A Skeleton in God's Closet

by Paul L Maier

  Jon slowly poured a third—and he intended to pour as many as Jennings could possibly drain—and then he set out on his bitter journey. “Here’s my . . . ah . . . problem, Austin,” he sighed, looking into the black night outside the window. “All these past months, the name of our game has been ‘Find the flaw . . . the chink . . . the blemish . . . that one shred of evidence that doesn’t comport with the rest.’ If, that is, those aren’t Jesus’ bones. I think I may have found it.”

  “Really? Smashing, Jonathan! What in the world is it?”

  “Do you recall my asking you what Gladwin Dunstable sent you from Pompeii so you could test the radiocarbon lab at Rehovot?”

  “Yes—”

  “Well, you told me it was a piece of carbonized wooden handle. Now, please find it in your heart to forgive me, Austin, but I called Dunstable to get more detail on that episode, and he told me no handle was involved. He rather sent you a packet of powder soot or lampblack he’d brushed off one of the bake ovens at Pompeii.”

  “Oh, dear me, dear me, it certainly was that, of course. Stupid memory lapse on my part! Oh yes, I remember now. I asked him for something wooden. He said the Pompeii authorities would permit only something like the soot.”

  “But he said you had specified a soot sample. And quite a quantity of it.”

  Jennings’s eyes narrowed. “Unlikely.” He shook his head. “Perhaps Dunstable’s memory is faulty. But why were you interested in something so insignificant as what Dunstable may have sent me from Pompeii?”

  “Well, remember when Henri Berthoud was parading out all his weird scenarios of fraud, the day all of us went paranoid in suspecting each other?”

  “Oh yes,” Jennings laughed. “I suspected you . . . you suspected Clive . . . Clive suspected me . . . and so on. I think only Shannon was spared because she was too young!”

  “Well, we all recognized the theoretical possibility that someone on our staff was the perpetrator. Shortly after that, when Montaigne held his press conference and claimed grammatical errors in the Aramaic, it was you who—just a little uncharacteristically—kept pressing him on the grammatical question, almost challenging him, as it were, to find something wrong. At the time I didn’t notice it, but my memory kept bringing up your performance that day, which suited you perfectly if you were the perpetrator.”

  Jennings smiled. “Come, come, Jonathan! I didn’t like how nebulous Montaigne was that day, did you? I was only trying to pin him down. In fact, I recall that it was you who raised the issue again at the Latin Patriarchate.”

  “I know that. But my suspicions grew when I learned that you sent only three grams of carbon soot to be tested at Rehovot.”

  “You mean you called the Weizmann to check on that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Jennings’s jaw dropped. “Great balls of fire!” he exclaimed. “You really do suspect me, don’t you, Jonathan? Look, that was years and years ago. So what if I didn’t send all the soot? I simply sent what they required.”

  Again Jon filled both glasses with sherry. He noticed—and Jennings could not have helped noticing—how the bottle trembled.

  “All right, then, Austin,” he continued. “What did you do with the rest of the soot? Thirty or forty grams’ worth?”

  “Oh, good Lord, Jonathan! I used it to blacken our faces for a minstrel show here! How in ruddy Hades am I supposed to recall what I did with some-thing like that? That long ago?”

  “I’ll tell you, then. You carefully mixed it with gum arabic and water, and you used the ink to paint the titulus parchment, and, perhaps, in different ratios, to write the papyrus too.”

  Jennings broke out laughing. “Good enough, Jonathan. You’ve carried your little practical joke far enough. But it’s late, and I have to be getting to bed.” He saw that Jon was not smiling.

  “I’m serious, Austin. I’m deadly serious.”

  “Well, then, you’re a fool too!”

  “You see, the water would evaporate and not affect radiocarbon dating—if it came to that—and most of the gum gel too. The balance of the mate-rial—the carbon residuum—would date beautifully to before AD 79—just perfect for your purposes. So any analysis of the ink would register authenticity.”

  “I can see the strain of all this is getting to be too much for you, Jonathan!” said Jennings, his face darkening. “I won’t even begin to explore your motives as a . . . an ingrate and scoundrel, a student viper who’d try to strike the hand of his teacher!”

  “Please be sure that this is the most painful, the most horribly difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, Austin! The implications here are tearing me apart.”

  Jennings’ mood seemed to soften. “Well, this has shaken all of us. But, put the case that your impossible hypothesis were correct. Why would I ever have undertaken anything like this?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Jon lied. “But I’m going to suggest that Glastonbury’s panel go over your whole past with a fine-tooth comb. Quite likely, motive enough will be found.”

  “You mean, you haven’t told Glastonbury about these wild speculations of yours?”

  “No.”

  Good. He was swallowing the bait.

  “Or anyone else?”

  Better. The bait was lodging deeper.

  “No. Obviously I had to discuss this with you first.”

  Jennings thought for some moments, taking a deep sip of wine. Then he put down his glass and said, “Let’s continue with your mad scenario. How would you ever, ever go about proving that I’d done what you claim I did?”

  “I’ve given that a lot of thought. I have in mind to scrape all the darkest ink off the titulus—you know, the ‘DAEORVM’ letters at the corner—and compare those granules with similar lampblack from Pompeii . . . if we can get Dunstable to find the spot where he scraped the first time. If the soot’s the same, you’re the perpetrator.”

  Jennings chuckled again. “Such a dreamer you are, Jonathan. Oh, that’s a fine scheme, all right, and I find only seventeen things wrong with it.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the fact that the authorities over at the Shrine of the Book would never let you damage this or any other artifacts. You’d be an archaeological outlaw.”

  “I think they’d cooperate, once they knew the rea-son for it and how it could break open this mystery.”

  “Not likely. Have you discussed it with them?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “The second problem is the sampling. You’d never be able to scrape off enough for radiocarbon testing.”

  “There are other tests—quant and qual, spectrometry, particle analysis.”

  “And Dunstable, of course, would have no trouble finding that oven?” He was smiling.

  “He has a good memory, I understand.”

  “Have you discussed it with him?”

  “Obviously not.”

  Jennings stood up abruptly and paced the room. Then he stopped and said, “You know, Jonathan, perhaps we’ve both had too much to drink. I can’t believe even in my sodden wits that this conversation is actually taking place. You really think I did this? The entire thing?”

  Sadly, wearily, Jon nodded.

  “Well . . . this is . . . this is just too bizarre for words. Actually you compliment me, sir. I wouldn’t know Aramaic well enough to have brought off something like this.”

  “I know . . . that is a problem,” Jon again prevaricated. “But who knows? Maybe Glastonbury and Paddington could explore that too. We don’t know that much about your Oxford student days.”

  “Have you suggested that to them?”

  “Of course not, Austin! The least I could do was expose my private . . . horrible . . . hypothesis to you, and to you alone.”

  “When do you plan to launch this sensational speculation of yours?”

  “I’m going to ask the Shrine authorities for per-mission to scrape the titulus tomorrow morning.”

  “Fine!” said Jennings. “In f
act, I’ll drive over there with you. Well, good night, Jonathan. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He stood up and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Jon sat at the table, devastated. Jennings’s previous responses had been so in line with his hypothesis. But why was his last comment so out-of-line?

  Sleep escaped him that night.

  At breakfast the next morning, Jennings called him over to a separate table for privacy. “Well, Jonathan,” he opened, “did that all really happen last night . . . our weird conversation? Or was it just a nightmare?”

  “It did take place, I regret to say.” He was finding it difficult to look Jennings in the eye.

  “Well, your . . . disgusting suspicions of me had one good effect: they drove me back to my files from the Shiloh dig. I spent half the night reading my papers from that era, including correspondence with Dunstable, and I may well be onto something. Gladwin Dunstable, it turns out, should be our prime suspect.”

  “What?!”

  “It’s all coming into focus now. Remember, that was years ago. But now I recall that Dunstable had some unholy interest in Piltdown and other frauds, and he loved to ask me about some of the famous hoaxes in archaeology. Over some late rounds of scotch one night, when I was in my cups, I faintly recall him suggesting how a papyrus might be forged with a fresh batch of ‘ancient’ ink.”

  “Why in blazes didn’t you tell Glastonbury’s panel about this?”

  “I didn’t remember it at the time, Jonathan. It didn’t come back to me until I read through that material last night.”

  “But what possible motive would Dunstable have had for the forgery?”

  “How should I know?” Jennings shrugged his shoulders. “Well, unless . . . you know, he was a past president of the BFA—”

  “What’s that?”

  “The British Freethinkers Association. Anyway, on—”

  “Hold it a minute, Austin,” said Jon, as he took a quick gulp of coffee. “Let me sort this out for a moment.” Staring out the window, he tried desperately to assimilate the new data. If Dunstable were the perpetrator after all, why had he defended Jennings so vigorously in London? He could better have covered his tracks by letting Jennings be suspected instead. But . . . that was wrong thinking, he suddenly realized! If Dunstable were the forger, he would want to hide the forgery and not have anyone suspected, which was virtually his conduct in London.

  Glancing back at Jennings, Jon said, “Sorry, Austin! It’s just possible that I’m guilty of . . . of a colossal error here. But please continue.”

  “Well, anyhow, on our off days during the Shiloh campaign, Dunstable and I did some surveys down at the Dead Sea, and we stumbled across a cavern shaft south of Qumran on the way to the Wadi Murabba’at. We climbed down inside it and found a burial pit, apparently from the first century. But here’s what fascinates me: one of the skeletons there had a shock of dark hair still attached at the crown of the skull, I now recall, just like our remains.”

  “That does have possibilities, Austin! But why didn’t you excavate the burial pit?”

  “We didn’t own the site. I planned to dig there later on, but never got title to it.”

  Jennings downed another quick cup of coffee and stared at the hills outside the dining room. “I won’t be able to rest until I check out that site and see if, just perhaps, that skeleton is now missing. I’m telling the rest of the staff to dig without me today. Want to come along, Jonathan?”

  “Absolutely.”

  By this time, Jon knew every bend on the Jerusalem-Jericho road. This was his third trip in ten days. They reached the Dead Sea by midmorning. Jennings was at the wheel of the Rover, and he now turned south-ward along the coastal highway. About three miles below Qumran, he drove westward off the shore road and up a gravel wadi until they reached a sheer rock face and could go no farther.

  Jennings studied his map, nodded, and said, “Yes, I think this is it. Let’s take our backpacks and move out, Jonathan. It’s on foot from here on. With any luck we’ll be in and out before the afternoon heat.”

  They shouldered their packs. Jon followed Jennings up a steep pathway that zigzagged up the pinkish-orange escarpment of Judean hills facing the Dead Sea. Twenty minutes later, Jennings paused and checked his map again. “Yes, this is it,” he said. “We leave the path here. Follow me.”

  Jennings now led the way over extremely rough, boulder-strewn terrain. “Are you all right, Jonathan?” he called back.

  “Sure! But it’s a miracle you ever found that burial pit in this wilderness!”

  “Well, I will admit that friendly Bedouin helped us. Ah! Should be just over this ridge and down to the hollow beyond.”

  Ten more minutes of careful climbing brought them to a sloping declivity at the foot of a ruddy granite cliffside that towered a hundred more feet above them. At the base of the cliff, Jennings pointed to a small orifice. “That should be it,” he said.

  Walking over, he pulled scrub brush and several stones away from the hole to enlarge it. Then he opened his backpack and took out a rope ladder and metal crossbar, part of which doubled as a meter stick. Kneeling down at the edge of the opening, he said, “Here, Jonathan. Shine your torch down inside.”

  Jon aimed his flashlight and exclaimed, “Wow! That’s some shaft!”

  “That’s why I brought the ladder.” Jennings now anchored the ladder to the steel bar, which he laid across the ground rock at the orifice. “There,” he said, “that’ll hold more than five hundred pounds. Now climb down while I hold the light for you. I’ll follow after as you hold the light for me.”

  A little gingerly, Jon gave the rope ladder a practice tug and started climbing down the shaft. The ladder swayed a bit, but seemed strong enough. He climbed down sixteen or seventeen feet from the surface, and then called up, “Okay, I’ve hit bottom, Austin.”

  “All right, I’ll toss you the torch. Then hold it for me.”

  Jennings dropped the flashlight. Jon let go of the rope ladder to catch it. That instant, Jennings jerked the ladder up and out of his reach.

  “What are you doing, Austin?” Jon called.

  There was no response from the top. Jon trained the flashlight a full circle around the base. “I don’t see any burial pit here,” he said. “Where is it?”

  “There isn’t any, Jonathan,” Jennings replied softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well . . . I regret to say that the whole business about Dunstable was a fiction. He had nothing to do with Rama. I merely had to . . . ah . . . get you out here.”

  Jon felt a stab of nausea. But he kept his voice from wavering. “And you, of course, had everything to do with Rama, right?”

  “Right you are, my good friend. From beginning to end, ’twas I, and I alone.”

  Jon’s heart was racing, and he could feel the throb at his temples. “All right, Austin,” he called up. “I have two questions, and I’ll bet you know what they are.”

  “Let me guess. How did I do it? And why did I do it? Is that it?”

  “Those are the two!”

  “Well, now . . . in answer to the first, I began with a completely authentic archaeological site. All of Rama is genuine except for the cavern finds . . . oh, and the ‘Joseph’ jar handles. They really were frightfully difficult to fabricate, by the way. I practiced etching inscriptions into ceramics with Carborundum drills until I was ready to do the job on authentic first-century jar handles that had no inscription. After using the drill, I finished, of course, with crude tools, so you people would find only ‘ancient’ workmanship. I then ‘aged’ the inscriptions by firing them briefly through templates of the lettering. Thermoluminescence, of course, tested the clay nowhere near the incriptions.”

  “Very clever, Austin. But when did you do all this?”

  “Oh, I had two long years to ‘salt’ the cavern area—1972 and 1973. I was nearby at Shiloh, but I spent most weekends at Rama—alone, obviously. Kensingt
on had assigned title to Oxford and the Rama Foundation—I represented them—so I had no trouble moving on or off the site at will. There were no campaigns at Rama during those years, you’ll recall.”

  “How’d you hit on the cavern?”

  “Well, originally it stood exposed along with the upper cavern. I trucked in a first-century sarcophagus, did the inscription, and buried it.”

  “But how’d you ever get the inscription to have a patina of age similar to the rest of the sarcophagus?”

  “Aha! No easy task, I assure you! But you can get patina on limestone by covering it with a wet, salty soil impregnated with iron salts, then exposing it to air, then covering it again for repeated cycles. I did that to the inside of the carved lettering, until the color exactly matched the rest of the sarcophagus. But first, of course, I had to have the appropriate skeleton inside, now, didn’t I?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, finding first-century bones in Israel is no great chore, as you know, and the set I finally used came from one of the tombs at Qumran, where I dug under de Vaux.”

  “Why didn’t you simply use a set from the Rama cemetery?”

  “I tried, believe me. But I couldn’t find a male skeleton of exactly the right age. The Qumran bones were close to the mark. But I got the grave linens from the Rama cemetery, a Herodian grave.”

  “What about the ‘crucifixion marks,’ so to speak?”

  “Aha! I simply laid the spearhead of a first-century Roman javelin against the rib cage and scored in the imprint with a scalpel, then abraded it with the Carborundum drill. Ditto, the other ‘abrasions.’ Then, of course, I found a way to add calcareous accretions. I was strong in chemistry during my undergraduate days.”

  “And the ceramics, of course, were no problem, right?”

  “Pottery was the least of my problems. I could have brought in a whole collection from the first century. Ditto the coin, ditto the other finds inside and outside the sarcophagus.”

  “And the titulus parchment?”

  “You were absolutely on target with your hunch about the Pompeii carbon, Jonathan. I congratulate you! We had some parchment scraps left from the Qumran excavations, which I managed to swipe. Then I mixed up some ‘ancient ink’ and wrote out the titulus—rather brilliantly, if I do say so myself, intentionally making the ‘error’ that you caught. Didn’t that add marvelous credibility?”