Mission Read Free Page B

if our tentative explanation was anywhere near the truth then our own births, lives and deaths had occurred in the same instant as that in which the body of Christ had been transported from the first century AD to our own. And as he lay in the alleyway over on the East Side and later on that slab in the morgue, four Roman guards were lying blinded outside a rock tomb in a Jewish cemetery near Jerusalem and, if the scientists were right about the Shroud, maybe even dying from radiations burns. While we sat in Miriam’s apartment on 57th and First, his life and ours and all the events in between co-existed simultaneously along with every other event from the beginning to the end of the world – and the universe itself.
    As you can imagine, the implications of such a concept were too stunning to even begin to contemplate. What we needed was reassurance. The comforting thought that our world was still as it had always been. That everything was as we perceived it to be. And so we tried to convince ourselves that what we had witnessed had not reallyhappened. After all, visions of Christ, complete with stigmata, and of the Virgin Mary had appeared on numerous occasions to more than one witness. In some cases over periods of several hours. Days even. But to avail ourselves of this escape route meant explaining away the fact that the cops in the squad car, the crew of the ambulance, the admission personnel on duty in Emergency at the Manhattan General, Wallis, Lazzarotti, the morgue attendant and the two of us had all been exposed to different segments of a unique hallucinatory experience.
    Maybe Saint Teresa or Saint Augustine might not have had any trouble taking something like this on board, but ecstatic visions were definitely not part of our scene in spite of the highs we’d had whilst sharing the odd joint.
    To be honest, we would have given anything to have been able to shrug the whole thing off, but no matter how our minds twisted-and turned, the circumstantial evidence of our time-traveller remained. And while it could be destroyed, it could not be denied. The thorns that Miriam had picked out of the victim’s scalp and the blood she had transferred on to three glass slides and had passed on for microscopic examination. And the photographs. Yes. They were a surprise to me too. One of the cops had taken four colour Polaroids of the body before it had been moved from the alleyway on the East Side. We didn’t know about the pictures on that first night but later, when they came into my possession, I remember saying to Miriam – ‘Have you any idea what these could be worth?’
    You will find them with the other documents in my safety deposit box at the Chase Manhattan.
    Sunday morning, 19th April. The sun rose on schedule. The world around us, and presumably the universe, appeared to be still in one piece. Monday, the same thing. We went back to work and tried to forget what had happened. What the hell, life had to go on – right? We went out to dinner a couple of times. We made love. We even went to see the Fassbinder movie. But it was no good. Neither of us could shake off the image of that whipped and beaten body on the slab and its sudden inexplicable disappearance. And although I said nothing to Miriam, I was haunted by those eyes and the look they had given me.
    Through a colleague, Miriam had got in touch with an obliging lady botanist who was able to identify the thorns as coming from aprickly shrub called
Palerius.
It was one of several similar types to be found in Israel and the Middle East generally. As evidence, it wasn’t particularly conclusive but it didn’t help our mental campaign to turn the Saturday night mystery into a non-event.
    I asked Miriam if she was going to try and have the thorns carbon-dated.
    â€˜No need,’ she replied. ‘Alison found traces of sap on the base of the thorns. She reckons that the branch they were growing on had been cut from the