The Eighth Veil

by Frederick Ramsay

  “It must be you,” he muttered, “but if so why hadn’t he taken it? Ah, unless you slipped from his fingers at the same moment Barak entered the bath on his rounds.”

  His view of the items on the table blurred and swam before him. They beckoned to him and seemed to say. “Look at me, no look at me. I am the answer to the question you have not asked.” He rubbed his eyes to bring them back into focus. He thought of the physician’s notion of veils and absently counted the items on the table. Seven? More than seven. His dancer, he thought irreverently, would be a bit more heavily clad than the princess. He shook his head to lose both the thought and the image it evoked. He needed to act, to do something.

  If he could reconstruct the crime, at least in his mind, if he could arrange all the items in the right order perhaps something would emerge, a hint, a peek at the way of things. There had to be a chronology—first this happened and then that. In his mind’s eye he pictured the bath and the girl. Torches barely lighting the space, steam rising from the water, and debris from the revelries scattered about. Coins in the water, carelessly discarded clothing, wine and food and those suggestive murals. What possessed that child to go there? Was she one of the revelers playing with the others but who stayed behind for some reason? Of the little he’d learned about the girl, it seemed unlikely she would be one of them, much less to have lingered. But she did go to the bath and once there was savagely despoiled and murdered. Why? Because someone persuaded her to. What sort of news or person could entice this young woman to leave the safety of her bed in the middle of the night and go to the king’s bath?

  Perhaps it was not so much a who, but a what? What lured to her death? He closed his eyes and tried to remember everything he could about the girl. What was he missing?

  A letter!

  Of course. She went because she believed there was a new letter. The night of her murder someone must have brought the promise of good news, a reversal of fortunes, perhaps another letter. It would not fail to bring her out.

  Chapter XXVII

  If one ignored the pendant, the thing that set the girl apart from the servants and others who shared her station were the letters. Except for the privileged few, most women could not read or write and those who could, did not do so with regularity or facility. Yet Barak said he’d seen her weep over one letter which he took to be the most recent. To read and to weep! It obviously contained bad news. As she had undoubtedly been receiving the letters in secret, a request to meet discreetly and late at night in just such an out of the way place as the bath, would not have seemed unusual to her. Even if it had, the thought of a new missive would quickly dispel any hesitation she might have felt. It had to have been the promise of news that lured her to her death. The beginning of the end, he thought, will be found somewhere in the letters. Then all he would need to do is determine who gave her the message that sent her to the bath and her death.

  Gamaliel scooped up the stack of letters and spread them across the table, moving the other items out of the way. He’d read them before with superficial success. Now, he would read them again, this time slowly. He, of all people in the country should be able to tease the truth from them. He’d spent his adult years studying Torah, inspecting documents, hundreds of them from around the empire. Some written in Greek, some in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and some in languages so old and arcane he could barely fathom their source much less their content. He’d been trained to discriminate between various versions of the same text. He could scan a scroll or sheet of papyrus, leaf through a bound volume and tell by the way the characters were formed, by the word usage and idioms it contained, sometimes even by the ink, the writing surface, or any of a dozen reference points, when and often by whom a particular piece had been crafted. He felt sure these letters, although not separated so much in time, still had meanings and information he could and would dig out.

  They were all in Greek. They were idiomatic but not in the vernacular Greek spoken in Jerusalem. These letters had been composed elsewhere by a different Greek speaker. The language was not literary, that is to say not Homeric, but neither was it street patois. Obviously, the writer had had the advantage of a formal education of some sort. Also, there were Latin words and expressions scattered throughout the text. Gamaliel could read Latin, though not with proficiency, and he would never admit that he did. In a world ruled by arrogant Latin speakers, he found it to his advantage to feign ignorance of their tongue. Let them come to his level and speak Greek like everyone else.

  All the observations regarding language and style applied strictly to the earlier letters. The letter he considered to have been the last—the one wept over—he felt sure had been composed by a different author. Where the older ones seemed wordy even erudite and included references to many topics, the last seemed terse, painfully blunt, and had a finality about it, as if to say there would be no more missives sent. But the syntax seemed as vague and the idioms as difficult to interpret as the earlier ones. He read.

  Dear one, the girl obviously. The one of whom you love…did it translate, the one you love or the one who loves you?…has gone to his relatives…visiting, travelling?…relatives, male…his brothers, fathers? He’s joined his fathers…he died. Someone close to the girl, someone she had been corresponding with probably, someone, whom you love, has died. Could it also read killed? Yes, possibly. Whether it meant killed or died depended on the placement in the sentence, the context, the case. Your relatives plural, male and alive…brothers, cousins? Your meaning the loved one’s…brothers? Her uncles? Yes, definitely uncles. Regrets and so on.

  Who in the empire had been assassinated recently or died suddenly and perhaps mysteriously at the hands of his brother or close male relatives? He sat back and regretted that he considered the intrigues of the powerful and ambitious of insufficient interest for him to follow. Did he dare ask the Prefect? Of all the people currently in the city, the one person who most likely could answer that question was Pontius Pilate. Not just yet, maybe later. The Prefect could be intimidating to say the least and he’d had more than enough contact with the man lately. He’d try the physician first. A man not quite as well informed as the Prefect, but more so than Gamaliel, and a far safer interview to conduct than one with Pilate.

  He slid the last letter aside and then read the others in order. They were not in code but it was patently apparent that the writer did not want anyone who might by chance come across the letters and read them to grasp the contents. They were filled with circumlocutions and vague references to places and events that the girl must know and share with the writer, but only someone equally familiar with the two of them, or who had also shared the experiences, would know what they referred to. Very clever.

  You will recall the pergola where I yoked you with the riddle…Did what? One yokes an ox or a team of oxen. A riddle? A mystery…something covert or hidden? He draped something mysterious…no, hidden, no, a thing which hid something else, around her neck. It had to be the pendant. The writer wanted her to remember the place where he, must be a man, placed the pendant around her neck. Why remember the place? It must have some significance, perhaps it symbolized something greater. The same reference that he’d read in the last letter followed, a mention of the relatives. The cousins, brothers, uncles, definitely masculine, so not women. The next bit read, Remember your mother’s mother. Odd way to refer to a grandmother, if that is what it meant. Or if it came from a pagan household it could refer to something altogether different, to Hera or Gaia, or any of a pantheon of goddesses. Gamaliel shuddered. Idolatry always made him anxious. He knew the Lord had no patience with idols; they were proscribed by the Commandments. And as he was the Rabban, the rabbis’ rabbi, he would have even less patience with him should he be caught spending too much time in their contemplation.

  Was the Greek usage consistent with a pagan writer? Possibly, but he thought not. The physician knew the Hebrew Scriptures but he was an exception…or was he? Another mystery for another day. This letter writ
er cited bits and pieces from the book of Judges. An interesting and puzzling book to cite.

  He poured over the letters finding they raised far more questions than they answered. He did arrive at one or two conclusions. They dealt with the girl’s identity. The queen had reported she’d been placed in her household by her first husband, the late Herod Philip. But he had since passed on to his reward, a dubious one, Gamaliel thought. He had admonished the queen to “keep an eye on her.” This girl, young woman, must have been the daughter of an important acquaintance. But what king will take in a friend’s daughter, place her with his queen, and not tell her what or who she was? A man to whom he owed a debt? Possible but…no…family. The most likely explanation would be that Cappo must somehow be connected to him by blood. She must have been one of the myriad multigenerational offspring of the late Herod. That knowledge would help, but not much. Offspring from his multiple marriages and liaisons plus his children’s similar behavior had resulted in an array of princes, princesses, kings, queens, and those who were neither one or the other but had ambitions in that direction.

  Gamaliel read on until his wonderful lamp began to sputter. He lit another and stretched out on a low couch to continue his reading.

  His servant found him the next morning asleep on the couch, the letters scattered across the floor where they had fallen from his hands when he had finally drifted off to sleep.

  Yom Shishi

  Chapter XXVIII

  The palace seemed unnaturally quiet when Gamaliel entered it at midmorning. Earlier he’d sent a messenger to the Prefect informing him that the evidence against Menahem had collapsed and the investigation had recently taken a new and politically dangerous turn. He didn’t know what he meant by that exactly, but he assumed the combination of the words politically and dangerous would get Pilate’s attention and hold him at bay for a few days. Barak met Gamaliel at the entrance to the room he now thought of as the Interview Room. Barak waggled his eyebrows and glanced toward the wall. Gamaliel nodded his understanding. It seemed he had a monitor again. Who could it be this time?

  “Is the steward here?”

  “He said he would attend you soon. There has been an incident in the cellars.”

  “An incident? What sort of incident would that be, Barak?”

  The steward bustled in and interrupted any answer Barak might have given.

  “Rabban, your pardon, but I fear there has been another death.”

  “Murder?”

  “No, yes, no…I can’t say. It’s suspicious. A man is dead.”

  ***

  The cellars of this palace—like those Herod had built elsewhere—on the shores of the Great Salt Sea at Masada, the Herodium to the south, and Machaerus across the Jordan—had been designed by him to hold stores for extended periods of time. He’d lived in a chronic state of agitation, fearing possible plots against him, attempts on his life, his kingdom, and his family. To secure his body and court, he constructed his palaces like forts and his forts like palaces and all with storage space for enough food and water to sustain him and his followers for prolonged periods of time, even a siege by his enemies if necessary. But in Jerusalem under Antipas, less than half the space in the warren-like arrangement of connecting cellars did in fact hold material of that sort. Still, the goods and their amounts were substantial. Some served the current residency and the rest were the supplies needed for an extended stay or another later stay should the king suddenly force an unscheduled return.

  All these goods were stacked close to the entry to the kitchens and servant’s work areas. Another cellar farther along had been designated as a place to store miscellaneous items and things no longer pleasing or useful to either the queen or her daughter. It was in this area that the crumpled body of a kitchen worker had been found with the back of his head crushed. Scattered next to him were the shards of a large clay pot along with the metal clasps, fasteners, and rivets it once held. The pot appeared to have fallen off the shelf above him which, Gamaliel noted, extended the width of the room. It contained rows of similar earthenware jars along its length with the one solitary gap where the shattered jar must have once been placed.

  “An accident do you suppose?” he asked.

  “It would seem so but…we may never know.”

  “No? Did this poor man reach up to secure this jar only to have it slip and fall on him? And who is this man? What reason had he for being in the basement in the first place?”

  “According to his master, he was sent for wine. It is kept in the large stone urns over against the opposite wall. He had no business in this area. His duties are simply to aid the cooks and cup bearers. His master said that he would go to the stores every morning and bring up whatever the cooks needed. He also had the duty to replenish the wine skins and urns from those great stone jars.”

  “If that is so, what was he doing over here in this storage area?”

  Chuzas held out his hands and shrugged. “I cannot say. Perhaps he thought to help himself to something among the queen’s things.”

  “A pot full of fasteners? I think that unlikely. Let us try something else, he was drawn over here because he saw, or thought he saw something suspicious or out of place. He accidently bumps into the shelf and the pot drops on him.”

  “Suspicious? Like what?”

  “I can’t say, Steward, but it might have been anything or nothing, another servant pilfering, rats, a shadow, who knows? And there is also the real possibility that the jar did not fall on his head by accident.”

  The steward’s face blanched and he began to sweat in spite of the mildewed chill afforded by the cellars. “If that is the case, you may have another murder to contend with, Rabban.” Chuzas’ eyes darted here and there, beginning panic, as if this new murder threatened to upset his household in ways the other didn’t.

  “It will be my responsibility only to the extent that it can be shown to be connected to the death of the girl, Chuzas.”

  “But surely, it must.”

  “I don’t see why it must, but I concede that it most likely does.

  “I see. Yes, well, what should we do?”

  “For the time being, leave him exactly where he is.” He turned to the old man, “Barak, run fetch the physician, Loukas, and bring him here. Tell him it is urgent and that he should come at once. You remember where he lives?”

  Barak nodded and hurried off. Chuzas found a rough measure of sacking and covered the body. He sent away the servants who had originally come in response to the cries of the person who’d discovered the body, and stayed to gawk—alternatively at the dead man, and at the famous Gamaliel.

  “What would have caused that jar to fall in such a way as to kill this man?”

  “Sir?”

  “Sorry, Chuzas, I am thinking out loud, but as you are here, tell me, if this is an accident, why would he have tried to steal something of so little value?”

  “He must not have known the contents and assumed the jar must have value. Why else would it be stored in the king’s cellars?”

  Gamaliel reached up to the shelf and attempted to dislodge another, similar jar. It took considerable strength to move it a finger’s breadth.

  “Even if he were trying to steal this jar, and had begun the process, he would have quickly learned that it would not be an easy task. Further, given the difficulty in moving these jars, I would expect that if it started to slip he would have easily stepped aside.”

  “So?”

  “So, I don’t know. We will await the arrival of the physician and hear what he has to say, but I am almost sure he will conclude this man’s death was not an accident. If that is the outcome, then we will indeed have to consider this another murder.”

  “But, can you establish a connection to the dead girl?”

  “Chuzas, I cannot even say it is a murder at this time, much less one connected to any other. Wait and see.”

  While he waited for Loukas to join them, Gamaliel paced the area. He didn’t know what
he thought he’d find but he searched anyway. That the area received a number of visitors each day seemed apparent and not just in the area where the food and consumables were kept. He saw traces, here and there, of visits to other parts of the cellar.

  The physician arrived, greeted Gamaliel, and bent over the body. He turned the man’s damaged head to one side and stood.

  “Congratulations, Rabban, you have another murder to reconcile for your master.”

  “How can you tell?’

  “The man’s head has been struck by a blunt instrument like a club or the heavy end of a sword, the hilt, maybe.”

  “But what about the earthen pot?”

  “Undoubtedly dragged off the shelf and allowed to shatter to create the illusion of an accident.”

  “I do not need this additional distraction.”

  “Yet here it is.”

  Chapter XXIX

  Too many things were piling up around him. He hoped the physician could help him if it meant only listening to him while he talked. The two men, polar opposites, as Loukas might have described them, sat on the bench in the atrium just outside the bath. “Sometimes,” Gamaliel said, “just hearing the words in your own mouth can prompt a new thought. What do you think? This is the spot where this uncomfortable journey began.”

  “I remember it so. So, Rabban, has your mysterious woman been dancing for you? Are there any new revelations you wish to tell me?”

  “I wish you would erase that shameless image from your mind and our conversations. It is unseemly.”

  Loukas smiled and cocked his head to one side. “I will, if you refrain from pontificating about your Law. Tell me what you have turned up, or would it be down? Sorry. Proceed.”