Selected Detective
STORAGE BOX

A secure storage box was available to Khalifa when he arrived at the Bank of Iskandaria, located on an indoor table on the lower floor of the bank steps. He was shown by the assistant manager, a middle-aged woman with red lips and a silk veil, who brought him some documents, unlocked the box lid and left again, tell him that if he needs something he is outside.

Khalifa waited until the sound of the door being completely shut, her fingers tapping on the table, the windowless space seemed to be pressing so much around her. Then, with a deep breath, as if he was swimming inside an icy watering pond, he advanced forward, opened the box and looked at its contents.

Wallet, that's the first thing he saw. A cheap plastic women's wallet is on top of a thick file. He lifted the wallet and opened it, already knowing instinctively, even before he checked the contents, that it belonged to Hannah Schlegel. There were also a few pounds of Egyptian money and Israeli shekels; a laminated green identity card; and pulling out of the side pocket, two small passport-sized, black-and-white photographs, the edges chipped away over time. He pulled the two together and placed them side by side on the table. One is a family picture, a man, a woman and two little children Hannah and Isaac Schlegel with their parents, I think all four are standing at the door of a big house, smiling and waving to the camera. The other one showed the same children, older now, sitting behind a wooden carriage, laughing, their legs swinging from the tail of the board, arms both coiled around each other's shoulders.

Khalifa only dealt with Schlegel as an old woman, whose bloodied corpse lay on the floor at Karnak. In a certain way his childhood pictures were so beautiful, innocent, completely oblivious to the horrors awaiting him that Khalifa was outraged beyond anything he had found in this investigation. He stared at their photo for a long time, stunned by the thought of how it was with his own daughter, with her long black hair and thin legs; then, with *******, he inserted the picture and wallet to one side and turned his attention to the file with hard paper.

Whatever he hoped for and in the last few days all the crazy ideas have crossed his head about whether Hoth's mysterious weapon the contents of the file prove anything anticlimactic. interesting and of course tempting.

However, it is not something of dramatic disclosure that has corroborated itself.photos and documents, and, that's what he found when he removed the tape that bound the file and opened it up a pile of material that, if examined more closely, became something that had nothing to do with guns and terrorism, but more on archaeology and history. There are traces, maps, photocopies of pages of books he never heard of (Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum: massoth Schel Rabbi Benjamin), photos of everything from excavation sites and church interiors to grand triumphal arches with embellishments in reliefs depicting throngs of gilded men carrying huge seven-branched lights (Titus' Arch in Rome, according to the notes on the back of the picture). However, nothing, not a single object that in many ways impresses a kind of weaponry, something that can be used, as Gratz has said, “to help destroy the Jewish nation.” He continued researching the collection, marveling, digesting things, and spending time on other things: tracing ancient inscriptions in Greek, Latin and Coptic; enlarged photo contains a handwritten Latin sentence (“Credo id Castelombrium unde venerit relatum esse et ibi sepultum esse ne quis inventire posset”); the shielded plastic bag contains an old yellowed sheet of parchment with six lines of script made from randomly selected letters and with a signature underneath it in the form of the initial GR.

He really did not know what all this meant, although the more he looked at the material the more he had a feeling that its constituent elements might not be as random as he first assumed, that instead they are in fact related, part of a single research project. What the project was, he could not even guess; and, despite his admiration for all things historical, he did not try to guess. What was important to him was that the more he took out all the contents of the file he was more and more convinced that Hoth's great story about the possession of some kind of secret weapon, he said, the monstrous great power that could be directed against the Jewish nation was in fact a mere great mouth. The pride of a lonely, frightened and paranoid man who is desperate in persuading and convincing those around him, and perhaps himself as well, that he is someone who must still be reckoned with.

He began to open his courtyard, at first quickly as if shuffling a deck of cards, then more slowly when, though unwanted, he began to be drawn into the progress of the excavation. In each photo the trench looks a little wider and a little deeper. About three meters, a type of box begins to open itself gold, when it is guessed from the metallic radiance on its surface that looks like part of a branch or curved arm. The same arm appeared on his side, then another, and then more and more boxes, which seemed to have a second smaller box on it, were on it, it was just that now it appeared they were not boxes at all but rather a multi-story row of pedestal elaborates from which from the center a thick rod was projected in the direction of the engraved arms. Inch by inch this important object is lifted off the ground, each stage of its true appearance caught in the film until at last, in the final photograph, it is taken, the object had been completely lifted from the ground, then lifted from the trench and laid on a tarp in front of the stone window, where the curved lines of the stone window were seen to surround and cover it like a picture frame.

Khalifa looked at the last picture for almost a minute, her cigarette burned unnoticed between her fingers, and her eyes narrowed. Then, as he advanced forward, he reached into the pile of paper he had seen, pulling out a photo of the triumphal arch with a decoration depicting a seven-branched lamp. He held the two photos together, comparing the subject, the lights in the decoration and the lights from the excavation. Both identical.

The engrossed meeting in the Cairo synagogue re-emerged into his mind. This is called menorah.... God's Lamp. A symbol of immense power for my people. That symbol.

The sign of all signs. He looked at the two photos, with his eyes alternating between them; then, slowly, he stood up and headed for the door. The assistant manager was waiting from the outside.

“Is everything okay?” he asks.

“Good,” said. “Good. I just want to ask, is it possible to send a fax to Jerusalem from here?”