The Sixth Station (43 page)

“How? I thought they were now hidden away and only Judge Bagayoko has seen them.”

She just looked at me.
Right.

The subject was changed. “I assume you have a lead on the source blood or you wouldn’t be heading north. The mountains?” she asked.

“Yes. I think it may be in Manoppello—a small town in Abruzzo. In a monastery there.”

“And how do you know this?”

“Reporters investigate,” I said, playing her game her way. She let it go and opened the plastic bag she’d brought with her. Inside was a nun’s veil, a gray dress, some sensible shoes, and a bottle. She held it up. Instant tanning lotion. “You really
will
be a ‘sister’ now.”

How many times in one lifetime—or make that one week—am I going to dress up like a nun? I’m like a fetish hooker.

I went into the little bathroom and applied the tanning liquid by the dim light of the bathroom fixture. In Italy the ceilings and the light fixtures are all too high to cast any decent light for you to actually see anything very well in a mirror. But from what I could make out, I didn’t look tan, I looked African-American.

“You forgot your hands,” she said, sticking her head into the bathroom. “Black women do not have white hands.” She took the bottle and rubbed the tops of my hands and handed me the clothes. “Now put these on,” she said, before washing the tanning lotion off her own palms.

As I slipped the dress on, Maureen took her gun out of her little-old-lady purse, walked to the window, and opened the shutter slats a hair to survey the area below. “Hurry now.”

I slipped into the clothes, and she helped me attach the veil and hung a crucifix around my neck. “I’ll divert the clerk. You take the next lift.”

When I came back down to the lobby, the clerk was nowhere to be seen and Maureen directed me to a nondescript black car parked across the street, and we got in. “It has an Alfa engine; don’t worry,” she said.

“My rental car…”

She just looked exasperated at my idiotic compulsiveness as she started her car.

38

The minute we got back on the highway, I heard a loud explosion in the area of the motel.

“The car?” She said nothing.

We could also hear gunfire from towns around us and small fires blazing in the trees on the mountainsides. She pushed the pedal to the floor and accelerated to a dangerous speed.

“It’s begun,” she said, and turned on the radio.

She switched to BBC.

“Ben Yusef. He’s about to do it.”

From his jail cell, the voice of Demiel ben Yusef was clear and strong, even though he’d been fasting for what must have been at least forty days by then.

“Now that I am about to give up the shell in which I have been entombed in this lifetime,” he said, “neither do I refute nor admit to the charges against me. Only God, my parent, can judge me.

“Do not mourn me, nor exalt me, and do not kill in my name. You cannot mourn me, for I will never die. As you will never die—no matter what you fear in the coming days.

“Death is just an altered state of being. Life after life is the normal state. Everyone who is alive is already dead and also now alive. Understand this and fear death no more.

“If you believe in the concept of life—the undeniable fact that humans are born from the love of two people, and from that coming together you were made flesh, each with hands and eyes and organs and blood and minds and hearts, then you do believe in the concept of life.

“The very idea of life itself is so complex that anything and
everything
that comes after the creation of life is simple. And ongoing.

“If you know life, you already know the unending wheel of life and death. You already know God. The spirit that is
you
continues with you and around you after you give up the shell of the human body.

“So I too will be with you and all around you. Just look and you will find me. I am everywhere. In the trees, the air, the sun. I return to the home of my parent, yet I will remain with you.

“I beg you not to fear what is coming in the next days.

“The gift of the earth, like all life itself, has a cycle of life and death. Has it been hastened by the hand of humans who corrupted it, polluted it, sickened it?

“Meditate on this: You took the great oceans and made them filthy and then claimed they were clean. You took the fertile fields and made them give up barren fruit. Instead of following the natural and perfect order, the fields were not allowed to lie fallow in rotation—even though by divine design, all things must be allowed to rest to renew—each on its own Sabbath.

“You developed chemicals and killed the mother that fed you. You have reaped the harvest of that death by growing obese while wasting away in mind and body.

“You took God’s very spark of life—the atom—and split it. It is as though you split your own child in half. Then when it became the monster that is destroying its own mother, the earth, by spewing Her with its toxic breath—radiation—you react with surprise and shock.

“You are still shocked at every nuclear reactor that melts down. Why? For everything there is a season.

“You refuse to believe that when you take you must give back or you lose it all. That is the law of all things in nature.

“Know this: My blood—the blood of Christ—can
not
die. I shall, like my parent before me, rise again. And again and again—for the blood that made me lives as surely as does the blood that runs in your veins. So do not lose faith in the Lord, our God.

“The blood of my parent that runs in my veins and remains here on earth is the only measure against the end of days. It is all that remains to restore the earth to its former grandeur.

“So I implore you: Do not mourn me in the coming days. Nor mourn your loved ones who will pass. Instead contemplate the words of the Creator, our parent, and only then can you truly love God. Only then can you be saved.

“For I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.…

I am the barren one

and many are her sons.…

I am she whose wedding is great,

and I have not taken a husband.

I am the midwife and she who does not bear.

I am the solace of my labor pains.

I am the bride and the bridegroom,

and it is my husband who begot me.

I am the mother of my father

and the sister of my husband,

and he is my offspring.

I am the slave of him who prepared me.

I am the ruler of my offspring.

But he is the one who [begot me] before the time on a birthday.

And he is my offspring [in] (due) time,

and my power is from him.

I am the staff of his power in his youth,

[and] he is the rod of my old age.

And whatever he wills happens to me.

I am the silence that is incomprehensible

and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.

I am the voice whose sound is manifold

and the word whose appearance is multiple.

I am the utterance of my name.

“In love I came to you, and in love I leave you.”

The voice of the BBC announcer came on. “Those were the first and, by the sound of it, the last words that will be spoken by the thus-far-silent Demiel ben Yusef, the man on trial for terrorism and crimes against humanity.

“We have with us a panel of religious and political experts here to interpret the words of the suspected terrorist. Nut job or prophet?”

Maureen turned off the radio. “I’m amazed that he chose to recite that passage from the Nag Hammadi library. It’s called, ‘The Thunder, Perfect Mind.’ He knows how to manipulate the people enough to have used just some parts and not others.”

“Nag Hammadi
—
that’s where the Gnostic gospels were found in the 1940s in Egypt, right?”

“In 1945 to be exact. Fifty-two tractates about Jesus Christ that were uncovered by Arab peasant farmers, including one named ’Alī al-Sammān, at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif, a cliff near the town of Hamrah Dawm in Egypt. While digging for fertilizer near a giant boulder, they hit an earthen jug. They dug it out. Huge. Six feet high.

“Inside of this enormous jug was a stack of books produced sometime in the fourth century AD. None of the fifty-two tractates in the thirteen leather-bound books they found are included in the New Testament. He was digging for fertilizer, thought he’d found gold—and was disappointed it turned out to be just leather-bound papyrus.”

“But worth its weight in gold, though.”

“More than that. They are considered to be the most important find of the modern age, in fact. You see, these are allegedly the words of the private Jesus—mystical teachings he imparted to his closest disciples. They are not the sermons he gave for the multitudes.”

“So was ’Alī al-Sammān the Chosen One of his day?”

“Perhaps—if you believe the words in the books are the words of Jesus. I, for one do not. And ’Alī al-Sammān? Hardly what you’d call a visionary. In fact, after bringing these extraordinary lost books home, his mother used some pages as kindling for the home fires. Shortly after that, according to ’Alī al-Sammān himself, he and his brothers set forth to avenge the death of their father by another local.”

“And?”

“He said they found him, hacked off his limbs, ripped his heart out, and proceeded to eat it. Then, fearing they’d be caught and needing money, they sold what was left of the books on the black market.”

“Wow.”

“So while you are a Chosen One yourself, it’s not necessarily because of your specialness.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it. Anyway, I don’t think I’m special as much as cursed at this point. Unless I get a great story out of it…”

“Well, hurry up with that. I think ben Yusef just announced the end of the world.”

“Or maybe the beginning.”

“You mean his reference to ‘again and again’?”

“Yes. I think he meant, if I’m not mistaken, that the source blood, if we find it, will be his resurrection.”

“So you believe that he
is
indeed the clone of Jesus?”

“I’ve come to believe that he’s not evil, if that means anything. I believe that he wasn’t responsible for those atrocities. Is he the Son of the Son? Hell, I don’t know. But I know I need to find out for myself.”

As we came over the next rise, the traffic, which had been nonexistent a moment earlier, was now at a dead stop. Up ahead red lights were flashing, sirens were blaring, and a lot of angry Italians were standing outside their cars and cursing.

“Roadblock. That would be for you, my dear.”

“Oh, crap—as they
don’t
say in the Nag Hammadi.”

We inched our way up car by car until we were five or six from the roadblock itself and the inspection of our vehicle.

“I have this fake passport and license.…”

“I just need to show my license and you can show yours if asked. We are just a couple of nuns traveling to see the various churches in the area. You don’t even need to show your passport—no reason you’d be carrying it around for a car ride. Got it?”

“Got it.”

As we approached the roadblock, a news flash came on the radio and every Italian standing outside his or her car, previously cursing and yelling, grew silent to listen. Even the cops stopped checking IDs momentarily.

“Another message? You mean he didn’t finish?” I ventured.

Instead, a reporter from the BBC came on breathlessly to announce, “Chief Judge Fatoumata Bagayoko, president of the United Nation’s Special International Criminal Court, has entered the General Assembly room, temporary home of the ben Yusef tribunal, to make a special announcement.”

Even Maureen’s eyes widened. If we hadn’t already been at a standstill, I think she would have slammed on the brakes.

The voice of Bagayoko came on clear but not strong. She sounded—what?—defeated.

“Good day, ladies and gentlemen. First let me thank you all for attending the tribunal these past days and reporting the facts as accurately as humanly possible. It is, however, my sad duty to inform you that due to a gross and unforgivable breach on my part, I will not be able to continue in my role as chief judge of the most important tribunal in modern history.”

What the—?

“Because I was moved to visit the children who were victims of the terrorist bombings allegedly masterminded by Demiel ben Yusef—children you all saw for yourselves in court on the first day of the tribunal—and then to make a public declaration about it, I tainted the process. I went so far as to declare that they had been healed after being prayed for by ben Yusef.

“I therefore can no longer serve as a fair and impartial overseer of these proceedings. For as God is my witness, I
am
no longer impartial.

“These actions, along with my deep conviction, after witnessing the healings of the children, that Demiel ben Yusef is not an ordinary human being, have been deemed by those who sit with me in this tribunal to be a breach of ethics and protocol. And they are correct.