The Sacred Scroll Page 21

  ‘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 1000BC, 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!’

  57

  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?’

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘He was in Constantinople in about 1170. And he travelled in the Holy Land from there. As the Venetian envoy. After he’d made his copy, Adhemar would certainly have left the original tablet somewhere for safekeeping.’

  ‘And if he left it in the Holy Land, or someone did, after he went mad?’

  ‘The Templars began to hold property as surety or simply in safe-deposits. They became bankers. They were the equivalent of a Swiss bank. Dandolo had dealings with the Templars nearly a century after Adhemar’s death.’

  Marlow shook his head. ‘Too far-fetched.’

  ‘Have you a better hypothesis?’ asked Graves.

  Marlow thought some more. ‘What if this tablet still has the power to do what it did for Dandolo – if it did anything – if it still exists?’

  ‘There’s no reason why it shouldn’t have. It won’t be some kind of magic spell. It’ll be a scientific formula. The Babylonians were interested in the movement of the constellations and the effect the various changing positions of the stars had – or might have – on their people, and what might happen to them. That’s what they were chiefly interested in – observing the stars, and reading clues from them – in order to control the future. You could say that they were astronomers by accident. What they were really interested in was astrology. But that doesn’t devalue what they discovered about the stars. They were scientists first and foremost, and it’s possible they knew more than we do, even today. Einstein and Max Planck both took their findings – as they came to light – very seriously. Einstein was a pioneer of astrophysics. Planck was the founder of quantum mechanics.’

  ‘The physical properties of celestial bodies; and the interactions of energy and matter,’ said Marlow, remembering the special qualifications, over and above those of archaeologists, of Adkins and Taylor.

  ‘Adkins and the rest weren’t just working on Dandolo’s tomb for the sake of early medieval history, were they?’ said Graves.

  ‘It doesn’t look like it now,’ replied Marlow slowly. ‘If you’re right, they were looking for this – scroll.’

  ‘But their interest wasn’t purely archaeological.’

  ‘So, who – beyond Yale and Venice – were Adkins and Taylor really working for?’

  ‘And de Montferrat.’

  ‘And who else was interested?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If they were abducted, kidnapped – taken – the people who did so ce
rtainly weren’t the ones they were working for!’

  ‘Maybe they thought they were simply working for their universities. Maybe we’re reading too much into this.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It explains why we’re involved.’

  ‘We’ve still got to find them.’

  ‘Get all this to Leon,’ Marlow said. ‘Top secret – ultra-secure, as we have to say these days. He’s to follow up with Yale and Venice. Very discreetly. No one else in on this. No one. We’ve got to find out what’s behind the mask.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘And well done. You’re a star.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  They looked at each other. Then Marlow’s expression changed: ‘There’s still the question of that key,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed.

  ‘It’s a small key, wherever it is.’ He looked abstracted. ‘Remember the inscription on the key? – “Unless I open the box …”’

  Graves looked at him. ‘That would work,’ she said.

  ‘Some kind of casket! The same date as the key. Made of –?’

  ‘Iron, probably. And designed to contain …?’

  His face cleared. ‘Something about the size of a BlackBerry. Or a Palm?’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘But where the hell is it?’ she said.

  ‘Wherever it is, somebody has the key to it.’

  ‘The question is, who?’

  ‘We have to find the box,’ said Marlow. ‘We have to find the key.’

  58

  It was after 11 p.m. The night staff had already checked in. Marlow was the last to go – as always, he reflected. But life at the moment held nothing for him outside his work. He remembered something Boris Cyrulnik had written in Talking of Love: ‘Someone who is wounded cannot come back to life immediately. It is hard to dance when your legs have been broken.’

  But he found his thoughts trailing towards Su-Lin.

  The blue phone rang. He returned reluctantly from the door to pick it up.

  ‘I know it’s late, but I thought you’d like my conclusions on that dream as soon as possible,’ said Ben Duff.

  Marlow sat back at his desk.

  ‘I had another talk with Su-Lin before I left. I think the experience was real. But she disagrees. She says she would never have done anything like that.’

  Marlow thought about that. ‘Well, why doubt her?’

  ‘Young children haven’t yet learned not to be selfish. But the rules most of us learn, and become second nature as we mature and live with other people – to take our place in society, in other words –don’t get fully absorbed by some people.’

  ‘And you’re saying she’s one of them?’

  ‘All I’m saying is that she may actually have committed this bizarre act in her childhood. It may sound like a small thing, but it’s worth considering. There are people who go through life protected, as it were, by their egocentricity, which goes hand in hand with their emotional immaturity. It never leaves them. And they’ll always write a script in their head which places them as the blameless party in any situation, even situations they’ve created themselves. Bad ones, especially.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The thing is, such people are very difficult to spot, unless you’re a victim of one. They can function perfectly normally in every aspect of life until they’re confronted with something they can’t cope with, and then they kick out at it – in one way or another. Their disadvantage is that they’re often not aware of it when a normal person has seen through them – but most of the time they get away with things. It was recognized long, long ago. Lao-Tsu was writing about it 2,500 years ago. He described egoists as people who, “without ropes, bind themselves”. Duff paused. ‘I’m sorry. I’m getting a little obsessive here. Nothing to do with memory loss.’

  Marlow’s tone was brisk. ‘What we need to find out, before anything else, is how she ended up in Jerusalem after disappearing in Istanbul, and what the hell happened to her, and the others.’

  Duff’s voice sounded more businesslike now. ‘She’s making good progress, even since you saw her last, and certainly she’s up to another session with you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Early.’

  Marlow’s Paris apartment was a small, anonymous duplex owned by INTERSEC, in the Quartier de l’Horloge, just north of the Pompidou Centre.

  The minute he’d closed his front door, the exhaustion hit him, as did the familiar loneliness, somehow worse since he’d met Su-Lin.

  But the loneliness ran deep, and it was like an ocean he didn’t have the strength to swim across. Little warnings flickered in his brain about how vulnerable this made him, but they weren’t strong.

  He looked round at the bleak, white space, with its spartan furniture and poor insulation, through which the north wind blew and sometimes moaned with insistent vigour. He sighed, and pulled off his coat, slinging it on the coat-stand in the narrow hallway, from which an unsteady wooden spiral staircase ran to the upper floor.

  He took a leak in the draughty lavatory, washed and changed in the adjoining bathroom and bedroom and climbed the stairs to the living area with its open-plan kitchen. He switched on the television. He zapped between a couple of American crime series dubbed into French, an interminable political discussion programme, and an old movie – Chabrol’s Le Boucher.

  He switched the thing off again. Well over a hundred channels, in several languages, and nothing he could face.

  He looked hard at the remains of the bottle of Jameson’s. Maybe a quarter of it left – not enough to do him any serious harm. But something he couldn’t put his finger on was bugging him, and he resisted the whiskey, making coffee instead.

  He went out on to the small terrace, to look at the view of Sacré Coeur to the north, St Eustache to the west and, twinkling away like a giant, kitsch sparkler for its ten-minute long, on-the-hour lightshow, the Eiffel Tower; but the raw wind from the north drove him inside again. He picked up a novel – Fred Vargas’s L’Homme à l’Envers – but even it couldn’t engage him in his present mood.

  He thought of the woman who’d brought his life to a standstill a year ago. He had to shake himself free. But nothing in his training manuals said anything about how to cope with heartbreak.

  Work was the thing. The only way back.

  Finally, he sat at the marble-topped table which separated the kitchen from the living room and worked on the questions he needed to ask Su-Lin. At about 4 a.m., he sighed, blinked pricking eyes, and made his way down to the bedroom.

  But his night, what was left of it, was sleepless.

  59

  The weather showed no sign of relenting the next day. Marlow made his way south down the rue St Martin early, cutting across the place Michelet, where he bought a Guardian from the ginger-haired man at the kiosk. He knew he wouldn’t have time to read the paper, and threw it on his desk when he arrived in his office, switching on his computer and checking emails before turning his back to the room and looking across the courtyard it faced, towards the windows of the flat where Su-Lin was under surveillance.

  He tried to put himself in her position, into her mind, but the exercise was impossible, and he abandoned it, looking at his watch. Fifteen minutes to go before Duff was due. He picked up the paper and leafed through it after all, but, as he’d anticipated, he took nothing in. He felt impatient. He wasn’t enjoying being back in Paris.

  He suppressed the bad memories which were still clouding his mind from the night before and concentrated on the questions he’d prepared. He hadn’t been working for more than a few minutes when there was a knock at the door.

  Ben Duff was early, but Marlow was relieved to see another face.

  ‘I’ve visited her already,’ said Duff, ‘and she’s ready to talk to you alone again.’ He didn’t seem happy. ‘I know you have things to ask her about which don’t concern me, but I’m still going to sit in for a while. If it’s g
oing well, I’ll leave you to it. But not for long – say, an hour. She won’t be able to take more than that.’

  Marlow nodded assent.

  They made their way to the apartment. There was the same offer of lemon tea, which this time they accepted.

  Marlow had decided to start his questions with Jerusalem, and work backwards from there.

  She answered him with evident difficulty, but she seemed keen to be as helpful as possible. She was also nervous; but that was to be expected. Marlow watched the delicate movements of her hands and body as she prepared the tea, making the humdrum task into a ritual.

  There was something vulnerable about her, too. He needed to be on his guard. He had been played that way before.

  She remembered nothing about travelling to Jerusalem. She knew she was lost, but whether or not she had known the city previously, she couldn’t say – she hadn’t been able to remember any cities at all. She’d instinctively kept her bag with her because something told her that its contents might provide a clue to her identity, but she hadn’t recognized the passport for what it was, let alone known it was hers.

  ‘Might you have been in Jerusalem in connection with something in the past? Something you were researching?’ said Marlow.

  She looked nonplussed. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said.

  ‘You remember what you were doing in Istanbul?’ Duff put in, prompting her lightly. Marlow glanced at him. His eyes were very clear as he looked at her. It looked as if his concern for her might go further than his professional care.

  ‘Of course I remember Istanbul now, and Dr Adkins and Dr Taylor, but after that …’ She looked distressed.

  ‘Let’s focus on Jerusalem first,’ Marlow said, as gently as he could. ‘What might have been happening there at about the time of the Fourth Crusade – or a little earlier?’

  She was able to deal with historical facts. ‘It was a Christian city. The centre of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted for two hundred years from the year 1099, when the First Crusade took the Holy Land from the Seljuk Turks,’ she said, as if reciting. ‘In 1291, the Kingdom’s last city, Acre, was destroyed by the Muslim Mameluks. That was the end of it.’