and other partisans of the late Pope and his revolutionary Vatican III, who rallied and hit back hard.
It had been five hundred years since Luther and the schism that tore the Catholic Church in two, the news panels were saying. Five hundred years before that, the Great Schism had divided the Western from the Eastern Church. Would the cycle repeat itself? With half the Church accusing the other of sodomy and apostasy? Could the Church even survive this time?
Flying back to Rome, Maryse had watched the news for the first time in days. She had not realized the extent of the struggle that was now gathering force. The Ecumenical Council was calling itself back into session without waiting for a new Pope. There was video of the bull-like Irish Cardinal Tyrell denouncing Vatican III. Some cardinals were calling for a conclave to select a Pope to begin immediately after the funeral; others were refusing to participate until a decent period of mourning for Zacharias had passed. There was open talk of two conclaves.
She had looked around to find the airliner filled with clergy, mostly French, some of them women wearing the collar, talking agitatedly among themselves. They were all making their way toward the eruption.
She had closed her eyes at this and thought of the Carmelites in their little retreat near Paris. She knew none of this would touch them. Even if the Church were torn in two, they would continue their prayers as they had for centuries inside those walls that were like rock in a stormy sea. Fitfully, she tried to retreat mentally and sleep, but could not.
Ari Davan had left her at Chartres. She had caught the strange look on his face as he examined the statue of St. Peter on the North Porch of the Cathedral. He said he needed to return immediately to his headquarters at Jerusalem. He would not stay for Jean-Baptiste’s elaborate lunch. She watched him walk briskly down the hill toward the station.
This is what men do, she had said to herself. When they leave, they leave abruptly.
Jean-Baptiste had been quiet at lunch. He had given Maryse what she needed and then withdrawn into fragmentary remarks about the food. When they returned to his house, he had sat down at his desk and written a few sentences on a paper which he then sealed up with red wax. It was the seal of the order of Malta.
“How unfold the secrets of another world perhaps not lawful to reveal. We think you are ready—both Milton and myself.” His wide smile had thinned as he gave her the envelope. But the answers she had found at Chartres led only to more questions.
West Jerusalem, 0630h
As a boy, Shin Bet Inspector Ari Davan had barely endured the long hours of shul, the intense study of Torah and Talmud he had to undergo to become, as his father put it, a man. At that age he had been more interested in the black eyes of a neighborhood girl staring down from the women’s gallery than in the black-on-white words he was required to decipher and recite endlessly.
Right now, though, those words mattered very much.
It had come together for him on the porch at the Cathedral of Chartres as he had looked up at the statue of the man the Christians called Saint Peter—the first Pope. What struck Ari was the figure’s dress. It reminded him of an engraving in an old illustrated book in his father’s library. He had to see it again.
Before sunrise, he had arrived at his parents’ house, touched the mezuzah at the door, and found his father awake in the small study of the West Jerusalem house. The room had not changed; he was familiar even with the dust. Among the grainy pictures of forgotten relatives that crowded the walls was a heroic photo of Moshe Dayan looking like a benevolent pirate in his black eye patch, and next to it a large portrait of a bearded Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel. His father had served under Dayan as a very young soldier. The silver menorah, the only thing his family had kept from before their first days in the land, shone yellow in the low lamplight.
His father found the book for him, a crumbling antique, and he knew exactly where the picture was. The illustration was still as brightly colored as the day it was printed. He had already, on his flight home, called up a hundred images like it on his GeM, but this page was worth more than all of them.
The caption read Aharon ha-Cohen: Aaron, the high priest of Israel, vested in the linen robes of the priesthood with the breastplate of twelve shimmering jewels, each of them representing one of the twelve tribes of Israel.
As he had done as a boy, he took a pen from his pocket and traced the words on the page with it:
And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron…a breastplate, and an ephod, and a robe, and an embroidered coat, a mitre, and a girdle…and thou shalt make the breastplate of judgment with cunning work…and thou shalt set in it settings of stones, even four rows of stones: and the stones shall be with the names of the children of Israel…every one with his name shall they be according to the twelve tribes.
As he read, childhood returned. Then, as now, his father would wind phylacteries around arm and forehead and mourn aloud, this man who even then had always seemed to him as old as Sinai itself, over the destruction of the Temple; and when as a little boy he had learned to cry over a loss he did not understand and lament an uncleanness that could not be washed away, he had barely comprehended the grief of the Jews, the peculiar suffering they could not escape. And he also came to resent it all.
He had often idly wondered why he had become a Shin Bet man. Now it came clear for him. It was a way of purging the helplessness of his father and the impotent shadows of the generations before him, a people marched off again and again like animals to the slaughter. He had tried to break away while holding on at the same time. No high priest could exorcise the history that was in his blood.
Reb Davan was startled to see his son at that hour, and he was even more surprised at the questions Ari asked—warily, just as he had done years before. Ari knew better than anyone about his father’s wish for a scholar son who would one day read aloud in the synagogue; there was all at once a sad new eagerness in the pious eyes. Wandering frantically through his books, he nearly burst with erudition on the subject.
But it was all plain enough.
Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place…he shall put on the holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh, and shall be girded with a linen girdle, and with the linen mitre shall he be attired: these are holy garments…
And he shall take of the children of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering…Then shall he kill the goat of the sin offering, and bring his blood within the veil, and he shall sprinkle of the blood upon the altar eastward with his finger seven times.
Blood sprinkled on the altar again and again, in waves. Within the veil of the Holy of Holies. In the Sancta Sanctorum.
In the whole world there is no holier place.
His father had nearly wept as he described the great Day of Atonement. “The Sabbath of Sabbaths,” he had called it. As a boy, Ari remembered, he had sweated through the long warm holy day without a bath, without a morsel of food or a sip of water, listening to the keening prayers of his father and the others in the massive cubical shadows inside the synagogue. He was not permitted to put on his shoes. One Yom Kippur afternoon he had stared endlessly at a television screen that showed only a still picture of flowers and a flaming candle; and at the breath of evening he had shot out of the house up a sand hill to get fresh air into his lungs.
Now, however, his father’s every word was important. “Yom Kippur is the day of cleansing, when all Israel makes atonement for sin, when we fast and mortify ourselves before Ha-Shem because of our impurity.”
“And the blood, the altar, the priest?”
“That was in the days of the Temple,” his father explained. “Two goats were selected to bear the sin of the people. One goat was l’Adonai, for the Lord, and the other l’Azazel—for the Devil. The blood of the Lord’s goat, slaughtered by the priest, was taken solemnly into the temple and sprinkled upon the ark within the veil. Only the high priest was permitted in the Holy of Holies. Then he laid hands on the other goat—the scapegoat—to transfer upon its head the sin of Israel. A red cord was tied around the goat’s head and it was led