The Fire Gospel Read online

  He took a deep breath, counselled himself to relax. He lit up a smoke, turning his back to the scroll while igniting the cigarette’s tip, just in case a stray spark might leap through the air and set fire to his future. He inhaled the menthol-flavoured drug, blew a cloud towards the orange walls, inhaled again, blew again. He smoked hurriedly, without pleasure, as though he were standing at a bus stop and had mere seconds to finish the thing off before the bus left without him. When he was finished, he extinguished the butt on a fragment of pizza and left it embedded in the mozzarella.

  His treasured copy of John Coltrane’s Stellar Regions was playing through the computer speakers, the aural equivalent of a dog marking freshly claimed territory with its scent. A home wasn’t a home until Coltrane had sprayed it with his saxophone. Except that Stellar Regions was currently turned down to an almost inaudible volume, for fear of upsetting the neighbours, who’d introduced themselves yesterday afternoon bearing a gift of cookies. As if to say, You wouldn’t make life hell for people who’ve given you cookies, would you? Trane’s wild sax improvs blended with the whirring cooler fan of the PC, producing an ambient hybrid that was faintly irksome.

  Theo considered going to bed. But then remembered that he’d spent one night in this apartment’s bed already, and hadn’t liked it. The bed creaked when you turned from side to side. There was no Meredith in it and its sheets were too new. The room was small and on the ceiling there was a small red light – mandatory for safety purposes – blinking on and off all night. The light was like an insect trapped in the room; you wanted to get up and slap it.

  In this apartment, with its uncomfortable bed and alien lights and orange walls, it was difficult to hold on to the conviction that he would soon have enough money to buy any house he wished, anywhere. He must have faith. He mustn’t forget that the scrolls were historical relics on a par with the pyramids. Yes! The pyramids! Right here on his desk, weighted down with coffee mugs, was a marvel of antiquity. The Colossus of Rhodes, the Temple of Artemis, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon: all of them destroyed and turned to myth, but the scrolls . . . the scrolls were here, and he possessed them.

  And yet, until other people recognised their fabulous value, the scrolls were just part of the contents of his flat, along with the empty pizza box and the not-quite-functioning Walkman. That dazzling, euphoric moment of discovery, when he first glimpsed them on the floor of the Mosul museum, and his future was illuminated in a glow of anticipated glory, had dimmed now. Love at first sight can’t last. He’d seen the scrolls, he’d taken them; now what? The challenge of converting them into a brilliant future was trickier than he’d thought.

  Sure, millions of people would be interested in his discovery. But he couldn’t sell the scrolls to millions of individuals. What he could sell was a translation of Malchus’s words from Aramaic into English, and this was where self-doubt came in. And not just because Malchus’s prose was dull beyond belief.

  The very process of translating the scrolls demystified them, made them humdrum. As a professional linguist engaged on a task, Theo was subject to the usual niggly little worries, fretting about imperfect equivalents of Aramaic verb stems and the ethics of changing the syntax from Verb Subject Object to Subject Verb Object. In his head, he deconstructed the text into individual words and clauses, until the original grand edifice, an Eighth Wonder Of The World, was reduced to an inventory of stones. Then he reassembled those stones in digital typeface on a computer screen mounted on a plastic pedestal. The result looked no different from anything else in his PC, figments of the same universe as eBay and CNN.com and the offers of cheap Viagra and penis enlargement in his email inbox.

  He looked across at the scroll, pinioned on his desk, and tried to remind himself that these inky marks on ancient paper were astonishing, sensational, priceless.

  ‘I have spilled ink for no purpose,’ was the first sentence his eyes lit upon.

  Could that be true? No, it couldn’t be, it mustn’t be.

  OK, so Malchus was a bore. So what? This guy was not your average fundamentalist gasbag from Poopville, Missouri, writing an internet blog. He was the author of the oldest surviving piece of Christian literature! He knew two of Jesus’s disciples personally! He was a full-time evangelist at a time when Saint Paul was still a government bullyboy called Saul of Tarsus, hauling illicit believers off to jail. Malchus might be a moaning nonentity, but he was Important with a capital fucking I!

  Theo applied himself with fresh determination to the task at hand.

  Now I turn to the question put to me by my beloved brother Choresh.

  Theo chewed his lower lip. Translate ‘Choresh’ as ‘George’? Jabbing at his keyboard’s backspace bar he deleted seven letters, then typed ‘George’ in their place. Then he deleted ‘George’ and typed in ‘Choresh’. The time displayed at the bottom right corner of his computer screen was 1:27. The cold bed was waiting for him, there was half a pound of salami-encrusted, Pepsi-marinated mozzarella lodged in his stomach, and Meredith probably had her legs wrapped round the neck of the wildlife photographer by now.

  You ask after the true name of Thaddaeus. Thaddaeus, when I enquired of him regarding this matter, told me that his name was Thaddaeus. Therefore I must pass on to you that his name is Thaddaeus.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ cried Theo in frustration, and went to bed.

  Next morning, bleary-eyed, his glasses slightly fogged by hot coffee, Theo translated the lines that followed.

  However, speaking discreetly among trustworthy friends, I think it would not be disloyal to say that if you asked this same question not of myself, but rather of Thaddaeus’s mother, she would tell you that his name is Judas. For by that name was he known, until the actions of the other Judas, that is to say the Betrayer, brought shame upon the name. Furthermore, in the event that you should ever meet Judas, that is to say Thaddaeus, in person, which you may likely have the good fortune to do, for he has embarked on a journey of devoted witnessing to the glory of our Saviour, I advise you to greet him as Thaddaeus, and on no account speak the other name. For it is a point of soreness with him.

  Which I understand well enough. For I have known both Judases, and indeed I was present in the temple of Caiaphas when Judas the Betrayer was given his payment. And it is as galling for me, as it is for Thaddaeus, to observe how Judas has since grown fat and lazy upon that money.

  But most grievous for me is the knowledge that I was standing by at the precise moment when the betrayal of our Saviour was arranged, and felt no disquiet of my own. I felt only a prick of envy at the size of the sum, which seemed to me overly generous for the service rendered.

  Such was the filthiness of my heart, in those last days of my old life, before I stood on Golgotha and my heart was scalded clean by the blood of our Saviour.

  Such was Malchus.

  Numbers

  ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, take it or leave it,’ said Baum, leaning back in his chair until the sunlight from the window behind him turned the lenses of his spectacles into opaque circles of brilliance. ‘That’s a quarter of a million.’

  Theo frowned. The word ‘million’ hung in the air, a distracting illusion. The true figure, lacking that magical seventh digit, was merely in the thousands. Which was not what his research into author advances had led him to expect.

  ‘The book could easily generate that much in the first few hours of publication,’ he protested. ‘I’d have to be completely stupid.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Baum, not in the least offended. ‘If sales really do go through the roof, you’re a big winner. You earn out your advance in a single afternoon, and then it’s royalties forever after.’

  ‘Yes, very tiny royalties,’ said Theo, striving to sound wry rather than exasperated. ‘Maybe the tiniest, longest-delayed royalties in any publishing contract, ever. I feel I need a refresher course in algebra just to understand how the micro-fractions would eventually add up to my first dollar. Any half-decent lawyer o
r agent would look at me and just shake their head.’

  Baum swivelled forward once again, and fixed Theo with a kindly, merciless stare.

  ‘But they’ve already done that, haven’t they?’ he wheezed. ‘The half-decent ones and the decent ones and maybe the not-so-decent ones. Nobody wants to represent you.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Theo. He felt himself blushing and when he blushed the scars on his face itched. They’d healed awkwardly; he really should have got them stitched, instead of rushing home to be humiliated by Meredith. He was damned if he would let himself be humiliated again. ‘I only approached two agents,’ he insisted, ‘or five, if you count the three that didn’t answer my calls. Of the agents I had meetings with, one ended up saying she doesn’t handle anything religious in nature, which was annoying, because she could’ve told me that on the phone. The other seemed keen to go ahead. Very keen.’

  ‘But you’re here on your lonesome.’

  ‘I . . . I just didn’t like the guy. We didn’t click. And so I decided to see what would happen if I approached a publisher myself. I mean, this book is fantastically important; it’s not as if anyone is going to need convincing that people will want to read it.’

  ‘Sure,’ agreed Baum softly. ‘Sure.’ He removed his glasses and wiped them on his tie, gazing vaguely at his desk. He devoted a full thirty seconds to one lens, then began on the other. All the while, in other rooms of the office floor occupied by Elysium, telephones kept ringing and being answered by employees. Baum’s own phone flashed intermittently but made no sound except for the occasional click, like a nervous person swallowing. Theo looked around the office, taking in the stacks of identical hardbacks next to the watercooler, the display case of past publications, the posters for Elysium’s one and only bestseller, the African statuettes, the wall-mounted cover designs, the unopened cardboard boxes and, in a far corner, the mound of manuscripts (some still sealed in outsize Jiffy bags) which must be the Slush Pile. Theo hadn’t expected the Slush Pile to be a literal pile. He’d assumed it would be something less pitiful and publicly on view.

  ‘A book like yours’, said Baum, ‘gets tongues wagging in an industry like ours. I’m under no illusions. You approached Oxford University Press; Knopf; Harcourt; Grove Atlantic; Little, Brown; HarperCollins; Penguin . . . maybe others I didn’t hear about. I suspect you approached just about every publisher that has a sizeable turnover. And then you came to me.’

  ‘Elysium is a highly regarded publisher of academic texts,’ said Theo.

  ‘So it is, so it is,’ said Baum breezily. ‘It is also – or was, until two years ago – a small fish, an also-ran, a little sparrow hanging around the hyenas hoping that when the big orgy of feasting is over, there might be some overlooked morsel left to scrounge.’ His voice was developing a harder edge. For the first time since ushering Theo into his office, he no longer resembled the mild-mannered proprietor of a second-hand book-store. ‘Then, two years ago, on one of those jamborees of slaughter that publishers call book fairs, when all the self-evidently big books had been dragged away in a trail of fresh blood and I was left with the offal and the fragments of toenail as usual, I came upon a manuscript by a Norwegian schoolteacher, translated by a not-quite-bilingual translator, of games that parents should play with their children in order to teach them arithmetic. That little book, as I’m sure you know, has become a surprise bestseller for Elysium. In fact, it has outperformed every other book from that book fair, all the hyped novels that were auctioned for astronomical sums, all the chauffeur-driven manuscripts, all the gold-plated proofs. It has stomped on them with its little knitted Scandinavian booties. And we are selling thousands of copies a week to worried parents who want to sing the multiplication tables with their kids at bedtime.’

  Theo sat silent. When someone was springloaded, it was best to let them speak their piece.

  ‘Do I sound like a man with a grudge, Theo? Very well, I am a man with a grudge. I’ve been a sparrow hanging around hyenas for too many years. I’ve grown old waiting for my chance. I know very well that my kiddie arithmetic book won’t persuade any prestigious authors to give their next magnum opus to Elysium. Sing Times Seven will be a fluke, and at the next Frankfurt Book Fair, I will be mobbed by agents trying to sell me books about teaching your dog geometry via jazz ballet.’

  ‘My book isn’t about teaching dogs geometry,’ Theo reminded him. ‘For God’s sake, Mr Baum, it’s a new Gospel! It’s a previously unknown account of the life and death of Jesus, written in Aramaic, the language Jesus himself spoke. In fact, it will be the only Gospel written in Aramaic: the others are in Greek. And it’s earlier than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, years earlier. I can’t understand why publishers aren’t falling over themselves to put it out – 99.99 per cent of books aren’t important, not really. This one is.’

  Baum smiled sadly. ‘Theo, you keep calling it a book. That’s obstacle number one. It isn’t a book. It’s thirty pages of text, max, if it were printed in quite a roomy font with generous margins. We cannot publish it as a pamphlet. So, the obvious solution is that we pad it out with your account of how you found the scrolls, how you got them back from Iraq, some fascinating facts about the history and structure of the Aramaic language, what you had for breakfast on the morning you arrived back in Toronto, and so on and so on and so on. That part is a risk for Elysium. Because we have not the faintest idea if you can write. Which, despite what you may have concluded from Sing Times Seven, is still an issue of concern for me.’

  ‘I’ve written a number of articles on Aramaic for linguistics journals,’ said Theo.

  ‘And your payment for those articles, I have no hesitation in guessing, was a couple of free copies of those journals. Not 250,000 dollars.’ Before Theo could object again, Baum went on: ‘Obstacle number two: the scrolls, arguably, are stolen goods. This is why Oxford University Press and Penguin and all the others won’t commit, and you know it.’

  Theo was ready for this one. He’d prepared his defence. ‘I just can’t see it that way; my conscience is clear. If you’d asked the museum whether they owned those scrolls before I came on the scene, they would’ve said, “What scrolls?” They had no scrolls, as far as they were concerned. I’ve studied the museum’s inventory, every last statue and coin and tablet they owned before the war started. The scrolls weren’t on it. So, officially, they don’t exist. They might as well have fallen out of a tree in the street outside, or washed up on a beach.’

  Baum nodded wearily. ‘Either of those scenarios would have been a much safer bet, legally speaking, but it’s too late to start spinning them now. The point is that it’s a grey area. You took something the museum didn’t know it had. Something extremely valuable that the Iraqi nation would surely wish to keep a hold of, in normal circumstances. Of course, there’s a big question mark hanging over what they’ll do if we publish. They may do nothing. They’re kind of . . . preoccupied with other things, after all. The whole concept of an Iraqi nation, and who speaks for it, and who represents it, is up in the air. But I suspect that somebody in Iraq, sometime, surely will demand the scrolls be returned. Which isn’t necessarily a problem for our book, which will’ve sold whatever it’s going to sell by then. Or maybe it is a problem, if some Iraqi lawyer argues that our profits are illegal and we should forfeit them. I don’t know. It’s a grey area. I can well understand why other publishers are hesitant to go there. I may live to regret going there myself.’

  ‘What about the Bible?’ Theo was speaking a little too loudly now; he couldn’t help it. ‘Anybody can publish a Bible if they want to, can’t they? Or a Dickens novel for that matter, a Mark Twain novel, Gulliver’s Travels, anything that’s older than a hundred years. OK, there may be some person or institution that owns the original manuscript, but that’s a separate issue. The text, the actual words, are out of copyright. They’re in the public domain.’

  ‘Which brings us to obstacle number three,’ said Baum. ‘Our man Malchus has been dea
d a lot longer than Dickens. Which means that when our book comes out, the only parts of it that will have the cast-iron protection of copyright law will be your parts. Your thrill-packed account of your sweaty forehead when you thought your suitcase might get impounded by security at Baghdad Airport. Your description of how many Band-Aids you had to apply to your face. And so on. Copyright will keep every word of it sacred. Whereas Malchus’s part will be all over the internet within forty-eight hours, or however long it takes somebody to type the text onto a website.’

  ‘That’s not true. My translation will be copyright.’

  ‘Of course, of course. They’ll have to paraphrase, change a few words here and there. Or maybe they won’t bother. The internet is a slippery beast. Cut off one website, and another seven spring up in its place. I’m getting an ulcer just thinking about it. But I still want to publish. Is that dedication or what?’ He smiled. His teeth were false. He was, as he claimed to be, an old man.

  ‘The contract is still outrageous,’ said Theo.

  ‘The contract is not outrageous,’ said Baum. ‘The contract gives you a quarter of a million dollars and it gives me half a million headaches. Please remember that Elysium is, or was, an academic publisher. In academic publishing, usually, very little money changes hands. Authors often don’t even get an advance. We at Elysium are not in the business of bestsellers, we are in the business of . . . of . . .’ Baum leapt up from his chair, crossed over to the nearest bookcase, and pulled out a handful of slim volumes. He whacked them down on the desk for Theo to examine, one, two, three, four, like playing cards. Gothic Ascetic: The Paradoxical Oeuvre of Giovanni Piranesi was one. The Smallest Intimations of Tomorrow: Women Poets and Political Oppression in Iran, 1941–1988 was another.