The Old Boys (9 page)

Kosher meals in a Nazi prison?

“Heydrich had given me absolute authority, in writing, to manage the project as I thought best. His signature and stamp made anything possible.” Hawk started to smile in fond memory, caught himself, but could not resist the pleasantry that had popped into his head. “We just ordered the arrest of a Jewish cook or two,” he said. “Heydrich was a man who thought in spirals but acted in straight lines.”

The lists of art objects for France and the Low Countries, complete with estimates of current market value, were completed in a couple of months. The combined value of works of art in private hands ran into hundreds of millions of reichsmarks. Heydrich ordered Hawk to form his own personal special unit of
SS troopers and began training them to locate the houses where the paintings on Heydrich’s list were hanging, and to know these pictures when they saw them. Hawk’s men spent their days memorizing works of art in the way that Luftwaffe trainees learned to recognize the silhouettes of Allied aircraft. When the war came, they would be among the first German troops into the target cities, and also among the first out as they sped back to Berlin with truckloads of treasure for Heydrich’s art collection.

It was from one of his Jewish scholars, a specialist in ancient manuscripts who had done groundbreaking work in Jerusalem and in the Vatican library, that Hawk first heard about the possible existence of Roman manuscripts secreted in amphorae by confidential agents of the emperor for shipment back to Rome from the far corners of the empire.

“This man had a sort of informed obsession that such manuscripts must still be preserved in amphorae that had gone to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea as a result of Roman shipwrecks,” Hawk said.

Hawk kept this fellow upstairs for a few more days after the other scholars had been locked up. After exhaustive conversation and much consultation of Latin sources, Hawk made a trip to the Vatican library. There he found plausible evidence in ancient records that amphorae had in fact been used as moving dead drops aboard Roman ships, and that certain of those ships had sunk— many of them in relatively shallow waters off Crete while bound for Ostia or Brindisi from ports in Egypt, Phoenicia and Samaria.

“Any such manuscript would, of course, be a thing of great beauty as well as an object of inestimable value,” said Hawk.

Hawk took his findings to Heydrich, who was tremendously pleased by his news.

“He saw the possibilities immediately,” Hawk said. “Beyond that, he was quite moved by the romance of the thing. Imagine, from his point of view, the prospect of owning an authentic dispatch from a secret policeman who had worked for Caligula.”

Imagine it, indeed. The harmonies must have been deafening.
In short order Hawk found himself on a small motor yacht off the sunny coast of Crete, commanding a dozen young troopers who could not believe their luck.

“My Jew had a pretty shrewd idea of where wrecks might be found,” said Hawk, “and by a mixture of his scholarship and Heydrich’s incredible luck, we found one in a matter of weeks. It had been a galley. Human bones had long since been dissolved by the salt, but the ship’s keel and ribs were still intact. Coins bearing the head of Augustus and all sorts of corroded bronze objects were scattered about. And of course, masses of perfectly preserved amphorae.”

The Roman amphora, smaller than the Greek one on which it was modeled, was an object whose combination of beauty and utility moved Hawk’s soul. He had seen them in museums, of course, but it was quite another matter to descend three or four fathoms into the murk and behold by the bent light of the sun these marvels of ancient handicraft, so shapely, so perfectly symmetrical. They lay in profusion on the bed of the sea where they had rested since the time of Christ. The divers hauled the amphorae to the surface one by one. Except for a few empty or broken ones, they were still watertight and still held precisely 25.5 liters of whatever the Romans had put into them before setting sail. Under Hawk’s personal supervision the beautiful jugs were carefully opened. Their contents included thick, sour wine that was sometimes still drinkable, water, grain and other foodstuffs, all duly numbered.

Number eighty-seven was filled with wheat (“so fragrant still that it made me sneeze,” said Hawk).

And buried in the wheat was the Amphora Scroll.

“The scroll was sealed in thick red wax,” said Hawk. “My heart has never before or since beaten so fast as when I loosened the seal with my razor.”

Unrolled, the scroll was almost a meter in length. It was written in Greek, filled from edge to edge with the dense handwriting of a Roman official who signed himself Septimus Arcanus. Although
Hawk had learned the rudiments of ancient Greek at Worksop College and improved his knowledge of the language at Marburg, he was unable to puzzle out the text. Once he got used to the handwriting, he realized that the manuscript was written in cipher. Decoding it was beyond his abilities, so at this point he had no inkling that he held in his hands a world-shaking document that was beyond price. The fact that it was in cipher suggested that it was a secret communication, and that alone made it an even greater object of fascination than a decipherable manuscript would have been.

He was terrified that exposure to air and sunshine would fade the ink or cause the parchment to disintegrate. After all, it had been made from the skin of a kid that had been slaughtered almost exactly nineteen hundred years before.

Heydrich promoted Hawk to
Haupsturmführer,
the SS rank equivalent to captain, decorated him, and presented him with an engraved pistol. Heydrich was tremendously excited by the fact that the manuscript was in Greek and in code. He wanted to know without delay what it said.

The Jewish scholar whose brilliant theory had just been vindicated by his worst enemies was brought upstairs once again.

“It turned out that he had a good knowledge of ancient ciphers, and in no time at all he cracked the code,” said Hawk. “It was a very simple one, based on a key that was easily deduced. Naturally he was also perfectly fluent in ancient Greek, so we soon had a complete translation. When I read it, I did not believe it.”

Hawk had another scholar, even more eminent than the first man, arrested. His decipherment and translation matched the first man’s almost exactly.

“It was all there, dated in the year we call A.D. 36—names, places, mysterious events,” Hawk said. “Which of the disciples was the handler, the lot. What Roman purposes were.”

Heydrich was overjoyed with the scroll. He was not, however, a man to live long without suspicions. He became convinced that the Amphora Scroll was a hoax, that the Jews who had translated it were playing a joke on him, making a fool of him with the Jesus
story. It was just too good to be true. Hawk offered to find Aryan scholars who could decipher and translate the scroll, but Heydrich decided that Lori would do it. Hawk was detailed to arrest her husband and son and then to kidnap Lori as she rode in the park. His men delivered Hubbard and Paul to Gestapo headquarters for questioning and Lori to a Gestapo safe house in a wooded section of Berlin. There Heydrich asked her to do him the great favor of translating something from ancient Greek.

“According to Heydrich, she read and translated the language of Homer as fluently as English or French,” Hawk said. “And so the Baronesse became, with Heydrich and me, the third person on earth still living to know that the Amphora Scroll existed, and the only one of the three who had seen with her own eyes exactly what it said.”

Her translation of a Greek typescript of the scroll, completed at amazing speed, confirmed the accuracy of the scholars’ version, which she had not seen.

“After this, more than ever, Heydrich was entranced by this woman,” Hawk said. “And when he was named Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in September 1941, she went along with him. As did the Amphora Scroll, sealed now in a vacuum inside a glass tube. Heydrich kept it in a special cradle on his desk in his official residence in Prague. I think it amused him to hide the rarest treasure of the last two thousand years in plain sight.”

I asked Hawk for a photograph of the entire Amphora Scroll. He professed not to have one. But he did let me see some of his many photographs of Lori in the company of her kidnapper. And he presented me with a copy of the picture of Lori’s hand holding the manuscript, along with a shot of Heydrich and Lori in Berlin, heads close together, reading the Amphora Scroll with what appears to be a painting by Frans Hals hanging on the wall in the background.

The photograph was staged as if Hals had controlled the models, arranged for the costumes, imagined the props. But of course it was Heydrich, an artist in his own way, who had done all that.

During my brief absence spring had turned to summer in Washington. A fierce white sun burned over the city as my flight from Miami, where I had changed planes, came in for a landing at Reagan National Airport. Granted, I was in a classical frame of mind after all that talk about the Amphora Scroll, but from the air the shimmering Greco-Roman structures on the Mall looked more than ever like some misplaced imperial outpost from the time of the Caesars. Except for Charley Hornblower, our man in Washington, the Old Boys had scattered to their various operational destinations and I had hoped to slip in and out of town unnoticed. However, when I arrived home I found a long string of telephone messages from Stephanie. Each one was a bit higher on the treble scale than the one before, so I believed that she meant it when she said that she had something important to discuss with me. My bones ached. The tambaqui I had eaten the night before had had a bad effect on my stomach and so had Simon Hawk. I took a hot shower and had a large cup of espresso coffee before deciding not to call her back.

As I was drinking my second cup of coffee I heard the mail slot in the front door open and close. Had someone slipped a letter bomb through the slot? Had Stephanie entrapped me at last? Then
I heard heavy footsteps in the yard. Charley Hornblower’s long foxy face—Ben Franklin eyeglasses, lantern jaw, claret nose—appeared in my kitchen window. When he saw me through the glass, he smiled. It was the same delighted grin he had had as the gung-ho young spook I had worked with thirty years before. Apart from the broken veins and a few wrinkles and white eyebrows and a glassy bald scalp instead of a bowl-cut thatch of rufous hair, senior citizen Charley looked pretty much the same as the junior officer Charley had looked.

I let him in and offered him coffee. He shook his head No. “Upsets my stomach.”

Charley needed no caffeine; excitement was written all over his face. He did not refuse a glass of Laphroaig.

Before leaving for Paris I had given him the photograph of Lori’s hand holding the fragment of the Amphora Scroll and asked him to decipher the portion that was visible.

“It presented no difficulties,” Charley said, producing the photograph, now covered with notations in red ink. “It’s written in a cipher using a simple transposition of letters. The Greek is a bit clumsy because of the cipher, and maybe because it was written in Latin first, then translated. However, it’s easy enough to read once you break through. I think it’s an intelligence report.”

He went on a little longer about technicalities that had fascinated him. Charley, a doctor of philosophy twice over, liked to dwell on minutiae that did not necessarily excite the untrained mind. I waited. Something about the fragment had blown Charley away, and he wanted to delay the pleasure of sharing it with me.

At last he said, “It’s only a fragment, of course, a couple of hundred words. This is the way it begins. ‘Lucius Aelius Sejanus from Septimus Arcanus. In such-and-such year following the umptyumpth Olympiad, I was commanded to proceed to Aelia Capitolina’ … that’s the Latin name for Jerusalem… ‘for the purpose of weakening the power of the priests, whose arrogant disregard of
Roman taxes and other acts of disloyalty had caused the displeasure of the emperor.’ You know about Sejanus?”

“Yes.”

Charley gave me the pertinent facts anyway. “For a while he was Tiberius’s right-hand man. For all intents and purposes, Sejanus was the dictator of Rome during the years that Tiberius was living on Capri.”

“What else did the fragment have on it?”

“Enough to tantalize. The next sentence is cut in half by the edge of the photograph, but it mentions the name of one Joshua ben Joseph, who came from Galilee, and also refers to someone named Paulus, who may have been Joshua’s case officer. And there it ends.”

“No other ID for Paulus?”

“Only that he was a Roman citizen,” Charley said. “You do understand that the Hebrew name Joshua translates as ‘Jesus’ in Greek.”

“I understand.” I am anything but a religious man. Nevertheless, the hair rose on the back of my neck as I listened to Charley’s report. I said, “So what’s your opinion?”

“That this scroll is a lot more dangerous than any twelve fission bombs ever manufactured.”

“If it’s authentic.”

“Obviously,” Charley said. “But if it really was found sealed inside an amphora in a first-century Roman shipwreck, how can it
not
be authentic? The cipher, the handwriting, the syntax, the context all match up with manuscripts for that period.”