Stones of Fire

1

His movements slow and deliberate, the curator ran his fingertips over the small bronze coffer, lightly grazing the incised Hebrew letters. A lover’s caress.

Holding his breath, he opened the box.

‘Claves regni caelorum,’ he whispered, entranced by the relic nestled within the box. Like Eve gazing upon the forbidden fruit, he stared at the twelve polished gemstones anchored in an ancient gold setting.

The keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Dr Jonathan Padgham, chief curator at the Hopkins Museum of Near Eastern Art, reached into the coffer, carefully removing what had once been a gem-encrusted breastplate. Once. Long ago. More than three thousand years ago by his reckoning.

Although bits and pieces of the gold scapular still precariously clung to the setting, the relic was scarcely recognizable as a breastplate, the chains that originally secured the gem-studded shield to the wearer’s body having long since vanished. Only the stones, set in four rows of three, gave any indication as to the relic’s original rectangular shape, the breastplate measuring some five inches by four.

‘That’s some real bling-bling, huh?’

Annoyed by the disruption, Padgham glanced at the curly-haired woman engaged in placing a camera on a tripod. Not for the first time, he wondered what possessed her to pair black leather motorcycle boots with a long tartan skirt.

A cheeky grin on her face, Edie Miller stepped over to his desk, bending her head to peer at the relic. Since immigrating to ‘the land of the free’ he’d come to realize that American females were far more brazen than their English cousins. Ignoring her, Padgham arranged the breastplate upon a square piece of black velvet, readying it to be photographed.

‘Wow. There’s a diamond, an amethyst, and a sapphire.’ As she spoke, the Miller woman pointed to each stone she named. Padgham was tempted to snatch her hand, afraid she might actually touch the precious relic. A freelance photographer hired by the Hopkins to digitally archive the collection, she was not trained to handle rare artefacts.

‘And there’s an emerald! Which, by the by, happens to be my birthstone,’ she continued. ‘What do you think that is, about five carats?’

‘I have no idea,’ he said dismissively, gemology not his strong suit. Hers either, he suspected.

‘How old do you think it is?’

Barely glancing at the plaid-garbed magpie, he again replied, ‘I have no idea.’

‘I’m guessing really old.’

To be certain, the age of the breastplate was punctuated by a very large question mark. So, too, its provenance. Although he had an inkling.

Again, Padgham ran the tip of a manicured finger over the engraved symbols that adorned the bronze coffer in which the breastplate had been housed. He only recognized one word — — the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. The unspeakable four-letter name of God. It had been placed on the coffer as a talisman to ward off the curious, the covetous, the greedy who gobbled up ancient relics like sugar-coated sweeties.

How in God’s name did an ancient Hebrew relic end up in Iraq?

Although the museum director Eliot Hopkins had been very hush-hush, he had let slip that the relic originated in Iraq. Padgham had been entrusted by the old man with the initial evaluation of the bejewelled breastplate. He’d also been cautioned to keep mum. Padgham was no fool. Far from it. He knew the relic had been bought on the black market.

Risky business, the purchase of stolen relics. In recent years a curator at the renowned Getty had been brought to trial by Italian prosecutors for having knowingly purchased pinched artefacts. The black-market antiquities trade was a billion-dollar business, particularly with the unabated pilfering of Iraqi relics, Babylonian art popping up all over the place these days. Many in the museum world turned a blind eye, jaded enough to believe that they were preserving, not stealing, ancient culture. Padgham concurred. After all, had it not been for European art thieves, the world would have been deprived of such treasures as the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles.

‘There’s too much backlight falling on it. Do you mind if I adjust the window shades?’

Padgham drew his gaze away from the relic. ‘Hmm? No, no, of course not. This is your arena, as it were.’ He pasted a smile on his face, needing the woman’s cooperation. He’d been ordered not to show the relic to anyone on the museum staff. It was the reason he was conducting his preliminary evaluation on a Monday — the museum closed to the public, no staff on the premises. Of course, the photographer didn’t count, the woman a freelance contractor who didn’t know a breastplate from a bas-relief. Who would she tell? As far as he knew, aside from the two guards in the museum lobby, they were the only two bodies present.

A flash of light momentarily illuminated the dimmed office.

‘Looks good,’ the photographer remarked, reviewing the image on the camera display. She deftly pushed several buttons on the camera. ‘I’ll just snap a back-up copy.’ No sooner did a second flash go off than she gestured to the bronze coffer. ‘Do you want a shot of the metal box as well?’

‘Is Queen Anne dead?’ Then, catching himself, he added in a more congenial tone, ‘If you would be so kind.’

Padgham stood aside as the photographer repositioned the tripod. Contemplating the beautiful relic, he worriedly bit his lower lip. As curator of Babylonian antiquities, he’d been given custody of the breastplate because it had been found in the deserts of Iraq. The museum director assumed he’d be able to put flesh to bone, to discover the four Ws of provenance — who, where, when and why. To Padgham’s consternation, those answers eluded him. The breastplate was most definitely of Hebrew derivation and his knowledge of the ancient Israelites was sketchy at best. Thus, the reason for the digital photograph.

As fate would have it, an old Oxford chum, Cædmon Aisquith, was currently in Washington on a publicity junket for his newly released book Isis Revealed, one of those faux histories that purported to expose the arcane secrets of the long-buried past. Never one to gawk at the proverbial gift horse, upon reading the newspaper review Padgham immediately rang up Aisquith’s publishers, got the number of his hotel, and called him. Last he’d heard, old Aisquith had inherited some money, absconded to Paris and opened an antiquarian bookshop on the Left Bank. Drinking Beaujolais and banging French tarts, the man should have his head examined. Although they hadn’t set eyes on one another in nearly twenty years, Aisquith had agreed to meet him later that evening for drinks. Hoping to pique his interest — and in the process glean some kernel of information about the mysterious Hebrew relic — he intended to email Aisquith the digital photographs. A true Renaissance man with an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient history, Cædmon Aisquith would hopefully be able to shed some much-needed light. As with the freelance photographer, Padgham did not deem the secrecy stipulated by the museum director applicable to his Oxford chum.

‘All finished,’ the photographer announced. Popping open the digital camera, she removed a tiny rectangle of plastic and handed it to him.

He stared at the minuscule object. ‘And what am I supposed to do with this? I asked you to take a photograph.’

‘And I did just that. There’s your photograph. On the memory card.’ She stuffed the camera into her pocket, her outlandish garb topped by a khakicoloured waistcoat.

Cheeky cow, Padgham thought. Although only forty-two years of age, he often felt as though the modern world and all its technical sleights of hand were passing him by at a dizzying speed.

As she dismantled the tripod, Padgham repeated his question. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘You’re supposed to download it on your computer. Once you do that, you can print it, email it, doctor it up, whatever.’

There being no staff available to assist him, Padgham was forced to grovel. ‘I would be most appreciative if —’

Just as he hoped, she snatched the memory card out of his hand. Bending at the waist, she inserted it into the computer tower under his desk.

Biting back a pleased smile, he pointed to a notepad inscribed with the museum logo. ‘I would like to send the photographs, via email, to that address.’

‘Yes, sire. I live to serve.’

Padgham turned a deaf ear on her disgruntled mumblings. ‘You’re most kind, Miss Miller.’

‘You say that only because you don’t know me.’ She seated herself at his carved mahogany desk. ‘All right, let me get this straight. You want me to send the pics to one C.Aisquith at lycos.com?’ When he nodded, she said, ‘Probably best if we send the photos as JPEGs.’

‘Yes, well, I’ll leave it up to you.’

She quickly and deftly tapped away on the keyboard. Then, getting up from his executive-style chair, she said, ‘Okay, I want you to pull up your email account.’

‘I would be only too happy to oblige.’ Padgham seated himself at the desk. ‘What the bloody hell!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Are you blind, woman? The screen has gone blank.’ He pointed an accusing finger at the monitor.

‘Calm down. No need to have a conniption. It’s probably just a loose cable.’

‘Hmm…’ He peered under the desk then glanced at his Gieves and Hawkes hand-tailored trousers. The problem had but one solution. ‘Since you so easily diagnosed the problem, would you be a dear and…?’

‘You do know that this is not in my job description,’ Edie Miller griped as she scrambled to her knees. There being no room to pull the computer tower forward, she was forced to wedge herself under the desk in order to check the cables. Padgham glanced at the Waterford dish on the nearby console, thinking he might offer her a cellophane-wrapped sweet. Recompense for a job well done.

As the woman under the desk silently went about her business, Padgham picked up the ancient breastplate, returning it to the incised bronze coffer.

‘Ah, let there be light,’ he murmured a moment later, pleased that a spark of life now emanated from his computer, the monitor flickering the familiar Dell logo. Out of the corner of his eyes Padgham saw a third person enter the office. Surprised to see a man attired in grey overalls, a black balaclava pulled over his head, he imperiously demanded, ‘Who the devil are you?’

The man made no reply. Instead, he raised a gun and pointed it at Padgham’s head, his finger poised on the trigger.

Death almost instantaneous, Padgham experienced a sharp, piercing pain in his right eye socket. Then, like the flickering lights on his computer monitor, he saw an explosion of colour before the world around him turned a deep, impenetrable shade of black.