The Thirteenth Apostle (24 page)

Two days later, the Temple of Jerusalem had almost finished slowly burning. Of the splendid monument barely finished by Herod, nothing remained.

On 8th September 70, Titus left the ruins of Jerusalem and marched to Caesarea.

Yokhanan waited until the last legionary had left the city before he ventured in: the western district no longer existed. Making his way with difficulty through the rubble, he recognized, from its enclosure wall, Caiaphas's luxurious villa. The house of the beloved disciple, the house of his happy childhood, was two hundred yards away. He found his bearings and walked on.

You could not even make out the basin of the
impluvium
. Everything had burned down and the roof had collapsed. It was here, under this pile of charred tiles, that the remains of the upper room lay. The room in which Jesus had taken his last meal forty years earlier, surrounded at first by thirteen, and then by twelve men.

For a long while he stood there, gazing at the ruins. One of the two Essenes accompanying him finally touched him on the arm.

“Let us leave this place, Yokhanan. There is no memory in these stones. Memory resides in you. Where do we go now?”

“The memory of Jesus the Nazorean,” thought Yokhanan. “That fragile inheritance, coveted by everyone.”

He replied: “You're right. Let's head north, to Galilee: Jesus's words still echo there among its hills. I have an inheritance with me that I need to hand on.”

He took a sheet of parchment out of his pocket and brought it up to his lips. “The copy of the epistle written by my
abbu
, the thirteenth apostle.”

Three centuries later, a well-to-do Iberian woman, Etheria by name, who had treated herself to the very first organized tour that enabled one to participate in the Holy Week celebrations in Jerusalem, saw as she passed along the Jordan an engraved stele, tilting rather forlornly to one side. Filled with curiosity, she stopped her litter: was this another souvenir of the time of Christ?

The inscription was legible. It stated that at the time of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, a Nazorean, Yokhanan by name, had been massacred at this very spot while fleeing from the ruins of Jerusalem. Titus's legionaries must have caught up with him, Etheria reflected; they had slaughtered him and thrown his body in the nearby river. She exclaimed:

“A Nazorean! It's been ages since any of them were around. This poor man must have been the last of them, and that's probably why they erected this stele on the site where he was killed.”

What the pious Christian lady did not know was that Yokhanan was not the last of the Nazoreans.

Ever since that day, only two copies of the epistle written by Jesus's thirteenth apostle had been in existence. One was hidden away at the bottom of a jar, inaccessible in its cave perched in the middle of a cliff overlooking the ruins of Qumran on the Dead Sea.

And the other was in the hands of the Nazoreans who had escaped from Pella. And taken refuge in an oasis in the Arabian desert named Bakka.

55

Mgr Calfo slipped on his purple-hemmed cassock. To receive Antonio, he needed to be dressed in the attributes of his episcopal dignity. Young recruits should never forget who they are dealing with. Once the preliminary interviews had been conducted, he rarely invited the members of the Society in to see him. They all knew his address, but the demands of confidentiality are better respected in one of the discreet trattorie of Rome. And sometimes, Sonia's fragrance would float in his studio long after she had left.

It was with pleasure that he opened his door to the twelfth apostle.

“Your mission will now consist in keeping an eye on Father Breczinsky. He's a
pauvre type
, a loser. But that type of man is always unpredictable. He might react impulsively.”

“What do I need to get out of him?”

“First, he needs to keep you informed about what the two monks might be telling each other during their sessions in the book stacks of the Vatican. Then remind him where he comes from, who he is and who the Cardinal is. That simple reminder should keep him faithful to his mission. You are now one of the very few men to know of the extremely confidential documents he has in his guard. Don't forget that he has a terrible wound lodged in his memory: we just need to prod that, and we'll get what we want from him. You need have no scruples: the only thing that counts is the current mission.”

Once Antonio had been given his instructions, he left the building and ostentatiously took a right turn, towards the Tiber, as if he were heading back into town. Without looking up, he could sense the eyes of the Rector staring down at the back of his neck from the window of his apartment. But once he reached the corner of Castel Sant'Angelo, he took another right turn, and after another sudden swerve he started to walk away from town, towards St Peter's Square.

Rome's ochre-coloured walls still gleamed in the wan December sunlight. For centuries she had watched the incessant ballet of the intrigues and plots of her Catholic prelates. Eyes half-closed, she lay in a maternal doze, enjoying the long winter of her splendour; she no longer attached any importance to the games of power and glory unfolding around the tomb of the Apostle.

“Come in, my friend,” exclaimed Catzinger with a smile. “I was expecting you.”

The young man bent forwards to kiss the Cardinal's ring. “He escaped two successive purges,” he reflected, “that of the Gestapo first, then that of the Liberation. Honour and respect to those fighting for the West.”

He sat down opposite the desk and fixed his strange black eyes on His Eminence.

56

Nil had asked Leeland to go to the Vatican book stacks without him.

“I want to work on a phrase I discovered in the diary left by Andrei at San Girolamo. I need to use the Internet – it'll take
me maybe a couple of hours. If Father Breczinsky asks you any questions, invent some excuse for my absence.”

Now that he was alone at the computer, he was starting to feel discouraged, lost in the midst of a tangle of paths leading in every direction. The texts photocopied by the Huntington Library merely confirmed what he had been sensing would be the case since he had been studying the manuscripts of the Dead Sea. The Coptic manuscript? Its first phrase had enabled him to understand the code introduced into the
Symbolon
of Nicaea. That left the second phrase, and the mysterious apostle's letter. He had decided to follow up this last clue, a trace of which he had found in Andrei's diary. All these leads must come together somewhere or other. This had been his friend's last message:
link things together
.

Rembert Leeland… What had become of the friendly, confident student of bygone days, the laughing young man who played his life the same way he played his music, with brio and optimism? Why had he succumbed to that brief attack of despair? Nil had perceived within him a wound that went too deep for him to tell an old friend about it.

As for Breczinsky, he seemed completely isolated in the glacial and deserted basement of the Vatican Library. Why had he made those private remarks to him? What had passed between himself and Andrei?

He decided to concentrate on the apostle's letter. He needed to find a book, somewhere in the wide world, just from its Dewey classification. He connected to the Internet, called up Google, and typed
university libraries
.

A page with eleven sites came up. At the foot of the page, Google indicated that twelve similar pages had been selected for him. About a hundred and thirty sites altogether.

With a sigh, he clicked on the first site.

* * *

When he came back shortly after noon, Leeland was irritated to find that there was just a brief note propped up in front of the computer: Nil had returned to San Girolamo as a matter of urgency. He would be returning to Via Aurelia in the course of the evening.

Had he found anything? The American had never been much of a Biblical scholar. But Nil's work was starting to interest him to the highest point. As he sought to discover what had led to Andrei's death, his friend was filled with the desire to avenge his memory – as for himself, it was his own ruined life that he now dreamt of avenging. For he sensed that those who had destroyed his existence were also those who had caused the fatal accident that had befallen the librarian of St Martin's Abbey.

The setting sun gave a dark red tinge to the cloud of pollution hanging over Rome. Leeland had headed back to the Vatican. In the apartment underneath, the Palestinian suddenly heard someone come in, then sit down at the computer: it must be Nil. The tape recorder was merely recording the clatter of the keyboard.

Suddenly the aural landscape came to life: Leeland had just arrived in his turn. They were going to talk.

57

Egypt, second to seventh centuries

Forced by the war to leave Pella, the Nazoreans were welcomed by the Arabs in the Bakka oasis, where they settled. But the second generation found the austerity of the desert of Arabia
difficult to live in: some of them decided to carry on to Egypt. They moved to a place north of Luxor, a village in the jebel El-Tarif called Nag Hammadi. Here they formed a community kept together by the memory of the thirteenth apostle and his teaching. And by his epistle, of which every family possessed a copy.

They soon came into conflict with Christian missionaries from Alexandria, whose Church was undergoing rapid expansion. Christianity was indeed spreading across the Empire with all the impetuosity of a forest fire: the Nazoreans, who refused to accept the divinity of Jesus, were forced to submit – or disappear.

Transform Jesus into the Christ-God? Be unfaithful to the epistle? Never – they were persecuted by the Christians. From Alexandria came orders written in Coptic: this epistle must be destroyed, in Egypt and everywhere else in the Empire. Each time a Nazorean family was driven out into the desert, where death awaited them, their house was searched and the letter of the thirteenth apostle destroyed. It spoke of a tomb containing the bones of Jesus, somewhere in the desert of Idumaea – but Jesus's tomb needs to remain empty, so that the Christ may live.

However, one single copy did escape the persecutors and reached the Library at Alexandria, where it was buried away among the five hundred thousand volumes of that eighth wonder of the world.

Shortly after the year 200, a young Alexandrinian by the name of Origen started to frequent the Library with great assiduity. He was a tireless researcher, and he was fascinated by the person of Christ. He had a prodigious memory.

* * *

When he became a teacher, Origen was persecuted by his bishop, Demetrius. This was due to jealousy: Origen's charisma was luring the elite of Alexandria to hear him. But it was also due to mistrust, since Origen did not hesitate to use in his teaching texts that were forbidden by the Church. Finally, Demetrius drove him from Egypt and Origen took refuge in Caesarea, Palestine – but he took his prodigious memory with him. As for the letter of the thirteenth apostle, it remained buried in the huge library, known to nobody: there are few scholars that have the genius of an Origen.

When, in 641, Alexandria fell into the hands of the Muslims, General Amr ibn al-As ordered all the books to be burned, one by one. “If they are in agreement with the Koran,” he proclaimed, “they are superfluous. If they are not in agreement, they are dangerous.” For six months, the memory of antiquity heated the boilers in the public baths.

By burning the Library of Alexandria, the Muslims had achieved what the Christians had never succeeded in doing: now there was not a single copy of the epistle anywhere to be found.

Except for the original, still buried in a jar protected by the sand, on the left as you go into one of the caves looking out over the ruins of Qumran.

58

“So, have you found anything?”

Leeland, his face looking tense, had just arrived in the studio. Next to the computer, several sheets of paper were lying scattered. Nil seemed tired; without replying, he went over to the window and glanced out. Then he came back to his seat,
resolved to ignore the warnings of Breczinsky and to tell his friend everything.

“After you'd left, I started to look in the biggest libraries in the world. Around midday, I came across the librarian from Heidelberg, who has lived in Rome. We started to chat online, and he told me that the Dewey classification probably came from – guess where?”

“From the Library of San Girolamo, and that's why you rushed back there!”

“I should have thought – it was the last library that Andrei used before his death: he came across a book and jotted down the details on what he had at hand, his diary – probably intending to consult the work a second time. And then he hastily left Rome, leaving the now superfluous diary behind him.”

Leeland sat next to Nil. His eyes were shining.

“And you've found the book?”

“The San Girolamo Library was built up out of odds and ends, following the whims of the successive librarians who followed each other in quick succession. You can find something of everything there. But the books are more or less all catalogued, and I did indeed discover the one that had attracted Andrei's attention, a catena by Eusebius of Caesarea – a rare edition from the seventeenth century, I'd never heard of it.”

Leeland asked, in some embarrassment:

“Excuse me, Nil, I've forgotten pretty much everything except my music. What's a catena?”

“In the third century there was a fierce struggle over Jesus's divinity, which the Church was seeking to impose. They were destroying all the texts they could find that didn't conform to the new dogma. After condemning Origen, the Church methodically burnt all of his writings. Eusebius of Caesarea greatly admired the Alexandrine, who died in his city. He
wanted to save what he could of his work, but – so as to avoid being condemned in his turn – he chose excerpts from it and had them circulated. He arranged them one after the other like the links of a chain: a
catena
. Later on they picked up on his idea, and many ancient works are now accessible to us only through these excerpts. Andrei guessed that this unfamiliar catena might contain passages from Origen that were barely known. He sought, and he found.”