The City of Lost Secrets: A Mara Beltane Mystery (15 page)
I hadn’t kept the story from him on purpose. I hadn’t intended to not tell him. It just got pushed into my subconscious somehow, along with all my memories of Thomas, and my attraction to Uri, and my sudden disdain for a beautiful Israeli woman I hardly knew.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” Uri said, concern in his eyes. “Are you all right?”
“I’m…I’m fine,” I said, distracted by the warmth of Uri’s touch. I was still staring at our hands, wrapped together in my lap, when he pulled his hand loose and placed it in his own lap.
“So who is he?” I asked, my head still lowered to hide my blushed cheeks. “The man that followed me?”
“Benjamin Schwarz, the head of the Jerusalem district of the Israel Police.”
I recognized the name. Benjamin Schwarz was the man quoted in the Talpiot tomb articles from the Jerusalem Post that I’d read at the Bloomfield Library. He was quoted in the articles as saying that he believed Uri and Lev had no help breaking into the tomb. They had acted alone, he’d said rather emphatically. Open and shut case.
“And he’s Ziva’s husband,” Uri added.
My head shot up. “Husband?” I shouted, and the word echoed throughout the lecture hall. “They’re married?” I said, lowering my voice. “But how…” I tried to do the math in my head, figure out how much time had past since Ziva and Uri had broken up. Not long, it seemed. A year? And Ziva had already re-married?
“Benjamin arrested me and Lev the night we broke into the Talpiot tomb,” Uri said, ignoring my inquiry. “And I believe he’s responsible for the crank calls you and I received.”
“Whoa, wait,” I said, thrown by the accusation. “How can you be sure of that? The person on the other end didn’t say anything to either of us.”
“Ziva,” was all Uri said. He seemed so sure.
“Are you saying that Ziva told you her husband was spying on the both of us?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Why on Earth would she do that?”
“She was trying to warn me about what might happen.”
“How did she warn you, exactly? By just coming out and telling you that we’d be arrested?”
“Well, yes,” Uri said, as if the answer to my question seemed so simple and obvious. “But there’s more to the story…”
“I thought you said you didn’t talk to Ziva very often?” I asked, not wholly concerned with the rest of the story, only the part that involved Uri and Ziva sharing confidences.
“We are friends, Mara,” Uri said. “She tried to warn me about impending danger.”
I tamped my foot down, harder than I’d wanted to, and it landed with a loud crack on the linoleum floor. “How can you remain friends after what she did to you, Uri?” I said. “She left you!”
Uri shrank back, alarmed by my sudden outburst. “Mara, don’t be mad at Ziva. If you must be angry with someone, let it be me. I got you into this, not her.” He leaned forward and held his index finger up as if making a point. “But remember that I warned you. I never said this would be easy. Do you recall me telling you that once we started there was no turning back?”
My shoulders slumped and I could feel myself sliding off the edge of the chair. “Yes,” I said sighing, realizing that Uri was right.
There was nothing I could do to change the past. All I could do was move forward and finish what I came to Jerusalem to do. I was so close. I couldn’t turn back. Even if I now had misgivings about writing the book I hoped would redefine my career, I still had to see the Talpiot tomb. Uri was determined to get me inside. So, even if I couldn’t have Uri, I’d always have that.
“Now, finally, you understand the urgency of our mission,” Uri said.
I nodded.
“What are you doing the day after tomorrow?” he asked.
“Well, I have a spa treatment in the morning, and then I’m meeting some girlfriends for lunch…” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
Uri smiled and laughed and patted my hand.
“Nothing, Uri,” I said. “I’m not doing anything the day after tomorrow.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he said, a look of optimism on his face. “It’s settled then. We see the Talpiot tomb in two days.”
“What about Lev? Don’t we have to clear things with him and his contacts first?”
“I’ve already been in contact with Lev,” Uri said. “Everything has been arranged.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, wondering when Uri was going to tell me about this had I not come to see him first. “Can’t we do it tomorrow?” I asked. “I thought this was urgent?”
“It is,” Uri said.
“Then why can’t we see the tomb
tomorrow
?” I said, sounding more impatient than I’d intended. I had nodded my head for emphasis, and a strand of hair fell in my face.
Uri tilted his head and smiled at me, a hint of affection glinting in his eye.
“Because there is something you must see first,” he said, gently pushing my hair back into place. “Something of great importance. And tomorrow, my dear Mara, I will show it to you.”
The local radio station came back from commercial break to
deliver a news brief. The male DJ’s voice was deep and serious:
“Several protesters, policemen and worshippers were injured late yesterday afternoon when violence erupted during a Palestinian protest over the continuing Israeli settlement building along the West Bank.
“Police stormed the Temple Mount—-a holy site for both Jews and Muslims--when Muslim protestors started hurling rocks and bottles and taunting Jewish worshippers. The worshippers were evacuated from the Western Wall plaza at the foot of the hilltop compound, but not before several of them were cut by shards of flying glass. Police released tear gas and fired rubber bullets to disperse the violent protesters. It took several hours for the smoke to clear and before police had the situation under control. All told, two policemen sustained minor injuries and--”
Uri reached across and switched off the car radio
before I had a chance to hear the rest of the story. He was silent in doing so and I also remained quiet, unsure if I should comment on the chaos that frequently erupts between the warring Jewish and Palestinian populations.
“Are you excited?” Uri finally said, eyeing me from the driver’s side of his car, an older Mercedes with a missing rear-view mirror.
We were on our way to a storage facility in Beth Shemesh, within the industrial zone of Jerusalem, and I doubted that we’d be able to gain access without special permission.
“I’m excited,” I said, “and a little concerned. Are we just going to waltz in there?”
“They know we’re coming,” Uri said. “I made arrangements. This place is hard to find, but it’s not off limits.”
“Oh, I thought…”
“That the warehouse was top secret and purposefully hidden?”
“Well, yes.”
“A lot of people think that. In reality, anyone can request a visit to the IAA warehouse for research purposes. Besides,” he continued, smirking, “I’ve been here enough times that the staff knows me pretty well.”
The staff in question, all employees of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, guarded over some of the most precious cultural antiquities discovered in the Holy Land, including the six inscribed ossuaries pulled from the Talpiot tomb in 1980.
It was these ossuaries that we were on our way to see.
When the Talpiot tomb was excavated in 1980, the bones that were found inside were reburied according to Jewish tradition. The six inscribed ossuaries were archived and put in storage at the IAA warehouse in Beth Shemesh, where they’d been for almost 30 years. The IAA believed the Talpiot tomb ossuaries to be common, typical for the time period they were from, and hundreds just like them were stacked floor to ceiling within the walls of the warehouse.
But a two-year-old documentary, the one I’d watched on the Discovery Channel, claimed the tomb and the ossuaries belonged to Jesus Christ and his family. I was in Jerusalem to find out if there was any validity to this claim as fodder for a novel I wanted to write, and this warehouse was the second most important stop on my itinerary.
We pulled into a parking lot in front of a large concrete building with a white garage door. Above the door was a white sign with blue lettering in Hebrew and English, declaring that this building belonged to the IAA.
We entered the building and Uri led me through room after room of artifacts: Small corners filled with delicate pottery shards and fine jewelry; climate-controlled rooms for metallic objects; an entire room just for glass; and large storerooms with metal shelves stacked floor to ceiling with large vessels and pieces of architecture.
There were many people at work--examining ceramic shards under a microscope, wheeling large stone slabs through the hallways, dusting off pieces of pottery with fine-bristled brushes. All around me progress was being made, history was being uncovered…life, discovered and dissected as I watched.
“What do you think of the National Treasures Storerooms?” Uri asked as we made our way to our final destination: The ossuary storeroom.
“This place is amazing,” I said.
“One million items are warehoused here,” he said. “Each one of them archived electronically and arranged chronologically and by place of origin. It is the largest facility of its kind in the Ancient East.”
Eventually we reached a large storeroom with fluorescent lights and seemingly endless rows of metal shelves stacked floor to ceiling with ossuaries. All the ossuaries dated from around the first century A.D., the time of Jesus of Nazareth, when the creation of stone bone boxes was being practiced. But what seemed like thousands of ossuaries to me, in fact, numbered only in the hundreds.
Uri was a few steps ahead of me, watching me closely as I surveyed the room and its precious contents.
“Let me show you the way,” he said, motioning me forward, beckoning me to follow him.
He led me part way down an aisle and stopped, his eyes trained on an ossuary housed on a shelf about chest height. He placed his hand on it.
“This is the Marya ossuary,” he said, shifting the bone box so that the front panel with the inscription on it was facing out. The inscription was centered on the upper half of the ossuary, near the rim. Uri said the letters as he traced his fingers over each one. “M-A-R-Y-A. You would know the name by its Latin origins: Maria, or Mary.”
“As in Mary the mother of Jesus?” I asked playfully.
Uri smiled but didn’t directly address my comment. “This ossuary was inscribed in Hebrew,” he said. “Marya translated into Hebrew is Miriam. Most scholars and experts believe this is the ossuary of a Palestinian Jewish woman known to other Palestinian Jews at the time as Miriam, one of many Miriams known to have lived in Jesus’ time.”
“So, the fact that the ossuary of a woman named Miriam, or Mary, was found in the same tomb as an ossuary inscribed with the name Jesus son of Joseph is coincidence?”
Uri smiled but said nothing, and was on the move again.
I barely had time to look at the Marya ossuary, let alone contemplate its significance before I was being ushered to a second ossuary.
“Jose,” Uri said, pointing to the Hebrew inscription on one of the front panels. The inscription was positioned near the top, left of center. “Notice the similarity of this inscription with the Marya inscription.”
I moved closer to the ossuary, until my nose just about touched the cold stone. Indeed, the inscriptions looked similar. They shared no letters, but each letter appeared to be the same width and depth, and spaced the same distance apart. It was as if both inscriptions were etched by the same hand, using the same instrument.
“Jose is a shortened form of Joseph,” Uri said. “Like a nickname.”
“Like calling a friend whose name is Peter by his nickname, Pete?”
“A friend…” Uri said, raising his eyebrows, “or a relative.”
I thought about this a moment. “Jesus had a brother named Joseph.”
“Yes, he did.”
“Aren’t there claims that the Jose ossuary is the bone box of Joseph, brother of Jesus?”
“Yes,” Uri said. “And since we know that ossuaries were inscribed by family members of the deceased, if this is the bone box of Jesus’ brother Joseph, it makes sense that it’s etched with the name he most commonly went by in his family circle: Jose.”
I pulled my notebook and a pen out of my shoulder bag in order to document our conversation.
The Jose ossuary was a good place to start in making an argument that the Talpiot tomb was real, and that the final resting place of Jesus of Nazareth had been found at long last.
“But putting Jose’s nickname on his ossuary had a practical purpose too,” Uri continued.
“Which was?” I asked, still writing.
“It’s possible that Jose’s family inscribed this nickname on his bone box to distinguish him from Joseph, the name that appears on the
Jesus son of Joseph
ossuary.”
“I see.”
“Most scholars and historians treat Jose and Joseph as two separate people, but there’s another possibility…”
I looked up at Uri, my pen in mid stroke. His eyebrows were raised and his hands were clenched together in front of him, as if he was about to burst from the excitement of this new revelation.
“Which is?” I asked.
“If we are to believe the Talpiot tomb is the resting place of Jesus and his family, then we would expect to find Jesus’ parents’ ossuaries in the tomb. You could argue that the Marya ossuary, which you just saw, belonged to Jesus’ mother, but where’s his father Joseph?”
“You wouldn’t expect to find Joseph’s ossuary in the Talpiot tomb because he wasn’t from Jerusalem; he was from Nazareth,” I said. “Isn’t that Jewish law? That you are to be buried near your geographic origins?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that one of the main arguments detractors use to disprove the legitimacy of the Talpiot tomb? That Jesus’ family wasn’t even from Jerusalem?”
“Yes, but what if Joseph wasn’t buried in Nazareth? What if his ossuary has been under our nose the whole time and we never knew it?”
