“It’s almost closing time,” I whispered. “Maybe we’ll have better luck in the morning.”
Sssshhhh, came an annoyed hiss from the woman on my left. She was German; I knew this not from the accent of her sssshhhh, but from the wording on the prayer card she’d chosen to kneel before. A Shroud-inspired prayer had been printed in seven different languages and posted on the railing for the convenience of the faithful. Between angry glances our way, the woman at my elbow was muttering the German prayer in a guttural growl.
“They get a zillion requests a year to see the Shroud, touch the Shroud, cut a tiny snippet of the Shroud,” Miranda whispered on. She’d dropped her voice so low it was barely audible; she was all but breathing the words into my ear, and I found the intimacy of the communication both unsettling and exhilarating. “You think your request is special. So does everybody else—the parents of the dying kid, the nun who’s had a vision, the physicist who’s thought of a new way to authenticate the image on the cloth. Everybody thinks they’re special. And everybody is. So the priest or the bishop or whoever has to treat everyone as if no one is special.”
“I know, I know,” I whispered back. “But I thought it was worth a try. I thought maybe…” I shrugged.
“I know what you thought. You thought maybe you could convince him your case was extra special. Especially special.” I couldn’t help laughing—she knew me so well.
Ssshhh!
“Yeah, right,” I conceded. “My specialness and two euros will get me a cup of cappuccino.”
“More like four,” she corrected.
“Four euros? Six bucks? For something I don’t even like?”
“That’s your own fault. It’s never too late to grow, expand your horizons.”
“Yeah, well, show me the Shroud of Turin and I’ll drink all the cappuccino you want.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Tenured, full professor’s word of honor?”
“Word of honor.”
“Prepare to chug some caffeine with your humble pie,” she said, looking mischievous.
SSSSHHHH!!!! The angry shush filled the nave. The German lurched to her feet and stormed out, the accusatory echoes of her clogs ricocheting like gunshots.
LAID OUT FLAT IN THE HALLWAY OF THE HOTEL DIPLOMATIC, where Miranda and I had booked rooms for the night, the Shroud of Turin ran half the length of the corridor. The tips of the toes practically touched the elevator; the other end of the image stretched to a window overlooking a noisy Turin street. What filled the floor was not, of course, the sacred relic itself; rather, it was a full-length, life-size, high-resolution photographic print of the entire Shroud, all 14.3 feet of it, plus another six inches of border at each end.
The print had arrived rolled like a scroll, tightly packed in a cardboard shipping tube. To flatten it, we’d briefly rerolled it the opposite way, inside out; that had mostly tamed the curl, though we’d had to anchor the corners with our shoes.
On my hands and knees, studying the face, I looked up at Miranda. “Come on, you gotta tell me. Where’d you really get this? It did not ‘miraculously appear’ at the front desk.”
“Sure it did,” she chirped. “Okay, with a little help from Holy Shroud Guild dot org.”
“A Web site?”
She nodded. “A Web site with an online gift shop. Through the miracles of Google, AmEx, and FedEx, I ordered it yesterday morning, right before we left Avignon on this wild-goose chase. I had the image file—a huge file—sent to a blueprint shop here, and I got them to deliver it to the hotel.”
“I take it back,” I marveled. “It did ‘miraculously appear.’ So how much does a full-length, high-res, special-delivery print of the Holy Shroud go for these days?”
“About a week’s pay,” she said. I whistled, but she cut me off. “A week of my pay, not yours. That’s actually dirt cheap, as miracles go.”