Along with a purse containing an additional fifty pieces of silver in case more money was needed, he sent word to Paulus to step up the pace—and if such a thing were imaginable, to encourage Joshua to be even more confrontational with the priests. On the downside, two worrisome things seemed to be happening. Judas was becoming fond of Joshua to the point where he often, even usually, chose Joshua’s interests above those of the mission. This is by no means unusual. Handlers in intimate situations like Judas’s often come to love the agent more than the operation. Emotional isolation has something to do with this. So does propinquity and the guilt of lying about everything to someone whose life is in your hands. Moral confusion is a problem when the handler is more intelligent than he strictly needs to be to handle the job. The Judas of the Amphora Scroll certainly seems to have had a high IQ.
“Through all of this,” Septimus Arcanus wrote, “Joshua appeared to be distancing himself from Judas. In the midst of one of his lectures to the disciples he said, ‘One among you is a devil.’ Such outbursts were frequent, but Joshua’s words encouraged Judas’s enemies within the group. He became more and more isolated, he had less and less access to Joshua. This was because he kept urging caution and recommending such measures as the period of hiding at Ephraim. Obviously we wanted no interference with the fatal outcome. I ordered Paulus to remind Judas who he was working for and what his real job was. Because Joshua’s crowds tended to be larger in Galilee, and because his disciples believed that he was not safe in Judea, he spent most of his time on home ground. Word of his signs had spread through the province—he had recently predicted the dramatic recovery of a dying child and then, on the sabbath, cured a sick man at Bethesda. The sabbath cure and his growing tendency to suggest that Yahweh was his actual father was shocking to his listeners. The Galileans knew him as the son of Joseph the carpenter, one of several brothers and a couple of sisters. How then could he be, as he put it, the bread that had come down from heaven?”
Although the gospels speak of multitudes coming out to hear Jesus speak, Septimus Arcanus insists that the crowds were small. However, they grew in size in the wake of the miracles.
“You will be amused, dear Sejanus, to be told that Judas had no explanation for some of these incidents. Joshua seemed truly to be able to cure the sick, cast out demons and produce other signs without Judas’s help or anyone else’s. Of course this was nonsense. Either the people whom Joshua cured were malingerers who feigned their illnesses or he had found some other way of fooling the credulous. Neither Judas nor Paulus put any stock in episodes in which the dead were brought to life. It wasn’t always possible to tell if a person who appeared to be dead really was dead. The Judeans have little or no medicine. Mistakes are made. A good many people are buried alive. The local custom of burying the dead before the next sunset added to the risk of having unconsciousness mistaken for death. That’s why at their funerals shrouded corpses were pelted with handfuls of dirt before the grave was filled—to test whether they could be awakened. The lucky ones sat up or cried out before the shoveling began.”
Septimus Arcanus explains the miracle of the loaves and fishes as the work of a conjurer who had learned this elaborate trick from Egyptians. He suggests that he himself sent the conjurer out, since a trick of this magnitude required professional skills and hidden confederates and expensive props that Judas could not possibly organize without ripping gaping holes in his cover. Although the Scroll estimates the crowd at around 500, rather than the 5,000 mentioned in John 1:10, the enterprise was a huge success. Joshua, however, walked away from the feast while it was still in progress, leaving the disciples behind, and disappeared into the hills alone (John 6:15). Judas reported this as Joshua’s disgusted reaction to the trickery. Even Joshua could not possibly believe, Judas told Paulus, that he was capable of turning five fishes and five loaves of barley bread into a hundred times that many. Judas warned that no more such surprises must ever be sprung on him.
“Joshua had not returned from the hills by nightfall,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “And now something happened that shook my confidence in Judas. Although a strong wind blew and night had fallen, the disciples decided, inexplicably, to get into a boat and row in pitch darkness across the Sea of Galilee in search of Joshua. Three or four miles from shore, the water turned very rough. They thought the boat was going to capsize. Then, up ahead in the stormy darkness, they saw Joshua walking toward them on the water. In Judas’s account, he appeared and disappeared depending on whether he was standing on the phosphorescent crest of a wave or walking in a trough. The next thing the mesmerized disciples knew, their boat bumped ashore on the other side of the lake.
“Now this would be utterly unbelievable to a Roman or any civilized man, but all in that boat agreed that they had seen the same thing and that what they had seen was a miracle. Judas was no exception. He assured Paulus that what he had seen was real. I asked myself, Was there any such thing as a sensible native, no matter how much Roman education had been pounded into his thick skull? Could we believe anything Judas reported from now on? Could he even be trusted to carry out the simple tasks assigned to him, or was he so besotted by superstition that he was useless and needed to be replaced? Paulus advised patience: Judas was an intelligent boy who knew where his true interests lay. It was no easy thing to live a deception for weeks or months, to be continually under suspicion, to exist as an unwelcome stranger inside a group of men who despised him for the favors he did for them. Judas would wake up to his own foolishness sooner or later. Give him time and the benefit of the doubt. The charade would soon be over.”
Septimus Arcanus agreed to do as Paulus advised. He had no choice, since Judas was irreplaceable, but he ordered Paulus to give Judas a stern talking to. Judas’s reporting had become more and more emotional and spotty. He was deeply worried about Joshua. Passover was approaching. Joshua was planning to show himself in Jerusalem on this highest of holidays.
“He could not resist doing so,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “The priests had arranged for the preacher to be arrested on sight. Anyone who saw the wanted man must report this to the Temple at once. After Joshua’s provocative entry into Jerusalem—a band of followers waving palm fronds greeted him at the city gate and he rode a donkey, the traditional mock-humble mount of a king coming to assume the throne of Judea—Judas was more concerned than ever that his friend was inviting arrest and death.”
Judas appealed to Paulus for help in saving Joshua from himself. This was, of course, the last wish Septimus Arcanus was likely to grant. While Paul and Judas talked in a safe house in Jerusalem, Arcanus listened from the next room. Judas was emotional to the point of tears.
“It was obvious that this young man had changed so much that he could not be depended upon to help deliver Joshua for arrest unless he was tricked into doing so,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “Therefore, Judas was told that the only way to rescue Joshua was to deliver him up for arrest by the Romans. Once in Roman hands, he would be safe, because only the Romans could carry out an execution and Arcanus would make sure that there would be no execution. Interrogation by the high priest? Yes. A Roman trial? Yes. Imprisonment? Possibly, but it would be brief. But death? No. I myself gave Judas these necessary assurances, making sure that I was magnificently dressed and wearing the badges of my office. His gratitude, dear Sejanus, was profound. He kissed my hand and wetted it with his tears, an extraordinary gesture for a man of his religion. They are haughty, these penniless worshippers of Yahweh. As you can imagine, I was deeply moved as I looked downward on this sobbing fellow’s unwashed hair in which I saw legions of tiny creatures on the march, and smelled the dusty rags he wore and the sweat he had carried in his armpits all the way from Galilee.”
Septimus Arcanus omits a description of the Last Supper. A dinner party of nobodies talking nonsense in Aramaic would not have interested him. According to Arcanus, Judas confided the Roman plan to Joshua, who gave him no immediate answer. Later, however, in the presence of the othe
r disciples, he gave Judas (or did not give him—Joshua was cryptic as usual) what the latter understood as instructions to go ahead and fetch the Romans to arrest him. “If you’re going to do it, do it quickly,” Joshua told him.
“Judas departed trustfully into the night,” Septimus Arcanus wrote. “Quite soon he returned with the squad of Roman soldiers, together with some of the high priest’s men, whom I had arranged to wait upon him. Although it was a cold night, Joshua awaited them in the garden. He showed no sign of surprise on seeing the soldiers and calmly identified himself to the officer in charge. He instructed his bodyguards not to interfere. Nevertheless, one hothead called Peter drew a sword and with a shout of rage tried to split the skull of one of the high priest’s men, a fellow named Malchus. Fortunately he missed, cutting off Malchus’s ear instead [John 18:10]. He then fled, along with most of the others. Joshua was arrested and led away.”
For most of the remainder of the report, Septimus Arcanus describes Pontius Pilate’s outrage over having been put in the position of cleaning up after Arcanus and his agents.
“You know how small and bald and nearsighted our friend Pilate is, dear Sejanus,” he wrote. “His questions were delivered in a shower of spittle. I answered as many as I could out of kindness but confided as few details as possible. Nevertheless, he understood that he had been left out of a secret plan. This took his breath away. He was suffocated by the insult. He commanded that the prisoner be brought into his presence, an extraordinary thing to do, and turned on him as if the poor fellow were Septimus Arcanus instead of the miserable ragged beggar that he was. Had he ridden a donkey into the city because he thought he was the king of Judea? ‘If you say so,’ the man replied with the utmost insolence. Joshua answered Pilate’s questions with riddles and treated him with the contempt with which Pilate should have been treating him. Pilate’s temper rose and rose. Finally he had the wretch whipped in hopes of teaching him manners and loosening his tongue. This had no effect. At one point the prisoner, still babbling what he obviously considered to be the most profound philosophy, said something about Truth. Pilate, glaring at me with red eyes, cried out, ‘Truth? Truth? What is that?’
“After all this I had thought that nothing Pilate might do could surprise me, but right after this outburst he turned to me and said, ‘This man is guilty of nothing.’ As you may well imagine, dear Sejanus, I was taken aback. Of course he was guilty of nothing. That was the whole point. Was Pilate going to release the prisoner out of spite and ruin everything? I reminded Pilate of what was at stake and where my orders came from. He was too angry, too insulted, too humiliated to listen to reason. It was impossible to speak frankly to him in the presence of the prisoner even though the lash had left the wretched fellow half-dead.
“A crowd—next to nothing by Roman standards, but large enough to make noise—had gathered outside, awaiting Pilate’s verdict. He said, ‘Very well, we’ll leave it up to them.’ He meant the crowd! I could scarcely believe we were speaking in our own language. Before I could protest, Pilate seized Joshua by the arm (adding to this comedy, the soldiers who whipped Joshua had dressed him up as a king of clowns in a purple robe and jammed a crown of thorns on his head) and dragged him out onto the balcony. The crowd hooted at this comical sight, then hushed in anticipation of Pilate’s words. These were not at all what they were expecting.
“‘I find no case against this man,’ Pilate bellowed. ‘Shall I let him go?’
“What an enormous voice Pilate has for such a little fat fellow! His words silenced the crowd. They certainly silenced me as I stood behind him in the shadows, wondering whether it was better to push Joshua over the balcony or put him to the sword. The prisoner seemed to take no notice. He seemed to be quite indifferent to his fate. In fact he seemed to welcome it, but this is often the case with condemned men. He was, perhaps, in too much pain to understand or even hear what was happening. The crowd’s silence lasted no more than a moment. Then a scream of protest rose from a thousand savage throats. Pilate stood his ground, repeating that the prisoner was innocent. He even offered to set him free as a holiday gift to the crowd. A gift! The only gift they wanted was this man’s death, and the more painful it was, the better. Finally, with a mighty shrug worthy of an actor on the stage at Rome, Pilate gave them what they wanted. And then, dear Sejanus, he called for a bowl of water and washed his hands of the whole matter in front of the crowd! You can imagine my amazement. He might as well have washed his hands on the steps of the palace at Rome after touching the emperor. It was, I respectfully suggest to you, the grime of his wounded pride and his disgust with duty that he was attempting to wash away.
“And so that, dear Sejanus, is how the fates worked in this particular case. We Romans were commanded by the rabble to kill one of their own—a man the Roman procurator himself would have permitted to live out of hatred for me and for those in Rome who sent me to this place. However, we were saved from Pilate’s folly by the very people we had deceived. The priests and their followers had demanded that we take them into our power. It was a pretty ending. Even Pilate will someday relish its irony. But not soon, dear Sejanus, not soon.”
In a postscript, just a line or two, Arcanus records that Judas has disappeared and that he suspects that Paulus has arranged for him to go abroad, perhaps to Greece under a new identity, out of the reach of the vengeful bodyguards. Perhaps the two will meet again, Arcanus remarks. Paulus was not a man to let a good agent go to waste.
“As for the very loyal and useful Roman citizen Gaius Julius Paulus,” Arcanus wrote, “he pursues and destroys Joshua’s believers with the greatest zeal. I have told him that he must leave the eleven bodyguards in peace. This has given him a new idea. He wishes to see what he can do to turn Joshua’s followers into a sect that might be useful to Rome. Obviously they are at loose ends and need an organizer. He wants to plant the idea that they must go into exile and make converts. Apparently Joshua suggested something of the sort during one of his tirades. I see little prospect of profit in this, for who could believe that a half-mad vagabond who let himself be killed by mere men was an immortal god in disguise? However, I see no danger in it either. Certainly it would be a good thing to maroon these louts on a Greek island. Perhaps they can write their memoirs. It would be useful, and amusing, to have a report of these events by people who actually believed their own eyes and ears. Therefore I intend to indulge the good Paulus. When next we meet in Damascus I shall give him a little money and my permission to go ahead with his plan.”
As all who have read the ninth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles will remember, it was on the road to Damascus that Saul of Tarsus, the Roman citizen afterwards known as Paul the Apostle, was blinded by the radiance of a vision in the sky. A thunderous divine voice spoke to him. Soon afterward, his blindness cured by a miracle that caused the scales to fall from his eyes, he began preaching that Jesus Christ was the son of God. Surely Septimus Arcanus, who had so many reliable sources, knew about this. One wonders what he made of it. Not much, probably. By that stage in his career he must have been beyond surprise.
EIGHT
1
Suddenly, in the here and now, everything depended on the houbara bustard. How could this have been predicted? But then, how can anything be predicted? If Septimus Arcanus had recruited any other principal assets besides the unstoppable Gaius Julius Paulus and the schizophrenic Judas, would the Holy Roman Catholic Church be named after the empire instead of the triptych divinity it worships? Reading the Amphora Scroll had created a mood from which I was not sure I would ever escape. As if I were twenty again, existence seemed mysterious, events inexplicable, outcomes uncertain, meaning unknowable. Irony may be to life what gravity is to the universe, the invisible force that holds everything together and keeps everything apart.
On the spur of the moment (I really wanted to leave behind me, before dark if possible, the dank villa into which I had introduced the ghosts of Septimus Arcanus and his assets and targets), I decided
to make myself useful by going to see Kalash el Khatar. I cannot account for this impulse, but I followed it. If hunting the houbara bustard was the favorite sport of the Prophet’s descendants, Kalash must know something about it. Or about Ibn Awad’s favorite hunting grounds. In any case it could do no harm to ask. I took a boat to the city and a taxi to the airport. Security was very tight—so tight that one of the black-jawed unsmiling Turks guarding the outer doors of the terminal took my satellite phone apart and handed it back to me in pieces. Among other inconveniences, this made it impossible to call any of the Old Boys and tell them what I was up to. I supposed that any attempt to put the phone together again while in the airport or aboard a plane would lead to my arrest on suspicion of building an infernal machine, so I stowed it in my pocket. I bought a phone card and used a pay phone to call the number Kalash had given me after our meeting in Paris. To my amazement, he answered his own satellite phone. The word allô rang like a coin tossed onto the pavement in front of a beggar who was expected to scramble for it.
In English I said, “This is Paul’s cousin.”
Silence.
I said, “I have something to discuss with you.”
In French, Kalash said, “What could that be?”
“Are you in Paris?”
Kalash switched to English. “My phone says you’re calling from Istanbul. Take a flight to Cairo. Call again after you’re through customs.”
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