“How did the artist remember all the details, after the sketch was covered with wet plaster?”
Stefan looked at the ceiling, or beyond, lifting the palms of his hands. “A miracle.”
“So, Boss, what’s the verdict?” Miranda finally asked. “You think Giovanetti’s our guy? Did he do the Shroud?”
I took another look at Jesus, then rescanned the entire room, floor to ceiling. “This is beautiful,” I said. “Giovanetti was a great painter.” Finally I shook my head. “But the style’s not right. His people are…I don’t know…too pretty. Too delicate. They don’t have the heft, the fleshiness, the power that the figure on the Shroud does.” I sighed. “That’s my two cents’ worth, anyhow.”
“Agreed,” said Miranda. “Too bad, though. Seemed like a great theory. Stefan, what do you think?”
“I think you are chasing smoke.” He checked his watch. “Merde,” he cursed, “I must go now. I have a stupid meeting with a petty bureaucrat.”
Miranda laughed. “But how do you really feel about him? And who is this charmer?”
“Pfft.” His meeting, he said, was with the city official who had jurisdiction over the palace. “I tell him I need to move the bones, and he says no, and no, and no,” he fumed. “I keep saying, ‘Someone’s going to steal them, and then you will be sorry,’ but he won’t listen. He is even too cheap to pay for the motion detector—I had to buy it with my own money. Fou. Idiot.” He shook his head in disgust. “Allons-y. Let’s go.”
He led us out by way of a different door, which—like every door in the palace, seemingly—yielded to his master key. This door opened onto a cavernous banquet hall, which was filled with display cases and milling tourists. Frowning at the tourists, Stefan pointed us toward the far end of the hall, where a doorway led to the main exit.
Miranda ducked through the doorway, and I was just about to, when I stopped dead in my tracks. There on the wall at the end of the banquet hall—on plaster the color of old linen—was the face of Jesus, larger than life. The eyes were piercing; the nose was long and slightly crooked, as if it might have been broken once in a fight; the first two fingers of the right hand, uplifted in a gesture of blessing, were long and thin.
“Miranda—wait! Come back!” She wheeled and hurried toward me, her face full of concern. I pointed; when she saw the picture, her eyes widened and her jaw dropped.
I read the plaque on the wall. The picture was a preliminary study for a fresco, it explained, like the sketch I’d seen upstairs. But this wasn’t a crude outline in charcoal; this was a finely detailed work of art, rendered in the same reddish-brown hue—and the same sure, powerful style—as the face on the Shroud of Turin.
The portrait was the handiwork of another Italian artist, one who—unlike the stylistically promising Giotto—actually did work in Avignon at the time of the popes. He was known by three names.
Simone Martini.
Simone of Siena.
Master Simone.
CHAPTER 19
AVIGNON
1328
“MASTER SIMONE, HURRY! PLEASE HURRY! IF WE’RE caught, this will happen to us.” The nervous jailer leans backward slowly, easing his head through the doorway of the cell just far enough into the hallway to look and listen. He sees and hears nothing, but when he straightens and turns his attention into the cell, he pleads again, “Hurry.”
His eagerness to leave is inspired by more than just fear of detection. The scene set before him is like something from one of his nightmares—and in fact, after this night, it will become one of his nightmares, destined to haunt him for the remaining seven years of his life.
Six oil lamps flicker on the cold stone floor, their wicks sputtering at odd, startling intervals as they’re struck by droplets from the damp ceiling. All around the small cell, the lamps cast shadows of Simone at work. As he bends, straightens, shifts his feet, moves his arms, the shadows jump and writhe, like demons performing a macabre dance around the dead man stretched at the center of the cell.