“ Most interpretations sugarcoat it,” agreed Shannon.
Jessica repeated the last phrase, “ '… but with the flesh, the law of sin.' What is the literal meaning of that? What does that mean. Shannon?”
“ Render unto Caesar.”
“ Yeah, I get it, but I thought they were talking about taxes.”
They examined the passage further, and O'Brien said, “I've sent for a Bible scholar, a real expert, a priest to verify this, but God help me if I don't believe this madman has not only buried her alive but buried her strapped to his decaying son, likely in the same coffin.”
“ Christ, how do you get that from this biblical passage?” asked Jessica, feeling ill at the mental image O'Brien had created in her brain, Kim Desinor's sores flashing like red flags in her mind's eye.
“ It comes out of my interpretation of the passage.”
“ Well let's hope you're entirely off base.”
A knock at the door, and they were joined by a man in the priesthood, a Father Joseph Pinwaring. He looked like the actor Max Von Sydow, and he also looked completely lost and out of place here at the Washington Post. “I am here, Tim, just as you requested,” he said, taking O'Brien's hand and firmly shaking it.
O'Brien thanked the minister profusely for coming so quickly. They obviously had some history between them. After introductions, the Bible scholar set immediately to work, his dark, piercing eyes instantly fascinated with the selection of Romans 7:24-5.
“ It's a highly unusual citing, even for a clergyman, much less a lay person.”
He hemmed and hawed and read and reread the selection, trying to place it in the context of the letter, and what he knew of the case from the papers, and from his young friend, O'Brien. “Highly unusual,” he repeated, looking dumbfounded, snatching his wire-rimmed glasses off and cleaning them with a handkerchief. “I'm surprised. It's a passage usually… that is normally left alone… a sleeping dog in the literature, you might say. One of those footnotes we'd all as soon forget.”
“ Really, no kidding, Father. Why do you think I called you down here? None of us knows what to make of it.” O'Brien's remark must have sounded more caustic than he'd intended, as it made the white-haired clergyman stare at him and half grin. “Tim, you were always the boy in the choir I worried most about.”
Jessica said, “We're all on edge, sir.” She could not believe she was making apology for O'Brien. “You can imagine the frustration since the abduction. It has taken a terrible toll on Tim's pleasant side.”
Laughing lightly at this, Father Pinwaring seemed to take no offense. He continued on, while nervously pulling at his bearded chin and caressing his throat. He stood as tall as Jessica and had piercing black eyes with multicolored specks that looked like shards of broken glass meant to surprise and dazzle as they reflected any color. “Little is spoken about it,” he softly began, “but the Romans, well known for creating horrid ways to destroy any enemy to the state, refined various methods of impaling and crucifixion. That much is general knowledge, yes?”
The others nodded almost in unison.
“ But the Romans reserved one method for convicted murderers,” Pinwaring added with a sad shake of the head, his luminous eyes now downcast, taking on a deep sorrow.
Jessica asked, “And you believe this is what the passage is about?”
“ I do indeed.”
“ And that method of punishment?” asked Jessica.
“ They would strap the murderer to his victim.”
'Tie the dead man to the living?”
“ Precisely, usually onto the back. Why? So that the poor devil could not possibly undo the decaying dead man or woman from his flesh, and once the dead flesh began to eat away at the living flesh, believe me, the murderer made every attempt to free himself of the 'monkey on his back' because not only did his life depend upon it, so did his sanity and level of pain.”
“ He was literally eaten alive by decay,” added O'Brien.
“ Can't imagine a more horrible way to die,” said Keyes, going pale. She exchanged a look with Jessica, both of them realizing what Kim had been saying all along.
Jessica, who had seen every kind of evil imaginable, now tried to imagine how Old Man Purdy might exact such a price from Judge Maureen DeCampe. The thought made her want to vomit, but she pushed on, considering O'Brien's take: Bury her alive with Jimmy Lee's rotting corpse. Obviously, O'Brien thought no one would believe him unless his interpretation of the passage was in sync with and supported by a man of the cloth.
“ But then… why did the old man take two coffins from the Huntsville Penitentiary?” Jessica asked.
“ Perhaps he's dug a hole for himself as well, for when it's over,” suggested Keyes.
O'Brien disagreed. “A hole for himself. Not likely if he's threatening to make Jessica his next victim.”
“ Hence death on my shoulder,” Pinwaring now said. Pinwaring, a stoop-shouldered, once tall man had been made slighter by age. His large chin and long jaw set him apart. He replaced his glasses and again studied the letter and the reference from the Holy Book. He next snatched the glasses off again and punctuated his remarks with the pointed ends. “It's where the phrase monkey on my back originates-the black monkey being the decaying corpse-a euphemism for the most cruel of capital punishment man has ever devised. I mean compare this slow cruelty to a lethal injection or the electric chair. There is no comparison.”
“ But Dr. Keyes here says the passage was about rendering that pound of flesh unto Caesar-that which is his, taxes, all that,” Jessica countered, wanting to believe the old minister wrong.
“ Well… yes… And that has been a time-worn and I suspect more easily palatable interpretation; unfortunately, the truth of the matter is this is a direct reference to the Roman method of just retribution for murder-an ancient concept even to the Romans-to punish in the manner most fitting.”
“ How's that?” asked Richard Sharpe.
“ In murdering someone, you consign him to the worms- decay. So how should you be punished but by decay? Most people are far more agreeable to the kinder interpretation of this passage, but this version is quite within the realm of the Roman world. Notice it does not refer to it as the law of men nor the law of man, but rather the law of sin.”
“ Yeah, that's what struck me,” agreed Jessica, finding that she liked Pinwaring.
“ Given what I know of original texts-I've studied in Rome-I have to disagree with those who soft-sell the passage. My take on the passage makes the most hardened criminal grimace with the thought of such a horrid punishment: being killed by the decay of a rotting corpse from which you have no hope of escape until you, too, rot to death, but you do it alive. Trust me, being buried alive, able soon to die of asphyxiation, while horrible in itself, is a cakewalk to this sort of end.”
“ God, and I thought all the really bad and horrible stuff was caused by modem-day stressors, the times, alienation, disenfranchisement, big cities, isolation in an uncaring, jaded modern world,” said Sharpe.
Pinwaring vigorously shook his head. “Those who fail to understand the lessons of the past are doomed to commit its errors over and over, and perhaps those who do understand the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them as well. I'm not sure. Jury is still out on that one, but in the Roman mind, the laws governing murder- the most inescapably despicable act on the planet-were quite simple, really: If you bring on someone else's decay- the pollution of the temple of the soul of another human being-then you repay murder in exact kind. In fact, they believed a murderer paid over and over throughout eternity; that there was no forgiveness for a capital crime, and there was no escaping one's punishment for the greatest crime man can commit.”
“ A far cry from our judicial system today,” complained O'Brien. “Christianity's influence.”
“ Perhaps we need a little more Roman thinking in our courts today,” Jessica agreed. “Can I quote you on that, Jessica?” asked O'Brien. “No, you may not. I've got enough problems left over from the last time you quoted me.”
“ Hey, that story brought our man out, didn't it?” asked O'Brien. “Just as you had hoped, if I don't miss my guess.”
“ No comment.”
“ Fair enough.”
“ You realize that if this madman from Iowa is reading his Bible literally, he will interpret the passage in the same sense that I have,” said Pinwaring.
A silence fell over them all. They were left alone with a terrible image and their thoughts.
