Gospel (103 page)

“I'm worried about my health.”

“You're taking your malaria pills, right? You're fine, if you don't drink the tap water.” He glanced at her to see if she was ill. “Ah. Pharoah's Revenge caught up with you at last, heh-heh-heh. I had my bad day yesterday.”

Lucy, appearing pale and red-eyed, sat down across from him, swatting at the flies that had immediately found her. “You still are determined to go to Khartoum overland?”

“Where else can I get to the invaluable material on the lost kingdom of Meroe, hm? If not at Khartoum University, and the archives at the National Museum, then where?”

“We couldn't have someone photocopy these things?”

“Between Sudanese photocopying and Sudanese mail and Sudanese uncooperation, that idea doesn't have a prayer.” O'Hanrahan folded his paper. “Khartoum's the key for us, Luce. Professor Fletcher in the early 1900s began trying to decipher Meroitic and gave his whole life to it.” O'Hanrahan lifted a finger to make a point. “But lots of scholars have shrugged and given up, taken it off the front burner. With all this new interest in Africa, someone's gonna figure it out any day now, so we've gotta get there first, Sister Lucy!”

Lucy could not be moved to share his enthusiasm. She glumly looked down at his newspapers, full of invasion news. A picture in
The New York Times
of General Colin Powell beside a chart showing the calling-up of American reserves. A photo of an open-mouthed Jesse Jackson protesting that too many black people were in the army. Surely we weren't going to war in the Middle East, Lucy thought darkly, standing.

“Whereya going?”

“Taking a walk,” she said, patting her camera looped round her neck.

She wandered down a few dusty blocks, already 100 degrees in the sun, to the grand Cataract Hotel, a world-class joint decked out like a Moorish villa, overlooking Elephantine Island. Lucy asked at the desk if they had an international phone booth. A dark man whose face was a giant smile took her number and placed the call repeatedly until it connected:

“Rabbi Hersch?”

“What? Lucy! Where the hell have you guys been?”

“We're in Aswan. We're leaving for Khartoum tomorrow—”

“Khartoum?”
Then there was a noise as if he had dropped the phone. “It all explains itself—you too are a meshuggenitzke! Is
the moon
on this man's itinerary?” The rabbi then came as close as Lucy had heard to raising his voice. “Nu nu nu, do you know anything about the Bashir regime in the Sudan there? I'm not gonna tell you, so that you'll sleep tonight, okay?”

There was a pause.

The rabbi said in a level tone, “Look. You might go back to Chicago and stop wasting your time. I got some bad news. The scroll's been stolen from Father Vico, and we're back to square one anyway.”

Lucy paused a moment to prepare her response, but it was enough to confirm the rabbi's suspicions.

“I
knew it
!” seized the rabbi. “I knew that son of a bitch Patrick O'Hanrahan had the thing stolen—that nudzh Gabriel! Damn you two!”

“Rabbi, sir, I think you have to understand—”

“When you didn't call for a week I got suspicious! Surely, I said to myself, Paddy will stop pouting and check in with me; surely he needs to be close to the scroll … and then light dawns like the shmendrik I am that
Paddy
had it!” A few choice sentences in Yiddish-English followed this. When he raised his voice the satellite call hissed and crackled.

“If I could explain—”

Rabbi Hersch reversed himself: “No! I take it back: God bless you, let God bless showers and showers of blessings upon you! Blessings upon you and your issue unto all the generations! Blessings because at least you
have
the scroll. Tell Paddy, all is forgiven, if he'll just go back to Chicago and wait for me there.”

“Chicago?”

“I don't trust Jerusalem. If Paddy hadn't swiped it, someone else would certainly have done it. Something's going on here. I had a break-in in my office. We had some weird guys harassing my cleaning lady at my house. I got a visit from Mossad again wanting to know about something called ‘The Flight of the Griffin.' Something really big is up and, though I should be insulted, I'm actually glad you pulled this stunt.” The rabbi reflected a moment. “I take it you're calling me behind Paddy's back.”

“Yes, he said he was going to do it but I think he's chickened out. And besides, as far as I was concerned…”

The rabbi waited patiently.

“I didn't know if I could trust
you,
Rabbi, sir.”

“Trust me?”

Lucy got brave and pursued the matters that had led her to call: “I saw you in front of the King David Hotel with the guy who was in Ballymacross and who stalked us in Florence. The Man in the Cheap Suit we've been calling him. I don't know if Dr. O'Hanrahan mentioned him to you, but I saw you and this crook exchanging money.”

He was quiet a moment. “Ah. So this is why the silence. Okay, little girl, you remember when we discussed my selling a faculty member's library to the Bible-thumpers for $43,000?”

“Yes.”

“He's from a Bible college, your Man in the Cheap Suit. He's been in touch with me for a few months or so and he's trying to undercut Bob Jones's offer for Rabbi Shimon's library. In Rome, I realized he didn't want my library, he wanted the
Gospel of Matthias
and was haggling for my library to cover his true intentions.”

“I saw you hand him money.”

“He gave me $1000 in an envelope if I would tell him who had the scroll. I handed it back to him.”

“You then got in his car.”

“He dropped me off at Hebrew University.”

Lucy processed this.

The rabbi: “What? You think I've gone to all this trouble to find the
Gospel of Matthias
so I could give it to some hayseed back in the States?”

“What Bible college?”

“That TPL place down in Louisiana.”

Lucy closed her eyes. So Farley and Mr. Cheap Suit
were
traveling together. Both were from a Louisiana pentecostal college. And Lucy felt her face color: Farley repeatedly wanted to have dinner, have drinks, get together, and talk to her
about the scroll!
Naturally, it wasn't about any romantic interest. Yep, she sighed, figures it couldn't have been that I'd swept him off his feet—

“You still there, little girl?”

“Yes. Another question.”

“I am this untrustworthy? You gotta play detective here? Paddy thinks I'm up to something too, does he?”

Lucy persevered: “Gabriel told me about something that happened this spring—”

“That momzer?”

“He said when he and Dr. O'Hanrahan went to Rome to purchase the scroll from those dealers, that they left you back in Jerusalem. But then he ran into you in Rome trying to purchase the scroll secretly as well, behind Dr. O'Hanrahan's back.”

“Do you blame me for that?” he said. “It doesn't look so nice, but my suspicions about Gabriel were correct, huh? Hey, I've lived in Jerusalem for forty years, I got sources. I heard the Franciscans were gonna try and swipe it—was I right? Huh? So I came to Rome as a backup. Paddy left the hotel when Gabriel disappeared and I never got to make contact with him.”

He collected his thoughts: “Look, little girl.
I
invited Patrick O'Hanrahan to work with me on this, remember? If I
had
gotten the scroll in Rome I'd have invited Paddy to Jerusalem to work on it there, together. Any imputation that I am scheming against him—when he's here because of me in the first place—is so much shlock!”

Indeed, the rabbi's instincts were correct about Gabriel … and probably right about O'Hanrahan losing control of his own life. Maybe the
Gospel of Matthias
was a job for Father Beaufoix, a job for a team of established scholars—not some crazy old man who had played upon the rabbi's strained sense of friendship, and not some undistinguished grad student from Chicago.

Rabbi Hersch; “So are you safe there?”

Lucy was aware she was sounding weepy and girlish but she almost let the rabbi know the worst of it: “Not really. We got our hotel room broken into in Cairo. O'Hanrahan carries the scroll on him most of the time, so whoever it was didn't find it. Then we moved hotels and the same thing happened the next day. We decided to stop using the credit card that Merriwether Industries sent us—somebody is using it to track our every move.”

“So what are you doing for money?”

“Dr. O'Hanrahan is back to using his
own
credit card, which has gotta be pretty much up to its limit, since I bet he hasn't paid off his bill in months.”

“This they love at credit cards. They probably raised his limit.”

Lucy sighed and conveyed more news: “Oh and we had a near-encounter with the Mad Monk too. When we went to the Egyptian Orthodox monasteries at Wadi Natrun. We arrived to hear that a monk had preceded us by a day asking around for the
Gospel of Matthias
and books on Meroitic.”

“The Mad Monk? The Greek Orthodox fellow Father Vico told us about; the guy trying to destroy the
Gospel of Matthias?
”

“I have no idea what his mission is. I do know that this monk fellow has shown up in Assisi, in Athens and on Mt. Athos, and now he's in Cairo. It's uncanny how he seems to know where to look. He's not following us because he gets places
before
we do.”

“Look, tell Paddy for me to get what he needs at Khartoum, get the hell out of there, and we'll all reconvene in Chicago.”

“Okay. Uh, Rabbi, apropos of nothing.”

“Yeah, what now?”

“What's Israel's policy on adoption and abortion?”

Abortion, no. Adoption, yes, if the baby's Jewish, he explained, though there are no doubt special cases for both. “Why do you ask? You knocked up?”

Forced laughter. “Of course not!”

“You'd be taken care of in Israel, if that's what you want to know. I'd see to it. You're not knocked up? Paddy and you do something you oughta be ashamed of?”

“Rabbi, no!”

He didn't believe her now.
“Oy vey,”
he muttered. “Last time I have anything to do with a goddam Christian gospel! This has been one long kick in the toches!”

A
UGUST
16
TH
–17
TH

The tourists at this time of year were nonexistent, of course. Who would be crazy enough to travel up the Nile in the summer?

O'Hanrahan went to a bank in the morning and asked what the limit on Merriwether Industries' corporate VISA card was for cash advances and was told there was nearly $1000 he could have. O'Hanrahan thought this over. He could get the $1000 and spend it without leaving a trace … except that he had gotten the cash advance in Aswan. Wouldn't the masterminds at Merriwether Industries assume Aswan was but a staging ground for a push to Khartoum? He didn't risk it. He used his own MasterCard for his cash advance in Sudanese pounds and committed Merriwether Industries' VISA permanently to his wallet, determined not to use it again.

Those traveling by ferry to the Sudan were numerous enough to book all but one of the first-class cabins on the steamer to Wadi Halfa, the Sudanese border outpost reached by the twenty-hour boat ride across Lake Nasser. O'Hanrahan as a peace offering had given Lucy the last first-class cabin, with its semblance of air-conditioning. He took a second-class cabin, paying for all the bunks so he could have it to himself.

Lucy awoke in the middle of the night to discover she was quite cold. Fumbling for the bedside lamp, she adjusted her eyes to the light and began trying every panel and knob of the air-conditioner unit, fiddling to stop the flow of cold air. Finally she unplugged it. Maybe it actually
was
cold. She opened the door to her room, which was on the top deck, and indeed, it was the middle of the night and quite cool. The lake was still and black as oil, the sky was clear with many stars, and only rarely could she find a light on the shore, perhaps a Nubian camp, or a village of the Shaiga peoples, or the Gaalyeen.

Here is Africa.

Peoples in tribes clustered around fires, speaking languages understood by them alone, people whose physical characteristics looked a certain way, who dressed and sang and danced in specific patterns honed by the centuries and the harsh conditions, the rise and ebb of the Nile, the beneficence and indifference of the gods. People who told stories, passed and embellished from the original tale told to their ancestors by God Himself or God Herself. “Primitive” peoples: a term a number of politically correct people back at the university found insulting, but “primitive” from
primus
meaning first, meaning original, meaning “here first”—that was not insulting. For this was where humankind began, remembered Lucy, in the headlands of this river, the oldest-known bones of
Homo sapiens.
The first place on the planet to host human life, and ironically, maybe the last place to become livable.