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still owe me, Marcus. And this time I pick the restaurant. I don’t
     think we’ll be welcome at Chez Nous again.”
    “What did you do, Duncan?” Constantine scolded with fatherly concern.
    “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