by Elik Katzav
Crimes of Spirit:
Haunted Blood
Elik Katzav
Copyright © 2018 Elik Katzav
All rights reserved; No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the author.
Translation from the Hebrew: Guri Arad
Contact: [email protected]
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
About the Author
Message from the Author
Part One
Nazareth, May 2013
Chapter 1
Father Conroy raises his tea cup and takes a small sip. He seems heavier than in the photo in the file I had received back at the station. In addition, his red hair is beginning to turn gray. He watches the people all around us nervously, as every now and then someone glanced at this priest, sitting with another man in the middle of an intimate café.
His green eyes seem sunken and weary, the eyes of a man who has not slept well for quite some time.
Father Conroy came to us via the Nazareth Police. He had told them about a number of suspicions transactions at the local Synagogue Church.
- So how are you enjoying life in Nazareth? Must be quite different from what you were accustomed to back in Ireland, eh?”
Father Conroy gives me a faint smile. “It certainly is different,” he answers in a heavy Irish accent. “The weather in particular, but one gets used to it, you know; I’ve been in Israel for over a decade now.”
- Yes, so I read. And you’ve been in Nazareth since then, right?
“I have been in charge of managing the funds of the Church of the Annunciation and Synagogue Church from the very first days of my arrival in Israel. I asked to come here, to the cradle of Christianity. This country holds the history of my spiritual world.
“You must understand, I am taking quite a risk making this move. I could lose my position at the church if they were to find out I revealed our internal affairs to outsiders, to the police.”
- I guarantee you that everything will be handled discreetly. This isn’t the first time I’ve worked on an undercover investigation. Everything is being carried out at the highest level, and if there’s any problem, I assure you we shall do our utmost to resolve it in a quiet, discreet way.
The clergyman goes silent for a few seconds, as though debating with himself as to how he should proceed. Turns out priests have their own qualms about reporting on their superiors. Eventually, he seems to acquiesce and begins to speak.
“As I’ve said, I have been at the church for over a decade now, and Father Gaynes has been at the head of the church for over twenty years.
“Father Gaynes’ health has deteriorated considerably in recent years. You know, the usual things that appear with old age. He had to use a cane, then a walker, his eyesight got worse, almost to the point of blindness. All those hours of reading and studying have taken their toll.
“Everyone at the order assumed his days in office were numbered, whether he stepped down by choice or whether he would die before he got the chance to do so. Either way, we began preparing for the day after he was gone.
“Everything changed about six months ago. One Sunday morning, Father Gaynes stood up in the middle of Mass and joined in, singing in a clear voice, something he had not done for years. We were all confounded. He stood up all by himself, walked all by himself and conversed with the same clarity he had exhibited years earlier.
“It was a real miracle by any standard,” Father Conroy pauses, taking another sip from his tea.
“At the end of that Mass, we all rushed over to him, to ask how he was and to witness the miracle for ourselves. It was then that Father Gaynes turned to us and explained that in the course of prayer, the Lord’s angel spoke to him and said he was highly righteous, but there was still one more charge for him to complete, a sacred task, for the sake of which his body was revived. Nothing stands in the way of God’s will!
“This was one of our happiest days ever,” Conroy says, nodding his head as he contemplates his tea. “We spent that afternoon praying in gratitude to the Lord for returning our beloved Father to us.
“In the days following that miracle,” he continued, playing with the spoon, “everything seemed possible, as though the spirit of the Lord was with us in person. Father Gaynes was up from the crack of dawn to the wee hours of the night. He was always vital and alert, which was all the more extraordinary considering he was in his nineties.
“Everything seemed to be going amazingly. A few brothers reported the miracle in their respective social media pages and received thousands of heartfelt responses and reactions from across the globe.
“Attendance increased fivefold, with everyone coming to church in droves especially to witness the miracle in their own eyes, as well as per chance receive the blessed Father’s benediction in person.
“There were even murmurs of congratulations from the Vatican itself. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
“The problems began about a month after the miracle happened,” he halts his story for a moment. “The blessed Father stopped seeing the people who came to meet him. He began keeping to himself more and more, and his number of visitors naturally dropped accordingly. The man they were hoping to see wouldn’t meet them. The story began to die down and it seemed life was resuming its normal course.
“Father Gaynes did not elaborate concerning the mission the angel had tasked him, and we all assumed this was some sort of moment of enlightenment focused on worshiping the Lord and His son more devoutly and taking part in the life of our church. Nevertheless, we were wrong.
“Father Gaynes was acting like a much younger man. He was walking without the aid of a cane, and even seemed to be hopping at times. In and of itself, there was nothing unusual about his demeanor, aside from divine intervention, of course. One day, we noticed he was talking to himself as he was walking through the garden in the Church of the Annunciation. At first, we thought he was singing hymns. A few of us were close by, so they noticed his speech sounded as though he was speaking with someone else. They heard questions and answers, explanations and so on.
“As we returned to normal, more or less, Father Gaynes began missing prayers. He called on some of the p
riests for personal chats, conversations whose content they later refused to disclose. Over time, those priests brought in additional men, outside the church, for talks with Father Gaynes. After about a month, it seemed the church consisted of two camps: those in whom he had confided and those in whom he had not.
“The priests the Father had confided in were now keeping a different schedule than before. They would show up for afternoon and evening prayers, but did not stay at the church during the night at all, and they never attended morning prayers.
“And then, the bills started coming in. It turned out Father Gaynes had acquired construction materials, claiming they were to be used for rebuilding the church. He also hired professionals, whom we never saw around the church.
“When I tried to ask him about these expenses, which were quite considerable at times, he dismissed me, saying, ‘I have no time for these earthly things. The work we’re doing here is designed to preserve our divine soul!’ He made me approve all the expenses without any further explanations.”
Father Conroy takes another pause as he glances into his half empty tea cup. “When the expenses got too high,” he resumes his story, “I tried to contact the Vatican in the hope they’d send someone from the outside to look into Father Gaynes’ activity, but he must have had his contacts with the right people at the Vatican, so he received some notice, alerting him of my letter.
“He summoned me to his room at Synagogue Church. When I arrived, he was sitting in his chair, writing in some large book. Two men were standing on either side, men who were not part of the church, bodyguards of sorts.
“He raised his head, and when he saw me, his face turned red and it was as though he was foaming at the mouth while he was shouting at me. He threatened me, saying I should never dare to go over his head, and that if I were to continue spreading my lies to anyone, he’d have me thrown out of the church and that I will be made to suffer for my conduct.
“All of the sudden, when he was done yelling, he calmed down, color returned to his cheeks and he was even smiling. He told me, ‘I don’t understand why you’re trying to stop us, when all we do is for the glory of Kingdom Come. We are making sure the soul of each and every one of us reaches heaven.’ He asked me not to be annoyed with him for my not being part of the process, and still to not try and stand in the way.
“Father Gaynes then added, ‘The Lord chose me and let me choose the men who would accompany me on my righteous path,’ he chuckled in a low voice and delved back in the book in front of him, as though I no longer existed.
“I remember,” Conroy says, tapping the edges of his cup, “that I had assumed the meeting was over, so I got up to leave the room. When I pushed my chair back, Father Gaynes raised his eyes from the book, as though he had not just seen me there in his room before. He smiled, asked me how I was doing and asked why I came to see him at that late hour. His astonishment was visible, for he immediately answered his own question, ‘Oh yes, that nasty business with the expenses. Do not concern yourself, my friend. It is all under control. The expenses will be over and done with soon.’ He then leaned back over his book. I remained in my spot for a few seconds longer, trying to digest everything that had just happened. Only then did I notice the book the father was reading. I had only a few seconds, but it seemed he was reading a book written in a language akin to Assyrian characters. This realization shook me almost as much as the father’s aggressive speech a few moments earlier.”
- You mean to say Father Gaynes could not read Assyrian?
“Precisely,” Conroy continues before I get the chance to ask him the obvious question.
“A few months prior to this, he brought me a page written in Assyrian to translate for him, since he could not do it himself.
“I’ll have you know that throughout all the churches in Nazareth, I am the go-to person to have ancient texts translated. It’s a sort of hobby of mine.
“I have been fascinated by lost texts and languages from a very tender age. Indeed, this does not have any bearing on Christianity, but history has a great deal to teach us, so I studied ancient languages. It came easy to me. I could peruse any text, and the letters would simply present themselves to me in words I could understand, so I grasped the meaning quite plainly, even when it was in a dialect I wasn’t familiar with. Eventually, I was able to read manuscripts with very little effort.
“After the encounter with Father Gaynes that evening,” Father Conroy returns to his story, “I decided not to pursue proper channels again in my attempt to resolve the situation, and contact the Israeli Police.
“I made several attempts here in town, but they only seemed to be giving me the runaround every time, until one of the investigators who sat with me homed in on the story about the group surrounding Father Gaynes. He kept reiterating that this seemed to him like the activity of some cult, so he must turn the matter over the proper authorities, and here you are.”
I listen to Father Conroy patiently. My unit, the Counter Cult Squad, investigates cults, tracks them and saves people who had been brainwashed, as well as attempting to prevent even worse cases, of abuse, rape, all sorts of exploitation, even human sacrifice, that can be part of the cult’s doctrine. Nevertheless, I regard this case as merely indirectly related to the issue of cults.
- Seems to me, “I told Aharon, the Squad Commander, after my meeting with Father Conroy, “that the Nazareth District Police have neither the desire nor the patience to meddle in the church business in town, so they prefer to get rid of this case and throw it as far away from them as possible, all the way to us, without offending anyone or anything of consequence.
My commander Aharon, who is already familiar with my mantra that ‘religion is merely a mechanism designed to extract money from people under the promise of redemption, which will never come, for there is no God, no retribution, no reward. We are all going to be food for worms, regardless of creed, color or gender,’ nodded when I gave him my two cents on this case, and said, “Chances are you are right, David, but we are here to carry our missions out, regardless of organizational politics. Go up north and try not to step on too many toes.”
Chapter 2
Father Conroy arranges for me to do maintenance work at the church, so I spend the week following our meeting mostly cleaning, replacing burnt light bulbs, and even selling carved wooden figurines to the faithful, who take for granted that those statuettes possess some power. Little do they know, that in storage, the church has thousands of them, sanctified, as it were, by Chinese workers.
My position enables me to mainly carry out observations at the church, observing Father Gaynes and his band of followers. It seems that Father Gaynes’ inner circle did possess the attributes of a cult. The members, part of whom were clergy and the rest men outside the church, meet almost every evening at one of the church’s crypts for group prayers and to listen to the Father.
A new state-of-the-art lock secures the room from being opened for most of the day. The single time they open the doors, only to lock up behind them immediately after that, is during their scheduled meetings. Father Conroy could not be of any assistance to me in terms of obtaining the key. Turns out the lock was changed shortly after Father Gaynes received his benediction, and he’s the only person in possession of the key to that room.
I did manage to sneak a quick peek this one time. I stood in the hallway leading to that room during the time they usually gathered and switched on the lights. I got a chance to see this large topographic map hanging on the wall. It had various multicolored markers on it.
Sneaking into the meetings without being noticed is impossible, so, after consulting with Aharon, we decide I should try tailing the priests as they leave the church in the evening.
It did no good. They tend to split and vanish into the shops in the city’s small market streets, as though they were well trained to shake surveillance.
I ask Aharon for backup,
so Na’ama arrives in Nazareth that very evening.
Na’ama came to the Counter Cult Squad about a month after me, straight from her investigator’s training course. I was already familiar with the police, having arrived at CCS after an uneasy time due to an internal affairs investigation that nearly shut me down as a member of the force, so I already heard about CCS. I learned it was a dead end, the last stop, with no chance of promotion, seeing as this unit was built especially for Chief Aharon Hanan and consisted of two investigators in addition to himself.
Aharon was a gifted and experienced police officer with a promising career, but his whole world had come crashing down when his son was murdered by a gang of teenagers who thought devil worship and sacrificing another boy would get them somewhere. It landed them in prison for life.
From that day on, Aharon became the nemesis of all cults. He pursued cult cases. Whenever he would hear of suspicion of cult activity going on anywhere in Israel, he asked to be assigned there. He pressured a friend of his, chief of the International Crime Investigations Unit. Their friendship dates back to the time they were in investigator’s course together.
As for Na’ama, she made the fatal error of mentioning to the recruitment officer at the end of the investigator’s course that her favorite course during her criminology degree was “Introduction to Cults Worldwide”. She neglected to mention she liked that course because it was the last course on her academic week, right before the weekend, so it symbolized the temporary respite from school. The recruitment officer was quick to note the preference and fill the vacancy, and so Na’ama found herself very far from home—an affluent suburb north of Tel Aviv.
I remember when she first showed up at the unit, along with her personnel file and recruitment papers. When she saw our office at the end of the basement floor, far from the madding police crowd, it didn’t take a great investigative mind to figure out the depth of her disappointment.
Two months later, in the course of one of our assignments together, she owned up in confidence to the fact she joined the police thinking it would be thrilling, full of adrenaline, something her secure and boring suburban life did not consist of. She certainly never thought she’d end up being assigned to the closest thing the police have to a dump. “It’s not what I think now,” she quickly added, “Now, I couldn’t ask for a place with such a real impact on people’s lives,” she smiled, the sort of contagious smile you cannot help smiling back at.
