Gospel, page 88
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“Lucy,” said O’Hanrahan, looking exhausted after his restless, sleepless night, “please come in. Look, let me apologize. I don’t know what I was thinking. Teheran is out. I must have been crazy…”
Lucy quickly stepped inside to his room of spent smoke and an emptied half-pint whiskey bottle.
“Better sit down,” Lucy warned him, beginning to pace.
O’Hanrahan sat on the edge of his bed. “What?”
“By merest chance I learned there’s a monk in the hotel who was looking for us yesterday.”
O’Hanrahan’s eyes widened.
“The trusting woman at the desk gave me the room number. She said he was an American. I got curious, I went to Room 416 and it was ransacked. And the suitcase inside belonged to Rabbi Hersch.”
O’Hanrahan lightly touched his forehead. “So … he did say he was going to meet us here…”
“Do you think Rabbi Hersch could be our Mad Monk?”
The professor muttered, “Jesus,” and began thinking, reviewing the whereabouts of their nemesis. The Mad Monk had first surfaced in Assisi, according to Father Vico … and, yes, the rabbi was in Italy where he wasn’t supposed to be, in Rome. So he could have preceded them to Assisi.
Then the monk was at Athens and on Mt. Athos. Conceivably, Morey could have not gotten on a plane to Tel Aviv and flown to Greece days ahead of them.
No sign of the monk in Jerusalem, damningly enough, and then at Wadi Natrun and the Coptic Library, then at Khartoum … Why would Morey do such a thing? He and Lucy considered every possibility, going over and over the scanty collection of facts.
“Let’s go down to the reception desk,” said O’Hanrahan, standing. “There is one way we can tell where Morey’s been for sure.”
In the elevator Lucy looked anxiously at the professor. “What are you gonna do?” she asked.
“Let’s hope all old white men look alike to Ethiopians.”
O’Hanrahan went to the reception desk and talked to a honey-colored, smiling man, very eager to please. “Excuse me, sir,” said O’Hanrahan. “I need my passport to cash the last of my traveler’s checks. Could I have it? Room 416.”
A moment of truth. Would O’Hanrahan look enough like Rabbi Hersch in his passport photo to fool this young man? But the man handed the passport of the guest in 416 to O’Hanrahan without checking, an American asking for an American passport. Lucy approached the professor as he flipped through the pages.
“Of course,” mumbled O’Hanrahan. “Morey was raised in Brooklyn and has dual citizenship in Israel. No Israeli could travel easily in the Sudan so, of course, he’d travel on this American passport…”
Lucy remembered he used this passport at the Northern Irish border.
“Here he is in the U.K., in Ireland, stamped at Dublin on the right date, here’s Italy, Milan … Damn it, here’s Greece! He was there the day before we were there! So he didn’t go back to Jerusalem after Rome. Didn’t you see him get on his plane when you guys went to the airport in Rome?”
“No,” she shrugged. “I was getting drunk in the lounge, remember?” But the thought occurred: “But that’s right, I didn’t even see a flight for Tel Aviv. I recall that now.”
The man behind the counter now squinted at them suspiciously.
“Changed my mind,” said the professor. “I’ll do it tomorrow.” The professor noticed that the key for 416 was missing. They doubled back and took the elevator to the fourth floor.
“If his key’s out,” said O’Hanrahan, “he might have come back.”
This time the door to 416 was closed.
O’Hanrahan knocked.
The rabbi was there. He cautiously, as if expecting the former vandals, asked, “Who is it?”
“Morey,” O’Hanrahan said somberly.
“Hello, my friend,” sighed the rabbi glumly, opening the door. Looking burdened, he sat on his bed. “Come in, pull up a broken chair.”
“So you’re the Mad Monk?” said Lucy, hurt deeply for a reason she couldn’t put into words. Betrayal? Being wrong about someone yet again?
“What’s going on here, Mordechai,” said O’Hanrahan, still standing.
“We’re all in a lot of trouble, is what’s going on,” he said.
O’Hanrahan found an overturned chair, righted it, and sat down. “All right, Morey,” he said carefully. “I’m not going to say anything until I hear what you have to say. It looks bad.”
Rabbi Hersch stroked his beard with his typical composure, but less serene somehow. “Now Paddy, you listen to me and don’t get upset. All right, so I dressed up in the monk’s outfit—you yourself gave me the idea in Rome. It was the most painless way to look at some of these indexes and books of alphabets in Athens. No harm done—”
“Except that you didn’t trust me to do it. Morey, what am I to think? You call me and say come from Chicago and work on the scholastic find of the century, then when I’m here, ready to give the rest of my life to this project, I find you sneaking around behind my back, trying to beat me to it! What am I to think?”
“You think what is the truth: I had to find the key to that language. Yes, before you did. I asked you to help me before I had thought out all of the implications of this gospel.”
O’Hanrahan was speechless.
“Listen to me, Paddy. Since April all kinds of strange things have been happening. Visits from Mossad, visits from government officials. I found listening devices in my phone. Last week, my office and my safe were broken into. The bearer bonds from my Uncle Leopold they left, the gold coins minted by the tsars from Uncle Sasha—that, they left. Whoever it was has resources beyond our imagination.”
O’Hanrahan thought of the limitless credit card once at his disposal, the million deutsche marks offered by Herr Kellner.
“These people, I figured, were looking for the Gospel of Matthias, not knowing the Franciscans had it. Then you took it, and they still kept breaking in. And then they broke in my house, still looking for something. It occurred to me. They were looking for the missing last chapter, and they thought that I had it.”
O’Hanrahan and Lucy watched him as he stood.
“And,” said the rabbi, “I did have it.”
“You have the missing last chapter…” breathed O’Hanrahan.
“Rabbi, no!” said Lucy automatically.
“For several years now. I wasn’t sure, because I needed the first six segments to know if what I had was the seventh. When I examined the larger part in Northern Ireland, I was sure. The alphabets matched up, the papyrus was the same—no doubt in my mind. A few years back I looked up Mrs. Rosen and sure enough, it was among her things. He had taken the last segment home with him the day before he had his accident.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” O’Hanrahan demanded.
Rabbi Hersch: “You’re not going to understand this…”
“I think I get it!” said O’Hanrahan, now standing too. “It wasn’t enough that you had a shelf of books to your name! You wanted to make this discovery your own as well! Of course, you have the right—your university owns the thing. But why did you string me along? Get my hopes up! I had planned on this—sold my worldly possessions, Morey. This was my life!”
“Calm down, Paddy, please, let me—”
“Or was it money?” O’Hanrahan was particularly convincing in his accusation, having fingered tempting sums himself. “I was offered a million deutsche marks to steal that scroll and hand it over to a private collector and I didn’t. Was that it? You wanted to cash in?”
“I think I understand it,” said Lucy, a trace of harshness in her voice. “It had nothing to do with money, Dr. O’Hanrahan.”
“The little girl’s right, Paddy—”
“It has to do with Christianity. I’ve been thinking about the rabbi’s book, Not the Messiah, and the sustained effort, the discipline that writing that kind of 200-page attack on Christianity required. I’ve heard Rabbi Hersch say he didn’t trust the Jesuits or the Franciscans or the Catholic Church to publish the Gospel of Matthias unexpurgated and unedited. He figured this last chapter had proof that Jesus was … was merely a deluded fool and his disciples shady accomplices. And he didn’t want to risk that last chapter being destroyed.”
“Oh, you think that’s it, do you?” said the rabbi, bristling.
Lucy finished, “Isn’t this why Israel has gone to such trouble to get this thing? That it contains the last stroke of the Jewish argument made for 2000 years? That Jesus is a fraud.”
“You had your little speech, little girl? May I talk now?”
Lucy’s face was stinging from her own argument, which was more emotional than reasoned. She stood behind the chair of Dr. O’Hanrahan for solidarity.
The rabbi surprised them by shouting:
“Hypocrites! You, Paddy, with your delusions of grandeur! Cover of Time magazine, front page of The New York Times, money and new position—did you hear yourself in Jerusalem? Not just Jerusalem. For as long as we’ve known each other the Gospel of Matthias was going to be your ticket. It was going to make up for everything that had gone wrong in your life. A panacea, a philosopher’s stone!”
The rabbi, pacing measuredly, turned on Lucy: “And you, little girl. Did you hear yourself, bagel in your mouth, at the King David? Princeton, Harvard, Columbia—what to do with all the big offers coming your way? Oh yes, this scroll meant you got to see the world, got to take a Greek cruise, buy some pretty new schmattes, get rid of that thesis you hated. Both of you, think about it! You never once have thought about the implications of this scroll! Never once!”
Both Lucy and O’Hanrahan remained quiet.
“You didn’t care if this gospel caused a war? You didn’t care if this gospel shook the faith of millions? I never once heard you consider such a thing. And you, Paddy, you yearned for it to be a firebomb. I’ve heard you delight in the possibility that you could dismantle the Vatican, upset housewives all over America—you prayed for this to turn Christianity on its ear.”
The rabbi’s voice weakened with strain: “I’m sorry I wrote that book, Not the Messiah. It was unworthy of the gifts that God has entrusted to me. You don’t believe me, little girl, though I have spoken honestly with you. But I don’t care what you think anymore. I tell you…”
The rabbi sat down on the bed, he too showing the strain of the recent weeks.
“I tell you,” he continued softly, “I think about God all the time. When I wake up in the morning—you, Paddy, may mock—but I praise God for the day and that I am alive in it. And when I go to sleep, I go to sleep praying—God is the last thought I think. And through the day, I make a sandwich. I take out the garbage. I make the bed. And I think then too of God.”
Lucy now wished she hadn’t spoken. She wanted to say something but it was impossible. Because she used to be that way too.
“… but it is how I am,” the rabbi went on. “And as I get older, I come to see the world as a great challenge laid out to us by God. Moslem, Jew, and Christian all adoring the God of Abraham. If we kill each other in war after war, I am convinced God will have done with us! If we learn to love and respect each other and praise this God of Abraham together, then we will be worthy of His world, and not until. And that is why I held back that last chapter. Just in case it did upset the apple cart, hm?”
Rabbi Hersch stared directly at Lucy, looking tired but his eyes piercing and purposeful as ever.
“Because, little girl … I wouldn’t do that to you. The bleeding Sacred Immaculate Wounds of Mary’s little toe—I think a lot of your religion is full of crap. I respect it—this much…” He held up a pinched finger. “Which is nothing. To hell with the church, to hell with your religion, but I would not shake your faith. I would not do that to you because you are a good person, Lucille. And if you find God in what you believe then I am not going to have it on ledger: the Rabbi Mordechai Hersch took that away from Lucille Dantan. No one who believes in God…” He looked to the ceiling. “… should cause others to disbelieve in this godless world. I would never do that to you.”
Then he turned from them and paced toward the hotel room window. “Besides,” he mentioned, “it’s a dangerous thing finding out what happened in the First Century with this man named Jesus, hm? Maybe the evidence makes it woise for the Jews, huh? Maybe it will launch a wave of anti-Semitism by the Catholics—who can say? Or maybe it proves Jesus is a fraud. And the Orthodox and the Ultra-Conservative Jews will celebrate and demand that Christian shrines in Jerusalem be torn down, the land ceded to Jewish settlers, and Israel waves goodbye to its American support.” He sighed heavily. “Throw it in the fire before any of that.”
“Where is the last chapter now?” asked O’Hanrahan quietly. “Did the thieves get it?”
“No, in Jerusalem I had been keeping it in a friend’s safe. Before I left I sewed it into these, uh, robes—what used to be robes here…” The rabbi lifted a shredded garment near his suitcase and let it drop. “Everywhere I went in Jerusalem someone was following me, so since the girl told me you were headed for Addis Ababa, I hopped on the plane to find you people and run to Chicago. This morning I went to the U.S. Embassy and entrusted the chapter to their valuables safe, figuring their security’s pretty good.” He laughed darkly and turned to them. “For all I know, it’s been the American government after this thing all along…”
There was a noise at the door.
“The CIA,” Colonel Westin said, leaning into the doorway, “is a pretty good guess, Rabbi.”
The trio spun around to observe Colonel Westin in his dark green uniform and Mr. Thorn in a black suit entering the room.
“You’re a smart man, no doubt about it. It took us a long time to figure out where that last chapter could be, but eventually we traced all our sources back to Hebrew University and we figured it never left that location. Holding out on your partners, I see, Mr. Rabbi.” The colonel sucked in air quickly, shaking his head. “Ah, the shrewdness of the Jewish mind. One learns to appreciate that, yes indeed—”
Colonel Westin turned to lock the door behind him.
“You fellows made it too easy,” said the colonel. “What with Patrick here calling the embassy first sign of trouble, I was able to keep track of him. And then you, Rabbi, bringing us the missing puzzle piece, pretty as you please…” The colonel uttered a porcine, snorting laugh. “Oh, and I like how you stiffed Underwood with that two-bit scroll. Looks like no $20,000 bonus for him!”
“What could the American government possibly,” began the professor faintly, “possibly want with this gospel, Colonel?”
“Why, we want you to translate it, Patrick,” he said cheerily. Colonel Westin sucked in air through his teeth. “Agent Thorn?”
“Yessir?”
“Get the needle.”
As Lucy and Rabbi Hersch and O’Hanrahan felt their blood freeze in their veins, Agent Thorn opened up a doctor’s kit and produced a syringe and a bottle of clear liquid. Thorn stuck the needle into it and drew up the liquid into the hypodermic.
“My God,” mumbled the professor.
“What are you going to do?” asked the rabbi quietly.
“Rabbi rabbi rabbi,” began Colonel Westin lightly, as if some parlor game were being played. “You have been of service, yes indeed, but now you are in the way—”
O’Hanrahan stood: “If you harm him, so help me God, I’ll testify about this to a Senate subcommittee and get you clowns put under the jail they should have put Oliver North in!”
“Relax, Patrick,” said Colonel Westin, taking the syringe from his assistant. “I just need the rabbi to sleep and stay out of my hair for about 48 hours … No sense him running back to Israel or the press or the authorities of any variety while we’re trying to get out of this Soviet hellhole, hm?” A jet of liquid spurted from the top of the hypodermic as Colonel Westin held the device up to the light. “It’s just a sedative, Rabbi. And by the time you get up we’ll be long gone—”
O’Hanrahan: “You hurt him and I’ll … My cooperation is not assured, Colonel! If anything bad happens to him, you’ll never get a moment’s cooperation from me!”
“Well, that’s where Miss Dantan comes in,” said the colonel, as his assistant went to restrain the rabbi. “Don’t make us use Miss Dantan as … how shall we say,” he sucked in an intake of air, “leverage?”
The rabbi was absent of expression, the look of inevitability and weariness that connected him to centuries of moments where God allowed his Chosen to fall prey to the godless. Rabbi Hersch turned to O’Hanrahan, who gasped at him, speechless. Was this their final meeting? The rabbi’s resigned expression burned itself on Lucy’s memory—poor man! If only she could recant her accusations … Lucy, her eyes tearing up, turned away. Westin rolled up the rabbi’s sleeve and Thorn held the syringe. Then the rabbi suddenly attempted to get free but was restrained roughly by Agent Thorn, wordlessly, like a robot following orders. Thorn mumbled something piously to himself, and then concluded, “In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
It was done.
“Make sure he’s resting comfortably,” said Westin. “He’ll be in that position for some time, we don’t want anything to lose circulation.”
“Paddy, I…” The rabbi felt a wave of sleep wash over him.
“Everything will be all right, Morey, I promise,” said O’Hanrahan desperately. Lucy looked down at her hands to see them tremble, as weak as her knees.
“We have a 12:30 P.M. flight we have to meet, my friends. Agent Thorn will be happy to help you pack.”
O’Hanrahan: “And what about—”
“Yes,” said the colonel, reading his mind. “We have been through your luggage, Patrick, and have the first six chapters in our possession. The Gospel of Matthias is now complete.”
The rabbi groaned, and O’Hanrahan looked as if he might charge Colonel Westin like a mad bull.
But Westin spoke quietly. “And do I have to be so crude as to, well, say that if you prove uncooperative or try anything rash that we have people here permanently in Addis who could make your Hebrew friend’s escape from this third-world sideshow very, very difficult. What if, shall we say, cocaine found its way into his luggage here … What’s left of his luggage. Looks like you need a new set of Samsonite, great rabban, heh-heh-heh.”
