Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (8 page)

His nerves unsteady and his head dizzy, he
eventually arrived in the monastery courtyard where two monks
greeted their Dominican visitor with animated hand signals rather
than break their order's strict rule against speaking. They pointed
to a rack for storing keys to the vehicles parked outside the
walls. Dutifully, Benoit surrendered the Buick's to a vacant hook,
then followed his hosts through a maze of dank stone corridors. A
monk seized his arm when he wobbled, a delayed reaction to the
unusual means of moving over rather than through the monastery
wall. They passed living quarters and meditation cells lit by small
electric bulbs hanging naked from the ceiling. Dark cloaked monks
were coming and going, but none offered a welcome. Only the
clip-clop of footsteps on the cobblestones broke the pervading
silence. Once he arrived at his destination, Benoit nodded good-bye
to his guides and watched them disappear somewhere in the dim light
of the corridor.

He seized a candle from a table, lit it, and
opened a small wooden door, then bowed his head and stepped into a
chamber large enough for a single person. Once seated on the
chamber's only stool, he extinguished the candle and carefully
peeled back a black felt curtain over a small window to peer down
upon an interior room. Late-model office machines—a computer, a
scanner, a server, and a copier—rested on three broad oaken
refectory tables. On the floor, Benoit noticed several picnic
coolers in various colors.

Warm air radiating from the office machines,
rose to the aperture. Tim Matternly suddenly appeared from a corner
of the room to approach a vacuum-sealing machine normally used for
preserving household food. He moved quickly, following a practiced
routine. Benoit observed him matriculate through a full cycle in
which a Ziploc bag from Qumran was emptied on a clean surface where
single and double letters were separated from full words. Fragments
that clung together, even by so much as a thread of decomposing
parchment, Tim handled as a unit. Each cluster was then placed on a
glass slide for digital scanning. Next, every scan received an
identifying code. From time to time, Tim transferred the results to
a DVD disk and then to a backup server.

With this process completed, he would
carefully place each fragment in a new plastic bag for
vacuum-sealing, a label with the assigned code attached to the
outside. The finished product found a temporary home in one or
another of the picnic coolers. Help from the monks would have
expedited this laborious process, but Benoit was pleased to see
that, for the sake of secrecy, Tim had honored their agreement not
to seek assistance.

When satisfied that the processing was
proceeding according to their original plan, Benoit left the
viewing chamber and descended a flight of narrow stairs to the
workroom. A gentle knock on the sealed door announced his
presence.

Tim cautiously cracked it open. "Glad you're
here, brother," he exclaimed upon recognizing Benoit in the
shadows. Normally, a warm hug would have been in order, but for
cleanliness, Tim wore a sanitized white scrub suit used by
technicians in high-containment biological labs. On his hands were
sterile surgical gloves, both of which were raised to ward off
physical contact.

"I'm furious you sent Friar Hilarion to the
École," Benoit barked, making no attempt to mask his irritation.
"And I'm unhappy about having to sneak back to Bethlehem tonight."
He withdrew from his satchel a stainless-steel thermos. "Here's
some coffee. I know they prohibit caffeine here. Don't let others
know I did this."

"An angel from heaven," Tim responded,
stripping off his gloves. He readily accepted the coffee Benoit
poured into a plastic top that served as a cup.

As Tim sipped, Benoit growled, "You wouldn’t
have contacted me if it wasn’t important. I hope that proves
true."

"It is," Tim said. "I'm exhausted. You get
into a routine repeating the same procedure from early morning to
late at night. To speed up this process I made a rule not to read
anything because it would only distract me. I was working
yesterday, my mind in some other world, my hands doing the work,
but something I cannot describe stirred me. I looked down on the
scanner, and despite my resolve not to read what was there, I read
it anyway. You must believe me, Father, that my eyes read by
themselves, against my will. Before me was a fragment, much like
the others. I had already assigned it a code number. My eyes
eventually sent a message to my brain and what I was seeing was
clearly impossible. My consciousness told me I could not be reading
what was there. It just couldn't be, because it was the most
unexpected thing on this planet."

Tim eyed his cohort, suddenly seeing in him a
suspicious and calculating expression that had eluded him in their
previous collaborations. He wasn't sure what this meant, but he had
gone too far to retreat from his pledge to share everything. "We've
hit the jackpot," he said with new force, "maybe the most revealing
artifact in the ancient world, rivaling the Rosetta Stone. No, no,
I believe
more
significant than the
Rosetta."

Benoit's eyebrows rose with curiosity.

Tim opened a green cooler, carefully lifting
a vacuum-sealed envelope from the left side. Half-dozen steps
brought him to a refectory table used for sorting fragments. Benoit
helped make room by removing tweezers and a circular magnifying
glass, then stepped alongside Tim's right shoulder. An explosive
pulse of pain shot from his arthritic hip down into the thigh. He
stiffened for an instant to let the sting pass before bending over
farther.

To read, the priest needed to hook rimless
glasses behind his ears. When he looked down, an impulse urged him
to scream.
What? No document! No scroll!
Only three words on a scrap of decomposed parchment! Why had
Matternly endangered their enterprise by summoning him to Jericho
for a few lousy words? He immediately recognized the ancient Hebrew
script similar but not identical to the familiar modern Hebrew
letters used everywhere in Israel. His lips silently spoke what he
read before asking, "Any idea of the context?"

"Not yet. We'll learn more when we assemble
the other fragments."

Benoit lips curled in a skeptical gesture
while his eyes scrutinized Tim for signs of how much he was
withholding. Surely, with such a discovery, he wouldn't stop
there.

"I have three or four more days of work
here," Tim said, deliberately exaggerating because, by his
calculation, he was two days from finishing. "Now that we have the
material digitalized, we must contact Itamar Arad and transfer the
originals to the Antiquities Authority."

By placing his hand on the sleeve of Tim's
scrub suit Benoit allowed bacteria from his fingers to transfer
onto the sterile garment. "I'm afraid we can't do that." His voice
took on the uncompromising managerial tone he employed with staff
at the École.

Tim pulled free. "Now hold on. We agreed to
turn over all the artifacts as soon as we had them coded, scanned,
and prepared for study. I've worked like a dog for weeks with this
in mind. My back's killing me. And my feet are so sore I can hardly
hobble back to my cell each evening. If we delay returning this
stuff to the legal owner, we'll look like looters, not
scholars."

"Legal owner?" Benoit exclaimed. "You say
'legal owner.' Who might this be, Timothy? I hope you're not
suggesting the Israel government just because it's currently the
authority in this region. Running the Zionist state doesn't make
Jews into the rightful owners of Christian treasures. These
fragments are two thousand years old. Where was the Jewish
government when they were written? Rome ruled then, but Rome is
long since gone and can howl its claim of ownership only from the
pages of history books. The people who wrote these scrolls had no
idea that two thousand years later there would be a Jewish
commonwealth here. Had we discovered these texts before 1948, would
we have handed them to the British Mandatory Government? Or the
League of Nations? Or the United Nations? How about consigning them
to the local Arabs? Come on now, Reverend Matternly. Don't be
naive. You can be damn certain we wouldn't."

"You never made this argument
before
we entered the cave, Father. I agreed to help
at Qumran only to obtain documents for our study, not our
possession. I nearly got shot. At Qumran, we both agreed that the
Israeli government was the legal owner. Israelis have hardly abused
their Dead Sea documents. On the contrary, they put them on
permanent display for the world to see in the Shrine of the Book.
Today, anybody can read them on the Internet."

Benoit's irritation showed in a fierce scowl.
"These documents will be displayed under the Star of David over my
dead body. This is undeniably Christian record, Tim, not Jewish
artifact."

"It's historic documentation that evolved
from the reaction of Jews to the Roman world."

"I beg your pardon. It's the spiritual record
of our relationship to the Father. I demand that you recognize new
realities. The landscape has changed since we were in Qumran.
Perhaps I was naïve. But that doesn't make me a damn fool.
Christians are the rightful owners. It is literature written
by
Christians
for
Christians."

"And exactly
which
Christians have you in mind?" Tim asked, sensing his Dominican
cohort had a deeper agenda.

"Exactly whom?" Benoit barked, as if it were
not obvious.

"Christianity is a fractured mosaic," Tim
said before Benoit could answer his question. "Place the
stewardship of this document with one faction and the others will
object. The most practical proprietor is a neutral people like
Jews. And let's not forget that Christ was a Jew from the day he
was born to the day he died."

Benoit growled, "It was I who discovered that
the cave was being looted. You wouldn't have known about it, and
you would never have found these fragments without me. This is my
operation, Timothy, and I'm telling you now, we're not giving any
of this to the Antiquities Authority. And even if we wanted to,
it's now impossible."

"Nothing's impossible. We just take them a
few miles to Jerusalem. It's not like breaching the Atlantic
Wall."

Benoit's delivery slowed for emphasis. "I
don't think you heard me when I said we can't turn anything over,
even if we wanted to. Remember the Bedouin at the cave entrance. We
found blood on the ground."

"He returned to his people."

"He died. I have it on good authority that
his body was found in a wadi nearby with a bullet in his jaw."

"By what authority?" Tim demanded.

"It doesn't matter. All that matter's is that
I'm telling you an indisputable fact. Hand over these fragments and
the police will throw us in jail. And not for a parking violation
or looting artifacts, but for murdering a Bedouin. They're probably
looking for you as we speak."

"Why me and not you?"

"If they know that loose fragments were
discovered, wouldn't they want to talk to someone who has written
the definitive work on compiling them?"

"The Bedouin shot first. You fired in
self-defense. The police will take our word for it," Tim said, a
tremor of uncertainty in his voice.

"Why should they? They'll argue that if we
knew the cave was being looted, we should have come forward
immediately. Even if no one was hurt, we're still looters. And if
we go to them now, they'll want to know why we waited so long. And
if we knew a Bedouin guard had been shot, why didn't we seek
immediate help? We might have been able to save that poor bastard's
life."

"They'll take the word of respected
scholars."

"This is bigger than local archeology,
mon ami
. Don't expect largess when
religious sensibilities are involved. Besides, Itamar Arad and I
have been at each other’s throats for years. If my friends in the
Vatican hadn't protected me, he'd have shipped me out of Israel
long ago. He lets me pad around in Bethlehem where he can keep an
eye on me because it's like being under house arrest."

Tim considered that for a moment before
saying, "If we hadn't gone to the cave, everything would have been
lost to looters. We've performed an invaluable service." He turned
back toward the scanner where he had left a two-word phrase on the
glass surface, but at the last moment, whirled about to face Father
Benoit once again. "Had I known you would change your mind…"

"It wouldn't have made a smidgeon of
difference," the Catholic priest finished the sentence for him.
"You would never have let an opportunity like this slip through
your fingers. This is no time to throw yourself on the mercy of the
Israelis. Finish the scanning. Leave here when you're ready to
begin deciphering. The important thing is to keep a low
profile."

"That wasn't our agreement."

"The original understanding is dead and you
know it."

"I'll agree only to finish my work here. I'm
making no more pledges. As soon as I'm finished, I'll need to take
a few days off to think."

"Of course you will. After what you've just
shown me, I will, too."

"I'll get a lift to Bethlehem and pick up my
Hyundai."

Benoit paused in an uncertain moment before
narrowing his eyes. "That's another thing I need to talk with you
about," he said, clearing his throat. "I'm afraid your car is gone.
You can take my Buick for a holiday."

"What do you mean
gone
?" Tim snapped. "You promised to drive it back to
Bethlehem and park it there for me."

"Well, I drove it to Bethlehem, but it isn't
there anymore. I couldn't take the chance it had been photographed
by the drone. So I parked it with the keys in the ignition where
car thieves operate. And lo and behold it just disappeared. Wooof.
Gone, gone like a dream. Thieves always make physical alterations
to a stolen vehicle before sending it to market. For all we know,
your SUV is now in Jordan, Syria, or Iraq. And that's exactly where
we want it to be."