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I waved off any further conversation. “It’s okay. Stay; enjoy your dessert. I can find my way back from here.”
That much was true — I had no trouble finding my way back. It was finding my way forward that seemed difficult at the moment.
CHAPTER 4
I peered over Miranda’s shoulder at the screen of her laptop. “Okay,” I said, “push the button. Let’s see what the verdict is.”
It was nearly noon, though no speck of sunlight could penetrate the depths of the palace’s subterranean subtreasury. We’d spent the morning taking measurements of the bones, a task that was tedious, time-consuming, and therefore welcome: a convenient excuse to ignore how awkwardly dinner had ended.
Miranda had keyed dozens of measurements into her laptop, and was running ForDisc, software we’d developed at UT to compare unknown bones with our forensic data bank, which included thousands of skeletons whose sex, race, and stature were known. Might ForDisc shed light on the racial and geographic origin of our John Doe — or Jesus Doe?
Miranda scrolled the cursor and clicked. “Gee, here’s a shocker,” she said. “It’s a dude.” I laughed; given the robustness of the skull and the narrowness of the pelvis, there’d been no doubt in my mind that the skeleton was male. “Hmm,” she mused. “You measured the stature directly, right?”
“I did — head to heel — and added a bit to make up for the missing cartilage.”
“And what’d you get?”
“About one hundred sixty-six centimeters; five five.”
“Hmm,” she repeated. “ForDisc puts him at one hundred seventy-five centimeters — nearly five nine.”
“That’s odd. Really odd.” Could my tape measure be off — by four full inches? I stepped back and took another look at the skeleton. Suddenly I was struck by how unusual the proportions were — an anomaly I’d registered subconsciously but had failed to appreciate fully. “Look how long of limb and short of trunk he is,” I said to Miranda and Stefan. “This guy was like a human stork.” ForDisc estimated stature by extrapolating from femur and tibia length, and normally that formula was quite accurate. But the formula was fooled by a leggy guy like this — a reminder that it’s the exceptions and outliers that make life interesting and keep science challenging.
The software was also handicapped by the age — or rather the youth — of its data. ForDisc knew nineteenth-and twentieth-century skeletons well — especially modern white Americans — but ancient bones were terra incognita to it. And so, like us, ForDisc didn’t know if our guy was first century or fourteenth, if he was Palestinian or Parisian.
“Well, rats,” said Miranda. “I want a ForDisc upgrade. One that has time-travel and crystal-ball features.”
I was disappointed, too, but Stefan seemed unfazed. “No problem. Let’s get the samples for the C-14 test. That’s the big question anyway: How old are the bones — seven hundred years or two thousand?” He turned to me. “Do you prefer to be a dentist or a bone surgeon? I brought a saw if you want to cut a cross section from the femur.”
“Dentist,” I said. “Pulling teeth is easier. Besides, it doesn’t fill the air with bone dust. Or with plague spores. What if this guy had the plague — wasn’t there an epidemic here in the fourteenth century?” Miranda nodded. “So shouldn’t we be worried? Shouldn’t we be wearing masks?”
“Yes, but no,” said Miranda. “It was really bad here. An infected ship anchored at Marseilles in January of 1348, and the rats swam ashore. Plague hit Avignon two weeks later. Within a matter of months, two-thirds of the people were dead — twenty, thirty thousand people. Corpses rotting in the streets, choking the river.”
“Terrible,” I said. “Must have been terrifying, too.”
“A lot of people blamed the Jews,” she went on. “All over Europe, Jews were driven from cities. Entire Jewish settlements were massacred. Horrific. But here, the pope at the time of the plague — Clement the Sixth — defended the Jews, said they weren’t to blame. He even offered them refuge.”
“That took guts,” I said. “The townspeople could’ve turned on him.”
“No kidding,” she agreed. “What’s the old saying? ‘The friend of my scapegoat is my scapegoat’? But plague doesn’t make hibernating time-bomb endospores the way some other bacteria do.”
“And you know this how?” I pressed.
“I studied up on the way over last week — journal articles on plague were my in-flight entertainment.” Despite my lingering annoyance about the unpleasant turn the dinner-table conversation had taken, I gave her a grudging half smile for that. “In London,” she added, “a team of scientists is trying to reconstruct the entire DNA sequence of the plague bacterium. They’re getting snippets from known plague victims — bones from a fourteenth-century plague cemetery — but they’re having a hard time piecing the genome together. Bottom line? Plague doesn’t survive for centuries, and this guy’s not contagious.”
“Okay, okay, I’m convinced. But I’d still rather pull a tooth than butcher a bone.”
“Let’s send a molar,” Stefan suggested.
Holding the mandible with my left hand, I gripped one of the eighteen-year molars, a wisdom tooth, pinching it firmly between my right thumb and forefinger. I wiggled it gently and felt a slight grating as the tooth wobbled in the dry socket. Wiggling a bit harder, I began to tug, and with a rasp and a faint crunch, it pulled free of the jaw. “What do you think?” I asked, holding out the tooth for Miranda and Stefan to inspect. “First century or fourteenth?”
Miranda weighed in first. “I say it’s him. With a capital H: Him.”
“Jesus? Really?” I pointed toward the fringe of osteoarthritis on the spine. “But he’s ancient,” I reminded her. “My age; maybe older.”
“Nah, not older,” she shot back. “Just harder working. Wore out his spine.”
“You surprise me, Miranda. I had you pegged as a doubter.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes I like to play the long shot. Makes life more interesting.”
I looked at Stefan. “What about you? How do you vote?”
He shrugged, looking bored. “Oh, of course it would be interesting if Miranda was right, but that’s unlikely. I think probably fourteenth century.” He said it in a monotone, but his eyes flickered, and I wonder
ed if he was more hopeful than he was admitting.
I reached for the Ziploc bag, but Miranda stopped me before I could drop the molar in. “Wait. No fair. You haven’t said what you think.”
“Rats. You know how I hate to go out on a limb.” I held up the molar and studied it. It was a dull grayish brown nearly down to the roots; the gum line had receded during the man’s life. A large cavity had burrowed into the center of the tooth’s crown. Could this stained, decaying tooth really be from the man whom millions around the world revered as the Son of God? “It’s clear to me now,” I finally said, “that this guy died six months ago, and that all this is an elaborate hoax to cover up a modern-day murder.” I nearly dropped the tooth when Miranda punched me on the arm, hard. She had a sneaky right cross that way; it wasn’t the first time she’d popped me when she thought I was being insolent.
“You’re no fun,” she said, but her eyes were smiling — maybe at my silliness, maybe at finding an excuse to punch me — and it felt as if we’d finally gotten out of the minefield of last night’s prickly conversation and back onto safe, comfortable ground again.
I tipped the tooth into the small bag. Stefan took the bag from me and was about to seal it when I stopped him. “Should we send them two? The lab said ‘one or two teeth,’ didn’t they?”
“I think one is enough,” he said, “but okay, if you want to send two.” I picked up the mandible again and grasped another molar. “Wait,” he said. I looked up from the jaw. “Not another molar.”
“Why not?”
“No reason. Call it a crazy Frenchman’s superstition. This time…a canine.”
“Okay. I mean, oui, monsieur, you’re the boss.” I shifted my grip to a canine, one of the fanglike “dogteeth.” This one was pegged tightly into its socket; the snug fit and the tooth’s tapered shape made it harder to pull, and I was forced to use pliers. The tooth came free, but the root snapped off in the jaw, giving the tooth an oddly flattened base. I balanced the tooth upright on the table briefly, just for fun, and then slid it into the bag, where it settled against the molar with a slight click.
