Gospel (131 page)

The doctor nodded. “It's certainly possible she might skip a period. Is your friend with you? She can buy a home-pregnancy test in the pharmacy, right next to the gift shop.”

“Yes, I'll suggest that,” said Lucy smiling falsely. “To my friend.”

Lucy turned to the elevator banks.

Well, are we gonna get this over with or what?

In the hospital pharmacy she picked up some toothpaste, a magazine, neutral things for the home-pregnancy kit to hide behind. She read the instructions on the box …

But Lucy couldn't do it.

She thrust the kit into her carpetbag. I'll do it back at the Bullinses', she told herself. And as she walked out of the pharmacy:

“That you, Miss Dantan?”

Lucy turned, not believing her eyes at first. It was Rabbi Hersch!

He sauntered down the hall, his familiar gait, his venerable tweed coat with the leather patches, necessary in the hospital's arctic air-conditioning. Lucy ran to him and gave him a hug.

“Hello,” he said, shying away quickly, awkward about the affection.

“Rabbi, you're alive! I'm so glad to see you!” Lucy talked incomprehensibly. “I'm sorry I had such suspicions; you see, when I found out that you had been the Mad Monk I thought that—”

He raised his hand. “No, enough! It is I who had suspicions and didn't trust you either. We're a fine trio. But cautious, and cautious is good. We are where we are because we are cautious. Paddy is getting better?”

Lucy shook her head glumly, and repeated the doctor's prognosis.

“Ehh,” said the rabbi, shaking his head. “This I knew should happen. And I told him as much. He's finally done it.”

Lucy turned to walk Rabbi Hersch to O'Hanrahan's room. The rabbi turned and looked over his shoulder, hesitating a minute as if expecting someone.

“Someone following you, sir?”

“Yes, actually. This fat moron who thinks he's playing spy. He stands out a mile … Too stupid to be a real secret agent. Feh! Let's go to Paddy's room.”

In the elevator to the ninth floor, Lucy began a synopsis of the odds and ends she knew about Merriwether and Bullins and O'Hanrahan's tales of oil leases in the Gulf, about Colonel Westin and Operation Flight of the Griffin. They arrived at O'Hanrahan's room.

Rabbi Hersch: “What's wrong, little girl?”

“This is his room and he's not here.”

“You don't got the wrong room?”

“Excuse me,” said Lucy, flagging down a nurse. “I was here not twenty minutes ago and a Patrick O'Hanrahan was in this room.”

“Reverend Bullins hisself has taken an interest,” the hefty nurse said with the ubiquitous muddy accent, which Lucy realized was nearly the same for black and white people. “We wanna be very careful, now don't we? We've moved him down to Intensive Care.”

“That necessary?” asked the rabbi.

“Fever of 104,” she said. “Delirium, the shakes, irregular heartbeat. They're gonna hook him up to a monitor.”

The rabbi and Lucy looked at one another, allied in a common sadness.

*   *   *

Lunchtime, late in the afternoon.

Lucy took a brown plastic tray and scooted it along the metal grill before the steam tables. Large black women in crisp white uniforms and hairnets stirred steaming piles of black-eyed peas, tubs of mashed sweet potatoes, and a tray of fried breaded okra under a heatlight. Lucy bravely pointed at the Southern vegetables, ready to give them a try. After paying, she turned her tray toward the sunny rows of tables and saw, as expected, Rabbi Hersch reading a newspaper. They had taken turns seeing O'Hanrahan in Intensive Care since only one visitor at a time was allowed in. O'Hanrahan, so perky that morning, had faded seriously into fever and delirium. He came in and out of focus, not sure if Rabbi Hersch was a vision or a reality. Lucy went into the room second, and agreed to meet the rabbi downstairs for a late but long-awaited lunch.

“No improvement,” she said, as the rabbi read through his paragraph, then folded up his newspaper. “He was awake again but I didn't like what I saw. Delirious, high fever, ice packs, and monitors all hooked up…”

“So he's worse.”

“Yes, he's worse,” said Lucy simply. She wondered suddenly if he hadn't downed the bottle of bourbon and sent himself into this tailspin. She cursed her indecision about pouring the bourbon in the sink.

Rabbi Hersch looked around him, and leaned toward her. “Keep your voice down. You see that shlemazl three tables away? That's the clown who was on my flight from Jerusalem. Two rows behind me on the plane.”

Lucy scanned the culprit briefly: a fat man in a white suit, yellow shirt, and pale blue tie that matched his pocket handkerchief; a panama hat sat atop a pink baby's face with a dark blond, groomed King Tut goatee.

Lucy wanted to ask what would happen should O'Hanrahan … die. Would Rabbi Hersch volunteer to take over, committing himself to Bullins and the enemy camp? He probably would, long enough to grab the
Gospel of Matthias
and make a run for it back to Israel. But wouldn't the Masons or Merriwether just come looking for it again? In any event, Lucy would be an unnecessary appendage, and it would be back to the old thesis … A sick feeling came over her thinking of it, all the little four-by-six notecards with little factoids on them, waiting to be compiled into a several-hundred-page thesis. Oh, and what would it all matter really, if poor Patrick O'Hanrahan died and left her alone in this deeply indifferent world she'd built for herself. If he would come out of his fevered sleep, Lucy was confident that he would assure her that he, if no one else, cared passionately about what she, his last disciple, did with her life.

Lucy said slowly, “I should have been stricter with him. I could have stopped him from a lot of his excesses, if I'd put my foot down. Not at first, perhaps…”

The rabbi waved this consideration aside. “What could you have done? I, on the other hand, I should have trusted him and been open with him about the last chapter…”

A spoon fell to the floor, and the fat man made an unconvincing display of craning closer to pick it up.

“And,” continued the rabbi, almost whispering, “maybe if I'd have been more open he wouldn't have felt so paranoid about everything and turned up so many bottles—although that's the way he is. Maybe,” he took a deep breath, “maybe I shouldn't have called him in the first place. Maybe I should have left him where he was in Chicago and not tried to be the savior here, raise his hopes.”

Lucy risked putting a hand on his hand briefly. “No sir. That was a good thing to do.”

He withdrew his hand, embarrassed.

She smiled faintly. “I would never have got to meet him otherwise. Or meet you.”

Still to be spoken, Lucy knew, was a better apology for her quick and too-easily-made accusations in the hotel room in Addis Ababa. How seamlessly she was able to ignore what she knew to be the good heart of this man and become filled with righteous indignation for herself and O'Hanrahan, and—she cringed—the glories of the Christian faith. For a moment, and it had only been a moment, she had sided with the Inquisition. It is in those little waverings of basically good people, she understood, that the evil of the world is done.

“And you wouldn't have got to see lovely Philadelphia, Louisiana,” he added.

She shared a brief smile with him. Also unspoken were some nagging questions … These, however, she could now ask:

“Rabbi sir, there's a question that's been bothering me for days. I understand how you could have got to Athens before us in your Orthodox monk suit—”

“Not that again!”

“But the day that we went to the National Library in Khartoum we learned the Mad Monk had been there. But I called you in Jerusalem two days after that. So you hopped a flight that night?”

He stared at her uncomprehendingly. “I've never been in Khartoum in my life.”

“What about Wadi Natrun in Egypt?” she asked. “Our Mad Monk was there too. And Cairo.”

“Look, I just put on the damn robe
once,
for Christ's sake. For a little checkup trip to the Patriarch's Library in Athens, and I mostly did it to cut through the paperwork. Paddy gave me the idea. In Rome he told me some monk was after the scroll, so it seemed a good way to cover my tracks.”

A greasy, raspy sound came from the direction of the man in the white linen suit, as if air was escaping at intervals from a tire. The large, cherubic-faced man tried to turn away and hide his evident amusement.

“So,” checked Lucy, now confused, “you weren't in Wadi Natrun or Khartoum—”

Then the rabbi blasted the fat man impatiently: “
What
the hell do you want?”

“You are refarrrink to me?” he said, disclosing his German accent.

“You've been on my ass since Ben-Gurion. Now, please to tell me: what do you want?”

Lucy noticed the man's face transform from pink to a healthy crimson. Then he suppressed his wheezing, silent laugh that vibrated his frame. “I know who you are … You are the venerable Mordechai Hersch of Hebrew University,
ja
?” The man picked up his tray with a pudgy, ring-covered hand and moved to Lucy and the rabbi's table. “And you are the assistant of the Dr. O'Hanrahan, yes? I haff been overhearing your discussion, forgive me, forgive me … I am Matthias Kellner of Trier.”

“A one-time owner of the Matthias scroll,” deduced the rabbi.

“It was myself,” he beamed proudly, putting a hand on his heart, “who was in Wadi Natrun and Khartoum! I had for myself made a robe of an Orthodox monk, yes?” He paused as if he might be congratulated on his cleverness. “Your mentor,” he nodded to Lucy, “told me that a monk was in pursuit of the scroll and it occurred to me to undertake this adventure,
ja?
And Herr O'Hanrahan was good enough to recite his entire itinerary for me, never to be suspecting that I had the genius to follow, yes?” He laughed and patted his thighs in short sharp pats. “I am happy to report that I was entirely believable and aroused suspicion nowhere. Alas, I did not find the final missing segment of the evangel in question, or clues to the language in which it was written.”

The rabbi was impassive. “May I ask what you're doing here now?”

“I assume,” he said, “that you have in your possession the entire gospel now and are engaged in its translation. Hence I have come to offer you a pretty sum, Mr. Hersch. And yes, something for you as well,” he added to Lucy.

The rabbi collected his coffee cup and rose to get another cup, saying, “Well, Mr. Kellner, I am sorry to disappoint you but we are not the people you must do business with. We don't have it, and wouldn't sell it to you if we did.”

“For a million dollars?”

The rabbi paused, weighed it, tilted his head one way and then another, then pronounced, “We could talk about it. Maybe the Matthias Kellner Wing of the Jerusalem Museum featuring the ancient
Gospel of Matthias
scrolls displayed—”

“No, it vill return to its home in Trier!”

The rabbi absorbed this and went to fetch his coffee. “We'll talk.”

Herr Kellner immediately, furtively turned to Lucy. “Steal it for me, young lady, and I vill make you rich!
Rich!
”

Lucy smiled as she allowed herself at last to eat a bite from her plate of vegetables. “So you're the Mad Monk?” she asked, not entirely without condescension.

He tapped her on the arm. “I was very industrious, no?”

Lucy slowed in her chewing. “So you have been crossing our path as far back as Assisi?”

“No,” he said, now attacking his slice of pie. “Assisi? Why should I go there?”

Perhaps, thought Lucy, amused and relieved, Father Vico made up the whole Mad Monk story to begin with.

*   *   *

O'Hanrahan felt the cool damp cloth being laid on his forehead. It seemed to him as if he was burning, and he imagined a sizzling sound as this cloth was laid on his forehead. His eyes focused on a long black sleeve and an older hand that was tending him. His consciousness was swimming, about to plunge him back to sleep when he then focused on the bedside table and the clock. Six in the afternoon. Then he refocused on the black-clad figure standing near his bedside.

“Glasses,” he uttered drily, hardly a voice left.

The blurred figure in black swayed before him and he thought he made out a black bag in his hand. The figure set the black bag on the bedside table and opened it, removing a bottle of something. O'Hanrahan heard it clink on the table. Then a little bowl was produced from the bag and some liquid was poured into it.

“Who is it?” O'Hanrahan moaned, now curious.

Next he saw the figure reach for the glasses case on the table and slide them out. The man in the monk's outfit put them on O'Hanrahan's face gently.

“Ah, it's you,” O'Hanrahan breathed softly.

Father Sergius from Prophet Ieremiou on Mt. Athos looked kindly down upon him.

“This is a dream … you have come so far,” O'Hanrahan said.

“Ssssh,” said Father Sergius. “I heard from my Orthodox brethren in Jerusalem what had happened. Fortunately the Franciscans cannot keep a secret. For you, my friend, I have left Athos again.”

O'Hanrahan looked up weakly into Father Sergius's strong blue eyes. He thought deliriously that he might have died and that God was Father Sergius, long white beard, countenance of kindness, Himself putting the cool cloth upon his fevered head. “Left Athos again?” O'Hanrahan wondered aloud.

Father Sergius nodded seriously. “Yes, for you I would leave my beloved home, for you and St. Matthias. And his gospel. I hoped first to procure this gospel in Assisi, but it was not to be.”

O'Hanrahan strained to refine his thoughts, barely able to make a fist in his weakness. He must concentrate! “You remembered me speaking of the
Gospel of Matthias?
”