The Last Secret Of The Temple (44 page)

'It is a strange coincidence, no?' Gulami's voice drifted back to them from up ahead. 'An Egyptian, an Israeli and a Palestinian began this whole process. And now it is upon an Egyptian, an Israeli and a Palestinian that its survival depends. I like to think that maybe this is a good sign.'

'Please God it is,' said Milan.

'Please God,' echoed Marsoudi.

The envelope was waiting for Yunis Abu Jish when he woke at dawn, slipped beneath the door of his house, although who had delivered it, how and when, he had no idea. Inside was a simple typewritten note informing him that his martyrdom was to take place in six days' time. At exactly five p.m. on the afternoon of that day he was to be outside the payphone on the corner of Abu Taleb and Ibn Khaldoun streets in East Jerusalem, where he would receive his final orders.

He read the note three times, then, as instructed, took it outside into the narrow dirt alley that ran along the back of the house and burnt it. As its paper curled, blackened and crumbled into ash he felt a sudden rush rising from his stomach. Collapsing onto all fours, he began to vomit uncontrollably.

'What is it? What have you found?'

Khalifa leant forward over the veranda rail, his voice urgent, excited.

'A bicycle frame, ya inspector.'

'Dammit! You're sure?'

'I think my men know a bicycle when they see one.'

'Bloody dammit!'

The detective spat out his half-smoked cigarette and stomped it beneath his foot, muttering in frustration at this latest false alarm. In front of him, leaning on their
tourias
amid the remains of Dieter Hoth's garden, its neatly tended rose beds and immaculately clipped lawn now scarred with an unsightly assault course of pits and trenches and heaps of sand and mud, stood four dozen workers in earth-stained djellabas. Three days and nights they'd been digging,
Gurnawis fellaheen,
peasant labourers from the villages on the west bank of the River Nile, the best excavators in Egypt. If there was anything buried in the garden, they would be the ones to unearth it. Yet they'd found nothing, just a couple of concrete utility pipes, the rotted remains of an old wooden
shaduf
and, now, part of a bicycle. Wherever Dieter Hoth had hidden the Menorah, it certainly wasn't here. As, deep down, Khalifa had always known would be the case.

He gazed out at the mess in front of him, weary, despondent; then, lighting another cigarette and signalling to the gang's
rais
that his men should call it a day and pack up their tools, he turned and wandered back inside the villa. Here too the scene was one of utter devastation: half the floorboards were up, drifts of books and papers lay scattered everywhere, ragged holes gaped in the white plaster walls and ceilings – the detritus of three days' increasingly frantic searching. Three days' vain searching, because here too he'd drawn a complete blank: no Menorah, no clue to the Menorah's whereabouts, not even a mention of the damned thing.

Standing in the hallway now, cigarette dangling limply from between his lips, mayhem all around, Khalifa acknowledged that he'd reached the end of the line. Jansen's office at the Hotel Menna-Ra – a play on the word menorah, he now realized – his former house in Alexandria, even his blue Mercedes: all had been thoroughly gone over and all had yielded precisely
mafeesh haga
– nothing. The only other possibility, that Hoth's friend Inga Gratz had kept something back when he'd interviewed her the other night, was for the moment unverifiable, the old woman having fallen into a coma a few hours after he'd left her bedside, a state from which, according to her doctors, she was unlikely to emerge for some while, if at all. There was no-one else to talk to, nowhere else to look, no stone still to be turned. Whatever Hoth had done with the Lamp, the answers weren't, it seemed, going to be found in Egypt.

He remained in the villa for another twenty minutes, trudging aimlessly from room to room, uncertain whether he ought to feel relieved that he'd done all he could and could now abandon the hunt with his honour intact, or disappointed that he hadn't got more of a result. Then, locking up the house, he set off back to the station to call Ben-Roi, to tell him his search had failed. The Israeli wasn't going to be happy. From the conversations they'd been having over the last few days – curt, stiff, monosyllabic – it was clear that his end of the investigation had been going no better than Khalifa's. Time and options were both running out, and still the Lamp remained resolutely hidden.

As the two of them walked up through the grounds of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre, past its pretty terraces of flowering plants and collage of neatly spaced stone buildings, Layla was tempted to make some reference to the place's history, to ask Ben-Roi if he was aware that the older buildings had once formed part of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, scene, in 1948, of an infamous massacre by Jewish paramilitaries: two dozen men, women and children shot dead in cold blood. One look at her companion – his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, his mouth set into a seemingly permanent rictus of stress and displeasure – was enough to tell her the information wouldn't be appreciated, and she said nothing, just carried on up the hill in silence.

A joint Israeli-Palestinian investigation – that's what he'd proposed when he'd marched into her cell out of the blue three mornings ago. The two of them working together as a team to try and track down the Menorah, plus some other guy called Khalifa following up leads in Egypt, all officially sanctioned, all top secret, all for the greater good. Was she up for it? Would she help?

Of course, she'd been surprised. Suspicious too, even though it was she who had mooted the joint-investigation idea in the first place (never for one minute believing he'd take her up on it). That manic glitter in his eyes, the not entirely successful attempt to sound calm and reasonable; everything about him had screamed out that there was more to his proposal than he was letting on, some concealed agenda. There was too much at stake for her to refuse to cooperate, however, and she had agreed immediately and without question to do whatever was required.

Equally unexpected had been his insistence that for the duration of the search she should move into his apartment in West Jerusalem. Again, every warning system in her body had rung out, told her the arrangement had less to do with them having somewhere they could work together without arousing suspicion, as he claimed, than his wanting to keep tabs on her, follow her every movement. Again, she had kept her concerns to herself, said that, yes, in the circumstances that would be a very good idea, accepting that if she wanted to remain in the hunt for the Menorah she was going to have to play by his rules. And anyway, with the stakes this high she was just as anxious to keep an eye on him.

So he'd signed her release forms, driven her over to her apartment to pick up her laptop and a change of clothes – she saw immediately that the place had been thoroughly gone over in her absence – and then back to his flat in Romema, whose living room had been turned into a makeshift office. And that's where they'd been ever since – three solid days, tense, uncomfortable, claustrophobic. Each morning they would start work first thing, calling, emailing, surfing the net, chasing up every lead they could possibly think of, continuing thus all day and deep into the night, living off coffee, sandwiches and, in Ben-Roi's case, endless swigs of vodka. In the early hours she would collapse onto the sofa for a few hours' uneasy sleep and he would disappear into his bedroom, although he didn't seem to do much sleeping there because on several occasions she'd jolted awake in the dead of night to hear him pacing up and down, whispering into his mobile phone, and once to find him standing in the corridor staring in at her, his face deathly pale, his lips trembling. A couple of times, near the beginning, she'd tried to break the ice, get some sort of dialogue going, asking him about his background, the photograph of the young woman on his bookshelf, anything; but he'd simply snarled and told her she was there to help find the Menorah, not write his fucking biography. So she'd just got on with it, phoning, emailing, researching, trying to stay focused. And all the while that insidious, choking atmosphere of mutual antipathy and suspicion.

Hoth's visit to Dachau – from the beginning that had formed the main thrust of their investigations. There seemed little doubt that the crate he'd brought with him had contained the Menorah. But where had he taken it afterwards? Why had he commandeered the six prisoners? These were the questions they needed to answer. And these were the questions they had singularly failed to crack. Dachau experts, Third Reich experts, Ahnenerbe experts, experts in tracking down looted Nazi treasure, even experts in World War Two German transport infrastructure – they'd contacted them all, questioned and delved, but to no avail. Most hadn't even heard of Hoth; those that had could offer no clue whatsoever as to why he'd visited the camp or where he'd gone subsequently. She'd contacted Magnus Topping again – yes, she'd love to have dinner with him when she was next in England – Jean-Michel Dupont again, half a dozen friends and associates of Dupont, all in vain. No-one knew anything, no-one could help them.

In three long, hard days of researching only two new pieces of information had come to light: the type of trucks Hoth had had with him – Opel Blitzes, three-ton, standard German Army transport – and, from the archive at Yad Vashem, the names of the six Dachau inmates Hoth had commandeered: Janek Liebermann, Avram Brichter, Yitzhak Edelstein, Yitzhak Weiss, Eric Blum, Marc Wesser, the first four Jews, the last two, respectively, a communist and a homosexual. None of them had been returned to the camp; every attempt to try and track them down, to discover if any of them had survived the war, had failed. In short, they had come to a dead end.

Which is why, after three days, they had finally left Ben-Roi's apartment and made their way to Kfar Shaul. Because the only other possibility was that during her long quest to locate Hoth, Hannah Schlegel had somehow tracked down the Menorah as well. And that she in turn had communicated that information to her brother Isaac.

'Waste of bloody time,' Ben-Roi had grumbled during the drive over. 'The guy hasn't spoken for fifteen years. He's a cabbage.'

But it was the only possibility left.

As arranged over the phone, they made their own way up to the North Wing Psychogeriatric Centre, where they were met by Dr Gilda Nissim, the woman who had escorted Ben-Roi on his previous visit. She greeted them both with a perfunctory nod and, throwing a suspicious glance at Layla, led them through the wing's glass doors and down the softly lit corridor, their shoes squeaking on the polished marble floor, the overhead air-conditioning filling the building with a ghostly whispering sound. When they reached Schlegel's room she delivered a brief lecture, informing them that her patient had been extremely disturbed by Ben-Roi's previous visit, that she would not tolerate him being upset again in that manner, and that they could have fifteen minutes only, no more. Then she opened the door and stepped aside. Ben-Roi strode through; Layla hesitated, then followed, the doctor half-opening her mouth as if about to issue further instructions before Ben-Roi turned round and, with a curt 'Thanks', closed the door in her face.

'Fucking busybody,' he muttered.

The room was unchanged from his last visit: bed, table, crayon drawings all over the walls and, in an armchair by the window, pyjama-clad and thin as a scarecrow, Isaac Schlegel, his gaze locked onto the same dog-eared book in his lap. Ben-Roi grabbed a stool and sat down in front of him. Layla remained where she was, eyes flicking around the walls, taking in the numerous drawings of seven-branched menorahs.

'I'm sorry to have to trouble you again, Mr Schlegel,' began the detective, launching straight in, 'but I need to ask you some more questions. About your sister Hannah?'

He tried to keep his tone calm and reassuring, so as not to frighten the old man. It didn't work, because the moment he heard the detective's voice Schlegel's eyes widened in distress and he began to rock back and forth in his chair, hands clasping and unclasping around the spine of the book, a faint whimpering sound emitting from his mouth. Ben-Roi bit his lip, clearly not in the mood for this sort of thing.

'There's no need to be afraid,' he said, forcing a not entirely sympathetic smile across his face. 'We're not going to hurt you. We just need to talk to you. It won't take long, I promise.'

Again, his attempts at reassurance had the opposite of the desired effect. The whimpering grew louder, the rocking more pronounced.

'I know this is difficult, Mr Schlegel, and I'm sorry if I upset you before, but it's extremely—'

Schlegel's hands bunched into fists and came up to either side of his head, like a boxer trying to ward off a barrage of blows, his whimpers expanding into a high-pitched wail, filling the room. Ben-Roi's mouth crumpled into an irate grimace, his own fists clenching in frustration.

'Look, Schlegel, I know you—'

'For God's sake!' Layla stepped forward, throwing the detective a cutting look as if to say 'What the hell's wrong with you?' before squatting down beside the old man and cupping one of his fists between her palms. 'Ssssh,' she said gently, stroking the pale, translucent skin. 'It's OK, it's OK. Calm down.'

Almost immediately the fit began to abate, the old man's rocking gradually slowing, his wailing subsiding into a low-pitched purr, like the background murmur of a fridge or a computer.

'That's it,' she said softly, continuing to caress the old man's hand. 'There's no need to be afraid. Everything's going to be OK. There's nothing to be scared of.'

Ben-Roi watched her, a momentary flicker of uncertainty registering in his eyes, as though he was discomforted by this show of tenderness, confused by it; then, removing his hip-flask, he sat back and took a swift gulp. Layla carried on talking to the old man, soothing him, relaxing him, humming the odd bar of a lullaby her father used to sing to her when she was a child, until eventually he was completely calm, his opaque grey eyes staring downwards into his lap, his hand clasped around hers. She gave it another half a minute, then, judging that she had gained as much of his confidence as she was going to, shuffled round so that she was kneeling directly in front of him, her back to Ben-Roi.

'Isaac,' she said gently, her voice little more than a whisper, 'we need your help. Will you help us?'

Behind her, Ben-Roi gave a dismissive snort. She ignored him, focusing all her attention on the scarecrow figure in front of her.

'Will you tell us about the Menorah, Isaac? You saw it, didn't you? You and Hannah. At the ruined castle. Like in your drawings. Do you remember? At Castelombres. When you were children.'

Schlegel just stared down at his book, a beam of early-morning sunlight slanting through the window onto his skeletal face, the faint humming sound continuing to drift from his nostrils.

'Please, Isaac.' She squeezed his hand, silently willing him to speak to her. 'We're trying to find the Menorah. To protect it. Do you know where it is? Do you know what happened to it?'

Nothing.

She asked again, and again, and again, all the while trying to rein in her frustration, keep her voice level. Then, when there was still no response, not even a flicker of understanding or connection, she sighed, slipped her hand out of his and dropped her head, acknowledging that Ben-Roi was right, it was a waste of time.

'Yellow.'

It wasn't even a whisper; more a faint disturbance of the air around Schlegel's lips that might or might not have actually constituted a word. Layla looked up, thinking she must have imagined it. The old man was still staring down at his book.

'Yellow.'

The word was stronger this time, although still so low as to be barely audible. Behind her she could feel Ben-Roi tensing, leaning forward.

She reached out, took Schlegel's hand again.

'What's yellow, Isaac? What do you mean?'

Slowly, the old man looked up. He held Layla's eyes a moment, his own now seeming to glow faintly, like bright light seen through frosted glass. Then, slipping his hand from hers, he raised it and pointed a trembling finger up and to his right, to the four drawings depicting the arch at Castelombres, with in their midst a fifth drawing of a seven-branched Menorah.

'Yellow,' he whispered for a third time, his entire body shaking as though with the effort of forcing the words up from within him.

'What do you mean, yellow?' Ben-Roi had come so far forwards his knees were pushing into Layla's back. 'That the Menorah's yellow?'

The old man continued to point for a long moment, then dropped his arm again, clasping his hands tightly around his book.

'Look at the yellow one.'

Layla half-turned, throwing a bewildered glance at Ben-Roi, then dipped her head and looked up into the old man's face, laying her hands on his again.

'Is that what Hannah told you, Isaac? Did Hannah say that?'

Schlegel was squeezing the book, twisting it, bending the spine.

'Look at the yellow one,' he repeated.

'But what does it mean?' Ben-Roi's voice was harsh, loud. 'What yellow one?'

Schlegel said nothing, just continued to twist the book.

'The yellow picture?' pushed the detective. 'Is that what she meant? Look at the yellow picture? The picture of the Menorah?'

There was a pause, then a scrape of wood on linoleum as Ben-Roi pushed back his stool and got to his feet, striding over to the Menorah drawing and gazing at it, searching for some hidden meaning in the simple, yellow-crayon image. Nothing. He ripped the sheet from the wall and looked on the back. Blank. He threw a glance at Layla, then started round the room examining the other Menorah drawings, tearing them down, his movements increasingly agitated. Still nothing. Schlegel just gazed down into his lap.

'Please, Isaac!' whispered Layla, clasping her hands around his. 'What did Hannah mean? What did she want you to tell us? Please help us, Isaac. Please!'

He was receding, she could feel it, sliding back into himself. She continued to press him, squeezing his hands, gently kneading the bony palms as if by so doing she could somehow force one final piece of information out of him. The moment had passed, however, and with an exasperated groan she sank back on her haunches and stared up at the ceiling, shaking her head.

Ben-Roi slammed his hand against the wall.

'Fuck it,' he muttered.

Afterwards, as the two of them trudged in despondent silence back down through the hospital grounds, the only sounds the atonal twittering of the birds in the pine and cypress trees and, from somewhere away to their right, the faint pop and clack of a ping-pong ball being knocked back and forth, Ben-Roi fought to focus his mind, work out what his next move should be, how the hell he could still make this whole thing work.