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“I know, I know,” I whispered back. “But I thought it was worth a try. I thought maybe…” I shrugged.
“I know what you thought. You thought maybe you could convince him your case was extra special. Especially special.” I couldn’t help laughing — she knew me so well.
Ssshhh!
“Yeah, right,” I conceded. “My specialness and two euros will get me a cup of cappuccino.”
“More like four,” she corrected.
“Four euros? Six bucks? For something I don’t even like?”
“That’s your own fault. It’s never too late to grow, expand your horizons.”
“Yeah, well, show me the Shroud of Turin and I’ll drink all the cappuccino you want.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Tenured, full professor’s word of honor?”
“Word of honor.”
“Prepare to chug some caffeine with your humble pie,” she said, looking mischievous.
SSSSHHHH!!!! The angry shush filled the nave. The German lurched to her feet and stormed out, the accusatory echoes of her clogs ricocheting like gunshots.
* * *
Laid out flat in the hallway of the hotel diplomatic, where Miranda and I had booked rooms for the night, the Shroud of Turin ran half the length of the corridor. The tips of the toes practically touched the elevator; the other end of the image stretched to a window overlooking a noisy Turin street. What filled the floor was not, of course, the sacred relic itself; rather, it was a full-length, life-size, high-resolution photographic print of the entire Shroud, all 14.3 feet of it, plus another six inches of border at each end.
The print had arrived rolled like a scroll, tightly packed in a cardboard shipping tube. To flatten it, we’d briefly rerolled it the opposite way, inside out; that had mostly tamed the curl, though we’d had to anchor the corners with our shoes.
On my hands and knees, studying the face, I looked up at Miranda. “Come on, you gotta tell me. Where’d you really get this? It did not ‘miraculously appear’ at the front desk.”
“Sure it did,” she chirped. “Okay, with a little help from Holy Shroud Guild dot org.”
“A Web site?”
She nodded. “A Web site with an online gift shop. Through the miracles of Google, AmEx, and FedEx, I ordered it yesterday morning, right before we left Avignon on this wild-goose chase. I had the image file — a huge file — sent to a blueprint shop here, and I got them to deliver it to the hotel.”
“I take it back,” I marveled. “It did ‘miraculously appear.’ So how much does a full-length, high-res, special-delivery print of the Holy Shroud go for these days?”
“About a week’s pay,” she said. I whistled, but she cut me off. “A week of my pay, not yours. That’s actually dirt cheap, as miracles go.”
I turned my attention once more to the image on the replica of the Shroud. The body apparently had been laid faceup on the linen, with the feet at one end and seven or eight feet of fabric extending beyond the head. That part was then doubled back and folded down over the face, torso, and legs. The front and back images linked at the top of the head — an odd, hinged effect, rather like Siamese twins conjoined at the crown of the skull. Judging by the photo, the Shroud’s linen fabric was a stained and dingy ivory color; the image of the man was a faint reddish brown, with brighter red splotches and trickles here and there — in places consistent with wounds from scourging, crucifixion, and lacerations from a crown of thorns.
The color and faintness of the image surprised me. Most news articles and Web sites about the Shroud showed an eerie black-and-white face, like the large poster hanging in the cathedral. Those versions looked like photographic negatives, because they were negatives: dramatic, high-contrast images in which the linen backdrop appeared dark gray, the eye sockets looked dark gray, the eyelids a lighter shade of gray, and — lightest of all, in the photo-negative versions — the cheekbones, eyebrows, nose, mustache, and beard. The scroll Miranda and I were studying on the hotel floor, on the other hand, was a positive print, one that faithfully reproduced the actual image on the Shroud. In our copy, as in the real McCoy, the highest points were darkest, as if a damp cloth had been pressed onto a face and body coated with reddish-brown dust.
Studying the man’s face, I found myself distracted by his hair. “Hmm,” I said.
“What?”
“Well, I don’t get it. He’s lying on his back, right?”
“So they say. So it seems.”
“Then how come his hair looks like it’s hanging straight down, the way it would if he were standing up?”
“Hmm, indeed,” Miranda echoed. “Good question.”
“And another thing,” I continued. “What’s with these bright red stains all over the body — the wrists, the feet, the side, the back, the forehead?”
“Duh. They’re the wounds of Christ, dummy. From the nails, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the spear in the side. Remember?”
“Duh yourself,” I retorted. “I do remember the wounds of Christ. But there shouldn’t be blood on them. He wouldn’t have kept bleeding after he was dead. Besides, he’s too perfect.”
“How do you mean, perfect? He’s a bloody mess, Dr. B.”
“Exactly. He’s the perfect bloody mess.” She looked at me as if I’d gone over the edge. “Take that trickle of blood on the head.” A red squiggle, three inches long by a half inch wide, meandered down the forehead from just below the hairline to the medial end of the right eyebrow. Along the way, it broadened in three spots, as if it had seeped into lines in the forehead.
Miranda knelt and scrutinized it. “From the crown of thorns. What about it?”
“According to the Bible, the crown of t
horns was put on his head before he was crucified. Before he carried the cross through the streets of Jerusalem. Before he hung there for hours. In all that time and all that trauma, that neat little ribbon of blood doesn’t get smudged by a flood of sweat? Doesn’t get smeared as the body’s wrestled down from the cross and lugged to the tomb? Doesn’t get washed away as they’re cleaning the body for burial? They’re burying him with sweet-smelling spices and wrapping him in this fancy piece of linen, right? Why wouldn’t they bother to wipe the blood off the face while they were at it?”
“I take your point,” she conceded.
“And look at that foot,” I went on. “That nice bloody sole is flat against the cloth, the knee bent the way it is on every Jesus on every crucifix you ever saw. Think about all those dead guys on the ground at the Body Farm — does one knee bend artfully like that? No way — their feet flop out to the sides.”
Miranda nodded slowly. “It pains me to say it, but you might actually be right.” I smiled; she enjoyed the game of pretending I was slow-witted. “In fact, if you look at this forensically, the whole thing starts to seem totally staged — as if somebody was working from a checklist: Crown of thorns? Check. Spear wound? Check. Nail holes? Check. Scourge marks? Check.” Miranda was on a roll. But suddenly she clutched my arm and gasped. “Oh, my God.”
“What?!?”
“I just had an idea, Dr. B. A brilliant, awful idea. Millions of people believe the Shroud is a holy relic, right? But what if it’s exactly the opposite?”
“The opposite of a holy relic? What do you mean?”
She took a deep breath before heading down this new trail. “Let’s assume, for the moment, that those C-14 tests back in 1988 were right — that the Shroud is only seven centuries old. In that case, it’s a fake, right?” I nodded. “But what if it’s a fourteenth-century not-fake?”
“Huh?” I stared at her, utterly confused.
“What if it’s medieval but also genuine, Dr. B? What if all the bloodstains, all the wounds, are real?” She pointed at the image, moving her hand up and down as if she were doing a scan. “What if this piece of cloth documents actual trauma, but fourteenth-century trauma? Not the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus, but the scourging and crucifixion of a guy in Avignon — a guy killed specifically to create…this!” Her hand stopped scanning; her finger pointed accusingly at the face. “This could be the world’s first snuff film. A snuff Shroud. Created expressly, deliberately, in order to document the very murder it depicts.”
