ordinary tourist cracks, gets up on the Old City wall and declares he’s the Messiah. A nun sits in the Via Dolorosa and gouges her hands and feet until she bleeds like Jesus. A crazy businessman from Jakarta sets himself on fire to protest the infidels in Palestine. We’re surrounded by it. We even have a special hospital for religious cranks.”
“And these things add up to what?” Miner was a little impatient. “How does any of this help explain the murder of Emanuel Shor and the theft of the whatsit?”
“Two things. Both victims wore gold rings with the same inscription.”
“Right. ‘Until he comes who has the right to rule.’ ”
“Suppose there was some cultic connection between them. Everything I saw in France points to it.”
“An Orthodox Jewish scientist and a Catholic priest? That’s some cult,” Miner snickered.
“That’s the second thing. A missing DNA sample belonging to someone named Chandos—the only missing sample from a locker our victim probably entered minutes before the murder. And it happens to bear the name of our Catholic priest.”
Miner looked chastened. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it does. When I was in France I saw a sculpture, a statue of Saint Peter, the first Pope. He was dressed in the robes, not of a Pope, but of the cohen gadol, the High Priest of Israel. The special breastplate with the twelve stones, the turban. Look at this.” Ari flicked at his GeM and up on the wall came the image of the high priest from the Tanakh. Then a photo of the statue of St. Peter on the North Porch of Chartres cathedral.
“The same costume.”
Miner shook his head. “What are you getting at?”
“I think I understand.” Toad spoke for the first time, and Ari looked at him hopefully. “Catholics see the Pope as the successor to the high priest of Israel. The statue shows that. But according to Torah, the high priest must be a cohen, a direct descendant of Aharon ben-Amram. If Chandos believes he is himself such a person, he considers Zacharias illegitimate.”
“Thus the DNA sample in the Cohanic collection,” Miner concluded. “Sara Alman is typing the Monsignor’s DNA at Technion right now. I wonder what she’s found out.” He made a call on his GeM and stepped out of the room.
Ari and Toad looked at each other. “I didn’t know he was still in touch with her,” Ari said. “She’s at Technion?”
“She’s working on the Tay-Sachs problem.”
“I guess there’s always hope.”
Toad smiled without humor, and Ari left the subject.
“So…you’ve been quiet.”
Toad gazed at nothing for a few moments, and then asked, “Why would a Catholic priest want to know if he’s a cohen? What difference would it make to him?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that somebody carried out a Jewish ritual in that chapel—which, by the way, is called the Holy of Holies. Blood was strewn on the altar. The scapegoat was marked.”
“It could be. It is intriguing.” Toad’s bland face hid the workings inside. He was neither surprised nor disappointed that the answer was not simple. In his experience, crime involved the most complicated of motives. No crime was simple.
“Think about whoever did this. Everyone is guilty but you. You’re the real victim. The world is a standing violation of everything you cherish. You’re a soldier.”
Toad hesitated. Ari was surprised to hear Toad expound like this, but any entrance into his mind was worth taking. He leaned forward to listen.
“Think about how you carried out the shootings: all of them commando-style. To you, these were not murders—they were acts of war.” He paused. “What we have to figure out is, what is the nature of the war?”
Miner came back in the room. “They’ve just got the results on the Monsignor. Hold on—you won’t believe it. The profile of Peter Chandos shows 95 percent on the Cohanic scale.”
“The Monsignor was a Jew?” Ari cried.
“Not only a Jew, but what a Jew. An almost pure match to the cohen gadol haplotype, whatever that is.”
“A haplotype is like a fingerprint,” said Toad. “The man who died in that chapel was one of the priesthood of Israel…”
They looked at each other, wondering.
“So?” Miner asked, “What difference does it make? There are tens of thousands of Cohanic men in the world. Why should it matter that much to him? Could it have been some kind of…hobby?”
“Shor removed the sample without going through procedures. And on a high holy day.” Toad pointed out. “Why would he go to all that trouble for a trifle? Why the secrecy?”
“He’s protecting somebody. A client.”
“A very important client. So important that Shor is willing to do aven and break the law.”
Miner spoke up. “Maybe Shor knew Chandos. Maybe he was doing him a favor by profiling his DNA for him against the Cohanic type, then saw the news and decided he wanted nothing further to do with him. So, he grabbed the sample and erased all references. Simple.”
“And then casually went out to be murdered?” Ari asked sarcastically.
“Why should Shor’s murder have anything to do with Chandos? It happened elsewhere. Different building, different crime. We should be looking at the robbery instead of this religious mumbo-jumbo. Isn’t 99 percent of police work about following the money?”
All three were quiet for a moment. A draft of air from the building’s useless cooling system ruffled the piles of evidence on the table. The laboratory clock hummed overhead.
Ari wondered for a moment if chasing these ancient ghosts could end up as a fatal detour. Maybe he and Toad were overcomplicating things. Maybe the nature of this war was totally clear, and the oblique connections they had made were simply fog. Maybe it was the same old story—not a new one after all.
“Well, if Miner’s right, we’ve been going down a cul-de-sac. For argument’s sake, let’s leave off Chandos for a minute.”
“Wait.” All at once Miner was looking puzzled at the GeMscreen in his hand. “There’s another message from Sara. It looks like Chandos also had MAO-A mutation.” He spelled it out carefully and looked up at Ari, who shrugged.
“Let me see that,” Toad asked for the GeM and examined it carefully. “MAO-A mutation pre-disposes a person to aggression and violence. The head of the institute told me that. It’s their main research project right now.”
“You’re saying that killing might have come naturally to Chandos?” Ari was surprised. “I thought the man was a saint.”
“And there is still the eyelash. And the inscription on the rings,” Toad reminded them.
Miner sighed and took back the GeM. “I guess we won’t be leaving off Chandos.”
Magisterial Library of the Order of Malta, Via Condotti, Rome, 1000h
The sealed letter from Jean-Baptiste Mortimer was more than Maryse needed. The Director knew what was wanted before she asked for it and had prepared a small, elegant study for her use. A man known to her by reputation as a retired historian—and an eminent one—he closed the door silently behind him, seated her at the table, and opened a cabinet in the wall with an old-fashioned iron key. From this cabinet he drew a book, one of the most ornate she had ever seen, and carefully laid it on the table in front of her. The leather cover featured scrollwork illuminated with four figures—a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a winged angel.
The administrator smiled tensely and locked the door as he left. Maryse took out her magnifying