Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright Read Free Book Online Page A

seat.
    ‘You have sweetheart?’
    His gold teeth are winking obscenity.
    I don’t answer.
    ‘She is Jew?’
    The obsession that never goes away.

5
    The Levant
    I have been here nearly four weeks. Already I feel that I am becoming a Levantine. This world of ambiguity and disillusion and the shadows of past glory and the whispers of endless intrigue are getting to me in ways I hadn’t expected. I have walked the Old City ceaselessly. I have, with Father Prosper’s help, gained access to the closed chapel in the depths of the Holy Sepulchre. This little chapel is said to have been built on the spot where Helena, the mother of Constantine, found the True Cross.
    Levantines, I think, don’t make a clear distinction between what is true and what they would like to believe is true. As a way of seeing the world, it has its charms; certainly this crypt is ancient, but it is not clear how Helena would have found the True Cross here in ad 328. It was said that she was led here by a vision. I emailed a professor in Oxford, an expert on the Holy Sepulchre: he thought it likely that what Helena discovered was some of the scaffolding left over after the destruction of the Temple of Venus, built by Hadrian on the site of the crucifixion. She found, or was sold, the titulus , the incised inscription bearing the words: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews , along with some of the beams of the cross itself and part of the crosses of the thieves crucified with Christ. The inscription was in three languages, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It was in mirror-writing from right to left in the Hebrew fashion. Helena had it sawn in half, and took one piece to Rome. When, in the fifteenth century, this section of the titulus was discovered hidden behind plaster in Santa Croce, in Rome, which retains some of the walls of Helena’s palace, Leonardo da Vinci rushed to see it. The Oxford professor told me that he believed the crypt was built in the depths of what had once been a stone quarry, used for building purposes. I didn’t ask him what special interest Leonardo may have had, for fear he would imagine I was a mythomane.
    I have grown very close to Noor. She has red hair, the deep russet colour of a gun dog’s coat, which falls around her face and onto her shoulders. Her skin is almost golden. She speaks like a Canadian. (For instance she says ‘aboot’ for ‘about’.) She has the innocence of a Canadian too, although she has seen – she is unwilling to tell me the details – some terrible things in the Middle East. She is also closely related to one of the substantial Palestinian families of Jerusalem. Her glamour makes me feel both uneasy and blessed. Although I know her body intimately now, with all its little uplands and valleys, there is a hinterland to which I am still a stranger. I couldn’t say exactly what it means, but Noor is intensely female. She belongs to an altogether different species of womanhood from Emily. Emily has the gawky vulnerability of a newborn antelope, her limbs rather loosely connected, so that there is something of the marionette in her movements. It’s endearing in its way, but also needy.
    I have maxed out my credit card. It has an insubstantial look at the best of times, entry-level. It’s an old student card, never upgraded. I used the last of my credit to book an extra week at the hotel because I can more easily conduct our liaison there, particularly urgent as she is going on assignment soon.
    It’s a short walk, sometimes a libidinous scamper, from the bar, our feet clacking goatishly on the slabs. (I am thinking of buying some Ottoman slippers.) She leaves early because she is living with her relatives somewhere not far away and they expect her. She is driven away in a black Mercedes. I don’t like to ask her if the car is armour-plated, but it does have a bulky look. The driver also has a bulky look, as if he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. Sometimes I stand at the front door of the hotel as she