Free Virgin by Mary Elizabeth Murphy

much where I come from, but I don't remember ever
hearing that he was."
    "True. But
nowhere is it said that he wasn't."
    "Well, we
do know that he rubbed the higher-ups the wrong way."
    "I've done
my share of that," Dan said, thinking of his long-running battle with
Father Brennan, St. Joseph's pastor, over his soup kitchen in the church
basement.
    "It got
him killed."
    Dan laughed
again. "Not to worry. I'm not looking to get my palms and soles
ventilated."
    "You can't
be too careful, Fitz," Hal said, glancing back toward the plaza. "A lot of these folks are more than
a few bricks shy of a full load."
    Dan nodded.
"I'm aware of that." He thought of the couple of occasions when some
of Loaves and Fishes' "guests" got violent, mostly screaming and
shouting and pushing, but one went so far as to pull a knife during an argument
over who would sit by a window. "And I'm careful."
    "Good. I'm
sure there's a place in heaven for you, but I don't want you taking it just
yet."
    "Heaven's
not guaranteed for anybody, Hal. Sometimes I wonder if there is such a place."
    Hal was looking
at him strangely. "You?"
    He didn't want
to get into anything heavy with Hal so he grinned. "Just kidding. But how
about lunch? It's the least I can do." He pointed to Nino's on the corner
of St. Mark's Place. "Slice of Sicilian?"
    "I'll take
a raincheck," Hal said, extending his hand. "Got to run. But I want
to get together with you again after you've read the translation. See if you
can make any sense of it."
    "I'll do
my best. And thanks again. Thanks a million. Nice to own something this old--and
know it's one of a kind."
    "Not one
of a kind, I'm afraid," Hal said, frowning. "Shortly before I left,
an Israeli collector came in with another scroll identical to this one. The
parchment and the writing carbon dated the same as yours--about two thousand
years apart."
    Dan shrugged.
"Okay. So it's not one of a kind. It's still a great gift, and I'll
treasure it. But right now I've got to get back to the shelter for the lunch
line."
    Hal waved and
started down the sidewalk. "See you next week, okay? For lunch. I should
have my appetite back by then."
    Dan waved and
headed back to St. Joe's, wondering how many of these weird scrolls were
floating around the Middle East?

    She had been dead for two years and more, yet her body showed no
trace of corruption. The brother had kept her death a secret. He and the others
feared that Ananus or Herod Agrippa or even the Hellenists might make use of
her remains to further their various ends.

    from
the Glass scroll
    Rockefeller Museum
translation

    6

    Ramat Gan, Israel
    Chaim Kesev
stared westward from the picture window in the living room of Tulla Szobel's
sprawling hilltop home. He could see the lights of Tel Aviv--the IBM tower, the
waterfront hotels--and the darkness of the Mediterranean beyond. The glass
reflected the room behind him. A pale room, a small pale world--beige rug,
beige walls, beige drapes, pale abstract paintings, low beige furniture that
seemed designed for something other than human comfort, chrome and glass tables
and lamps.
    Kesev wrinkled
his nose. With all the money lavished on this room, he thought, the least you'd
think she could do was find a way to remove the cigarette stink. The place
smelled like a tavern at cleanup time.
    He had arrived
here unannounced tonight, shown Miss Szobel his Shin Bet identification, and
all but pushed his way in. Now he waited while she procured the scroll from a
room in some other quarter of the house.
    The scroll. . .
he'd begun a low-key search for it immediately after its theft four years ago.
A subtle search. Not I'm looking for a scroll recently stolen from a cave in
the Judean Wilderness. Have you seen or heard of such a thing? That kind of
search would close doors rather than open them. Instead, Kesev had extended
feelers into the antiquities market--legitimate and underground--saying he was a
collector interested in purchasing first-century manuscripts,