The Flaming Sword Read online

  Manny had laughed at his ideas. “Peace is not just the lack of violence,” he had said. Rappaport had not known how to respond to this; to him, the elimination of violence seemed contribution enough. The director’s lack of interest in the monoamine project had hampered progress, but now Rappaport saw his way clear. A tragic death—in Rappaport’s world, Manny would not have died this way—but the past was Manny’s business, the future Rappaport’s.

  There would be no more excursions to Jerusalem to wait alongside Manny Shor while he stared at King David’s Tomb. Many times the old man had coaxed him into coming up to the city with him, primarily because Manny was not a confident driver. He would chatter about Moshiach ben David and the world to come, about the royal priesthood and lineage, about the ludicrous prospect of digging for King David’s DNA. Long meetings with puzzled officials always ended with a pilgrimage to the Tomb, a marble monolith jammed into a little building on the south end of the city. It did no good to tell him again that it was not the Tomb of King David, that it was a Christian monument dating to the Crusades. He knew that as well as anyone; he went over and over the dilettantish archeological diagrams that pretended to show the location of the real tomb, needling the historic-preservation people about this or that possibility, checking to see who was digging where.

  Rappaport always held back at these meetings, pretending as hard as he could to be the chauffeur, staring deliberately at his fingers. The officials he met, wary but respectful of Manny’s reputation, bit their lips and tried to listen. “The Messiah of David will carry the DNA of David,” Manny would explain. “We need those bones. Nothing is more important than isolating this strain. If the genome were available, the Messiah’s lineage would be immediately recognizable. Don’t you understand the urgency…the importance…?” And then he would trail off in realization that the officials he spoke to wanted nothing more than to see the back of him. His campaign to get the Israeli government to crack open the marble sarcophagus in the Crusader church—in the desperate hope that everyone might be wrong—went nowhere. Still, he would beg Rappaport to take him there.

  The old man always stood covered before the Tomb and always prayed the same prayer, over and over—“May he come into his kingship in my lifetime and in my days and in the lifetime of the whole family of Israel swiftly and soon.”

  The drives back to Haifa were long and dispiriting. Uncharacteristically quiet, Manny would sit behind him poring over worn-out maps of Mount Zion or reading some new article that promised a breakthrough. But the remains of King David remained undisturbed—wherever they were.

  In the final few months, Rappaport had noticed a new energy in his colleague. Even though he rarely came to the lab, Manny was excited about the prospect of triangulating on the Aharonic genome—the genetic profile of the first great high priest of Israel, Aaron, brother of Moses. Of course, without a bone or two, there could never be certainty. But mathematical possibilities became probabilities as Manny studied and compared the profiles of thousands of Cohanic descendants. Rappaport cooperated politely, waiting for the opportunity that would inevitably come.

  And now the old fool was gone and he was at last Director of the Centre—even if temporarily. It would soon be permanent, he was sure. He stood up and looked around at the lab through his glass office walls; with the past taken care of, he would spend the afternoon planning the future. He hoped that, if Heaven existed, Manny had found his discussion group.

  A lanky young woman, one of the lab technicians, was crossing toward his office with an electronic notepad in hand. She was an intriguing case—a carrier of Tay-Sachs, she had joined the lab hoping to work on a therapy for it and turned out to be quite competent. He had come to rely on her, and in fact had just given her a highly confidential assignment.

  “What do you have for me, Sarah?”

  “We finished running the profiles the police wanted. Here are the results.”

  Rappaport glanced at the data. “What’s the story?”

  “We compared the sample we got from Rome with the Cohanic profile. It’s a very pure strain—95 percent match.”

  “Hm. But nothing on sample 3111.”

  “Sorry. As you know, we don’t keep printouts of the Cohanics—that one’s gone. Unless it’s in one of the old control studies. Still, there’s something else I thought you’d find interesting.” She scrolled quickly to a stop on the luminous blue screen of her handheld. “Here,” she pointed. “And here. Mutation at this point…this point…”

  “MAO-A1 defect—severe, too. Whoever our Roman is, you wouldn’t want to get on his wrong side. Thanks, Sarah.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Wait. Where do we keep the backup files on those old control studies?”

  Queen Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1000h

  Ari was glad to have his team around him again. The squat little detective he called Toad stood as usual in the corner, hands in pockets, while Miner—an engineer with a peninsular nose and a gift for detail—towered over piles of evidence laid out in plastic bags on the table. In Miner’s lab, they could get some work done. Ari had scattered photos and a diagram of the Sancta Sanctorum on the table.

  “See?” Ari gestured at the diagram and measured the air with his arms. “The Pope never gets closer than two meters from the altar. First, the chest shots—big arterial splash on the floor. Then a head shot, a smaller spray mark here. Then a long blood trail to the exit. And now we know the blood on the altar isn’t the Pope’s: it belongs to Chandos.”

  Miner was excited. “But Chandos falls where he shoots himself, too far away to get so much blood spray on the altar.”

  “But that’s the point,” Ari said. “He couldn’t have shot himself. There must have been a third person in that room. Either somebody shot him and moved him, which isn’t likely because there are no drag marks; or somebody carried his blood to the altar and scattered it there.”

  “What possible reason would anyone have to do that?” Miner asked.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for the last two days.” Ari boosted himself up on the table and sat to compose himself, trying to decide how to make sense to his team.

  “Why scatter blood on an altar? To make atonement. To pay for transgression. It’s all in Leviticus—the priest slaughters the sacrifice, collects the blood, and sprinkles it on the altar. It was done in the Temple of Solomon.”

  Miner interrupted, smirking. “So, your idea is this—the killer breaks through an impenetrable cordon of police, draws on the Monsignor and the Pope, shoots the Monsignor and collects his blood to perform some ancient ceremony, shoots the Pope as the only witness, and then escapes—again, through an impenetrable line of police who are rushing the place. Oh, and all within about five minutes.”

  To himself, Ari added, “And while carrying a big wooden icon in a fifty-kilo silver frame.” He looked silently at Miner and made a face, hesitating. “All right. I’m waiting to hear your explanation.”

  “Simple. Just what the police said. Chandos shoots the Pope and, while standing next to the altar, shoots himself, spraying blood across it. He staggers a few steps and topples where they find him.”

  “You don’t ‘stagger a few steps’ with that kind of injury: you drop where you are. Even the police admitted that. And there were no staggering footprints and no blood trail. Your theory doesn’t work.”

  “It’s more likely than yours…a mysterious third party in there carrying out some bizarre ceremony.”

  “Sha. Just let me finish. The killer sprinkles blood on the altar, which makes the whole thing a ritual murder. There’s more. The killer then removes the Monsignor’s red sash from his robe and wraps it around his head. Now, why would he do that?”

  “Chandos did it himself,” Miner shot back. “After firing at the Pope, he decided to hang himself with his sash. But the Pope escaped from the room. Chandos realized he
had no time, so he shot himself instead.”

  Ari considered this, examining the photos of the chapel that lay on the table and slowly shaking his head. Miner’s view was plausible, but wrong. The photos were not clear enough to show this, but Ari had seen the chapel for himself. The Monsignor’s blood on the altar was not like the wound sprays he had examined so many times before—it had been flung there.

  “All right,” Miner said. “Tell me why the ‘killer’ would wrap the Monsignor’s sash around his head.”

  “It’s another ritual. I checked this with my father this morning. The ancient priesthood would choose a goat to carry away the sins of Israel—they called it the scapegoat—and they tied a red cord around its horns to symbolize the blood guilt of the people.”

  “Therefore,” Miner picked up, “our ritual murderer not only killed the Pope but also transferred his own guilt to a scapegoat and sacrificed him, too?”

  “Not quite. There’s tension in the Catholic Church over this Pope. According to some, he was a heretic. A betrayer of the faith. He changed a lot of things, like allowing women to be priests and so forth, and a good many people have made a row over it. Maybe somebody thought he needed to be stopped. Chandos was the Pope’s man, and maybe that same person thought Chandos would make a good scapegoat—you know, in the ordinary sense. To make it look like Chandos did the deed.”

  “So…a religious nutter is behind everything.”

  Ari jumped from the table. “How many times have we dealt with this sort of thing? We live in the center of it all. You know the Jerusalem Syndrome…a perfectly ordinary tourist cracks, gets up on the Old City wall and declares he’s the Messiah. A nun sits in the Via Dolorosa and gouges her hands and feet until she bleeds like Jesus. A crazy businessman from Jakarta sets himself on fire to protest the infidels in Palestine. We’re surrounded by it. We even have a special hospital for religious cranks.”

  “And these things add up to what?” Miner was a little impatient. “How does any of this help explain the murder of Emanuel Shor and the theft of the whatsit?”

  “Two things. Both victims wore gold rings with the same inscription.”

  “Right. ‘Until he comes who has the right to rule.’ ”

  “Suppose there was some cultic connection between them. Everything I saw in France points to it.”

  “An Orthodox Jewish scientist and a Catholic priest? That’s some cult,” Miner snickered.

  “That’s the second thing. A missing DNA sample belonging to someone named Chandos—the only missing sample from a locker our victim probably entered minutes before the murder. And it happens to bear the name of our Catholic priest.”

  Miner looked chastened. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe it does. When I was in France I saw a sculpture, a statue of Saint Peter, the first Pope. He was dressed in the robes, not of a Pope, but of the cohen gadol, the High Priest of Israel. The special breastplate with the twelve stones, the turban. Look at this.” Ari flicked at his GeM and up on the wall came the image of the high priest from the Tanakh. Then a photo of the statue of St. Peter on the North Porch of Chartres cathedral.

  “The same costume.”

  Miner shook his head. “What are you getting at?”

  “I think I understand.” Toad spoke for the first time, and Ari looked at him hopefully. “Catholics see the Pope as the successor to the high priest of Israel. The statue shows that. But according to Torah, the high priest must be a cohen, a direct descendant of Aharon ben-Amram. If Chandos believes he is himself such a person, he considers Zacharias illegitimate.”

  “Thus the DNA sample in the Cohanic collection,” Miner concluded. “Sara Alman is typing the Monsignor’s DNA at Technion right now. I wonder what she’s found out.” He made a call on his GeM and stepped out of the room.

  Ari and Toad looked at each other. “I didn’t know he was still in touch with her,” Ari said. “She’s at Technion?”

  “She’s working on the Tay-Sachs problem.”

  “I guess there’s always hope.”

  Toad smiled without humor, and Ari left the subject.

  “So…you’ve been quiet.”

  Toad gazed at nothing for a few moments, and then asked, “Why would a Catholic priest want to know if he’s a cohen? What difference would it make to him?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that somebody carried out a Jewish ritual in that chapel—which, by the way, is called the Holy of Holies. Blood was strewn on the altar. The scapegoat was marked.”

  “It could be. It is intriguing.” Toad’s bland face hid the workings inside. He was neither surprised nor disappointed that the answer was not simple. In his experience, crime involved the most complicated of motives. No crime was simple.

  “Think about whoever did this. Everyone is guilty but you. You’re the real victim. The world is a standing violation of everything you cherish. You’re a soldier.”

  Toad hesitated. Ari was surprised to hear Toad expound like this, but any entrance into his mind was worth taking. He leaned forward to listen.

  “Think about how you carried out the shootings: all of them commando-style. To you, these were not murders—they were acts of war.” He paused. “What we have to figure out is, what is the nature of the war?”

  Miner came back in the room. “They’ve just got the results on the Monsignor. Hold on—you won’t believe it. The profile of Peter Chandos shows 95 percent on the Cohanic scale.”

  “The Monsignor was a Jew?” Ari cried.

  “Not only a Jew, but what a Jew. An almost pure match to the cohen gadol haplotype, whatever that is.”

  “A haplotype is like a fingerprint,” said Toad. “The man who died in that chapel was one of the priesthood of Israel…”

  They looked at each other, wondering.

  “So?” Miner asked, “What difference does it make? There are tens of thousands of Cohanic men in the world. Why should it matter that much to him? Could it have been some kind of…hobby?”

  “Shor removed the sample without going through procedures. And on a high holy day.” Toad pointed out. “Why would he go to all that trouble for a trifle? Why the secrecy?”

  “He’s protecting somebody. A client.”

  “A very important client. So important that Shor is willing to do aven and break the law.”

  Miner spoke up. “Maybe Shor knew Chandos. Maybe he was doing him a favor by profiling his DNA for him against the Cohanic type, then saw the news and decided he wanted nothing further to do with him. So, he grabbed the sample and erased all references. Simple.”

  “And then casually went out to be murdered?” Ari asked sarcastically.

  “Why should Shor’s murder have anything to do with Chandos? It happened elsewhere. Different building, different crime. We should be looking at the robbery instead of this religious mumbo-jumbo. Isn’t 99 percent of police work about following the money?”

  All three were quiet for a moment. A draft of air from the building’s useless cooling system ruffled the piles of evidence on the table. The laboratory clock hummed overhead.

  Ari wondered for a moment if chasing these ancient ghosts could end up as a fatal detour. Maybe he and Toad were overcomplicating things. Maybe the nature of this war was totally clear, and the oblique connections they had made were simply fog. Maybe it was the same old story—not a new one after all.

  “Well, if Miner’s right, we’ve been going down a cul-de-sac. For argument’s sake, let’s leave off Chandos for a minute.”

  “Wait.” All at once Miner was looking puzzled at the GeMscreen in his hand. “There’s another message from Sara. It looks like Chandos also had MAO-A mutation.” He spelled it out carefully and looked up at Ari, who shrugged.

  “Let me see that,” Toad asked for the GeM and examined it carefully. “MAO-A mutation pre-disposes a person to aggression and v
iolence. The head of the institute told me that. It’s their main research project right now.”

  “You’re saying that killing might have come naturally to Chandos?” Ari was surprised. “I thought the man was a saint.”

  “And there is still the eyelash. And the inscription on the rings,” Toad reminded them.

  Miner sighed and took back the GeM. “I guess we won’t be leaving off Chandos.”

  Magisterial Library of the Order of Malta, Via Condotti, Rome, 1000h

  The sealed letter from Jean-Baptiste Mortimer was more than Maryse needed. The Director knew what was wanted before she asked for it and had prepared a small, elegant study for her use. A man known to her by reputation as a retired historian—and an eminent one—he closed the door silently behind him, seated her at the table, and opened a cabinet in the wall with an old-fashioned iron key. From this cabinet he drew a book, one of the most ornate she had ever seen, and carefully laid it on the table in front of her. The leather cover featured scrollwork illuminated with four figures—a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a winged angel.

  The administrator smiled tensely and locked the door as he left. Maryse took out her magnifying glass and went directly to work. The book was old and broken-backed. She learned it had never been digitized and existed only in this form. Most of the writing had faded long ago. The further back in time, the more fluid it was, until it became nearly unreadable, but there were some fresher entries dating from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth.