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That was his
single best hope: that the scroll had been in the urn the thieves had broken,
that it had been damaged to the point where its remnants were little more than
an incoherent jumble of disjointed sentences.

Kesev turned
and was so startled by the sight of her that he nearly tumbled backward off the
ledge.

Robed and wimpled
exactly as she had been in life, she stood near the rubble that blocked the
entrance to the Resting Place and stared at him. Kesev waited for her to speak,
as she had spoken to him many times in the past, but she said nothing, merely
stared at him a moment, then faded from view.

So many years,
so
many
years since she had shown herself here. Kesev had heard reports
from all over the world of her appearances, but so long since she had graced
this spot with her presence.

Why now, just
after the scroll had been pilfered? What did this mean?

Kesev stood on
the precipice and trembled. Something was happening. A wheel had been set in
motion tonight. He could almost feel it turning. Where was it taking him?

Where was it taking the world?

I approached the Essenes at Qumran but they tried to stone me. I
fled farther south wandering
the west
shore of the sea of Lot. Perhaps Massada would have me. Surely they would
welcome one of my station. Or perhaps I would have to push farther south to
Zohar.

I do not know where to go. And I am alone in Creation.

from the Glass scroll

Rockefeller Museum translation

1995

Fall

2

Jerusalem

The poor man
looked as if he were going to cry.

"You . . .
you're sure?"

Harold Gold
watched Professor Pearlman nod sagely as they sat in the professor's office in
the manuscript department of the Rockefeller Archeological Museum and gave Mr.
Glass the bad news.

Richard Glass
was American, balding, and very fat--a good hundred pounds overweight. He
described himself as a tourist--a frequent visitor to Israel who owned a condo
in Tel Aviv. Last month he'd brought in a scroll he said he'd purchased at a
street bazaar in the Arab Quarter and asked if its antiquity could be verified.

"I'm
afraid so, Mr. Glass." Pearlman stroked his graying goatee. "A
gloriously skillful fake, but a fake nevertheless."

"But you
said--"

"The
parchment itself is first century--we stand by that. No question about it. And
the ink contains the dyes and minerals in the exact proportions used by first
century scribes."

The first thing
the department had done was date the parchment. Once that was ballparked in the
two-thousand-year-old mark, they'd translated it. That was when people had
begun to get excited.
Very
excited.

"Then
what--?"

'The writing
itself, Mr. Glass. Our carbon dating tests--and believe me, we've repeated the
dating numerous times--all yield the same result: The words were placed on the
parchment within the past two or three years."

Mr. Glass's
eyes bulged.
"Two three
--/ My God, what an idiot I am!"

"Not at
all, not at all," Professor Pearlman said. "It had us fooled too.
It's a
very
skillful job. And I assure you, Mr. Glass, you cannot be
more disappointed than we by these findings."

Amen to that,
Harold thought. He'd been in a state of euphoria for the past month, thanking
God for his luck. Imagine, being here on sabbatical from N.Y.U. when the
manuscript department receives an item that could make the Dead Sea scrolls
look like lists of old matzoh recipes. When he'd read the translation he'd
suspected it might be too explosive to be true, but he'd gone on hoping . . .
hoping . . .

Until the
dating on the ink had come in.

Harold leaned
forward. "That's why we're very interested in where you got it. Whoever
forged this scroll really knows his stuff."

He watched
Glass drum his fingers on his thigh, carefully weighing the decision. No one in
the department believed for a moment that Richard Glass had picked up something
like this at a street stall. Harold knew the type: a wealthy collector, buying
objects here and sneaking them back to the states to a mini-museum in his home.
He also knew if Glass named his true source he might precipitate an
investigation of other purchases he'd made on the antiquities black market, and
his shipments home would be subject to close scrutiny from here on in. No
serious collector could risk that.

"We're not
interested in legalities here, Mr. Glass," Professor Pearlman assured him.
"We'd simply like to interview your source, learn
his
sources."

Harold grinned.
"I think most of us would like to shake his hand."

No lie there.
Undoubtedly the forger possessed some sort of native genius. The scroll Glass
had presented was written
on
two-thousand-year-old parchment in ink identical to the type used in those
days. The forger had used an Aramaic form of Hebrew enriched with Greek and
Latin influences--much like the
Mishna,
the earlier part of the
Talmud--and had created a narrative that alternated between first and third
person, supposedly written by a desert outcast, a hermit but obviously a
well-educated one, living in the hills somewhere west of the Dead Sea. But the
events he described . . . if they'd been true and verifiable, what a storm they
would have caused.

Perhaps that
was the forger's whole purpose: controversy. The money from the sale to someone
like Glass was a lagniappe. The real motive was the turmoil that would have
arisen had they not been able to disprove the scroll's authenticity. The forger
could have sat back and watched and smiled and said,
I caused all this.

After a
seemingly interminable wait, Glass shook his head.

"I don't
know the forger. I can't even find the stall where I bought it--and believe me,
I've searched high and low for it. So I can't help you find the creator of this
piece of junk."

"It's not
junk," Pearlman said. He slid the wooden box containing the scroll across
the desktop toward Glass. "In its own way, it's a work of art."

Glass made a
face and lumbered to his feet.

"Then hang
it on
your
wall. I want nothing further to do with it. It only reminds
me of all the money I wasted." He took the box and looked around.
"Where's your trash."

"You can't
be serious!" Harold said.

Glass turned to
him. "You want it?"

"Well,
I--"

He shoved the
box into Harold's hands. "Here. It's yours."

With that he
turned and waddled from the office.

Professor
Pearlman looked at Harold over the tops of his glasses. "Well, Harold.
Looks like you're the proud owner of a genuine fake first century scroll. It'll
make a nice curiosity back at N.Y.U."

Harold gazed
down at the box in his hands. "Or a unique gift for an old friend."

"A
colleague?"

"Believe
it or not, a Catholic priest. He's something of an authority on the early Christians.
He's read just about everything ever written on the Jerusalem Church."

Pearlman's
brown eyes sparkled. "I'll bet he's never read anything like that."

"That's
for sure." Harold almost laughed aloud in anticipation of Father Dan
Fitzpatrick's reaction to this little gift. "I know he'll get a real kick
out of this."

I despaired.

The Lord oppressed me, my
fellow men oppressed me, the very
air oppressed me. Perhaps the only fitting place for me was in Sodom or
Gomorrah, cities of the dead, hidden beneath the lifeless waves
.
I threw myself into the salty water
but
1 could not drown.

Even the sea will not have me!

from the
Glass scroll

Rockefeller Museum translation

1996

3

Manhattan

Father
Daniel Fitzpatrick stopped in front of the Bank of New York Building, turned to
the ragged army that had followed him up from the Lower East Side, and raised
his hands.

"All right, everybody," he called to the group.
"Let's stop here for a sec and organize ourselves."

Most of them stopped on command, but some of the less alert--and
there were more than a few of those--kept right on walking and had to be pulled
back by their neighbors.

Father Dan
stepped up on the marble base of a sculpture that looked like a pair of
six-foot charcoal bagels locked in a passionate embrace and inspected the ranks
of his troops.

Even if we turn
back now, he thought, even if we don't do another thing tonight, we'll have
made a point.

Already they'd
garnered more than their share of attention. During the course of their long
trek uptown from Tompkins Square Park they'd earned themselves a police escort,
a slew of reporters and photographers, and even an
Eyewitness News
van
complete with minicam and blow-dried news personality.

Why not? This
was news, a mild spring evening, and a fabulous photo op to boot. A small army
of chanting, sign-carrying homeless marching up Park Avenue, around and through
the Met Life and Helmsley Buildings, to the Waldorf--the contrast of their
unkempt hair, shambling
gaits, and dirty
clothes against the backdrop of luxury hotels and pristine office buildings was
irresistible.

As Dan raised
his hands again and waited for his followers' attention, he noticed all the
camera lenses coming to bear on him like the merciless eyes of a pack of hungry
wolves. He was well aware of the media's love of radical priests, so he'd made
sure he was in uniform tonight: cassock, Roman collar, oversize crucifix slung
around his neck. The works. He was well aware too of how his own
appearance--clean-cut sandy hair, slim, athletic build, younger looking than his
thirty-two years--jibed with that of his followers, and he played that up to
maximum effect. He looked decent, intelligent, dedicated--all true, he hoped--
and most of all,
accessible.
The reporters would be fighting to
interview him during and after the demonstration.

And as far as
Dan was concerned, that was what this little jaunt to the Waldorf was all
about: communication. He hated the spotlight. He much preferred to keep a low
profile and let others have center stage. But no one else was interested in
this little drama, so Dan had found himself pushed into a leading role.
Media-grabbing was not his thing, but somebody had to get across the message
that these people needed help, that they couldn't be swept under the rug by the
presidential wannabe appearing at the Waldorf tonight.

That wannabe
was Senator Arthur Crenshaw from California, and this high-profile fund raiser
was a golden opportunity to confront the senator on his radical proposal to
solve the homeless problem. Normally Dan wouldn't have given a second thought
to a crazy plan like Crenshaw's, but the way it had taken hold with the public
was frightening.

Camps.

Of course Crenshaw didn't call them camps. The word might
elicit visions of concentration camps. He called them "domiciles."
Why have a hundred programs scattered all over the country? Senator Crenshaw
said. All that duplication of effort and expense could be eliminated by
gathering
up the homeless and putting them in
special facilities to be built on government lands. Once there, families would
be fed and sheltered together, with the children attending schools set up just
for them; all adults would receive free training for gainful employment; and
those who were sick or addicted or mentally ill would receive the care they
needed to make them productive citizens again.

The
public--especially the urban-dwelling public-- seemed to be going for the
Domicile Plan in a big way, and as a result the concept was gaining support
from both parties. Dan could understand the attraction of getting the homeless
out of sight while balming one's conscience with the knowledge they were being
cared for as they were retooled for productivity, but he found the whole idea
unsettling. The domiciles
did
sound like concentration camps, or
detention camps, or at the very least, gilt-edged prisons, and he found that
frightening. So would many of the homeless folks he knew--and Dan knew plenty.