But by the time the sarcophagus had been retrieved and brought back — a task that took six months of planning on its own — Rommel’s Afrika Korps had swept across the region, destroying everything in their path and stealing anything worth having. The ossuary was part of the booty, and Simone, like her father, thought it had been taken indiscriminately, and with no idea of its true provenance or value.
She had soon been disabused of that notion when she learned, as part of her duties at the Ministry of Culture, that it had been singled out for special delivery, and to the Führer himself. Somehow, and not to her surprise, the Nazis must have planted a mole in the ministry. When she found out that the United States had then gone after it, too, she realized that the ossuary had become a pawn in some game — a game whose players might not even know what they were squabbling over.
“To think that such an ancient journey should end in a country so foreign,” her father said, as if thinking along the same lines, “and so young.” He waved a hand dismissively at the faux colonial surroundings.
“Maybe it was all fate.” She could only imagine all the thoughts swirling through his mind. The years of research into the whereabouts of the tomb, his growing conviction of its power and potential. Her own commitment had remained more prosaic. She had always been more interested in its immense archaeological importance, not to mention the vindication of her father’s lifework. Together they had made the arduous trip into the White Desert, the descent into the cave, the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic, and now, at the very moment when the box might be opened, reveal its contents, and confirm or refute his theories, he would not be present, except by proxy. She knew it had to be agony for him.
He coughed, took a long sip from his glass of club soda to quell it — alcohol, to her knowledge, had never crossed his lips — and then sighed resignedly. In the old days, he’d have put up much more of a fight than this. Now, it appeared that even he knew his limitations. His ebony cane was hooked to the back of his chair, and in order to read the papers in the blue folder, he’d had to move the candle, in its little pewter base, much closer to his plate.
“Then you will have to be my eyes,” he said, “and ears.”
“I’ll give you a full report, in writing,” she promised with a smile. “Triple-spaced, the way you like it.”
His dark eyes fixing hers, he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and took out a threadbare velvet pouch. “Even if this is of no help,” he said, withdrawing a tarnished old medallion on a frayed leather string and handing it to her, “humor me. What harm can it do?”
The medallion was plainly ancient, its symbol so worn away that it was hard for her to discern in the feeble light of the taproom.
“It’s a pentagram,” her father said, to Simone’s surprise.
“The symbol of evil?”
“Not originally. Until the Middle Ages, when it was finally supplanted by the cross, it was a symbol of Christ. The five points represented the five wounds to his body, and it was believed to protect the wearer from evil.”
To oblige him, she slipped it around her neck and under her blouse. What harm could it do? It was something like the philosopher Pascal’s wager, to her mind: Although an atheist, Pascal said he would make a deathbed confession to God. If there was no God to hear it, what difference did it make? But if there was…
As she got up to go, Dr. Rashid reached out, squeezed her hand, and said, solemnly, “God be with you.”
“I’m counting on it,” she replied, tapping the medallion now resting against her skin.
Outside, it was a cold, clear evening, and the streets of the town were still busy with people buying their dinner fixings, or getting back from their jobs. But the quaint, yellow-tinted lamplights were on, and the sidewalks were crowded. As she walked back toward the campus gates, she thought how easily she could have wound up in just such a place, devoting herself purely to writing and research, married to another professor, someone, strictly for argument’s sake, like Lucas Athan.
But she had always had bigger, and more adventurous, goals than that.
Passing under FitzRandolph Gate and into the precincts of the college, she lost the bright storefronts of Nassau Street, the noise of human voices, the rumble of motor engines. The darkness was deeper, punctuated only by the occasional lantern in a Gothic archway, or the gleam of some student’s light behind the casement window of his dormitory. On her way to meet up with Professor Delaney at Guyot Hall, she was accompanied by the rustle of leaves on the ground and the sighing of the boughs in the trees overhead. Only a couple of students scurried past her, complaining about a coach who had kept them late. By the time she reached Guyot Hall, with its cabinet of curiosities displayed in the lobby, Delaney was coming down the stairs. Spotting her, he lifted a jingling key ring in greeting.
“I was looking for these all afternoon,” he said. “Turns out they were in my coat pocket the whole time.”
“It’s a hazard of the profession,” Simone said, thinking of her own father and half a dozen professors she’d had at Oxford.
“What is?”
“Absentmindedness.”
“Let’s hope that’s all it is,” he said, locking the main doors behind them.
At his feet, she noticed a closed-up Gladstone bag. “You look like a country doctor ready to make a house call.”
Delaney laughed and lifted the bag — she heard a clank from inside it. “Never lost a patient yet.” They passed under the row of concrete gargoyles leering from the parapets above them, then across the forecourt of the university’s colossal Tudor Gothic chapel. The art museum was not far off, but they passed most of the way in silence, each no doubt running through what he or she planned to do once they got there, and wondering what they might ultimately find inside the sarcophagus.
Simone wondered, too, what kind of reception she would get from Professor Athan. So far, it hadn’t been good. She’d known plenty of men who were threatened by a woman of her background and professional standing — in the Middle East, she was regarded the way one would regard a talking camel — but even in the West, she had encountered resistance. With Lucas, however, it seemed like something else was in play. She didn’t want to flatter herself, but she could tell from the way he looked at her — when he allowed himself to — that he was fighting something a lot more elemental. That was part of it, she felt sure.
But was she fighting something elemental, too? Where, for instance, had that brief fantasy of married life come from only minutes ago?
The rest of his resistance could possibly be chalked up to something more arcane — maybe to a bit of the scholar’s possessiveness. No one liked to share, especially prematurely, the fruits of one’s labor and research. In the academy, the spoils were so thin — reputations made and tenures secured on the slimmest of discoveries — that intellectual property was guarded as jealously as gold bullion. She knew the feeling well; when the ossuary had been ripped from the main hall in Cairo, she had felt like a mother whose child had just been stolen from her. It was no surprise that Lucas had been a little standoffish, even rude.
His approval didn’t matter to her. Only his access to the ossuary did.
Delaney used his key ring to open the side door to the museum lobby, then turned off the internal alarm and led her through the galleries, faintly illuminated by night-lights, and back to the locked door of the conservation wing. As he fumbled with the keys — Was he as nervous as she was? — she could see a crack of light under the threshold and hear the faint scraping of metal on a hardwood floor. She hoped that Lucas hadn’t jumped the gun and started the work without them.