The Psalter Read online

  “I apologize for summoning you at this ungodly hour, Father,” said the General, an overweight man also in his sixties whose tailored uniform couldn’t disguise his girth. A younger man in his mid forties with a powerful build rose at the same time.

  “May I present Colonelo Del Carlo,” the cardinal continued, “commander of the Gruppo Intervento Speciale.” Romano knew all about the GIS as did everyone in Italy. The Italian press had mentioned them every day since the September 11 attack on New York’s Twin Towers. They were the Carabinieri’s elite counter-terrorism unit.

  Colonelo Del Carlo pushed an old floppy briefcase in front of the priest. “This is why we need your expertise, Father. If you could identify the evidence in the briefcase, perhaps we’ll discover something to help our case.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  Del Carlo and Generale Giudici turned their questioning gazes on Cardinal Keller. “Father Romano has been given no details gentlemen,” the Grand Inquisitor said. “I thought it prudent not to mention the accident.”

  Del Carlo took command of the conversation. “Do you know Father James Mackey?” The colonel’s demeanor turned somber.

  “Of course,” Romano said. “The Pope’s Secretary.” They weren’t merely close friends, but confessor and penitent as well, and Mackey was a compassionate counselor, if sometimes brusque. They also shared an interest in the writing style of a particular medieval scribe Father Romano had nicknamed Giovanni. He didn’t know the scribe’s actual name, of course, but he had seen enough of the monk’s ninth-century texts to recognize his handwriting. Giovanni had been a most prolific scribe. Mackey had been a frequent visitor to the Secret Archives and often asked Romano’s professional opinion about Giovanni’s manuscripts.

  “Father Mackey has been in an accident,” the colonel continued.

  “Is he all right?” Alarm shook Romano’s voice.

  “Father Mackey is dead.”

  Romano made the sign of the cross. “But I just—”

  “He was killed by a hit and run driver. We haven’t determined for sure whether it was intentional. You were going to say, Father?”

  “Nothing, only…surely it had to be an accident.”

  “Even so, leaving the scene is a crime.”

  “He had this briefcase with him? Is the manuscript inside?” Romano’s voice had an inflection of astonishment.

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “We never let scrolls out of the Secret Archives. Well, perhaps on rare occasions for an exhibition or special event, but only with the Library Prefect’s permission and written consent from the Office of His Holiness.”

  “You received no such authorization?”

  “Not from the Archives. One could have come from the Library, but I’m sure their rules are the same.”

  The cardinal interrupted. “Surely, Father Romano, the Pope’s personal Secretary might have had permission.”

  “Of course Eminence.” The priest acquiesced more than agreed. However, Romano thought that even had permission been granted, he would have been informed. He knew all six of the other librarians in the Archives, and as Assistant Archivist, he was in charge. Besides, Mackey himself would have said something.

  Romano sensed Del Carlo’s eyes on him. He met their gaze, then the colonel turned toward Cardinal Keller. “Perhaps your Eminence could provide us a copy of an authorization.”

  Keller smiled thinly. “I’ll try to locate it.”

  Romano returned to the subject of the manuscript, impatient to examine the contents. “Did you recover the manuscript from the accident, Colonelo?”

  “In a way. Perhaps I should tell you what we know.”

  The Grand Inquisitor added, “You understand, of course, that anything disclosed here must remain within these walls unless you receive instructions from me.” The cardinal’s charm was replaced by the same stern insistence Romano had detected earlier. Romano chafed but replied with the slightest nuance of a smile.

  “A car with Vatican license plates struck and killed Father Mackey,” Del Carlo said. “Then the driver stole the briefcase you see on the table. We have witnesses.”

  Romano was dumbfounded. “You can’t believe one of the clergy committed the crime?”

  “Of course not, Father.” Del Carlo had reassurance in his voice. “The man wasn’t even Catholic.”

  “You know who did this?”

  “Yes. Regrettably, the suspect lost control of his car while being pursued and crashed into a garbage truck. He died instantly. That’s where we recovered the manuscript.” The colonel hesitated for a moment, gauging the priest, then said, “Father, have you heard of the Children of the Book?”

  “Don’t you mean the People of the Book,” Romano said. “What Muslims call Jews and Christians?”

  Del Carlo scanned an Interpol computer printout. “No, our intelligence says Children of the Book.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “They’re a sort of messianic sect on the Iran, Iraq border.”

  “Christians or Muslims?”

  “I’m not sure. They’re a mysterious group in an area with a number of small, unusual religions.” Del Carlo looked down at the printout again. “The same general area as Mandeans and Manicheans.”

  “Of course. Very ancient religions. Saint Augustine was Manichean until he converted.”

  “The man who ran over the Pope’s Secretary comes from the region and he’s on the FBI’s watch list.”

  “A terrorist?”

  “Perhaps.” Del Carlo said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You think terrorists wanted Father Mackey dead? Why?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to determine. What we would like to know is the value of the manuscript and any other details you can provide, and I should like to find out why a foreigner was driving an official Vatican car.” Colonelo Del Carlo flashed a look at Cardinal Keller. The Grand Inquisitor stared straight ahead.

  “Do you need any special equipment to examine the manuscript?” the colonel asked.

  Romano pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket. “I’m a paleographer. This is all I need.”

  “Excuse me, Father,” Del Carlo said. “What is a paleographer?”

  “A handwriting expert.”

  “Like personality assessments when you apply for a job?”

  “Not at all. We analyze ancient scripts, handwriting if you will, to date manuscripts by the style used during a particular era.” Romano pulled the heavy briefcase toward him and opened the flap. As he slid out the thick volume, his heart sank. He didn’t need to look at the pages to see they weren’t from the first century. The book was a codex, bound in a style common to the Middle Ages. He lifted the cracked leather cover. The text was Latin from the latter part of the ninth century.

  “Well?” The Grand Inquisitor said, leaning forward, staring hard into Romano’s eyes.

  The priest couldn’t hide his disappointment. He replied acerbically without thinking. “Eminence, this is a common prayer book.”

  “Are you certain? Look closer.”

  Romano scanned the front side of the first page known as the recto, studying the text below the rubric, or title. It read Beatus. Then something did catch his eye. The scribe who copied this book was without a doubt Giovanni, the same Giovanni he had discussed many times with Father Mackey. Something else caught his eye as well, faint and nearly invisible impressions. Romano turned the page, stopping to examine a few words with the magnifying glass.

  “It’s an early medieval prayer book called a Psalter.” The priest explained to Colonelo Del Carlo and Generale Giudici that a Psalter was in essence a handwritten book of the Psalms, but often included canticles, a list of saints, prayers, and a calendar. “It’s not from the first century, not even close. Psalters were medieval bestsellers. Every noble lady wanted one. We have hundreds, maybe thousands, in the Vatican Library in excellent condition. This is ninth-century Latin, very common. Did you look at it, Emine
nce?” Romano asked the Grand Inquisitor, a hint of condescension in his voice. He didn’t mention Giovanni. That was his little secret, and secrets prompted questions. Romano didn’t want any inquiries from the Grand Inquisitor, especially about Giovanni.

  Cardinal Keller’s face flushed as he marched around the table, pushing his way past Romano. He read out loud, seeming to ponder each word, “beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum…blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly.” He flipped a page and then another, faster and faster. Romano wanted to stop him. He almost did. After all, it was still a twelve-hundred-year old-antique. Keller regained his composure, straightened himself, and muttered, “Killed for an ordinary prayer book.”

  Del Carlo broke the awkward moment. “How would you value this Psalter, Father Romano?”

  “I’m no appraiser, but I’ve seen Psalters in this condition sell on the Internet for ten or fifteen thousand dollars, perhaps as much as twenty. Regrettably, rare document dealers buy them to remove the bindings so they can turn individual pages into framed artwork. They make more money that way. Printed pages sell for four or five hundred dollars. Illustrated pages go for three or four thousand, the finest as high as ten, but that’s rare. Still, this is no priceless text.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Del Carlo said. “Thank you for your expertise. May I call you if I need further assistance?”

  Romano turned to the cardinal, and the dour Grand Inquisitor nodded. “I’m at your disposal, Colonelo.” Romano hesitated for a moment, but couldn’t help himself, “Can I return the Psalter to the Archives?”

  “It’s evidence, Father.”

  “You’re right, of course, but we would take better care of it. It’s our specialty, and if you need the book back, I’ll deliver it personally. You have my word.”

  Generale Giudici spoke for the first time, “I don’t see any reason not to release the book. It’s not as though we’ll be prosecuting anyone.”

  Del Carlo turned to face Romano, “Of course, Father, and you need not give me your word. You’re a priest. I believe everything you say.” The colonel glanced hard at the cardinal, who averted his eyes. Del Carlo showed Father Romano to the door, holding him by the arm. He added in a low voice, “Here’s my card, Father. Should you think of anything else, please call me. My home telephone is on the back.” Then he patted the briefcase. “Keep the book safe, even if it is just ordinary.”

  3

  Secret Archives

  Father Romano tucked the leather briefcase under his arm as he trotted toward the Secret Archives. He breathed hard—not from exertion, because his daily jogging kept him in superb physical condition. Rather, his suspicions left him exhilarated. Why hadn’t he mentioned those suspicions to the police, he wondered? He knew why he didn’t tell the Grand Inquisitor. I’ve been down that road before, Romano thought, and almost lost my job. He had no intention of leaving himself open to another anonymous denunciation with no defense against the arcane and capricious regulations of the Inquisition. They might enforce grudging obedience, but they can’t bully me into agreement.

  He could have voiced his speculation to Colonelo Del Carlo in private. The GIS colonel had extended a personal invitation. Perhaps he just needed to be sure or feared being wrong. That might be a piece, but not all. Romano had long suspected that Giovanni was hiding something significant. His pattern seemed too systemic, too perfect. Scribes filled parchment with elaborate and copious ink. Yet Giovanni wrote in small, slender strokes, as though he was taking great care to write around something hidden.

  The paleographer side of Romano was disheartened this wasn’t a first-century manuscript. Nevertheless, he had indeed noticed something unexpected and tantalizing at Carabinieri headquarters and kept it to himself. Nothing the cardinal would notice. Even had the police spotted the pinpoint dents in the vellum, they likely would have ignored them. Only a paleographer trained in ancient manuscripts could understand their significance.

  He unlocked a side entrance to the Archives and rushed, not for the rooms housing thousands of books and church documents, but for the stairs to the underground level and the Conservation Laboratories. Inside one of the labs, Romano placed the leather-bound book on an examination table and pulled on white cotton gloves.

  The dusty smell of antiquity filled his nostrils as he opened the Psalter to the first page. He swung around a powerful magnifying glass attached to a folding arm and positioned it over the verse he had already examined. His eyes skimmed the spaces between the letters and lines of Latin script. There were indeed indentations, so small they might have been made by a safety pin.

  A neon light atop a pole, like the poles that dangled IV solutions, stood in the corner. Romano rolled it over and directed the lamp at the page. He turned off the overhead lights and flipped a switch on the stand. Ultraviolet light illuminated the text. Smudges appeared in the gaps between the lines and letters. Romano’s heart pounded as he grabbed another lamp. He shut off the ultraviolet and pressed the switch on the other pole. An infrared bulb transformed the folio into a shade of dull scarlet and the smudges grew more distinct. They were clearly letters, but not Latin or even Greek.

  The pinpricks in the vellum had been made by a stylus or a writing reed known as a calamus. High-quality reeds were common lettering tools in antiquity, used to write on papyrus and parchment. They left tiny impressions where the calamus began the pen stroke, or, in this case, the reed stroke, and where it ended if the scribe pressed hard enough. The stylus was also a sharp instrument made of bone or metal, used to prick and rule manuscripts without ink so scribes could write in straight lines with uniform margins. These small indentations, however, weren’t underneath letters or at the beginning of sentences where they should have been, but in blank spaces between the lines.

  Romano suspected the ordinary-looking Psalter hid a much older manuscript. Under ultraviolet and infrared lights, he confirmed it was a palimpsest, a book written over an earlier text. Writing materials in the Middle Ages were expensive. So scribes erased ancient scientific or philosophical literature, and especially heretical scriptures, to reuse the paper for acceptable theological works. They cut the cumbersome scrolls into pages and bound them together to make portable books.

  Romano recalled a palimpsest discovered in Constantinople. Underneath a banal collection of Greek prayers, an erased copy of several of Archimedes’ most famous mathematical writings lay hidden. One was believed lost forever: The Method of Mechanical Theorems, essentially proto-calculus. The librarian side of Romano wondered how many works of the highest scholarship and historical value had been obliterated for mundane sermons or stale prayer books.

  He studied the script with his powerful magnifying glass. The letters looked familiar, but seemed out of context. He pushed the glass away and stood, rubbing tired eyes. Refocusing on the page from a few feet’s distance, the solution popped into his head. “Of course,” he said and turned the book ninety degrees. The erased text had been written at a right angle to the words copied over it.

  The priest’s heart jumped as he recognized what he saw. His paleographer’s eye identified the Aramaic script, once the language of the Jews and the Lingua Franca of the Middle East. He swung the magnifying glass back over the book and skimmed the page, looking for an entire word, but spotted only fragments of letters. Then his eye fell on a complete character between the lines of Latin script, ‘h’. The letter was unmistakably Aramaic, the dialect of Jesus, and the writing style had been in use in Palestine during the time of Christ.

  He searched for another letter and discovered a ‘w’ between two Latin words. Then he found ‘+’ near the bottom. They were the characters from an alphabet he had studied since his days in the seminary, letters he prayed he might find one day in a Christian text. The priest plopped onto his stool. Without a doubt, the page had been written sometime around fifty A.D., perhaps closer to forty, only a decade more or less after the Crucifixion.

  Why di
d Father Mackey take the Psalter from the Library? Romano wondered. He certainly didn’t have permission. Did he discover that ancient scriptures in Jesus’ native tongue had resided for centuries in the recesses of the Vatican Library or the Secret Archives, concealed by Giovanni in an ordinary Psalter? And if they were hidden, would they be heresies? The church had a long history of suppressing non-canon scriptures and their devotees, through violence if necessary. And why did the Grand Inquisitor believe the Pope’s personal secretary possessed a first-century scroll when it was simply a prayer book? Yet, the Psalter might actually be hiding a first-century text after all. Keller knew more than he had revealed, and why didn’t Colonelo Del Carlo trust the cardinal? Most troubling was the possibility that Father Mackey had been killed for this book.

  Questions and suspicions raced around hairpin turns in Romano’s gray matter until one overriding thought crossed the finish line with crystal clarity: he had to translate the palimpsest. He would find no answers until he knew what the text said. But the Secret Archives didn’t have the technology. It was far too expensive. Then a memory returned as a possible answer. Romano had attended a Library Science seminar at the French National Archives months earlier. One of the lectures had fascinated him: digital imaging, a sort of spectral analysis that had gone over his head. The lecturer had been a young archivist who had helped decipher the celebrated Archimedes Palimpsest.

  The priest was searching the recesses of his brain for the lecturer’s name when a lump swelled in his throat. He suddenly recalled that no complete work had ever been found in any single palimpsest because medieval scribes cut scrolls into dozens of pages and bound them into different books. Portions had to be recovered from several volumes to reassemble a whole document. This Psalter might have a large section of the original scroll or a fragment, perhaps only a single page.

  Romano closed the Psalter and slid it inside the floppy leather briefcase. He turned off the lights and slipped out of the lab. First things first, he thought as he climbed the stairway to ground level and marched to the medieval section of the Archives, to the shelves holding Psalters. Most were in the Vatican Library where they belonged, but quite a few were here. He pulled the Psalter from the briefcase and replaced it with another from the shelf. Then he laid the briefcase back on the bookshelf, gathered up Giovanni’s Psalter and started for the exit. He had to get to Paris. But if anyone came hunting for Giovanni’s Psalter, they would find an almost identical one inside poor Father Mackey’s briefcase.