Again his hand strayed to the dagger at his side, lingering over the blade.
He wished he could read its story with his touch.
He wished he could understand it all.
Akim Caspi had found him in Geneva. He was young, impressionable, ripe to be imprinted with idealism. He had been drawn to Caspi. The man was enigmatic, but more than that he was inspirational. He talked about the lies of Matthew, whose Gospel sought to force the truth of Judas into fitting some Old Testament prophecy and how the Bible itself contradicted the death of Judas Iscariot. In the Acts of the Apostles he is said to have fallen down head first in a field and burst asunder in Akeldama, the field of blood. Matthew had Judas hang himself from a tree-and in doing so doom himself as a suicide to exile from heaven. He listened while Akim Caspi talked with such passion about how Matthew’s words sought to bury the truth, how so much of these lies of the Church was founded upon were the reworkings of reality. Why paint Mary Magdalene as a whore if not to take away her importance to the true Messiah? Why not even mention Judas, most loyal, most beloved at all, in the Gospel of Peter?
That Peter did not mention Judas of course led others to believe the silver itself could not exist if the man himself didn’t; after all, how could you buy betrayal from a man who had never walked the earth?
But why would anyone be surprised by this? Victors wrote the words remembered by posterity, which is why the Testimony of Menahem ben Jair was so fundamental to what Caspi believed. It was more than just words; it was the truth delivered first hand, truth that supported the Gospel of Judas itself. Jesus told Judas: You shall be cursed for generations. You will come to rule over them. You will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me. Matthew and Mark excoriate Judas: Alas for that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.But who gains from these lies? the would-be assassin asked himself. Who gains from these twisted truths?
Caspi had been passionate in his sharing, and he clearly believed his truth. And even now, with the white Mercedes Benz nearing the stage, the young Swiss Guard knew it was a truth worth believing.
It was a truth that made his heart race, his skin creep with anticipation. It was a truth that the world needed to know, needed to understand, simply because it was honest.
It had taken almost a year before Caspi had shared his plan with him.
It was a simple plan, filled with tragic symmetry.
Two millennia after the silver brought about the death of Jesus those same coins, melded now into the form of a dagger, would be used to kill the Bishop in white, the Pope of the Church of Lies. If Matthew wanted to twist lies about the Messiah to fit prophecies from Zechariah, then they would take prophecies of their own, from every man who had predicted the rise of the Antichrist, and use this death of the False Father to prove these prophecies true.
There were patterns within the patterns. The Prophecy of the Popes given by Malachy, the 12th-century Bishop of Armagh, offered 112 future Popes, according each an enigmatic phrase to identify them. The list, like all so-called prophecies, was enigmatic and open to interpretation, but there were truths in it that Caspi had identified. Truths that helped him believe their path was preordained, that now was the time. Those short phrases were important: Paul VI, Flower of Flowers; John Paul I, the Middleness of the Moon; John Paul II, the Labor of the Sun; Benedict XVI, the Glory of the Olive; and finally, the 112th name on the list, the final Pope, Petrus Romanus.
The signs all pointed to the truth. The Flower of Flowers bore the Fleur-de-lis on his coat of arms, the flower of purity and chastity. The Middleness of the Moon, Albino Luciani as he was born in Belluno, so close to bela luna, Beautiful Moon, reigned for only 33 days, dying before the new moon. The Labor of the Sun, born and died within a solar eclipse. The Glory of the Olive that would bring peace to a troubled world by demanding a sovereign state for Palestine, one might have reasonably thought, yet Caspi taught him otherwise. The Glory of the Olive, he argued, was the glory of the Olivet Discourse in the Gospel of Matthew, that the time of Tribulation was at hand. The prophecy of the Popes led them by the hand to the truth, that the true Messiah’s return was at hand, the one who was everything this Christ of the Christians was not.
The car turned into the square and the faithful began to cheer.
His heart burned with the birth of the truth.
Soon the world would know.
Soon.
24
Then – The Testimony of
He crept up behind the holy man. The air was thick with musk meant to hide the filth of humanity. Sunlight streamed in through the narrow windows and scattered across the floor like gold coins given up in offering to the greediest of gods. Yitzhak, the priest, was on his knees, hunched over before the altar, mumbling his devotions in the temple's inner sanctum. The holy man didn't break away from his prayer. He crept closer, listening to the shallow rise and fall of Yitzhak’s breathing and the gentle rise and fall of his prayer. There was hope in it, love, and strength. In a matter of heartbeats there would be nothing but empty silence where all of that had been.
The Sicarii paused one step behind the priest.
Yitzhak turned and looked up, startled, hands clasped in his lap. "The god you believe in is a lie," he told the holy man. They were the last words the priest would ever hear. Yitzhak's eyes blazed feverishly with fear as the Sicarii gbbed his hair and pulled his head back. In one smooth motion the dagger sliced across his throat. A death rattle escaped Yitzhak’s lips. He clawed at the gash, trying to force the air and blood back inside the flaps of skin. But there was no salvation. The Sicarii released his grip and Yitzhak fell. He was dead before his corpse sprawled across the blood-slick floor.
Menahem never did forget that promise. It burned inside him as the world turned and he grew into a man. It shaped everything he believed. It echoed in every act he performed and every decision he reasoned. In many ways his grandfather’s truth was the core of the man he had become: bitter, brooding, a loner. Menahem ben Jair was an outsider. He took comfort in solitude. He drew strength from isolation. He called no man friend. He had no time for the sects and their new religions. There were thirty or more already in Jerusalem, everyone worshipping their own brand of messiah. Menahem didn’t worship any false gods. He had a mind of his own. He believed one thing, one truth-that his land should be for his people. He had seen his father suffer. He had sat at his knee and listened to tales of the Pharisees spitting at his grandmother and calling her a whore for loving the wrong man.
And then they had killed Jair. That day had changed the boy into the man he was always destined to be.
Menahem ben Jair was Sicarii.
A dagger man.
The world might have turned him into a killer, but in his heart he still yearned to be the boy who had walked into the garden to listen to his father’s lesson.
His mind raced. He looked down at his hands. Shaped like the wings of an angel they were coarse, hardened by life, but they were still beautiful. The blood was gone, but no amount of scrubbing with lye could remove its bitter iron tang from his mind. Still, it did not matter. He scrubbed them for a fifth time. It was strange… usually it was so easy to forget the faces of those he killed, but not this time. The face of Yitzhak Ari burned inside him. He saw it every time he closed his eyes. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.
Menahem was no stranger to death, but this was the first time he had taken the life of a priest.
Yitzhak Ari’s murder wasn’t about faith or fury. It had another purpose entirely. The motivation was as coldly rationalized as the deed itself. His murder was a political killing. It was the opening gambit in a long game of murder and sacrifice where the glittering prize was freedom. The holy man’s blood would be used to rally the faithful against the faithless. The Herodians and the other Roman sympathizers were already venting their outrage at the killing. They were already out in the streets shouting blue murder. Come sunrise that outrage would have brewed over into fervor and fury, and by dawn Jerusalem would run thick with blood.