The Fifth Gospel(40)

            “Take this,” Ugo said, handing me the other flashlight. “The timer lasts only twenty minutes. Now let me show you what we’re up against.”

            He synced the countdown to his digital watch, set it running, then removed the loop of wire from the grocery-store bag. For the first time I got a good look at it: an electronic handset connected to an oval of metal like an oven coil. When he turned it on, red letters flickered across the handset.

            “They’re installing a new inventory system,” he said, “so they won’t have to shut down the library for a month every year to do it by hand. Do you know what this is?”

            It looked like the offspring of a TV antenna and a towel warmer.

            “It’s a radio frequency scanner,” he said. “Tags have been implanted in the manuscript bindings, and this scanner can read fifty at a time, straight through the air.”

            He led me past the first stack, demonstrating as we passed. Lines of text scrolled down the screen faster than I could read them. Call numbers. Titles. Authors.

            “Even with this wand,” he said, “it took me two weeks of searching to realize the manuscript must be down here. Two weeks, and a bit of luck.” He nodded in the direction of a white plastic box installed on the ceiling. “Those are the permanent scanners. For some reason, they interfere with the security system, so the steel door has to remain unlocked until the problem has been fixed.” He glanced at me. “For us, that’s good news. The bad news is that this RF technology makes the steel door irrelevant. My first visit to this vault, I made the mistake of taking a book to a different shelf across the aisle. The scanners saw it moving. In five minutes, a security guard was here.”

            “What did you do?”

            “Hid and prayed. Fortunately, the guard thought the system was just on the fritz. From then on, I’ve followed two rules. One: I read in situ. And two: I wear these.”

            He produced the pairs of latex gloves from the bag.

            “To avoid leaving fingerprints?” I said.

            “Not the kind you’re thinking of,” he said with a glint in his eye. “Now follow me.”

            As we moved through the stacks, his precision increased. Leaving the duffel at the end of an aisle, he exhumed a vial of alcohol swabs and cleaned his hands before donning the gloves.

            “Is this it?” I asked, seeing that the handset was now registering a fondo of manuscripts in Syriac, the ancient language of Edessa in the time of the Diatessaron. The language, also, closest to Jesus’ Aramaic.

            But Ugo shook his head and continued deeper into the aisle. “This,” he said, “is it.”

            On the screen, a strange notation had appeared. Where call numbers should have been, there was a Latin word. CORRUPTAE.

            Damaged.

            “This shelf,” Ugo said, “is a backlog for the restoration workshop.” He gestured at an entire stack, more than one hundred in all. “They don’t even seem to realize it’s here.”

            “How did you find the right manuscript?”

            Ugo couldn’t read Greek, and knowledge of Syriac was far rarer.

            “Father Alex, I’ve been coming down here every night since I came back from Turkey. I sleep only during the days. What you see here has become my life. I’m this far”—he pinched his fingers in the air—“from proving that the Shroud was in Edessa in the second century. If I’d had to, I would’ve searched every manuscript in this palace by hand.” He grinned. “Fortunately, all the manuscripts on this shelf still have indexes from the old inventory system—written in beautiful Latin.”