“Oh, we can take it off the shelf,” he said. “That isn’t the problem.” He checked his watch. “Now step lively, Father Alex. We need to hurry.”
I pointed to his bag. “We won’t get past the guards at the front desk carrying that.”
He scoffed. “Don’t be silly. There’s a steam duct that vents through a window on the second floor. It’s been out of commission for years.”
I stared at him.
Ugo chuckled and gripped my arm. “Kidding, kidding. Now stop worrying and come on.”
* * *
HE HAD A FRIEND on the inside. An old French priest whose office stood in a forgotten corner of the building. The library closed in ten minutes, but Ugo’s apartment was so close that we reached his friend in under two.
Ugo stopped me outside the office and said, “Wait here a moment.”
He went in alone but didn’t shut the door completely.
“Ugolino,” I heard the man say anxiously in his French accent, “they’ve found out about you.”
“Doubtful,” Ugo replied.
“Security went door-to-door today, warning us to report any unfamiliar persons.”
Ugo didn’t answer.
“The priest who came with them,” continued the voice, “knew your name.”
Ugo cleared his throat. “The new system is still being tested?”
“Yes.”
“So the door’s still open?”
“It is. But it’s not a good idea for you to be down there alone anymore.”
“Agreed.” Ugo came to the door and admitted me. “Meet Father Alexander Andreou. He’ll be joining me tonight.”
The Frenchman was a silver fox of a priest. He had a bottle-brush beard that almost concealed the sharp downturn in his mouth at the sight of me.
“But Ugolino . . .” he began.
Ugo collected his friend’s hat and umbrella from the coatrack. “You’re wasting your breath. And they’re going to notice if you don’t leave at the usual time. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
The priest closed the blinds over the glazed office door. “This isn’t wise. Every little sound travels in these halls. With him here, you’re bound to talk. To draw attention.”
But Ugo only nudged him toward the door. The clock over the door read twelve past five. In the reading rooms, scholars had already packed away their notebooks and laptops. They were returning to the main desk for keys to their lockers, and in a few minutes they would be gone. After that point, it would be impossible to explain why Ugo and I were here.
“What was he warning you about?” I asked when Ugo closed the door.
He peeked between the blinds. “Nothing.”
“Then why are you looking into the hallway?”
“Because I wish your uncle would hire a few curators who look like Signorina de Santis next door!”
I slumped against the wall. In camaraderie, Ugo followed suit, retrieving the loaf of bread from his duffel bag. He smiled sadly. “You understand you won’t be able to tell anyone what you see tonight. Not even your students.”
Under the door, the hall lights began to go dark.
“I’m not doing this for my students,” I said.
“Father Simon tells me your father trained both of you to read the New Testament in Greek.”
I nodded.
“He also said you were the studious one, and he was the laggard.”
“The gospels were my favorite subject in seminary.”
For any gospel teacher—even one who taught altar boys in pre-seminary like I did—there was excitement in knowing that our understanding of the Bible was imperfect. That older, better, more-complete manuscripts of the gospels were always waiting to be discovered. Tonight was a chance to hold one of those manuscripts before it was locked away like the rest.
Ugo cleaned his glasses on his handkerchief. He peered at me with eyes that were surprisingly lucid. “And did we tell Father Simon what we were doing this evening?”
“No. I haven’t been able to reach him for a couple days.”
He sighed. “Neither have I. Your brother disappears sometimes. Glad to know it isn’t personal.” He checked his watch and stood up. “Now, there’s something you need to know before we go. We mustn’t leave a trail, because it seems someone’s been following me.”
Remembering his conversation with the French priest, I said, “Who?”
“I don’t know. But after tonight I hope he won’t have another opportunity.” Ugo removed his shoes and changed into the slippers from his duffel bag. “Just follow me. Down we go.”
* * *
THE HALLS WERE dark, but Ugo knew his way. For a man of his size he was soundless even when we entered the first monstrous corridors of stacks.
I had expected old wooden bookcases piled high in vast frescoed arches. Instead there were low, industrial tunnels longer than ocean liners, veined with electrical conduit. On the cold metal decks my shoes made a slapping sound that echoed down the corridors, and I had to stoop to avoid hitting my head on the caged lightbulbs. But Ugo traveled deftly, as if the drinks had only limbered him up.
The steel stacks were on all sides of us now—left and right, above and below—floor upon floor connected by attic-like openings linked by narrow ship-ladders. Ugo relied on the flashlight he had brought because the overhead bulbs were on timers. Down we went, and down again. At last we came to an elevator.
“Where does it go?” I asked.
My voice, just as the French priest had warned, rebounded across the marble floors, shearing through the woolly darkness.
“To the very bottom,” Ugo whispered.
The doors closed after us, and the car immediately went dark. The beam of Ugo’s flashlight went straight to the control panel. Before I could even read the inscriptions there, he had launched us on a slow descent.
The doors reopened on an area with butter-colored walls and fluorescent lights. There were no shelves here, only the occasional crucifix and holy icon on the walls, separated by fire detectors and boxes of emergency lights. All of it had the unfamiliar, chemical odor of newness.
“Are we underground?” I whispered.
Ugo nodded and led me around the bend, murmuring, “Now to see if he was right.”
Around the corner we came to an immense door built entirely of steel. The adjoining wall was mounted with a security keypad.
But instead of entering a passcode, Ugo reached his fingers behind the lip of the door and leaned backward.
The slab of steel quietly swung open. Beyond it lay darkness.
“Excellent,” Ugo muttered. Then he turned and said, “Touch absolutely nothing until I explain why this door was left unlocked.”
He reached inside to twist the timer on the electric lights. When they came on, my legs went numb.
Twenty years ago, John Paul had broken ground on a new project. The Vatican Library had run out of shelf space, so in a small courtyard north of the library, where employees once grew vegetables in wartime and where Uncle Lucio now ran a café to squeeze money from visiting scholars, John Paul dug a pit. Into it he poured the foundation of a bombproof concrete chamber, designed for his most prized possessions. Today, when scholars sipped drinks at Lucio’s café, they stood on a thin layer of grass concealing the steel-reinforced crypt of John Paul’s treasures.
As a child I had imagined the place. It was, in my daydreams, as large as a bank vault. But the room that now lay before me was the size of a small airfield. The main passage was half the length of a soccer field, with aisles on either side deep enough to park a tour bus.
“Behold,” Ugo whispered, “the world’s greatest collection of manuscripts.”
There are two kinds of books in the world. Since the time of Gutenberg, printed books have been spawned by the millions, mass-produced by machines, blotting out
the older species of book: manuscripts. An illiterate Renaissance businessman with a printing press could spew ten books faster than a team of educated monks could hand-make a single manuscript page. Considering how few manuscripts were produced, and how much mistreatment they endured over the centuries, it’s a miracle any have survived. But since books were first invented, they have had a powerful friend: there has always been a Christian Church to make them, and a pope in Rome to collect them. Of all the great libraries in human history, only one still exists. And by the grace of God, into the heart of that library I now stepped.
“Take this,” Ugo said, handing me the other flashlight. “The timer lasts only twenty minutes. Now let me show you what we’re up against.”
He synced the countdown to his digital watch, set it running, then removed the loop of wire from the grocery-store bag. For the first time I got a good look at it: an electronic handset connected to an oval of metal like an oven coil. When he turned it on, red letters flickered across the handset.
“They’re installing a new inventory system,” he said, “so they won’t have to shut down the library for a month every year to do it by hand. Do you know what this is?”
It looked like the offspring of a TV antenna and a towel warmer.
“It’s a radio frequency scanner,” he said. “Tags have been implanted in the manuscript bindings, and this scanner can read fifty at a time, straight through the air.”
He led me past the first stack, demonstrating as we passed. Lines of text scrolled down the screen faster than I could read them. Call numbers. Titles. Authors.
“Even with this wand,” he said, “it took me two weeks of searching to realize the manuscript must be down here. Two weeks, and a bit of luck.” He nodded in the direction of a white plastic box installed on the ceiling. “Those are the permanent scanners. For some reason, they interfere with the security system, so the steel door has to remain unlocked until the problem has been fixed.” He glanced at me. “For us, that’s good news. The bad news is that this RF technology makes the steel door irrelevant. My first visit to this vault, I made the mistake of taking a book to a different shelf across the aisle. The scanners saw it moving. In five minutes, a security guard was here.”
“What did you do?”
“Hid and prayed. Fortunately, the guard thought the system was just on the fritz. From then on, I’ve followed two rules. One: I read in situ. And two: I wear these.”
He produced the pairs of latex gloves from the bag.
“To avoid leaving fingerprints?” I said.
“Not the kind you’re thinking of,” he said with a glint in his eye. “Now follow me.”
As we moved through the stacks, his precision increased. Leaving the duffel at the end of an aisle, he exhumed a vial of alcohol swabs and cleaned his hands before donning the gloves.
“Is this it?” I asked, seeing that the handset was now registering a fondo of manuscripts in Syriac, the ancient language of Edessa in the time of the Diatessaron. The language, also, closest to Jesus’ Aramaic.
But Ugo shook his head and continued deeper into the aisle. “This,” he said, “is it.”
On the screen, a strange notation had appeared. Where call numbers should have been, there was a Latin word. CORRUPTAE.
Damaged.
“This shelf,” Ugo said, “is a backlog for the restoration workshop.” He gestured at an entire stack, more than one hundred in all. “They don’t even seem to realize it’s here.”
“How did you find the right manuscript?”
Ugo couldn’t read Greek, and knowledge of Syriac was far rarer.
“Father Alex, I’ve been coming down here every night since I came back from Turkey. I sleep only during the days. What you see here has become my life. I’m this far”—he pinched his fingers in the air—“from proving that the Shroud was in Edessa in the second century. If I’d had to, I would’ve searched every manuscript in this palace by hand.” He grinned. “Fortunately, all the manuscripts on this shelf still have indexes from the old inventory system—written in beautiful Latin.”
Squinting, he peered up at the shelves and ran a gloved finger through the air, just a hairsbreadth from their spines. When he came to the one he wanted, he cocked his head and glanced back at the nearest scanner on the wall, as if estimating its tolerance for movement. Finally he said, “Put your gloves on.”
The thrill of those words was more intense than I had expected. “Before I do,” I asked, “could I touch it? Just for a second. I’ll be very careful.”
He didn’t answer. Instead, with a practiced movement he notched the volume off the shelf, opened the gilded leather cover—and out slid something gnarled and awful looking. It was no bigger than a necklace case, with rust-colored scratches that webbed the black, pitted surface of its cover. The librarians had never removed the original binding to slip it inside the papal covers.
“There’s something you need to know,” Ugo said, “before you touch this. Something I was able to track down only after I discovered it. Three hundred years ago, the pope sent a family of priests to search for the oldest manuscripts in the world. One of them stumbled upon a library in the deserts of Nitrian Egypt, in the Monastery of the Syrians, where an abbot had assembled a collection of texts in the nine hundreds AD. Even in the abbot’s day, these texts were extremely old. Today they’re the most ancient books known to exist. The abbot printed a warning inside them: He who removes these books from the monastery will be accursed of God. The priest, Assemani, ignored this warning, and on his way back to Rome his boat capsized in the Nile. One of the monks was drowned. Assemani paid men to dredge up his manuscripts, but the books needed repair for water damage, which is one reason this book ended up on a forgotten shelf.
“The other reason is that when Assemani’s cousin tried to make a catalog of these manuscripts, he died in the attempt. A third Assemani took over, only to have a fire break out in his apartment beside the library. The whole catalog was destroyed, and no one has ever completed it. That’s why no record of these manuscripts exists, and nobody seems to know they’re here.”
“Ugo,” I said, “why are you telling me this?”
“Because while I consider myself to be above superstition, and lucky to have found this book, you’re entitled to decide for yourself.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I was a teacher of modern gospel methods. The scientific, rational reading of the Bible. I didn’t even hesitate.
He shifted the ancient text between his own gloves so that it sat in the palm of one hand while he raised the other for me to see. Where the manuscript had made contact with the glove, the latex was ruddy brown.
“The cover,” he said, “leaves an almost indelible stain. It took me days to scrub it off my skin. Please, wear the gloves.”
He waited until I had done it; then, tenderly, like the doctor who placed Peter in my arms, he handed the text over.
Never had I seen a book made that way. Like a prehistoric creature found living at the bottom of the sea, it bore only the faintest resemblance to its modern cousins. The manuscript’s cover was made with a sheet of skin hanging off like a satchel flap, designed to wrap around the pages again and again, to protect them. A leather tail dangled from it, beltlike, looping around the book to cinch it closed.
I undid the straps as carefully as if I were arranging hairs on a baby’s head. Inside, the pages were gray and soft. Flowing letters were penned in long, smooth strokes with no rounded edges: Syriac. Beside them, inked right there on the page, was a Latin index written by some long-dead Vatican librarian.
Formerly Book VIII among the Nitrian Syriac collection.
And then, very clearly:
Gospel Harmony of Tatian (Diatessaron).
A shudder went through me. Here in my hands was the creature invented by one of the giants of early Christianity. The canonical life of Jesus of N
azareth in a single book. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John fused together to form the super-gospel of the ancient Syrian church.
There were no sounds down here except from the titanic earthworms of ductwork on the ceiling, ventilated by a faraway mechanical lung. But in my ears was the watery drumming of my blood.
“Dyed goatskin,” Ugo said nervously under his breath, “over papyrus boards. Pages made of parchment.”
With a type of tool I didn’t recognize, he turned the first page.
I gasped. Everything inside was too water-stained to read. But on the next page, the stains became smaller. And on the third, handwriting became visible.
“You’re right,” I whispered. “It’s a diglot.”
There were two columns on the page: the left one in Syriac, the right one in Greek. And this time, when Ugo turned the leaf, it was as if the fog of damage had begun to roll off. There, in all capital letters, with no spaces in between, was a line of Greek I could transform into something familiar.
ΕΓΕΝΕΤΟΡΗΜΑΘΕΟΥΕΠΙΙΩΑΝΝΗΝΤΟΝΤΟΥΖΑΧΑΡΙΟΥ.
“The word of God came to John the son of Zechariah,” I said. “That’s from Luke.”
Ugo glanced at me, then back at the page. In his eyes there was now fire, too.
“But look at the next line!” I said. “He confessed, ‘I am not the Christ.’ That verse is only in the gospel of John.”
Ugo searched his pockets for something but didn’t seem to find it. He dashed back to the duffel bag and returned, panting, with a notebook.
“Father Alex,” he said, “this is the list. These are the Shroud references we need to check. The first one is Matthew 27:59. The parallel verses are Mark—”
Before I could scan the page, though, he frowned and stopped short. For a moment he turned and stared at the scanner.