The Moses Legacy Read Online Free

‘That sounds like a…’
    â€˜He was my uncle’s star pupil,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Just like I was yours ,’ she added with a twinkle in her eye.
    Mansoor was silent for a moment. After a while, he nodded reluctantly. ‘Well, I guess if this Daniel Klein was Harrison Carmichael’s star pupil, then that’s good enough for me.’
    â€˜Shall I call him?’ asked Gabrielle. ‘He knows me.’
    â€˜Okay, you call him and introduce me and then put me on.’ Sensing her excitement, Mansoor added, ‘But let’s not tell him at this stage that we think we’ve found the original Ten Commandments.’

Chapter 4
    â€˜This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt,’ Nathan Greenberg solemnly intoned.
    In a house in Golders Green, Nathan Greenberg, father of three, was holding up a plate of three matzos, reciting a paragraph attesting to its significance. Nathan’s own parents and siblings lived in America, but he and his glamorous wife Julia had invited some of Julia’s extended family for the Passover seider .
    The seider is a quasi-religious service performed at the dinner table before the festive meal marking the beginning of Passover in which Jewish families retell the story of the Exodus of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. ‘Bread of affliction’ was perhaps a misnomer, because it wasn’t the bread the Israelites ate when they were slaves in Egypt, but rather the bread prepared in haste when they were allowed to leave by the Egyptian Pharaoh whose will had been broken by the Ten Plagues.
    But Nathan’s six-year-old daughter May and her twin sister Shari were not looking at the plate with the matzos. Their big, wide eyes were focused squarely on the area of the tablecloth just to the left of their father, under which he had placed half of the middle matzo that he had broken off and wrapped in a serviette less than a minute before. Thiswas the afikoman – from the Greek meaning ‘leave it till later’ – so called because it was to be put aside and eaten at the end of the meal. According to a long-standing tradition, the children are supposed to ‘steal’ the afikoman and use it to bargain for presents and gifts from their beleaguered parents.
    However, the twins were sitting too far away from their daddy to get their little hands on the prize, and any attempt to get up from their seats now would merely alert their father to the fact that juvenile intrigue was afoot. This was where Uncle Danny came in.
    Daniel Klein, who had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, was sitting to his brother-in-law’s immediate left. In addition to his ideal position, Daniel also had a background as an amateur magician, so it was only natural that the twins should enlist his aid in this conspiracy to commit grand larceny. However, he set a high price for putting his reputation on the line in such a criminal enterprise.
    â€˜You must ask for a present for your little sister Romy, as well as your own presents.’
    Little Romy was less than three and a half, and although she could stick up for herself, she couldn’t always explain what she wanted with quite the same clarity as her older siblings.
    â€˜But she likes different things,’ said May.
    â€˜And what if she wants something that costs too much money,’ said Shari, demonstrating her eminently practical side.
    â€˜Well, why don’t you ask for a toy you can all play with?’ suggested Danny.
    The twins rose to the occasion and after putting their heads together for half a minute, came up with the ideal solution.
    â€˜We’ll ask for the play house,’ Shari announced.
    The ‘play house’ in question was a colourful, flat-packed, plastic kit that they had seen on a previous visit to a toy shop and it was just the right size for all three of them to play in.
    There was no time to waste now because