The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  Just as he was dozing off he murmured, “Hebrew?”

  BOOK 8: 1 -14 HIDDEN SENSE

  The Therapeutae have been recognized throughout the centuries as identical with the earliest Christian Church of Egypt. They were known to Philo at the very latest as early as 25 A.D., and they must have existed long before. If the canonical dates are correct, they could not have been Christians, in the sense of being followers of Jesus; and yet they were so like the Christians that the Church Fathers regarded them as the model of a Christian Church. We are, therefore, confronted with this dilemma; either Christianity existed before Christ, or the canonical dates are wrong.

  — GRS MEAD

  8: 1

  PROFESSOR DE LA CROIX

  WHEN DREW AWOKE, Jesse was standing over him, brushing hair off his forehead with a finger. Groaning, he sat up and rubbed his face.

  “Time to get dressed.” She bent and kissed him lightly. “I’m starving.” She modeled her Turkish clothes in front of the dresser mirror. “I look like a damn Gypsy.” Both hands flew to her mouth. Cautiously, as if something else might escape, she lowered her hands. “Drew, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know what you meant.” He tried not to stare at the freckles below her throat, exposed by the top three buttons of her blouse she’d left undone. What was it about those warm flecks of color…?

  She pulled aside the curtains with a whoosh and flooded the room with sunlight. “I’m dying for some eggs.”

  Drew squinted and turned his head away. “Eggs,” he muttered as he pushed off the bed. He tugged on a pair of shorts, washed his face, and tied his hair into a ponytail. Letting a t-shirt hang over his cargo shorts, he slipped into his sandals. “All set.”

  She shook her head. “You really are the textbook definition of a slacker, aren’t you?”

  “Professor de la Croix thought so. Couldn’t stand me.”

  “Because you got good grades in spite of your sloppy habits. And because you’re a man. I hate to say it, but my mother bore a grudge against all of you.”

  “Your mother? Professor de la Croix is your mother?”

  Jesse nodded.

  He shook his head. “I can’t … I just can’t put the two of you together.”

  “My father’s last name was Fenton, but my parents never married. In fact, I hardly ever saw him.”

  “He ran out on her, huh?” Drew couldn’t really blame him for that.

  “Pretty much.”

  “I’m sorry. It must have been tough for her, being a single mom. And tough for you.”

  “We managed.”

  “And I thought you were teacher’s pet because you were the best student.”

  “We were the best students.”

  “I guess that explains why you didn’t take my side that day she lost her temper in class.”

  She nodded. “Conflict of interest.”

  “What about now? Is your mom—?”

  “She died seven years ago. Sort of an accidental suicide.”

  “Jess … I’m so sorry.” If he took one step forward and reached for her, he could wrap her in a hug, but something in her face kept him from taking that step.

  “I’ve come to terms with it.”

  “Can I ask … what happened?”

  “Well …” Jesse was looking at the floor now, as though deciphering something in the pattern of a rug. “You know she sometimes lost her temper in class. The head of the department covered for her more than once. Add to that the fact that she was seen as a kind of dinosaur by most of her colleagues … with her literal belief in the Bible. She was basically forced into early retirement. About a year later, the book she considered her life’s work came out, The Gospels as Eyewitness Accounts. I guess you know that most of the reviewers panned it—including your hero, Stephen.”

  Drew’s breath scraped past his teeth. “I know they didn’t see eye to eye.”

  “No, they didn’t. Anyway, she had no classes to teach. Her views were obsolete, except in the Deep South. Her life’s work was a commercial and critical failure. One night, too much wine, too many pills …” Jesse shrugged. “She just didn’t wake up.”

  It was hard to believe that, however indirectly, Stephen had helped kill Jesse’s mother. “Do you have any brothers? Sisters?”

  “Mm-mm. Only child. Mom never married. She always said I would be all she needed in her retirement—me and her library.”

  “Jess, I’m so sorry.” Before she could protest, he had both arms around her.

  “Same shirt as yesterday …” She pressed her cheek against his chest. “But you still smell good.” She pulled away by half an arm’s length. “I guess I was a little scared when I got married. My college boyfriend. I felt very alone after I lost Mom and … I guess I didn’t want to go through life that way.”

  “I still can’t get over it. You and Professor de la Croix … you’re so different.”

  “In a lot of ways, yes. I’m sure if she could see me with you now—”

  “She’d blow a gasket.”

  “That’s one way to put it.

  His cell phone rang. Zafer.

  “Saint-Savoy is out of jail. Which means he’ll probably be showing up in Istanbul.”

  Drew remembered the man he’d seen being hauled away in handcuffs by the Egyptian police. Neatly trimmed black hair, Roman nose, early thirties, dark eyes. “Yeah, I could pick him out of a crowd.”

  “I’ll swing by the hotel in a couple of hours. We have a little blackmail on the agenda today.”

  “Who?”

  “A police captain.”

  Blackmail and police sounded like an exceptionally bad combination.

  8: 2

  AYA SOFYA

  THE CATHEDRAL OF DIVINE WISDOM—the Hagia Sophia—had been converted into a mosque after the Turkish conquest of the city. Centuries later, at the insistence of Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, it was turned into a museum. It was only a five-minute walk from the hotel, and Drew thought it would be a great diversion after breakfast.

  The avenue, inlaid with tram tracks, took them along the massive, crenellated wall Mehmet the Conqueror had built. Or rebuilt. Drew didn’t remember which.

  Rising above trees and the city wall, the Aya Sofya, as the Turks called it, was a tiny city unto itself—a minor skyline crowned by a lead-covered dome. Four minarets surrounded the monument like sentinels. Once painted red, the cathedral was now a drab gray with only hints of ruddiness.

  Tourists thronged the entrance.

  As soon as the cathedral took them in, Drew felt as though light and heat had been swallowed as well. They stood in a kind of vestibule facing a set of doors a giraffe could have gone through without ducking. Sheathed in brass with a patina of green, the doors were as smooth as porcelain. A mosaic of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus glittered on the wall above the threshold. The figures were set against a background of gold slightly tarnished by the dimness. The entire interior, Drew had read somewhere, had once been covered by something like four acres of gold leaf.

  “There are better mosaics inside. C’mon.”

  Their footsteps echoed on a floor paved with marble tiles.

  “Wow.” Jesse tilted her head back to take in what, nearly a millennium and a half ago, was regarded as the antechamber of heaven.

  “The largest enclosed space for something like a thousand years,” Drew said.

  “The architecture is … stunning. Really. I can’t believe how high the center of the dome is. And how intricate the … I mean, the capitals of those columns look like lace, but they’re stone.”

  Double-tiered colonnades of green marble, parallel to the nave, receded into the gloom. Rows of windows honeycombed the walls with sun and fragments of sky. Here was the artfully worked glass staining Shelley’s white radiance of eternity. Just below the dome itself, a ring of arched windows created the impression the dome rested on a foundation of light.

  A pigeon circled near the overarching ce
iling. Thanks to the acoustics, the feathery rustling reached them more than 150 feet below.

  “Just for a second I imagined we’d startled an angel.” Jesse was still looking up.

  “Definitely a pigeon. Ask the guy who has to clean up the shit.”

  “Oh don’t be such a killjoy. This is an amazing monument to faith. Imagine if people really dedicated themselves to common goals, to shared values. Imagine if we weren’t always fighting each other, if we didn’t pour billions into weapons and wars.”

  “Sounds like a John Lennon song.”

  “Well he was right, wasn’t he?”

  “You know who did the most damage to this church?”

  “The knights of the Fourth Crusade?” She smiled. “Surprised? Good old Catholics under Enrico Dandolo, a Venetian.”

  Drew nodded. “You’re a hard date to impress. Dandolo used to have a tomb around here somewhere, but the Turks destroyed it. There’s a marker now with his name carved in it. Up in the gallery. The Crusaders were supposed to be fighting the Muslims—”

  “But they were broke,” Jesse continued, “and when they saw the wealth of the city, they decided to pillage it themselves.”

  “Exactly.” Drew led her by the hand back into the vestibule where there were illustrations of the earlier incarnations of the Saint Sophia and summaries of its history. He pointed.

  The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale that even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable. They smashed the silver iconostasis, the icons and the holy books of Hagia Sophia, and seated upon the patriarchal throne a whore who sang coarse songs as they drank wine from the Church’s holy vessels.

  - Speros Vyronis, Byzantium and Europe

  “How can people can be so cruel to each other?” Jesse asked as they re-entered the cathedral.

  “Let me show you the gallery upstairs. That’s where my favorite mosaic is. I can spit on Enrico’s marker while we’re there.”

  “Drew …” She frowned.

  “You can spit on him, too, if you want.”

  She shook her head and followed him up a winding ramp of uncut stones polished by thousands of feet.

  Standing between columns, they looked down on the tourists milling around on the floor.

  “This way …” Drew tugged on her hand. “Here it is … The Last Judgment.”

  Hardly half of it left, the mosaic showed Christ flanked by his mother—only her face and a piece of her shoulder remained—and John the Baptist. Like Christ, John’s legs were missing. Their faces beautifully rendered, the three robed figures were set against shimmering gold.

  “Oh this is lovely …”

  Only now Drew didn’t see Jesus; he saw James the Just. James, whose death had been left out of the Gospels. Who had prayed for those killing him. Who’d had no heavenly father to fall back on.

  Jesse put both hands on his arm and pulled him closer. “You were right. This is something I needed to see.”

  “Every time you sink a shovel in the city, you turn up some piece of history. You know a carpet dealer found an entrance to the basement of Constantine’s palace behind his shop? It’s underground now because the city has sunk about six meters since it was founded. They estimate there are something like thirty blocks of city, pretty much intact, right under Sultanahmet.”

  Drew’s cell phone rang.

  Jesse let go of his arm.

  “Duty calls,” Zafer said.

  8: 3

  TARGET PRACTICE

  DREW HAD NEVER FIRED a gun with a silencer.

  “Smith & Wesson automatic,” Zafer said. “The original hush puppy, as Americans call it. Paid a nice piece of change for it in Iraq.”

  After giving Jesse color copies of the Habakkuk Scroll, Zafer had taken Drew back to the Office with the usual tortuous precautions.

  The basement was gray cement with a couple of bare bulbs for light, its windows boarded up. The space looked like a mini commando training camp. Two punching bags hung from the floor joists. There were weights, a leather jump rope, and a sheet of plywood with silhouette targets stapled to them. Behind the plywood was a stack of lumber the size of railroad ties. Cans dangled on strings from the ceiling. They varied in color and had been hung at different lengths and distances.

  Zafer opened a leather bag full of weapons.

  “You got an Uzi in there for me?”

  “So you can shoot everyone in the room, including me? No.”

  He handed Drew the Smith & Wesson. “I want to see how you handle it.” He gave Drew a pair of shooting glasses with amber lenses. “Put those on.”

  Walking over to the plywood sheets with the only gun Drew had seen in the Office that wasn’t lethal, Zafer stapled up some fresh targets. Ch-chnk. Ch-chnk.

  Drew stood about twenty-five feet away behind a yellow line painted on the floor.

  Zafer walked back. “Take your time aiming and give me four shots.”

  Remembering what his father had taught him, Drew held the gun with both hands and aimed slightly below the bull’s-eye: bullets traveled in an arc and, at close range, the pistol would shoot a little high. He squeezed off the first round. The gun jumped in his hand but made hardly any noise. All four shots probably took about six seconds. The acrid smell of gunpowder stung his sinuses. He’d always found the odor oddly appealing.

  Zafer examined the target. “Nice group. One bull’s-eye, the other three to the right. Unless this guy was wearing Kevlar, he’s dead.” Using a yellow marker, he circled the four holes and wrote 1st Grp. “Of course, this is just a target. You had plenty of time to aim, and no one was shooting back. This time, bring the gun up from your waist and give me four more as fast as you can.”

  Drew let his hands hang at his side for a second before raising the pistol as though someone were aiming back at him. Four shots in about two seconds.

  “Not bad. Two wide, two in the black.” Zafer made an amoeba-like shape with the marker. 2nd Grp.

  Drew felt a little giddy. Despite the weak popping sound the pistol made, he was holding the power to kill another human being. Jesus, no wonder criminals get addicted.

  “This time, I want to you to hit as many cans as you can as fast as you can. Nearest first. If you miss, shoot at the same can again. Go until you run out of ammo.”

  Drew took a second to gauge distances: the white can was closest. Then yellow, blue, green.

  The pistol popped. There was a satisfying ping as the white can leapt up and back. He nailed the yellow can on the second try and took two more for the blue one.

  The slide stayed open after the last shell was ejected, and a wisp of smoke curled out of the chamber.

  “Not bad at all. You have the basics down.”

  “You gonna take a turn?” Drew held up the Smith & Wesson.

  “Put another magazine in.”

  Zafer took the pistol after Drew had reloaded it. “Whenever you’re ready, get the cans swinging. Then get your ass behind me.”

  Running with his arms out as though imitating an airplane for a game of charades, Drew knocked into all the cans. Zafer starting shooting. Pings followed rapid flashes from the muzzle, and cans jerked on strings. The clip was empty in a few seconds.

  Drew had counted ten pings. “You missed.”

  “I missed twice. Fourteen rounds in the clip, I hit the cans ten times, and twice I aimed at the targets. Go look.”

  Drew shook his head. The bulls-eye was over the heart of the silhouette, but Drew only saw his own shots, which were circled and labeled.

  “You missed.”

  “Look at the head.”

  One silhouette had a hole in the forehead, the other in the face.

  “If he was wearing Kevlar, he’s still dead.”

  Drew nodded. “Pretty fuckin’ good.”

  “Get over here so I can fit you with a shoulder holster. You’re going spend a couple of hours prac
ticing your quick draw and pulling the slide. Just don’t fire on the draw—you won’t hit anything like that.”

  “Ok.”

  “Next week I’ll show you how to work with C4.”

  “Plastic explosives?” The idea didn’t appeal to Drew.

  Zafer snickered. “You never know when you’ll need to blow something up.” He handed Drew a pistol. “Here, this is your new friend.”

  A Beretta automatic pistol with a tiny bore. Probably a .22.

  “How come you’re giving me a peashooter?”

  Zafer took something out of his back pocket and flipped it to Drew.

  Drew caught it as it fell. It was an official-looking ID card that said his name was David Katz. “Mossad? The Israeli intelligence agency? Are you kidding me?”

  “No. And they like pea-shooters.”

  8: 4

  SWORD IN THE CLOSET

  HIS WRISTS STILL SMARTING from the shooting he’d done, Drew rang up Yasemin. She was as playful and seductive on the phone as she’d been when they first met. He hung up and grinned at Zafer. “Got a date!”

  He walked into the room where he slept and stripped off his shirt. For his Mossad role, Zafer wanted him in the pearl gray suit he’d worn in Cairo.

  He and Yasemin had to come to a decision tonight—try again or break it off and cauterize the leaks. Then he and Jesse could figure out what to do with their long-incubated infatuation.

  Zafer stood in the doorway while he changed. “We’re going to have a little talk with an antiquities officer who’s probably taking bribes from Serafis.”

  “Probably?” Drew pulled up the silk trousers.

  “My kankardeshim made a few phone calls. Captain Ozatalay has more money than he should. His house is just a little too nice, his car is a little more expensive than it should be, and his daughters go to a private high school.”