The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

  As he hung up, Calfo smiled. He would not like to be in the American’s shoes: the bait was about to be swallowed by His Eminence. This was of no importance: he had played his role perfectly, first getting Nil to talk and then taking him to meet the Israeli. The bait was for the Cardinal. He was seeking to skitter the fish.

  He returned to his bedroom and suppressed a gesture of exasperation: Sonia had removed her accoutrements and was sitting naked on the edge of the bed. Her face was stubborn, and tears were trickling down her cheeks.

  “Come on, my pretty, it’s not so terrible!”

  He made her stand up and obliged her to put on a wimple, which masked her lovely hair, and to slip over it a starched cornet, the points of which fell onto her round shoulders. Thus attired as a nun from the olden days – “just her upper body, the rest is for me” – he made her kneel on a prie-dieu in red velvet, in front of a Byzantine icon. Always attentive, he had thought that an icon would allow the Romanian woman better to play the role he wanted her to play.

  He took a step backwards: the tableau was perfect. Sonia was stripped bare, but her oval visage was nicely set off by the cornet, and her eyes were raised to the icon as she joined her delicate hands and seemed to be praying. “A virginal attitude in front of the Virgin’s image. Very suggestive.”

  Rome was plunged into the silence of night. Mgr Calfo, kneeling behind Sonia and pushing against the curve of her back, started to celebrate the divine service. His shins rested on the prie-dieu, and he was thankful for its velvety surface. His hands took a firm grip of the young woman’s breasts. For a moment he was uncomfortably aware of the gaze of the Byzantine virgin staring at him in what looked like mute reproach. He closed his eyes: in his quest for mystical union, nothing within him would come between the human and the divine, the carnal and the spiritual.

  As he started to murmur words that made no sense to her, Sonia, her eyes fixed on the icon, uncrossed her hands and wiped the tears that were clouding her eyes.

  70

  At the very same moment, Lev was raising his glass before the eyes of his companions.

  “A toast! Good to meet up!”

  He’d taken the two monks to a trattoria in Trastevere, one of Rome’s more populous districts. The clientele was entirely composed of Italians swallowing gigantic portions of pasta.

  “I recommend the penne all’arrabbiata here. It’s home cooking, I always come here after a concert: they close very late, and we’ll have plenty of time to talk.”

  Since their arrival in the restaurant, Nil had remained silent: it was impossible that the Israeli did not recognize him. But Lev, jovial and relaxed, seemed not to notice the silence of the man sitting opposite him. He exchanged with Leeland memories of the good old days, their meeting in Israel, their musical discoveries.

  “At that time, in Jerusalem, we could at last start to live again after the Six Days’ War. Commander Ygael Yadin would very much have liked me to stay with him in Tsahal…”

  For the first time, Nil intervened in the conversation.

  “The famous archaeologist? You knew him?”

  Lev waited until three plates of steaming pasta had been set before them, then turned towards Nil. He pulled a face and smiled.

  “I not only knew him, something really rather extraordinary happened to me thanks to him. You’re a specialist in ancient texts, a scholar, it should interest you…”

  Nil had the unpleasant sensation of falling into a trap. “How does he know that I’m a specialist and a scholar? Why has he brought us here?” Unable to reply, he decided to let Lev show his hand, and silently acquiesced.

  “In 1947, I was eight years old and we were living in Jerusalem. My father was friends with a young archaeologist at the Hebrew University, Ygael Yadin: I grew up alongside him. He was twenty, and like all the Jews living in Palestine he led a double life: he was a student, but above all he was a fighter in the Hagana, and rapidly rose to become its commander-inchief. I knew this and was full of admiration for him. I had only one dream: I too wanted to fight for my country.”

  “At the age of eight?”

  “Rembert, the formidable fighters of Palmakh and Hagana were teenagers. They were intoxicated by the allure of danger. They didn’t hesitate to call on children to transit their messages; we had no other means of communication. On the morning of November 30th, the United Nations accepted the creation of a Jewish State. We knew that war would break out: Jerusalem was covered all over with barbed-wire fences, and only a child could get about without a pass.”

  “And you did so?”

  “Of course: Yadin started to make use of me daily. I listened to everything that was being said around me. One evening, he mentioned a strange discovery: a Bedouin had been chasing after a goat among the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea, and had come across a cave. Inside, he had found jars containing gluey parcels that he sold for five pounds to a Christian cobbler in Bethlehem. Who eventually handed them over to the Metropolitan Samuel, the superior of St Mark’s Monastery, in the part of Jerusalem that had just turned Arab.”

  Nil pricked up his ears: he had heard of the fantastic odyssey of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His mistrust suddenly evaporated: he was face to face with a direct witness. This was an opportunity he had never dreamt of.

  As he tucked into his penne, Lev kept glancing over at Nil, whose sudden interest seemed to amuse him. He carried on:

  “The Metropolitan Samuel asked Yadin to identify those manuscripts. It was necessary to cross the city to St Mark’s. Every street was an ambush. Yadin gave me a schoolboy’s apron and satchel and showed me which direction the monastery lay in. I slipped between the British barricades, the Arab tanks, the Hagana platoons. They all stopped shooting for a while to let this kid get to school! In my satchel I brought two scrolls back from the monastery and Yadin immediately realized what they were: the oldest manuscripts ever discovered in the land of Israel, a treasure that belonged by right to the new Jewish State.”

  “What did he do with them?”

  “He couldn’t keep them, it would have been theft. He returned them to the Metropolitan and told him he was prepared to buy all the manuscripts the Bedouins might find in the caves of Qumran. In spite of the war, the news got out: Americans from the American Oriental School and French Dominicans from the École Biblique de Jérusalem pushed up the bidding. One minute Yadin was commanding military operations, the next he was locked in secret negotiations with antiques sellers in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The Americans were making off with everything…”

  “I know,” Nil interrupted. “I’ve seen the photocopies from the Huntington Library, in my monastery.”

  “Ah, you’ve managed to get hold of a copy? Very few people have been so lucky. I hope they’ll get published one day. Well, I then became an unwitting actor in an incident that ought to interest you…”

  He pushed his plate away and poured himself a glass of wine. Nil noted how his face suddenly became set – just as in the train, or when he was playing Rachmaninov!

  After a silence, Lev pulled himself together and continued his story.

  “One day, the Metropolitan Samuel told Yadin that he had come into possession of two exceptionally well-preserved documents. The Bedouin man had found them on his second visit to the cave, in the third jar on the left going in, next to the skeleton of what must have been a Templar, since he was still wrapped in the white tunic with the red cross. I once more made my way across the city, and brought the contents of the jar to Yadin: a big scroll wrapped in oil-soaked cloth and a little parchment – a single sheet, tied up with just a single linen cord. In the room that he used as headquarters, when the bombs were falling, Yadin opened the scroll that was covered by Hebrew characters: it was the Manual of Discipline of the Essenes. Then he unrolled the sheet: it was written in Greek, and he translated the first line aloud to me. I was a child, but I still remember: ‘I, the beloved disciple, the thirteenth apostle, to all the Churches…’”

  Nil turned
pale and gripped his knife and fork tightly, trying to master his emotion.

  “You’re sure? That’s what you heard? ‘The beloved disciple, the thirteenth apostle’?”

  “Absolutely. Yadin looked really downcast. He told me that he was only interested in Hebrew manuscripts, since these were the patrimony of Israel: this letter, written in the same Greek as that of the Gospels, concerned the Christians, and needed to be given back to the Metropolitan. He kept the Manual of Discipline, slipped a bundle of dollars into my satchel in exchange and added the little Greek parchment. Then he sent me off through the bombs to St Mark’s.”

  Nil was transfixed. “This man,” he thought, “has held in his own hands the letter of the thirteenth apostle, the only copy to have escaped the Church – perhaps even the original!”

  Lev, his features still impassive, continued:

  “I’d got to within about a hundred yards of the monastery when a shell fell in the street: I was flung into the air, and I lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes, a monk was leaning over me. I was inside the monastery, the skin on my skull was split from top to bottom” – grimacing, he touched his scar – “and my schoolboy’s satchel had vanished.”

  “Vanished?”

  “Yes. I’d been in a coma for twenty-four hours, between life and death. When the Metropolitan came to see me the next day, he told me that one of his monks had picked me up in the street and handed the satchel over to him. When he opened it, he realized the situation: Yadin was paying him in cash for the Qumran manuscript, but he wasn’t interested in the Greek letter. He’d just sold the letter to a Dominican, with an assortment of odds and ends of Hebrew manuscripts that the Bedouins had brought him. He even added, with a laugh, that he’d bundled everything together, letter and manuscripts, in an empty crate of Napoleon brandy, which he was very partial to. And he told me the Dominican seemed completely unaware of the value of what he’d just acquired.”

  Questions were jostling to be answered in Nil’s head.

  “Do you think the Metropolitan read the letter before he sold it on to that Dominican?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest. But I’d be surprised. Metropolitan Samuel was anything but a scholar. Don’t forget we were at war: he needed money to feed his monks and look after the wounded who were being brought into the monastery in their dozens. It was no time to start analysing texts! He certainly didn’t look closely at the letter.”

  “And what about the Dominican?”

  Lev turned to him: he knew that his story would be of the greatest interest to the little French monk. “Well,” he thought, “why do you think that I’ve invited you here to dinner this evening, Father? Just to enjoy the penne all’arrabbiata?”

  “I told you,” he said aloud, “these recollections had remained engraved in my memory. Much later, before he died, Yadin mentioned the letter again, and asked me to try and track it down. I carried out a small-scale inquiry thanks to Mossad – I’d become, let’s say, one of their occasional agents. The best secret service in the world, apparently, after that of the Vatican!”

  Lev was now sparkling, and his playful expression had returned: all tension had vanished from his face.

  “The Dominican was in fact a lay brother, a good chap but a bit obtuse. Just after Israel’s declaration of independence, the situation had become so tense in Jerusalem that many monks and priests were repatriated to Europe. Apparently the Dominican stuffed the crate of Napoleon brandy into his luggage, quite unaware of its value, and lugged it with him all the way to Rome, where he ended his days at the General Curia of the Dominicans, on the Aventine. We learnt that the crate was no longer there – when he died, all they found in his cell was an olive-wood rosary.”

  “And… where might it be?”

  “A General Curia is an administrative body that doesn’t allow itself to get snowed under with documents of no use.

  It will have handed on the assorted material from Jerusalem to the Vatican, where it doubtless joined all the old stuff that nobody knows what to do with – or that nobody wishes to make use of. It must be gathering dust somewhere, in a corner of one of the libraries or some cubbyhole in the Holy City – if it had been opened, news would have got out sooner or later.”

  “Why’s that, Lev?”

  The Israeli’s relaxed tone was contagious, and Nil had called him by his first name. Lev noticed, and poured him another glass of wine.

  “Because Ygael Yadin had read the letter before he gave it back to the Metropolitan. And what he told me on his deathbed suggested to me that it contained a terrifying secret, the kind of secret that no Church, no State – even one as impenetrable and monarchical as the Vatican – can stop leaking out sooner or later. If anyone has seen that letter, Father Nil, either he’s dead by now, or the Vatican and the Catholic Church would have imploded – and that would make more noise than the Arab-Israeli war of 1947, more than the Crusades, more noise than any other event in the history of the West.”

  Nil nervously rubbed his face.

  Either he’s dead by now…

  Andrei!

  71

  The light Castelli wine was rather making Nil’s head turn. He noticed with some surprise that the waiter was placing a cup of coffee in front of him: he had been so captivated by Lev’s story that he had swallowed down, without noticing it, the penne all’arrabbiata and the cotoletta alla milanese that had followed. Looking preoccupied, Leeland was stirring the coffee in his cup. He decided to ask Lev the question that Nil had confronted him with in the Belvedere courtyard.

  “Tell me, Lev… Why did you send me two invitations to your concert, specifying in your note that it might be of interest for my friend? How did you know he was in Rome and, well, quite simply, how did you even know of his existence?”

  Lev raised his eyebrows, looking surprised.

  “But… you told me so yourself! The day after I arrived, I received a letter in my hotel on the Via Giulia. It had the Vatican coat of arms on it. Inside there were a few lines of typescript – if I remember rightly, something like ‘Monsignor Leeland and his friend Father Nil would be happy to attend…’ and so on. I thought you’d asked your secretary to tell me, and I simply thought it was maybe a bit hasty – but that’s probably how things work in the Vatican, and I imagined the style had rubbed off on you.”

  Leeland replied gently:

  “I don’t have a secretary, Lev, and I never sent you a letter. I didn’t even know what hotel you were staying at for your concert series in Rome. Tell me… did the letter have my signature?”

  Lev swept his hand through his thick locks of blond hair.

  “Gosh, I can’t remember! No, it wasn’t your signature, there was just an initial at the bottom. A capital C, I think, with a full stop. Anyway, Rembert, I was fully intending to see you while I was passing through, and I would inevitably have got to know Father Nil.”

  Leeland’s face had suddenly darkened: Catzinger or Calfo? Anger again started to rise within him.

  Nil, lost in his own thoughts, had been only half-following this conversation. He was assailed by many other questions, and suddenly remarked:

  “Only the result matters, since thanks to this letter I’ve been able to hear a fabulous performance of the Rachmaninov concerto. But Lev… why are you telling us all this? You can guess what it would mean for Rembert and myself if a new apostle’s letter had been discovered, miraculously dragged out of oblivion at the end of the twentieth century, and putting a question mark over our faith. Why have you told us all this?”

  Lev replied with his most charming smile. He could not possibly tell Nil the truth – “because these are my instructions from Mossad”.

  “And who could be more interested in it all than you?”

  He seemed to attach no importance to Nil’s question, and gazed at him with a friendly expression.

  “Father Nil… would a mere ancient document contesting the divinity of Jesus change anything for you?”

  The last cus
tomers had just left the trattoria, and they were now alone in the dining room, where the manager was idly starting to tidy up. Nil thought for a long time before replying, as if he had forgotten whom he was addressing.

  “You have told me this evening that an apostolic letter was discovered at Qumran at the same time as the Dead Sea Scrolls: I have been accumulating proof of its existence for several weeks now. In the third century in a Coptic manuscript, at the turn of the fourth century in a text by Origen. In the seventh century in allusions in the Koran, in the eighth century in a code introduced into the Symbolon of Nicaea at Germigny, and finally in the fourteenth century in the account of the trial of the Templars. All this after spending years decrypting the text from the end of the first century that started it all off: St John’s Gospel. I’ve been able to follow the traces of the letter of the thirteenth apostle thanks to the shadow it has left on the history of the West.”

  He looked Lev right in the eyes.

  “Now you have just told me that you transported it in your schoolboy satchel, as you attempted, while the bombs were falling, to carry out a mission for the head of Hagana. Then you tell me that it must be somewhere in the Vatican, hidden away or simply not known about. You heard Ygael Yadin tell you that it contained a terrifying secret. Even if I were to know of its contents – which must indeed be terrible to have given rise to so many expulsions, murders and plots – it would change nothing in my relationship with Jesus. I have met him personally, Lev, can you understand that? His person does not belong to any Church, and he does not need them in order to exist.”