The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) (18 page)

“Leslie, I had
hoped
I’d finally find you in. This is Suji.”

“Hello, Suji.”

Suji giggled in Japanese. Possibly female, after all.

“Nice outfit, Chauncey. The Oscar Wilde look?”

“An exact replica, actually.”

“Very fetching.”

“Thank you.”

“Your message said you’ve decided to major in literature?” Les asked.

“It’s much more concentrated than that, actually. I’m studying criticism.”

“You’re studying to be a critic.”

“Exactly.”

“I didn’t know they’d gotten that specialized.”

“I’m working on a paper right now on the Blue Moon novels, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m very gratified.”

“I suppose you’re wondering about my thesis in this paper.”

“Not really.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, the problem with your books is that the hero is too perfect. He’s tall and handsome, always perfectly dressed, skilled at sleight-of-hand, irresistible to the ladies, always knows the clever thing to say. All amateur authors do this. We call these characters Mary Sue’s or Marty Stu’s. If you’re not familiar with the term, these are fictional characters portrayed in an idealized way and lacking any noteworthy flaws — really just characters made in the image of how the author sees himself in his fantasies. It’s a dead giveaway, very amateurish.”

“He is dead, of course.”

“Pardon me?”

“The protagonist of the books, the Count. Dead.”

“What difference does that make?” Chauncey asked.

“I’ve thought a lot about this objection, Chauncey, and I believe you’re right. In my next novel, the hero will be a one-eyed illiterate child molester who wears a colostomy bag and drools uncontrollably.”

“Really?”

“Slobbers like a St. Bernard. It’s already underway.”

“Well. That’s fine. If you’re serious. The goal being just a little more realism, you see.”

“Of course. In the real world no one is
really
tall and handsome and witty as well. No one with athletic ability is ever bright enough to figure out the sales tax in his head. Pretty models and flight attendants are all airheads, none of them can ever go on to become successful in business or politics, this is well known. So why make the poor inadequate readers feel bad by making them believe there are people who study hard and work hard, who don’t waste all their time watching TV or drinking pitchers down at the tavern, who can end up physically fit
and
able to quote Shakespeare? In the real world, no one who’s previously been a guitar-player ever decides to go back to school and get their medical degree and become a great diagnostician, no college quarterbacks ever go on to get MBAs. Why give people false hope that they can ever change their lives through their own efforts? I may give him a limp and an epic case of body odor, too. Vampires avoiding running water, all that. You can go online and order a copy in advance, if you like.”

“I’ll certainly give that some thought, Leslie. Finances, you know. Though the monthly check is due, actually.”

“Meantime, I’m expecting a call, I’m afraid. Was there anything else you’d like to share, Chauncey?”

“Parts of your books are funny.”

“And that’s bad?”

“Well, it’s just that
parts
of the books are amusing. I mean either a book should be all funny, or it should be serious. Otherwise the reader keeps getting confused, caught off guard. He doesn’t know when he should take the content seriously, and when it’s OK to laugh. This swinging back and forth is unsettling, it’s very . . .”

“Amateurish?”

“That’s it.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind. Either all serious or all funny. This has been very useful, Chauncey.”

“Don’t mention it, Leslie.”

“And I hope you’ll drop off some of your own published work. Maybe I can find some more pointers there.”

“Well, of course . . . What with my other time commitments, and I’m sure you know the New York agents and editors can form quite an impenetrable phalanx when you’re trying to present them with something really new, something that doesn’t quite fit their previously established tropes and paradigms.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“Les?” There was Marian, finally. “That call from Orson?”

“You’ll have to excuse me, now. Chauncey. And Suji. Feel free to browse.”

Marian sent an eager Lance White back to the kitchen, where Matthew and Chantal had swabbed and dried the table before throwing down a heavy linen cloth.

“You’ve found it?” Lance was wearing another pair of spotless bleached-white cotton slacks, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.

“Professor St. Vincent believes it’s authentic. If somewhat fragile. He wanted to lock it up immediately.” Matthew gingerly removed the volume from its box, then from its makeshift wrappings.

“Is it possible?”

“Probably best to give it just a quick look for now. Then it’s into the safe while we try to track down Rashid. Technically, it’s not clear I have any right to sell it. The professor offered us a humidity-controlled vault, but we’ve got some guy from the Egyptian Cultural Ministry prowling around now, as well as our friends the Inquisitors.”

“Is there still an Inquisition?” Chantal asked.

“Oh, sure,” the Rev. White answered as he took his first, cautious look at the old book, testing the pages to make sure they could be turned without crumbling. He was wearing sandals today, and a different Hawaiian shirt — equally bright, but featuring images of palm trees and old wooden-sided station wagons. “The first way you’d know that is all the historical rehabilitation going on. The Inquisition was never intended to crush diversity of thought or oppress anyone, no no, it was intended to
save
lives by guaranteeing fair trials, preventing the illiterate mobs from just lynching suspected witches and heretics willy-nilly.”

“They’re really saying that?”

“They’re flooding the online encyclopedias.”

“I thought they tortured confessions out of people and then burned them at the stake.”

“Of course they did, burned a hundred thousand in Germany, alone, and the Protestants were no better. Sex that wasn’t painful, feasting, dancing, any kind of joyful activity, was the cardinal sin. The inquisitors preached that destroying the human body with fire was actually merciful if it saved the soul from the torment of eternal hellfire. Tortured them on the rack and the iron maiden, red hot irons, sliced off their breasts, whatever it took, till they each named twelve associates, in between their blood-curdling screams.

“Thirteen witches in a coven, you see. The first victim’s reward was death; then they arrested
those
twelve victims and divided their property between the church and the local baron, over nonsense most people today won’t believe even if you explain it. Did you ever dance counterclockwise? Do you own a black rooster? Did you put the evil eye on your neighbor’s cow? Let’s strip you bare and shave off your pubic hair and see if we can find a spot or a freckle; those are caused by having sex with Satan, you know. These guys weren’t too repressed, do you think? Burned them with green wood or charcoal so it took hours for their veins to pop and their heads to explode. ‘Fair trial,’ my ass. Herbal healing and using belladonna and wolfsbane in a topical ointment to create the sensation of flying aren’t
crimes
. How on earth do you stage a ‘fair trial’ on charges of practicing a different religion?

“And if they’re so proud of their heritage why do they keep changing their name? They were the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1244, when the Pope’s troops took the castle at Montsegur and burned more than two hundred screaming Cathars, including women and old people on their sickbeds, right at the foot of the Hill. By 1908 they’d morphed into the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office; in 1965 they became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. One of my fellow Californians was appointed to head the outfit in 2005, when the previous chief witch-hunter, William Ratzinger, vacated the position to become Pope.”

“The head of the Inquisition became Pope?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t remember that being in the papers.”

“And of course he subsequently retired without doing anything about all those thousands of queer priests pumping their altar boys, after promising up and down he’d take care of it. He was also a Nazi, just for good measure.”

“You mean, he was a strict disciplinarian?”

“I mean he was a Nazi. World War Two. Hitler Youth, then the Wehrmacht. Watched them rounding up the Jews, never said a word. The guy came out against rock music festivals as a heathen cult, for heaven’s sake. Why do you think they called him God’s Rottweiler?”

Chantal sighed. “No one’s perfect, I guess.”

“These leaves are older than the tenth century.”

“I thought you’d spot that,” Matthew agreed. “The good professor says late fourth century, re-bound in the tenth, after the conquest. You looking for anything particular?” Lance was examining pages near the end of the volume, which would have been the beginning except that it was in Hebrew.

“The speculation is that he explains how his brother arranged to survive the crucifixion, arranged to meet with the disciples to serve as his witnesses once he started to recover from his wounds.”

“They wouldn’t have been in on it?” Chantal asked.

“One thing that strikes you more and more strongly, as you read the texts,” Lance was on a bit of a roll, this being his favorite topic, “is that the twelve disciples were not Jesus’ closest confidants. They don’t seem to have been overly bright, for one thing. In keeping with the master’s wishes, none of them tried to write anything down, assuming they even knew how — the folks who wrote the gospels borrowed their names forty to sixty years later. Of course, it’s easy to sit in the comfort of our living rooms today and criticize working-class people who left their chosen trades to follow the teacher, knowing full well they could be arrested and charged with heresy or treason at any time. It’s not like there was some ACLU to come bail them out.

“But the disciples had scattered by the time of the crucifixion. None had been in on Jesus’ real plans, except possibly the smartest, Judas of the Dagger, who he trusted enough to get the timing right on turning him in to the authorities. But at the crucifixion you’ve got the women, some traditions say his mother Mary, but almost certainly Mary of Magdala, of whom some of the disciples seem later to have been jealous, asking why Jesus taught her things of which they were kept in ignorance. And the women were in on it; they had to know what was in the bucket of vinegar so they’d know when to use it; they had to know how important it was to get him into the tomb where no orthodox Jew would follow after sunset and then get the ointments there in a hurry to treat his wounds.”

“I remember the sponge dipped in vinegar,” Chantal frowned, although she said it like a question.

“In
The Passover Plot
Schonfield goes ‘Wait a minute. Just before Jesus loses consciousness they pass him a sponge full of vinegar. The prophecy said it would be “vinegar and gall,” that’s obviously where they got the idea. But vinegar would disguise the smell of all kinds of alkaloids, including opium. One of the gospels says they passed it to him on a hyssop stalk, which would be a weird choice, given that hyssop isn’t all that woody. But hyssop was strewn in the temples as an insecticide, it can have a sedative effect.’”

“Hyoscalomine,” said Matthew, “also found in henbane.”

“Now I need to read more pharmacology,” Chantal sighed. “And do not call me ‘grasshopper.’”

“No, ma’am.”

“But primarily you’ve got this far more elevated group of friends and supporters, who we don’t hear much about up till then,” Lance went on, his attention still focused on the book, “Joseph of Arimathea and others, including Nicodemus, actual members of the Sanhedrin, the high ruling council, who could have kept Jesus up-to-date on political events on a daily basis. How do these wealthy and powerful supporters keep completely out of sight for so long, and then suddenly pop up just when they’re needed to handle things after the crucifixion? The disciples start to look more and more like reporters on the press bus; they’re there to witness and report the miracles, they had to have a certain level of credulity, it wouldn’t do to show them how all the tricks were done, the weight-guesser at the fair pretending to write down his guess before you get on the scale but actually marking his paper while everyone else is watching the dial swing back and forth after you’re already on.”

“Isn’t it possible the disciples just made up the stuff about seeing Jesus alive after the crucifixion, or that someone added that, later?” Chantal would not be put off.

“Of course.” Lance talked as he turned the old book back and forth under the light. “We’re talking about oral traditions that were finally written down a couple of generations later, after a terrible war of conquest. All kinds of things could have been added or deleted or exaggerated. But that takes us right back to the first question: Allowing for a few transcription errors, do you believe the story told in the four canon gospels of the New Testament is literal truth, or not?

“If not, no problem. In that case, what we have is a series of entertaining fairy tales and parables, some of them teaching good moral lessons, clustered around the name of this otherwise obscure first century rabbi and minor prophet named Yeshua bar-Yoseph, and how much of the tales you choose to believe makes about as much difference as whether you believe there really was a Robin Hood and whether he poached the king’s deer and whether Maid Marian really looked like Olivia de Haviland on a good day.” Lance was squatting by the table, now, lowering his vantage point to look at the book from the side, trying to get a sense for whether the papyrus of the pages was original, or had been treated in some way. Matthew handed him a magnifying glass.

“But if you
do
choose to assert the four gospels are literal truth, then in the first place you’ve got a few problems with what sure appear to be later wholesale borrowings from the Mithra and Osiris cults, especially the virgin birth business, since the very reason Jesus was considered a good candidate for the role of messiah by the first century Jews is that he was descended from the line of the high priest Aaron on his mother’s side and the line of David the king on his father’s side — you need both, it doesn’t work if Joseph isn’t the father. But more important, you can’t then start picking and choosing which parts you are or aren’t going to insist are true.