The 13th Apostle

Her smiled faded and a soft sadness crept across her face. “You don’t want to know,” she said quietly.

“Yes, I do. Come on. How come you get special treatment?

She moved closer, her face only inches from his, and smiled impudently. “Because most people, especially men—but women too—feel funny about touching someone who’s been raped. Even if it’s nothing more than a standard security frisk, it makes them uncomfortable. In my case, they would rather risk my smuggling sensitive information out of the Museum than to chance offending me and creating a scene.”

Gil struggled to sort through her comeback. If Sabbie had wanted him to know she had been raped, she had chosen a particularly lousy way to tell him. No accident, he concluded. She wasn’t about to waste the shock value of it. He wasn’t certain what she expected but he wasn’t buying into the game.

“I didn’t know,” he said simply. He stared back unblinkingly.

“About which, the rape or people’s reactions?” she asked haughtily.

“Either.”

“Well, it’s true. Once people know you’ve been raped, they never treat you the same again. Every time they see you, the first thing they think about is the rape. You can see it in their eyes. It affects how they treat you, how they speak to you, certainly, how they touch you.”

Her tone, though it had started out as defiant, had become honest and passionate.

“It’s probably a lot like being fat or being a nun,” she continued. “Few people are able to get past that first big fact. In my case, it works to my advantage. I get to bypass the groping sweaty hands that wait for you every time you leave the building, while you get a free thrill every time,” she added with a mischievous grin.

“Thanks a lot!” he said sarcastically.

“So, how’s it going?” she asked.

“What, the pattern-hunting? It’s not,” Gil admitted.

“What would help?”

“A good smack in the head with some particularly heavy object might do the trick. Look, as far as I can see, Elias’ message says nothing about the scroll. Nada, zilch, zippo,” he concluded with a pop of his lips.

“Come on,” she said warmly. “You need a break.” She took him by the hand and walked toward the door. “I’m going to show you what you’ve been working for.”

The next two hours passed as if they had been minutes. The Museum’s plethora of riches, beauty, ingenuity, and sheer antiquity were overwhelming. He had expected to see Judaica, historical finds of disintegrating paper and rusted metal. He was met with fourteenth-century sculptures of Venus, astounding riches of Turkish Sultans, the works of Pollock, Ernst, Rembrandt, Rodin, and hundreds of other treasures that, each in itself, would have warranted its own place of exhibit.