by Unknown
Claire had assured him that since the Grail was nonferrous it would pass undetected through the airport magnetometers. He arranged for the hotel to mail the rosewood box to Sandy Marina, wrapped the Grail in his clothes and placed it in his backpack. Then he booked a flight to Tel Aviv from Milan leaving later that night.
Even with all their planning and forethought both of them were nervous wrecks throughout the check-in process in Milan. Had Hengst been found? Had the French police put out an alert for Claire?
It was only when the wheels went up and they were airborne that Arthur was able to relax a little, have a drink, and hold Claire’s moist hand.
34
They arrived in Tel Aviv at 3 A.M. and by the time they emerged from customs, rented a car, and drove to Jerusalem the sky was already lightening. In a calculated move, Arthur had hoped that having a reservation at a top hotel might deflect suspicion away from their baggage, so he booked them into the King David where he’d stayed before on Harp Industries business.
The Israeli customs agent hadn’t checked their bags. The Grail was back in Jerusalem.
“Welcome back to the King David, Mr. Malory,” the reception clerk said.
“It’s good to be in here again.”
When Neti Pick arrived later in the morning she proved to be a force of nature. She was short and stout, in her sixties with hair jet black and done in a youthful short cut. Her black dress was a good four inches above her bare knees. She wore bold gold jewelry hanging from her ears, neck and wrists. When she saw Claire across the hotel lobby she waved her arms and was soon delivering kisses to both cheeks.
“And you must be Arthur,” she said with a thick Israeli accent, reaching for his hand and holding it in both of hers. Then she whispered, “Where is it?”
Arthur pointed to his backpack.
“Good. Please don’t let it out of your sight. We should go somewhere where I can see it. Then we can talk a little.”
They took her up to their room. Through the windows the Old City and the Mount of Olives was bathed in morning sun, a full palette of browns and yellow. Claire threw the bedspread on to give Neti a place to sit.
When Arthur placed the black bowl in her hands her face lit up in surprise and joy.
“Sweetheart,” she said to Claire. “Get me some tissues to dry my eyes. I won’t take my hands off this beauty.”
“What do you think?” Arthur asked.
“What do I think? I think I died and went to heaven. It’s as warm as a baby’s bottom and look at the way it makes my fingers disappear. It’s a treasure you found, the biggest treasure. And it’s so simple. Just a small black polished bowl made of the most precious material on earth. Here, take it back and keep it safe, Arthur.”
He took it back.
“Okay, show me the data, Claire.”
Arthur placed the Grail into his backpack and the two women sat side by side on the bed poring over the Modane printouts. Much of their banter was over his head but it was clear that the professor was in agreement with Claire’s interpretation. The bowl contained some amount of dark matter. Their conversation veered off into additional experiments that needed to be done and Arthur went onto the balcony to search his mobile phone for any news about Hengst and Modane. Why was there nothing? Had he recovered from the head blow? Could he possibly still be on their trail? It was unsettling but at least he and Claire didn’t appear to be international fugitives.
Claire called him back inside. “Neti has some ideas.”
Arthur drew up the desk chair.
“Claire told you I have two passions,” Neti began, “physics and archaeology. The first I got from my father, who was a great physicist, the other I got from my husband, may he rest in peace, but not complete peace because to tell you the truth he wasn’t such a nice man all the time. He was an archaeologist at the Hebrew University who studied Jerusalem at the time of the Romans. So, it was natural that I picked up some of his subject matter and I got interested in applying some physics to what he did. For a Jew, I must say, he became pretty obsessed with the search for the tomb of Jesus and through him I got involved with the Shroud of Turin.”
“Claire told me,” Arthur said. “I thought the dating of the shroud some years back cast substantial doubt on its authenticity.”
“There is no question,” she answered, “that the radiocarbon dating done in 1988 under Vatican supervision came up with a date of thirteenth or fourteenth century but there’s been a lot of criticism about sampling errors, contamination problems and even the possibility that they dated a piece from medieval patchwork. But there are other features, like the sewing technique of the linen and limestone particles embedded in the weave, which are the same as from Roman tombs, that all suggest a first century date. But from my point of view there is no convincing artistic technique that could have simulated this image of a crucified man on a piece of linen. The techniques weren’t known in the first century, they weren’t there in the fourteenth century, and I don’t believe anyone could do it in the twenty-first century. That’s why I think it’s real.”
“And you think neutrinos have something to do with the image formation?” Arthur asked.
“This has always been my leading hypothesis. In fact, I don’t know what else could have made this image. You press a piece of linen against the corpse of a bloody man, you anoint him with oils, leave him in a hot place, a cold place, any place, and you’re not going to get this kind of a perfect, almost photographic negative of a human body complete with the stigmata of the crucifixion spikes, the dumbbell-shaped scourge marks from the flagrum—the Roman whip—the blood and serum stains from where his lung was punctured by the spear.”
“Neutrinos could produce an image on cloth?”
“Absolutely. A burst of neutrinos emanating from a body would oxidize the cellulose layer in linen and produce the precise negative image of the body upon the cloth. But neutrinos are very weakly interacting particles so nothing else would have been disturbed. Now here comes your Grail and here comes a possible explanation, don’t you think?”
Claire nodded. “The mass of dark matter with its neutralino–antineutralino collisions is a continual source of neutrino production. If Jesus drank from the bowl and incorporated enough of these fundamental particles into his tissues, the neutrino release after death could explain the images on his shroud.”
Neti agreed. “No need for dematerialization to explain the shroud.”
“But his tomb was empty,” Arthur said. “What about the resurrection?”
“You’re not Jewish, are you?”
“Church of England.”
Neti shrugged. “I don’t want to interfere with your religion. Maybe the accounts of the Gospels were made up to promote a new religion. Maybe someone stole his body. Maybe the resurrection was real. All I’m saying is that my theory on neutrinos and the shroud mesh very nicely with your Grail. So I agree with Claire. The possibility exists to complete the picture.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Arthur said.
“I’ll make the arrangements. We’ll use my instruments at the most credible tomb sites in the Old City. If we detect neutralinos and neutrinos I’ll go to Barcelona with you and the three of us we can give the most amazing press conference anyone has ever seen. Okay?”
“I’m tremendously grateful for your help, professor, I really am, but we’ve been followed the past week. Three people have been killed. This is dangerous.”
Neti stood up and pulled down the hem of her dress. “Claire told me about all this. Yes, it is, but I’m too old and too stubborn to be scared. I’m not surprised there are people who want the Grail. It’s a very valuable object which people have been looking for, maybe since the day Jesus became more than just a troublemaker who was executed. You two think about it. I’ve got to give a class. You’ll call me in a few hours, Claire?”
“Absolutely.”
Arthur was about to get the door for her when Neti suddenly said, “Tell me, Arth
ur, have you ever heard of a group called the Khem?”
35
Arthur was jolted by the question. “I have heard of the Khem.”
“What do you know?” Neti asked.
“Only that a distant relative of mine, Thomas Malory, the man who wrote Le Morte D’Arthur, chronicled being hounded by men he called Qem—Q-E-M—in the 1400s. He was on the trail of the Grail and they were on his.”
She sighed loudly and sat back down on the bed. “When I was a young woman and first introduced my husband-to-be to my father I remember listening to them talking and getting to know each other a little. My father wasn’t so interested in archaeology, which he regarded as a very soft science, but when he found out that Ari was studying things related to Jesus of Nazareth and the Roman occupation of Judaea the subject turned to the Holy Grail. It seems my father knew a physicist when he was a student himself, in the Soviet Union. He said this physicist—whose name I can’t possibly remember—had a great interest in the Grail. My father said he heard the man was a member of a secretive group who called themselves the Khem. They were all physicists and all Grail hunters and by the sound of my father’s description, this was a bad fellow and these Khem were bad apples.”
Arthur felt queasy. Jeremy Harp was a physicist too, as well as Claire’s ex, Simone. “Did he say what they wanted with the Grail?”
“They called it the Resurrection Stone. That’s all I know but this name for it suggested all sorts of possibilities for their motivation.”
Arthur said numbly, “Jesus, resurrection …” As soon as he said it, the irony struck him.
“So, listen, Arthur,” Neti continued. “If these Khem were around in the 1400s like you said and still strong in the 1950s like my father said, maybe they’re here right now, today. I want both of you to be very careful. Claire is my little princess. I want you to protect her.”
“I will.”
“After my class I’m going to make some calls. I know all the groups that control the so-called Jesus tombs very well and I’ll pull every string to get us after-hours access, hopefully starting tonight.”
“How many sites are there?”
“Only two serious ones, the ones in which the real academics, including my husband, Ari, had any confidence: the Garden Tomb and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I’ll get to work on obtaining permissions and preparing my portable instruments. You’ll do this?”
Arthur and Claire both nodded.
“Until then you should stay in the hotel to be safe.”
“Good advice, I’m sure,” Arthur said.
“And if we go to a tomb tonight, take the Grail with you. Don’t leave it in your room. Not even in the safe if it fits. It’s not so hard to break into a hotel room. I don’t trust anyone with something so valuable.”
“Won’t it interfere with your measurements?” Arthur asked.
“I love that he’s so smart,” Neti said, touching Claire’s arm. “I’ll bring a special box lined with lead to shield my instruments from it.”
#
The Garden Tomb was in East Jerusalem, just outside of the Old City walls and the Damascus Gate. Neti picked them up in the hotel in her car and, true to her word, in the backseat was a lead-lined box for the Grail. Arthur let Claire sit in front, stuffing his Grail-filled backpack into the box and latching it. It was 10 P.M., short-sleeves warm, and the streets were largely deserted. In a few minutes they arrived. Neti pulled into a parking space reserved for the owners of the tomb, a Protestant charitable trust based in the UK. Arthur retrieved Neti’s gear from the trunk and carried most of the heavy load. Claire took along the Grail box. Neti led the way with a flashlight and keys for the gate set into the walled compound.
Once inside, Arthur found the garden to be a tranquil oasis within the bustling city. There was a fragrance of trumpet lilies and a pleasant rustling of shade trees. In the darkness he couldn’t well distinguish the outcrop of quarry rock above the garden, notable for a formation that very much resembles a human skull. It was precisely this deep-socketed natural sculpture that led Charles Gordon, a British general visiting Jerusalem in 1883, to explore the site further: as stated in the Gospels, of Jesus and the crucifixion, “And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew, Golgotha” (John 19:17).
At the bottom of the quarry wall Gordon had found an ancient tomb chiseled into the limestone with a small entrance and groove cut into its base, which he thought surely was intended for the rolling stone that had covered Jesus’ tomb. As far as Gordon was concerned, everything fit the biblical picture of this being the true tomb of Jesus, for John also had written, “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid. There they laid Jesus” (19:41–42).
Gordon established the society that owns the tomb to the present day, and since his time, archaeologists and biblical historians have avidly studied the site and debated its authenticity.
They stood before the vertical chiseled wall of the tomb that Neti now illuminated. A tall doorway leading to the so-called weeping chamber apparently had been enlarged at some more recent time: the original doorway was only a third the size and more compatible with biblical descriptions of both John and Mary Magdalene stooping down to look inside. To the right of the doorway was a nephesh, or soul window, through which, according to Jewish tradition, the spirit of the deceased departed after the third day in the tomb.
Neti entered first and set up a battery lamp that harshly lit the weeping room. It was small but large enough for the women described in the bible to have prayed and lamented over the body of Jesus. Through a low portal and down a single stone stair were four diminutive burial chambers including the longest in the northeast corner, the one said to be where Jesus was laid out.
Arthur bent over to enter and took in the burial chamber’s stark simplicity: a hand-chiseled bench within a hand-chiseled room, a place to honor the dead, a place that might have served the needs of the most venerated soul in all of history. His reverie was interrupted by Neti’s announcement.
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t know if this was the place but that’s what we’re here to find out. I want to put one detector right there on the possible Jesus burial niche and another one in the weeping room. Help me unpack everything and make the connections to the laptop.”
“Where should I put the Grail?” Arthur asked.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s shielded. You can put it in the burial chamber.”
The instruments were electronic boxes with hard-wired detector wands that Neti placed on small tripod stands. As they worked to set up the instruments, Arthur asked how they worked and was treated to a long, dense discourse from the professor about germanium wafers, palladium electrodes, ion fields and the like. When he rolled his eyes behind her back Claire smiled weakly and went on with her business at the laptop keyboard. Finally, Neti declared they were ready and took command of the laptop, which had been set up in the weeping room on a small folding table with a folding chair.
“How long will this take?” Arthur asked.
“Why? You got someplace better to be?” Neti answered.
“It should depend on the quantity of lingering neutralinos and neutrinos,” Claire explained. “Maybe right away, maybe hours, if we find anything at all.”
Arthur was concerned about Claire. She seemed listless, dragging. She had reasons enough—the stress, sleep deprivation, the blow she’d taken, her father. He’d asked if she was worried about him and she told him she was. As soon as Barcelona was over he vowed to take her to Toulouse to attend to her family.
They’d brought along a few water bottles. Arthur had some and offered Claire a drink. She gulped at it thirstily and wiped her lips with her hand.
A half hour passed, then an hour. Arthur had been told they were looking for red or green dots to appear on a computer plot but nothing was happening. He stood behind Neti while Claire
crouched in the burial chamber.
After staying quiet for a long time, he finally asked Neti, “How strong is the evidence for this being the authentic tomb?”
“Well first of all, the site is clearly outside the walls of the Old City, which is where all the executions and burials would have been done in those days. The skull formation in the quarry makes this a good candidate to be the Golgotha in the bible and there’s a lot of evidence that this quarry was a Roman execution ground, close to the city gate and near the main northern road. This would have been a very good place for passing people to see the crucifixions and get a lesson from their Roman masters. Now for the tomb itself, it certainly qualifies as a tomb made for a rich Jew like Joseph of Arimathea because it’s got this very nice separate weeping room and the same kind of chiseling as many of the wealthy first-century Sanhedrin tombs in the Kidron and Hinnon valleys. On the other hand, some scholars think that some of the elements, like the multiple burial niches, make it more likely it’s much older than first century, which goes against the idea it was a new tomb as the Gospels state. But then look at the Jesus niche: it’s more finished than the other niches, which could mean that it was a new tomb when Jesus was buried here. And see how it’s been chiseled and enlarged in the area where the head would have been? That’s a sign the person who was put here was too tall for the original bench, and guess what? The length from head to toe is the same length as the image on the Turin Shroud. How about that?”
“Did your husband think this was the place?” Arthur asked.
“When I asked him things like that he’d always answer, ‘I’m only an archaeologist. Make me a time machine and I’ll get back to you.’”
The night droned on and the computer screen remained static. Arthur sat on the cool weeping room floor with his back against the rough wall. Claire stayed in the burial chamber seated next to the Jesus niche and the two kept eye contact through the portal, exchanging small gestures.
