On the Third Day

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘You mean,’ said Anna, ‘that a billion Christians are suddenly going to become Jews just because you dig up the body of Jesus?’

  Louvish laughed. ‘I hardly think so, no. They would still be Christians, but the follower not of God but of an unusual man. They would no longer have grounds for that supposition which lies behind all Christian thinking – that, somehow, the obliteration of Israel by the Romans, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the demolition of the Temple by the soldiers of Titus, was not only no more than what the Jews deserved for killing the son of God, but was also predicted by Christ as the necessary demonstration that the old Covenant was at an end.’

  Anna again looked at Jake, and, although her instinct told her that it might be wise to appear convinced by what Louvish was saying, her irritation at the smug look on her brother’s face got the better of her. ‘If you’ll excuse me saying so, Colonel,’ she said scornfully, ‘I think solitary confinement sent you slightly crazy. I know some Christians, and most of them don’t think like that at all.’

  Louvish did not seem discouraged by her reaction. ‘Consciously they may not, but unconsciously they do. And for us time is running out. The sympathy we can still count on for what we suffered under Hitler will not outlive those who remember the last war. Certainly we can remind the young of what happened with trials of war criminals like Demjanjuk, but soon there will be no war criminals to uncover, and the images of suffering Jews will be replaced in the newspapers and television screens by images of suffering Palestinians as we put down their intifada. All the world will care about is the danger of war and the threat to their supplies of oil, and then the age-old hatred of the Jews by the Christians will rise to the surface once more, and it will be “’raus mit den Juden” all over again – ’raus not from the ghettos of the European cities but from this ghetto here, between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.’

  Anna scrutinized Louvish with a puzzled look on her face. She still thought that he must be mad, but he did not look mad, and she had to acknowledge that everything he said had a kind of inner coherence. It was not that she felt persuaded to approve of the hoax – she did not feel sufficiently involved with the plight of her people for that; but she could appreciate the logic of what Louvish was saying – that people’s attitudes and convictions are malleable – and could accept, if marshalling support for Israel was his job in counter-intelligence, that the plan to find the skeleton of Jesus became a plausible project for covert propaganda.

  Her attention turned to the mechanics of the thing. ‘OK,’ she said to Louvish. ‘I see now why you did it. But how was it done? How did you come up with the Vilnius Codex?’

  ‘Here,’ said Louvish, ‘providence came to my assistance. As you know, I was originally captured by the Shi’ites in Lebanon. After a certain amount of rough treatment by them, I was handed over to the Syrians, who sent me to Damascus for interrogation. They were rather more sophisticated – certainly less violent – and seemed to accept quite quickly the limits I placed upon what I would tell them. They were principally interested in what they could extract in exchange for me – in terms of prisoners we had taken and hard currency.

  ‘Our people, I like to think, wanted me back but the demands at first were so exorbitant that they had to pretend for a time that I was not of much value. That is why I was kept waiting in Damascus. After a while, however, the Soviets in Damascus came to hear of my capture and expressed an interest in what I might know. One of their men used to visit me almost every day – an urbane and intelligent man called Gedda – Leon Gedda – who spoke excellent Hebrew as well as Arabic, English, Russian, Polish, even Lithuanian because he had lived in Lithuania as a child.

  ‘His method of interrogating was far subtler than the Syrians’. Where they had put quite straightforward questions which told me immediately what they wanted to know, Gedda never put any questions at all. He always referred to my interrogation as a chat, and arranged for it to take place in a relatively pleasant room, with comfortable chairs and decent coffee; and he left an open pack of cigarettes on the table from which we each helped ourselves as we wanted.

  ‘He also gave the impression of being genuinely more interested in me than in what I had been doing behind the lines in the Bekaa Valley. To get me to talk about myself, he told me about his own life, and it turned out that, in our pasts, there were several points in common. Not only were we both Jews, but his grandparents, like mine, came from Brest, but while mine had gone to Israel as Zionists, his had joined the Bolsheviks. His father, having fought against the Whites, had joined the Cheka, ending up in Vilnius as the coordinator of the Soviet campaign against the partisans.

  ‘In 1949, his father had been taken prisoner in an ambush. Five days later his mutilated body was dumped in the main square of Kaunus. Gedda was then ten years old. From that date he vowed that he would follow in his father’s footsteps and one day take his revenge.

  ‘I cannot pretend,’ Louvish said to Anna, ‘that, after two months of solitary confinement, I was not vulnerable to Gedda’s technique. He not only had great charm, but he also had a most infectious nonchalance, which seemed to suggest that he did not care what he said, so why, I thought, should I? I realized, of course, that this put me off my guard, and that I might easily forget what was secret and let slip some piece of classified information. Therefore, to protect myself, I decided to talk to him about what I had been considering alone in my cell – my plan to undermine the central tenet of the Christian religion by digging up the body of Christ.

  ‘The idea seemed to interest him at once. At first I thought it was only from historical or political curiosity. We went back over the precedents for this kind of thing – the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, or the Piltdown Skull. Then we moved on to the technology, and for a while I thought he was trying to find out what techniques we had evolved for forging documents or frustrating the effects of carbon-dating. He boasted of Soviet skills in this field. Indeed, even as we talked, he seemed to adopt my project as his own – returning to it day after day, often with answers to the questions of the day before.

  ‘The problems, we soon decided, were not technical, because it would not be hard to find in Israel the skeleton of a man crucified in the first century of the modern era. The difficulty would be to identify it as the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Our first idea was to fake the pieces of wood or papyrus which Pilate had nailed to the cross, saying that this was Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. The objections to that were not technical, but were the same as any that could be made in respect of corroborative evidence found at the actual site – the whole thing could be a hoax.

  ‘We arrived at two necessary conditions for the scheme to have a chance of success. The first was that the discovery should be made by an archaeologist with an international reputation whose integrity was beyond reproach. The second was that the critical corroborating evidence should be quite independent of the find.

  ‘As to the archaeologist, well, there were several, but my mind settled upon your father first because of his reputation and second because I knew that I could call upon Ya’acov to help me. More intractable was the question of corroboration. We thought about it for days on end and came up with various ideas, all more or less improbable. Then Gedda remembered Josephus and the Slavonic additions to his Jewish War. What poetic justice if the man who so shamelessly betrayed his people in the first century could be used to help them in the twentieth. If I could think of a place where the body could be discovered which had some unique features not hitherto made public, then he would arrange for the discovery to be made in Russia of a hitherto unknown Codex which referred to the burial of the Nazarene in the same place.

  ‘For days I racked my brains to consider where the body might have been hidden. Our hypothesis was the same as that of the chief priests at the time – that Christ’s own disciples had stolen the body and smuggled it out of the city. I thought of sites in Galilee or Samaria where the
skeleton might be found, but, not being an archaeologist, I was not familiar enough with any of them to know which of them would serve our purpose. The choice of a site to place a skeleton would have to await my return to Israel.

  ‘By this time, it had become clear that Gedda would arrange my release. Quite what he told the Syrians or his superiors in Moscow, I do not know. He had no assurances from me that I would go through with the plan, but he was so eager to see it put into effect that he seemed prepared to take the risk that I might let him down. Only right at the end did I ask him why he or his government were willing to embark on a venture of this kind. He then explained to me quite candidly the difficulties being faced by the Soviet Union – how the economy was inefficient; how its failure to produce not just consumer goods but the minimal requirements of its people had led to widespread disillusion with the theories of Marx and Lenin upon which the whole legitimacy of the Communist state depended.

  ‘There was a grave danger that the Soviet Union would disintegrate – each republic falling back upon the racial, national or religious ideologies of its bourgeois past to justify seceding from a now unwanted union. Russia itself might survive the demise of Marxist thought – and even Byelorussia and the Ukraine, because they shared the same heritage of Orthodox Christianity. But the Muslim republics like Azerbaijan; or those whose populations were Lutheran like Latvia, and above all Lithuania, with its links with the Roman Catholic Church, would be overwhelmed by a popular desire to secede.

  ‘Of course, behind all this reasoning, there were Gedda’s personal reasons for wanting to frustrate the rebirth of a nationalist, Catholic Lithuania. He was quite candid in his determination to prevent the ideological heirs of those who had murdered his father from taking power once again in Vilnius. There were others, he said, who thought like him, but how far my scheme had the backing of the Kremlin, I was never able to tell.

  ‘He accompanied me as far as the border with Jordan. There we parted with a handshake – two Jews whom ideology had taken in quite different directions but who remained brothers all the same. Back in Jerusalem, I worked out with Ya’acov just where the skeleton should be found. Three months later, in Geneva, I handed Gedda the text of the new Slavonic addition. Five months after that came the news that a lost Codex of the Slavonic version of Josephus’ Jewish War had been discovered in Lithuania.’

  Louvish sat back in his chair, his explanation over. There was not, on his face, any expression of conceit, but simply the sombre look of an officer who had described the background to a necessary mission.

  His eyes, however, remained fixed on Anna, studying her reaction. If she had been alone with him, he might have seen in her expression a certain admiration for the audacity of his scheme. She had no interest, after all, in sustaining the dogmas of the Christian religion; indeed, it was essential to her happiness that Andrew, at least, should continue to believe that there had been no Resurrection. However, Jake sat next to Anna, and the feelings of rivalry he provoked in her proved stronger than her caution. She turned away from Louvish and, with a look of sneering disdain, said to her brother: ‘I suppose you provided the skeleton?’

  ‘It wasn’t hard to find.’

  ‘And hoodwinked Dad?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Did he never suspect what was going on?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘People don’t ask questions when they might get answers they don’t want to hear.’

  ‘And you thought that, if you could fool him, you could fool the world?’

  ‘We don’t need to fool the world,’ said Louvish. ‘Just some of the people some of the time will do.’

  ‘Like Father Lambert?’

  ‘Of course. If he had announced the find, it would have been front-page news; and any doubts expressed later would take up only a couple of inches on the inside page.’

  ‘And now you expect Cardinal Memel to announce it instead of Father Lambert?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jake. ‘He was completely taken in.’

  ‘And it didn’t bother you to use him in that way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or that it drove Father Lambert to suicide?’

  ‘There are always unforeseen eventualities,’ said Louvish.

  ‘Like me.’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Well, I won’t kill myself, I can promise you that.’

  Louvish smiled. ‘Not, certainly, while you’re under my protection.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Anna, ‘but I can look after myself.’

  ‘I’m afraid, given what you now know, that won’t be possible.’

  She looked from Louvish to Jake. Jake looked away. ‘You mean I’m a prisoner?’ she asked.

  ‘You avoided the draft,’ said Louvish. ‘You are liable to three years in prison for that alone.’

  ‘I was deferred …’

  ‘Your deferment has just expired.’

  ‘But you can’t keep me quiet for ever,’ said Anna. ‘And then there’s Henry. What are you going to do about him?’

  Neither Louvish nor Jake replied.

  Twenty-two

  Michal Dagan returned home late that night in a state of some agitation. Rachel, his wife, seemed to realize this and served his supper in silence. Only when they were both sitting at table did she say that Andrew had telephoned an hour earlier, asking after Anna.

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘That I didn’t know where she was.’

  She said this in a tone which suggested that her husband did know, but Michal Dagan said nothing.

  ‘He thought that she might have had lunch with you,’ Rachel said.

  ‘She came after lunch,’ said Dagan, as if the exact moment mattered, ‘and then she went off with Ya’acov.’

  Again Rachel waited for him to say more; but when he did not she swallowed the morsel of fish that was in her mouth, laid her fork aside and said: ‘Did she come to talk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About you and her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘About what, then?’

  ‘The dig.’

  ‘She wanted to talk archaeology?’

  ‘Yes … Except it was more than archaeology.’

  Rachel picked up her fork and put a piece of boiled potato into her mouth. She ate it methodically as she always did, waiting for her husband to go on.

  ‘She asked me about Louvish,’ said Michal.

  For a moment, Rachel’s jaws stopped moving. Then she swallowed what was in her mouth, and once again laid aside her fork. ‘Why should she ask you about Louvish?’

  ‘Because she suspects what we suspect …’

  ‘Suspect?’

  He flinched. ‘Very well. What we know.’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘You must get out of this, Michal, before it gets worse.’

  ‘Get out? How? I have found what I have found.’

  ‘You have found nothing,’ she said with unusual vehemence.

  ‘How can you know that?’ asked Dagan miserably.

  ‘Because I know my son, and I know the influence that Louvish has over him.’

  ‘Of course, of course, but if it is for Israel …’

  ‘Israel can survive without lies.’

  ‘You don’t understand …’ He got up from the table and crossed the room, as if unwilling to hear any rejoinder, but Rachel said nothing. She remained at table, finishing her food.

  Michal sat down on the sofa and opened the evening newspaper, but his eyes would not focus on the words. It was as if, quite independent of the mind which directed them, they were terrified of reading the story of his extraordinary find.

  For some time the old couple sat like this – the husband pretending to read the newspaper on the sofa, the wife methodically eating the supper she had prepared. The silence was like low cloud hiding peaks of antagonism and troughs of recrimination. It was finally broken by the sound of a key moving in the lock of the front door. Both looked towards the hallway to see Jake come in.r />
  ‘Ah, Ya’acov, good,’ said Michal, his expression changing to one of mute admiration for his heroic son.

  Jake greeted his parents, then went into the kitchen to pour himself a drink.

  ‘What happened to Anna?’ shouted Michal after him in an almost jovial tone of voice.

  ‘She’s OK,’ said Jake. He came back from the kitchen holding a glass filled with milk and sat down at the table next to his mother.

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘With Louvish.’

  ‘Still?’ asked Michal.

  ‘She’s been detained.’

  Dagan went pale. ‘Louvish detained her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘Because she asked too many questions.’

  Dagan put down the unread newspaper. That is going too far.’

  ‘She should have minded her own business.’

  ‘It was her business. We made it her business.’

  ‘Just as we made it the business of Father Lambert and drove him to suicide,’ said Rachel, handing Jake a plate with fish and boiled potatoes, but looking, as she did so, at her husband on the sofa.

  Dagan, with his elbows resting on his knees, hid his face in his hands.

  ‘He didn’t kill himself,’ said Jake with an anxious glance towards his father.

  ‘He’s found hanging out of the window of his cell,’ said Rachel, ‘and he didn’t kill himself?’

  Dagan looked up at his son.

  ‘We now know he was murdered,’ said Jake.

  ‘How can you know that?’ asked Dagan.

  ‘Louvish told me. We have his notebook.’

  ‘But how? Where did he find it?’

  ‘They killed him to shut him up.’

  ‘Who?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘Some Catholic fanatic. A Jugoslav. They caught him at Heathrow checking in for a flight to Zagreb. One of our people was working on security and found the notebook in his suitcase.’