He grew thoughtful. “If you’ve suffered through some kind of trauma, they say you should talk about it, but that only seems to make it worse.”
“Thank God you survived the invasion. Samuel told me he was in Jordan, in Amman. Did you meet up with him there?”
“What do you mean? He was with us all the time.”
“You’re telling me he was in Iraq?”
“Didn’t you know? He came the week before the invasion because he’d learned the engraving was at risk.”
I felt a momentary surge of anger. Samuel had lied to me. Why would he do that? To keep me from worrying? “That’s why he brought the engraving to New York, then? To keep it safe?”
“Yes.”
“The minute he took it off museum premises he’d effectively stolen it. I can’t believe my brother would do something like that.”
This struck the wrong chord and Tomas bristled. “Many people did this. Antiquities are being returned now. Things people took to protect them from the looters.”
“These days all Iraqi antiquities are suspect; dealers won’t touch them. If I get my hands on the engraving, it’s going right back to the museum.”
By the look on his face I could see he believed my remark extended to him. “It’s easy for you to judge. You can’t imagine what it was like during the looting. I came close to being killed.”
So far his story sounded credible. “No criticism intended. It must have been pure chaos.”
He gave me a dark look. “It was intentional.”
“That sounds like a conspiracy theory.”
He waved his hand back and forth as if clearing away cigarette smoke. “Explain then, out of all the government buildings, why one of the very few protected buildings was the Ministry of the Interior. It housed Saddam Hussein’s secret service documents. They said the looting was impossible to stop because of Republican Guard snipers at the museum, but it carried on for two full days after they fled.”
“It generated a lot of bad publicity for us though.”
“Have you ever heard of that shocking treatment? It’s used for the mentally ill.”
I was disconcerted by this and couldn’t imagine what his question was leading to. “You mean electroconvulsive therapy?”
“Yes, that. The war planners wanted no reminders of the past. Their idea was to create a new society with no history, like a blank slate.”
Again I had the impression of a tightly wound coil ready to spring loose at the slightest pressure. I decided to cool the conversation down. I’d gain nothing by alienating the guy. “Samuel was in Iraq during the bombing and everything, then?”
“I was quite worried because of his age, but he held up surprisingly well.” Tomas paused as if unsure how much to reveal. “It was our only option, you know. You’ve heard of the treasures of Nimrud? The tombs of the three great Assyrian queens?”
“You mean the gold headdresses and necklaces?”
“Our country’s crown jewels,” Tomas said. “Only we had no Tower of London to keep them in. We were afraid they’d been stolen too, but they were eventually found in an underground vault in the Central Bank. A long time ago it had been flooded with half a million gallons of sewage water. That prevented any theft. The Baghdad batteries are missing, though, another terrible loss. Our people discovered electricity eighteen hundred years before you did. Did you ever see them?”
I shook my head.
“They were tall terracotta jars with copper rolls connected to an iron rod. When an acid like vinegar was added they produced an electric current. What a travesty that they’ve been taken.”
“A lot was saved though, I understand.”
“Thanks only to the museum staff who hid thousands of objects beforehand. They’re national heroes, those people.”
Our server interrupted to ask whether we wanted to order food. Tomas and I both declined, and I took the opportunity to switch the conversation back to the missing relic. “What does the engraving look like?”
“It’s a large tablet, oblong, two feet by fourteen inches. The words on it are in Akkadian, cuneiform chiseled into the stone. Only a few people knew about the engraving, or so we thought. Samuel, of course, me, and Hanna Jaffrey, an intern from the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s one of the problems.”
“What is?”
“Jaffrey. After we closed our camp at Nineveh she left for the town of Tell Afar near the archaeological site Tell al-Rimah. She had a boyfriend, another U of Pennsylvania intern, there. We were told she returned to America before the outbreak of the war, but I haven’t been able to contact her since. She’s simply vanished. I can’t find out if she’s really back here or still over there.”
“Surely she’d have left before war broke out?”
“Some on the archaeological team decided to remain and try to protect the sites. She may have been one of them.”
“She was at Nineveh, then, when you found the engraving?”
“Yes, last December. We were working at Kuyunjik mound.” He hesitated, in mid-sentence. “That’s—”
“I know where it is.”
It suddenly struck me that part of his stiffness had to do with nervousness about meeting me. We were circling each other like two male dogs, neither ready to trust the other.
“Nineveh is one of the legendary lost cities of Assyria,” he continued. “More than a hundred years after its discovery, there’s still an enormous amount to excavate. You’ve been on digs with Samuel, I assume.”
“Of course.”
“I envy you that, being so young and traveling to foreign lands. Touching the history, not just studying it in school. You were lucky. Your memories of Nineveh are probably hazy after all this time. You’ll recall there are two mounds, Kuyunjik, the principal site, and Nebi Yunus, the old armory. Excavations at Nebi Yunus presented a lot of difficulty because houses have been built on some sections.”
“A shrine to the prophet Jonah was also built there, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” Tomas replied, “another reason access to the site is limited. The shrine is sacred to Islam. But Samuel got permission to take another look at the old workings on Kuyunjik. The Antiquities Board agreed because some of the mud-brick and stone walls had become badly eroded. We had foreign financing, and part of our mission was to protect the ruins.
“For me there’s always a sense of awe when I first catch sight of the Nineveh mound. You’ll remember it’s on a flat, barren plain, and the hill rises suddenly out of nowhere. The eye can tell immediately it’s not a natural phenomenon. It has an almost spiritual presence, even now, after millennia have gone by.”
I let my mind slip back to the accounts I’d read about Nineveh, in its time the largest city in the world. Sennacherib’s magnificent palace, with massive stone statues guarding the doorways and decorative limestone panels depicting each step of the palace construction. Waterfalls, carp ponds, and eighteen canals adorned the parks where elephants, camels, and monkeys wandered free.
“What’s the condition of the excavation now?” I asked Tomas.
His thin lips turned down into something approaching a grimace. “Very poor, I’m afraid. Dirt piles and holes, mostly. It was extensively looted in the nineties. When we set up operations last year we concentrated on terrain near the Shamash and Halzi gates, areas both Layard and Hormuzd Rassam investigated.”
I knew that in Layard’s time, in the mid-1800s, archaeological excavations differed little from wholesale plunder. Early explorers focused on the flashy stuff and cut whole sections out of palace reliefs, taking what appealed to them most or what they could easily remove to ship home. Not until the early twentieth century when
