F Paul Wilson - Novel 03 (13 page)

           
 
"I tried. But my Aramaic is rudimentary
at best; there were words I could not translate. And besides, the scroll was
incomplete. Fragments were out of place and some were missing completely. I
reassembled them the best I could but—"

           
 
"Where is that original now?"

           
 
"It . . ." His voice shrank to a
whisper. "It's gone."

           
 
Sudden rage crackled through Kesev's brain. He
leaned forward and jammed the muzzle of the silencer against Mahmoud's thigh.

           
 
"You
sold
it?"

           
"No-no! Please! It's gone!
Whisked away into the air!"

           
 
"I warned you about lying!"

           
 
"Please! I swear by Allah! The wind took
it! It happened in the back room, not ten meters from here, just as I was
finishing the first copy. Suddenly all the windows in the building crashed
inward and a blast of icy wind tore through the halls and rooms. The winds
seemed to gather in my workroom. They rattled my walls, knocked me to the floor,
and upset my worktable. The scroll fragments swirled into the air in a whirling
column, then they blew out the window and were gone."

           
 
Kesev's rage cooled rapidly, chilled by the
dealer's words. A wind . . . filling the halls and rooms . . . stealing the
fragments in a miniature whirlwind . . .

           
 
"You must believe me!" Mahmoud
wailed. "Every word is true!"

           
 
Kesev nodded slowly, almost absently. The fat
forger wasn't lying. He wouldn't make up something so fantastic and try to pass
it off as the truth.

           
 
And that meant that the original scroll had
been destroyed, reduced to scattered, indecipherable bits of parchment . . .
but not before it had been copied.

           
 
"How many copies did you make?"
Kesev asked finally. "Two," Mahmoud said. "There were only two
blank scrolls. I forged the second copy from the first."

           
 
How many scrolls had been in the sealed jar?
Two sounded right but he couldn't be sure. He didn't remember. Two copies: one
here in Kesev's possession, and the other in America. That thought would have
panicked him if he hadn't known it had been branded a forgery.

           
 
He had a sense that events were spinning out
of control. An odd progression of incidents—the errant SCUD, the theft of the
scroll, the copies, the destruction of the original. Especially unsettling was
the last incident. An unnatural wind had whirled the scroll fragments into
oblivion, but only after they had been copied.
After.
Unfortunate happenstance, or design? He sensed a power at
work, a deft hand moving behind the scenes. But what power? And to what end?

           
He had to stay on guard. The scroll
in America was probably rolled up and sealed in a glass case, just like Tulla
Szobel's. A curio. Something to be looked at but not touched. And besides, how
many Americans knew Aramaic? Highly unlikely that anyone would realize what it
was about.

           
But something was happening. Once
again he was overwhelmed by the sensation of giant wheels turning, ready to
crush him if he stepped the wrong way.

           
 
Increased vigilance was the key. He'd have to
find a way to keep a closer watch on the Resting Place. And be ready to deal
swiftly and surely with any curious Americans he found wandering in the area.

           
So
here sit I, alone, a filthy cave for a home and only locusts, wild honey, a few
goats, and figs for sustenance. I who once dwelt in luxury. Who once wore the
striped blue sleeve and had free access to the Temple.

           
 
I am alone and mad. And sometimes I imagine I
am not alone. Sometimes I see her walking. Sometimes she speaks to me. But it
isn’t her. Only a fever-dream of my madness.

           
 
I pray that each day is the Lat Day, but each
day ends like the one before it. When will it end? Dear Lord, when will you
allow it to end for me?

           
 
FROM THE GLASS SCROLL

           
 
ROCKEFELLER MUSEUM TRANSLATION

Manhattan

           
 
Dan awoke with a start—bright light in his
eyes and an excited voice in his ear.

           
 
"Dan! Wake up! Wake
up!"

           
 
He blinked. Carrie . . . leaning over him . .
. dark hair falling about her face . . . bright eyes wide with excitement. God,
she was beautiful. She made him want to sing though he knew damn well he
couldn't carry a tune. How had he spent his whole life without this woman—not
any woman . . .
this
woman? Celibacy
was an unnatural state for a human being. He didn't care what the Church said,
he was a better person—a more compassionate, more understanding, more fully
rounded man—and therefore a better priest, because of Carrie.

           
 
He'd never been in love before. Grade school
and high school puppy loves, sure. But this went beyond physical attraction,
beyond infatuation. If Carrie were a lay person he'd leave the Church for
her—if she'd have him. But Carrie had no intention of leaving her order. Ever.
So he'd have to settle for things the way they were.

           
 
Of course, if she'd been laity, the
relationship never would have begun. He wouldn't have let her within arm's
reach. His guard would have been up, his defenses primed at all times when he
was around her. But Carrie, being a nun, being a member of the club, so to
speak, had slipped past his guard without even trying.

           
 
That first afternoon in her brother's condo
had awakened a long-dormant hunger in him. Along the course of his years as a
priest he'd learned to structure his life without regard to sex. Excruciatingly
difficult at first. He'd found it went beyond avoiding thoughts of sex. It
meant avoiding thinking about avoiding thoughts of sex. You did that by
cramming your days full of activity, by hurling yourself headlong into the
neverending hustle and bustle of a downtown urban parish, by sublimating your
own needs to those of your parishioners. After all, that was what it was all
about, wasn't it? That was why you joined the priesthood. And if you did your
job right, at the end of the day you collapsed into bed and slept like the dead
until dawn when it was up and out for early Mass and back again into the parish
whirl.

           
 
After a while you got pretty good at it. After
a while, the lusty parts of the brain atrophied and became too weak to bother
you with much more than an occasional, feeble nudge.

           
Unless something kick-started them
with a steroid charge and pumped them up to strength again.

           
Something like making love to Sister
Carrie. Now he was like a randy teenager. He wondered where the guilt had gone.
Overwhelmingly awful at first, especially when she'd told him about her father
and what he'd done to her. Dan had almost despaired then, wondering if he might
be aiding and abetting some dark, self-sabotaging compulsion within Carrie.
She'd run to the convent to escape a sexually molesting father; she'd become a
model nun, a paradigm of virtue and saintliness except for the fact that she
was having a sexual relationship with her parish priest . . . a man everyone
called "Father."

           
 
Dan had always been skeptical of facile parlor
psychoanalysis, but the doubts nagged at him when he was apart from Carrie.
When he was with her, however, they melted in the warmth of her smile, the glow
of her presence. Carrie seemed perfectly comfortable with their relationship;
it took him a while, but now he was just as comfortable.

           
 
And Dan loved her as he had never loved
another human being, and that love let him see the world in a whole new light,
brought him closer to the rest of humanity. How could that be wrong.

           
He loved Carrie completely, and he
wanted her—
all
the time. Every moment
they were together at Loaves and Fishes was a struggle, a biting agony to keep
his hands off her. He'd learned to freeze his emotions at those times, confine
his thoughts to the instant, force his brain to regard her as no more than a
pleasant co-worker and to leave her clothes on whenever he looked at her.

           
 
But God, it was hard.

           
 
But more than wanting Carrie physically, he
wanted her emotionally. Just being near her was a thrill. But being near her in
bed was heaven. Like now . . .

           
 
He noticed her bathrobe hanging open, exposing
the rose-tipped globe of her left breast. He reached for it but she brushed his
hand away with a sheaf of papers.

           
 
"What
is
this?" she said, shaking them in his face.

           
 
"Wha—?" Dan propped himself up on
his elbows and stared at the papers in her hand.

           
 
"Where did you get this, Dan?"

           
 
He couldn't remember ever seeing Carrie this
excited.

           
 
"Oh, that. Harold's back from
Jerusalem
. It's the translation of a scroll that
somebody turned in to the
Rockefeller
Museum
over there. He gave it to me as part of a
little gift."

           
 
She laughed. "A gift? He gave this to you
as a
gift?
But this is fabulous! Why
hasn't the world been told?"

           
 
"There's nothing to tell, Carrie. The
scroll is a fake."

           
 
She stared at him in silence, the glow of
excitement slowly fading from her eyes. She shook her head.

           
 
"No." Her voice was a whisper.
"That can't be."

           
 
"It's true. Hal said the carbon dating
showed the ink is only two or three years old."

           
 
Carrie was still shaking her head. "No.
There's got to be a mistake."

           
 
Dan leaned forward and kissed her throat.
"What's so important about it? It's paranoid, jumbled, and seems
deliberately obscure. The forger was probably some nut who—"

           
 
"It's about Mary," she said.

           
 
Now it was Dan's turn to stare. "Mary?
Mary who?"

           
 
"The Blessed Virgin Mary."

           
 
Dan knew from Carrie's expression that he'd
better not laugh, but he couldn't repress a smile.

           
 
"Where on earth did you get an idea like
that?"

           
 
"From this." She held up the
translation. "The dead woman he's talking about, the body he's supposed to
guard—it's Mary's."

           
 
"I guess that means we're tossing out the
Glorious Mystery of the Assumption."

           
 
"Don't be flip, Dan."

           
 
"Sorry," he said.

           
 
And he meant it. He knew of Carrie's devotion
to the Blessed Virgin and didn't want to tread on any of her vital beliefs. But
even though he was a priest, Dan had never been able to buy the Assumption. The
thought of Mary's soul reentering her body after her funeral, then reviving and
being carried aloft to heaven by a host of angels was pretty hokey.

           
 
That sort of fairy-tale stuff was all through
the Bible, Old Testament and New, and had nothing to do with Dan's idea of what
the Church was all about. Nifty little stories to wow the kids and get their
attention, but sometimes fairy tales only served to distract from the real
message in the Gospels: the brotherhood of man.

           
 
"But you've got to admit," he said
cautiously, "that the Assumption is a bit hard to buy." Carrie didn't
react; she simply stared down at the papers in her hands. So he pressed on.
"I mean, we can agree, can't we, that heaven isn't a
place.
It's a state of being. So how could Mary be 'assumed' into
Heaven body and soul when heaven is a spiritual state? Her body was a physical
object. It couldn't go to heaven. It had to go somewhere else. And I doubt it's
in orbit."

           
 
A vision of the space shuttle passing the
floating body of the Virgin Mary popped into his head. He shook if off. Carrie
looked up at him, her eyes bright again. "Exactly! And that's what this is
all about. This tells us
where
she
really is!"

           
 
Uh-oh. He'd backed himself into that one.
"Now wait just a minute, Carrie. Don't get—"

           
 
"Listen to me, Dan! Whoever wrote this
was assigned the task of guarding the body of a woman, a very important woman.
'Twenty years and five after his death they found me.' Tradition holds that
Mary died twenty-two years after her son's crucifixion. The timing is almost
perfect."

           
 
"But, Carrie, the guy never says
whose
death. In all the Gospels and
letters and other texts, Jesus was called by name or referred to as the Master,
the Lord, the Son of Man, or the like, and the Dead Sea scrolls referred to the
Messiah as the 'Branch of David' or a 'shoot from the stump of Jesse' or as the
'Prince of the Congregation.' I'd expect the writer to use one of those terms
at least once if he was referring to Jesus."

           
 
"Maybe he wrote the scrolls for himself.
Maybe he feared mentioning Jesus by name—there were all sorts of persecutions
back then."

           
 
"That's possible, of course, but—"

           
 
"But I get the feeling from this that he
didn't feel worthy to speak Jesus's name."

           
 
A rather melodramatic interpretation, Dan
thought, but he said nothing. Carrie's intensity impressed him. The translation
had really got to her. She was inspired, afire with curiosity and . . .
something else . . . something he couldn't put his finger on.

           
 
"And here," she said, tapping one of
the pages, "this part where he refers to 'his brother.' Who else can that
be but St. James the Apostle, the brother of Jesus."

           
 
"His brother or his cousin," Dan
said, "depending on which authority you believe."

           
 
But he sat up straighter in the bed and took
the page from her. As he scanned the passage Carrie had mentioned it occurred
to him that she had a point. The recent publication of some obscure Dead Sea
scroll fragments suggested a link between the Essenes of Qumran and the
Jerusalem wing of the early Christian church, or "Nazarean movement,"
as it was called. The Jerusalem Church had been led by St. James. King Herod
Agrippa martyred his share of early

           
Christians, and even the High Priest
Ananus was after them. So they were periodically fleeing into the desert.

           
 
"You know," he said softly, "I
never saw it before. I mean, the writing was so disjointed and cryptic, but the
timing fits. If we assume that 'his death' refers to the crucifixion, and that
'his brother' arrived 'two decades and a half later, that would date the Glass
scroll somewhere around fifty-eight A.D." Dan felt a tingle of excitement
in his gut. "James was still alive in fifty-eight. Ananus didn't have him
killed until sixty-two A.D."

           
 
Carrie clutched his arm. "And tradition
says Mary died twenty-two years after Jesus's death, which is pretty darn close
to two decades and a half."

           
 
Dan could tell Carrie was getting pumped
again. It seemed to be contagious. His own heart had picked up its tempo.

           
 
"But who wrote this? If we can trust the
little he says about himself, I would guess he was a scribe or a Pharisee, or
both."