Gospel (11 page)

Lucy smiled, not sure what mainlining was.

“Not like the flavorless bag of Lipton in a Styrofoam cup you get in many fine American establishments.”

Under the influence of English Breakfast tea, served in a lovely urn, two kinds of sugar in bowls for his delectation, cream and then milk in precious mini-urns, O'Hanrahan's resuscitation accelerated. The menus were put before them. And Lucy saw that they would be lucky to escape for under £15. She figured she had £20 in change and bills and traveler's checks after that—

“My good man,” O'Hanrahan announced to the long-faced waiter, “I'd like the herring in cream sauce to start, on a plate with a slice of cold cantaloupe melon, and to the side a cut of your sweetest Morvan ham—no, make that prosciutto. I'm missing
bella Italia.
”

Lucy was inwardly tabulating: £6 plus £5, that's £11 plus—

“… and, to follow, two eggs, poached. I think atop a crisp muffin, a rasher of smoked Canadian bacon to the side. And look, black pudding on the menu here! Let's have a patty or two of that, shall we?”

Maybe they would take her traveler's checks, thought Lucy, a big fancy place like this. Just whatever you do, damn you, don't get the steak—

“And yes, I think a
petite béarnaise,
a trifle rare, if you would.”

“As you wish, sir. And for the miss?”

“Just grapefruit juice, I think, will be fine.”

“Nonsense,” snapped O'Hanrahan, taking her menu from her. “I insist. A traditional English breakfast for my daughter.”

The waiter archly retreated, and Lucy looked at O'Hanrahan sheepishly. “So you remember me after all. At the Turf you were passing me off as your daughter.”

“A bit of resemblance there, unfortunately for you,” he added, laughing until it caused his head to smart. “You're Roman Catholic, aren't you?”

Lucy nodded.

“And you're, worse than that,
Irish
Roman Catholic, huh?”

She nodded again.

“Knew it,” he sighed, “that dark red hair. And the way you blushed when I mentioned the mistress business last night. Dantan, Dantan … that's not an Irish name, is it? Oh, look!” A waiter was passing by with a pastry cart laden with a tableau of croissants and
gateaux,
strudel and
Kuchenstücke,
muffins and scones and crumpets and Danish pastries. “Excuse me,” O'Hanrahan said to the man. “I'd like a strudel, yes, that thing there. Lucy?”

“The Danish, I guess,” said Lucy, the bank broken for sure. “You're not going to have room for all you ordered, sir, if you pick your way through the pastry cart.”

“I don't intend to eat all I ordered. I just want those bastards at Chicago to pay for it all. You were saying?”

“Dantan,” she commenced, “is a Breton name. Somewhere in the late 1700s my great-great-grandsomething came over to Ireland.”

“No doubt to avoid the French anticlericalism of the 1790s.”

Lucy was embarrassed to know so little of her family history, let alone the history of the world that prompted it. “Yes, I suppose,” she continued. “They made it to Ireland just in time for the famines. Then my grandfather came to the U.S. after World War One.”

“Probably
instead
of World War One if he was true to Irish form. A lot of priests in the family, I bet.”

“Fair number.”

O'Hanrahan provided his own skewed take on Irish history: “The Bretons are the great Catholic prudes of Europe. Ireland used to be a fun-loving, copulating country before they imported a wave of Breton priests to help them survive the famine. By the time the Bretons were done, the average marriage age in 1850 for a woman was thirty-eight, for a man, fifty. And they were virgins too. Look at our island now! Thanks to your relatives, more puritanical than the Puritans.”

Lucy noticed O'Hanrahan referred to it as
our
island. As did her father. Somewhere a line was drawn between her father's Irish-American generation and her own. She had never once been tempted to claim anything but America as home, and the troubles of Ulster held no romance at all. Who would lead the St. Patrick's Day parade in Chicago? A proper IRA-backing Republican—Kerry O'Casey from her father's union local, a man dubbed Uncle Kerry in the family—or some mealy-mouthed arse-kissing drunken ol' sod who'd say Your Majesty faster'n a lightnin' flash? Her father had noted a lack of Republican sympathy in his children and remonstrated with them for their apathy. When Lucy was nine years old her father as a birthday present made out a check to NORAID in her name. So she'd remember her ninth, and the nine former counties of Ulster. Thanks a lot, Dad.

Lucy got down to business. “I think I have an idea what you're hunting for, sir.”

He raised an eyebrow, mildly interested. “You do, do you?”

Lucy cut her Danish into sections, trying to project nonchalance. “Yes. I think you're on the trail of a heretofore lost gospel. Something very old, Second Century maybe, by the sound of it, or you wouldn't be so excited. And it's attributed to one of the Twelve Disciples.”

“Why do you figure one of the Twelve is the author of this supposed lost work?”

“Before I identified myself I heard you say as much to Father Beaufoix.”

He grimaced. “Said that, did I?”

“Of course, maybe you've found a First-Century account. That would explain what the rabbi's doing here.”

Now how the hell did she get
that?

“I looked up Mordechai Hersch in the Scholarly Register at Braithwaite.”

“I'm in there too, you know.”

(Want to tell him the news, Lucy?)

Actually Lucy also looked up Patrick O'Hanrahan and didn't find his name, but diplomatically let the occasion to inform him pass. She reached into her carpetbag to her side and found her ever-present notepad. She went on, “Rabbi Hersch holds the Rosen Chair of Ancient Languages at Hebrew University. What would this man want, I figured, with some Greek Christian document? Perhaps, I got to thinking, this work is contemporary with Josephus, his specialty.”

Good detective, thought the professor, before reminding himself never to discuss anything in public with anyone again on this subject. “Is that all?”

“No. I talked to the head of the Theology Department back at Chicago, Dr. Shaughnesy?”

“That moron? He did his lousy doctorate on Freemason rituals, copied it out of a book! I mentioned the Rosetta Stone to him one time and he thought it was the Hispanic cleaning lady who came in on Fridays. Reads everything in translation. A ninth-rate mind presiding over the first-rate department I created!”

(That's no way to talk about the man who conferred professor emeritus upon you. Out of kindness, let Us add, since you gave him nothing but abuse toward the end when he successfully got you out of the department and saved the entire program from ruin. What's more, you know the truth!)

“You got
nothin',
baby,” O'Hanrahan said momentarily. “A thousand scholars, such as myself, are hoping to acquire for their institutions a thousand scrolls at any given time. I've been involved in the papyrus trade for a half-century now.”

This was Lucy's opening to read from the notepad again: “Dr. Shaughnesy says you have a sister who says you've hocked everything you own to pursue this project, including your house—”

“The old witch probably thought she was getting it when I die. Ha!”

“The university knows you've cashed in your life insurance plan. You began two months ago with the department credit card—”

“The bastards canceled it.”

“—before they canceled it, and you racked up expenses of $2,243.86 in places such as Rome, Assisi, Jerusalem, Damascus, Trier in West Germany, Antwerp, Jerusalem again, Rome again—”

“God, they're getting off cheap! Only $2000 for a trip like that!”

“And they're worried about Gabriel—”

“I told you never to mention that little faggot to me again!”

Lucy hunched down in her seat, positive that “faggot” carried to the rafters. “And they're worried about your … your state of mind.”

O'Hanrahan laughed richly. “So they think I hold the Alzheimer Chair in Ancient Studies, right? They'll wish they had treated me a little better when this whole thing is over.”

Lucy reached into her carpetbag again and produced two letters. “This is from your sister, and this is from Dr. Shaughnesy.”

“Burn them.”

But Lucy held the letters out to him. He took the one from Dr. Shaughnesy, used his butter knife to open the envelope.

“Humph,” he said, skimming. “Just what I expected. They want me to come back to Chicago, stop spending my money, the department's reputation, blah blah blah, they're worried for
my
reputation, et cetera et cetera…” He handed the note back to her. “Those swine wouldn't know an important scholastic find if the Hand of God led them to it.”

At this juncture the
petite béarnaise
arrived with Lucy's English breakfast on an oblong, silly-looking trolley with a squeaking silver hood. Lucy looked down at her plate of bacon and fried eggs, fried bread—buttered bread deep-fried in the breakfast grease, she felt her arteries tighten—and this fried potato cake with shreds of cabbage inside it.

“That's bubble and squeak,” explained O'Hanrahan, happy to switch subjects. “That's a banger, the link of sausage there. And
that
delicacy is black pudding.” He pointed with his knife to the two black disks that Lucy mistook for American-style sausage patties.

“I'm sort of a vegetarian,” Lucy confessed.

“Lucille, anyone who eats a vegetable now and then is ‘sort of a vegetarian.' Are you telling me I ordered all this for nothing?”

“No, but I'd rather you had the bacon and the banger-thing. I think it's important to try other nations' cuisines.”

O'Hanrahan ate steadily while talking. “England doesn't have a cuisine. Look at the word
cuisine.
They even had to borrow that.”

Lucy slowly chewed a bit of her black pudding. Not bad, but it tasted odd somehow. “What
is
this?”

“Congealed animal blood with bits of fat and scratchings.” Lucy swallowed quickly, irrevocably, and washed her mouth out with orange juice. Then went back on the offensive:

“Look, there are only twelve disciples. I virtually know what you're after, so why don't you tell me?”

“Because,” he enunciated, as he cut his bacon, “I don't
know
you.”

“I'm real trustworthy, honest.”

“That's what Gabriel said.”

She was dying to ask about Gabriel, but that seemed to be the dead end of all dead ends, so she held off. “If I guess what you're looking for,” she asked politely, “will you tell me?”

Lucy imagined this would earn a quick rebuff, but O'Hanrahan stared at her oddly as he had a moment before. And surprised her: “Yeah.”

“You would?”

“Because I know you'll never guess it.”

“How many guesses do I get?”

“One.”

“One's not very sporting.”

“What would you suggest, Miss Dantan?”

“Ten would be nice.” He didn't dignify this with a response. “Okay, six. Fifty-fifty chance.”

He ran a piece of steak around in the
béarnaise
sauce. “With ten, you still wouldn't get it.”

Oh yeah? thought Lucy.

“But what's in it for
me?
” said O'Hanrahan, now enjoying a mouthful of herring in sweet sour cream.

She hadn't thought about this. “I could go back to Chicago and tell everyone that what you're up to is very exciting and important and…”

O'Hanrahan pretended he was shaking a New Year's Eve party favor. “Whoopdie-doo. That would mean,” he bent his head in sarcasm, “so very, very much to me.”

“Well, let's make some kind of deal then,” said Lucy.

“For allowing you six guesses?”

“Yeah, for allowing me six guesses.”

He looked to the ceiling. “How much money do you have? How much can you get ahold of?”

“They gave me $500 spending money, and this breakfast will probably cost that.”

“Just $500?”

“Maybe I can get more,” she suggested weakly.

O'Hanrahan rose and patted his belly. “Miss Dantan, you make some phone calls and see what kind of additional funding you can get me. Then we'll talk, all right?”

Lucy nodded quickly and reached for her handbag. “Yeah, okay sure, but wait—wait, what about your sister's letter?”

“The flames, the flames!” he said, as he walked by her without ceremony.

And he was gone.

And so, moments later, was £60.32 … or, as she figured, $100. As Lucy walked down the historic Broad Street between the elegant Sheldonian Theater on one side and a row of quaint shops, a pub, and the venerable Blackwells bookstore on the other, she contemplated how to invent some money for O'Hanrahan.

There was, after all, her older sister's credit card.

Cecilia, the married, responsible sister who gave her mother all the angelic grandchildren the other daughters didn't. Ceece didn't want to surrender her MasterCard to Lucy, but Mrs. Dantan insisted, pleaded, was on the point of tears contemplating emergencies, near-deaths, terrorist acts, floods, natural disasters, and in a final calamity-saturated soliloquy worthy of Euripides coaxed Cecilia to lend Lucy the card for the duration of the trip. Credit limit $1000. Lucy could get an advance on the card and pay Cecilia back later when O'Hanrahan paid her back.… But let's face it, sighed Lucy, that may never happen. She decided she'd think it over at the Codrington Library.

Lucy reentered the grand hall, now returned to its Georgian primness as a deathly quiet place of study. And sleep, Lucy noticed, spying a young undergraduate head down on the old-fashioned scribe's desk. She wandered into the card-catalogue room not exactly sure what she would do.