The Thirteenth Apostle (32 page)

Leeland looked up at him, his eyes swimming in tears.

“Never! Never, you hear me – if it's anything vulgar you're alluding to. I breathed in his presence, I perceived every
vibration of his being, but our bodies never indulged in any coarse contact. I never stopped being a monk, and he never stopped being as pure as crystal. We loved each other, Nil, and knowing this was enough for us to be happy. From that day on, I understood the love of God better, and grew closer to it. Perhaps the beloved disciple and Jesus experienced something similar, all that time ago?”

Nil pulled a face. One shouldn't mix everything together, but stick to the facts.

“If
nothing happened
between you, if there was never any act and thus no matter for sin – I'm sorry, but that's the way the theologians argue – what is Catzinger concerned about? You've just come from his office, haven't you?”

“I once wrote some letters in which this love is evident – I don't know what pressures the Vatican exerted to get their hands on them – with two innocent photos in which Anselm and I are side by side. You know the Church's obsession with everything to do with sex: this was enough to feed their sick imagination, to accuse me of moral depravity, to sully a feeling that they can't understand and cover it with mud, make it stink. Are those prelates still human beings, Nil? I doubt it, they've never experienced the wound of love that brings a man to life, makes him really human.”

“So,” persisted Nil, “it's you Catzinger is pressurizing now. But do you know why? What has he told you, why are you so upset?”

Leeland lowered his head and replied in a murmur:

“On the day you arrived in Rome, he told me to go and see him. And he ordered me to report all our conversations to him, or else he'd throw me to the wolves in the press. I'll survive, perhaps, but Anselm is without defence, he doesn't have the strength to stand up to the mob, I know it will destroy him.
Just because I have experienced love, because I have dared to love, they asked me to spy on you, Nil!”

Once the first moment of surprise had passed, Nil stood up and poured himself a glass of bourbon. Now he could understand his friend's ambiguous attitude, his sudden silences. It all started to become clear: the documents stolen from his cell on the banks of the Loire must have landed on a desk in the Congregation very soon after. His summons to Rome on an artificial pretext, his meeting up with Leeland, it had all been planned out and arranged in advance. Had he been spied on? Yes, in the Abbey, immediately following the death of Father Andrei. Once he had come to Rome, poor Rembert had merely been a pawn on a chessboard in which he was the central piece.

He was deep in thought, but he soon came to a decision.

“Rembert, my research and Andrei's seem to be upsetting rather a lot of people. Ever since I discovered the presence of a thirteenth apostle in the upper room, next to Jesus, and the way he was relentlessly excluded by a deliberate and tenacious effort of will, things have been happening that I would have thought were no longer possible in the twentieth century. As far as the Church is concerned, I have become a black sheep because I have finally accepted what cannot be admitted, however convincing the proof: Jesus's transformation into Christ-God was an imposture. And also because I have discovered a hidden face to the personality of the first pope, and the manoeuvring for power at the origins of the Church. They won't let me carry on down this path: I'm now convinced that it was because he started down it that Andrei fell from the Rome express. I want to avenge his death, and only the truth will avenge it. Are you ready to come with me, all the way?”

Without hesitating, Leeland replied, in a hoarse voice:

“You want to avenge your dead friend, and I want to avenge my living friend, who is now reduced to shame and silence in my own abbey: he hasn't written to me for months. I want to avenge the way we have been spattered in mud, and the way something much too innocent to be understood by the men in the Vatican has been annihilated. Yes, I'm with you, Nil – at last we're back together again!”

Nil leant back in his chair and emptied his glass with a grimace. “I'm starting to drink like a cowboy!” he thought. Suddenly, he relaxed: once again he could share everything with his friend. Only action would allow them to escape being caught.

“I want to find that epistle. But I have a few questions about Lev Barjona: our meeting wasn't a matter of chance, it was deliberately arranged. Who fixed it, and why?”

“Lev is a friend, I trust him.”

“But he's a Jew, and he's been a member of Mossad. As he told us, the Israelis know the letter exists, and perhaps they even know what it contains, since Ygael Yadin read it and spoke of it before he died. Who else is in the know? It seems that the Vatican doesn't know that the epistle is somewhere within its walls. Why did Lev drop that item of information? A man like him never does anything lightly.”

“I have no idea. But how are you going to find a mere sheet of parchment, maybe jealously protected, or maybe simply gathering dust in some nook? The Vatican is huge, with all the different museums, the libraries, their annexes, the eaves and the basements containing an incredible jumble – from abandoned manuscripts in a cupboard to the copy of the Sputnik that Nikita Khrushchev gave John XXIII. Millions of barely catalogued objects. And this time you have nothing to guide you, not even a classification number.”

Nil got up and stretched.

“Lev Barjona, perhaps unwittingly, gave us a valuable clue. In order to make use of it, I have just one trump card to play: Breczinsky. That man is a human fortress, barricaded on every side: I have to find some means of breaking through, he's the only one who can help me. Tomorrow we'll go and work in the stacks as usual, and you will let me take the necessary steps.”

Nil was leaving the studio: Mukhtar took off his headphones and rewound the tapes. One was for Calfo. He slipped the other into an envelope that he would take to the Egyptian embassy. Thanks to the diplomatic bag, it would be in the hands of the Supreme Guide at the Al-Azhar University the following morning.

His lips pursed in disgust. Not only was the American in cahoots with Nil, but he was a queer. Neither of them deserved to live.

73

That same evening, Calfo called an extraordinary meeting of the Society of St Pius V. It would be brief, but events required that the Twelve demonstrate their total solidarity around their crucified Master.

The Rector glanced over at the twelfth apostle: his eyes modestly lowered under his cowl, Antonio was waiting for the session to begin. Calfo had given him the task of putting pressure on Breczinsky, and had pointed out the Pole's weak point: why hadn't the Spaniard come to report to him, as had been arranged? Might his trust in one of the twelve apostles be misplaced? This would be the first time that had ever happened.
He brushed away this disagreeable thought. Ever since his celebration, the night before, kneeling before Sonia transformed into a living icon, he had been afloat on a tide of euphoria. The Romanian girl had finally accepted all of his demands, keeping her nun's cornet on her delicate little head right until the end.

Emboldened by this success, he had, on sending her away, informed her that next time he would be organizing an even more suggestive act of worship, that would unite them on a very intimate level with the sacrifice of the Lord. When he explained to her the ritual that he wanted her to join him in, Sonia had turned pale, and then fled.

He wasn't worried: she'd be back, she had never refused him anything. This evening he needed to get through this meeting pretty quickly, so that he could return home where long and meticulous preparations needed to be done. He rose to his feet and cleared his throat.

“My brothers, the current mission is taking an unexpected and very satisfying turn. I've managed to get Lev Barjona, who is at present giving a series of concerts at the Academy of Santa Cecilia, to meet Father Nil. Actually, my intervention was superfluous: the Israeli intended to meet our monk in any event, which shows the extent to which Mossad too is interested in his research. In short, they've met, and in his conversations with the inoffensive intellectual, Lev casually dropped the information we had so long been looking for: the letter of the thirteenth apostle has not disappeared. There is indeed a copy in existence, and it is very probably in the Vatican.”

A quiver ran through the gathering, expressive of its stupefaction as well as its excitement. One of the Twelve raised his crossed forearms.

“How can that be possible? We suspected that a copy of that epistle had escaped our vigilance, but… in the Vatican!”

“We are here at the centre of Christendom, an immense web whose strands cover the whole planet. Everything ends up in the Vatican one day or another, including ancient manuscripts or texts discovered here or there: this is what must have happened in this case. Lev Barjona didn't give away this information for free: he must be hoping that it will arouse Father Nil's curiosity and lead him to this document, which the Jews covet as much as we do.”

“Brother Rector, is it necessary for us to run the risk of exhuming this letter? Oblivion has, as you know, always been the Church's most powerful weapon against the thirteenth apostle, oblivion alone has ensured that his pernicious testimony remained harmless. Isn't it better to prolong this salutary amnesia?”

The Rector seized this opportunity to remind the Eleven of the grandeur of their task. He solemnly extended his right hand, showing off the jasper of his ring.

“After the Council of Trent, St Pius V – the Dominican Antonio Ghislieri – was dismayed by the weakening of the Catholic Church, and did all in his power to save it from the shipwreck he sensed it was heading for. The most serious threat did not come from Luther's recent rebellion, but from an old rumour that even the Inquisition had not managed to stifle: the tomb containing Christ's bones existed and could be found somewhere in the deserts of the Near East. A lost epistle by a privileged witness of the Lord's last moments claimed that not only had Jesus not risen from the dead, but that his body had in fact been buried by the Essenes in that region. You know all this, don't you?”

The Eleven nodded.

“Before becoming Pope, Ghislieri had been Grand Inquisitor: he had learnt of the interrogations of the dissidents burnt alive for heresy, he had consulted certain minutes of the Templars' trial,
all documents that have now disappeared. He became convinced of the existence of Jesus's tomb, and realized that its discovery would mean the definitive end of the Church. It was then, in 1570, that he created our Society, to preserve the secret of the tomb.”

They knew this too. Sensing their impatience, the Rector lifted his ring, which shed a brief gleam in the light of the wall lamps.

“Ghislieri ordered this episcopal ring in the shape of a coffin to be cut from a very pure jasper. Since that time, its shape has reminded every rector – when he removes it from the finger of his dead predecessor – of the nature of our mission: to ensure that
no coffin
containing the bones of the Crucified of Jerusalem can ever be discovered.”

“But,” one of the brothers asked, “if the echo of the thirteenth apostle's letter has come down through the centuries, nothing proves that it indicates the exact location of the tomb. The desert is vast, and the sands have covered everything for ages!”

“Indeed, there was no risk of Jesus's tomb being discovered so long as the desert was crossed by nothing more than camels. But the conquest of space has placed at our disposal extraordinarily sophisticated means of research. If they've been able to detect traces of water on a distant planet like Mars, they can also these days pick out all the bones in the deserts of the Negev and Idumaea, even those covered by sand. This is something that Pope Ghislieri could not have imagined. If the existence of the tomb becomes public knowledge, hundreds of radar planes or space probes will start to comb the desert from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. The sudden emergence of space technology creates a new risk, one that we cannot afford to run. We need to get our hands on that abominable document, and quickly, since the Israelis are on the same track as we are.”

He devoutly raised the jasper coffin to his lips, before hiding his hands under the sleeves of his alb.

“This explosive document must be placed in the shelter of the casket opposite us. We need to find it, not only to place it out of reach of our enemies, but also to obtain, thanks to its presence here, financial resources that will enable us to fulfil our ambition: to stem the drift of the West. You know how the Templars managed to acquire their immense fortune; the relic that we venerate every Friday 13th reminds us of it. This fortune can become ours, and we shall use it to preserve the divine identity of Our Lord.”

“What do you have in mind, Brother Rector?”

“Father Nil has picked up the scent of what might be the right trail: let's leave him to follow it. I've reinforced the surveillance around him: if he succeeds, we'll be the first to know. And then…”

The Rector knew that he did not need to finish his sentence. “And then” had already happened thousands of times, in the cellars of the palaces of the Inquisition whose walls were drenched with pain, or on the stakes erected to light up Christendom all throughout its history. In the present case, only the practical details of this “and then” would change. Nil would not be burned in public – Andrei had not been.

74

The sun was caressing the flagstones on the courtyard of the Belvedere when Nil and Leeland entered it. Relieved that he had told Nil those things about his private life, the American had slipped back into his usual playful demeanour, and throughout their walk he had talked of nothing but their youthful student days in Rome. It was ten o'clock when they presented themselves at the door of the stacks.