Solomon's Jar

by Alex Archer

  “You disapprove?” Roux asked.

  “I’m thinking about the sunburn.” She shuddered.

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Will you remain covered?”

  “Of course. I don’t need that kind of sunburn.” She tipped down her own shades and studied him. “Are you being a dirty old man?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps I would disapprove.”

  They sat a moment in silence. Above them the sky was clear but for a few faint brush-strokes of cloud and a contrail making its way south across the sea. Gulls swarmed above the water like white scraps of paper borne on the breeze. The beach smelled of hot sand, salt water, seafood somewhat past its sell-by date, semirandom petroleum fractions. Roux smelled of sunscreen with aloe vera and coconut oil, old man’s sweat and faintly of alcohol.

  “What about Peru?” she asked.

  “The manuscript has been duly sold to an Asian consortium that will ensure its discoveries are brought to the world at reasonable price, not coopted by either greedy governments or the Western pharmaceutical cartel.” He sipped and smiled. “We realized a tidy sum on this transaction. Altogether a good thing; we certainly have expenses to defray.”

  “What about the people?” she asked impatiently.

  “No further harm came to them.” He shrugged. “For the most part drug barons cannot afford to act the way their counterparts do in the movies. They sacrifice too much of their support among the populace that way. They start to act like outlaws.”

  “What about those mercenaries? What happens to them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Annja was outraged.

  “Nothing. Their operation is very highly connected in the United States.”

  Annja shook her head in disgust.

  “You must learn to accept what is beyond your power to change, child,” Roux said. “You cannot save the world.”

  “I thought that was my mission.”

  “Perhaps. But you must learn to prioritize. Nothing is more certain than that you cannot save it all at once.”

  At that she turned a frowning face out to sea. A few sails stood up above the water like white fins. The supertanker had almost dissolved into the haze. The seagulls cried like lost souls.

  “Tell me,” Roux said at length.

  So she did. She held back nothing, from the first hint on the Usenet of the discovery of Solomon’s Jar; to her adventures in Amsterdam and subsequent escape from the Netherlands into Germany posing as the relief driver for a friendly, and well-bribed, Belgian lesbian trucker; to her visit to Ravenwood Manor.

  At the last Roux grunted. “Does the expression, ‘leading with your chin’ suggest anything to you?”

  She tipped down her shades and grinned at him. “Apparently a course of action.”

  He nodded and looked at the water. His expression was dark. “I have lost one champion already,” he said. “I don’t want to mislay another and spend the next half millennium looking for her replacement. Try to learn a modicum of caution, if you please.”

  “It’s on the to-do list. You know what puzzles me?” Annja asked, quickly changing the subject.

  “Of course not. I make no pretense at clairvoyance,” Roux said, perturbed.

  “It’s not important at all, but it keeps niggling at my attention. Who or what was ‘trees’?” Annja asked.

  “Terry.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t say ‘huh,’ young lady. It indicates muddy and undisciplined thinking,” Roux scolded.

  Fleetingly Annja wondered just how much her predecessor had personified lucid and disciplined thinking. Not much, from Annja’s reading of history. She chose to say nothing because it was a tender subject for Roux and she had no desire to hurt him with flippancy. Also, because he took gloomy satisfaction in lecturing her about her forerunner and her unpleasant demise, and it always made Annja acutely uncomfortable to hear the facts surrounding Joan of Arc’s destruction.

  “I beg your pardon,” Annja said precisely and formally.

  “That’s better. ‘Trees’ is short for ‘Theresia,’ which is cognate to your English ‘Theresa.’ Trees’s Schatwinkel means, Terry’s Treasure Shop,” Roux stated.

  “Oh. I didn’t know you spoke Dutch.”

  “You’d be surprised what oddments one picks up in a few short centuries, my dear.”

  He sipped his drink down until his straw slurped noisily in the ice at the bottom of his plastic cup. “So, has the true jar been found? What do you say?”

  Annja frowned. “I don’t know if we have sufficient evidence to say one way or another.”

  “Evidence? Bah!” Roux produced a theatrically Gallic sniff. “You moderns, with your veneration of rationality.”

  “Not everybody feels that way,” she said.

  “You refer to the Paleolithic dreams of your friends in Kent? Those who would cast away all modernity and return us to squinting at graffiti scrawled on the walls of caves by smoky firelight are as superstitious as those who cannot imagine life before text messaging! What you fail to realize is that rational thought is a tool. It suits some uses and not others. It is no less—and certainly no more.”

  She smiled at him. “I presume you had a point?”

  “Of course! Use your intuition. You knew at once that the jar you found on Highsmith’s mantel was false. What do you feel about the real Solomon’s Jar?”

  She expected to have to scrunch her face up and squint and concentrate. Instead she found herself answering, “It has been found,” without her own conscious volition.

  Roux nodded his white-bearded chin. “Indeed.”

  “You knew?”

  “Of course. Otherwise, why would the crew of the fishing trawler who found it be murdered? A random maniac would be too coincidental, non? And the fact that six men were butchered in a manner which inevitably must have proven as noisy as it was messy implies strongly the existence either of confederates or supernatural strength and speed.”

  She cocked a brow at him. “You think demons were involved?”

  “Perhaps. Not in the way you think.” He shook his head. “No. Those men were murdered, most likely, by other men possessed of ample evidence that the true jar of Solomon had been found.”

  “Now you’re using reason,” Annja said.

  “Of course. Did I not say it was a handy tool indeed—when appropriately used?”

  He stood and began to fold his parasol. “I must be on my way. There’s a world poker tour tournament commencing in Monte Carlo this evening, and I don’t want to be late to put down my entry fee. I believe I’ve spotted a tell in Phil Ivey on the television.”

  “I’ll never know how you square gambling with your service of the good.”

  “It’s not important that you do so,” he said. “Keep in mind that there are many paths to righteousness. And unrighteousness, as well. Your view of good will not always concur with that of others who may serve it as fully and diligently as you do yourself. That’s another reason not to go looking for wrongs to right or, more precisely, not to go looking for witches to burn. You may find you have destroyed another great warrior for the cause.”

  Annja winced. She knew he would not use that particular metaphor lightly. He of all people.

  “We will ourselves not always see eye to eye, my child,” he told her, his voice gentler now. He folded up the chaise. “We may yet find ourselves at cross purposes, or even open opposition. And yet still fighting with true hearts for the same great cause.”

  “So you admit to working for good? I thought you were indifferent. Or undecided, maybe.”

  He ignored her. “The path of good is not supposed to be easy. That is the allure of the path of evil. Few who wreak great harm do so with any intention of working evil in the world. Most often their intent is exactly the opposite. And most who do lesser evils do so because it is the simplest and most expedient thing to do.”

  “So what’s my next move?
” Annja asked.

  “Must I tell you everything?” Roux said dismissively.

  “Well, if you aren’t willing to forgo the pleasure of picking my performance apart after the fact—”

  He sighed. “Don’t imagine your powers shield you more than they do.”

  “I don’t, by and large,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have run away so fast.”

  “I worry.”

  She reached up and briefly squeezed his hand. The flesh was resilient, like any strong hand. Yet somehow she thought to feel in its dry grasp the strength of ages.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “As for whence to proceed from here,” he said, “you are the archaeologist. But I would be so bold as to suggest the source. I bid you good day.”

  He tipped his hat and walked off along the beach. His stride belied his years—the age he appeared, and vastly more his real age.

  Seventeen hours later she was on an El Al Boeing 737 touching down outside Tel Aviv.

  8

  There was a riot going on at the Temple Mount.

  Jerusalem was above all else a city of contradictions. Contrasts, between cultures, between faiths, between old and new, what had been celebrated or lamented into the ground centuries before were on studied display like trinkets in a tourist-trap window. The quaint biblical streets of the Old City, narrow and winding, were appropriately inconvenient. Mostly Annja found the place hot, dusty and tense. And that was before the riot.

  Walking past a pair of Israeli soldiers standing in front of a coffee shop, their bulky battledress casting grotesque late-afternoon shadows down one of the broader streets, Annja found herself wondering why the Holy City didn’t make more of an impression on her. Although biblical archaeology wasn’t her field, the fabled jar of King Solomon would have held at least academic interest for her, if not more.

  Perhaps it was the depressing present. From the evident hostility among rival Christian creeds and sects, to the division between Arab and Israeli, to the less known but virulent differences among the Israeli people themselves, the city that should have been a haven of spiritual peace was a hotbed of worldly strife.

  Annja had little plan at the moment. She was fairly sure the jar wasn’t where legend had it, the demons King Solomon had subsequently bound within it had built him a mighty temple. Yet Roux had suggested she seek the source for knowledge.

  The disturbance—maybe she had been premature in characterizing it as a riot, but she could feel something coming on, like a thunderhead rising from just beyond the horizon—was packed into the plaza where the Moroccan quarter had once stood, hard up against the retaining wall built by King Herod to aggrandize the temple, and also to keep the sides of Mount Moriah from slumping into what was even then a substantial urban concentration. Its gray stone face, knobbled like a collection of knees, age pitted and sprouting random tufts of brush like hair on moles, was turned all orange and gold by the setting sun. The crowd’s sullen mutter washed against it and broke back like storm surf. Cutting through the white noise came the stridency of an electronically amplified voice whose words Annja could not make out.

  She had passed through the forty-foot stone walls Süleyman the Magnificent had surrounded the Old City with in the sixteenth century at the New Gate and made her way through the Christian quarter. She wore what she considered standard adventure tourist drag: white cotton blouse with long sleeves rolled up, khaki cargo pants with many invaluable pockets, sunglasses and Red Wing low-top hiking shoes, unfashionable but likewise indestructible. The clothes were of good quality and were far from being glamorous or provocative. Annja knew conservative religious elements, of all three major faiths with spiritual interests vested in the country, had a record of hassling or even attacking female tourists whose dress they considered scandalous. Her ensemble was designed to make her unremarkable, as inconspicuous as her height and willowy build and looks allowed. She had a bulky pack that could serve as a daypack or masquerade as a big utilitarian purse slung over one shoulder. A digital camera rode around her neck on a strap.

  As she approached the Western Wall, she noticed that the tourists and idlers and even businesspeople suddenly began to thin from the streets like townsfolk in advance of a gunfight in a Western movie. She started seeing more Galil-toting soldiers, then riot police standing between the mob and the Wailing Wall itself. The riot squad wore dark blue helmets and bulky synthetic body armor that looked startlingly like the armor of the Roman legionnaires.

  Then she spotted that most infallible sign of trouble brewing, more certain than circling vultures. Vans from the international news services were parked around the edge of the big plaza, with satellite antennae sprouting from their roofs.

  She didn’t read Hebrew, so many of the signs being waved by the protesters, most of whom wore yarmulkes, meant nothing to her. But there were plenty of signs written in English to clarify the situation.

  This particular disturbance, she gathered, was being pitched by West Bank settlers resisting government attempts to remove them from their claims outside the country’s acknowledged boundaries. Some of the anti-government sentiments were astonishingly vitriolic, making her wonder what the signs she could not read might say. As she drew near she heard the cries of the protesters as they hurled insults at the riot cops and the soldiers who formed a loose cordon along the outside of the crowd.

  The demonstrators were also throwing physical items that looked like bits of stone pried from the ancient walls and streets of Jerusalem itself. That tightened her brow and mouth and narrowed her eyes. She had to remind herself that more important issues lay at stake here than the preservation of random antiquities. But it ran altogether contrary to her archaeologist’s instincts to think that anything could be more important.

  Annja moved around outside the cordon of glumly businesslike soldiers. She still wasn’t sure what she was doing here, what it was she expected to see. She felt an increasing sense of urgency, though. She was meant to be here; that much she knew.

  The electronically amplified individual voice emanated from a podium erected hard by the wall itself. A tall man in a business suit with a yarmulke perched on an expensive-looking dark blond coiffure and some kind of cincture around his neck in lieu of a tie, urged the protesters to peace, love and moderation, in what Annja belatedly realized was English. Distortion and the setting’s strangeness had conspired to prevent her from recognizing the calming words.

  She frowned. She wasn’t an avid follower of popular culture—at least, not more modern than five hundred years old or so. Still, she had the itching impression of having seen that rather handsome face, perhaps on the cover of a celebrity magazine on a table in a dentist’s waiting room. She felt as if she ought to know who he was.

  To her amazement the police and soldiers stoically endured the stones pelting off their helmets and riot shields as if they were raindrops. Occasionally a demonstrator would turn and try to loft a rock up over the top of the wall toward the black dome of al-Aqsa Mosque, peeking over the wall’s top. None of them had the range.

  Some protesters turned their ire on a passing businessman—an Arab she guessed from his appearance and hunched, harried posture, though he wore a shabby tan Western-style suit. For a moment he just pulled his head farther down between his shoulders and tried to weather the abuse. Then something stung; he straightened, turned, spit something.

  Instantly a pair of soldiers pounced on him and slammed him to the irregular gray flagstones with the metal butts of their rifles.

  The mob surged outward, flowing around the other soldiers like water between tree boles. Whether they were themselves trying to attack other, largely Arab, passersby or simply started like a flock of pigeons by a sudden eruption of the violence that charged the air like electricity before lightning, Annja couldn’t tell. The soldiers grabbed futilely at the protesters, or pushed them with their assault rifles. The mob largely ignored them, thrusting them rudely aside and flowing past, until a trooper man
aged to catch a handful of somebody’s shirt.

  Motivated, Annja guessed, by little more than the policeman’s predator pounce reflex, the riot phalanx charged. They hit the mob from behind like a mobile wall. She noticed they used Roman techniques, too: jabbing with their short-sword-sized batons, then clubbing in lieu of hacking with the gladii.

  Tentacles of the mob blew forth like debris from an explosion. One group blasted straight at her. It consisted mostly of unshaved young men who, in her flash impression, seemed more like middle-class kids dressing down than the proletarian types their work shirts and dungarees suggested. They spotted her and veered toward her, screeching in a combination of rage and triumph. Whether they took her for a possibly unsympathetic journalist or just felt like venting their feelings in some good old-fashioned foreigner bashing she couldn’t tell. It didn’t much matter. Annja turned and darted into the maze of narrow streets and alleys that veined the Old City.

  Their cries pursued her. With the pedestrian traffic and obstructions littering her path she couldn’t move very quickly. Indeed, because her pursuers had fewer compunctions about shoving people out of the way or simply running over them, they quickly gained on her.

  When an age-bent man with a black hat, frock coat and snowy beard and earlocks opened a half-sprung screen door directly in her path, Annja’s pursuers caught up. As she reared and stopped, without space even to dodge for fear of bowling the old man over, a hand roughly seized her right shoulder from behind.

  It was almost a relief to be able to act rather than flee. As the man who held her pulled she did not resist, but rather clapped her left hand over his and turned the way he urged her. At the same time she peeled the hand off and twisted it painfully down against itself, then turned it to lock the man’s elbow. Before he knew it her attacker was doubled over and immobilized.

  Three more men closed in on her from behind. The lead attacker, who was skinny with a bluish white complexion emphasized by his white shirt and the blue-black hair spilling out from beneath his yarmulke, had arms spread as if to catch her in a bear hug. Sensing her first foe was controlled for the moment, Annja fired a high front snap kick straight at the point of the young man’s chin. He was wide open and the kick came as quickly as a boxer’s jab. His teeth clacked together, his eyes rolled up and he toppled, stunned, against a crumbling wall.