by James Becker
But Puente’s face lit up as he eagerly scanned the object.
“What is it?” Angela asked.
The Spaniard glanced up at her, then resumed his scrutiny of the diptych. “As I said, it may be years before we’re certain of their age and authenticity, but to me this appears to be a genuine first-century relic. It looks like a codex accepti et expensi.
That,” he went on, glancing at Bronson, “was what the Romans called their records of payments and expenses. A kind of receipt book,” he added.
“Is that all?” Bronson asked, feeling a stab of disappointment.
Puente shook his head, his eyes bright with excitement. “A receipt book makes for pretty dull reading, usually,” he said, “but this one’s rather different. It appears to be a list of payments—quite substantial payments, in fact—made by the Emperor Nero himself to two men over a period of several years. The recipients aren’t named, but they have signed their initials against each amount. The initials they’ve used are
‘SBJ’ and ‘SQVET.’ Do they mean anything to you?”
Bronson shook his head, but Angela nodded, her face pale. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about. I think ‘SBJ’ was ‘Simon ben Jonah’ and ‘SQVET’ was ‘Saul quisnam venit ex Tarsus,’ or ‘Saul who came from Tarsus.’ ”
“Who’s rather better known to us today,” Puente remarked, “as St. Paul.”
“Hang on,” Bronson interrupted. “That Italian told us the scroll we found in the skyphos was written by someone who signed himself ‘SQVET.’ Are you saying that was St. Paul?”
“I . . . I think so,” Angela replied, her face pale.
“So who’s ‘Simon ben Jonah’?”
“Well,” she said, almost reluctantly, “it could be St. Peter.” She turned to Puente. “Is it genuine?”
“It’s difficult to say for certain,” Puente replied. Bronson noticed his hands were shaking. “All three of these relics could be fakes. Very early, and very good, first-century fakes, but fakes nevertheless. But if they are genuine, they could relate directly to the bodies in the tomb.”
“How?” Bronson asked.
“You found two bodies,” Puente stated, “one beheaded, and the other crucified. The very early history of Christianity is incomplete and often contradictory, and little is known about the fate of some of the early saints. However, St. Peter is believed to have been martyred in Rome by Nero in about A.D. sixty-three. The date’s uncertain, but the manner of his death is believed to have been by crucifixion—upside-down, apparently—as he didn’t feel worthy enough to occupy the same position on the cross as Jesus.”
“But even I know that the bones of St. Peter have been found in Rome,” Bronson interrupted.
Puente smiled briefly. “What people know is often very different from the truth. But you’re quite right. The remains of St. Peter have been found in Rome—at least twice, in fact.
“In 1950 the Vatican announced that bones had been found in a crypt underneath the high altar of the Basilica of St. Peter, and conclusively identified them as those of the saint. But pathologists later identified the remains as parts of the skeletons of two different men, one much younger than the other, the bones of a woman plus bones belonging to a pig, a chicken and a horse.
“You might think, after such an embarrassing fiasco, that the Vatican would be more cautious about making such claims, but a few years later yet another group of bones was found in more or less the same area. These, too, were confidently proclaimed by the Vatican to be the mortal remains of this apostle. Another one of his tombs has been found in Jerusalem.
“The point is that nobody knows much about St. Peter, mainly because he only appears within the pages of the New Testament, and no contemporary writings mention him at all. Despite that, he’s generally regarded by the Roman Catholic Church as the first pope. He was the son of a man named John or Jonah, hence his biblical name of Simon ben Jonah or Simon bar Jonah, but he was also known as Peter, Simon, Simon Peter, Simeon, Cephas, Kepha and, sometimes, as ‘the fisherman’ or the ‘fisher of men.’ ”
Puente looked at Angela and Chris steadily. “No one actually knows if St. Peter ever lived. And if he did, nobody knows where his body was buried, or whether his remains have survived.”
He spread his hands. “Until today, that is.”
27
I
In the café down the street, Verrochio nudged his companion and pointed as Gregori Mandino and Rogan got out of a car on the north side of the Carrer de Valencia.
“And about time, too,” Perini said. He stood up, tossed a ten-euro note onto the table to cover the cost of their last few drinks, and walked away from the café.
“Well?” Mandino demanded, as Perini stopped beside him.
“They’re both inside the museum,” Perini replied. “They arrived about three-quarters of an hour ago. Bronson was carrying a black leather case.”
The four men crossed the road and entered the museum together.
“So what you and Angela are saying is that we found the last resting place of St.
Peter, and that one of the skeletons—the one that had been crucified—was his. Is that correct?”
Puente shook his head helplessly at Bronson’s question. “I’m a Catholic,” he said,
“and I’ve always accepted the teachings of the Church. I know there’s been confusion about the bones they found in Rome, but I’ve always assumed that the apostle’s remains—if they still exist—would be found somewhere in the city.” He looked down at the diptych, then up again at Bronson. “Now, I’m not so sure.”
“So is that the secret—the lie?” Bronson asked. “Is that what the Italian meant? That St. Peter’s bones were not buried somewhere in Rome?”
“No,” Puente said decisively. “Neither the existence nor the location of the bones would make any real difference to the Church. He must have been talking about something else.”
“What about the second body?” Bronson demanded. “You’re not going to tell me that was St. Paul?”
“It’s at least possible. Again, it’s not known exactly when he died, but it’s almost certain he was executed on Nero’s orders in A.D. sixty-four or sixty-seven.”
“Paul was a Roman citizen,” Angela added, “and so he couldn’t have been crucified.
Beheading would be the obvious method of choice, and that does seem to fit with the bodies we found.”
“But why would Nero have been paying these two men money? And why would he then have had them both killed?”
“That,” Puente said, “is the nub of the matter. Perhaps the second diptych or the scroll will provide some answers.”
Tenderly, he closed the first diptych and placed it, together with the fragments of linum, in a cardboard box on the table. He reached for the second tablet and repeated the process of opening it, again taking photographs at every step.
“Now this,” he said, when the relic was open on the table in front of him, “is different. This appears to be a confidential order, issued by Nero himself, giving specific instructions to Saul of Tarsus—he was also sometimes known as ‘the Jew from Cilicia.’ It’s signed ‘SQVET,’ so presumably Paul accepted the assignment.”
Puente sat back in his chair and rubbed his face with his hands. “This is unbelievable,” he muttered.
“Take a look at the scroll, Josep,” Angela suggested quietly. “That’s what frightened me.”
Puente moved the diptych to one side, picked up the small scroll and carefully unraveled it. He moved the magnifier over the text to begin translating the characters.
When he finished, he looked up at Angela, his face as pale as hers. “What do you think this means?” he asked.
“I only read the first few lines, but it referred to the ‘Tomb of Christianity,’ which held the bones of ‘the convert’ and ‘the fisherman.’ ”
Puente nodded. “This scroll,” he said, “was apparently written by a Roman named Marcus Asinius Marcellus.”
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br /> “We worked out that he was acting as Nero’s agent in some secret operation,”
Bronson said.
“Exactly,” Puente replied. “From what I’ve read here, it looks to me as if he was pressured into acting by the Emperor—”
“That makes sense,” Bronson interrupted. “We think Nero saved him from execution when he was involved in a plot to forge a will.”
“Well, according to the scroll,” Puente said, in a voice that was far from steady, “the author states explicitly that Christianity was a sham, nothing more than a cult started by Nero to serve his own purposes, and based on a handful of lies, and that these two men—the men we now know as St. Peter and St. Paul—were in the pay of the Romans.”
II
“Check the whole building,” Mandino instructed Rogan. “Start with the roof terrace and work your way down. I’ll stay on the ground floor in case they’re somewhere here. When you see Bronson and Lewis, leave Perini and Verrochio to cover them, and come and fetch me.”
“Understood.”
Rogan led the way up to the deserted roof terrace and worked his way back down, checking each level carefully.
“No sign of them, capo, ” he reported, when he returned to the ground floor. “Could they have slipped away somehow?”
“Not through the front entrance,” Perini answered. “We were both watching it carefully. They definitely didn’t come out again.”
“There’s a basement with a private library,” Mandino told them, checking a museum information leaflet. “They must be down there. Let’s go.”
It was almost closing time as Mandino led the way toward the basement entrance.
As they approached, a guard came over to them, raising his hand to stop them.
“Take him, Perini,” Mandino murmured, as the man walked toward them, “but do it quietly, then lock the doors. We don’t want any interruptions.”
Perini drew his pistol and jammed it into the man’s stomach.
“Verrochio,” Mandino said, turning away, “take the receptionist. Rogan, secure the shop.”
Under the silent pressure of Perini’s Glock, the guard walked over to the main doors, which he closed and locked. Verrochio escorted the receptionist over to the museum shop, the sight of his pistol ensuring her silent cooperation. Two late visitors and the shop assistant stood quaking at the far end of the shop, their arms in the air, while Rogan covered the three of them. Perini produced a handful of plastic cable ties and handed them to Verrochio, who expertly tied up all five people, making them sit on the floor and lashing their hands behind their backs and tying their ankles together.
“There’s hardly any money in the till,” the assistant said, her voice quavering.
“We’re not interested in the takings,” Perini told her. “Keep quiet—that means no shouting for help—and you won’t be harmed. If any of you yell out, I’ll shoot. And I don’t care who gets hurt. Do you understand?”
All five nodded vigorously.
Josep Puente had always taken pride in his faith. He was a Roman Catholic, born and raised. He attended mass every Sunday. But what he’d read that afternoon in the two diptychs and the scroll had turned his world upside down. And he really didn’t know what he should do about it. He did know that the three objects—whether elaborate and convincing forgeries or genuine relics—were probably the most important ancient documents that he, or anyone else, would ever see.
When they heard the sound of approaching footsteps, none of them paid much attention. Then a man stepped through the doorway, flanked by three others, each holding a pistol.
“So, Lewis, we meet again,” Mandino said, his voice cutting through the silence.
“And where’s Bronson?”
For several seconds nobody said a word. Angela and Puente were sitting on opposite sides of the library table, the scroll and the diptychs in front of them.
Bronson was out of sight, walking between the library shelves. The moment he heard Mandino speak, he drew the Browning pistol and crept back toward the center of the room.
He risked a quick glance around a freestanding bookcase to check exactly where the intruders were, then took four rapid strides across the room. Two of the gunmen saw him, but before they could react he’d cocked the Browning—the metallic sound unnaturally loud in the tomb-like silence—seized the back of Mandino’s collar with his left hand and placed the barrel of the pistol firmly against his head. Bronson pulled the man backward, away from his armed companions, the pistol never wavering.
“It’s time,” Bronson said, “to find out what the hell’s going on, starting with why you’re here, Mandino.”
He felt the man give a start of surprise.
“Yes, I know exactly who you are,” Bronson said. “Tell your men to lower their weapons, otherwise the Rome family of the Cosa Nostra is going to be looking for a new capofamiglia. ”
“The bodyguard, I suppose?” Mandino’s voice was surprisingly calm. “Put your weapons away,” he told his men, then turned his head slightly toward Bronson. “I’ll tell you what I know, but it will take some time.”
“I’m not in any particular hurry,” Bronson said. “Angela, can you bring a couple of chairs over here? Put one behind the other, back to back.”
Bronson pushed Mandino onto the front chair, and he sat down on the one behind, resting the muzzle of the Hi-Power on the chair back, so that it was just touching his captive’s neck. Rogan and the other two men took seats between Mandino and the table where Angela and Puente were sitting.
“This story started,” Mandino said, “in first-century Rome, but the Vatican’s involvement only began in the seventh century. I’m nothing to do with the Church, but my organization—the Cosa Nostra—was contracted to resolve this problem on its behalf. The Mafia and the Vatican are two of the longest-lived organizations in Italy, and we’ve had a mutually beneficial relationship for years.”
“Why don’t I find that surprising?” Bronson murmured.
“In the first century A.D., the Romans had been fighting the Jews for decades, and the constant military campaigns were weakening the empire. Rather than initiate a massive military response, Emperor Nero decided to create a new religion, based on one of the dozens of messiahs who were then wandering about the Middle East. He chose a Roman citizen called Saul of Tarsus as his paid agent. Together they decided that a minor prophet and self-proclaimed messiah named Jesus, who had died in obscurity somewhere in Europe a few years earlier after attracting a small following in Judea, was ideal. Nero and Saul concocted a plan that would allow Saul to hijack the fledgling religion for his own purposes.
“Saul would first achieve a reputation as a persecutor of Christians, as the followers of Jesus were becoming known, and then undergo a spiritual ‘revelation’ that would turn him from persecutor into apostle. This would allow Saul to insinuate himself into a position of power and leadership, and he would then direct the followers—mainly Jews, of course—into a path of peaceful cooperation with the Roman occupying forces. He would tell them to ‘turn the other cheek,’ ‘render unto Caesar’
and so on.
“In order to achieve this fairly quickly, Saul needed to ‘talk up’ Jesus into far more than he ever was in real life. He decided that the obvious option was to portray him as the son of God. He concocted a variety of stories about him, starting with the virgin birth and finishing with him rising from the dead, and proclaimed these to be the absolute truth.
“To help him spread the word, he recruited a man named Simon ben Jonah—a weak and gullible man—who had known Jesus personally, but had regarded him as nothing more than just another prophet. Simon—who later became much better known as St. Peter—also entered Nero’s employment, but toward the end of his life he began to believe his own stories. A third man—Joseph, son of Matthias, better known as Flavius Josephus—later joined them, but as far as we know he was a true believer. All three men preached Saul’s version of events, attempting to recruit Jews w
ho, because of their teachings as Jesus’s ‘disciples,’ had become peace-loving people who no longer wished to fight the Romans.”
“Are you seriously trying to tell us that Nero founded Christianity as nothing more than a device to keep the Jews quiet?” Angela whispered.
“That’s precisely what I’m telling you. In the seventh century A.D., Pope Vitalian found a draft of a speech Nero never gave to the Roman Senate. It explained in detail exactly how Christianity began, and that it was an idea suggested by Nero himself.
Pope Vitalian was appalled at what he read and began what would be a lifelong search for any other documents that might support or—hopefully—repudiate this horrific claim.”
“And he found something,” Bronson suggested.
“Exactly. In a bundle of uncataloged ancient texts he found a scroll that turned out to be a copy of what Vatican insiders began calling the Exomologesis. The name Vitalian gave to this document was the Exomologesis de assectator mendax, which translates as
‘The confession of sin by the false disciple.’ It was an admission that Nero’s statements were true, and was handwritten by Saul.”
“Dear God. So what did Vitalian do?” Angela asked.
“Precisely what the Church has been doing ever since: he hid the evidence. He prepared a document—now known as the Vitalian Codex—that explained what he’d discovered, and included the copy of the Exomologesis. The Codex also included one other piece of information derived from Nero’s draft speech: it stated that the bodies of Saul and Simon ben Jonah had been buried in a secret location after their respective executions, a location that Vitalian referred to as the ‘Tomb of Christianity.’ He left instructions that each new pope, as well as a handful of carefully selected senior Vatican officials, was to be shown the Codex.
“But the Exomologesis that Vitalian had found was obviously a copy, specifically prepared for Nero, and there was a short note on it to that effect. The Pope ransacked the Vatican archives and every other document source that he had access to, but could find no trace whatsoever of the original scroll. A search was started for the relic, and the quest has been running ever since. Vitalian also instructed that the Exomologesis was to be destroyed as soon as it had been found, for the eternal good of the Church.