Gospel (84 page)

“You have the gospel with you, Father?”

“Antonio!”

O'Hanrahan stared agog that the little safe on wheels had made it to Jerusalem. Squeak-squeak-squeak. Antonio rolled it from a locked closet in the antechamber into Father Vico's room.

“Here,” said the father, “I shall open the safe and show you that
Matthias
is indeed with us in the Holy City. Ah, but you must turn your heads—yes, you too, Antonio. It is a very simple combination and anyone might see … ah, now what is it? Ha-ha, you are panicked that I have forgotten, yes? Of course I remember…”

Father Vico opened the safe and O'Hanrahan suspiciously examined the scroll case and slid the protective sack from it to glimpse the papyrus within. “Yes, this is it,” the professor said. “I may have to photograph it again,” he added, pessimistically contemplating a period of noncooperation from the rabbi.

“Ah,” said the Franciscan father, “I see from your eyes you are not to be bribed by money from our agreed arrangements.”

O'Hanrahan was certain that he could leave politely now. “You mustn't worry, Father. Nothing means more to me than translating our scroll.” He then scooped up the
Pseudo-Acts of Andrew,
rested it in his satchel, and bade his host farewell. “Oh, I have a question.” This slipped out before he thought about the implication of detaining himself with Father Vico.

“Yes?”

“Is the
Gospel of Matthias
safe here, amid the other five sects?”

Father Vico leaned forward and said confidentially, “None but the Franciscans will ever lay hands on it, and we will defend it, as we have defended thees church, to the death!” It struck O'Hanrahan that Father Vico rather titillated himself with thoughts of defending the scroll to his own demise. The father continued gleefully, “If someone were to pursue me, they should have no satisfaction! I am but a
zimbèllo
—what was your word? Dee-koo, Dee-koe…”

“Decoy, Father.”

“Ah, I shall write that down…” Father Vico looked through his robe for a pen and could not find one, then every drawer of the desk, then the cabinet, then he called for Antonio, who also did not have a pen but went to fetch one, returned without a pen, was lectured, was sent out again, returned some minutes later with a pen.

“And now I am ready … ah! No paper! Antonio!”

*   *   *

Like all pilgrims, Lucy Dantan was initially disappointed in the run-down Holy Sepulcher, some chapels little better than storage rooms for debris, the Chapel of the Apostles, alive with frescoes from floor to ceiling, now a dumping ground for rotted lumber and rusted pipes. How, she wondered, did it ever get so dilapidated?

(The Syrians and their small caves in the back had had a fire—their fellow Christians cheering their misfortune. The Greeks and the Franciscans who have let walls and ceilings fall in rather than go to the expense of repairing something that might benefit another sect. A church that in 1834 had a fire during which a panic broke out among the Christian congregation and 300 people were trampled to death as the crowds rushed to save themselves. A church that in 1852 had a violent riot over who got to sweep the doorstep. A church in which a riot this century began over who had jurisdiction over the changing of an oil lamp. Monks have killed other monks over the issue of who gets to polish what. Godless place!)

Then the afternoon services began and the resulting cacophony Lucy found enthralling: the Armenian boys' choir with their atonal chanting was led in by pointed-hooded monks. The Syrians grouped around the backside of the Sepulcher itself and began a mass in Aramaic. Up on the mezzanine, as it were, at the site of Calvary, the Greeks began a ceremony. The Franciscans held Latin mass before the front entrance of the Sepulcher, which was encased in a gaudy marble hut under Constantine's much-restored dome. And at last the Ethiopians filed down from the roof and into the church and began touching their heads to the floor before the Stone of Unction, where Nicodemus and the women anointed the Lord's body with oils and balms. This echoing, ill-lit church in which one can barely see the ceiling reverberated with chant and rite and clinking censers that spread an Eastern perfume throughout the ancient hodgepodge.

It will take, thought Lucy, more than a few visits to decipher this labyrinth of catacombs: the Chapel of Adam, displaying the crack in the rock made during the earthquake as Jesus was crucified, his miraculous blood trickling down to the grave and bones of Adam—redeemed at last for his Fall. Down the stairs to a basement level, and down more stairs into a cave, was the Chapel of the Invention of the True Cross where Constantine's mother, Helena, was convinced she had found, 300 years after the fact, the real McCoy.

Lucy smiled.
Invenire,
“to find,” in Latin; making the Latinized “Chapel of the
Invention
of the True Cross” a more cynical commentary than its namers had intended for us moderns. The Chapel of the Division of the Raiment. The Chapel of the Derision. The Chapel of Mary Magdalene on the spot she first beheld the Risen Christ. The Chapel of the Armenians where one can buy frankincense and myrrh from a nice monk—which she did—where one can view the 4th-Century pavement with Armenian letters in the mosaic, and see the Armenian Patriarch's throne, which looked amazingly like an easy chair in her mom and dad's living room … In fact it
was
an easy chair, discovered Lucy, inspecting it up close.

With clouds bringing an early darkness over the Holy City and the mosque across the courtyard sounding time for prayer, Lucy stepped out of the complex and into the open air, free of incense and chant, only the birds making noise. The inevitable horde of pilgrims, who lined up for hours for a solitary prayer in the Sepulcher or for the privilege of having a flash-photo taken at Calvary, where a silver plaque marks the spot of the Cross, had mysteriously thinned. There were no more than twenty people in the courtyard and Lucy lingered to look at the variety of Christians from East and West.

And from America.

Here came an American contingent of Baptists—they marched with a banner proclaiming
THE PROMISED LAND
and
JERUSALEM MAKE-A-MIRACLE-HAPPEN MISSION
1990, as if their little banners would provoke God to action for the occasion. The Americans had availed themselves of Via Dolorosa, Inc., a group of untroubled Arabs who provided pilgrim groups with an oversize Cross they might carry along the Way of Sorrows. Lucy leaned against the dusty, chalky walls as this ostentatious group passed by in great solemnity. For one thing, thought Lucy, when Jesus carried his Cross it wasn't some chipboard, ten-pound prop like that—why don't you get a
real
Cross and see what the man went through? The Americans stopped before the front door to the church and an elder posed with the Cross for a picture.

“Mama,” asked one drawn, middle-aged Southern woman, “have you had your time on the Cross yet?”

There'd be a chance for everyone to stand before the camcorder with the Cross before entering the Holy Sepulcher, the elder announced. We have rejected the ikon, thought Lucy, for the videotape souvenir played in the VCR, our modern altar. The Cross was passed to an overdressed Barbie doll of a Southern woman, all frills and calico ruffles, who wept profusely and had to surrender the Cross to someone less emotional. Next up was a young man …

“Farley,” Lucy said with a jolt of recognition.

She decided to observe him secretly, and she scurried to the dark Ethiopian Chapel off the courtyard, to linger in the shadowed doorway. Farley with great seriousness carried the Cross, then turned to the video cameraman and said a few words, sharing his impressions for the folks who'd watch this, Lucy imagined, back home at Sunday school. Lucy scanned the Baptist mob for the Man in the Tacky Suit whom she and O'Hanrahan had decided was accompanying Farley. Suddenly it didn't seem very likely Farley was part of a master plan to steal the
Gospel of Matthias.

A
UGUST
4
TH
–5
TH

Lucy left the Hebrew University Medical Center with a slow sense of impending unease. She had gotten yellow fever, cholera, and typhus vaccines in her left arm, a shot of gamma globulin in her behind, and had picked up two hefty containers of chloraquine antimalarial tablets. She cursed Dr. O'Hanrahan.

“It's just a bunch of shots,” he had goaded her earlier at breakfast. “Stop being a baby. Your arm will be a bit sore for a few hours and then you'll be fine.
This
is a lot more worrying…” He showed her the headlines. Iraq had invaded Kuwait.

Lucy could care less at the moment, although she couldn't fail to notice how every headline, every newspaper, Arabic, Hebrew, and English, was blaring headlines about the international implications. Would Israel get dragged into this, one editorial wondered. Lucy stared coldly at the newspapers. Let's hope we're long gone before the answer to that plays out, she comforted herself. Of more immediate concern to her was her left arm, already throbbing in complicity with a slight fever; she reckoned a little bit of each of these killer diseases was swimming around somewhere in her body. That's right, she remembered, David McCall said the typhus shot was hell.

“I don't want
any
shots,” she had firmly told O'Hanrahan that morning.

“All right, but when we start exploring monasteries along the Nile and the mosquitoes bite, don't come crying to me if you get yellow fever. Of course, you won't have any tears to cry with, since your 106-degree fever will have dehydrated every bit of moisture in your body, racked with spasms and sores—”

“All right,”
she conceded.

Now all she wanted was to get back to the King David and crawl into bed, preferably lying on her right side. She raised her pulsing, wounded arm perversely to see if it was functional enough to hail a taxicab. She realized she would suffer for each and every movement.

O'Hanrahan was checking his phone messages at reception as Lucy passed by for her key. “How's our patient?” he asked cheerily.

“Regretting that she ever met up with you,” she said, rubbing her shoulder. “The only recompense possible is that I can be around to see you get these shots too.”

“I've had most of them already,” he said lightly. “Did you get our malaria pills?”

She nodded, and even that hurt her arm.

“Look who keeps calling,” said O'Hanrahan, sharing one of his phone messages. Lucy looked at the pink message-paper: Gabriel O'Donoghue. Who came by the hotel at 11:36
A.M.
Lucy glanced at the reception desk clock, which said 11:45
A.M.

“He must be nearby,” she said.

“Yeah, and that's why I'm making my getaway for the library.”

“How'd it go last night?”

He smiled, patting his satchel. “I've decided that the
Matthias
scroll is some form of Meroitic. Both Morey and I rejected that language earlier, but I've come back to it. Too many similarities, like the colons that separate the words. All the characters match up.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“No one has ever deciphered Meroitic. It's one of the world's great lost languages. One of the reasons Morey and I rejected Meroitic is because Rabbi Rosen was reading this scroll in about a week and it's hard to believe he translated a mysterious language that scholars have been working on for a hundred years and then not tell anyone. But maybe he did just that.”

O'Hanrahan noticed Lucy looking oddly at a giant rubber plant.

O'Hanrahan trailed off and turned in the direction she was looking.

A shambling, red-faced Clem Underwood sidestepped out from behind the fronds, as if he had been spying. “Heh-heh, well well well.”

They stared at him.

“Long time no see, huh? What are you doing here, Mr. O'Hanrahan?”

O'Hanrahan and Lucy looked down as the five-foot Clem Underwood, the State Department lackey from their adventures in Greece, revealed himself. He now was wearing a light brown suit, again ill-fitting as if altered from a suit he'd got off the rack, a suit he persuaded himself looked tailored. His eyes were enormous behind thick circular glasses.

“I got the impression,” said Underwood in his flat Midwestern drawl, putting out a pudgy hand to shake, “that you were going straight home. You sure gave our State Department sleepless nights. Miss Dantan,” he added, nodding in her direction and extending his hand. Lucy noticed the ring on his right hand wasn't a wedding band but some fraternity ring.

“I'm a religious scholar,” the professor said blandly. “Why shouldn't I visit Israel before going back to Chicago?”

Lucy looked at Underwood's sparse headful of hair that had been lacquered with some gel to form a point.

Underwood: “Hey, I hope you enjoy your stay here. And, heh-heh, if you need us at State don't, uh, hesitate to call.”

O'Hanrahan was obdurate.

“Uh, I've got a meeting and I gotta fly,” said Underwood, backing away. “Perhaps we can get together sometime for dinner, right?” Underwood picked up his briefcase, gave a lame military salute, and padded away.

“That was an odd encounter,” said Lucy.

“Yeah. What's a two-bit functionary in the Thessalonika consulate doing down here in Jerusalem all of a sudden?” O'Hanrahan turned to the reception desk woman. “Excuse me, dear. Did that man, that short man, just check into the hotel?”

No, sir.

“Did he leave a message for me, perhaps?”

No, he didn't.

O'Hanrahan squinted, thinking about possibilities. “Okay, if it's not a coincidence and he's following us, we know two things. One, he's a very clumsy spy and a moron.”

Lucy: “I got that impression back in Athens.”