A Treasure Deep (22 page)

Gleason sat to Perry’s left, Dr. Curtis to
his right. Across the table, Jack was making short work of a
Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza. At the edge of the opposite
bench, Brent toyed with a slice of pepperoni and sausage pizza
before finally letting it sit on a paper plate. They’d been there
twenty minutes “decompressing,” as Perry put it. Perry had made a
point of inviting Brent who, he knew, was feeling lower than
dirt.

“Yeah, I suppose you have a right to know,”
Perry said.

“I’ll wait out front,” Brent said and rose
from the bench.

“No, it’s okay,” Perry said. “Sit down. Eat
your pizza and listen carefully.”

“I can’t apologize enough,” Brent said. “I’m
so sorry that I—”

“Forget it, kid,” Jack said. “We don’t hold
grudges here.”

“Besides,” Gleason added, “I could have,
should have, double-checked you. That’s what we do. Everyone
watches out for each other. I didn’t do that.”

Perry turned to Brent. “Look at me. What’s
done is done. Gleason is right. Any one of us could have checked to
see if the docs were secure. Truth is, we were all taken aback by
the . . . find.”

Curtis was becoming impatient. “Now that
we’re all lovey-dovey, can we please get to the point? I gave up my
beauty sleep to jet across the country only to be grilled by the
local cops about a murder. All I know so far is that you found the
remains of a skeleton, and that if Perry is right—and there is no
way he can be right—it’s where it doesn’t belong.”

“Pull in close, guys, because I’m not going
to talk very loud, and I’m not going to repeat myself. There are
only a handful of people who know what we’re attempting to do here.
Besides myself, there is Jack and Gleason, my father, and Mrs.
Henri; I’ll tell you about her in a moment.

“Brent, those people I mentioned are
insiders. Dr. Curtis has been advising the firm for many years.
What I’m about to say cannot go beyond this group. Not in idle
conversation, not spoken of with your family. Not until I say it’s
okay to do so. You must understand that clearly. The ramifications
go beyond imagination. I know that sounds like advertising talk,
but I mean it. No one living knows more about this than I do, and I
can’t begin to guess the impact. Have I been clear so far?”

Brent nodded.

“I need a commitment from you, Brent. I need
your word that this stays in the group. Nothing illegal is
involved. I’ve made sure of that. Do I have your word?”

“I swear, Perry. I swear by—”

Perry waved him off. “I don’t want you to
swear. I don’t want an oath. Gleason has told me you’re
trustworthy, and I’m willing to take his word for it. All I need is
your promise.”

“I promise. I won’t let you down again.”

Perry wondered if he had ever before seen a
young man so serious.

“Yeah, yeah, I cross my heart too,” Curtis
said. “Cut to the chase.”

“Six months ago I left the office in Seattle
late. I rounded a corner and saw what looked like a fender-bender,
except no one was around. I looked down the street and saw a man
running. He wasn’t running well, and I could tell he was an older
man. Another guy was walking quickly after him. It didn’t seem
right, so I parked and followed.”

“You poked your nose in,” Jack said. He
looked at Brent. “He’s always poking his nose in things.”

Perry ignored him. “The long and short of it
is that I got there in time to see a young man about to shoot the
old gent. I . . . persuaded him otherwise.”

Brent looked puzzled.

“He cleaned his clock,” Jack interpreted.
“He’s just too modest to say anything.”

“Anyway, the old man was Dr. Jamison Henri, a
professor at North Pacific Seminary. He’d already been shot in the
leg once, but to make things worse, he was having a heart attack.”
Perry told of Henri’s agitation over the safety of the leather
satchel, then of his cardiac arrest. The minutes flowed by as he
recounted the scene at the hospital and his meeting with Claire and
Joseph and how Henri had died an hour later.

“I gave my card to Mrs. Henri and offered to
help in any way I could. I also gave her the satchel.”

“Without looking inside?” Brent said with
surprise. “Weren’t you dying to know what was in there?”

“It wasn’t my satchel. I had no right to look
inside.”

“Man, you are a straight arrow,” Brent said
then quickly added, “but I mean that in a good way.”

Choosing not to respond, Perry continued. “I
walked Mrs. Henri to her car and waited for her to drive off, and
then I went home. About a week later, I got a call at the office.
It was Claire. She was concerned about the satchel. She told me
that after the funeral she’d gone home and discovered her house had
been ransacked. The satchel was gone. She thought she’d hidden it
well, but whoever did the deed was a professional and knew all the
tricks. Claire had hidden the thing in the pantry behind some
cereal boxes.”

“The whole house was ransacked?” Curtis
asked.

“From one end to the other,” Perry replied.
“It was probably done by a team of two or three. There’s no way to
tell for certain. The police found no fingerprints.”

“How did they get in?” Brent inquired.

“Through the front door. No sign of forced
entry. The police think the lock was picked.”

“What was in the satchel?” Curtis prodded.
Perry had worked with him several times and knew him to be a man of
keen insight and little patience.

“A document,” Perry said flatly. “A very old
document. I went to Claire’s home to help straighten things up and
to help her deal with the police. After they were gone, she told me
how her husband came home from the seminary clutching the satchel
to his chest. She said his face was white and he vacillated between
giddiness and astonishment. Claire pressed him for information, but
all he would say was, ‘The greatest find ever.’”

“So she never actually saw the document,”
Curtis intoned.

“Oh, she saw it on several occasions,” Perry
corrected. “Dr. Henri would work on it at home, sitting at the
dining room table taking notes and consulting books.”

“Tell me she described it to you,” Curtis
pleaded.

“She did. It was a brownish paper with what
she called ‘crude, dark writing.’ Dr. Henri told her it was a type
of Greek.”

“Not paper,” Curtis said. “Not if the
document was truly ancient and since Henri said ‘a type of Greek,’
I assume that he’s referring to either Classical or Koine depending
on the age of the writing.”

“What’s the difference?” Brent asked.

“Koine was a latter form of the earlier
language,” Curtis explained. “It was the common language and was
used in some literature, the courts, and in business. It’s the
language of the New Testament. Classical Greek is more formal.”

“So the satchel held a bunch of papers
written in Greek?” Brent asked.

Curtis spoke before Perry could. “As I said,
it can’t be paper. At least not paper as we use the term. Paper is
made from plant material. Early paper came from the reed-like
papyrus plant. In fact, the word ‘paper’ comes from papyrus. The
word ‘bible’ comes from the name of a town where the papyrus plant
was harvested: Byblos, later known as Gebal. Over the years
‘Byblos’ became ‘bible’ meaning ‘book.’”

“Man,” Brent said. “You should go on
Jeopardy.”

“Don’t interrupt the professor, newbie,”
Gleason admonished.

“Documents were also written on vellum, which
is made from animal skin. The ancients would take the skin of a
slaughtered animal like a lamb, goat, or calf, clean it, and rub it
with a coarse powder or pumice. The younger the animal the finer
the vellum.”

“Hence,” Jack interjected, “the proverbial
sheepskin given at graduation.”

“I don’t suppose you know if it was papyrus
or vellum,” Curtis asked Perry.

“No. I never saw the documents. Claire said
that there were dozens of little pieces and Dr. Henri would work
long into the night trying to assemble them at home.”

“Wait a minute,” Curtis said. “Something
isn’t right. If I understand you, you’re telling me that a scholar
who teaches at a seminary somehow came into possession of an
ancient document written on vellum or papyrus, took it home, and
worked on it in his dining room.”

Perry affirmed the summary with a nod. Curtis
shook his head. “It can’t be,” he said. “No true scholar would do
that.”

“Why not?” Brent asked.

“Because,” Curtis explained sharply, “ancient
documents are extremely fragile and require specialized care. Too
much moisture, too much handling, and you end up with little piles
of dust. If Henri truly had an ancient document, then he wouldn’t
treat it in such a cavalier fashion. He’d have to be crazy or—”

“Terrified,” Perry inserted. “And he was.
Terrified. Claire said he became almost paranoid. She’d make plans
to have people over to the house for dinner, but he canceled them
all. In fact, he canceled everything they had planned, including a
vacation. He rose early, worked on the documents, went to work,
returned, and worked late into the night. Claire was sure he was
losing his mind.”

“What would terrify a man so much that he
would break all scholastic protocol and endanger valuable
historical documents?” Curtis asked.

“What would make you behave that way?” Perry
asked.

“Nothing. Nothing could be so important that
I’d risk losing something irreplaceable.”

Perry said nothing, allowing the conversation
to settle into silence.

“Well,” Curtis said after a moment. “I
suppose I might do something like that if I felt the documents were
in greater danger among others than with me.”

“Bingo,” Perry said. “Something or someone
had him scared.”

“Who or what force could do that?” Curtis
asked.

“The force that had Dr. Henri attacked. The
same force that put a murdered man on our site.”

“That sounds an awful lot like a conspiracy
theory,” Curtis shot back.

“The thing about conspiracy theories is that
some of them are true.”

Curtis lowered his head, and Perry let him
think. “It would have to be more than that. The content—there must
have been something about the content. He deciphered enough to know
that some enormous impact would come from the knowledge of the
writings.”

“That’s how I figured it,” Perry stated.

“Where did Henri get the docs?” Curtis
asked.

Perry shrugged. “He never told his wife. We
don’t know. It’s because of those documents that we’re here.”

Curtis rubbed his eyes. “Okay, wait a minute.
You said the documents were stolen and that you never saw them. Yet
here we are because of them. And if I understand you, Mrs. Henri is
no scholar. She couldn’t have told you what was on those
fragments.”

“She has no idea. Claire is a kind and caring
woman, but she has no desire to understand her husband’s work. He
was an ancient language expert, and such things held little
interest for her.”

“If the docs were stolen, and Dr. Henri’s
wife doesn’t know what’s on them, then how did you know to come to
the Tehachapi Mountains?”

“Well,” Perry began, “this is where things
get weird.”

“Good,” Dr. Curtis quipped. “I was getting
bored.”

“Claire has a special son,” Perry explained.
“Are you familiar with the term ‘Savant Syndrome’?”

“I’m not,” Brent cut in.

“Savant Syndrome describes individuals who
are socially and educationally dysfunctional but who exhibit great
skills at art, math, and memory. Usually they cannot express
themselves verbally, and although they might be able to mentally
calculate the first solar eclipse in the year 2023, they generally
have no idea what it is they’re doing. Experts say it has something
to do with damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. Joseph Henri
is just such a savant. He’s skilled at calculations, able to do
multiplication problems faster than you can enter them in a
calculator. He can draw pictures that look near photo quality. He
also has a prodigious memory. He reads everything and can replicate
everything he reads or sees. He can reproduce every word of a book
he’s looked at, apparently without understanding any of it.”

“You’re not telling me . . .”

“Yes, I am,” Perry continued. “After the
satchel was stolen, Joseph began to reproduce the document it held,
letter for letter, line for line, even the accent marks.”

“He rewrote the text?” Curtis asked.

“In a sense, but it’s more than that. I’ve
gotten to know Joseph over the months, and he doesn’t think as we
do. It’s almost as if he’s a foreign intelligence. So when he
reproduced the documents he had seen his father working on, he
wasn’t just rewriting the Greek works, he was making a piece of
art. Clear the table.”

Pizza pans, plastic cups, napkins all
disappeared quickly as the group made room for Perry. “I stopped by
the motel before coming over here. I picked up what Joseph did.”
Reaching down by his side, he picked up a hard plastic tube that
was capped on one end. He removed the cap and pulled out a roll of
paper.

“It looks like butcher paper,” Curtis
said.

“It is,” Perry replied. “Joseph goes through
an enormous amount of paper. This stuff is cheaper and comes on a
large roll. It can keep him occupied for several months.” Perry
spread out the roll, aided by his friends around the table. “As you
can see, Joseph did more than rewrite the letters; he actually drew
the fragments and colored them to match what he saw. To Joseph,
these are not words, they’re images.”

Perry gave Curtis time to take in what he was
seeing. He watched as the archeologist let his eyes trace the
pictures before him. The roll of paper was two feet wide and close
to six feet long. Drawn in detail not thought possible in art were
dark brown shapes that were unmistakably reproductions of vellum
fragments. Dark squiggles were barely visible on the “fragments”
but clear enough to be read if studied closely.