“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
“Will Rogers,” I identified the quote. Another game.
Ryan’s hand went to the back of my neck.
“Not much doing on the Sabbath.”
Ryan’s lips brushed my ear.
“Day of rest,” I agreed.
“Little we can detect right now.”
“Mm,” I said. I think.
“But I have another excellent question,” Ryan whispered.
I had an excellent answer.
Yes!
* * *
In the Toronto airport I’d noticed a book on the tao of sex, health, and longevity. I hadn’t purchased it, but at the current rate, I was guessing I’d live to be 180. The deep breathing alone must have bought me a decade and a half.
Following breakfast and an argument concerning my driving solo to Beit Hanina, Ryan headed to police headquarters and I drove solo to Beit Hanina.
Jake was in better spirits than when I’d left him.
“Got something you’re going to love,” he said, flapping a paper above his head.
“Beard’s recipe for grouse pie.”
Jake dropped his hand. “Your abrasions look better.”
“Thanks.”
“You have a facial or some kind of treatment?”
“Moisturizer.” I cocked my chin at the paper. “What do you have?”
“A memo from Haas to Yadin containing notes on the Cave 2001 bones.” Jake leaned close and squinted. “Just moisturizer?”
I squinted back. “Positively Radiant.”
“No treatment?”
Not one I was going to discuss.
“Let me see the memo.” I held out a hand.
Jake yielded the paper. The notes were handwritten in Hebrew.
“How long have you had this?”
“A couple of years.”
I shot Jake a look.
“It came mixed in with materials I requested on these first-century synagogue ruins I’m digging. Probably because there’s a first-century synagogue site on Masada. The thing popped into my mind while I was eating breakfast. I vaguely remembered skimming some memo from Haas. It had nothing to do with the Talpiot site, so I set it aside. I dug back through my files, and there it was. I’d never really read it until this morning.”
“Does Haas mention an isolated articulated skeleton?”
“No. In fact it’s clear from his memo he never saw that skeleton.” A mile-wide smile. “But he mentions pig bones.”
“Pig bones?”
Nod.
“What does he say?”
Jake translated as he read: “‘This has nothing to do with the riddle of the pig tallith.’”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but he refers to a pig tallith ‘riddle’ or ‘problem’ twice.”
“What would pig bones be doing at Masada? And what does that have to do with Cave 2001?”
Jake ignored my questions. “Another thing. Yadin estimated there were more than twenty cave skeletons, but Haas catalogs only two hundred and twenty individual bones. He places them into two categories: those that are clear, and those that are not so clear with regard to age.”
He translated again from the memo.
“In the clear category, he lists one hundred and four old, thirty-three mature, twenty-four juvenile, and seven infant.” Jake looked up. “He says six of the bones belonged to ladies.”
There are 206 bones in the adult human skeleton. I did some quick math.
“Haas cataloged two hundred and twenty bones. That would mean ninety-six percent of the assemblage was missing.”
I watched Jake chew dead skin on the ball of his thumb.
“Do you have a copy of the photo in Yadin’s book?”
Jake went to his files and returned with a three-by-five black-and-white print.
“Five skulls,” I said.
“That’s another inconsistency,” Jake said. “Tsafrir wrote in his field diary there were ten to fifteen skeletons in the cave, not twenty-some, and not five.”
I wasn’t really listening. Something in the photo had caught my attention.
Something familiar.
Something wrong.
“May I take a closer look?”
Jake led me to the back room. I took a seat at the dissecting scope, clicked on the light, and brought the center skull into focus.
“I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
I increased magnification, shifted to the photo’s upper left corner, and slowly moved across the print.
At some point Jake said something. I agreed.
At another point I noticed Jake was no longer with me.
With each grainy detail, my apprehension grew. The same apprehension I’d felt upon spotting Max’s ill-fitting tooth.
Had no one noticed? Had the experts been wrong?
Was I wrong?
I began again at the upper left corner.
Twenty minutes later, I sat back.
I wasn’t wrong.
32
JAKE WAS IN THE KITCHEN, KNOCKING BACK aspirin.
“These bodies weren’t just dumped in the cave.” I flicked Yadin’s print. “They were buried. Laid out in graves.”
“No way!”
I placed the photo on the counter. “Notice the hands and feet.”
“The bones are articulated,” Jake said. “They’re lying in anatomical position.”
“Indicating at least some of these were primary burials.”
“No one’s ever interpreted the site that way. Why’s everything else so helter-skelter?”
“Check out the long bones. There.” With a pen, I indicated a small puncture. “And there.” I indicated another.
“Tooth marks?”
“You bet they are.” I tapped several bones and some long, jagged fragments. “These were splintered to extract the marrow. And look at this.” I moved my pen to a hole in the base of one of the skulls. “Some critter tried to munch that brain.”
“What are you saying?”
“This wasn’t a body dump. This was a small cemetery disturbed by animals. Roman soldiers didn’t just throw dead bodies into the cave after the siege. People took time to dig graves and place these bodies into the ground. Animals later dug them up.”
“If the cave was used as a cemetery, then why the cooking pots and lamps and household debris?”
“The site may have been inhabited at one time, later used for burial. Or maybe people lived in an adjacent cave and used 2001 for burial and refuse disposal. Hell, I don’t know. You’re the archaeologist. But the presence of a cemetery suggests that the Roman-soldiers-dumping-bodies interpretation of the remains is wrong.”
Jake still sounded skeptical. “Hyena and jackal predation has been a problem here for centuries. In antiquity, both Jewish and Christian graves in the northern Negev were covered with slabs to prevent animals from digging them up. Modern Bedouins still use stones.”
“Looking at this photograph, I think there were two or three single inhumations, and maybe a common grave of five or six individuals,” I said. “The disturbances probably took place shortly after the burials. That’s why everything looks so chaotic.”
“Hyenas are known to drag remains back to their dens.” Less skeptical. “That would account for the large number of missing bones.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay. The cave contained graves. So what? We still don’t know whose.”
“No,” I agreed. “Haas’s memo mentions pig bones. Wouldn’t their presence suggest the burials weren’t Jewish?”
Jake shrugged a bony shoulder. “Haas talks about a pig tallith riddle, whatever that means, but it’s unclear where this pig and its prayer shawl were found. Pig bones in the cave might suggest that the bodies there were those of Roman soldiers. That interpretation has its supporters. Or they could suggest that the bones were those of Byzantine m
onks. Monks had a small colony on Masada in the fifth and sixth centuries.”
“According to Haas, the cave remains included six women and a six-month fetus. That doesn’t sound like Roman soldiers to me,” I said. “Or monks.”
“And remember, fabric found with the bones yielded dates of forty to 115 C.E. That’s way too early for the monks.”
Jake refocused on the photo.
“Your take on this as a disturbed cemetery makes a lot of sense, Tempe. Remember the palace skeletons?”
I did.
“Yadin’s book gives the impression that he found three separate individuals, a young man, a woman, and a male child. He concluded, very dramatically, I might add, that the palace skeletons were those of the last defenders of Masada.”
“That’s inaccurate?” I asked.
“It’s quite a stretch. Not long ago I was allowed to examine archival evidence pertaining to the northern palace loci, including all diaries and photos. I’d expected to see three distinct skeletons. Not so. The bones were scattered and very fragmentary. Wait a minute.”
Jake laid down the photo and took up the Haas memo.
“I thought so. Haas also talks about the palace skeletons. He describes both males as adults, one about twenty-two, the other about forty years of age.”
“Not the kid Yadin described.”
“Nope. And, as I recall, one male was represented only by legs and feet.”
I started to speak. Jake cut me off.
“And another thing. Yadin’s field diary referred to animal dung at the palace locus.”
“Hyenas or jackals might have dragged three partial bodies there from elsewhere.”
“Quite a different picture from the brave little family taking its noble last stand.”
I suddenly realized what had been bothering me about the palace skeletons.
“Think about this, Jake. After its capture, the Romans inhabited Masada for thirty-eight years. Would they have left corpses lying around in one of Herod’s luxurious palaces?”
“The palaces may have fallen into disrepair during the zealot occupation. But you’re right. No way.”
“Yadin wanted desperately for the palace skeletons to be a Jewish rebel family. He took a few liberties in interpreting those bones, then heralded the discovery to the press. So why the wariness concerning the cave skeletons?”
“Maybe Yadin was aware of pig bones from the get-go,” Jake said. “Maybe the pig bones made him uneasy about the identity of the cave people. Maybe he suspected they might not be Jewish. Maybe he thought they were Roman soldiers. Or some outsider group living on Masada during the occupation, but separate from the main zealot group.”
“Maybe Yadin was aware of more than that,” I said, thinking of Max. “Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Yadin, or one of his staff, figured out exactly who was buried in that cave.”
Jake guessed my thought. “The single articulated skeleton.”
“That skeleton was never sent to Haas with the rest of the bones.”
“It was spirited out of Israel and sent to Paris.”
“Where it was buried in the collections at the Musée de l’Homme, and discovered by Yossi Lerner a decade later.”
“After happening upon the skeleton, Lerner happened upon Donovan Joyce’s book, and was so convinced of the skeleton’s explosive potential, he filched it.”
“And now that skeleton’s been filched again. Does Haas mention a complete skeleton anywhere in his memo?”
Jake shook his head.
“Do you think his reference to pig bones is significant?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did Haas mean by the ‘riddle of the pig tallith’?”
“I don’t know.”
More questions without answers.
And still the big one.
Who the hell was Max?
* * *
Ryan picked me up at eleven in Friedman’s Tempo. Again thanking me for the return of his rental car, Jake dragged off to bed.
Ryan and I headed back to the American Colony.
“His spirits have improved,” Ryan said. “But he’s still kind of dopey.”
“It’s been less than forty-eight hours. Give him time.”
“Fact is, he was kind of dopey be—”
“Noted.”
I told Ryan about Haas’s memo, and its reference to a pig tallith riddle. I also told him it was clear from Haas’s skeletal inventory he’d never seen Max.
I shared with Ryan my belief that the bodies had been buried, not dumped in the cave, and that the graves had later been disturbed by animals.
He asked what it all meant. Other than throwing doubt on traditional interpretations of Masada, I didn’t have an answer.
“Did you get your phone records?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ryan patted his breast pocket.
“Does a phone dump always take so long?”
“Gotta get warrants. Once warrants are issued, Bell Canada moves at the pace of sludge. I asked for incoming and outgoing back through November, and told them to hold the lists until they’d ID’d every call.”
“Meaning?”
“Ferris’s home and office. Kaplan’s shop and flat.”
“What about mobiles?”
“Fortunately, we’re not dealing with the cell phone set.”
“That simplifies things.”
“Considerably.”
“And?”
“I just glanced at the fax. Since this place is in Sabbath lockdown, I thought we might divide and conquer this afternoon.”
“You want to go over it together?”
“What do you think?”
How bad could it be?
Ninety minutes later I knew.
In one month the average person places and receives enough calls to fill two to four eight-by-ten sheets. With very small print. We were looking at two businesses and two residences, for a period of four and a half months. You do the math.
How to proceed? After some debate we’d settled the issue scientifically. Heads: by chronology. Tails: by subscriber.
The coin opted for the time-line approach.
We started with November. I took Ferris’s home and Les Imports Ashkenazim, Ryan took Kaplan’s flat, and le centre d’animaux Kaplan. In the first hour we learned the following.
Hersh Kaplan wasn’t the most popular guy in town. The sole person to ring his flat in November was Mike Hinson, his parole officer. Ditto for dialing out.
At le centre d’animaux Kaplan most callers were pet, pet-food, or pet-product suppliers, or people from the neighborhood, presumably customers.
At the Ferris home, calls went back and forth between Dora, the brothers, a butcher, a kosher grocer, a temple. No surprises.
Out in Mirabel, calls were made to and received from suppliers, shops, and temples throughout eastern Canada. Several calls were placed to Israel. Courtney Purviance phoned the warehouse, or was phoned at home. Miriam checked in, but less frequently. Avram rarely called his condo in Côte-des-Neiges.
Hour three revealed that December’s pattern deviated little from that of November. Late in the month, several calls were made from the Ferris home to a local travel agency. The Renaissance Boca Raton Hotel was also contacted. The Renaissance was also dialed twice from the warehouse.
At three, I sat back, a low-level headache seething in my temples.
Beside me, Ryan laid down his marker and rubbed his eyes.
“Break for lunch?”
I nodded.
We trooped downstairs to the restaurant. In an hour we were back at my room desk. I again took Ferris’s records. Ryan resumed with Kaplan’s.
A half hour later I spotted something.
“That’s odd.”
Ryan looked up.
“On January fourth, Ferris called l’Abbaye Sainte-Marie-des-Neiges.”
“The monastery?”
I slid the sheet sideways. Ryan glanced at it.
“They t
alked for fourteen minutes.” He turned to me. “Did Morissonneau mention contact with Ferris?”
I shook my head. “Not a word.”
“Good eye, soldier.” Ryan highlighted the line with yellow marker.
Ten minutes. Fifteen. A half hour.
“Bingo.” I indicated a call. “On January seventh, Ferris called Kaplan.”
Ryan switched from the pet shop record to Kaplan’s home phone.
“Twenty-two minutes. Ferris asking Kaplan to black-market Max?”
“The call was made three days after Ferris talked with Morissonneau.”
“Three days after Ferris talked to someone at the monastery.”
“True.” I hadn’t thought of that. “But the January fourth call lasted almost a quarter of an hour. Ferris must have been talking with Morissonneau.”
Ryan raised his I-am-quoting-a-quote index finger. “Assumption is the mother of screw-up.”
“You made that up,” I said.
“Angelo Donghia.”
“And he is . . .?”
“It’s on the Internet. Simpson’s Quotations. Google it.”
I made a note to do just that.
“The Ferris autopsy was February sixteenth,” Ryan said. “When he gave you the photo, did Kaplan say how long he’d had it?”
“No.”
Back to the records. Several lines down I spotted a vaguely familiar number preceded by an Israeli country code. I got up and checked my agenda.
“On January eighth Ferris called someone at the IAA.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. It’s the main switchboard number.”
Ryan sat back. “Any idea why he’d do that?”
“Maybe he was offering to give the Masada skeleton back.”
“Or sell it back.”
“Maybe he was looking for documentation.”
“Why would he want that?”
“To reassure himself of the skeleton’s authenticity.”
“Or to goose its value.”
“Authentication would do that.”
“When you first made contact, did Blotnik mention knowing about the bones?”
I shook my head.
Ryan made a note.
Another half hour passed.
The fax was fuzzy, the numbers and letters barely legible. My neck ached. My eyes burned. Edgy, I got up and paced the room. I told myself it was time to quit. But I rarely listen to my own advice. Returning to the desk, I plowed on, hearing each breath in cadence to the pounding in my head.