Jonathan Rabb - The Book of Q

Her sudden willingness to revisit the real issue surprised him. “I realize that. Whatever the Manichaeans have-”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said firmly, her back still to him. He stopped loading the pack and waited for her to explain. “What if it is older than the Gospels? What if it does alter the way we understand Christ’s message, the church?” She turned to him. “I know you’ve always had trouble with the structure, but this goes a good deal beyond that. They think it could actually tear down the church. Regardless of how the Manichaeans would want to use it, as a Catholic, Ian, how much are you willing to find?”

For the first time in hours, Pearse recalled his first reaction to the scroll. Not apprehension. Not fear. Only wonder. The possibility of Christ untethered. The purity, the connection that he’d always craved. Sola Scriptura . How much more powerful could it be than that? And if no longer in the scroll, then in whatever awaited him on Athos. Disentangled from the Manichaeans, it posed none of the threat Angeli was investing it with. At least not to him.

Maybe that was why he was so eager to go after it, why he had so quickly taken the task as his own. For the Manichaean threat? For himself? In all the excitement, he hadn’t really bothered to ask. Nor could he have. The two were now inexorably tied together. The questions would have to wait.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“You might want to figure that one out.” She stared at him for a moment longer, then opened her purse and pulled a baseball from it. She tossed it to him. Without thinking, he reached out and caught it. “I found it in the Rinascente,” she said. “Amazing what they have there these days.”

Tracing his fingers across the seams, he smiled. “You remembered.”

“A priest tossing a little ball in a cafe so he can figure out an ancient picture grid? Yes, that’s not something one forgets.” Now she smiled. “Just make sure the monks don’t catch you. They’d probably confiscate it.”

The surreal quality of their last hours together remained with Pearse for much of the train trip to Brindisi, sleep an impossibility. She had insisted on taking him to lunch, along with giving him a brief summary of Athos’s history, all in a vain effort to lend some normalcy to the situation. More than not, though, they had eaten in silence. There was enough conversation around to relieve them of the burden. As one might have expected, talk of the Pope had monopolized every table. More like touts than a grieving flock, the clientele of the cafe had been placing odds: Peretti at two to three, von Neurath at even. Other names had entered the mix, as well, Pearse amazed by the familiarity the lunchtime crowd displayed with the inner workings of the Sacred College. Silvestrini at four to one (too old); Mongeluzzi at six to one (too young); Iniguez, Daly, and Tatzric all at ten to one (too foreign). Enough of a distraction, though, for both of them.

The good-byes had been brief, awkward at best, both trying to downplay the events of the last day. He had made it to the station by 1:30.

The choice of train, then ferry, had been an easy one. Overland routes would have taken days, not to mention the precariousness of a jaunt through the former Yugoslavia. And, Vatican ID notwithstanding, Pearse knew that passport control at the Adriatic was far less strict than at any of the airports he might have tried. Not that he thought the Austrian could possibly be monitoring all of them-although at this point, he had no idea how extensive the network might be-but best to make it as difficult as possible to track him. The Brindisi ferries sailed for two destinations: Albania and Greece. Unless the men of Vatican security had a sixth sense, the port wouldn’t warrant much consideration. No, the boats were his best bet. Lots of tourists to get lost among at this time of year.

The train pulled in at 6:46. By 8:00 P.M., he had reserved a cabin on a 10:30 ferry-L140,000 for overnight passage to Igoumenitsa, on the southwestern coast of Greece. He would worry about the next leg of the trip tomorrow.

For two hours, he sat in a small Greek-style cafe by the piers, several cups of coffee, something resembling a gyro, and Angeli’s notes to pass the time. He was trying to commit the layout of St. Photinus to memory-descriptions of benchmarks she had gleaned from the scroll with remarkable detail. But his lack of sleep was beginning to tell. Every so often, he found his eyes drifting, scanning the area along the street leading to the wharf, looking for what, he didn’t know. Easier to concentrate on the casual meanderings of tourists than on the minutiae of a hastily scrawled map.

Those making the trip began to show up at around nine o’clock.

They wandered in the distance, their movements muted, the cafe too close to the strip of shoreline to permit anything but the sound of lapping tide against the pier. Pearse found himself listening intently to it, slowly attuned to the Adriatic’s gentle glide, its beat less emphatic than the one he had grown up with on the Cape, the waves landing without the fullness he had come to expect of the sea.

And if only for a moment, he let his mind slip back to that past, recalling the hours he had spent alone on the beach, the glare angling itself lower and lower onto the surf-vivid blue into pale lemon-and all he’d had to do was cradle himself at the water’s edge, the unmetered swish erasing everything and everyone around him. Not as a visual cleansing, but as a timbred one, the surge after surge of sound to engulf him.

Maybe that was what he was hoping to find on Athos.

A horn sounded near the ticket office. He looked up and saw the crew beginning to let people on board. The present resumed focus. Along the pier, the tourists were in full buzz, a rival ferry about to head out. He turned to the backpack and slotted everything inside, then made his way to the men’s room at the rear of the cafe-priest’s shirt, jacket, and collar to replace the green jersey he had been wearing since Angeli’s, a quick wash of the face to snap some life into his eyes.

Within ten minutes, he was walking up the gangplank of the Laurana -another reminder of those summers on the Cape, the ferry a larger cousin of the boats he’d taken out to the Vineyard-his outfit and papers eliciting the desired response from the official. A few meaningless questions, his signature and stamp on various forms, followed by the deferential nod reserved for members of the clergy. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Pearse found his cabin-the room no more than six feet across, a narrow iron-framed bed bolted to the far wall, a tiny steel sink wedged into the corner. No window.

Perfect insulation. More comforting than perhaps he cared to admit.

His eyes bolted open at 6:00 A.M. to an overwhelming sense of panic. It lasted less than a second, but it was long enough to get him upright, the taste of stale breath in his mouth. Sitting in the pitch-black of the room, he knew exactly where he was, no need to remind himself of the last day and half. His appreciation for his surroundings had less to do with the momentary shock than with the way he had slept-on the edge of consciousness, eyes opening from time to time, dreams melding with the reality of an airless room, 3:30 the last time he had checked his watch. He was grateful for the last few undisturbed hours.

He had dreamed of Dante, uneven images returning again and again, always the same, the monk leading him through St. Photinus-a monastery neither of them had ever seen-but always away from the prize, away from the parchment he knew to be inside.

“You’re taking me the wrong way, Dante. She said it’s to the left.”

“You don’t want to go to the left. Please, Ian, do as I ask.”