Mission (2 page)

‘How many years have you been married?'

‘Twenty-seven,' replied Wallis. The doors closed behind him.

Miriam turned to me. ‘You see? Some people do make it.'

‘Don't rush me,' I said.

Lazzarotti, the intern, came out with another nauseous nugget. ‘You know, I've been thinking. Maybe it was a bunch of religious
maniacs that did this. Remember that news item about that guy in England who had himself nailed to a cross on Hampstead Heath? Right through the palms of his hands. The police arrived just before his friends got to work on his feet. Happened about fifteen years ago.'

‘You must have been a really creepy kid,' I said. ‘What did you used to keep under the bed – a Jack the Ripper scrapbook?'

Lazzarotti looked hurt. ‘No. I just read about it. Thought it might be relevant. After all, you never know.'

‘That's right,' said Miriam. She eyed me then turned back to Lazzarotti. ‘Paul, get me an ECG and EEG unit down here as fast as you can.'

‘But –'he began.

‘Just do it, okay?' said Miriam. ‘Call me if there's any problem.'

Now, for those of you who, like me, avoid watching open-heart surgery on TV, I should perhaps explain that ECG stands for electrocardiogram, and EEG for electro-encephalogram. The first monitors heartbeats; the second, brain activity.

Miriam saw my puzzled frown. ‘You don't understand?'

‘I can understand you wanting to get rid of Lazzarotti,' I said. ‘But why send him for an ECG unit? A pizza with sausages and peppers would have been more useful.'

‘We'll get to the pizza later,' she replied. ‘Right now I want to run a couple of tests.'

‘I still don't get it,' I replied. ‘What can they prove that you don't know already?'

‘That this man isn't dead.'

As you can imagine, that was a real jaw-dropper. ‘You've got to be kidding,' I said.

‘No. Something happened just as Wallis went out of the door.' Miriam motioned to the guy's left hand which hung over the edge of the slab. There was a quarter-sized drop of blood on the tiled floor beneath. Another drop fell beside it. Then another. The stab wound had begun to bleed too.

I turned to Miriam. ‘You're the doctor, but I have to ask – how can a mistake like this happen? I mean, my God – just think. If Wallis hadn't been in a hurry to get away from here, this poor bastard could have been sliced open from his neck to his navel.'

Miriam gave me one of those pitying looks doctors reserve for laymen. ‘Leo, I was one of the people who checked him over in Emergency. He was dead. Believe me. Don't ask me to explain things. All I
can tell you is he's alive now.' She plugged the hole in his side and bandaged his wrists and feet. When she'd finished, she looked at me with this odd kind of expression. ‘This is going to sound a little crazy but since you haven't remarked upon it, I have to ask – doesn't he remind you of somebody?'

The question made me smile. ‘Is that why you sent Lazzarotti to fetch that equipment?'

‘This is serious, Leo,' said Miriam. ‘Answer the question.'

I cast my eyes dutifully over the bandaged body. ‘Well, I know who you mean, but it's only because of what's happened to him.'

‘Take a look at his teeth …' Miriam opened up the man's mouth and showed me. ‘No fillings, or signs of any other dental work. He's also never worn shoes.'

I shrugged. ‘So he's a barefoot freak who doesn't eat candy. That's not so unusual. Especially if he came from somewhere like Somalia, or the middle of Saudi Arabia. And in any case, the party you have in mind had his big moment two thousand years ago.'

‘I know. But just suppose …' Miriam let it hang there. I could see that she thought that what she had been about to say was as outrageous as I did.

‘I'm way ahead of you. It's a great idea but – ‘ I shook my head. ‘Forget it. Things like that just don't happen.'

The phone rang in the morgue attendant's office. He leant backwards and stuck his head around the door without moving his butt off the chair. ‘Lazzarotti …'

Miriam went across to take the call.

I turned back towards the body on the slab and found him looking at me. A chill shock-wave rippled up my spine and I was still quivering when I reached the attendant's office.

Miriam lowered the phone. ‘What's the matter?'

I gestured wordlessly towards the body. But when we looked round, the cover sheet was lying flat on the top of the slab. The body had gone. My back had been turned for ten, maybe fifteen seconds.

Miriam eyed me, took a deep breath and spoke into the phone. ‘Paul, uhh – hold those units. I'll see you back up in Emergency.'

Miriam and I went back to the slab, lifted up the cover sheet and looked at each other. ‘This is crazy,' I said. ‘His eyes were open. What happened?'

She shrugged. ‘You tell me.'

‘Well, at least the blood's still here.' I went down on one knee and
reached out a finger.

‘Don't touch it,' said Miriam. ‘I want to put that on a slide.' She folded the cover sheet over the foot of the table. There were smears on the slab where the lacerations on his back had started to bleed. She shook her head. I knew how she felt.

‘There has to be a rational explanation,' I insisted. ‘Just don't ask me what it is. But even if one buys the idea of the whole event, it doesn't add up. I mean, if the body disappeared, why didn't the blood go with it?'

Miriam gave me a look that spelled bad news. ‘That wasn't the only thing he left behind.' She took her hand out of her coat pocket and offered it to me, palm upwards. ‘I found these stuck in his scalp when I looked him over upstairs.'

She was holding three dark inch-long spikes. I thought at first that they were nails. Then I looked again and saw that they were thorns.

Terrific. On top of which, we had a signed death certificate and no body to go with it. I handed the problem right back to her. ‘What do we do now, Doctor?'

Miriam decided that the best thing to do was play it straight down the line. The morgue attendant, who was totally absorbed in the twin activities of reading a paperback and picking his nose, had noticed nothing and looked unlikely to move from his chair until pay day. She reasoned, with a kind of Polish logic, that as no one was likely to come looking for the body we might as well pretend that it was still there. While I held my breath, Miriam calmly filled out a card for the front of the freezer drawer that would hold our invisible corpse, then we put a combination of our finger-prints on the sheet that had to go down-town. Since the NYPD was not going to come up with a match for the dabs, we figured that the freezer drawer would stay closed until the time came to ship the body to the city morgue. And when somebody opened it and found it empty, that would be their problem.

Miriam transferred the blood from the floor on to glass slides then cleaned up the slab. We went back upstairs into Emergency where she did a quick snow job on Lazzarotti then we hung up our white coats and slipped out of the hospital.

Needless to say, we gave the Fassbinder movie a miss. We went back to Miriam's apartment on 57th and First, brewed up some strong coffee, bolstered ourselves with an even stronger drink and looked at each other a lot. Occasionally, one of us would pace up and down and start a sentence that foundered somewhere between the
initial intake of breath and the first three words. We were like a couple of characters from a play by Harold Pinter. In the second act, we withdrew into silence. I think we both thought that if we did not talk about the problem it would go away. A well-known tactic which, as you've probably discovered, doesn't work. Deep down, of course, we were both trying to figure out some kind of explanation that our dazed minds could accept. After all, we were normal people, leading normal lives, with a firm belief in the normal scheme of things. We both knew that thin air disappearances just did not happen. And yet – there it was.

In the third act, when the words came, it was in the form of small talk that touched upon our lives but carefully side-stepped what had happened at the hospital. It was as if the event was a concealed Claymore mine which, if triggered by one careless word, might explode and blow our lives to pieces. So we kept our distance until finally we could no longer resist playing the verbal equivalent of chicken. Jumping in with both feet but protecting ourselves by jokes – the New Yorker's defence against calamity. At least, I did. And we might have managed to laugh off the event if we'd been dealing with the inexplicable disappearance of an unknown Hispanic too poor to buy himself a pair of shoes. But all the black humour and scepticism I was able to muster could not shake Miriam's deep inner conviction that she had bandaged the wrists and feet of you-know-Who. And that really had me worried. Because on top of being a very down-to-earth doctor, this was a girl who had no time for religion. She came from a good solid family background, so naturally, like any nice Jewish girl, she had had a grounding in the faith. But, like me, she had left all that behind a long time ago. And again, like me, she was a very together person. She needed a religious experience like a hole in the head. But if she was right about who had done that Houdini act in the hospital morgue, there was only one possible explanation.

Somehow, at the instant of the purported Resurrection, the body of the man known as Jesus had been transported forward through time and had materialised for at least seventy-five minutes in Manhattan on Easter Saturday of the eighty-first year of the twentieth century.

‘Instead of where?' I asked, when we reached this conclusion.

‘Wherever he went to when he disappeared from the morgue,' said Miriam.

‘What kind of an answer is that?' I huffed.

‘The kind you get when you ask that kind of question.'

Now I am sure that some of you who have been following this may already have spotted what seems to be a deliberate mistake and maybe have even checked to see what it says in the Book. And the question you're asking is – if he rose on the third day, what was he doing in Manhattan on Saturday night? The answer is that the time in Jerusalem is seven hours ahead of New York. It was already Sunday over there.

I mention this now, but it didn't occur to me on that first fateful night. As I've said, we were both trying to find a way to dismiss the whole thing because, even if one set aside the nut-and-bolt practicalities of the time-travel hypothesis, it raised other issues which strained the limits of credibility.

To begin with, it meant accepting that the event described in the New Testament Gospels and which formed the cornerstone of the Christian faith actually took place. Until quite recently, I'd never taken that part of the story seriously but, after the publication of the latest scientific investigations of the Turin Shroud, I was prepared to accept the possibility that something quite extraordinary might have occurred. And if, as rumoured, the alleged image of Christ had been sealed into the linen by some process involving cosmic radiation then, clearly, we were into a whole new ball game.

For it meant accepting not only the reality of time-travel, but also the simultaneity of time. Which meant, as I understood it, that Einstein had got it wrong. For 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 really
happened. 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.