The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

All that day, and now into the evening, Simone had been champing at the bit, waiting for the museum to close to the public so that she could join Professors Delaney and Athan in the conservation wing for the great unveiling.

There was just going to be one problem. Telling her father, who was sure to bridle at not being included.

She found him settled, as usual, in the darkest corner of the Yankee Doodle taproom in the basement of the Nassau Inn. The room took its name from the broad Norman Rockwell mural behind the bar, depicting a colonial soldier, feather in his cap, riding a scrawny pony through the streets. She didn’t know if her father actually preferred this quiet, candle-lit corner, not far from the hearth, or if the hotel was trying to keep him as much out of the sight of their lily-white, Anglo-Saxon guests as possible. Under his elbow rested a blue folder, weighted down by a copy of the Koran and a much depleted box of mentholated cough drops.

Simone slipped into the empty seat across the table and it was several seconds before he looked up from the book and registered her presence. “I was wondering where you’ve been.”

“I was wondering the same thing about you.”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about me,” he said with a sly grin. “I was in the chapel, having a delightful conversation with Professor Einstein.”

Simone did not know if he was joking.

“It’s true. He gave me these cough drops,” he said, as if offering incontrovertible proof of the encounter.

“What did you talk about?”

“The weather. Our work. The universe.”

Simone would love to know more about it, and in much greater detail, but time was short, and her father was pushing the bread basket toward her.

“Let’s get you some dinner,” he said.

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”

“Nonsense. You have to eat.”

“I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“There’s that cough, for one thing.”

He brushed it aside.

“Or that maybe you were feeling abandoned here?”

“Abandoned? Me? Never. As long as I have my work, and a place to do it in — the library here is particularly fine, by the way — I have everything I need.”

Since they had arrived, Simone had been occupied with nailing down her temporary sinecure at the university, and she’d felt guilty about leaving him to his own devices from morning ’til night. But how could she have forgotten who he was — a man who could lose himself in a single book, not to mention a world-class, open-stack library, for hours on end?

“And my work on the papyri is going exceedingly well,” he confided, leaning forward. “I’ve translated enough of them to believe they contain the revelations we’ve been hoping for.”

She felt herself holding her breath. “What revelations?”

“That my reasons for hunting the tomb all these years were right.” He lowered his voice further. “I have long suspected, as you know, that it contains a benevolent power, one that might be used in this present world as a force for good.”

“Now would certainly be a good time for it.”

“But there’s a danger — what if that force is coupled, inexplicably, with a malevolent one?”

Simone looked deep into his dark eyes, alight with the fervor of his theory. “What if it’s impossible to release one,” he murmured, “without freeing the other?”

A waitress in colonial garb set a plate of sautéed broccoli and cauliflower down in front of her vegetarian father, and asked Simone if she would like a menu.

“No, thanks, I’m not staying.” His words were still echoing in her skull.

Flicking open his napkin, her father said, “After what I’ve just told you, you’re going to leave? Impossible.”

“Possible.”

“We have so much to discuss.”

“We’ll have to do it later. I have an appointment.” Now it would be even harder than she’d foreseen to tell him the rest.

“At this hour?” her father said, spearing a stalk of broccoli. “Where, and with whom?”

“A certain saint.”

He stopped, fork poised above his plate, and gave her a long look. “Do not be cryptic with me.”

“Professor Athan has decided to open the ossuary tonight.”

He dropped the fork onto the plate, dabbed his napkin at his lips, and said, “And when were you planning to tell me about this? Obviously, there are things I need to prepare.”

This confrontation was precisely what she had hoped to avoid, and why she had been reluctant to notify him in the first place. “You don’t need to prepare anything. I’ll take care of it all.”

“We are going to the museum?” he said, not hearing a word of what she’d just said. “Whether or not my worst suspicions are correct, there are precautions that must be taken.”

“The project is being kept under the tightest security, and only personnel okayed by the OSS are allowed to be present,” Simone said, placing a hand on top of his. “It’s a miracle I was able to worm my way in. I’m afraid I will have to go there alone.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “absolutely not. I won’t allow it.”

It reminded her of the time he had refused to let her go off on a motorcycle trip with a boy she’d met at school (though she had gone, anyway). “I’ll make sure no harm comes to anyone, or to the ossuary, for that matter.”

“What do you mean by anyone? Who besides Athan?”

“Professor Delaney, from geophysics, is the only other person allowed.”

“And I am not,” he said with disgust. “Do any of these people have any idea of what might be inside it?”

Simone dropped her eyes to the flickering candle flame. “Nothing other than the usual skeletal remains.”

“I thought not.” He withdrew his hand from beneath hers. “Is that because you are afraid to tell them? Afraid of what they might think of you if you did?”

The answer was yes, but she did not say it aloud. She didn’t have to.

“Don’t you think they should know?”

“Why?” she blurted out. “First of all, they’d never believe a word of it. And chances are, none of it is true, anyway.”

“Yes, there is always that possibility.” What hung in the air, however, was the rest of that thought — that it just might be. “If only we’d had the opportunity to open it in Cairo,” her father added, slapping the edge of the table in frustration. “We could have gone about this properly.”

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.

Inside, she found that the door was nearly blocked by all the spindly easels and old crates that the army crew, or Lucas himself, had moved out of the way in order to clear a perimeter around the ossuary, which was now bathed in the glare of several spotlights mounted all around it. It looked like a magazine photo shoot. Lucas himself was standing on a cinder block, adjusting the lens on a movie camera fixed to a sturdy tripod. He lifted one hand to signal that he had seen them, but otherwise continued with what he was doing.

Delaney carried the Gladstone bag to a nearby worktable and unclasped its handles. An old, thin mattress, the kind used on dormitory cots, was tucked under the table.

Simone wasn’t sure where she should go or what she should do. She considered taking her coat off and draping it on one of the stools, as Delaney had just done, but there was something chilly, and discomfiting, about the room.

“Looks like this is going to be a Cecil B. DeMille production,” Delaney joked.

But Lucas was still so absorbed in the camera he made no reply.

Simone looked around. It was a big space, cluttered with wooden boxes, stacked canvases, and half-restored sculptures. The clerestory window, the one the bats had apparently flown through, had been securely closed after the incursion. Lucas had spread drop cloths around the base of the pedestal on which the ossuary rested.

Removing his good eye from the viewfinder on the camera, Lucas leaned back and surveyed the setup. He had still not looked directly at her.

“So, whose idea was the movie?” Delaney asked, removing from the bag what Simone now saw was a hacksaw, and laying it on the worktable.

“Colonel Macmillan’s.” Lucas wound a crank on the side of the Bell & Howell Eyemo assembly. “But it was standard procedure in the field, too.”

“Maybe for the Cultural Recovery Commission, it was — I hear you guys got whatever you wanted.” Turning to Simone, he said, “You knew, right, that Lucas here was one of the guys assigned to recover the artworks the Nazis had stolen?”

“I did.” Despite whatever personal problems they had, she would be forever grateful to him for rescuing the ossuary from the Nazi hoard.

Flicking a lever on the camera and positioning himself in front of one of the three lenses on the turret, Lucas announced his name, the date, the time and location of the filming, and, finally, the other dramatis personae.

“Professor Patrick Delaney, of the Princeton Mineralogy and Geophysics Department,” he said, “and… um…” He didn’t seem to know exactly how to complete the introduction.

“Simone Rashid, PhD Oxford, representing the Egyptian Ministry of Culture,” she said, putting him out of his misery by stepping into full view of the lens as she spoke. “Oh, and currently an interim professor attached to the Middle Eastern Studies Department here.”

Then, like an extra who had strayed onto the center of the stage, she dutifully took one big step back. Unless she was mistaken, Lucas had visibly blushed when she’d stood at his side.

“Yes, thanks for that,” Lucas mumbled, and finally gave her a glance, at once so bashful and sincere that it threw her into further confusion. Maybe he wasn’t the only one feeling some unacknowledged current passing between them, she thought. He flicked off the camera in order to preserve the remaining film in the canister.

“I see you’ve got a blowtorch there,” Delaney said, taking an inventory of the tools Lucas had laid out on the table. “I wouldn’t recommend it. If you try to use it to sever the chains, it’s going to scorch the alabaster for sure, and you’re going to get a very nasty chemical reaction.” Holding up his own hacksaw, he said, “Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”

Lucas acceded, and then asked Simone if she could run the movie camera while he helped with the removal of the chains.

“I’ve never done that before,” she confessed. The Egyptian ministry was lucky if it could procure a still camera.

“There’s nothing to it,” he said, guiding her up onto the cinder block. “You just direct the lens by looking through here — the focus is already set — and flick this lever forward to begin filming, and backward to stop. I’ve loaded extra stock, so we have a total running time of almost fifteen minutes.”

Simone took up her position, glad in a way to have something to do, and watched as Lucas, wearing heavy-duty work gloves, lifted the first chain away from the lid of the ossuary — it allowed for only an inch or two of leeway — and wedged a protective cloth underneath it.

“Start rolling,” he said, and as she put her eye to the viewfinder and pushed the lever forward, she felt the low hum of the spring-wound camera vibrating against her cheek.

Lucas held the chain taut as he watched Delaney, wearing his own gloves, place the blade of the hacksaw to the links. He could hardly believe that this time had come, that within a matter of minutes he would finally know what the ossuary contained. After only a half-dozen strokes, the rusty links gave way, dissolving into a gingery powder.

“Hope it all goes that smoothly,” Delaney said.

“Hear, hear,” Lucas said, noting that his pulse had begun to race. Curiosity was quickly overtaking his anxiety.

The next chain, however, did not yield as easily. It took some persistent sawing to remove it. For the last one, directly positioned over the diamond shape that he had yet to identify, Lucas said, “Let’s switch,” and took the saw into his own hands. This spot was too delicate to risk incurring any damage.

“Be my guest,” said Delaney, lifting the last links as far from the alabaster surface as the chain would allow. “This is your baby.”

Lucas touched the blade to the chain and pulled it back as if he were drawing the bow across a violin. Flakes of rust fell onto the soft rags wedged underneath. He pushed the blade forward again, and this time larger flakes fell, like ashes from an open fire. After several more strokes, the link broke, and the two ends of the chain slithered off of the sarcophagus like snakes racing back to their burrows. One of them coiled over Lucas’s shoe, and he involuntarily shuddered as he kicked it aside.

“Should I keep filming?” Simone said as the two men stood back to assess the next step.

“No, hold on for a second,” Lucas said, retrieving the thin mattress from under the worktable, then wedging it on the floor at the top end of the ossuary. “We’re going to slide the lid off lengthwise. That way, we can support it from both sides all the way.”

“Gotcha,” Delaney said. “Say when.”

Lucas took a deep breath, and got as firm a grip as he could on the smooth white stone. Even through his gloves he could feel how cold it was. After instructing Simone to start rolling again, he said, “On three,” and at the end of the count, he and Delaney gently pushed in the same direction. At first, the lid went nowhere, as though it were riveted in place, and Lucas wondered if it somehow had been. But there were no indications of that — no nails, no bore holes in the sides of the box — so he counted it off again and they both pushed harder. This time, there was a tiny grinding noise, as the accumulated grit of the centuries began to crumble under their exertions.

“At least we know that we can budge it,” Delaney said, brushing grains of sand from his gloves.

Lucas nodded, his gaze fixed on the capering creatures carved along the borders of the lid. For the first time — no doubt it was just the peculiar angle from which he was viewing them — he thought he detected a gleeful expression on one or two.

“Again?” Delaney said, bending slightly to put his shoulder into it.

“Again.”

Together, they pushed the lid farther along the length of the box, fully a foot or two, before they both had to take a breather. The bottom of the interior was now exposed, though even the glare from the surrounding lights somehow failed to penetrate it. Lucas didn’t want to look, anyway. He wanted to wait until the lid was entirely, and safely, removed, and then take in the contents all at once. He checked to see that Simone was following the action, then returned to the task.

The ponderous lid scraped along the rim of the sarcophagus until enough of it protruded over the top end that Lucas had to change positions. With Delaney pushing from the bottom, while he kept the slab balanced, they were finally able to tilt it on end, and from there lower it flat, with a resounding thump, against the mattress. A cloud of dust rose from the old mattress, and the ossuary itself, as if exhaling, released a gust of acrid air, a smell like burnt matches and desert sand. Lucas barely had time to turn his head away and catch a breath of less tainted air when he heard Simone murmur, from behind the camera, “Oh my God.”

Straightening, he turned to the open box. Delaney was standing mute, staring into it. Lucas’s eye jumped from the jumble of bones to the crooked staff, and from that to the ancient iron crucifix — or was it silver, dulled by the centuries? — all lying helter-skelter inside. He had certainly expected to find skeletal human remains, but he had not expected — nor, apparently, had Simone — to find so many bones, including two separate skulls, only one of which was plainly human. The other one was more perplexing. Smaller, and with a sloping brow and unusually close eye sockets, it might have been the skull of an ape, or even a hideously deformed child.

“Are you getting this?” Lucas asked, and Simone, still manning the camera, said, “Yes,” in a hushed tone.

Lucas leaned forward, and as if under some strange compulsion, lifted the odd skull from the heap of other bones and artifacts. Like Hamlet staring into the empty orbs of poor Yorick, he held it up for closer scrutiny.

“Something’s going wrong with the camera,” Simone said. “Everything’s getting blurry.”

Before Lucas could even think to come to her aid, he felt an even stranger sensation — a feeling that the yellowed skull was somehow looking back at him. A shiver descended his spine, and a breeze stirred the hair on his head. He looked at Delaney — his hair was blowing, too, and Simone, he saw, was struggling to keep her balance on the cinder block. A wind had sprung up in the room, out of nowhere, and was rustling the tarps around the base of the pedestal, making the paintings quiver on the creaking easels.

Delaney said, “Put it back,” and Simone, nearly falling, left the camera running, its lens pivoting on the tripod as she stepped down to the floor, hugging herself as though she were freezing.

Lucas dropped the skull back among the other bones, but the turbulence only grew stronger, as if something unseen was gathering speed and racing around the room in search of escape. The new window groaned in its frame, the glass splintered but held, and though it might only have been the wind, Lucas thought he heard a low moan from behind the crates piled around the door.

The spotlights flickered and dimmed, and before they came back on again, there was a banging sound as the door was flung open so violently that the hinges squeaked and the wood cracked.

The wind followed, sucked out into the dark galleries, leaving an eerie emptiness in the room. The camera had swiveled toward the door, and it clicked and whirred as the last of the film was depleted. Simone’s teeth were chattering, and Lucas instinctively went to her and wrapped her in a bear hug — a hug she did not resist.

“Did that just happen?” Delaney said, slumping against a worktable and passing his hand across his eyes in disbelief.

“Yes,” Simone whispered, so low it was as if she were speaking only to herself.

Lucas said nothing, though he, too, had been gravely affected. Inside him now, there was a melancholy ache, a sorrow more profound than any he had ever known. He sensed that he had served as a conduit, however fleetingly, for something suddenly free and wild, something as old as time, and unutterably bad.