The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

  Leeland acquiesced in silence, and smiled encouragingly at Nil before leaning back over the medieval manuscript that they were examining.

  His heart thudding, the Frenchman knocked on the librarian’s door.

  Breczinsky’s face was feverish, and behind his round glasses there were dark shadows under his eyes. He motioned to Nil to take a seat.

  “Father, I prayed all night for God to enlighten me, and I have made my decision. What I did for Andrei I will also do for you – but I just have to tell you that I am again infringing the most sacrosanct instructions that were handed on to me when I took on this job. I’ve decided to go ahead because you’ve assured me that you’re not working against the Pope, and indeed that you intend to communicate all your discoveries to him. Will you swear to do so, before God?”

  “I’m only a monk, Father Breczinsky, but I have always sought to be a monk to the last fibre of my being. If what I discover represents a danger for the Church, the Pope will be the only person to know.”

  “Good… I believe you, just as I believed Andrei. Managing the treasures contained here is just one of my tasks, the only visible one and the least important of them. In the extension to the stacks, there is a room that you won’t see on any plan of this set of buildings, and which you won’t find mentioned anywhere, since it doesn’t officially exist. It was ordered by St Pius V in 1570, just as they were putting the finishing touches to St Peter’s Basilica.”

  “The secret archives of the Vatican?”

  Breczinsky smiled.

  “The secret archives are perfectly official, they are two floors above us, and their contents are made available to researchers in accordance with public rules. No, this particular room is known to very few people, and since it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t have a name. If you like, it’s the secret collection of the Vatican, and most states across the planet have something similar. It doesn’t have an officially appointed librarian – since, as I’ve already said, it doesn’t exist – and its contents are neither classified nor catalogued. It’s rather like what French librarians call an enfer, a hell – a private collection where sensitive documents are thrust into oblivion, so that they will never come to the attention of historians or journalists. I’m the only person in charge of them, and I answer to the Holy Father. Through the centuries, a great variety of disparate things have accumulated there, on the initiative of a pope or of a cardinal prefect of a dicastery. When anyone decides to send a document to the secret collection, it never emerges again, not even after the death of the person who sent it there. It will never be archived or exhumed.”

  “Father Breczinsky… why are you revealing the existence of this secret collection to me?”

  “Because it’s one of the two places in the Vatican where what you are seeking may be found. The other is the secret archives which are made public year by year, fifty years after the facts they concern. Unless a decision is made to the contrary – though this is generally given some official explanation. You have told me that a crate containing manuscripts from the Dead Sea came to the Vatican in 1948 at the time of the first Israeli-Arab war: if it had been classified in the secret archives, it would already have emerged. And if any item in that batch had been deemed too sensitive to be placed in the public domain, I would inevitably have known about it: that sometimes happens, and I then receive a file or a parcel that needs to be placed far from prying eyes in the secret collection. I alone am authorized to do so – and for five years I haven’t received anything new, either from the secret archives or anywhere else.”

  “But… do you ever have a closer look at what you are supposed to classify away, definitively, in this secret collection? Have you ever been curious enough to glance at what your predecessors have been storing away there ever since the end of the sixteenth century?”

  Breczinsky replied almost joyfully.

  “Pope Wojtyla made me swear an oath never to seek to discover the contents of what was handed to me, or of what is already in that room. In fifteen years, I’ve only had to go in there three times, to place a new item there. I have been faithful to my oath, but I couldn’t help noticing a series of shelves labelled Dead Sea Manuscripts. I don’t know what’s contained in that section of the room. When I talked to Father Andrei about it, after sharing all these same secrets with him, he begged me to let him have a look. Who could I ask for permission to do so? Nobody but the Pope – and it’s the Pope whom Andrei and I wished to protect, though he didn’t know this. I agreed, and let him look round the room for an hour.”

  Nil murmured:

  “And it was the next day, I imagine, that he left Rome in such a hurry?”

  “Yes. He took the Rome express the next day, without telling me a thing. Had he discovered something? Had he spoken to anyone? I don’t know.”

  “But he fell from the Rome express during the night, and it wasn’t an accident.”

  Breczinsky wiped his face with his two hands.

  “It wasn’t an accident. What I can tell you is that, by carrying on your colleague’s work, you have placed yourself in the same perilous position. Your research has led you, as it led him, to the threshold of that non-existent room. I am prepared to let you too enter it, I trust you as I trusted him. Catzinger, and many others too, I fear, are on the same track: if you get to the goal before them, you will be in the same danger as Andrei. There is still time for you to drop it all, Father Nil, to go back to the room next door and carry on examining your harmless medieval manuscript. What is your decision?”

  * * *

  Nil closed his eyes. He imagined he could see the thirteenth apostle, placed at the right hand of Jesus in the upper room, listening to him with veneration. Then, having become the keeper of a weighty secret, struggling alone against the hatred of Peter and the Twelve, who wanted to remain twelve and to be solely in possession of the monopoly of the information to be transmitted. They condemned him to exile and silence, so that the Church that they were going to erect on top of the falsified memory of Jesus would endure for ever, alpha and omega.

  The secret had lasted down the centuries before reaching him. Reclining at the table of the last supper, propped on his elbow, the beloved disciple of Jesus was at this minute asking him to take up the torch.

  Nil rose.

  “Take me there, Father.”

  They came out of the office. Leeland, bent over the table, didn’t even look up when he heard them pass behind him. They walked through the successive rooms of the stacks. Breczinsky opened a little door, and motioned Nil to follow him.

  A corridor sloped gently down in front of them. Nil tried to get his bearings. As if he had guessed what he was thinking, Breczinsky whispered:

  “Here, we are under the right transept of St Peter’s Basilica. The room was dug into the foundations, about forty yards away from the tomb of the Apostle discovered during the excavations ordered by Pius XII under the main altar.”

  There was a band in the corridor, which then came to a reinforced door. The Polish librarian unbuttoned his Roman collar and took out a little key that he carried on a chain dangling round his neck. Just before opening the door, he looked at his watch.

  “It’s 5 p.m., the stacks close at six: you have an hour. All our doors can be opened from the inside without a key: the same is true of this one. You just need to push it as you come out, and it will close automatically. Switch off the light before you leave, and come and join me in my office.”

  The armoured door opened without a sound, Breczinsky slipped his hand in against the inner wall and turned on a switch.

  “Make sure you don’t damage anything. Good luck!”

  Nil went in: the door swung shut behind him with a muffled click.

  78

  He was standing at the beginning of a long vaulted tunnel, brightly lit. The right-hand wall was bare, in fashioned stone. Nil moved his hand over its surface, and immediately recognized the cutting technique. It was not the chisels of medieval masons, or the saw ma
rks of recent times. The regular traces of the chisel marks and the way they were spaced out were the signature of Renaissance stonecutters.

  Along the left-hand wall there were rows of shelves extending right back. Some were sculpted with art and refinement – the oldest ones. Others were simply in undressed wood, and must have been added over the centuries as new items were classified and stored.

  Classified… At his first glance, Nil realized that no rational classification system had been adopted. Crates, boxes, containers, piles of folders were all stacked up on the shelves.

  “Why should any order be introduced into a library hell? Nothing’s ever going to get out of here.”

  He took a step forward to peer down to the end of the tunnel: about fifty yards. Dozens of stacks, thousands of documents: he had an hour to find a needle in this haystack. It wouldn’t be possible. And yet Andrei had found something here, Nil was convinced of the fact: this alone could explain his flight and his death. He advanced down the rows, examining the stacks on his left.

  There was no classification, but signs had been nailed onto the edges of the shelves, in a mixture of elegant old-fashioned calligraphy and more modern handwriting. He felt as if time had been abolished.

  Cathars… Trial of the Templars… a whole stack. Savonarola, John Huss, The Galileo Affair, Giordano Bruno, Sacerdoti rinnegati francesi – the list of the priests who had sworn to support the revolutionary French republic, and were condemned by Rome as apostates in 1792. Corrispondenza della S.S. con Garibaldi… All the secret history of the Church in conflict with its enemies. Suddenly, Nil halted: a stack filled with cardboard boxes that looked recent bore a single label – Operation Ratlines.

  Forgetting why he was there, Nil turned into the bay and opened one of the boxes at random: it was the correspondence between Pius XII and Draganovič, the former priest who had become head of the Ustaše, the Croatian Nazis who had committed atrocities during the war. He opened other boxes: the identity papers of notorious Nazi criminals, dockets of Vatican passports drawn up in their names, receipts for considerable sums of money. Operation Ratlines was the code name for the network that had enabled Nazi criminals, just after the war, to escape with impunity, aided by the Holy See.

  Nil wiped his face. He wasn’t learning anything new here. The Church’s compromises, its crimes indeed, were the logical consequences of what the thirteenth apostle must have suffered in the middle of the first century. He came out of the bay, and his eyes were drawn to a dossier that was just lying there on a shelf: Auschwitz, rapporti segreti 1942. He repressed his desire to open it. “So the Holy See knew what was going on in Auschwitz as early as 1942…”

  He looked at his watch: more than half an hour. He moved on.

  Suddenly he halted: he had just spotted a label in recent writing:

  Manoscritti del Mar Morto, Spuria.

  A dozen dusty boxes were piled up there. He took the one on top and opened it: inside were several fragments of scrolls, half worn away by time. He regretted that he hadn’t brought his gloves, and picked up one of the scrolls: bits of parchment came away and fell to the bottom of the box, which was strewn with them. “The Hebrew writing from Qumran!” They were indeed the manuscripts from the Dead Sea, but why had they been relegated to this library hell, doomed to fall to pieces when scholars from all over the world were looking for them? Spuria – “scraps and leftovers”: had the worldwide community been deprived of these scraps because they were valueless… or because they represented the leftovers of history and needed to be concealed for ever, because that history had taken another direction?

  He put the box back in its place. The one underneath it was made of deal, and bore on its side a printed inscription: Cognac Napoléon, cuvée de l’Empereur.

  The crate of Metropolitan Samuel, the crate that had been given to the Dominican lay brother in Jerusalem!

  His heart pounding, Nil pulled it from the pile. On the lid, three letters had been written: M M M. He recognized Father Andrei’s bold handwriting.

  His head started to turn. So when, in the train, Andrei had written M M M on his note, he had not simply been alluding to the batch of photocopies from the Huntington Library that were preserved in the library of St Martin’s Abbey. He had been designating this box – the very same one that Nil had just discovered. Andrei himself had written these three letters on its lid so that it could be more easily identified one day: this was the one he had meant to tell him about. Its discovery, made possible by the encounter with Breczinsky, had been the end and goal of their research, and he had been intending to tell Nil everything.

  That was why he had been killed.

  Nil opened the box: the same heap of fragmentary scrolls. And, to one side, a single sheet of rolled parchment. Nil’s hands were trembling as he undid the twist of linen tied around the manuscript. He unrolled it carefully: it was in Greek, an elegant hand, perfectly legible. The handwriting of the thirteenth apostle! He started to read:

  “I, the beloved disciple of Jesus, the thirteenth apostle, to all the Churches…”

  When he had finished reading, Nil was pale with emotion. The beginning of the letter had not told him anything he did not already know: Jesus was not God, the Twelve – driven on by their political ambitions – had deified him. But the thirteenth apostle knew that this would not be enough to preserve his Master’s true face: he testified, in an irrefutable fashion, that on 9th April 30 ad he had met men in white, Essenes, in front of the tomb from which they had just taken Jesus’s body, and that they were about to carry this body to one of their desert burial grounds, to give it a proper funeral.

  As for this tomb, he did not indicate its exact location. In a laconic phrase, he stated that only the desert sand would protect Jesus’s tomb from the covetousness of men. Like all the prophets, the Nazorean was alive for all eternity, and the veneration of his bones might distract humanity from the only real way in which it could encounter him: prayer.

  During all these months of research, Nil had believed that the mystery facing him was that of the thirteenth apostle, the role he had played in Jerusalem and what he had bequeathed to posterity. The man who had written these lines in his own hand knew that he was already eliminated from the Church, written out of its future. And he sensed that this future would have nothing to do with the life and teaching of his Master. He had entrusted to this parchment the secret that, perhaps one day, would enable the world to rediscover Jesus’s true face. He had done this without any illusions: what did a slender sheet of paper represent when opposed by the consuming ambition of men who were ready to do anything to achieve their ends, by manipulating the memory of the man he had loved more than any other?

  The thirteenth apostle had just brought him to the true secret: the real, physical existence of a tomb containing Jesus’s bones.

  Nil glanced at his watch: ten past six. “I hope Breczinsky’s waiting for me!” He put the miraculously rediscovered letter back in its box, and the box back in its place. He would keep his word: the Pope would be alerted, via the Polish librarian, to the existence of this apostolic letter that neither the centuries nor the men of the Church had managed to destroy. Thanks to the inscription M M M it would be easy for Breczinsky to find it again and hand it over to him.

  What happened after that no longer concerned a little monk like him. It concerned nobody but the Pope.

  Nil came quickly out of the room, taking care to switch off the light: behind him, the door closed automatically. When he reached the room where Leeland and he had been working every day, it was empty and the ceiling lights had been switched off. He went over and knocked at the office door: no reply, Breczinsky had not waited for him.

  Nil wondered, rather anxiously, whether all the doors leading to the Belvedere courtyard did indeed open from the inside: he was extremely reluctant to spend the night in the cramped, musty stacks. But Breczinsky had not lied to him: he got through the two armoured doors without any difficulty. The entrance airlock was
empty, but the door leading outside was ajar. Without thinking, Nil walked out into the courtyard and took in a great gulp of fresh air. He needed to walk, to get his head round all that had happened.

  He was in so much of a hurry to leave that he paid no attention to the tinted window behind which the papal policeman was smoking a cigarette. As soon as he saw him go out, the man picked up the internal Vatican City phone and pressed a button.

  “Your Eminence, he’s just left… Yes, he was alone: the other one left before him. Di niente, Eminenza.”

  In his office, Cardinal Catzinger hung up with a sigh. It would be time for Antonio to act, very soon now.

  79

  Nil crossed St Peter’s Square, and mechanically looked up: the Pope’s window was lit up. Tomorrow he would speak to Breczinsky, tell him where to find the crate of brandy marked M M M, and entrust him with the task of giving the old Pontiff a message by word of mouth. He turned into the Via Aurelia.

  When he reached the third-floor landing, he halted: through the door he could hear Leeland playing Erik Satie’s second Gymnopédie. The melody, floating in air, expressed a sense of infinite melancholy, a feeling of despair tinged with a touch of humour and derision. “Rembert…” he thought. “Will your sense of humour enable you to overcome your own despair?” He knocked discreetly at the door.

  “Come in! I couldn’t wait for you to get here!”

  Nil sat near the piano.

  “Remby, why did you leave the stacks before I came back?”

  “Breczinsky came to tell me when it was six o’clock: he had to lock up, he said. He seemed worried. But never mind that: tell me, did you discover anything?”

  Nil did not share Leeland’s carefree attitude: the absence of Breczinsky disquieted him. “Why wasn’t he there as we’d agreed when I came back?” he wondered to himself, before pushing the question to the back of his mind.

  “Yes, I found what Andrei and I had been seeking for such a long time: an intact copy of the letter of the thirteenth apostle – the original, in fact.”