Brotherhood of the Tomb (33 page)

‘And when there comes to pass that which has been decreed for the city, that it may fall stone from stone, if any still be alive, by God’s grace, he shall go unto Egypt, which is Babylon, that he may strike down Pharaoh, even as he sits on his throne, in vengeance for God’s Temple, both the earthly Temple and the Temple that was crucified.

‘And that shall be the true Passover, that God’s chosen people shall pass out of the land of Egypt and come into the Land of the Promise. And our Lord shall return. There shall be a new Jerusalem, and God and the Lamb shall be its Temple. Egypt shall fall then, and Babylon, all them that have scattered the children of God among the nations. For Jesus said: “Do not think I have come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”And so it shall be.

‘And if all die, let him that conies after take up the sword in our place, that the days may be numbered and the wicked brought to a reckoning. For the Tomb is a sacred trust, and the sword also, that goodness endure and all manner of wickedness perish from the earth.’

Patrick looked up.

‘That’s the main text. There are just a few more lines in a different hand, in Hebrew. They’re a bit more difficult to read.’

‘I’m sure you can manage. Have a go.’

Slowly, Patrick deciphered the broken script in front of him.

‘I, John of Amathus, known as the Zealot, though long baptized, leave here what Simon the Levite has written concerning the last days of Jerusalem, that it may serve as a testimony to others. Of the Brotherhood of the Tomb, I alone remain alive. I shall seal the sepulchre and seek refuge in Egypt, where others have gone before me. I shall carry with me the secret of the tomb, and the secret of him that entered it, and of the manner in which he came to enter it, lest those things be forgotten. There are among the believers who have preceded me still a number that know a little of those matters. If God wills it, I shall choose among them six Elders to lead the Brotherhood. These words I leave for him whom God shall send in the latter days, that he may take up this sword and deliver God’s people out of bondage. May he finish what I have begun and determine all things with justice.’

Patrick looked up. O’Malley was looking at him intently.

‘So now you know,’ he said.

FORTY-FIVE

When they returned to the apartment, the others had already eaten lunch. Francesca prepared fresh pasta and fish and left them in the kitchen to eat it in peace.

When they finally joined the others in the living room, coffee had been prepared. Francesca poured out large cups of espresso and passed round a plate of amaretti. Father O’Malley was the first to speak.

‘You must be wondering by now what this is all about. I didn’t like to say too much until I’d had a chance to show something to Patrick.’ He paused and glanced at Assefa. ‘Roberto will have explained to you, Father Makonnen, why I thought it best not to have you with us. We paid a little visit to the Vatican Archives, Patrick and I, and there was a fair to even chance that someone there or in the vicinity would have recognized you. At the moment, even an old friend could be unwittingly dangerous to you. I’m sure you understand the reasons for my caution.’

Assefa nodded. A sense of personal danger had become second nature to him by now. He wondered how he had got by without it before.

O’Malley sat forward on the edge of his chair. For all his size, he seemed to Patrick a remarkably gentle man. Gentle, but not soft. Patrick sensed something in him, a kind of righteous anger that would tear his gentleness to shreds and burn it if it seemed necessary.

‘You’ll have to forgive my theatricality in taking you off so mysteriously, Patrick. But I did have a serious purpose in showing you that document. Had you not seen it - the original, mind, not a copy - you

might think some of the things I am about to tell you a little ... far-fetched. Unfortunately, they are not. I would give anything to have them so, but they will not be other than what they are.’

He paused and folded his hands in front of him as though in prayer.

‘Roberto Quadri and I,’ he began, speaking slowly, ‘are directors of an organization called fraternita. The name is really an acronym: Fondazione per Reabilitazione degli Aderenti e Transfughi delle Religioni Nuove in Italia - the Foundation for the Rehabilitation of Adherents and Fugitives from New Religions in Italy. Actually, the Foundation is just the Italian branch of a much larger network set up by the Church a few years ago to help people who have been harmed in some way by their involvement in new religious movements - what the newspapers sometimes call cults. Moonies, Scientologists, followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Children of God, Krishna devotees, Baha’is, Divine Light Missionaries - the list is endless.

‘We’re only interested in people who think they have suffered through their involvement: disciples who are in and want help getting out, former members who have problems adjusting to the ordinary world again. We find them jobs, give them temporary accommodation, help reconcile them with their families. And sometimes protect them from other cult members who want to get them back or teach them a lesson for leaving in the first place. If someone’s in a group and is happy that way, we’re just as happy to leave him there. Unlike some organizations I could mention, we don’t go in for kidnapping sect members and deprogramming them. That only amounts to brainwashing them to accept what society thinks is normal.’

He glanced round the room.

‘But since modern society is itself even more abnormal than many of the sects, I see no particular benefits in forcing someone who has found some sort of meaning for himself to return to the lunatic asylum out in the streets.’

He paused.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to preach. To continue. Our little group has been in existence about ten years now, but during the last five of those Roberto and I have spent an increasingly large amount of our time with one particular cult. Roberto, by the way, used to be a member of ISKCON, the Hare Krishna movement. He stopped travelling to other planets twelve years ago, studied law, and started helping fraternitA full time six years back. I think I’d better let him take over at this point.’

Quadri put his cup on the floor. Again, Patrick noticed the tiredness, the slow movements of someone critically ill. When the lawyer spoke, however, his voice had none of the languor Patrick expected. He was incisive, clear, and wholly in command of his subject.

‘Okay, where do I start? At the beginning, I suppose. So, how did all this start? Not fraternita, but this thing we’re all involved in.’ He paused.

‘Not long after I started working for Dermot, a woman arrived at our office in Rome. I was on duty. I answered the door and brought her in. She looked to me as though she was in her mid-forties, but something made me think she might be much younger than that. At first, she was in a state of extreme distress - very frightened, very jumpy. She kept looking round, as though expecting someone she didn’t want to see. It took a long time before she could summon up enough courage to talk. It

took days. Weeks for all the details to emerge.

We’d just bought this apartment as a refuge for people on the run from the more violent sects, and I brought her here the same evening. After Dermot and I heard her story, we gave her exclusive use. Since the deeds had not yet been transferred to fraternita, I was able to make the entire transaction disappear. Not even the other directors knew of its existence. They still don’t.’

He paused to pour more coffee into his cup.

‘For weeks I stayed here in the apartment with her. She was so frightened, she could not be left alone, not for a moment. Dermot came on the second day and every day after that. Sometimes we talked into the early morning, sometimes we just sat with her in silence, reading, waiting for her to talk again. She was on edge, you see, so much on edge. But the more she talked the calmer she became. It was a sort of therapy, you understand, just to tell us what she knew.

‘At first we thought, she’s making this up; she’s telling lies or she has a vivid imagination. No doubt we thought other things too - that she was mad at heart, frantic with some grief, perhaps, a lonely woman looking for fears to comfort her, to give her existence meaning and purpose. Well, we were used then to milder sorts of madness, the trivial obsessions of spiritual misfits. Sex is the chief obsession: if they dream, they dream of sex. Some have too little, some too much, others none at all; it makes no difference. But not for her. If she was mad, she was mad with violence. If she dreamed, she had dreams of slaughter.’

He paused, as though entranced by the mere possibility of such dreams. ‘But the more we talked with her, the more we came to know she was not

mad. She was sane, you see. Very sane indeed.

‘She gave us a list of things we could investigate without drawing attention to ourselves. And everywhere we looked, we found confirmation of what she had told us. Her story held water. I wish ...’ He hesitated, glancing at Patrick, then at Assefa, ‘I wish now it had been a lie, or she had been mad.’

Then his eye caught Francesca’s and he smiled, a little wan smile, lonely, private. ‘Well, perhaps not that. How could we have wished that? Mistaken, let

us say.’ He paused briefly, fixing his eye on Patrick before

continuing.

‘Signor Canavan, the document you were shown this morning at the Vatican - you are satisfied as to its authenticity?’

Patrick hesitated.

‘I’m not an expert,’ he said. ‘But superficially, yes - it seemed genuine. It had the feel of the thing, it felt like ... what I imagine a document from that period would be like.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry, that isn’t very specific. Well, the Aramaic was convincing, the details of the siege were historical, as far as I remember them from Josephus. But for any sort of certainty, you’d have to bring in a paleographer, someone with the right equipment, with the expertise to do a proper job, to examine the material, the ink, the script, the language. Ideally, a team of experts.’

‘Yes,’ said Roberto. ‘I know. But that has already been done to our satisfaction. Eamonn De Faoite examined the letter in the Archives under the pretence of working on the other documents in that volume. There are facilities there, excellent facilities. They are not so medieval as they would like to seem. I have a copy of his report here, if you would like to examine it.’

Patrick shook his head.

‘Very well. Perhaps you will give us a description of the contents of the letter, for the benefit of Father Makonnen, who has not seen it.’

Hesitantly, Patrick did as requested. Assefa listened carefully, motionless, like a condemned man hearing his sentence read out in court, slowly, with deliberation, line by damning line. When Patrick finished, he said nothing. He had come to a redundancy of words.

Quadri spoke again in his quiet lawyer’s voice. ‘As you will have guessed by now, the Brotherhood to which that letter refers did not vanish into the mists of time. They are still very much with us. Over the centuries, they have grown subtle and rich and powerful, and now they are poised to make a bid for a power and influence even they have never previously dreamed of.’ He paused and took a mouthful of hot coffee.

‘I think Francesca should explain the rest in her own words,’ he said.

Patrick turned his eyes to Francesca, only to find her gaze fixed on the floor, avoiding all contact with the others. He watched her collect herself, and with a pang recognized the way she drew her brows together, frowning briefly as she gathered her thoughts.

‘There has always been a Brotherhood,’ she began. ‘Since the days of John the Zealot, there has been in existence somewhere a body of men and women dedicated to the preservation of mankind’s greatest secret, the whereabouts of Christ’s tomb. They have had many names, gone under many disguises, but the Brotherhood itself has always been one and indivisible. In almost two thousand years, until I came back from the dead and poured my heart out in this room to Dermot and Roberto, no one has ever betrayed them.’ She hesitated. ‘No, that’s not quite true. They

have been betrayed many times. But no one before this has ever betrayed them and lived this long.’

She looked up and caught Patrick’s eye.

‘Yes, Patrick, I know,’ she said. ‘Long before I betrayed them, I betrayed you. You want me to explain it all, and I don’t know how to. Not without telling you more than it may be fair for you to know.’

‘Let me be the judge of what’s fair, Francesca. What happened to you happened to me as well. I have a right.’

She did not reply at once. Her hair fell across her eyes, as it had fallen years ago; but now it was streaked with grey, and the eyes beneath it harboured memories unthought-of then.

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I shall try to explain. But first ... Dermot - please help me. Father Makonnen ...’

O’Malley nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’ He turned to Assefa. ‘Father Makonnen,’ he said, ‘I know you have been sorely tested in the past few days. I feel I should warn you that, if you stay, you may hear things you might prefer not to have heard. Things that will test, not only your vocation, but your faith. I do not say this lightly. Whatever else, I am a priest like yourself. I know that, if you hear what Francesca is about to tell us, you will not know a full night’s sleep for a very long time to come. Perhaps never again. If you prefer to leave, none of us will think the less of you, least of all myself. But it must be your decision.’

Assefa got up and went to the window. He looked down into the street, at the coming and going of people and cars, at the world of his vocation. He was thinking of the Virgin he had prayed to that morning, of her blackness and her virginity, like two sides of a coin, knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and unwisdom. To be black was to know things other

men could never know. To have suffered always, to have been poor always, to have known no hope of change in your own lifetime. Suffering was a kind of knowledge, pain was a kind of wisdom. Ignorance, like virginity, gave no trouble to the heart. But his own virginity, the denial he had chosen for himself, was a virginity of suffering. He could not turn his back on it as Patrick had turned his back on the Virgin that morning. ‘I would prefer to stay,’ he said.