14
The room was almost entirely circular, as though set in a tower, and lined with books from floor to ceiling. It was perhaps forty feet in diameter, and dominated by an old banker’s desk lit by a green-shaded lamp. Nearby was a more modern source of illumination, stainless steel and hinged, with a light source that could be adjusted to a pinpoint. Beside it lay a magnifying glass and assorted tools: tiny blades, callipers, picks, and brushes. Reference volumes were piled one on top of another, their pages marked with lengths of colored ribbon. Photographs and drawings spilled from files. The floor itself was a maze of books and papers set in piles that seemed forever on the verge of collapsing, yet did not, a labyrinth of arcane knowledge through which only one man knew the true path.
The bookshelves, some of them seeming to bend slightly at the center beneath the weight of their volumes, had been pressed into service for other purposes as well. In front of the books, some leather-bound, some new, there were statues, ancient and pitted, and fragments of pottery, mostly Etruscan, although, curiously, no undamaged items; Iron Age tools, and Bronze Age jewelry; and, littered among the other relics like curious bugs, dozens of Egyptian scarabs.
There was not a speck of dust to be found on anything in the room, and there were no windows to look out upon the old Massachusetts village below. The only light came from the lamps, and the walls absorbed all noise. Despite some modern appliances, among them a small laptop computer discreetly set on a side table, there was a timelessness about this place, a sense that, were one to open the single oak door that led from the study to elsewhere, one would be confronted with darkness and stars above and below, as though the room were suspended in space.
At the great desk sat Herod, a fragment of a clay tablet before him. Pressed to one eye was a jeweler’s glass, through which Herod was examining a cuneiform symbol etched into the slab. It was the Sumerians who had first created and used the cuneiform writing system, which was soon adopted by neighboring tribes, most particularly the Akkadians, Semitic speakers who dwelt to the north of the Sumerians. With the ascendancy of the Akkadian dynasty in 2300 BC, Sumerian went into decline, eventually becoming a dead language used only for literary purposes, while Akkadian continued to flourish for two thousand years, eventually evolving into Babylonian and Assyrian.
Aside from the damage to the tablet over time, the difficulty facing Herod in determining the precise meaning of the logogram that he was examining lay in the difference between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Sumerian is agglutinative, which means that phonetically unchanging words and particles are joined together to form phrases. Akkadian, meanwhile, is inflectional, so that a basic root can be modified to create words with different, if related, meanings by adding vowels, suffixes, and prefixes. Thus Sumerian logographic signs, if used in Akkadian, would not convey the same exact meaning, while the same sign could, depending upon context, mean different words, a linguistic trait known as polyvalency. To avoid confusion, Akkadian used some signs for their phonetic values instead of their meanings in order to reproduce correct inflections. Akkadian also inherited homophony from Sumerian, the capacity of different signs to represent the same sound. Combined with a script that had between seven hundred and eight hundred signs, it meant that Akkadian was incredibly complex to translate. Clearly, the tablet was making reference to a god of the netherworld, but which god?
Herod loved such challenges. He was an extraordinary man. Largely self-educated, he had been fascinated by ancient things since childhood, with a preference for dead civilizations and near-forgotten languages. For many years, he had dabbled without purpose in such matters, a gifted amateur, until death changed him.
His death.
The computer beeped softly to Herod’s right. Herod did not like to keep the laptop on his work desk. It seemed to him wrong to mix the ancient and the modern in this way, even if the computer made some of his tasks immeasurably easier than they might once have been. Herod still liked to work with paper and pen, with books and manuscripts. Whatever he needed to know was contained in one of the many volumes in this room, or stored somewhere in his mind, of which the library in which he toiled was a physical representation.
Under ordinary circumstances, Herod would not have abandoned such a delicate task to answer an email, but his system was set up to alert him to messages from a number of specific contacts, for access to Herod was carefully regulated. The message that had just arrived came from a most trusted source, and had been sent to his priority box. Herod removed the eyeglass and tapped the Perspex lightly with the tip of a finger, like a player forced to leave the chessboard at a crucial moment, as if to say, ‘We are not done here. Eventually, you will yield to me.’ He stood and made his way carefully between the towers of paper and books until he reached the computer.
The message opened to reveal a series of high-resolution images depicting a cylindrical seal, its caps inset with precious stones. The seal had been laid upon a piece of black felt, then moved slightly for each photograph so that every part of it was revealed. Particular details – the jewels, a perfectly rendered carving of a king upon a throne – had been photographed in closeup.
Herod felt his heart beat faster. He drew closer to the screen, squinting at what he saw, then printed off all of the images and took them back to his desk, where he examined them again through a magnifying glass. When he was done, he made the call. The woman answered almost immediately, as he knew she would, her voice cracked and old, a fitting instrument for the withered old hag that she was. Nevertheless, she had been in the antique business for a long time, and had never yet led Herod astray. Their natures were also similar, although her malevolence was merely a dull echo of Herod’s own capacities.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have it. It was brought to me, and I was asked to offer an opinion on its value.’
‘Who brought it to you?’
‘A Mexican. He calls himself Raul, but his real name is Antonio Rojas. He works closely with a man named, ironically, Jimmy Jewel, who is based in Portland, Maine. Rojas told me that there were other seals; a number, regrettably, have been destroyed.’
‘Destroyed?’
‘Taken apart for their gold and gemstones. The fragments, too, he showed to me. It was all that I could do not to cry.’
Under ordinary circumstances, Herod would also have mourned the annihilation of such a beautiful object, but there were other seals, and such treasures were not unique. What he wished to find was immeasurably more valuable.
‘And you believe that this is linked to what I seek?’
‘According to the catalog, it was stored in Locker 5. Other, less valuable seals from Locker 5 were found at the scene of the warehouse killings, along with the lock from the lead storage box.’
‘Where did this Raul get the seals?’ said Herod.
‘He wouldn’t say, but he is not a collector. He is a criminal, a drug dealer. I’ve facilitated him in the past with the sale of certain items, which is why he came to me. If he really has other seals, then my guess is that he stole them, or took them in payment of a debt. Either way, he has no idea of their true value.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘That I would make inquiries and get back to him. He gave me two days. Otherwise, he threatened to cut out the jewels on the remaining seals and sell them.’
Despite his priorities, Herod hissed in disapproval, and he found himself already despising the man who had uttered the threat. So much the better. It would make what he would have to do next even easier.
‘You’ve done very well,’ he said. ‘You’ll be amply rewarded.’
‘Thank you. Do you want me to find out more about Raul?’
‘Naturally, but be discreet.’
Herod hung up the phone. His earlier tiredness began to fade. This was important. He had been searching for so long, and now it seemed that he might be closing in on that which he sought: myth given form.
He felt an old man’s urge to visit the bathroom, so he left his library, breaking its bubble of solitude, and walked through the living room into his bedroom. He always used the master bath, never the main bathroom, because it was easier to clean. He stood over the toilet, his eyes closed, feeling the welcome release. Such a small pleasure, yet not one to be underestimated. His body was betraying him in so many ways that he felt a sense of elation at the minor triumph of an organ that functioned properly.
As the sound of the last trickle faded, Herod opened his eyes and regarded himself in the mirrored wall of the bathroom. The wound on his mouth tormented him. The surgeons wanted to try again to remove the necrotic tissue, and he would have no choice but to acquiesce. Yet they had failed before, just as the chemotherapy had not arrested the metastasizing of his cells. He was being eaten alive, inside and out. A lesser man would have succumbed by now, would have chosen to end it all, but Herod had a purpose. He had been promised a reward: an end to his suffering, and a visitation of greater suffering on others in turn. That promise had been made to him when he died, and upon his return to this life he had commenced his great search, and his collection had begun to grow.
He sighed, and buttoned himself up. No zippers for him. He was a man of older tastes. One of the buttons was giving him trouble, so he looked down as he struggled to slip it through its hole.
When he glanced back at the mirror, he had no eyes.