Gospel (87 page)

But Lucy didn't want to go home. “Why did you ask Dr. O'Hanrahan to come work with you in the first place if you thought he was undependable?” She then added, “You raised his hopes only to cut them off…”

The rabbi opened the car door again and hopped up, exercised though not angry. The cab driver muttered more Yiddish, pointing to the ever-running meter. “Little girl,” he said firmly, “all his life Paddy has been on the cutting edge of his field only to fumble it—only to turn up a bottle, only to back away from the serious scholarship he was capable of. No one on this planet, if he put his mind to it, can give me more help than Paddy on this gospel, and he seems to be the last person who understands how serious this is! And how little time he has left.”

Lucy said at last, “I'll help him walk the straight and narrow, I promise.”

The rabbi was unpersuaded but ready to end this long evening. “And if he continues to carry on like this, will you also promise that you will help me put him on the plane to Chicago?”

Since it bought time, Lucy vowed she would.

“Lela tov,
Miss Dantan,” said Rabbi Hersch, at last committing himself to the taxi.

A
UGUST
6
TH

Monday morning was painful and hung over. O'Hanrahan looked stricken and unrested, and declined when the breakfast waiter asked if he might like the champagne–orange juice cocktail that was on special this morning.

“No,” he sighed, resignedly. “Today is a work day, isn't it, Sister Lucy?”

“Yessir,” Lucy replied, having miraculously avoided the ill effects of last night. The genetic Irish tolerance must be kicking in, she thought. I am my Daddy's little girl. She eagerly devoured a plate of succulent Middle Eastern fruits, a bowl of yogurt with some kind of bran dust sprinkled atop it, to the side of a butterless, hard bran roll.

“Very healthy this morning, I see,” he grumbled.

“You've got a plate of cholesterol there, sir,” she said, briefly pointing a spoon at his eggs and sausages. “I meant to tell you, all yesterday, that Gabriel kept calling. He wants to make peace with you.”

“Fat chance.”

“He's leaving the Franciscans again.”

O'Hanrahan snorted. “That boy reminds me of my own son.”

Lucy listened intensely; this was the first he had ever alluded to his ill-fated family.

“Rudy was the same way. Changed majors three times—each time he came up with something worse than the last time. Sociology, that kind of thing, political science.”

O'Hanrahan was quiet and an impossible silence grew between them. He returned presently, saying, “We're meeting Rabbi Hersch at the Damascus Gate this afternoon, right?” He tried to remember how they had left it last night. Oh yeah, that's right: Rabbi Hersch threatening to bring in Father Beaufoix, which O'Hanrahan had heard as he played passed-out on the cab ride home. “Seen the Dead Sea Scrolls yet?”

“No, sir, I haven't got around to it.”

“My greatest glory and you have not found time to pay homage?” He felt empty inside—his greatest trophy was nearly half a century behind him. Father Beaufoix's new book would be in the stores this week … Beaufoix and Elaine Pagels, actually writing
best-sellers,
making fortunes off this material that O'Hanrahan knew off the top of his head! “After the Museum,” he added, “Mordechai said you should drop around Hebrew University, look him up.”

That was the last thing she wanted to do. Just the rabbi and herself alone. Without O'Hanrahan there to intercede, what would they talk about?

“No, I'm ordering you to go,” he went on. “I feel we need some damage control here. And I sense, despite my being a close friend, that Morey'd happily bring in someone else to replace us.”

Right, thought Lucy, old Father Beaufoix waiting in the wings, fingernails sharpened for his grab. Unhappily, a more realistic vision of O'Hanrahan was taking shape: O'Hanrahan the almost-ran, the talker not the doer, the beloved but, sadly, dispensable scholar, no books on the shelf, no entry in the Scholastic Register. She would have been happier to think of him as invulnerable and titanic. But this, she reckoned, is the price of intimacy with one's idols.

“I told the rabbi,” said Lucy, “that I'd make you take the pledge today. No alcohol at all. Will you swear?”

“Don't worry,” he muttered, tapping his head.

Lucy, suspicious, questioned his day's activities.

“I'm going to see an important man in the history of this gospel. Mustafa al-Waswasah.”

Lucy: “Who's that?”

“He's just about the wiliest old devil I've ever met. He sold a number of Dead Sea Scroll fragments to Israel for the moon—he's still living off the money. He's in East Jerusalem at the El-Khodz Hotel in one of those posh lobby stores where he can pawn off cheap brass coins left to sit in urine for a month as fabulous numismatic antiques.”

“Urine?”

“He told me his way to age coins and get that green-blue brass effect.”

“I'll remember that the next time I counterfeit Roman coins.”

Promptly at ten
A.M.
, they left the hotel separately.

*   *   *

Lucy spent the morning cashing traveler's checks O'Hanrahan had purchased for her with the all-powerful VISA card. She had been treated curtly at the bank, which offered no clue as to who approved what or how to proceed once one got approval; her every question was met with a long-suffering impertinence to tourists.

Lucy next wandered into a shop and was pressured by the over-solicitous Israeli merchant to buy a chessboard she did not want and finally made an escape rather than dare to look at the merchandise she did have an interest in.

She stepped up to a magazine store and bought a few postcards and discovered that Israelis who entered the line after her were served and dealt with before she was. For God's sake, she told herself, I'm trying to
give
them money, you'd think they'd want to take it.

Along the Jaffa Road she found a bookstore. She recalled Gabriel's characterization of Rabbi Hersch and his anti-Christian tract. Lucy stepped inside. The caretaker asked her something outright in Hebrew that she couldn't understand. She could read Hebrew at a snail's pace but she had no chance of speaking it. Only the Israelis could decide in the course of a generation to resurrect a language abandoned long before the time of Jesus, Lucy considered. Can you imagine America switching over to, say, Old Saxon in a generation, just on utopian principle?

She noticed the collections of Hasidic folktales and she took a few books from the shelf and perused happily. Edging toward the H's she saw a used copy of
Not the Messiah
by Mordechai Hersch. Just as Gabriel had said. Published 1974. Dedicated to all the students who have been swept up in Jews for Jesus, may your apostasy shame you into returning to the fold. Sounds more like Khomeini and his
fatwas
than Mordechai Hersch, she thought.

She flipped to a section titled:
WHAT BRAND OF CHRISTIANITY SUITS YOU BEST
? It was snide, taking the denominations of Christianity one by one and ridiculing them, with especial acid reserved for Catholicism. There was a chart of persecutions, and paragraph descriptions of who had done what historically to the Jews.

The Jewry of Brussels wiped out because Catholics testified that they overheard Jews sticking pins in the communion wafer and Jesus crying out. A consecrated host with blood on it was found and the thousands of Jews—who had, as always, built the town—were wiped out in horrible tortures and burnings. The countless churches to St. Chad and St. Hugh in England, little boys whose blood was drunk by Jews. A Gentile child disappeared and it was as good as certain that the Jews would pay for it—and of course all debts to the moneylenders would be erased. And Jews had to money-lend—they couldn't own property, practice any normal trade …

Catholicism invented fascism,
wrote Rabbi Hersch,
and of course the papacy, the Pope, the papa and his Fatherland, are the original model for modern, infallible totalitarianism. Spain, South America, Italy—where fascism flourishes one finds the Catholic Church tied into it, and let us not forget Hitler rose from Catholic Austria and Bavaria. The Vatican signed concordats with Hitler, with Mussolini, and finally Franco in 1953; Pope Pius XII breathed not a word about the concentration camps despite the fact a smattering of Catholics were going to them as well—he even called on the Allies to stop their fighting the Axis as late as 1943.
There followed actual Nazi-Catholic liturgies with Hitler interwoven with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; a photo of Köln Cathedral with swastikas from the altars …
With Western security forces, the Catholic Church under orders from Pius XII smuggled war criminals, many of them the priests, out of Europe to South America or to new identities in America—Barbie, Eichmann, the worst of the monsters! And his cardinal, the later Pope Paul VI, was his key operator in this filthy charade.

Lucy stopped reading. What pathetic little defense could be offered up for all this villainy; what human could accommodate in one lifetime the requisite shame? Second, she wondered why Rabbi Hersch would write such a fondly detailed document against Christians.

(It's not as if what he writes isn't true.)

Lucy replaced
Not the Messiah
on the shelf, not sure she wanted to read 120 pages of unceasing accusation.

Then she took it down from the shelf again. She determined she would buy it and steep herself in all the guilt as part of her education for Israel. Lucy then browsed through the Mysticism section and thumbed through books of Kabbalah and magic, amused at this vast trove of secrets that had been cherished by the Sephardim and Hasidim, with a smattering of Christian, Islamic, and pagan mumbo jumbo sprinkled throughout—

“That you, Lucy?”

Lucy looked up to see Farley. “Hi,” she said, off guard.

“Remember me? Farley, we met in Florence, I'm from Louisiana?”

“Yes, I remember. So your college group is in Jerusalem now.”

Farley was enthusiastic. “Yep. See these books?” He had a grocery bag of paper pamphlets. He reached into the bag and presented Lucy with one titled
THE ONLY HOPE FOR PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
, which was a tract full of elementary school–level prose with Bible quotes and large storybook pictures of Jesus performing miracles and looking kindly down upon his earthly children. If Israel would acknowledge Jesus, the text insisted, peace would automatically descend.

“We're passing 'em out to bookstores to give out for free, you know? We figure anyone buying religious books will wanna read it.”

Lucy consciously hid the front of Hersch's
Not the Messiah.
“I don't think the rabbis in this town would be too enthusiastic, but good luck.”

Farley magnanimously insisted that she keep that one for herself. “I know you don't need it,” he said, “being Christian already but maybe you could give it to someone. You're not in your nun's uniform.”

Lucy decided to be honest, with an ulterior motive of playing detective—she would rush back to O'Hanrahan with all the clues she would gather! “I'm not a nun.”

“But you were dressed…”

“Well, that was for Father O'Hanrahan's benefit. I didn't want to let the dear man know I wasn't a Poor Clare, you see.” Not too convincing, but Farley seemed overjoyed to have Lucy returned to the secular world.

“That's great,” he laughed. “You wanna come to lunch today?”

“I can't,” she said truthfully, “I have to meet a rabbi friend today at Hebrew University.”

Farley crestfallen: “You're not Jewish, are you?”

“No, I was telling the truth about being Catholic. And a practicing Christian,” she added, before she was asked as to her born-again status.

“We're having a prayer service at the Baptist Mission in the New City, and my mom's gonna lead it this afternoon. You could meet my dad. I told him all about you.”

“You did?”

“He said what I said, you oughta come teach at my Bible College.”

Well, the job market
is
tight, thought Lucy, but I don't think it's come to that. “Actually, Farley,” she said, looking at her wristwatch, “I had better be getting over to Hebrew University. See you around.”

Lucy left the bookstore and dropped her pamphlet in the nearest waste can, walked a few steps further, went back and fished it out again, and reburied it under some deeper trash so Farley wouldn't be offended if he walked this way and saw it in the receptacle.

*   *   *

O'Hanrahan decided against taking a taxi with a Hebrew roof sign, since he was headed into East Jerusalem. Waswasah, the famed antiquities dealer, worked in the lobby of the plush El-Khodz Hotel, a Palestinian-run luxury hotel from the days when Jordan controlled the Holy City.

O'Hanrahan began a sunny walk to the Damascus Gate where one could find an Arab cab driver. He reflected on Mustafa Waswasah and the many Palestinians who profit by the Jewish intellectual and university community so many Arabs despise. What a philistine place Jerusalem had been before the advent of Israel. King Hussein of Jordan kept the Christian churches in shambles, presiding over their slow deterioration; Jews had no freedom of worship at the Western Wall; a suppurating Arab
fellahin
ignorance hung over the city then. Palestinian and Philistine are, O'Hanrahan considered, from the same root—proof that the Middle East only has a few conflicts, endlessly recast each new generation.

“El-Khodz Hotel, my friend?” checked the Palestinian cab driver.

O'Hanrahan was fairly gyp-proof with his conversational Arabic. Since the driver was talkative, O'Hanrahan ventured, “So what do you think of Iraq in Kuwait and Saddam Hussein?”