The Body Page 5

  “Excuse me, excuse me. Excuse me,” said the monsignor. “I must ask this question even at the dinner table. Yes?”

  Both Jesuits nodded.

  “It must be done tonight,” said the monsignor. He glanced at a yellow sheet of paper.

  “Either one of you may answer first. Suppose someone finds a … I can’t read this word,” said the monsignor, turning to one of the assisting priests.

  “Ancient. It is bad handwriting. It is not Cardinal Pesci’s handwriting. I know his,” said the priest.

  And the monsignor lowered a disdainful glance at the priest for mentioning something he didn’t have to, and continued:

  “Suppose someone found an ancient object in the ground, and came to you with it. How would you verify its authenticity?”

  “Jim,” said the British Jesuit, offering Folan first chance.

  “After you, Father.”

  And then the British Jesuit gave a short course in carbon dating, stratification, and the general instrumentations of dating old objects. It could have been an advanced course in archaeology. One of the monsignor’s assistants held a microphone to the British Jesuit’s mouth. The line went into a black briefcase, where obviously there was a recorder. The monsignor wiped his brow and tidied his appearance.

  Jim realized he was just a courier, as was every priest who had come here from the Secretariat. Undoubtedly they had certain key clearing questions to which they had the right answers. But the questions that required writing went to someone else to read, just as the tape recording would go to someone else.

  If anyone interrupted this line of communication between the interviewees and the real interviewer, whom Jim knew none of the Jesuits had met yet, there would be nothing that would let some enemy or foreign power know what the Vatican was doing. Only those who had to know, knew.

  It reminded Jim of Laos. Ah well, he thought, the Church was part of the world too.

  And then the microphone was in his face.

  “First, I probably would hire my British colleague,” said Jim, and everyone laughed except the monsignor. He wasn’t even listening. “This is not a joke, or as much of one as it may seem. Expertise can be hired, and certainly my colleague has demonstrated his talents and disciplines. But there is something else. I would ask who brought this thing to me and why. Why did he bring it to me? And then, besides the mechanics, I would look into the natures of the people, the motives of the people, and then one more thing that I believe is perhaps one of the most useful tools in finding out what is really going on. Gossip, the weather, the very smallest things are often the best corroborating or disputing evidence. What I mean is this. If someone comes to you with a story of a great purple building down the road, you don’t ask him about the purple or the building so much as what the people were eating when they built it, and what did the trucks look like that carried the cement, and would he perchance know the person who sold the cement. Because if that building is really there, those are the things that will be known and accurately known. But if he’s making it up, he is not going to slip up on the fact that the building is purple, or how big it is, but on the trivia. The weather, the gossip, what people are eating, and who does what.”

  Jim paused to think, to add one more clarifying statement.

  “Are you done?” asked the monsignor.

  “Yeah. I guess. Sure, that’s my best.”

  He was awakened that night, and told to pack. He was sleeping in his underwear, and he dumped everything into a small bag and put on the suit and collar because he knew he would be flying only one way and he could get it cleaned at home.

  It was 1 A.M., and he dozed in the car, having said a little prayer for the British Jesuit, who was now going to meet his calling.

  Jim felt a nudge, and the car door was open, and someone was helping him out into a drizzle that had come upon Rome. He tasted the custard he had had for dinner. Now it had taste. Hours later.

  “Come, come,” said the priest. With a courtly flourish, he was led into the building. Ornate tapestries hung everywhere. Chairs were covered with gilt. The floor was covered with impeccably intricate marble designs, and was immaculate. Soft, yellow lights illuminated the ceiling. There was an elegant hush to the place, almost a sense of perfume in the air.

  Behind an elegant, dark-wood door was an elevator, so rickety Jim would not inflict it on a Boston prison. It chugged up to the second floor.

  Here the tapestries were rich yellows with coats of arms, and men in helmets and pantaloons stiffly holding pikes. He didn’t have to see St. Peter’s Square outside as he walked along the hall. He knew now where he was. He was in the Vatican.

  Two guards raised their pikes in salute, and one, holding a pike in his left hand, opened the door with his right.

  An elderly cardinal with a soft, fleshy face worked at an ornate gilt desk, looking up only briefly from what was in front of him. When he saw Father Folan, he dismissed his aides.

  Jim bent a knee to kiss his ring as a sign of respect. The cardinal accepted it briefly, and raised his hand, signifying he wanted to get on with business.

  “Sit. I am Almeto Cardinal Pesci, Secretary of State, as you may know. You have never been to Jerusalem, correct?”

  “Yes. Correct.”

  “Good. We didn’t think so. I had thought that the British scholar might have been the one, but I guess your answer to the last question made the difference. We have a standing archaeological commission, but it never had the strength of the Jesuits, you know. And in the end, the third floor decided absolutely in favor of the broad range of investigative abilities.” The third floor meant the Pope himself, the floor he lived on in this building. The final arbiter, the man whose handwriting the priests could not read too easily back in the Jesuit house, was His Holiness.

  And broad range could mean only one thing. The Pope had chosen Jim from among all the other Jesuits because of Jim’s year in Laos, because of that year in the CIA. In that case His Holiness might be a bit wrong.

  His Eminence did not give Jim a chance to discuss this, but started pushing to Jim’s side of the desk pictures of what appeared to be some very old settled bones, data on strata which he didn’t understand, background on a Dominican archaeologist who was the first Catholic on the scene, the difficulties of the Church’s position in the Middle East, and the significance of Aramaic on a kiln-fired disk.

  “How do you know it’s Aramaic?” asked Jim.

  “Don’t you know?” said Cardinal Pesci, looking at the black and white photograph of a piece of pottery with strange sticklike drawings on it.

  “No,” said Jim. “I thought it was supposed to be like Hebrew.”

  “They say it was,” said Pesci, looking at the notes in front of him.

  “I can’t make out one letter,” said Jim. “What does it say? And why are these bones important?”

  3

  The Romans Are Coming

  Sharon Golban was furious, and she did not like to be furious on a Friday night because that began Shabbat, and while she did not believe in the Shabbat prayers, she did believe in her older brother’s family, and in being with them every Friday night to share events of the week.

  But the last week’s events were so disheartening she did not want to share them with anyone, least of all her family. And besides, officials had asked her to keep everything about the dig on Haneviim Street to herself unless otherwise instructed.

  It started with her doing what she considered her responsibility. Recognizing how the body had conformed significantly to Christian Gospels, she reported it to the Department of Antiquities. She thought there would be some religious implications, some possible difficulties that could well be avoided before they became massive.

  But before nightfall things started to become ugly. She was told to dismiss her crew.

  “What am I supposed to tell my volunteers? They’re a good crew. They deserve better.”

  “Tell them that the dig has been closed because of Religious
Party opposition.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Tell them that.”

  “It’s not so,” Sharon had angrily replied, “and I will not do it.”

  The next day she found out it had been rudely done for her, and she would be working with a Dominican priest, showing him all her data.

  “What does a priest have to do with this? Our holy men, their holy men. The worst thing you can bring into a dig is … is religion. You might as well lower your pants and defecate. The difference is you can clean that up. What holy men do, nobody can clean up. It lasts for centuries, forever.”

  “His name is Pierre Lavelle,” she was told.

  “Dr. Lavelle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? Dr. Lavelle. Pierre. He’s an archaeologist. He’s a good one. He’s a solid man. A priest, you say? Well, he’ll be fine. I never knew he was a priest.”

  She did not bring up the fact of Dr. Lavelle’s priesthood while she worked with him, but was sure the priesthood was some form of juvenile passion he had never bothered to resolve on his way to becoming a respected archaeologist.

  At the dig Sharon watched his face to see who was doing the observing, the priest or the archaeologist. He asked more right questions. He seemed perhaps too calm for such a historically significant find.

  But on leaving, as he got down on his knees to get through the small hole at the top of the carved stairs, he paused before he moved on. Sharon saw moisture there, quite dark and clear in the dry, yellow-brown stone. She thought he had spilled something on the steps until she realized they were his tears.

  And then he was gone.

  At noon on Friday, just before the Shabbat Eve, Sharon got a very good idea as to how sticky everything was going to be.

  She was asked to see a man called Mendel Hirsch, Deputy Director for Jerusalem in the Ministry of Religious Affairs, on the third floor of a drab, sandy-colored building opposite the glorious domes of the Russian Church of the Holy Trinity.

  As he explained it, his job entailed smoothing things out when different religions bumped into each other, keeping things out of the courts and news.

  Naturally, Sharon understood, he explained, every religion had its own courts for its marriages and intrareligious disputes. Mendel was a sort of friendly referee. He smiled a lot. He had a healthy tan, and two white tufts of hair over his ears. Otherwise, he was bald. He knew every bishop and patriarch in Jerusalem. There were many pictures in his office of him posing smilingly with all manner of holy men. There were also pictures of Mendel with Israeli politicians. She judged he was with the right-wing Likud block, and, by his age, he just may have been a member of the extremist Irgun before independence.

  “Sharon,” he said, “there is no good way to break bad news, so I won’t try.”

  But he had been trying, lapsing into Yiddish phrases to show warmth. Ashkenazis did that. Why Yiddish was still a language of warmth for them, she could not understand. It was based on German, and considering what the Germans did to the Jews, she would not think any Jew would want to use that language again. Besides, it was not beautiful like Farsi, or graceful as Arabic. It was far too guttural for her, an ugly sound. But then she didn’t like the sound of most European languages.

  “Sharon, you cannot return to Hebrew University. You are assigned indefinitely to this dig. You will work under my direction.”

  “And what do you know about archaeology?” asked Sharon.

  “Only what you tell me, Sharon.”

  “If you must know, Christianity is not one of my strengths, although I am familiar, of course, with the Byzantine period. But there are better than me for this dig.”

  “We are not bringing in another archaeologist at this point. Too many people know about this already. What we want now is fewer people knowing. That’s part of my job.”

  “When will Lavelle return?” asked Sharon.

  “Oh, that,” said Mendel. “Dr. Lavelle will not be returning. You are to meet in a few days a Mr. James Folan, at Ben Gurion Airport.”

  “Who’s James Folan?”

  “I presume an archaeologist.”

  “Not in this area.”

  “One you haven’t heard of, perhaps,” said Hirsch.

  “No. Everybody knows everybody else. There are only seventy or eighty solid ones. Is there a member of the Knesset you don’t know?”

  “There are some I would like not to know.”

  “Yes, but you know everyone. This man James Folan may not have any serious qualifications.”

  “That’s all right,” said Mendel.

  “How is it all right?” asked Sharon, outraged.

  “It’s all right. All right?”

  “No.”

  “I am sorry. He is the one we have been informed the Vatican is sending.”

  “What in a pound of celery does the Vatican have to do with this?”

  “The Vatican is very important,” said Mendel. “It’s Roman Catholicism, the largest single Christian sect.”

  “So?”

  “You don’t understand how touchy this whole thing is. It is a basic Christian tenet that Christ rose again from the dead. Resurrection. It is basic. You don’t know how this city gets turned upside down at Easter.”

  “I know that. He is their Messiah. Ours is yet to come. Of course, no rational person is holding his breath for either of them.”

  “To have the State of Israel involved in any way with something so damaging to an essential element of their faith could have serious repercussions. Very serious,” said Mendel Hirsch, with his gravest and most authoritarian voice.

  “What repercussions? We haven’t done anything,” answered Sharon. She had little respect for this politician, bureaucrat, Deputy Director Ashkenazi, who obviously knew how to keep himself in a job if he knew nothing else.

  Mendel Hirsch leaned forward as though to whisper. But he spoke loudly, his hands flying out in exasperation.

  “Who needs this? Right now, the last thing we need with everything happening everywhere, and very little of it to our good, is a big fight with the Christian community. Yes. That’s it. What we want out of this is no trouble.”

  “Then, why didn’t you blow up the body the day I found it?”

  “There was some talk of that, too, Dr. Archaeologist. What happened was, no one knew what to do. At the highest levels, they didn’t know what to do. You don’t understand what this means in the Western world.”

  “How did you get to the Vatican? What was your thought process for that?”

  “Aha,” said Mendel. “It was decided that we should get a Christian sect involved, to participate in everything going on so there could be no fingers pointing and saying, ‘Look what the Jews are doing to our God.’”

  “They are always pointing fingers. If you’re worried all the time what people say you wouldn’t get out of bed.”

  “There are pointing fingers and pointing fingers. With the Catholic Church now involved, we are, as you say, covered.”

  “But Dr. Folan may not even be an archaeologist,” said Sharon. “Complications or no, you don’t operate with a bread knife. You use a scalpel.”

  “Dr. Folan is not our problem, Sharon. He is our solution. And by the way, how did you find out he had a doctorate?”

  “He doesn’t?” asked Sharon.

  “They didn’t say,” said Mendel Hirsch, with a shrug of a shoulder and the exclamation of an upturned hand.

  Sharon got the spelling of Folan’s name in English letters and went to the library, but the only Folan who might remotely have any sort of related discipline was a Brendan Folan who was an authority on Sumerian architecture. And he had died five years before in Leeds, England. James Folan was no one.

  And, on that realization, Sharon headed to her brother’s apartment, which was behind Hebrew University, on Naveshanan Street. He was a doctor and had both an apartment he owned as well as a car, something beyond ordinary Israelis. Sharon herself had chosen to re
nt her apartment and buy a car.

  Her brother was the physician to much of the Persian community in Jerusalem because he knew the “old cures” as well as the Western ones. He also, through that, had a large Arab clientele.

  The apartment was convenient to the university, and many a night she would have liked to have slept there, but there was no space. Avrahim’s bedroom was his study, and daughter Mari’s bedroom was little more than a closet, and the older son’s bedroom was also the living room. His wife, Paula, raised in America, said doctors had big houses in America, if all one wanted out of life was a big house.

  The one reason she sometimes talked of taking the whole family to America was to give them a good Jewish education, which she loudly proclaimed was getting more impossible every day in Israel. Just the other day, Rani, fifteen, had gotten into a fight. With fists. And hitting in the head, no less. This was no way to get a decent Jewish education. Paula warned Rani that if he kept on getting into fistfights, he would never be accepted into the paratroopers. That was his ambition. His sister Mari’s ambition was getting breasts, she often confided to Sharon. She was twelve and did not have them yet, while others had them. And her mother didn’t like her looking in the mirror so much, watching for them to bud.

  It was her only family. Avrahim said the prayers as Paula lit the candles. The whole ceremony was pure Ashkenazi, like Paula, down to the meal of boiled beef and ground potatoes, fried, no less, called latkes.

  “In America, we call it Jewish cooking,” said Paula, who seemed to direct the gastronomy with a wooden spoon.

  “In Israel I call it indigestion,” joked Avrahim, and immediately assured everyone he was joking. Everyone wanted to know why Sharon had not dropped in once during the week, since it was the end of digging season and she should be resuming her job across the street at the university.

  “Things. We found something on the dig, and it’s hush-hush.”

  “A bomb,” said Rani, excited.