I said, “May I know where you’re going?”
“Kyrgyzstan.”
“Why?” I said, flustered.
Zarah did not have an automatic American-girl smile. She looked gravely into my eyes and said, “There are things I want to know, questions I have to ask.”
“What things, what questions?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Ah. Well, keep in touch.”
“You can count on it.”
Her room had French doors that opened onto a winter-brown garden. Beyond the garden lay Istanbul with its domes and minarets washed by watery morning light. She walked through the doors and down the steps, a straight-backed young woman in a blue blazer, and as far as I knew, all alone in the world. And on her way to Kyrgyzstan.
4
Zarah had given us a new direction. Ben Childress left on the morning plane for Cairo, Charley Hornblower on the afternoon flight for New York. They had work to do. I had run out of things to do next and had nowhere to go unless I wanted to hang my birding binoculars around my neck and start walking toward Xinjiang, looking for the houbara bustard. As happens in life, especially in a life devoted to trying to catch slippery trout with your bare hands, I had come to an impasse. Thanks to weeks of methodical labor by the Old Boys and brilliant thinking by Zarah, I now knew far more than I had any right to know about the targets I had set out to acquire. But I did not yet know enough and I could not proceed further until I knew more. It seemed a good moment to read Zarah’s retranslation of the Amphora Scroll.
Bright sunshine notwithstanding, it was too cold to read in the garden, even if there hadn’t been sound reasons not to show myself outdoors in daylight. I put on a sweater, switched on the electric fire in the sitting room, made myself a cup of tea, and sat down with Zarah’s typescript. She had printed it out on heavier paper than is usual. Several minutes passed—long enough for the tea to cool—while I stared at the thing as if it were still written in the Greek alphabet. When at last I steeled myself to begin, I found things to enjoy. It was uncanny how closely the voice of Septimus Arcanus, confiding and worldly, resembled the voices in the top secret cables and dispatches I had been reading for most of my adult life. Arcanus was a type I knew by heart—intelligent, truthful to a nicety, diligent, and infinitely condescending to the outlandish persons on whom he was reporting. It was no comfort whatsoever to remember that Simon Hawk had told me that he and Reinhard Heydrich had felt pretty much the same sense of kinship to this dead Roman. No doubt the similarity would have been even stronger had I been able to read the original in the author’s Greek but, as Homer and the New Testament have taught the world, translations from the Greek are quite powerful enough. In any case, the manuscript soon made the world I lived in go away.
Septimus Arcanus began by describing a lazy slave being beaten in the street by his red-faced master.
“Puffs of dust sprang from the slave’s filthy tunic with every blow of his owner’s staff,” he wrote. “These caused the master to sneeze but he went on with the beating anyway: Whack! Ah-choo! Whack! Ah-choo! It was hot in Jerusalem. As you know, dear Sejanus, Judea is a waterless country where the masses are caked with a lifetime accumulation of dirt and for the most part never feel water on their skins. Recently I watched a baptist at work dunking converts in a river. I am told that the baptized feel that their sins have been washed away, and no wonder. According to my information it was the specialty of a religious eccentric called Yohanan, a Hebrew name meaning ‘Yahweh has been gracious’— Yahweh being the local god who, unlike Jove, feels no need for subsidiary gods and runs the world unassisted. I say was because Yohanan, who had attracted a considerable following among the unwashed by predicting that a messenger from Yahweh would soon arrive and supplant earthly rulers, got his head chopped off by Herod for his troubles.”
It was the decapitation of Yohanan that awakened Septimus Arcanus to the operational potential of religious dissidents. “I reasoned,” he wrote, “that if a half-mad derelict like Yohanan could get under the skin of Herod to the point of being arrested and then beheaded merely for making prophecies about the imminent arrival from heaven of a messiah who was going to rule over the Jews, then zealotry was an asset worth looking into. These are primitive people, driven by superstition, who had lived so long in fear of their angry absentee god that they trembled at the smallest sign that he might be coming back to visit another of his catastrophic punishments upon them. ”
All of the above and everything that follows, I wish to emphasize, represent Septimus Arcanus’s interpretation of what Christians know as the stories of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth. At the time, of course, there was no such thing as a Christian. Jesus was attempting to perfect Judaism, not found a new religion, and until the eminently practical apostle Paul pointed out that the movement would attract few converts if gentiles were required to observe the bewildering requirements of Hebraic religious law, all followers of Jesus were intensely observant Jews. Since reading Septimus Arcanus’s report I have refreshed my memory of the Gospels, and I have inserted references to chapter and verse that seem to resemble his version. Often the similarities are striking. For example, according to Acts of the Apostles 1:15, a total of 120 believers in the Resurrection existed in Judea soon after the crucifixion. This accords more or less with the information available to Septimus Arcanus, who lists by name 123 believers in the immortality of the late Joshua ben Joseph. The names included eleven of the original disciples or “bodyguards,” as Arcanus persisted in calling them.
In the beginning, as described in Arcanus’s report and in the gospels, the priests were suspected by the Romans of encouraging the evasion of Roman taxes. Because the whole point of having an empire is to milk it for taxes, this was deeply upsetting to Rome. What if this madness spread to Egypt or even beyond?
“I called upon the services of an agent, already in place, who specializes in keeping an eye on religious agitators,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “This man, a Pharisee who lived in Tarsus, was a Roman citizen, quite picturesquely called Gaius Julius Paulus. I instructed Paulus to find the most outrageously radical preacher then at large and surround him with bodyguards so that he could travel about the country attacking the priesthood as heretics. The objective was to disrupt the priests’ antitax campaign by challenging their theology. This must be done rudely, openly, even blasphemously. Doing violence to a few priests was an option to consider. If Paulus’s man could put in a good word about Roman taxation now and then, so much the better.
“The most important point was this: This preacher, whoever he turned out to be, must never know that he was working for the Romans. Nor should his bodyguards be aware of this. It was essential that he and they believe absolutely in their own authenticity. This meant that one Roman agent—but not more than one—must be infiltrated into the group as a handler. This man would provide the preacher and his retinue with money for food and lodging and alms for the poor. I authorized the expenditure of two hundred pieces of silver for these purposes. Our man would also, of course, report on the doings of the group to Gaius Julius Paulus, and Paulus in turn would report to me. Strict secrecy was essential. No one else in Judea or anywhere else, not even the governor, was to be told anything about the operation. With the fate of Yohanan in mind, I supposed that this endeavor would end with the death of the preacher. Best not to kill any of the others, I thought, because this would rob the central figure of drama. What was needed was a martyr, not a gang of ruffians who got their just deserts for thumbing their noses at Yahweh’s priests.”
As all chiefs of station should be, Arcanus was well-versed in the local languages, politics and ethnology. He spoke Aramaic and read Hebrew. He knew all the Israelite tribes, and provided Sejanus with a brief tutorial: “Gaius Julius Paulus, for example, is a member of the tribe of Benjamin, to which King Saul belonged, and which was renowned for its fierce warriors. Its slingers had the remarkable ability to twirl two slings at the same time, one with each
hand, thus doubling the number of stones catapulted on the enemy.”
In the overt portion of his life Paulus was a teacher of religious law who had studied philosophy at the renowned university at Tarsus. He came from a well-to-do family and was trustworthy in the first place because he was not only a Roman citizen himself but also the son of a Roman citizen. Paradoxically, Paulus was trustworthy above all because he was a patriot. This did not surprise me. I have never known a political dissident who did not have a deep-seated need to describe their own treasonous thoughts and actions as patriotism. My own experience had taught me that this is true in all countries, including my own. Paulus’s love of his people and religion constituted a solid-gold guarantee that he would serve Roman interests. By accepting Roman money and protection to overthrow a corrupt regime, he served the true interests of his people. His Roman citizenship was the door that Septimus Arcanus knocked upon, and Paulus opened it as duty required. But he had his own purposes and he was under no obligation to show the visitor through the whole house.
“After receiving his instructions, Paulus returned to Tarsus,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “Soon after that he requested a meeting. We met in Damascus, where the chance of either of us being recognized was smaller than in Tarsus or Jerusalem, in a Roman house. Paulus dressed in the toga of a Roman citizen and he has the manners of a Roman when he chooses to have them. Paulus observes Roman social amenities with an impatience that would amuse you, dear Sejanus. At heart, he is an ascetic who has little taste for wine and none for Roman food, which is against his religion. We had hardly wet our lips when he burst out with his news. There was no need to invent the preacher we were looking for. The man already existed. He was an Amharetz, one of the common people of Galilee, and so were the eleven followers who traveled with him. This preacher, Joshua ben Joseph by name, was an uneducated nobody. Unlike Yohanan, he had no great speaking voice. So far this had not been a handicap because he had drawn very small crowds, almost all of them Galileans. However, he was by far the most reckless preacher Paulus or anyone else had ever heard. He attacked the Pharisees, who are the learned priestly authorities on Hebraic law and tradition including such fascinating questions as Judgment Day, the resurrection of the body, and the coming of the messiah. Joshua used blunt, not to say blasphemous language. His fundamental message was profoundly subversive: the priests misunderstood Yahweh’s law and his intentions. So far, this message had not struck sparks into the tinder of the rabble. But in Paulus’s judgment, Joshua was going to develop, with or without Roman help, into a thorn in the side of the priesthood.”
Paulus was authorized to infiltrate Joshua’s entourage. This was both easy and difficult—easy because Joshua and his followers were very poor, a band of beggars scrounging for pennies and food, difficult because they were all Galileans, many of them brothers or cousins or old friends. Theirs was the sort of cell that remained relatively secure even if penetrated because the brothers and cousins did not confide in members of the cell to whom they were not related. It was difficult to pin down their identities because Joshua had arbitrarily changed some of their names and others had changed their own, ostensibly as a sign that their lives had been changed by their master’s message. (Arcanus, naturally, regarded these name changes as tradecraft). Status among the disciples derived from closeness to Joshua. Some were closer than others. Three brothers named James, Peter and John were the closest. Others, even most of the others, fell outside the circle of trust and friendship and hardly counted at all. They were sycophants and Joshua treated them as such, lecturing and scolding them. He told them over and over that they did not understand him or his message and probably never could. And then in the next breath he told them that they must carry on his work after he was gone. He was obsessed by the idea that he was going to be killed for speaking truth.
“In Julius Gaius Paulus’s opinion,” Septimus Arcanus wrote, “what Joshua needed were the usual items—money and information. These could only be provided by someone outside the circle who had reliable information about what the priests were planning, what the Romans were thinking and so on. None of Joshua’s current disciples answered this description. Paulus recommended a man named Judas. He came from Kerioth, a wretched town lying east of the Dead Sea in Moab. His full name, Judas Iscariot, meant Judas of Kerioth. In addition to being likeable and presentable, Judas was described to me as highly intelligent, experienced, diligent to a fault, devoted to his work, and trustworthy as long as your ideas and objectives were exactly the same as his. This was Paulus’s assessment. I understood from this description that Judas was another version of Paulus.
“Paulus understood that none of the Galileans would like or trust Judas. They would hate him and scheme against him and warn Joshua that he was not to be trusted. However, their enmity would be Judas’s great advantage because it would give Joshua an independent adviser who owed everything to Joshua and nothing to the group—no brotherly affections or old loyalties applied. Also, Judas would finance the operation and this, too, would remain a secret between Joshua and Judas. If it stirred up more animosity, as sudden money usually did, so much the better. To Joshua this could only mean that Judas was useful to him and to nobody else.”
Septimus Arcanus was impressed by Paulus’s operational plan. Two thousand years later, so was I. A mind like Paulus’s occurs perhaps once in a millennium, the Prophet Muhammad being the next case and Karl Marx the one after that. When one of these bent geniuses appears in the world and decides to reinvent salvation, woe to the status quo. We never understand them for what they really are before it’s too late. Their cover, like Paulus’s and the other two just named, is never blown—and even if it were, few would believe that they were not what they had claimed to be. What came next caused me to put the pages down for a moment and gaze out the windows at the sloshing dark waters of the Bosporus.
“Paulus suggested to me that it might be a good thing for Joshua to do a few signs,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “Wonders would swell the crowds and, besides, this sort of thing was expected of prophets. I asked what he meant by signs. Paulus said conjurers’ tricks, such as turning a staff into a snake, or transforming one liquid into another, or curing a cripple or a leper or a blind man.”
Septimus Arcanus approved Paulus’s idea and duly recorded the miracles that followed. His sense of place and sequence of events was vague, probably because he was hearing about them by word of mouth whispered down a chain of cut-outs, but the events themselves are usually recognizable. In his version, the changing of water into wine at the wedding in Cana (John 2:1) was a simple matter of filling all but one of the water jugs with wine (better wine, Paulus grumped, than it was strictly necessary for Judas to buy with operational funds) while no one was looking. Judas bribed the servants, hired for the day, to tell the guests about the magical transformation and give Joshua the credit. Joshua got his startling information about the five ex-husbands of the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob (John 4:15) from Judas, who had heard it from a village gossip. A blind beggar was cured when Joshua rubbed spittle in his eye and sent him to bathe in a pool whose name no one present recognized. He came back an hour or two later, but apparently as a different man who resembled, but did not seem actually to be, the original blind man. He was denounced as an impostor by some in the crowd and thrown out. But as usual in such matters, others believed in the cure (John 9:1). Lazarus (John 11:1) had awakened from a coma and Joshua just happened to be there when it happened. That Lazarus did not stink after three days in the tomb, as his own sister Mary warned Joshua he would, was proof enough to the literal-minded Paulus that Lazarus had never been dead in the first place.
“Now the amusing thing, dear Sejanus, is that this Joshua seemed to believe that he had actually performed the signs that Judas had set up by bribery and trickery,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “So did the other eleven disciples—or at least they pretended to believe. However, they were colder to Judas, and although they were eating better than before, accuse
d him of stealing money from the group. Still, he stayed in character. He outraged them all after Lazarus’s sister Mary rubbed a highly perfumed ointment on Joshua’s feet and wiped it off with her hair [John 12:3] by asking why the ointment had not been sold and the money given to the poor. Joshua brushed the criticism aside by saying to him that the poor would always be with Judas and the others, but he would not because it was his fate to be slain by his enemies.”
Arcanus was delighted with Paulus’s report on Joshua’s raid on the Temple. Kicking over the tables of money changers and sellers of birds and animals intended for sacrifice and driving them out of the Temple with a whip improvised from a piece of rope was exactly the sort of rowdyism he and Paulus had in mind. And Arcanus was beside himself with amusement on hearing about Joshua’s answer to a man who asked if it was permissible for the pious to pay Roman taxes. The phrase about rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s is so familiar that I won’t reshuffle the words by providing Arcanus’s more vivid and quite possibly pepped-up rendition.
“Now strangely enough, Judas apparently had nothing to do with staging either of these events,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “This was hardly surprising, since even Judas never knew what Joshua might say or do next. For example, he had begun to say that those who believed in him would eat his flesh and drink his blood. This caused converts to leave him in disgust. His following, tiny to begin with, shrank. On at least one occasion a crowd threatened to stone him, but he hid and then escaped without harm. However, obscure and unpopular as Joshua remained, our plan was bearing fruit. The Pharisees were beginning to worry about him. I made sure that they worried by sending emissaries to inquire about Joshua and suggest that he was developing into a dangerous man. If the Pharisees let him go on, he might attract new believers and the Romans might have to get involved. Soldiers might even seize the Temple. The high priest of the year, a man named Caiaphas, called for his death. After this, Joshua and the disciples were convinced that the preacher truly was in danger of his life, just as he had foreseen. Judas was so worried that he persuaded Joshua to hide out for a while in the mountains at Ephraim, a city far removed from any other. Of course I instructed Paulus to countermanded this mistake as soon as I learned of it. Of what use was a preacher who did not preach?”
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