The Thirteenth Apostle (36 page)

As for this tomb, he did not indicate its exact location. In a laconic phrase, he stated that only the desert sand would protect Jesus's tomb from the covetousness of men. Like all the prophets, the Nazorean was alive for all eternity, and the veneration of his bones might distract humanity from the only real way in which it could encounter him: prayer.

During all these months of research, Nil had believed that the mystery facing him was that of the thirteenth apostle, the role he had played in Jerusalem and what he had bequeathed to posterity. The man who had written these lines in his own hand knew that he was already eliminated from the Church, written out of its future. And he sensed that this future would have nothing to do with the life and teaching of his Master. He had entrusted to this parchment the secret that, perhaps one day, would enable the world to rediscover Jesus's true face. He had done this without any illusions: what did a slender sheet of paper represent when opposed by the consuming ambition of men who were ready to do anything to achieve their ends, by manipulating the memory of the man he had loved more than any other?

The thirteenth apostle had just brought him to the true secret: the real, physical existence of a tomb containing Jesus's bones.

Nil glanced at his watch: ten past six. “I hope Breczinsky's waiting for me!” He put the miraculously rediscovered letter back in its box, and the box back in its place. He would keep his word: the Pope would be alerted, via the Polish librarian, to
the existence of this apostolic letter that neither the centuries nor the men of the Church had managed to destroy. Thanks to the inscription
M M M
it would be easy for Breczinsky to find it again and hand it over to him.

What happened after that no longer concerned a little monk like him. It concerned nobody but the Pope.

Nil came quickly out of the room, taking care to switch off the light: behind him, the door closed automatically. When he reached the room where Leeland and he had been working every day, it was empty and the ceiling lights had been switched off. He went over and knocked at the office door: no reply, Breczinsky had not waited for him.

Nil wondered, rather anxiously, whether all the doors leading to the Belvedere courtyard did indeed open from the inside: he was extremely reluctant to spend the night in the cramped, musty stacks. But Breczinsky had not lied to him: he got through the two armoured doors without any difficulty. The entrance airlock was empty, but the door leading outside was ajar. Without thinking, Nil walked out into the courtyard and took in a great gulp of fresh air. He needed to walk, to get his head round all that had happened.

He was in so much of a hurry to leave that he paid no attention to the tinted window behind which the papal policeman was smoking a cigarette. As soon as he saw him go out, the man picked up the internal Vatican City phone and pressed a button.

“Your Eminence, he's just left… Yes, he was alone: the other one left before him.
Di niente, Eminenza
.”

In his office, Cardinal Catzinger hung up with a sigh. It would be time for Antonio to act, very soon now.

79

Nil crossed St Peter's Square, and mechanically looked up: the Pope's window was lit up. Tomorrow he would speak to Breczinsky, tell him where to find the crate of brandy marked
M M M
, and entrust him with the task of giving the old Pontiff a message by word of mouth. He turned into the Via Aurelia.

When he reached the third-floor landing, he halted: through the door he could hear Leeland playing Erik Satie's second
Gymnopédie
. The melody, floating in air, expressed a sense of infinite melancholy, a feeling of despair tinged with a touch of humour and derision. “Rembert…” he thought. “Will your sense of humour enable you to overcome your own despair?” He knocked discreetly at the door.

“Come in! I couldn't wait for you to get here!”

Nil sat near the piano.

“Remby, why did you leave the stacks before I came back?”

“Breczinsky came to tell me when it was six o'clock: he had to lock up, he said. He seemed worried. But never mind that: tell me, did you discover anything?”

Nil did not share Leeland's carefree attitude: the absence of Breczinsky disquieted him. “Why wasn't he there as we'd agreed when I came back?” he wondered to himself, before pushing the question to the back of his mind.

“Yes, I found what Andrei and I had been seeking for such a long time: an intact copy of the letter of the thirteenth apostle – the original, in fact.”

“Tremendous! But… is this letter really so terrible?”

“It's short, and I know it off by heart. Origen was right – it provides irrefutable proof that Jesus did not rise from the dead as the Church teaches. So he isn't God: the empty tomb in Jerusalem, on which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is
built, is a decoy. The real tomb, the one containing Jesus's remains, is somewhere out in the desert.”

Leeland was stupefied.

“In the desert! And where, exactly?”

“The thirteenth apostle refuses to indicate the place with any precision, so as to preserve Jesus's body from human covetousness: he simply mentions the desert of Idumaea, a vast zone to the south of Israel whose limits have varied through the ages. But archaeology has made considerable progress: if you use the right tools, you'll find what you're looking for. A skeleton placed in an abandoned Essene burial ground located in that zone and bearing traces of crucifixion, carbon-14-dated to the middle of the 1st century, would have a shattering impact on the West.”

“Are you going to publish the results of your research, make this epistle known to the public, and join the archaeological digs? Nil, do you really want this tomb to be found?”

Nil was silent for a while. Satie's melody was trotting round and round in his head.

“I will follow the thirteenth apostle right to the end. If his testimony had been preserved by the history, there would never have been any Catholic Church. It was because they knew this that the Twelve refused to accept him as one of them. Remember the Germigny inscription: there must only be twelve witnesses to Jesus, for all eternity,
alpha and omega.
Are we to question, twenty centuries later on, the edifice they have built over an empty tomb? The burial place of the apostle Peter today marks the centre of Christianity. An empty tomb has been replaced by a full tomb, that of the first among the Twelve. Then the Church created the sacraments, so that everyone on the planet might be able to enter into physical contact with God. If we take this away from believers, what
will they be left with? Jesus asks us to imitate him day by day, and the only method he proposes for that is prayer. But the multitudes, and an entire civilization, can only be swayed by concrete and tangible evidence. The author of the epistle was right: placing Jesus's bones in the Holy Sepulchre would mean transforming that tomb into a unique object of adoration for the credulous masses. It would mean forever turning away the humble and the lowly from access to the invisible God via the means that they have always been given: the sacraments.”

“So what will you do?”

“Inform the Holy Father of the existence of the epistle, and tell him where it is. He will be the keeper of yet one more secret, that's all. Once I'm back in my monastery, I will bury away the results of my research in the silence of the cloister. Except for one, which I want to publish without delay: the role played by the Nazoreans in the birth of the Koran.”

On the floor below, Mukhtar had been scrupulously recording the two
Gymnopédies
of Satie, then, after Nil's arrival, the start of the conversation. At this particular moment he quickly put on his headphones.

“Has the letter of the thirteenth apostle taught you anything new about the Koran?”

“He addressed his letter to the Churches, but in fact it was meant for his disciples, the Nazoreans. At the end, he adjures them to remain faithful to his testimony and his teachings about Jesus, wherever their exile may lead them. He thus confirms something I already suspected: after taking refuge for a while at Pella, they must have hit the roads again, probably fleeing from the Romans in 70 ad. Nobody knows what happened to them, but nobody seems to have noticed that, in the Koran, Muhammad often mentions
nasara
, a term which has always
been translated as ‘Christians'! In fact,
nasara
is the Arabic translation of ‘Nazoreans'!”

“What do you conclude?”

“Muhammad must have known the Nazoreans at Mecca, where they had escaped to after Pella. Attracted to their teaching, he almost became one of them. Then he fled to Medina, where he became a warlord: politics and violence took the upper hand, but he remained forever marked by the Jesus of the Nazoreans, the Jesus of the thirteenth apostle. If Muhammad had not been devoured by his desire for conquest, Islam would never have been born, and Muslims would be the last of the Nazoreans – the cross of the prophet Jesus would be floating on the flag of Islam!”

Leeland seemed to share his friend's enthusiasm.

“I can guarantee that in the United States, at all events, academics are going to be really excited about your research! I'll help to spread the word back there.”

“Just imagine, Remby! Muslims might finally accept the fact that their sacred text bears the mark of someone close to Jesus, someone who was himself excluded from the Church for denying Jesus's divinity – just as they do! It would be a new basis for a potential rapprochement between Muslims, Christians and Jews. And probably the end of the Jihad against the West!”

Mukhtar's face had suddenly darkened. Overwhelmed by hatred, he was now only half-listening: Nil was now asking Leeland what his plans were, and what he would do to conceal all this from Catzinger. Would he be able to resist the pressure and give nothing away? What would happen if the Cardinal enforced his threats and made his close relationship with Anselm public?

They were babbling away like women: the Palestinian had lost interest, and took off his headphones. The two men had just crossed the forbidden limit:
nobody touches the Koran
. Christian scholars could dig out secrets buried away in their Gospels if they wanted to – that was their problem. Never would the Koran be subjected to the methods of their impious exegesis; the Al-Azhar University drew its strength from rejecting them. Nobody dissects the words of Allah as transmitted by his Prophet, blessed be his name.

Muhammad – a secret disciple of a Jew, Jesus! The Frenchman would apply his infidel methods to the sacred text, and he would publish the results with the help of the American. In the hands of America, Israel's lackey, his work would become a terrible weapon against Islam.

Frowning, he rewound the tapes and remembered a sentence he often quoted to his students:

“The infidels, seize them, kill them wherever you find them!”

Mukhtar felt relieved: the Prophet, blessed be his name, had made his decision.

80

All day long it had been raining. Swathes of mist were slowly rising up the slope of the Abruzzi on our side, then seemed to hesitate for a moment before crossing the crest and disappearing in the direction of the Adriatic. The flight of the birds of prey seemed as if drawn towards the horizon.

Father Nil had given me shelter in his hermitage cut into the rock. A straw mattress thrown down onto a bed of dried ferns and a small table in front of the tiny window. A rudimentary
fireplace, a Bible on a shelf, some bundles of wood. Less than the essential – for here, the essential lay elsewhere.

He told me that we were coming to the end of his story. It was only after it had all happened, in the silence of these mountains, that he had understood all of its twists and turns. He betrayed emotion only once, and I perceived this from the trembling in his voice: when he told me about Rembert Leeland, about the inner torment that he had endured and that had led to such a tragic end within just a few hours.

As soon as he had laid hands on the lost manuscript, events had started to happen very fast. By exhuming this text from a bygone age and bringing it out of oblivion, he had opened the sluice gates. Behind them, men unknown to him were waiting grimly, each of them defending his own cause with a relentlessness whose violence still remained incomprehensible to him, even today.

81

That same evening, Mukhtar had telephoned Lev Barjona, arranging to meet up with him, in a bar this time. They ordered drinks and remained standing at the counter, talking in low voices in spite of the hubbub of conversation around them.

“Listen, Lev, it's serious. I've just handed over to Calfo the recording of a conversation between Nil and Leeland. The Frenchman has found the epistle – it was indeed in the crate of brandy that the Metropolitan Samuel had told you about. He has read it and left it in its place, in the Vatican.”

“Good, very good! Now we just need to go about things nice and slowly.”

“We need to act now, and act quickly. That dog claims that the letter contains the proof… or rather, confirms his deeply rooted conviction that the Koran was not revealed to Muhammad by God. He thinks the Prophet was close to the Nazoreans, before relapsing into violence when he went to Medina. He thinks Muhammad was blinded by ambition… You know what that means: you've known us since forever. He has crossed the line beyond which any Muslim will immediately react: he needs to be eliminated. Quickly, and his accomplice too.”

“Calm down, Mukhtar – have you received any instructions from Cairo telling you to do as much? What about Calfo?”

“I don't need any instructions from Cairo, in this situation the Koran dictates how believers should act. As for Calfo, I don't give a damn. He's a depraved old fool, and the stories Christians concoct leave me indifferent. Let them sort out their own problems and get involved in whatever dirty little tricks they fancy:
I
have to protect the purity of the message transmitted by God to Muhammad. Every Muslim is ready to shed blood for this cause; God will not tolerate his name being sullied. I will defend God's honour.”