It was terrific, in fact. The dish had been baked until the top of the cheese was golden brown and crispy, and it was garnished with crunchy bits of salty ham. It was, I decided, nearly as special as my first night’s feast of Corsican lamb stew.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t the food that was special; maybe what was special was stumbling across this hole-in-the-wall café on a steep cobblestone street in an ancient town, sitting across a stained checkerboard tablecloth from Miranda. She was speaking, but I had no idea what she was saying; instead, as I watched her mouth move, I was thinking what a lovely woman she was; I was wishing I weren’t her boss; wishing I were twenty years younger. Suddenly she stopped talking, stared at me, and waved her hands like semaphore flags.
“Sorry, what?”
“I knew it,” she sighed. “You had that lost-in-space look on your face. Where’d you go?” Hope and terror surged in me—Should I tell her? Has she guessed?—but she shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. So, I was just saying that the Romans crucified thousands of people, but only one set of crucified remains has ever been definitively identified. Found in an ossuary in Jerusalem in 1968. Totally a fluke. One of the heels still had a nail in it; the nail had hit a knot in the wood, and it bent, so when the body was taken down, the nail yanked out a chunk of wood.”
I chewed on the information while chewing on a bite of cheese-slathered potato. “When did you study up on crucifixion?”
“Right after Stefan showed me the bones.” I regretted my question; I didn’t want Stefan sharing the café table with us, even figuratively. Luckily, he merited only a passing mention. “It was uncommon to nail people to the cross,” she went on. “Rope was more common.”
“Rope?”
“Sure. You just tie the wrists to the crossbar.” She spread her arms wide, her hands slightly above shoulder height, tilting her head sideways and slightly down, though not enough to hide the playful smile on her face. “Asphyxiation’s the cause of death, right, if you’re hanging on a cross by your arms for hours?” I nodded, feeling a bit short of breath myself. Miranda made even crucifixion look miraculously fetching. Get a grip, Brockton, I scolded inwardly.
“So . . . uh . . .” I struggled to put together a sentence. “Do you think the gouge marks in our bones are fake, then? Made by a medieval-relic forger who didn’t know that nails weren’t generally used in crucifixions?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. But then again, what good’s a fake relic if nobody knows about it? The point of relics—the cynical point, at least—was to attract pilgrims. Not a lot of pilgrims visited the pope’s treasure chamber, I’m thinking. Besides, they’d’ve needed X-ray vision to see it. Makes no sense.” Just then she got a text message. When she read it, she frowned. “Well, crap. Stefan says he needs me to help him test the motion sensor.”
I suppressed a sigh. He had elbowed his way to the lunch table after all.
We’d planned to finish our day another twenty miles north, at the city of Orange, whose immense Roman amphitheater was already a millennium old when the cornerstone was laid at the Palace of the Popes. But Miranda felt obliged to help Stefan. And the truth was, my heart wasn’t really in playing tourist. Except for my delight in having Miranda to myself, I was just killing time—drumming my fingers on the stage sets of history—while waiting to hear from Joe Mullins. Waiting to see the face of the man whose bones had been entombed in a wall seven centuries before.
Would it be the face of a medieval murder victim—or the face of Jesus of Nazareth?
About the Author
Jefferson Bass is the writing team of Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility—the Body Farm—a quarter century ago. He is the author or coauthor of more than two hundred scientific publications, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir about his career at the Body Farm, Death’s Acre. Dr. Bass is also a dedicated teacher, honored as National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. His writings have been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and Popular Science and broadcast on National Public Radio. The coauthor of Death’s Acre, he is also the writer and producer of two highly rated National Geographic documentaries about the Body Farm.
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