by Paul Sussman
Layla still hadn't drunk any of her beer. She raised the bottle now and took a swift gulp, struggling to process everything she'd just heard, to tie it into what she already knew: William de Relincourt finds some object beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; he sends it to his sister Esclarmonde at Castelombres; Castelombres becomes the focus of some Jewish mystery cult; the object is transferred to Montségur for safekeeping during the upheavals of the Cathar Crusade; when Montségur falls it is returned to Castelombres and buried. It all seemed to fit together. Yet, fascinating as it was, it ultimately didn't move her any further forward. There was still so much she didn't know, so many questions to answer. What was this mysterious thing? Why was it so important to the Jews? What was its relevance to al-Mulatham? And what had happened to it?
'The report of your talk said something about Nazi archaeologists,' she said, taking another sip, bringing up her left foot and tucking it under her right knee. 'How do they come into it?'
Topping smiled. 'I was wondering when you'd get round to that. In many ways it's the most curious part of the whole story.'
He got to his feet and wandered over to the window, gazing down into the court below. Aside from the muffled thud of music from an adjoining room, everything was completely silent.
'Inquisition transcripts are a pretty obscure topic of study,' he said after a brief pause. 'Not many people are interested in them. Some of the registers in the Bibliothèque Nationale haven't been looked at for years, decades even. I once came across one that hadn't been opened since the middle of the nineteenth century.'
She tapped her pen on her knee, wondering where he was going with this.
'According to the Bibliothèque records,' he continued, turning back to her, 'the last time anyone looked at the register in which I found the Berenger d'Ussat transcript was at the beginning of September 1943, during the German occupation of Paris, when it was examined by a Nazi scholar named Dieter Hoth.'
The name seemed to spark a faint connection somewhere deep in Layla's mind. She was so overloaded with information that she couldn't immediately think why.
'Go on.'
'Well, initially I thought this Hoth – who incidentally I'd never heard of, which was strange given how narrow the field is – must have missed the Berenger transcript altogether because there's no record of him ever publishing anything about it. Anyway, just for the hell of it I checked him with a contact of mine down in Toulouse, a Nazi specialist, and guess what? Less than a week after looking at the register this same Dieter Hoth turns up down in the depths of Languedoc, staying in the modern village of Castelombres, this time accompanied by a unit of SS stormtroopers. And what do you think they were all doing down there?'
Layla shook her head. Topping took a swig of his beer and leant back against the windowsill, smiling wryly.
'Excavating.'
She gawped. 'You're serious?'
'That's what I was told.'
'And? Did they find anything?'
Again he gave a wry smile. 'Apparently so, although exactly what I can't tell you. Like I said, Nazi archaeologists aren't really my area of expertise.'
He stared down at her, then, pushing himself away from the windowsill, went through into the kitchen and began rummaging in a cupboard. Layla sat back and sipped her beer, her mind whirring. There was so much to follow up here, so many avenues to explore.
'Who's this friend of yours?' she asked after a moment. 'The one in Toulouse.'
'I wouldn't call him a friend as such,' replied Topping, 'more a passing acquaintance. I met him a couple of years ago, when I was on sabbatical at Toulouse University. Runs an antiques shop near the St Sernin. Odd man. Eccentric. Knows everything there is to know about the Nazis, though. Name of Jean-Michel Dupont.'
As with Dieter Hoth, this seemed to ring a vague bell somewhere deep inside Layla's head. She closed her eyes, trying to pin it down. Dieter Hoth, Jean-Michel Dupont; Dieter Hoth, Jean-Michel Dupont. How did she know these people?
And then, suddenly, it came to her. Of course! From the web the other night. The article about Nazi archaeologists, with the footnote containing the unidentified initials DH. Her eyes snapped open and, after scrabbling through her notes, she pulled out the print-out she had made at the time:
November 13, 1938 Thule Soc. Dinner, Wewelsburg. Spirits high after events of 9-10, with WvS making joke about the 'shattering of Jewish hopes'. DH said they'd be more than shattered if the Relincourt thing came off, after which long discussion on Cathars etc. Pheasant, champagne, cognac. Apologies from FK and WJ.
'My God,' Layla whispered. 'He knew. De Relincourt, Castelombres, Montségur. He made the connection.'
'What was that?' said Topping.
She ignored the question.
'This Dieter Hoth. What happened to him?'
Topping came back into the room, munching on an apple.
'Died at the end of the war, apparently. Got his head blown off by a Russian artillery shell. No more than he deserved, by all accounts.'
He took another bite of his apple and leant against the door of the kitchen.
'Don't fancy something to eat, do you? I know a very nice little Greek taverna down on Trumpington Street.'
She looked up, distracted.
'Are you hitting on me, Professor Topping?'
He smiled.
'Absolutely.'
JERUSALEM
Har-Zion wound the leather straps of the tefillah anticlockwise around the bicep of his left arm and down around his gloved fingers, ensuring that the box with the holy passages in it was positioned exactly adjacent to his heart. By rights, the bicep and hand should have been bare – that is what the Torah prescribed. With his ravaged flesh, however, he did not feel comfortable exposing himself, and had managed to gain a rabbinic dispensation permitting him to keep the relevant portions of his body covered.
He finished winding the seven loops and attached the second tefillah to his forehead, centring the scripture box midway between his eyes; then, with a nod at Avi as if to say 'wait for me', he heaved a prayer shawl over his shoulders and started forward across the floodlit esplanade towards the HaKotel Ha-Ma'aravi, the Western Wall, last vestige of the ancient Temple, holiest site in the Jewish world.
It had been a while since he was last down here, over a week. He would have liked to come more often, every day if possible, but what with all his various commitments there simply wasn't the time. Tonight, however, he had made the time. There were some things it wasn't safe to delegate.
He approached the Wall and positioned himself at its far left-hand end, gazing up at the twenty-metre-high patchwork of giant stone blocks rearing overhead, like some intricate gaming board, every nook and cranny of its lower courses jammed with a dandruff of folded paper notes on which were scribbled the prayers and supplications of previous visitors. By day this area would be crowded, with tourists in makeshift cardboard yarmulkes, Haredi Jews in their black coats and hats, boys performing their bar mitzvah ceremonies. Now, aside from himself and a lone Hasidic worshipper away to his right bowing back and forth in prayer like a pecking raven, the Wall was completely deserted. He cast a quick glance around, then placed a palm against the pock-marked stone, lowered his head and began to recite the shema.
'Like a story come to life.' That's how his brother Benjamin had described the Wall when the two of them had first come here all those years ago. 'Like something out of a book or a song.' The image had stayed with Har-Zion, elaborating and embellishing itself over time so that now, as he stood beneath the towering matrix of cream-yellow stone, he felt himself in the presence not of something dead and inanimate, an ossified relic of some long-forgotten world, but rather of something vibrant and alive and relevant. A voice. That's how he thought of it. A deep, sonorous voice singing to him from out of the void: of things that had once been – kings and prophets, the Ark and the Menorah, Moses and David and Solomon and Ezra – but also, more importantly, of things that were yet to come: God's people g
athered together once again, the Temple rebuilt, the Holy Lamp recast and filled with light. The Wailing Wall some called it, those who came here to weep, pull their hair and fixate upon the centuries of exile and loss. Not Har-Zion. For him it was a Singing Wall, a place not of pain and remembrance but of hope and joy and expectation; a tangible, touchable reminder that God was with them, that they were not abandoned, that they were His chosen people, precious above all others. That they would endure, just as the Wall had endured, whatever man and nature might throw at them.
He continued reciting, the words of the prayer swooping and swirling within the soft musical hum of his voice, before eventually coming to the end and falling silent. At the same moment a figure, tall, broad-shouldered, came up beside him, positioning himself in a deep pool of shadow at the Wall's far-left extremity so that his face was lost in darkness. The solitary Hasid had by now departed, so the two of them were completely alone.
'You're late,' said Har-Zion, his voice so low as to be barely audible.
The man edged himself deeper into the shadows, mumbling an apology.
Har-Zion delved into his pocket and produced a small, folded sheet of paper which he slipped into the gap between two masonry blocks.
'All the details are there. The boy's name, contact address. Just follow the instructions. It will be—'
There was a sound of approaching footsteps and a young soldier came up to the Wall, stopping a few metres to their right. Har-Zion flicked his finger at his companion to indicate that their conversation, such as it had been, was at an end. He leant forward and kissed the wall, turned and, without a backward glance, walked back across the esplanade towards his bodyguard Avi.
Five minutes later, when the young soldier had finished his prayers and moved away, the man crept a hand up the wall, pulled the folded sheet of paper from the crack and slipped it into his trouser pocket.
CAMBRIDGE
Layla rose at five a.m. and, leaving Topping asleep, quietly gathered her things, tiptoed from the bedroom and left the house.
She wasn't sure why she'd slept with him. He'd been good company – witty, charming, attentive – and the sex had been great, among the best she'd ever had. Despite that, at no point had she felt fully engaged in the experience, allowed herself simply to let go and disappear into the whirlwind of his love-making. Even as she had ridden on top of him, hips grinding into his, beads of passionate sweat jerking down her small, tight breasts, still a part of her, most of her, had stayed detached, locked away in her own thoughts, turning over what she'd heard earlier, what was happening back in the Middle East, as if her body was simply some inanimate vehicle that had been programmed on to autodrive while she, the pilot, sat back inside and focused on something completely separate.
She clicked the front door closed and stepped out onto the empty street, rows of neat Victorian houses running off to either side, the world around her grey and still, no longer dark but not yet light either, the dim no-man's land between night and dawn.
She had called Jean-Michel Dupont, Topping's contact in Toulouse, the previous evening, explaining that she was interested in Dieter Hoth and his excavations at Castelombres. They had agreed to meet at his antique shop at 1.30 p.m., and she was now booked on to BA's ten a.m. flight from Heathrow. Briefly the thought struck her that with so much time to kill she could walk out to Grantchester, have a look at the old house where she had gone to live after her father's death. Although both her grandparents had long since passed away, her mother, so far as she was aware, still lived there, with her second husband. A barrister. Or was it a banker? Layla couldn't be sure. She hadn't spoken to her since she had remarried six years ago, unable to forgive what she regarded as a grotesque betrayal of her father's memory.
Yes, she thought, it would be nice to see the old place again, with its moss-covered roof and garden full of plum and apple trees, about as far away from the dust and horror of Palestine as you could possibly get. She even started to cross the street, aiming for the public footpath that, if memory served her right, led out through the water meadows that lapped against the town's eastern fringes. After only a few metres, however, she stopped and, with a shake of the head as if to say 'What's the fucking point?', turned and set off in the opposite direction, towards the station, tears pricking her eyes at the thought of how utterly and irrevocably alone she was in the world.
EGYPT – BETWEEN LUXOR AND CAIRO
Khalifa sipped at the plastic beaker of tepid in-flight coffee, nibbled on the corner of his biscuit and glanced out of the aeroplane window at the miniature world beneath. It was a spectacular view – the Nile, the cultivation, the crumpled yellow sheet of the Western Desert – and under other circumstances he would have spent the entire journey staring down at it in wide-eyed wonder. It was, after all, only the second time in his life he had ever been in an aeroplane, and there was surely no better way of appreciating the natural miracle that was Egypt, the extraordinary juxtaposition of life and barrenness – Kemet and Deshret as the ancients had known it, the Black Land and the Red Land – than to view it from above in this way, stretched out from horizon to horizon like some vast unfolded map.
This morning, however, his mind was preoccupied with other things, and after gazing out of the window for only a moment he looked away again, draining the remainder of his coffee and refocusing on the business in hand.
He had wanted to travel down to Cairo the previous afternoon, immediately after his conversation with Ben-Roi. Unfortunately, force etiquette dictated that he couldn't just turn up on another station's patch without some sort of official notification, and by the time he had jumped through all the necessary bureaucratic hoops he had missed the last flight up to the capital. Which, as it turned out, had proved to be a blessing in disguise, because the delay had afforded him the time to do a bit of background checking into the mysterious Mr and Mrs Anton Gratz, with some extremely interesting results.
For a start, it turned out that Anton Gratz used to run a medium-scale fruit and vegetable import business. According to Ben-Roi, the 'Gad' or 'Getz' who had ordered the destruction of Hannah Schlegel's Jerusalem flat had also been involved in the fruit business. Khalifa had already assumed, of course, that 'Getz' and 'Gratz' were one and the same, but this new snippet of information seemed to provide absolute confirmation of the fact.
Equally if not more intriguing had been the similarities between the Gratzes' background and that of their friend Piet Jansen. Like Jansen, both were foreigners. Like Jansen, both had applied for and been granted Egyptian citizenship in October 1945. And like Jansen, neither seemed to have any discernible history prior to that date. Where they came from originally, when and why, whether Gratz was even their real name – all were questions to which Khalifa had been unable to find answers. The more he had dug the more he had got the feeling that, like Jansen, the Gratzes had something to hide. And the more he had dug the more he had got the feeling that all three were trying to hide the same thing.
By far the most significant piece of information he had come up with, however – a real revelation – concerned Mr and Mrs Gratz's original citizenship applications. The contemporary paperwork for these had, inevitably, been lost or destroyed. What remained, according to a contact of Khalifa's in the Interior Ministry, was a basic administrative record of the receipt and subsequent approval of said applications. And who was the security official responsible for that approval? None other than Farouk al-Hakim, the man who, four and a half decades later, would step in to stop Jansen being investigated for the Schlegel murder. Some further digging had revealed that al-Hakim had also dealt with Jansen's citizenship application, thereby establishing for the first time a clear link between the two men. More importantly, it implied that whatever Jansen and the Gratzes had been up to prior to October 1945, whatever it was they were all so desperate to keep hidden, al-Hakim had most likely known about it. It still didn't explain why he should have been so intent on protecting Jansen back in 1990, but it did reinforce Kh
alifa's conviction that the key to the Schlegel murder and subsequent cover-up, the key to everything that had been troubling him this last fortnight, lay in those crucial years prior to Jansen's arrival in Egypt.
And the only people who, it seemed, could now shed any light on those years were the ones he was currently on his way to see.
