The Psalter (3 page)

“I was afraid of that,” Del Carlo said. “Thank you for your expertise. May I call you if I need further assistance?”

Romano turned to the cardinal, and the dour Grand Inquisitor nodded. “I’m at your disposal,
Colonelo
.” Romano hesitated for a moment, but couldn’t help himself, “Can I return the Psalter to the Archives?”

“It’s evidence, Father.”

“You’re right, of course, but we would take better care of it. It’s our specialty, and if you need the book back, I’ll deliver it personally. You have my word.”

Generale
Giudici spoke for the first time, “I don’t see any reason not to release the book. It’s not as though we’ll be prosecuting anyone.”

Del Carlo turned to face Romano, “Of course, Father, and you need not give me your word. You’re a priest. I believe everything you say.” The colonel glanced hard at the cardinal, who averted his eyes. Del Carlo showed Father Romano to the door, holding him by the arm. He added in a low voice, “Here’s my card, Father. Should you think of anything else, please call me. My home telephone is on the back.” Then he patted the briefcase. “Keep the book safe, even if it is just ordinary.”

3
Secret Archives

Father Romano tucked the leather briefcase under his arm as he trotted toward the Secret Archives. He breathed hard—not from exertion, because his daily jogging kept him in superb physical condition. Rather, his suspicions left him exhilarated.
Why hadn’t he mentioned those suspicions to the police
, he wondered? He knew why he didn’t tell the Grand Inquisitor.
I’ve been down that road before
, Romano thought,
and almost lost my job
. He had no intention of leaving himself open to another anonymous denunciation with no defense against the arcane and capricious regulations of the Inquisition.
They might enforce grudging obedience, but they can’t bully me into agreement
.

He could have voiced his speculation to
Colonelo
Del Carlo in private. The GIS colonel had extended a personal invitation. Perhaps he just needed to be sure or feared being wrong. That might be a piece, but not all. Romano had long suspected that Giovanni was hiding something significant. His pattern seemed too systemic, too perfect. Scribes filled parchment with elaborate and copious ink. Yet Giovanni wrote in small, slender strokes, as though he was taking great care to write around something hidden.

The paleographer side of Romano was disheartened this wasn’t a first-century manuscript. Nevertheless, he had indeed noticed something unexpected and tantalizing at
Carabinieri
headquarters and kept it to himself. Nothing the cardinal would notice. Even had the police spotted the pinpoint dents in the vellum, they likely would have ignored them. Only a paleographer trained in ancient manuscripts could understand their significance.

He unlocked a side entrance to the Archives and rushed, not for the rooms housing thousands of books and church documents, but for the stairs to the underground level and the Conservation Laboratories. Inside one of the labs, Romano placed the leather-bound book on an examination table and pulled on white cotton gloves.

The dusty smell of antiquity filled his nostrils as he opened the Psalter to the first page. He swung around a powerful magnifying glass attached to a folding arm and positioned it over the verse he had already examined. His eyes skimmed the spaces between the letters and lines of Latin script. There were indeed indentations, so small they might have been made by a safety pin.

A neon light atop a pole, like the poles that dangled IV solutions, stood in the corner. Romano rolled it over and directed the lamp at the page. He turned off the overhead lights and flipped a switch on the stand. Ultraviolet light illuminated the text. Smudges appeared in the gaps between the lines and letters. Romano’s heart pounded as he grabbed another lamp. He shut off the ultraviolet and pressed the switch on the other pole. An infrared bulb transformed the folio into a shade of dull scarlet and the smudges grew more distinct. They were clearly letters, but not Latin or even Greek.

The pinpricks in the vellum had been made by a stylus or a writing reed known as a
calamus
. High-quality reeds were common lettering tools in antiquity, used to write on papyrus and parchment. They left tiny impressions where the
calamus
began the pen stroke, or, in this case, the reed stroke, and where it ended if the scribe pressed hard enough. The stylus was also a sharp instrument made of bone or metal, used to prick and rule manuscripts without ink so scribes could write in straight lines with uniform margins. These small indentations, however, weren’t underneath letters or at the beginning of sentences where they should have been, but in blank spaces between the lines.

Romano suspected the ordinary-looking Psalter hid a much older manuscript. Under ultraviolet and infrared lights, he confirmed it was a palimpsest, a book written over an earlier text. Writing materials in the Middle Ages were expensive. So scribes erased ancient scientific or philosophical literature, and especially heretical scriptures, to reuse the paper for acceptable theological works. They cut the cumbersome scrolls into pages and bound them together to make portable books.

Romano recalled a palimpsest discovered in Constantinople. Underneath a banal collection of Greek prayers, an erased copy of several of Archimedes’ most famous mathematical writings lay hidden. One was believed lost forever:
The Method of Mechanical Theorems
, essentially proto-calculus. The librarian side of Romano wondered how many works of the highest scholarship and historical value had been obliterated for mundane sermons or stale prayer books.

He studied the script with his powerful magnifying glass. The letters looked familiar, but seemed out of context. He pushed the glass away and stood, rubbing tired eyes. Refocusing on the page from a few feet’s distance, the solution popped into his head. “Of course,” he said and turned the book ninety degrees. The erased text had been written at a right angle to the words copied over it.

The priest’s heart jumped as he recognized what he saw. His paleographer’s eye identified the Aramaic script, once the language of the Jews and the Lingua Franca of the Middle East. He swung the magnifying glass back over the book and skimmed the page, looking for an entire word, but spotted only fragments of letters. Then his eye fell on a complete character between the lines of Latin script, ‘h’. The letter was unmistakably Aramaic, the dialect of Jesus, and the writing style had been in use in Palestine during the time of Christ.

He searched for another letter and discovered a ‘w’ between two Latin words. Then he found ‘+’ near the bottom. They were the characters from an alphabet he had studied since his days in the seminary, letters he prayed he might find one day in a Christian text. The priest plopped onto his stool. Without a doubt, the page had been written sometime around fifty A.D., perhaps closer to forty, only a decade more or less after the Crucifixion.

Why did Father Mackey take the Psalter from the Library
? Romano wondered. He certainly didn’t have permission. Did he discover that ancient scriptures in Jesus’ native tongue had resided for centuries in the recesses of the Vatican Library or the Secret Archives, concealed by Giovanni in an ordinary Psalter? And if they were hidden, would they be heresies? The church had a long history of suppressing non-canon scriptures and their devotees, through violence if necessary. And why did the Grand Inquisitor believe the Pope’s personal secretary possessed a first-century scroll when it was simply a prayer book? Yet, the Psalter might actually be hiding a first-century text after all. Keller knew more than he had revealed, and why didn’t
Colonelo
Del Carlo trust the cardinal? Most troubling was the possibility that Father Mackey had been killed for this book.

Questions and suspicions raced around hairpin turns in Romano’s gray matter until one overriding thought crossed the finish line with crystal clarity: he had to translate the palimpsest. He would find no answers until he knew what the text said. But the Secret Archives didn’t have the technology. It was far too expensive. Then a memory returned as a possible answer. Romano had attended a Library Science seminar at the French National Archives months earlier. One of the lectures had fascinated him:
digital imaging
, a sort of spectral analysis that had gone over his head. The lecturer had been a young archivist who had helped decipher the celebrated
Archimedes Palimpsest
.

The priest was searching the recesses of his brain for the lecturer’s name when a lump swelled in his throat. He suddenly recalled that no complete work had ever been found in any single palimpsest because medieval scribes cut scrolls into dozens of pages and bound them into different books. Portions had to be recovered from several volumes to reassemble a whole document. This Psalter might have a large section of the original scroll or a fragment, perhaps only a single page.

Romano closed the Psalter and slid it inside the floppy leather briefcase. He turned off the lights and slipped out of the lab.
First things first
, he thought as he climbed the stairway to ground level and marched to the medieval section of the Archives, to the shelves holding Psalters. Most were in the Vatican Library where they belonged, but quite a few were here. He pulled the Psalter from the briefcase and replaced it with another from the shelf. Then he laid the briefcase back on the bookshelf, gathered up Giovanni’s Psalter and started for the exit. He had to get to Paris. But if anyone came hunting for Giovanni’s Psalter, they would find an almost identical one inside poor Father Mackey’s briefcase.

4
Isabelle

The old woman was stronger than Mike. She sat on him, pinning his arms to the floor by his wrists while she ground her hips on his groin, making him hard. Tears squirted from his burning eyes and he tried to raise his body, but she was too heavy and the struggle left him breathless. He twisted his slight torso trying to roll over, but she bounced on his belly and he gasped, the wind knocked out.

Romano felt a soft tapping on his knee. His eyes fluttered open and he strained to focus on the blurry image of two teenage girls in tight jeans and pullover sweaters. They spoke words he didn’t understand.

“I’m sorry,” he said in English wiping his cheek with the back of his hand.

“Are you all right, Father?” one asked in a lilting French accent.

“Where am I?”

“We’re at the terminus, Paris.” The priest peered out the train window. A dark blue sign with white print read
Gare de Lyon
.

“
Merci, Mesdemoiselles
,” he managed, red faced. The girls lowered their gaze and scurried for the door, whispering. Romano stretched his aching joints. A sharp pain in his neck made him wince. Fifteen hours in a second-class seat and now he had a crick. Rubbing it with one hand, he slung the backpack over his shoulder, stepped out of the car, and headed for the exit. He looked for the
Metro
sign, the Parisian subway system.

Romano changed Metros at
Hôtel de Ville
then got off at the
Rambuteau
stop. Concrete stairs led to a pungent mélange of exhaust fumes and unfamiliar odors borne by the damp air; the clanging and banging of city traffic and the cacophony of another workday in Paris. Searching for a familiar landmark, he couldn’t remember how to get to the National Archives and had forgotten to bring a map. He stopped a slender man in a gray business suit to ask for directions. The man listened to his elementary French, pointed and walked away without a word.

Romano made his way along on the
rue Rambuteau
, dodging pedestrians who came toward him at fast-forward speed. He crossed the
rue des Archives
and recognized the
Hôtel de Soubise
, one of the grandest mansions in the
Marais
district. Built around an older medieval castle, the newer one had been constructed in the early eighteenth century.

The mansion became the National Archives after the French Revolution and was a historian’s fantasy world. It housed thousands of historical documents from the fifth century to the twentieth, such as the wills of Louis XIV and Napoleon, the
Declaration of Human Rights
and the
Edict of Nantes
. Romano walked down the long courtyard over uneven cobblestones and into the entrance. A young man sat behind a pedestal-type reception desk, his head lowered, studying something beyond the priest’s view. Romano scanned the Rococo foyer waiting to be noticed. The room seemed light and airy despite the heavy stone construction, with tall windows and creamy walls.

“Excuse me, Father,” the young man said finally looking up.

“I need to speak with Madame Héber.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Well she’s busy.”

“It’s important,” Romano said.

The telephone chimed on Isabelle Héber’s cluttered eighteenth-century desk. She ignored the call, letting it go into voice mail, but the caller kept redialing. Exasperated, she yanked the handset from the cradle, her right index finger pointing to her place on an open page. “
Oui
,” she exhaled in a loud breath.

“Doctor Héber, this is the reception desk. A man is here to speak to you.”

“I told you Eugène, no visitors.”

“I know Madame, but he’s not any man.” Eugène lowered his voice to a whisper. “He’s a priest.”

Isabelle’s interest was piqued. Why would a priest want to meet with her? She didn’t know any priests except the local curé who kept insisting she return to the church. She had decided she was an atheist while still in high school. Religion never held the slightest interest for her. Science was her faith. Now, whenever she saw Father Demerest at weddings or First Communions, he began with the same reproach, calling her rebellious and proclaiming that God could forgive any transgression except abandoning the Holy Church. He always ended his assaults in tears, begging her to come to confession so she might partake of the Holy Communion. Horror invaded her reflection.
Someone has died
. “I’ll be right down,” she said into the phone and ran for the stairs.