‘Your Excellency, please ... you misunderstand.’ Aharoni sensed the bishop’s anger. It frightened him, here in this confined space, with so little light.
‘I think you should leave.’
What...?’
‘I think you should get out of here. This is a holy place. I don’t expect you to understand that. But I do. You’ve no right to be here. No right at all.’
But that was no good. If the Jew left, he would only bring more back with him. They ran this city now. They would just march into God’s inner sanctum and claim it for their own. He hated them for their self-righteousness, for their sanctimonious possession of the land where his saviour had walked. A stiffnecked people, that’s what God had called them. And now, here they were, about to lay godless hands on the mortal remains of God’s son.
‘I think we should both leave,’ said Aharoni. The Italian was over-reacting to their discovery. Perhaps it was understandable. Aharoni, who wasn’t even a practising Jew, let alone a Christian, had been deeply moved by what they had found. He appreciated its emotional charge. That was why he wanted the whole thing handled properly, before the wreckers and sloganizers and opportunists had a chance to move in. With a shudder, he remembered how an American company had offered to market pieces from the wreck of the Titanic as paperweights. What would Jesus’s bones fetch on the Stock Exchange?
He took a step forward and put a hand on the big man’s arm. Migliau grabbed his wrist and pulled him towards himself.
Tour Messiah came and you crucified him. And now you want to turn his bones into some sort of political toy, something your politicians can use to bargain with. You...’
‘Please, I don’t want some sort of religious argument with you. That’s not my problem.’
All his life, Bishop Migliau had been waiting for this moment. He had never doubted that there would be a tomb, never doubted that he would be the one to find it. But in his imagination, he had always been alone at the moment of discovery. Aharoni had never figured in his calculations before this moment.
‘Please God,’ he thought, ‘tell me what to do. You have guided me here, you have given me this honour. I need your help. I can’t do this alone.’
He looked round, at Aharoni, at the tomb. His whole life had been rewritten here, on a limestone box in an unlit sepulchre - an imperfect inscription by an unknown hand. In that moment, he knew what he had to do. What God wanted him to do. It was God’s will. The Jew wanted to tell the unbelieving world of this place. He could not be allowed to do that. God would not let him.
Migliau looked once into Aharoni’s eyes.
‘Forgive me,’ he whispered. But he knew that God had already forgiven him.
He pushed the Israeli hard. Aharoni stumbled backwards, losing his balance. He tripped and fell, striking his head hard on the sharp corner of the middle sarcophagus. He did not even cry out. There was no time between push and crushing blow, between fall and final agony. Death was instantaneous. Blood streamed across the white stone, bright and gleaming.
Migliau watched the red stain spread and listened to his heart beating in the stillness. He felt the weight of the sepulchre all about him, and the air moving heavily through it without sound. He heard the rustle of shadowed wings again, harsh above the beating of his heart. Aharoni lay slumped where he had fallen, a scarlet pool forming beneath him among shadows on the floor.
He lifted the lamp and shone it on the coffins. Aharoni lay unmoving at the Saviour’s feet. The blood had stopped flowing. Migliau turned and looked at the little opening through which they had entered. There was plenty of time. It would not be too difficult to put the entrance slab back as it had been. He could push it along the floor, up into the first tomb, then tilt it back into the opening.
The generators would provide their harsh lighting again in the morning. No one would ever find the break in the wall. No one would ever know that another tomb existed. It had remained hidden all these years, it would remain hidden now.
In three days they would rebury the bones of the dead and seal the tomb again. The bulldozers and cement mixers would return to work. Houses would be built, and shops, and car parks. Next year, he would buy the entire development through one of his family’s holding companies. He had come into his true inheritance at last.
THREE
Trinity College Dublin October 1968
Her name was Francesca. His friend Liam had told him during Commons one evening. Francesca Contarini, an Italian. Her family lived in Venice, in a golden palace, so Liam said. With servants and painted rooms and a private gondola to go to Mass in. She had been sent to Dublin to improve her English, which was already fluent, and to study English and Italian literature. He had been madly in love with her for over two weeks now.
Patrick Canavan had arrived in Dublin five months earlier. He was eighteen, American, and in search of a heritage. Twenty years before, almost to the day, in the summer of 1948, his parents had said goodbye to the city and set off for a new life in America. They had sent him back alone, a sort of ambassador to the past.
He had found its frontiers and outposts everywhere: in the names of streets and theatres; in the river by night, ripening and spreading like a long, thin stain through the heart of the sleeping city; in the voices of beggars on O’Connell Bridge, young pale-faced women with paler babies wrapped in shawls, selling their poverty for the price of a wheaten farl.
The summer had passed like a dream. He had stayed and got drunk on Guinness and cheap red wine, and late one night in August found himself on the beach at Dalkey, kissing his first girl and dreaming that he had found his roots. At eighteen, the Celtic twilight seemed full of promise.
The girl had left two weeks later. Kissing on a beach and holding hands while the moon swept over a white sea had been fine enough for the time of year, she said. But those other things he was suggesting would only lead them both as sure as crikey to the fires of hell. He had yet to learn that virgins are Ireland’s oldest, largest and best-organized professional group.
In spite of his disappointment - and perhaps even because of it - he decided to stay. The city spoke to him in whispers of things he barely understood. It revealed itself to him slowly, nervously, in quiet, distracted gestures, in unexpected moments of intimacy. Suddenly, Brooklyn seemed a universe away, a noisy place full of noisy people.
Once, on a long afternoon as summer drew to its close, he lay on the cricket pitch at the back of Trinity and watched a student fly a red kite against a pale blue sky. The moment entranced him: at eighteen, a kite in the wind can seem as substantial as a kiss. At the beginning of September, he enrolled at the College to study Semitic languages.
Autumn was turning to winter now, and an elaborate stillness lay across the grey expanse of Trinity’s inner courts. Inside the 1937 Reading Room, a dim, academic light fell across endless rows of books. He sat two tables away from her, glancing up from time to time to catch a furtive glimpse of her face. Even when he looked away again, pretending to read, her image swam across the page: long, dark hair falling in a stream against her shoulder, grey eyes opening in the book-warm half-light, small white teeth pressed against her lower lip, the slope of tiny breasts against thin fabric.
Strictly speaking, he should not have been here but in the main library. The Reading Room was reserved for literature students, and it had no books on his own subject. But a large part of Ireland’s attraction for him lay in the country’s literature, which he had begun to discover. He had already become a regular theatregoer, attending performances at the Abbey, the Peacock and the Gate. On one occasion, he’d travelled up to Belfast to see a trilogy of plays by Yeats, directed by Mary O’Malley at the tiny Lyric Theatre.