The 13 th tribe if-1 Page 6

  “It is,” Oliver said. “I’ll show you how to use it.”

  Tyler smiled up at his father. Jagger checked his watch. He said, “Go for it. I’ll make my rounds and swing back in a little while.”

  He stood and ran his fingers around the inside of his waistband to tighten his shirt. The stream of tourists had vanished from the front of the excavation site. He turned to see the last of them struggling up the mountain. The peak was out of sight, beyond the first towering slabs of rock.

  At the place where Moses had encountered God now stood a tiny chapel. The monks had told Jagger that under the chapel’s floor, in the surface of the stone mountain, were the perfect imprints of two knees, left there by Moses as he knelt before God.

  In the pit, Oliver was gently scraping the potsherd with the chopstick as Tyler watched, waiting for his turn.

  “And, Ty?” Jagger said. “If it’s poop, don’t bring it home.”

  [15]

  Sunlight reflected off the rippling water and played against the room’s arched ceiling like electrical currents. Reclining in a poolside lounge chair, Philippe Gerard blew smoke into the air, adding to the illusion that he was in a dream, just floating in clouds and waiting to wake up. If only…

  He had never thought his carefully constructed scheme to get rich would fall apart as suddenly as it had done. But like a house of cards, once the first fell, the rest followed.

  Above him, the imitation lightning storm dissipated. He reached down to a box of tennis balls and tossed one into the pool, restarting the sun’s reflected dance.

  While it had lasted, his empire building had worked like the hand of God, relentless and unseen but for the things it left in its wake. It had built the lavish mansion around him; given him friends who controlled countries and starred in blockbuster movies; funded vacation homes, cars, global travel-everything he’d ever dreamed of owning and doing. But now that everyone knew the money had flowed out of retirement accounts and trust funds, diminishing them to near nothing, not only were the friends gone and the bank accounts frozen, but Philippe was days away from being sentenced to decades in prison.

  He flipped the cigarette into the pool. He would miss this place, its opulence and proximity to the opera houses and nightclubs. The sunlight danced on the ceiling, calming him. At least that, the sunlight, he would not miss, because he was taking it with him. Different walls, different water, but equally beautiful, equally tranquil. He had no intention of ever seeing the gray drabness of a prison cell. Years ago he had purchased a villa in the resort town of Yalikavak, on Turkey’s Bodrum Peninsula. Panoramic views of the Aegean Sea, a private beach, rooms with glass walls that levered up to let in the warm sea breezes.

  His mother had been Turkish and had always insisted that he maintain citizenship in her native country. Now her conceit seemed providential. With Turkey’s notoriously rigid extradition laws, he was a short car ride and private flight away from leaving his troubles behind.

  Jacquelyn and the kids were already in Yalikavak, preparing for his arrival. He’d finished tying up loose ends with just enough time for one last meditation by the pool before the car came to whisk him away. He picked up the pack and tapped out another cigarette.

  A loud rapping on glass made his fingers fumble, and the smoke fell to the tiled floor. He jerked his head around to see a figure at one of the French doors. At that angle, the pane’s many bevels prevented a clear view. Only a journalist would be so bold as to broach the walls and gates around his property and make his way around back after receiving no answer at the front door.

  “Go away!” he yelled.

  More rapping, loud and sustained.

  He sighed and rose out of the lounge chair. He pulled his robe closed and tied the belt, then picked up the revolver that had been under his leg. Holding it behind him, he approached the doors. A beautiful woman smiled at him from the other side. Long black hair, finely chiseled cheekbones and nose, exotic dark eyes-pretty enough to be the on-camera talent for any number of news agencies. But she was less modestly dressed than the ones who’d been shoving microphones in his face recently: tight black slacks, what appeared to be a matching bodice that accentuated her hourglass figure. A long black trench coat, open in front, fell below her knees. He glanced past her, saw no one else, no cameramen or sound guys lurking behind a topiary.

  Hope goosed his heart. A fan, maybe? A going-away gift from one of his attorneys? He stopped in front of the door, only thin panes of glass between him and what he now realized was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Perhaps thirty-five, she was one of those rare wonders whose appearance had obviously refined with age.

  He shook his head. “No interviews,” he said.

  She pouted and said, “Do I look like I’m here to interview you?”

  Behind his back, his finger slid over the trigger. His other hand unbolted the door, and he pulled it open. A breeze pushed her scent to him, overpowering the pool house’s chlorine and tobacco. It confused his imagination-not altogether unpleasant, but dusty and old, with a touch of sweetness, an orchid ground into dirt. “What do you want?” he said. “This is private-”

  Her hand came out of the trench coat pocket, holding a piece of paper, which she unfolded with the same hand. He saw a printout of a newspaper article, his face prominently displayed. She looked at it, then at him. “You’re more handsome in person,” she said.

  He fought a smile. “What is this? Who are you?”

  Her features hardened, as if solidifying into a statue-just as beautiful, but unattainable now, someone else’s vision of beauty cast forever in stone. “Justice,” she said.

  “What?” He began to pull the gun around. Someone slapped it out of his hand. He spun. A man glared at him with wild eyes, a big crazy grin. Twin white wires snaked from a bulge in his shirt pocket to his ears. Midtwenties, short-cropped hair, patchy facial fur: Philippe immediately pegged him as a punk and realized the situation had exploded into something horrible. The young man lifted a flat blade, replacing half his face with the reflected image of Philippe’s stunned expression. Squiggles of blood cracked the image like veins through marble.

  Philippe looked down at his gun on the floor and saw his hand still clutching it. Blood pumped out of the stump of his wrist. For the briefest moment, all he could think about was how sharp the knife must be to slice through flesh and bone so easily. He reeled back and felt a sharp pain in his lower back and the solid form of the woman pushing against him.

  The punk’s blade flashed toward him.

  When it was over, Nevaeh gazed down at the bloody corpse.

  Phin bobbed up and down on the balls of his feet, absently shaking blood off his blade. He tugged out his earbuds and let them dangle over his shoulder. “Like a cold glass of water in a desert,” he said. He bent, dipped two fingers into a pool of blood, and held them under his nose. He stopped fidgeting long enough to cast a puzzled expression at her. “What’s wrong?”

  Staring at the body, she said, “I just keep thinking, This is it. This is the one.” She looked into Phin’s eyes. “But it never is.”

  “Someday,” he said, his head nodding like a bobblehead. “He can’t ignore us forever.”

  “Can’t he?”

  With that she spun around, sending her hair sailing behind her like a cape, and strode through the backyard toward the gate.

  [16]

  “You see on this page,” Gheronda said with more excitement than should be legal in a man his age, “the artist put a representation of each of the four evangelists in the corners.” Under his cotton-gloved finger was a colorful and intricate illustration of an angel. “This one is Matthew.” He pointed to a lion: “Mark.” An ox: “Luke. And the eagle is John.”

  Tyler stood beside him, in front of the table on which the thirteenth-century book lay. He held his hands up like a surgeon stepping into an operating theater and continuously flapped them, making his oversized gloves wobble like ghosts.

  Beth s
tood on the other side of Tyler, rubbing his back. She could tell Gheronda was losing her son’s interest under a barrage of technical terms. Tyler had temporarily perked up when Gheronda described the process of making vellum from animal skins, but then it was back to rubrics and drolleries and insular majuscules, which elicited from Tyler yawns, roving eyes, and fidgetiness. It hadn’t helped his enthusiasm when Gheronda asked him, despite the gloves, not to touch the delicate manuscripts. Don’t touch was as grating to a nine-year-old as the word bedtime.

  Trying to help, she said, “The illustrations are so detailed. It’s incredible.”

  “Yes, yes,” Gheronda said. “The transcribers fancied themselves artists-and certainly they were-but many of them abbreviated words to accommodate more illustrations, making translating the text a chore, to say the least. Look here…” He began methodically turning pages.

  Tyler backed away, and when he was clear, turned to check out other parts of the library. He glanced back, seeking tacit approval, which Beth gave him through a smile. He stripped off his gloves and shoved them into his back pocket.

  Beth scanned the long, two-story hall of the library-clean and white and modern looking, utterly at odds with the ancient dusty jumble of buildings beyond its doors. Nor did it resemble the Vatican’s archival libraries she’d read about, with their hermetically sealed, temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms. Here invaluable books, manuscripts, paintings, and icons were stored on shelves and in cabinets and hung on walls. Apparently the dry desert air was the perfect preservative.

  “Oh,” Gheronda said, drawing her attention. “I believe we have a truant.” He watched Tyler stroll past shelves of books to a window, onto which he pressed his palms and then his face. Instead of the admonition Beth expected, Gheronda laughed. “If I had his energy, I wouldn’t spend an ounce of it on an old man’s ramblings either.”

  She put her hand on his arm. “It’s very interesting,” she said. “Please go on.”

  The long hairs of his mustache and beard rustled into a grin, and they turned back to the book.

  A few minutes later Tyler said, “Hey, what’s this?” He was standing at the far end of the hall, where a door led to the icon archives. Beside the door was an antique sideboard, and on that stood a large painting with an arched top and heavy frame.

  “Ah, that,” Gheronda said, heading down the hall. “It’s a diptych. Do you know what that is?”

  “It looks like a dartboard,” Tyler said.

  As Beth approached, she saw what he meant. The painting was split down the middle: It had been painted on two panels that apparently opened to reveal something behind. That and the curved top resembled the dartboard cabinet they’d had in their den in Virginia-except instead of an old-fashioned Coca-Cola logo, this one displayed a baroque painting of what appeared at that distance to be an angel rising from a crypt. It was also at least three times larger.

  Gheronda laughed. “Not a dartboard, no. A lot of polyptychs were created for the altars of- Wait! ”

  His bark made both Beth and Tyler jump. Tyler had been reaching to open the front panels. He froze with his hand hovering an inch from them. His saucer eyes stared back at them over his shoulder. His expression mirrored Beth’s panic.

  “Tyler, get away from that!” she said.

  He snapped his hand away and jumped back.

  Gheronda reached him and laid a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I scared you. It’s just that… well, a portion of the painting inside isn’t suitable for all eyes.”

  “We can’t see it?” Tyler said, disappointed.

  “Not all of it,” Gheronda said, reaching behind the sideboard. “Occasionally we host young people like yourself and others with sensitive spirits, so I made this.” He withdrew a length of cardboard about four feet long by a foot tall. One of the long sides was irregularly shaped, reminding Beth of the surface of stormy seas. “Now, turn around, go on.” He made a circle over Tyler’s head with his finger.

  Tyler made a face at his mother- Oh brother! — and reluctantly turned away.

  Before Gheronda opened the panels, Beth realized that what she’d thought was an angel was a man, tearing himself out of a earthen grave as though from the flames of hell. Soil fell from his hair, cheeks, and open mouth. If Michelangelo had painted zombie scenes, they would look like this. No wonder it had intrigued Tyler.

  The man split in two, and half of him swung toward her as Gheronda opened the panels. Her eyes landed on the lower half of the painting within, and shock unhinged her jaw. Animal parts lay at the base of a stone altar-heads, legs, cleaved bodies. Blood everywhere, and somehow she felt not all of it came from animals. People writhed in the gore, some on their knees, arms raised in worship, some fighting, others.. She swallowed and tried to divert her eyes, but they would not obey. The others were naked, and not alone in their nakedness and debauchery. Then it was gone, covered by the cardboard.

  Her mind could not process all that she had seen in that momentary glance, but her body was ahead of the game: nausea stirred her stomach, and she pressed a hand over it. As bad as the activities of the people were, their faces were worse. Fear, torment, delight-the artist had managed to capture them all on each face. The mixture produced expressions that were, if not demonic, then at minimum, evil. She felt light-headed and unsteady, and grabbed the corner of the sideboard, wondering how a painting could have hit her so hard. It was as though the very act of painting such vileness had imbued the artwork with a repulsion that assaulted viewers like a noxious gas.

  She stepped to Tyler and took his hand. “Come on, we’re going.”

  “But, Mom-!”

  “Beth,” Gheronda said, touching her arm. “It’s worth seeing.”

  “I saw.”

  “The rest of the piece. I promise there’s nothing like the lower portion.”

  Tyler started to turn, and she grabbed the top of his head, holding it straight. Gheronda nodded encouragement and swiveled his eyes toward the diptych. She followed his gaze, ready to slam the shutters over her eyes at the first hint of depravity. The hint was there-in the faces, sly ecstasy-but they were only dancers, clothed dancers. It was a fascinating painting, and she understood why it held special meaning for Gheronda.

  “What is it?” Tyler said.

  She let go of his head and guided his shoulders around.

  “Wow,” he said.

  [17]

  The left panel showed Moses kneeling on a stone mountain, head bowed, hands clasped in front of him. A few twigs and leaves of a fiery bush encroached from one side, casting golden light on his face. Much as the bottom portion of the main painting had disgusted her, this one brought peace: humble man in communion with his loving Creator. In the right panel, Moses’s demeanor had swung in the other direction. Face contorted in fury, he stood on a boulder, two stone tablets raised above his head. The same golden glow seen emanating from the bush radiated from the tablets. Instead of feeling his fury, Beth felt only sadness.

  Both panels were masterfully crafted, but it was the center panel that commanded attention. It depicted the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. Men, women, and children danced around a large, gleaming-gold bull perched high on a chiseled stone pedestal. Several had joined hands, but most were engaged in their own private spinning and hopping, laughing and singing. Coming around the far side of the pedestal was a line of skipping musicians, playing their instruments with all the gusto and passion of a modern-day rock band. Behind them, the mountain-the one Beth marveled at every day-rose out of sight. Bodies packed the sides of the painting, giving the impression they went on forever, thousands, tens of thousands partying, reveling, worshipping the wrong god. Hair flew, clothing whipped around, a small child had tripped and was being dragged by an oblivious adult. Beth could almost hear the dissonance of music, singing, and shouting-blurring into a sustained, undulating scream. That she had to remind herself it was a painting and not a window onto a scene happening at the moment was a t
estament to the artist’s talent.

  “Who…?” Beth said. She lost the thought among all the activity on the panel.

  “No one knows,” Gheronda said. “Experts have compared it to Rubens, and it’s been dated to around his time, the early 1600s. Marvelous, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not the word I would use,” she said.

  “Are they happy?” Tyler said. His eyes roamed over the painting as though following a particular string among a tangled mass.

  “I think they’re trying to be happy,” Gheronda said. “In their hearts they know what they’re doing is wrong, but they let their impatience and need to worship something get the better of them. That contradiction drove them a little crazy, I think.”

  “A little?” Beth said.

  Tyler pointed at the cardboard covering the lower foot of the six-foot-tall painting. Its contours perfectly covered the most offensive images. “What’s under that?” he said.

  “You don’t need to know,” Beth said. “Just people doing bad things.”

  “I don’t usually censor art,” Gheronda said. “But in this case.. ”

  “I’m a writer,” Beth said. “I’m opposed to almost all censorship, except the kind each of us does in deciding what we will and won’t let in. What you’ve done in covering up that part isn’t censorship, it’s decency.” She shook her head. “Why would someone with the talent to paint like that, paint that?” She waved her hand at the covered portion, as though swishing it away.

  A voice spoke behind them: “Because it’s the truth.”

  The three of them spun toward it.

  Father Leo was leaning against a pillar, arms crossed over his chest. Leo was the collection’s curator. He had a scraggly beard clinging to his jawline, chin, and upper lip-considering his baby face, Beth suspected it was the best he could do to match the long, bushy beards the other monks sported.

  He came off the pillar and stepped forward. “The artist did his homework.” He mussed Tyler’s hair. “Hey, Ty.”