A Treasure Deep

by Alton Gansky

  “With what? His answers? He’s cool under pressure, I’ll say that for him.”

  “I meant with getting your wish to watch the interrogation.”

  “Being mayor ought to have some perks.”

  “Just don’t let those perks get in the way of this investigation. I like you, Mayor, but I won’t sacrifice my career for your curiosity. There is a limit to the latitude I will allow, even if you are the mayor.”

  “I appreciate that, Greg. Your warning is understood.”

  “You caused quite a scene up at the site. We were lucky that Sanchez hadn’t arrived yet. He’s a by-the-book guy. Having you at the crime scene wouldn’t have been healthy for my career.”

  “Did he do it?” Anne asked. “Did Perry Sachs kill that man?”

  “I doubt it,” Montulli replied. “I don’t think he’s the type. He’s one of those religious people.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He as much as admitted it when I arrived on the scene this morning. You know the type.”

  “Yes, I do. I know the type very well.”

  Chapter 12

  “ALL RIGHT,” Dr. Curtis said. “Someone needs to fill me in and do it soon.”

  “This wasn’t the trip you had in mind?” Jack jested. He pulled a large slice of pizza from the pan. “Explanations are Perry’s domain.”

  Perry set his soda down and looked at the people around him. They were at Pizza Joe’s, indulging in an early dinner. He’d chosen the place because of its proximity to the motel and because he needed a place to be alone with his key crew-members. The manager had been gracious enough to open the back room for them, so for the moment they had privacy.

  Gleason sat to Perry’s left, Dr. Curtis to his right. Across the table, Jack was making short work of a Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza. At the edge of the opposite bench, Brent toyed with a slice of pepperoni and sausage pizza before finally letting it sit on a paper plate. They’d been there twenty minutes “decompressing,” as Perry put it. Perry had made a point of inviting Brent who, he knew, was feeling lower than dirt.

  “Yeah, I suppose you have a right to know,” Perry said.

  “I’ll wait out front,” Brent said and rose from the bench.

  “No, it’s okay,” Perry said. “Sit down. Eat your pizza and listen carefully.”

  “I can’t apologize enough,” Brent said. “I’m so sorry that I—”

  “Forget it, kid,” Jack said. “We don’t hold grudges here.”

  “Besides,” Gleason added, “I could have, should have, double-checked you. That’s what we do. Everyone watches out for each other. I didn’t do that.”

  Perry turned to Brent. “Look at me. What’s done is done. Gleason is right. Any one of us could have checked to see if the docs were secure. Truth is, we were all taken aback by the . . . find.”

  Curtis was becoming impatient. “Now that we’re all lovey-dovey, can we please get to the point? I gave up my beauty sleep to jet across the country only to be grilled by the local cops about a murder. All I know so far is that you found the remains of a skeleton, and that if Perry is right—and there is no way he can be right—it’s where it doesn’t belong.”

  “Pull in close, guys, because I’m not going to talk very loud, and I’m not going to repeat myself. There are only a handful of people who know what we’re attempting to do here. Besides myself, there is Jack and Gleason, my father, and Mrs. Henri; I’ll tell you about her in a moment.

  “Brent, those people I mentioned are insiders. Dr. Curtis has been advising the firm for many years. What I’m about to say cannot go beyond this group. Not in idle conversation, not spoken of with your family. Not until I say it’s okay to do so. You must understand that clearly. The ramifications go beyond imagination. I know that sounds like advertising talk, but I mean it. No one living knows more about this than I do, and I can’t begin to guess the impact. Have I been clear so far?”

  Brent nodded.

  “I need a commitment from you, Brent. I need your word that this stays in the group. Nothing illegal is involved. I’ve made sure of that. Do I have your word?”

  “I swear, Perry. I swear by—”

  Perry waved him off. “I don’t want you to swear. I don’t want an oath. Gleason has told me you’re trustworthy, and I’m willing to take his word for it. All I need is your promise.”

  “I promise. I won’t let you down again.”

  Perry wondered if he had ever before seen a young man so serious.

  “Yeah, yeah, I cross my heart too,” Curtis said. “Cut to the chase.”

  “Six months ago I left the office in Seattle late. I rounded a corner and saw what looked like a fender-bender, except no one was around. I looked down the street and saw a man running. He wasn’t running well, and I could tell he was an older man. Another guy was walking quickly after him. It didn’t seem right, so I parked and followed.”

  “You poked your nose in,” Jack said. He looked at Brent. “He’s always poking his nose in things.”

  Perry ignored him. “The long and short of it is that I got there in time to see a young man about to shoot the old gent. I . . . persuaded him otherwise.”

  Brent looked puzzled.

  “He cleaned his clock,” Jack interpreted. “He’s just too modest to say anything.”

  “Anyway, the old man was Dr. Jamison Henri, a professor at North Pacific Seminary. He’d already been shot in the leg once, but to make things worse, he was having a heart attack.” Perry told of Henri’s agitation over the safety of the leather satchel, then of his cardiac arrest. The minutes flowed by as he recounted the scene at the hospital and his meeting with Claire and Joseph and how Henri had died an hour later.

  “I gave my card to Mrs. Henri and offered to help in any way I could. I also gave her the satchel.”

  “Without looking inside?” Brent said with surprise. “Weren’t you dying to know what was in there?”

  “It wasn’t my satchel. I had no right to look inside.”

  “Man, you are a straight arrow,” Brent said then quickly added, “but I mean that in a good way.”

  Choosing not to respond, Perry continued. “I walked Mrs. Henri to her car and waited for her to drive off, and then I went home. About a week later, I got a call at the office. It was Claire. She was concerned about the satchel. She told me that after the funeral she’d gone home and discovered her house had been ransacked. The satchel was gone. She thought she’d hidden it well, but whoever did the deed was a professional and knew all the tricks. Claire had hidden the thing in the pantry behind some cereal boxes.”

  “The whole house was ransacked?” Curtis asked.

  “From one end to the other,” Perry replied. “It was probably done by a team of two or three. There’s no way to tell for certain. The police found no fingerprints.”

  “How did they get in?” Brent inquired.

  “Through the front door. No sign of forced entry. The police think the lock was picked.”

  “What was in the satchel?” Curtis prodded. Perry had worked with him several times and knew him to be a man of keen insight and little patience.

  “A document,” Perry said flatly. “A very old document. I went to Claire’s home to help straighten things up and to help her deal with the police. After they were gone, she told me how her husband came home from the seminary clutching the satchel to his chest. She said his face was white and he vacillated between giddiness and astonishment. Claire pressed him for information, but all he would say was, ‘The greatest find ever.’”

  “So she never actually saw the document,” Curtis intoned.

  “Oh, she saw it on several occasions,” Perry corrected. “Dr. Henri would work on it at home, sitting at the dining room table taking notes and consulting books.”

  “Tell me she described it to you,” Curtis pleaded.

  “She did. It was a brownish paper with what she called ‘crude, dark writing.’ Dr. Henri told her it was a type of Greek.”


  “Not paper,” Curtis said. “Not if the document was truly ancient and since Henri said ‘a type of Greek,’ I assume that he’s referring to either Classical or Koine depending on the age of the writing.”

  “What’s the difference?” Brent asked.

  “Koine was a latter form of the earlier language,” Curtis explained. “It was the common language and was used in some literature, the courts, and in business. It’s the language of the New Testament. Classical Greek is more formal.”

  “So the satchel held a bunch of papers written in Greek?” Brent asked.

  Curtis spoke before Perry could. “As I said, it can’t be paper. At least not paper as we use the term. Paper is made from plant material. Early paper came from the reed-like papyrus plant. In fact, the word ‘paper’ comes from papyrus. The word ‘bible’ comes from the name of a town where the papyrus plant was harvested: Byblos, later known as Gebal. Over the years ‘Byblos’ became ‘bible’ meaning ‘book.’”

  “Man,” Brent said. “You should go on Jeopardy.”

  “Don’t interrupt the professor, newbie,” Gleason admonished.

  “Documents were also written on vellum, which is made from animal skin. The ancients would take the skin of a slaughtered animal like a lamb, goat, or calf, clean it, and rub it with a coarse powder or pumice. The younger the animal the finer the vellum.”

  “Hence,” Jack interjected, “the proverbial sheepskin given at graduation.”

  “I don’t suppose you know if it was papyrus or vellum,” Curtis asked Perry.

  “No. I never saw the documents. Claire said that there were dozens of little pieces and Dr. Henri would work long into the night trying to assemble them at home.”

  “Wait a minute,” Curtis said. “Something isn’t right. If I understand you, you’re telling me that a scholar who teaches at a seminary somehow came into possession of an ancient document written on vellum or papyrus, took it home, and worked on it in his dining room.”

  Perry affirmed the summary with a nod. Curtis shook his head. “It can’t be,” he said. “No true scholar would do that.”

  “Why not?” Brent asked.

  “Because,” Curtis explained sharply, “ancient documents are extremely fragile and require specialized care. Too much moisture, too much handling, and you end up with little piles of dust. If Henri truly had an ancient document, then he wouldn’t treat it in such a cavalier fashion. He’d have to be crazy or—”

  “Terrified,” Perry inserted. “And he was. Terrified. Claire said he became almost paranoid. She’d make plans to have people over to the house for dinner, but he canceled them all. In fact, he canceled everything they had planned, including a vacation. He rose early, worked on the documents, went to work, returned, and worked late into the night. Claire was sure he was losing his mind.”

  “What would terrify a man so much that he would break all scholastic protocol and endanger valuable historical documents?” Curtis asked.

  “What would make you behave that way?” Perry asked.

  “Nothing. Nothing could be so important that I’d risk losing something irreplaceable.”

  Perry said nothing, allowing the conversation to settle into silence.

  “Well,” Curtis said after a moment. “I suppose I might do something like that if I felt the documents were in greater danger among others than with me.”

  “Bingo,” Perry said. “Something or someone had him scared.”

  “Who or what force could do that?” Curtis asked.

  “The force that had Dr. Henri attacked. The same force that put a murdered man on our site.”

  “That sounds an awful lot like a conspiracy theory,” Curtis shot back.

  “The thing about conspiracy theories is that some of them are true.”

  Curtis lowered his head, and Perry let him think. “It would have to be more than that. The content—there must have been something about the content. He deciphered enough to know that some enormous impact would come from the knowledge of the writings.”

  “That’s how I figured it,” Perry stated.

  “Where did Henri get the docs?” Curtis asked.

  Perry shrugged. “He never told his wife. We don’t know. It’s because of those documents that we’re here.”

  Curtis rubbed his eyes. “Okay, wait a minute. You said the documents were stolen and that you never saw them. Yet here we are because of them. And if I understand you, Mrs. Henri is no scholar. She couldn’t have told you what was on those fragments.”

  “She has no idea. Claire is a kind and caring woman, but she has no desire to understand her husband’s work. He was an ancient language expert, and such things held little interest for her.”

  “If the docs were stolen, and Dr. Henri’s wife doesn’t know what’s on them, then how did you know to come to the Tehachapi Mountains?”

  “Well,” Perry began, “this is where things get weird.”

  “Good,” Dr. Curtis quipped. “I was getting bored.”

  “Claire has a special son,” Perry explained. “Are you familiar with the term ‘Savant Syndrome’?”

  “I’m not,” Brent cut in.

  “Savant Syndrome describes individuals who are socially and educationally dysfunctional but who exhibit great skills at art, math, and memory. Usually they cannot express themselves verbally, and although they might be able to mentally calculate the first solar eclipse in the year 2023, they generally have no idea what it is they’re doing. Experts say it has something to do with damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. Joseph Henri is just such a savant. He’s skilled at calculations, able to do multiplication problems faster than you can enter them in a calculator. He can draw pictures that look near photo quality. He also has a prodigious memory. He reads everything and can replicate everything he reads or sees. He can reproduce every word of a book he’s looked at, apparently without understanding any of it.”

  “You’re not telling me . . .”

  “Yes, I am,” Perry continued. “After the satchel was stolen, Joseph began to reproduce the document it held, letter for letter, line for line, even the accent marks.”

  “He rewrote the text?” Curtis asked.

  “In a sense, but it’s more than that. I’ve gotten to know Joseph over the months, and he doesn’t think as we do. It’s almost as if he’s a foreign intelligence. So when he reproduced the documents he had seen his father working on, he wasn’t just rewriting the Greek works, he was making a piece of art. Clear the table.”

  Pizza pans, plastic cups, napkins all disappeared quickly as the group made room for Perry. “I stopped by the motel before coming over here. I picked up what Joseph did.” Reaching down by his side, he picked up a hard plastic tube that was capped on one end. He removed the cap and pulled out a roll of paper.

  “It looks like butcher paper,” Curtis said.

  “It is,” Perry replied. “Joseph goes through an enormous amount of paper. This stuff is cheaper and comes on a large roll. It can keep him occupied for several months.” Perry spread out the roll, aided by his friends around the table. “As you can see, Joseph did more than rewrite the letters; he actually drew the fragments and colored them to match what he saw. To Joseph, these are not words, they’re images.”

  Perry gave Curtis time to take in what he was seeing. He watched as the archeologist let his eyes trace the pictures before him. The roll of paper was two feet wide and close to six feet long. Drawn in detail not thought possible in art were dark brown shapes that were unmistakably reproductions of vellum fragments. Dark squiggles were barely visible on the “fragments” but clear enough to be read if studied closely.

  “My Greek is rusty,” Curtis said. Perry noticed his voice shook. “I . . . I specialize in North American archaeology, but I studied some Greek in graduate school. It’s the language of the New Testament, you know . . . oh, I think . . . I think I already said that. I read the New Testament a lot. I like to study it in the original language . . . This can’t
be.” His hands began to shake, and he licked his lips several times. “No, no, this is a joke. You’re having fun at my expense, aren’t you, Perry? Yeah, that’s it . . . this . . . no . . . this can’t be right . . . I must be reading this wrong. Have you had this . . . have you had this translated?”

  “You okay, Doc?” Jack asked softly, his brow furrowed.

  Curtis slapped his hand on the table; the sound of it filled the room. “I asked you a question! Did you or did you not have this translated?”

  Perry quickly laid his hand on that of Dr. Curtis. He was trembling. Perry said nothing at first; he just looked in the stunned academic’s eyes. “I should have prepared you, Dr. Curtis. I’m sorry.”

  Curtis took a ragged breath. “Please, Perry. I must know. Am I reading this right?”

  “Do you remember my saying that Joseph can recall everything he sees or reads? He translated it . . . Well, he didn’t truly translate the text, but he associated each Greek word on the drawing with those he found in his father’s books.” Perry pulled up the second cylinder and opened it as he had the first. Again he removed a roll of paper and spread it out on the table. “This is what brought us here.”

  It took only seconds for Curtis to absorb the images before him. The drawing was the same as the first, with one exception: Greek words had been replaced with English.

  “He couldn’t have done this,” Curtis said. “To do this requires years of disciplined study . . . the declensions are right, the parsing; he’s even maintained the Greek syntax.” His voice faded. “This can’t be. Someone is playing a huge joke, a monumental practical joke. No, I refuse to believe it. This would turn the world upside down.”

  “Brent,” Perry said. Brent was trying to read what was before him. “Brent,” Perry repeated.

  “Huh? Oh, sorry.”

  “Did you bring the video camera you used last night?”

  “Yeah, I have it right here, just like you asked.”

  “Set it to play back for Dr. Curtis.”

  Brent pulled the small camera up and opened its digital display panel. “Here you go, Doc. I’ve got it cued to start when Mr. Sachs pulls the first board out.”