Gospel (125 page)

O'Hanrahan was distressed his hand was shaking so. He raised his head to meet the eyes of Reverend Bullins, who had a look of concern. O'Hanrahan knew he was jaundiced and his eyes an unhealthy color. Some African malady kicking around inside.

“Our medical center is the finest in the Baton Rouge area,” the reverend said gently. “Yes, over on Philadelphia Drive. We'll getcha over there while it's still called that,” he added morosely.

“What do you mean?”

Bullins explained as if O'Hanrahan were a natural ally. The sole black city councilman in Philadelphia, Louisiana, had staged a loud protest, packing the city council chamber with “his people” all demanding a street named after Martin Luther King, Jr. “If it just weren't going by my hospital,” said Bullins disgustedly.

“Let me guess,” said O'Hanrahan in a feisty mood. “You don't like Dr. King, though, I'm sure, some of your best prayer-partners are black.”

“Don't get me wrong, racism is a vile sin, but that man should not be lifted up. He was an adulterer.”

“Hell, half you TV preachers
are.
Aimee Semple McPherson, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Elmer Gantries all!” O'Hanrahan was satisfying himself if no one else. “It must be something in the American water. Even ol' John Wesley, founder of Methodism, couldn't keep from getting run out of Georgia, caught with his pants down with the mayor of Savannah's niece.”

Reverend Bullins ignored him. “Your Dr. King was also a plagiarist.”

“You know, one thing really mystifies me about you crackers,” said O'Hanrahan. “The way good Christian white Americans treated the black man in the '50s we're lucky we have
one
city left standing, and Martin Luther King was a man who could have said, all right, people, go to it, burn this country down. But he didn't. And all you can do after some white trash shot him, is run him into the ground.”

(Martin Luther King was a prophet of God. One of the few America has ever known. Do the Ed Meeses and Jesse Helmses, the Pat Buchanans and David Dukes, Ronald Reagan with his cabinet's jokes about “Martin Luther Coon”—does no one think there will be a judgment? Do they not even sense the reckoning to come?)

Bullins arranged some papers on his desk, not looking up. “I wouldn'ta figured you for a liberal, Patrick. I take it you're for quotas, discrimination against the white man and all that.”

O'Hanrahan wasn't going to waste his breath on this man.

“
I'm
penalized,” Reverend Bullins added emphatically, “by the U.S. government. None of my students can get a government-sponsored loan to come here. Why? Because, like Bob Jones University and many others, we forbid interracial dating. It is a sorry day in the history of America when good Christian men and women can't be supported by their government in Bible College because liberals in Washington put pressure on us to dilute the races.” Bullins changed the subject quickly, looking in O'Hanrahan's eyes as a physician might. “You're jaundiced. Tomorrow, let's say you and me go over to the TPL Medical Center and have 'em take a look-see.”

O'Hanrahan stiffened his resolve to avoid doctors.

“Demons working within your body, my friend. The demon alcohol. And your medication—our cleaning woman saw the pill bottle by the sink…”

Before any more moral exhortations, O'Hanrahan lumbered to his feet. “I think I'll see the scroll now, Bullins.”

He was ushered to a small library with a large oaken desk, the private study of Reverend Bullins. Again, O'Hanrahan noted it smelled freshly painted and plastered, didn't look truly utilized but rather assembled for show.

Bullins sincerely wished to be helpful. “If you need any book, call it up on the computer and Jessica down the hall will see to it that it's brought over from the main library.” He directed Jessica to bring in the scroll from the valuables vault.

O'Hanrahan noticed an armed security guard standing in the doorway, a retired, donut-eating, Southern ex-cop in his sixties. He had a gray crew cut. Reverend Bullins beamed, “Oh, hello, Tom. Patrick, this is Tom. This scroll is perfectly safe within this room—no thief or rival collector will bother you here.” With a less than hidden tone, Bullins assured O'Hanrahan the scroll would in
no way
leave the room with the culprit unscathed.

O'Hanrahan nodded, “I get the idea, Bullins.”

The reverend blessed the enterprise and left to attend to other business. Presently, Jessica brought in the scroll and set it before O'Hanrahan, leaving a trail of her splendid perfume. O'Hanrahan spread out the papyrus in its clear plastic sheath, not exposing the actual papyrus to air. O'Hanrahan was content to work with the many legal pads Lucy had filled with transliterations of Meroitic script. Page after page of letters, senseless, indecipherable. He stared at the first line again:

Hopeless! Reams and reams of this stuff. Perhaps he should enter it all into a computer and ask the computer to identify any of the 800 known Meroitic names, hoping by some coincidence a Pharoah or Candace was mentioned in the gospel somewhere.

“My oh my,” said Jessica, who brought him a cup of coffee dutifully. “I can't make head or tails out of that. What language is it, professor?”

Rather than elaborate, he shrugged. “No idea, honey.”

“What's the Bible say? It's Greek to me?” she laughed.

O'Hanrahan rolled his eyes and like Reverend Bullins watched her saunter from the room. Tom the Security Guard watched her walk down the hall as well. “It's Greek to me” is Shakespeare, honey.

O'Hanrahan was alone with the scroll again.

It's just you and me now, he said to himself. God, I wish you
were
Greek, he thought. If you were in Greek, Mr. Matthias, I'd be reading you this very week. Just as Rabbi Rosen read this scroll in under a week.

Wait.

Maybe it is in Greek.

Maybe that's how Rabbi Rosen read it so quickly. Rosen realized this scroll had nothing to do with Meroitic and that the language was merely a
code,
merely a code for Greek letters … but, no, no, O'Hanrahan calmed himself, steadying himself at the table. That can't be. Greek has 24 letters, Meroitic 23.…

Wait.

As if an intoxicating drug spread through his body, O'Hanrahan felt his head lighten, his fingers tingle. Oh God, that's it, isn't it? The
colon
isn't a word-separator: it too is part of the code. It's a letter! A Greek letter! This damn thing's in
Greek
!

He stood up, laughing. O'Hanrahan's head darted around wildly. Who was looking at him? Any hidden cameras? Could anyone observing him steal this revelation? In triumph, he allowed himself a deep, restoring breath.

Oh, but what geniuses the transcribers of this gospel were, what masters of deception!

They encoded the
Gospel of Matthias
in a lost language—lost and mysterious to the First Century even! They knew! They knew every pitfall of those who would come after! They knew any linguist attacking the thing would try to solve the mysteries of Meroitic—for 2000 years they led scholars to this dead end! Those geniuses! Those devils.

O'Hanrahan smiled: of course, the 23 Meroitic characters and the colon make 24, one symbol for each of Greek's 24 letters. Dimly, like Eurydice falling back into the shadow-world, hands outstretched, the Empire of Meroe and its unknowable language darkly withdrew, never to be deciphered this generation, not by O'Hanrahan. The Nile would keep this mystery.

An hour of work, trial and error, and he had a pretty good idea what figures were
sigma,
and once
Iosephus
was picked out, the code unraveled in no time. The colons were
nus.
The first line read:

APEBALONTHNEMHNPISTINIOSEPHUS

O'Hanrahan marveled at it:
Apebalon tin emin pistin, Iosephus.
“I had lost my faith, Josephus.” A disciple writing of a loss of faith? His hands began trembling anew with the import and gravity of such a find!

And nor would he share this new revelation with anyone, not even Lucy or the rabbi—well, not at first. With this information, any fool could decode the gospel and render himself, the rabbi, and Lucy superfluous. No, it would be just his alone now.

(Not even a thank-you. Not even a small hosanna?)

O'Hanrahan now with a new sense of wonder and awe before this epistle from the 100s turned over a new leaf in the legal pad with trembling hand—Matthias, he said, a tear coming to his eye, you old comrade. What have you to tell me, my friend?

*   *   *

In the midst of the campus was an antebellum plantation home, three stories with Greek columns, a grand portico and a staircase leading to the front door. The driveway was cobblestone and wound up to the slight rise of the mansion as if it were the White House, designed for a procession of limousines.

“We call it home,” said Farley.

The tolerance Lucy had surprisingly found for the TPL empire was beginning now to slip away. This house costs a million, figured Lucy, stepping out of the station wagon.

“A big place.”

“Well, we get important visitors so it has to be a bit of a showplace,” Farley explained, not bothering to lock the car in this Christian community. “President Reagan, when he was running in 1980. That sure was exciting! I got to shake his hand and everything. He came down to help dedicate the Bullins Rapture Center. What are you, Luce? A pre-Tribulationist or a post-Tribulationist?”

“I think the Rapture is a bunch of hooey,” she said. “You guys are doing what the Catholics did in 1956 with Mary being assumed to heaven. You've seized upon a symbolic sentence or two in
Thessalonians
and invented your own theology around it.”

Farley shook his head, “I'll be waving down at you from the clouds.”

“That's where Heaven, is, Farley? Up above us. How far into outer space? When you go up up up, where will you stop? Pluto? Or after the big special effect, will God fast-forward you to Heaven several zillion light years away?”

Lucy was escorted through the lavish, marble-floored vestibule to stand before an antebellum staircase that wound to the upper floors, past soft flattering pastel portraits of Reverend and Mrs. Bullins staring beatifically to the promised land of verdant fields fresh in the light of sunrise.

Lila Mae Bullins was a dynamo of energy at 5′4″ with her hair teased up high for another three inches of added height, lightened to a lavender-silver, a face thick with makeup, apparently true to the unwritten rule that TV evangelists' wives have to do their best to represent the
vanitas
of the world, stopping this side of clown face-paint. But aside from her cosmetic-surgeried caricature of ageless Southern-belle charm, she seemed to Lucy somehow fragile, ready to weep at any given opportunity, like on Bullins's often hysterical revival telecasts. Lucy was deposited with Farley's mother in the kitchen while Farley ran upstairs to get some promised treat.

“We have many prayer-partners in Chicago,” said Mrs. Bullins, groping for commonality with Lucy, while fetching her guest a Diet Coke from one of two large refrigerators. “You know,” she added confidentially, “we have Catholic Pentecostals now too.”

Yes, Lucy had heard of this. It was an attempt to keep black Catholics particularly from streaming out of the staid, unchanging rote of mass and into the more ethnic and exciting African-American Protestant denominations. Lucy thought of Reverend Stallings in Washington, excommunicated for the African elements in his mass … and yes, that bishop in Africa she had read about, Emmanuel Milingo, thrown out as well for allowing dance and no small amount of folk-healing to mix in with what John Paul II commanded. Mind you, thought Lucy cynically, when it's Polish culture and Solidarity rallies, the pope mixes culture, politics, and Church just dandy. It's a small wonder the Host hasn't become a kielbasa by now …