F Paul Wilson - Novel 03 (8 page)

           
 
She was still at it when Dan turned back to
his gift and spotted a legal-size envelope tucked in next to the scroll. He
pulled it out.

           
 
"What's this?"

           
 
Hal dragged his eyes away from the woman with
the deodorant. "The translation. I know you're pretty good at old Hebrew,
but this will save you from risking damage to the scroll by unrolling it. And
as jumbled, paranoid, and crazy as it may read, you can rely on the accuracy of
the translation. The folks who did it are tops."

           
 
"Great, Hal. You've thought of
everything."

           
 
An elderly man in a shabby blue suit slipped
past the Ban lady and seated himself next to Hal. Immediately he began untying
his shoes.

           
 
"You don't mind, do you?" he said in
an accented voice as he slipped the first one off. "They're really sweaty.
I need to air my feet something awful."

           
 
"Be my guest," Hal said, rolling his
eyes at Dan as the odor from the exposed feet and empty shoes began to rise.
"We were just leaving. Weren't we, Fitz."

           
 
"Gee, I kind of like it here, Hal,"
Dan said in his most guileless tone. "Why don't you save our seats while I
run up to the corner and buy us a couple of hot dogs. We can eat them right
here. You like sauerkraut?"

           
 
"I've lost my appetite," Hal said
through a tight, fierce grin. "Let's. Go. For. A. Little. Walk. Shall.
We?"

           
 
Dan hadn't the heart to play this out any
longer. After all, Hal had just given him a first-century scroll.

           
 
"Sure."

           
 
As they left, the Ban lady took their spots
and switched to her left underarm.

           
 
When they reached the sidewalk on Avenue A,
Hal said, "I think I preferred living under the threat of a PLO
attack."

           
 
Just then a very pale woman with very black
hair, black blouse, and black stretch pants walked by balancing a loaded green
plastic laundry basket on her head.

           
 
"And sometimes I wonder if I've truly
left the middle East."

           
 
Dan smiled. Poor, fastidious Hal. "You
should be at
Princeton
or Yale."

           
 
"Yeah. I could have been. But I thought
I'd like
New
York
.
Don't they get to you?"

           
 
Dan shrugged. "Those folks are like most
of the people I hang out with every day, but considerably more
functional."

           
 
"How do you do it? You all but live with
them. And you don't have to."

           
 
"Jesus hung with the down-and-outs. Why
shouldn't I?"

           
 
He noticed Hal looking at him closely.
"You don't think you're Jesus, do you?"

           
 
"Hardly." Dan laughed. "But
that's what being a priest is all about—modeling your life on the J-man, as
he's known around here. Truth is, we don't know much about His life. He might
even have been married."

           
 
"We don't look into the New Testament
much where I come from, but I don't remember ever hearing that he was."

           
 
"True. But nowhere is it said that he
wasn't."

           
 
"Well, we do know that he rubbed the
higher-ups the wrong way."

           
 
"I've done my share of that," Dan
said, thinking of his long-running battle with Father Brennan,
St. Joseph
's pastor, over his soup kitchen in the
church basement.

           
 
"It got him killed."

           
 
Dan laughed again. "Not to worry. I'm not
looking to get my palms and soles ventilated."

           
 
"You can't be too careful, Fitz,"
Hal said, glancing back toward the plaza. "A lot of these folks are more
than a few bricks shy of a full load."

           
 
Dan nodded. "I'm aware of that." He
thought of the couple of occasions when some of Loaves and Fishes'
"guests" got violent, mostly screaming and shouting and pushing, but
one went so far as to pull a knife during an argument over who would sit by a
window. "And I'm careful."

           
 
"Good. I'm sure there's a place in heaven
for you, but I don't want you taking it just yet."

           
 
"Heaven's not guaranteed for anybody,
Hal. Sometimes I wonder if there is such a place."

           
 
Hal was looking at him strangely.
"You?"

           
 
He didn't want to get into anything heavy with
Hal so he grinned. "Just kidding. But how about lunch? It's the least I
can do." He pointed to Nino's on the corner of St. Mark's Place.
"Slice of Sicilian?"

           
 
"I'll take a raincheck," Hal said,
extending his hand. "Got to run. But I want to get together with you again
after you've read the translation. See if you can make any sense of it."

           
 
"I'll do my best. And thanks again.
Thanks a million. Nice to own something this old—and know it's one of a
kind."

           
 
"Not one of a kind, I'm afraid," Hal
said, frowning. "Shortly before I left, an Israeli collector came in with
another scroll identical to this one. The parchment and the writing carbon
dated the same as yours—about two thousand years apart."

           
 
Dan shrugged. "Okay. So it's not one of a
kind. It's still a great gift, and I'll treasure it. But right now I've got to
get back to the shelter for the lunch line."

           
 
Hal waved and started down the sidewalk.
"See you next week, okay? For lunch. I should have my appetite back by
then."

           
 
Dan waved and headed back to St. Joe's,
wondering how many of these weird scrolls were floating around the
Middle East
?

           
She
had been dead for two years and more, yet her body showed no trace of
corruption. The brother had kept her death a secret. He and the others feared
that Ananus or Herod Agrippa or even the Hellenists might make use of her
remains to further their various ends.

           
 
FROM THE GLASS SCROLL

           
 
ROCKEFELLER MUSEUM TRANSLATION

           
Ramat Gan
,
Israel

           
 
Chaim Kesev stared westward from the picture
window in the living room of Tulla Szobel's sprawling hilltop home. He could
see the lights of Tel Aviv—the IBM tower, the waterfront hotels—and the
darkness of the
Mediterranean
beyond. The glass reflected the room behind
him. A pale room, a small pale world—beige rug, beige walls, beige drapes, pale
abstract paintings, low beige furniture that seemed designed for something
other than human comfort, chrome and glass tables and lamps.

           
 
Kesev wrinkled his nose. With all the money
lavished on this room, he thought, the least you'd think she could do was find
a way to remove the cigarette stink. The place smelled like a tavern at cleanup
time.

           
 
He had arrived here unannounced tonight, shown
Miss Szobel his Shin Bet identification, and all but pushed his way in. Now he
waited while she procured the scroll from a room in some other quarter of the
house.

           
 
The scroll. . . he'd begun a low-key search
for it immediately after its theft four years ago. A subtle search. Not
I'm looking for a scroll recently stolen from
a cave in the Judean Wilderness. Have you seen or heard of such a thing?
That
kind of search would close doors rather than open them. Instead, Kesev had
extended feelers into the antiquities market—legitimate and underground—saying
he was a collector interested in purchasing first-century manuscripts, and that
money was no object.

           
 
Perhaps his feelers hadn't been subtle enough.
Perhaps the seller he sought preferred more tried-and-true channels of
commerce. Whatever the reason, he was offered many items but none were what he
sought.

           
 
Then, just last year, his feelers caught
ripples of excitement from the manuscript department at the
Rockefeller
Museum
in
Jerusalem
. A unique first-century scroll had been
brought in for verification. As he homed in on the scent, word came that the
scroll turned out to be a fake. So he'd veered off and continued his search
elsewhere.

           
 
And then, just last month, whispers of another
fake, identical to the first—the same disjointed story, written in the same
Aramaic form of Hebrew, on an ancient parchment.

           
 
Something in those whispers teased Kesev. The
scant details he could glean about the fakes tantalized him. He investigated
and learned that the first scroll had been brought in by an American who had
since returned home. But the second . . . a wealthy woman from a Tel Aviv
suburb had brought that in, and taken it home in a huff when informed that
she'd been duped.

           
 
Kesev was standing in her living room now.

           
 
He heard her footsteps behind him.

           
 
"Here, Mr. Kesev," said a throaty
voice behind him. Her Ivrit carried a barely noticeable Eastern European
accent. "I believe this is what you want."

           
 
He turned slowly, hiding his anticipation.
Tulla Szobel was in her mid-fifties, blond hair, reed thin, prematurely
wrinkled, and dressed in a beige knit dress the color of her walls. A cigarette
dangled from her lips. She held a Lucite case between her hands.

           
 
Kesev took the case from her and carried it to
the glass-and-chrome coffee table. Without asking permission, he lifted the lid
and removed the scroll.

           
 
"Careful!" she said, hovering over
him.

           
 
He ignored her. He uncoiled a foot or so of
the scroll and began reading—

           
 
Then stopped. This wasn't the scroll. This
looked like the scroll, and some of it read like the scroll, but the writing,
the penmanship was all wrong.

           
 
"They were right," he said, nodding
slowly. "This is a fake. A clumsy fake."

           
 
Miss Szobel sniffed. "I don't need you to
tell me that. The
Rockefeller
Museum
—"

           
 
"Where did you get this?" Kesev
said, rerolling the scroll.

           
 
She puffed furiously on her cigarette.
"Why. . . I . . .picked it up in a street bazaar."

           
 
"Really?" They all said that.
Amazing.
Israel
seemed full of lucky collectors who were forever happening on
priceless—or potentially priceless—artifacts in street stalls, and purchasing
them for next to nothing from vendors who had no idea of their true worth.
"You must take me to him."

           
"I wish I could," she
said. "I've been looking for him myself, trying to get my money back. But
he seems to have vanished into thin air."

           
 
"You are lying," Kesev said evenly,
replacing the Lucite lid and looking up at her.

           
 
She stepped back as if he'd spit at her.
"How dare you!" She pointed a shaking finger toward her front door.
"I want you out of—"

           
 
"If I leave without the name that I seek
I will return within the hour with a search warrant and a search team, and we
will comb this house inch by inch until we turn up more forgeries from this
mysterious source."

           
 
Kesev couldn't back up a word of that threat,
but he knew the specter of a search of the premises would strike terror into
the heart of any serious antiquities collector. There wasn't one who didn't dip
into the black market now and then. Some bought there almost exclusively. If
Miss Szobel followed true to form, a search might result in the seizure of half
her collection; maybe more.

           
 
Miss Szobel's pointing arm faltered and fell
to her side.

           
 
"Wh-why? On what grounds? Why does
Domestic Intelligence care—?"

           
 
"Oh, it's not just the Shin Bet. The
Mossad is involved too."

           
 
She paled further. "The Mossad?"

           
 
"Yes. We have reason to believe that
these scrolls are merely the latest in an ongoing scheme to sell worthless
fakes to wealthy collectors and funnel the money to Hamas and other terrorist
organizations."

           
 
Amazing how facile a liar he'd become. It
hadn't always been this way. As a younger man he'd insisted on speaking nothing
but the truth. But that youth, like truth, was long gone, swallowed up by time
and tragedy.

           
 
He sighed and rose to his feet. "Please do
not leave the house, Miss Szobel. I will return in—"

           
 
"Wait!" she cried, motioning him
back toward the couch. "I had no idea terrorists were involved. Of course
I'll tell you where I bought it."

           
 
"Excellent." Kesev removed a pen and
a note pad from his breast pocket. "Go ahead."

           
 
"His name is Salah Mahmoud. He has a shop
in
Jerusalem
—the old town. In the Moslem quarter, off
Qadasiya."

           
 
Kesev nodded. He knew the area, if not the
shop.

           
 
"Thank you for your cooperation." He
bent and lifted the scroll and its Lucite box from the table. "I'll need
to take this back to Shin Bet headquarters for analysis."

           
 
"Of course," she said, following him
to the door. "But I will get it back, won't I?"

           
 
"Of course. As soon as we are finished
with it."

           
 
He waved good-bye and headed for his car.
Another lie. Miss Tulla Szobel had seen the last of her forged scroll. He'd
take it with him to
Jerusalem
for his visit to a certain Salah Mahmoud. The dealer couldn't plead
ignorance if Kesev held the scroll under his nose. Threats probably wouldn't
suffice to loosen Mahmoud's tongue. Kesev might have to get rough. He almost
relished the thought.

I asked the brother why he had come to me
with this miracle. He said to me. Because it had been told to us that you are
to guard her, and protect her as if she were your own mother and still alive. I
told him, Yes. Yes, I will guard her with my life. I will do anything you ask.

           
 
FROM THE GLASS SCROLL

           
 
ROCKEFELLER MUSEUM TRANSLATION