“You can’t be too careful, Fitz.” Hal glanced back toward the plaza. “A lot of these folks are more than a few bricks shy of a full load.”
Dan nodded. “I’m aware of that.” He thought of the couple of occasions when some of Loaves and Fishes’ “guests” got violent, mostly screaming and shouting and pushing, but one had gone so far as to pull a knife during an argument over who would sit by a window. “And I’m careful.”
“Good. I’m sure there’s a place in heaven for you, but I don’t want you taking it just yet.”
“Heaven’s not guaranteed for anybody, Hal. Sometimes I wonder if there is such a place.”
Hal was looking at him strangely. “You?”
He didn’t want to get into anything heavy so he grinned. “Just kidding. But how about lunch? It’s the least I can do.” He pointed to Nino’s on the corner of St. Mark’s Place. “Slice of Sicilian?”
“I’ll take a rain check.” Hal extended his hand. “Got to run. But I want to get together with you again after you’ve read the translation. See if you can make any sense of it.”
“I’ll do my best. And thanks again. Thanks a million. Nice to own something this old—and know it’s one of a kind.”
Hal frowned.”Not one of a kind, I’m afraid. Shortly before I left, an Israeli collector came in with another scroll identical to this one. The parchment and the writing carbon dated the same as yours—about two thousand years apart.”
Dan shrugged. “Okay. So it’s not one of a kind. It’s still a great gift, and I’ll treasure it. But right now I’ve got to get back to the shelter for the lunch line.”
Hal waved and started down the sidewalk. “See you next week, okay? For lunch. I should have my appetite back by then.”
Dan waved and headed back to St. Joe’s, wondering how many these weird scrolls were floating around the Middle East.
She had been dead for two years and more, yet her body showed no trace of corruption. The brother had kept her death a secret. He and the others feared that Ananus or Herod Agrippa or even the Hellenists might make use of her remains to further their various ends.
--from the Glass scroll
Rockefeller Museum translation
FIVE
Ramat Gan, Israel
Chaim Kesev stared westward from the picture window in the living room of Tulla Szobel’s sprawling hilltop home. He could see the lights of Tel Aviv—the IBM tower, the waterfront hotels—and the darkness of the Mediterranean beyond. The glass reflected the room behind him. A pale room, a small pale world—beige rug, beige walls, beige drapes, pale abstract paintings, low beige furniture that seemed designed for something other than human comfort, chrome and glass tables and lamps.
Kesev wrinkled his nose. With all the money lavished on this room, he thought, the least you’d think she could do was find a way to remove the cigarette stink. The place smelled like a tavern at cleanup time.
He had arrived here unannounced tonight, shown Miss Szobel his Shin Bet identification, and all but pushed his way in. Now he waited while she procured the scroll from a room in some other quarter of the house.
The scroll...he’d begun a low-key search for it immediately after its theft. A subtle search. Not I’m looking for a scroll recently stolen from a cave in the Judean Wilderness. Have you seen or heard of such a thing? That kind of search would close doors rather than open them. Instead, Kesev had extended feelers into the antiquities market—legitimate and underground—saying he was a collector interested in purchasing first-century manuscripts, and that money was no object.
Perhaps his feelers hadn’t been subtle enough. Perhaps the seller he sought preferred more tried-and-true channels of commerce. Whatever the reason, he was offered many items over the years, but none were what he sought.
Then, just last year, his feelers caught ripples of excitement from the manuscript department at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. A unique first century scroll had been brought in for verification. As he homed in on the scent, word came that the scroll turned out to be a fake. So he’d veered off and continued his search elsewhere.
And then, just last month, whispers of another fake, identical to the first—the same disjointed story, written in the same Aramaic form of Hebrew, on an ancient parchment.
Something in those whispers teased Kesev. The scant details he could glean about the fakes tantalized him. He investigated and learned that the first scroll had been brought in by an American who had since returned home. But the second...a wealthy woman from a Tel Aviv suburb had brought that in, and taken it home in a huff when informed that she’d been duped.
Kesev was standing in her living room now.
He heard her footsteps.
“Here, Mr. Kesev,” said a throaty voice. Her Ivrit carried a barely noticeable Eastern European accent. “I believe this is what you want.”
He turned slowly, hiding his anticipation. Tulla Szobel was in her mid fifties, blonde hair, reed thin, prematurely wrinkled, and dressed in a beige knit dress the color of her walls. A cigarette dangled from her lips. She held a lucite case between her hands.
Kesev took the case and carried it to the glass-and-chrome coffee table. Without asking permission, he lifted the lid and removed the scroll.
“Careful!” she said, hovering over him.
He ignored her. He uncoiled a foot or so of the scroll and began reading—
Then stopped. This wasn’t the scroll. This looked like the scroll, and some of it read like the scroll, but the writing, the penmanship was all wrong.
“They were right,” he said, nodding slowly. “This is a fake. A clumsy fake.”
Miss Szobel sniffed. “I don’t need you to tell me that. The Rockefeller Museum—”
“Where did you get this?” Kesev said, rerolling the scroll.
She puffed furiously on her cigarette. “Why...I...picked it up in a street bazaar.”
“Really?”
They all said that. Amazing. Israel seemed full of lucky collectors who were forever happening on priceless—or potentially priceless—artifacts in street stalls, and purchasing them for next to nothing from vendors who had no idea of their true worth.
“You must take me to him.”
“I wish I could,” she said. “I’ve been looking for him myself, trying to get my money back. But he seems to have vanished into thin air.”
“You are lying,” Kesev said evenly, replacing the lucite lid and looking up at her.
She stepped back as if he’s spit at her. “How dare you!” She pointed a shaking finger toward her front door. “I want you out of—”
“If I leave without the name that I seek I will return within the hour with a search warrant and a search team, and we will comb this house inch by inch until we turn up more forgeries from this mysterious source.”
Kesev couldn’t back up a word of that threat, but he knew the specter of a search of the premises would strike terror into the heart of any serious antiquities collector. They all dipped into the black market now and then. Some bought there almost exclusively. If Miss Szobel followed true to form, a search might result in the seizure of half her collection; maybe more.
Miss Szobel’s pointing arm faltered and fell to her side.
“Wh-why? On what grounds? Why does Domestic Intelligence care—?”
“Oh, it’s not just the Shit Bet. The Mossad is involved too.”
She paled further. “The Mossad?”
“Yes. We have reason to believe that these scrolls are merely the latest in an ongoing scheme to sell worthless fakes to wealthy collectors and funnel the money to Palestine terrorist organizations.”
Amazing how facile a liar he’d become. It hadn’t always been this way. As a younger man he’d insisted on speaking nothing but the truth. But that youth, like truth, was long gone, swallowed by time and tragedy.
He sighed and rose to his feet. “Please do not leave the house, Miss Szobel. I will return in—”
“Wait!” She motioned him back toward the couch. “I had no idea terrorists were involved. Of course I’ll tell you where I bought it.”