Gospel (85 page)

“And two, he knew we were here in Jerusalem and in this hotel. In Athens, did you say we were heading to Jerusalem?”

“No, you told me not to tell Mr. Underwood and Colonel Westin anything, so I didn't.”

“Who knows we're here, then?”

Lucy sighed. “Rabbi Hersch knows. I called my mom. Apparently, Gabriel because of Father Vico knows we're here. Did you notice Mr. Underwood's ring?”

O'Hanrahan didn't.

“I could swear I've seen that design, that insignia before somewhere.”

O'Hanrahan: “Well, you get some rest, Sister Lucy. And I'll keep plugging away at Meroitic and see what we get.”

Lucy got her key and wandered to the elevator, her arm now aching with each footstep. Oh damn, she muttered, and lying down isn't going to help really. She needs sleeping pills. She needs to obliterate her consciousness for the next twenty-four hours until this goes away—

“Lucy!”

It was Gabriel. He ran up to give her a hug—

“Don't touch me!” she shrieked, turning a few strangers' heads, imagining a lover's spat. Lucy explained about the inoculations and Gabriel laughed.

“What are you still doing here? I thought you were back in Chicago.”

“The chase continues,” Lucy offered.

“Coming to Jerusalem was sort of my reward,” Gabriel said, as tan as Lucy had ever seen him. “Father Vico said I could accompany him. Of course, he has no idea that I'm going to leave the Franciscans.”

Lucy felt short-tempered due to the shots. She snapped at him, “One week you're in, one week you're out. Don't you get tired of yourself?”

Gabriel's big eyes went even bigger. “I'm trying to decide. I'm going through a lot right now.”

Lucy tried to put this less sharply. “So going to South America and feeding the third world is out, for a while?”

“Oh, well, that wasn't very serious, feeding the world and all that. I think it's more important that I keep on with school.” He began to discuss degrees he might get, programs he might consider, and Lucy found herself longing for the comfort of her hotel room. So Lucy invited him up—great view of the Old City from the window, she promised.

Lucy soon took to her bed, gently laying her left arm on a soft down pillow and turning to the chair where Gabriel had positioned himself.

“Can I have these?” Gabriel had discovered the chocolates left each night by the maids. Lucy, ever mindful of her virtuous loss of weight and never being a chocoholic like Judy, had stacked them neatly on the nighttable.

“Why do you want to see Dr. O'Hanrahan?” she asked.

“I'm hoping you'll help me. I mean, I think it's important to have resolution in your life, you know?”

Lucy listened, wondering why she had never detected so much New Age–speak in her friend's jargon before.

“And before I go home I want to sit down with Patrick and really
communicate
to him. I'm hoping we can secure some kind of bond before I leave because with all the bad things that have intervened between us, I still feel our time together was a really special growth experience for me and I want him to know that.”

Hm, thought Lucy, I'd like to be a fly on the wall for that discussion.

“I was so depressed in Oxford,” he was saying. “I'd have given anything to have someone to talk about the whole thing with…”

I
was in Oxford, Lucy reminded herself.

“And I think I need to be free of the order for a while and pursue something for myself. You know, it's always been the Church—I don't do enough things for
me.
”

Lucy yawned. “Gabe, I'm about to fall asleep, no offense.”

Gabriel looked crestfallen. “Aw, we just started … How about getting together on Wednesday? I heard Dr. O'Hanrahan say that would be a free day because he's going to Tel Aviv to look up old friends. You and me can do the town.”

Lucy said Wednesday sounded fine. Then he began a discussion of maybe being an art history major back at Chicago—

“Gabe, I've got to get some sleep. Rabbi Hersch is supposed to join us for dinner tonight and I always need to get my batteries charged before tangling with him.”

Gabriel read more malice into the comment than she'd intended. “I hear that. The farther you and Dr. O'Hanrahan get from Rabbi Hersch the better, I think.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I mean, I know Hebrew University owns the scroll and all, but I don't trust the old codger. Don't like him, and he didn't like me. He doesn't like any Catholics. Ever read his
Not the Messiah
book? It's really anti-Christian.”

“He wrote a book called
Not the Messiah?
”

Gabriel declared it was the work of a Zionist fanatic. Then added, “You know when I tried to swipe the
Matthias
scroll in Rome back in April? The rabbi had said he was going to stay in Jerusalem, but then I saw him in Rome after all. I met with those art dealers and I was on my way out of the hotel where Patrick and I were staying, when Rabbi Hersch and I rounded the corner of an alley at the same time. I ran smack into him. I called out to him but he ran away.”

Lucy reflected that the rabbi had shown up unexpectedly in Rome when she and the professor were there, too.

Gabriel noted, “And I never saw Patrick again to tell him about it. Doesn't matter now anyway, I guess.”

Lucy found herself wide awake. “Interesting.”

*   *   *

The next morning, following her five-hour afternoon nap and eight hours of sleep beyond that, Lucy was called upon to do some work. O'Hanrahan dug her out of her room where, enraptured, she was watching Israeli television and dragged her to a 7:30
A.M.
breakfast with an emphasis on coffee. Then it was back to their adjoining rooms, where she was instructed to scoot her table against his room's table for a big work space.

“How's the arm today?”

“You're almost forgiven.”

O'Hanrahan started right in: “Both Morey and I rejected out of hand that
Matthias
was in the Meroitic language earlier this year, but that was before I got out the newer German books last night and took a closer peek. Meroitic has 23 letters—four vowels, 17 consonants, and two diglyphs—with words separated by colons. So does our scroll,
exactly.
The Meroitic that Fletcher studied in 1909 was much different and that's the book Morey and I were using; but if you look at the Nubian manuscripts discovered when they started digging for the Aswan Dam in the 1960s, you'll find a later Meroitic, and it's a perfect match.”

“I don't even know what kind of language that is.”

“Join the club. No one's ever translated Meroitic.”

“What's it like?”

“Nilotic Egyptian presumably, though it very quickly took on its own peculiar character. None of the Empire of Meroe's contemporaries could speak it either. Like all Nile languages, it evolved from a linear hieroglyphic to a hieratic alphabet around 200
B.C.
to finally a more demotic written language.”

“And it's totally indecipherable?”

“Hey. If the
Gospel of Matthias
is indeed written in some form of Meroitic, we'll be less famous for the gospel than for cracking this long-running mystery. People have been working on this goddam thing for over a century.”

“Are there any clues at all?”

“Yeah. By comparing known pharoahs' names and gods and goddesses with their representations in Meroe, we can guess how the various letters are pronounced. We can sound the language out, but it means gobbledygook. And the grammar defies any known system. Here's what we're up against.”

O'Hanrahan set down a yellow legal pad and scrawled some letters on the page:

NWSTHTMFRLLGDMNTCMTTHDFTHRCNTR

“Can you read that, Luce?”

“No,” she laughed.

“This is a demonstration I used in my classes. It's an English sentence with no punctuation, and as in Semitic languages, there are no vowels. No clues to where one word stops and another one starts. This is what the Dead Sea Scrolls look like to the uninitiated.”

O'Hanrahan let Lucy stare at the sentence for a moment, before he deciphered it,
“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

“Oh I see,” she breathed. “Once you tell me I can see it, sort of.”

“And so could the Hebrews who read the Qumran scrolls. They knew the material before reading it. They'd memorized it as if their memories were the sole, oral tradition, which was smart because in those days who could guarantee that papyrus or a scroll would survive. The Vedic Hymns from 2000
B.C.
survive because still in the 19th Century Indians had memorized them perfectly—memorized them in a language dead for three millennia. Alexander the Great entertained his camp by reciting the entire
Iliad.
Man when he applies himself has a memory, what can I tellya?” O'Hanrahan sat down on the edge of his bed. “Fortunately we're not in total darkness, because Meroitic
does
tell us where words end with the colons. However…”

He leaned over to take out a brand-new set of prints of the
Gospel of Matthias,
courtesy of Rabbi Hersch.

“… however, look at the first line of the gospel here.”

“Now,” said O'Hanrahan, bringing out a yellow legal pad. “We know, if Rabbi Rosen wasn't deluded, that this is an epistle to Josephus and it is from Matthias. No epistle
ever,
in any archaelogical find I have ever heard about, fails to include in its opening the sender and the receiver. You never knew how many months or years it would take for the
grammatophoroi
to deliver mail in ancient times so you had to spell it out very clearly in the opening. Here is that top line with the Meroitic phonetics substituted…”

KVQGKJL: FR: QNR: VXMFX: XLMQSM

Lucy and O'Hanrahan stared at it.

O'Hanrahan: “Remember to read from right to left. I see nothing that sounds remotely like ‘Matthias' or ‘Josephus' or ‘Jesus Christ' and I've converted half of the first block this way…” O'Hanrahan flashed the next and the next page in his yellow pad, revealing his transliterations. “I've read it up, down, sideways, you name it, trying to find one word that sounds familiar.”

“Maybe it's just not in Meroitic.”

O'Hanrahan crossed his arms pensively. “It's gotta be. Every character matches, with the most minor of variations, to the letter. And this colon business.”

“So. What do I do?”

He smiled. “While I continue in the library, you go through the second and third chapter of
Matthias,
as far as you can go, and write the Roman equivalent of the Meroitic letters. It'll take a long time at first, but soon you'll just fly along.”

O'Hanrahan left her with a chart with the 23 Meroitic characters and what sounds they equaled for her convenience. Lucy was eager to be of service … but what a long, dreary afternoon now presented itself.

*   *   *

Rabbi Hersch and O'Hanrahan and Lucy were in agreement for once: they all needed a break this evening from the drudgery.

O'Hanrahan returned to the King David Hotel at five
P.M.
with Rabbi Hersch, having detoured by way of the bar. O'Hanrahan was cross-eyed from reading everything about Meroitic in the library; the rabbi had spent the day sorting through library records to see what books Rabbi Rosen had once checked out. Lucy also suffered from cabin fever after making it most of the way through the second block of text, Chapter Two of the
Gospel of Matthias,
having in the process ordered up high English tea, a six-pack of Diet Cokes, and a pack of cigarettes from room service. She was wired.

In the Armenian Quarter, the three evangelophiles enjoyed two bottles of wine at an Armenian restaurant, ground lambsteaks with a wonderful red aromatic powder simply known as “Armenian spice,” a finely diced salad Jerusalem-style, a confetti of spices and leaves, plates of
hummus
to be explored with warmed, blackened stone-baked pita bread, followed by a dessert of sugary, sandy pastries.

As promised, Rabbi Mordechai Hersch accompanied O'Hanrahan, with yarmulke, and Lucy, dressed conservatively in her long black skirt with black stockings, to the Wailing Wall, this remnant from Solomon's Temple. The pilgrim passes through a security station near the Dung Gate and looks down upon the marble plaza, a natural amphitheater leading to the Wall and its many supplicants there praying, chanting, men along one half, women at the other half, inserting their written prayer requests into the crevices of stone and mortar, this lapidary proof of 3500 years, marveled Lucy, of continuous faithfulness to Yahweh.

(Not entirely faithful, or else Solomon's Temple would still be there.)