Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt

Catholic, huh?”
    She nodded again.
    â€œKnew it,” he sighed, “that dark red hair. And the way you blushed when I mentioned the mistress business last night. Dantan, Dantan … that’s not an Irish name, is it? Oh, look!” A waiter was passing by with a pastry cart laden with a tableau of croissants and gateaux, strudel and Kuchenstücke, muffins and scones and crumpets and Danish pastries. “Excuse me,” O’Hanrahan said to the man. “I’d like a strudel, yes, that thing there. Lucy?”
    â€œThe Danish, I guess,” said Lucy, the bank broken for sure. “You’re not going to have room for all you ordered, sir, if you pick your way through the pastry cart.”
    â€œI don’t intend to eat all I ordered. I just want those bastards at Chicago to pay for it all. You were saying?”
    â€œDantan,” she commenced, “is a Breton name. Somewhere in the late 1700s my great-great-grandsomething came over to Ireland.”
    â€œNo doubt to avoid the French anticlericalism of the 1790s.”
    Lucy was embarrassed to know so little of her family history, let alone the history of the world that prompted it. “Yes, I suppose,” she continued. “They made it to Ireland just in time for the famines. Then my grandfather came to the U.S. after World War One.”
    â€œProbably instead of World War One if he was true to Irish form. A lot of priests in the family, I bet.”
    â€œFair number.”
    O’Hanrahan provided his own skewed take on Irish history: “The Bretons are the great Catholic prudes of Europe. Ireland used to be a fun-loving, copulating country before they imported a wave of Breton priests to help them survive the famine. By the time the Bretons were done, the average marriage age in 1850 for a woman was thirty-eight, for a man, fifty. And they were virgins too. Look at our island now! Thanks to your relatives, more puritanical than the Puritans.”
    Lucy noticed O’Hanrahan referred to it as our island. As did her father. Somewhere a line was drawn between her father’s Irish-American generation and her own. She had never once been tempted to claim anything but America as home, and the troubles of Ulster held no romance at all. Who would lead the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago? A proper IRA-backing Republican—Kerry O’Casey from her father’s union local, a man dubbed Uncle Kerry in the family—or some mealy-mouthed arse-kissing drunken ol’ sod who’d say Your Majesty faster’n a lightnin’ flash? Her father had noted a lack of Republican sympathy in his children and remonstrated with them for their apathy. When Lucy was nine years old her father as a birthday present made out a check to NORAID in her name. So she’d remember her ninth, and the nine former counties of Ulster. Thanks a lot, Dad.
    Lucy got down to business. “I think I have an idea what you’re hunting for, sir.”
    He raised an eyebrow, mildly interested. “You do, do you?”
    Lucy cut her Danish into sections, trying to project nonchalance. “Yes. I think you’re on the trail of a heretofore lost gospel. Something very old, Second Century maybe, by the sound of it, or you wouldn’t be so excited. And it’s attributed to one of the Twelve Disciples.”
    â€œWhy do you figure one of the Twelve is the author of this supposed lost work?”
    â€œBefore I identified myself I heard you say as much to Father Beaufoix.”
    He grimaced. “Said that, did I?”
    â€œOf course, maybe you’ve found a First-Century account. That would explain what the rabbi’s doing here.”
    Now how the hell did she get that?
    â€œI looked up Mordechai Hersch in the Scholarly Register at Braithwaite.”
    â€œI’m in there too, you know.”
    (Want to tell him the news, Lucy?)
    Actually Lucy also looked up Patrick O’Hanrahan and