The Eighth Veil (20 page)
Gamaliel’s head began to ache.
It had been a day Gamaliel hoped he’d never have to repeat. If he had his wish, he would never allow himself to be tangled up in this sort of thing again—ever. Murder and political intrigue, jealousy and deceit, betrayal…he smiled at the irony. If he were not so engrossed in this business, he would be reading the scriptures. And the history of Israel’s kings and heroes were mostly about intrigue, jealousy, deceit, and betrayal. It is the continuing human condition, endless conflict between good and evil, between the Lord and the forces that oppose him. Is it any wonder he seemed so angry so much of the time. Still, as he reflected on his day, he came close to regretting that he’d not accepted Pilate’s offer to throw Menahem to the dogs. With his only suspect, however poor, off his list, where could he turn now? The probable removal of a guilty Menahem left him with no other choice but to start all over again. He left the palace after charging Barak to tell the steward he wished to interview the captain of the guard and Menahem the next day. He made his way home.
He trudged the width of the quarter and turned in to his house in time for his evening meal. He could only toy with his supper. He’d had it served early. He’d even skipped his prayers and
mikvah
. This business was slowly eroding away his routines, the things that defined him, things he’d forever held sacrosanct. He felt as if some new Gamaliel was replacing the old one, pushing him aside and introducing someone he did not recognize, someone who did not fit comfortably in his skin.
He knew he needed to find a quiet place away from this sewer of royal plotting and scheming and sort the whole thing out, starting at the beginning, starting with a dead girl lying on the bottom of the bath, her throat cut, raped, and cast off like the carcass of a sacrificed lamb. Who was she? He secluded himself in his private room where he ordinarily pursued his studies apart from his students. He contemplated the physician’s remark that he had begun to think like a Greek. It was not a comfortable thought, but on reflection he believed it might be correct and further, that it might also be necessary if he was to ever sort through this basket of entrails.
He sat at a small wooden table and lit his reading lamp. The scent of olive oil mixed with just a pinch of incense filled the room. The incense had been his late wife’s idea. He had objected at first—thought it unseemly. He’d heard of the houses in the city that were said to offer travelers the delights of the flesh. They were known for mixing incense in their lamp oil. But in the end, he became used to it and had to admit however reluctantly, the ambience it created relaxed him. Tonight he desperately needed relaxing. When he was a young man and newly married, he recalled, he had a more immediate method of finding relaxation and release. But he was older now and more importantly, his wife was dead these two years. So now it had to be the incense or nothing. Of course he could always remarry. He would think about that some other time. He had grown sons to consider. He poured a cup of new wine and set it close at hand. The lamp flickered and brightened as all four wicks of his marvelous reading lamp flared and settled into steady burning.
One by one he placed each of the items he had collected over the last few days on the table in front of him. First the headdress which he smoothed flat. In spite of its overnight soaking in the bath, it still retained the faint scent of nard and cinnamon. If he were skilled in the use of hair oils, he could have positively identified the scrap of cloth as belonging to the girl. Next he spread out the bit of clothing he’d at first referred to as a loin cloth even though it was shaped and sewn. He had to admit he knew little or nothing about the garments women wore beneath their robes, nor did he wish to. Where would the mystery be then? Next to the rumpled bit of linen he placed the coins he’d recovered, carefully lining them up in a neat row their obverse side up. They glittered dully in the lamp light, the faces of emperors and kings stared off into the dark in dull bas relief. Next to them he placed the pendants, the replica and the original that now glittered faintly in the lamp light. Agon had done a marvel with the false one. He dropped the thong next to them which he also rearranged so as to juxtapose its cut ends. At the far end of the table he placed Menahem’s knife. In a second row away from him on the table, he put the box and its seal next to the girl’s letters.
Somewhere mixed in this pitiful collection of odds and ends, information, and guesswork he hoped to uncover both motive and killer. He closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep. To sleep a dreamless sleep and erase the awful images, blood, the ragged gash across the poor girl’s throat. Alas, not now. As much as he detested the Prefect and the task he’d been set, he owed justice to this poor anonymous girl. She’d been brought to the court for a reason and serving clearly wasn’t it. So what was?
Not on the table, but etched in his mind, were the facts of the girl’s death. Alexandra, or Cappo, had been raped, held underwater and either drowned and then had her throat cut, or drowned as a result of having her throat cut. He would probably never know the truth of that. All this done, it seemed, by someone who used his “dirty hand” to do it. If he was going to rape her, why kill her as well? To prevent her from identifying her assailant? Probably, but…If the rape was not the primary purpose of his attack, it had to be something else. What else was there? The pendent. He picked up the gold original and stared at it.
“It must be you,” he muttered, “but if so why hadn’t he taken it? Ah, unless you slipped from his fingers at the same moment Barak entered the bath on his rounds.”
His view of the items on the table blurred and swam before him. They beckoned to him and seemed to say. “Look at me, no look at me. I am the answer to the question you have not asked.” He rubbed his eyes to bring them back into focus. He thought of the physician’s notion of veils and absently counted the items on the table. Seven? More than seven. His dancer, he thought irreverently, would be a bit more heavily clad than the princess. He shook his head to lose both the thought and the image it evoked. He needed to act, to do something.
If he could reconstruct the crime, at least in his mind, if he could arrange all the items in the right order perhaps something would emerge, a hint, a peek at the way of things. There had to be a chronology—first this happened and then that. In his mind’s eye he pictured the bath and the girl. Torches barely lighting the space, steam rising from the water, and debris from the revelries scattered about. Coins in the water, carelessly discarded clothing, wine and food and those suggestive murals. What possessed that child to go there? Was she one of the revelers playing with the others but who stayed behind for some reason? Of the little he’d learned about the girl, it seemed unlikely she would be one of them, much less to have lingered. But she did go to the bath and once there was savagely despoiled and murdered. Why? Because someone persuaded her to. What sort of news or person could entice this young woman to leave the safety of her bed in the middle of the night and go to the king’s bath?
Perhaps it was not so much a who, but a what?
What
lured to her death? He closed his eyes and tried to remember everything he could about the girl. What was he missing?
A letter!
Of course. She went because she believed there was a new letter. The night of her murder someone must have brought the promise of good news, a reversal of fortunes, perhaps another letter. It would not fail to bring her out.
If one ignored the pendant, the thing that set the girl apart from the servants and others who shared her station were the letters. Except for the privileged few, most women could not read or write and those who could, did not do so with regularity or facility. Yet Barak said he’d seen her weep over one letter which he took to be the most recent. To read and to weep! It obviously contained bad news. As she had undoubtedly been receiving the letters in secret, a request to meet discreetly and late at night in just such an out of the way place as the bath, would not have seemed unusual to her. Even if it had, the thought of a new missive would quickly dispel any hesitation she might have felt. It had to have been the promise of news that lured her to her death. The beginning of the end, he thought, will be found somewhere in the letters. Then all he would need to do is determine who gave her the message that sent her to the bath and her death.
Gamaliel scooped up the stack of letters and spread them across the table, moving the other items out of the way. He’d read them before with superficial success. Now, he would read them again, this time slowly. He, of all people in the country should be able to tease the truth from them. He’d spent his adult years studying Torah, inspecting documents, hundreds of them from around the empire. Some written in Greek, some in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and some in languages so old and arcane he could barely fathom their source much less their content. He’d been trained to discriminate between various versions of the same text. He could scan a scroll or sheet of papyrus, leaf through a bound volume and tell by the way the characters were formed, by the word usage and idioms it contained, sometimes even by the ink, the writing surface, or any of a dozen reference points, when and often by whom a particular piece had been crafted. He felt sure these letters, although not separated so much in time, still had meanings and information he could and would dig out.
They were all in Greek. They were idiomatic but not in the vernacular Greek spoken in Jerusalem. These letters had been composed elsewhere by a different Greek speaker. The language was not literary, that is to say not Homeric, but neither was it street patois. Obviously, the writer had had the advantage of a formal education of some sort. Also, there were Latin words and expressions scattered throughout the text. Gamaliel could read Latin, though not with proficiency, and he would never admit that he did. In a world ruled by arrogant Latin speakers, he found it to his advantage to feign ignorance of their tongue. Let them come to his level and speak Greek like everyone else.
All the observations regarding language and style applied strictly to the earlier letters. The letter he considered to have been the last—the one wept over—he felt sure had been composed by a different author. Where the older ones seemed wordy even erudite and included references to many topics, the last seemed terse, painfully blunt, and had a finality about it, as if to say there would be no more missives sent. But the syntax seemed as vague and the idioms as difficult to interpret as the earlier ones. He read.
Dear one,
the girl obviously.
The one of whom you love…
did it translate
,
the one you love or the one who loves you?…
has gone to his relatives…
visiting, travelling?…relatives, male…his brothers, fathers? He’s joined his fathers…he died. Someone close to the girl, someone she had been corresponding with probably, someone,
whom you love,
has died. Could it also read killed? Yes, possibly. Whether it meant killed or died depended on the placement in the sentence, the context, the case.
Your relatives
plural, male and alive…brothers, cousins?
Your
meaning the loved one’s…brothers? Her uncles? Yes, definitely uncles. Regrets and so on.
Who in the empire had been assassinated recently or died suddenly and perhaps mysteriously at the hands of his brother or close male relatives? He sat back and regretted that he considered the intrigues of the powerful and ambitious of insufficient interest for him to follow. Did he dare ask the Prefect? Of all the people currently in the city, the one person who most likely could answer that question was Pontius Pilate. Not just yet, maybe later. The Prefect could be intimidating to say the least and he’d had more than enough contact with the man lately. He’d try the physician first. A man not quite as well informed as the Prefect, but more so than Gamaliel, and a far safer interview to conduct than one with Pilate.
He slid the last letter aside and then read the others in order. They were not in code but it was patently apparent that the writer did not want anyone who might by chance come across the letters and read them to grasp the contents. They were filled with circumlocutions and vague references to places and events that the girl must know and share with the writer, but only someone equally familiar with the two of them, or who had also shared the experiences, would know what they referred to. Very clever.
You will recall the pergola where I yoked you with the riddle
…Did what? One yokes an ox or a team of oxen. A riddle? A mystery…something covert or hidden? He draped something mysterious…no, hidden, no, a thing which hid something else, around her neck. It had to be the pendant. The writer wanted her to remember the place where he, must be a man, placed the pendant around her neck. Why remember the place? It must have some significance, perhaps it symbolized something greater.
The same reference that he’d read in the last letter followed, a mention of the relatives. The cousins, brothers, uncles, definitely masculine, so not women. The next bit read,
Remember your mother’s mother
. Odd way to refer to a grandmother, if that is what it meant. Or if it came from a pagan household it could refer to something altogether different, to Hera or Gaia, or any of a pantheon of goddesses. Gamaliel shuddered. Idolatry always made him anxious. He knew the Lord had no patience with idols; they were proscribed by the Commandments. And as he was the Rabban, the rabbis’ rabbi, he would have even less patience with him should he be caught spending too much time in their contemplation.