The Rembrandt Code


Pardo had been in one of his excited moods when he had called Lindstrom to his apartment for a conference that evening. She hated it when he got into that mood. Most of the time he was perfectly okay—a little eccentric now and then, but an amusing fellow to know and not a bad writer, if you liked that sort of thing. Every year or two, though, he would convince himself that he had had a breakthrough in proving one of his pet theories. And then he would call on her, his favorite expert on ancient Mesopotamian scripts, to come and help him prove it. It was bad enough listening to him talk about his crackpot ideas now and then, without him trying to involve her on it!

She sighed as she entered the lobby of his building and waited for the elevator. It had all started some years back when he had visited the National Gallery in London and taken a close look at Rembrandt’s painting entitled The Feast of Belshazzar. The painting depicted the biblical scene where the reveling aristocracy of Babylon were shocked at the sight of a man’s hand writing on the wall, declaring the doom of the evil King Belshazzar and his kingdom. Pardo had been fascinated by the intricate detail of Belshazzar’s richly ornamented sleeve. Somehow he had convinced himself, among the patterns and the brush strokes, the he saw writing—a cryptic inscription in Latin and what he took to be Mesopotamian cuneiform script.

From there he had gone off the deep end, convincing himself that Rembrandt and other Dutch masters were the keepers of hidden knowledge regarding the true lineage of Abraham. The book of Genesis had falsified it, Pardo said. In fact Abraham had had a son by his wife Sarah before ever leaving the city of Haran in northern Mesopotamia. It was this descendants son, not the descendants of Isaac, who was the true bloodline of Abraham, and the true keepers of the world’s secret knowledge. And of course there were those in power in the world who wanted that knowledge to remain suppressed, who would stop at nothing to keep it that way.

On the eighth floor she paused outside Pardo’s door, took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell. Hopefully she could avoid saying anything that would set him off this time. He could be hard to talk to in the full flush of one of his periodic great discoveries in the case.

From the other side of the door she heard the rattle of several locks being undone. The door opened a crack. Pardo’s furtive face peered through.

“You weren’t followed?” he whispered.

“No.” Lindstrom wondered why she was whispering as well. Talking to Pardo had a strange effect on people.

He opened the door and let her pass. After a glance around the hall to make sure she had, indeed, come alone, he closed the door and carefully locked it. He urged her to have a seat in his book-jumbled living room.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Dora. You’ll never guess what I’ve found!”

“Let me guess…you finally located that sequel to the Voynich Manuscript you’ve been looking for?”

“Oh, when are you going to let me live that down? No, not that at all!”

“Are you trying to set up another trip to Rennes-le-Chateau?”

“Learned my lesson on that, Dora. Though I still think if you’d just go with me and put your expert eye on those designs I found there you might make some quite illuminating discoveries.”

“So what is it, Stan?”

Pardo’s eyes fairly glowed with enthusiasm as he launched into his tale. It seems that he had, through a typically convoluted chain of events, reading, and conjecture, come to believe that nineteenth-century British archaeologists had uncovered a cuneiform tablet telling the story of Abraham and Sarah’s life at Ur and Haran. It had, of course, been suppressed. Fortunately one brave soul had managed to keep it from being destroyed and had squirreled it away for safekeeping. Eventually it had ended up in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, hidden away with thousands of other tablets in its basement collection.

Lindstrom chuckled to herself as he spoke. The story contained half a dozen howlers and fallacies that would have been obvious to any expert on Mesopotamian history and archaeology. For that matter, any reasonably knowledgeable layman ought to have been able to spot a couple. It was vintage Stan Pardo.

What in the world made her listen to all this stuff, anyway? If anybody else had tried to feed her such nonsense she would have seen him off in no time. But she liked this guy—not in a romantic sense, of course, but Pardo was an old friend who had an undeniable charm. He was like an eccentric relative, someone you loved and whose occasional silliness you bore with. He was always so crestfallen whenever she deflated one of his fantastical balloons of speculation, even when she was polite about it. Being brutally honest would only hurt his feelings even more. It might even end the friendship.

“And that brings us to 2003,” Pardo was saying. “You know what happened to the museum that year.”

“Yes, I do,” she sighed. “A great cultural tragedy. Even if the extent of the looting turned out to have been exaggerated.”

“Well, one of the missing artifacts has found a safe place,” Pardo announced, with a hint of smugness. “Excuse me for a moment.”

He rose from his seat and disappeared into the next room. A few moments later he returned with a small box. He hands shook with excitement as he opened it and withdrew a little cloth bundle. He handed it to Lindstrom.

“Be very, very careful, Dora. You’re holding something of inestimable value!”

Lindstrom unwrapped the bundle. Inside she found a little clay tablet about half the size of a deck of playing cards.

She recognized at once the lines of wedge-shaped symbols that covered it. A cuneiform tablet! She held it up to the light and took a careful look at it.

“Well?” Pardo demanded.

“Looks to be authentic. I can even see the fingerprints of the scribe who wrote it down.”

An odd, almost eerie feeling came over Lindstrom. She had handled many of these millennia-old tablets before. Each one gave her a little thrill, a little sense of awe that she was in the presence of records written down by people who had lived so many centuries earlier. There was something almost magical about the power of writing to cross space and time.

“Where in the world did you get it?”

“I’d…like to keep that to myself for the time being.”

“You know, garden-variety cuneiform tablets aren’t that rare. I doubt there are any goon squads looking for you.”

“I’m not taking chances. And this is hardly a ‘garden variety’ find!”

“No, of course not.” As usual, she was prepared to humor him. “So, I assume you’d like me to translate it for you?”

“Yes, of course!”

“You realize I’ll have to take it to my office at the university to work on it.”

“I trust you, Dora.”

“You also realize that most cuneiform tablets are very prosaic documents? You won’t be too disappointed it it’s not what you’re after?”

“I tell you, Dora, this is it!”




“And you’re sure you weren’t followed?”

“Definitely!” Lindstrom removed her scarf and coat. It was much colder this evening than it had been last week. It had probably seemed like years to Pardo.

He hardly gave her time to take a seat. “So, what did you learn?”

Lindstrom pulled a notepad from her purse. “First of all, this is a genuine cuneiform tablet, written in Old Akkadian script. So it could, depending on whether it was written near the end of the Old Akkadian period, have been roughly contemporaneous with Abraham.”

“I knew it! And what does it say?”

Lindstrom donned her glasses and read the transcription she had prepared. “I, Gudea, son of Balih, do swear upon the holy names of Utu and Inanna that I will, after the coming harvest, pay to Ilshu the following: Two oxen, and two she-asses, and nine sheep, and sixteen measures of wheat, and eight measures of barley, and six jars of finest beer, and eighty shekels of good copper. If I do fail to pay anything upon this list, or if I do short the measure, or if I do provide any stock that are lame or halt, or do provide any goods that are not of good quality, I do call upon the gods to smite me for my crime. May Utu wither my crops in the field, may Inanna leave me without offspring, if I fail to do as I have said!”

Lindstrom looked up from the document. “And then it is signed with Gudea’s and Ilshu’s seals, and the seal of the scribe who wrote it down. And…that’s it.”

Pardo stared at her. “Are you telling me that this is nothing more than the equivalent of an ancient Sumerian IOU?”

“Essentially, yes. The ancient Mesopotamian cultures were nothing if not meticulous record-keepers.”

Pardo sat there, crestfallen. Some wicked impulse made Lindstrom add a little bit that she knew she really shouldn’t say at this moment.

“And Stan—if this tablet set you back by more than a few hundred dollars, I’m afraid you overpaid.”

Pardo looked ready to cry.