The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

Jack grunted. ‘It’s as if the ingredients are there, but nothing’s cooking. This trip’s make or break. If we don’t get anywhere today, I’m out of options.’ He took a deep breath, calmed himself, then glanced curiously at Jeremy’s book. ‘Cryptography?’

  ‘One of my childhood passions. I collated all the German codes broken by the Allies during the First World War. I was just getting myself back up to speed. It was looking at some of those early Christian acrostics that did it. I’ve realized you can’t have too many skills in this game.’

  ‘It would appear,’ Jack said, scratching his stubble, ‘that you have the makings of an archaeologist. Maria was right. Maybe I should just give up now and hand it all over to you.’

  ‘Maybe in about twenty years,’ Jeremy replied thoughtfully, then grinned at Jack. ‘That should give me time for a stint in special forces, to learn everything about diving, weapons and helicopters, to overcome all fear, and, most importantly, to work out how to handle your esteemed colleague opposite.’

  Costas moaned and snorted in his sleep, and Jack laughed. ‘No one handles him. He’s the boss around here.’

  ‘Trouble is, in twenty years’ time, all the world’s mysteries will have been solved.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘The past is like the New World was to the first colonists. You think you’ve found it all, then you turn a corner and another El Dorado’s shimmering on the horizon. And look where we are today. Some of the greatest mysteries may always be there, half solved, constantly drawing you on.’

  ‘Sometimes that’s the best way,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘You remember the Viking sagas? The loose ends aren’t always tied up, virtue isn’t always rewarded. We don’t always want a conventional ending.’

  ‘And you won’t always get one, with me,’ Jack grinned. ‘Something else I’ve learned, the treasure you find is rarely what you think you’ve been looking for.’

  ‘There it is.’ The aircraft banked sharply to port, and Jeremy pointed to the coastline some ten thousand feet below. ‘I asked the pilot to take us into Los Angeles from the north, to give us a view of Malibu. It’s pretty spectacular.’

  ‘Beaches,’ Costas murmured. ‘Good surfing?’ He had been asleep for the entire trip from JFK in New York, and before that for most of the transatlantic haul from England. He looked as if he had just come out of hibernation, and leaned his forehead against the windowpane as he peered blearily down.

  ‘Not bad,’ Jeremy replied. ‘Not that I’d know, of course. When I was here, I was working on my dissertation.’

  ‘Right.’ Costas still sounded blocked up, but the worst of his cold seemed to have passed. ‘I’m looking forward to finding out what we’re doing here, Jeremy, but I’m not complaining.’

  ‘I told Jack the whole story while you were dead to the world. I found Everett in the California State Death Registers. Same date and place of birth, no doubt about the identity. He lived just north of here, in Santa Paula, arrived here after leaving England in 1912. On a hunch I called a friend in the Getty Villa. Turns out he can tell us more, a whole lot more. For a start, Everett was a devout Roman Catholic, a convert.’

  ‘Huh?’ Costas rubbed his eyes. ‘I thought this was all about the British Church, the Pelagian heresy.’

  ‘That’s what I hope this visit will sort out for us.’

  ‘So we’re not going surfing.’

  ‘The trail’s hotted up again, Costas,’ Jack said intently. ‘Jeremy’s made a real breakthrough.’

  ‘You can see it now,’ Jeremy said. ‘The Getty Villa. In the cleft in the hills down there, overlooking the sea.’

  Jack peered at the cluster of buildings visible just in from the Coastal Highway. Suddenly it was if he was back at Herculaneum, staring at the plan of the Villa of the Papyri made by Karl Weber more than two centuries before. He could see the great peristyle courtyard, extending towards the sea, with the main mass of the villa structure nestled behind at the back of the valley.

  ‘The only big difference is the alignment,’ Jeremy said. ‘The villa at Herculaneum lies parallel to the seashore, with the courtyard and the main buildings abutting the seafront. Otherwise the Getty Villa’s faithful to Weber’s plan. It’s a fantastic creation, the kind of thing that’s only possible with American philanthropy, with unfettered vision and unlimited wealth. It’s also one of the finest museums of antiquities anywhere in the world, and the place where I’ve done some of my best writing. Whatever else awaits us down there, you’re in for a treat.’

  Three hours later they stood beside a shimmering rectangular pool in the main courtyard of the Getty Villa. They had entered unobtrusively by a small door at the west end, and now they stood stock-still like the statues that adorned the garden, soaking in the sunshine and the brilliance of the scene. It was as if they had entered a movie set for a Roman epic, yet with an intimacy and attention to detail rarely seen in the sweeping panoramas of history. The pool was almost a hundred yards long, extending from the front portico of the villa to the seaward side where they had walked up from the Coastal Highway. At either end were copies of ancient bronzes found in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, a drunken Silenus and a sleeping faun, and opposite them was a seated Hermes so lifelike he seemed ready to slip into the pool at any moment. Between the pool and the colonnaded portico that surrounded the courtyard were trees and beds of plants that made the marble seem like natural extrusions of the bedrock, surrounded and cushioned by vegetation. The entire garden was an orderly version of the world outside, cocooned and protected by human ingenuity. The pool reflected the columns and trees, creating an illusionistic scene like the wall paintings they could just make out on the interior of the portico, as if they were being drawn beyond the garden to other, fanciful creations of the human mind, not to the disordered and uncontrollable reality beyond. Jack remembered the wall painting of Vesuvius he had shown Costas as they flew towards the volcano, an image that summed up all the Arcadian dreams of ancient Rome, a flimsy sheen over a reality that had blasted its way through on that fateful day almost two thousand years before.

  ‘Everything’s authentic,’ Jeremy said. ‘The plan’s based on Weber’s original record of the villa he saw in the tunnels in the eighteenth century, and the statues are exact copies of the originals they found then. Even the vegetation’s authentic, pomegranate trees, laurels, fan palms brought all the way from the Mediterranean.’

  Jack closed his eyes, then opened them again. The California hills had the same stark, sun-scorched beauty he loved in the Mediterranean, and the smell of herbs and the sea transported him back. The villa was not an interpretation of the past but a perfect resemblance of it, full of light and shadow, alive with people, gesturing and breathing. Few other historical reconstructions had done this for him, and here it felt right. As he looked at the villa, rich with colour and precision, in his mind’s eye he saw the excavated buildings of Herculaneum, flickering in the background like a photographic negative. He found himself remembering the times he had witnessed death, the moment of transition when the body suddenly becomes a husk, when colour turns to grey. Herculaneum was too close after that moment for comfort, more troubling to behold than sites that had decayed and become whitewashed by time, like old skeletons. It was the blasted corpse of a city, still reeking and oozing, like a burns victim after a terrible accident. Yet here in the Getty Villa it was as if someone had injected a burst of adrenaline into the still-warm corpse and miraculously revived it, as if the ancient site was again pulsating and sparkling with a dazzling clarity.

  ‘Only in California,’ Costas said, shaking his head. ‘I guess with Hollywood only a few miles down the coast, this is what you’d expect.’

  ‘When the villa opened in 1974, the reaction was amazing,’ Jeremy said. ‘A lot of the critics panned it. The Romans can get a pretty bad press over here. It’s all Pontius Pilate, debauched emperors, throwing Christians to the lions. This place was a stunning revelation. The colour, the brilliance, the taste. Some scholars even
refused to believe it was an authentic recreation.’

  ‘This place is all about putting art back in its original context, and that can be a shock to modern sensibility,’ Jack said. ‘The European aristocrats who plundered Greece and Rome thought they were doing it, arranging statues on pedestals in their neoclassical country houses, but their idea of the classical context was based on the bleached ruins of Greece rather than the Technicolor reality of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Here, you get the real deal, with objects like these bronzes as components of a larger whole, with the villa as a work of art in itself. Classical scholars for too long venerated these things as works of art in the modern sense, in their own right. What the critics didn’t like was that the villa makes these venerated sculptures seem frivolous, and the whole setting more whimsical and fun than they’d bargained for. But that’s what it was really like.’

  ‘And that’s what I like about it.’ Costas squatted down with a coin in the crook of his finger and eyed the length of the pool. ‘If the Romans could have fun, so can we.’ Jack shot him a warning glance as a man appeared through the entrance portico and made his way briskly towards them. He was of medium height with a close-cut beard, and wore chinos and a shirt and tie with his sleeves rolled up. He raised a hand in greeting to Jeremy, who gestured towards Jack and Costas.

  ‘Allow me to introduce Dr Ieuan Morgan,’ Jeremy said. ‘An old friend, my mentor when I was here. He’s on secondment from Brigham Young University. Permanently, by the look of it.’

  Costas and Jack shook hands with him. ‘Thanks for seeing us at such short notice,’ Jack said warmly. ‘Are you anything to do with the BYU Herculaneum papyrus project?’

  ‘That’s why I came here originally,’ Morgan said, a hint of Welsh in his accent. ‘I’m a Philodemus specialist, and the infra-red spectrometry on the scrolls from the eighteenth-century excavations was inundating me with new stuff. I needed breathing space, somewhere to put it all in perspective.’

  ‘And where better than the Villa of the Papyri itself.’ Jack gestured around. ‘I’m envious.’

  ‘Any time you want a sabbatical here, just give the word,’ Morgan said. ‘Your reputation precedes you.’

  Jack smiled back. ‘Much appreciated.’ He winked at Jeremy. ‘Maybe in about twenty years’ time.’

  Morgan looked intently at Jack. ‘I understand from Jeremy that you’re on a tight schedule. Follow me.’

  He led them along one side of the peristyle, then on to the west porch of the villa and through the open bronze doors that served as the main entrance to the museum. They went up a flight of marble stairs to the upper storey, and came to a second, inner courtyard, another fragrant and colourful place, resonating with the flash and sparkle of fountains. Below the tiled roof, tiers of columns dropped down to surround a garden proportioned in the Roman way, with bronze statues of five maidens in the centre appearing to draw water from a pool. Again Jack felt the extraordinary immediacy of the past. Whatever else came of the day, this Roman villa on the coast of California had been an unexpected revelation, another vivid lens on the ancient world.

  Jack narrowed his eyes, and spoke from memory. ‘“Lovely gardens and cool colonnades and lily ponds would surround it, spreading out as far as the raptured eye could reach.” Those are words that Robert Graves in Claudius the God has Herod Agrippa, King of the Jews, saying to his Queen Cypros. I’ve always remembered that description, since I first read Graves as a boy. Herod has always been thought of as anti-Christian, the man who ordered the execution of St James, but to me those words could have been an ancient Christian image of heaven.’

  ‘You’re talking about Herod Agrippa, friend of Claudius?’ Costas said.

  ‘That’s the one.’

  Costas scanned the courtyard. ‘So if this villa is an accurate replica of the place where Claudius ended his days, he didn’t give up on life’s pleasures completely,’ he said.

  ‘He had all this to look out on, sure, but I doubt whether he would have cared less,’ Jack replied. ‘As long as he had his books and his statues of his beloved father and brother, he’d probably have been content to eke out his days in a sulphurous cave somewhere up on Mount Vesuvius.’

  ‘Claudius?’ Morgan said, clearly mystified. ‘Which Claudius?’

  ‘The Roman emperor Claudius,’ Costas said.

  ‘Jeremy didn’t mention any emperors.’ Morgan paused, then eyed Jack quizzically. ‘I think you’ve got some explaining to do.’

  ‘We have,’ Jack smiled. ‘Lead on.’

  Morgan led them a few paces further to a room at the back of the portico. He opened the door, ushered them in and gestured at the marble table in the centre. ‘I had the café send up some things. Hungry?’

  ‘You bet.’ Costas launched himself at a plate of croissants, and Morgan poured coffee. After a few moments he gestured at three seats on one side of the table, and walked around to the other side with his coffee and sat down.

  ‘Okay.’ Jack sat in the middle chair, and leaned forward. ‘You know why we’re here.’

  ‘Jeremy filled me in. Or at least I thought he did.’ Morgan swivelled in his chair to face Jack, took a sip of his coffee and then set his cup down. ‘When Jeremy had his fellowship here we worked quite closely together, and when he called me yesterday he discovered I had an interest in Lawrence Everett. I’d always kept quiet about it, a private obsession of mine, but of course I told him when he asked. It’s an incredible coincidence, but a man like that can’t go completely underground as he might have wished. And I thought there couldn’t possibly be anyone else on his trail, but there was another enquiry this morning.’

  Jack suddenly looked alarmed. ‘Who?’

  ‘No idea. Anonymous hotmail address.’

  ‘Did you reply?’

  ‘After my conversation with Jeremy yesterday, I felt it prudent to claim ignorance. But I sensed that this was someone who wouldn’t go away. Somehow they knew there was a connection here, with the Getty Villa. I checked the online ticket reservations for the museum, and someone with the same e-mail address booked a ticket for tomorrow.’

  ‘Could be a coincidence, as you say,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘I can’t see how they’d have known.’

  ‘Known what, exactly? Who are you talking about?’ Morgan said.

  Jeremy was quiet for a moment, glanced at Jack and then looked back across the table. ‘You were right. I haven’t told you everything. But what I did tell you was true, that we think Everett had something extraordinary to hide, an early Christian manuscript. That’s the key thing. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, then we’ll fill you in.’

  Morgan looked perplexed. ‘I’ve got no reason to be secretive. My scholarship, the collections here are open to all. It’s the founding ethos of the museum.’

  ‘Unfortunately this has gone way beyond scholarship,’ Jack said. ‘There’s far more at stake here. Let’s hear you out, then we’ll bring you up to speed before we leave this room.’

  Morgan pulled a document box towards him on the table. ‘Fair enough. I can start by giving you a potted biography.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘The reason I know about Everett is that he tried to correspond with J. Paul Getty, the founder of the museum. The nuns who looked after Everett during his final illness found the Getty headed notepaper among his belongings, and some architectural drawings. They thought the museum might be interested. I stumbled across the box of papers when I was researching the early history of the Getty villa, and thought they might have some bearing on the Getty interest in antiquities.’ He opened up the box and carefully lifted out a handful of yellowed pages covered in words and figures in a precise, minute hand. He spread them out on the table in front of him, including one page with a ruled-out plan of an apsidal structure. ‘Everett was fascinated by mathematical problems, by the game of chess, crosswords. There’s lots of that kind of stuff here, most of it way beyond me. But before he came to America he’d been an architect, and there’s an unf
inished manuscript I’ve been annotating for publication. He was interested in early Church architecture, in the earliest archaeological evidence for Christian places of worship.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Jack murmured. ‘But why try to contact Getty?’

  ‘The two men had a surprising amount in common,’ Morgan replied. ‘Getty had studied at Oxford, Everett at Cambridge. Getty was a passionate Anglophile, and he might have been pleased to discover a kindred spirit in California. And both men had rejected their professional careers, Getty to be a millionaire philanthropist, Everett to be a Catholic ascetic. There may seem a world of difference between those two, but Everett’s correspondence shows that he’d liberated himself in much the same way. And there was a more particular reason.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was well known that Getty had been to Pompeii and Herculaneum before the First World War, had visited the site of the Villa of the Papyri, been fascinated by it. Hence the villa we’re in today. Then in the late 1930s Everett heard of an extraordinary new discovery at Herculaneum, and wanted Getty’s opinion. Everett was really intrigued by it, to the point of obsession.’

  ‘You mean the House of the Bicentenary?’ Jack said.

  ‘You guessed it.’

  Jack turned to Costas. ‘I pointed it out to you on our quick tour of Herculaneum, when we arrived at the site last week.’

  ‘Another black hole, I’m afraid,’ Costas said ruefully. ‘I think I was still asleep.’

  ‘Bicentenary refers to the two hundredth anniversary of the discovery of Herculaneum, in 1738,’ Morgan said. ‘The 1930s excavation was one of the few to have taken place on any scale since the eighteenth century. Mussolini was behind it, part of his own obsession with all things Roman, though there seems to have been Church resistance to his more grandiose excavation schemes and the Herculaneum project was almost stillborn.’

  ‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Costas murmured.

  ‘They discovered a room which they called the Christian Chapel,’ Morgan continued. ‘They called it that because they found an inset cross shape in plaster above a wooden cabinet, which they thought looked like a prayer stand. In a house nearby they found the name David scratched on a wall. Hebraic names are not unusual in Pompeii and Herculaneum, but they’re usually Latinized. Jesus was thought to be a descendant of King David of the Jews, and some think the name David was a secret way the early Christians referred to him, before they started to use the Greek word for messiah, Christos.’ Morgan paused, and looked pensive. ‘These were very controversial finds, and plenty of scholars still don’t accept the interpretation, but it may be the earliest archaeological evidence anywhere for a place of Christian worship.’