On the Third Day

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘He knew what it was?’

  ‘He had been briefed.’

  ‘So what did he do?’

  ‘He switched the notebook for a gun and then called the British police.’

  ‘But who was this man?’

  ‘A Croatian – a defrocked Franciscan from Mostar.’

  ‘How did he know about the find?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘The Franciscans here run the Holy Places, don’t they? Someone must have got wind of it – perhaps from Father Lambert.’

  ‘But then why …’

  ‘Whoever knew about it here must have alerted the order.’

  ‘And they killed him?’

  ‘Those Croatian Franciscans worked with the Ustasi during the war. If they could massacre hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Jews, why should they hesitate over a crazy priest?’

  Dagan looked at his wife to see if she believed their son’s story; but, at that moment, she rose to take some used plates into the kitchen. He stood, meaning to follow her, but instead paced up and down the room. ‘Of course it makes much more sense if he was murdered, because I knew when he rang me that afternoon – I knew from his tone of voice – that he could not then, straight afterwards, have thrown himself out of the window. He was very polite, of course – he was unwilling to disappoint me – but he made it quite clear that, after thinking it over, he felt sure it could not be the body of Christ. So why, after that, should he kill himself?’

  ‘I had to be murder,’ said Jake.

  ‘Yes. Of course. But if only the Croatian had known.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Father Lambert no longer believed in the find.’

  Jake nodded. ‘Then there would have been no need to kill him.’

  Dagan returned to the sofa and sat down. Once again, he covered his face with his hands. Then he asked: ‘But what made Louvish suspect that he had been murdered?’

  ‘He knew about Father Lambert’s call to you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He knew.’

  ‘He tapped his telephone?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Or mine?’

  Jake did not answer.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dagan. ‘It would have to be mine.’

  ‘He has to know what’s going on.’

  Dagan did not dissent. Once again, he covered his face, as if blocking out the light would help him think. ‘So, Louvish thought Father Lambert had been murdered,’ he said to Jake, ‘but how did he know that the notebook had been stolen?’

  ‘If someone had taken the trouble to kill him, they would hardly have left the notebook with evidence that he believed in the find.’

  Michal nodded. ‘No, that’s true.’

  Rachel came back from the kitchen with a pot of coffee and a jar of Coffeemate. ‘It seems to me,’ she said quietly, ‘that Louvish had a better reason to kill Father Lambert than any Croatian.’

  Jake frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Father Lambert must have realized that the find was a fraud.’

  ‘He never said that,’ said Michal Dagan.

  ‘But he said he was sure, didn’t he, that it could not be the body of Christ?’

  ‘Yes, certainly, but as a matter of faith, not of fact.’

  ‘How much better for Louvish, then, to have people think that Father Lambert killed himself in despair, or that his fellow Catholics killed him to keep him quiet,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Then why wasn’t the notebook left there,’ asked Jake, ‘for the monks to find with the body?’

  ‘Because he had written nothing …’

  ‘Then why take it?’

  ‘To add something later or …’ She hesitated.

  ‘Or what?’ asked Dagan.

  She turned to her husband. ‘To persuade you that Father Lambert was murdered by someone else.’

  Dagan looked at his son.

  ‘You make things too complicated,’ said Jake.

  ‘Perhaps Louvish,’ said Dagan, ‘is a too complicated man.’

  ‘He is a simple man,’ said Jake, ‘who would die for Israel.’

  ‘And kill for Israel,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Of course,’ said Jake, looking defiantly at his mother.

  ‘And expect others to do the same.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jake again.

  She looked into the eyes of her son. ‘You were in London, Ya’acov …’

  ‘Rachel, please,’ said Dagan. ‘How can you suggest such a thing?’

  ‘And Anna?’ she asked, without taking her eyes off her son. ‘Is the same thing going to happen to her?’

  Jake looked away. ‘He won’t harm her,’ he said with an exaggerated bluster.

  ‘Then what will he do with her?’

  ‘Keep her out of the way until the story has broken.’

  ‘And afterwards? Can he ever let her go – someone who knows so well just what has happened?’

  Jake scowled. ‘If he thinks she’ll be sensible, he’ll let her go.’

  ‘When has Anna ever been sensible?’

  Jake said nothing. His father got up from the sofa. ‘You must speak to Louvish, Ya’acov. Tell him that things have gone far enough.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Jake. ‘I’m going back to London.’

  ‘To London? Why?’

  ‘To fetch the notebook.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. At six in the morning. On the British Airways flight.’

  ‘Then I shall speak to Louvish.’

  Jake shrugged his shoulders. ‘Please yourself.’

  The building where Louvish lived was not far from the Dagans’ apartment, and, being one which housed several vulnerable officials, was guarded by a man wearing jeans and trainers with a machine-gun slung over his shoulder.

  He recognized Professor Dagan and let him pass. Dagan climbed the stairs, the cool air, scented by pine and eucalyptus trees, coming in from the open windows at each landing. He rested for a moment on the first floor, and again on the second, but on the third walked straight to the door of the flat which belonged to Louvish. He knocked and waited, his face squarely in front of the peephole in the door.

  Louvish himself opened the door. He was still wearing his uniform, but had changed his boots for sandals. He stood aside and asked Dagan in, as if he had half-expected such a visit so late at night, then led the way towards the living-room. Before either had sat down, Dagan said: ‘Where is my daughter?’

  Louvish raised his hand and made a soothing gesture to calm him down. ‘She’s perfectly comfortable and perfectly safe.’

  ‘If she has been arrested,’ said Dagan, ‘I should like to know on what charge.’

  ‘There is no need of a charge,’ said Louvish, sitting down on a chair. ‘There are the emergency regulations.’

  ‘To deal with Arab agitators,’ said Dagan, ‘not patriotic Jews.’

  Dagan was thinking more of himself than of Anna when he said this, because he felt that her detention was an affront to him, but it enabled Louvish to recover from the defensive posture he had held since the Professor had appeared at his door.

  ‘But is she a patriotic Jew?’ he asked. ‘If I could be sure of that, I would let her go.’

  Dagan was confused. ‘She may not see things as you or I do,’ he said lamely, ‘but that is no reason to detain her.’

  Louvish sighed and gestured to Dagan to sit down on a chair. ‘You know quite well, Professor, that what you have discovered in that cistern is of considerable political significance. Already, one man has died as a result of it – your friend, Father Lambert, murdered, we now know, to prevent him authenticating the find. If news gets out in the wrong way, it could lead to riots and bloodshed, and destroy much of the good will which is felt towards Israel in other parts of the world.’

  ‘There is no need to pretend any more,’ said Dagan, his voice rising with his growing agitation.

  ‘Pretend what?’ asked Louvish coldly.

  ‘That the whole thing is n
ot a preposterous deception.’

  Louvish neither frowned nor smiled. ‘You only say that,’ he said, ‘because your daughter put the idea into your head. That is why she must be detained. We cannot have her influencing others in the same way.’

  ‘It won’t work,’ said Dagan. ‘No one will be taken in.’

  ‘No one?’ Now Louvish smiled. ‘Didn’t you believe in what you found? Didn’t Father Lambert? Father van der Velde? And Cardinal Memel?’

  ‘Yes. But they didn’t know about the Vilnius Codex.’

  ‘But you are a scientist, Professor, and I am a soldier. We deal in facts, not silly, unsubstantiated rumours. There is the Codex – it will undoubtedly be subjected to rigorous tests. There is the cistern. There is the jar. They too will be open to examination. And there is the skeleton which, as you know, is certainly that of a man crucified in the first century of the modern era. What else is asked of you but that you should attest to these facts as facts, and leave rumours and conjectures out of the equation?’

  ‘I was confused, deceived …’

  ‘Deceived? By whom?’

  ‘By myself. By my own wish to discover something that would help establish our right to eretz Israel.’

  ‘And your wish has come true,’ said Louvish. ‘If the find is announced by the right people in the right place, by Cardinal Memel or by the Pope in Rome, then it will establish beyond doubt in the Christian mind that God’s Covenant with Israel still stands.’

  ‘It still stands,’ muttered Michal Dagan. ‘Of course it still stands, and we know that Jesus of Nazareth did not rise from the dead – that, somewhere, there are the bones, or the dust from the bones that were his. And I wanted the bones in the cistern to be his. I was so determined that his was the body I had uncovered, that I ignored all my instincts as an archaeologist, instincts which told me that the whole thing was too improbable, too coincidental, too good, indeed, to be true.’

  Louvish shook his head sadly. ‘Those were the right feelings, Professor – not the selfish ambitions you now suppose them to be, but the culmination of all those aspirations which you have had for our people since you were a child. We have suffered, Professor – your parents and my grandparents, herded into gas chambers, then shovelled into ovens. They had no nation to protect them – nowhere to go – because for nineteen hundred years it had been accepted that God’s gift of a nation to the Jews had been withdrawn; that the promised land was no longer Palestine but some mirage of paradise in another world.

  ‘Yet you know – you know – that this is our land, and that the rock where our father Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac for the sake of the God of our people, and where Solomon built his Temple to house the Holy of Holies, you know, as I do, that this rock is the heart of eretz Israel and the foundation for a new Temple, which must be built and shall be built before our people can feel that they are truly home.’

  Dagan shook his head. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he moaned.

  ‘We both know,’ Louvish went on, ‘that, somewhere, there must lie the bones of Jesus of Nazareth. You know, too, that the longer those bones remain undiscovered, the longer a billion Christians are encouraged to believe that he was the son of God whom we killed by crucifixion, thereby bringing upon ourselves the well deserved punishment of expulsion from our homeland. You know, too, that only when those bones are found again can it be demonstrated that he was not superhuman, but a minor political agitator and would-be prophet. The bones have to be found; and people have to believe that they are the bones; and whether the bones you found in the cistern are the actual bones or not does not matter. What matters is that they could be the bones, because the bones do exist, and that, because of the Vilnius Codex, many will believe that they are the bones. Only then, after nineteen hundred years, will the vile blood-libel that we Jews killed the son of God be once and for all disproved, and will all the wretched humiliation and persecutions which followed from that libel – right up to the gas chambers and ovens in which your parents died – be brought to an end as Israel is reestablished as the land promised by God to his chosen people.’

  Dagan sat in silence, his head bowed, as if crushed by the weight of Louvish’s argument. There seemed nothing he could dispute. What was asked of him but that he should connive at a lie? What sacrifice was that if it saved his people? Then he remembered his reason for coming to see Louvish that evening – the detention of Anna – and wondered if he might not be expected to sacrifice something more.

  ‘Ya’acov told me,’ he said, ‘that Lambert was murdered after all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Louvish. ‘By a Croatian.’

  ‘My wife does not believe you.’

  ‘We have the notebook to prove it.’

  ‘She thinks that Ya’acov killed him.’

  Louvish was silent for a moment. Then he asked: ‘And what difference would it make if he did?’

  ‘It would make a difference to me.’

  ‘Struggle demands sacrifice, Professor. You sent your son to fight in Lebanon. You knew he would kill there.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you were prepared to see him die.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did you love him less than you loved Father Lambert?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why complain if it was his life and not Ya’acov’s that was lost to further our cause?’

  ‘Did he have to die?’

  ‘He was the foremost Catholic archaeologist – and the first to see your find. His judgement was critical. If he had believed the skeleton was that of Jesus, then his Church would have found it hard to deny it; and at first, as you know, it seemed he did. But then he called you from London and said he had changed his mind – and we had to resort to our second option and make it seem that he had committed suicide.’

  ‘Why did you take the notebook?’

  ‘Since he had written nothing in it about the find, no purpose would be served in leaving it there. Later, it could emerge that he had left the notebook here in Jerusalem, with a final entry giving the reason for his despair.’

  ‘And this story about the Croatian?’

  Louvish smiled. ‘That was Ya’acov’s idea, to spare your feelings.’

  ‘To spare my feelings?’ asked Dagan sceptically.

  ‘And to allay your suspicions. He knew you would wonder why Father Lambert had killed himself so soon after calling you to say that he no longer believed in the find.’

  ‘How considerate of my son.’

  ‘He is a fine young man – not just brave, but also clever.’

  ‘And Anna?’

  ‘The same qualities but slightly distorted. Foolhardy, and too clever by half.’

  ‘For which she must die like my friend?’

  ‘Die? No, I hope it won’t come to that,’ said Louvish. ‘But she must serve her sentence for avoiding the draft, and then … we shall see.’

  ‘And what am I to do?’ asked Dagan. ‘What am I to tell her mother?’

  ‘Tell her that no war is won by those who let pity rule their hearts. Tell her that she must be prepared to sacrifice her daughter just as you, like Abraham, are prepared to sacrifice your son.’

  ‘I don’t think she could bear it,’ said Dagan.

  ‘Then let us hope that Yahweh provides a ram caught in a thicket,’ said Louvish, ‘so that you can sacrifice that instead.’

  Twenty-three

  Michal Dagan left Louvish at around two in the morning and started to walk back towards his own home. When he had gone less than a third of the way, however, he was stopped by the thought that Rachel would be waiting for news of Anna. Knowing that she would see through any pretence or procrastination, he felt unable to face her.

  He turned – not back towards Louvish’s flat but in the general direction of the Staedtler Institute of Archaeology. He was tired – very tired – but so painful and confused were the thoughts tormenting him that, even if he had lain down on a bed, he would not have been able to sl
eep. He walked in the cool, quiet streets, hoping that a steady stride would bring order and calm.

  If only, he thought, he could be governed either by emotion like Rachel or by reason like Louvish, and yet what contradictions there were in both the reasoning and the feeling. He had been prepared to sacrifice Ya’acov for Israel, so why not Anna? Was it because he loved her less that he felt so loath to lose her? Or was it because he was afraid of Rachel’s reproach? She felt, he knew, that he loved his daughter less than his son and would never believe, if Anna now disappeared, that he had done what he could to save her.

  What had Abraham told Sarah, he wondered, as he had set out with Isaac, their only son, with the fire and the knife in his hands? Had he told her what Yahweh had commanded him to do? Had she seen anything odd in the look in his eye? And if, like Isaac himself, she had known nothing of what he intended, what would Abraham have said when he returned?

  Dagan shivered – not because of the cool night air, but with the dread with which he anticipated Rachel’s reproach. She would know that he had connived at whatever Louvish had done; and she would think that he had abandoned Anna not from an excessive zeal for Israel, but from the lukewarm affection she inspired in him. And, of course, there would be truth in her suspicions. Dagan had to acknowledge that, while he had always been ready to sacrifice Ya’acov in the Lebanon, he could never, like Abraham, have raised his own hand to cut his throat.

  Was he less reluctant to sacrifice Anna? As Rachel had told Anna, Dagan had never felt as fond of his daughter as he had of his son. Sometimes, to defend himself for this lack of affection, he blamed Anna for growing into someone so unlike what he thought a daughter should be. In a more honest frame of mind, he would recognize that the reasons he had put forward for leaving her to be educated in the United States had really been pretexts for banishing this cuckoo from the nest.

  What would Abraham have done, he wondered, if he had had ambivalent feelings for Isaac? Would he have felt, as Dagan now felt, the sour bile of bad conscience as he prepared to sacrifice what was in fact no sacrifice at all? No. It was inconceivable, because Yahweh spoke so clearly to Abraham, and Abraham to Yahweh. Would that Yahweh would make himself so clear to Michal Dagan.