He checked his watch. A few minutes after 3:00.
A limousine appeared and its driver dashed from his seat to open a rear door.
“Can we drop you somewhere?” the reverend asked as his driver helped Mrs. Groom into the car.
Lang shook his head. “Thanks, but no. Remember, no press conferences, no words to anyone regarding this case.”
“I understand” were the last words the Reverend Bishop Groom spoke before he also disappeared into the interior of the limo.
It was one of those Atlanta winter days that promised, often falsely, an early spring. Knowing that the next week could as easily produce one of the region’s ice storms, Lang had decided to walk the approximate mile from his office to the federal building. He could return with a detour of only a few blocks if he went easterly along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive past the county courthouse to the church. He reached for his cell phone before deciding the walk would do him good whether or not Francis was in or out tending his flock.
As had become habit in the last few days, he stopped, this time to put his briefcase down and rest a shoe on a parked car’s bumper while he pretended to tie it. The gesture gave him an opportunity to check his surroundings. As far as he could tell, everyone he could see was either coming from or going to the building behind him. None of them looked Asian. Of course, there were any number of places on the viaduct where an unseen observer would have a view of the “railroad gulch,” as the area was locally if less than poetically known.
The buildings in this part of town were predominantly occupied by fast-food franchises, discount electronics shops and down-at-the-heels clothing stores. There was a welcome dearth of the beggars, bums and self-appointed “guides” that populated the greener pastures of the hotel and office districts. By and large, Lang had the sidewalks to himself.
He passed the Fulton County Administrative Building, a modern tower that had been designed to hold an oasis of flowing water and stately palm trees in its lobby. The twenty-foot trees had been installed at great expense, only to die both because no one had bothered to consult the county arborist as to the proper care and planting of the root system, and leakage of the pond around which they had been planted. Additionally, the clock in the modernistic tower displayed a perpetual 3:45 and inclement weather outside the building meant an archipelago of buckets inside to catch the offerings of a leaky roof. After the finger-pointing and accusations died down, the county’s elected leaders admitted the cost of construction of the building had so far exceeded budget that there remained no funds to fix the problems other than removing the dead tress and filling in the pool.
Lang crossed Pryor Street, walked along the northern side of the county-court complex and waited for the light to change so he might cross Central Avenue. The church was on the far corner. By now, Lang was surrounded by briefcase-toting lawyers, jurors discharged for the day, uniformed deputies and such other personnel as had business at the courthouse. He saw one or two Asian-looking men and women, none of whom paid him any attention.
Across the street, Lang passed the main entrance, opting for a side door into the complex that he knew led to the church’s offices. He walked down a short hallway plastered with children’s crayon drawings and a bulletin board heavy with notes and messages Lang suspected no one read.
At the end of the corridor a young black woman, her hair in cornrows, smiled up at him from the screen of her computer’s monitor. “Yes?”
“Father Francis, is he in?”
She nodded, reaching for the phone. “Who shall I say is here?”
“His favorite heretic.”
Her eyes narrowed, thinking she was being ridiculed. The door behind her opened and Father Francis stared out in obvious surprise.
“Praise be to heaven! The apostate has come to salvation!”
“More likely for a cup of coffee,” Lang said.
The priest nodded to the young woman. “Tawanna, would you be so kind…? One black, one sweetener only.”
Lang settled into one of two wooden chairs facing the priest’s desk. “Any particular reason you have such uncomfortable furniture?”
Francis sat behind a desk cluttered with books and papers, the sort of thing Lang would have expected to see had he been calling on a professor of English at one of the local colleges. “You’d have to ask whoever at the diocese provided them. My guess is that the furniture was perceived as a bargain.” He picked up a printed bulletin, scanned it and returned it to the pile already in front of him. “What can I do for you today? I’m betting it has nothing to do with your spiritual side… if you have one.”
There was a gentle tap on the door just as it opened. Tawanna pushed it wide with a hip, a steaming mug in each hand. She set them down on what little empty space the desktop had and left without speaking.
“Thanks!” Francis called afer her, handing one mug to Lang. “Now, you were saying…?”
Lang tested the brew before taking a full swallow. “The other day at lunch you made a remark about Saint Mark’s bones not being what was taken from his tomb in Venice. If not his, whose?”
Francis leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and making a steeple of his fingers. “You want the short answer or the long one?”
“I get a choice?”
Francis untwined his fingers to pick up his coffee. “In the mid-first century, Saint Mark served as bishop of Alexandria, then the second-largest city in the Roman Empire. He was so efficient at converting the Egyptians to Christianity, the priests of the old gods stirred up a mob that dragged him out and killed him. They intended to burn his body, thereby depriving him of the afterlife in which they believed. Legend has it a miraculous storm intervened, dousing the flames that had only partially consumed the saint’s remains. Somehow the Christians retrieved the body and buried it in their church by the sea. Subsequently the Church of Saint Mark the Evangelist was erected on the site.
“By 828 Egypt was under the rule of the Turks, Muslims. In the city of Alexandria, Christian churches were being looted, torn down for building material or converted to mosques. Fearing for the relics of their city’s patron saint, two Venetian traders stole the bones, hid them under a layer of pork to discourage Turkish customs officials from examining the basket in which they were hidden and brought them to Venice.”
Lang put his mug down on the corner of the desk. “I know. The event is memorialized in mosaics in the basilica in Venice. But so far, you haven’t explained why the bones there aren’t Saint Mark’s.”
“Gutta cavat lapidem, consumitur anulus usu.”
Lang shifted his weight in an unsuccessful attempt to make the chair more comfortable. “I’m aware a drop hollows out stone and a ring wears away by use. The Roman proverb counsels patience, not endurance. If a church in Alexandria was built over the partially incinerated remains of Saint Mark and those bones were subsequently stolen and moved to Venice, why would they not still be there?”
Francis held up a finger. “Perhaps because they were never there in the first place. By the time the Venetians took whatever it was they stole, the church had long been destroyed. They claimed to have found the relics amid ruins of what they supposed had been the church, since the rubble was located by what had been known variously as Saint Mark’s Gate or the Pepper Gate, the entrance into the ancient part of the city from what is now Cairo. A number of ancient travelers had described the church as being located just inside this gate as late as the mid- seventh century.”
“Are you saying the relics could be anybody’s?”
A shake of the head as Francis leaned forward over the desk again, coffee forgotten. “Not at all. There was someone else of note buried in Alexandria over two centuries before Saint Mark ever set foot in Egypt.”
Lang stared at his friend. “Alexander the Great?”
“Indeed. His mummified body was hijacked on its way to Macedonia, taken to Memphis, then to Alexandria. Possession of the remains legitimized the Ptolemy dynasty’s rule of Egypt until the Romans came along.”
“But how…?”
“Alexander was viewed as a god by the Egyptians, the son of Ammon. For that matter, the Greeks also deified him as a son of Zeus, and much later, he even appeared in chapter eighteen of the Koran as Zulqarnain, the two-horned lord.”
“Two horned?”
“He was depicted on coins and some statues sprouting a pair of ram’s horns.”
