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Geneva hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment improvisation. Descartes and I had discussed how to stall while we looked for the bones, and the Swiss bank was the most plausible delay we could invent. We had also set other wheels in motion — a contingency plan, in case we couldn’t find the ossuary. We feared that Stefan had sent photos to the buyers, so Descartes had commissioned a local mason to create a replica of the stone ossuary; my role in the ruse was to arrange for Hugh Berryman, the anthropologist who was holding down the fort for me at UT, to overnight an old skeleton from Knoxville.
Hugh had plenty to choose from. Shelved deep beneath the university’s football stadium were roughly five thousand human skeletons: more than one thousand modern donated skeletons, plus several thousand Arikara Indian skeletons from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — bones I’d excavated from the Great Plains many years before as the Army Corps of Engineers dammed rivers, creating new reservoirs and flooding Indian burial grounds. The Arikara bones certainly weren’t two thousand years old, or even seven hundred years old — more like two hundred to three hundred — but they had a gray patina that made them look convincingly old, and they bore no dental fillings, orthopedic devices, or other traces of modernity. I’d given Hugh detailed specifications: The skeleton had to be an adult male, roughly five and a half feet tall, and free of obvious skeletal trauma — except for the gouges I instructed Hugh to inflict on the wrists, feet, and lower left ribs to simulate the wounds of Christ, or the wounds of our Jesus Doe. We were performing a bizarre sort of crucifixion — a postmortem, postdecomp crucifixion, surely the only one of its kind ever done. With this counterfeit Christ, I realized, I was joining the ranks of forgers, taking up a new trade: the trade in fake relics. With luck, the decoy skeleton would arrive in thirty-six hours, and while it might not fool a forensic anthropologist, it might fool a crazed televangelist.
It was risky. But we needed time. We needed bones.
And we needed a miracle.
CHAPTER 37
I flipped through the pile of papers on the desk for the third time, but it still wasn’t there. My panic and my blood pressure were skyrocketing. I’d been back at Lumani for only a couple of hours, and already I felt caged and crazy. Descartes had told me to sit tight while he and a search team combed the palace for the bones, but I couldn’t bear the confines of my room any longer. I desperately needed to talk to someone, but Jean and Elisabeth were nowhere to be found, and I couldn’t find the phone number I wanted.
Finally I thought to look under the desk, and sure enough, down by the baseboard, hidden by the desk’s square leg, I found the card with the number scrawled on it. My hands shaking, I dialed it.
“Sorry I missed you,” announced a cheerful Irish voice, “but leave me a wee message and I’ll ring you back.”
I cursed silently; after the beep, my words poured out like water through a collapsing dike. “Father Mike. It’s Bill Brockton. The American anthropologist. We met a few days ago at the library. I don’t know if you’re still in Avignon, but if you are, I’d appreciate a call. Really appreciate a call. I…something terrible has happened, and I don’t know who else to call. I…So if you’re still around, please call me.” After I hung up, I realized I hadn’t left my number, so I called back and left that.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when my phone rang. I stared at the display. The number looked familiar, but I was having trouble placing it; on the third ring, I realized that it was the very number I’d dialed only moments before. “Father Mike, is that you?”
“Hello, lad. Yes, it’s me. And yes, I’m still here. I’d been planning to leave this morning, but I had a drop too much last night and I missed my train. So here I am, at your disposal. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and the serendipitous hangover is one of his most mysterious.” His voice grew serious. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong, lad?”
“I do. But not over the phone. Could we meet somewhere? Talk in person?”
“Of course. There’s a lovely little church two blocks east of the Palace of the Popes. It’s Saint Peter’s, but the Frenchies insist on calling it Saint Pierre.”
“I don’t know, Father Mike. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a church.”
“You didn’t let me finish, did you? Right in front of Saint Pierre’s is a lovely outdoor restaurant with green umbrellas. L’Épicerie. It’s French for ‘grocery,’ or so I’m told. Somewhere nearby, I suppose, is a greengrocer’s called Le Restaurant. Could we meet at L’Épicerie? I’m starving, and to tell you the truth, lad, I could do with a little hair of the dog, too, if you wouldn’t mind terribly.”
“I don’t mind. I don’t even drink, and I’m tempted to have a few. How soon can you be there?”
* * *
A young couple was just sitting down at the last of the umbrella-shaded outdoor tables when I arrived at L’Épicerie fifteen minutes later. In the restaurant’s doorway, I noticed Father Mike talking earnestly with the headwaiter. The maître d’ was shaking his head stubbornly, but suddenly he paused and seemed to listen more attentively. He leaned closer; he smiled; finally he nodded. Father Mike smiled, too, and shook the man’s hand, and a moment later the young couple — now the indignant young couple — was being ejected from their table, and the waiter’s profuse apologies did little to smooth their feathers. They glared at Father Mike, who shrugged, smiled sheepishly, and pointed heavenward before taking one of the vacated chairs for himself and offering the other to me.
“That was impressive,” I said. “The power of the collar, or the gift of the gab?”
“Neither, lad,” he grinned. “The allure of the euro. I slipped the bloke a twenty.”
“You’re very worldly, for a priest.”
“I wasn’t always a priest, remember. Besides, I’m just doing what the Lord told us to do.”
“Jesus said something about bribing maître d’s?”
“In a manner of speaking, lad. He said to be as crafty as serpents and as innocent as doves.”
“I’d say you’ve got the first part down cold, Father Mike.”
He laughed, but then his face turned solemn. “But we’ve got more serious things to talk about, haven’t we, now? You’ve gotten more bad news, I’m thinking. Something more about that undercover fellow?”
It took a moment to realize that he wasn’t talking about me. “No, no, it’s not Rocky. Not at all. It’s Miranda.”
“Forgive me for being thick, but who’s this Miranda?”
“She’s my assistant. My graduate assistant. She’s here for the same reason I am — the old bones I mentioned to you. But she’s in terrible danger, Father Mike.”
“What kind of danger?”
“She’s been kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped, is it? Are you sure? I’ll bet she’s just off on a lark with some French lad she’s taken a fancy to.”
“The kidnapper called me, Father Mike. And he let me talk to her. She sounded scared, and he’s threatening to kill her.”
“Dear Lord in Heaven. Have you gone to the police?”
“Yes, of course, but if this guy finds out, he’ll kill her for sure.”
&nb
sp; “Well, let’s pray he doesn’t find out, then. How much ransom money is it he’s wanting? Is it a huge lot? Can you get your hands on it?”
“It’s not money. He doesn’t want money.”
There was a silence before he asked the obvious next question. “Then what does he want, Bill Brockton? You don’t have to tell me if it’s too personal. But I’m thinking you want to.”
I considered keeping the secret, but the idea made me angry, I realized: It had been Stefan’s secrecy — his damnable secrecy and lying — that had caused all this trouble in the first place. “The bones.”
“Excuse me? I’m not quite following you, lad.”
“He wants the bones. The goddamned, stupid, sonofabitch bones.”
If he was shocked or offended, he didn’t show it; all he said was, “These must be some mighty important bones, then.”
“Yes. And no. People think they’re important — one guy’s already been killed over these bones — but they’re not as important as Miranda is.”
“Well, then, it’s simple, isn’t it? Just give him the bloody bones.”
“I wish I could. It’s not that simple, Father Mike.”
“Ah, well, then. It usually isn’t, is it? If it were, you wouldn’t be sitting here with me, would you, now? So how can I help you, lad?”
I shook my head. “I don’t even know. Just by listening, I guess. You do a lot of that, right?” He nodded and leaned forward, so I talked. I talked while the waiter brought beer for Father Mike and water for me; I talked while plates heaped with food appeared before us, and empty plates got cleared away. Starting with Miranda’s unexpected invitation and sudden departure to Avignon, I told him almost everything that followed: my own hasty trip; Stefan’s secrecy and paranoia; the facial reconstruction and its uncanny similarity to the Shroud of Turin; the carbon-14 results and the way Stefan had rigged those; finally, the murder of Stefan.
When I described the death scene, the priest gave a soft whistle. “Crucified? You’re not feeding me shite here, are you, lad?”
