The Dead Sea Deception
Page 13
But she felt bad about leaving Peter alone, after being out all evening. It was ridiculous, she knew. The phantom figure of her sister stood at her ear, delivering a phantom lecture. ‘After what that bastard put us all through …’ She had no defence: it was true. Peter had been a truly awful husband and father, was infinitely more bearable in his current condition, a placeholder for a personality that had gone AWOL. His cruelties, his failings, had shaped her, but so had his example and his expectations. In the long run, none of it mattered. It came down to whether you could walk away, and clearly she couldn’t.
So she took her own coffee back into the living room and sat through the rest of the programme with her father. When it finished and the ads came up, she turned the TV off. ‘So how was your day?’ she asked him.
‘Pretty good,’ he said. ‘Pretty good.’ He never gave any other answer.
Kennedy told him about her murder investigation in a reasonable amount of detail. Peter listened quietly, nodding or murmuring an ‘oh’ from time to time, but when she stopped he didn’t offer any comments or questions. He just stared at her, waiting to see if there was any more to come. Well, she hadn’t expected a reaction. She just felt a compulsion – intermittently, and up to a point – to treat him as a human being, since there was nobody else around who was prepared to do that for him any more.
She went over to the stereo and put some music on: the Legendary Gypsy Queens and Kings, singing Sounds from a Bygone Age. Kennedy’s mother, Janet, whose claims to gypsy blood Peter had always declared to be utter nonsense, had listened to nothing but Fanfare Ciocărlia through the year of her final illness. Peter scorned this while she lived, as he scorned most things his wife did and the basis on which she did them, but when she died he cried, for only the second time in his life as far as Kennedy knew. And then he took to playing the album himself, late in the evening or in the early hours of the morning, in hypnotised silence. And then he started buying Balkan gypsy music in wholesale amounts. Kennedy had no idea whether he enjoyed it or not. She suspected, though, that sometimes, if they hit him at the right time and from the right angle, those albums could function for Peter as a sort of sound construct of his dead wife. The music had the power – intermittently anyway – to change him, both while it was playing and for a little while after it stopped.
Tonight it seemed to work. Peter’s eyes swam into a clearer focus as the skirling fiddle and bombastic accordion clashed with each other for domination of the tune. She only played three tracks, because clarity was a double-edged sword. If he remembered that Janet was dead, his mood would shift into something darker and more unpredictable, and he probably wouldn’t sleep that night.
‘You look tired, Heather,’ Peter said to Kennedy, while the last notes of ‘Sirba’ were still hanging in the air. ‘You’re working too hard. You should be a little more selfish. Look after yourself more.’
‘Like you always did,’ she countered. The bantering tone was wholly assumed. It was more painful than pleasant to hear him talk like himself again. It made her miss him, but it made her hate him, too, as it partially reconstructed him – took him some of the way back to being someone who was responsible for what he did, and could be hated.
‘I worked for you,’ Peter mumbled. ‘You and the kids. What are you working for?’
It was a good question, even if the way he phrased it seemed to confuse her with her mother. She gave a glib answer. ‘The public good.’
Peter snorted. ‘Right, right. The public will thank you the way it always does, sweetheart. The way it did me.’ He tapped his chest on the me. It had been his characteristic gesture once, as though the words I and me needed an extra assist when they referred to Peter Kennedy.
‘You do what you know how to do,’ she said. A better answer, and Peter accepted it with a laugh and a nod. His eyes were changing again, the light in them softening as his mind slipped off the little island of awareness into the sea of fuzz and static in which it usually floated.
Involuntarily, Kennedy raised her hand and waved goodbye to him.
‘Piss off, Dad,’ she said, gently, and she blinked in quick staccato, half a dozen times, determined that the tear wouldn’t fall.
From her own room, later, Kennedy tried Emil Gassan again. This time she got lucky: someone picked up on the home number. He had a high-pitched, querulous voice, and his accent was pure RP rather than Scots. ‘Emil Gassan,’ he said.
‘Dr Gassan, my name is Heather Kennedy. I’m a detective sergeant with the London Metropolitan Police.’
‘The police?’ Gassan immediately sounded both alarmed and slightly indignant. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m investigating the death of a former colleague of yours – Professor Stuart Barlow.’
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘It’s possible that there might be something suspect about his death. Particularly in light of the coincidental deaths of two other academics with whom Professor Barlow had dealings.’
‘Are you suggesting that Barlow was murdered? I thought he fell downstairs!’
‘I’m not suggesting anything at this stage, Dr Gassan. Just gathering information. I wonder if you have a little time to talk to me about Professor Barlow’s translation project.’
‘Barlow? Barlow’s project? Good god, you don’t mean the Rotgut?’
‘Yes. The Rotgut.’
‘Well, I’d hardly dignify that asinine proposal with the term “project”, Sergeant …’ He waited for the prompt.
‘Kennedy.’
‘And for that matter, I’d hesitate to call Stuart Barlow a colleague. He’s barely set his name to paper in the last two decades, did you know that? He floats wild hypotheses on his, what do you call it, Ravellers forum, but a few emails here and there don’t amount to serious scholarship. And as for the idea that anything new could be discovered about the Rotgut Codex at this stage … well, better minds than Barlow’s have foundered on that rock.’ The last statement was accompanied by a sour, supercilious laugh.
‘So when he approached you,’ Kennedy said, ‘and asked if you wanted to be part of his team …’
‘I said no. Emphatically. I didn’t have the time to waste.’
Kennedy chanced her arm. The entire case seemed to hinge on things way outside her comfort zone, and this guy’s arrogance had to be based on at least some degree of knowledge. ‘Do you have the time to explain to me exactly what the Rotgut is, Dr Gassan? I’ve heard various accounts now, but I’m still not clear.’
‘Well, read my book. Palaeographic Texts: Substance and Substrate. Leeds University Press, 2004. It’s available on Amazon. I can send you the ISBN number, if you like.’
‘I’m no expert, Dr Gassan. I’d probably get lost in the details. And while I’ve got your ear, so to speak.’
There was a slightly charged silence at the other end of the line. ‘What was it you wanted to know?’ Gassan demanded at last. ‘I don’t have time to give you a thorough grounding in palaeography, Sergeant Kennedy. Not from a standing start. And even for an introduction, I’d normally expect to charge.’
‘I wish I could afford you,’ Kennedy said. ‘But really, I don’t want to know much. Just what you think Professor Barlow was trying to do, and why it might have mattered – to him or to anyone else in your field. Obviously, from your standpoint, he was making some elementary mistakes. I just wish I had the context to understand where he was going wrong because right now I’m floundering in the dark.’
Another hesitation. Had she gone overboard with the implied flattery? Presumably Gassan wasn’t a fool, whatever he sounded like.
Fool or not, he took the bait. ‘To explain the Rotgut, I’ll need to explain a few basics about Biblical scholarship.’
‘Whatever it takes.’
‘A quick run-through then. Because really, I have other things I need to attend to.’
‘A quick run-through would be great. Is it okay if I record this? I’d like my colleagues to have the b
enefit, too.’
‘So long as I’m credited,’ Gassan said, warily.
‘Absolutely.’
‘Very well, Sergeant. How much do you know about the Bible?’
16
TRANSCRIPT OF STATEMENT TAKEN FROM DR EMIL GASSAN, 23 JULY INSTANT, COMMENCING 10.53PM.
EMIL GASSAN:
Very well, Sergeant. How much do you know about the Bible?
DS KENNEDY:
Not a whole lot, I suppose. I know there are two testaments.
EG:
There are indeed. And you know, of course, that the New Testament was written a lot later.
DSK:
Of course.
EG:
How much later?
DSK:
Oh. Must be at least a thousand years, right? The New Testament is written right after the events it describes – right after Jesus died. The other stuff is … well, back when the Pharaohs were around.
EG:
Some of it is, yes. But it took a long time to put the Bible together – to get it the way we’ve got it now. Some of that material dates from the thirteenth century BC, so you’re right, it’s very, very old. Before Rome. Before Athens. Almost before Mycenae, even. But other parts of it were written a thousand years later. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are our oldest surviving copies of some key sections of the Old Testament, date back to only a century before Christ. And it kept changing. What was included – what counted as the word of God – was different from generation to generation.
DSK:
Is all this relevant to the Rotgut Codex?
EG:
Oh, I’m barely getting started, Sergeant Kennedy. So the Old Testament was a thousand years in the making, more or less. The New Testament was the same in some ways, different in others. It took its time to settle down into the form we know now, but the actual writing happened relatively quickly. Most of the key texts are already written by the end of the second century. That is the prevalent theory. Now, how many gospels are there?
DSK:
Four?
EG:
Thank you for playing. The correct answer is closer to sixty.
DSK:
Umm … Matthew, Mark, Luke, John …
EG:
Thomas, Nicodemus, Joseph, Mary, Philip, Matthias, Bartholomew … And I’m just talking about the books that call themselves gospels. The word doesn’t really mean that much, at the end of the day. To a police officer, perhaps it means, um, a witness statement. A witness statement from someone who saw amazing events.
DSK:
That’s an interesting analogy.
EG:
Thank you. Perhaps I’ll use it again. All told, there are close to a hundred other books that have been included in the Bible at different times, or by different churches, but don’t make the cut any more. Although some of them still do make the cut, in some of the other schools of Christianity. The Greek and Slavonic Orthodox faiths, for example, have a very different bible from the Catholic Church. There are a lot of extra books in there.
DSK:
You’re talking about the Apocrypha. Apocryphal books.
EG:
Well, yes. Yes, I am. Partly. But I’m also saying that one man’s Apocrypha is another man’s orthodoxy. The argument about what was really the holy word, and what wasn’t, went on well into the Middle Ages. And it’s hard to tell who won. The different churches took away their own texts, and each of them said they had the right one. The books that are usually called Apocrypha are the ones that nobody wanted. But even they sometimes got promoted – or vice versa, books that used to be part of the Bible got kicked out. Like the Book of the Shepherd of Hermas. The early church fathers put it right after the Acts of the Apostles. Now, scarcely anyone even remembers what it was.
DSK:
So is the Rotgut Codex an Apocryphal book? Something that dropped out of the Bible?
EG:
You’re determined to get to the punchline, aren’t you, Sergeant Kennedy? Straining at the leash. But I’m afraid we’re not quite there yet. In the early Christian church, this whole question – what came from God, what came from man – was literally a matter of life and death. They fought over it. They killed each other to decide who had the better version of the truth. And I mean murders, as well as executions and martyrdoms. Arius of Alexandria was poisoned, and died in agony, because he attacked the doctrine of the holy trinity. And many of the religious texts that we’ve got from that time are really polemics. They say ‘Don’t believe that, believe this’, and ‘Stay away from the people who say such and such.’ You’ve heard of Irenaeus?
DSK:
No, I’m afraid not. Oh, wait. Stuart Barlow’s sister … she said Barlow was studying him at one point.
EG:
Stuart studied everything at one point or another. Bishop Irenaeus of Lugdunum – and later, in due course, Saint Irenaeus. He lived around the close of the second century after Christ, in what was then still called Gaul. And he wrote a very influential work called the Adversus Haereses. It was, essentially, an attack on deviant faiths – a list of what good Christians were and were not allowed to read. Most of the writings he attacked belonged to what we now call the Gnostic tradition.
DSK:
Another of Stuart Barlow’s pet subjects.
EG:
I refer you to my previous comment.
DSK:
And you’re saying that the Rotgut Codex ties into the Gnostic tradition in some way?
EG:
Oh yes.
DSK:
Please go on, Dr Gassan.
EG:
Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses is very much an early Christian public safety announcement. It tells the faithful what to avoid. It talks about all these ideas that were floating around – survivals, some of them, from earlier ages, but shoehorned now into the Christ-religion – which in the good bishop’s view were really unexploded bombs. He warns his flock about supposed holy men who were actually strangers with sweets in their pockets and wicked intentions. And he was particularly keen to attack the Gnostic movements, which were almost like secret societies within Christianity – mystery religions, passing on arcane knowledge about Christ’s life and teachings. Knowledge that sometimes went directly against the teachings of the orthodox churches.
DSK:
So is the Rotgut one of the things that Irenaeus attacks?
EG:
[laughs] Not exactly.
DSK:
Okay, I’m missing something there, obviously.
EG:
The Rotgut Codex dates from the fifteenth century, Sergeant. It’s called that because a Portuguese sea captain traded a barrel of rum for it. It’s a translation – in English – of a gospel.
DSK:
An Apocryphal gospel?
EG:
Not in the slightest. It’s the Gospel of John. The whole of the Gospel of John, not very well translated but very close to what we have. But then at the end, and this is what makes it fascinating – and controversial – there’s something else. A few verses of a different gospel. And this one is very Apocryphal because we’ve never found it. It never turns up elsewhere. Seven verses of a different gospel, which starts with some very peculiar statements. Do you know what a codex is, Sergeant?
DSK:
I found out very recently. The first books, right?
EG:
Exactly. But they were only like books in that they were aggregations of pages that had been folded and stitched together. Unlike modern books, they often threw together several texts that had not the slightest connection to each other. People at that time didn’t really have the concept of a book as a single text between a single set of covers. Codices didn’t even have covers. Just pages, bound together. And if you got to the end of what you were writing before you got to the end of your page, very often you’d just start right in on something else.
DSK:
Which is what the Rotgut does.
EG:
Which is exactly what the Rotgut does. The extra verses at the end are not from John. They’re not from any gospel we know. But Judas Iscariot figures prominently in them, and Irenaeus talks about a Gospel of Judas that was current in his time – a gospel that he thought contained very evil teachings indeed.
DSK:
So you’re saying, after the Gospel of John, the Rotgut has a small sample of this other gospel? The Gospel of Judas.