The Last Secret Of The Temple

by Paul Sussman

  There had been no time to find out anything about the final two objects, the flyer and the slide, and, leaning forward now, Khalifa picked up the latter and held it to the light, puffing on his cigarette, the phone still clutched in his left hand. The image of the dark, narrow tomb doorway at the foot of a vertical wall of rock meant nothing to him, and after staring at it for a moment, wondering whether it had any relevance, he laid it back on the desk and took up the flyer instead, reading slowly through it, struck, as he had been the first time he'd looked at it, by the incongruity of someone of Jansen's evident breeding mixing with a fundamentalist firebrand like Shaykh Omar Abd-el Karim. He was just scribbling a note to himself to look in on the meeting the flyer was advertising when the line finally clicked back into life.

  'Have you speak to Israeli Embassy in Cairo?'

  'It was the Israeli Embassy in Cairo who gave me your number,' replied Khalifa, banging his cigarette out into the ashtray, trying not to lose his temper.

  She put him on hold again, only for fifteen seconds this time, then came back and asked if he knew the victim's last known address, or rather her 'place of living before death', which he took to mean the same thing. He reached across the desk for Schlegel's murder file and leafed through it.

  'Forty-six O-hor Har Chime Street,' he read, struggling with the unfamiliar words. 'Flat four.' He had to repeat it twice before the woman recognized it.

  'Ohr Ha-Chaim,' she said. 'This is Old City. You must speak David Police Station.'

  She gave him a phone number.

  'Do you have a contact name?'

  'You speak investigation department. They help you.'

  'If possible I'd like a name,' pushed Khalifa, aware that without one he was liable to end up being fobbed off by some secretary. 'Someone I can speak to directly. Anyone. Please.'

  The woman let out an annoyed sigh, making no effort to disguise the fact that she thought he was being a nuisance, and put him on hold for a third time, eventually coming back and reading out a name, which Khalifa wrote down on the pad in front of him.

  'And this is a detective?' he asked.

  'This detective,' she said curtly, and rang off.

  He downed the receiver and lit another cigarette, grumbling to himself, all his worst suspicions about the Israelis confirmed. He took a couple of deep puffs, then picked up the phone again and dialled the number the woman had given him. The line rang seven times before someone answered.

  'Good afternoon,' he said. 'My name is Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Egyptian Police Force. Can I please speak to . . .'

  He squinted down at the pad in front of him.

  'Detective Ar-ee-ay Ben-Ro-eye.'

  JERUSALEM

  The phone was ringing when Ben-Roi walked into his office, which he could have done without, fuzzed as he was by the two beers he'd drunk on the way up to the station, not to mention the unbearable sense of melancholy he always experienced after visiting Galia's grave. He snatched up the receiver, cursing whoever it was at the other end of the line.

  'Ken.'

  'Detective Ben-Ro-eye?'

  'Ben-Roi,' corrected the Israeli, scowling. Who was this maniak?

  'Forgive me. My name is Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Egyptian Police Force. Your name was given to me by Central Police Headquarters.'

  Ben-Roi said nothing.

  'Hello?'

  'Ken.'

  'Do you speak English, Mr Ben-Roi?'

  'Ata medaber Ivrit?'

  'Sorry?'

  'Do you speak Hebrew?'

  'I'm afraid I do not.'

  'Then it looks like I'll have to speak English. What do you want?'

  Khalifa puffed on his cigarette. He'd been speaking to the man for less than fifteen seconds and already he disliked him.

  'I am currently investigating a case involving an Israeli national,' he said, struggling to keep his tone civil. 'A murder case.'

  Ben-Roi transferred the receiver to his left hand and, with his right one, eased the hip-flask from his pocket.

  'So?'

  'The victim was a woman named Hannah Schlegel. She was killed in 1990.'

  Ben-Roi snorted. 'And you're just investigating it now?'

  'No, no, you misunderstand. We investigated it at the time. A man was convicted. But now new evidence has come to light and we are re-examining the case.'

  Ben-Roi got the lid off the flask and took a swig.

  'You convicted the wrong person?'

  It was more an accusation than a question. An imputation of professional incompetence. Khalifa gritted his teeth.

  'This is what I am now trying to find out.'

  Ben-Roi took another swig.

  'So what do you want from me?'

  'I am trying to get . . . how do you say? . . . a little background information on the victim. Job, family, friends, interests. Anything that might help us establish a motive for the killing.'

  'And?'

  'Sorry?'

  'Why are you phoning me?'

  'Oh, I see. Well, the victim used to live at' – Khalifa glanced down again at the file in front of him – 'Ohr Ha-Chaim Street. Number forty-six, flat four. I was told this address comes within the . . . how do you say? . . . care of your station.'

  Ben-Roi sat back and, reaching up his free hand, began rubbing his temples. For fuck's sake! This was the last thing he needed, getting roped into a joint investigation with some bloody rag-head. Amateurs, the lot of them. Fucking amateurs. He should never have picked up the phone.

  'I'm busy at the moment,' he said gruffly. 'Can you call back?'

  'Later today?'

  'Next week.'

  'I'm afraid it can't wait that long,' said Khalifa, sensing the fob-off and refusing to accept it. 'Perhaps one of your colleagues can help me.' Someone a bit more professional, he felt like saying. Who takes a bit of pride in his work. 'Or perhaps I should speak to your superior,' he added.

  Ben-Roi's scowl tightened into a snarl. Cheeky Arab cunt! He held the phone away from him and glowered at it, tempted simply to slam it back down into its cradle, to cut the man off. He got the feeling he wasn't going to get rid of him that easily, however. Why the hell hadn't he just left the phone to ring?

  'Inspector Ben-Roi?' Khalifa's voice echoed down the line.

  'Yes, yes,' growled Ben-Roi, taking a final swig from the flask and screwing the cap back on. 'OK, give me the name and address again.'

  He grabbed a pen and started scribbling as Khalifa repeated Schlegel's details.

  'And she was killed when?'

  'March the tenth 1990. I can send you the case notes, if that would help.'

  'Forget it,' said Ben-Roi, aware that the more information he had, the more work he'd be obliged to do. A couple of calls, maybe a quick visit to the woman's former address – that's as far as he was prepared to go. And if that wasn't enough, well, that was the Arab's problem. It was him who'd fucked up, after all.

  'One thing you should know,' Khalifa continued. 'Our main suspect in this case is someone named Piet Jansen. Any connection you can find between this man and Hannah Schlegel would be very useful. That's—'

  'Yeah, yeah, I've got it,' said Ben-Roi. 'Piet Hansen.'

  'Jansen,' said Khalifa, no longer bothering to mask the annoyance in his voice. 'J . . . A . . . N . . . S . . . E . . . N. Have you got that?'

  Ben-Roi's hand bunched into a fist. 'Got it,' he growled.

  Khalifa took an angry drag on his cigarette, taking it right down to the butt before grinding it out in the ashtray in front of him.

  'You'll need my contact details.'

  'I guess I will,' responded Ben-Roi, bristling.

  Khalifa gave them to him.

  'Yours?' he asked.

  Ben-Roi gave him his email.

  'Mobile?'

  'Don't have one,' said the Israeli, gazing down at his Nokia.

  Khalifa knew full well he was lying, but couldn't see any point pushing the issue so he simply said he would appreciate it if Ben
-Roi could treat the matter with as much urgency as possible.

  'Sure,' grumbled the Israeli.

  There was a silence, the line between them seeming to crackle with mutual antipathy, and then Ben-Roi said that if that was all he had work to be getting on with. Khalifa thanked him, stiffly, and both men started to lower their phones.

  'One question!'

  Khalifa's voice echoed back down the line. For fuck's sake, thought Ben-Roi.

  'What?'

  Khalifa was flicking swiftly through the file in front of him.

  'Something I do not understand. On the victim's arm. There was a . . . how do you say . . . tatter?'

  'Tattoo?'

  'Exactly.'

  Khalifa came to a black and white photograph of the dead woman's forearm and pulled it out, holding it up in front of him.

  'A number. Four-six-nine-six-six. With a triangle in front of it. This is some Jewish ritual?'

  Ben-Roi sat back in his chair, shaking his head. Fucking ignorant, anti-semitic Arab.

  'It's a concentration camp number. The Nazis tattooed them on the arms of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust. Although seeing as you lot don't believe the Holocaust ever happened that probably won't help you much. Anything else?'

  Khalifa was staring at the photo in front of him.

  'Anything else?' repeated Ben-Roi, louder.

  'No,' said Khalifa. 'Nothing else.'

  'Then I'll be in touch.'

  The line went dead. Khalifa continued gazing at the photo for a long moment, eyes dwelling on the five digits crawling across the dead woman's skin like a procession of insects emerging from the triangular mound of an ant-hill, then laid it aside and picked up Jansen's pistol. This too he stared at for some while, brow furrowed, before putting it down again, picking up his pen and, on the pad beside the phone, writing 'Nazi' and 'Holocaust', underscoring each with a double black line.

  JERUSALEM

  'The war between Israelis and Palestinians – and make no mistake, it is a war – is being fought on many different levels, and with many different weapons. Most obvious, of course, is the physical confrontation: rocks against Galil rifles, Molotov cocktails against Merkava tanks, car bombs and suicide attacks against Apache helicopters and F-16 jets.

  'There are other elements to the conflict, however, which, if less overt, are no less significant. Diplomacy, religion, propaganda, the economy, intelligence, culture – all are arenas in which the ongoing struggle between my people and our Israeli oppressors is played out on a daily basis. In this article I shall concentrate on one of the less likely theatres of attrition, and yet in many ways the most crucial of all, one that sits at the very heart of this corrosive conflict: archaeology.'

  Layla paused, fingers hovering over the keypad of her laptop, scanning what she had just written, reading the words out loud to check that they flowed smoothly, made sense. She added another sentence – 'For the Israelis, archaeology, specifically the unearthing of evidence to support the existence of a biblical State of Israel on the lands they now occupy, has from the outset been a key component of their war against the Palestinians' – then, with a sigh, pushed herself away from her desk, stood up and went through into the kitchen to make herself some coffee.

  The article, for the Palestine-Israel Journal, was one she'd been turning over in her mind for the past week, since her meeting with the young man Yunis Abu Jish in Kalandia refugee camp. It was a good subject, and, given her usual speed of writing and the fact she'd already planned the whole thing out in her head, one she should have wrapped up in a couple of hours or less.

  As it was she'd been working on it for twice that length of time, since returning from the meeting with Father Sergius, and although it was now early evening she'd still only produced a fraction of the two thousand words she intended to write. If it had been any other subject she might have concentrated better. The references to archaeology and history, however, were a constant reminder of the whole William de Relincourt thing; she would write a few words only for her mind to start drifting almost immediately, pulling her away from the job at hand and back to de Relincourt and the mysterious treasure he had supposedly found buried beneath the Holy Sepulchre. What was it, she kept asking herself? How did it tie in with al-Mulatham? Who was the mysterious correspondent who had alerted her to the story in the first place? What? How? Who? The questions echoed around her head like a constantly ringing bell, shattering her concentration.

  She brewed her coffee, making it Palestinian-style, boiling water in a metal flask and adding coffee and sugar, then went up onto the roof and gazed eastwards at the darkening sky, trying to clear her head. On top of Mount Scopus the lights of the Hebrew University had come on, sharp and cold, as though the hilltop was covered in a glittering sheet of ice; to the right, on the Mount of Olives, the Church of the Ascension was just visible, enveloped in a warmer corona of illumination, like a halo. She smiled faintly to herself, recalling the time she and her father had raced all the way down the hill from the church to the Gethsemane Basilica below, her father betting her a dollar she couldn't beat him to the bottom. She had, just, and although she'd known he'd let her win, had held back deliberately, the knowledge had in no way diminished her sense of triumph as she crossed the agreed finishing line, raising her skinny arms and whooping in delight before breathlessly demanding her prize money.

  It was, like so many of her memories of him, an ambivalent image, one replete with happiness, yet also a melancholy symbolism. In a way, after all, she was still running that race. Had been ever since his death, her father always at her shoulder, haunting her, pushing her, never receding, however hard she ran. The difference being that whereas once there had been a finite distance to cover, a clear end in sight, a reward for her exertions, now there was . . . what? Nothing. No expectation of triumph or delight, no enjoyment. Just the ceaseless running, the hopeless headlong sprint from emptiness into emptiness. And always her father's memory behind her, his skull shattered, his hands cuffed behind his back like an animal tethered in an abattoir. Always there. Always present. Always driving her.

  She dragged her arm across her eyes, wiping away the moisture that had gathered there, and gazed out at the last faint band of twilight as it slowly dissolved into night. A breeze got up, pushing against her face, and she closed her eyes, enjoying the calming freshness of the night air. She remained like that for a long while, wishing she could just spring up above the rooftops and fly away, escape from the whole vicious thing, leave it all behind; then, with a sigh, she downed her coffee and descended once again into the study, sitting back in front of her laptop and reading through what she'd written. She added another couple of sentences, half-heartedly, then, realizing it was a waste of time, that she was too preoccupied, shut down the file she was working in, put away her notes and logged on to the internet, calling up Google and typing 'William de Relincourt' into the subject field.

  She spent the next five hours going back over every relevant de Relincourt entry listed, searching for some new lead, something she might have missed on her initial trawl through the listings the previous night. William de Relincourt and the Holy Grail, William de Relincourt and the Rosicrucians, William de Relincourt and the lost scrolls of Atlantis, William de Relincourt and the Vatican conspiracy to take over the world – she waded through them all, each match seemingly that bit more bizarre than the one preceding it. Had she been researching an article on New Age oddballs, or History as the New Mysticism, she would have had a field day. As it was, she found nothing whatsoever to add to the facts she already knew.

  When she'd exhausted all the William de Relincourt matches, she began typing in variations, widening the net: Guillelmus de Relincourt; Gillom of Relincar; Esclarmonde de Relincourt; De Relincourt Jews; De Relincourt France; De Relincourt Languedoc; De Relincourt C. Still nothing. Sometimes there'd be no matches at all, sometimes dozens of them but all irrelevant, sometimes matches she'd already brought up and gone through under another heading.


  Only one combination proved, if not necessarily helpful, at least interesting, and that was 'Guillelmus Relincourt Hitler', which she typed in on the basis of Father Sergius's parting shot that morning. Here again she was confronted by more than a few crazy theories, including one suggesting de Relincourt had unearthed some sort of secret magical weapon capable of vaporizing the world's entire Jewish population, a weapon that, for obvious reasons, Hitler had been anxious to lay his hands on (and the author too, to judge by the anti-semitic tone of the article). Among the dross, however, were a number of more plausible-sounding pieces in which de Relincourt was name-checked as an example of the Führer's well-documented obsession with archaeology and the occult. Most of the references were brief and lacking corroborating detail, but one, in an article by a Frenchman named Jean-Michel Dupont, carried an intriguing footnote quoting from the diary of one Dietrich Eckart, a Nazi ideologue and the man to whom Hitler had, apparently, dedicated Mein Kampf: