TANATA:

There are swirling rumors, Dan Brown, that you did not write …
All the books that bear your name … surely, that’s not right.
Why would someone say these things, surely it’s not true. …
Come out Dan Brown and answer these things being said of you!
If someone is lying and you did write every word …
You deserve to clear your name; your side should be heard.
You should get the benefit of doubt; you have your rights;
You don’t need ghost writers, Dan, surely you can write.
Come out, Dan Brown, come out … if you should not be blamed,
Stand up like the man you are and clear your tarnished name.
Now, if you did not write these books, you should say who did.
It’s not fair to take the fall, while others remain hid.
If you’ve lied, as others have, Dan Brown, if you have lied …
You know that you’ve mocked God’s son … and should apologize.
There’s a sacred code; it’s a matter of dignity and honor:
Tell us, was the plan all along Dan … to hide Presbyter John?
John the scholar, the African … why would you hide him?
Because he’s brown, no, surely not … for that is just his skin.
What determines a man’s worth is his heart and not his skin.
Tell us Dan, we will forgive … for that was Jesus’ teaching.

— rcg

CHAPTER ONE

I’d wanted a rundown, and I’d gotten it: In the span of about fifteen minutes, going “fast,” she’d said, because she had to “go,” a manilla envelope had been shoved into my hands and this beautiful, lanky young black woman had sat down, like she’d known me all my life, or her life, and started talking, rocking forward and back on my dingy couch as she spoke. Now she was in my bathroom. “Tequila” was the only thing she had said as she popped up and instinctively headed in the right direction. In the envelope were photographs, color, crisp, taken of old signs, black painted on white, chalk handwritten on a chalkboard … and various scenes, buildings which I knew immediately was Jerusalem. The shot of the Mount of Olives at night and what I thought was St. George’s chapel was beautiful. I’d never seen a night photo of this ancient mound of earth, with so many dwellings crammed onto it, it looked like a big pile of debris, boxes with squares cut into them. In another moment, my beautiful visitor and apparent colleague stepped back into the living room of my studio apartment, shaking her head. I’d never seen a person of African descent look pale.

“I can’t drink that shit,” she said. “Not in that quantity.”

“Tequila?” I asked lamely, knowing full well that had to be what she was talking about. But she didn’t answer. She was back on my couch, rocking, but less intensely, and deep in thought.

“Think that’s everything,” she said. “Oh,” she then said, sticking out her hand, “Monique.”

“Yeah. Pretty name.” Great smile. No ring. But she was taller than me, but just by a hair, and I was a white boy. Or man. Why does it always have to be about sex? Still, she looked great, even in a pair of ragged gray cotton sweats, running shoes with no socks, and a tight pink and lime top pulled over her sleek frame.

I think she sensed that I was sizing her up as a partner, potentially, and suddenly looked ill at ease: she didn’t want to return my gaze. I hate awkward moments like this, where a female just automatically assumes that because you’re a male and she is female, and pretty, that romance or sex was all that a man would naturally have on his mind. Which was true, but only partly true. I’d found that women, though they sometimes seemed to resent men for “always” thinking about sex, that it was really them, more than me, when the situation arose, who were the first to think that I was thinking about sex, which of course I was, but not in any intense, forward sort of way.

“So you have the itinerary,” she’d said, biting her lip. “And … you’ve got that,” she said nodding toward the envelope in my hand. “Do you want to look at the list, and see if there’s anything you want to ask?”

Pretty straightforward, printed off on a laser printer, precisely numbered. The things I would need to bring, which caused me to recall the times I’d gone to camp and sat with my mother going over the list to be sure I had everything. It felt like that, which seemed over the top, but this guy, who I had at least found out was a guy, was “a stickler,” as Monique had said. At the bottom of the page were websites I needed to look up, and precise instructions. He’d ask me to have a certain email software, with extra security features, installed on my computer.

“You have a PC,” Monique said, looking around the room, thinking something in my place would remind her of anything else. “He’s a Mac man.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I can use a Mac.”

“But do you have one?”

I had a laptop somewhere, which was three years old. A Christmas present. It didn’t run games, so I had ditched it. Macs aren’t made for games. And I was a heavy into gaming. Blame my father, so was he. We’d played the first video games that came out, for a Commodore 64, when I was no more than five or so, and gradually moved up, buying each new system as it had come out, even though my mother would howl every Christmas, because my dad would have promised he wasn’t “going to do the game thing this year.” You had to do the game thing. I wanted to learn to be a game developer, because my old man wanted me to, but I didn’t have the aptitude for it. Although I could learn anything, if I put my mind to it. Gaming experience was one of the things which had appeared in the classified ad, which was the strangest I had ever seen, but the job sounded like a hoot. Five-hundred a week, through the summer and into the fall, my travel expenses would be paid, and I had to keep a journal, and sometimes pull “all nighters,” but I had no idea what they meant.

Had to speak French or Italian, both would be “a plus.” Turkish and Hebrew would be “a plus.” I could read Hebrew, phonetically, and I had a Yiddish sense of humor, even though I wasn’t Jewish. Turkish was out. I spoke a little French and Italian. I could read French better. I had excelled in history, new quite a bit about the Mediterranean region, not much about Africa. Some “Egyptology,” that was how my new boss had phrased it. I knew who the patristic writers were, the “early church fathers,” through the third century A.D. And I liked baseball. Loved football. I got the job.

“The guy’s not weird is he?” I blurted out, needing to get that straight. I didn’t want this job to turn out to be some perverted little series of junkets with some older guy who expected me to … get weird.

“Oh, no,” Monique said. “He’s crazy, in a good way. Funny. But happily married. Two grown kids, about to be married. Cute kids. But he’s driven,” she said, biting her lip again, “and he’s determined to do this thing.”

“Expose people?” Was what Monique had said.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Monique took a deep breath, and looked in the direction of my bathroom. “He’s seen some things, I dunno. In his childhood. And he’s a vet, slightly disabled. He carries that around like a chip on his shoulder.”

I nodded. “And tell me how you pronounce his name again … Hasheem?”

“Hacim,” she said, “but it isn’t spelled the way it’s pronounced, or, pronounced the way it’s spelled. I don’t know what it means. But he says it ha-seem, though it looks like hackem.”

“Yeah, it does, if you’re spelling it H-a-c-i-m.” And she was. She nodded, and decided to sit back. That was a good sign. I didn’t want her to leave. She dressed the place up, and she smelled wonderful.

“So, first stop Turkey?” I said, knowing that was right, because that was what appeared at the top of the itinerary.” Ephesus, Turkey. Asia Minor. What became Constantinople. I always thought of a poem by William Butler Yeats every time I thought of or saw that word, which was actually fun to pronounce, “Constantinople.”

“What?”

I shrugged and sat back. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of a poem.”

“He writes poetry,” she said.

Did everything have to be about him? I thought.

“Some of it is really quite beautiful,” Monique said, scratching her scalp with one of her long fingernails, in a way that made a whisking sound. Women with long nails intimidated me, for some reason. A woman with nails was … all woman. No nonsense, and expected her men to be alpha males, which, if my confidence was up, I could pretend to be. But she wouldn’t be interested in me. But I had to ask. Before I could speak, she spoke.

“Which poem … were you thinking of?”

“Sailing to Byzantium,” I replied, prompting Monique to turn up her nose. “What the hell is that about?”

“Um, well, sailing to Byzantium,” I said. “In a little boat. Yeats? William Butler?”

“Oh,” she said, “is he the fairy guy? The Irishman?”

I nodded. “Yeah … fairy guy? You men gay? I don’t know whether …”

She chuckled, standing up part way to look toward my kitchen, like she’d like for me to offer her something to drink. “No, I didn’t mean gay,” she said. “Do you have any water?”

I did, obviously. I also had beer, but I gathered she was not going to be in a beer drinking mood, not at two in the afternoon, with apparently a night of drinking tequila to shake off.

“Um …”

“No, he believed in fairies and all that,” Monique said. “Like Arthur Conan Doyle. What a freak he was. Killed Houdini. That’s what Hacim thinks. Big Houdini guy, for some reason.”

So was I, as a matter of fact. She was intelligent, and educated. Knew something about literature and poetry, but she was very opinionated, negative for some reason about people with an inclination to believe in fairies, for some reason. “Yeah, I have some water. Ice? … Or how about a beer? … probably not though.”

“Hair of the dog that bit my ass,” she said standing up, impressing me all over again. “Yeah, maybe I’ll do a beer. But let me have the water first. Do you have any lemon?”

She saw me pull a domestic American beer out of my refrigerator, and turned up her nose. “Nah, no beer. I don’t drink that piss … sorry. Neither does he. He doesn’t drink as much as he used to. But he only drinks dark, imported beer. … Guinness. Ales. Jack Daniels.”

Big deal. Monique sounded like she was this guy’s girl Friday, or something, maybe a mistress, even though she’d said he was happily married, but that could mean anything, different things to different people. And he was white, although she’d said he had Cherokee ancestry, which he was proud of. Whatever. She’d said he was “big.” I didn’t know if that meant tall or fat, or muscular, or what. Or all three. I pictured some big tall Indian, a Native American with long black hair and a headband. But that couldn’t be right … what would an American Indian be doing interested in “shutting down the Christian heretics of Europe,” as Monique had said. “Changing their minds, first,” she had said, whatever that had meant. Changing their minds from what to what?

“So changing their minds from what to what?” I said. “Ha-seem.”

“Funny guy,” she said, shaking her head. “But people like him were bound to surface, you know? God bless him. I so did not think he was on the level, when he started talking to me in a bar, where I was working as a waitress, you know, through college.”

Hmm. Yeah, he might be doin’ her. An older man. A Svengali figure. An alpha male, a nut. A vet. Crazy, but in a good way. Women, so shrewd with some men, protecting themselves, were sometimes almost more masculine than some of the guys that came onto them. Let you know right away who was in charge. The supermodel types. The ones who knew they were gorgeous. I hated that, but loved it all at the same time. But in the presence of an alpha male … so women, I had observed, acted like little girls. A big man could take down a big woman. I, unfortunately, had never been in that position, nor would I ever be … even though I was lifting weights.

“People like him?” I said, handing her a glass of ice water, with a knife and a lemon.

“He loves ancient history,” she said, “but he seems to have no stomach for the medieval period, although I don’t know exactly why. It’s almost like he lived back then, you know?” She took a long sip of her water, after crushing half of the lemon in her slender hand with long powerful fingers and letting the last drops of the lemon fall.

No, I didn’t know. How could he have lived back then, unless he was a nutbar? I needed the money, and a job, being right out of college, and my girlfriend determined to “find herself” with two of her other girlfriends backpacking in Europe, which had sounded like sex with Frenchmen or Italians, if the situation arose. God, it made my stomach churn. And she had had the audacity, the corny nerve to say, “If you love something … you will set it free, and if it comes back to you, it will love you forever.” Or something screwed up and sappy like that. What that had sounded like to me, when Karen had said it, with an independent smirk on her face, I thought, was “Now, if I go to Europe and get my eyes drilled out, and come back to you, don’t ask me if I got my eyes drilled out.” Did it always have to be about sex?

“People like him?” I repeated, drinking from the bottle of “piss,” as Monique had so diplomatically called the house beer, in my hand.

“An apologist,” she said, walking back into the living room, picking up the remote to my ratty TV, which I prayed she wouldn’t cut on, because there was only about seven-eighths of a picture, depending on the channel. It was embarrassing. “He believes he knows what makes heretics … tick,” she said. “He wants to save them from themselves. Tell them that they are being deceived and used. Tell them that Jesus is real … and prove it to them by confronting them with the fact that they’re trying to win the debate by lying, using smoke and mirrors … and apparently listening to weirdoes, for whom death and blood and perversion … are all just part of life.”

She turned and looked at me with glistening eyes. “And it’s not, you know?” she said. “Life really is beautiful. And love does conquer all. And Jesus does exist. He did exist. He must … as Ha-seem said. Because the flowers are too pretty for evil to have made them. And beauty is truth. And …”

She was going to cry, for crying out loud. Well, at least this guy wasn’t a Charles Manson guy, in an Indian package. He sounded like a Jesus freak. I’d replied to the ad, because I was a Christian, which was a stipulation, but I wasn’t a Christian, really, in a typical sense. But neither was Hacim, apparently. Not if he was a boozer. But, after all, he was a Vietnam vet, and I imagine if you were to have found yourself in the middle of that shit, you had to have faith, some pretty extreme beliefs, and quite a constitution, a mind and will like a steel trap, and could drink anything … because I couldn’t imagine anyone going through that and not eating nails for breakfast. I couldn’t wait to meet him, but if he was a weird Christian, or a man with a split personality or something, a Jeckyll and Hyde, which is what he sounded like, with scars up and down his torso and his soul … I was probably not the man for him. But what a bad ass. Who doesn’t admire a true bad ass? He had to be doin’ Monique. Had to be. She was in love with him. He was a big bad white boy, pushing sixty, I’d gathered.

“Couronne des epine,” she said, speaking beautiful French. It took me a moment. She was tearing up again.

“Crown of thorns. … So, is he what … like an evangelist, or something?” I asked.

She was too choked up to talk, but she was shaking her head no. She was off again to my bathroom, after setting down her glass on my coffee table. There was Kleenex in the kitchen. Maybe it was the tequila. She was puking, for crying out loud. Damn. No, not an evangelist. Maybe a roaring nutbar … but not an evangelist. A bad ass Vietnam vet, decorated, who liked flowers. This was going to be one crazy summer. I could feel it. And if I went through with if, I just knew … I was either going to get my ass killed … or hurt bad.

Did I need five-hundred a week, travel, all expenses paid … that badly? Hell yes I did. And if this guy was a bad ass vet, he would be carrying a piece … or a bow and arrow, maybe, I thought to myself, being amused. At any rate, he could keep us protected, I surmised. He’d better. Of course there was more I wanted to know about a guy from the South named Hacim, who was not an Arab, but spoke some Arabic, or Ahmaric, I think she said. Ancient Ethiopian languages. For one, I wanted to know what baseball had to do with any of this. I’d played baseball, in high school, second base. When Monique had called me back, she’d said that had been “a plus.” Maybe we were going to be setting up an international baseball team, trained to be undercover agents … or assassins or something. But no, Monique had said he was not into weapons … but carried a knife, or knives.

And steel ball bearings, for crying out loud. And then she’d asked me if I had ever been a sleepwalker, or knew what narcolepsy was, and of course I did. Or anything about neurology or Alzheimers or amnesia. Which I didn’t, not really, except they were all brain … related. She’d nodded, and looked like she’d wanted to say more … but hadn’t.

— to be continued

“Brown says about 10,000 people have read “The Da Vinci Code” before its release, including Catholic priests, religious scholars and art historians.

“There has not been one negative comment about the book. And I think that when people read the book they understand it’s presented in a historical light - it’s not taking sides. I worked hard to paint everyone - including Opus Dei - in a very fair and balanced light and the book is meticulously researched and very accurate and I think people know that.”

Not ONE negative comment! Not one!

Remarkable!

— Lewis Perdue, March 25, 2005

And en Francais:

Le “brun indique qu’environ 10.000 personnes ont lu” le code de Da Vinci “avant sa version, y compris les prêtres catholiques, disciples religieux et historiens d’art.

Remarquable!

Why do we have a cover, but no book?
If they change the title, will they change the look?
What is it that’s opened by Solomon’s Key …
A window on evil’s superficiality?
Dan Brown isn’t hiding; he’s not that weak and frail;
Could it be the franchise is about to fail?
Angels & Demons, Opie’s ready to shoot!
Has Tom sold his soul to the devil, too.
Doesn’t it seem odd that these books just spill out …
Secrets here, treasures there, codes as from a spout?
These books so thick and pricey, but the PR’s wearing thin.
Tell us, now, where did you say Dan Brown was again?
Or is it Danielle Brown that we’re looking for?
Musician, children’s author, songwriter, novelist no more?
Was the blythe, gay spirit really good for you?
Goethe had cosmic knowledge, lots of good that this will do.
Faustian agreements, are they really only fiction?
Mass media worship … Simon says, I’ve had a predilection!
The Brown family surely has their share of green;
If there is no talent, though, that’s rather obscene.
187 Men That You’ll Want … You’ll Want To Avoid:
Poppies grow in Flanders Field, look what they’ve destroyed!
Who would buy the Bald Book? Maybe those other Grays …
Hairless little monkeys … how fast they steal away!
Stop the presses, stop the presses the real code’s been revealed!
How many more whistleblowers will be calling soon to squeal?

— Simon O. Seuss

TANATA has learned from an unidentified female caller “from upstate New York” that Dan Brown, best-selling author, allegedly “has not plotted or written a single viable word of any of his novels.”

“It has been novels by committee,” she alleged.

As a result, the alleged non-novelist, whose alleged non-work has been compared to John Le Carre and … as well as that Blythe Brown and friends, apparently doesn’t want to answer the bell to begin the new round of media appearances required to sell the soul, er, book. Can this in fact be the reason that a book set in Washington, D.C., about Freemasonry has still not been released? If we could ever get a contract … we’d have knocked out three by now, or at least one on the 1,900-year-old mystery swirling around the elaborate efforts to hide the African scholar and New Testament writer John Mark, which, we contend, is why there’s a botched repainted, dry-plaster fresco in Milan and hence the need for a “Da Vinci Code” in the first place. And we’d to happy and proud to talk about our work.

The caller said that she had read our tongue-in-cheek essay about Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code” and other previous novels possibly being ghostwritten (which was purely a hunch), and called to say, “Bingo.” We raised the point that we were sort of working on a piece about the elaborate websites devoted to “The Da Vinci Code” and the codes in the dust jackets, which we suspect were not Brown’s work, so whose were they? Again, the caller said, “Bingo.”

The caller did not say how she got our number, which is not provided on this site … I don’t think. Shoot, if someone wants someone’s phone number badly enough, not to mention their favorite flavor of ice cream, and if they’re willing to pay whomever, Equifax, or Big Brother’s Dirt Farm or Zoominfo, they can get it.

The caller referred us to the Wikipedia biography online, Brown’s “lightweight,” in her opinion, educational background and previous projects — “children’s tapes” — and the “very odd marriage to” Blythe, which we had never looked into. She also said that we should go to the Exeter website, a private school where Brown’s father taught, and read the piece about the fund being set up in honor of Richard Brown, Dan’s father. So, we did. She made a reference to “Bush family ties” … and my first thought was not more conspiracy theories. It would be the Hinckleys all over again! And that surely is nothing but talk.

We read the piece at the Exeter site, and the reference is there, but we haven’t corroborated any wrongdoing of any sort by anyone. We don’t know if this caller is blowing smoke or pranking us or what, but it was unusual enough to take note of.

And, since we aren’t legitimate media, “alternative news,” as they say, we figured we’d fire it onto the old TANATAscope so youse guys could read about it. Isn’t guerilla communications technology fun?

Some quick searches to follow up on some points made by the caller, who hung up laughing (Oooo … kay), confirmed what she had said about Brown’s plagiarism trials and the conspicuously absent Mrs. Brown, who was credited, apparently by the author himself, with some of the research on the Renaissance art, symbols and whatnot which showed up in the best-selling novel. Something else we didn’t know, and we’re surprised no one in the media has followed up on this: that Brown once wrote under the nom de plume of Danielle Brown, a little book strangely enough titled “187 Men To Avoid.” Perhaps Danielle was referring to himself. Also, something else tasty: Brown apparently recorded an album titled “Angels & Demons” back in his struggling songwriter days (that’s how most novelists begin, right?), which featured an ambigram or whatever created by an illustrator named John Langdon.

Did anyone know anything about any of this? Agents, editors, publishing executives?

We do intend to follow up, and we’re in the process even now trying to track down Brown’s number, or that of a publicist, or some spokesperson at Random House, but good luck, right? We’d also like to talk to the guy or gal who designed the book covers not only in America but internationally and see who has made the decisions on including codes in those, particularly those which are supposed to give advanced promotion on books to come. If this is not a campaign, being orchestrated, what else could it be, if the covers all have codes … and if Brown isn’t creating them?

We have to presume that Brown, who says he is good in mathematics, but doesn’t know why (even though his father happens to be a … MATHEMATICIAN!), did not sit down and come up with all of these little code games on his website and those found on sites promoting the novel. I’d like to know who has designed the sites, too. Who pays to keep them up.

Of course, all of the stuff we’ve been working on pertaining to John Mark, and our allegations that not only is the code a coverup, and part of a campaign, but one that reaches back to the days of Jesus … if not before, plays somewhat into all of this. I’ve never been satisfied with any of the explanations re Solomon and Queen of Sheba, and how all of that plays into this ooky, spooky stuff and the novel to come either. Oh, what a tangled web we weave … when first we practice to bash Jesus, we say …

… who is looking pretty good, considering if your opponent lies in a debate and gets caught … the debate is OVER.

More to come, as we gain some facts. Until then, we don’t know whether this caller is credible … or if was maybe the lady next door who called with a snootful. Kidding. Seriously, everything we have done thus far on Brown and the code/coverup has been speculative, although we stand by our biblical scholarship with regard to John Mark … and how he was most likely painted out of the dry-plaster fresco in Milan, for reasons which we detail in previous posts.

So, is there any truth to any of this? We haven’t got a clue. But it feels about right. But their unsubstantiated allegations. But who sits on a novel that the world is anticipating — or so they tell us — with baited breath, when all you have to do is type ‘the end’ and turn it over to an editor. Except, perhaps, in Brown’s case, allegedly, he may just allegedly stand back and watch all the alchemists as they hover over their manuscript … like a cauldron of brew. Ha ha ha ha ha.

—rcg