The Gospel Of Judas (15 page)

Night was a desolate time, a darkness beset by dreams he could not recall when he awoke, and fears he could not enunciate when he confronted them in the cold light of dawn. Daytime painted over the fears of the night with a thin wash of immediacy.

The telephone rang.

It would be her. They had spoken on the phone but seen one another only twice, once when all three of them, Jack and Madeleine and Leo, had gone to some concert together and she had sat between the two men and Leo had sweated in his narrow seat, knowing her presence beside him, the contact of her shoulder, her knee against his, the quick, covert clasp of her hand. He wondered if he was the subject of some complex game, a game of finesse and sacrifice, the rules known only to her. Perhaps known to Jack as well. As they left the concert hall and walked down the wide triumphal way that leads towards the Basilica of Saint Peter’s, she clung to his arm and extolled his virtues to her husband. ‘My favourite confessor,’ she called him. ‘Saint Leo the imperturbable.’

‘He doesn’t look imperturbable to me,’ Jack had remarked.
‘He looks damned embarrassed, you clinging to him like that, and only a hundred yards from headquarters.’

The telephone rang.

Their phone conversations had been cautious and oblique, as though each was concerned that someone might be listening, someone else on the line, someone else hidden in the fabric of the world around them like a actor behind the scenery, a third party looking over their shoulders – God, perhaps, reduced to the status of an eavesdropper.

The telephone rang.

He was hurrying with his breakfast – the alarm clock that she had bought him showed the time as nine-thirty, and he had a seminar at ten.

The telephone rang.

Who else phoned him here? The phone lay on the floor in the living room, the cable snaking across the floorboards. It had been abandoned by the last occupant and activated only after arguments with the phone company, only after that rendezvous at the Church of San Crisogono, when she alone had turned up and they had been precipitated together by circumstance or chance or whatever it was that governed the pure caprice of the world.

The telephone rang.

And they had met, just the two of them together, just once. They had driven up in her car and parked on the Janiculum Hill with the whole of the city splayed out before them. There were tourists up there to see the view, and puppeteers performing for groups of shrieking children, and a trick cyclist and a fire-eater, a stall selling ice cream and another selling trinkets, all this around the refuge of her car. ‘Safety in numbers,’ she said. She sat half-turned towards him, her knees up on the seat so that if he wished he could put out his hand and touch the smooth, silken
mound of her patella. He felt a delight in her presence, something of the delight of juvenile love, the breathless longing to be the other, to be subsumed in the other. There were snatched moments of rapture that were no more than a clasp of hands (mature hands, these, lined with sinew and vein, their knuckles wrinkled; mature hands, but clinging to each other like children’s). There was confusion and anguish. ‘If we were any other couple,’ she said, ‘we’d be deep into adultery by now. Do you realise that?’

‘Of course I realise that.’

‘And instead we’re here, meeting like children who don’t quite know what to do.’

‘Maybe that’s what we are in a way. Children.’

‘
You
are,’ she said sharply. A sudden anger bubbled up within her. ‘Not me.
You
are like a child. Retarded, for God’s sake.’

‘That’s unfair.’

She laughed, but there was no humour there. ‘What the hell do you know about unfair? What do you know about having to live with someone whom you know longer love, having to show affection for him, having to tell him how fond you are of him – I use the word
fond
, do you know that? So that I won’t actually have to lie about
love
. What do you know about having to let him fuck me when I no longer want it, when I want only you?’ And the word
fuck
hung there in the air between them like a threat, the scabrous issuing forth from that articulate arabesque of a mouth, while her expression trembled, shook, collapsed slowly into tears.

‘I’m sorry, Madeleine,’ he said pointlessly. ‘I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.’

She shook her head, as though trying to shake the tears from her eyes. ‘I’ll just disappear from your life if you want
that. Do you want that? I’ll just vanish. I won’t give you any trouble, Leo, I promise you that.’

He felt panic at the idea of her absence, a desperate, physical panic, a shortage of breath, a constriction in the chest, the emotional manifested in the organic, a plain, bewildering attack of panic as though he needed to come up for air, as though stricken by asthma, as though felled by shock. ‘I don’t want you to go,’ he said. ‘I love you, but I don’t understand
how
I love you. I’ve no practice in the thing, that’s the trouble. I don’t know which way to turn.’

‘You can turn to me,’ she said quietly. ‘You can always turn to me.’

The telephone rang. He knew it would be her. His mind trembled as he lifted the receiver. ‘
Pronto?
Madeleine?’

There was a silence.

‘Is that Leo? Leo Newman?’ A man’s voice, an American accent.

‘Who is this?’

‘This is Steve, Leo. Steve Calder. I’m glad I found you.’ There was something about his tone, some wavering hint of shock that was detectable even over the line. ‘You’ve moved, is that right? We called your old number. They said you’d moved and I had one hell of a load of trouble getting them to part with your new number. I’m his long-lost cousin from Wisconsin, I told them. Look, Leo, there have been developments. Pretty big ones, if you want to know. I’ve booked you a flight. I hope your passport is in date. You collect the ticket at the desk at the airport.’

‘What the devil are you talking about?’

‘Tomorrow morning. Didn’t I say that? There’s a problem? What time is it with you now?’

‘Half-past nine.’

‘Right. We’re one hour ahead. Look, someone’ll meet you at the airport, is that OK? Tomorrow morning. Your flight leaves at nine your time, that’s ten here.’

‘What’s all this about?’

‘I told you. There’s some new stuff from En-Mor. Didn’t I say that?’

‘You didn’t say anything. What is it? What have they found?’

There was a silence, a hiatus in the rush of words, a carefully constructed pause. Calder knew how to do these things. At last he said it:

‘They’ve found a scroll.’

Madeleine phoned later, when he had got back from lecturing at the Institute. Her familiar voice, the small hesitations, the slants, the quick, nimble tones, the anguish that lay behind it, and the anxiety: ‘Can we talk, Leo? Can we do that? Jack goes away this evening, Leo. Can I come round tomorrow? I promise … God, I don’t know what I promise. I promise I’ll not pressure you. Nothing like that. But I must see you.’

‘I can’t, Madeleine. Not tomorrow.’

‘Why not tomorrow?’

‘I’ve got to go away.’

There was a silence on the other end, that strange hollowness on the line when you know someone is listening but saying nothing, a faint electronic questioning. When finally she spoke her voice seemed far away, a small, fragile thing far away. ‘Why so suddenly?’

‘This business in Israel. The excavation. They’ve asked me to go.’

‘Tomorrow morning?’

‘Tomorrow morning. An early flight.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I didn’t know before––’

‘Why do you spring it on me like this?’

‘I told you––’ Their words trampled across each other, contrasting words clashing where once their same words had echoed.

The flight to Tel Aviv was half empty. There were a few tourists, a few kids heading for the kibbutz experience, one or two businessmen, a group of orthodox Jews. In the departure lounge he encountered two Dominicans he knew, one of them a scroll scholar, a Frenchman of fierce and sceptical expression who had worked under Father Roland de Vaux at the Ecole Biblique.

‘Father Newman.’ The Frenchman examined him critically, as he might have examined a text; and appeared to find him corrupt. ‘You look as though you are going on
holiday
. Surely this cannot be so.’

‘There’s a meeting,’ Leo told him.

‘A meeting? I know of no meeting.’

‘It’s a
private
meeting.’

They made their way out to the bus. Hautcombe’s French intonation smoothed out the path, made the rough places plain. ‘You are making quite a stir at the moment, aren’t you? These papyri from En-Mor. Perhaps now you will remove your opposition to my reading of 7Q5?’ 7Q5 is a Qumran papyrus fragment that had been identified by Hautcombe and others as being part of an early gospel, a proto-Mark. Most authorities doubted it and doubt it still. Leo doubted it. A mere twenty letters, ten of them damaged, on five fractured lines. An academic quibble over whether the letters
nu-nu-eta-sigma
could be the middle letters of the name Gennesar, which may be the Gennesaret of Mark
6: 52–53. Things rankle in the minds of celibates. Ideas are your children, for you have no others. Ideas are your contribution to posterity. There had been an exchange of acid letters between Hautcombe and Newman in specialist journals, an embarrassing stand-up row during a conference of papyrologists in Switzerland.

‘Perhaps,’ said Leo in a conciliatory tone. ‘But perhaps it doesn’t matter any longer.’

The bus drove them far across the airport to a distant hardstanding where the Tel Aviv plane stood, corralled by two police vehicles and an armoured car. The laughter of the orthodox Jews rang inside the cabin as the passengers took their seats. ‘They want to show that they are used to this kind of thing,’ Hautcombe said as he and Leo shuffled down the aisle. ‘Searches and questions, police and guns. They want to celebrate the fact that the Promised Land can only be gained by blood and sweat and tears.’

‘Isn’t that our line as well?’

They took off into a spring sky. And as the plane climbed up over the Mediterranean the chaos of Leo’s life in Rome receded, thoughts of Madeleine diminishing as though fading along lines of perspective towards some far vanishing point. In the seat beside him the French priest turned to reading his breviary. Outside the icy wind of 30,000 feet howled across a glittering silver desert.

When he emerged from the arrivals section at Lod airport he found a familiar figure waiting for him beyond the barrier.

‘Remember me?’ the man said.

‘Patron saints,’ Leo replied.

‘You got it. Hole in one. Saul Goldstaub.’ He held out a heavy paw to be shaken. When Leo had last seen him the man had been wearing collar and tie, sitting awkwardly at
the Brewers’ dinner table; now he was absurd in shorts and sandals, with a straw hat that would not have looked out of place on a croquet lawn. The T-shirt stretched tight across his belly was embellished with the slogan
THE CONTENTS OF THIS PACKAGE ARE KOSHER.

For a moment Leo toyed with the possibility that this was all some ridiculous plot of Madeleine’s. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m with WBC now,’ the man explained. ‘Press and public relations.’

‘What a strange coincidence.’

‘Not strange at all. You know I once did an article on the human nexus?’

‘What’s nexus?’

‘Nexus, plexus, sexus,’ the man said, incomprehensibly. ‘Here, let me take your bag.’ They walked to the car park, Goldstaub prattling away. Spring in Rome, it was summer in Israel, the light burning hot and white outside the airport buildings and cicadas shrieking from amongst the agave plants. ‘You see, there’s this one professor in Boston who has demonstrated that everyone in the developed world is linked to everyone else through a maximum of about six acquaintances.’

‘So?’

‘So there’s nothing at all strange about you and me coming up against each other like this. Happens all the time. It’s this professor’s theory of the human nexus.’

‘So tell me what the excitement is all about,’ Leo asked as he climbed into the car beside Goldstaub. ‘What’s all this secrecy?’

But Goldstaub only laughed. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Steve Calder looks like he just got the tablets of the law from Moses himself.’

*     *     *

They left the heat of the coastal plain and drove up to the cool of the city in the hills: Jerusalem,
Yerushalem
, whose Hebrew name was born out of the Canaanite god Shalem but over the centuries has become conflated with the Hebrew word that everyone knows, the word for the one thing that they have never had there in that dusty corner of the Mediterranean –
shalom
, peace. Approaching from the west they saw nothing of the Old City, nothing of that view that the prophets wept over. They straggled along behind buses and trucks into the sprawling suburbs. New housing projects were startling white in the sun, their buildings scattered like dice across bare hillsides where before only lizards had licked their chops and shepherds had tended their flocks. ‘How are the Brewers?’ Goldstaub asked. ‘How’s Madeleine?’

The Brewers were fine, just fine. Madeleine was fine. Her name, her words, danced through Leo’s mind as Goldstaub weaved the car through the traffic.

‘You see much of them?’

‘A bit,’ he replied evasively. ‘Every now and then.’

‘A difficult woman.’ Goldstaub shook his head and laughed, but there wasn’t much humour in it. ‘Crazy. All that patron saint stuff …’ Something obviously rankled with him.

‘Just her idea of a joke,’ Leo said. He stared away from Goldstaub, out into the alien streets and guilt seeped through his mind like a thin and corrosive fluid.
Keep away from fornication. All other sins are committed outside the body; but to fornicate is to sin against your own body
. They passed the bus station and the central markets, and the song of the police siren was loud in the land. Outside the windows of the car soldiers slouched along the pavements toting guns, like children with toys.
Your body is the temple of the Holy
Spirit. You are not your own property; you have been bought for a price
.