Highlander - Donna Lettow [12]
“It’s a long story. But no lame excuses about curation emergencies next time.”
Constantine acted shocked at the very notion. “Lame? Not lame at all, I assure you. Look at this.” He led MacLeod toward another case, this one made of a tinted plastic. “I spent the entire day wrestling French Customs for this piece—you thought facing Karros was tough. But if I hadn’t, it would have ended up in some bureaucratic warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.” MacLeod stopped and looked closely at Constantine for a moment, then decided it must just be museum humor. With Constantine, you couldn’t always tell when he was kidding. “It will come as no surprise to you, I’m sure, that the Israelis don’t look kindly on removing antiquities from the country. You’d better have your paperwork in order. In triplicate.”
Constantine flipped a switch at the back of the case and a dim light illuminated the contents. An old, worn fragment of papyrus, apparently blank in the half-light. MacLeod looked at it for a moment. “Am I waiting for it to warm up?” he asked.
“No holograms here, my friend. This is the real thing. But I believe we can help it out a bit with the magic of technology.” He flipped another switch, bathing the scrap in infrared light, and suddenly MacLeod could make out a tiny, delicate script covering the papyrus. Hebrew, he realized, very old. He looked up at Constantine, questioning.
“A fragment of the Torah, Duncan.” Both Constantine’s voice and face conveyed a reverence MacLeod had not expected from a man who could be considered an ancient relic himself. “Recovered from Masada. It just arrived today from my student, Avram Mordecai.”
To get a better look at the delicate writing, MacLeod moved closer to the Torah.
Chapter Three
Warsaw: January 18, 1943
MacLeod moved closer to the Torah, taking the precious scroll carefully from the shaking hands of the man who clutched it to his chest for protection. “Rebbe, please, we must hurry “
“My son, he is gut?” Rabbi Mendelsohn asked for perhaps the third time in the ten minutes since MacLeod had roused him from his sleep in the predawn gloom. The old man was smaller than MacLeod had expected, stooped and bowed with the effects of age and three years of deprivation, confined behind the formidable walls of the Jewish Ghetto. Only the rabbi’s clothes, carefully patched and mended and hanging from his gaunt frame, bespoke the strong, robust man his son Shimon had described to MacLeod in such loving detail back in Paris.
“Shimon is fine, zai’er gut,” MacLeod reassured him. MacLeod knew only a little Yiddish, although Shimon Mendelsohn had tried to teach him all he could before MacLeod left. The rabbi’s Polish was rusty, Yiddish having been the language of daily life and commerce in Warsaw’s Jewish community for centuries, but quickly they’d discovered they could communicate in a rough pastiche of the two languages, mixed with a little German, a little Russian. It was enough. “He’s living with monks outside of Paris. He is safe there.”
“Safe.” The old man savored the word and his eyes grew bright with unshed tears. “Danken Gott, Shimon is safe,” he repeated to himself while MacLeod set the Torah down carefully by the rabbi’s hat on a low table near the door. The table and an old wing chair were the only furnishings left in the room. “Then his story has been told?” Rabbi Mendelsohn asked him, tugging eagerly on MacLeod’s sleeve for emphasis. “The West knows? Shimon has told them?”
How to tell the old man the messenger had gotten out safely, but not the message? How to tell him his only son fought his way to the West to proclaim the word, eager to expose for all the world the atrocities of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the world had turned its back on him? How to tell him Shimon Mendelsohn had escaped the death camps, broken the news that the Germans were systematically destroying his people, and instead of finding aid, found only apathy and disbelief?
He didn’t have to tell him. The rabbi, no stranger to the human heart, read it in his face, saw the despair and