The walk from the library back to the port district was nothing like far enough for Alberts to shake off his agitation. He carried on past his apartment, therefore, before cutting inland at Mercato and wandering around Piazza Garibaldi for a while until a 154 bus stopped close by and he realised how sore his feet were. The driver saw him running and waving and took pity, and fifteen minutes later, he was finally back home.
Yet tiredness didn’t settle him. He remained in turmoil. What a day! First the explosive implications of his Tertullian research and the potentially devastating ramifications for his beloved Church. Then his spat with D’Agostino and the drama over the opening of the safe. And, finally, seeing the scroll again for the first time since the afternoon of his arrival, when Lucia had afforded him a brief glance. Back then, it had felt an immense privilege, like standing beside the holy crib. But today it had been bathed in a very different light, almost as if the creature in that foam swaddling had been from the other place instead.
And what measures might a man be allowed to stop that?
But stop it how? That was the nub. Everything was happening so fast. Knowledge of it was leaking inexorably. Carmen Nero knew more than she’d let on, he was sure of it, as did Victor too. And never had he seen such naked ambition on a man’s face as on Taddeo Santoro’s when he’d contemplated the scroll. The man would push on with decipherment and excavation both. Threats hadn’t scared him off. Nor even the murder of his friend. Could anything then stop him? Anything short of…
He shook his head to clear it of that unthinkable notion. But what alternative was there? The cross was too heavy for him to bear by himself, that was the truth of it. He needed to share its weight. With a trembling hand, he called Rome and asked for his Cardinal. As ever, though, it was the Cardinal’s secretary Francisco who intercepted. ‘Yes?’ he asked sharply.
‘I need to speak to him,’ said Alberts tremulously. ‘I need to tell him what I’ve learned.’
‘I’m sorry. He’s busy right now.’
‘He’s always busy. How am I to—’
‘Put it in your report. He reads them closely, I assure you. If he has anything to suggest, he’ll let you know.’
‘But he never says anything. He gives me no guidance—’
‘I have to go now,’ said Francisco. ‘But, believe me, the Cardinal has great faith in you. He’s confident that you’ll do whatever is necessary to bring this troubling situation to a happy conclusion.’
‘No. Don’t go yet, I beg you. It’s too much for me. Ask him… Ask him please to take this cup away from me.’
‘But you yourself know how that passage continues, Monsignor. Let his will be done. Not yours.’
The phone went dead. Alberts stared at it a moment. He felt small, useless and overwhelmed. He went through to the kitchen. The knives were kept in a wooden block. He took out the longest, heaviest and sharpest. Almost out of curiosity, he placed its tip against his heart, then gripped its hilt tight in both hands. He closed his eyes and ordered himself to fall forward, to let the tiled floor do the work. But he couldn’t do it. He placed its blade to his throat instead, cold and sharp. One stab, that was all. How many times had he dreamed of it, the sweetness of that silence? But how many times had he baulked for lack of courage?
With a sigh, he put the knife back down. A kind of fatalistic numbness descended on him then, much as the Holy Spirit was supposed to feel. He knew then what he was he going to do that night. He knew it even though it appalled him. The decision was out of his hands. He went through to his bedroom, moved his chair over to the hanging cupboard. He brought down the steel lockbox and set it on his bed. He fished out his key, opened its lock, lifted its lid, and stared down in trepidation at its contents.
Yes. It was out of his hands.
Cesco hit heavy traffic on his way out to Herculaneum. So many of the cars he passed had heavily loaded roof racks or trailers that he came to suspect word of an evacuation had leaked, and these people were getting out ahead of the rush. Numerous pleasure boats were fleeing the town’s marina too, their sails glowing brightly from the low-dipping sun.
He parked outside the police station, then buzzed to be let in. The front desk alerted Valentina to his arrival, then sent him up two floors to Serious Crimes. Messana was deep in conference with Izzo. She showed him to a stand-alone computer in the basement, handed him Raff’s memory cards, excused herself with urgent business and left him to it. It puzzled him that she no longer wanted to go through the disks together, but he shrugged it off and settled in.
The chair kept rocking whenever he shifted his weight. He folded up a sheet of paper to set beneath its foot. The third memory card was blank, as if never used. He popped it back out. A different make from the others too. He bit his teeth together at the obvious implication. Messana had gone through the disks herself and had found something interesting too. So she’d kept that disk for herself, then had made up numbers with a new one.
He marched back upstairs to Serious Crimes. Its lights were off and its door locked. He asked next door. Messana had gone off with Romeo Izzo some twenty minutes earlier. He thought dark thoughts of her, then took out his phone to protest. But what was the point? She’d only deny it. And maybe he was wrong anyway. He returned downstairs and carried on, just in case. One of the disks was full of pictures of artefacts taken at a museum warehouse. He remembered the day well, an ill-fated experiment at shooting on-site rather than in the studio, only for it to prove too cramped and the light too poor. It had been early in his time with Raff, so he’d been trusted only to lug equipment and sit in the van while…
He frowned, stopped, went back a page. Yes. A broken funerary stele depicting the robed shoulder and bearded chin of a man with a long staff. He’d seen it recently, he was sure of it. Not that day at the warehouse or at the studio either. Where then? He enlarged it on screen then rocked back in his chair, the better to contemplate. And so it was that, when he finally realised, the answer so convulsed him that he had to grab the edge of the desk to stop from toppling backward.
Closing time arrived in Rare Books & Manuscripts. Victor and his assistants politely rousted Carmen and the other researchers from their places to collect their books and materials. The larger library would remain open a few hours yet, however, so she found herself a free berth to continue her research into Marcion, Tertullian and St Paul, adding ever more tabs to her browser until she had dozens open, each offering a slightly different angle or new lead.
She learned, for example, that the ten letters of St Paul that Marcion had included in his canon were widely accepted as authentic. But that the authorship of the ones that Marcion hadn’t included, yet which had made it into the New Testament all the same, was far less certain – not least because certain aspects of their theology so clashed with Paul’s undisputed works that they seemed written almost to counter them. She also came to understand better why Marcion’s belief in Docetism had obliged him to strip Jesus’s nativity and childhood from the Gospel of Luke; and why his disdain for Judaism had made him expunge most references to Jewish scripture.
She read up, too, on the Jewish school run by Gamaliel that St Paul had attended as a young man, and which had so clearly influenced his Christianity; and how his insistence on embracing gentiles in the new faith had led to its first great civil war. Its particular battlegrounds had been circumcision, cleanliness and the interpretation of Mosaic law. But the underlying conflict had been Christianity’s relationship to Judaism, the one carried on so fiercely by Marcion himself with his categorical rejection of both Jewish scripture and its God. And made particularly pertinent by wider events taking place in the ancient world at that same time, what with Simon Bar Kokhba inciting the Jewish people into their ill-fated revolt, leading to their brutal defeat and the final levelling of the Second Temple for one to Jupiter to be built in its place.
That truly had been a desecration.
The thought made her frown. The Olivet discourse had overstated Roman reprisals in 70 CE, but fitted almost perfectly the events of 136. Maybe Jesus had been a prophet after all. She sat back, gave herself up to contemplation. For her, history came in flavours. There was the history that one knew, from reading books, journals and primary sources. But there was a level beyond, a history that – for lack of a better word – one experienced. For Carmen, this was usually triggered by visiting a place or by holding an artefact in her hands, by letting her imagination take charge of her knowledge, transporting her, almost physically, back to the time in question. And she realised for the first time how terrifying Bar Kokhba’s defeat must have been for the Jewish people. How disorienting. Driven from their homes and homeland, their families slaughtered, their property and wealth all seized. And, to top it off, their culture and religion – the ways in which they’d made sense of the world – torn down, trodden into the dust, made to look worthless and absurd. What wailing there must have been. What sorrow and confusion. And desperation too. Desperation for a new way to make sense of the world, to regain their bearings and plot out a fresh course. And the feeling gradually settled on her that a whole new land lay hidden at the very periphery of her view. But, peer and squint though she might, she couldn’t quite make it out.