Schlegel talking on the phone in her hotel room and the Karnak guard who had seen someone hurrying from the scene of her murder – but after a bit of digging had discovered the guard was dead and the maid had married and moved away from the area, leaving no forwarding address. He was, effectively, having to start from scratch.

  He reached the villa's front door, and, after some fiddling with keys, got it open and stepped into the cool, shadowy interior, flicking on a light-switch. Everything was exactly as it had been on his last visit – the armchairs, the rack of papers, the large oil painting of a craggy mountain summit, that same air of sterile neatness, of obsessive security. Half a dozen letters were lying scattered on the floor at his feet, and he bent over, picked them up and flicked through them. The first five were bills or circulars; the sixth had a handwritten envelope and a Luxor postmark. He ripped it open and pulled out a cheap, photocopied flyer advertising a talk the following day: 'The Iniquities of the Jews'. The speaker was one Shaykh Omar Abd-el Karim, a local cleric renowned for his seditious, anti-Western preaching. Khalifa studied the flyer, puzzled that such a thing should be sent to someone like Jansen, then slipped it into his jacket pocket and, kicking the front door closed behind him, set off around the house.

  An opening. That's what he was looking for. Some sort of window on to Jansen's secret world. Something, anything, that would tell him more about the villa's mysterious owner. Something to help him breach the impermeable façade the man seemed to have built up around himself.

  He started in the living room, certain there were clues here to Jansen's story, but uncertain how to read them. The large oil painting, for instance. It was clearly telling him something about its owner, about his inner life. But what? That he simply liked mountains? Or was its message more specific? That this was the landscape of his native country, perhaps (but wasn't Holland supposed to be flat)? He felt as though all the information he needed to get to the heart of his quarry was here in front of him, but it was in code, and he didn't have the crib to decipher it.

  He spent half an hour going over the room, then went through to the bedrooms, then the study, where he spent a long while going through Jansen's bookshelves, pulling out volumes at random, flicking through their pages: Die Südlichen Raume des Tempels von Luxor by H. Brunner; The Complete Works of Josephus, translated by William Whiston; Cathares et Templiers by Raimonde Reznikov; From Solon to Socrates by Victor Ehrnberg; The Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre by G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville. As on his first visit he was struck by the diversity of Jansen's reading matter, by the man's obvious intelligence and erudition. There were works on everything from Pre-dynastic Egypt to the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades to Aztec burial customs, Byzantine Jerusalem to the art of rose growing. It was a rich, eclectic, scholarly collection, and Khalifa again got the feeling it was at odds with the outward life of the man who owned it.

  'Who were you, Piet Jansen?' he muttered to himself. 'Who were you, and why were you here?'

  From the bookcase he turned his attention to the desk, then the two filing cabinets. The first, containing plastic folders full of business, banking, insurance and legal documents, proved no more revealing than it had when he'd flicked through on his first visit to the house. The second, with its sleeves of photographic slides, was more interesting, if only because the slides were of places Khalifa either knew and loved or had always yearned to visit. Giza, Saqqara, Luxor, Abu Simbel – all the major monuments were there, expertly photographed and neatly labelled, as were numerous smaller sites few tourists would ever bother to go to: the great mud-brick walls at el-Kab; the boundary stela of Akhenaten at Tuna el-Gebel; the tomb of Djehutihotep at Deir el-Bersha. Some of the sites – Gebel Dosha, Kor, Qasr Dush – were so obscure Khalifa hadn't even heard of them.

  One slide in particular held his attention, for it was the only one that appeared to feature Jansen himself. He was sli
ghtly younger here, with neatly brushed hair and an erect, straight-backed stance, standing in what looked like the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, in front of an image of the king with the gods Horus and Osiris. There was something faintly menacing about the image, the way its subject stared straight through the camera lens, his gaze hard and knowing, arrogant, his expression hovering midway between a smile and a sneer.

  'You were bad,' Khalifa whispered to himself. 'It's in your face, in your eyes. You did bad things, cruel things.'

  He gazed at the image for a long while, then put it back and worked his way swiftly through the rest of the collection, not bothering to look at every slide, simply holding each sleeve up to the light and flicking his eyes back and forth across it, focusing on perhaps six or seven pictures before moving on to the next sleeve.

  He would most likely have missed the tomb entrance had it been in a normal plastic frame like all the other slides, for by the time he came to it he was almost at the end of the collection and was giving each sleeve little more than a cursory glance. As it was, the picture stuck out from those around it because of its old-fashioned brown cardboard mounting. His interest piqued, Khalifa removed it and took a closer look.