Leaning forward, I studied the glass wall that separated me from the artifact I’d hoped to see. The thickness of the glass was hard to gauge, but I assumed it was at least an inch thick, maybe more—possibly bulletproof; at any rate, surely Brockton-proof. There must be a back door into that chapel, I thought. A way in, so the pope can open the magic curtain every decade or two…or the cleaning lady can dust it once a month. Could I bribe the cleaning lady? Jimmy the door with a credit card or a paper clip? Suddenly I laughed—was I really fantasizing about breaking into a heavily protected chapel in order to scrutinize what was probably a fake relic? I took one last wistful look, then headed out in search of a café.
The café’s barista was a pretty brunette with immense brown eyes and a microscopic English vocabulary. After several fruitless, awkward attempts to request hot tea, I stammered out the words “caffè crema,” which I guessed to be Italian for “coffee with cream.” She smiled and nodded, and I congratulated myself on my suave Italian.
I uncongratulated myself two minutes later, when she handed me a thimble-size vessel containing what looked—and tasted—like soft-serve mocha ice cream. It was 8 A.M., far too early for ice cream. The barista looked my way, saw my confusion, and hurried over, cocking her head to punctuate the question in her eyes. I took another taste, and she beamed when I shrugged and smiled and trotted out the only other Italian word I knew: “Magnifico!”
Suddenly a dusty file drawer in my memory flew open. Magnifico: One of my all-time favorite graduate students used to say that a lot—and her name sprang to the tip of my chilled tongue and from there into the café, right out loud: “Emily Craig!” Years before, Emily had written an article that had something to do with the Shroud of Turin, though I couldn’t quite dredge up the details from that file drawer in my mind. Emily was now the forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and we kept in touch across the mountains between Knoxville and Frankfort. Did I have Emily’s number in my phone? I did! I hit “send” to place the call.
She answered on the sixth ring, just as I’d expected the call to roll to voice mail. “Hello?”
“Emily? Hi, it’s Bill Brockton.”
“Who?”
Perhaps we’d not kept in touch quite as well as I’d imagined. “Bill Brockton.”
“Bill who? Oh…Dr. B? Uh…okay. Yeah. Hi. Give me, uh, give me just a second here.”
Her speech was slow and thick. Was it possible that she’d been drinking? At 8 A.M.? “Am I catching you at a bad time, Emily?”
“Well, since you ask, yeah. I don’t know what time it is where you are, but where I am, it’s two in the morning.”
“Oh, crap, Emily, I’m so sorry. It’s eight here—I’m in Italy—and I was so interested in what I’m calling about, I didn’t even think about the time difference. Go back to sleep. I’ll call you again at a reasonable hour.”
“Hell, I’m awake now,” she said, “and you’ve got me all intrigued. If you hang up now, I’ll just lie awake all night wondering why you called. So spill it.”
“Okay. If I’m remembering right, a few years ago you wrote a journal article that had something to do with the Shroud of Turin.”
“A few years ago?” She gave a groggy laugh. “Try fifteen years ago. Maybe more. I was still in the Ph.D. program at the time, so let’s see, that would have been 1994 or ’95. It was in the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology. Probably not on your regular reading list.”
“Can you give me the skinny on that article? Like, an abstract of the abstract?”
“Sure, more or less.” There was a pause. “Wait. Did you say you’re in Italy?”
“I did.”
“Where in Italy?”
“Three guesses.”
“You’re in Turin? My God, are you looking at the Shroud?”
“Ha. I wish. I’m definitely, damnably not looking at the Shroud. Everybody’s not looking at the Shroud; it’s under wraps until 2025, they say. But I am looking, or at least have been looking, and will be looking again, at a full-size, high-resolution photo of it.”
“No offense, but wouldn’t it have been easier and cheaper and smarter to just have that sent to Knoxville?”
“Long story,” I said. “Yeah, it would’ve. But I was in France, so Italy was right next door. Sort of. Anyhow, that article you wrote—didn’t it have something to do with your prior career as a medical illustrator? Or am I imagining that?”
“No, that’s right. Very good. Okay, here’s the story. One afternoon at UT, I was sitting in a lecture by Randy Bresee—”
“Randy Bresee—textile scientist?”
“Exactly. I was taking his course on textile forensics. And that particular day, he showed slides of the Shroud of Turin. He called it ‘the greatest unsolved textile mystery of all time.’”
“What did he mean?”
“He meant the mystery of how the image was put on the cloth. Part of the mystique of the Shroud is that supposedly there’s no way to reproduce that image with any technique known to man. ‘Not made with hands’ is how the church puts it, I think.”
“What’s so special about it, besides the subject matter?”
“The image is so faint, so superficial—it’s only on the surface of the fibers, not soaked in. It’s barely there at all. No brushstrokes; no snow fencing.”