A Skeleton in God's Closet

by Paul L Maier

  Whether or not Rama was responsible, Gideon Ben-Yaakov continued to be the government’s chief liaison with the Rama staff. To say his relationship with Jon showed signs of strain was to understate, and the reason—obviously—was Shannon. For his part, Jon tried to stay out of Gideon’s way as much as possible, letting Austin Jennings handle most of their contacts. Early in July, though, he did run in to him at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, where he had taken the Paleography Panel to examine the titulus more closely. All cavern artifacts were now being stored there. The greetings Gideon exchanged with Jon were quite professional, if a little frosty.

  When Jon returned to Ramallah that night, Clive Brampton met him with happy news. “Guess what, Jon? Naomi said yes! We’re going to be married in October!”

  “Fabulous, Clive! I’m so happy for both of you!”

  “I’m only afraid that with our backgrounds, we’ll breed pots instead of kids!”

  “No trouble dating them if you do!” Jon laughed.

  After supper, he told Shannon the happy news and added, “I really like their plans, my love. What say we make it a foursome?”

  She gave him an incandescent smile, but said nothing.

  “No, on second thought, I don’t want to share our joy with anyone else on that magic day.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” she agreed.

  “When will it be, then? You know, you’ve never given me a clear ‘yes,’ Shannon!”

  She pulled his head down to plant a long, tender, tingling kiss. “That’s intentional, my darling. I want to keep you waiting, wondering, a little off-guard—the prince must fight for the affections of his lady fair, who is never to be taken for granted.”

  “Exquisite psychology, my dear. But terribly frus-trating.”

  “Smashing! Let’s keep it that way.”

  “Eventually, though, how does the concept of ‘Shannon Weber’ strike you?”

  “Oh, I had the answer to that months ago.”

  “Which is . . .”

  “If you can’t figure that out, I may have to reconsider!”

  He clasped her tightly, holding her locked inside his soul for some moments. At times, he reflected, hug-ging can be better than kissing, or even what can fol-low. “When, Shannon?” he finally asked, once again.

  “When the crisis is over—one way or the other. You’ll be hopelessly distracted until then, and I want you all to myself.”

  “All right, my darling. That does make some sense.”

  “Besides, now I don’t even know what sort of wedding I want. Traditional Christian? Or just a civil ceremony?”

  “Losing your faith?”

  “I . . . could be. How about you, Jon?”

  “Each passing day, it gets harder and harder to believe.”

  The “foursome” happened after all, though not in nuptial form. The two staff couples who were very much in love found rare happiness that pres-sured summer by escaping on weekends to the Mediterranean, since Clive had infected them all with a new hobby—marine archaeology. Piling scuba gear into the Land Rover, they made for Caesarea, where they dove down through crystal green waters and explored the huge jetties built by Herod the Great to enclose his magnificent harbor. On their latest scuba excursion, they also swam in the Mediterranean until sunset, and then lit a camp-fire to picnic along the beach.

  “I think I’ll transfer here after we’ve finished at Rama,” said Clive.

  Naomi tittered and said, “Some people think archaeology is only a matter of gluing cracked pots together. They should see us now!”

  “I knew you couldn’t get away for even half a day without thinking of your sacred ceramics,” Clive joshed.

  She playfully lunged for him and then chased him up the beach.

  “She is a very beautiful woman,” said Shannon. “I wish I had her legs. How come you didn’t fall in love with her instead, Jon?”

  “Who says I didn’t? She’d make some consolation prize if you turn me down!”

  She made a small fist and cuffed his shoulder.

  “Well, Shannon, it’s only—let’s see if I get it right—it’s only that ‘I want to keep you wondering, a little off-guard . . . never to be taken for granted’ . . .”

  “Monster!” She pinched his arm. “That’s okay. Gideon will have me back.”

  He laughed, embraced the lissome figure across the length of her body, and lavished her smooth, tanned skin with kisses. Suddenly the place and the circumstances recalled a poignant parallel. Andrea! His dear—forgotten?—Andrea. Some of the next kisses were in her memory. Shannon would never know. He only hoped that, somehow, she’d under-stand and forgive him if she had known.

  In late July, the Investigative Panel met inside the boardroom of the British School of Archaeology on the slopes of Mount Scopus in north Jerusalem. Since Jennings and Brampton were off scouting new sites, Jon represented the Rama staff. Henri Berthoud was at his creative best, unveiling a fresh scenario of fraud for the panel, but his latest effort failed to account for first-century human remains at the Rama cavern—if they were not authentic. He turned to Jon and asked, “Aren’t ancient bones something of a rarity in Israel?”

  “Not really,” he replied. “At Qumran, for example, de Vaux found a cemetery just east of the structures there. They excavated about forty of the graves, and found something like thirty males.”

  “Oh?” Glastonbury asked, his eyebrows arching. “Where are the bones now?”

  “All reburied, of course.”

  “Do we know that?”

  “Certainly. That’s standard operating procedure.” Jon paused for a moment, then added, “And our bones couldn’t have come from there. None of the Qumran skeletons had any ‘Christlike’ abrasions on their bones.”

  Glastonbury held up his plump hands. “Paddington, what did you find in your history of the site?”

  The James Bondian figure stirred in his seat and replied, “Well, we now know the ownership of the site as far back as 1810. Only two Arab families, connected by marriage, have owned the property through their descendants since then, and Kensington was able to buy it from the last generation in the turmoil following the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. Here’s a copy of the title from the Register of Deeds in Jerusalem.” He passed out several photocopies.

  “Then,” Paddington continued, “I made a list of all staff personnel in the Kensington and Jennings campaign annuals, including Arab labor chiefs, and interviewed as many as remained in Israel or Jordan. The rest I sent on to you, Reginald. I trust you chased them down?”

  “Yes, most of them. But continue.”

  “Well, I have several hundred pages of transcript from the interviews.” He opened a fat file. “Shall I read them?”

  “Good Lord, no!” Glastonbury chortled. “Just tell us where you found the flaw, the secret strange exception, the clue. Then we can happily solve this mystery—if it is a mystery—and all go home.”

  Paddington looked up wearily and said, “I didn’t find any. It all bears out pretty well what’s in the annuals, allowing for slight differences due, most likely, to the fallibility of human memory . . . And what did you find, Reginald?”

  “Oh, a little more. I focused on the principal archaeologists—all British—with one strange exception—that American fellow—what was his name? Weavil? Weaver? Oh, yes, Weber . . . Jonathan Weber!”

  As the panel duly snickered, Jon said, “Shall I excuse myself?”

  “No, stay, stay! Because you did it, you see.” Silence blanketed the boardroom. Glastonbury’s eyes bored in on Jon, as he continued. “One inter-national best seller wasn’t enough for you. You also had to set up a second one, which will expose to the world how you brought it all off!” Glastonbury was not smiling.

  Several panel members looked shocked. Jon actually started to squirm.

  A vast grin broke across Glastonbury’s face and his jowls shook with laughter. “I jest, you fools! We’ve come to a miserable pass indeed if we lose our sense o
f humor! No, Jonathan, my flight to the ‘colonies’ to check your credentials was quite useless indeed. They’re not only frightfully impressive, but clean as the proverbial hound’s tooth . . . which I’ve always thought a rather dismal expression, not? Imagine using that phrase in the case of the Baskervilles! But I digress—”

  “You do indeed, Reginald,” said Paddington. “Sign of dotage. Have you considered putting out to pasture?”

  The chairman chuckled. “Yes, this is the case that could well force my retirement! But seriously, Scotland Yard now has a complete file on Lord Kensington, Professor Jennings, Clive Brampton, Noel Nottingham, and several other English archaeologists and scholars associated with the Rama dig in various seasons. Did we find motives, you’d like to know. Well, perhaps, but only very shallow ones. Kensington, if you can keep this confidential, was no Puritan moralist, let me tell you. With a wife and children back in Bristol, he had a contessa in Rome and some courtesan in Cairo to keep him occupied, and he was known to complain about the moral strictures of the established Church. But was that enough to have him engineer a hoax of this magnitude? One doubts.

  “Now, Austin Balfour Jennings came from an Anglican parsonage in Ulster. Parents English on both sides, but they loved Northern Ireland and moved there. Jennings deeply admired his father, who was killed in a traffic accident just before retiring. He then studied for the ministry at Oxford, but got sidetracked into Semitics and archaeology, where he performed so brilliantly that they invited him onto the faculty. Between stints in the classroom, he dug with Roland de Vaux at Qumran and then with Kensington at Rama. Just before Kensington died in ’67, Jennings met a Catholic girl from Drogheda—that’s on the Irish east coast. They married and had Shannon, who was born in 1974. While still a baby, her mother died, leaving Jennings despondent for the next year or so.”

  “What did she die of?” asked Jon. He knew Shannon’s version, and was only checking out Scotland Yard’s.

  “Pneumonia. After that, Jennings conducted digs at Bethel and Shiloh before returning to Rama. Those are the high points. Of course, we have much more detail in the files.”

  “Any of the details give Jennings a motive?” Paddington probed. “Father died . . . wife died. Maybe he was mad at God. You said he was despondent.”

  Jon was getting perturbed, and said, “Pretty flimsy motives for fraud on this huge a scale! Jennings just isn’t the charlatan type. A true hoaxer would have dis-guised his grief. Jennings has talked freely about it.”

  Glastonbury went on to open the Brampton and Nottingham files. Both were secularists, but hardly militant sorts, who wanted to kill Christianity. Next, he reached for the files of those scholars who had worked with Kensington or Jennings in Israel. Motives here were weak or nonexistent, but one name was well-known in archaeological circles—Gladwin Dunstable, of the University of London Institute of Archaeology. Jon knew him as “the British Sandy McHugh.”

  After presenting his vitae, Glastonbury continued, “Dunstable dug with Jennings at Shiloh in ’72. Now, of course, he runs the great analysis labs in London. What a memory that man has! When I interviewed him, he all but gave me details on what Jennings had for breakfast each morning! He’s the one who introduced Jennings to radiocarbon dating. So when Dunstable left for the season and planned to see Italy on the way back to England, Jennings suggested he send him something from Pompeii so that he could test the new Weizmann lab at Rehovot to see how close they came to AD 79.”

  “Clever idea,” commented Paddington. “What did he send?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest. In any case, that’s our last name, my colleagues. Do any of you find anything amiss? Do you see any motives? Any flaws? Clues? Whatever?”

  No one raised his pencil. Or hand. Or eyebrow.

  “Well, then, homework for you all!” said the chairman. “We’re copying every page in each of your files, and you will all read the fine work being done by your colleagues. Then we’ll compare notes and have a final session in September. Meanwhile, ferret out anything else you can. Anything.”

  As they stood up to leave, Glastonbury put an arm across Jon’s shoulders and said, “You continue digging in your way. We’ll continue digging in ours.”

  For Jon, it was simply fun talking with Naomi Sharon across the lunch table at the dig. He hoped everyone understood that, especially Shannon and Clive. Naomi’s breathtaking appearance was almost a disadvantage, since people usually assumed the woman couldn’t possibly have a brilliant mind with such an exterior, as though brains and beauty were mutually exclusive. The Rama staff knew better, of course, and Jon often consulted Naomi for the Jewish viewpoint on some aspect of the crisis, since she read widely beyond her specialty in ceramics.

  One noon toward the end of summer, they were sit-ting apart from the group in the mess tent when Jon posed a startling question. “Put the case, Naomi, first, that our finds prove absolutely authentic; second, that the liberal interpretation of a purely spiritual resurrection for Jesus becomes the norm for Christianity as a result; but put the case, third, that instead of being accepted, there is instead a vast rejection and a tune-out of the Christian faith in general. Now, if all this happens, chart the religious future of our planet.”

  Naomi nearly choked on the pear she had been munching. “Well, Jon,” she recovered, “that sounds like a one-question doctoral exam even the great Hillel would have been hard pressed to answer!”

  “Try Nostradamus. He could see into the future.” Jon winked.

  “I hate to say this, Jon, but there may be more truth to that third possibility than you realize. Most people on earth, including believers, are very material, very tangible sorts. They have trouble with abstractions, and think only in the concrete. A spiritual-only hereafter may appeal to the Platonists—a tiny group—while leaving the masses untouched. Do you know what’s boosted your Christianity into the world’s highest religious orbit?”

  “The Resurrection?”

  “Exactly. Its teachings about ‘the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.’ No eschatology touches yours. What, after all, does any dying person want but the assurance that death is not the end, but rather the beginning of something better? And not ‘better’ in the abstract. Take away the Resurrection, and you lose probably 80 to 90 percent of your membership.”

  Jon nodded. “I always had my doubts that the common believer would ever accept the ‘mature faith’ being urged by our Christian left. So, now we’re beyond hypothesis three. The church loses three-quarters of its members. Who, if anyone, picks them up?”

  “Well,” she peered into her water glass as if it were a crystal ball, “I see Islam making giant strides—not by picking up your ex-Christians, but by winning the undecided Third World, since it will no longer have the powerful competition of Christianity.” She said nothing more.

  “That’s too bad, Naomi. I wish it could’ve been Judaism instead. Along with Christianity, it’s the only other faith with rock-solid historical credentials.”

  “Judaism could benefit,” she replied, slowly. “But only if it got its act together and learned a few lessons from the Christians about missions and evangelism. We have a resurrection, too, you know.”

  “As well as your very own country, no less!”

  At that moment, Shannon walked over and said, playfully, “I’ve been watching you two. You’re not trying to steal my man, now, are you, Naomi?”

  “Of course!” she laughed. “Aren’t all the girls?”

  That night, Shannon was a little less playful when she asked, “What were you discussing so intently with Naomi this afternoon, Jon?”

  When he told her, she seemed dissatisfied. “Sure, sure, Jon!” she said. “You and this . . . gorgeous sabra were discussing the ‘spiritual future’ of humanity!”

  “But we were, Shannon! It was all purely platonic.”

  “Exactly—play for you, tonic for her!”

  He chuckled, but she continued to frown.

  Words were exc
hanged. Dialogue grew heated. Voices were raised. Accusations flew. Emotions replaced logic. Her Irish temper flared. His Germanic temperament kindled. In a great huff, they stalked off to their rooms that night, slamming the doors behind them. It was a new, unwelcome milestone in their relationship—their first fight. Both spent a bad, restless night.

  Something about the beauty and sobriety of day-light seems to bring resolution to life’s problems. Jon and Shannon were back in each other’s arms just after breakfast, confessing that they’d behaved at the maturity levels of high-school sophomores.

  Rama was not so easily resolved. It was now late September, when Jon should have returned to Harvard, but the university granted him extended leave. All Phase III panels had completed their tasks except for Archaeology and Investigation, the former because all of Rama had not yet been uncovered, the latter because Glastonbury refused to throw in the towel. The international scholars’ congress, however, meeting in plenary session in Jerusalem, felt the task was virtually completed, since the last digging to be done at Rama was nowhere near the cavern area, and Glastonbury had nothing fresh to offer. He was only a meticulous old bloodhound who, in fine Scotland Yard tradition, never closed a file on any case so long as the culprit had not been found. The probability that there was no culprit in this case had never really registered with Glastonbury. Paddington said as much at their final meeting, wishing him a happy retirement.

  The Phase III findings were summarized in a fat, 585-page manual that represented only the epitome of the total research. The whole body would publish out to a dozen volumes. Rama was now the most meticulously researched archaeological site in history.

  Jennings and Jon returned to Ramallah after the final session of the scholars’ congress in Jerusalem, the ponderous typescripts of the epitome in hand. Shannon asked what they contained. “I’ll tell you after supper, dear,” said her father.

  After supper, however, Jennings said he was too tired. “Why don’t you ask Jonathan instead?”