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“Ah, yes. I remember her as a pretty little girl. And do you and Giovanna have a brood, a passel of little Martinis?”
“Not yet,” says Simone, wishing that Giotto had not broached this subject, a source of sadness between him and Giovanna.
“A man as handsome as you should make many babies, Simone. Look at me — I am the ugliest man in Florence, but I have six children. Do you wish to know my secret?” Simone nods, miserable but polite. “The darkness.”
“The darkness? How do you mean?”
“In the darkness, Simone, I am as handsome as any man!” The old painter laughs at his joke. “Now clean your brushes and come with me. We’re dining with your father-in-law. I’ve just seen his frescoes in San Gimignano, and I want to know how he did it.”
“Did what, Master Giotto?”
“Got paid to paint men and women—naked men and women! — bathing together, going to bed together! On the walls in the palace of government! A man can bear to paint only so many martyrs and virgins. Let us move to San Gimignano, Simone — or better yet, to Avignon; that’s where the money is now — and let us start a new fashion of painting there. Courtesans, concubines, and lusty country wenches. Get me those commissions, my boy, and I will pay you ten times more than I paid you to mix plaster.”
Simone laughs. “At that rate, Master Giotto, I would still starve.”
CHAPTER 11
Avignon
The Present
I’d been up since 5 A.M., despite the fact that I’d been wandering the streets with Stefan until one, and I was obsessively checking my e-mail inbox every five minutes. I’d hoped Joe might send me a picture of his facial reconstruction by now. It was 8 A.M. in Avignon, which made it 2 A.M. for Joe; I couldn’t imagine he was still up and working.
I’d just decided to head downstairs for a croissant when my computer chirped to announce a new e-mail. My heart began to thump when I saw that it was from Joe. I opened it eagerly but there was no message, only a small icon indicating that an image file was attached. I clicked on the attachment, and with maddening, line-by-line slowness the masklike image of a clay face materialized on the screen. Joe had done it; he’d restored a face to the skull from the Palace of the Popes.
As I studied the features, I had the eerie feeling that I knew the guy, or at least that I’d seen him before. Was it just that I’d seen Joe’s work before? Facial reconstructions, especially when done by the same forensic artist, do share similarities: “white female #7”; “black male #4.” Was that the reason this face looked familiar? I turned away, looked out the window to clear my mind, and then directed my gaze at the screen again.
Again I felt the tingle of unexpected familiarity. Who was this guy, and why did I think I knew him? It wasn’t simply that this was another generic white male, similar to a hundred other reconstructions I’d seen. This face was distinctive, the face of a unique individual: long and narrow, with prominent cheekbones and a slightly crooked nose, perhaps broken once in a fight. I’d noticed the general features when I’d examined the skull, but they were more pronounced now that Joe had fleshed out the bones.
Suddenly a synapse in my sleep-deprived brain fired. Pulse racing, I fired off a message to Joe: got it. great work — thanks. are you still there?
yes, came his answer a few seconds later.
can you do a couple of quick tweaks?
A pause. what sort of tweaks?
can you give him long hair? and a mustache and beard? oh, and maybe smooth out some of the wrinkles, take 10 years off him?
As I waited for his response, I feared he might balk.
so, you want me to give him rogaine & botox — er, claytox, right, doc?
right, joe.
no problem.
I breathed a sigh of relief, then sent another message: not to sound pushy, but how long will that take?
depends. you want it fast, or want it good?
I smiled. start with fast, I wrote back. if i need good, I’ll beg you for that tomorrow.
good answer. fast is lots easier for me right now — just got a new case I need to jump on. give me twenty minutes. i’ll tinker with it and shoot you a revision ASAP.
Twenty minutes was going to drive me crazy, so I went downstairs to grab breakfast. In my nervousness, I wolfed down three croissants and a dozen strawberries. Just as I reached the top of the stairs and opened the door of my room, I heard the chime of a new message arriving.
how’s this? was written above the revised image.
How was it? It was astonishing.
If Joe’s facial reconstruction was accurate, the bones of Avignon belonged to a guy who was a dead ringer for the man on the Shroud of Turin.
CHAPTER 12
Turin, Italy
The Present
“What’d you think,” she whispered, “that they were gonna open the drapes, pull it down off the wall, and let you lay it out on the floor?”
Miranda and I were kneeling — kneeling and bickering — in a corner of the Duomo di Torino, Turin Cathedral, where we’d journeyed after seeing the face Joe Mullins had sculpted on the Avignon skull. Miranda had tried to talk me out of the trip, a seven-hour drive, insisting that nothing short of a direct order from the pope himself would get us a glimpse of the Shroud. But I’d refused to be deterred; somehow I’d convinced myself that if I showed a photo of Joe’s facial reconstruction to someone in authority — the senior priest? a bishop? an archbishop? — he’d be so astonished by the resemblance that he’d happily arrange for me to compare the images side by side.
There was another reason I’d pushed for the trip, though I’d not mentioned it to Miranda. Rocky Stone had phoned shortly after I received the facial reconstruction. “Doc, I’ve got good news and bad news,” he’d told me. “The good news is, I know who the shooter in Sevierville was — a Colombian named Cesar Morales. The bad news is, he got off a plane in Amsterdam an hour ago.” Morales was in Amsterdam to negotiate a drug shipment, Stone believed. “But I can’t guarantee he’s not looking for you, too,” he’d added. “I’ve contacted Interpol,” he went on, “so the police in the Netherlands and France will be looking for him. But I want you to be careful. Lay low. Get out of town for a day or two, if you can.” What he said next had surprised and moved me. “I’m on the next flight for Amsterdam,” Rocky had added. “I’ll be there tomorrow morning…and I won’t stop looking till I find him.”
An hour after Rocky’s unsettling call, I borrowed Jean and Elisabeth’s car again — this time I was putting some serious mileage on the venerable Peugeot — and Miranda and I had raced up the flat belly of France to the foothills of the Alps, then angled eastward and careened through mountain passes and granite tunnels before finally looping down into the Po River Valley and the grimy sprawl of Turin.
Turin Cathedral was tucked inconspicuously at the edge of a paved plaza, flanked by the ruins of an ancient Roman gate and city wall. I might have overlooked the church entirely if not for the tall, freestanding bell tower beside it. I was surprised at what a small, drab building held the Christian world’s most famous relic. Turning to Miranda, I’d joked, “I’m reminded of my friend Sybil’s comment when she saw the Grand Canyon. ‘I thought it’d be bigger,’ was all Syb said.”
“I’ve had that same thought on a few occasions,” Miranda had answered with a sly grin as we crossed the threshold.
Inside, too, the cathedral was spare and austere: plain wooden benches, unadorned columns and plaster walls, a stone floor inlaid with octagons of white and gray, linked by small squares of red.
The Shroud was housed in a side chapel at the front of the nave, on the left side of the building. In front of the relic was a simple kneeling rail eight or ten feet long, and — between the rail and the Shroud — a wall of glass stretching from floor to ceiling. Within the glassed-in chapel, the Shroud was mounted above a long white altar garnished with woven thorn vines — reminders of the barbed crown placed on Jesus’s head before he was crucified. A bl
ack curtain, the width of the chapel, hid the relic completely from view; a poster-size enlargement of the face on the Shroud — a ghostly gray negative, which was more dramatic than the faint, reddish-brown image the cloth actually bore — was suspended above the altar. The poster was a consolation prize, of sorts, for those of us whose pilgrimage to Turin was thwarted by the black curtain.
Still kneeling, I unfolded the two prints I’d brought with me. One was a normal, positive print of the face Joe had made; the other was a negative image, which Miranda had created by Photoshopping Joe’s file. The likeness between the images I held in my hand and the poster behind the glass wall was uncanny, especially when I compared the Photoshopped negative with the poster.
Unfortunately, no one in authority had been astonished by the images we’d brought, because no one in authority was anywhere to be found. Except for one other pilgrim — a stout woman who knelt beside me and cast disapproving glances as we whispered — the only person we’d managed to find in the cathedral was an ancient woman selling Holy Shroud bookmarks, postcards, posters, books, and other mementos at the tiny gift shop at the rear of the nave.
“It’s almost closing time,” I whispered. “Maybe we’ll have better luck in the morning.”
Sssshhhh, came an annoyed hiss from the woman on my left. She was German; I knew this not from the accent of her sssshhhh, but from the wording on the prayer card she’d chosen to kneel before. A Shroud-inspired prayer had been printed in seven different languages and posted on the railing for the convenience of the faithful. Between angry glances our way, the woman at my elbow was muttering the German prayer in a guttural growl.
“They get a zillion requests a year to see the Shroud, touch the Shroud, cut a tiny snippet of the Shroud,” Miranda whispered on. She’d dropped her voice so low it was barely audible; she was all but breathing the words into my ear, and I found the intimacy of the communication both unsettling and exhilarating. “You think your request is special. So does everybody else — the parents of the dying kid, the nun who’s had a vision, the physicist who’s thought of a new way to authenticate the image on the cloth. Everybody thinks they’re special. And everybody is. So the priest or the bishop or whoever has to treat everyone as if no one is special.”
