The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  “Why should we pay you? It’s ours.”

  “Abu did not get this scroll in a legal way, but you say it was his.” Kadir shrugged. “I did not get it in a legal way, too, but it is mine. My friend is dead because of this scroll. The hoja is dead because of this scroll.”

  “Look, Kadir, we won’t keep anything but the photographs. The scroll is going to be returned to the Israeli government. They have a policy of generous compensation. There’s your money.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “After we find out how much, we’ll talk,” Zafer said. “We’ll contact you in Istanbul. You have my word.”

  Nathan sighed heavily.

  Kadir reached up with a hand. “It is a deal?”

  Nathan took Kadir’s child-sized hand in his own. “All right then, Istanbul. Now, if you guys don’t mind, I’d like to talk to Drew for a couple minutes.”

  Zafer shrugged.

  Kadir found an empty computer near the door and hopped up on a chair. Zafer stood next to him, arms folded over his chest.

  Standing over Drew, Nathan said, “I have a confession to make …”

  Aware of a tingling in his groin as though he had to pee, Drew glanced over at Zafer.

  “I’m not an Ebionite.”

  Why is he telling me this?

  “I’m an atheist. Like the professor.”

  “Then why—?”

  “I don’t believe in God, but I can accept a religion that completely rejects violence.”

  “So you’re using the Ebionites.”

  “My agenda is no different than Stephen’s. Hasn’t the world had enough of blind faith? Imagine a group of religious fanatics getting their hands on a nuclear weapon—9/11 would be nostalgic. And right now the best way I can think of to deal with that possibility is through the Ebionites. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect to change two thousand years of belief by disproving it. Most people aren’t interested in the truth unless it reinforces what they already believe.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I know this scroll means a lot more to you than it does to them.” Nathan tipped his head to indicate Zafer and Kadir. “Just be careful who you trust. The Sicarii aren’t the only ones who don’t want you to know the truth.”

  What Nathan was saying, in effect, was that he was the only one Drew could be certain was above suspicion. But for the first time since they’d met, Drew didn’t trust him.

  5: 10

  AHWA

  “YOU STILL THINK NATHAN is Sicarii?”

  They were in an ahwa, a coffeehouse. Every square inch of wall space had been taken up with one kind of decoration or another: a bust of Nefertiti on a wall shelf, a mirror inscribed Welcome to Egypt, a painted belly dancer framed by a pattern inspired by the twists of vines and the soft undulations of leaves, a portrait of a Turkish Sultan—all dulled by the smoke they’d been saturated in for years.

  Zafer took the stem of the narghile—a shisha to the Egyptians—out of his mouth. “What were you doing in that Internet café?”

  “Checking my e-mail.”

  Drew had ordered helba, which the Egyptians also called yellow tea although, as far as he could tell, it was some kind of bean infusion. It had a subtle taste and seemed to mellow out the stomach riot that often followed a spicy Egyptian meal.

  “No, you were in that Internet café because you were bait. And what did we catch? Nathan. It’s classic good cop, bad cop. He feeds us some names, tells us who the bad guys are, winks and says, Don’t worry, I got your back.”

  Drew sucked hard on the narghile. Exhaling, he searched the cloud of white smoke for something meaningful. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “He told you he’s an atheist. An atheist who works for a church? Does that make any sense?”

  “I don’t know. Today was the first time I started to wonder who he really is.”

  “Never mind who is Nathan,” Kadir said. “We’re going to Antakya to see Serafis.”

  Drew was elated that there were no flights between Cairo and the airport near Antakya. It meant that after they arrived in Istanbul, he could meet Yasemin.

  “Who is this guy, Serafis?’

  “A Greek,” Kadir said. “He is knowing the black market very well. I have heard of him, but I never met to him. Tariq was plan to see to him if we do not find buyer in Istanbul.”

  Drew wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of a hand. “You can’t sell it to him, Kadir.”

  “Why I can’t sell it?” Water bubbled as he inhaled through the coiled arm of the narghile.

  “Because … you can’t. Scholars have to see it. This is … this could change history.”

  Kadir shrugged. “Abu didn’t change history.”

  “Yes but … don’t you understand? Everything Christians believe might be … might change.”

  “Serafis is Christian. If the money is enough, I am saying goodbye to this scroll, and he can change everything he wants.”

  Drew leaned closer to Kadir. “Stephen didn’t die so you could make money.”

  “Did he die so I could be poor?”

  “He died—” Drew straightened up. “He died for something he believed in.” His voice had sharpened to a blade.

  Reaching across the little round table, Zafer grabbed Drew’s wrist. “You knew sooner or later we were going to sell the scroll. You want us to sell it to Nathan? We won’t get anything. The Ebionites are broke. Even if he’s not Sicarii. If he is, we lose money and the scroll.” He withdrew his hand.

  “My friend is dead too.” Kadir had switched to Turkish. “I can’t do anything with a two-thousand-year-old roll of paper. I can do something with five million dollars.”

  Drew stood up. “Listen, you money-grubbing, little bastard—”

  Zafer, who’d jumped up at the same time, seized Drew’s wrist.

  Drew broke the hold and retracted his arm. “Not that easy when the other guy has some training, is it?”

  “Don’t challenge me, Drew.”

  Drew’s heart had kicked up a couple of gears, and now some of the Egyptians at other tables were looking at them.

  “Sit the fuck down.” Zafer patted the table with his hand.

  Drew sank into his chair.

  A waiter knocked gray embers off the tops of their narghiles with tongs and replaced them with coals glowing a healthy orange.

  “Look, Kadir, what if this scroll were part of the Qur’an? Or the Hadith?”

  “If it tells the same things as the Qur’an and the Hadith, who can need it? If it tells something different, it is haram and must be burned.” Kadir shrugged. “Instead of burning, I would sell.”

  Drew let out an exasperated breath. “What if … what if it had some—some new information about Muhammad? About his life?”

  Kadir drew meditatively on his pipe. White smoke drifted past his face as he exhaled. “I would sell. Not to the black market, but still I would sell.”

  “Exactly!” Drew poked a long finger at him.

  “Infidel. Still there is a problem … it is not about Muhammad, it is a Christian writing.”

  “Jewish.”

  “Yes, Jewish. I am Muslim. So why I am caring about a Jewish writing?”

  “You want money, right? Then what about the Israeli government? Nathan says they’ll pay.”

  Zafer shook his head. “It’s not that easy, Drew.”

  Reappraising Zafer’s wide-set shoulders, his bull neck, and the thick bone of his brow, Drew was glad he had sat back down.

  “What if they don’t pay?” Zafer asked. “What if they just take the scroll? Then what?”

  “And we don’t know the how much.” Kadir shook his head, which despite his diminutive body, was almost as big as Zafer’s. “Ten thousand? Twenty?”

  Drew raised both of his hands as though acknowledging a foul in a basketball game. “All right, all right. Just promise you won’t sell it until you at least find out how much they’ll give you.�
� Drew looked at Zafer. “You have a friend in MIT. He can find out, can’t he? Don’t they have clerks or something who can do that? You know … fact-checking? Bullshit work?”

  Zafer nodded. “I’ll talk to him.” His cheeks hollowed as he drew on his narghile.

  The American looked at Kadir. The dwarf was maybe three-and-half feet tall. No wife. No kids. It couldn’t be easy. To watch a woman walk by, to know there was no point in talking to her no matter the clamor in your chest. To know that … what? Ninety-eight percent of all women fell into the category of Unattainable. His whole life must be one knot of frustration. Getting on a bus was a task. Shaving meant dragging a chair into the bathroom. Walking attracted jeering kids. No wonder Kadir, sitting on a stool outside his shop, subsisted on a diet of cigarettes and pulp sci-fi in which he journeyed to far-flung worlds, bathed in the leaden light of blue stars, explored the ruins of ancient Martian cities.

  Drew had had long talks with him after Sahaflar Charsisi had been mostly closed for the night, and the outdoor shelves cleared. Light from Kadir’s shop spilling into the cobbled alley, moths and gnats would make a scattered cloud over their heads. On more than one of those late nights, Kadir had listened to him whine about his divorce. And whenever he’d had one raki too many, Kadir would talk about moving to southern Turkey and living on a boat. It was the only dream Drew had ever heard him mention. A boat on the Mediterranean.

  Drew backhanded sweat off his forehead. “I’m sorry, Kadir.”

  “I’m also sorry.” He sat sullenly smoking.

  Zafer’s cell phone rang. Glancing at the number, he smiled. “Perfect timing.”

  The Turk did very little talking, but from what Drew overheard, he assumed it was his friend at MIT.

  Zafer put the phone back in his pocket and grinned. “Looks like Jean is going to be on ice for at least a month. That’s one down, eleven to go.”

  Drew smiled, but he noticed that Zafer hadn’t said anything to his friend about the Israeli government or its policy of compensation for returned antiquities.

  5: 11

  THE TERRORIST NETWORK

  THE ALLEY, LIKE MOST in downtown Cairo, was dimly lit in spite of the hooded lamps hung from sagging cables strung between buildings. A small crowd of men clogged the passage. They were watching a television that had been set up above the doorway of a dingy coffeehouse. Drew and the Turks slowed to a stop, and he looked up at the screen. “What’s this all about?”

  The television camera swept across a ruined street: an apartment building had been shorn in half and chunks of cement dangled from the steel rods used for reinforcement. A rug hanging over a rough lip of floor reminded Drew these were homes he was staring into.

  “Where is this?” Drew asked in English.

  “Baghdad,” Zafer said.

  The television cameras were rolling in a hospital now. Drew’s jaw involuntarily lowered—slowly, like a drawbridge slightly too heavy for its counterweights. He’d never seen anything like the scorched face of the man on screen whose arms were suspended by cables because, Drew realized, in any other position they would have caused him intense pain. Yes, he’d seen burn victims, equally hideous, but not in the same way. He was bandaged from head to foot, only the lower part of his face visible. Spots of crimson had soaked through. The lips were absurdly swollen and deformed. Black, they had bubbled, and the bubbles had in turn grown smaller bubbles, which seemed to have hardened into a crust. Drew wouldn’t have believed human tissue could do this—that this could be done to human tissue—if he hadn’t seen it.

  “How…?” was all he could say.

  “Cluster bombs,” Zafer said.

  An Iraqi boy with a blackened chest lay in a hospital bed. Bandaged stubs had replaced his arms. He looked up as though he had been caught naked on camera. He had. He would never be able to cover up. He would never be able to hug anyone, not even himself.

  “Is this Al Jazeera?”

  “Bush calls it the terrorist network.” Zafer snorted. “Embedded journalists. What a joke. Did you ever see anything like this on CNN?”

  Drew shook his head. “If Americans had seen images like these every night, the war would have been over in a week.” He prayed silently that was not a lie.

  Zafer aimed a finger at the TV. “See that guy … the one who lost his face?”

  Drew nodded.

  “What do you think he’ll do when he gets out of the hospital?”

  “Join a group of terrorists?”

  Zafer didn’t bother to answer.

  The report lasted another twenty minutes, at the end of which Kadir was bored. “Hadi, gidelim,” he said. “I want to go back to hotel.”

  Their new hotel was only a few blocks away. Eight stories high, it occupied the whole building. It also had a fairly posh lobby with a floor of green marble tile and graceful wooden archways beneath a high ceiling. The furniture was the sort you might expect in an English drawing room—amply cushioned and highly polished.

  Drew’s head snapped back for a second look at the woman sitting on the velvety green couch. “Is that…?”

  Looking up, she seemed to mirror his own startled expression.

  Her black hair was a little longer, her face now had mature lines and sharper angles but was as freckled as ever.

  “Jesse?”

  She stood up. “Drew?”

  Jesse Fenton. After all these years—years that had taken her from a good-looking girl to … Christ, if she smiled at him he was probably going to lose bladder control. It wasn’t that she had a model’s looks, it was more the way it all added up: the slash of her dark eyebrows against her pale forehead, the curvy upper lip and slight overbite, the bright green eyes and, of course, the freckles.

  Walking toward her, Drew held up the one-minute finger to Zafer and Kadir, who were standing in front of the elevator.

  “What are you doing in Cairo?” He couldn’t help leaning forward to hug her, although they’d never had any such physical intimacy in college. To his relief, she hugged him back. He straightened up and gave her some space.

  “I really shouldn’t be. I’m supposed to be in Syria finishing up some research on Suriani Christians and monastic Christianity. But Egypt is so close I thought I’d make a side trip to take in the pyramids. My grant won’t cover it …” She shrugged. “But what the hell? Tomorrow night I have to fly back to Aleppo.”

  “So you’re still in the field?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m a professor at Loyola. I’m on sabbatical.”

  “Why didn’t I ever see your name on the web? I did a dozen searches.”

  She smiled up at him. “Probably because you were looking for Jesse Fenton. I publish under my married name: Willard.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “I see.” In college, a boyfriend. Now, a husband. History repeats.

  5: 12

  A MODEST PROPOSAL

  JESSE AND DREW SAT AT A TABLE on the hotel’s roof. The view consisted of a cluster of neoclassical buildings that formed an artificial canyon stretching away to the east, the roof of an adjacent building a couple of stories lower, and a confluence of broad avenues that would become unbearably noisy in a few hours. Zafer and Kadir were a couple of tables away. A pair of tourists who looked to be German had the only other occupied table.

  “I’m sorry about last night, but things are … complicated.”

  Last night Zafer had interrupted their unexpected reunion, pulling Drew away by an arm. He’d barely managed to get Jesse’s card and room number. Drew had been fuming on the elevator. “What the fuck did you do that for?”

  Zafer was impassive as usual. “Aren’t you the one who can’t wait to get back to Istanbul to see his ex-wife?”

  “It’s nothing like that.” If Drew had been facing someone other than Zafer, he might have grabbed him by the shirt. “She’s married. And she’s a scholar. Someone who can read those goddamn photographs you carry around with you everywhere.”

  “Like the professor?”

 
“Yeah, like the professor. Only a lot younger and a lot better looking.”

  “You want her to end up like the professor?” Zafer asked. “No,” Drew took in a deep breath. “I guess not.”

  “Wait till morning. Then invite her to breakfast or something if you still feel like dragging her into this. Then give her a chance to think it over.”

  He raked back his long hair with his fingers. “You’re right.”

  “How do you know her?”

  Drew smiled and shook his head. “College. I haven’t seen her in like twelve years.”

  The elevator had stopped. The double doors had to be swung inward manually and then a gate that folded like an accordion had to be drawn back. “You can’t tell her much. Nothing about the scroll we’re looking for, Drew. Nothing.” Zafer had closed the gate behind Kadir. “Nothing about Antakya or Serafis. And don’t give her any way of contacting you. Except your e-mail address. That’s it. You call her if you need to.”

  Drew had nodded.

  “Drew, I need your word on this.”

  “All right … I promise.”

  Now here he was sitting across from Jesse, squinting in the bright sunlight and wondering how to explain the situation to her. “Have you ever heard of Stephen Cutherton?”

  “Sure. He and de la Croix were archenemies.”

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter anymore. He was murdered last week in Istanbul.”

  “Murdered? I wasn’t a big fan of his work, but … that’s awful.”

  “To me Stephen was … in some ways, he was like a father.” Drew looked away. “I didn’t actually see it, but I was there a few minutes later.”

  “You were there? What exactly happened?”

  “One of the Dead Sea Scrolls is involved.”

  “What?”

  Drew let out an exasperated sigh and summarized what he’d been through since Kadir had given him an unmarked package to take home. He was careful to edit out everything about the second scroll.

  Jesse’s coffee cup clacked softly against the saucer. “Drew, is this some kind of joke?”

  “Not remotely. So before the conversation goes any further, you have to decide whether or not you want to be involved.”