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?
CHAPTER 7
CHTEAUNEUF-DU-PAPE
1327
A FAINT SHEEN OF PERSPIRATION BEDEWS THE FOREHEAD and fleshy upper lip of Jacques Fournier—Cardinal Jacques Fournier, for the past week now—as he’s ushered into the pope’s chambers. The journey from Avignon to the countryside castle has taken an entire sweltering day, but a papal summons is a mark of high favor, and a private audience is a rare privilege, especially for a young, freshly hatted cardinal.
Pope John XXII hunches on a wooden throne by a window that overlooks vineyards—his vineyards—spreading across the wide valley. His desiccated, dyspeptic face is crosshatched with wrinkles, and the liver-spotted hands clutching the arms of the chair bear an unsettling resemblance to the carved talons that serve as the throne’s four feet. A papal claw slithers forward by an inch, and Fournier kneels—no easy task for a man of his bulk—to kiss the Fisherman’s Ring on the old man’s bony third finger. Despite his conspicuous contempt for earthly luxuries, the young cardinal’s eyes linger on the massive gold signet. John XXII’s monogram is simple yet regal, and the embossed image of Saint Peter hauling a net aboard a small wooden boat portrays to perfection the hard, humble work of fishing for the souls of men.