places like Gaza, rooting out Islamic terrorists. Let’s just say that ringing
doorbells wasn’t an option.”
Pocketing the tools, he stood and opened the door.
The pair slipped inside the unlit office and Amit closed the door quietly
behind them.
“If you wanted to get me alone in a dark room,” Jules said, “you could’ve
just asked.”
“Save that thought,” he replied. He felt along the wall for the light
switch.
A small click preceded a sterile wash of halogen light.
Immediately, Amit went for the light boxes. That’s where yesterday
morning, he’d watched Jozsef carefully cut away the jar’s wax seal and
remove the lid to reveal three loosely rolled papyri. Before Yosi pulled
out the scrolls, he’d tried to temper Amit’s excitement by explaining that
most old vellums were too frail to open—something about collagen in the
sheepskin being exposed to moisture, then drying. “Now we may have to
send them out for X-ray analysis,” Yosi had said. “I’ve read about a new lab
in Oxfordshire too . . . developed a light source ten billion times stronger
than the sun that can decipher writings on scrolls too brittle to open. Can
you believe this? Incredible!”
But when Yosi had pulled them out and laid them on the light box,
ever so delicately testing their spring with a gloved index finger, he’d been
pleased. Further prodding and a “quick look-see” under intense magnification gave him the confidence to attempt to open one himself. The first
unfurled with little effort, as did the second and the third. To Yosi’s surprise, the condition of the
limed and frame-stretched. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” he said. Then
he’d sandwiched the vellums on the light box beneath a protective glass
cover.
But all that meant nothing at this moment, because Amit was staring
at the blank top of the light box. The one beside it was vacant too—no jar.
Not even the wax Yosi had scooped into a glass dish had been left behind.
Amit felt like he’d just been punched in the throat. “Damn.” “Still so sure he didn’t skip town?”
This time, Amit was silent. He was already mourning the loss of his
life’s greatest discovery—and the blunt dagger had just been pushed deeper.
Not to mention that he’d lost the best evidence implicating the guy whose
face was a pix file on his cell phone. So it wasn’t the opportune time to
entertain any notion that his great friend was Judas in disguise. Suddenly the door opened.
Startled, both Jules and Amit spun to it. It stayed empty for a moment.
Then there was the sound of squeaking rubber on the tiles.
Jules tensely waited as a young man, maybe twenty, rolled through the door in a wheelchair—frail looking, pale as snow. Beneath his disk-shaped prayer cap, he had tightly cropped black hair with earlocks spinning down
along his protruding ears.
“Oh, Professor Mizrachi,” the young man said in a timid voice. “Sorry
to disturb you.”
“Joshua,” Amit said, his neck muscles slackening. He was the docent
from the main gallery, son of the museum’s most exalted benefactor—the
controversial Rabbi Aaron Cohen. Amit clearly recalled Joshua walking
these same galleries only two years ago. But then he’d manifested some
type of neurodegenerative disease that crippled him in mere months. A
terrible thing for such a young man.
