Crucified (9 page)

"I might write a book."

"About the
Ace of Clubs!"

"Yes. To reveal why it was shot down."

"Another
conspiracy?"

"Huh?"

"Aren't you the author of
Dresden?"

"Yes."

"A muckraker?" asked the detective.

"I wouldn't put it like that."

"There's a lot of money in raking muck, is there, sir?"

"Where's this going?"

"Ran out of conspiracy theories on your side of the pond, did you? Is that why you came over here to milk some of ours for cash? Your reputation is that you stop at
nothing
to get what you want. Unmasking Judas would be a coup. How far would you go, Mr. Rook, to get your hands on the key to that puzzle?"

"Are you accusing me of murder, Inspector?"

"Detective
Inspector."

"Are you?"

"Where were you last night?"

"In London."

"All night? Early and late?"

"Yes. Why?"

"The Judas chair that spiked the victim was stolen from a museum in York hours before Mr. Balsdon was killed."

"Then I have an alibi."

"Unless you have an accomplice."

"Do you think I'd go that far to muckrake, as you call it, Detective Inspector?"

"Why did you write
Dresden?"

"I was intrigued by a quote. The more I thought about it, the more I had to know."

"What quote?"

"At the start of the RAF's bombing campaign, Sir Arthur Harris—'Bomber' Harris to the press, and 'Butcher' Harris within Bomber Command—said, 'The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them.

At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.'

Near the end of the war—February 1945—Harris had reached the point where he could state, 'I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier.' That same month, his planes unleashed hell on Dresden."

"So you took him to task?"

"Wouldn't you?"

"My grandmother died in the Blitz, and my grandfather was killed in one of the Lancasters lost in that raid."

Uh-oh, Wyatt thought.

"A Judas chair?" Liz said. "Why's it called that?"

She'd met Wyatt at King's Cross Station, after his long and eventful daytrip to York. Taking a cab to his hotel in the heart of the capital, they'd headed right to the bar on the revolving top floor, and here they sat sipping drinks—a single-malt Scotch for him and a gin and tonic for her—as the lights of London slowly swirled beneath their table.

"How well do you know the Bible?"

"Minimal," Liz replied. "Just what you pick up here and there. My mom was a second-wave feminist in the burn-your-bra years. She thinks the Bible's a sexist putdown of women."

"And you?"

"I never got into it."

"God is dead?" Wyatt asked.

"I wouldn't go that far. I've never seen a burning bush, I'm not Adam's rib, and She—by that I mean God—doesn't talk to me. Until I hear from Her, I'll remain a skeptic."

"What? You didn't slip me this in that teashop?" Wyatt joked. He touched the cartilage in his throat.

"I don't get it," Liz said, popping a peanut from the bowl on the table into her mouth.

"The tree of the knowledge of good and evil grew in the Garden of Eden. God forbade Adam to eat its fruit. But the serpent—Satan in disguise—persuaded Eve to eat from the tree and share the fruit with Adam. After he took a bite, Adam became aware of his nakedness. The end result was that God expelled them from Eden and cursed Eve by commanding Adam to rule over her. Thus was born original sin, us having to wear fig leaves, and"—he wagged his finger at Liz—"the need for you to keep your blouse buttoned up."

"I'm not wearing a blouse," she said, plucking her black pullover with her fingers.

"You were in the teashop."

"What do Adam and Eve and my undone blouse have to do with a Judas chair?"

Wyatt moved his Scotch aside and placed his laptop on the table. He found what he wanted on the Internet, then turned the screen around for Liz to read:

By his sin, Adam, as the first man, lost the original holiness
and justice he had received from God, not only for himself but
for all human beings.

Adam and Eve transmitted on to their descendants a human
nature polluted by their own first sin and hence deprived of
God's original holiness and justice; this deprivation we call 
"original sin."

As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its
powers, subject to ignorance, suffering, and the domination of
death, and inclined to sin.

"And that," said Wyatt, "is why you mustn't tempt a weakling like me with undone buttons."

"Original sin?"

"No. Concupiscence. The passed-on pollution."

"Con
-what?"

"Lustful desire," he replied.

"Peanut?" Liz asked, holding one out and throwing him the sexiest of pouts.

Wyatt grinned.

He
liked
this concupiscent game.

"So what about your cartilage?" Liz prodded, eating the forbidden peanut herself.

"The Bible doesn't identify the tree of knowledge.

Mediterranean tradition says it was a fig tree, because Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their genitals.
Malum
is the Latin adjective for 'evil.' But used as a noun,
malum
means 'apple.' When the Bible was translated from Latin by northern Europeans, a mix-up occurred, and the forbidden fruit became an apple. The larynx in my throat is more prominent than yours because the apple Eve gave Adam stuck in his gullet when he swallowed. So men have 'Adam's apples.'"

"I still don't know what a Judas chair is."

"Want another drink?"

"No, I've got a pile of work to finish up tomorrow before I leave for Germany."

Wyatt motioned to the bartender for their check.

"Christianity is based on original sin. Without mankind's fall from paradise into ongoing sin and death, there would be nothing for Jesus to redeem us
from
with his crucifixion. Without original sin, he would be a messiah without a mission. And why was Christ crucified? Because of betrayal. And who betrayed him?"

"Judas," said Liz.

"Why?"

"Greed. Thirty pieces of silver."

"That's in the Gospel of Matthew. But what's the deeper reason given in the Gospels of Luke and John?"

"Give me a clue?"

Wyatt punched the keys of his laptop and showed her the result:

Luke 22:3

Intravit autem Satanas in Iudam qui cognominatur Scarioth unum de duodecim.

"Satan?" said Liz.

Another keypunch revealed the translation, and the similar passage from the Gospel of John:

And Satan entered into Judas, who was surnamed Iscariot, one
of the twelve.

John 13:2

Et cena facta cum diabolus iam misisset in corde ut traderet eum Iudas Simonis Scariotis.

And when supper was done (the devil having now put into the
heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray him).

"Judas is the villain of the crucifixion of Christ, yet the Bible tells us little about him," Wyatt said. "Betraying his master to the temple priests earned him a paltry sum: those thirty pieces of silver. Jesus exposed him as his traitor at the Last Supper, then left Jerusalem with his eleven faithful disciples for the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. During the night, Jesus awoke and warned his followers, 'Look, my betrayer is at hand.'

 Judas entered the garden with troops carrying torches, clubs, and swords. He told them, 'The man I shall kiss is the one. Arrest him.' Then he walked up to Jesus and said, 'Hail, Rabbi,' and kissed him. A scuffle ensued, during which a disciple—the later St. Peter—cut one ear off the high priest's slave with his sword.

Jesus patched the man up and was led off to crucifixion."

"So where does the chair come into this?" asked Liz.

"You tease me with buttons, I respond with suspense."

"You devil."

The check arrived and Wyatt paid it.

"The Bible offers two versions of how Judas died. The Gospel of Matthew says he repented and confessed his sin, then tried to give his blood money back to the priests. They refused to take it, so Judas flung the money into the temple and went off to hang himself. The money was used to buy a potter's field as a burial place for foreigners. Matthew calls it the field of blood."

"
Still
no chair," said Liz.

"The Book of Acts, the second gospel of Luke, says crypti-cally that"—Wyatt fingered more keys and read off the screen—"Judas possessed a field of the reward of iniquity, and being hanged, burst asunder in the midst: and all his bowels gushed out. And it became known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem: so that the same field was called in their tongue, 
Haceldama
,
that is to say, The field of blood."

"Weird," said Liz.

"See the connection? Satan entered into Judas, and Judas's bowels gushed out. So during the Inquisition, Catholic torturers built a Judas chair to disembowel the Devil's disciples. And now, for some reason, that device was used on Balsdon."

"It's a house of cards," said Liz.

"What is?"

"The Bible. It demands internal consistency from the beginning—Genesis—to the close of the New Testament if it's to withstand scrutiny."

"That's why Darwinism dealt the Bible such a severe blow.

There went Adam and Eve and original sin."

"It reminds me of my mother and her feminist friends."

"How so?"

"Second-wave feminists engineered a social philosophy that was internally consistent to the nth degree. They tried to rewrite language and create a non-sexist male. Victoria Frankenstein—that's how I taunt her whenever we clash over my generation. My mom and her friends are dumbfounded by sexed-up girl power."

"You're not your mother's feminist?"

"Girls just wanna have fun."

"No one—not even God—can fight genetics," Wyatt replied.

As they left the bar and headed for the elevator, Liz said,

"So will you come to Germany?"

"That's difficult."

"But not impossible?"

"I have meetings set up to market my documentaries."

"They can wait. This can't. Don't you want to be there when they open the plane?"

"Of course, but—"

"My grandmother's dying," Liz interrupted. "I desperately want to unravel the secret behind her husband's disappearance before she's gone. From your point of view, how can you
not
go? Unmasking Judas would give you one hell of a book and TV show. Who knows what Christian relics might be in the Judas package, but someone thinks they are valuable enough to steal Mick's archive and gut him on a Judas chair. If you don't go, you'll regret it for the rest of your life."

They reached his floor.

The door slid open.

Wyatt stepped out into the hall.

He turned to face her.

Liz kept her finger on the Open button.

"You drive a hard bargain," he complained.

"I'm a good poker player."

"So I see."

"Y'ain't seen nothin' yet."

"I'm poor at poker."

"Why do you say that?"

"Your buttons in the teashop. If I knew how to bluff, I'd have held out for your bra."

"What bra?" Liz said, grabbing her pullover by its waist and hiking it up to her chin like a partygoer at spring break.

In the time it took him to blink, she'd pulled it back down.

"How do you like them apples?" Liz asked, mimicking the voice of the possessed girl in
The Exorcist,
then flicking her tongue like a serpent in the Garden of Eden and hooking two fingers from her temples as devil's horns.

The lift door closed and she was gone.

Actually, Wyatt was an accomplished poker player.

Yep, he thought. I'm off to Germany.