Twenty minutes was going to drive me crazy, so I went downstairs to grab breakfast. In my nervousness, I wolfed down three croissants and a dozen strawberries. Just as I reached the top of the stairs and opened the door of my room, I heard the chime of a new message arriving.
how’s this? was written above the revised image.
How was it? It was astonishing.
If Joe’s facial reconstruction was accurate, the bones of Avignon belonged to a guy who was a dead ringer for the man on the Shroud of Turin.
CHAPTER 12
Turin, Italy
The Present
“WHAT’D YOU THINK,” SHE WHISPERED, “THAT THEY were gonna open the drapes, pull it down off the wall, and let you lay it out on the floor?”
Miranda and I were kneeling—kneeling and bickering—in a corner of the Duomo di Torino, Turin Cathedral, where we’d journeyed after seeing the face Joe Mullins had sculpted on the Avignon skull. Miranda had tried to talk me out of the trip, a seven-hour drive, insisting that nothing short of a direct order from the pope himself would get us a glimpse of the Shroud. But I’d refused to be deterred; somehow I’d convinced myself that if I showed a photo of Joe’s facial reconstruction to someone in authority—the senior priest? a bishop? an archbishop?—he’d be so astonished by the resemblance that he’d happily arrange for me to compare the images side by side.
There was another reason I’d pushed for the trip, though I’d not mentioned it to Miranda. Rocky Stone had phoned shortly after I received the facial reconstruction. “Doc, I’ve got good news and bad news,” he’d told me. “The good news is, I know who the shooter in Sevierville was—a Colombian named Cesar Morales. The bad news is, he got off a plane in Amsterdam an hour ago.” Morales was in Amsterdam to negotiate a drug shipment, Stone believed. “But I can’t guarantee he’s not looking for you, too,” he’d added. “I’ve contacted Interpol,” he went on, “so the police in the Netherlands and France will be looking for him. But I want you to be careful. Lay low. Get out of town for a day or two, if you can.” What he said next had surprised and moved me. “I’m on the next flight for Amsterdam,” Rocky had added. “I’ll be there tomorrow morning…and I won’t stop looking till I find him.”
An hour after Rocky’s unsettling call, I borrowed Jean and Elisabeth’s car again—this time I was putting some serious mileage on the venerable Peugeot—and Miranda and I had raced up the flat belly of France to the foothills of the Alps, then angled eastward and careened through mountain passes and granite tunnels before finally looping down into the Po River Valley and the grimy sprawl of Turin.
Turin Cathedral was tucked inconspicuously at the edge of a paved plaza, flanked by the ruins of an ancient Roman gate and city wall. I might have overlooked the church entirely if not for the tall, freestanding bell tower beside it. I was surprised at what a small, drab building held the Christian world’s most famous relic. Turning to Miranda, I’d joked, “I’m reminded of my friend Sybil’s comment when she saw the Grand Canyon. ‘I thought it’d be bigger,’ was all Syb said.”
“I’ve had that same thought on a few occasions,” Miranda had answered with a sly grin as we crossed the threshold.
Inside, too, the cathedral was spare and austere: plain wooden benches, unadorned columns and plaster walls, a stone floor inlaid with octagons of white and gray, linked by small squares of red.
The Shroud was housed in a side chapel at the front of the nave, on the left side of the building. In front of the relic was a simple kneeling rail eight or ten feet long, and—between the rail and the Shroud—a wall of glass stretching from floor to ceiling. Within the glassed-in chapel, the Shroud was mounted above a long white altar garnished with woven thorn vines—reminders of the barbed crown placed on Jesus’s head before he was crucified. A black curtain, the width of the chapel, hid the relic completely from view; a poster-size enlargement of the face on the Shroud—a ghostly gray negative, which was more dramatic than the faint, reddish-brown image the cloth actually bore—was suspended above the altar. The poster was a consolation prize, of sorts, for those of us whose pilgrimage to Turin was thwarted by the black curtain.
Still kneeling, I unfolded the two prints I’d brought with me. One was a normal, positive print of the face Joe had made; the other was a negative image, which Miranda had created by Photoshopping Joe’s file. The likeness between the images I held in my hand and the poster behind the glass wall was uncanny, especially when I compared the Photoshopped negative with the poster.
Unfortunately, no one in authority had been astonished by the images we’d brought, because no one in authority was anywhere to be found. Except for one other pilgrim—a stout woman who knelt beside me and cast disapproving glances as we whispered—the only person we’d managed to find in the cathedral was an ancient woman selling Holy Shroud bookmarks, postcards, posters, books, and other mementos at the tiny gift shop at the rear of the nave.