Book of Judas--A Novel

by Linda Stasi

  “Ish, and if I can get the sitter to stay. I’ll text you. Gotta run or I’ll get fired,” I said, while running to the conference room, cell phone to my ear.

  “You’re a Pulitzer winner, they can’t fire you.”

  “I never actually won. Bye!”

  “Oh, Russo?”

  “What? Please, honey, I’m late for the morning news meeting!”

  “I forgot to tell you something.”

  “I know you’re in a bad way, but I will be, too, in about thirty seconds if I don’t get in there…”

  I remember that I was standing in The Standard’s newsroom just under the big screen that digitally flashed the headlines right next to the ancient clock that didn’t do anything much. You tend to remember things like where you were when your life changes forever.

  He couldn’t be stopped. “Just listen to this one last thing,” he said, now sounding—what? Desperate? Excited?

  “On his deathbed—yup, the deathbed confession really does happen—even though that was last night and I didn’t know he was dying.” Roy continued, somewhat out of breath, “Old Morris, he grabbed my hand, my good beer mug hand at that, in his boney mitt, and said, ‘Son’—like the old bastard ever called me anything but ‘Useless’—‘Son, I need to tell you that I stole something.’

  “‘Yeah, like what—my childhood?’ I told him, so he squeezed my hand like he wanted to break it, which he probably did, and wheezed out, ‘Stop whining, Useless.’ I swear he said that. Then he said, ‘What I stole were some pages. A codex. When I was bank manager.’ He called it a ‘Judas bible’ that had been left in a safety-deposit box in his bank branch in Hicksville. He claims he only stole some pages because he wanted to save them from rotting.”

  “Wait a damned minute!” I said, stopping short and putting my rush to the morning meeting on a brief hold. “I’ve heard about that. It was called the Gospel of Judas. I know it because we covered it when National Geographic negotiated for it. But—I swear—even though it was mentioned that it had been left in a Citibank in Hicksville, I never made the connection that it was our branch—our Hicksville branch. But, Roy, it was supposed to be rotted into a bazillion pieces.”

  “Well, not all of it was found then, my father told me. He said he stole it way back in the 1980s or something. Then he sealed it up in a brass tube in the house.”

  “Jesus! No pun intended. How many pages did he steal?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “But why those particular pages? Did he tell you that at least?”

  “Yeah, but get this: he said he stole only the pages that revealed Jesus’ secret to resurrection. Like Jesus’ resurrection was nothing but a magic trick.” He spat with such disgust, I felt like I’d have to clean my phone receiver. Roy’s Jewish faith was solid—but he’d always had a real soft spot for Jesus. Thought He was a cool dude. His words, not mine.

  I wasn’t swayed and like the good reporter that I am, stuck to the storyline. “Did Morris expect you to use this resurrection magic trick on him or something?”

  “I sincerely doubt that. If that were the case for sure he woulda chosen somebody else,” he answered, knowing that I knew their brutal father-son history. “But my father also said that the stolen pages were like two thousand years old and because of what was in them, they were worth—are you ready?”

  I was more than ready. A great story like this would take me off the “she’s-just-back-from-maternity-leave-so-stick-her-on-the-easy-boring-city-council-since-she’ll-have-to-rush-home-beat,” and put me back where I had been before I took maternity leave. I knew that even thinking about the story opportunities as my oldest friend was sitting next to his father’s stiffening body was probably so awful it would condemn me in my next life to manning a toilet-bowl brush in a public toilet in China, but still, I am a reporter at heart.

  “He said these resurrection pages or whatever the hell they are, are worth,” pause, pause, “ten million bucks!”

  I nearly dropped my phone and just stood there stock-still with Bob glaring daggers at me from inside the glass-walled conference room.

  “How much did you say?”

  “Ten million.”

  “You inherited something worth ten million from that tightwad? Oh, I’m sorry, your father, that tightwad.” How could it be that dour, dull Morris the bank manager was actually an international man of mystery? Impossible. The guy rode a bike to work to save fifteen cents on gas—way before it was hip to ride a bike to work. He had three suits, all dark blue, and one good pair of shoes that he resoled over and over again for thirty-five years. “Bastard!”

  I wasn’t going to be cleaning the toilets in Hebei province in my next life for saying that at least. Roy’s father was an abusive terror. I remember he made Roy work like Cinderella around the house for an allowance, which he was made to use to pay for his own piano lessons, which Roy despised in the first place. Roy would be left with zero money for regular kid stuff like the ice cream truck, and when his mother got caught slipping him a couple of bucks out of her tightly controlled grocery money, Morris knocked her around so bad that she ended up in the hospital. She told the doctors she’d fallen down the stairs. How many times a day do doctors hear that one?

  “There’s a hitch though,” Roy continued.

  “A hitch?”

  “He said that if these pages are unlocked in the wrong way without the proper keys, it’ll release Armageddon.”

  “Armageddon? That could be a hitch, yes,” I sort of joked back.

  Then, “See, though, even if all the spells or whatever the hell is needed to open it properly are followed, he said that if terrorists got hold of it, it would give them the power to raise the dead and control who lives and who dies.”

  “You’re talking all the power in the world! Jesus H., Roy.”

  “I realize that,” he said, perhaps finally taking in, or maybe believing what his old man had said.

  “Hey, kiddo? Forget El Quijote, I’ll come out to Hicksville.”

  2

  I walked into the morning news meeting with a look of shock on my face. I mean, how do you absorb something like, “I inherited ten million dollars but it’s in a tube that could unleash Armageddon?”

  I tried to walk in unnoticed because I was so late. Good luck with that, sister.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Russo,” Bob Brandt, the editor, snarled at me as I opened the glass door. I mumbled an apology that I didn’t mean.

  The twenty-two-year-old hipster geniuses were already reading off their story ideas for the day—all gleaned courtesy of BuzzFeed or one of the other 24/7 news/pop culture sites.

  One dope in a wool cap with dirty hair peeking out said, “A woman in Peoria, in Illinois—right? She exploded her Chihuahua in the microwave by putting him in to dry after his bath.” Talk about a laugh riot! Or so you’d think by the reaction in the room.

  “Get it up right away,” Bob barked, I mean, growled—dammit—I mean, said. At sixty-two, Bob had survived the paper wars and was still up and taking nourishment—the guy was a phenomenal editor—and had steered The Standard from print to almost all digital without dropping dead or losing old-time readers.

  The old tabloid maxim, “If it bleeds, it leads,” is, in this digital age, being replaced by a new one: “If it clicks, it sticks.” If a story doesn’t get the clicks, it doesn’t stay on the homepage for long. Everything is tracked instantly and constantly.

  “Exploding pet? That will explode with clicks and shares,” he joked, (sort of), taking a slug of his mocha latte.

  What happened to newsroom bosses who came in drunk and drank their coffee black with a shot of Scotch?

  “Who doesn’t love a good exploding dog story,” a seasoned reported moaned. That’s what news media has turned into, I thought to myself for the ten thousandth time: clicks, hits, shares, and lifting from other sources lifted from other sources. And by sources I didn’t mean actual people like cops and politicians and insiders looking to dro
p a dime or some keystrokes or whatever on somebody they disliked to a reporter they trusted. No, no, no.

  We reporters were no longer encouraged to cultivate human sources; now we were encouraged to scour other sources for stories in this 24/7 news-cycle world. Quicker, easier, and a whole lot cheaper than sending someone to Peoria to interview the dog exploder. Leave it to TV news, with their big budgets, to chase those stories.

  As soon as a story went live (online), anyone/everyone could crib, sorry “advance,” that story, which means that by adding a factoid or two, anyone could claim a new version of the same story as their own, with even, yes, a new byline. (As the exploding-dog lady would surely be any minute now.)

  Reporters are now required to have the hacking skills of Julian Assange, the writing chops of Hemingway, and the ability to churn it all out in thirty minutes or less. Failing that, you work for one of the millions of pop-up Web sites, or are a self-professed expert/YouTube sensation without credibility but millions of followers, all of which helps legit news to become less and less important every day.

  The one or two old-time columnists/drunks still around weren’t around that day since they rarely made it in before noon unless they had slept on their desks in a drunken heap the night before. None of them, however, had this story. I had it and it was all mine!

  Man! A possible ten million dollar find in my best friend’s house! The lost pages of the Gospel of Judas, completely intact. Maybe.

  I was deep into my own head when I realized that Adam, the digital editor, was asking the assembled group for a roundup of the best overnight stories. Some new and unknown boy, also in a wool cap—it was spring for God’s sake!—talked about a new scientific breakthrough in which there were ten ways to lose weight while eating pizza and tacos. Ten—count ’em—ten!

  This new form of news—ten this, twenty that—is called lift and list. Lift someone else’s story and highlight it with a list of bullet points. We used to call those bits cover lines—the things you see on the covers of magazines—now they’re called news stories.

  “Great!” someone else chimed in. “Let’s order in some pizza!” Ha-ha. What a card. “Tacos!” someone else added in a near explosion of hilarity. “Let’s chow down!”

  I reflexively looked down at the slight bulge where a concave area once called my flat stomach had been. Six dreaded baby-fat pounds to go! “Only the Kardashians can eat pizza and tacos and then have babies in order to shrink their waistlines,” I chimed in.

  At nearly forty-three, I was in good shape and was at least chic enough to avoid wool watch caps except in blizzards. I dressed like a reporter should—black jeans, black silk shirt, boots, hoop earrings. Work casual without being work slob.

  I have three good natural assets. Good, thick, black, Italian hair; a good haircut, which I usually keep chin length; and red lipstick. Some may not consider a good haircut or red lipstick natural assets, but I believe they are. Height is not, tragically, one of my natural assets. I lie and say I’m five three, but five two is more like it. On a good day.

  At the time of Roy’s announcement, being a new mom with six months of maternity leave under my belt, it wasn’t that I exactly felt out of it—it was more like I didn’t quite feel back in it, either. Look, I’d been to the mountaintop—literally—and in my current circumstances, I didn’t imagine ever getting there again—facing life, death, or even getting the shot at that kind of story. But back then, I had no clue that the whole mountain—not just the top—was about to explode.

  Too bad that the newbies in this conference room wouldn’t have as much chance to exhaust themselves doing a surveil and experience the horrible scut work that turns a cocky know-it-all into a real reporter the way I had, I mused to myself. OK, yeah, they might get to the mountaintop, but for sure it wouldn’t be with a man like Pantera.

  Bob looked at me. “Russo—hello?”

  I looked up.

  “Not to disturb you, but what are you working on?”

  Besides my swollen boobs from weaning Terry off the teat? I wanted to say, but instead I said, “Just something yuuge, as Donald Trump would say. This, while you thought I was on the phone with my sitter.”

  Everyone laughed. I got along with all the reporters and editors, and my desk tended to be hangout central, and everyone as far as I knew thought I was terribly clever. Even the hipsters in wool caps. Hanging out with a Pulitzer finalist was almost as great as hanging out with Justin Bieber and his naked girlfriends. Or failing that, being the first to lift and list a Trump tweet.

  They all looked at me, waiting for pearls of wisdom or a wisecrack. Ah, shit. May as well spill, I thought, hoping none of these jerks were interviewing at Newser or Google and would lift and list my story.

  “Well, I was on the phone with an old friend,” I started to say, wondering how much I’d give away—and how much was even real. “He’s broke as Bernie Madoff, but unlike Bernie, never had more than three dollars to his name.”

  “You always hung with the best people,” Bob joked.

  “Wrong!” I answered. “He is the best. Roy, that’s my friend’s name, was a firefighter at Ground Zero. Maybe the only gay Jewish fireman I ever knew. Got PTSD, took early retirement.”

  Bob looked bored. “And?”

  “And he just inherited something worth ten million bucks from his father who was an abusive tightwad still living in his old Levitt house in Hicksville. The guy was so tight he needed 3-in-One Oil to move. Anyway, the old man—on his deathbed—told Roy that what he left was something he’d stolen, that was worth a lot, but that if Roy sold it he’d unleash Armageddon.” By the skeptical look on Bob’s face, I thought it wise to skip the part about Jesus’ secret personal resurrection formula.

  “Sounds like the ravings of a crazy man,” Bob said, with Adam eagerly agreeing. Horses’ asses!

  “Yeah, well, what if it were true—that this thing he left him, which he said was two thousand years old—was really worth ten million? Or maybe even a lot more…”

  They all shut up and stared. I couldn’t help myself, and went for it—sort of—risking the smirks of the assembled. “And better, what if it is cursed?”

  “Holy shit,” said one wool cap.

  “Fuck me,” said a rewrite guy.

  “Sounds like the plot to The Amityville Horror,” said a pretty twenty-one-year-old intern in a crop top, leaning her chair back onto two legs for no reason.

  “That was about a haunted house,” I corrected her.

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean,” she said. Anybody home?

  More to the point was what Bob now said, which was, “Do it! Go out there and talk to this Roy guy, Russo. Now.”

  “I will, but I can’t now,” I answered.

  “And why the hell not?”

  “This Roy guy, as you call him, is now sitting with the stiff—that would be his recently deceased father—in the father’s house, in—get this—the living room, ironically enough. They’re—well, I mean he’s—waiting for the coroner, who has to sign off on a cause of death since no one was present when he passed.”

  “Well, shit, can you get him to take a selfie?” Adam asked, so excited he jumped up from his chair, picturing the lead online story complete with selfie of Roy and the corpse. I imagined the photo composite of a giant cartoon bag of money next to them.

  “A selfie with a stiff? Isn’t that even below The Standard’s standards?”

  After a second or two of quiet, a chorus of “hell no” and “absolutely not” broke out.

  Question: How many stiff drinks does it take to get a gay Jewish ex-firefighter/oldest friend to pose with a stiff?

  Answer: None. If you didn’t know him, you’d have thought by the sound of his voice when I called Roy back that he was already through half a bottle, but I knew it was just from pure joy. In fact, I’d never heard him sound anything but morose when he tied one on, so I surmised that he hadn’t, in fact, been hitting Morris’s Manischewitz. Roy Golden was truly a hap
py man for the first time in his forty-three years on this Earth. And he deserved it.

  It took him about two minutes to send a pic of himself standing next to his dead dad in the hospital bed in the middle of his living room. Mr. Golden, or the corpse of Mr. Golden at any rate, died with a snarl on his puss, while his son was grinning like he’d just won the lottery, which in a way he had. But Roy would look like a greedy, heartless man yukking it up with his dead father’s corpse on the front page, so for his own good, I asked him to take another selfie where he looked somber.

  I couldn’t help but search his two sent JPEGs for what might be bullet holes or stab wounds on Mr. G. But the corpse was clean. It looked like ole Morris Golden had just dropped of natural causes at ninety. (Roy was the sad product of Morris’s second marriage, and his only child, thank the Lord!) But these were grim pics nonetheless, and a helluva nasty way to start the day.

  I wrote the preliminary story to accompany the photos, leaving out some of the details like what exactly he’d found. I reported only that it was an ancient relic from the time of Jesus that was reportedly worth millions and that the dead man’s last words indicated that the relic carried a deadly curse. Armageddon seemed a stretch—even for a tabloid.

  Details would come when I had investigated everything thoroughly. My story went up on The Standard’s Web site immediately.

  In my hurry to get the story up and out, we never thought about how revealing even that much info could be dangerous. Dumb. Especially in this day and age of instant news, instant access, and instant crazies armed with a bit of info.

  Even Lotto winners get themselves all lawyered up before coming forward.

  But who would have the nerve to steal a stolen relic?

  Who would even think they could get away with it? Oh, right, Morris got away with it for decades.

  3

  Within thirty minutes both the pic of Roy with his dead father and the story of the possible $10 mil find with a curse attached were up online as the lead story. My lead story.

  Five minutes after that, the story had seventy-eight thousand clicks and ten thousand shares (and two million Facebook and Twitter shares by 2 P.M.). Within minutes of the story going viral, news vans were lined up outside Mr. Golden’s old Levitt house in Hicksville. They captured the undertakers loading the body bag into a hearse with Roy standing by, looking handsome as can be with his crazy red hair, two days’ growth of beard, a shit-eating grin on his face, wearing a NYFD T-shirt barely containing his shit-kicker shoulders.