"Mission" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tilley Patrick)

Miriam lowered the phone. 'What's thc matter?'
I gestured wor&essly 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, ifthe 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 ~t. 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 fror~i his chair until pay day. She reasoned, with a kind of Polish logic, that as rio 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 Ibr the dabs, we figured that the freezer drawer would stay closed until the time came to ship the body to the city morgue. Arid 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 t lie 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 Fasshindcr movie a miss. We went hack to Miriam's apartment on 57th and First, brewed up some strong coi1i~e, holstered ourselves with an even stronrzer drink and loolinitial 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 himselfa 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 l~r 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.
17
Now I am sure that some of you who have been f~1lowing 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, hut also the simultaneity of time. Which meant, as I understood it, that Einstein had got it wrong. For if our tentative ~planation 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 reassurarice. 'I'he 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 thewhole thing ofl 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 nck 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
microscopic examination. And the photographs. Yes. They were a surprise to me too. One of the cops had taken four colour l'olaroids 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 - iHave 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 goon - 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 identif~y the thorns as coming tram a
prickly 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 hut 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.
'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 bush within the last couple of weeks.'
Which, when you think about it, seemed to make sense.
It was with the blood sample that things got a little sticky and the story we concocted eventually fell apart, hut it was the best we could come up with at the time. Miriam had asked a friend of hers called JetiFowler to analyse it. lie was the head of some research team or other that was working on blood fats. When he called Miriam back he had sounded distinctly twitchy so she fixed for the three of us to meet at my place.
As he came in through the door, he said, 'Where did you get this sample from?' We hadn't even shaken hands.
'Before I answer 1 want to know one thing,' I said, stalling fhr time. 'Is it human and, uhh - what would you like to drink?'

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253545556575859606162636465666768697071727374757677787980818283848586878889909192