The Thirteenth Apostle (3 page)

Only a reliable man could be entrusted with power over the Abbey, over its unique theological college and its three libraries. So not a muscle in his face betrayed the slightest emotion to the gendarme, who was still standing to attention.

“Father Andrei! Good Lord, how terrible! We were expecting him this morning – he was due back from Rome. How could such an accident have happened?”

“
Accident
? It's too early to use that word, Reverend Father. The few indications that we have suggest another line of inquiry. The passenger cars used on the Rome express are old models, but the doors are locked as soon as the train departs, for the entire journey. Your colleague can only have
fallen out of the window
in his compartment. When the ticket
inspector did his last check before arrival in Paris, he saw that this compartment was empty: not only was Father Andrei no longer there – although his suitcase was where he'd left it – but the two other passengers had disappeared without leaving any luggage behind them. Three seats in the compartment had been reserved, but had remained unoccupied ever since Rome: so there was no witness. The inquiry is only just starting, but our initial hypothesis rules out any accident: it looks more like a crime. It seems possible that Father Andrei was pushed out of the window by one or both of the passengers as the train was moving. Do you mind coming with me for the identification?”

Father Nil had taken a discreet step backwards, but he had the impression that a flood of emotions was going to burst through the dam of his superior's face, however implacably it had been fashioned to stem the waves.

But the Father Abbot immediately mastered his feelings.

“Go with you? Now? That's not possible: this morning I am seeing the bishops from the Centre-Val-de-Loire Region, and my presence here is indispensable.”

He turned round to Father Nil and said, with a heavy sigh, “Father Nil, could you go with this gentleman and carry out this painful formality?”

Nil bowed his head in sign of obedience: his study of the conspiracy around the death of Jesus would have to wait. It was Andrei who had just been crucified – and
this
death had taken place only the night before.

“Of course, Reverend Father: I'll go and get our coat, it's cold… It'll just take me a moment, Monsieur, if you don't mind waiting…”

Monastic poverty forbade a monk from proclaiming himself to be the owner of the least little object:
our
coat had for years been used solely by Father Nil – but it would have been
inappropriate to say so. The Father Abbot asked the gendarme to step into the empty gatehouse and took him familiarly by the arm.

“I don't wish to prejudge the final result of your inquiry. But a
crime
– that's just not possible! Can you imagine what the press, the television, the journalists will make of it? The Catholic Church would come out of it badly, and the Republic would be gravely embarrassed. I'm certain it's a
suicide
. Poor Father Andrei… do you follow my meaning?”

The gendarme gently pulled his arm away: he followed all too well, but an inquiry is an inquiry, and it's no easy matter to climb through the open window of a speeding train while two innocent passengers watch. And he didn't like a civilian telling him what to do – not even one wearing a pectoral cross and a pastoral ring.

“Reverend Father, the inquiry will take its course. Father Andrei can't have fallen out of the window all by himself: it's up to Paris to decide what happened. Allow me to tell you that, right now, everything seems to indicate that this was a crime.”

“No, I'm sure you mean a suicide…”

“A monk committing suicide? At his age? Highly unlikely.”

He stroked his chin: all the same, the Father Abbot was right, this business was likely to cause quite a stir, and in high places too…

“Tell me, Reverend Father, did your Father Andrei suffer from… from psychological problems?”

The Father Abbot looked relieved: the gendarme seemed to understand.

“He did indeed! He was being treated for them. In fact, I can confirm that he was in a state of great mental fragility.”

Andrei was known among his colleagues for being remarkably well balanced, physically and psychologically, and in forty
years of monastic life he had never once needed the infirmary. He was a studious man, surrounded by manuscripts; a scholar whose heart rate can never have risen above sixty beats per minute. The prelate smiled at the gendarme.

“A suicide is, of course, a horrible sin for a monk – but all sin deserves mercy. Whereas a crime…”

The wan light of morning enveloped the scene. The body had been moved away from the tracks so that the investigation would not get in the way of the trains, but the stiff corpse had not changed its posture: Father Andrei's left forearm was still pointing heavenwards, his fist clenched. On the ride over, Nil had had time to prepare himself for the shock. But he still found it difficult to approach, to kneel down, to draw back the cloth that had been placed over the head, twisted awry.

“Yes,” he murmured with a sigh. “Yes, it's Father Andrei. My poor friend…”

There was a moment's silence, which the gendarme respected. Then he touched Father Nil on the shoulder.

“Stay with him: I'll draw up the statement of identification in the car, you'll just need to sign it and then I'll drive you back to the Abbey.”

Nil wiped away a tear trickling down his cheek. Then he noticed the body's clenched fist that seemed, in a last gesture of despair, to be cursing the heavens. With difficulty he managed to prise open the dead man's chill fingers: in the hollow of the palm there was a crumpled little square of paper.

Nil glanced round: the gendarme was leaning over the dashboard of his car. He peeled the scrap of paper from his friend's hand, and his eyes fell on a few lines written in pencil.

Nobody was looking at him: he adroitly slipped the paper away into his coat pocket.

6

Gospels according to Matthew and John

A few days before the evening of the last supper, Peter had been waiting outside the walls. The Judaean came through the gate, greeted by the sentries who recognized him as the proprietor of one of the local villas. He took a few steps; the shape of the fisherman emerged from the shadows.

“
Shalom!
”

“
Ma shalom lek'ha
.”

He did not hold out his hand to the Galilean. For a week, apprehension had been gnawing away at him: whenever he met them, on the hillside outside the city where they spent each night in the friendly, secluded darkness of a vast olive grove, the Twelve spoke of nothing other than the imminent assault they were about to launch against the Temple. Never again would the circumstances be so favourable, they argued: thousands of pilgrims were encamped pretty much everywhere around the city. The crowd had been worked on by the Zealots, and were ready for anything. Jesus's popularity had to be exploited to set off the explosion, now.

They would fail – that much was obvious. And Jesus risked being killed for no reason at all, in a Jewish-style riot. The Master deserved better: he was worth infinitely more than all the rest of them, and he needed to be protected from his fanatical disciples. A plan had been hatching in the Judaean's head – now he just needed to convince Peter.

“The Master has asked if he can come to supper at your house,” Peter said, “in the upper room. It's impossible for him to celebrate Passover this year – we're being watched much too closely. Instead, a solemn meal, following the Essene rite – that's all.”

“You're all completely mad! You want to come and do that
in my house
? Two hundred yards away from the High Priest's palace, in a part of town where your Galilean accent will get you arrested straight away?”

The fisherman from the Lake gave him a crafty smile.

“Exactly: your place is just where we'll be safest. The authorities will never think of coming to look for us in the protected district, especially not in the house of a friend of the High Priest!”

“Oh… ‘friend' is going a bit far. We're neighbours. There's no way a former Essene like me and the highest dignitary in the clergy could be ‘friends'. When do you plan on holding this supper?”

“Thursday evening, at nightfall.”

It was a crazy but cunning idea. Hidden away inside his house, the Galileans would evade all notice.

“All right. Tell the Master that I'll be honoured to welcome him into my home, and everything will be ready for a solemn meal. One of my servants will help you slip past the patrols: you'll recognize him from the pitcher of water that he'll be carrying for the ritual ablutions of your meal. Meanwhile, come along with me, we need to talk.”

Peter followed him. They climbed over a pile of bricks. There was a gleam of metal from under his cloak: the
sica
, the short sword the Zealots used to gut their victims. So he never went without it these days! Jesus's apostles were ready for anything…

In a few words, the Judaean told him of his plan. So the uprising was going to occur on the occasion of the feast, was it? An excellent idea: the crowd of pilgrims would be easy to manipulate. But given that Jesus preached only peace and
pardon, how would he react, in the heat of the moment? And wasn't there the risk of his being wounded, or worse? If he were slain by a legionary's sword, their coup would fail…

Peter listened, his interest suddenly aroused.

“So are you saying we should ask him to go back to Galilee, where he doesn't run any risk? It's all going to happen so quickly, and we can't have him four days' journey away from here…”

“And who's asking you to send him away from Jerusalem? No, not at all: you need to bring him into the heart of the action, but in a place where a Roman arrow can't reach him. You want to have your meal in the part of town where Caiaphas's palace is, since you think it's where you'll be safest. A good idea. In the same way, what I'm telling you is this: just before the action, get Jesus into a really safe place,
right inside the palace
. Have him arrested and taken to Caiaphas on the eve of Passover. He'll be locked away in the cellars and, as you know, they're not allowed to hold trials during the feast. When it's over… power will have changed hands! You can go and fetch him in triumph, he'll appear on the balcony of the palace, the crowd will howl for joy at being finally delivered from the caste of priests…”

Peter interrupted him, after being completely stupefied.

“Have our Master arrested by our sworn enemies?”

“You need Jesus to be safe and sound. You're the ones who can take care of the violent stuff; then he can speak and take the people along with him – as only he knows how. Shelter him from the uproar of a violent insurrection, and then go and fetch him afterwards!…

And when you fail, the Judaean thought grimly – and you
will
fail, you're up against Roman troops – Jesus at least will still be alive. What happens then will be quite different from what you're dreaming of. Israel needs a prophet, not a gang leader.

They took a few steps in silence across the rocky crest that looked down over the Vale of Gehenna.

Suddenly Peter looked up.

“You're right: he'll be in the way if we start any violent action – he won't approve of it. But how can we ensure he gets arrested at just the right time? Things can change from one hour to the next!”

“I've thought of that. You know that Judas is completely devoted to him. You're a former Zealot like him, so you can explain things to Judas. He'll need to bring along the Temple guard at the precise time and place where they'll be sure to find him, separated from the crowd that's always protecting him. For example, just after the supper at my house, on Thursday night, in the Garden of Olives.”

“Will Judas agree to that? And how will he make contact with the Jewish authorities? He's just an ordinary Galilean – how can he get into the High Priest's palace? How's he going to negotiate with the man he dreams of eliminating? Why on earth do you think he went over to the Zealots? I know those people:
this
is what
they
negotiate with!”

He slapped the
sica
rubbing against his left thigh.

“You can tell him it's for the good of the cause, to protect the Master. You'll find the right words: he'll listen to you. And I'll take him to Caiaphas. I'm allowed to enter and leave the palace at will: they'll let Judas in, if he's with me. Caiaphas will fall for it – the priests are so scared of Jesus!”

“Fine… So if you say you can bring him to Caiaphas, if you think he can pretend to betray Jesus while in fact protecting him… It's risky, but what isn't risky right now?”

As they passed back through the gate into the City, the Judaean gave a friendly wave to the guards. In a few days, many of these men would be dead or wounded, and the
Romans would easily suppress the revolt. As for the gang of Twelve, the Land of Israel would soon be rid of them once and for all.

And Jesus's mission, his real mission, could then begin.

7

Nil had spent the whole morning – from the time the gendarme had brought him back to the Abbey – slumped on his stool. He had not opened the notes and papers relating to his ongoing research into the circumstances of the death of Jesus. A monk's cell never contains a chair on which he might rest his back and daydream. And yet this is just what Nil was doing, mulling over his memories. The Abbey was silent, as if shrouded in cotton wool: all the classes in the theological college had been suspended until Father Andrei's funeral. There was still an hour to go before the conventual mass.

Andrei… the only one to whom he could ever talk about his research. The only one who seemed able to understand his conclusions, and sometimes even to reach them before he did himself.