Why? Why has this happened?
Kesev did not wait for an answer. Instead he headed across the field toward the east wall of the canyon.
One more place left to check.
He knew the way. He hadn’t been up to the ledge in a long, long while, but his feet had trod the hidden path so many times that they carried him along now with no conscious effort.
He reached the top and stood on the broad ledge, breathing hard. He’d grown soft in many ways. He coughed and sipped from the canteen. So dry out here. The membranes inside of his nostrils felt as if they were ready to crack and peel like old paint. In the old days he wouldn’t have noticed, but he’d grown soft living so near the sea all these years in Tel Aviv.
He hurried to the mound of rocks that covered the entrance to the Resting Place. They remained undisturbed, as he’d expected. Still, relief flooded through him.
This was holy ground. Kesev had vowed to protect it. He would gladly die—more than gladly—to preserve its secret.
But his relief was short lived. The secret of the Resting Place lay within the coils of the stolen scroll. Its theft could have disastrous consequences.
He drifted to the edge of the ledge and stared down the sheer three-hundred-foot drop to the canyon’s shadowed floor. In the old days, at least for someone who didn’t know the torturous little path to the top, this sort of climb would daunt all but the most foolhardy adventurer. Nowadays, with modern climbing techniques—or helicopters, for those with deeper pockets—such a precipice offered but a momentary obstacle.
He turned and stared east, across the lengthening shadows behind the foothills that sloped down to the mirror surface of the Dead Sea. He hurled the urn fragments into the air and knew he’d never hear the clatter of their impact on the rocks so far below. The Resting Place was safe up here, hidden from the casual observer as well as the determined searcher...
Unless...
Unless a searcher had something to guide him.
Where are you? he thought as he searched the craggy wilderness spread out below. Where are you thieving bastards hiding? You can’t stay hidden forever. I’d be searching for you now if I weren’t afraid to leave this place unattended. But I’ll find you eventually. Sooner or later you’ll have to show yourselves. Eventually you have to slither out from under your rock to sell what you’ve stolen from me. And then I’ll have you. Then you’ll wish you’d never laid eyes on that scroll.
The scroll...how much did it tell? How detailed were its descriptions of the area? If only he could remember. So long since he’d last read it. Kesev squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temples, trying to massage the hidden information from the reluctant crevices of his brain.
Was the scroll even legible any longer?
That was his single best hope: that the scroll had been in the urn the thieves had broken, that it had been damaged to the point where its remnants were little more than an incoherent jumble of disjointed sentences.
Kesev turned and was so startled by the sight of her that he nearly tumbled backward off the ledge.
Robed and wimpled exactly as she had been in life, she stood near the rubble that blocked the entrance to the Resting Place and stared at him. Kesev waited for her to speak, as she had spoken to him many times in the past, but she said nothing, merely stared at him a moment, then faded from view.
So many years, so many years since she had shown herself here. Kesev had heard reports from all over the world of her appearances, but so long since she had graced this spot with her presence.
Why now, just after the scroll had been pilfered? What did this mean?
Kesev stood on the precipice and trembled. Something was happening. A wheel had been set in motion tonight. He could almost feel it turning. Where was it taking him? Where was it taking the world?
I approached the Essenes at Qumran but they tried to stone me. I fled further south, wandering the west shore of the sea of Lot. Perhaps Massada would have me. Surely they would welcome one of my station. Or perhaps I would have to push further south to Zohar.
I do not know where to go. And I am alone in Creation.
--from the Glass scroll
Rockefeller Museum translation
THE PRESENT
ONE
Fall
Jerusalem
The poor man looked as if he were going to cry.
“You...you’re sure?”
Harold Gold watched Professor Pearlman nod sagely as they sat in the professor’s office in the manuscript department of the Rockefeller Archeological Museum and gave Mr. Glass the bad news.
Richard Glass was American, balding, and very fat—a good hundred pounds overweight. He described himself as a tourist—a frequent visitor to Israel who owned a condo in Tel Aviv. Last month he’d brought in a scroll he said he’d purchased at a street bazaar in the Arab Quarter and asked if its antiquity could be verified.
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Glass.” Pearlman stroked his graying goatee. “A gloriously skillful fake, but a fake nevertheless.”
“But you said—”
“The parchment itself is First Century—we stand by that. No question about it. And the ink contains the dyes and minerals in the exact proportions used by First Century scribes.”
The first thing the department had done was date the parchment. Once that was ballparked in the two-thousand-year-old mark, they’d translated it. That was when people had begun to get excited. Very excited.
“Then what—?”
“The writing itself, Mr. Glass. Our carbon dating tests—and believe me, we’ve repeated the dating numerous times—all yield the same result: the words were placed on the parchment within the past ten or twelve years.”
Mr. Glass’s eyes bulged. “Ten or twelve—! My God, what an idiot I am!”
“Not at all, not at all,” Professor Pearlman said. “It had us fooled too. It’s a very skillful job. And I assure you, Mr. Glass, you cannot be more disappointed than we.”
Amen to that, Harold thought. He’d been in a state of euphoria for the past month, thanking God for his luck. Imagine, being here on sabbatical from NYU when the manuscript department receives an item that could make the Dead Sea scrolls look like lists of old matzoh recipes. When he’d read the translation he’d suspected it might be too explosive to be true, but he’d gone on hoping...hoping...
Until the dating on the ink had come in.
Harold leaned forward. “That’s why we’re very interested in where you got it. Whoever forged this scroll really knows his stuff.”
He watched Glass drum his fingers on his thigh, carefully weighing the decision. No one in the department believed for a moment that Richard Glass had picked up something like this at a street stall. Harold knew the type: a wealthy collector, buying objects here and sneaking them back to the states to a mini-museum in his home. He also knew that if Glass named his true source he might precipitate an investigation of other purchases he’d made on the antiquities black market, and his shipments home would be subject to close scrutiny from here on in. No serious collector could risk that.
“We’re not interested in legalities here, Mr. Glass,” Professor Pearlman assured him. “We’d simply like to interview your source, learn his sources.”
Harold grinned. “I think most of us would like to shake his hand.”
No lie there. Undoubtedly the forger possessed some sort of native genius. The scroll Glass had presented was written on two-thousand-year-old parchment in ink identical to the type used in those days. The forger had used an Aramaic form of Hebrew enriched with Greek and Latin influences—much like the Mishna, the earlier part of the Talmud—and had created a narrative that alternated between first and third person, supposedly written by a desert outcast, a hermit but obviously a well-educated one, living in the hills somewhere west of the Dead Sea. But the events he described...if they’d been true and verifiable, what a storm they would have caused.
Perhaps that was the forger’s whole purpose: controversy. The money from the sale to someone like Glass was a lagniappe. The real motive was the turmoil that would have arisen had they not been able to disprove the scroll’s authenticity. The forger could have sat back and watched and smiled and said, I caused all this.
After a seemingly interminable wait, Glass shook his head.
“I don’t know the forger. I can’t even find the stall where I bought it—and believe me, I’ve searched high and low for it. So I can’t help you find the creator of this piece of junk.”
“It’s not junk,” Pearlman said. He slid the wooden box containing the scroll across the desktop toward Glass. “In its own way, it’s a work of art.”
Glass made a face and lumbered to his feet.
“Then hang it on your wall. I want nothing further to do with it. It only reminds me of all the money I wasted.” He took the box and looked around. “Where’s your trash.”
“You can’t be serious!” Harold said.
Glass turned to him. “You want it?”
“Well, I—”
He shoved the box into Harold’s hands. “Here. It’s yours.”
With that he turned and waddled from the office.
Professor Pearlman looked at Harold over the tops of his glasses. “Well, Harold. Looks like you’re the proud owner of a genuine fake first century scroll. It’ll make a nice curiosity back at NYU.”
Harold gazed down at the box in his hands. “Or a unique gift for an old friend.”
“A colleague?”
“Believe it or not, a Catholic priest. He’s something of an authority on the early Christians. He’s read just about everything ever written on the Jerusalem Church.”
Pearlman’s brown eyes sparkled. “I’ll bet he’s never read anything like that.”
“That’s for sure.” Harold almost laughed aloud in anticipation of Father Dan Fitzpatrick’s reaction to this little gift. “I know he’ll get a real kick out of this.”