‘You’ve heard my story, Mr Dittami. I translated the Pali text as accurately as I could,’ Notovitch says. And then, with some of the pedagogical huffiness of Renan: ‘Reality doesn’t care whether you choose to believe in it, Mr Dittami.’

‘But there is no evidence!’

‘Evidence! What evidence would satisfy you?’

That’s when Notovitch took off his slipper to show Vincenzo his ancient wound – the livid skin, the missing toes – beneath the strange frugality of his darned sock.

There is a whole genus of tokens that are offered in stories to redeem the inflated currency of words: handkerchiefs dipped in blood, wounds, strawberry marks, the livers of slaughtered animals, heads on silver plates. Sincerity is generally made visible through someone or something’s suffering. ‘I cannot believe in Western sincerity because it is invisible,’ said the writer Yukio Mishima, ‘but in feudal times we believed that sincerity “resided” in our entrails and if we needed to show our sincerity, we had to cut our bellies and take out our visible sincerity.’

Examining the old man’s mutilated foot, Vincenzo allows himself to be persuaded. But doubts remain. And possibilities almost too dark to contemplate.

*

I’VE LIVED WITH NOTOVITCH for a very long time, I’ve wondered about his motives, his aims, and how best to tell his story. There’s no question that his gospel has become an idée fixe – for both of us.

His complete works are memorialised in the frontispiece of the volume on my desk. It’s the one he inscribed to the Duchess of Kent one January night in 1939, in which the list of previous publications has been slyly and almost imperceptibly defaced with the word jésus.

‘Why, Notovitch!’ the duchess said afterwards, as his identity dawned on her. ‘The scoundrel who claimed Jesus was a Hindu!’ Her inaccurate judgement is not the unkindest verdict we need to consider.

In some volumes of the secret books, He is Himself Judas. Nicolas Notovitch and the tale of his lost gospel are real. It’s my fascination with him that has drawn me into this enchantment. The events he’s described to Vincenzo – foreshortened, condensed, assuming the liberties of fiction – impinged on the history we know roughly in the way he said they did.

The figure who bothers me is Mulhouse. Who is this thrusting young writer, so Gentile in origin and yet, in other ways, so close on the palette to Nicolas? As Notovitch has told the story, he’s pinned the blame on Mulhouse. But when you see them side by side, are they two different men, or one, gazing at his reflection in a pool of mercury?