Brotherhood of the Tomb

by Daniel Easterman

  Quadri put his cup on the floor. Again, Patrick noticed the tiredness, the slow movements of someone critically ill. When the lawyer spoke, however, his voice had none of the languor Patrick expected. He was incisive, clear, and wholly in command of his subject.

  ‘Okay, where do I start? At the beginning, I suppose. So, how did all this start? Not fraternita, but this thing we’re all involved in.’ He paused.

  ‘Not long after I started working for Dermot, a woman arrived at our office in Rome. I was on duty. I answered the door and brought her in. She looked to me as though she was in her mid-forties, but something made me think she might be much younger than that. At first, she was in a state of extreme distress - very frightened, very jumpy. She kept looking round, as though expecting someone she didn’t want to see. It took a long time before she could summon up enough courage to talk. It

  took days. Weeks for all the details to emerge.

  We’d just bought this apartment as a refuge for people on the run from the more violent sects, and I brought her here the same evening. After Dermot and I heard her story, we gave her exclusive use. Since the deeds had not yet been transferred to fraternita, I was able to make the entire transaction disappear. Not even the other directors knew of its existence. They still don’t.’

  He paused to pour more coffee into his cup.

  ‘For weeks I stayed here in the apartment with her. She was so frightened, she could not be left alone, not for a moment. Dermot came on the second day and every day after that. Sometimes we talked into the early morning, sometimes we just sat with her in silence, reading, waiting for her to talk again. She was on edge, you see, so much on edge. But the more she talked the calmer she became. It was a sort of therapy, you understand, just to tell us what she knew.

  ‘At first we thought, she’s making this up; she’s telling lies or she has a vivid imagination. No doubt we thought other things too - that she was mad at heart, frantic with some grief, perhaps, a lonely woman looking for fears to comfort her, to give her existence meaning and purpose. Well, we were used then to milder sorts of madness, the trivial obsessions of spiritual misfits. Sex is the chief obsession: if they dream, they dream of sex. Some have too little, some too much, others none at all; it makes no difference. But not for her. If she was mad, she was mad with violence. If she dreamed, she had dreams of slaughter.’

  He paused, as though entranced by the mere possibility of such dreams. ‘But the more we talked with her, the more we came to know she was not

  mad. She was sane, you see. Very sane indeed.

  ‘She gave us a list of things we could investigate without drawing attention to ourselves. And everywhere we looked, we found confirmation of what she had told us. Her story held water. I wish ...’ He hesitated, glancing at Patrick, then at Assefa, ‘I wish now it had been a lie, or she had been mad.’

  Then his eye caught Francesca’s and he smiled, a little wan smile, lonely, private. ‘Well, perhaps not that. How could we have wished that? Mistaken, let

  us say.’ He paused briefly, fixing his eye on Patrick before

  continuing.

  ‘Signor Canavan, the document you were shown this morning at the Vatican - you are satisfied as to its authenticity?’

  Patrick hesitated.

  ‘I’m not an expert,’ he said. ‘But superficially, yes - it seemed genuine. It had the feel of the thing, it felt like ... what I imagine a document from that period would be like.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry, that isn’t very specific. Well, the Aramaic was convincing, the details of the siege were historical, as far as I remember them from Josephus. But for any sort of certainty, you’d have to bring in a paleographer, someone with the right equipment, with the expertise to do a proper job, to examine the material, the ink, the script, the language. Ideally, a team of experts.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roberto. ‘I know. But that has already been done to our satisfaction. Eamonn De Faoite examined the letter in the Archives under the pretence of working on the other documents in that volume. There are facilities there, excellent facilities. They are not so medieval as they would like to seem. I have a copy of his report here, if you would like to examine it.’

  Patrick shook his head.

  ‘Very well. Perhaps you will give us a description of the contents of the letter, for the benefit of Father Makonnen, who has not seen it.’

  Hesitantly, Patrick did as requested. Assefa listened carefully, motionless, like a condemned man hearing his sentence read out in court, slowly, with deliberation, line by damning line. When Patrick finished, he said nothing. He had come to a redundancy of words.

  Quadri spoke again in his quiet lawyer’s voice. ‘As you will have guessed by now, the Brotherhood to which that letter refers did not vanish into the mists of time. They are still very much with us. Over the centuries, they have grown subtle and rich and powerful, and now they are poised to make a bid for a power and influence even they have never previously dreamed of.’ He paused and took a mouthful of hot coffee.

  ‘I think Francesca should explain the rest in her own words,’ he said.

  Patrick turned his eyes to Francesca, only to find her gaze fixed on the floor, avoiding all contact with the others. He watched her collect herself, and with a pang recognized the way she drew her brows together, frowning briefly as she gathered her thoughts.

  ‘There has always been a Brotherhood,’ she began. ‘Since the days of John the Zealot, there has been in existence somewhere a body of men and women dedicated to the preservation of mankind’s greatest secret, the whereabouts of Christ’s tomb. They have had many names, gone under many disguises, but the Brotherhood itself has always been one and indivisible. In almost two thousand years, until I came back from the dead and poured my heart out in this room to Dermot and Roberto, no one has ever betrayed them.’ She hesitated. ‘No, that’s not quite true. They

  have been betrayed many times. But no one before this has ever betrayed them and lived this long.’

  She looked up and caught Patrick’s eye.

  ‘Yes, Patrick, I know,’ she said. ‘Long before I betrayed them, I betrayed you. You want me to explain it all, and I don’t know how to. Not without telling you more than it may be fair for you to know.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of what’s fair, Francesca. What happened to you happened to me as well. I have a right.’

  She did not reply at once. Her hair fell across her eyes, as it had fallen years ago; but now it was streaked with grey, and the eyes beneath it harboured memories unthought-of then.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I shall try to explain. But first ... Dermot - please help me. Father Makonnen ...’

  O’Malley nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’ He turned to Assefa. ‘Father Makonnen,’ he said, ‘I know you have been sorely tested in the past few days. I feel I should warn you that, if you stay, you may hear things you might prefer not to have heard. Things that will test, not only your vocation, but your faith. I do not say this lightly. Whatever else, I am a priest like yourself. I know that, if you hear what Francesca is about to tell us, you will not know a full night’s sleep for a very long time to come. Perhaps never again. If you prefer to leave, none of us will think the less of you, least of all myself. But it must be your decision.’

  Assefa got up and went to the window. He looked down into the street, at the coming and going of people and cars, at the world of his vocation. He was thinking of the Virgin he had prayed to that morning, of her blackness and her virginity, like two sides of a coin, knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and unwisdom. To be black was to know things other men could never know. To have suffered always, to have been poor always, to have known no hope of change in your own lifetime. Suffering was a kind of knowledge, pain was a kind of wisdom. Ignorance, like virginity, gave no trouble to the heart. But his own virginity, the denial he had chosen for himself, was a virginity of suffering. He could not turn his back on it as Patrick had turned his back on the Virgin that mornin
g. ‘I would prefer to stay,’ he said.

  FORTY-SIX

  ‘They called us the Dead.’

  Francesca held herself tensely in the chair, as though braced against a storm at sea.

  We were chosen. Chosen out of all the world, they said. A new nobility, a priesthood consecrated by God. So they told us. Our families chose us and the Seven approved their choice. Or disapproved it if they had doubts. Once chosen, there was no going back. It was as if someone had taken a sponge and wiped our names from a slate. From that moment, we were treated as though we were truly dead.’

  She glanced at Patrick.

  ‘You know that: you rode to my funeral, you watched them bury me, heard them pray for my soul’s rest. You think now it was a mere pretence, an elaborate game they played. Perhaps. But their grief was no more simulated than yours. For them, it was as though I had really died. My parents knew they would never set eyes on me again. My brothers, Giulietta my sister, they all knew. So you see, they suffered almost as much as you, dear Patrick. Almost as much as you.’

  She halted, her eyes nervously seeking his, as though to reassure him, to tell him his grief had not been wasted. But her own eyes held a sadness that frightened him more than simple grief.

  ‘The Dead are a brotherhood within a brotherhood,’ she continued. ‘Strictly speaking, they are divided into a brotherhood for men and a sisterhood for women. Like the first Christian monks, like the first Brothers of the Tomb themselves, they live in Egypt, in two order houses close together in the western desert

  beyond the Dakhla oasis. Whenever their services are needed in Europe or America, they are sent for. For centuries, they have been the heart of the Brotherhood. Its eyes, its ears ... its hands.’

  She shivered slightly, as though a thin draught had passed unseen through the room. They were close, she thought, closer than they had ever been. Events during the past few months had forced her to show her hand more than had, perhaps, been wise. They were still hunting, still waiting for her to make the one mistake that would put her in their hands. And when they found her, they would have no mercy. None at all.

  ‘Having died once,’ she said, ‘they are willing to die again. Or to kill. They are, in a sense, beyond morality. Of course, they have a morality of their own; but they bend it to their own ends, like fashioners of glass who pull and twist and draw it so fine that, in the end, it has no other purpose than to break.’

  Patrick watched her thin fingers move as though spinning glass filaments. He remembered going with her once to see a craftsman on Murano work with the thinnest of glass, fashioning the legs of tiny insects. He had bought her a glass spider, but by the time she brought it home, two of its eight legs had broken.

  ‘The Dead,’ she was saying, ‘are substitutes. By accepting death while still alive, they renew Christ’s sacrifice.’ She hesitated. ‘How can I explain this? Patrick, when you were in the palazzo with my father, did you see a painting on the wall, a fresco?’

  ‘Yes, it showed ...’

  ‘The figure of Christ bound hand and foot, dragged to the tomb.’ She paused. ‘That isn’t how the Bible tells us he died, is it? But it’s not a painter’s fantasy either, nor some ghastly attempt at blasphemy. For

  the Brotherhood, it is the literal truth. It is the centre of their faith.’

  Patrick remembered Alessandro Contarini as he had last seen him, angry, his long white hair falling loose across his face, his finger raised, pointing again and again at the fresco on the wall and crying: ‘For that, you fool! For that!’

  Francesca hesitated and turned to O’Malley.

  ‘Dermot, I...’

  ‘It’s all right, my dear. You’re doing well. Keep going.’

  She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again, as though, in a moment’s darkness, she had found strength.

  ‘The Old Testament,’ she said, ‘is built around the notion of sacrifice. Bullocks, rams and sheep, goats, turtle-doves, pigeons: an endless flow of sacrificial blood.

  ‘But there is human blood as well. Abraham goes to a mountain with his son and prepares to slit his throat as an offering to his God. Moses is sent by the same God to redeem His people from Pharaoh: the price is the blood of Egypt’s first-born. God gives them their Promised Land, and the price is yet more blood - whole cities put to the sword, men, women and children without distinction. Jephtha returns from his victory over the children of Ammon and the price is his only daughter, to fulfil a vow to God. Hiel the Bethelite rebuilds Jericho and pays with the blood of his sons, Abiram and Segub, cast beneath the foundations and the gate. In time, the Temple reeks of blood.’

  The unseen storm that raged round her was reaching its height. She fought against it, denying its force in her.

  ‘Christ was born into a world obsessed with sacrifice. The daily burnt offering, the weekly sacrifice

  on the Sabbath, the monthly offering, Passover; burnt offerings, drink offerings, sin offerings. Within days of his birth the streets were awash with the blood of little children. That was God’s price, the ransom that allowed him safe passage to Egypt. In Jerusalem, in the Temple, the altar was red.

  ‘He wanted to change that world, to invest the throats of doves and the necks of rams with a different sanctity. His own life for the world, his own body as a final sacrifice, his own blood as the price of everything, the coin that would buy God’s pardon. That is what the Church teaches, what the Church believes. The Mass repeats his sacrifice endlessly, flesh and blood on God’s new altar.’

  She looked at Patrick, then at Assefa. Her eyes had a faraway look now.

  ‘That is what you believe, isn’t it? That in one man the Temple sacrifice became universal. But the Brotherhood thinks otherwise. The Brotherhood knows the truth.’

  From the table next to her, she lifted a small book bound in black.

  ‘This is a copy of the Aramaic Gospel of James,’ she said. ‘It has been in the possession of the Brotherhood since its inception. Any other manuscripts that may have existed have long ago been lost or destroyed. The Brotherhood itself has only ever printed a few hundred copies. I stole this one from my father’s library just before I came to Rome. It’s an Italian translation. Let me read James’s account of the death of Jesus.

  “He went up to the cross, and they nailed him and hung him on it, as the prophet had foretold. And he suffered greatly from the sixth hour until the ninth, whereupon he cried out with a loud voice and hung upon the cross as one dead. And yet he had not died,

  but still lived. For when they came to take him down that they might carry him to the tomb, they rejoiced that they found him still alive.

  “His mother and Mary Magdalene tended his wounds and nursed him by day and night for three months, until he recovered. And in those days but a tiny number of his followers knew what had passed, that he had not died as predicted, but was still alive. For most of the disciples thought he had been buried and had risen from the dead.

  “For three months, his mother and the Magdalene tended him in secret. They let the Sanhedrin and the Romans think him dead, for in that thought lay his only hope of safety. It was their plan, once he was fully come once more to his strength and could walk again, that they might find a way for him to take himself out of Palestine, into another country. And he himself desired it greatly, for the cross had broken him, and he could not face the nails again.

  “But I, James his brother, together with Simon the Canaanite, Andrew the brother of Peter, and seven others from among the disciples other than the twelve, all of us who knew the truth thought otherwise. For God’s will had been thwarted, and His Sacrifice remained unfinished. Wherefore, we met together in Simon’s house that is in the Street of the Water Gate and swore a solemn oath binding us to finish what had been left undone. That night, we came to a place outside the city, where Jesus had been hidden, and took him from there over the cries of the women that watched over him, and carried him to the place outside the city, where Joseph of Arimathea had given a t
omb for his burial. And he was bound with cords and his mouth tied with cloth, lest he break free or the Romans hear his cries and send men to investigate.

  “And we laid him in the sarcophagus that Joseph

  had inscribed with his name and the circumstances of his crucifixion under Pilate. It was a great anguish to us to treat him thus, but we remembered God’s promise to us that He would forgive us all sins through the blood of His son, and the sins of all men. And so we laid him in his place and covered him with the stone and sealed the tomb.” ‘

  She stopped reading and the room filled with a terrible silence. Minutes passed and still no one spoke. At last Assefa turned to Father O’Malley.

  ‘Do you believe this?’ he asked.

  The priest laughed loudly, breaking the spell of gloom that had settled round them all. ‘Good God, no,’ he said. ‘I can’t say it isn’t all true, of course. How would I know? How would anyone know? But the world is full of apocryphal Gospels, isn’t it? Sure, the Gnostics had Gospels and Epistles and Apocalypses and God knows what coming out of them like eggs out of a chicken. I choose not to believe in the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter or the Gospel of the Ebionites, or, for that matter, the Acts of Paul or Peter or Thomas, and the Lord alone knows what besides. So why on earth should I believe this Gospel of James? And if it is true, what difference would it make to anything? If the saints are in hell, I’d far rather be there with them than in heaven with James and his gang.’

  He paused and looked sadly at Assefa.

  ‘I don’t doubt that the Brotherhood exists; I know too much about them and their doings for that. And the papyrus I showed Patrick is proof enough that they go back a long way. But it doesn’t mean they know all there is to know.’

  He smiled.