The Gospel Of Judas (34 page)

they sang.

‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

‘Sometimes it makes me want to tremble, tremble, tremble;

‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’

He went up the steps into the main entrance of the World Bible Center. ‘Beast,’ they called from behind. ‘Beast.’

Or was it
Peace
?

A face nodded at him from behind the glass cubicle just inside the door. ‘
Asalamu aleikum
,’ it said. Peace be with you. Under the circumstances it seemed to carry a heavy burden of irony. Leo turned down the corridor towards the manuscript department with its NO ENTRY signs and its warnings about alarms and security, with its lipless mouth that took his security card and mulled over it and spat it out with a grunt from the locking mechanism.

The heavy doors closed behind him. Within the manuscript rooms all was quiet. You couldn’t hear the chanting from outside, the praying and the ragged hymn that the protesters cobbled together. You couldn’t even hear the interior noises of the building itself. There was nothing more than the hush of the air conditioning and the heavy stillness of double glazing and fireproof doors. A digital clock on the wall gave the time as five fifty-nine. His own clock – that old-fashioned mechanical thing that Madeleine had given him – sat beside his keyboard and contradicted the electronic age: eight minutes to six.
Carpe diem
, it exhorted him.

He went about his work as usual – the comfort of the
quotidian, the consolation of ritual. He turned on the radio to listen to the morning news on the BBC and then turned on the computer.
Powered up
. Goldstaub had taught him to say that. He
powered up
the computer. The words
Welcome to the World Bible Center
appeared in an arc across the screen, like the rays of light from a great sunrise. The Center’s logo, the open book with the word LOGOS inscribed across the pages, took the part of the world. On the radio the newsreader spoke in measured terms of protest and demonstration.

How long now? A month? Time seemed an elastic, malleable dimension. Only a month since Madeleine’s death? As much as a month since the first words of the scroll? He dreamt about her often. Sometimes she was remote and inaccessible, sometimes she was all too vividly present, suave and naked against his own naked body so that he exploded into her and woke up with the shock to find his belly wet and glutinous with his own wasted semen. And other times she just seemed so plainly, simply
there
that when he awoke he expected to find her in the room with him; and the discovery that she was not was like the loss all over again.

R
ANDY
P
RIEST
B
ETRAYS HIS
V
OWS,
the
Sun
newspaper had written.

Leo opened the file directory on the computer, and selected the folder named Judas. What had happened yesterday? He couldn’t remember exactly. He had experienced something, some kind of panic, some kind of breakdown perhaps. Was that it? A notice on the wall warned that
YOU
were responsible for any document taken from the shelves, that
YOU
must enter your name in the logbook, that
NO DOCUMENT
was to be removed from the room, that
NO IMAGE
of any part of the Judas scroll was to be made with the intention of removing it from the manuscript rooms of
the Center. He recalled speaking to Hautcombe, showing him the evidence, begging him to do something about it all. But what? What could be done now that the beast was unleashed?

The newsreader was talking about a group of fundamentalists holed up in a log cabin in Montana, waiting for the end of the world. The Beast of the Apocalypse is at large, one of them had declared. The tone of the report was of faint irony, a hint of BBC amusement. The group was reported to have anti-tank weapons with them and assault rifles.

He opened the drawer where the photographs of the text were kept and took them out. Thirty-five of them, each showing a different page, a different view, a different light. He placed them on the desk beside the computer, then he turned to the cabinet that held the scroll.

A discussion programme had started on the radio.
Focus on Faith
, the programme was called. There was the Anglican Archbishop of York and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, allies in the battle against a representative of the British Humanist Society.

‘What exactly does the discovery of this scroll mean in the post-Christian age?’ the chairman asked.

‘I don’t think we
are
in a post-Christian age,’ one of the archbishops retorted. He had an ingratiating voice, a voice that sounded as though it had been strained through a dozen layers of abstract reasoning. ‘The Christian message is as relevant today as it has ever been …’

Leo turned the key in the lock and opened the lid of the cabinet.

‘But we haven’t even been allowed to see this so-called scroll,’ the Archbishop of Liverpool was complaining. ‘All we have is a whole
mélange
of rumour and half-truth. The so-called World Bible Center must release the text
for all of us to assess. At the moment it appears to be the exclusive property of an apostate priest and a renegade Baptist.’

‘I must take issue with that description …’

Leo looked down on the scroll, the winding-sheet, the long, faded banner from some distant war. His hands did not shake. His bowels did not churn. His mind did not balk. He thought of Madeleine, of course. Yes, he thought of her. Two minutes past six. The manuscript rooms were still and silent. No one came in, no one would come in for two hours or more. He opened the glass lid that covered the scroll.

The radio was saying, ‘If this scroll is what it purports to be – and I may say I am
extremely
sceptical about that – but
if
…’ and there was a small bright splutter, a sharp, cheerful spurt of flame.

‘… a genuine account by a hostile witness, then why should we worry …?’

There was a concussion, a soft warm wave of heat like a belch from some deep and fiery maw. Leo made a sound, lifted his hands perhaps in protection, perhaps in benediction. As though it was possessed with an inner life the length of papyrus blackened and coiled. And then a great body of flame emerged from the cabinet, a transparent liquid body out of whose heat claws reached out to tear at him, to tear at his clothing, to tear with talons of pain at the back of his hands as he raised them to his face.

Madeleine. Somehow he thought that she might save him. The claws tore and scoured, the arms reached out to embrace him. Madeleine. And the last thing he heard was the prattle of the radio and above it the sound of screaming, the screaming of the beast, the wailing of the souls of the damned deep inside the pit into which he was being pulled.

‘I want to see him.’ She has found her husband in the top garden, the formal Italian garden, amongst the box hedges and the gravel paths where he is reading an official document, the word
Geheimnis
, secret, in red across the top. She is distraught, her hair awry, her eyes – those blue, innocent eyes that captivated the older man all those years ago in Marienbad – wide with anguish. ‘I want to see him.’

A tired smile and a weary glance up from his paper. ‘My dear Gretchen, why on earth?’

‘I want to see him.’ The repetition is dull, mechanical, as though she has steeled herself to do this but the effort has strained her beyond the point where she can bring any arguments to bear. ‘I just want to see him.’

‘It is out of your hands now. Out of
our
hands.’

‘I want to see him.’

‘But it is all over. You have promised me.’

She bites her lower lip. ‘I want to see him,’ she repeats.

*     *     *

During the 1930s the building in Via Tasso was conveniently near enough to the Villa to turn it into the German cultural centre, where Teutonic and Aryan values could be transmitted to the people of Italy. But now another use has been found for it: the roadway is blocked at either end by steel chevaux-de-frise and barbed wire, and pedestrians pass down the street with reluctance, under the eye of armed soldiers. Only the long, black Mercedes belonging to the embassy is allowed through the barricades, to slide as slowly as a barge past the reefs of steel and dock alongside the pavement beside number 155. A soldier holds open the nearside rear door and the passengers emerge. There is the tall, stooping form of Herr Huber. The figure behind him shows a flash of blonde hair beneath the black scarf that she clutches around her head. Black scarf, black dress, grey stockings. The two hurry up the steps and inside the door.

The entrance hall is ill-lit and poorly ventilated. A smell of disinfectant pervades the stairwell, and beneath that something organic: the faint and putrefying scent of drains perhaps. In the first room there is a ledger to fill in with name and rank and time of entry, and then an escort to show the way upstairs. Little deference is shown to Herr Huber and his wife. They have left the world of embassy and diplomacy and tact and crossed the threshold into another realm where all is different: relationships are different, rank is different, manners are different, logic itself is different. This is a realm that stretches unbroken from border territories such as this, right across Europe to the heartland of the East where the names of Treblinka and Sobibor and Belzec are whispered. Outside the limits of Via Tasso it is a hot Roman day, pregnant with the past and with fear of the future; within the limits of this tawdry
apartment block Herr Huber and his wife are in one of the antechambers of hell.

Frau Huber’s high heels clip briskly on the marble stairs behind her husband’s heavy tread. They pause on the landing outside a closed door while the escort knocks and whispers to the guard inside. The door opens. Beyond lies a hallway, a narrow, darkened domestic hallway with five doors giving on to it. The smell is stronger here – the pestilential smell of sepsis – and Frau Huber pulls a handkerchief from the pocket of her jacket and holds it to her face. Before they enter the apartment her husband bends towards her and says softly, ‘You will
do
nothing, you will
say
nothing.’ Above the lace edge of her handkerchief her eyes stare back like the terrified eyes of a rabbit. She nods her head. The pair of them step over the threshold.

The door on the left of the hallway is painted dark green. It is marked with nameless stains and inscribed with the plain number 5. In the centre of the door, at about five feet from the floor, there is a disk of thin metal. The guard flips this aside and uncovers a hole in the wood. He puts his eye to the hole for a moment and then stands aside and indicates to the visitors that everything is ready.

Huber is the only one who smiles. He cannot help smiling. It is smiling that has got him where he is; but this is a thin, nervous smile as he points his wife to the door. ‘Don’t breathe a word,’ he says in her ear as she presses her eye to the spy-hole.

She can see part of a tiled room, illuminated by a bare bulb set in the ceiling. The tiles are pale blue. There is a sink opposite the door and a zinc bucket beneath the sink. There is no other fitting in the room. Where there might once have been a window above the sink there is now a
rectangle of bare brickwork. Her single eye allows no depth to the view, but the angles between floor and wall create perspective lines that converge into the vanishing point of the far corner. At this focus a man crouches, speared by the lines of perspective, crucified by the angles. The figure wears pyjama trousers and a collarless striped shirt. The front of his shirt is stained rust-brown. His feet are bare. The face – slick with sweat, grey with two days’ growth of beard – is a slack, lifeless caricature of the face of Francesco Volterra. He has his hands in the front of his trousers and he is massaging himself gently, like a child comforting himself with a favourite shawl.

Without raising his head, without moving anything but his eyes, without ceasing the rhythmic massage, Francesco looks up at the door.

Has he sensed their presence? What does he see? The blank back of the door. A single, blue, anonymous eye framed by the peep-hole, an eye as vacant and without expression as the lens of a camera. And then the eye has gone and there is the small and secret sound of the disk falling back into place. Nothing more. No sound. No hope.

On the landing outside, Gretchen is being violently sick into a corner. Her husband stands beside her, holding her narrow waist and turning his head away in disgust. A cleaner stumps up the stairs carrying a zinc bucket and a mop. But there isn’t much to clear up for she hasn’t eaten for days.

On their return to the car Herr Huber orders the driver to return to the Villa, but Gretchen shakes her head. She wants to go to the church, the Church of Santa Maria dell’ Anima. She wishes to go there to pray. Her husband accedes to her request, directing the driver through the centre of the old
city, amongst the bicycles and the pedestrians, amidst the people scratching an existence from the relics of grandiose days – the days of Bernini and Borromini, of rebirth and counter-reformation when these people had a genius that Herr Huber really cannot understand. ‘Monkeys in the ruins,’ he says of the Italians as the car eases its way into Piazza Navona where the great fountain is dry and sandbagged. A policeman waves them on. The car noses its way through the square, like a barge nosing through the flotsam of a harbour. ‘Monkeys in the ruins,’ he repeats, acknowledging the policeman’s salute with a regal wave of the hand.

The car halts outside the church entrance, which lies in a narrow street, the ironically named Vicolo della Pace, behind the buildings of the great square. ‘I’ll wait here,’ Huber says. His wife passes through the entrance, through the tiny courtyard beyond where one of the Franciscan fathers is watering the plants, through into the shadows of the church where incense lies on the air like a promise of things ancient and ineffable.

There are a few figures kneeling in the stalls, young men in uniform mainly. There are heads blond and heads brown, uniforms black and grey, all bowed before the ornate baroque of the high altar, each one praying, no doubt, more or less the same thing: God, let me survive. But given the normal run of things, the pure, incontrovertible nature of statistics, some of them are bound to be disappointed.