The Genesis Secret

14

It was just getting dark by the time they climbed into Christine’s Land Rover. Rush hour. Within a few hundred metres the car had come to complete stop. Stuck in gridlock.

Christine leaned back, and sighed. She turned the radio on, and then off. Then looked at Rob. ’Tell me more about Robert Luttrell.’

‘Such as?’

‘Job. Life. You know…’

‘It’s not that interesting.’

‘Try me.’

He gave her a brief résumé of the last decade. The way he and Sally had rushed into marriage and parenthood; the discovery she was having an affair; the ensuing and inevitable divorce.

Christine listened, keenly. ‘Are you still angry about it?’

‘No. It was me, as well. I mean-it was partly my fault. I was always away. And she got lonely…And I still admire her, kind of.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Sally,’ he said. ‘She’s training to be a lawyer. That takes guts. As well as brains. To change your career in your thirties. I admire that. So it’s not like I hate her or anything…’ He shrugged. ‘We just…diverged. And married too young.’

Christine nodded, then asked about his American family. He sketched in his Scots-Irish background, the emigration to Utah in the 1880s. The Mormonism.

The Land Rover at last moved forward. Rob looked across at her. ‘And you?’

The traffic was really thinning out. She floored the pedal, accelerated. ‘Jewish French.’

Rob had guessed this by the name. Meyer.

‘Half my family died in the Holocaust. But half didn’t. French Jews did OK, in the war, comparatively.’

‘And your mum and dad?’

Christine explained that her mother was an academic in Paris, her dad a piano tuner. He had died fifteen years back. ‘In fact,’ she added, ‘I’m not sure he did much piano tuning even when he was alive. He just sat around the flat in Paris. Arguing.’

‘Sounds like my dad. Except my dad was a bastard, too.’

Christine glanced over at him. The sky behind her, framed by the car window, was purple and sapphire. A spectacular desert twilight. They were well outside Sanliurfa now. ‘You said your father was a Mormon?’

‘He is.’

‘I went to Salt Lake City once.’

‘Yeah?’

‘When I was in Mexico, working at Teotihuacan, I took a holiday in the States.’

Rob laughed. ‘In Salt Lake City?’

‘ Utah.’ She smiled. ‘You know. Canyonlands. Arches Park.’

‘Ah.’ He nodded. ‘That makes more sense.’

‘Marvellous scenery. Anyway we had to fly through SLC…’

‘The most boring big town in America.’

An army truck overtook the Land Rover, with Turkish troops hanging casually out the back, shadowy in the dusk. One of them waved and grinned when he saw Christine, but she ignored him. ‘It wasn’t New York, but I quite liked it.’

Rob thought about Utah, and Salt Lake City. His only memories of SLC were of dreary Sundays, going to the big Mormon cathedral. The Tabernacle.

‘It’s funny,’ Christine added. ‘People laugh at the Mormons. But you know what?’

‘What?’

‘ Salt Lake City is the only big town in America where I have felt perfectly safe. You can walk down the street at 5 a.m. and no one’s going to mug you. Mormons don’t mug people. I like that.’

‘But they eat terrible food…and wear polyester slacks.’

‘Yes, yes. And some towns in Utah you can’t even buy coffee. The drink of the devil.’ Christine quietly smiled. The desert air was warm through the open window of the Land Rover. ‘But I’m serious. Mormons are nice. Friendly. Their religion makes them that way. Why do atheists sneer at people of faith, when faith makes you nicer?’

‘You’re a believer, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I guessed.’

They laughed.

Rob leaned back, scanning the horizon. They were passing a concrete shack he’d seen before. Plastered with posters of Turkish politicians.

‘Isn’t this near the turning?’

‘Yes. Just up ahead.’

The car slowed as they neared their junction. Rob was thinking about Christine’s belief: Roman Catholicism, she had said. He was still confused by this. He was still confused by a lot of things about Christine Meyer: like her love for Sanliurfa, despite the local, very patriarchal attitude to women.

The Land Rover swerved off the asphalt. Now they were rattling along the rubbled track, in real darkness. The headlights picked out stray bushes, and bare rocks. Maybe a gazelle, skittering into the gloom. A tiny village, illuminated by a few straggly lights, twinkled on the side of a hill. Rob could just make out the spear of a minaret in the shrouding twilight. The moon was just rising.

Rob asked Christine directly: about her attitude to Islam. She explained that she admired aspects of it. Especially the muezzin.

‘Really?’ Rob said. ‘All that wailing? I sometimes find it intrusive. I mean, I don’t hate it, but still…sometimes…’

‘I think it’s moving. The cry of the soul, imploring God. You should listen more closely!’

They took the second turning past a final, silent Kurdish village. A few more kilometres, and they would see the shallow hills of Gobekli, silhouetted in the moonlight. The Land Rover rumbled as Christine took the ultimate curve. Rob didn’t know what to expect at the dig, following the ‘accident’. Police cars? Barriers? Nothing?

There was indeed a new barrier, set across the track. It said Police. And Keep Out. In Turkish, and English. Rob got out of the car and pushed the blue barrier aside. Christine drove on and parked.

The site was deserted. Rob felt serious relief. The only indication that the dig was now the scene of a suspicious death was a new tarpaulin, erected over the trench where Franz had been pushed-that and a sense of emptiness in the tented area. Lots of things had been taken away. The big table had been moved, or dismantled. This season’s dig was definitely over.

Rob glanced at the stones. He’d wondered before what it would be like, standing amongst them at night. Now, quite unexpectedly, here he was. They were shadowy in their enclosures. The moon had fully risen and was casting white darkness across the scene. Rob had an odd desire to go down into the enclosures. Touch the megaliths. Rest his cheek against the coolness of the ancient stones. Run his fingers along the carvings. He’d wanted to do that, in fact, the very first time he’d seen them.

Christine walked up behind him. ‘Everything OK?’

‘Yes!’

‘Come on then. Let’s be quick. This place…rather scares me at night.’

Rob noticed that she was averting her gaze from the trench. The trench where Franz had been killed. He sensed how difficult this visit must be for her.

They walked swiftly over the rise. To the left was a blue plastic cabin: Franz’s personal office. The door was freshly padlocked.

Christine sighed. ‘Damn.’

Rob thought for a second. Then he jogged back to the Land Rover, opened the car’s back door, and fumbled in the darkness. He returned with a tyre jack. The desert breeze was warm and the moonlight glinted on the padlock. He shoved the jack in the lock, twisted, and the padlock snapped open.

Inside, the cabin was small and pretty empty. Christine shone a torch around. A spare set of spectacles sat on an empty shelf. Some textbooks were haphazardly scattered on a desktop thick with dust. The police had taken almost everything.

Christine knelt down, then sighed again. ‘They took the bloody locker.’

‘Really?’

‘It was hidden down here. By the little fridge. It’s gone.’

Rob felt a keen disappointment. ‘So that’s that?’ It was a wasted journey.

Christine looked deeply sad. ‘Come on’, she said. ’Let’s go before someone sees us. We’ve already broken into a murder scene.’

Rob picked up the tyre jack. Again, as he walked to the car, past the shadowy pits, he felt that strange urge to go and touch the stones. To lie down next to them.

Christine opened the driver’s door of the Land Rover. The interior light came on. Simultaneously, Rob opened the back doors to stow the jack. And immediately he saw it: the light was glinting on a shiny little notebook. Nestling on the back seat; black but expensive looking. He picked it up. Opening the cover, he saw the name Franz Breitner-in small, neat handwriting.

Rob paced around the car and leaned in through the passenger door to show Christine his find.

‘Jesus!’ she cried. ‘That’s it! That’s Franz’s notebook! That’s what I was after. That’s where he wrote…everything.’

Rob handed it over. Her face intent, Christine flicked through the pages, muttering: ‘He wrote it all in here. I’d see him doing it. Secretly. This was his big secret. Well done!’

Rob climbed into the passenger seat. ‘But what’s it doing in your car?’ As soon as he asked the question he felt a little stupid. The answer was obvious. It must have fallen out of Franz’s pocket when Christine was driving him to hospital. Either that, or Franz knew he was dying, as he lay bleeding on the backseat, and took it out of his pocket and left it there. Deliberately. Knowing that Christine would find it.

Rob shook his head. He was turning into a conspiracy theorist. He had to get a grip. Reaching left, he slammed his door, making the car rattle.

‘Whoops,’ said Christine.

‘Sorry.’

‘Something fell.’

‘What?’

‘When you slammed the car door. Something fell out of the notebook.’

Christine was scrabbling on the floor of the foot well, running her hands this way and that beneath the pedals. Then she sat back, holding something in her fingers.

It was a dry stalk of grass. Rob stared at it. ‘Why on earth would Franz preserve that?’

But Christine was gazing at the grass. Intently.