Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

signalling me to be quiet. “Maggie and Martha are in the back. They’re angry with you. All of you. Now they’ll be angry with me for letting you in.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    He shrugged. “What can they do? It’s my house.”
    I went directly through the front room into a second room that opened off to bedchambers, the mikveh, and the courtyard where food was prepared. I heard voices coming from one of the bedchambers. When I walked in, Maggie looked up from braiding Martha’s hair.
    “So, you’ve come to tell me that it’s done,” she said. Tears welled up in her eyes and I felt as if I would break down with her if she started sobbing now.
    “No,” I said. “He and the others are on their way here. Through Ben Hinnon, so it will be a few hours. But I have a plan.” I pulled the ying-yang amulet that Joy had given me out of my tunic and waved it before them.
    “Your plan is to bribe Joshua with ugly jewelry?” asked Martha.
    I pointed to the tiny stoppers on either side of the amulet. “No, my plan is to poison him.”
    I explained how the poison worked to Mary and Martha and then we waited, counting the time in our imaginations, watching in our mind’s eyes as the apostles made their way through Jerusalem, out the Essene gate, into the steep valley of Ben Hinnon, where thousands of tombs had been carved into the rock, and where once a river had run, but now was only sage and cypress and thistles clinging to the crevices in the limestone. After several hours we went outside to wait in the street, then when the moon started down and the night made way into early morning, we saw a single figure coming from the west, not the south as we had expected. As he got closer I could tell from heavy shoulders and the moon shining on his bald pate that it was John.
    “They took him,” he said. “At Gethsemane. Annas and Caiphais came themselves, with Temple guards, and they took him.”
    Maggie ran into my arms and buried her face in my chest. I reached out and pulled Martha close as well.
    “What was he doing at Gethsemane?” I said. “You were supposed to be coming here through Ben Hinnon.”
    “He only told you that.”
    “That bastard lied to me. So they arrested everyone?”
    “No, the others are hiding not far from here. Peter tried to fight the guards, but Joshua stopped him. Joshua negotiated with the priests to let us go. Joseph came too, he helped talk them into letting the rest of us go.”
    “Joseph? Joseph betrayed him?”
    “I don’t know,” said John. “Judas was the one that led them to Gethsemane. He pointed Joshua out to the guards. Joseph came later, when they were about to arrest the rest of us.”
    “Where did they take him?”
    “To the palace of the high priest. That’s all I know, Biff. I promise.”
    He sat down hard in the middle of the street and began to weep. Martha went to him and cradled his head to her breast.
    Maggie looked up at me. “He knew you would fight. That’s why he sent you here.”
    “The plan doesn’t change,” I said. “We just have to get him back so we can poison him.”
    John looked up from Martha’s embrace. “Did you change sides when I wasn’t here?”

W ednesday
    At first light Maggie and I were pounding on Joseph’s door. A servant let us in. When Joseph came out from his bedchamber I had to hold Maggie back to keep her from attacking him.
    “You betrayed him!”
    “I did not,” said Joseph.
    “John said you were with the priests,” I said.
    “I was. I followed them up to keep them from killing Joshua for trying to escape, or in self-defense, right there at Gethsemane.”
    “What do you mean, ‘in self-defense’?”
    “They want him dead, Maggie,” Joseph said. “They want him dead, but they don’t have the authority to execute him, don’t you understand that? If I hadn’t been there they could have murdered him and said that he’d attacked them first. The Romans are the only ones who have the authority to have someone killed.”
    “Herod had John the Baptist killed,” I said. “There were no Romans involved in that.”
    “Jakan and his thugs stone people all of the time,” Maggie said. “Without Roman approval.”
    “Think, you two. This is Passover week. The city is crawling with Romans watching for rebellious Jews. The entire Sixth Legion is here, plus all of Pilate’s personal guard from Caesarea. Normally there’d only be a handful. The high priests, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisee council, even Herod