Free The Last Ember by Daniel Levin Page B

from gamekeeper to poacher?”
    Jonathan said nothing for a moment. “Emili, it’s been seven years. You’re making some assumptions that—”
    “Assumptions?” She pointed to the artifact in the center of the room.
    “Whoever sold your client this piece may have shot Sharif. Sharif , Jon. He was your friend.” She walked toward him, her air of professionalism disappearing. “Tell me,” she said, “what broke you? Was it the tunnel’s collapse? Getting suspended from the academy? Working at the Met after being a Rome Prize winner? Or was it having to take the job in the back room at Sotheby’s to help pay for law school?” She took another step toward him, securing her ground. “I can still faintly see the graduate student you once were, Jon, buried like a ruin under that expensive suit.” Another step. “And maybe with enough excavation someone could make sense of how Gianpaolo’s death buried the heroic part of you with him.”
    “Heroes are for myths!” Jonathan said more loudly than he would have liked. “This is reality, and you’re still talking about heroes? My job isn’t about myths or heroism. It’s about the law.”
    “This case is about something more, Jon. There is something about those fragments.”
    “Emili, ancient secrets were an intriguing diversion in grad school, but—”
    “Someone murdered Sharif for those fragments. Your friend. If that doesn’t take your head out of your legal briefs, nothing will.”
    In her eyes Jonathan saw a passion that he recognized vaguely, but now it struck him as wild and unfamiliar. “I’m sorry, Emili, this case is not about villains or ancient messages. It’s a legal case. I hope one day you understand. Tempus ignoscit. ” Time forgives.
    “Time doesn’t forgive,” Emili said. “It doesn’t even allow a person to forgive himself.” She walked down the courtroom’s aisle and turned around just before leaving the chamber. “You, more than anyone, should know that.”
    She stepped through the courtroom door and it swung shut behind her.
    Alone now in the courtroom, Jonathan ran both hands through his hair.
    “Okay,” he breathed, “that did not go well.”
    He walked back toward the gallery rail, where an easel displayed the location of the Colosseum gate depicted on the two Forma Urbis fragments. The fragments fit along the Colosseum’s southern rim, completing the arena’s oval shape like missing puzzle pieces.
    An archaeological notation was penciled above the gate: Porta Sanavivaria.
    “That was the gate for gladiators,” Jonathan murmured. Gladiators and the prisoners of war forced to fight them entered the arena through the Porta Sanavivaria, the Gate of Life. If killed, their bodies were dragged with hooks through the Porta Libertinensis, the Gate of Death, located on the arena’s other side.
    These fragments of the Forma Urbis depict a gladiators’ gate.
    The doors of the courtroom flung open again, startling Jonathan.
    “What’s taking you so long?” Mildren stomped toward the gallery rail. “Tatton is waiting for you in the car.”

13
    O utside the Palazzo di Giustizia, Emili carried her files down the courthouse steps. She started across the Ponte Sant’Angelo, walking by the ten oversized angels overseen by Bernini and between the unlicensed sidewalk vendors. She stopped midway across the bridge and stared into the Tiber. Its water surged from the winter rain, rolling beneath the bridge like a giant gray tarp in the wind.
    “Souvenir?”
    A souvenir vendor tapped Emili on the shoulder and she turned around. Rows of miniature statues of saints sat in tidy rows on a small concessionaire’s display hanging from his neck. He was a middle-aged man with a gray Edwardian mustache and torn wool gloves.
    “Souvenir?” he repeated.
    “No, grazie,” Emili said politely.
    “Souvenir?” the man said to her again, raising his arms thick with dangling rosary beads. The man was tired and the crowd’s current jostled