“I will not, father, I promise,” the boy said solemnly.
Jair smiled gently. “I know, my son. I know.”
“Then what happened?” Menahem asked, as though it was any other story he had heard and wanted to know the end of.
“After the fighting in the temple Jesus was a marked man. The Pharisees could not abide this man who walked among the poor people, spreading a message of love without fear. Without fear, boy, that is the important thing here. Love without fear. Love without avarice. Love without stricture. He took them out of the temples, bringing them back to the earth. He was their teacher. He hated what they had done to his god, how they had taken him away from the people and hid him in their huge temples and their false idols. He wanted people to worship the natural wonder, not its manmade face.” Jair picked up one of the stones and turned it over in his hand so the boy might see. “Look at this stone, see it properly, see the miracle of time and attrition and earthly forces that had to come together to press it into this final form. That, boy, is a miracle worthy of God. Putting them two by two atop one another to make a wall, that is just sense. Do you see the difference?”
The boy thought about it for a moment. “Yes, father,” he said, eventually. “The stone was always there, whatever shape we choose for it. Like the tree. By itself it can offer comfort and shade, bear fruit and provide, or the carpenter can reshape it to match his needs.”
Jair smiled. The boy had a sharp mind. “And which is the miracle?”
“The first, the tree.”
“But they are both creations, are they not?”
“No father. One is creation, the other is recreation.”
“Very good, Menahem. Very good.” Jair’s smile widened. He wondered if he had grasped the concept so readily when he was the boy’s age. He doubted it. “The Nazarene was recreating the god of their book, taking him out of the temples and into the fields, back to his original wonders, and reminding them that they did not need stone temples to glorify him. That frightened the Pharisees. Inside the temples they had control of the people. Strip them of their temples and you strip them of their power. Worse, change the way people think of their god, make him this caring father instead of some distant wrathful deity who purged the world with flood and plague, and you take away the fear. Without power, without fear, these men were nothing. And that more than anything frightened them.”
“So they wanted Jesus dead?”
“Exactly. They wanted to strip away everything that made him special, assuming that whatever remained would prove to be as craven as they themselves were. They couldn’t grasp the notion of sacrifice. It was outside of their philosophy. So to make him suffer, they made the people who followed him suffer. After his attack on the money-lenders the Pharisees turned their anger onto the people who listened to the message of this new caring god, and they hurt them.
“So here, in this garden, Jesus turned to your grandfather and begged him to help put an end to their suffering. Even though it meant ending his own life. Judas did not want to betray his friend. What man would? But what choice did he have? The people he loved were suffering. The Pharisees were persecuting them in his name, promising that the suffering would only end when Jesus was silenced. They spread lies and hate. They used both to undermine the truth enough to have people turning back to the temple for protection. It was all about fear with them. Always fear.
“So, together these two friends conceived of a plan that would end the tyranny of the temple once and for all. And they did it here, in this arden, the same place my father would surrender his friend to the soldiers, the same place the stones of the disciples would end his life. Here, in this garden.”
Eyes wide, the boy looked around as though seeing the place for the first time. Where there had been trees and shrubs he saw ghosts. Jair remembered that sensation. He remembered thinking he had seen his father incline his head just slightly and smile as his mother gave him the coins. The mind had a way of giving you what you needed most. He wondered who the boy saw.
“That promise destroyed my father. It killed the man he had been. Killed the kindness and the humor and everything mother loved him for. For the rest of his life he was a shell, a husk, a broken man. Not that there was much life left to him. Mother met him on the road here. He knew they were waiting for him. He knew they were going to kill him. She begged him to leave, to run, but he wouldn’t because he wanted to die.”
Something bothered the boy.
“What is it, son?”
“Why didn’t Jesus surrender himself? Why did he need grandfather to deliver him?” Menahem asked earnestly.
That was a question that had bothered Jair for most of his adult life. He had seen people spit at his mother, so called holy men, and curse her and call her a whore. It had cut deep. The Pharisees looking to smear her. He had asked his mother why Judas had to die for this other man with his new religion. Because she knew both men better than anyone, he thought she might have the answer. She gave him the only answer that made any sense: “Because he doubted himself. He doubted his own strength. Jesus needed someone at his side to be sure he went through with it. He wasn’t merely surrendering, he was sacrificing himself. He needed to know he wasn’t alone. So that was the sacrifice your grandfather made. He gave himself so that his friend could end the tyranny of the Pharisees.” And for that she allowed them to spit at her and call her whore.
“Grandfather must have been brave,” the boy said.
Jair nodded, lost again in memories that weren’t his. “Even his own friends turned on him because he couldn’t tell them the truth. Like everyone else they thought he had betrayed Jesus. They didn’t understand. There was so much they didn’t understand. They thought he had acted out of jealousy and greed. They thought it was all about these damned coins. It wasn’t. It never had been. You know that now. He lost everything because he was the best of them, the strongest, most faithful. And now they call him faithless.” Jair closed his eyes. The real betrayal was still fresh inside him.
0" width="19" align="justify"›“He was about to become a father, yet for the sake of his friend he gave up the chance of ever knowing me.” He looked at his son, trying to imagine himself in his father’s place. All of the choices he had made in his life paled beside that single choice Judas had made in this garden. It would have been so easy to flee, to take Mary and start their new family. Again that familiar swell of bitterness rose inside him. “I can’t imagine never knowing you,” Jair said, glad he had been spared that agony at least.
He gathered up the silver and handed the pouch to his son.
“These are yours now. Think of them as the last reminders of your grandfather’s sacrifice. We cannot forget the truth. We owe that much to him, don’t we?”
“I’ll never forget,” Menahem promised.
16
Now
The first siren blared almost immediately.
The second and third came only a second later. In less than five seconds every alarm box in the street was wailing. Half of them might have only been for show, but the other half were doing the best to raise the dead. In thirty seconds they had joined into a single wall of noise.
“What the hell’s that racket?” one of the uniforms said.
“Not sure, Sarge. Sounds like burglar alarms.”
“You trying to tell me every bastard in this street just got robbed? I don’t like this. Go and check it out, Hollis.”
Ronan Frost listened to one set of booted footsteps clump down the stairs. That still left two uniforms upstairs. They were better numbers. He could take two, quickly, if he had to. Still, with a little bit of luck there would be no need.