Book of the Just

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  “Yes. You believe in angels?”

  Angelo sat back in the chair and looked at the faces of the brothers and sisters. Mouse would’ve been able to tell if they were lying. Angelo had to guess.

  “I believe,” he said quietly.

  “Me, too,” Khalid offered as he patted the young man on the back.

  “This girl, my ancestor, was afraid,” the young man continued. “So she got up to run away, but the angel called her back. He handed her the stone box and told her to take it with her. She was not to open it. She was not to sell it or give it to anyone, not even her own father.”

  The older brother bent down to the leather bag hanging from his shoulder and untied the flap. “She kept this box as she was told. She never told anyone until she was an old woman and knew she was dying. She gave it to her son. And, later, he gave it to his son.”

  Angelo leaned forward, thinking the story done and ready to see the book he’d come to buy, but the young man wasn’t finished.

  “This son was tempted to open the box. On the night he tried, the angel came to him and warned him. He told him that inside was a book called the Book of the Just. He said it was as old as the earth and held much power and that to read the book meant death. The son did not open the box or read the book, and he told this warning to his son when he passed the box to him. Finally, it came to my great-grandfather.”

  The young man pulled a stone box from his bag and put it on the table. It was smaller than a sheet of paper and stood about three inches tall.

  “It’s never been opened?” Angelo asked.

  Both the young man and Khalid shook their heads.

  Angelo reached his hand out to touch the box, but then he sat back, his hand pressed against his lips. “Why are you selling it now?”

  It was Khalid who answered. “These children must move. They have no family left. They were driven from their lands in the Negev in Israel. They came here and want to go to the West.”

  “I want a different life for my sisters and brother,” the young man said. “This is why I take your money. But this is not why I have brought you the book.”

  “Why have you brought me the book?” This time, Angelo couldn’t stop his skin prickling in warning.

  Khalid looked at the young man and shook his head. “He will think you are crazy. He will not want to buy your book then.”

  “This man should know before he takes the box, Khalid,” the young man argued.

  “Know what?” Angelo asked.

  “It was meant for you.” It was the youngest girl who spoke, her voice high and light. It didn’t belong in the back room of a shop in the midst of a black-market sale, or as part of a conversation about ancient books and the end of time.

  “What do you mean?” Angelo asked.

  “The angel told me.” She scooted to the edge of her seat, closer to him.

  “You saw an angel, too?” Angelo’s heart was pounding in his ears.

  “The angel came to her weeks ago, out in Wadi Rum,” the girl’s brother explained. “It told her to take the box to Amman. It told her to give the box to a man called the Angel loved by God.”

  The knot in Angelo’s throat erupted out of nowhere and flooded his eyes with tears. He saw Mouse in his mind—his Mouse, not the one painted for him by Kitty Ayres’s memories. He heard Mouse’s voice as she lay nestled beside him, whispering the meaning of his name after she’d heard it for the first time. He’d forgotten what she sounded like, and the memory given back to him was a treasure.

  “You are Angel loved by God, yes?” The little girl put her hand on his knee.

  Angelo nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said gruffly as he pressed his hand against his eyes, trying to stop the tears. Khalid handed him a handkerchief and put his hand gently on Angelo’s back. It took several minutes before Angelo was able to speak again.

  “What did the angel look like?” he asked, his heart full of an impossible hope.

  “He had writing on his skin. He looked like a man, but his face . . .” The girl shuddered and hid her head behind her brother’s arm.

  Angelo sagged with disappointment, chiding himself for believing it might be possible for Mouse to still be alive, or for some version of her to be working to help him.

  “I’m sorry,” the young man said. “That’s all she would say to us as well. She is young.”

  “How old?”

  “Seven.”

  “She’s special,” Angelo said against the knot still stuck in his throat.

  “Yes. It is because of her we are alive. She warned us about the raid that killed my parents. They would not leave, but they sent us into hiding.” He put his hand on the scarf covering his sister’s hair. “It is she who tells us we should leave Jordan. And so we go.”

  “Where?”

  “Germany, first, and then . . .” He lifted his hands and shrugged.

  “Well, you’ll have plenty of money to help you get settled. It should be enough to care for you and your sisters for the rest of your lives.” Angelo pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and dialed a number. He waited just a moment. “We’re good to go,” he said, then hung up and looked at Khalid. “The Reverend has it all set up. If you check the various accounts you’ve given us, you should see the transfer of funds.”

  Khalid got up and went to a computer on a counter covered with packing pellets. He returned after a moment, smiling and nodding. “It is all there, in all the right places.”

  The young man stood and took the toddler from his sister, swinging him up onto his shoulders. The little boy giggled. His sisters also stood. But as they were leaving, the youngest paused and laid her hand against Angelo’s cheek and whispered words he did not understand. Then she followed her siblings out.

  Khalid came back as Angelo was pushing himself up onto his crutches. “It was a Bedouin blessing she gave you,” Khalid explained. “She says your heart will be restored to you.”

  Angelo shook his head but said nothing. He was reeling. The sudden undertow of grief pulled him down while the girl’s revelation set him spinning.

  Khalid put his hand on the stone box. “I will pack this so you can take it through the airport, yes?”

  “Sure.”

  Angelo watched as Khalid carefully placed the box into a foam-lined cutout of a resin replica of the Ancient City of Petra, a typical tourist trinket. Once the stone box was settled inside, Khalid glued the back on the resin statue. The edges fit neatly as if it were one whole piece. No one would suspect from looking at it that inside was an antiquity worth more than five million dollars.

  After letting the glue dry for a few more minutes, Khalid put the resin Petra in a small crate that looked like a miniature wooden pallet with open slats. “Most likely they will be happy just to see it without asking to open the crate and examine it,” he said as he hammered tiny nails into the back casing, “but even if they do, the glue will hold and they will not find the real treasure inside.”

  “Thank you,” Angelo said as he took the box and slid it into the canvas satchel hanging from his shoulder. He leaned heavily on one crutch and freed his other hand, stretching it out to Khalid. The man took Angelo’s hand in both of his own, shaking and then kissing it.

  “May your heart be restored to you,” he said as Angelo slipped past the hanging carpet and back into the front of the store, then out onto the street.

  Angelo walked a few steps toward the corner, where he could catch a cab back to the hotel, but the wave of emotions he’d been holding back surged over his makeshift dam. He turned into a narrow, empty lot and sank to his knees, surrounded by broken concrete and shattered glass. He held his head in his hands, rocking back and forth as he wept until the haunting call to noon prayers rang out over the rooftops of Amman and lifted Angelo from his grief.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Kitty was waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel. “Let’s see it,” she said, her eyes lit up with desire.

  Angelo shook his head and kept movi
ng toward the elevator. “It’s packed to get through customs.”

  “Well, what does it look like? Is it a book? A scroll? On parchment or—”

  “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “What?” The smile slid from her face. “You just authorized my husband spending—”

  “I saw the outer box. It has an ancient Jewish inscription on it. I met the seller. I know what I bought is authentic.” He wasn’t about to tell her his faith came from a story about angels from the mouth of a child.

  “What you bought? I don’t think you bought a thing, Angelo,” she snapped. “And it sounds like we bought an old box. Let’s go check and see if you owe us five million dollars.” She pushed the elevator button.

  “We will check, and you’ll owe me an apology when you see that I’m right about what’s in the box, but not here,” he said quietly as the elevator doors opened. “We need to get it out of the country first. And then we’ll need to go somewhere secluded to open it.”

  “Why?”

  “You never know what might happen when you open a book.” It was a lesson he’d learned from Mouse.

  Kitty followed him into his hotel room as he started gathering his things. “What do you mean? What might happen?” She sounded both accusing and excited.

  “If it’s truly a thing of power like I think it is, sometimes other . . . creatures can be drawn to it, or bits of the power can slough off, like dead skin. Things can get out of control. I don’t want to take that risk in the middle of a city full of innocent people.” Angelo grabbed a rolled-up pair of pajama bottoms and crammed them into his bag. “Do you?”

  Her answer was another question. “What’s that?”

  Angelo turned his head to look where she was pointing. He turned back to his bag quickly, working fast to mask his face. “Nothing. Just an old trinket of mine.”

  It was a small stone angel, sitting on the table beside the hotel bed. It had once belonged to Mouse, a christening gift from Father Lucas a very long time ago and a token of his faith in her goodness. She had carried it with her for more than seven hundred years, leaving it with Angelo when she’d gone to Megiddo to confront her father.

  “It looks very old,” Kitty said.

  “I’ve had it a long time,” Angelo lied. Mouse had teased him about giving the angel back to her, but Angelo claimed it as a penitent offering for the hell she’d put him through. After Megiddo, the stone figure had been his anchor during the three days Mouse had lain dead in the convent in Haifa. Angelo had cradled it when he wept, and it had given him hope. He had caressed it like a rosary while he prayed over Mouse’s pale, cold body. The angel had watched over them both when Mouse, against all odds, took her first resurrected breath.

  “Is that blood?” Kitty’s hand stretched out, about to touch the chipped wing covered in dark streaks. Angelo wrapped his fingers around the angel and laid it gently among the socks and T-shirts in his bag.

  The angel had been with him in his backpack at Lake Disappointment, and, like him, it had miraculously survived. He ran his thumb softly over the delicate stone face. Angelo had pulled the statue out last night, like he did every night, trying to remember Mouse’s face, her smell, her touch, her sound—anything that belonged to his own memory of her and not Kitty’s implanted vision of Mouse broken and bloody and dead. He’d gone to sleep empty once more.

  But today, the little girl had given Mouse’s voice back to Angelo. He could hear her again in his mind, saying his name. Angelo D’Amato. Angel loved by God.

  His back turned to Kitty, he lifted the angel to his lips.

  “Well, hurry up,” she said. “The pilot’s got the plane ready. I know the Reverend will be anxious to see what he’s bought.”

  “Do you always call him the Reverend? Does he call you Mrs. Ayres?”

  Angelo swung his bag over his shoulder, leaned against his crutches, and moved to the door, the muscles in his back tight against his shirt.

  “Someone needs a nap,” Kitty said. “You should sleep on the way to Moscow.”

  “We’re not going back to the house at Australia?” he asked as the elevator doors closed.

  “You want secluded. I have just the place.”

  An hour later, Angelo dropped into one of the deep leather seats on the Reverend’s private jet and pulled out his phone. He wanted to let Khalid know that he had made it through customs without a single agent asking to examine the Petra statue. He wanted to thank the man for his kindness and to ask him to call when the kids got settled in Germany.

  Kitty stretched out on the couch on the other side of the cabin, watching him. Khalid did not answer the phone.

  Angelo dialed again, trying to silence the whisper of foreboding as Amman fell away beneath the ascending plane.

  The Reverend met them, in his bathrobe, at the door of what Kitty called the farmhouse. It was a renovated Russian castle.

  A television blared from a room to the left of the foyer. The modern sounds clashed against the old stone walls and rich wood bannister that twisted up to the second and then third floors.

  “Where is it?” the Reverend asked, greeting neither his wife nor Angelo.

  Angelo patted the satchel hanging from his shoulder.

  “Bring it in here—the game’s on.” He led them toward the television, an enormous flatscreen mounted over an even larger fireplace. The wavering glare filled the otherwise dark room. The walls were lined with empty bookshelves.

  “Now just a minute, Rev—” Kitty stopped herself and took a step forward, laying a hand on the Reverend’s arm. “Kevin, it’s been a long trip. Why don’t we get a drink and let Angelo tell you what he knows first? And then we’ll see about opening it.”

  The Reverend kept his eyes on the television. “I don’t care what he’s got to say. I paid for the thing. It’s mine.”

  Angelo lowered himself onto a large settee in the corner near the vacant fireplace. Hours on the plane and then the long car ride had the nerves in his back and legs screaming. His tolerance for pain was reaching a threshold, his vision blurring and his mind a fog of worry about Khalid, who still had not answered his calls.

  The Reverend was suddenly yelling at the football game, and Kitty was directing a maid to bring in drinks and something to eat. Demons and angels and ancient books had all felt natural in Mouse’s world, but here, against a backdrop of wealth and banality, Angelo felt unsteady; the landscape seemed unreal. He lowered his head into his hands, pressing against his eyes. He needed his head clear for the battle to come.

  After a few minutes, he heard the slap of the Reverend’s foot against the gap of stone floor between the carpets at the corner of the settee. “It’s halftime. Give me what you got, boy.”

  Angelo looked up at the Reverend, trying to mask his hatred. He knew his best chance was to play a careful game of feigned aloofness. If the Reverend saw how much Angelo wanted to be alone when he opened the book, he’d do anything to make sure it didn’t happen.

  He pulled the crated Petra statue out of his bag and laid it beside him on the settee. “Here it is.”

  The Reverend picked up a poker from the fireplace and jammed it against the loose slats, prying.

  “Oh, honey, be careful! That thing’s priceless!” Kitty said.

  “It’s never been opened,” Angelo said, trying to keep his voice steady. “If it’s as old as I think it is, depending on what it’s made of, it might disintegrate in the wrong air.”

  “What do you mean?” the Reverend asked as he popped another slat free and reached in to pull the Petra statue out of what was left of the splintered crate.

  “Well, once it’s unsealed, if it’s made of some kind of parchment, the fresh air might be too hot or too humid or too dry, and the book could just . . . dissolve. All five million dollars’ worth.”

  “It’s hidden in the back here?” the Reverend asked, turning his head back to the television.

  “Yes. Would you like me to—?”

  “No.” The Rev
erend strode across the room to a desk and pulled out a letter opener, digging the point into the seam at the back where Khalid had glued it.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, honey, you’re going to tear it up. Let me do it.” Kitty took the opener from him and sat down at the desk, more carefully dislodging the back of the statue.

  “Khalid did a nice job of hiding it, don’t you think? Customs officers barely even gave it a glance,” Angelo said. “I tried to call him to thank him, but I couldn’t get through. Have you spoken to him?”

  “No.”

  Kitty almost had the back off. “You should tell him what you told me, Angelo, about what might happen when we open it.”

  The Reverend looked at him, waiting.

  “Objects of power, like I think this is, often release a bit of that power when they’re opened or disturbed. It can sometimes draw—”

  “He thinks something might come, Kevin. Something bad.” Her voice was laced with awe.

  But the Reverend’s face twisted into a disdainful sneer. “That’s bullshit, Kitty. He just wants to open it by himself, be the first one to see what there is to see. He’s trying to scare you off.”

  Angelo shrugged, but his heart was jackhammering against his chest as he watched the Reverend snatch the statue, tilting it until the stone box tumbled free into his fat hand.

  “That’s a little thing for how much I paid. There better be something worth a whole lot inside,” he said. He shook the box. A sharp, bright clink sounded and then was eaten by the commentators on the television discussing rushing yardage.

  Kitty gasped. Angelo held himself still.

  “That sounds like something solid in there. Not paper,” the Reverend said, a new gleam in his eye.

  “It would likely be a scroll rolled on a wooden dowel. If you open it, it might—”

  “I didn’t build an empire on being scared of what might be. I can’t be so afraid of losing something that I won’t take a risk.” He wrapped his thick fingers around the top of the stone box.

  “But what about the creatures that might come, honey?” Kitty whispered, poised as if she was just as eager for him to open it as she was afraid.