“He sends a legion up the Nile to look for the treasure of the land of Sheba and King Solomon’s Mines.”
“What legion are we talking about here?”
“The lost legion?” Holliday laughed. This was getting more Byzantine by the second. “They disappeared up by Hadrian’s Wall. They were wiped out.”
“That’s one theory,” said Rafi. “The other is that they suffered heavy losses and changed their name when they were sent to Africa under Mark Antony. They became the Eighteenth Legion
“Says what historical source?”
“Julian de la Roche-Guillaume, the Templar turned rich kids’ tutor,” responded Rafi. “While he was in Alexandria he found the legion’s records detailing their orders, equipment, stores, all kinds of things. The Imperial Romans were like Germans, meticulous about their records, but there’s no record anywhere of their return. They simply vanished up the Nile.”
“Looking for King Solomon’s Mines.”
“Apparently.”
“That’s quite a rabbit hole you’ve got there, Alice,” said Holliday. He dipped a spring roll in a small dish of soy sauce and took a bite. “What’s next, the Mad Hatter?”
“Better,” said Peggy, grinning. Outside a light breeze gently ruffled the leaves on the olive trees in the courtyard. In the distance they could hear the arthritic creaking of the old stone windmill that had once generated electricity for the neighborhood.
“Better?” Holliday said.
“Harald Sigurdsson,” said Rafi.
“A Viking? The one who became Harald Hardrada, Harald the Hard Man? This is starting to get silly, guys.”
“Harald Sigurdsson was, among other things, the head of the eastern emperor’s Varangian Guard in Constantinople. He also led the Varangians into battle in North Africa, Syria, Palestine and Sicily gathering booty. While he was in Alexandria raping and pillaging he heard rumors about the lost legion and sent one of his best men, Ragnar Skull Splitter, to lead a crew up the Nile looking for them.”
“When was this?”
“A.D. ten thirty-nine. About three hundred years before Roche-Guillaume.”
“So what happened to Ragnar Skull Splitter, or should I ask?”
“He disappeared, just like the lost legion.”
“So where is this going exactly?”
“Ragnar Skull Splitter took a scholar much like Roche-Guillaume with him to record the story of the journey. His name was Abdul al-Rahman, a high-ranking slave from Constantinople with a yen for travel and adventure. He was also useful as an interpreter. He also had his own artist to record what he saw, a court eunuch named Barakah. An eleventh-century version of Peg here.”
Peggy gave her husband a solid swat on the arm. “I ain’t no eunuch, sweet lips.”
“And they went looking for King Solomon’s Mines, right?” Holliday asked.
“Not only did they look for them; they found them. Ragnar died of blackwater fever on the journey home but Abdul al-Rahman survived and made it as far as Ethiopia. While Roche-Guillaume was at Lake Tana he found al- Rahman’s chronicle of the journey at an obscure island on the lake. He copied the parchments, which were buried with him.”
Holliday shrugged. “Who’s to say Roche-Guillaume didn’t make it all up, a pleasant fiction? A Homeric epic. Where’s the proof?”
Rafi got up from the table and went to the old Victorian buffet where the Shabbat candles burned. He took out an old, deeply carved wooden box and set it gently down in the center of the table. The carvings appeared to be Viking runes.
“Open it,” said Rafi.
Holliday lifted the simple lid of the dark wood box. Nestled inside was a piece of quartz about the size of a roughly heart-shaped golf ball. Threaded around one end of the stone was a thick, buttery vein of what appeared to be gold.
“That was in Roche-Guillaume’s tomb,” said Rafi. “If the thugs at the Central Revolutionary Investigation Department in Addis Ababa knew I’d smuggled it out they’d probably arrest me.”
“For a bit of gold in a quartz matrix?” Holliday said.
“It’s not quartz,” replied Rafi. “It’s a six-hundred-and-sixty-four-carat flawless diamond. VVSI, I think they call it. I asked a friend who knows about such things. According to him it’s the tenth-largest diamond in the world. Fair market value is about twenty million dollars. The historical value is incalculable.”
“And this supposedly came from King Solomon’s Mines?” Holliday said, staring at the immense stone.
“According to al-Rahman’s chronicle that Roche-Guillaume copied there’s a mountain of stones just like it. Tons.”
“Where exactly?”
“That’s the problem,” said Rafi. “As far as I can figure out the mines are located in what is now the Kukuanaland district of the Central African Republic.”
“Oh, dear,” said Holliday. “General Solomon Kolingba.”
“Kolingba the cannibal,” added Peggy, eating the last piece of lemon chicken. “The only African dictator with his own set of Ginsu knives for chopping up his enemies.”
2
Dr. Oliver Gash drove the black-and-yellow-striped Land Rover down the dusty dirt road from Bangui at seventy miles an hour, the air-conditioning going full blast and Little Richard screaming out “Rip It Up” on the eight-speaker Bose. Since crossing the border into what had once been known as the Kukuanaland district of the Central African Republic and which was now known as the Independent Democratic Republic of Kukuanaland, Dr. Gash hadn’t seen another vehicle on the road. Every village he drove through seemed deserted, every roadside stall shuttered and dark.
The young black man behind the wheel wasn’t surprised. In fact, the apparent emptiness made him smile. It was a demonstration of fear, and fear, as he well knew, was power. The bumblebee-striped Land Rover had the Kolingba royal crest on the doors, and news traveled fast in the new Kukuanaland about anything and anyone to do with General Solomon Bokassa Sesesse Kolingba.
Dr. Gash was the minister of the interior in the Independent Democratic Republic of Kukuanaland, as well as the young country’s minister of revenue and secretary of state and director of foreign affairs. Oliver Gash was not the name the man behind the wheel had been born with; nor was he a doctor of any kind. Gash had once been Olivier Hakizimana Gashabi of Rwanda and had left that country with his older sister, Eliane, during the genocide of 1994, traveling across the Democratic Republic of Congo to eventually settle in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.
Three years after their arrival in Bangui, Olivier’s sister had been chosen from an online catalog as a contract e-mail bride by an American named Arthur Andrew Hartman, who lived in Baltimore. Nineteen-year-old Eliane had agreed to the marriage only on the condition that Hartman formally adopt her eleven-year-old brother.
Hartman was in no position to refuse Eliane’s proposition. As an acne-scarred, introverted, sexually problematic, onetime Section 8 discharge from the United States Army for an unspecified “condition,” and an ex- postal worker now on psychiatric disability, Arthur Andrew Hartman had little or no opportunity for meaningful contact with members of the opposite sex and was far too paranoid about contracting a sexually transmitted disease to purchase relief from his lonely predicament.
Three years later Arthur Andrew Hartman was found with his pants around his ankles, his genitals mutilated
