Intervention (34 page)

James sighed as he wistfully recalled all the twists and turns of his career and now its possible end at the hands of a friend. It seemed the ultimate betrayal, a thought that suddenly gave him an idea. He realized it was the personal angle that would most likely affect Shawn’s decision to publish. James was well aware of Shawn’s negative attitude toward organized religion, such that any appeal in that arena would fall on deaf ears.

James was also aware that Shawn was not particularly moral, but he was definitely a com mited friend. With a modicum of new optimism, James decided that his approach with Shawn was going to emphasize that his actions would injure him, James, and more or less downplay what they might do for the Church in general and its laity.

James exited the highway into the West Village and made his way to Morton Street, taking the first parking place he found. As an admittedly poor parallel parker, it took him ten minutes to get the Range Rover into the spot, and even though it ended up two feet away from the curb, he considered it parked well enough.

Five minutes later James turned into the walkway that led to the Daughtrys’ wood-frame house and stopped. He’d visited before but had forgotten how charming it was. Nothing about it was square or plumb for its entire four floors. All the window frames and even the front-door casing were leaning slightly to the right, suggesting that if the door was inadvertently slammed shut, the entire building might fall to the right against its more solid-appearing brick neighbor. The clapboard siding was stained a light gray, while the trim was painted a pale yellow. The roof, although hard to see except for just the corners of the fourth-floor dormers, was a medium-gray slate. The front door with several bottle-bottom windows was dark green, almost the same color as James’s Range Rover. In the middle of the door was a brass door knocker in the shape of a human hand holding a ball. Just to the left of the door was a sign that said CAPTAIN HORATIO FROBER

HOUSE, 1784.

James found himself inwardly smiling. He recognized it was just the kind of off-the-wall residence Shawn would choose. There was no doubt Shawn liked to stand out from the rest of the crowd, a thought that gave James another idea. Perhaps he could arrange to have Shawn given some kind of high award if he promised not to publish anything about the Blessed Virgin’s relics, something like being inducted as a modern Knight of Malta.

With the comforting sense of having come up with something of a plan, even if of dubious efficacy, James reached up and used the brass knocker to announce himself with a few healthy clangs against its brass base. After doing so he cringed, remembering the entire house’s precarious lean to the right.

Within seconds the door was yanked open by a euphoric Shawn with a scotch on the rocks in one hand and a smile to beat the band on his face. “The guest of honor has arrived!” he shouted over his shoulder back into the house from whence a most delightful aroma of grilled meat wafted. A Beethoven piano concerto was playing as background music. Both Sana and Jack materialized out of the smoky, candlelit background on either side of Shawn. There was a buzz of voices, hugs, and slaps on the back as James was welcomed into the living room. A small fire was comfortably crackling in the fieldstone fireplace behind an appropriate-size screen.

“My word,” James said, pressing a palm against his chest in a gesture of being overwhelmed. “I’d forgotten how very cozy you have it. My highest compliment is that it out-cozies, if that’s a word, my lakeside retreat in Jersey.”

“Well, sit down and enjoy, birthday boy!” Shawn said, guiding James gently by the elbow to a club chair and hassock situated just to the side of the fireplace. The light from both the fireplace and the candles made his chronically red cheeks look almost like bruises. “What is your preference? We have a terrific vintage Pétrus that’s been breathing for several hours or your usual favorite, single-malt scotch.”

“My word,” James repeated, taken aback. Such extravagance immediately caused him concern about a possible breakthrough with the ossuary. “Pétrus! This is a celebration!”

“You bet your life it is!” Shawn confirmed. “What will it be?”

“Pétrus is a rare pleasure, and provided I’m not taking it away from dinner, I would love a glass.”

“No problem, old friend,” Shawn said, scuttling off after Sana to the kitchen.

Suddenly becalmed after the tsunami of the welcome, James and Jack exchanged glances. “Thank you for coming,” James said pianissimo. “Although I really need to be here to start my campaign, I’m not sure I would have been able to force myself without your presence.”

“I’m actually pleased to be here,” Jack responded equally softly, even though with the music playing there would be little chance of being heard from the kitchen. “But I feel obligated to warn you that Shawn seems hell-bent on publishing this Virgin Mary story.

I’ve tried to help as you asked me, but I’m feeling less and less optimistic that he’ll even consider not publishing, and for a kind of scary reason. Well, two scary reasons, one more so than the other.”

“What are they?” James demanded, with a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“I think he’s beginning to believe that there is a religious component involved. Several times he’s alluded to the possibility that he has been singled out by the powers that be to bring what he considers this enlightenment to the world at large.”

James’s eyes opened wide. “Are you saying that he’s beginning to believe he is acting as a kind of messenger of the Lord?” James exhaled through partially open lips. To him, such thinking smacked of blasphemy, if not mental illness. He’d seen it before with certain zealots, but he hardly considered Shawn a zealot. Either way, James did not consider it a positive sign, or even healthy. “What’s the other reason?”

“Just the one we’ve already mentioned, that he sees this whole affair as his crowning contribution to archaeology and firmly believes it is going to make him famous. That’s always been his number-one goal, and until now, he’d resigned himself to the fact that as an archaeologist he’d been born a hundred years too late to achieve such a status.”

“Nectar of the gods,” Shawn announced loudly, as he came in from the kitchen with a crystal goblet nearly filled with ruby-red claret. “Your Eminence,” he said with a bow, handing James the stemware.

“How gallant,” James remarked, taking the wine. After holding up the glass in the form of a toast to his two friends, he swirled the goblet, took a whiff of the wine’s full aroma, and then tasted it. “Truly the nectar of the gods,” he agreed.

At that point the three men took seats at the points of an equilateral triangle, with James and Shawn on opposite sides of the fireplace and Jack on the sofa directly in front.

“Is Sana going to join us?” James asked.

“I believe she will after finishing the final preparations for dinner. Or maybe she’ll just give a yell when all is ready.”

“James,” Jack said. “It’s great to see you in mufti. In my mind you look better in jeans, shirt, and sweater than those Renaissance prince costumes. They are too intimidating.”

“Here, here!” Shawn said in agreement, motioning with his scotch as if making a toast.

“If it were up to me, this is how I’d dress most every day!” James said, settling back into his club chair and putting his feet up on the hassock, pretending to be relaxed instead of as tense as he was. “So bring me up to date about the contents of the ossuary!”

“It is turning out to be better and better,” Shawn said, looking back and forth between the others. “I haven’t even told you yet, Jack, but I was able to unroll with great difficulty two pages of the first scroll of the Gospel of Simon, and it is terrific.

Unfortunately, at that pace it might take more than a month to do all three.”

“In what possible way is it terrific?” James asked, studying his cuticles as if not particularly interested.

Shawn sat forward, and the firelight sparkled off the surface of his eyes. “It was like being transported mystically back to the first century as a witness to the struggles of the early Church.”

“You could more effectively do that with Henry Chadwick,
The Early Church,
and with a good bit more confidence in the accuracy of the material,” James said, taking a sip of his wine.

“Not the same by any stretch of the imagination,” Shawn said. “I was hearing directly from a man who was there and believed himself to be intimately involved.”

“How so? By trying to buy Peter’s powers from the Holy Ghost?” James laughed.

“James, I already know your opinion about the ossuary and its contents,” Shawn gently chided. “But I think you should hear more. You’re not going to change my mind by mocking what we have learned so far before you have even heard it.”

“I think my role is to keep your feet on the ground,” James retorted. “My sense is that you are the one who is apt to jump to conclusions.”

“Perhaps I might need a reality check at some point, but surely not before you understand what we have already learned and what we will learn from the scrolls and the bones.”

“You’re right,” James agreed. “Let’s hear what you have supposedly learned so far.”

“The gospel starts out with what I’d call a bang,” Shawn said. “Simon describes himself as Simon of Samaria, to be sure the reader differentiates him from another relatively contemporary figure, Jesus of Nazareth.”

Despite having just moments earlier resigned himself to be polite while Shawn talked, James burst out laughing. “You mean to tell me that Simon, in a sense, in his own gospel, is putting himself on equal or better footing than Jesus of Nazareth?”

“I am indeed,” Shawn said. “Simon, with obvious reverence, gives Jesus of Nazareth full credit for being the logos, or word, and for having been the redeemer in relation to sin, particularly original sin, but he also says of himself that he is gnosis, or knowledge, the great power, who has come to bring knowledge of truth and in that way supersedes Jesus just as he believed Jesus superseded the Temple and the Laws of Moses.”

“So Simon writes that he is divine?” James questioned, a wry, mocking smile of disbelief still on his face.

“Not in the same sense as Jesus of Nazareth,” Shawn continued. “I have to let you take a long look at the text and see for yourself when it is totally unrolled and fully protected under glass. Simon believed, like other Gnostics, that he had a divine spark because he’d been blessed with gnosis, or special knowledge.”

“This is early Christian Gnosticism,” James said for Jack’s benefit.

“Absolutely,” Shawn stated, now smiling himself. “It seems that Simon was perhaps the first Christian Gnostic, which is why Basilides was so eager to ask Saturninus about his master. Simon goes on to say that the violent Jewish god who created the world was not the same god as the Father of Jesus of Nazareth, who is the true God, the perfect God who has had nothing to do with the vastly imperfect and dangerous physical world.”

“So, Simon was then an early Platonist eschewing his Jewish roots.”

“Exactly,” Shawn said, still smiling. “Simon was more Paul than Peter; some thought he had more in common with Peter in his early life as far as we know, since he grew up in less-than-prosperous surroundings in Samaria, while Peter did the same in neighboring Galilee. Anyway, I find all this fascinating, and I’ve unrolled only two pages. What I find so fascinating is Simon’s idea of adding to Jesus of Nazareth’s mission, giving Jesus the credit for doing the redeeming about sin, while he, Simon, would take on the issue of knowledge. What I’m wondering is whether Simon in his gospel, when I get it completely unrolled and translated, might actually redeem himself from being the convenient whipping boy down through the ages.”

“I sincerely doubt that,” James said. The last thing James wanted at this point was for Simon Magus to redeem himself. “His perfidy is canonical and unchangeable, and certainly not by something he might have written himself.”

“Dinner, everybody,” Sana said, coming in from the kitchen and sipping a glass of wine.

The men struggled to their feet, and while Shawn tossed a couple of logs on the fire to keep it going, James and Jack followed Sana to the very back of the house, where there was a dining table in an attached greenhouse-like structure. “This ossuary mess keeps getting worse,” James mumbled to Jack, when he and Jack were sitting and when he knew neither Shawn nor Sana could hear.

Jack nodded, but from his perspective it was the opposite, although he did not let on to James, whom he could tell was clearly more anxious now than when he’d arrived.

A few minutes later they were all seated, and Shawn asked James for a blessing, which he was happy to provide. It was a pleasant setting, and both James and Jack commented that one would never know they were in the middle of the West Village in New York City, as quiet as it was. There was not a single siren in the distance. Shawn had switched on a group of lights that illuminated their carefully planned and enchantingly serene Japanese garden bordered by a rough-hewn cedar fence. Nothing of the enormity of New York was even vaguely visible.

“A toast to our hostess!” Jack said, lifting his wine goblet and nodding toward Sana at the right end of the table. Shawn was at the left end and James directly across. In front of each person was a plate of grilled meat with a curiously orange-colored, pungent-smelling sauce, couscous with slivered almonds, and an artichoke with a vinaigrette dip.

“We’re eating lamb loin with Indian spices,” Sana announced. “Unfortunately, the lamb got to marinate for only slightly less than two hours, whereas the minimum is supposed to be a full two hours, but I did the best I could with the time I had after getting my samples into the incubator to dry overnight.”

“I assume you are trying to obtain DNA from the ossuary bones?” James asked. With the idea the bones might be those of the Blessed Virgin, albeit a very slim chance, James felt unease about trying to isolate DNA, without knowing why he felt that way. He imagined it was a privacy issue about someone he held inordinately dear.

“That’s correct,” Sana responded. “But our current attempt is from a tooth, not from bone.”