Gospel Truths

by J. G. Sandom

  He paused, staring off into space. “Someone else mentioned something about the Book of Thomas the Contender just a few months ago. I think it was Clermont. He’s the curator of the Amiens museum. But the real expert, if you’re interested, is the Countess Irene Chantal de Rochambaud. She lives in Paris.”

  Lyman nodded. Hadn’t Captain Musel sent the Masonic missal to a countess in Paris? He made a mental note to call the museum curator, Monsieur Clermont, that afternoon. Then he took another sip of wine and said, “What would happen if it were found—this Gospel of Thomas? Would it be valuable today?”

  “No, no,” Guy said reprovingly. “The Gospel of Thomas is another thing altogether. You mean the Book of Thomas the Contender.” He smiled impishly. “I’m afraid the value would be in the hunt, not in the prize. Gnostic gospels are rare, but not unknown. Copies of the Book of Thomas the Contender, as well as other Gnostic gospels, already exist in ancient Greek and Coptic. But I imagine they might fetch a hundred thousand pounds or so. One legend has it that a copy of the Gospel of Thomas was hidden in a golden cup, underneath the Chartres cathedral.”

  “Really?” Lyman said. “Who exactly were the Gnostics?”

  This time it was Father Marchelidon who answered. He leaned on his pointed elbows, cupping his chin in his hands. “No one is absolutely sure,” he replied. “We know what they came to believe, at least to a certain extent, but the roots of Gnosticism are difficult to follow, to separate. The Gnostics were a religious movement, not a people. And you have to bear in mind that in the first three centuries A.D. there were a lot of competing Christian groups. Look at Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. Everybody had a different interpretation of what Christ had said.

  “The Gnostics didn’t believe in the three-tiered hierarchy of the Church: the bishops, priests, and deacons. They didn’t really believe in centralized power. Instead, they elected a priest from their group by lot, someone to read the Scriptures, and a bishop to offer the sacrament. Each week it was someone different. Even women were invited to participate.”

  He laughed thinly. “But what really marked them as heretics in the eyes of the Church fathers was their belief that to have gnosis, a kind of mystical secret knowledge, also meant that you didn’t need the Church, the organization. The more gnosis you had, the more you knew yourself. And the more you knew yourself, your own human nature, the more you were in touch with God. Obviously the centralized Church in Rome felt threatened. To them Peter and his fellow apostles were the only real authority.” He sighed and Lyman noticed his fingers tighten around his wineglass. “Eventually all the Gnostic gospels were burned or edited or hidden away. Many Gnostics were killed for their beliefs, while the rest of their communities, for the most part, simply died out.”

  “Their philosophy sounds almost Eastern,” Koster said.

  Marchelidon nodded. “Some people see a Buddhist influence. Others claim that the roots are more Persian than Indian. But you’re right—it does have an Eastern flavor to it.”

  “You’re certainly well informed,” Lyman said. “Are you a historian too, Father Marchelidon?”

  The priest smiled faintly. “No, not really. Most priests know something about the Gnostics, simply because they once posed such a tremendous threat to the early Church. I’ve always found them interesting.”

  “That’s because they were so democratic,” Guy added with a laugh. “Go on, tell him. Xavier here is a bit of a heretic himself, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t think so. Unless a heretic is one who works against poverty and social inequality. Then I welcome the title, Guy. Nothing has changed.”

  Lyman leaned across the table toward the priest. Now he knew the reason for the burr which had been pricking at him. The priest was much thinner and older of course, but there was something about his face that reminded him of David Ellison, the Yorkshire vagabond.

  The priest returned Lyman’s stare with a sudden grin. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Mr. Lyman.”

  Lyman shrugged.

  “Perhaps I’m wrong,” Marchelidon continued. “What exactly do you do, if I may ask?”

  “I run a fishing tackle shop in Winchester, outside London.”

  “You don’t seem like a shopkeeper.” Marchelidon tilted the wrist of his right hand and his long narrow fingers closed like a fan.

  “I don’t?” Lyman smiled flatly. “And what about you, Father? Are you from Amiens?”

  “Originally, yes.”

  “Xavier was a fidei donum in Brazil,” Guy said. “A kind of freelance missionary. Twenty years, wasn’t it?”

  “Eighteen. Close enough.”

  “That’s when he became a heretic.”

  “Guy,” Mariane interrupted, pointing at the shopping basket at her feet. “Why don’t you see if there’s anything for dessert.”

  Father Marchelidon smiled at Mariane. “Yes, it was in Brazil,” he said. “But you make it sound much more interesting than it was. After Gutiérrez in Peru, it was easy to embrace the new theology. It became a fashion almost, a hemline. Gutiérrez made it respectable. He articulated. So did Assmann in Brazil. We just understood.”

  “Gnosis?” Koster asked.

  “If you will.” Father Marchelidon laughed and Lyman noticed that his jaw had once been broken, then badly set. An accident, perhaps.

  “Yes, why not?” the priest continued. “Liberation theology is a theology of the people after all, a people crying to be free from the dominance of the few—the rich, the powerful, the elite. We believe in a more democratic Church, a South American Church to address those problems that are peculiar to the region, that they know nothing of in Rome.” He looked embarrassed. “Well,” he said, trying to laugh. “You see. Confessed but unforgiven. I’m sorry.” He glanced up at Guy, who towered over him, his arms crossed.

  “No dessert,” the big man said.

  “Oh, well.”

  “So you returned home to Amiens,” Lyman prompted.

  “I was recalled—let’s put it that way. And when I didn’t come they threatened to withdraw their funding of a school I worked with up in São Luís. But I wouldn’t call it home exactly. Home now will always be Brazil.” He paused, looking around the table. “And what about you, Mr. Lyman? What brings you to Amiens?”

  “On holiday. The Continent by rail. Switzerland’s next, I think.”

  “Are you Catholic?”

  Lyman frowned. “Not much of anything, really. My mother was Catholic. From Dinard, in Brittany. My father was Church of England.”

  “Ah,” Father Marchelidon said, nodding sagely. “Are you married?”

  “Divorced.” Lyman looked down at the table.

  “Any children?”

  “One. A boy. We lost him in the Falklands war nine years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” the priest said quietly, but Lyman knew that he was lying. It was as if he had known about his son already, about the way in which the Exocet had come in low across the waves and ripped into the battleship.

  “So you are one of us,” said Guy. “A pilgrim too.”

  “Guy!” Mariane said, cutting in.

  Father Marchelidon leaned back in his chair and it dawned on Lyman that it was not a knowledge of the facts but a kind of kinship with the circumstances that had led the priest to poke this corner out of all the others Lyman had so carefully concealed. The priest had had this conversation many times before. He had already met his life’s allotment of inquisitive policemen. He had already been interrogated. And more, it was his job to sense the weak points of the human heart, to press against them gently like a blind man fingering a stranger’s face, searching for recognition.

  It was this empathy which gave him strength, as it gave strength to a policeman. It was this knowledge too which made him dangerous, and which had already made his theology of liberation such a spear in the side of the Church.

  Marchelidon had done his job too well. He had understood the peasants of Brazil, their basic needs and fears,
and put them above the needs and fears of the Church. No wonder he had been recalled, Lyman thought. And for the first time he began to understand the power of this latest heresy, and the threat it posed to Rome. It was the same power for which the Gnostic Book of Thomas the Contender had been banned so long ago. And, somehow, it was the power which had slipped a nylon rope around Pontevecchio’s neck.

  He looked at Father Marchelidon and recalled the words which Jacques Tellier had written in his cryptic note: But this I know with certainty—the labyrinth is the real door… And if you understand Amiens, then Chartres will follow. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas will be yours.

  Somehow, the gospels were the answer, the gospels and that cup of gold and precious stones which Thierry had described. But surely, Lyman thought, the cup alone couldn’t be the “wonderful thing” which Pontevecchio had mentioned to his wife before his death. No, it was the gospels which were important. And more than that, it had to be the Gospel of Thomas alone. After all, the Book of Thomas the Contender had already been unearthed by Tellier in Amiens and, according to his note, sold to Pontevecchio. Yet Guy had said the gospels had limited value. There were already other copies in both Greek and Coptic.

  Lyman took another sip of wine. It tasted dusty and complex. It had aged well.

  Father Marchelidon was watching him. Lyman put his glass down, and as his hand came to a stop he suddenly remembered another line which Thierry had written in his prologue to the missal: Its pages bear the oldest Logoi we have seen in Aramaic, predating those in Luke and Matthew.

  The oldest Logoi, Lyman thought. After two thousand years, the words were still killing. Two men had died already: Pontevecchio, and the man with the wing-tipped shoes. How many others had fallen before them? And how many more to come?

  He looked out through the windows at the rooftops of Amiens, the slick wet slate, the dark gray clouds gathering like bulls in the sky above.

  Chapter X

  ROME

  September 16th, 1991

  ARCHBISHOP KAZIMIERZ GRABOWSKI WOKE TO THE sound of church bells ringing in St. Peter’s Square. He opened his eyes and the burden of memory descended on him from the ceiling, from the half-light streaming through the shutters, from the sounds and smells of Rome which every morning set him in the world. He sighed and propped his large frame up on one elbow. Sometimes he felt as if the bells would drive him mad.

  The archbishop swung his feet off the bed. It had been another bad night. His pyjamas were sticking to his back, wet with perspiration. He crossed into the bathroom and peeled them off. As he did so he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. He still looked pretty good for his age. His golf helped there. And he’d lost a lot of weight over the last few months. He smiled grimly, and turned on the hot water in the sink. In the end, he thought, his trimmer figure had been the only good thing to have come out of the Banco Fabiano scandal.

  It was then, as he was reaching for his shaving cream, that he first saw the words on the mirror. He stopped midmovement, trying to sense if he were alone in the apartment. Then he watched the words grow more distinct as the steam from the hot water filled the bathroom. The words read Dottore Vincenze Marone—Rare Books and Manuscripts.

  The archbishop wiped his hand across the mirror, smearing the soap with which the words had been written. The steam vanished underneath his fingers, revealing his own face in the glass, pale and softened by the condensation, desperate.

  A moment later the steam had concealed it once again.

  That afternoon, Archbishop Grabowski sat working in his office near St. Peter’s Square. It was a large airy room, typical of that part of the Holy City, with an eleven-foot ceiling and four tall windows overlooking the piazza. The walls were dotted with paintings depicting scenes from the Old Testament—the flood, the flight of Lot from Sodom, the test of Isaac.

  A bust of Pope Boniface IX stood in one corner. It had been sent to the archbishop as a gift from Cardinal Giovanni Spinelli of Florence at the height of the Fabiano scandal. In truth, Grabowski had never really cared for it. Not only were the features thick and lifeless, but the whole idea had been a bad joke from the very start.

  Cardinal Spinelli was a descendant of Niccolò Spinelli, the fourteenth-century advisor to the Visconti court who had written a bitter polemic history of papal power during the pontificate of Boniface IX. Though nominally successful as a history, Spinelli’s work had really been a warning to the Church against the perils of material wealth, and even after six hundred years it was still speaking out, however indirectly, through this artless statue. For some reason the archbishop had never seen fit to remove it. Indeed, in some ways he enjoyed the reminder.

  There was a knock on the door, the archbishop grunted an acknowledgment, and a young priest entered quietly.

  Grabowski looked up over his glasses. “What now?” he said. “More supplicants?”

  The priest approached, his right hand extended with the white line of a business card straight as a razor blade between his fingers. “I told him you were busy, your Excellency, but he insisted.”

  The archbishop took the card and placed it on his desk. It read Dottore Vincenze Marone—Rare Books and Manuscripts. “How long has he been waiting?” he said.

  “Only a few minutes, Your Excellency.”

  “I see.” Grabowski looked out through the window. St. Peter’s Square was almost empty, but it had been a cold week and the tourist rate had fallen off. Then he turned back and smiled. “Well, Charles,” he said. “‘Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.’ Send Dottore Marone in.”

  As soon as the priest had disappeared, Grabowski reached forward slowly and opened a small drawer in his desk. So Marone had come already, he thought, a stranger for the strange name he had read that morning on his bathroom mirror. How the name had come to be there was of less concern to him than what it meant, for Grabowski had found such messages before. They belonged to a part of his life that he had only just begun to put behind him. They meant that the weeks and months which had slipped by without event had only been a false spring after all. He pulled a pocket tape recorder from the open drawer and checked the cassette. Then he pushed the red recording button and replaced the machine in his desk, closing the drawer just as the antechamber doors swung open.

  The man who called himself Marone was dressed in a gray, double-breasted suit with a navy blue silk tie. He was well over six feet tall, with an unusually high forehead which would have made his eyes seem small and insignificant were it not for their cold, almost reptilian gaze. He walked boldly across the room, without the customary deference which most expressed when entering the office of the chairman of the IOR. Grabowski moved around his desk to meet him, and Marone bowed, snatching up the hand of the archbishop and pressing the heavy ring seal to his lips. “Your Excellency,” he said without expression. “You do me honor.”

  There were two small chairs before the archbishop’s desk and Grabowski pointed to them. “Please sit down,” he said, as he stepped around his desk. “Thank you, Father. That will be all.”

  Archbishop Grabowski waited for the priest to close the doors behind him before he sat down himself, hooked his fingers together, and dropped them at the very center of his desk. Marone smiled.

  “I have come, Your Excellency,” he said, “because I have heard you are a man of discriminating taste and judgment.”

  “Cut the crap, Marone,” the archbishop answered, leaning forward. “If that’s your name, which I doubt. You’ve got the heel of Scarcella’s boot stamped all over your face. It didn’t take him long to bribe his way out of Switzerland, did it?”

  Marone ignored him. “I have come about a certain manuscript which a client of mine is planning to put up for auction.”

  Grabowski remained silent, simply appraising Marone’s face. This one was articulate compared to most of Scarcella’s messengers. He didn’t just talk with his hands.

  “Understanding your natural interests in this
affair, my client is willing—generously, I believe—to let you make the first offer.”

  “What manuscript are you talking about, Marone?”

  The stranger shifted in his chair. “Surely your cousin, Joseph Koster, has kept you abreast of his latest findings.”

  “My cousin?” The archbishop unlocked his fingers. “What findings? What does Joseph Koster have to do with anything? I haven’t seen him in over twenty years.”

  Marone nodded. “As you wish,” he said after a pause. “Then I must assume you are not aware of his work in France for Signor Robinson.”

  It was only with these words that Grabowski remembered the letters he had recently received from his cousin in New York. They had mentioned something about France, about a book, but the archbishop received so many letters; he had barely glanced at them. Joseph was his Aunt Martha’s grandson. The archbishop had never really known him, except as a young boy during the early 60’s, when Joseph’s father had played with the Roman Philharmonic. But even then he had only seen him once or twice. Grabowski barely knew Aunt Martha’s sons, let alone her grandsons.

  He smiled at Marone cryptically. Perhaps it did not matter. Marone did not seem to know a great deal either, or else he would have never broached the subject as he had. “What about his work?” Grabowski said.

  “A prudent man, Your Excellency, would realize the importance of this manuscript, and that it would be extremely uncomfortable for the Church should it prove to be as old as it appears.” Marone shifted forward, reaching for an Alitalia bag which he had placed on the floor before him. He removed a package wrapped in Christmas paper and placed it on the desk.

  “As an act of good faith, and as a display of authenticity, my client has entrusted me to leave this package here with you. In it you will find an early Hebrew version of the Gnostic Book of Thomas the Contender which dates back to approximately A.D. 100. It was discovered at the Amiens cathedral some months ago. We received it from a dealer named Jacques Tellier, an acquaintance of your friend Salvatore Pontevecchio.” He paused, scanning the archbishop’s face, but Grabowski displayed no emotion. “The package also contains,” Marone continued, “a copy of another document discovered at the same time. It is a kind of prayer book or missal used in certain proto-Masonic rituals during the Middle Ages.” Marone pushed the little package across the desk. “Go ahead, Your Excellency. Please, open it.”