Inside the carriage, motionless because he had not signaled Shem to move on, Joseph of Arimathea, his face still flushed, said, “Tell me, Matthias, how many suspects would still remain on the list of the Christ Commission if they were conducting this investigation?”

For a kindly old man he was excellent with the needle when he tried. “Just two,” I mumbled, “you and Nicodemus.”

“Are you too tired to go on? This would be the ideal time to see Golgotha and the tomb, for it is almost the same hour that we removed Jesus from the cross and laid him in the sepulchre.”

“I’m ready.”

“Excellent. And from there it is a pleasant ride, on the road to Emmaus, to the home of my old friend Nicodemus. There you will have the pleasure of visiting the most impressive and beautiful garden of flowers since the days of Babylon, as well as meeting the wealthiest man in the nation.”

“Wealthier than you?”

“It is like comparing an anthill to Mount Hermon.” He chuckled. “And what will your next move be, if, after you have questioned both Nicodemus and me, you decide that we are not your grave robbers?”

Exactly what I had been wondering. “I don’t know, Joseph.”

“But your manuscript: what did you plan to have the Christ Commission do next, after their witness list was exhausted?”

“I cant tell you. Long before my writing of the book reached this point, I had abandoned the project as hopeless.”

“Then after myself and Nicodemus, you have no others to question?”

“None,” I replied hopelessly.

“Well,” he mused, “perhaps I can find you one more.”

thirteen

“THERE HAVE BEEN NO CRUCIFIXIONS here for several years,” Joseph said. “As you can see, and smell, it has become no more than a dumping ground for those too lazy to cart their waste to the fires in Hinnom Valley.”

The place was called Golgotha in Aramaic, meaning “the skull,” but as soon as I had stepped down from Joseph’s carriage I could see that its name had not derived from its shape, as so many biblical scholars had conjectured. The hill’s sandy terrain, scarred by patches of giant weeds, animal droppings, and mounds of foul-smelling garbage, ascended gradually for fifty feet or so to a barren flat summit no more than twenty feet in elevation above the road. Even in the warm orange sunlight of midafternoon, the place was foreboding and the stench of death hung like an invisible gas above our heads. Rodents, chirping their ugly cries, scurried in all directions when the sound of our approaching footsteps disturbed their feeding.

“Why no more crucifixions?” I asked, ready to clutch at any straw.

“Pilate decided that this was not a public enough place to display the bodies of executed criminals as examples to the people. Now the crosses are usually raised near the main roads to the northeast of the city.”

“And why is it called Golgotha?”