Book of Judas--A Novel

by Linda Stasi

  “Let me go!” I said, struggling to get out of his grip.

  “I will … if you let me explain.” So I nodded reluctantly, rubbing my hand as though he’d injured me, even though he hadn’t. Somehow he knew how to do that without actually causing any marks.

  “Alessandra,” he said, as though he had the right to address me like a friend. “Those pages in your possession are very, very dangerous. That’s why they are locked up in a tube. They cannot be released to just anybody.”

  “I know that. Do you still take me for an innocent? And you? You’re not just anybody, I take it?”

  He looked at me, or at least his eye without the patch looked at me, mocking. I couldn’t help but to think, Well, yes, now that you mention it, you aren’t just anybody, you are the father of my child.

  “Keeping it in your apartment was so…”

  Son of a bitch! Had I told Father Paulo? I couldn’t remember. Either Pantera was telling the truth and he’d been in touch with Paulo as he said, or he’d tortured the story out of him before he killed him.

  “As soon as I knew—although I couldn’t believe—where you’d kept the pages, I knew I had to get them out of there.”

  “You had to get them out of there? Then why didn’t you come and get them instead of making me travel halfway around the freaking world?”

  “Would you have just handed them over to me of all people?” he said.

  “No. Never,” I answered.

  Almost pleading, he then said, “Please understand that every second that you had them in your apartment, the baby was being harmed.”

  “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Had you not noticed anything different about Terry?” Pantera obviously knew enough not to use Terry’s full name—after all, my baby had been named after him—although now that was something I regretted. Deeply.

  I continued, “No, certainly not. There is and was nothing different about my son.”

  “No?”

  Then I remembered. “Well, he did start speaking early…”

  “At six months.”

  “Yes, he’s very smart.”

  “And? Was it after the tube came into your apartment?”

  I thought about it and in fact he hadn’t started speaking until I put the tube in the box in his room for safekeeping! And then there was the freakish episode when he stood in my bedroom doorway.

  What I said, though, was, “Well, he did put a few words together, too.”

  “And you didn’t think this was odd?”

  “I did. In fact, I phoned my mother in Africa and she kind of poo-pooed it as though I were a crazy, overly proud mom. Said it wasn’t possible. And why am I telling any of this to you, anyway?” I shoved him away—he was entirely too close—and I plopped down hard on the bed.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said, sitting down next to me as though he’d been invited, so I stood again. “Can you rationally explain the temperature changes in your apartment?”

  I steadied myself on the night table. “Yes. It did get very cold.” I said almost to myself and then, aloud, “And you know that—how?” He, of course, said nothing, and even so I continued, intrigued. “The window kept opening even though they all have baby safety locks on them.”

  “That’s why I had to get the tube as far away from the baby as expediently as possible. He’s still an innocent, unformed child. He was totally vulnerable. Even through the metal.”

  “But was Terry harmed in any way?” I was sickened by the thought.

  Yusef stood up next to me and I shrugged him off roughly. “No, he wasn’t harmed, I don’t believe,” he said, “but then again, I wasn’t there.”

  “No kidding! But I was.”

  “Anyway,” he continued, “he would have been harmed had he been exposed much longer.” Then, “Who did you say is staying with Terry while you’re away?”

  “Like you don’t know?”

  “Actually no.”

  “Well, my parents are. They’ve already landed.”

  “That’s good. But you left yesterday…”

  I started rubbing my face hard. “My neighbors. The Judsons. Nice, kind people. Lost a son and Terry is sort of like the grandson they never had.” He stared at me.

  “Don’t you dare stare at me. You have nothing to do with me or my baby and how I raise him. Got it?”

  I had almost said, “You haven’t been there since he was born,” but caught myself. I didn’t want to go there—admit he was the father.

  “I want to call them now anyway,” I said and picked up my cell and dialed my apartment. It wasn’t to appease him, really, it was to appease myself. Pantera’s dead calm and subliminal distrust had made me nervous. I hated him, but he was the smartest human I’d ever met—and the best informed.

  My own landline apartment voice mail picked up, so they hadn’t gone back there. I dialed their apartment and after a few rings and then a click, Raylene picked up. “Hello?”

  “Oh, hi, Raylene. It’s Alessandra.” I put it on speaker so he could hear the conversation.

  “Yes. I know,” she said somberly.

  “You’re home in your apartment. Is everything all right? Is Terry all right?”

  “He’s fine, dear, but we’re getting ready for a stroll and Dane is already downstairs.”

  “Oh. Can I say hi to my little man?”

  “Like I said, he’s downstairs with Dane.” No, she hadn’t said that exactly. Then, “We’re walking over to the Norwegian consulate.”

  “What? Why?”

  “The Norwegian consulate? Why, they’re having a breakfast for VIPs.”

  “And you’re bringing a screaming baby?”

  She seemed to get angry. “He doesn’t scream. Not with me.” Jesus.

  “Well, Raylene, I’m calling to say my parents are on their way. Should be in my apartment within the hour.”

  “That’s nice, dear. I’m sure Terry will be very happy to see them.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Then as she was rushing to get off the phone, she added, “Has Terry ever seen them before? Oh, I’m sure he has and he’ll be just fine.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said defensively. I leave my baby for one overnight with people I trust until my parents come rushing back from another continent to stay with him and suddenly I’m answering questions from an absentee dad and the granola crunchers like I’m the worst mother in the world?

  Raylene was clearly trying to hang up and sniped—yes, sniped!—“But really, like I said, Dane is waiting and so is the Norwegian ambassador. We’ll speak later. Ta-ta!” I stared at the phone, very, very glad that my parents would be arriving very shortly to take Terry back into the family fold. Raylene was acting like he was not just her grandchild, but her child!

  My mommy radar was pinging, but I wasn’t panicking because my parents were on the way. Nothing terrible could happen in less than an hour. Could it?

  We hung up and I smiled broadly but insincerely. “Like I said, he’s doing great!” Pantera looked blank. “I hate when you have that idiotic blank face.”

  “What do you know of these people? Did you do a background check?”

  “Excuse me? They’re my neighbors. And very nice people.” Then, in an attempt to wound him, I exaggerated, and said, “The man I’m dating, a councilman from Manhattan, has more than vouched for them. He’s known them for years.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring. Who wouldn’t trust the word of an elected official,” he swiped back.

  “This from the mouth of a professional assassin.”

  “Yes, you’re right. A mass-murdering killer for God, and whoever else gets in my way,” he mocked.

  “Probably, yes. You’re here, and so you must have some idea of what the hell happens next. I’ve got the relic. Somebody else has the means to open it. And we don’t know who because it died with Father Paulo.”

  “I have a pretty good idea who he may have been dealing with,” he answere
d.

  “The Vatican,” I said.

  “But as the buyers, not as the ones holding the key. That’s another story. Holding the pages is dangerous, finding and taking the key is dangerous. Terrible things started happening to your friend when he became the relic’s owner, and now it’s in your possession.”

  I didn’t want to say what I thought: that my harm would come through Terry. Instead I asked: “Do you know—since you were assigned to the so-called ‘great experiment’ by Headquarters, whatever the hell that is—what powers these pages have, exactly?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Talk to me, Pantera!”

  “I will, but now is not the time. I swear it’s not the time. We really need to move quickly.”

  “Well, first I’m locking it up,” I said, taking the tube out of my bag and heading toward the wall safe. “I really need a shower to wake up and, well, I’m locking it up…”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Russo. You think I’m going to steal it?”

  “You are capable of everything,” I said and slammed the bathroom door, as though he couldn’t pick a hotel room wall safe.

  Once inside, I let the water run as hard and as hot as it would get and stripped down. How could Pantera be alive? I saw him die! Sort of. And why did he abandon his baby and me? Was he a monster? Was the man in my hotel room whose face bore the scars of—maybe Manoppello, maybe something else—really the man I’d been pining for for so long? Now Paulo and Engles were dead, too. Who was this person? I knelt down next to the tub and sobbed. Who could I trust? Trust no one.

  Just then the door opened and Pantera walked into the bathroom. He picked up a washcloth and took my hands from my face and gently washed my face where I’d already abraded it.

  I was completely confused. I shook my head to clear it, tried to push him away as tears ran down my face. No luck. Yusef held onto my arms, and said, neither harshly nor softly, “Russo, listen to me. You have five minutes to be hysterical, and then you have to pull yourself together. Yes, you need to take a shower, but first lukewarm,” he said, adjusting the controls, “and then run it ice cold to get your circulation working. We have work to do…”

  “You’re telling me what to do? You?” It was like another resurrection of the dead. “I don’t need you to tell me what to do, mister. I managed to bring the whole Demiel business—after you supposedly were killed—to a conclusion. Gave the cloth with Jesus’ image to Demiel’s mother. I managed to climb out of the rubble and escape the carnage and the earthquake. I looked for you for weeks, and when I couldn’t find your body in the wreckage, I walked and hitched rides in army and relief trucks for hundreds miles back to Rome—while I was pregnant! I gave birth without a father to help and I’ve been raising my child on my own for six months. So, really? I don’t need you to tell me what the hell to do. It’s not about you. I’m not crying about you. OK? It’s just that my best friend might end up in jail forever, and my other friend Paulo is laying in a giant puddle of blood on the street. I need a minute, OK? And I miss my baby, too.”

  Then he said what he shouldn’t have said: “Our baby.”

  I glared at him. “Don’t you dare go there. Terry is my boy. Not yours. Got it? Good.”

  So he knew for sure. He had never doubted it, I could feel it. But then why …

  He cut off me off mid-thought. “You’ve used up three of your five minutes.”

  Right. I had to get moving. But what was I moving toward? In reality, I needed to get rid of this unholy thing—if it was as terrible as Pantera said it was—and never look upon it again. But how could we find the other key? Clearly baby Terry had started acting strangely immediately after I brought the pages into the apartment …

  “Two minutes…”

  “Do you know about what the pages—”

  He cut me off. “One minute.”

  The man wasn’t going to get deeper into it right then no matter how much I needed facts. He wasn’t leaving me alone in the bathroom, either. Maybe he thought I’d try to overmoisturize or something.

  “Get out,” I said. “Maybe in France or wherever the hell you came from, strangers hang out in the shower together, but not here!” Then I remembered I was in Israel.

  Who was he and what was I doing here with this dead man? In reality we were in many ways strangers, despite the days we had had together on the lam. Despite the fact that I thought we had this bond—sexual, spiritual, physical, impossibly magical—it wasn’t as though I could have Googled him to find out the who, what, and where of him. He was more elusive than the steam that had fogged up the mirror and twice as hard to make out.

  “Just want to make sure you don’t climb out the window,” he said as he exited the bathroom.

  “I won’t. And oh, Pantera? You can busy yourself while I’m showering by fucking off!”

  “Just make sure you rinse off with cold water,” was what he answered. “It’ll break the jet lag.”

  “Get out.”

  He’d been right about the cold shower. Yes. I did feel better. But that didn’t make him right about anything else. My resolve was returning. As I had learned the hard way, “trust no one” meant exactly that.

  I slipped into my jeans, pulled on a fresh T-shirt, and walked back out. He was sitting at the desk, holding some kind of smart phone, a kind I’d never seen before (of course).

  Who was this man whom I’d mythologized into a superhero? How does he even earn a living, where does he live—now that I know he lives, that is?

  21

  Yusuf Pantera is the kind of man who can make himself invisible, which is why, as I’d seen, he can be very deadly. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd unless he wanted you to notice him for whatever reason. He was several years older than me—in fact he was in his fifties—but in Olympic-athlete shape. Average height, thin but with a rock-hard body, close-cropped sandy hair with a bit of gray, green eyes, (or eye, now it seemed), and a slightly off-kilter international accent. Asshole.

  I walked over and saw that he had a map up on the screen. Not a regular map, but an ancient-looking map.

  Without looking up he said, “Those numbers: 31.780231° N, 35.233991° E? It’s code, I think.”

  “You went through my bag and found the note?” I asked, exasperated at his sheer nerve.

  “You told me to get busy…”

  “No, what I told you to do was to go fuck yourself.”

  “I thought that meant go into your bag and look for things.”

  “You are such a pain in my ass,” I said, grabbing back the paper Father Elias had shoved into my bag and looking at it as though I understood the code.

  “I think I can find out what it means. Trust me.”

  I walked away. “Trust no one, Pantera. You’re the one who drilled that into my head once—or am I mistaken?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You did and yet somehow I still I trusted you. I trusted that you were dead, for starters!”

  “Not to be redundant,” he answered calmly. I noticed that his slight, vaguely European accent was resurfacing. “But just this once, forget what you thought and trust what I’m telling you.”

  “I can’t. I can’t trust anyone with my friend’s life hanging in the balance. With Paulo murdered. Not them, not you, not anyone.” Why was I feeling now like I also shouldn’t have trusted the Judsons? Shut up, I told myself. Your parents are probably in front of your building right now, getting their luggage out of the cab. God knows what they brought the baby from Africa. Probably a book on obscure African dialects if I know them.

  “So tell me the truth, Pantera. Or get the hell out. Those are the options.”

  Ignoring me, he simply said without any affectation, “I saw you had some decent sports sandals in your bag. That’s good. We’ve got a walk ahead.”

  “A walk? Where?”

  “Here,” he said, pointing to the map. “Right here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Put on your Tev
a sandals, please.”

  “Not until you explain…” I said, refusing to put them on.

  “Put your shoes on,” he said. “And I promise we’ll talk on the way, OK?”

  “I give you something, you give me something. Isn’t that how it works?”

  “Do you want to get the money and free your friend from jail and pay off his expensive lawyer or not? More importantly, do you want this evil thing in the right hands and out of your life—out of the baby’s life—or not?” A cold chill went down my spine. He wasn’t bullshitting. Not that he ever did—except maybe always, such as when he pretended to be dead.

  I said nothing. “The sooner we do this thing, the sooner you get back to our”—he hesitated—“your son.” As much as I tried to stay stoic, my heart melted a bit. Pantera always knew how to touch me in a way no one else could. I always just knew that Pantera was Terry’s father—and now here he was. I had decided when he was born that I would never have a DNA test to definitively determine whether Pantera or Donald—the only two men I’d ever loved and both of whom I now knew would remain in my life forever—was Terry’s biological father. Pantera suddenly showing up, though, gave me cause to doubt. The cold, hard fact was that Donald never disappeared. He’d always stayed close by. And I thought Donald was the biggest bad boy I’d ever known. Ha!

  OK, enough! Snap out of it. You are his mother and that’s all that counts. You’ve got something in your possession that can cause terrible harm to everyone who comes into contact with it and maybe the whole world. Your friend is in prison, possibly for life, for crimes he certainly didn’t commit. Focus.

  So, grabbing my sturdy sandals out of my bag and slipping them on, I said, “You’re sure about all this?” I meant the pages, not the biology of my son.

  “I am.”

  “Are you doing this for the benefit of the buyer, the Vatican, or who exactly?” I asked.

  “For you,” was his answer. This man who was by design virtually indistinguishable in a crowd was in reality the most distinguishably unique and complex man I’d ever known—and as a reporter I’ve known more than my fair share of complex, famous, infamous, off-the-wall, let alone off-the-beaten-track humans, and even nonhumans. I guess that’s why after hating the guy, I ended up falling hard for him back then.