Gospel (49 page)

Lucy was mesmerized by the baroque ceiling—every intersection of every beam an excuse for gold encrustation, sculpted leaves, gilded excrescences, cherubim and seraphim, coats of arms … O'Hanrahan pointed to the baldaquin at the transept and explained the heads of Peter and Paul were kept in gold orbs there.

(What? No mention of the urn of manna, the rod of Aaron, tablets from the original Ten Commandments, a dress of the Virgin, John the Baptist's hairshirt, some fish left over from the Feeding of the Five Thousand?)

Lucy now wondered aloud, “Certainly surprising to see Rabbi Hersch, isn't it?”

O'Hanrahan didn't commit himself.

“He said he was going straight back to Jerusalem,” Lucy reminded him.

“So, he changed his mind.”

“Think he's up to something?” Lucy asked this remembering the sneaking around at Rathlin Island.

“No, but he might be
on
to something.”

“If he's identified the script,” began Lucy, now observing the rabbi shaking his head, thumbs down on his toilet mission, ambling across the expanse of the nave, “he'll surely tell you, right?”

“Sure,” said O'Hanrahan, convincing himself. “Mind you, Lucy, it is his university's scroll. He can do what he likes with it.” Then he said aloud in hopes of persuading himself: “I'm just along for the ride. Expendable at any point.”

The rabbi returned. “Century upon century,” he said, raising his hands to take in the whole of this former Roman palace, “and no toilet for tourists. See if I ever light a candle in here.”

(Mordechai is too proud to admit he didn't understand the sexton's Italian. The toilets are off the cloisters.)

Time then, announced O'Hanrahan, to find a café.

They flagged a cab for the next pilgrimage basilica, Santa Maria Maggiore. The taxi let them out on the wrong side of the busy Via Merulana leading to the basilica, and so there was another life-endangering run, dodging the tramcars, threading the traffic on the wide avenue, until they found sanctuary at a small café, a few tables outside in the morning sun.

“We're supposed to
walk
to the basilicas,” Lucy informed them, panting. “Not take cabs. We don't get the indulgence if we cheat.”

“The only indulgence I'm interested in is a toilet,” said the rabbi, making his way into the café's back rooms.

O'Hanrahan ordered three glasses of white wine, then said quietly to Lucy, “I meant to tell you something in Assisi. I saw, in the Lower Basilica parking lot, up on the hill? I saw the white Cadillac again with the German plates. I guess Mr. Cheap Suit figured out our train-to-Rome ploy after all. I suspect he walked the length of the train looking for us, then, not finding us, made his way back to Florence and started for Assisi. Where he'd been tipped off.”

Lucy spoke in a needless whisper. “Tipped off? Who knew we were going to Assisi? You, me…”

“Gabriel?” suggested O'Hanrahan.

“Impossible,” she said, pausing to collect her theory. “Mr. Cheap Suit and Gabriel couldn't be working together because back in Ireland Mr. Cheap Suit would never have blown up the safe and drugged Father O'Reilly if he knew Gabriel had just stolen the scroll.”

“Then who's left?”

Lucy shook her head, and yet some information was teasing her from the edge of cognition. “Maybe the rabbi? He knew we were headed to Assisi.”

“Now that's
really
absurd. Morey and that goon working together?”

But the rabbi was coming back, scooting through the narrow spaces of the tables inside. “Ah, Frascati!” he sang happily, sitting before his glass of chilled white wine.
“And I commend enjoyment, for man has no good thing under the sun but to eat and drink and enjoy himself…”

“… for this will go with him in his toil,”
finished O'Hanrahan, holding his gold-filled glass to the light. “This stuff only tastes good in Rome,” he added. “I knew an Italian Carmelite who always called this stuff Montefiasco.”

After this pit stop: the dazzling Santa Maria Maggiore of the 400s. The rabbi hadn't visited this church and, for his pleasure, a treat awaited him, the finest Christian homage to the Jewish fathers. Maria Maggiore is a long basilica, a vast hallway between two rows of Roman columns that support walls of the incomparable 5th-Century mosaics of gold and agate and glass and onyx and polished gems. There was Melchizedek greeting Abraham, Hamor and Shechem petitioning Jacob for the hand of Dinah, Moses marrying Sepphora.

Lucy went to stand in the magnificent Sixtus Chapel, a side chapel so spacious and tall, with each successive story more ornate and gold-strewn than the last, that she merely collapsed in amazement against a marble column, staring to the heavens agog.

“And guess whose relics were once thought to be here?” asked O'Hanrahan, hands around both the rabbi's and Lucy's shoulders. “Our old friend, St. Matthias. Lucy, you're the functional Catholic of the party. Go offer up a prayer to Matthias so that we might figure out his chicken-scratchings.”

“You serious?”

The rabbi concurred. “Light one of them Catholic magic candles.”

“Well, all right…”

(It might help, Patrick, if
you
offered up a prayer.)

While Lucy lit a candle and lined up behind some women from a Portuguese tour bus for kneeling space, the rabbi and O'Hanrahan walked away to view the apse.

Lucy's prayer was short and direct: “Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to work on this great discovery of the Church. And help us, Holy Spirit, to translate it … that is, if it be Thy will, and … Thou doesn't think that this gospel is going to cause too much trouble.”

(The Holy Spirit has no fear of the truth, and neither should Her children.)

“Amen.”

In another frenetic push, O'Hanrahan swept Lucy and the rabbi toward the metro station nearby, and they bought a subway ticket for the B line and their trip south of town to the next pilgrimage basilica, St. Paul Without the Walls.

“Morey brought up the subject of antipopes,” said O'Hanrahan. “When you couldn't get the job legally, you'd bribe a few cardinals to come to Maria Maggiore and crown you there.”

The professor mused on the most unfortunate antipope: Constantine of the 700s, pawn of the Roman aristocracy and the unscrupulous Duke Toto.

“Duke
Toto?
” Lucy wondered.

“I don't make this stuff up,” said O'Hanrahan.

Having poisoned the reigning Pope Paul I, Toto had a mob take Constantine on their shoulders and rowdily install him as pope in the Lateran. The Lombards marched on Rome and Toto was slaughtered fighting in the streets, and poor, defenseless Constantine hid out in a monastery until a mob of Romans seized him, beat him senseless, and gouged out his eyes with the papal ring. Surviving this he was degraded in the Lateran, angering the inquisition by insisting on his innocence, so the cardinals took turns kicking and hitting the blind man in turn. He was exiled to solitary confinement in a forgotten monastery for the rest of his long life.

Antipope for a day: following this, the Lombards elevated their own pretender to the papal throne, Philip, so laughable a creature that the bishop who presided over his installation had to be forced at knife-point. Philip got no further than saying the blessing over a coronation banquet before the farce became too much and he was escorted to a nearby monastery so that a serious pope could be elected. In this brutal, bloody time, Philip never received as much as a cross word of punishment—perhaps the most likable buffoon ever to wander into the Holy See.

“Pope for a day,” cried O'Hanrahan, “July 31st, 768!”

From the commuter station they began a brisk walk to the front of St. Paul Without the Walls. The rabbi made the inevitable joke, “How does the roof stay up without any walls then?” and Lucy was secretly glad she didn't ask the question in all seriousness, wondering if “Without the Walls” meant it was an open-air church.

The three pilgrims discovered that a stroll to the front of St. Paul's, the largest in Christendom until St. Peter's, was strenuous exercise on a hot Lazian day; on and on and on the rough brick walls and great stone foundations imposed themselves. Three Byzantine emperors, explained O'Hanrahan, decided to build Christianity's Big Mama throughout the 300s: four aisles of twenty massive columns, and a nave you could lose a football field in …

Lucy stood in the doorway of this gloomy expanse and let her eyes adjust. She watched tourists far away at the altar, people ant-sized against the hugeness. She looked to her left and right to see tourists obscured against the forest of columns and unlit chambers; a human being here felt nonexistent, reduced to a speck in the very throne room of Heaven itself.

(But of course, Heaven is an intimate place.)

Ahead of them in the transept, under the mosaics of the apse, was an altar under a gothic canopy, and under that, the simple rock that once marked Paul's grave, unmoved since his martyrdom in the year 66. Lucy was worried about the gift shop closing, which threatened her postcard collection, so she excused herself and began a brisk jog to the transept.

O'Hanrahan watched her depart, conjuring up a vision of an athlete running amid the ancient Roman columns, not the first time something pagan and lost would whisper to O'Hanrahan in a Christian sanctuary. He turned to his friend: “Whadya think? Jewish boy made good? St. Paul, the Rabbin Gamaliel's star student.”

The rabbi nodded serenely. “The School of Hillel taught Jesus as a boy, and his grandson Gamaliel taught Paul, and later Gamaliel the Younger turned the Christers out of the synagogue and probably was first in line to stone them. He also ran out of town the followers of Rabbi Yochanan ben-Zakkai, the teacher who said
It is the unlearned who bring trouble into the world,
but wise as he was, he was wrong. It is the learned, Paddy—men like you and me—who start trouble. Men like Paul, Saul of Tarsus.”

O'Hanrahan smiled in agreement. “Have you heard of the
Clementine Homilies
and the
Clementine Recognitions?
Not by Clement of Rome, but the name has stuck. Gnostic and latter-day texts and tracts, some in bizarre Syriac, some in codes; there are twenty homilies and ten books of recognitions—some, to this late, late day, untranslated.”

“Sounds like a treasure trove,” concurred the rabbi.

“Most of the work is in Greek, but the translations were by Rufinus in the 300s, who butchered and edited as he saw fit. God knows what these obscure African documents
really
say. I thought I'd hop over to the Metropolitan's Library in Athens and take a peek, and see if the Matthias script appears. And then I'll join you in Jerusalem.”

“And you can walk right into Athens and read these things?”

The professor nodded.

“Go to it, then,” Rabbi Hersch suggested. “I'll dig through the kabbalahs, some of the best of which, the Master of the Universe only knows why, are in the Vatican Library.”

O'Hanrahan was querulous. “But Kabbalah is a thousand years older than the Matthias gospel…”

“Alphabets, Paddy,” reminded the rabbi. “The
Sefer Yetsirah
is full of magical, mystical alphabets—22, in fact, one for each letter in Hebrew. I'll find Matthias's damn language yet!”

O'Hanrahan savored unwillingly the possibility that his friend would find the key to this gospel before he did. Yes, the rabbi would likely turn over all the work to him eventually, as a gift, as charity for old, doddering Patrick O'Hanrahan. To be the sole detective on this mystery, O'Hanrahan brooded, to solve this puzzle by myself, I would … I would sell my soul.

(Don't jest. Temptation lies ahead, Patrick.)

“Another thing,” concluded O'Hanrahan glumly. “Father Vico, the Franciscan who's got the gospel, said that some Greek Orthodox monk came by the basilica in Assisi hunting for Matthias earlier this year. Some monk who went up and down Italy; asked for it by name, too. He also said he got the impression this … this Mad Monk wanted to destroy it.”

“Oh, just great. A Mad Monk on the trail too. This trail is getting pretty crowded, Paddy.”

A sacristan and two sextons rushed around trying to shoo people toward the exit; the church was closing for lunch.

Rabbi Hersch: “When you getting rid of her?”

This caught O'Hanrahan off-guard. “Well … after she sees Rome.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

The rabbi, thought O'Hanrahan, seemed oddly persistent. “She said she was leaving soon. She's gotta load up on trinkets for all the aunties back home, plastic Marys, et cetera. Of course, now that Gabriel's gone, I need an assistant—”

“Paddy, stop shmying around here. You can't take her to Athos, you can't take her to Wadi Natrun, if it came to that. What about Mar Saba and the library, hm? No women allowed. You're headed eastward and she'll be a millstone.”

O'Hanrahan nodded.

“And that whole Gabriel business in Ireland; I can't say I trust her. Also, if there
are
big guns out looking for this, Mad Monks and aggrieved collectors, then she's in danger. You can't be responsible for her. What if someone kidnaps her? That kinda news you should want to break to her parents, huh? Think of the lawsuits.”

O'Hanrahan acquiesced and said he'd get her packing within 48 hours.

“Good,” he said. “How's the health?”

“No problems,” said O'Hanrahan, the next moment tipping his hand a bit: “I guess the thought of translating that scroll keeps me alive, keeps the blood pumping.”

But the rabbi didn't say anything. He just looked ahead at Lucy running up to them.

“Lunchtime at last?” she said.

Safely Within the Walls in central Rome, O'Hanrahan led his friends to an old favorite
trattoria
wedged against the back of Il Gesù, the spectacular baroque cathedral and headquarters of the Jesuit Order.