by James Becker
‘Is it at your stall?’
‘Yes. My cousin Rashid is there now, if you would like to see it.’
‘Very well, my friend,’ Husani said, careful not to appear too enthusiastic because that would encourage Mahmoud to raise the asking price of the object. ‘There are a few other dealers who have offered me relics, and I need to see them now, but I will be at your stall within the hour.’
Husani arrived at Mahmoud’s small establishment just over forty minutes later, having found nothing of real interest in the other stalls.
Mahmoud opened a battered leather suitcase and removed a pile of yellowing paper.
‘That,’ he said, as Husani looked at the bundle of pages, ‘is exactly the way the papers appeared when I opened the metal case. The unusual one is right in the middle.’
Husani picked up the top sheet and studied it for a few moments. It appeared to be part of some kind of contract or agreement – the numbers on the left-hand side of the indented paragraphs suggested that very clearly – and he thought the language was Spanish, or perhaps Italian. What struck him as odd was that the first paragraph was numbered ‘17A’, which suggested that there must be at least two or three other pages that would presumably contain the earlier sections of the document, but none of the pages immediately underneath appeared to be in any way related to the sheet he held in his hand. Some of the sheets were unusual sizes, and the colour of the typewritten text varied from blue to black.
Those pages that had dates on them suggested that the papers had all been acquired at more or less the same time, because they were all from roughly the same period, the early-to mid-1960s. But, glancing at the text on each one as he did so, Husani guessed that the typewritten sheets had probably been selected at random. They looked like nothing more than a miscellaneous collection of discarded business documents.
And that gave him pause for thought. There were two fairly obvious reasons why somebody should have decided to stuff the metal case with such pages. They might be there to protect something, the pages to act as nothing more important than packing material, or perhaps they might be a kind of basic disguise – something to show an inquisitive customs officer if he insisted on the case being opened and checked. Or maybe, he decided, the pages could be performing both functions, acting as a protection and a disguise.
‘This is exactly how you found them?’ Husani asked.
Mahmoud nodded. ‘Exactly. I lifted the bundle of papers out of the case and examined the sheets just as you are doing now, but I didn’t change the order of the pages, in case that was important for some reason.’
He paused for a moment and glanced shrewdly at Husani.
‘So is it important, my friend?’
‘At this moment, I have no idea.’
Husani ran his fingers down the side of the bundle of papers until he felt something thicker and stiffer approximately in the middle of the pile. He took hold of the stack of pages which overlaid it, and lifted them all to one side.
The object was not particularly impressive. It looked like a sheet of brownish cardboard, but as soon as Husani touched it he realized that it was actually parchment, and it looked old. There were words written on it, the letters barely visible and extremely difficult to make out. He picked up the parchment by its edges and held it up to the dim light streaming through a section of the roof of the souk, angling it to try to make out what was written on it.
At first, he could only pick out the occasional letter, but then he saw one word fairly clearly, and a tingle – like a shot of electricity – passed through his body. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, what he was looking at was written in Latin.
7
Most of the forged scrolls and parchments Husani had handled in the past were clearly of recent origin, the ink black and the writing easy to read. The text he was looking at now was barely legible at all, and Husani had not the slightest doubt that it really was old. He’d never heard of a forger successfully fading ink on parchment to this extent and with this degree and feeling of authenticity. What’s more, assuming everything Mahmoud had told him was the truth, and the dates on the papers were accurate, the object had been locked away in a steel box since about 1965, almost half a century earlier, and that more or less ruled out the chance of it having been manufactured as a fake antique. If somebody had made it, they would also have sold it, not hidden it away. Nothing else made sense.
So it was old. The next question was did it have any value and, if so, what was it worth? And if it was valuable, just how little could he persuade the rascally Mahmoud Kassim, well-known in the souk for always demanding the highest possible price for anything he had on offer, to sell it for?
With an expression of disinterest on his face, Husani put the parchment to one side and then examined the sheets of paper that had been underneath it. It was immediately clear to him that these pages, too, were just as uninformative as those he’d already looked at. The only common factor seemed to be that they had been typed at about the same time, in the mid-1960s, as the other sheets. Other than that there was nothing to link them, and none appeared to be of the slightest interest. At the bottom of the pile there were a few sheets of newspaper, one of which he examined. It was clearly Italian in origin – the name of the paper made that clear – and also dated from 1965.
Husani still had no idea what the significance was of the piece of parchment, or what the Latin text on it was describing, but the way it had been hidden, or protected, in the centre of a stack of paper, locked inside a metal box and then secreted away somewhere in a house, suggested that it was important in some way. He needed to buy it as cheaply as he could and then try to find out exactly what it was.
Mahmoud was still looking at him, an eager expression on his face.
‘Do you know what it is, that thick paper?’ he asked.
Husani had found from his previous dealings with Mahmoud that the man often knew far more than he was prepared to admit at first, and it was a mistake to try to deceive him on such matters. A little truth often went a long way in his negotiations.
‘It seems to be a sheet of parchment,’ Husani began, and Mahmoud immediately nodded.
‘That was what I thought, too.’
Husani nodded. He’d guessed as much. Mahmoud would certainly have done some investigating himself before offering the object for sale to anybody. And the trader’s next words confirmed his suspicions.
‘I’ve had a look at the writing on it,’ Mahmoud said, ‘and I think I’ve been able to make out a couple of words, or most of the letters, anyway. It looks like Latin.’
‘What were the words?’ Husani asked.
‘I think one was a place name and the other possibly the name of a man, but the ink is faded so badly that I can’t be absolutely certain. I ran some searches on the Internet on what I think they were, just in case they were of some significance, but I didn’t find out anything particularly interesting – not to say they won’t yield something of importance if an expert were to look at it.’
Husani looked away from Mahmoud’s face and down at the parchment.
‘From what you’ve said, you probably know more about this than I do. I’m fairly certain that it’s a piece of parchment, but that’s about all I can tell you about it. Like you, I can see the writing on it, and I can make out a few of the letters, but it’s so indistinct that it might be impossible to ever decipher the whole thing. The only other point is that it looks to me as if the parchment is quite old, but other than that, I really have no idea what it is.’
Mahmoud’s expression changed, a frown replacing his earlier eager smile.
‘So do you think it has any value?’ he asked.
Husani replaced the parchment on the lower stack of papers, added the remainder and put the entire pile back into the old leather case before he replied.
‘Possibly,’ he said, ‘but I doubt if it’s worth very much. Pieces of old parchment are not exactly rare, and I have several for sale in my shop right now, a
ll in much better condition than this. At best, I think this is nothing more than a curio, something I might be able to sell to a tourist just because it is so obviously old, and not because it has any other importance.’
‘Then I could sell it myself,’ Mahmoud suggested, clearly expecting Husani to disagree.
‘You could indeed, and if that’s what you want to do, I wish you luck,’ Husani replied, deciding at that moment to call Mahmoud’s bluff. He closed the catches on the suitcase and turned as if to leave the storeroom.
‘On the other hand,’ Mahmoud went on, ‘it’s not the usual kind of item that I would sell. Would you make me an offer for it? I’ll include the suitcase and the papers as a part of the deal.’
Husani turned back to look at the trader.
‘You know as well as I do that the papers are completely valueless, and the case is so old and battered that most people would just throw it away, not try to sell it. I’m not sure that it’s even worth my while bothering about the parchment,’ he finished. Then he suggested a figure that was little more than the old leather suitcase was worth by itself.
Mahmoud reeled backwards somewhat theatrically, clearly appalled at the sum offered, and proposed a figure more than ten times higher. And then the haggling, the part of the transaction that in truth both men enjoyed more than any other, began.
8
Many people think the Vatican City is living in the past. The fact that the official language is still Latin – a dead language that is spoken by no other nation anywhere else in the world – the medieval weapons carried by the Swiss Guard, the burning of incense, using different coloured smoke to signal the choosing of a new pontiff, and the ancient robes worn by the senior clergy who attend the Pope, all hark back to the Middle Ages. What they don’t realize is that these facts deliberately conspire to suggest that both the Vatican and the papacy are essentially mediaeval in nature, an anachronism.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the chanting and the piety and the centuries of tradition and custom, the papacy of the twenty-first century is every bit as modern as any multinational corporation or Western government, and with good reason. The Catholic Church has had more than its fair share of problems over the last century. Some were self-inflicted, like the assistance given at the end of the Second World War to help wanted Nazis to escape from the ruins of Germany and establish themselves in new lives and with new identities elsewhere in the world. The whole question of resistance to birth control also showed that the Vatican, and most especially the then Pope, was completely out of touch with reality, by promoting unlimited expansion of the human race at a time when the world was already grossly overpopulated.
Perhaps most worrying of all for the Vatican were the fundamental criticisms of religion itself, whether from academic sources or from popular books – especially criticisms of Christianity and Roman Catholicism. The basis of the problem was that science had now been able to explain virtually everything from the creation of the universe itself right through to identifying the most fundamental particles, the very building blocks of every kind of matter.
In Australia, just to look at a single nation that particularly concerned the Church, belief in Christianity fell from over 95 per cent of the population to just over 60 per cent in the twentieth century alone, and the fastest growing ‘religion’ on that continent was, in fact, atheism.
And while Christianity, though still the world’s largest religion, was in possibly terminal decline, other religions that shared no part of the Christian ideal, such as Islam, were beginning to grow.
The portents for the future were not good, and successive occupants of the Throne of St Peter had been made very aware that the last thing the Church needed was any other damage to the core beliefs of Christianity. And it was the growth of the single largest communication medium in history, the Internet, which had provided them with the tools they needed to detect any such undesirable ripples of doubt.
At the end of the twentieth century, the governments of Western Europe and America had created a global monitoring system known as Echelon, a way of eavesdropping on telephone conversations, faxes and electronic mail transmissions from almost anywhere in the world. The purpose of Echelon was entirely laudable: the detection of potential terrorist activity before it could be turned into a devastating reality. To achieve this, the security services of the world employed a program known as the Echelon Dictionary, a vast list of words that the monitoring system was created to detect, and which it was hoped would lead to the surveillance, and if necessary the arrest and imprisonment, of potential suicide bombers and members of terrorist groups.
The Vatican, for all its enormous wealth and influence, possessed neither the resources nor the legal authority to create such a global monitoring system. But some years earlier, as the first handful of computers began to be connected to the fledgling network that would soon begin to grow exponentially into the Internet, a group of far-sighted and technologically literate priests working at the Vatican had seen the potential of the new information resource and also realized that it could be a useful – perhaps even an essential – tool to help guarantee the future of the Church.
Like every large organization, there were a fair number of skeletons in the Vatican’s closets, documents and objects which, if they ever saw the light of day, would cripple – or at least very severely damage – the Church’s credibility. And it made sense that anyone who discovered even a hint about any such dark secret would very probably use an online search engine to research the topic. A kind of early-warning system was needed.
So the Vatican approached the emerging companies operating the search engines and explained the concerns the Church had. And, because almost all of the owners of these companies were American, a nation with far more than its fair share of fundamentalist Christians, getting agreement to install monitoring software had proved to be surprisingly easy.
The result was a loose and informal arrangement with the providers of all of the major search engines on the Internet. Somewhat like the Echelon Dictionary, the Vatican’s monitoring system – known to the handful of indoctrinated senior clerics in the Holy See as ‘Codex S’, a nod to perhaps the most important single extant book in the Christian world, the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, a Bible handwritten in Greek – was programmed to detect certain words being entered into the search engines, particularly when two or more of those words were entered together. The date and time would be noted, and the search term recorded, the information then being fed back to the Vatican.
As a further refinement, when any such search term was entered, the monitoring software would also locate the precise Internet address of the initiating computer. Every computer that accesses the Internet is allocated either a permanent or a temporary address – this is essential to ensure that responses go to the right place – and also geographically locates that computer. So by this fairly simple method, the Vatican was informed every time any search that might be considered dangerous to it was entered on any computer in the world, as long as one of the principal search engines had been used.
Early that morning, in a large open-plan office in a building in a part of the Vatican to which the public, and almost all of the staff of the Holy See, never had access under any circumstances, a speaker system attached to a desktop computer emitted five short beeps, indicating a hit from the monitoring system. The room was unmanned for most of the time, but a log was maintained at each of the workstations and these were combined into a master electronic document that was inspected at least once a day.
Late that evening, a senior member of the Vatican staff inspected the log and immediately saw the two words that had triggered the response by the monitoring system. His orders were clear, and he followed them straight away. He printed a hard copy of the entry and then ran a simple program that identified the precise geographical location of the computer from which the search had been generated, translating the Internet address into a street addr
ess.
Then he left the room, secured the door behind him, and made his way quickly through the corridors and passages of the building to the Secret Archives. There, he went straight to the office occupied by the Prefect in charge, Father Antonio Morini, and placed on his desk a sealed envelope containing the printouts.
9
That evening, Husani fired up his home computer and began to do his own research. Within a very short time, it was clear to him that almost all of the papers in the case were in Italian.
He identified an online translation service, and converted some of the words into Arabic. That didn’t help much, except to confirm what he had first suspected: the pages must have been randomly chosen, and what was typed on them was of absolutely no importance. Most of the phrases he translated had very obviously been taken from various sorts of business correspondence, letters, draft contracts, price lists of goods and the like.
But at least Husani could now discount the papers and get to the item that excited him. He turned his attention to the parchment, placing it on the table in front of him and angling a couple of bright desk lights towards it so that its surface was clearly visible.
In the much better lighting then available to him, he found that a few more of the letters and words were visible. And it was possible, he knew from talking to other traders who tended to specialize more in this kind of relic, that other examination techniques, such as bathing the object in infrared and ultraviolet light, could sometimes reveal text that remained invisible to the naked eye.
Husani knew that whatever value the object had must be determined by the text that would be revealed: it was the information that was important, not the parchment itself. The message, not the medium.
