The Sacred Scroll (26 page)

Maybe.

‘Try!’ he persisted.

But there was nothing in those enigmatic eyes.

Marlow looked at her long and hard. If there
were
anything in those eyes, it was loneliness. Loneliness. That was something he was getting close to becoming an expert on. He thought about that. It was something with which he could empathize. Maybe that would be the way to get through to her.

It wasn’t in the rule book, but he reached across and took her hand.

Mid-afternoon, Marlow reappeared in the fourth-floor office.

‘How’s it going?’ Graves asked, as he hurried in.

‘With Su-Lin? She recognizes where she is and who she is. Our problem is her recent memory field.’

‘The one that counts.’

He ignored that. ‘You?’

‘Mixed bag.’ But she was finding it hard to keep the excitement out of her voice.

‘Spill.’ Marlow was about to sit down in the chair across from her desk, and she pushed her computer aside, ready to talk. But then his BlackBerry rang. He checked the incoming number before turning aside and leaving the room again.

Graves watched him go, slipped on her reading glasses, and picked up the file she’d been working on, the one she’d need for the conversation they were about to have. She was looking forward to it.

She thought about Marlow despite herself. She thought about him too much.

They’d been working together for weeks. She prided herself on her ability to find out what made a person tick pretty quickly. It made it easier to work with them. Leon Lopez had been a pussy-cat. Easy, friendly, open-hearted to those he trusted, and humorous. It hadn’t taken long
for them to get each other’s measure. Since they’d been away from New York, she’d missed Leon.

Of course, no one ever knows what’s going on in another person’s mind, but you’ve got to recognize where you can repose trust.

Graves was trained to do that only with extreme caution. Everyone has a chink in their armour, and that can be exploited; but Lopez was a co-worker Graves felt she could lean on.

Marlow was different. It wasn’t just his reserve. He was a man who kept his gloves up. On the defensive.

Against what?

Something must have happened to him to make him like that. Something which had hurt him, or some professional slip, buried in his past, which caused him to build such walls around himself.

She thought of his dark eyes, and the wariness in their depths.

She heard him raise his voice slightly, outside in the corridor. What he was saying was indistinct, though she could tell he was speaking French. Then he hung up and there was the sound of his footsteps on the parquet as he returned.

She shook herself back to reality. She couldn’t deny that her interest was personal, any more than she could deny that she was attracted to him, but anything in that direction would have to wait. There was work to do, and it was nothing short of crazy in their line of work even to think of a personal relationship with a colleague. Death and betrayal were always too close for that.

But she had something here which she could really impress him with.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said in a voice which gave nothing away.

She flipped back into her professional mode without missing an outward beat, and opened the file.

‘There’s good news and bad,’ she began.

‘Bad first,’ he said, sitting down but not relaxing a muscle, arms forward, leaning lightly on the desk.

‘Leon’s back in New York now. Venice turned up some interesting stuff.’

‘He’s sent his report in?’

‘It’s what I’ve been working on this morning.’

‘Shoot.’

‘OK – bad news first.’ She looked at him. ‘Leon took a thorough look at the Archivio di Stato in our area of interest. He searched documents dating from 1160 to 1210.’

‘Took his time.’

‘Those archives go back a thousand years. There’s seventy kilometres of shelves.’

‘Point taken. And the bad news is?’

‘We know Dandolo became doge in 1192, when he was over eighty, and died in 1205. But he was politically active for years before he took over as leader of the city-state. There’s some minor stuff dealing with him between 1160 and 1169, but after 1170 – nothing.’

‘Computer files? Microfilm?’

‘Leon was on to that – the cupboard’s bare.’

‘Just the material on Dandolo?’

‘Just Dandolo.’

Marlow considered this. ‘Destroyed. Or someone’s taken it.’ He filed the information in his mind.

Graves gave him a look. ‘How long do you think it’ll take to get anything concrete out of Dr de Montferrat?’

‘Duff thinks another five days.’

‘Has he drawn any other conclusions about her?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know – anything at all.’ Graves hedged, deciding to keep any reservations she had to herself.

‘So – the good news?’ But Marlow’s face remained closed.

She picked up the file and drew a sheet of paper from it. ‘Look at this.’

It was a high-definition photocopy of an ancient manuscript, but what was written on it was completely indecipherable. Tiny, crowded-together incisions which looked like the jumbled footprints of small birds. The printing covered a very small physical area – barely larger than the surface of his BlackBerry. The ground was grey; the letters – or symbols – stood out in white. So whatever it was had been printed from something bearing incised markings, not raised ones.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘That’s what I’m working on.’

‘Did Leon find it?’

‘No – I did.’

‘Tell me.’

She’d been impatient to do so ever since she’d confirmed what she suspected when first examining the document. ‘I don’t suppose anyone’s looked at the original since it was filed in the archive. There was a note attached to it dated 4 February 1849: “Indecipherable. Cuneiform script? Language: Sumerian? Or Akkadian?
No date. Possible date:
c
. 1000
BC
?” No one’s bothered with it since. And you can imagine how long it took to get the museum officials to authorize a proper copy. French bureaucracy sometimes seems stuck in the nineteenth century itself!’

‘What archive?’

‘The archive in the Musée de Cluny. Just down the road from here. The Museum of the Middle Ages.’

‘Go on.’

‘It was a long shot, but while Leon was looking in Venice, I thought, why not look here too? It’s just as well that I did.’

‘But why here?’

‘Because Bishop Adhemar was French!’

Marlow knew immediately that his assistant had made a breakthrough. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ he said.

‘OK.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Bishop Adhemar is mentioned in some of the research documents Adkins and his team managed to communicate to Yale before they disappeared. It was Leon who dug him out first. Dandolo mentions him two or three times.’

‘So what’s the connection?’

‘Adhemar was one of the leaders of the First Crusade, around 1096. Adhemar travelled widely in the Middle East. He even spent time in Constantinople. He died in the Holy Land in 1098.’

‘He was in Constantinople, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s his background?’

‘He was bishop of Le-Puy-en-Velay. There’re various stories about him, one of which concerns a visit he made to Egypt. Shortly after that trip, he became obsessed with something – something he’d found there, something, the legends say, which had the ability to impart supreme power to anyone who possessed it.’

‘Some object?’

‘Yes.’ Graves’s eyes gleamed. ‘God knows when this document found its way to the Cluny Museum, but there
it is. It wouldn’t have gone to Venice, because, as I said,
Adhemar was French
.’

‘Where is this leading?’ Marlow could already guess.

‘Adhemar had a huge influence on the management of the First Crusade, and even after his madness and death many of the rank-and-file soldiers insisted he was still alive, still watching over them, controlling them. There were stories of the bishop walking among them, encouraging them.’

‘Don’t waste my time with ghost stories, Laura,’ said Marlow, but he was intrigued.

‘Don’t forget that people who lived nine hundred years ago or so were less cynical than we are. They believed
literally
in the miracles which Holy Relics could work, for example. And if you believe something hard enough, you can make it happen – or at least
think
you’ve made it happen.’

‘And you’re saying that this bishop had found some sort of relic in Egypt?’

‘In Alexandria, yes. Except that I don’t think it was a relic.’

‘Go on.’

‘I did some more research. Some of the papers Adhemar left behind apart from this one – and there aren’t many – have references by him – obsessive references, I’d say – to a “
sacred scroll
”.’

Marlow looked at the photocopy he was holding.

‘It was something he never seemed quite able to figure out how to use,’ Laura went on. ‘He knew what it was and what it could do – but he could never manage
to make it work
completely
. If he had any success, to judge from his writing, it was hit and miss, random. What ate him up was that he knew there should be a system, but he couldn’t work out what it was.’ She leaned forward, tense with excitement. ‘Just today, while you were working with the de Montferrat woman, I think I nailed it.’

Marlow continued to study the paper.

‘The original manuscript is ink on vellum,’ Graves went on, ‘and it’s in a poor state of repair now – much of what’s written on it has been eroded by time, and so the meaning of the whole is incomplete. But one thing’s for sure: what’s on that parchment hasn’t been penned by hand – it’s been
printed
.’

‘But people like Gutenberg and Caxton weren’t born until the fifteenth century.’

‘Printing existed before them – it’s been around for three thousand years. Adhemar travelled widely in the East. Printing was known in ancient Mesopotamia, what’s now Iraq. But there’s more to it than that.’

‘This script has nothing to do with the Roman or Greek alphabets, which would have been the two used in Dandolo’s time – and Adhemar’s. And, as I remember, the inscription on the pictures we have of the key the archaeologists discovered –’

‘Now lost –’

‘It isn’t Aramaic either.’

‘You’re right! This script must be much earlier. It probably
does
date from around 1000
BC
, the time the curator at the Cluny Museum suggested when he wrote his note in 1849. But it
may
be much earlier even than that.’

‘So what is it?’

‘This
is
written in cuneiform, as the curator at the Cluny guessed.’ Graves couldn’t resist going into an explanation which Marlow didn’t need. ‘It’s a kind of proto-alphabet, used by the priests and the priest-kings who ruled ancient Babylon. It was still in use for secret and ritual purposes, well after it had been supplanted in everyday use.’

‘OK – but what does it say?’

‘Nothing. It’s nonsense.’

Marlow looked at her sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Or rather, not quite nonsense. I said that what you can see here was printed.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, Adhemar must have got hold of something almost a thousand years ago, when he was in Egypt, that he thought was a printer’s block. He knew roughly how old it was, and he knew that ancient peoples of the Middle East had mastered the art of printing. He didn’t worry about the fact that the characters were incised, not raised. He only knew it was valuable, he knew it had some power, so he printed it out, to produce his “sacred scroll”.’

Marlow had caught some of her fire. ‘But – it
wasn’t
a printer’s block?’

‘No! That’s what had me perplexed. What we have here – and it’s impossible to make out its meaning fully, because the parchment it was printed on is so decayed – is a
mirror-image
of what was cut into what I guess was a small clay tablet. That’s what confused Adhemar. That’s why he couldn’t use it correctly. Only some of the symbols and phrases have the same mirror-image as the positive one.
That’s why his reading of it must have been incomplete. His “sacred scroll” – this parchment in the museum here in Paris – wasn’t the real thing at all!’

Marlow was silent for a moment. ‘Then what was?’ he said.

‘The Babylonians wrote on clay tablets. They stamped, or cut, the letters on the clay when it was still moist. When the clay dried, they had a permanent record of what they’d written. And they used small tablets, convenient enough to hold in the palm of one hand. Portable, easy to use – you hold the thing in one hand, you use the other to “write” on it.’

‘So –’ Marlow knew what this was leading up to.

‘Of course, they had far larger tablets and columns for writing, say, lists of laws, but for most purposes they used these little clay tablets. The Babylonians used them for everything from schoolbooks to shopping lists, but there are also hundreds which contain sophisticated mathematical and astronomical formulae. Hundreds of thousands have come to light since modern archaeology began in the region, right up to the time of the Iraq War, when everything came to a halt. And a hell of a lot has been destroyed since 2003. But the heyday for archaeologists was the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. One of the greatest of the researchers was a German called Robert Koldewey, who died in 1925, aged seventy.’

‘So the real sacred scroll is actually a small clay tablet.
The same size as the area covered by the printing on this photocopy of Bishop Adhemar’s manuscript,’ said Marlow. And there are hundreds and thousands of these?’

‘There are thirty thousand still waiting to be
catalogued
in the vaults of the British Museum alone. Most of them have been there for a century.’

They fell silent.

‘Dandolo managed to divert an entire foreign army from its original purpose and use it to smash Constantinople, the greatest trade rival Venice had,’ Marlow said. ‘Are you telling me that somehow he got hold of this – thing – and worked out how to use it to control a Crusade?’