Book of Nathan (22 page)

Not once in the past had I told Zeus flat out that he was
innocent. Actually, I still wasn’t fully convinced he was. But with only ten
minutes of phone time left, I didn’t need Zeus beating himself up.
  

“He says, okay,” Maurice reported. “But he wants to know
what a fig-a-ment is.”

I held back a scream. “Forget the figment. Right now, I need
you to think back to the night Benjamin Kurios died. Do you remember seeing a
computer disk?”

“What’s a computer disk, he wants to know,” Maurice
translated.

“A disk, you know, like a DVD.” Watching movie rentals on a
donated DVD was one of life’s highlights at the Gateway.

Maurice passed on Zeusenoerdorf’s answer. “He says, yeah.”

“You saw a disk?”

“No. He took the disk.”

“What?”

“He took what you said,” Maurice repeated.

I was stunned. “You took
the
disk?”

“Zeus says he thought it was a music CD,” Maurice explained.
“Had a lot of words on it. One started with the letter
N
like on his Nelly album.”

Thanks to Zeus and a boom box, I had learned more than I
ever wanted to know about Nelly, the rap artist who sang classics like “Ride
Wit Me” and “Pimp Juice
.
”
Leave it to Zeus to presume that any CD with an
N
on it had to be a hip-hop recording.

“What did you do with it?” I shouted at the phone.

Maurice’s translation followed a run of grunts. “He shoved
it under a rock.”

I took a deep breath. “Let’s see if I have this right,” I
said. “After a car sideswipes a van and after Benjamin Kurios ends up on the
pavement and after two guys try to tear each other’s throats out, you find a CD
and decide to hide it under a rock?”
 

Maurice replied, “He says that’s right.”

I closed my eyes. “Why didn’t you say something about this
before?”

Maurice jerked his head at Yigal . “He told his lawyer,
Figgy.”

“What?” I glared at Yigal who was doing a rain dance around
the speakerphone.

“Very hard to understand,” Yigal said. “Couldn’t figure out
what he was saying.”

Back to the phone. “Zeus, the cops went over the crime scene
dozens of times. They would have found the CD even it were under a rock. Are
you sure
about
this?”

A rattle of sounds. “He’s sure.”

It was possible. Granted, few humans would have given top
priority to hiding a CD after stumbling across a man whose head had just been
pulverized. But this was Zeus, whose neurotransmitters worked in mysterious
ways. Maybe I was wrong about the crime-scene investigation. I remembered
seeing a lot of rock and chunks of cement under or near the bridge overpass.
Nothing weighing more than half a pound appeared to have been moved.
 

I strained to come up with the right question. “Did you see
anybody take the CD? Did anybody even go near the rock where you hid the disk?”

A burst of sound followed. “He didn’t see nobody else. After
he hid the disk, he went back to help the preacher.”

“How long before the cops showed up?”

“Probably ten minutes. But that’s a guess, he says.”

“Could someone have taken the disk from under the rock
during those ten minutes?”

“He don’t know. He don’t think so.”

“What about the two college kids? Could they have walked off
with the disk?”

Maurice listened to Zeus jabber for a few seconds. “He don’t
think the boys got close enough to get the CD. But he’s not sure about that
either.”

I was out of steam. “All right, Zeus. Anything else we
should talk about?”

“Yes,” Maurice said.

“What?”

Hesitation and then a short spurt of noise. “He wants to
know if you really think he didn’t kill the preacher.”

“I think we’re going to find out who killed Benjamin
Kurios,” I replied. It was a far less definitive statement than I had handed to
Zeus earlier. In fact, the response was so slippery and lawyer-like that Yigal
stopped his jiggling long enough to give me a look of admiration.

For
a couple of reasons, I didn’t phone Abraham Arcontius to tell him about Zeus’s
bombshell and offer up a mea culpa
for
missing his “deliver-or-else” deadline. First, I loathed the thought of having
to deal with—never mind apologize to—the piece of scum. Second, I had a hard
time thinking about Silverstein’s lieutenant when I was thirty minutes away
from meeting a woman who probably could squash Arcontius like a cockroach.

My Buick started coughing as soon as it entered Princeton
Borough. I reminded the car if it broke down in a town where the per capita
income was higher than my Gateway annual budget, it was one phone call away
from a donation to the National Kidney Foundation. The Buick straightened out
and got me to where we needed to be: 6 Mercer Street, only a few clicks from
the heart of Princeton Borough.
  

“You’re here to see—?” asked a man who sounded as stuffy as
he looked.

“Judith Russet.”

“Ah, yes. Please wait in the reading room. I’ll notify Ms.
Russet you’ve arrived.”

I parked myself in a leather chair and surveyed the six
other men taking up space in a large corner room of the Nassau Club. The men
were all old and in various stages of sleep. Two were snoring, one appeared
dead. I had this creepy feeling the Grim Reaper was among the Nassau Club’s most
frequent visitors.
 

“A lovely room, don’t you think?”
 

The voice came from behind me but I didn’t need a visual to
know who had arrived.
 

“In fact, the whole house is exquisite. A physician named
Samuel Miller lived here a long time ago. His residence became a private club
back in 1889.”

“Interesting,” was my witty response.
 

“I’m not a member but one of
Quia Vita
’s
donors is,” Judith Russet said. “He makes arrangements for me to use the club
when I’m in Princeton.”

I got the message. Russet rubbed noses with people of
influence. “Good to have friends in high places.”

“That’s something you should keep in mind. We have a private
room downstairs. This way.”

We walked to the lower level of the Nassau Club and into a
room barely large enough for a round table and four chairs.

“Let me get right to the point,” Russet said even before I
was seated and the door soundly shut. “I’m going to give you some confidential
information and then I’m going to offer you some advice. I hope you listen very
carefully.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Before I start, you need to know your Friday night stunt
was despicable. I just wanted to make that perfectly clear before anything else
is said.”

“Go on.”

“There are two possibilities,” Russet continued. She had put
herself in a chair cattycorner to mine so she was at my eye level. “Possibility
number one is that you’re a crook—a purveyor of stolen goods. The second
possibility is that you’re an ignorant fool.”

“I’m moved that you hold me in such high regard.”

“Regardless of which possibility happens to be correct, I
want you to know where
Quia
Vita
stands. Before I do that, let me make sure we’re both on the same page.”
 

Russet opened her purse, took out a sheet of paper, and slid
it across the table. I read the sentences marked with a yellow highlighter:

We concur that the
Book
of Nathan
and the
Book of
Jehu
scrolls are authentic. Regrettably, only a small portion of the
Book of Jehu
can be salvaged,
but the entire contents of the
Book
of Nathan
are intact. In answer to your question about the accuracy of
the translation regarding personhood—yes, we are positive the Aramaic to
English conversion is correct.
The
Book of Nathan
is clear about the definition of personhood.

I guessed what Russet was showing me was a passage from a
message written by Henri Le Campion that
Quia
Vita
had managed to intercept. It was becoming more and more obvious why the
Book of Nathan
was
on the market for five million dollars.
 

“It may surprise you,” Russet said, “that we’ve known for
years Henri Le Campion found the
Nathan
and
Jehu
scrolls in a cave seventy miles from
Jerusalem.”

“It might surprise you that I’m not surprised.” Which was
true. I didn’t know a lot about
Quia
Vita
but had learned enough to know the organization had big money and a long reach.
If Arthur Silverstein had good intelligence about the
Book of Nathan,
it
was safe to assume
Quia Vita
had it also.

Russet redeposited the sheet of paper into her purse.
“You’re one of a very few people who know about the
Book of Nathan
and the
Book of Jehu
discoveries.”

Russet waited for a response. I didn’t cooperate.

“It was common knowledge that Henri Le Campion was an avid
Benjamin Kurios follower. Actually, that’s an understatement. Let’s call him a
fanatical follower. We learned from an informant that when Le Campion told
Kurios about his discovery, Kurios agreed to bankroll a lot of tests, including
carbon-14 dating. The tests proved the animal-skin scrolls that Le Campion
found are genuine.”

“You seem to know a lot about went on between Le Campion and
Kurios.”

“We monitored Kurios for years. We were aware that he was in
regular contact with Le Campion, but even so we knew very little about the
scrolls. Then, for some unexplained reason, Le Campion got careless. He sent an
open e-mail to Kurios. The hard copy I just showed you is a printout of part of
that note. Not long after we found out that one of the scrolls included a
definition of personhood, we learned Kurios was planning to go public with the
English translation of the
Book
of Nathan
at his Orlando meeting.”

“His revival. Would have been interesting.”

Russet reacted sharply. “Revival suggests that Kurios’s
spectacle was to be a religious event. Hardly the case. Benjamin Kurios was
more showman than a man of God. Orlando would have been a circus with the
Book of Nathan
as its main act.”

Russet stood, her flabby body unfolding like an accordion.
“We don’t have all the specifics, but we suspect Kurios was planning to tell
the world that personhood doesn’t begin at the moment of conception. If he were
to make that kind of announcement, the implications to
Quia Vita
,
of course, are clear.”

“Put you out of business, would it?” The question wasn’t
intended to be impertinent even though it came out sounding that way. I was
genuinely curious about whether a pro-life advocacy group could survive if
there were Biblical evidence that one of its core beliefs was bogus.

“You underestimate our commitment to do God’s work,’’ Russet
growled. “Whatever lies Kurios might try to sell to the public would never have
stopped us from doing what we know is right.”

“How do you know you’re doing God’s work?” I asked. Again, I
wasn’t trying to antagonize Russet. I was trying to get a better feel for how
people like her became so convinced they were correct.

“Don’t test my faith.”

“Isn’t faith what we’re talking about here?” I argued.
“Seems to me that when faith turns fanatical—”

“Protecting the unborn is hardly fanatical, Mr. Bullock!”

“From where I sit, a fanatic is somebody who doesn’t leave a
little wiggle room when it comes to believing in things that can’t be proven.
There’s not a lot of hard evidence about when personhood comes into play or
when it doesn’t. Which means you could be right—or you may be wrong.”

“We’re not wrong.” Russet’s words were fierce. “And I will
tell you that if the
Book of Nathan
is contrary to what we know is right, then you can be certain the translation
from Aramaic to English is inaccurate. In fact, Benjamin Kurios might have had
the translation altered so it would serve his own purposes.”

That brought back my confusion about just where Kurios stood
on the abortion issue. I had Googled a list of articles about the evangelist
and found Kurios had walked the murky middle ground whenever the topic
surfaced. Kurios had been the king of caveats and qualifiers.