The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

  In silence he led them down a series of vaulted rooms, each communicating with the next by a broad arched opening. The walls were covered with glass-fronted shelves, the lighting was uniform, and a low hum indicated the hygrometer necessary for the safe conservation of ancient manuscripts. Nil’s gaze darted along the shelves as they passed them: Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Risorgimento… From the labels, he surmised that these were the most precious witnesses of Western history, and had the impression he could survey it all within a few dozen yards.

  Amused by his astonishment, Leeland whispered:

  “In the music section, the only one I can use, I’ll show you autograph scores by Vivaldi, pages from Handel’s Messiah, and the first eight bars of Mozart’s Lacrimosa – the last notes he ever wrote as he was dying. They’re all here…”

  The music section was in the last room. In the centre, under the adjustable lighting, a bare table covered with a sheet of glass on which you would have sought in vain for a single grain of dust.

  “You know your way around, Monsignor, I’ll leave you to it. Er…” He seemed to be in a state of some mental turmoil. “Father Nil, could you come into my office? I need to find you a pair of gloves that will fit, you need them to handle the manuscripts.”

  Leeland looked surprised, but allowed Nil to follow the librarian to an office that opened directly onto their room. Breczinsky carefully closed the door behind them, took a box off a shelf and then turned to Nil with an embarrassed look.

  “Father… may I ask you exactly what was the nature of your relations with Father Andrei?”

  “We were very close. Why?”

  “Well, I… he and I wrote to one another – he sometimes asked for my advice on the medieval inscriptions he studied.

  “So… it’s you?”

  Nil thought to himself, “I sent the photo of the stone slab of Germigny to a Vatican employee. He wrote back to say that he had received it, but made no comment.”

  “Andrei had told me about his correspondent in the Vatican Library – I didn’t know it was you and didn’t think I’d get to meet you!”

  With downcast eyes, Breczinsky was mechanically fingering the gloves in the box.

  “He would ask me for technical details, the same way other scholars do: we had established a relation of trust, albeit at a distance. Then one day I found, as I was sorting out the Coptic holdings, a tiny fragment of a manuscript that seemed to come from Nag Hammadi and had never been translated. I sent it to him: he seemed most disturbed by this piece, which he sent me back without his translation. I wrote to him about this, and he then faxed me the photo of a Carolingian inscription found in Germigny, asking me what I thought of it.”

  “I know, we took the photo together. Andrei kept me up to date with his work. Almost all of it.”

  “Almost?”

  “Yes, he didn’t tell me everything, and made no bones about it – something that always surprised me.”

  “Yes, he came here: it was the first time we’d ever met, a very… intense meeting. Then he vanished, I never saw him again. And I learnt of his death in La Croix – an accident, or suicide…”

  Breczinsky seemed to be very ill at ease, and his eyes evaded those of Nil. Finally he handed him a pair of gloves.

  “You can’t stay with me too long, you need to get back into the room. I… we will talk again, Father Nil. Later on – I’ll find some means. Beware of everyone here, even Mgr Leeland.”

  Nil’s eyes opened wide in amazement.

  “What do you mean? I’ll probably not be seeing anyone apart from him here in Rome, and I trust him completely: we were students together, I’ve known him for ages.”

  “But he’s been living in the Vatican for a while. This place transforms all those who come near it, and they’re never the same afterwards… Anyway, forget what I’ve just told you, but look after yourself!”

  On the table, Leeland had already spread out a manuscript.

  “Say, he sure took his time finding you some gloves! There’s a drawer full of them in the room next door, every size…”

  Nil did not reply to his friend’s anxious glance, and went over to the big rectangular magnifying glass placed over the manuscript. He glanced at it.

  “No illumination, probably before the tenth century – to work, Remby!”

  At noon they ate sandwiches brought to them by Breczinsky. Suddenly all smiles, the Pole asked Nil to explain what his work would be consisting in.

  “First deciphering the Latin text of these manuscripts of Gregorian chant. Then translating the Hebrew text of the ancient Jewish chants which have similar melodies and comparing them… I’m only looking at the words, of course. Mgr Leeland is doing the rest.”

  “Ancient Hebrew is all Greek to me, like medieval scripts!” explained the American with a laugh.

  When they came out, the sun was low on the horizon.

  “I’ll head straight back to San Girolamo,” said Nil apologetically, “this air-conditioned atmosphere has given me a headache.”

  Leeland stopped him: they were in the middle of St Peter’s Square.

  “Seems to me you’ve made a big impression on Breczinsky: usually he doesn’t say more than a few sentences. So, mon ami, I have to warn you: beware of him.”

  “Oh Lord!” reflected Nil. “What kind of place have I come to?”

  Leeland insisted, a serious expression on his face.

  “Make sure you don’t make any faux pas. If he talks to you, he’s trying to worm things out of you – here, nobody’s innocent. You don’t know what a dangerous place the Vatican is – you have to mistrust each and every one here.”

  43

  A whirlwind of thoughts was still swirling around in Nil’s head when he entered his room in San Girolamo. He first assured himself that nothing had disappeared from the wardrobe – which was still locked – and then went over to the window: the sirocco, that terrible south wind that covers the city in a fine film of sand from the Sahara, had just started to blow. Rome, usually so luminous, was immersed in a yellowish, watery haze.

  He closed the window to keep out the sand. This would not stop him suffering from the brutal drop in atmospheric pressure that always comes with the sirocco and causes the population migraines that Roman justice considers to be an attenuating circumstance in cases of crimes committed under the influence of the baleful wind.

  He went over to the shelves to take an aspirin to keep headaches at bay, and halted at the sight of the objects left by Andrei. Nil had been rejected by his family when he had entered the monastery, and wounded by the death of his friend; he was easily swayed by emotion, and his eyes misted over with tears. He gathered together what were now precious souvenirs for him, and slipped then into his suitcase: they would find a place in his cell at St Martin’s.

  He mechanically opened the diary and leafed through it. A monk’s calendar is as uneventful as his life: the pages were empty up until the start of November. Here, Andrei had jotted down the date and time of his departure for Rome, then his appointments at the Congregation. Nil turned the page: a few lines had been hastily scribbled down.

  His heart thumping, he sat down sideways on the chair and lit the lamp on the desk.

  At the top of the left-hand page, Andrei had written, in capitals: LETTER OF THE APOSTLE. There followed, a little lower, two names: Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea – the latter followed by three letters and six figures.

  Two Fathers of the Greek Church.

  On the opposite page, he had scrawled: “SCV Templars”. And, opposite, another three letters, followed by just four figures.

  What were the Templars doing in the company of the Fathers of the Church?

  Was it an effect of the sirocco? He was starting to feel a little light-headed.

  Letter of the Apostle. In their conversations, Andrei had, rather vaguely, mentioned something of this kind. And it was one of the four leads on the note he had written on the Rome express.

  Nil had o
ften wondered what to make of this mysterious allusion. And here was his friend again talking to him about this letter, as if he were still at his side. Andrei seemed to be telling him that he would learn something about it from the writings of two Fathers of the Church, from whom he had here noted down something that looked like a scholarly reference.

  He needed to track down these two texts. But where?

  Nil went over to the washbasin for a glass of water and dropped his aspirin in it. As he watched the cloudy column of bubbles swirl up, he started to think hard. Three letters followed by figures: these were the classification marks from the Dewey system, telling you where to find a book in a library. But which library? The advantage of the Dewey system is that it is infinitely extendible: librarians can adapt it to their needs without having to stray outside it. With a good deal of luck, the two last figures could enable you to find one library among hundreds.

  If you asked every librarian. Throughout the entire world.

  Nil swallowed his aspirin.

  Finding a book just from its Dewey classification mark was like looking for a particular car in a car park with four thousand spaces without knowing either where it was parked nor what make it was. Nor the name of the attendant at the entry. Nor even what car park it is…

  He rubbed his temples: the pain was coming on more quickly than the aspirin.

  The three letters after Origen and Eusebius were followed by six figures: so this was a complete classification mark, giving the precise position of a book on a particular shelf. But the three letters accompanying “SCV Templars” were followed by only four figures: they indicated a book stack, or perhaps a zone in a given library, without giving the exact position.

  Was SCV the abbreviation of the name of a library? In what part of the world?

  Now Nil’s head was grasped in a painful vice that prevented him from thinking. For years, Father Andrei had been in communication with librarians from all across Europe, often by means of the Internet. If one of these classification marks were that of a library in Vienna, he could hardly see himself asking the Reverend Father Abbot to book him a return ticket for Austria.

  He took a second aspirin and went up to the terrace that looked out over the local district. In the distance, you could make out the lofty dome of St Peter’s Basilica. The Apostle’s tomb had been dug into the tufo of the Vatican Hill that was in those days outside Rome; here Nero had built an imperial residence and a circus. It was here that thousands of Christians and Jews, pursued by the same indiscriminate hatred, were crucified in 67 AD.

  His research had revealed an unexpected face of Peter, a man filled with murderous impulses. The Acts of the Apostles attest that two Christians from Jerusalem had perished by his hand, Ananias and Sapphira. The killing of Judas was only a hypothesis, but one that was supported by some highly persuasive evidence. And yet his death in Rome had been that of a martyr. “I believe” – says Pascal – “those who die for their faith.” Peter had been born ambitious, violent, calculating – perhaps, in the last moments of his life, he had finally become a true disciple of Jesus? History is no longer in a position to decide, but he had to be given the benefit of the doubt.

  “Peter must have been like all of us: a two-sided man, capable of the best after doing the worst…”

  Nil had just been warned to mistrust everything and everybody. This idea was intolerable to him; if he dwelt on it for too long, he’d jump into the first train, just like Father Andrei.

  So as not to lose his equilibrium, he needed to concentrate on his research. He should live in Rome as if it were the monastery, and in the same solitude.

  “I will seek. And I will find.”

  44

  Vatican Hill, 67 AD

  “Peter… If you won’t eat anything, you can at least drink!”

  The old man pushed away the pitcher proffered to him by his companion, who was wearing the short tunic of slaves. He leant over, picked up a straw and slipped it between his back and the bricks of the opus reticulatum. He shuddered: in a few hours he would be crucified, and his body coated in pitch. At nightfall, the executioners would set fire to these living torches, which would provide light for the show the Emperor was putting on for the people of Rome.

  Those who had been condemned to death had been penned up in these long vaulted tunnels that came out directly onto the arena of the circus. Through the entrance grille you could see the two stone markers – the metas – set at either end of the race track. It was here, around the great central obelisk of the circus, that every evening “Jewish” men, women and children were indiscriminately crucified, being allegedly responsible for the huge fire that had destroyed the city a few years earlier.

  “What’s the point of eating or drinking, Linus? You know it’s going to be this evening: they always start with the eldest. You’ll live a few more days, and Anacletus will see you leaving; he’ll be among the last to join us.”

  He stroked the head of a child sitting at his sides on the straw. The child gazed at him with veneration, his big eyes underscored by dark shadows.

  As soon as he had arrived in Rome, Peter had taken the Christian community in hand. Most of the converts were slaves, like Linus and the boy Anacletus. They had all passed through the mystery religions from the East, which exercised an irresistible spell on the people. They offered them the prospect of a better life in the beyond and spectacular, bloody cults. The austere and unadorned religion of the Jews who had converted to Christ – who was both God and man – experienced a meteoric success.

  Peter had finally admitted that Jesus’s absolute divinity was indispensable for the spread of the new religion. He forgot the scruples that had held him back right at the start, when he had still been living among the Jerusalem converts. “Jesus is dead,” he had thought. “The Christ-God is alive. Only someone alive can bring these throngs of people to the new life.”

  The Galilean became the uncontested head of the community in Rome. No more was heard about the thirteenth apostle.

  He closed his eyes. On his arrival here, he had told the prisoners how soldiers had captured him on the Via Appia as he fled with those trying to escape Nero’s persecution. Revolted by what they considered to be an act of cowardice, many of the Christians arrested for their courage gave him the cold shoulder in this prison.

  His life was abandoning him – would he hold out until evening? He must. He wanted to suffer this hideous death, rejected by his own, to redeem himself and become worthy of God’s forgiveness.

  He motioned to Linus, who sat beside Anacletus, on the mildewed paving. After midday, the roars of the wild animals had fallen silent: they had all been massacred by the gladiators during a huge fight that morning. The odour of a menagerie mingled with the nauseating stench of blood and excrement. He had to force himself to speak.

  “You may live, you and this boy. Three years ago, after the fire, the youngest prisoners were released, when the crowd grew weary of so many horrors displayed on the sand of the

  circus. You will live, Linus, you have to.”

  The slave gazed at him intently, tears in his eyes.

  “But if you’re not here any more, Peter, who will lead our community? Who will teach us?”

  “You will. I knew you when you’d just been sold at the market near the Forum, just as I watched this child grow. You and he will live. You are the future of the Church. I’m no more than an old tree now, already dead inside…”

  “How can you say that? You knew Our Lord, you followed him and you served him without fail!”

  Peter bowed his head. The betrayal of Jesus, the successive murders, the vicious struggle against his enemies in Jerusalem, so many sufferings of which he had been the cause…

  “Listen to me carefully, Linus: the sun is already setting, there isn’t much time left. You have to know: I’ve failed. Not only by accident, as happens to each of us, but over a long period, and repeatedly. Tell it to the Church, when it’s all over. But tell them too that I di
e at peace – because I have acknowledged my faults, my countless faults. Because I have asked forgiveness from Jesus himself, and from his God. And because a Christian should never – never doubt God’s forgiveness. That’s the very heart of Jesus’s teaching.”

  Linus placed his hands on Peter’s: they were frozen. Was it his life withdrawing from him? Several had died in this tunnel, even before being led out to execution.

  The old man looked up.

  “Remember, Linus – and you, child, listen – on the evening of the last supper we took with the Master, just before his capture, there were twelve of us with him. There were only twelve apostles with Jesus. I was there, I call God to witness before I die. Perhaps you will one day hear of a thirteenth apostle; neither you, nor Anacletus, nor those who will come after you must tolerate so much as the mere mention of any apostle other than the Twelve – not so much as an allusion to one. It’s a matter of the Church’s life and death. Will you swear solemnly to obey, before me and before God?”

  The young man and the child nodded gravely.

  “If he ever emerged from the shadows, that thirteenth apostle could completely destroy everything we believe in. Everything that will enable those men, those women” – and he motioned to the indistinct shadowy figures lying prostrate on the ground – “to die in peace this evening, perhaps even with a smile. Now leave me. I have a lot to say to my Lord.”

  Peter was crucified at sunset, between the two metas of the Vatican circus. When they set fire to his body, it lit up, for an instant, the obelisk, which was just a few yards away from the cross.

  Two days later, Nero proclaimed the end of the games: all those who had been sentenced to death were freed, after being subjected to the thirty-nine lashes of the whip.

  Linus succeeded the Apostle, whose body he buried at the summit of the Vatican Hill, some distance from the entrance to the circus.

  Anacletus succeeded Linus, the third on the list of popes proclaimed at every Catholic mass throughout the whole world. It was he who built the first chapel on Peter’s tomb. This was later replaced by a basilica erected by the Emperor Constantine, who already wanted the building to be one of great majesty.