Descartes reread the note and grunted his approval. “Okay,” he said, “if they don’t already have the bones, this will make them think that you have them. If they do have the bones, they will think you are blackmailing them. It might work. What do you think, Docteur?”
“I think it might get me killed,” I said. “If they think I’m blackmailing them, what’s to stop them from just shooting me—bang!—or crucifying me?”
“We’ll be watching you,” he said. “Besides, I don’t think they have the bones. If they did, why break into mademoiselle’s room?”
“And what do I do when they call our bluff and want me to deliver the bones—the bones I don’t actually have?”
“Simple. You set the hame?on—the fishhook—and I reel in the line. You meet them, and we arrest them.”
“Before or after they shoot me?”
He laughed. “Trust me, Docteur.”
We took the note inside to Lumani’s office, a tiny alcove just off the dining room—nothing more than a desk built into a recess in the wall. After Jean had made sure the machine would not transmit the inn’s name or phone number, we sent the note to the three fax numbers.
Now, we waited for the fish to strike. To strike me.
“LATELY I FEEL LIKE A TIME TRAVELER,” I SAID TO Miranda. “Or like there are two of me. One me is here now, in the present, trying to help Descartes find Stefan’s killer. The other me is somewhere back in the thirteen hundreds, trying to figure out how that box of bones ended up in the wall of the palace. And how in bloody hell the Shroud of Turin and this painter Simone Martini are connected to it.”
We were back at the library again, once more on the trail of Martini and the Shroud. I nodded toward the immense reading room that had once been a vast banquet hall. Computers and steel shelves and halogen lights surrounded by frescoed walls and leaded windows and a coffered ceiling. “I feel as schizophrenic as this library.” From somewhere below, an annoyed sshh floated up at me.
Miranda surveyed the space, the lavish architectural metaphor I’d just staked out for myself, then turned to me with a slight smile. “You could do worse,” she whispered. “Pretty damn fancy, as psychoses go.” I squelched a laugh and motioned her out into the stairwell so we could talk without disturbing everyone else. “We might as well hang out in the Middle Ages,” she resumed with scarcely a pause. “Descartes himself said as much. He’s busy bird-dogging those fax numbers, and you’re waiting for the fish to bite. Meanwhile, why not keep plugging away on the bones and the Shroud?” Miranda had bounced back remarkably from her scare. It helped that the hotel had moved her to a new room, and that Descartes had agreed to post a guard outside her door at night. It also helped, I figured, to have something to occupy her mind.
“Sure,” I said. “Maybe we can figure out the connection.”
“Maybe we can even figure out where Stefan hid the bones,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be swell, if we could find them.”
“I’m not so sure, Miranda. Maybe those bones aren’t meant to be found. Maybe they’re like the Hope Diamond—bad luck for anybody who tries to possess them.”
“Oh, that’s bullshit,” she said.
“Stefan might disagree with you,” I pointed out.
“I don’t mean bullshit about the bones; I mean bullshit about the Hope Diamond. All that stuff about the curse—it’s bogus. All those lurid tales of murder and madness and suicide? Hype conjured up to boost the diamond’s mystique and jack up the market value.”
“Remind me never to ask you about Santa Claus,” I retorted. “But seriously, none of it’s true? Nobody who owned it met a bad end?”
“Well, okay, there’s King Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette; I guess the guillotine wasn’t the greatest way to go.” She winced. “But it does beats crucifixion.”
“No kidding. So here’s the thing I don’t get. I thought I had the medieval mystery all figured out: This fourteenth-century monk, Meister Eckhart, pisses off people high in the theocracy. He’s attracting a big following, the people love him, and the ruling priestly class feels threatened, so he’s put to death. Sound familiar? Remind you of anybody else? Anybody from, oh, say, the first century?”
“There might be a parallel or three,” she conceded.
“And somehow this painter, Simone Martini, sees Eckhart’s body,” I pressed on. “And he sees the parallels to Christ, so he creates this image, this pseudo burial shroud. Maybe he’s moved by what he sees, or maybe he’s just greedy, just cashing in on the trade in relics. Either way, the theory works. It fits the facts—or it did until the damn C-14 test said the bones are two thousand years old.”
She studied my face. “Let me get this straight. You’re disappointed about that?”
“Confused,” I said. “Frustrated, I guess.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I liked the theory. Liked the story I was spinning.”