Gospel (83 page)

Lucy turned around to notice O'Hanrahan talking to a waiter, probably ordering more libation. O'Hanrahan then strolled out to stand at the railing beside her. He glanced at his watch, then exhaled deeply.

Lucy said “Dr. O'Hanrahan” and O'Hanrahan said “Lucy” at the same time. Lucy motioned for O'Hanrahan to go first.

“Well,” said O'Hanrahan, squinting at the view, “the great rabban has a point. We are in decline, Luce.
Quaeque ipse misserima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui.
”

“No argument there.”

“We should return to our professional distance.”

“If you'd like.”

He raised an eyebrow.

Lucy corrected: “If you'd like,
sir.
Have you been in contact with Father Vico yet?”

O'Hanrahan rubbed his head. “I called him from Haifa and I received a phone message that he's deep in the Franciscan cloisters of the Holy Sepulcher. I suppose it's better than him hiding out in one of the numerous Franciscan kitschpiles throughout the Holy Lands.”

O'Hanrahan's thoughts upon the visage of the Holy City were much different from Lucy's. She had the awe of the unacquainted; O'Hanrahan felt outrage at the atrocious, tasteless additions to Israel, campaigned by the insatiable Franciscans: Bethlehem's Church of St. Catherine adjoining the Basilica of the Nativity and its prize attraction, a ceramic, rosy-cheeked baby doll in a manger that reduces busloads of pilgrims to tears and is on sale in replicas around town. The nearby Church of the Milk Grotto, a cave with a chalky white powder that can be scraped from the walls and is sold representing Mary's own breast-drippings, featuring a chapel mannequin-Mary with exposed breast and life-size plastic Mary, Joseph, and donkey in another corner. The modern concrete Chapel Dominus Flevit, where Jesus wept. The cotton-ball sheep in the Church of the Shepherds of the Field. The airport-lounge modern of the Basilica of the Annunication in Nazareth, not to mention the Franciscans' modern insertions into, of all unmodern places, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where they unpopularly installed an organ to drown out the other sects' masses.

After his catalogue of aesthetic atrocities, O'Hanrahan announced, “I better go do homage to the rabbi this evening and soothe his feathers. So I can get another copy of the photos.”

“He's not serious about denying them to you, is he, sir?”

“Ah, he was just being crabby,” O'Hanrahan asserted less than convincingly. He tried to jump-start his brain: “Yes, this is perfect weather, isn't it? Perfect for work—and I'm eager to get back into it, Miss Dantan. We're getting soft, huh?”

She concurred.

A drinks-waiter in a tight uniform marched across the balcony and told Dr. O'Hanrahan there was a call for him, a Gabriel O'Donoghue.

O'Hanrahan said, “Tell him I'm not in, if you would.”

The waiter did as ordered, and the professor turned on Lucy. “What do you suppose that good-for-nothing wants now?”

Lucy shrugged, not her brother's keeper in this affair. But Lucy was curious about something else: “How do they know who you are already in just 24 hours at this hotel?”

“A minor accident in the bar last night after you'd gone to bed. A little fire, of sorts.”

“Of sorts?”

“I was merely demonstrating to this nice couple from Miami Beach the flammable qualities of a certain grade of arak. I was undone by a pillar of fire. A virtual pentecost!”

Lucy smiled as her mentor walked back to the hotel lobby, and she turned back to the Old City, the world's only inhabited ancient monument. The wonder is that there is not as much as a single square mile incorporated within Suleiman's walls, and yet the density of religious significance! Was there an unimportant inch in the Old City? A single brick that didn't mark a spilling of blood, a miracle, a site where some unsuspecting man or woman looked up from daily chores to hear the dreadful voice of God?

*   *   *

That afternoon, with the Sabbath looming and modern Jerusalem about to come to a holy standstill, O'Hanrahan and Lucy went in search of 2000 years of Christianity.

They taxied to St. Stephen's Gate, where one enters the Moslem Quarter of the city. The Temple Mount and its Islamic schools, the Dome of the Rock, where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, say the Christians and Jews, and Ishmael, say the Moslems; the site of the First and Second Temple, where Jesus argued with the Pharisees—the holiest of ground to nearly half the planet. From St. Stephen's Gate, where the Temple regulars rushed to stone Stephen and other heretics, one stands at the beginning of the Via Dolorosa. Lucy sighed: she had never been in a Catholic church anywhere that hadn't had along the walls the Stations of the Cross, and here she was! The Condemnation. The Accession to the Cross. Jesus Falls for the First Time. Jesus Beholds His Mother.

“I'm waiting,” said Lucy staring at the crowds milling about and snapping pictures across from an Arab business called the Fifth Station T-shirt & Souvenir Shop.

“Waiting for what?” O'Hanrahan then saw the arch announcing the Armenian Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Spasm. “Oh, I see. You thought a church named Our Lady of the Spasm was going to foster a blasphemous joke on my part.”

“It's not like you to hold back.”

“I do feel compelled to point out that the 7th Century's St. John of Climax in his travels through the Holy Land doubtlessly performed the Stations of the Cross like all good pilgrims, and no doubt John
Climacus
felt a sympathetic shudder at Our Lady of the Spasm, a
simultaneous
multiple Spasm perhaps, he and the BVM. Very rare in ancient times.”

Lucy hid a smile. “Erudite, but I think I prefer it when you go straight for the lowest possible remark.”

“Yeah, so do I.”

And now the Via Dolorosa led up the hill, past the Fifth Station where Simon the Cyrene took the Cross from Jesus, the Sixth, where Veronica wiped his face and occasioned the miracle of the Face imprinting itself upon her veil. Jesus falls for the second and third time at Stations Seven and Nine; he lectures the Daughters of Jerusalem at Station Eight. Few tourists track these down, having to go into dark, grimy Palestinian alleys to find a small Roman numeral on a plaque, but O'Hanrahan was, if anything thorough.

“Now to the Holy Sepulcher?” Lucy asked, thrilled to finally reach the place where the Crucifixion and burial took place.

“First, I'm going to take you to a holy place instead.”

Winding down a dusty alley filled with construction materials, they reached the Ninth Station, an old column worn by the touches of millions of pilgrims that marked the exit of the Old City in Jesus' time. Through the door and down a step was the roof of the great Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Lucy walked along the smooth plaster, hearing hymns and chants and bustle beneath her. She walked over to a cupola and peered down at the worshipers below in the Sepulcher's basement at the Chapel of the Penitent Thief.
Truly I say unto you, today shall you be with me in Paradise.

Lucy looked upward to see an even stranger sight. Huts. African huts, fashioned with white plaster. Beyond a wall were clotheslines with monks' garments hanging limp from them, huddled under the ruins of Gothic vaults. There were several little houses, one-room dwellings with leaning doorways and slanted plastered walls, like something out of the
The Hobbit
or Munchkinland.

“Who lives here?” she whispered.

“The Ethiopians,” said O'Hanrahan.

When Ethiopia fell on hard times in the 1600s, the Greek Orthodox showed the Ethiopians the door when they couldn't make payments on the Moslem tribute.

(Right. It never occurred to the Orthodox that they should pay up for Our impoverished brethren.)

Lucy immediately reminded herself to write of this oddity to David McCall, probably now on his way to Ethiopia. From the 300s the Ethiopians had clung to this church through every rise and fall of Ethiopia, through every persecution in the Holy Lands, and they were still here, with their impenetrable musical liturgy in Ge'ez, their walking sticks that they leaned against through their long masses, the chants that phased in and out like an eastern mantra, a hum that would coalesce into words at intervals. Lucy lingered at the door to the nearby chapel, aside the stairway that led down into the rest of the Sepulcher complex.

“The Copts,” explained O'Hanrahan, referring to those in the Egyptian Orthodox Church, “and the Ethiopians have been fighting over this stairway for centuries. The Ethiopians have it now because they changed the locks on the chapel in the 1970s and, after the Six Day War, no Egyptian could get a fair hearing in Israel. Fortunately, Moslems are in charge of the place and keep the peace.”

“Moslems? You're kidding.”

“Nope. Saladin's orders after the Crusaders were defeated. To this day the keys to the front door of the Holy Sepulcher, when it opens and closes and who gets in and who does what, are controlled by Moslems. They even do a lot of the repairs since the Christians can't be expected to do anything that might benefit another sect.”

Lucy frowned, annoyed with her fellow Christians.

“All right,” said O'Hanrahan. “You can die now, Sister Lucy, you're here at the Sepulcher where dispensations abound! I'm going to find Father Vico. I'll see you back at the hotel if I don't run into you. Wish me luck.”

Lucy was left to wander down the dark Ethiopian stairway that led to the courtyard and simple doorway that led inside to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It was a mob scene. She snapped a picture although this famous church wasn't particularly picturesque. There was no facade to speak of, just a doorway in a tall wall of ancient sandy stone. The dreamed-of portals for two millennia of pilgrims, the crowning moment of a medieval man's or woman's life, the greatest of indulgences.

*   *   *

O'Hanrahan penetrated the inner recesses of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. He asked in the Franciscan Chapel of Mary where he might find Father Vico, and was escorted to a small hallway. The place smelled of ruin and mold, though it was probable that the Franciscans were the best housekeepers of the six sects that shared this architectural pile-on. O'Hanrahan spied in a remote dank hallway the friar's assistant, Brother Antonio, appearing no more happy than in Assisi.

“Ah,
professore,
” said Father Vico emerging from the shadows. “Come to follow me … it is very dark, no? We cannot to make the electricity for to work here, eh?”

Father Vico had been given an office in the farthest reaches of the Franciscan vaults, virtually in the mosque next door. The room was airless and windowless, fitted with 19th-Century broken-down furniture one sees in poor parish offices.

“I have a soo-prise for you,
professore,
” Father Vico began.

“Oh boy.”

Father Vico walked to the tall clothes cabinet and opened the door, removed a long overcoat from a hanger and reached into a secret lining. He produced a long scroll case, which looked familiar.

“You're kidding,” said O'Hanrahan, recognizing it.

“No, we have our old friend from the
trecento
again, yes?” Father Vico had managed to recover the stolen 14th-Century vellum Ethiopian forgery from Rome. “The criminals dutifully returned it to the Church as I thought they would. A friend of the Franciscans passed it back to us. It is not without value, my friend.”

“I'm sure it is worth thousands, Father.”

“No one at the Vatican has missed it, so I suppose it will do no more trouble to let you to have it again. We have a word,
zimbello …
”

“A decoy, Father.”

“Dee-coy, dee-coy, what a funny-sounding word.” He returned to his desk. “Ah, but that is not all.”

O'Hanrahan waited patiently.

“I had a dream.”

O'Hanrahan bobbed his head, hoping he would continue.

“I had a dream of
you!
” Father Vico joined his hands and leaned back in his chair, inordinately pleased.

O'Hanrahan looked to the ceiling. “Was it … was it a nice dream?”

“Oh, I will tell you of the dream and then provide for you a interpretation, yes? I dreamed you were in the desert walking and walking, walking and walking, then you walked some more, walking and walking…”

The professor pinched the bridge of his nose. “Anywhere in particular?”

“No. And then a man whose face I could not see approached you within long robes, like an Arab, but not an Arab—very strange robes but very beautiful. And the man was beautiful too, very handsome.”

“I thought you couldn't see his face.”

“I could not but he had a possession of beauty, I knew without looking at his face. He held out to you a piece of bread and a vessel of water.”

“Did I take them?”

Father Vico motioned with his hands like fluttering birds. “I woke up and could not tell you. It is significant, yes?”

No, thought O'Hanrahan. “I'm not sure I believe in dreams.”

“Did I mention that the man had a tail?”

O'Hanrahan looked at the door that led out of the room and fantasized about passing through it. “You saw the tail?”

“No, I did not, but I
knew
of the tail, yes? You have this experience in the dreamworld? You know without seeing? Of course, it is the Devil perhaps. And you are to be tempted. Are you a man who can be tempted,
professore?
”

“Everyone can be tempted, Father.”

“But you are not a … not a …
venalo, meschino
…”

“A venal man? I'd like to think not, Father.”

Father Vico smiled at him placidly. “No, I think not also. I would hate for thees gospel to find the wrong possessor, and such a wrong person may to attempt to buy your favor, yes?”