Exclusive Excerpt (Beginning of Chapter 8) In the Wake of Golgotha by Daniel Grace:
Oh frick . . . Poor Henry Clay Frick. Priceless masterpieces by Monet, Degas, Rembrandt, Goya, and Renoir, even Vermeer’s borrowed Girl with the Pearl Earring couldn’t keep the schoolkids from giggling and messing around in his former Upper East Side mansion instead of marveling at his legacy. But what the hell, what’s in a name?
Jude, feeling alone, decided to go to see some old friends.
Art, more recently (since the Renaissance), and paintings in particular, had always calmed him. Still moments of character and landscape caught in eternal color on soft canvas. Art had proved to be breadcrumbs through history for him. Some of it personal, other pieces painful. None of it nostalgic. Judas had once stood in the cold, damp, echoing refectory of the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie a century or two after Leonardo da Vinci had been commissioned by the Duke of Milan to decorate the back wall of the dining hall in 1498 with his controversial Il Cenacolo.
Gazing up at the masterpiece, he’d been struck by several strangely specific, creatively deceptive details in The Last Supper. Leonardo’s frescoed portrayal of Judas included him clutching a small bag in his clenched right hand. That night in Gethsemane, before history had taken a bloody turn uphill, he did have a bag (and wondered how on earth the master painter from Florence could have known that)—but it was a bag of bread, not blood money, his Teacher had asked him to bring to the dinner.
“The original potluck dinner,” Judas had once sardonically remarked, somewhere, sometime more recently. Then had added, “Bad luck supper,” to himself.
Luck was as foreign to this wanderer as it was to that zealot, but Leonardo had mythologized dinner table misfortune by depicting a very visible vessel of spilled salt directly in front of Judas; most likely a tip of the hat to the expression Betray the salt meaning “to deceive one’s master.” Leonardo further immortalized Judas’s eternal shadow by capturing a detail that every mother since has scorned at their own dinner table (including a kind single mother in Syracuse, New York, some five hundred years later just two nights before she was no more), that of the Judaean’s elbows being on the table. None of the other disciples’ dining poses captured on the convent’s cafeteria wall of the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie pointed toward bad luck and bad manners.
Some legacy, that Judas had thought without irony standing in that drafty Milanese convent lifetimes ago. The legacy continues, this Jude had recently thought, noting the irony that some five hundred years later he was serving suppers in another holy drafty dining hall.
As Judas had stood in the convent in Milan at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment gazing up at the instantly iconic fifteen-by-thirty-feet fresco, he’d felt a sensation of another’s gaze upon him. Not any divine or artistic shine, but rather someone else was intensely staring at him. He looked around the refractory, which still had dining tables and chairs for the sisters’ silent meals, and saw there was only one other person in the hall. The once revolutionary zealot felt uncomfortable making eye contact with the glaring nun donned in a fully domed, all-black habit of tunic, scapular, and coif. She was unveiled, hence her gaze was apparent. Out of reverence, his eyes had danced around her face, avoiding her stare. When he felt someone not looking at but searching for him, he would blend into his landscape, like a chameleon, to avoid any reveal. But here in this cold, hollow space there was nowhere to hide.
The nun’s peer was not intrusive but more than curious; if he wasn’t mistaken, she was taken aback.
“Ma la somiglianza,” she had wondered aloud in her native tongue.
But the resemblance, Judas had heard in his native mind.
A subtle panic rose from within, and for a man who had met many deaths, this was rare. What has she recognized? Who has she recognized?
“Mi scusi,” he excused himself in return, and started to leave, but she’d stopped him with a soft touch of her hand on his. This was not only wildly unconventional at the time, for a sister to make any physical contact with a layman, but had taken him back to the beginning. When another had placed her hand on his. Soft, warm, maternal, comforting. Perhaps the last time he’d felt such things.
The nun was looking deep into his face, scanning his contours, embracing his appearance. He then followed her gaze back up to Leonardo’s work and watched amazement flood her expression.
“Sei tu.”
But it’s not me.
But it was.
“Sei esattamente come Giuda.” She had said that he looked exactly like Judas.
And he did. And she was mesmerized. Not frightened, but in awe of the resemblance. The sister of the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie didn’t speak German, nor know the term doppelgänger, but that sentiment of an uncanny duplicate had danced in her wondering eyes.
Had he looked the same? Was this what he’d looked like in Judaea? Did he look the same every time? DNA was centuries away from being discovered, yet he knew this seemed an unlikely evolution.
“I capelli, il naso, la mascella . . . gli occhi.” The nun had taken inventory of his identical features to the one painted on the wall. The hair, the nose, the jaw . . . the eyes, she listed, before gently removing her hand from his and covering her own mouth. “Mia Dio.”
If He’s listening, tell Him to hear me too, Judas had thought at her divine exclamation. Then before quietly and quickly shuffling out of the convent, he’d looked back up at The Last Supper for the last time and digested the undeniable likeness: the fear in his eyes, the grip of his hand, the tension in his shoulders, and bulging veins in his neck.
How had he known? da Vinci, that is. Judas hadn’t considered artistic divine intervention. But the notion of such blinding celestial inspiration flashed before him; to so acutely and accurately capture such a passionately pivotal moment in time was to stare past the heavens to someplace else and get a wink back. The art was in the deal, and the devil was in the details. Judas held his breath as he’d absorbed da Vinci’s deific masterpiece capturing the last time they were together. All of them.
Was he there too? the zealot wondered, unsure exactly who he was referring to.
“Mi dispiace,” Judas had apologized to the habited sister. He habitually apologized.
“Dio vi benedica.” She’d offered God’s blessing so sweetly and generously that it landed upon him like a kiss. Unlike his kiss.
He felt ashamed. He wished he hadn’t brought the bread. He wished his elbows hadn’t been on the table. He wished he hadn’t spilled the salt. He wished he hadn’t left.
But he had.
Many lifetimes had passed colorlessly for him, worlds of black and white, full of dust and fury. Except in dark, hollowed spaces where others hung. Frames of color and possibility, windows of memories and portals to people and places he once knew. Art was never his calling, but it was where the Judaean often searched for answers, or a conversation. It was in galleries and collections, not convents and basilicas, that Judas Iscariot visited his old friends. As he did today and today was a Frick day.
There is no crime to fit this sentence; there is no sentence to fit this crime. Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate's words are echoed by the zealot Judas Iscariot only hours before history takes a bloody turn on a cross atop Golgotha on Calvary Hill. Two thousand years later, these words are found scrawled in blood in New York next to three crucified men hanging on a basement wall.
Judas, now Jude Issachar, an enigmatic social worker and part-time professor, and Pontius, now Peter Pheiffer, an unsettled defense attorney at a ravenous global law firm, have lived many lifetimes since their original encounter. However, Jude is aware of his past and is cursed by the fateful lure of the noose and the tree. Peter is damned by a recurring ignorance, a cruel cyclical awakening that creeps up on him as he is compelled to defend a sociopath who crucified three men.
Condemned for their role in humankind's darkest betrayal, they must reckon with their pasts-and their futures-after a fateful, bloody collision of violence and addiction two millennia after their sentence began brings these lost souls together once more.
Fantasy Urban [ Koehler Books, On Sale: March 3, 2026, e-Book, / ]
DANIEL GRACE is a London born, California bred, former owner of an international advertising agency who produces critically acclaimed Tuscan wines at his family winery, Il Molino di Grace, in Panzano-in-Chianti, Italy. He is a storyteller by trade and a mythologist at heart. Daniel splits his time between San Francisco and Tuscany with his wife, three daughters and English Setter. 'In the Wake of Golgotha' is his debut novel.
In the Wake of Golgotha by Daniel Grace
© Copyright 2026 Daniel Grace
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