by Gregg Loomis
“Are you saying the relics could be anybody’s?”
A shake of the head as Francis leaned forward over the desk again, coffee forgotten. “Not at all. There was someone else of note buried in Alexandria over two centuries before Saint Mark ever set foot in Egypt.”
Lang stared at his friend. “Alexander the Great?”
“Indeed. His mummified body was hijacked on its way to Macedonia, taken to Memphis, then to Alexandria. Possession of the remains legitimized the Ptolemy dynasty’s rule of Egypt until the Romans came along.”
“But how…?”
“Alexander was viewed as a god by the Egyptians, the son of Ammon. For that matter, the Greeks also deified him as a son of Zeus, and much later, he even appeared in chapter eighteen of the Koran as Zulqarnain, the two-horned lord.”
“Two horned?”
“He was depicted on coins and some statues sprouting a pair of ram’s horns.”
Lang put down his mug half-empty. “That still doesn’t explain how he got into Saint Mark’s tomb.”
“He didn’t. The Venetian grave robbers looted the wrong tomb.”
Lang started to protest when Francis waved a hand, signaling for quiet. “Both Alexander and Saint Mark were buried in the same section of the city, the palace district, which was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 365 AD. There’s no firsthand eyewitness account of Alexander’s mausoleum after that; plus, in 391 the emperor Theodosius banned paganism. The edict would have provided a perfect excuse to loot whatever was left of the building.”
“Like the golden sarcophagus?”
“One of the subsequent Ptolemys had already sold it to pay his army.”
Lang held up both hands. “OK, OK. Let’s cut to the chase. What makes you think these Venetians pinched Alexander instead of Saint Mark?”
Francis spun his swivel chair around to face the bookcase behind the desk. Studying the shelves for a moment, he pulled out an oversize paperback and held it up. “Andrew Chugg’s The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great. ” He thumbed through the pages. “Here. In describing an account of the theft of the saint’s remains from Alexandria, the smell of embalming spices from the basket they used was overpowering. That was why they topped it off with pork. No way the Muslim Turk customs officials were going to touch pork.
“Embalming spices! The early Christians didn’t embalm, but the Egyptians did in the mummification process. And Alexander was mummified, remember?”
“So were hundreds if not thousands of Egyptians.”
“No doubt. But the area around the Pepper Gate wasn’t a series of tombs, it was where a number of royal buildings were.”
Lang smiled. “An interesting theory, but DNA testing could easily tell a Jew from a Greek, and carbon dating might establish when the body died.”
“The church has already denied permission for such tests to be run.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
Francis put the book on his desk. “Why the interest?”
“I figure the more I know about what was really stolen from Saint Mark’s in Venice, the better chance I have of knowing who tried to kill Gurt and me. And who sent the man who broke into our house.”
“Someone broke into your home? Anything stolen?”
“The, er, security system worked beautifully.”
Francis leaned back, his chair protesting. “And you think this break-in had something to do with what happened in Venice?”
Lang saw no reason to mention the use of the listening device by the unknowns the night the priest had last visited. “It had occurred to me, yes.”
Francis tsk-tsked, slowly shaking his head. “And I thought when Manfred came along, you and Gurt were going to settle down, live like normal people.”
Lang took a final sip of coffee, noting it had gone both cold and bitter. “Trying to kill us in Venice and burglarizing my house was not my idea. Thanks for the coffee and the lecture. Interesting that you think it was Alexander’s remains that were taken from the church.”
Francis shook his head. “I didn’t say that.” He held out the book. “I said this guy Chugg postulates that Alexander’s remains were taken from Alexandria. It’s entirely possible the tomb robbers you encountered in Venice read the same book and accepted his theory. Stealing Alexander’s remains makes a lot more sense that Saint Mark’s.”
“And that would be why?”
“Ancient legend has it that whoever possesses the body of Alexander will never be defeated in battle, again according to our friend Chugg.”
“So now we not only have grave robbers, we have superstitious grave robbers.”
Francis placed the book back on its slot on the shelf. “That should narrow the field as to suspects somewhat.”
Ansley Park
Later that afternoon
A winter twilight was waiting on the eastern horizon by the time Lang accelerated the Porsche onto Ansley Park’s meandering streets. Streetlights were stuttering on, their bluish fluorescence painting trees, shrubbery and buildings alike a ghostly hue. There were few people to be seen on the sidewalks and the winding byways. Early evening provided the temptation to unleash a few of the horses under the car’s rear deck lid and enjoy handling capabilities daytime traffic curtailed.
With that possibility in mind, he had taken the long way around, entering not at Fifteenth Street at the park’s southern edge but Beverly Road on the north. Only in second gear, he was enjoying the throaty burble as the tachometer whisked past 5000 RPM so much he almost missed the parked car.
Lang’s house on Lafayette Drive faced one of Ansley Park’s several small parks and green spaces, a strip of sculpted trees and small waterways known as Iris Garden, a venue managed by residents rather than the city in much the same way New York residents at one time maintained private parks, of which Gramercy is the last. Unlike New York, though, Iris Garden is not fenced in. The view of its ancient oaks, babbling water and seasonal shrubbery were a primary reason he and Gurt had selected their home.
Lang had planned to round the park, passing his house on the far side across the green space, and take a left-hand sweeper at the park’s western edge, which would bring him to his driveway. Because of the narrowness of the street along the park’s northern edge, parking at the curb was for bidden, a prohibition observed by anyone not wanting to risk finding their car a victim of an anonymous collision.
But there was a car parked there, perhaps fifty yards right across the park from his house.
Lang continued past, turning right rather than left at the street’s dead end into Peachtree Circle, a wide boulevard where street parking was allowed. Pulling the Porsche over, Lang cut the engine, locked it and began to backtrack. He was careful to keep in the shadows, where the fingers of light from the street lamps did not reach.
Rounding the corner, he could see the automobile in question clearly. The lighted tip of a cigarette told him this wasn’t some careless soul who had left his vehicle in a precarious position while he ran a short errand to one of the abutting houses. Whoever was in that car was there for a more sinister purpose.
Keeping in darkness as much as possible, Lang approached until he was no more than six feet from the car’s rear bumper. Against the streetlights’ glow, he could clearly see a single person aiming some sort of device across the park. Lang didn’t have to guess. The listener was back, this time in a position not so easily observed from the house.
A dilemma: Lang could sneak away unobserved, warn Gurt the house was under audio surveillance and wait for an opportunity to find out who this snooper was. Or he could take direct action, alerting the person or persons they had been detected, and perhaps identify them.
Stooping, Lang duckwalked to the rear of the car to keep below the line of sight of the rearview mirrors. By now, he was beside the driver’s door.
His knees were already protesting his cramped posture and he was about to lose feeling in his lower legs. Nevertheless, he made himself be still. How
long did it take to smoke a single cigarette, anyway?
He was rewarded when the window scrolled down. A hand with the cigarette in it appeared above his head and flipped the burning tobacco away in an arc of sparks. Like a spring suddenly uncoiling, Lang stood, grabbing the arm and twisting so the man inside was forced against the dashboard. With his free hand, Lang reached inside the car, unlocked the door and dragged the man outside, forcing him facedown on the sidewalk. He struggled and Lang wrenched the arm upward.
“Be still or it comes right out of the socket,” he snarled.
Still pushing the arm upward, Lang put a knee between the shoulders as he used his free hand to pat the man down. It took only seconds to relieve the prone man of an automatic in a shoulder holster and a wallet in a hip pocket. Lang stuffed the weapon into his belt under his suit jacket and the wallet into a pocket before dragging the man to his feet and shoving him against the car.
He ratcheted the arm up a little farther. “OK, who the hell are you and who sent you?”
The only answer was a groan of pain.
“You’ll answer me or I’ll tear it loose and beat you over the head with it.”
Lang and his opponent were suddenly bathed in light. “Hold it right there!”
Lang looked up into the headlights of a police cruiser.
Swell.
Possibly, some neighbor had witnessed what was going on, and the 911 system had experienced another of its occasional successes. More likely, it was one of the rent-a-cops Ansley Park paid to beef up the virtually nonexistent regular patrols of the neighborhood.
“Back, stand back,” the voice from the car commanded. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”
By this time, porch lights were flickering on up and down the street.
Lang slowly let go of the man’s arm and stepped back, his hands held above his head. The man beneath him struggled up, took one look at the police car and bolted.
“Stop!” the cop yelled with no effect whatsoever.
It took only a nanosecond for the officer to realize he would have to abandon one potential arrestee for another in full flight. The old bird-in-the-hand theory. A bird that required no exertion to reduce to possession.
Lang pointed at the running man. “He tried to mug me. Stop him!”
The portly officer took only a glance as the fleeing man rounded a corner, before turning his attention to Lang. “You got ID?”
Lang produced his wallet, removed his driver’s license and handed it over for inspection under the beam of a flashlight.
The officer looked up. “You live around here, huh?”
“I can vouch for him, officer.”
Both Lang and the cop turned to see an elderly man in an old-fashioned smoking jacket and carpet slippers. Lang recognized him from one of the few neighborhood-association functions he had attended. He couldn’t put a name to the face, but for once he was going to benefit from the mind-your-neighbor’s-business culture of Ansley Park.
“And who’re you?” the officer demanded.
“Frank Hopkins,” the man puffed, clearly chagrined the policeman didn’t recognize him. “President of the Ansley Park Civic Association.”
The cop nodded. “Oh, yeah, Mr. Hopkins, I recall you now. I spoke about crime prevention at the meeting at your house a year or so ago.” He turned to Lang, returning the driver’s license. “You say the guy was trying to mug you?”
“That’s right,” Lang improvised, hoping Hopkins hadn’t seen all of what had happened. “He jumped out of that car right there and grabbed me. He was going for my wallet.”
“Looked to me like he wasn’t very successful,” the cop observed, “but I’ll still need to make a written report.”
Lang gave a brief if fictional account of what had happened, stopping several times as the policeman filled in a number of blanks and added a written narrative. His manner suggested filling out reports of robberies, both attempted and otherwise, was nothing new. The report, Lang suspected, would be duly filed away and intentionally forgotten lest it be counted in the city’s carefully edited crime statistics, numbers that uniformly demonstrated Atlanta was a safe city with an ever-decreasing crime rate, which was cold comfort to crime’s victims.
“Your association dues at work,” Hopkins observed proudly. “If this officer hadn’t come along…”
It was as though he was personally taking credit for Lang’s perceived rescue.
The policeman put his clipboard with the report on it back in his car and walked around the one deserted at the curb, painting it with his flashlight. “Rented.”
For the first time, Lang noted the Hertz sticker just above the tag. “The name of the renter should be on the papers. Try the glove box.”
The cop opened the passenger door, reached inside and produced what Lang recognized as a parabolic listening device and a set of earphones. “What’s this?”
Specifically, Lang thought, it is a DetectEar, available for just under five hundred bucks plus shipping and handling from any spyware order-by-mail warehouse. With a collapsible twenty-inch dish and only three triple-A batteries, it can pick up voices three hundred yards away. A glance told Lang it had obviously been modified in some manner to pick up the vibrations of conversations inside, the modification that had caused the humming sound on the phone.
That there was a market for such things was not a favorable comment on contemporary American society.
He said nothing.
“Looks like some kind of spy-movie stuff” came from a group of curious residents who had gathered.
“Someone was snooping!” Hopkins’s tone indicated national security might rest in the privacy of Ansley residences.
Shrugging, the policeman put it in the cruiser and pulled a sheet of paper from the glove box, holding it up to the light. “Car was rented a week ago by a James Wang of Doraville.”
Doraville was an Atlanta suburb popular with Vietnam immigrants, Koreans and Chinese, so popular that the local city council had required all business signs to be in English in addition to their proprietors’ native alphabets so fire and police could find them in an emergency.
“That should make it easy to check out,” Hopkins volunteered. “How stupid can you get?”
If Lang was going to bet, he’d put his money on the fact Mr. James Wang of Doraville was in for a very unpleasant surprise. Either his identification or rental car or both had been stolen. Again, he said nothing.
Twenty minutes later, Lang garaged the Porsche and walked into the kitchen, where Gurt was bent over, opening an oven that emitted a delicious aroma of freshly baked bread. Manfred was seated at the kitchen table, moving a pair of toy trucks around with appropriate sound effects. Grumps, ever the optimist, was attentively watching Gurt in hopes of a stray scrap or dropped morsel. He gave Lang the briefest of glances before returning his attention to the stove.
“Whatever happened to the tail-wagging welcome?” Lang asked rhetorically before giving Gurt’s rear an affectionate pat, much to Manfred’s amusement.
“Vati schlug Mommy’s ass,” he chortled.
“It appears our son is learning more in school than we might wish,” Lang observed, lifting the little boy by the arms and swinging him in a circle.
Gurt straightened up, a pan in her hands, and gave Lang an appraising look. “You have been to the boxing ring instead of the office?”
Following her gaze, Lang noticed for the first time that one of the seams of his jacket was ripped and his knee gaped from a hole in his trousers.
“I met someone on the way home,” he said pointedly, setting Manfred down. “We can talk about it later.”
Gurt set the pan on the table. No doubt about it, it was home-baked bread. She gently slapped Lang’s hand as he reached to break off a piece. “And you can let it cool. Your friend Miles called. He said he’d call back at ten o’clock our time.”
Lang reached to his belt and removed the weapon he had taken from the listener, laying it
on the kitchen counter. He was not surprised to see that it was another knock-off Tokarev.
Gurt’s eyebrows arched. “Perhaps the person you met was Chinese?”
“Too dark to tell, but that’d be my guess. Oh yeah, I got this, too.”
He dropped the wallet beside the pistol. By this time Manfred’s attention had returned to the trucks.
Gurt picked it up, flipping it open. “James Wang? He was the person you met?”
Lang took it from her hand and started pulling out credit cards. “I doubt it, but I intend to find out. What’s for dinner, er, Abendessen, ” he said, remembering to speak German in front of Manfred. Except when the subject matter was one he preferred his son not understand.
“Schweinefleisch mit Apfel. ”
Pork with apples.
With Manfred now in prekindergarten, Gurt spent her new leisure time preparing native German dishes contributing to both Lang’s delight and his potentially expanding waistline. He put in extra time at the driving club’s gym to remove the extra five pounds. Observing her domesticity in the kitchen amused him: the world’s only gourmet cook who had repeatedly won the Agency’s marksmanship trophy.
She rapped his knuckles with a spoon as he attempted to lift the lid of one of several pots on the stovetop. “It will be ready by the time you have a drink and watch the news,” she said in German, “unless you continue to get in the way.”
Evicted from the kitchen, Lang wandered into the library/den and opened the doors of a walnut buffet de corps to reveal a sound system and TV screen. Punching the remote, he moved to the bar and poured a liberal dose of scotch into a glass as the newscaster interviewed an official with the water department. In the third year of a drought, the city had imposed strict limits on watering lawns, washing cars or filling swimming pools. The decline in water usage had, predictably, resulted in lower water bills. The water department’s solution to declining revenue was to raise rates.
Government’s principal function: extorting money from the governed.
Lang was tempted to add more scotch.
Or turn off the news.
22:01
Manfred long asleep, Lang and Gurt were propped up in bed themselves, engrossed in separate books.
