Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest

by Roger Herst

  The Orthodox Monastery of St. George had been carved from the mountain's limestone in the fourteenth century and offered a distant view of where the Jordan River now snaked through fertile green farmlands. High on this bluff, a gentle breeze ruffled Benoit's thinning silver hair as he tugged at a cord attached to a bell situated on the parapet above.

  The architects responsible for designing this mountain retreat seven hundred years before had deliberately ensured privacy by omitting to build a gate. To enter, monks and their occasional visitors were obliged to be hand-hauled over the wall in an unstable gondola dubbed by friars who operated its archaic pulleys "the lift." While waiting for the gondola, Benoit anticipated the ride would trigger acrophobia he had suffered since childhood. And after enduring this unpleasant ordeal, he would still have to descend into the monastery on a series of rickety wooden ladders, a second trial certain to aggravate his arthritic hip.

  His nerves unsteady and his head dizzy, he eventually arrived in the monastery courtyard where two monks greeted their Dominican visitor with animated hand signals rather than break their order's strict rule against speaking. They pointed to a rack for storing keys to the vehicles parked outside the walls. Dutifully, Benoit surrendered the Buick's to a vacant hook, then followed his hosts through a maze of dank stone corridors. A monk seized his arm when he wobbled, a delayed reaction to the unusual means of moving over rather than through the monastery wall. They passed living quarters and meditation cells lit by small electric bulbs hanging naked from the ceiling. Dark cloaked monks were coming and going, but none offered a welcome. Only the clip-clop of footsteps on the cobblestones broke the pervading silence. Once he arrived at his destination, Benoit nodded good-bye to his guides and watched them disappear somewhere in the dim light of the corridor.

  He seized a candle from a table, lit it, and opened a small wooden door, then bowed his head and stepped into a chamber large enough for a single person. Once seated on the chamber's only stool, he extinguished the candle and carefully peeled back a black felt curtain over a small window to peer down upon an interior room. Late-model office machines—a computer, a scanner, a server, and a copier—rested on three broad oaken refectory tables. On the floor, Benoit noticed several picnic coolers in various colors.

  Warm air radiating from the office machines, rose to the aperture. Tim Matternly suddenly appeared from a corner of the room to approach a vacuum-sealing machine normally used for preserving household food. He moved quickly, following a practiced routine. Benoit observed him matriculate through a full cycle in which a Ziploc bag from Qumran was emptied on a clean surface where single and double letters were separated from full words. Fragments that clung together, even by so much as a thread of decomposing parchment, Tim handled as a unit. Each cluster was then placed on a glass slide for digital scanning. Next, every scan received an identifying code. From time to time, Tim transferred the results to a DVD disk and then to a backup server.

  With this process completed, he would carefully place each fragment in a new plastic bag for vacuum-sealing, a label with the assigned code attached to the outside. The finished product found a temporary home in one or another of the picnic coolers. Help from the monks would have expedited this laborious process, but Benoit was pleased to see that, for the sake of secrecy, Tim had honored their agreement not to seek assistance.

  When satisfied that the processing was proceeding according to their original plan, Benoit left the viewing chamber and descended a flight of narrow stairs to the workroom. A gentle knock on the sealed door announced his presence.

  Tim cautiously cracked it open. "Glad you're here, brother," he exclaimed upon recognizing Benoit in the shadows. Normally, a warm hug would have been in order, but for cleanliness, Tim wore a sanitized white scrub suit used by technicians in high-containment biological labs. On his hands were sterile surgical gloves, both of which were raised to ward off physical contact.

  "I'm furious you sent Friar Hilarion to the École," Benoit barked, making no attempt to mask his irritation. "And I'm unhappy about having to sneak back to Bethlehem tonight." He withdrew from his satchel a stainless-steel thermos. "Here's some coffee. I know they prohibit caffeine here. Don't let others know I did this."

  "An angel from heaven," Tim responded, stripping off his gloves. He readily accepted the coffee Benoit poured into a plastic top that served as a cup.

  As Tim sipped, Benoit growled, "You wouldn’t have contacted me if it wasn’t important. I hope that proves true."

  "It is," Tim said. "I'm exhausted. You get into a routine repeating the same procedure from early morning to late at night. To speed up this process I made a rule not to read anything because it would only distract me. I was working yesterday, my mind in some other world, my hands doing the work, but something I cannot describe stirred me. I looked down on the scanner, and despite my resolve not to read what was there, I read it anyway. You must believe me, Father, that my eyes read by themselves, against my will. Before me was a fragment, much like the others. I had already assigned it a code number. My eyes eventually sent a message to my brain and what I was seeing was clearly impossible. My consciousness told me I could not be reading what was there. It just couldn't be, because it was the most unexpected thing on this planet."

  Tim eyed his cohort, suddenly seeing in him a suspicious and calculating expression that had eluded him in their previous collaborations. He wasn't sure what this meant, but he had gone too far to retreat from his pledge to share everything. "We've hit the jackpot," he said with new force, "maybe the most revealing artifact in the ancient world, rivaling the Rosetta Stone. No, no, I believe more significant than the Rosetta."

  Benoit's eyebrows rose with curiosity.

  Tim opened a green cooler, carefully lifting a vacuum-sealed envelope from the left side. Half-dozen steps brought him to a refectory table used for sorting fragments. Benoit helped make room by removing tweezers and a circular magnifying glass, then stepped alongside Tim's right shoulder. An explosive pulse of pain shot from his arthritic hip down into the thigh. He stiffened for an instant to let the sting pass before bending over farther.

  To read, the priest needed to hook rimless glasses behind his ears. When he looked down, an impulse urged him to scream. What? No document! No scroll! Only three words on a scrap of decomposed parchment! Why had Matternly endangered their enterprise by summoning him to Jericho for a few lousy words? He immediately recognized the ancient Hebrew script similar but not identical to the familiar modern Hebrew letters used everywhere in Israel. His lips silently spoke what he read before asking, "Any idea of the context?"

  "Not yet. We'll learn more when we assemble the other fragments."

  Benoit lips curled in a skeptical gesture while his eyes scrutinized Tim for signs of how much he was withholding. Surely, with such a discovery, he wouldn't stop there.

  "I have three or four more days of work here," Tim said, deliberately exaggerating because, by his calculation, he was two days from finishing. "Now that we have the material digitalized, we must contact Itamar Arad and transfer the originals to the Antiquities Authority."

  By placing his hand on the sleeve of Tim's scrub suit Benoit allowed bacteria from his fingers to transfer onto the sterile garment. "I'm afraid we can't do that." His voice took on the uncompromising managerial tone he employed with staff at the École.

  Tim pulled free. "Now hold on. We agreed to turn over all the artifacts as soon as we had them coded, scanned, and prepared for study. I've worked like a dog for weeks with this in mind. My back's killing me. And my feet are so sore I can hardly hobble back to my cell each evening. If we delay returning this stuff to the legal owner, we'll look like looters, not scholars."

  "Legal owner?" Benoit exclaimed. "You say 'legal owner.' Who might this be, Timothy? I hope you're not suggesting the Israel government just because it's currently the authority in this region. Running the Zionist state doesn't make Jews into the rightful owners of Christian treasures. These fragment
s are two thousand years old. Where was the Jewish government when they were written? Rome ruled then, but Rome is long since gone and can howl its claim of ownership only from the pages of history books. The people who wrote these scrolls had no idea that two thousand years later there would be a Jewish commonwealth here. Had we discovered these texts before 1948, would we have handed them to the British Mandatory Government? Or the League of Nations? Or the United Nations? How about consigning them to the local Arabs? Come on now, Reverend Matternly. Don't be naive. You can be damn certain we wouldn't."

  "You never made this argument before we entered the cave, Father. I agreed to help at Qumran only to obtain documents for our study, not our possession. I nearly got shot. At Qumran, we both agreed that the Israeli government was the legal owner. Israelis have hardly abused their Dead Sea documents. On the contrary, they put them on permanent display for the world to see in the Shrine of the Book. Today, anybody can read them on the Internet."

  Benoit's irritation showed in a fierce scowl. "These documents will be displayed under the Star of David over my dead body. This is undeniably Christian record, Tim, not Jewish artifact."

  "It's historic documentation that evolved from the reaction of Jews to the Roman world."

  "I beg your pardon. It's the spiritual record of our relationship to the Father. I demand that you recognize new realities. The landscape has changed since we were in Qumran. Perhaps I was naïve. But that doesn't make me a damn fool. Christians are the rightful owners. It is literature written by Christians for Christians."

  "And exactly which Christians have you in mind?" Tim asked, sensing his Dominican cohort had a deeper agenda.

  "Exactly whom?" Benoit barked, as if it were not obvious.

  "Christianity is a fractured mosaic," Tim said before Benoit could answer his question. "Place the stewardship of this document with one faction and the others will object. The most practical proprietor is a neutral people like Jews. And let's not forget that Christ was a Jew from the day he was born to the day he died."

  Benoit growled, "It was I who discovered that the cave was being looted. You wouldn't have known about it, and you would never have found these fragments without me. This is my operation, Timothy, and I'm telling you now, we're not giving any of this to the Antiquities Authority. And even if we wanted to, it's now impossible."

  "Nothing's impossible. We just take them a few miles to Jerusalem. It's not like breaching the Atlantic Wall."

  Benoit's delivery slowed for emphasis. "I don't think you heard me when I said we can't turn anything over, even if we wanted to. Remember the Bedouin at the cave entrance. We found blood on the ground."

  "He returned to his people."

  "He died. I have it on good authority that his body was found in a wadi nearby with a bullet in his jaw."

  "By what authority?" Tim demanded.

  "It doesn't matter. All that matter's is that I'm telling you an indisputable fact. Hand over these fragments and the police will throw us in jail. And not for a parking violation or looting artifacts, but for murdering a Bedouin. They're probably looking for you as we speak."

  "Why me and not you?"

  "If they know that loose fragments were discovered, wouldn't they want to talk to someone who has written the definitive work on compiling them?"

  "The Bedouin shot first. You fired in self-defense. The police will take our word for it," Tim said, a tremor of uncertainty in his voice.

  "Why should they? They'll argue that if we knew the cave was being looted, we should have come forward immediately. Even if no one was hurt, we're still looters. And if we go to them now, they'll want to know why we waited so long. And if we knew a Bedouin guard had been shot, why didn't we seek immediate help? We might have been able to save that poor bastard's life."

  "They'll take the word of respected scholars."

  "This is bigger than local archeology, mon ami. Don't expect largess when religious sensibilities are involved. Besides, Itamar Arad and I have been at each other’s throats for years. If my friends in the Vatican hadn't protected me, he'd have shipped me out of Israel long ago. He lets me pad around in Bethlehem where he can keep an eye on me because it's like being under house arrest."

  Tim considered that for a moment before saying, "If we hadn't gone to the cave, everything would have been lost to looters. We've performed an invaluable service." He turned back toward the scanner where he had left a two-word phrase on the glass surface, but at the last moment, whirled about to face Father Benoit once again. "Had I known you would change your mind…"

  "It wouldn't have made a smidgeon of difference," the Catholic priest finished the sentence for him. "You would never have let an opportunity like this slip through your fingers. This is no time to throw yourself on the mercy of the Israelis. Finish the scanning. Leave here when you're ready to begin deciphering. The important thing is to keep a low profile."

  "That wasn't our agreement."

  "The original understanding is dead and you know it."

  "I'll agree only to finish my work here. I'm making no more pledges. As soon as I'm finished, I'll need to take a few days off to think."

  "Of course you will. After what you've just shown me, I will, too."

  "I'll get a lift to Bethlehem and pick up my Hyundai."

  Benoit paused in an uncertain moment before narrowing his eyes. "That's another thing I need to talk with you about," he said, clearing his throat. "I'm afraid your car is gone. You can take my Buick for a holiday."

  "What do you mean gone?" Tim snapped. "You promised to drive it back to Bethlehem and park it there for me."

  "Well, I drove it to Bethlehem, but it isn't there anymore. I couldn't take the chance it had been photographed by the drone. So I parked it with the keys in the ignition where car thieves operate. And lo and behold it just disappeared. Wooof. Gone, gone like a dream. Thieves always make physical alterations to a stolen vehicle before sending it to market. For all we know, your SUV is now in Jordan, Syria, or Iraq. And that's exactly where we want it to be."

  "I don't believe this," Tim said. "I just don't believe you'd do a thing like that."

  "Your insurance company will pay. You do carry theft insurance, don't you?"

  While fighting to control his anger. Tim refused to give Benoit the satisfaction of an answer. Silently, he lifted the fragment from the table, noting Benoit's eyes trained on him. The latch on the green cooler stuck. Tim jiggled it free to expose numerous other vacuum-sealed bags. He carefully replaced the fragment to the exact location where it had been before.

  Father Benoit returned to the conversation, sounding conciliatory, "Let's bury our disagreements until we have everything in the computer. We can quarrel about the ownership later. I'll be back in a few days. Timothy, just finish the marvelous job you're doing here."

  Tim waited until he heard Benoit's retreating footsteps on the stone passageway, then immediately removed the last fragment from the cooler and, with masking tape, attached the transparent envelope to the small of his back. As soon as he was satisfied this treasure was snug against his skin, he slipped back into the scrub suit top. Now, if the priest returned to steal this treasure after nightfall, he'd be in for a big surprise.

  Father Benoit buttonholed the first monk he could find to show him a note he had written, saying that he wanted to see Abbot Nicholas Afanasieff. During his previous retreats in the monastery, Benoit had delivered silent presentations on biblical themes by showing his illustrative slides and writing commentary on a chalkboard. However challenging this method of communication, the brothers seemed to enjoy it. Once in Afanasieff's office, Benoit did not expect the abbot to respond. As head of the monastery, he preserved the right to speak when he deemed it appropriate, but to fulfill Benoit's request, no verbal response was necessary. A nod of understanding was sufficient.

  "The Presbyterian minister is doing work for my École," Benoit wrote on a tablet in French. "But for reasons you can probably imagine, he must not leave the
monastery. Please instruct your brothers not to lower him over the wall on the lift."

  The abbot's lips fell open as he contemplated a request that was inconsistent with St. George's reputation for hospitality. At the same time, he didn't wish trouble with the Roman Church and its influential friends in Istanbul. On his own notepad, Father Nicholas Afanasieff wrote, "For how long?"

  "A few short days," came the answer.

  Abbot Nicholas granted his consent.

  "I'm going to remain here with him," Benoit scribbled. "We must conclude our business together."

  Only after Benoit had withdrawn did Nicholas consider a more perplexing question: what would his brethren do if Dr. Matternly used force to leave? While his monks kept themselves in reasonable physical condition, they were men of peace, unaccustomed to violence. To see that such a situation did not occur, he ordered his brethren to place a padlock on the lift. In addition, he instructed them to remove the chrome crank handles from the pulleys. Now, not only was impossible for Dr. Matternly to leave, but anyone else—including Father Benoit.

  ***

  Outside an impoundment yard for stolen vehicles, two kilometers northeast of the Allenby Bridge linking the Occupied Territory of the West Bank with the Kingdom of Jordan, Major Zvi Zabronski eased behind the wheel of his forest-green armored police cruiser and reached for a briefcase containing enlarged photos provided by Colonel Bar Jehoshua. He shuffled through four pictures quickly before stopping to study a fifth. Flanking a dried desert wadi, a thin stand of gum trees provided cover for a vehicle swathed with netting, the kind used by the military to camouflage tanks and planes from aerial surveillance. In the picture, it was impossible to discern the precise make and model, but an army photo analyst had meticulously measured the dimensions and matched it with a late-model Hyundai Tucson SUV.

  After jotting notes on a PDA, Zabronski got out of his car to pace back and forth impatiently. The sun was nearly overhead, baking the desert floor. He was rolling his shirt sleeves when Itamar drove up twenty-two minutes late, excusing his tardiness with a complaint about traffic near Maale Adumim, an eastern suburb of Jerusalem, caused by religious Jews demonstrating against a government regulation curtailing the construction of future housing. Itamar introduced Gabby as an American rabbi working on a graduate degree in biblical studies whom he had brought to help identify the Hyundai SUV.