Honk If You Are Jesus

by Peter Goldsworthy

  As curator perhaps he had more right to claim ownership, spiritual ownership at any rate, than the actual owner, Dr Hollis Schultz.

  The long cars halted at the entrance to the Bible Museum; Mary-Beth stepped out with a girl’s quick grace and up the steps, a silk cloud which the rest of us followed as best we could, chasing her through the waxwork galleries, past Adam and Eve, and Daniel in the Lion’s Den, and innumerable cabinets of pottery shards. Somewhere in the far reaches of the building we halted at a security desk; a uniformed guard passed across a clipboard; each member of the lunch party was signed in. Mary-Beth removed her high heels and placed them on the desk, then slipped a paper surgical cap across her thick cloud of hair.

  Grossman unlaced his own black undertaker’s shoes, and began handing out surgical caps:

  ‘We try to avoid any contamination of the relics. Even a single human hair …’

  The party chatter had ceased: the removal of shoes had a sobering, reverential effect. A metal security door unsucked with a fridge-opening sound; we stepped through into a narrower corridor beyond, the door kissed shut behind us. Grossman paused at another locked door, punched a number sequence into the lock, and pressed his thumb to a small wall-screen. The door slid open.

  ‘Thumbprint recognition?’ someone said. ‘I’ve never seen that before.’

  ‘It’s very new,’ Mary-Beth whispered.

  Grossman turned, assuming the manner of a museum tour guide: ‘We are talking about priceless relics, good people. Values impossible to put a figure on. Some of the objects you are about to see belong to the Schultz Foundation. Others, of course, are beyond our resources to purchase. Many items have been entrusted to the Foundation on loan.’

  The room inside was small and cubic, and walled on three sides with gleaming safety-deposit drawers, their metal facings so highly polished as to appear at first sight to be mirrors. The ceiling was low and there were no windows; the room felt claustrophobic, a locked cupboard. Immediately inside the door another security guard was sitting — surgically-capped, reading a motoring magazine, Wheels. Beyond him, a second, smaller figure was perched atop a high stool at a central bench, wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves as well as the mandatory cap. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand, a suction pipette in the other; a tray of solvents sat on the bench before him.

  He pulled aside his face mask as we entered, surprising me.

  Grossman also seemed surprised; ‘Working Sundays, Professor Scanlon?’

  ‘Nothing better to do.’

  ‘This seems a bit out of your province,’ I said, approaching.

  He shifted his body slightly; was he deliberately obscuring the objects on the bench?

  ‘I take an interest,’ he murmured.

  I peered over his shoulder. A metal drawer the size of a shoebox sat at his elbow, with an empty glass phial inside. A small piece of metal was sunk in a flat petri dish of solvent next to it.

  ‘What’s that?’ I joked. ‘Murder weapon?’

  Scanlon glanced at Grossman, then back to me: ‘As a matter of fact …’

  Grossman supervened: ‘You are looking, Professor Fox, at one of the holy nails.’

  ‘The nails,’ Mary-Beth added, unnecessarily. ‘The crucifixion nails.’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ Scanlon murmured.

  Grossman aimed a long finger at the petri dish: ‘This is the Holy Nail of Trèves.’

  Seven heads clustered and bent obediently to examine the object. The silence was respectful, even devout.

  ‘How did you come by it?’ someone finally asked.

  ‘I offered my services to the owner. To prove its authenticity.’

  Grossman slid a second metal drawer from the wall, and lifted the lid. Inside was a glass phial; inside that another scrap of what might have been corroded metal.

  ‘The Nail from the Iron Crown of Lombardy,’ Grossman was saying. ‘Courtesy of the Treasury of Notre Dame.’

  His audience surrounded him, rapt.

  ‘I hold little hope of proving authenticity in this case. One problem: the nail had been beaten into the iron band of the crown. Another, the genealogy is highly suspect.’

  He slid the box back into the wall, extracted and opened another: ‘Far more promising material from the Santa Croce church in Rome.’

  The drawers slid open; the boxes were removed. We were permitted to examine an assortment of objects, some no more than a single crumb of rust, others in better condition: a collection that resembled the odd nails and metal scraps that might be found in a carpenter’s oddments box left out too long in the rain.

  Scanlon watched proceedings from his high stool with amusement.

  ‘Either He was a pincushion,’ he said, reading my mind, ‘or someone is telling fibs.’

  Grossman purred: ‘Our commission exactly. To find the fibbers.’

  He moved to the far side of the room, to another bank of gleaming drawers. Mary-Beth, Pfitzner, and the other guests followed, crowding him as he pulled out a succession of boxes, lifted the lids on each and set them down on the bench.

  ‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’ someone said.

  Heads crowded, I pushed mine in among them; we were looking down on an array of wooden splinters, shards, sawdust.

  ‘There are enough fragments of the True Cross,’ Grossman said, ‘to build an armada.’

  It sounded like a practised joke, but several of the circle laughed, on cue, Mary-Beth musically among them. Pfitzner’s diplomatic laugh could also be heard.

  Grossman lectured on, completely at home in museum-guide mode: ‘During the Middle Ages almost the only trade that occurred across national borders was in holy relics. Relics cured the sick, worked miracles. Every village, however small, every church needed its relic.’

  ‘So these splinters of the Cross are all fakes?’

  He smiled his gaunt undertaker’s smile: ‘Somehow supply always managed to meet demand. Perhaps the greatest miracle of all.’

  A few more of his seminar class tittered.

  ‘Botanists have identified the various woods.’ He moved his finger across the bench, lightly tapping phials: ‘Cypress, fig, fir, even olive.’

  Scanlon was still sitting on his stool, apart.

  ‘Interesting piece of carpentry,’ he murmured.

  I turned and spoke to him, quietly. ‘Why all the secrecy? I had no idea of the extent of this.’

  His face mask dangled about his neck like a bib. His eyes met mine, unwavering: ‘There’s a lot of belief invested in this stuff. A lot of … emotion.’

  ‘So why would anyone lend Grossman their priceless relics? Especially the Catholic church. Why send something all the way here just to have him announce it’s a fake?’

  He shrugged: ‘Better ask Grossman. He has quite a reputation in the field. Of course if we can prove a relic is real …’

  He shrugged: ‘I help out. The forensic side. It’s a bit of a hobby — finding bits of organic matter. Skin cells, blood cells, hair, anything. Protein. Degradation products. As I was saying, if we can vouch for a relic, it’s worth enormous kudos to a church. Pilgrims, money, status.’

  ‘Long odds to take.’

  ‘If we find a fake — wrong dates, sheep’s blood on a scrap of shroud, whatever — we say nothing, publicly.’

  I had to smile: ‘So the owners can’t lose. Very clever. But I still can’t quite believe that so much of the stuff is actually here.’

  ‘You think these are fake fakes?’

  I laughed, quietly: ‘It’s a long way from the Vatican to Queensland.’

  ‘A lot of work was done at the top,’ he said. ‘The Vatican, yes. And in the Eastern patriarchies: Antioch, Moscow, Istanbul.’

  ‘Hollis Schultz?’

  He smiled, knowingly: ‘Let’s say some big donations were made by the Schultz Foundation.’

  I tried to glimpse something behind that smile: ‘Personal donations?’

  ‘Someone always gets paid,’ he said.
‘Not necessarily the legal owners of a relic.’

  ‘You seem well informed.’

  ‘I keep my ears open.’

  Mary-Beth and her guests were still gathered around Grossman’s guide patter, but I’d seen enough. The wine and food had left me drowsy; the relics had woken me up: I felt disorientated, a mixed sweet-and-sour state. I wanted to get away by myself. I tugged Mary-Beth gently aside, thanked her for lunch, allowed her to brush her cheek against mine, overruled her insistence that I come back to the house for more coffee, that the lunch had ‘hardly started’, and let the security guard release me from that small, oppressive room.

  I walked down to the lake for the second time that day, and followed the shore-path slowly home. The sun was setting; rainbow lorikeets were feeding by the water, dozens gathering at the feeding stands where two members of the college ground staff were laying out breadcrumbs soaked in some sort of sticky honey solution. The brilliant plumage of the birds, with their chemistry-set colours of unnaturally vivid greens and blues, seemed to catch and retain the fading light: the sole residue of colour in a greying world.

  I walked past, drowsily preoccupied. The world I inhabited was growing weirder; failing to make complete sense. Something was wrong in that locked room; something was itching inside my mind.

  9

  Tad was home from the city, dressed in fez and silk smoking jacket — his standard informal evening attire. His weekend adventure seemed to have gone well; my apology for forgetting to invite him to the White House was accepted with a shrug.

  ‘I absolve you, chérie. Just this once. But I want to hear all about it. Not everyone gets to dine at High Table.’

  I smiled: ‘Later. I need a shower.’

  He was waiting with a glass of wine when I emerged from the bathroom half an hour later.

  ‘So how did it go, o favoured one?’

  ‘You think you can loosen up my tongue with this?’

  ‘This, and a little something to eat. I feel in Japanese mode. What say we slip into something less comfortable and essay forth into the world?’

  ‘I’m not eating again until December.’

  He laughed, and pushed past me into the lounge: ‘Then we’ll eat here. I want to hear everything. The lifestyles of the rich and religious.’

  I retreated to the bathroom and waved a hair drier across my head for several minutes. No magic wand, perhaps, but it left the mouse thatch manageable. I rejoined Tad — sans turban but still wrapped in my dressing gown — to find the coffee table spread with various scraps of food scavenged from cupboards and fridge: a small platter of cheese and biscuits, de-tinned anchovies, rough-hewn slices of tomato and capsicum. Two wineglasses sat next to the open bottle: mine still brimful, waiting, the other empty, probably for the second or third time.

  ‘You look a picture of elegance,’ he said.

  He sat slumped on the sofa, bulging around and through his smoking jacket. There was a squareness about Tad: a too-large body with a too-short limb at each corner. Not for the first time I was reminded of a turtle, flipped on its back.

  ‘You’re no oil painting yourself,’ I told him.

  I pulled my dressing gown tighter. In fact I could have sat there naked with no reaction from Tad — except perhaps for a grimace of distaste. He liked the company of women, he loved trading gossip with women, but there were limits. Which was part of the reason I felt comfortable with him; the sexual issue would never arise.

  He refilled his empty glass: ‘So who was there?’

  ‘Hollis Schultz.’

  ‘Of course. And?’

  ‘His child-bride.’

  ‘Now don’t be catty,’ he said, meaning exactly the opposite. Tad’s presence brought out a certain side of me, usually well repressed.

  ‘Miss South Carolina,’ I added. ‘Or perhaps not. Perhaps only a semi-finalist.’

  ‘She’s the second wife,’ he told me. ‘If you hadn’t guessed.’

  ‘I thought she was his daughter at first.’

  He shook his head: ‘A former member of the congregation back in the States. A member of the children’s choir, would you believe. It caused a megastink. The Church Elders wanted to defrock him.’

  He lifted the wineglass to his fat lips, and sipped.

  ‘And?’ I prompted.

  ‘And what you see all around you. All this. He did a Henry the Eighth. Took his bat and ball and started his own religion. I quite like her — what I’ve seen. Very young, but bright.’

  ‘She hides it well.’

  He smiled, and deftly moved me from the subject: ‘Tell me who else was there.’

  ‘Pfitzner. And his child-bride.’

  Tad was unimpressed: ‘Wherever there are feet to kiss.’

  ‘Thomas Grossman. The medievalist.’

  ‘Walking death.’

  I was a little surprised: ‘You know him?’

  ‘Scanlon performed the introductions some time back.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  He shrugged: ‘It didn’t seem important. When you’ve seen one cadaver you’ve seen them all. Tell me more.’

  ‘Grossman took us to see his collection of relics.’

  ‘You are privileged.’

  ‘This is the interesting part: you won’t believe who we found there.’

  He held up a podgy turtle paw: ‘Three guesses?’

  ‘You’ll need a hundred.’

  He smirked: ‘Scanlon?’

  ‘How on earth did you know that?’

  ‘Educated guess. I knew he had an interest in the relics.’

  I tried to raise some further indignation, but the wine had diluted it: ‘Why am I the last to be told anything around here?’

  He shrugged again: ‘I didn’t think it was a big secret. Bill himself told me.’

  ‘Bill?’

  ‘Bill Scanlon.’

  ‘Since when has it been Bill? The two of you suddenly seem very thick.’

  ‘We get on. I’m trying to introduce him to the joys of opera.’

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy together.’

  He stroked his sleek goatee; it seemed to arch itself, catlike, responsive to his touch.

  ‘Did Scanlon show you any of the fingerprints?’ he asked.

  ‘What fingerprints?’

  He covered his mouth with a hand, mock regret: ‘Oops.’

  The penny dropped; the connection had been staring me in the face all afternoon. Hidden in full view, my mother was fond of saying. Can’t see it for looking.

  ‘Of course! He’s running genetic fingerprints on the relics. He’s looking for DNA. That’s how he’s going to pick the fakes.’

  Tad sipped his wine: ‘Bravo, my dear. Two and two makes four. Quod erat demonstrandum.’

  ‘I must be losing my mind,’ I said. ‘I thought he was looking for material to carbon date. How thick can I be?’

  He was enjoying himself: ‘As thick as they come.’

  ‘As thick as I’m allowed to be. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You’ve been hard to find of late.’

  ‘Well, you’ve found me. Here I am. What else haven’t you told me?’

  He smiled and drained his wine, maximising effect: ‘There is one small thing.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You are going to love this, Frau Professor.’

  ‘Tad …’

  ‘More wine?’

  A deeper growl: ‘Tad!’

  ‘The Schultzes are infertile.’

  ‘Your short-term memory is failing, Tad. I told you that piece of news.’

  He held up a finger: ‘But what you didn’t tell me is it’s not her, it’s him. Your friend and mine, Doctor Hollis Schultz, is azospermic. He is the infertile half of the marriage.’

  10

  The air-conditioning didn’t seem to be working that night, or insufficiently. I tossed in bed, sleeplessly. My cheeks were aflame; the pillow too warm. I turned it repeatedly, finding temporary relief in the cooler Dark Side,
but soon having to turn it again.

  Of course the heat was internal, the combustion of burning thoughts. I had no objection to working for faith healers. I even had no objection to working for faith healers who didn’t believe in what they were doing. If anything, I had warmed to the Jekyll and Hyde flip sides of Hollis Schultz. Where my research funding came from was no concern of mine as long as it arrived on schedule and provided I was granted a free hand. But a new problem had surfaced: how free was it? I began to wonder why I had been offered — why I had been offered — that Chair, that Sofa, in Reproductive Medicine. And, above all, why funding for a scheme to create artificial sperm cells had been made so freely available. I couldn’t avoid the suspicion that I had been hired for one purpose: to allow Dr Hollis Schultz to inseminate his child-bride.

  To produce sperm cells from his sperm-free body.

  I felt no anger at Schultz himself. William Scanlon was my target. The more thought I gave it, the more his conniving hand seemed in evidence. Scanlon I could not forgive: I expected more from a fellow scientist; I expected higher standards of honesty.

  First light restored a little perspective. Conspiracy theories, paranoid night thoughts always vanish with the morning, as though exposure to daylight is somehow enough to dispel them. Vampire thoughts.

  A colder anger remained. Tad was still asleep with DO NOT DISTURB hung on his bedroom doorknob. I gulped down a black coffee, pulled on the basic clothes, tugged my hair into a severe bun, and walked briskly up the street to Scanlon’s terrace house.

  I had never been inside. As always the blinds were drawn, there was no sign of human habitation. A deflated basketball sat in the long grass of the front lawn, a backboard and ring were bolted to the wall above it set at a lower than regulation height.

  I leant on the bell-button for some time; no answer. I banged on the nearest windowpanes, and pressed the bell again. Finally I turned away and walked down towards the lake, following the shore-path to the Medical Centre. The sun was still low, tangled in the tree line, the air was cool and bracing — at least for Queensland. No other humans were in sight; the reedy lake edges were full of bird splashings, frog noises. Any other morning I might have dawdled; now a determined anger drove me on. The Medical Centre towered above me; a great punchcard of windows, most of them dark. On the Genetics floor one window was burning. I hurried in, crossed the hospital foyer, pushed past a lone security guard whose greeting, ‘Starting early, Professor?’, went unreturned, and banged every up button at the elevator bank within sight.