Facing Bowery, the massive fifteen-by-thirty-foot Tiffany window of the Prodigal Son story was removed, taken apart, cleaned, repaired, and reassembled. And the famous organ pipes were renovated back to their original luster and design.
On the structure’s façade, an architecturally beautiful building had emerged from decades of paint and neglect.
The transformation of the Bowery Mission was nothing less than awesome. And Bohannon’s heart was moved every time he looked at it.
Today his heart was moved for another reason. It was time to say goodbye.
Bohannon was in the aisle in the rear of the Bowery Mission chapel, leaning against the last large, wooden pew on the left side. The chapel was empty. It was thirty minutes before the doors would open for the evening service, followed by dinner for the poor and homeless people—probably more than one hundred—who crossed the Mission’s threshold three times a day.
His eyes on the organ pipes above the platform, at the far end of the long chapel, Bohannon shook his head. How much his life had changed. How grateful he was to still be alive. They had grieved and released Winthrop, then Doc, now Kallie. He ran his hand over the worn but polished wood along the top of the pew. His heart ached for the loss.
Bohannon took a deep sigh of a breath and looked over the work of a decade. Like many of the men who would kneel at its altar rail, the Bowery Mission had been reborn. And a verse came to mind. Well done, good and faithful servant.
It was time.
49
5:26 p.m., Little Italy, New York City
It was a tight fit getting all five of them—Tom and Annie, Joe and Deirdre, and Sammy—seated at the round table in the front window of Paesano’s Restaurant along Mulberry Street in New York City’s Little Italy. It was the Bohannons’ favorite table in their favorite restaurant, and it was the first time the team had been fully reunited in three weeks. Even though the price had steadily risen from the “$7.95 Pasta Special” the Bohannons first found twelve years earlier, Paesano’s still served some of the best dishes in Little Italy.
Looking like it had been rescued from a 1940s movie, Paesano’s was what an old Italian restaurant should look like. Straw-bound Chianti bottles hung from old, dark oak beams, lined with fake grapevines. Antique opera posters dotted the white plaster walls, green-checked cloths covered the tables, and Sinatra, Martin, and Como dominated the background music.
“Please don’t give away my secret,” Bohannon whispered into his wife’s ear, “but I admit I’ve even missed Rizzo.”
“I can hear you, Houdini. And I’ve missed you too, as long as you’re going to pick up the check. Yo guys”—Rizzo took two breadsticks from the bread basket and inserted them between his upper teeth and gums—“ever see a walrus?”
Bohannon was about to skewer Rizzo’s table manners when he looked into Alejandro’s eyes, his favorite waiter standing to the side of the table with his notebook and pen in the air, but his eyes as big as pizzas. “You’re scaring the staff, Samuel.”
“I’m scaring myself. This feels good,” he said as he twirled the still-implanted breadsticks. He glanced over at Alejandro. “More bread, please.”
That wicked Rizzo-smile flooded his face as Alejandro beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen.
“Sammy,” said Rodriguez, sitting to Rizzo’s right, “you are going to have a tough time adjusting to real life again.”
“Who says I want to?”
“C’mon, Sam. Our reality has changed, again, now that we’re back from the Mideast. We need to change, too.”
“Why? This place hasn’t changed a lick since Columbus served spumoni on the Santa Maria, and they’re doing fine.”
Tom had another moment of concern for Rizzo. In a way, he had lost more than any of them. Kallie’s death had broken his heart. Rizzo must have seen the concern in Bohannon’s eyes.
“No, seriously,” said Rizzo, pulling the breadsticks and pushing himself back in his chair. “I’m not going back to normal. I don’t think I can ever go back to normal, whatever that is.”
“Sam, what is it?” Annie asked, putting her hand on his.
“I’ve resigned my position with the library,” Rizzo said, holding Annie’s gaze. “I’m leaving New York.”
“Don’t be—”
“Wait,” Annie said in Joe’s direction. Then turned again to Rizzo. “Why?”
“Kallie and I had a lot of long talks in those few days we were here in New York, between our trips to Jerusalem. One of the dreams we shared was to open a dive shop in the town of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. You know that I’ve done a lot of diving. Underwater, I’m the same as anyone else, no matter what size. And Kallie loved the sea, loved the reefs. If she couldn’t be in the Red Sea, she wanted to be in the Caribbean. I think I can be closer to her there.”
For a moment, each of them appeared to be lost in thought. Then Deirdre leaned forward and reached out a hand to Rizzo.
“Just don’t be rash, Sam,” she said.
“That’s what I was going to say!” said Joe.
“I don’t think he’s being rash,” said Annie. “Tom and I have made a decision, too.”
“You’re opening a dive shop?” said Rizzo, feigning alarm. “We’re going to be competitors?”
“No dive shop,” said Tom. “But we’re leaving New York City, too.”
“What!” Joe’s back arched, his shoulders were thrown back, and his head twisted so fast that Tom thought he heard Joe’s neck snap. “What are you talking about?”
Tom reached to his right and grasped Annie’s hand in his. “Time is short. Life is fleeting, and we want to experience it together, every minute. We’ve talked to the kids, and they are all for it. Annie and I have come up with a plan that will allow us to work together in parts of the world that are most in need of peace and God’s love.”
“You’re going to be the new Mother Teresa?”
“No, Sam. I’ve taken a position with Global Compassion, a faith-based organization that finds sponsorships for children, helps build communities, and works for social justice in the poorest, most ravished and tumultuous areas of the world. My job will be to create and implement strategies that will enable peace and reconciliation to occur in countries most in need, including the United States and Ireland.”
“When does all this happen?” Joe sounded like a ten-year-old who had his Christmas toys repossessed.
“Soon. Annie is going to travel with me, working as a freelance photographer, contributing photos to National Geographic and international photo services, but also for Salvation Army, Global Compassion, World Vision, and other humanitarian agencies operating in the areas where I’m assigned.”
Joe looked from face to face, his eyes blinking in Morse code the questions that must have been in his mind. “Just like that? You’re going to chuck it all in, leave the kids behind, and go off to save the world? Haven’t you had enough of that the last couple of months?” He pushed his chair back and headed toward the restrooms.
Tom watched him walk away. I guess we could have announced that better.
“Joe’s been offered his dream job at the library,” said Deirdre, breaking into Tom’s thoughts. “I think they realized how much they needed him while he was away. With all of you leaving, he’s probably feeling guilty because we’re not going to the ends of the earth, too. He’s going to lose his best friends to boot and, now—” Deirdre put her hand on her brother’s arm. “Tom, the Joe who came back with you is a changed man. Something happened to him over there, something that I’ve been praying for years to see happen. There’s a new peace about Joe. But now, suddenly, you guys are going to be gone. He probably feels abandoned.”
Alejandro returned with three plates of steaming pasta, another waiter in his wake with the other two orders. And a new basket of bread, which he put on the table, as far from Rizzo as possible.
Joe returned, but didn’t sit. He stood between Tom and Annie and put a hand on each of their shoulders. “
I’m sorry. I’m going to miss you.” He returned to his chair and pulled close to the table, his eyes still on Tom. “It’s just I—does it have to be so soon?”
Starting with Annie, Tom looked at each of the faces around the table—most of the people he loved were with him tonight. “Annie and I have talked about it a lot, wondering the same thing. Maybe we should just wait awhile. Take a break. Rest after what we’ve been through. But we kept coming back to one key principle.”
Bohannon turned his full attention toward Rizzo. “Sam, what do you think this has all been about?”
“About I’m going to fall over dead if I don’t eat this food soon.”
Tom wasn’t going to let Rizzo get away with wisecracks now. “Come on, Sam. Humor me. Why have we gone through all of it? What’s the point?”
Rizzo intently studied his ravioli, his fork tapping a rhythm on the tabletop. “God at work.” His voice was barely audible. Rizzo raised his head. “There is something going on, something cosmic and eternal. I know I probably sound like some quack televangelist, but for a reason only the Almighty can understand, it certainly looks like we’ve been God’s instruments in bringing forward a time that has been prophesied for over three thousand years. The beginning of the end of what the devil started in the garden of Eden, and all that.”
Bohannon smiled and Rizzo smiled back. “Thanks, Sam. So you understand, then—why we can’t sit back.” He turned to Joe. “If finding the Temple and the priests holding ritual sacrifice was another switch turning on God’s prophetic clock, if bringing Aaron’s staff back to Israel is another harbinger of ‘last-days revelation,’ then time is short. The clock is ticking. There is only so much time left, only so much time to get the message out. To bring the hope of salvation to those in the world who most desperately need to hear it.
“While there is still time, we want to offer other people the gift of grace and spread the hope of salvation. If we are in the last days of earth as we know it, which Annie and I believe, then it’s up to us to do everything we can to share the truth, as we know it.”
Tom grabbed a breadstick and pointed across the table. “And I intend to start with you, Samuel. Let me tell you a story.”
50
11:54 p.m., Jerusalem
Benji Propolski turned his thermos upside down, and still no tea escaped into his cup.
I’m going to fall asleep, here. Melda, this is your fault.
His wife, Melda, had been preoccupied the previous evening as Propolski prepared to leave for his overnight security shift at the Israel Museum. Twenty-six years he had been doing this job … twenty-six years, and the routine was always the same. Melda made his lunch while he dressed in his uniform. She boiled water and made sure he had a full, steaming thermos of strong tea to get him through the night.
But not last evening. No, Melda was too preoccupied, too glued to the television to remember Benji’s lunch or his tea.
War with the Arabs had been averted. That fool Meir Kandel had been driven from office. General Orhlon seemed to have everything in order. Peace was ready to return to Jerusalem. Until the TV woke him up.
“Look, Benji, what they found.” His Melda wasn’t even on the sofa. She had pulled a chair right in front of the TV screen, her elbows on her knees, her eyes as wide as her amazement. “Under the Mount it is.”
Benji Propolski and his family had emigrated from Poland when Benji was ten. His grandfather’s shoe repair shop had been firebombed, Juden painted on the largest chunks of the ruins. It had been time to leave. But now he was an Israeli. Not a devout Jew, but a Jew nonetheless. So even Benji understood what so fascinated Melda.
“Look, the German engineers were doing a magnetic test something or other to make sure the rest of the Kotel didn’t collapse,” said Melda. “And they saw the image of a room, buried near the Kotel wall, near the Warren’s Gate. They say there is something—here, look. They are again showing it.”
Benji had to get to work. But he took a quick look over Melda’s shoulder. Inside the image of the room, a box, with two figures above it, what looked like two kneeling angels, their wings outstretched, touching each other.
He kissed Melda on the top of her head. “I’ll get lunch from the truck.”
Melda didn’t hear him leave.
Benji was tired of reading about the playoffs in the Israeli basketball league, so he threw the newspaper on top of the metal desk in the corner of the security post inside the Shrine of the Book. He was tired, period. No tea can leave you heavy-lidded.
Security Officer Propolski got up from the poorly cushioned metal chair, stretched to release the knots of arthritis in his back, and prepared for his rounds of the building. Rounds, it’s a good word. The building itself was round, its roofline representing the end of a scroll holder, a mezuzah, the spindle of the shaft extending above the roof. It represented the contents of the Shrine of the Book—the oldest extant copies of the Talmud, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the partial Aleppo Codex.
Propolski’s job, as it had been for the past twenty-six years, was to protect the safety and sanctity of these sacred documents. Not that he’d ever read them. Propolski didn’t read Aramaic nor did he understand the ancient Hebrew of the codex. So what? He didn’t need to read it. He needed to protect it. He knew that was important.
Before leaving the security post, Propolski checked the security cameras and the alarm system. All were green. There were no alarms on the motion detectors, no reports from the sensors in the floors that would detect the steps of even the lightest of men. Security had always been extensive, but the levels had increased even more when Aaron’s staff was added to the exhibit a week earlier.
Officer Propolski took his time as he wandered the outer rim of the building, ensuring all the doors were secure. He checked all the staircases, walking up and down them despite his arthritic knees, and opened the doors to the few offices in the shrine building.
As he entered the massive, round rotunda in the midst of the building, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were displayed in a muted, eternal twilight, Propolski’s thoughts returned to his stomach—the lousy lunch he bought at the truck, the cold tea—and he wondered if Melda was still watching television. He walked around the rim wall, with the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls and reproductions of many of the scrolls themselves. In the center of the room, elevated, surrounded by a platform with a railing at its rim, the room was dominated by a large, spoke-like display case within which was mounted the original Book of Jeremiah, over two thousand years old, removed from a clay jar in the Negev Desert.
The room was quiet, as it should be. None of the precious exhibits were disturbed.
Without warning or cause, brilliant shafts of light shot from the two circular stairways on opposite sides of the center display case that led down into the museum area underneath Jeremiah’s book. The lower area housed the Aleppo Codex and the display case holding Aaron’s staff. There were no lights in that area that could come close to producing the radiant light coming from the stairways.
Officer Propolski’s adrenaline level spiked, his heartbeat began pounding through his veins. He hesitated for a moment. Would he appear foolish? Was he simply tired? No. He clicked the small microphone attached to his uniform shirt at the left shoulder. “Code Red. Shrine of the Book,” he whispered. He descended the stairs and walked cautiously toward the nearly blinding light.
Housed in a specially designed, clear-sided security case, Aaron’s staff stood straight up, apparently not supported by anything. It shimmered and vibrated. It thrummed, a sound emitted by the shimmering vibrations, a sound that Propolski could feel painlessly moving his bones. White-blue light pulsed from within the staff. And it was budding. This five-thousand-year-old stick, now throbbing with a light that sounded like music, was growing, flowering, coming back to life right before his shielded eyes.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While The Aleppo Code is a work of fiction, several plot elements are based on fact.
The Aleppo Codex—safe in a vault in Jerusalem’s Israel Museum—is, in fact, the oldest, most accurate, and most comprehensive compilation of the Hebrew scriptures. It is written as a Masoretic text, meaning notes were added in the margins of the text to help with pronunciation and to provide explanation. Its history as presented in this book is true—begun by a group of rabbinical scholars in Tiberias, near the Sea of Galilee, the codex was completed around AD 930, captured by the crusaders, ransomed to the Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt, and in the fourteenth century, taken to Aleppo, Syria, where it was hidden in a cave below the Great Aleppo Synagogue.
But only half of the codex now resides in the Israel Museum. The most fascinating element of the codex’s history is what became of it after a riot in 1947 destroyed the Aleppo Synagogue. Was part of the codex destroyed in a fire? Or were parts of the codex stolen by those who conspired to return the codex to Israel? That mystery remains unsolved and is at the center of a book written by Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman, The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible. In 2012, the New York Times Magazine ran a fascinating story about the codex and Friedman’s research—“A High Holy Whodunit” by Ronen Bergman, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/magazine/the-aleppo-codex-mystery.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
The Great Synagogue Ades of the Glorious Aleppo Community actually exists in the Nahla’ot neighborhood of Jerusalem, just west of the Old City. Nondescript on the outside, the interior of the Ades Synagogue, founded in 1901 by Jews emigrating from Aleppo, Syria, is ornately decorated.
The biblical history of Aaron’s staff and the tradition and teaching of Jewish scholars is faithfully communicated in the book, including the literature that asserts Aaron’s staff is a fragment from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden of Eden and that it is to be used as a scepter of authority when Messiah arrives. There is nothing in Scripture or in Judeo-Christian teaching, however, which asserts that Aaron’s staff, or even the Ark of the Covenant, contained a power that was exclusively its own. The staff and the ark are only objects. God used these objects to display his power … but it is always God’s power at work through his created objects. Aaron’s staff, were it ever to be found, would not be the most powerful weapon in the history of the world. It would be a really old stick.
The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) Page 40