The Inquisitor's Key

CHAPTER 21

For a law-enforcement agency that had locked its doors and taken a holiday, the French Police Nationale now responded with impressive speed and force. Barely five minutes after Miranda had dragged a startled French passerby into the gruesome chapel — a desperate measure, but that’s what it took to persuade him we had a true emergency — I heard the two-note clarinet warble of a French siren. It was soon joined by another, then a third, then a fourth. The cacophonous quartet crescendoed and then died as the caravan of police cars screeched to a halt in the narrow street outside. Eight uniformed officers charged toward us through the passageway and across the courtyard. Miranda and the passerby waved them into the chapel as I held the door. When they saw Stefan’s body hanging in midair, his face a mask of agony, two of the officers crossed themselves; one, a close-cropped young man who couldn’t have been a day over twenty, staggered back to the doorway and vomited, barely missing my shoes.

A wiry, forty-something man with the crisp bearing of a former soldier took charge, ordering two of his underlings to cordon off the area. It wasn’t hard to do; they simply taped off the ten-foot-wide mouth of the corridor that led to the street. The words stretched across the opening were in French — ZONE IN-TERDITE — POLICE TECHNIQUE ET SCIENTIFIQUE — but the yellow-and-black tape spoke the universal language of crime scenes.

Talking in rapid-fire French with the man who’d placed the emergency call, the officer in charge — Sergeant Henri Petitjean, according to the ID bar on his chest — divided his attention (that is to say, his piercing glare) between the shell-shocked man, Miranda, and me. The unfortunate Passerby, who had probably been anticipating a leisurely Sunday-morning café au lait and baguette, was doing a lot of exasperated shrugging and indignant pointing — the shrugging at the policeman, the pointing at us; eventually, he gave a dismissive wave of his hand and turned to leave. In a flash, the policeman spun him around, pinned him to the wall, and made it crystal clear that he was not going anywhere except to one of the courtyard café tables, where he ordered the shaken man to sit.

The soldierly sergeant turned to us. “Monsieur et madame. Parlez-vous français?”

I knew enough French to know that he was asking if we spoke French. I also knew enough to say, “Non, pardon. Anglais?”

He glared at me, then turned his hawkish eyes on Miranda. “Madame?”

Miranda gave a regretful head shake. “Only a little bit. Seulement un petit peu. Nous sommes américains.”

“Ah. Americans. Quel dommage.” Too bad for him, or too bad for us? He touched the radio transmitter on his shoulder and spoke rapidly into it. I could make out almost nothing of what he said, except for French-sounding versions of homicide and crucifixion. Amid the hissing, crackling reply, I heard “Crucifixion?” He touched the transmitter again and repeated it. “Oui, crucifixion.” The same question came over his receiver again. This time he practically smashed the transmit button. “Oui! Crucifixion, crucifixion, cru-ci-FIX-ion!” This time his meaning got through; I heard the dispatcher’s “Merde! Mon Dieu!”—“Shit! My God!”—and then, after a pause, what sounded like the English words “day cart.” This response seemed to satisfy the officer. He grunted by way of a sign-off and then led Miranda and me to another of the café tables, some distance from the glowering Frenchman whose morning we’d ruined, and motioned for us to sit. He posted one of the officers beside the French pedestrian and posted another, the vomiter, near our table. The queasy young man had regained his composure by now, but his face remained ashen, and the muscle at the corner of his right eye was pulsing as if it were hooked to an electrode.

It wasn’t long before a forensic team — equipped with white biohazard suits, cameras, and evidence kits — arrived and entered the chapel. Not far behind them came a plainclothes officer, whom I took to be a detective. He looked to be about my age; his wavy black hair was going to gray, as were his bushy, tufted eyebrows. His brown eyes were deeply recessed beneath a prominent brow ridge. His complexion was the slightly sallow olive tone of Mediterranean peoples, and under his eyes were deep lines and dark circles, almost blue-black. His shirt cuffs and collar were frayed, his black pants had faded to a dull charcoal, and his shoes were badly scuffed.

The detective and the uniformed sergeant conferred in low tones beside the chapel door; at one point the detective paused and leaned backward, peering around the sergeant to study Miranda and me, then straightened and continued the murmured conversation. After several minutes of this, he and the officer entered the chapel.

The detective spoke briefly with the disgruntled civilian who’d gotten roped into the drama, then allowed the man to leave. Casting a final baleful glance in our direction, the man ducked under the crime-scene tape and vanished.

“Good morning,” said the detective, nodding first at Miranda, then at me. “You two found the body, yes? I need to ask you some questions.” His English was crisp and fluent, with a hint of a British accent. “My name is Inspector René Descartes.” He took out a notepad and flipped it open, then uncapped a pen and began to write.

“Like the philosopher?” asked Miranda. “The Descartes who said, ‘I think, therefore I am’?”

“Yes, that one. We are related — by blood, or by wishful thinking. ‘I think I am a relative, therefore I am a relative.’” Miranda managed a slight, strained smile before he continued. “Tell me what happened. But first, your names, and spell them, please.” We did; his eyebrows lifted slightly when Miranda said “Lovelady,” but he didn’t comment. “You’re both Americans?” We nodded. “Are you traveling together?”

“Yes,” said Miranda, at the very moment that I said, “No.” The pen hovered above the notepad. Descartes looked up, his gaze lighting first on Miranda, then swiveling to me, before returning to Miranda again. She flushed slightly. “We’re working together,” she explained.

“But she got here before I did,” I added.

“I see,” he said in a neutral tone. “Mr….” He checked his notepad. “Mr. Brockton, would you please wait here? Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable.” Sure, I thought. Comfortable — no problem. Stefan’s dead, and this guy’s bound to consider us suspects. Very comfortable. “Mademoiselle Lovelady, would you come with me, please?”

He led her to a table in the farthest corner of the courtyard, offering her a chair before taking one himself. He drew his chair close to hers, possibly so they could speak more privately but more likely so she would feel off balance, unsettled by the intrusion into her personal space — a favorite interrogation technique, I knew, of homicide investigators.

He interviewed Miranda for what seemed an eternity — more than an hour, in any case, for I’m sure I heard a bell toll eleven, and later counted twelve. It tolls for thee, Stefan, I thought. Finally he brought Miranda back and motioned for me to follow him. Miranda’s eyes were wet and red rimmed. I offered her my handkerchief, but she shook her head and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. I gave her shoulder a quick squeeze, then followed the inspector to the distant corner.

“I’m sorry this takes so long,” he began. “As you can imagine, this is a very unusual crime. And a very disturbing one.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “A good murder investigation takes time.”

He smiled. “Mademoiselle tells me you know a lot about murder investigations. In fact, I am somewhat familiar with your career. One of our big French newspapers, Le Monde, published a story about the Body Farm a few years ago. I still have it in my files. Very interesting work. Someday, if I visit the United States, I would like to see your research facility.”

“Certainly.” I took out my wallet and fished out a business card. “Just let us know when you’re coming.” He took the card and read the front, then flipped it over and studied the back. “What are these lines and markings? It looks like a small measuring scale.”

“Exactly,” I said. “If I’m taking pictures at a death scene and need to show the size of a bone, I’ve always got one of these, even if I don’t have a ruler or tape measure.”

He nodded. “Very useful. Very clever.” He flipped a page in the notebook, which was half filled now with notes from his interview of Miranda. “So, please, Dr. Brockton”—I took it as a good sign that he’d promoted me from “Mr.” to “Dr.”—“tell me about the events of this morning. Start at the beginning. Take all the time you need.”

He took copious notes as I talked, interrupting occasionally to ask me to slow down a bit, or to reword a phrase he didn’t fully understand, or to clarify a point.

He bore down on me when I told how Miranda and I had looked around Stefan’s apartment. “Why did you go there?”

“We were looking for him. He wasn’t at the palace; we hoped we’d find him at home.”

“Why didn’t you just call him?”

“We did. Many times. I’m surprised Miranda didn’t tell you that.” His eyes flickered almost imperceptibly, which I took to mean that she had told him, and that he was simply cross-checking our stories. “We also went to the police station, but we couldn’t get in. There’s probably a security-camera video of us knocking on the door, right?” He shrugged. “Anyhow, by that time, we were really worried about him. Looking at his apartment seemed like the only thing we could do.”

“But you went inside the apartment. I have to say, that was unfortunate. That looks suspicious. Why did you do that?”

“We were worried,” I repeated, “and the door was open. We were afraid he might be sick, or hurt.”

“Did he seem unhealthy to you, the last time you saw him?”

“No. But people get sick without warning; people die without warning. I had a friend who was forty-six — my friend Tim, a strong, athletic guy — who had a stroke one day out of the blue, dropped dead instantly. I knew a healthy young woman, a television reporter, who dropped dead in the middle of her nightly news broadcast. Another friend of mine slipped and hit her head on the bathroom floor; she lay there for two days before she came out of her coma and managed to call an ambulance.”

“Remind me not to become your friend,” he said. “It sounds very bad for the health.”

“Touché, Inspector.” I smiled. “The point is, unexpected things happen. If we’d known Stefan was dead, we wouldn’t have gone in. And if we were his killers, we certainly wouldn’t have left fingerprints on the doors and light switches and who knows where else. I know better than to contaminate a crime scene, Inspector. We just didn’t know it was a crime scene.”

He wasted no time pouncing on that. “What makes you say that the apartment is a crime scene?”

“Drawers were dumped out, Inspector. Furniture was cut open. If it’s not a crime scene, it’s the messiest apartment in France. Before we saw his apartment, I was just worried; after we saw it, I was sure something bad had happened. That’s when I thought to come here, to the chapel. If we hadn’t gone into his apartment, the murder wouldn’t even have been discovered yet.”

He was still frowning. “But why did you think to come here, to the Templar chapel? How did you know he would be here?”

“I didn’t know he’d be here. But I thought it was worth looking.”

“Why? What made you think that?”

“I’m not sure. For one thing, I suppose this was the only place that I knew Stefan had some sort of…connection to, besides his apartment and the Palace of the Popes. But that’s not all. This place seemed important to him for some reason. He brought me here one night last week — I couldn’t sleep, so I went out for a walk. It was very late — almost midnight — but I ran into Stefan on the street. We walked around for a while, and he brought me here, showed me the chapel, took me inside. He had a key; said he was friends with the owner. It was strange, though. Almost like he was letting me in on a secret.”

“What secret, Dr. Brockton?”

I shook my head. “I wish I knew. I just got the feeling that this place was more than an old building to Stefan.” I picked at my memories and intuitions a bit deeper. “There was something about the way he was behaving,” I finally managed. “When we first got here, it was almost like he was checking the place out — he looked up and down the street very carefully before he led me through the passageway, and he checked the courtyard before we went inside the chapel.” And then, when we left, he sent me away, but he stayed behind. It was almost like he was eager to get rid of me.” A realization finally crystallized. “Almost like he was expecting someone else to show up very soon.”

He leaned forward, his gaze intensifying. “Any idea who he was expecting?”

“None. Sorry. I wish I did.”

He leaned back, obviously disappointed, and studied his notes. Then he rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath, followed by another. “Inspector? Are you okay?”

He gave his head a shake, blinked hard, and raised his bushy eyebrows high, as if to open his eyes as wide as possible. “I’m just a little tired,” he said. “I put in some long hours on a case recently. An art forger who committed suicide.” He suppressed a yawn. “Tell me about Mademoiselle Lovelady.”

The request caught me by surprise. “Miranda? She’s great. Smart as hell. Hardworking. Strong-minded. Funny. Spunky.”

“Spunky? What is spunky?”

“It’s slang. It means feisty. Brave. Tough.”

“Ah. In French, we say plein de cran. ‘Full of guts.’”

“Oh, yes, gutsy. Miranda is very gutsy.”

“Do you trust her, this gutsy assistant?”

“Miranda? Completely. I’d trust her with my life.”

Descartes flipped back through his notes, twirling his pen between his fingers. He had just looked up to ask another question when his cell phone rang. Excusing himself, he stood up and walked toward the mouth of the passageway to take the call. He was gone for several minutes. When he returned, he sat, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Your assistant — what was her relationship with Monsieur Beauvoir?”

The question caught me off guard, and Descartes would have to have been blind not to notice. “Fine, I think. He asked her to come help with this excavation, so he clearly thought well of her. She came, so I assume she thought well of him, too.”

“Do you know why they thought so well of one another? And for how long a time?” Crap, I thought, not this.

“I think they met six or eight years ago. When she was an undergraduate student. Miranda was on a dig in Guatemala that Stefan organized.”

He chewed absentmindedly on the end of a fingernail, still eyeing me closely. “Did you know that they were lovers?”

There, the shoe had dropped; I had known that question was coming. “It wasn’t any of my business if they had a personal relationship.”

He shrugged. “But did you know?”

“Yes. She told me shortly after I got here. She felt awkward about it.”

“Awkward about telling you? Or awkward about being lovers with him?”

“Both, I guess. But it was very brief, and it happened a long time ago, Inspector. I think lovers is too strong a word. It was a quick fling at a field school. It happens all the time.”

“All the time?” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head slightly.

I flushed at the innuendo. “Not all the time, but it happens. It doesn’t necessarily mean very much. I thought the French were very tolerant about casual love affairs.”

“Sometimes. Not when one of the lovers ends up crucified. Tell me, was she angry with Monsieur Beauvoir? Resentful?”

“Resentful? About what?”

“About anything. About what happened in Guatemala. About what happened — or what didn’t happen — in Avignon.” Good God, did he actually think Miranda might have nailed Stefan to that beam?

“Look, Inspector, Miranda and I have worked together for six years. I never heard her mention this guy until she told me she was coming here. If she were burning with rage for years — or longing for love — I think I’d have heard about it.”

He shrugged again, and I found the gesture annoying; it might simply mean “Who knows?” but it might also mean “What the hell do you know?” “Do you know where Mademoiselle Lovelady was last night?”

I returned the shrug. “I assume she was in her hotel room.”

“And do you know where Monsieur Beauvoir was last night?”

I flung up my hands in exasperation. “Well, if I were guessing,” I said sarcastically, “which is all I can do, I’d guess that for the first part of the night, he was in his apartment, and for the rest of the night, he was here in the chapel dying.”

He smiled slightly, ironically. “Actually, he was in Mademoiselle Lovelady’s hotel room until almost midnight.” His words felt like a punch in the gut. He studied my reaction. “You seem surprised.”

“I…Yes. I’m surprised. But as I said, whatever personal relationship they might have had — or might not have had — it’s none of my business.”

“I disagree, Dr. Brockton. Normally, no. But now — with Monsieur Beauvoir hanging there in the chapel — I think it is very much your business. You are involved, in some way, with a murder. You are swept up in the tide of events. You do not have the luxury of detachment.”

His words were confirmed by a sinking feeling in my gut. Somehow, for reasons I could not begin to fathom, I had turned a fateful corner in the labyrinthine streets of Avignon, and I wasn’t at all sure I could find my way out of the maze again.

“Excuse me? Dr. Brockton?” His voice sounded faraway; I felt as if I were swimming up from deep water to reach it, and I had the impression he’d called my name more than once.

“I’m sorry. Yes?”

“Dr. Brockton, where were you last night?”

“Me?” I stared at him in astonishment. He nodded. “I was in my hotel room.”

“The same hotel as mademoiselle?”

“No. A different one. A little inn near the ramparts. It’s called Lumani.”

“Ah, oui, Lumani. You found a beautiful place to stay.”

“Actually, Stefan found it for me. I think he knows the owners. Knew the owners.”

“Docteur, were you angry with Monsieur Beauvoir?”

“Why on earth would I be angry with him?”

“Perhaps you were jealous of his attentions to your assistant.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “I wasn’t. But even if I was, I certainly wouldn’t kill anyone over something like that. Besides, I didn’t even know that he went to see Miranda last night until you told me just now.”

“Perhaps you were angry that he tricked you into coming to Avignon. That was very manipulative, non?”

“It was, and I didn’t like it. But once I found out the reason for the trick, I understood.”

“And what, exactly, was the reason for this trick?”

“Didn’t Miranda explain it to you?”

“She did give me her explanation. Now I’m asking for your explanation.”

“She and Stefan had uncovered some very old bones in the Palace of the Popes,” I said. “The ossuary — the bone box — was engraved with an inscription that might cause big news.” He said nothing; simply waited. “The inscription claimed that the ossuary contained the bones of Jesus Christ. If that inscription proves to be true, this is the most sensational find of the past two thousand years.”

He stopped writing. “But how can you prove whether they are real or fake? You can’t use DNA testing, I think. Because you don’t have DNA from Jesus to compare.”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “But some people would argue with you. Some people think you could get DNA from the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin. I don’t think so; I don’t think the Shroud is authentic — I think it’s a clever medieval forgery — and I don’t think the stains on it are really blood.” I decided to see if Inspector Descartes had any sense of humor. “On the other hand, if the Holy Sponge is authentic, it might contain traces of Holy Spittle, along with some DNA.”

“The Holy Sponge? Please, what is this Holy Sponge?”

I explained.

“Incroyable,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“What would really help,” I went on, “would be dental records: X-rays of the Holy Teeth.”

The inspector stared at me as if I were insane, then — when he realized I was joking — he laughed. “I like that,” he said. “Oui, X-rays of the Holy Teeth would be very helpful.”

“Oh!” My joke had reminded me of something serious. “We sent two of the teeth to a laboratory for carbon-14 dating, to see how old they are. We should get the results any day now. I’m guessing the teeth are only seven hundred years old, but if the lab says they’re two thousand years old, the bones suddenly become much more interesting.”

“What bones?”

“What do you mean, ‘what bones’? The bones I’ve just been talking about, Inspector.”

He repeated the question. “What bones?” He held out his upturned hands. His empty hands. Now I understood his meaning. “Where are these special bones?”

“I have no idea, Inspector. But I think if you find the bones, you’ll find the killer. What’s the French expression that means ‘Look for the woman’? Cherchez la femme?” He nodded. “How would you say ‘Look for the skeleton’?”

“Cherchez le squelette.” The word sounded almost like “skillet.” “Of course we will search for the skeleton. But I don’t understand, Docteur. Why all the secrecy? Why not just tell the world that you found these bones and explain that you need to do more tests to know if they are Jesus?”

“You want the truth?”

“Of course I want the truth. I always only want the truth.” For a moment I feared that I’d angered him, but he didn’t look mad; only intense. “Come.” He stood abruptly, beckoning to me to follow him. He led me into the chapel, where the forensic technicians seemed to be looking for the controls of the electrical winch that had hoisted Stefan into the air. Descartes studied the suspended body; then his gaze shifted to the fresco on the wall behind it, the wall above the altar. The painting showed a rosy-cheeked cherub hovering in the sky, beaming, as if delighted by the body hanging a few feet away. The detective shook his head slightly. “I don’t believe in angels or miracles or Holy Sponges, Docteur. But I do believe in the truth. La vérité.” A weary look clouded his eyes, and I wondered if he was thinking about the dead art-forger again. “I just have difficulty to find it sometimes.”

“How would you say it, Inspector—‘Cherchez la vérité’?”

He smiled slightly. “Oui. Exactement. So yes, please, tell me the truth about why Monsieur Beauvoir was so secretive.”

“This is just my opinion,” I stressed, “but I think Stefan wanted to keep it a secret because he was afraid someone else would take credit for the find; someone else would get the glory — some bureaucrat at the palace or the Ministry of Culture or wherever. I think he wanted all the glory for himself. Stefan wanted to be the one in the spotlight.”

I heard the whine of an electric motor. Overhead, the beam twitched and Stefan’s body jerked as the cable spool began to turn. As the wire unwound, the beam descended, slowly spinning in the glare of the theater lights.

Stefan had gotten his wish. He had taken center stage, and he was in the spotlight.

CHAPTER 22

Miranda was quiet on the walk back to her hotel, which was fine by me.

She looked tired and sad. I felt tired and sad, too; also confused and unsettled. I was shocked and puzzled by Stefan’s murder, but I wasn’t traumatized by it; he was a colleague, true, but I’d barely known him, so finding his body had been almost like stumbling upon a murdered stranger. No, my confusion and distress had more to do with Miranda. Was there something going on between her and Stefan after all? Had she lied to me about that? If she had, what else had she lied to me about? And was Descartes right — had his murder, and our involvement, made Miranda’s private life my business?

Perhaps it had, I concluded reluctantly. I was wrestling with what to say when I looked up and noticed where we were. Ambling on automatic pilot, we’d reached the Palace of the Popes. Miranda stared bleakly at the stone façade; silent tears sprang from her eyes and rolled down her face. “God, I hate this place,” she whispered fiercely, not so much to me as to herself, or perhaps to the palace. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, or at least to Disney, when I first saw it. The glory and the glamour, I totally fell for it, you know?” She laughed bitterly. “I was too dazzled to see that Stefan was just playing me. Probably using me to get to you — wanting to add your forensic heft to the project to give it more credibility. It never occurred to me to suspect him of that. I only suspected him of wanting to get into my pants again.”

It was, I supposed after my initial shock, as good an opening as any to the conversation we needed to have. “And did you want him to?”

“No. Well, maybe. But not really.” She shook her head. “God, what a mess. Would you let me just talk for a while? Can you just listen, and not interrupt, and try not to judge me?” She took my arm and led me to a bench at the edge of the plaza. “I hadn’t thought about Stefan for years; I really hadn’t. So when he first got in touch with me about this, I barely even remembered who he was. He had to say his name twice, and add ‘in France.’ But after that, it was like this seed started to germinate — ha, shades of Zeus and Leda; the seed of unfinished business, somehow. Digging around in the Palace of the Popes sounded cool, and so did a paid junket to France. But I got this nervous, hopeful feeling, too; this hope that maybe we could somehow get rid of some of the scar tissue we’d created six years ago, when Stefan’s wife showed up and I left Guatemala in disgrace.” I nodded; I wasn’t entirely sure I understood, but I’d been instructed not to interrupt, and I wanted her to know I was listening.

“So as soon as I get here, Stefan starts talking about how glad he is to be working with me again. How sorry he is about what happened in Guatemala. How grateful he is to have a chance to become real colleagues. I tried not to make too much of it; it sounded good, but I couldn’t help wondering if he was working me a bit, trying to get into my pants again. And he did make a pass at me that night on his balcony, but I turned him down, just like I told you. But what I didn’t tell you about that night is, I didn’t burn the bridge completely. I was willing to consider the possibility that there actually could be something there — something genuine with Stefan — after all.”

I nodded, biting my tongue to keep from asking if Stefan had given her reason to hope for more. It was almost as though she’d read my mind, though. “He kept dropping hints along those lines,” she went on. “Talking about what an opportunity this find was. How we could publish off it for years. How it could open all sorts of doors for us. Turns out death’s door was the only one, huh?” She took another deep breath. “There’s another thing I haven’t told you. Stefan came to my hotel room last night.”

I broke the no-interruptions rule. “I know.”

She looked miserable. “How?”

“Descartes told me.”

“Shit. I’m sorry you didn’t hear it from me first.” She looked down at the cobblestones. “About ten o’clock last night, Stefan calls me, says he’s on his way home from dinner and can he swing by for a minute and talk to me about something. I say okay. He shows up at my room with a bottle of wine, and he’s all funny and charming, and I let him talk me into having some wine with him. A couple glasses in, I’m feeling relaxed and happy, and then he starts kissing me. And this time, I’m not planning on turning him down. But then he starts whispering stuff in my ear about how he wants to run away with me. How we can get out of the rat race of academia. Live somewhere beautiful and exotic. Travel the world. Write novels, raise orchids, do whatever the hell we want. At first I just figure he’s trying to sweet-talk me, but he keeps on and on, so finally I ask him what the hell he’s talking about — it makes no sense to me; it sounds crazy and juvenile. So then he gets defensive and mad. He gets up and storms out.”

“That’s it? That’s all that happened?”

“Almost; not quite. As he’s walking out the door, he turns and says, ‘You have no idea what I’m offering you, Miranda. The door’s opening tonight. Right now. I’m stepping through it. I’d love for you to go with me.” He stands there looking at me, just…waiting. Then he shakes his head, steps into the hall, and shuts the door behind him. And then he’s gone.”

“Let me get this straight. He wanted you to leave the hotel with him, right then, at midnight, to seize some golden opportunity?”

“I think he did. I keep turning and turning those words over in my mind, and that’s where I end up every time.”

“Did you tell Descartes this?”

“Yes. I don’t know how seriously he took me. Or whether he even believes me.”

Suddenly I felt dizzy, almost sick. “If you’d gone with Stefan, you might have ended up hanging in that chapel with him. Nailed to the back side of that beam.”

“Yeah.”

CHAPTER 23

The mistral had come roaring back at nightfall, churning through the leaves of the trees in Lumani’s garden. I tossed and turned for hours, chasing sleep without catching it — like a donkey forever pursuing a carrot suspended just beyond its nose. I was finally getting my first taste of it when I heard a tapping at my door, so light it was all but drowned out by the wind. I sat up in bed, instantly on full alert. “Hello? Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Dr. B.”

“Miranda? Are you okay?”

“Yes. Sort of. Not really.”

Switching on the bedside lamp, I scrambled out from under the covers, fumbled with the lock, and opened the door in my T-shirt and surgical scrub pants. Even by the low light spilling from my room, I could see how ravaged her face looked. “You look like hell.”

Normally, this would have prompted a smart-ass response, but she simply nodded and crumpled against my chest. I wrapped my arms around her and patted her back. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you want to talk about it?” She shook her head. “Do you want to go get some coffee or something to eat? If we can find someplace that’s open?” She shook her head again.

“I just don’t think I can be by myself. Can I come in?”

“Of course.” The room wasn’t designed for company; the only places to sit were the bed and a narrow wooden chair in the corner. I nodded toward the chair. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but what I’d really like is to just sleep. I’ve been tossing and turning for hours, but I got really creeped out in that hotel room. I could still smell Stefan’s cigarettes and cologne in there; still feel his presence.” She drew a deep breath, then blew it out through pursed lips. “I just so desperately want to sleep. Would you mind if I slept here with you?”

“Miranda, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

“Maybe not, and I’m sorry to ask, but I really don’t want to be alone.” Her eyes looked sad and weary. “Just sleep. I promise. Please? I need a friend right now, not a boss.”

Five minutes later I was sharing my bed with Miranda, and I knew there’d be no sleep for me. I was lying on the far side of the bed, on the edge of the mattress, my thoughts and emotions swirling. I focused on my breathing, making it as regular as possible. Three seconds a breath. In-in-in. Out-out-out. In-in-in. Out-out-out.

The covers rustled, the mattress shifted slightly, and I felt Miranda press against me. She spooned up behind me, her knees tucked into the bends of my legs, her chest and belly against my back. She wrapped one arm around my shoulder and laid a hand on my chest. She patted my heart—tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump—and I swear, it beat in time with her touch. Gradually her body went slack and her breath grew deep. With each breath in, her belly swelled against me; with each exhalation, the hair on the back of my neck stirred.

Her body twitched slightly — a dream, or some neural synapse firing at random — and she took a deeper breath, then settled more closely against my back. Despite the bizarre and bloody events of the past twenty-four hours, the feeling of her body snugged against mine gave me a profound sense of well-being and comfort. A line from Meister Eckhart popped into my head: “If the only prayer you ever say is ‘Thank you,’ it will be enough.” Lying there with Miranda spooned up behind me — alive, unhurt, and important to me in ways that I didn’t understand fully, or perhaps was afraid to face — I prayed again: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

CHAPTER 24

When i woke, she was gone. On the nightstand, I found a note in Miranda’s small, neat script. It said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Underneath the thanks, these words: “A souvenir. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it’s important.” I tucked the note — an odd souvenir, I thought, or at least an odd inscription — in the drawer of the desk.

A few minutes later, as I was brushing windblown leaves off a chair in the garden, Jean appeared, a cordless phone in his hand. “A call for you.”

Inspector Descartes was on the line. “I have something interesting to show you,” he said. “Can you come to my office?”

“Yes, of course. I was just about to have breakfast. Tea, toast, and strawberries in the garden. Can I eat first, or do I need to come right away?”

“You can eat first,” he said, then, “or…I could come there. We could talk over breakfast.”

“I’ll ask Jean—”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said, and the phone went dead in my hand.

Descartes took his coffee black and concentrated: a small shot of espresso so dense he could almost have eaten it with a fork. Turning one of the lounge chairs by the fountain to face the sun, he set his espresso and a plate full of strawberries on a small table, then settled into the cushions, loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves, and slipped on a pair of wraparound sunglasses. “Ahhh,” he grunted happily. If not for the threadbare dress clothes, he might have been settling in for a day of Riviera sunbathing.

I sat in an adjoining chair with my cup of tea, now cold, along with two pieces of crusty toast slathered with cherry preserves. I sat without eating, waiting to see what he wanted to show me. He was in no hurry. His breathing grew slow and deep, and I wondered if he was going to sleep. “Inspector, you wanted to show me something?”

“Mmm? Ah, oui, of course.” I was glad I’d asked. “Yes, it’s right here.” He patted his shirt pocket, then pulled out a folded sheet of paper. With almost maddening slowness he unfolded it and peered at it, then handed it over. “Yes, I thought you might find it interesting.”

It took a moment for the name on the letterhead to sink in, but once it did, my adrenaline surged, and my eyes raced down the page.

“We found it in the office of his apartment,” he said. “We almost missed it. It was in his fax machine. It’s the report—”

“I know, I know,” I interrupted. “Good God.” I reread it, just to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. “Or maybe I should say ‘Jesus Christ’ instead.” What I held in my shaking hands was the report from Beta Analytic, the Miami lab where we’d sent the teeth for C-14 dating. The figures practically leaped from the page: “1,950 +/- 30.” According to the lab, the teeth — the teeth I’d pulled from the skull in the ossuary — dated back to the year A.D. 62, plus or minus thirty years: the century in which Jesus had lived and died. “So they might be the bones of Christ after all.” My mind was racing as fast as my pulse. “You said you found this in his fax machine. Had it been faxed to him, or had he faxed it to someone else?”

He smiled. “You would make a good detective, Docteur. The answer, I believe, is both. We looked at the machine’s archive, the log, I think you call it. He got a fax from Miami around eight P.M. on Saturday. Right after that, between nine and nine thirty, he sent three faxes.”

“Three? Did the first two fail?”

“No. All three went through. They were to three different places. Rome, London, and the United States.”

“Damnation,” I said. “I think Miranda was right — I think Stefan was up to no good. He made such a big deal about keeping the bones secret, but the minute he got the lab results, he ran to the fax machine. Have you tracked the numbers yet?”

“We’re working on it.” He frowned. “There’s some bureaucracy we have to go through to get the records.”

“Do you know where in the United States?”

“Ah, oui. The city is Charlotte.”

“Charlotte?” I was stunned. “My God. Some guy in Charlotte got in touch with me a week ago. Asked if I would examine some bones and artifacts from the first century.”

Descartes sat up straight, no longer sunbathing. “Who is this guy? Where do we find him?”

“His name”—I rummaged through my mental trash bin—“is Newman. Dr. Adam Newman. Director of the Institute for Something-or-other. Ah: the Institute for Biblical Science.”

He took out his notepad and wrote down the name. “You know this place, this institute? It’s a serious scientific institution?”

I shook my head. “I’d never heard of them.” Suddenly I made a connection. “But Stefan had heard of them. I showed him the letter they sent me. He warned me to stay away from them — said they were religious nuts, and if they disagreed with my work, they’d try to damage my reputation.”

“Interesting,” Descartes mused, “that Monsieur Beauvoir knew more about this American group than you did.”

“You think that’s who he faxed in Charlotte about the bones?”

“Peut-être. Maybe so. It’s a good place to start.”

“What about the London and Rome faxes? Who was he faxing there?”

He shrugged. “Other people he wanted to know about the age of the bones. But which people, and why? Sais pas—don’t know.” He selected a crimson strawberry from the plate and popped it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, as if testing the strawberry, and an appreciative smile dawned across his face. “Ah, délicieuse,” he breathed. “The food and wine in Provence are so wonderful. If I weren’t living on a policeman’s salary, I would love it here.” He cast a swift, wistful look around the garden and at the lovely buildings. Then, to my astonishment, he took a croissant from the platter, wrapped it in a napkin, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Seeing the expression on my face, he raised his eyebrows. Was he inviting me to tease him? Daring me to challenge him? I did neither, and after a pause he continued. “Perhaps, Docteur, you can help us find out who he was faxing. If you are willing.”

“Me? Help how? Does it require me to do anything illegal, immoral, or dangerous?”

“Illegal, no. Immoral, also no.” He smiled. “Sorry if that disappoints you.”

“You didn’t say it’s not dangerous, Inspector. I’m guessing that means it is?”

He held out a hand and waggled it. “Perhaps.”

“Does ‘perhaps’ mean ‘definitely’?”

“You can say no, of course.”

“You think someone killed Stefan for the bones?”

“Unless someone killed him for screwing your assistant.”

I hadn’t expected that. I felt the blood rush to my face, and I realized that I might have just stepped into a trap. Did Descartes still consider me a suspect? If so, had my reaction just raised his suspicions, made me look guilty? I was too angry to care. “Look, Inspector, I know what you think — Miranda’s personal life is fair game. Fine; you do your job. But if you want me to help you dig up dirt on Miranda, the answer’s no; you’re on your own.”

He seemed surprised by my reaction. “No, pas du tout—not at all. I was being ironic. I forgot you were sensitive about that.” Was he being sincere? There was no way to tell. “Of course the murder is about the bones. Immediately after he gets this report”—with his right index finger he pointed to the paper in my hands—“he faxes it to three people.” He held up the finger. “A few hours after that, he’s dead.” He held up his other index finger, then brought the two fingers together. “They are connected. How?” He tapped his temple. “I think he tries to sell the bones. I think he has three potential buyers — three fishes on the line. And one of the fishes kills him.”

“So, cherchez le squelette,” I reminded him. “Find the skeleton, you’ll find the killer.”

“Maybe.” He drained his cup and studied the sludge in the bottom. “Yes, maybe he takes the bones to a rendezvous at the chapel, and the buyer kills him and takes the bones.” I nodded; that was my guess about what had happened. “But I think not.” I looked at him in surprise. “Kill him, yes; shoot him—bang! — and take the bones, sure, it makes sense. But crucify him? Why? Why kill him in a way that’s risky to get caught? A way that’s slow and painful? Maybe to try to get information from him. Torture him into talking. You see?” I nodded; there was logic to that. He held up the finger yet again. “Also, why search his apartment, if you already have what you want?”

“Maybe to make sure there’s no evidence at the apartment, no paper trail for the police to follow?”

“Non,” he scoffed. “Whoever searched that apartment wasn’t looking for a piece of paper. He was looking for the bones. Of this I feel certain.”

“So what do you do now, Inspector?”

“I ask you to contact the three fishes.”

“Me? Why?”

“To offer the bones for sale.”

“But I don’t have the bones,” I pointed out.

“A minor complication,” he said, smiling. “You pretend to have them.” Suddenly the “dangerous” part of his request was becoming clear.

“Why don’t you pretend to have them, Inspector?”

He laughed. “Ah, oui. I will send this fax to the three fishes: ‘Bonjour, monsieur, if you still want the bones of Jesus, bring ten thousand euros to my office at the police station tomorrow morning.’ Like that?”

“No, not like that. Go undercover. Cops do it all the time.”

“I would make a terrible undercover officer,” he said. “I cannot act. My acting smells like shit. Besides, perhaps the killer has seen me already, at the chapel yesterday.”

“If so, he’s seen me, too — I got there before you did, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Ah, oui, but you were there as a witness, not an investigator. In fact, it’s good if he saw you there. You would be the logical person to have the bones, since Beauvoir no longer does. You, or perhaps Mademoiselle Lovelady.”

“No!” I practically shouted. “Not Miranda. I can’t let you put Miranda at risk.” He raised his sunglasses and squinted at me. “I’m responsible for her.”

“Pourquoi? She is an adult, yes? Twenty-five years? Thirty years?”

“Of course she’s an adult. But she’s my assistant. That makes me responsible.”

“But didn’t she come to Avignon to work for Beauvoir?”

He had me there. “Okay, technically, you’re right. But most of the time, I’m her boss. Keep Miranda out of it. Please.”

He shrugged. “I can try. But as I said yesterday, you are both involved. Perhaps you and I are not the only ones who have an interest in her.”

My cell phone rang; the call was from Miranda. She was talking even before I finished saying hello. “Slow down,” I said. “I can’t understand you. Are you crying? What’s wrong?”

“I’ve been robbed,” she sobbed.

“What? Just now? On the street? Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m not hurt. It must have happened last night. My room — somebody broke into my room while I was sleeping there with you.” She drew a few shuddering breaths. “When I got up this morning, I went for a long walk. Then I ate breakfast. I just got back to the hotel five minutes ago. My room had been trashed. They took my computer. My passport. My money. I’m scared, Dr. B.”

Twenty minutes later — spurred on by my fear for Miranda and my hope that if I did what Descartes asked, I could deflect danger from her to me — I signed my name to the message I would fax to each of Stefan’s three fish. The wording Descartes and I had finally settled on was meant to be both tantalizing and threatening: I am Stefan’s partner. I know about your dealings with him. Now you must deal with me. Contact me within 24 hours, or I will go to the police. Brockton.

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 hameçon—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.”

She frowned. “Liked it better than the possibility that they really are the bones of Jesus?” I pondered that, and while I was pondering, she pounced. “I don’t believe this. You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

I drew back; it felt almost as if she’d slapped me. “What on earth do you mean? Jealous of who?”

“Jealous of Stefan. You’re afraid that he was right after all — that he really did make the greatest find ever.” She shook her head, the disappointment in her eyes unmistakable. “He’s dead, Dr. B; you’re alive. You’ve got no reason to envy Stefan, and no need to be petty. If those are the bones of Christ, so what? It doesn’t make you any less, and it doesn’t make Stefan any more. It’s pretty clear he was up to no good. But just think — what if he was up to no good with the actual, for-real bones of Jesus Christ? How totally amazing! Can’t you see that?”

My mind reeled and raced, seeking how best to defend myself. Then, almost as clearly as if they’d been spoken aloud, I heard the words of Meister Eckhart: Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. But what would that mean, what would that be? What would I do, if I were my best self right now? I was so surprised at the answer that I laughed out loud. “Thank you,” I said. Her eyes narrowed, and I saw her bracing for the next salvo of sarcasm. “No, I mean it. Thank you. You’re absolutely right.” Was this really me talking? “I cared more about my pet theory than about the truth. That’s wrong — one of the cardinal sins in science. And yeah, I probably wanted to look smarter than Stefan, be righter than Stefan.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Maybe I wanted a little sip of schadenfreude. Maybe I was desperate to impress you.”

She shook her head again, but this time, as she did, she began to smile. “Sometimes, for such a smart, impressive guy, you can be so dumb,” she said. “But hey, that was good work you did just then.”

I took a deep breath, blew it out. “So. Let’s rethink this. If the bones really are first century, and they’re linked to the Shroud, does that mean the Shroud’s authentic after all? Was the carbon dating of the Shroud botched?”

“What, three separate labs all got it wrong, and all by thirteen hundred years? No way.”

“What about the invisible-patch theory, then? You think maybe the labs tested fabric from an invisible medieval patch?”

“Give me a break; the Shroudies are so grasping at straws there. Besides, I think Emily Craig’s right about the image. I think it was created by a terrific artist in the Middle Ages using that dust-transfer technique she described. It’s simple, and it’s credible. And that pseudoshroud she did of her friend was pretty damn convincing. Emily’s no Giotto or Simone Martini, but she proved her point.”

“So, circling back to your snuff-film theory,” I said. “How do you reconcile that with the idea that the bones are thirteen centuries older than the Shroud?”

“I don’t. I can’t.” She shrugged. “But interesting symmetry, in an ironic way, don’t you think? If the Shroud of Turin’s a medieval fake, but the bones from the Palace of the Popes are the real deal?” Suddenly she grinned. “Hey, try this one. What if the Shroud’s not the world’s first snuff film but the world’s first forensic facial reconstruction? What if your guy Martini saw the bones of Jesus and decided to put the flesh back on them? Maybe Master Simone was a thirteenth-century version of your NCMEC pal, Joe Mullins?”

My phone warbled, echoing loudly in the stairwell. The last call I’d gotten at the library had been the TBI agent’s bad news about Rocky Stone, so I was already gun-shy; when I recognized Descartes’s number on the display, I felt a tightening in my stomach. “Inspector?”

“Oui, Docteur.”

“Does this mean the fish are biting? Has something come in on the fax machine at Lumani?”

“Ah, non, not yet. That is not why I am calling you. This is something else.”

I felt my body relax, and only then did I realize how tightly I’d tensed when I saw who was calling. “What is it?”

“Where are you? Something interesting has just turned up.”

“Again? This is a big day for interesting finds. Miranda and I are at the library.”

“I am at Beauvoir’s apartment. Not far away. I can be at the library in five minutes.”

“Would it be easier if I came to the apartment?”

“It’s probably better if you don’t — one of the fish might be watching. It’s okay if he sees us questioning you. But it’s not good if it looks like you’re part of our team.”

“I understand, Inspector. I’ll see you here.”

“Meet me in the library courtyard. Without mademoiselle. Oh, and Docteur? Don’t look happy to see me.” Only after he hung up did I realize what he meant: One of the fish might be watching.

There were no parking places beside the library, but Descartes didn’t let that stop him. He pulled his car — a white Police Nationale sedan with lights and markings — onto the narrow sidewalk, practically scraping the passenger side against the wall of the adjoining building. It was the parking technique of choice — or necessity — in many of Avignon’s narrow streets.

I’d been waiting for him on a bench in the library’s courtyard. When he approached, I stood; I was about to stretch out my hand when I remembered his sign-off, so instead of a handshake, I offered him a scowl. “What do you want now, Inspector?” He raised his eyebrows, as if to tell me I’d gone a bit overboard, so I backed off. “What’s up?”

“This arrived at Beauvoir’s apartment a little while ago,” he said in a voice I felt sure could not be overheard. “Take a look.” He handed me a padded FedEx envelope. The lettering on the airbill was faint and smudged; it was easy to tell that it had come from the United States but hard to tell much more than that. Finally I deciphered “Miami,” and then — above that — two smeared words that looked like “Be Anal”: words, I realized with a start, that were probably “Beta Analytic.” The envelope was almost flat, but not quite, and I gave it an exploratory squeeze. Through the envelope’s built-in padding, I felt something small and hard, like a pebble. Opening the envelope, I found, as the size and shape had suggested I would, a human tooth — a canine — its ancient enamel a dull grayish brown.

“I thought the carbon-14 testing would destroy the sample,” Descartes said. “How can they send the whole tooth back?”

“Apparently they only used one of the teeth. We sent two,” I said. I tipped the tooth out of the Ziploc bag and into my palm. “A molar, and this canine.” I held it up for him to see, and suddenly an electric jolt shot through me. “My God,” I breathed. “Not this canine.”

“What do you mean?” Descartes leaned closer to inspect the tooth.

“This isn’t the canine we sent.” I raised my palm closer to his face. “At least, it’s not the canine that I pulled from the skull.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because when I pulled the tooth, it broke. The root snapped off in the jaw. Look — this one’s perfect.”

He plucked the tooth from my hand gently, as if it were a gem, or a ripe raspberry he didn’t want to bruise. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, he turned it, scrutinizing it from every angle. “You are sure of this?”

“Absolutely.”

“You think there is some mistake at this laboratory? A mix-up?”

“No,” I said slowly, an idea dawning in my mind. An idea whose brilliance was matched only by its wickedness. “I think Stefan swapped the samples,” I said. “I think he traded the teeth I pulled for teeth from another skull. A skull he knew was two thousand years old.”

“But how is this possible? Where would he get such teeth?”

“Hell, he was an archaeologist,” I said. “He could have gotten them anywhere. A dig in Greece or the Middle East — a site he knew dated from the first century. The catacombs of Rome, where there are thousands and thousands of skeletons that age. Maybe even the Museum of Natural History in Paris; there’s a whole building there filled with fossils and bones.” I snapped my fingers. “I just remembered — the first night I was here, we were talking about C-14 dating. He mentioned something about Turkish goat bones from the first century. He might have teeth from that same site.”

“So he faked it? Merde, every case I get now involves a faker or a forger. Do you think he planned this tout entièr—the whole thing — a long time in advance?”

I opened my mouth to say yes, but I found myself shaking my head no. “No, actually I think it was a spur-of-the-moment idea,” I said. “I think he really did find the bones in the palace — the wall collapsed first, Stefan was called second. I think the only thing he faked was the C-14 test, once he found that ossuary. I think the inscription — the cross and the lamb — put the idea into his head.” A realization struck me: If Stefan had rigged the C-14 test, maybe the skeleton was medieval after all…and maybe the Shroud of Turin really was created in Avignon. “The skeleton Stefan found is significant,” I added. “But he wanted it to be the most important — and most valuable — skeleton in the world. Unfortunately, his plan worked too well, and it backfired on him.”

Descartes was staring off into space. I wasn’t sure he was following me, or even hearing me. “Inspector?”

“Excuse me for one minute, please.” He took out his cell phone and made a call. The only words I caught for sure were “cherchez” and “appartement.” Descartes listened a long while, then murmured, “Ah, oui? C’est bon.” When he hung up, his face was a mask, but his eyes were gleaming. “As you were talking, I remembered. In his apartment were some small glass jars containing bits of metal, pieces of pottery, small bones. And — this is what I called to ask them to look for just now — two teeth. A dent de sagesse, the tooth of wisdom”—he pointed at one of his third molars—“and a dogtooth, a canine, broken at the root, exactement as you describe.” He caught my gaze and held it. “Okay, I’m leaving now. We should finish with a small fight.” He jabbed a finger in my chest. “You are not telling me everything, Docteur,” he said loudly. “I think you know where are these bones. I am watching you. And I can make things very bad for you if you give me a reason.”

He spun on his heel and walked toward the street. “Descartes,” I called after him. He stopped and looked back at me. “We saved your butts in World War Two,” I shouted. “If not for America, you’d be goose-stepping and eating sauerkraut.”

He resumed walking, and he raised both arms, his middle fingers extended. Unless it had a radically different meaning in France, the gesture needed no translation.

And the man claimed to be a lousy actor.

CHAPTER 25

When Miranda and I left the library an hour later, we persuaded Philippe to let us out a back door. We took a long, meandering way back to her hotel, detouring through the Rue des Teinturiers — the street of the tinters, the dyers. For centuries this was Avignon’s textile district, where the wools and silks for tapestries, vestments, courtiers’ cloaks, and ladies’ gowns took on hues of red, orange, gold, green, blue, violet, indigo. A small canal paralleled the street, and the buildings lining that side all had small bridges leading to their entrances. A smattering of ancient waterwheels, some still turning, offered picturesque reminders of the importance of waterpower to medieval industries. Miranda stopped to snap a waterwheel photo with her iPhone, then climbed the steps onto the small bridge beside it. Leaning on the stone balustrade, she peered down at the water. “Fancy a dip?” I called.

She shook her head. “Remember what Stefan said about the pollution in the Rhône? This looks a lot worse. The water’s opaque.”

“Urban runoff,” I said. “Brake fluid, mop water, dog crap — not great for the water quality.”

“Imagine, though, what this must have looked like in 1350. If all these buildings were dyers’ shops? This water probably changed color every time somebody emptied a dye vat. Wouldn’t that be fun? The canal running fuchsia one minute, burnt orange the next? Like something out of The Wizard of Oz.”

“That’s a pretty image,” I said. “And Avignon did play the part of the Emerald City for most of a century.”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, that’s for sure.”

A few blocks later, we wandered past the historic marker that mentioned the poet Petrarch and his unrequited love, Laura. Pointing it out to Miranda, I asked, “Do you know their story?”

“Petrarch and Laura? A little. He saw her at church and fell instantly in love. But it was doomed — she was married to someone else, I think — so he spent the rest of his life worshiping her from afar.”

“They were never together?”

“Only in his dreams. Well, and his poems.”

“Do you know the story of Petrarch?” Elisabeth and Jean looked up from their wineglasses and nodded in unison.

I’d dropped Miranda at her hotel after an early dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant near the clock tower — couscous, grape leaves, hummus, and eggplant; not my favorite fare, but Miranda liked it. The last of the daylight was fading as I entered the sanctuary of Lumani’s garden, and Elisabeth and Jean were sharing a bottle of red wine. A candle burned on the small table between them, and the wine in their glasses glowed like liquid rubies.

“Petrarch, oui,” she exclaimed. “A famous poet pastoral.”

“Pastoral? Like a pastor, a priest?”

Her brow furrowed, then brightened. “Ah, non. Like sheeps. Shepherds and maidens. Petrarch loved the countryside.”

“And Laura? What do you know about his lady love?”

“She was very young,” said Jean, “and very beautiful. Almost as beautiful as Elisabeth.” She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. “She was married to a French nobleman. Petrarch loved her, but could not have her.”

“Une tragédie,” said Elisabeth. “For him. But very lucky for us. He wrote many poems about her. He invented the sonnet, the love poem, just for her.” She pursed her lips, thinking, then held up a finger. “Ah! Wait here. I will come back.” She hurried across the courtyard to their house; a moment later she returned, holding a small book aloft as if it were a prize. “I have a book of Petrarch’s sonnets. A gift from Jean years ago.” She leaned down and kissed the top of his balding head — a simple gesture that spoke volumes about the easy, entwined intimacy of their lives.

She flipped pages in the book; some, I noticed, were dog-eared, including the page where she stopped. “Listen. This is the poem he wrote when Laura died. He had loved her for twenty years by this time. He wrote in Italian; this is in French, which I will try to put into English for you — sorry if the translation is not good.” She scanned the page, mentally trying out a word here, a phrase there, then held up a hand theatrically and began to read.

She stopped, then wiped a tear from each eye. “Such sweetness, and such sadness.”

“You say he loved her for twenty years?”

“More than that. He loved her for twenty years while she was alive. But then she died, during the Black Death. Still he loved her, after she died. He kept loving her, and writing about her, for the rest of his life — twenty-five, thirty more years.”

“But he never got to be with her?”

“Non, never. She was married. She refused all his advances. We don’t even know if they ever talked together.”

“That seems foolish,” I said. “He wasted his life sighing for a woman he could never have instead of looking for a love that he could have.” I gestured at the two of them. “Like you and Jean.”

“But he was pledged to the church,” she pointed out. “He was not supposed to have any woman.”

“He was doubly foolish, then, to obsess about her for his whole life.”

She gave me an odd look then — a look both critical and pitying. “Ah, monsieur scientifique—does your heart always obey the orders of your head? Have you never been foolish in the thing you wanted or the person you loved? Have you never loved unwisely, never grieved too much for someone you lost?”

Her question blindsided me. I felt light-headed and reached out to steady myself on the trellis beside me. Years before, when my wife, Kathleen, died of cancer, I’d retreated from people for two years, burying myself in my work. Then, just as I felt myself beginning to come alive again — just as I started falling in love with Jess Carter, a beautiful medical examiner from Chattanooga — Jess was killed. Then there was Isabella, with whom I’d had a brief romantic encounter, and who’d died in Japan when the tsunami struck the coast where she was staying. And now? Now I was struggling with my feelings for Miranda, a young woman who, because of her age and position, should be as off-limits to me as Laura was to Petrarch.

Elisabeth reached out a hand and laid it on my arm. “I spoke too strongly,” she said. “I think I have reminded you of something painful. I am sorry. Please forgive me.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s all right. It’s my fault. What do I know about what’s foolish and what’s wise, or what’s the best way to cope with pain? When I’m in pain, I study a skeleton. When Petrarch is in pain, he writes a poem. Most people prefer his way to mine. And who can blame them?” I gave her a rueful smile; she returned it with one of warmth and kindness.

“You find poems and stories in the bones,” she said, and Jean nodded. “Good night.” She gave my cheek a quick kiss, took her husband’s arm, and walked with him across the courtyard into the golden light spilling from the windows of their home.

I wondered if it was too late in life to take up writing sonnets.

CHAPTER 26

Descartes settled into a chair. I’d expected his eyes to light up at the array of pastries and berries — Jean and Elisabeth had started doubling the portions for his sake — but he looked bleak and bleary. “I’ve been up all night,” he said, in answer to the question in my eyes. “Fishing. We have some information on all three of the fishes.”

Coffee sloshed from my cup as my hand began to shake, filling the saucer. When I set the saucer down, milky coffee sloshed onto the table and dripped through the wooden slats, splatting onto the stones of the courtyard. “Tell me.”

“The one in London is a British art dealer.”

“An art dealer?” I was surprised, though I swiftly realized I shouldn’t have been. After all, if collectors and museums prized fractured Roman pottery and gem-encrusted Aztec skulls, why wouldn’t someone covet the bones of Christ, arguably the most revered figure of all time? “What else do you know about him?”

“Not him. Her. A woman named Felicia Kensington. She’s very shady. She’s been on the watch list of New Scotland Yard and Interpol for years now.”

“What for?”

“Buying and selling black-market art. Forgeries and fakes. Stolen antiquities. Her name has come up more than once in cases like this—”

“Murder cases?”

“No, nothing violent. Cases where a valuable piece of art — a painting, a sculpture, a precious document — disappeared, or mysteriously reappeared. Sometimes with fake papers, sometimes with no papers at all. But she’s slippery. Someone else always takes the fall.”

“She’s never been convicted of anything?”

“She’s never even been arrested.”

“Sounds like she’s lucky, or smart, or both,” I said. “What’s your take?”

“My take?” He looked startled, then he frowned. “Isn’t that what you call a corrupt policeman’s bribe — his take?”

“Ah. Not quite.” No wonder he’d looked confused and unhappy. “We do say that a crooked cop is ‘on the take,’ yes. But the money that a cop gets when he’s on the take is called his ‘cut,’ I think. ‘What’s your take?’ means ‘What’s your impression, what’s your intuition?’ So, what’s your take on this shady art dealer, Felicia Kensington — could she have killed Stefan?”

He studied the biggest of the strawberries, then plucked it from the platter and bit off the lower half. “My take is, she’s a morceau de merde—a morsel of shit, you would say?”

I smiled at the translation. “Americans don’t say ‘morsel’ a lot. We tend to say ‘piece’ instead.”

“Okay, she’s a piece of shit,” he said, popping the rest of the strawberry in his mouth. “But I don’t think she’s the killer.”

“Because?”

“Because she’s a woman, for one thing. Women almost never kill. They only kill their husbands or lovers. Well, sometimes their kids, but that’s rare. Besides, this woman has an alibi. She’s been in Cairo for the past two weeks. Probably buying mummies or robbing tombs.”

“Okay, so we can probably rule her out. Who’s suspect number two?”

He crossed himself, then raised his eyebrows expectantly, waiting for some sort of response. I shook my head and shrugged. Looking disappointed that I’d not understood the clue, he said, “The pope.”

“The pope? The pope? As in the Holy Father in Rome? Holy smokes.” The inspector nodded, cheered up by my dramatic reaction. “Well, well. I’ll say this for Stefan — he might have been stupid, but he wasn’t guilty of thinking small, was he? That’s a damn big fish.”

Descartes wagged a finger of clarification. “Not the pope himself, I think. The fax number belongs to the Vatican, though. The Vatican Museum, to be precise.”

“I’ve been to the Vatican Museum,” I said. “Took me six hours to go through it, and I skipped a lot. I’m guessing it’s not a one-man operation. Any idea who Stefan was negotiating with?”

“Not yet. The wheels of the Vatican roll slowly.”

“Gosh, there’s a revelation.” He didn’t seem to get the pun.

“They have two different police forces. The Swiss Guard is there to protect the pope.”

“Like the Secret Service in the U.S.,” I said. “They protect the president.”

“Exactement. The other force is the Vatican police — they do everything else. But neither group will cooperate with me unless someone très important commands it. The Catholic Church has had too many scandals lately. They don’t want bloody hands from a murder.” His lips twitched in an ironic little smile. “En particulier a crucifixion.”

“That wouldn’t look so good,” I agreed. “But do you think it’s possible that someone at the Vatican Museum would want the bones enough to kill for them?”

He shrugged. “I’m no expert. There’s plenty of blood on the hands of the Church. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Sexual abuse and cover-ups. But would the Vatican kill to possess the bones of Christ — or to destroy them? Only God knows.”

I slathered cherry preserves on a croissant and took a bite; for some reason, I’d started imitating Descartes, who seemed unable to string together more than three sentences without refueling. “So what do you know about the third fish, the one in Charlotte? Is it the Institute for Biblical Science, the place that contacted me?”

“No, that is not the place, but maybe there is some connection. This is a church.”

“Catholic?” He shook his head. “Protestant? Why would a Protestant church in North Carolina want to buy the bones of Jesus?”

“It’s not typical Protestant, I think. It’s called the Church of Dominion and Prophecy. A church gigantesque—a megachurch, oui? — with twenty thousand people. Also radio and television stations. The preacher is named Jonah Ezekiel. Not his original name; he changed it. He calls himself ‘Reverend Jonah, Apostle and Prophet of the Apocalypse.’ He’s — how do you say it? — on the fluffy edge of crazy.”

“Lunatic fringe?”

“Exactement, lunatic fringe.”

“Why do you say that, Inspector?”

“He thinks the world will end soon.”

“I hate to say it, Inspector, but millions of Americans — like, forty percent — think the world is about to end. Almost half of Americans believe that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world will happen by the year 2050.”

He held up a finger. “Ah, but this preacher — he says he knows exactement when these things will happen. God brought him to Heaven, he says, and gave him a special preview.” I had to admit, this was starting to sound fringy. “Two years ago, he tells everyone, ‘The Rapture happens in six months.’ So his followers quit their jobs to help him warn everyone. When the Rapture does not happen, does he say, ‘Sorry, I was wrong, I am an idiot’? Non! He says, ‘God gave me more time to save souls, so give me more money.’” He spat out a strawberry cap. “Morceau de merde.”

It was the same phrase—“piece of shit”—that he’d used about Felicia Kensington, the black-market art dealer.

“That isn’t all. He wants the world to end. Look, I’ll show you.” He pulled several folded pages from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed me the top one. It was a printout from the church’s Web site, advertising a series of upcoming sermons by Reverend Jonah titled “Signs of the End Times.” Most of the page was filled by an illustration in vivid color. The illustration was captioned by a quotation from the Gospel of Mark: “Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down…and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows…For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time…” At the center of the picture was an immense, shining cross rising from the smoldering ruins of shattered skyscrapers. In the smoky sky, winged angels hovered beneath the gates of Heaven, welcoming a handful of white-robed, haloed people streaming upward from the ruins. Underground, naked bodies writhed amid the flames of Hell; some were being tortured, and others were engaged in sexual acts that were graphic, degrading, and grotesque.

I handed the page back. “I don’t know which is more disturbing,” I said, “his eagerness for the world to end, or his fascination with pain and perversion.”

“He isn’t just waiting for the Apocalypse. He’s trying to speed it up.”

“Speed it up? How?”

Descartes took a sip of coffee. “For one thing, by creating red cows for Israel.”

I paused, my own cup halfway to my lips. “Red cows for Israel?”

“Oui, exactement. Red cows. For Israel.”

“I don’t understand, Inspector. What on earth do red cows have to do with the end of time?”

“I don’t understand it, either,” he said. “It’s very complicated. But some of these end-of-the-world people — not just this preacher, but also some fringe Jews, Messianic Jews — believe that Jesus, or the Messiah, will come again after the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt.”

“Rebuilt by red cows?”

“Oui, special cows, trained in architecture and construction.” He laughed. “Non, of course not. Here is how the red cow fits in. Somebody important a long time ago — Moses or Solomon or God, whoever — said that the best way to clean up sins is to sacrifice a red cow. Pure red, with not one hair of any other color — no brown, no black, no white — anywhere on its body. Also, not just a cow, but a génisse. I don’t know the word in English, but it means a female cow, one that is young. A virgin cow, you know?”

“Ah. The English word is ‘heifer.’ Yes, a sacrificial virgin. Female virgins always seem to take the sacrificial bullet for the team. But I still don’t get it, Inspector. What does sacrificing a red heifer have to do with the end of the world?”

“Pfffttt.” Descartes blew out a puff of air, a versatile French expression of irritation or impatience or uncertainty. “I’m telling you, it sounds crazy to me. But. These people who want the Apocalypse, they think that when the perfect red cow is sacrificed, the Jews will be purified and inspired. They will unite to drive the infidels from Jerusalem and rebuild their holy temple. And when that happens, voilà—the Messiah comes again.”

“So the eager preacher in Charlotte,” I mused, “joins forces with the militant rabbi in Jerusalem in the quest for the perfect cow.”

“Oui. But not just looking for the cow. Creating the cow. The preacher is paying farmers and scientists to breed red cows. They thought they had her, the perfect génisse, a few years ago. There was much excitement in Jerusalem and Charlotte, but then poof! — she sprouted some white hairs in her tail. There was much disappointment. But they keep trying.”

I looked around me, taking in the loveliness: the blooming lavender, the splashing fountain, the mobile rotating beneath the plane tree as miraculously and gracefully as the planets circling the sun. It was surreal, this conversation about the destruction of the earth, the desirability of mass suffering, and the notion that a cow’s pigmentation could flip the switch of the doomsday machine. “You’re making this up, Descartes. You’re just messing with my head.”

“Non, non, mon ami, I cannot make up such crazy shit — I do not have such a big imagination. It’s all true. Incroyable, but true. And there is more. More and more and more. This preacher, Reverend Jonah Ezekiel, he thinks your government — well, not the government tout entier, but the Democratic Party, for sure — is controlled by demons. He’s making friends with Republicans who have the potential to become president. Can you imagine? If your president — the man with the nuclear launch codes — decides to launch the battle of Armageddon? Very scary, Docteur.”

“Demons, you said? He thinks demons — actual demons from Hell — are running the government?”

“Oui. Also Hollywood. Also Wall Street. So to fight back, this preacher and his followers want to get power—‘dominion,’ they call it, that’s why it’s in the name of the church — over everything and everybody.”

I rubbed my throbbing eyes; squeezed my aching temples. “Unbelievable.”

“Here’s what worries me most,” Descartes said. “In one of his sermons, the preacher says that God is calling for martyrs — people ready to fight and die in the battle against evil.”

“Martyrs? Did he really use that word?”

“Yes. ‘Holy martyrs,’ those were his exact words.”

“Yikes. He sounds like Osama bin Laden.”

“Exactement. Put him in robes and a turban, glue a long beard to the chin, change the name of the religion, et voilà—an American bin Laden. La même chose—the same thing. Fou, fanatique, et dangereux. Crazy, fanatical, and dangerous.” He handed me the other folded pages he’d brought.

One was a close-up of Reverend Jonah preaching, his arms outstretched and lifted toward Heaven. One hand clutched a Bible; the other brandished a sword. The expression on his face was like nothing I’d ever seen before, an electric mixture of elation and rage. This is what zealotry looks like, I thought. He’d like nothing better than to hack some unbeliever to pieces with that sword.

The final two pages were grainy photos from a security camera. Despite the poor quality, I recognized the first photo as Reverend Jonah. The other picture showed a large, muscular man — he could have been a professional wrestler or football player — sporting a shaved head, wraparound sunglasses, and a black suit and shirt that strained to contain his chest and shoulders. “Who’s the gorilla?” I asked Descartes.

“That is the preacher’s chief of security. His name is Luther Talbot, but his pseudo—his nicked name, I think you say? — is Junior.” The inspector’s translation gave me a smile, but the time stamp on the photo quickly took it away. In the upper right-hand corner of each photo was a string of numerals indicating the date and time of the photo. The men had been photographed two minutes apart — Reverend Jonah Ezekiel at 9:11 A.M. and Junior at 9:13.

The pictures had been taken at Charles de Gaulle airport, in Paris, less than twenty-four hours before Stefan Beauvoir had been transformed into a human crucifix.

CHAPTER 27

Simone Martini. The name was like a fly against the windowpane of my mind, buzzing incessantly — and with more insistence than Stefan’s name buzzed — as I hurried to meet Miranda at the Avignon library again. Could Martini be the creator of the Shroud of Turin? If so, when, and why? Had he done what Emily Craig postulated had been done — copied a crumbling first-century original? Or had Miranda nailed it when she called the Shroud “the world’s first snuff film,” created by the murder of its main character?

My sense of having split-personality disorder — or, rather, split-century disorder, of being torn between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries — hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had intensified as I waited for Stefan’s three “fishes” to nibble at the bait Descartes and I had dangled. If not for the mystery of the bones themselves, I’d have gone off the deep end during the wait.

Elisabeth had shown me a book on Italian artists of the early Renaissance, but Martini merited only a few pages in it. So Miranda and I were returning to the library once more.

In the M section of art books, we found a slim volume devoted to Martini. Scurrying upstairs to the mezzanine — which we had to ourselves today — we huddled over the plates of Martini’s paintings.

One of his earliest works enchanted me. The image — a fresco in a chapel in Assisi, Italy — depicted Saint Martin being knighted by the Roman emperor. With a golden disk behind his head and his hands folded in prayer, Martin looked every bit the pious saint. But other figures in the scene looked like entertainers at a medieval party. Three singers had been captured in midnote, open mouthed, forever singing in close harmony. Beside them, a dark-haired man in a colorful, bejeweled robe strummed a stringed instrument — a mandolin? a lute? Accompanying the strummer was a flute player, smiling slyly, and for good reason. I pointed him out to Miranda. “Look,” I said, “he’s playing two flutes at once.”

“Cool,” she marveled. Then — a slight variation on her favorite utterance—“How does he do that?”

One of Martini’s final works—The Holy Family—was striking in its treatment of Mary, Joseph, and a youthful Jesus, age ten or twelve. “Wow, a family quarrel,” I told Miranda. “Mary and Joseph are scolding Jesus — you don’t see many pictures of that, huh?”

“And get a load of that pout Jesus is giving them,” she said. “What a brat!”

But it was Martini’s Avignon portrait The Blessing Christ—the red-ochre sinopia drawing I’d seen in the palace — that I kept flipping back to stare at again and again. The drawing had been made as a study for a fresco at the cathedral, one of four scenes tucked beneath the small roof of the front porch. The paintings themselves were gone, but the underlying sinopia of Jesus had been found and moved to the palace to preserve it, along with a companion drawing of Mary. The eyes of Jesus seemed to be looking right at me, as if to say, “You’re right — the Shroud, the bones, and I: Martini’s Holy Trinity.”

Miranda translated the artist’s biography for me; it didn’t take long, since details of his life were sketchy. “His first known work was in Siena, Italy, in 1315,” she said. “He worked in Siena, Padua, Naples, and Florence for twenty years. He moved to Avignon in 1335 or ’36 to paint at the papal court. He died here in 1344.”

“At the papal court? So he might have had a connection to the bones,” I noted. “Might have had access.”

“That’s a mighty big might,” she said. “Hey, this is interesting. He was friends with Petrarch, the sonnet-spinning chaplain who loved to hate the papacy. Martini painted a frontispiece for Petrarch’s copy of the writings of Virgil. Oh, cool—he also painted a portrait of Laura, Petrarch’s not-quite girlfriend.”

“Let’s see it,” I said. “What page is that on?”

“None, alas — it’s long lost. But we know it existed because Petrarch wrote two poems praising the picture, and praising Simone’s artistic genius.”

But was it possible that Martini had a dark side? Was it possible that he’d created a “snuff shroud,” as Miranda had speculated in Turin — a work made expressly to document the murder of the man it depicted? The idea was horrifying but undeniably fascinating. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the relic revered by millions was actually a piece of forensic evidence — the world’s most sensational and incriminating piece of forensic evidence, one whose meaning had been misunderstood for centuries?

But was Martini capable of committing a cold-blooded murder for the sake of…what? Did he have both motive and opportunity, as my detective friends had taught me to wonder? What might drive a talented and prominent artist to commit and document such a crime, and then commit the sacrilege of passing off the evidence as a holy relic?

I took out a pocket-sized notebook and flattened it open. At the top of a left-hand page, I wrote “Motive?” and — on the facing page—“Opportunity?” I stared at the neatly lined pages awhile, feeling foolish and bereft of ideas. Finally, shaking my head in frustration, I forced myself to put pen to paper. Under “Motive?” I wrote “artistic rivalry?” Did Martini have a competitor in Avignon he felt jealous of, threatened by? I nudged Miranda. “Know of any artists who’ve killed other artists?”

She looked amused. “Dueling paintbrushes? Spray cans of Krylon at twenty paces?”

“Come on, be serious. I’m talking poison, a dagger, a bludgeon, whatever. Murder motivated by artistic jealousy?”

“I think character assassination is more common in cases like that,” she said. “Premeditated bitchiness.”

“What about romantic rivalry? See if you can find anything on Martini’s love life.”

“Like, self-portraits showing him in a jealous rage?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “But Petrarch left a boatload of poems about his love life.”

She gave me a skeptical look, but she humored me by scanning the rest of the bio. “Sorry,” she reported. “Looks like your man Martini was the model husband.”

“What’s your evidence for that?”

“Spotty,” she conceded. “Just before he got married, he bought a house for his bride, Giovanna — Italian for ‘Joanna’—from her dad. He also gave Giovanna two hundred twenty gold florins as a wedding present.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I argued.

“Okay, try this,” she said. “Martini died in Avignon in 1344; three years later, when Giovanna moved back to Siena, she was still wearing widow’s weeds. He must not have been too scummy if she was still mourning. Of course, who knows what evil lurks in the heart, right? But from the little bit of bio there is, he seems like a stand-up guy.”

“The flower of Avignon?”

She nodded. “The flower of Avignon.”

CHAPTER 28

The flower of Avignon is unfurling, bursting into full and glorious bloom. By now, twenty years after the papacy arrived for a “temporary” visit, Avignon has grown from a sleepy village of a few thousand souls to a bustling city ten times that size. The cobbled streets clatter with the wheels of carts bringing in wine, meats, cheeses, spices, silks. Every square inch of ground within the old perimeter has been claimed, and the noise of prosperity is deafening: carpenters’ saws rasping through framing timbers; hammers pounding pegs into newly raised posts and lintels; tiles scraping and clattering onto new roofs, occasionally slithering off to shatter in the streets below. Most of the new buildings are modest — tenements, tanneries, bakeries, butchers’ shops — but others are grand. Avignon and Villeneuve, just across the Bénézet bridge, now boast a score of cardinals’ palaces, many of which outshine the pontiff’s own makeshift quarters, which are crammed into what had been the bishop’s palace until the papacy arrived and took it over.

Pope John XXII has now worn the papal crown for fourteen years. During his reign, he has steadily refilled the papal coffers; under his watchful eye, the treasury has swelled from a paltry 70,000 florins to 17,500,000 florins — an increase of 250-fold, which must surely please our Lord. The profusion of florins is heaven-sent—“sent” in a manner of speaking, that is, for the tithes and rents and payments for offices and indulgences must always be collected, sometimes upon threat of excommunication, by God’s tireless, toiling clergy. But never before has the machinery of collection been so well oiled; Pope John has been blessed with a genius for organization and administration, and that genius has yielded a rich harvest. Still, wealth can be a heavy burden, imposing the responsibility of sound stewardship, of protecting what God has entrusted to His humble servant for safekeeping.

And really, could there be any better steward than Pope John? A banker’s son by birth, a lawyer by training, John has brought the church’s administrative and banking systems into the modern era. By consolidating and centralizing his minions and their work, he can keep watch over his flocks of clerks and accountants, his vast expenditures and vaster revenues. His eagle-eyed oversight has brought unprecedented protection against embezzlement and fraud. But administrative protection isn’t enough; the ever-richer prize of the treasury must be physically protected as well. The snake pit that is Rome, God knows, became a hotbed of assassins and thieves during the papacy’s thousand years of residence there. Now, with the papacy’s wealth and power centered here, Avignon’s gravitational pull is strong, attracting some of Europe’s finest painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets. And where money and artists converge, can thieves be far behind? No, the treasury must be secured.

Such are the cares that increasingly occupy the thoughts and prayers of John XXII. The pontiff is now eighty-six — an age prone to mistrust and fear — and lacks the strength to undertake the project needed to safeguard the Church’s assets. That work must fall to his chosen successor, Jacques — Cardinal Fournier — who stands before him in the plain monk’s robe he still insists on wearing. The robe suggests pious simplicity, but the pope happens to know — His Holiness has spies in every cardinal’s palace — that Jacques owns no fewer than twenty such robes, so he will never lack for a spotless one.

“Jacques, you must begin planning,” the pope tells him. “I will be gone very soon, and you must act swiftly once you succeed me.”

Fournier clasps his plump fingers and bows deeply. “You do me great honor, Holiness, but no one knows the will of God. You might yet reign for many years.” Just to spite me, he thinks, but does not say aloud. “And when the sad time of your passing does come, the College of Cardinals might feel led to elect someone else as your successor.”

“Don’t waste my time with false piety and hollow protestations,” the old man snaps. “I am old. I was old when they elected me. Seventy-two. That’s why they elected me — they thought I would return the favor by dying quickly. For fourteen years I have disappointed them by continuing to live, despite three attempts to poison me. They killed my dear nephew Jacopo, but they could not kill me. And in these recent years, I have prepared the way for you, Jacques. I have created two dozen cardinals, most from southern France, three from my own family. The Italian cardinals are now few and weak; we French are many and strong; and you, Jacques, have distinguished yourself by defending the faith. You shall wear the crown and carry the keys.”

Fournier bows again, but this time less deeply, and with an eager glint in his eye. “Thy will be done, O Lord,” he murmurs in a mellifluous voice — perhaps to God, perhaps to his powerful patron.

“But there is one thing that could yet stand between you and your hopes,” the old man pipes in his thin, reedy voice. “And you know what it is.” Christ, thinks Fournier, will he never cease to cudgel me with this? “It is Eckhart.”

“Eckhart has been swept into the gutter, Holy Father. He is dead, and you have condemned his heretical teachings. Eckhart’s followers have scattered like dust. No one cares that he is dead. In a hundred years, no one will know that he ever lived.”

“I pray that you are right, Jacques. But you must take care, lest the Dominican friars make him out to be a martyr.”

“It cannot happen, Holiness. I alone witnessed his death.”

“But what of his remains? Your Cistercian brethren revere the head of Thomas Aquinas. What if the Dominicans find Eckhart and proclaim his head or his heart to be relics?”

“He will never be found. His bones are in a sealed ossuary in the treasury, and only you, I, and the chamberlain have keys to that room.”

“Bah!” The old man waves a trembling hand at their surroundings. “The treasury could be plundered by a dozen Carmelite nuns. You must build a proper palace, Jacques. One that is worthy of the heir of Saint Peter. One that is strong enough to protect God’s gold. God has given us sway over emperors and kings, yet we huddle here in a building built to house a bishop.”

“I have given this much thought since we first discussed it,” Fournier says. “I’ve taken the liberty of having an architect draw preliminary designs. And such designs they are!” Animated now, pacing and gesturing, he paints a word picture of the mighty towers and lofty battlements that will surround a central cloister — an exterior of formidable strength, an interior of tranquil beauty. “When I am pope — if I am pope — the work will begin immediately. Eckhart’s death, and Eckhart’s remains, will be sealed deep within the walls. And there they will stay until the glorious morning when the last trumpet sounds, and our Lord and Savior returns in all His glory to reward the faithful…and to unleash His righteous anger upon heathens, heretics, and all other enemies of the one true faith.”

He ends his impassioned soliloquy with his hands and eyes raised toward Heaven. He holds the pose a moment, then turns and looks to the pope for approval.

The old man is slumped in his chair, sleeping, slack jawed and drooling on his sumptuous silk vestments.

CHAPTER 29

Simone gasps when the boat rounds a bend in the Rhône and the city comes into view. Seven years earlier, he had thought that Avignon could not possibly grow bigger or more glorious, but the mighty stone towers rising from the dome of rock prove him spectacularly wrong. The cathedral, which once held pride of place atop the rock, is now dwarfed by a mighty tower, which looms so close to the nave that the two structures all but touch. Wooden scaffolds surround three other towers in various stages of construction. “Bellissimo,” Martini breathes, partly because the city truly is beautiful, but also because he feels such secret relief: His painful decision was surely the right one after all.

On his previous trip to Avignon, in the fall of 1328, Martini had come to scout the city, to see what prospects and commissions it might offer one of Italy’s most talented and respected painters. Avignon was indeed thriving then, but as he made the rounds of potential patrons — mostly the flock of wealthy cardinals who were descending on the city, trailing clouds of architects and decorators behind them — he was frustrated to find that most of the cardinals, and therefore most of the commissions, were French. For an Italian artist to move to Avignon on the strength of mere talent and brio would have been a foolish gamble in 1329. But now, in the fall of 1335, Martini’s been begged to come by a newly hatted Italian cardinal, and he knows now that his family won’t starve.

He has already landed a most unusual commission: a secular painting, a small picture of a young married woman, commissioned not by her husband, but by a poet who’s madly in love with her. A simple assignment, really — the face of a lady, nothing else in the picture — and yet Simone has never done such a painting before, nor, for that matter, has any painter he knows of. Oh, it’s common, and even crucial, to shoehorn the faces of rich patrons into chapel frescoes — to give one of the Three Wise Men, for instance, the craggy good looks of Count Corsino, if Corsino’s the one who’s piously paying for the fresco. But a picture of a woman — a woman as her real, true self, not masquerading as some saint or martyr, some spectator at a miracle? It’s unheard-of! Simone’s not sure how much demand there might be for such paintings, but who knows? If he does an inspired rendering of this heartbreaking beauty, portraits might actually catch on.

The lady’s heartbroken mad poet, needless to say, is Italian.

On his prior trip Martini had traveled light. Now he’s ponderously laden, freighted with so many tools of his trade that even he — who packed everything himself — finds the sheer quantity incomprehensible: boxes and jars of pigments, oils, solvents; cases of brushes and chalks and charcoals and easels and palettes; rolls of canvas and huge folios of paper; parchment envelopes containing gold leaf beaten thin as a day’s layer of dust; a carpenter’s shop worth of woodworking tools, needed to saw boards and build frames. The working gear is only the half of it, because he’s traveling with his beloved wife, Giovanna, and all their clothing and household goods. Rounding out the party is his brother, Donato, also a painter — a wonderful man but a mediocre artist, the meagerness of his talent exceeded only by the meagerness of his earnings.

It wasn’t easy, pulling up roots and setting sail to Marseilles and then upriver to Avignon. Twenty years of hard work, judicious flattery, and crowd-pleasing paintings had forged a solid career and a sterling reputation for Simone in Siena and as far away as Naples, where he’d been handsomely paid for his work — and knighted, too — by Robert, King of Naples. Moving to Avignon would require proving himself again, which now, at age fifty-one, was a daunting prospect. The move also meant uprooting his wife from her close-knit family — a leave-taking nearly as painful for Simone as for Giovanna, for her family is like his own, only better.

The good fortune of his marriage still fills Simone with gratitude. At forty years of age — and a homely forty, his discerning artist’s eye had forced him to admit — he’d given up on the idea of marriage. Then a miracle occurred. He and another Sienese painter, Lippo Memmi, worked together and became friends, and bit by bit, dinner by dinner, Lippo drew Simone into the circle of his family. Simone fit there as naturally as if he’d been born into it. Lippo’s father, uncle, and brother were painters as well, and dinners at the family’s table were lively, raucous, joyous occasions. The other family member, Lippo’s young sister, Giovanna — eighteen years Simone’s junior — astonished Simone with her glances, her smiles, her blushes, and — eventually, astonishingly — her love. They married and moved into a cozy house Simone bought from her father, and for ten years they were happy in it, except for their occasional spats and their dwindling hopes for children. But the work was slowing down, not through any lessening in Simone’s skill or reputation, but simply because Siena’s building boom — and therefore its fresco boom — had peaked. The paint on his last major commission there, an Annunciation scene for the cathedral, had been dry for two years now, with nothing much on the horizon. So when Simone had sighed and told Giovanna that Siena’s sun was setting, and that the future of art lay not in Italy but in Avignon, she’d cried…and then dried her tears and started packing.

As the late-afternoon breeze begins to calm, the boat tacks lazily up the final river-mile to the wharf beside the bridge. The twenty-two arches of the monumental span are the crucial links joining southern France to the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Savoy, the papal territories, and the great Italian city-states. Above its nearer end, the turrets and spires of Avignon seem illuminated from within, glowing with a golden light that soon deepens to orange and then to rose as the sun sinks. The effect — stone set ablaze by light — is dazzling; Simone has never seen its equal in any painting, not by himself nor even by Master Giotto, one of the few painters he acknowledges as his better.

Standing there in the bow of the boat, he feels Giovanna nestle up behind him, her arms burrowing beneath his to wrap around his waist. “Così bello,” she murmurs. “So beautiful. And you, Simone — you will make it even lovelier.”

Aside from being mad with love, the young Italian poet Francesco Petrarch is a charming and intelligent fellow. A thirty-year-old wonder boy whose family was exiled from Florence and ended up here, Francesco is a cleric of some sort, but his chief duties seem to consist in being eloquent, indignant, intellectual, poetical, moody, or whatever suits his fancy at any given moment. He loves to rail against the city and the papacy—“the Whore of Babylon,” he calls it, when he’s not busy feeding at her breast. He’s been posted at some godforsaken village in the dry, dull west of France for the past few years, but he’s currently maneuvering to return to Avignon, or some loftier place nearby, from which he can keep closer watch on the city he hates and the woman he loves.

The story, which Francesco clearly loves to tell, is this: During a Mass on Good Friday, nine years ago, he glanced to one side of the church and saw a beautiful young woman, with whom he fell instantly and forever in love. Pursuing her after Mass, he learned that her name was Laura de Noves — and that although she was only seventeen, she was already married, and to a French nobleman, a count. She refused to listen to Francesco’s words of love, and so he began writing them down instead, and publishing them: hundreds of love poems dedicated to a woman he spoke to for half a minute, nearly a decade ago. Now, he’s commissioning Martini to paint a portrait of her — an image he can gaze at whenever he needs to rekindle the flame of his love.

But perhaps “love” is not the right word. Martini has a sneaking suspicion that Petrarch cultivates his pain — a child picking at a scab — because it pleases him in some perverse way to carry an unhealed wound on his heart. It is his own version of the stigmata, Martini realizes, the wounds that proclaim, “Behold how I suffer!” Martini has been married to Giovanna for nearly a dozen years now. The two have fought, they’ve made up; they’ve laughed, they’ve cried; they’ve cooked and cleaned and pulled weeds together; they’ve made tender love and half-hearted love and primal, grunting animal love. Martini’s pretty sure that since Petrarch has done none of these things with Laura — has done nothing at all with her, in fact, and furthermore knows nothing about her except that he can’t have her — what the poet’s really in love with is not the woman, but in fact himself and his own sense of heartbreak. The man is writing a never-ending tragedy, and casting himself as the tragic hero. What’s more, it’s beginning to make him famous; other poets have started to copy and circulate Petrarch’s verses; some are even imitating his writing and his heartbreak.

No, Martini’s got no starry-eyed illusions about this goddess: She’s doubtless a pretty and privileged Frenchwoman of twenty-five, a knight’s daughter who married up and became a countess at age fifteen. She certainly wasn’t the first pretty girl whose youth and beauty were sold for a title and a life of ease, and Martini doesn’t begrudge her the good fortune. Martini’s got no illusions about his own role, either. If Petrarch wants him to immortalize his muse in paint, and is willing to pay well for the job — fifty florins! — Simone’s happy to unpack his paintbrushes and start mixing his reds and greens and golds. “I’ll get started right away,” he tells the poet. “When it’s finished, you must write a poem immortalizing my picture of your lady.” Petrarch nods gravely, as if he doesn’t realize that Simone is just joking.

CHAPTER 30

In all his thirty years of painting, Simone has never worked this way before; has never had to squint and strain and sneak to snatch furtive glimpses of the face or figure he’s painting. Often, in fact, he’s had the opposite problem: a model whose ripe lips or plump breasts were offered not just to his artistic eyes but to his strong hands; a woman — or occasionally a man — whom Simone had to push away, but gently, so as not to spoil the sitting and hinder the painting.

At first, he hated watching the young woman, hated following in Petrarch’s pathetic shoes — lurking in doorways near her house on Sundays; trailing her to Mass, or lying in wait inside the church to snatch a glance at her forehead or eyes; lurking across the aisle or behind a column as he studied her profile; dashing to his studio after the benediction to sketch and paint before the details of her face fade from his memory for a week. Gradually, though, Simone has been forced to admit that he likes the challenge — painting someone he can scarcely see — and he looks forward to studying her each week.

One Sunday as she kneels, he sees her head slump and her shoulders slacken; then, with a jerk, she awakens, wide eyed, and suddenly he hears her laugh — in church! — when she realizes what she has done. The matron beside her gives her a sharp, reproving look, and she forces her face back into its mask of composed piety. But Martini has now seen something else behind the church-face mask, and his curiosity is aroused.

That night, as he lies beneath the covers before going to sleep, he plays a painter’s game with himself, imagining how he might paint her face in various scenes, with various expressions and emotions: worry, gratitude, tranquility, terror, irritation, delight, lust. And then, when Giovanna rolls her body against his in the dark, and her fingers seek him out, stroke him to hardness, and guide his flesh into hers, it is Laura’s face, and Laura’s breasts, and Laura’s moans that he imagines and that make him gasp and shudder with a fiery passion that Giovanna’s simple honest love has never managed to ignite.

The next Sunday, she is not there. he checks her usual stations — the side chapels where she always pauses to light candles — scanning the congregation with confusion and growing dismay. Somehow, because she has always been here, he has taken it for granted that she always would be here.

His surprise gives way to another feeling, one he recognizes as fear — no, as panic! What if she’s gone for good — moved away to Paris, or killed by a sudden fever? How can he possibly finish the portrait until every detail of her is etched in his mind? How will he explain his failure to Petrarch? And then: How will he fill his Sunday mornings, and the other hours of his days and nights that she has come to occupy? Good God, he thinks, I am worse than the poet. I have a good wife, a sweet and faithful woman who loves me, and yet I am turning into a schoolboy over this woman — this girl — who is thrice forbidden to me: She is married, I am married, and she is beloved by my friend Petrarch. In a state of consternation, he stumbles over the feet of the other worshipers in his pew, turns up the side aisle of the nave, and makes for the door.

Just before he reaches it, he feels a tug on his sleeve. He turns, and there — hidden by a pillar — is the woman herself, a sight so unexpected he almost cries out in surprise. She watches him regain control of himself, then says, “Monsieur, vous me cherchez?”: Sir, are you looking for me? Working with French painters and seeking French patrons, he has mastered much of the language by now, but he is so taken aback by her sudden appearance and blunt question that he resorts to a well-worn ploy, shaking his head and shrugging to indicate that he does not understand her, and adding “Sienese” to make sure she gets the message.

“Ah, Siena, una bella città,” she says, switching to his own language so fluently and effortlessly, she might have grown up next door to him. “A beautiful city,” she repeats. “If you are Sienese, sir, I envy you.” She glances down briefly, then looks up at him again, and when she does, the intensity with which her eyes probe his is almost palpable: as if she were a blind woman, exploring his very soul with her fingers. She lays a hand on his arm. “Come. There is a garden in the cloister. I would speak with you.” She leads him out a side door, through an archway, and along a loggia to a far corner of the cloister, to a bench tucked into an alcove of boxwoods. She sits, and motions for him to sit beside her.

“Now, sir. Tell me why you were looking for me. Don’t pretend you weren’t.” Again he shrugs — not, this time, to feign incomprehension; this time, to acknowledge that he’s been caught, and has no defense. “I’ve noticed how you watch me. Not just today, but for weeks. Every Sunday I feel your eyes on me. Why?”

“You…you are a beautiful young woman, my lady. What man could resist looking at you?”

Slowly she shakes her head. “Many men look at me. Some with contempt, some with longing. But no one else looks at me the way you do. You study me; you examine me, as if I were a flower or an insect whose parts you wish to catalog. Why?”

He opens his mouth to speak, but he can find no words. If he lies, she will see through it; if he tells the truth, she will hate it. He looks away, fixes his eyes on a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and sighs. “Forgive me, my lady.”

“Sienese.” She says it slowly, musingly, turning it over in her mind as she turns it over in her mouth. She looks down, then she reaches down, taking his right hand in hers, lifting it, examining his rainbow-tipped fingers. “You are a painter. The Sienese painter. Simone of Siena.” He bows slightly in awkward confirmation. “I have seen your frescoes in Siena. They are wonderful. I was glad to hear that you had come to Avignon.” He bows again, more deeply, and when he straightens up, he meets her gaze frankly for the first time. Her eyes continue to bore into him, but there is no anger in them, only curiosity, as well as the glimmer of something else crystallizing in her mind. “Why do you study me with your painter’s eyes, Simone of Siena?” How can he even begin to explain? He does not have to. “Do you paint me, Master Simone?” He hesitates, then nods slowly. She looks away, and when she looks at him again, her expression has changed. “Do you paint me for him — for the poet who puts me on a pedestal?” He nods again. She looks down, and when she looks up, tears are beading at the corners of her eyes: dewdrops on a gray autumn morning. “I did not ask to be his goddess, Master Simone. I do not want to be his goddess. Why do I not have a choice? He has pinned me to the pedestal, in view of everyone, and now, no matter what I do, I cannot get down. With his eloquent and unrelenting insistence, he has made me into what he imagines. I’ve heard a story, Master Simone, about a Greek sculptor long ago who managed to turn a statue into a woman. This poet is transforming me from a woman into a statue.”

“Forgive me,” he says again. “I did not know — did not consider — how his…attentions…might affect you. I should never have accepted the commission. I will destroy the picture this very day.”

“No!” Her eyes widen, and she puts a hand to her throat. “No. Wait.” Her breath is rapid now, her cheeks flushed. “First, you must tell me about this picture. How are you painting me, Master Simone? What scene am I in? What biblical figure do I portray?” The corners of her mouth twitch. “I cannot be the Virgin Mary. Am I the woman caught in the act of adultery?”

The question makes him blush; can she read his nighttime thoughts? “Of course not, my lady,” he says, perhaps a bit too swiftly and loudly.

“Am I Elizabeth, the withered old wife of Abraham, who finally conceives at age ninety?” Her eyes twinkle, and he’s both shocked and delighted by the boldness of her teasing.

“Old and withered? Far from it, my lady. In my painting, you are young and beautiful. In my painting, you are no one but your own true self.”

She smiles. “I knew you were a fine painter, Master Simone. I did not know you were a skilled flatterer, too.”

“No. I have no gift for words. Only my brush can speak, and it says you are lovely and luminous.”

She pinks. “And in this secret picture, what does your brush say that I am wearing?”

“You are wearing your green silk gown with the collar embroidered in gold, the one you were wearing when Petrarch first saw you. The one you were wearing when I first saw you. Pearls — the choker, not the long strand — encircle your neck. Your hair is pinned up, as it is now, but it is the cloisonné comb, not this tortoiseshell, just above your left ear. Your head is turned a little to the right, which is why we can see the comb, but your eyes are looking straight at the viewer. Straight at me.” As he says the words, her eyes are indeed locked on him, just as in the portrait; just as in his imaginings. He continues, “The irises are mostly green — almost emerald at their edges — but flecked with gold, especially near the center, where the iris meets the pupil.” He is leaning closer now, staring at her eyes, talking almost in a whisper, almost to himself. “I wish I could paint the way the pupils pulsate in time with your heartbeat: larger, smaller; larger, smaller. But even at their smallest, they are large. I have never seen pupils so large as yours. They are quite…remarkable.”

Her eyelids close, and her breath whistles slightly across her lips as she breathes in deeply. Then her eyes reopen, glazed for just a moment before they refocus and fix on him again. “I do not wish for you to destroy the picture, Master Simone. I want you to finish it. But I want you to grant me one request in return.”

“What is your request, my lady?”

“I want to see it. When you have finished it — before you give it to him — you must show it to me. Will you?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. When? Where? Shall I bring it to your house?”

“By all means — if you wish for both of us to be killed!” She smiles. “Where is your studio, Master Simone?”

“It’s not much of a studio. More of a shed. Right behind the Carmelite church — the one with the open bell tower. Follow the smell of turpentine.”

“When do you expect to finish?”

“I had thought it was finished, my lady, but I was wrong. I need to fix your eyes.”

“Fix them? What’s wrong with them?”

“I have not made them luminous enough.”

She laughs. “See, such a flatterer. The courtiers in Paris should take lessons from you.”

He holds up a hand. “God’s truth, my lady. I had them right, but then I doubted myself. ‘Simone, you fool,’ I told myself, ‘eyes cannot possibly be so green and also so gold.’ So I changed them, made them more ordinary. Now, I must put them back as they were. As they are. As they must be.”

“I will bring my looking glass with me, Master Simone, so I can inspect your repair work,” she says. “When may I see it?”

“Perhaps next Sunday morning? Before Mass? Or after Mass?”

“Instead of Mass,” she says. “I will be there.”

“My lady? I, too, have one request. So that I can be sure I have it right, is it possible for you to wear the green silk gown?”

She bows. “Yes, Master Simone. And the pearl choker. And the cloisonné comb.”

CHAPTER 31

Elisabeth brought Descartes’s coffee and my tea; by now, she and Jean considered the detective to be a regular fixture at breakfast — the rule rather than the exception — and I made a mental note to ask, when I settled my tab at the end of my stay, if they needed to add an item to my bill: “Descartes’s breakfasts, 40 euros.” It no longer startled me to see him tuck a croissant into his pocket; I halfway expected him to start showing up with a Thermos and a lunchbox so he could load up on coffee, fruit, cheese, and baguettes.

This morning Descartes was branching out. He loaded the grain mill with oats, bran, and sunflower seeds, pressed the button, and presto, out came fresh-ground muesli, which he topped with dried cherries and fresh yogurt. He sampled the concoction, smacked his lips, and nodded in approval. “Bon. Healthy, too.” He took a bigger bite. “So, I’ve been looking for connections between the church in Charlotte and the research place that contacted you.”

“The Institute for Biblical Science?”

“Exactement. As we thought, it’s no coincidence. The preacher, this Reverend Jonah, he’s on the board of directors of the institute. And the scientist—”

“Newman, right? Dr. Adam Newman?”

“Oui, Newman. Guess what else he is doing?”

“Uh…calculating the exact moment when the Antichrist will appear?”

“Ha! Maybe that, too. But for sure he’s working on—”

He was interrupted by a phone call — my phone, not his. I glanced at the display. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I felt a surge of dread. The last call I’d gotten from this number had brought word of Rocky Stone’s death in Amsterdam. “Sorry, Inspector, I need to take this.” He nodded as I answered.

“Doc? It’s Steve Morgan at the TBI. I hope I’m not waking you up.”

“Not at all. I’m just having breakfast with a French detective. But why aren’t you sleeping? Isn’t it two in the morning there?”

“Three,” he said. “I had some news I thought you’d want to hear. We swooped down tonight — us, the DEA, and the FBI — and rounded up the outfit that killed Rocky and his undercover agent. We owed it to Rocky. The guy he had the shoot-out with in Amsterdam—”

“Morales?”

“Yeah, Morales. The feds recovered his cell phone. It was a gold mine: all his contacts. We picked up one of them in Tennessee, two in Atlanta, four in Miami.”

“Is that everybody?”

“No, but good enough for now,” he said. “The top guys are in Colombia; they’re out of reach, at least for now. But we got everybody who had a direct connection to the Sevierville operation. You can quit looking over your shoulder now — at least on this account.”

I drew a deep breath and let it out. “That’s a relief. Have you told Rocky’s wife yet?”

“I’ll go see her at a decent hour. After she’s had a chance to take the kids to school. She’ll be glad we got these guys, but it’ll be tough for her to hear, too. She’s still a wreck.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’ll go see her and the boys when I get back from France. If you get a chance, tell everybody I said ‘good work.’ I’ll do my part at the trial.”

“Thanks, Doc. Stay safe.”

I laid the phone down and picked up my tea. The sun was bright and the day would get hot, but not for another hour or so, and the warm mug felt good cradled in my hands. I took another breath to reground myself in the garden, in Avignon, in the case at hand. “Sorry, where were we?”

“The Institute for Biblical Science. Newman, the scientist.”

“Oh, right. Can you tell if he’s an actual, for-real scientist? Not some charlatan who bought a Ph.D. online?”

Descartes shrugged. “I don’t know where he got the Ph.D., or how good it is, but he’s a molecular biologist. So he’s trying to make the perfect red cow for Israel, using DNA from the cow that was almost perfect. He—”

“Wait. They’re not just breeding cows, they’re cloning cows?”

“Oui. Cloning. Trying, but they do not succeed yet.”

Alarm bells were tolling like crazy in my head. “And he’s working with this preacher, Reverend Jonah — the guy who wants to switch on the doomsday machine? And these guys want the bones from the Palace of the Popes? Why?” But I already knew the answer, even before I finished the question. “Good God, they’re hoping to get DNA from the bones. They want to clone Jesus. The high-tech Second Coming of Christ.”

“Sure,” said Descartes. “If you can clone a cow, why not Jesus?”

I set down my cup and raised my arms. “Because it’s crazy and impossible,” I sputtered. “There can’t possibly be undamaged DNA in those bones — not nuclear DNA, not the kind you’d need for cloning. Maybe, maybe, there’s mitochondrial DNA, but that’s just little pieces; it’s not the whole set of blueprints.”

“You are sure of this?”

“Very sure. Besides, it’s not unique to individuals. It gets passed down from mother to child, generation after generation. Your mitochondrial DNA is identical to your mother’s, Inspector. And to her mother’s. And her mother’s mother’s.”

Descartes considered this. “Jesus had the same mitochondrial DNA as his mother, oui?”

“Oui, Inspector.”

“So: the same as the Virgin Mary.” He raised his eyebrows. “Another virgin birth, then, n’est-ce pas?”

“But mitochondrial DNA can’t be cloned into a human being,” I practically shouted. “It’s scientifically impossible.”

He shrugged. “All it takes is another miracle, et voilà.”

I wanted to take him by the collar and shake him. “Damn it, Descartes, these aren’t even the bones of Jesus!”

“Ah, you are wrong, Docteur — they are the bones of Jesus. There is scientific proof, remember? The carbon-14 report from Miami. The bones are two thousand years old.”

“That was total bullshit, Inspector. Stefan faked that. You know that.”

“But the preacher, he does not know. He has faith in this report. If we tell him it is bullshit, he won’t believe us. He will say we are controlled by demons.”

Despair clutched at my heart, and I found myself thinking the unthinkable. Is the crazy preacher right about the end of the world? Is it time?

CHAPTER 32

Is it time? Simone counts the strikes of the bell ringing in the Carmelite church — ten — and realizes with despair that he has another hour to wait. To wait for her.

He sets to work tidying the studio but quickly realizes that it’s hopeless. The place is a mess; it is, after all, a workshop, crammed with brushes, boards, fabric, pigments, solvents, and a thousand other implements and ingredients. He uncovers the small portrait, then covers it again, so he can watch her face as he unveils it. Realizing he has no chair to offer her, he rakes brushes and tools off the worktable, shoves them underneath it, and drapes the rough boards with a clean drop cloth. He paces, then perches restlessly on the table, then paces again. Sixty minutes is an eternity.

Finally the bell begins to toll eleven, the hour of Mass, through the iron latticework of the steeple. By the second peal, he knows that she will not come. She should not come, he realizes — it could compromise her, and he would not wish to add that to her troubles. But then there is a knock at the wooden door, which he has left slightly ajar, and his heart surges when she calls his name.

“Yes! Please come in! I feared you would not come.”

“I feared you would not be here when I did.” Laura de Noves smiles. “What a lot of worry we’ve both wasted, Master Simone.” She is wearing a black shawl around her shoulders and a black scarf over her head; they mute her beauty and the elegance of her dress, but even so, she must surely have been the most striking woman in the streets of Avignon.

“Was it difficult for you to get here?”

“Not very. I only had to poison my husband and strangle my maid.”

Again he is startled and delighted by her humor. He wishes he could spend hours learning her habits of conversation, of mind, of movement. But he knows this will likely be his only chance to indulge his curiosity.

She points a silk-gloved hand at the small covered rectangle on the easel. “Is that it? Is that me?” He nods. “And did you fix my eyes?”

“I think so. I hope so. And did you bring your looking glass?”

“Of course. I said I would, didn’t I?” She pulls a small silver-handled mirror from some inner pocket, some secret fold of the dress.

“I didn’t know if you really meant it.”

“I don’t always keep my promises, Master Simone, but I do try.” She smiles, though the smile has sadness in it. He sees the poignancy in her expression at the same moment he hears the poignant chanting of the Carmelite nuns. She lays the mirror on the worktable, then unties the scarf and folds it, setting it on the table, too, followed by the shawl. Picking the mirror back up, she inspects her hair, adjusts the cloisonné comb in some infinitesimal way Simone can’t detect, and then walks to the easel. “Show me, Master Simone. How did you describe what you’ve painted — my ‘own true self’? Show me my own true self, Master Simone.”

Nervously, as if unveiling his very first painting for the very first time, the grizzled artist takes the cloth by the upper corners and lifts it. As it slides slowly up the picture, the threads catch now and then on the textured paint; the slight rustle of the moving fabric is the only sound in the room. Then he hears her breathe — a quick intake, almost a gasp. He dares to breathe now, too, and risks a glance at her.

He is shocked by what he sees. He’d hoped she would smile, perhaps even laugh or clap her hands in delight. Instead, she looks like a mother who has just witnessed the death of her only child. Her eyes are filled with anguish; her right hand flutters across her lips and chin and neck; her left hand, still holding the mirror, drops to her side. She closes her eyes and hangs her head, and her shoulders begin to shake.

“Oh, my lady, I have displeased you. I…don’t know what to say. Forgive me. Oh, forgive me, please.”

“You have deceived me, Master Simone,” she whispers. “This is not…my own…true…self. Perhaps it once was. But not now. I am not that woman now. Perhaps I never was.”

“What do you mean? Tell me, I beg you — I cannot bear this.” Never in all his years of painting has his work inspired such hope followed by such despair, and never in these years has he been brought to tears by a critic. Yet Simone of Siena, Knight of Naples, is crying now, too, and the chanting nuns seem to give voice to his pain. “Where is the fault? What is untrue? How have I disappointed you so badly?”

“You’ve put flesh and blood on your canvas, Master Simone. You should have painted stone instead. Marble, covered with words. I am nothing but stone and verses now. Even my heart has turned to stone. My husband prefers his mistress; the man who claims to love me sings my praises to everyone but me.” She turns away and steps behind the easel so she will not have to see the portrait any longer.

Simone does not speak for some time. Finally he shakes his head. “Oh, poor woman. Oh, foolish man — what has he done to you?”

He takes a step toward her, looks closely at her face. “Perhaps you are right; perhaps I have not portrayed you faithfully. It was difficult to see your features well in the dim light of the church, from so far away. I should take a closer look, in this light.” He is an arm’s length away now — closer than he has ever been to her, except for that brief conversation in the cloistered garden. He reaches out, tucks the stained knuckle of his index finger beneath her chin, and lifts her head slightly. He leans closer, adjusts his hand so that he holds her chin lightly between thumb and index finger, and then turns her head slowly from side to side, scrutinizing the planes and highlights and hollows of her face. “I did my best,” he says at last, “but you are right, I must confess. I did not capture your true self. Here, for instance.” Lifting his other hand, he brings his index finger to a spot just above the right corner of her mouth. “You have a little mole right here.” He grazes it with his fingertip — perhaps he strokes it lightly, or perhaps his finger is simply trembling. “I failed to see this mole. I’m sorry. I should have included it — it punctuates the line of your mouth.”

He leans back to glance at the portrait, but his hands do not leave her face, and now his finger traces her upper lip. “I am sure I have the bow of this lip right,” he says, “but I fear that I have not given enough ripeness to your bottom lip.” He slides the finger along her lower lip now, pressing slightly; the finger catches and tugs on the lip. She is quaking now, and her breath is fast and ragged. He takes the lip between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing and rolling it, and she gasps, then whimpers softly. “Your jawline,” he murmurs, stroking its edge, “I know I did not get that wrong. But these wisps of hair on your neck, I could not see them in the gloom.” Both his hands now float across the loose tendrils of hair; he does not touch the skin of her neck, only the down, and it feels to her as if a spring breeze is caressing her. His hand returns to her mouth, his fingers tugging and teasing the front of her lips, then grazing her teeth, then easing between their edges. “If only the Mass had made you smile,” he whispers, “I could have shown your teeth.” He presses the edge of his hand against them; they part slightly, taking in the meaty flesh and then clamping down, causing him to groan. Her face is flushed, her breath is ragged, and her pupils dilated almost to the outer edge of her irises. He slides his other hand down her arm and lifts it, raising the mirror. “Look in this glass again and tell me now: Is this a woman of stone, or of flesh and blood and fire?” She stares at the image she sees there; her breath catches, her knees buckle, and she sags against him. He lifts her with his paint-stained hands and sinewed arms, carries her to the table, and with exquisite tenderness begins to undress her.

He makes two small changes in the portrait, painting bare chested as she cleans herself with a damp cloth he has handed her. Near the corner of her mouth, he adds the mole, and on the bodice of her dress, between her breasts, he adds a small tongue of flame. As he finishes the flame, she buttons her dress, smooths the silk, and repins her hair. She inspects herself once more in the mirror, comparing herself with the portrait. This time she smiles as she tucks the glass back into the hidden pocket. They do not speak. She takes the paintbrush from his hand and lays it on the ledge of the easel, then places his hand on her breastbone, exactly where he has portrayed the flame. Pressing his hand tightly against her, she kisses him on the mouth, and then on each cheek, and then she slips out the door and into the street that will carry her from him.

The final, fading notes of the Carmelite choir waft in through the open door, entwining with the dissipating scent of her perfume and their musk. He wanders to the table, picks up the cloth she has used, and presses it to his face, inhaling their scent. It is the scent, he thinks, of forbidden fruit. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The next day he bundles up the portrait and sends it to Petrarch. He puts no note in the package; nothing but the picture. Besides breaking faith with Giovanna, Simone has broken faith with the man who is both his client and his friend. He knows this, and he suspects there will be a price to be paid, a penance to be done. But it must be a private penance, he resolves, one that he must impose on himself; a burden he must carry alone, to spare the feelings of those he has wronged. Inextricably bound to his memory of how she caught fire beneath his touch, Simone will bear the burden of his secret guilt.

Two weeks later, a courier brings him a package from Petrarch. It contains twenty-five florins — the balance of the fee for the portrait — and a poem. Petrarch has actually done it: taken Simone’s jest in earnest and penned a poem praising the portrait. Simone scans the poem’s opening lines, which declare that if all the best painters competed for a thousand years, they could capture only a fraction of Laura’s matchless beauty. The next lines proclaim, “Surely my Simone was in Heaven, the place my gracious lady comes from; there he saw her, and portrayed her on paper, to prove down here — where souls are veiled in bodies — that such a lovely face exists.”

Martini reads it a second time, and then a third. “Where souls are veiled in bodies,” he says aloud, shaking his head and adding, “foolish man.” He crumples the page with the strong, stained hands that gripped her ardent flesh.

A few days after receiving Petrarch’s poem and money, Simone receives a new commission, for a project he hopes will distract him from his longing and guilt: frescoes in the papal palace — in the pope’s own bedroom! The room is high in the Tower of Angels, the massive stone fortification that Pope Benedict’s army of workers has created during the past year. Just fourteen months ago they notched the massive foundation blocks into bedrock; now, the masons are capping the tower with crenellated battlements. Curious, Martini thinks. Siena’s cathedral, dedicated to God, took fifty years to complete, but this immense structure dedicated to the pope — papal palace, fortress, and strongbox — has sprung up overnight.

Simone identifies himself to a guard at the tower’s entry portal. The guard inspects him, clearly finding him lacking or distasteful in some way — perhaps it’s the odor of turpentine, or perhaps it’s the scent of foreigner that the French guard detects. Nevertheless, the guard waves him in, pointing to the back of the room. “Go see Monsieur Poisson. Architect and master of the works.” Poisson is hunched over a mountain of drawings, invoices, receipts, and notes. He looks up, weary and bleary, as Simone bows and announces himself in French. “Simone Martini, painter of Siena, at your service.”

“Martini? Ah, yes, Martini — you’re here to help the French painters in the pope’s chamber.”

Simone shrugs. “I prefer to think that the French painters are helping me,” he jokes, but Poisson doesn’t notice.

He leads Martini up two stories via a spiral staircase built into one corner of the tower. The pope’s chamber, the fourth floor of the square tower, measures some thirty feet square, with walls twenty feet high: room for buckets and buckets of paint. Martini counts two dozen workers — a third of them masons and plasterers, a third of them painters, and a third of them spectators or bosses, he can’t tell which. Scaffolds scale every wall, from floor to ceiling. At floor level, painters weave in and out of the legs of the scaffolds, covering a blue background with loops and swirls of golden vines, their branches populated by legions of birds. A level higher, a troop of plasterers has just finished applying a fresh coat of smooth plaster, and painters elbow them out of the way, eager to apply the blue background paint. They must work swiftly, applying not just the background but also the vines and birds, before the damp plaster dries. On the third and highest platforms, masons are applying the base coat of rough plaster to the top courses of bare stone. It is this level, the last five feet of wall below the ceiling, that Martini has been hired to paint — this, plus the deep recesses where windows have been notched into the massive walls.

Simone can’t help feeling disappointment. The best part of the room — the largest, lowest portion — has been given over to the French painters, and clearly it’s being wasted on them, these daubers with their simple swirls of gold on blue. Child’s play! Simone could paint vines and birds left-handed — with his eyes closed!

He clambers up the ladder to the top level of scaffolding — his level — and surveys the bustling room from there. He has not yet settled on the theme for his frescoes, but he knows it will be something far more challenging, far more impressive. Something with depth, detail, and drama; something that will move the pope to point to the scenes and say, “Bring us the painter who has done these, that we may reward him and exalt him above all other artists!”

His reverie is interrupted by a shout from below. “Martini!” He looks down; the chief of the contingent of French painters, Jean d’Albon, is waving to catch his eye. “We need to mix more tempera,” d’Albon says. “Can you bring us more eggs? Twenty eggs?” Simone glances at the clay pots in which the powdered pigments of red, blue, green, and gold have been stirred with egg yolk to moisten them and glue the paint to the plaster; indeed, the pots are nearly empty. Simone considers refusing — is d’Albon assigning him this menial errand simply to establish the pecking order? — but, in fact, all the French painters appear to be busy, and d’Albon puts his hands together in prayer posture, bows slightly, and adds, “Soon, when you are hurrying to finish your magnificent frescoes, I will bring eggs to you.” Simone can’t resist smiling — d’Albon will almost certainly never play the errand boy; he has apprentices for that — but the good-humored offer acknowledges that Simone is d’Albon’s equal, and the other painters cannot fail to have noticed the gesture.

Simone clambers down the ladder, calling, “And where will I find these twenty eggs, laid by twenty pious hens to glorify God, His Holiness Pope Benedict, and French fresco painters?”

D’Albon laughs and moves his index finger in a downward spiral. “All the way down, at the bottom of the tower, where it’s nice and cool. Soon it will become the subtreasury, filled with gold, silver, and jewels. But for now, it’s the egg cellar. Eggs and plaster and rags.”

Simone ducks through the doorway into the spiral staircase and starts down, but then — on impulse — he stops and looks overhead. The stairs continue upward, apparently to the roof, and Simone decides to take a quick detour before fetching the eggs. He jogs up the first spiral, walks briskly up the second, and lumbers up the third, huffing by the time he steps onto the rooftop.

The view from the roof is dizzying and dazzling. To the west, the arches of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge cascade across the Rhône to Villeneuve. At their far end is another square tower, this one built by the king of France to collect bridge tolls…and to remind the sometimes arrogant residents of Avignon who holds the real reins of power in this part of God’s world. From below, d’Albon’s voice wafts upward; an apprentice is getting a scolding for his clumsy plasterwork, and Simone turns from the view and scurries for the cellar.

Spiraling down turn after turn, he feels his head begin to spin, and he stops near the bottom and leans on the wall to steady himself. It’s cool and dark down here — there are no windows in the tower’s lower levels, only narrow slits that provide stingy hints of light and air. In the chamber just below him, he hears a gritty, sliding sound, punctuated by grunts of exertion. Curious now, he descends the final few stairs and peeks into the chamber — the egg cellar that will soon brim with treasure. By the golden glow of a flickering lamp, he sees a portly workman shoving a heavy chest into a deep niche in the wall, then wedging a flat stone over the opening and slathering mortar around the edges. The man’s troweling technique appears oddly awkward, and his work looks shoddy. Simone’s puzzlement only increases when the man finishes sealing the stone in place; when he stands, Simone sees that the pale garment he’d taken for a workman’s smock is instead a floor-length white robe. A Cistercian monk’s robe. The kind of robe favored, as everyone knows, by Pope Benedict himself: the White Cardinal who has become the White Pope.

Suddenly Simone senses the vulnerability of his position: lurking in the stairwell spying on some furtive secret of the pope’s. Edging back up the stairs one level, Simone ducks into a dark, vacant room and waits until he hears footsteps. From his hiding place, he sees the white-robed figure pass by like some stout, panting ghost. Once the footfalls and panting have faded, Simone hurries back to the cellar. He should collect the eggs and hurry upstairs with them — the French painters will be running out of tempera any minute now, if they haven’t already — but his curiosity triumphs over his sense of responsibility. Crossing to the far wall, he squats beside the mortar bucket and studies the crude handiwork, as if close inspection of the wall’s surface might reveal what’s hidden inside. Hidden by the pope himself! But why? Why hide a treasure chest inside the wall, when the entire room, floor to ceiling, is meant to be heaped with riches? In any case, why not order a real mason to do the work?

Astonished by his own sudden boldness, Simone picks up the trowel and uses the tip to scrape out the line of mortar holding the flat stone in position. Then he pries the panel free, leans it against the wall, and tugs the chest from its niche. The chest, a stone box, is wired shut, and the wires are crimped together with lead seals — the seals of Benedict XII! — to protect the contents. Rubies and emeralds? Gold florins? Perhaps even the Holy Grail?

Throwing aside any last vestiges of caution or respect for authority, Simone cuts the wires with the edge of the trowel and pries the close-fitting lid loose. Even before he lifts it off and sets it aside, the smell of death wafts out, so he’s not completely unprepared to see bones inside. Simone’s not squeamish — given that so many artists’ models are beggars and whores, a painter can’t afford to be squeamish — so it’s natural for him to take a closer look at the bones.

He starts with the skull. Cupping it carefully in both hands, he lifts it from its nest of ribs and raises it to eye level. The face is long and narrow, the cheekbones high and prominent, the forehead slightly lower than he would have expected. He rotates the skull in his hands, looking to see if there is damage — marks of a violent death — but there is none. As the skull comes full circle in his hands, Simone’s visual memory tells him there is something familiar about its shape and proportions. He frowns, trying to place it, and suddenly lays the skull aside and roots in the box until he finds what he’s looking for: the bones of a forearm, which are — as he knew they would be — slightly splintered at their lower ends, just above where they once joined the wrist. Just where a spike would have passed through them on its way into the wood of a cross.

He rummages in the box for the other arm, and then for the feet. All four extremities bear the ragged, splintery evidence of piercings. Martini lays the limbs on the shelf alongside the skull and stares at them, the bones that were within the flesh he studied and sketched so attentively.

His mind ranges back to that odd night seven years ago, when he spent hours drawing by flickering lamplight, capturing every detail of the fresh corpse laid out on the floor of the cell. He remembers the parting words of the jailer: “I do believe he was a holy man…. His only sin was his holiness.”

He fits the lid back onto the box. Then, acting on an impulse he could not have put into words, he reaches for a pair of tools lying on the floor — a chisel and a hammer — and swiftly incises a broad cross on the stone lid of the box. Then, beneath the cross, using the pointed corner of the chisel’s blade, he gouges the outline of a lamb. Working swiftly — for the mortar in the bucket will harden soon, and he is surely risking his life to tamper with the pope’s sealed secret — he replaces the box in its niche, wedges the slab back into place, and trowels mortar into the joints, taking care to mimic the Holy Father’s sloppy workmanship.

As he slathers the final bit of mortar into the gap between the stones, Simone wonders why God has put this dead man — this blameless man, if the jailer’s report was true — in Simone’s path not once, but twice now.

He rises, and starts up the steps. Only then does he remember and turn back. God might require penance of him soon, but d’Albon’s painters needed twenty eggs half an hour ago.

CHAPTER 33

Elisabeth surveyed the leftover fruit and pastries with surprise when she came to collect the breakfast tray, then peered at the untouched cup of espresso. “What,” she asked in astonishment, “no Monsieur l’Inspecteur?” She cast a glance at the cornflower-blue sky. “Did the sun fail to rise today? Is the world coming to the end?”

“I’m as amazed as you are.”

Instead of taking away the tray, she sat down in Descartes’s usual chair beside the fountain. “I am glad he is not here,” she said.

“I don’t blame you. He’s been eating berries and croissants by the truckload.” I didn’t mention the takeaway treats he always tucked in his pockets.

Her brow furrowed for a moment, then she beamed. “Ah, non. I do not mean for that reason. I am glad because I wish to talk to you. I have something news to tell you. I think you will be happy to hear it.”

“Have you been playing detective again, Elisabeth?” The last time she’d looked this excited was when she’d shared her theory about our “zhondo”: that the unknown skeleton from the palace might be that of Meister Eckhart.

She clapped her hands with delight. “Oui! Remember what you told me?” She leaned closer and spoke in a low, conspiratorial voice. “That the man had a unique shape? Legs that came almost up to the neck?”

I laughed. “Maybe not quite that long. But yes, very long legs for a man his size. As long as mine, and I’m much taller than he was.”

“Yes. So. Last week I got in touch with my cousin — I told you he is a Dominican, yes?” I nodded. “I do not tell him why I ask, so don’t worry, I keep the secret. But I ask him, ‘What do the Dominicans know about the appearance of Eckhart — his size, his shape?’ Mon Dieu, my cousin thinks I am crazy, but he says, ‘Okay, I will do some research.’ And this morning, I have an e-mail from him. No one painted a picture of Eckhart until hundreds of years after he died, so we don’t know what his face looked like. But. Sometimes, behind the back, the other friars called him Ciconia Dei.” She leaned back, looking pleased with herself.

“Why did they call him that?”

Her eyes danced and her smug smile broadened. “It is Latin. It means ‘the stork of God.’”

CHAPTER 34

Martini avoids Laura as assiduously as Petrarch seeks her out. Whenever Petrarch is in Avignon, he dogs the poor woman’s steps, carefully trailing twenty or thirty paces behind her, scrupulously praying a stone’s throw away: close enough to see her, close enough to be seen — his melancholy face, his artfully downcast gaze — yet far enough that the distance is conspicuously chaste. For Simone, on the other hand, no distance would be chaste or ethereal if he were in her presence, so he steers clear altogether.

And yet there’s no escaping her, or at least the reminders of her; in a way, she trails Simone as relentlessly as Petrarch trails her. Scarcely a day goes by without some count or marquis or emissary or lady seeking him out, taking him aside, and murmuring in his ear, as if it were a secret, “I know you painted the lady Laura’s portrait for poor Petrarch. I have seen it — and such a likeness!” Apparently everyone in Avignon has seen the secret portrait…and yet he knows that is not so, for occasionally, to test the admirers, he poses trick questions, which nearly always trip them up: “And what did you think of the emerald necklace she wore?” he might ask, or perhaps, “Was the blue of her eyes perhaps too deep?”

Astonishing, how the small, secret portrait of Laura — seen by few but praised by many — has put Martini’s name on the lips of all. Petrarch has now written not one, but two sonnets praising the picture. These have been copied and put into wide circulation, perhaps by other poets, but perhaps by Petrarch himself, not one for self-effacement. Martini had been appalled by the poems, but he’d be a fool to turn down the well-heeled clients that the poems have brought him. One of them, Cardinal Corsini — even more prone to self-admiration than Petrarch, if such a thing is possible — has commissioned a portrait of his own dearly beloved: himself.

Between the portraits and the frescoes in the pope’s bedchamber, Simone is now laden with work, and gradually the death portrait of Christ seems less urgent. The pope’s frescoes are nearly finished. The twenty-four panels that crown the bedroom’s walls depict scenes from the four Gospels, although — high on the walls as they are — who will be able to see and appreciate their details? The frescoes in the window recesses depict architectural features — arches, columns, and coffers — that heighten the illusion of depth, making the walls appear not merely six feet thick, but ten or twelve, so His Holiness can sleep secure in the knowledge of the strength of his fortress.

Simone now employs two assistants to do the drudge work for him: painting backgrounds and draperies and inscriptions, freeing Simone to focus on what he does best, and prefers above all: the faces and bodies that everyone tells him are more lifelike than any other painter’s — and it’s true! He’s buried in commissions, working harder than he has ever worked in his life.

His latest project is a set of four frescoes commissioned for the portico of the cathedral. One of them, Andrea Corsini Healing a Blind Man, is paying the bills for the other three scenes, in a manner of speaking. The painting depicts a miracle that — according to the Corsini family, at least — occurred only a few years earlier, right here on the cathedral’s front porch, one morning before Mass. A wondrous event, if true, restoring sight to a blind man, yet Simone can’t help suspecting that the painting isn’t motivated purely by piety. The Corsinis have launched a vigorous campaign to have Andrea declared a saint, and the fresco is central to their strategy: “See,” it seems to say, “the proof is right before your eyes. You’d have to be blind yourself not to see it.”

The second fresco, the Madonna of Humility, is obligatory — the cathedral is, after all, dedicated to Mary. This one, too, Simone finds it hard to put his whole heart into. Perhaps he’s grown skeptical about the miracle of the Virgin Birth, but more likely he’s simply tired of painting mothers and babies year after year, especially as Giovanna grows sadder and sadder about her barren womb.

The third scene, by contrast—The Blessing Christ—is a source of satisfaction and deep pride to Simone. Jesus seems to float in the sky; his right hand is raised in benediction, and his left cradles an orb. Within the orb, Simone has represented the world in miniature: a landscape, rippling waters, and a starry sky, all artfully contained inside the sphere. The Savior’s gaze is strong and direct, as if our Lord were locking eyes with each viewer, one by one. Such an intimate, powerful gaze is bold and without precedent — unlike any portrait of Jesus that Simone has ever done, or ever seen. Surely this homage to Christ will bless the man who painted it; surely this will wash away Simone’s secret guilt.

The fourth of the portal frescoes shows Saint George slaying a dragon and rescuing a princess. Not surprisingly, this fresco is livelier than the other three. Simone is not the first painter to portray the heroic deed, but he is the first — of this he feels sure — to bring such vivid drama to it. The knight, on horseback, charges forward, his lance gripped in both hands, galloping over the bones of earlier knights who died fighting the beast. The dragon rears up to fight, its scaly back arched, its talons clawing for the horse. The eyes are glittering with reptilian hate, and the sharp-toothed mouth is open to unleash a blast of fire. But the creature is a split second too slow: Although the dragon’s body has not yet had time to register it, the mortal blow has, at the very instant portrayed, been delivered. With unerring aim, Saint George has thrust his lance straight into the beast’s open mouth, with such force that it has pierced the throat completely and emerged at the back of the neck, its sharp tip drenched with blood.

But despite its brilliance and drama, the Saint George fresco proves to be Simone’s undoing. In portraying the princess rescued from the dragon, Simon has impulsively given the princess the face of the lady Laura. To be sure, the face is small — only a few inches high — but the few people who have glimpsed the work in progress seem far more interested in the princess than in the miracle worker Corsini, the Virgin, the Christ, or the dragon-slaying saint. As he puts the final touches on the dragon, Simone considers altering the princess’s face, but stubbornness or pride overrules the voice of caution, and he leaves it unchanged.

On the Sunday morning that the frescoes are unveiled, a huge throng gathers before Mass to file through the portico and view the paintings. On hand to bask in their admiration is Simone, standing just inside the door with Giovanna beaming beside him. A hundred people have already filed through to gawk and congratulate, and another two hundred still crowd the stairway and street outside. Simone leans out the doorway to see how the line is moving, and what he sees nearly drops him to his knees. She — the young countess herself, Laura de Noves — is at the top of the stairs, stepping onto the porch. Dressed in the green silk, she wears a pendant around her neck; the stone, which rests on her breastbone, is a large ruby, cut in the shape of a teardrop…or a flame. Inching along beside her, his hand resting possessively on the small of her back, is a thin, sallow man with sparse red hair and watery blue eyes. Trailing the couple is a nursemaid, carrying a small child on her hip. The boy’s hair, eyes, and skin are black, brown, and tan: the earthy tones of Siena; the earthy tones of Simone — his father!

Simone staggers backward into the nave, then flees to a side door, leaving behind hundreds of disappointed admirers. Just before stepping through the door, he turns and sees his wife staring at Laura and the baby, Madonna and child. Even in the dim light of the church, Simone can see recognition, shock, and betrayal dawning — no, flashing like lightning — across Giovanna’s face as she takes in the pale woman and the dark boy who is so clearly Simone’s.

Simone stumbles down the hill and hurries to his studio, where he sinks onto a stool and slumps forward onto the table. The cathedral frescoes were not his penance after all — if anything, he realizes, the foolish arrogance of the Saint George scene only added to his guilt, because Giovanna is now wounded by the knowledge that he has been unfaithful to her…and has even fathered the son that she has never been able to give him. Now, not only has Simone betrayed her trust, he has broken her heart, shattered her innocence. He groans and sobs as he comprehends the full extent of his shame. Then, with startling, piercing clarity, he suddenly understands the penance he must perform. Somehow, he thinks, I must find a way to portray the death of innocence — my innocence, Giovanna’s innocence, the world’s innocence. And how better to represent the death of innocence, he realizes, than a death portrait of the innocent Christ modeled on the blameless dead man God has sent his way again. What was it the jailer had said? “His sin, I think, was to be holy, to be free of sin”?

Clearing off his worktable and unrolling his dusty sketches of the dead monk, Eckhart, Simone finally begins the penance he has been avoiding these past two years. The penance for betraying Giovanna.

CHAPTER 35

Simone snatches a rag from his worktable and savagely wipes the tempera from the wooden panel. He has painted a dozen images of the dead man now and has destroyed them all, finding them bland and insipid — utterly lacking the force of that stark corpse laid on the floor of that stone cell; completely devoid even of the force of those charcoal sketches he made by flickering lamplight almost a decade before.

He returns, for the hundredth time, to the sketches. Unlike his polished attempts with paint, the charcoal images of the man are rough but powerful. Why can’t he render in paint what he captured in charcoal? Because, he thinks, a painting is too artful, too refined: a glittering object to be admired from a distance, not a force to be experienced and shaken by. The power of that scene, and of those sketches, lies in their rawness and immediacy. In the moment back then, and even in the sketches now, there is no possibility of distance, of a safe retreat into studied appreciation of color and technique, of composition and balance, figure and background, gilded borders and halos. The Death of Innocence cannot be a painting, he realizes; it must be something stark, spare, and haunting.

But sketches are not enough. Simone grasps the power of these rough sketches on coarse paper. But ordinary eyes — seeing humble materials — might be misled into dismissing the images as trifles; might not take them into their minds and hearts. Simone must help people let down their guard and open their hearts. To do justice to a man who was as innocent as a dove, Martini must be as cunning as a wolf.

An image pops unbidden into his mind: The Mourning of Christ, painted by Master Giotto on the wall of the chapel in Padua. The limp body of Jesus is surrounded by weeping followers; grieving angels hover overhead, their hands outstretched or clasped or clapped to their faces in dismay and grief. Behind the mourning people, a low rock ledge angles from the picture’s lower left to its upper right. But something about the rock ledge struck Simone as odd the first time he saw the fresco: The ledge’s surface seemed fluid, almost as if it were draped with fabric, and Simone had briefly wondered, all those years ago, if perhaps a burial shroud had been laid on the ledge to receive the body of Christ.

Now, that remembered painting and his own sketches of the dead man combine, and he knows how to proceed.

At a Weaver’s Shop on the Rue de Teinturiers, the street of dyers, he inspects and rejects half a dozen fabrics — too coarse, too shiny, too short — before finally settling on one: a long strip of pale linen woven with a herringbone pattern that adds heft and elegance without calling attention to itself.

He buys the entire roll and takes it back to the studio. Grinding one of his sinopia chalks into a fine dust, he mixes it with egg yolk to make a reddish-brown slurry of tempera. On a small corner of the fabric, he daubs a bit of the mixture, but he sees at once that the contrast is too jarring, the effect not at all mysterious or mystical. Frowning, he picks up another sinopia chalk and draws directly on the fabric with the dry crayon, sketching eyebrows and the bridge of a nose. It’s better, he decides, but still too obvious. To create the haunting effect he’s after, Simone must create a haunting face — the shadow of a face, the ghost of a face. Finally, doubtfully, he takes a sheet of parchment and shades the nose and eyebrows, followed by the rest of the face, but this time he deliberately makes the image dark and heavy. Then he lays another corner of linen atop the drawing. Using the blunt, curved end of the pestle with which he grinds pigments, he rubs gently from all directions, pressing the cloth against the image in dust. After several minutes of rubbing, he folds back the fabric.

Simone gasps. There on the linen, staring back at him, is the ghost of the murdered monk; the ghost of the crucified Christ; the ghost of innocence lost.

CHAPTER 36

I glanced for the twentieth time at the doorway of the library mezzanine, listening for the staccato cadence of Miranda’s clogs as she jogged up the stairs. I’d been waiting for half an hour, and I was getting anxious. It wasn’t like her to be this late, especially when she was the one who’d called the meeting. Our librarian friend, Philippe, who had by now taken an interest in our interests — Eckhart, Martini, and the Shroud — had phoned Miranda an hour before to say that he’d found something intriguing, and Miranda had wasted no time summoning me. Upon arriving at the library, I’d been surprised that Miranda wasn’t already waiting. Now, thirty minutes and a dozen unanswered cell phone calls later, my surprise was turning to genuine worry.

Finally I heard footsteps on the stairs, but they weren’t Miranda’s. Philippe appeared in the doorway. “Ah, good — I thought that was you sitting up here.”

“Yes, but we’re still waiting for Miranda.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot wait any longer,” he said. “I’m taking a class — art history — and I have an examination this morning. If I show you what I found, will you share it with her?”

“Of course, Philippe. Please.”

He pulled out a chair and sat across the table from me, laying a folder between us. “My art history professor is a curator at the Petit Palais — do you know it?”

“That’s the museum that’s in a former cardinal’s palace, right?”

“Exactly. Specializing in medieval art from the time of the Avignon popes. There is one painting on display there by Simone Martini — a Madonna and Child, not very interesting to you, I think. But my professor showed me a drawing in the storage room — not on display — that she is certain was made by Martini. It’s not signed, but it was found in the city archives, filed along with some very old records about Martini’s house and studio. She let me make a photocopy of it.” He slid the folder across the table to me. Slowly I opened it. The image inside was a charcoal sketch of a man’s face — or, rather, parts of a face: a pair of eyes and a nose. The nose was long and broad and slightly crooked. It looked like a nose that had been broken in a fight.

It looked like the nose on the Shroud of Turin.

Twenty more minutes crept by after Philippe left me with the Martini sketch of the Shroud nose, and still no sign of Miranda. Finally, unable to sit still any longer, I went to the window that overlooked the library’s leafy courtyard. The window was open, and the late-morning air wafting from the street was getting steamy with heat and smells. Along with the mouthwatering aroma of onions and potatoes frying, I caught the sour tang of sewage — one of the signature perfumes of ancient cities, I’d decided. Down below, two kids scampered toward the children’s wing; they were trailed by a mother who — at 11 A.M. — already looked weary. On the opposite end of the courtyard, a stout dowager waddled behind a fat, waddling dog, reminding me of Miranda’s comments on dogs and gods.

Suddenly, floating up from below, I heard music — the angelic voices of a mighty choir, funneled through a puny speaker. To my surprise, I realized that the angels were singing in English: “Glory, glory hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!” Scanning for the source of the sound, I glimpsed movement across the street. A man stepped from a shadowy doorway, pulling a cell phone from a holster. As he raised the phone, the hymn swelled by a decibel or two, then ceased as abruptly as it had begun. The man put the phone to his ear, and I thought I heard him say, “Praise God.” I leaned out the window for a better view, and when I did, his face swiveled toward me.

I’d seen that face before. I’d seen it framed by upraised hands — one of them clutching a Bible, the other waving a sword — and I’d seen it in a Paris airport security photo, taken the day before I’d arrived in Avignon. As I stared, frozen in the open window, Reverend Jonah Ezekiel smiled at me for what seemed an eternity, his smile and his gaze never wavering, until a car — a sleek black sedan with dark windows — screeched to a stop directly in front of him. It paused just long enough for the preacher to slip into the backseat. Then it spun forward, skidded around a corner, and was gone.

Inspector Descartes didn’t answer until the fourth ring, and by then my throat had clamped shut in fear. As I fought and failed to form words, he snapped, “Oui? Il y a quelqu’un? C’est quoi, ça?” Hearing no response, he hung up. I forced myself to draw a deep breath, then another, and hit the redial button. “Oui, Descartes,” he practically shouted when he answered.

“Inspector, it’s Bill Brockton,” I managed to choke out this time.

“Docteur? Is something wrong? Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m not hurt, but I’m afraid something’s wrong. Terribly wrong. I’m afraid Reverend Jonah has Miranda.”

“Merde,” he cursed. “What has happened? Why do you think this?”

Haltingly, with frequent pauses to breathe and to tamp down my panic, I told him.

“Merde,” he repeated. “What kind of car? Which way did it go?”

“I don’t know. Black. Four doors. A Mercedes? A BMW? Something French? Hell, I don’t know, Inspector. I only saw it for a second before it disappeared around the corner.”

“Did you see the driver?”

“No. The windows—” Suddenly the phone vibrated in my hand; startled, I nearly dropped it out the window. When I saw the number of the incoming call, though, my heart soared. “Inspector, I have to go. I’m getting a call from Miranda.” I pushed the “send” button. “Miranda? Thank God. I was worried sick.”

“No need to worry,” said a man’s voice, smooth and sarcastic. “She’s in very good hands. She’s in God’s hands.” The floor seemed to drop away beneath me, and the vast, frescoed reading room spun. “But you can get her back if you do exactly as I say.”

“Who is this? And what do you want?”

“Don’t play dumb. You know who I am, and you know what I want. You yourself offered it to me by fax. Shall we discuss a trade?”

I was heartsick. Descartes and I had gambled that Stefan’s killer would still want the bones, and we’d been right. I’d been willing to risk myself, but Reverend Jonah had outsmarted me: He’d guessed, correctly, that the highest trump card he could hold was Miranda. I opened my mouth to speak, but once more my throat had seized.

“Do you hear me?” The voice had grown less smooth and more menacing. “I have your precious pearl. Give me the bones, or she dies.”

“If you kill her,” I managed to force out, “you’ll have twice as many police after you.”

He gave a short, scornful laugh. “They have no jurisdiction.”

“Not just the French police,” I said. “Miranda’s an American citizen. If you kill her, the FBI will come after you, too.” I didn’t know if that was true, but I hoped it was true, or at least sounded true, sounded intimidating.

“You misunderstand me,” he sneered. “This world’s authorities have no dominion over me.” The words, and the thinking behind them, sent a chill through me. “But why are you talking about her death? The girl goes free when you hand over the bones. Do you not intend to do that?”

“Of course I do,” I hurried to assure him. “But how do I know you’ll keep your word? You’ve already killed Stefan.”

“Only because he didn’t keep his word. He betrayed me. I hope you won’t make the same mistake.”

“I won’t. But how do I even know you’ve got Miranda? How do I know she’s all right? Let me talk to her.”

“I’ll call you in an hour with instructions. You can talk to her then. Don’t call the police, and don’t play games with me. Not if you want her back alive.” The phone went dead.

Ninety-seven endless, agonizing minutes later, he called back. The signal was weak and his voice was breaking up badly; I didn’t know if that was because he was calling from someplace with poor signal, or because I was deep inside the concrete headquarters of the Police Nationale. “…attention,” the voice crackled. “Here’s…do if…girl back alive….”

“First I need to talk to her,” I said. “I won’t do anything until I know she’s okay.” I heard an angry breath at the other end of the line, and I feared I’d pushed him too far, but then I heard shuffling noises as the phone changed hands. “Oh, Dr. B,…sorry.” Even through all the dropouts, Miranda’s voice sounded thin and quavery; if it had been a pulse, I’d have called it “thready” and taken it as a symptom of shock. But still, the thready, shocky voice was her voice — blessedly her voice. “One of them…my hotel…paged…said you…chest pains. He had a car…hospital…with him…known better. God, I fell for the same…pulled on you…so very…”

“Oh, Miranda, I’m the one who’s sorry. I told Descartes I didn’t want to involve you, and look what I’ve done.”

“…not…fault…. Stefan’s.” Her voice shifted gears — got higher, faster, more urgent. Shaking my head in rage and pointing at the phone, I stood and jogged out of the inspector’s office and down the hallway to the building’s back door, inwardly cursing Descartes for bringing me into the concrete bunker. “Listen…Stefan…greedy…upted. Don’t let that…be interruptible…B, understand? Interruptible…key…get the bones. Do you hear…?…key…bones.”

I shoved open the door and raced outside, Descartes a few steps behind me. “Miranda, you’re breaking up really bad. Can you say that—”

“Wait, I’m not finished,” I heard her protest. Then came the sounds of scuffling and grunting, followed by the sharp smack of flesh on flesh, and the word “bastard” in Miranda’s low snarl.

“Miranda? Miranda?” I was shouting into the phone, spinning around in the parking lot, frantic with frustration and fear. Two uniformed officers, chatting beside a patrol car, stared and started toward me, but Descartes waved them off. “Miranda?”

“That’s all you get,” snapped the voice I assumed was Reverend Jonah’s, “until I have the bones.”

“Bring Miranda with you,” I demanded. “You set her free first, and I watch her walk away safely, or no deal.”

“Don’t push me. You’re playing games with her life, and her life means nothing to me.”

“But the bones do,” I reminded him. “You want those bones just as much as I want Miranda. Her safety is your only hope of getting them.”

“Bring them to the Templar chapel tonight,” he said. “Midnight.”

“No!” The thought of walking into a trap — or of finding Miranda’s body strung up the way Stefan’s had been — terrified me. What’s more, there was no hope of finding the bones that swiftly.

“What’s the matter, Doctor, does that venue disturb you?” He chuckled, and my blood ran cold. “I didn’t think a man in your line of work would be so squeamish. You disappoint me.”

“The police are probably still watching the chapel,” I said. “Anyhow, I can’t get to the bones until day after tomorrow.”

“What? What are you talking about?” His tone was sharp and suspicious. “What do you mean, you can’t get to them? Why not? Where are they?”

“Stefan and I put them in a very secure place. A Swiss bank vault. I have to go to Geneva to get them, and the bank’s closed tomorrow. Sunday. The Sabbath, Reverend.”

“You’re lying.” My heart nearly stopped when he said it. There was a pause; I thought I heard whispers. “Which bank?”

“Credit Suisse.”

“What street is it on?”

“Give me a break, Reverend. I’m supposed to help you plan my own ambush? I might be from Tennessee, but I’m not that stupid.”

“Stefan said the bones were here. He was supposed to bring them that night.”

“But he didn’t bring them,” I countered. “Why wouldn’t he have brought them if they were here?”

“I told you. Because he got greedy. We’d agreed on a million, but that night he said he’d gotten another bid, a higher bid. He said the new price was two million.”

I was stunned by the figures, but didn’t dare show it. “That’s not the way I do business, Reverend. If Stefan agreed to a million, I’ll honor that price.”

There was a pause, then more whispers. “I don’t think you understand the situation yet, Doctor.” His voice sliced into me, as cold and sharp as a straight-edge razor on a winter morning. “The new price I’m offering — the only price I’m offering — is the safe return of your assistant.” He paused to let that sink in. “If you don’t actually care about her, I suppose we could talk money instead. But that means I’ll have to kill her. And killing her would mean considerable inconvenience and risk for me. You yourself said the FBI would come after me. So if you’d rather have money than the girl, the new price is half a million.”

“You know I don’t want money,” I said. “I just want her back safe.”

“Then quit playing stupid games.”

“I’m not playing games. I’ll be back from Geneva with the bones Monday night.”

“If you’re not, she’ll die — and she’ll die a much worse death than Stefan did. And after she does, so will you. By God, you will.” With that, he hung up.

“Damn it, Inspector, why’d you put me in a cell-phone-proof building for that phone call? I missed half of what she was saying.”

“Sorry,” he shrugged. “I never have a problem using my mobile in there. It must be something about your American phone.”

“She was trying to tell me something important,” I fumed. “Something about where the bones were hidden.” Twice she’d said something about “key” and “the bones.” Piecing together the two fragmentary versions, I suspected she’d said, “the key is to get the bones.” By key, did she mean crucial, as in “it’s crucial to get the bones”? That seemed absurdly obvious; of course it was crucial to get the bones. No, she must have been talking about an actual key. She seemed to be telling me that the bones were locked in a hiding place that the key would open. But what key, what hiding place, and where? Wherever it was, the Geneva ploy had bought us thirty-six hours to find it.

Geneva hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment improvisation. Descartes and I had discussed how to stall while we looked for the bones, and the Swiss bank was the most plausible delay we could invent. We had also set other wheels in motion — a contingency plan, in case we couldn’t find the ossuary. We feared that Stefan had sent photos to the buyers, so Descartes had commissioned a local mason to create a replica of the stone ossuary; my role in the ruse was to arrange for Hugh Berryman, the anthropologist who was holding down the fort for me at UT, to overnight an old skeleton from Knoxville.

Hugh had plenty to choose from. Shelved deep beneath the university’s football stadium were roughly five thousand human skeletons: more than one thousand modern donated skeletons, plus several thousand Arikara Indian skeletons from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — bones I’d excavated from the Great Plains many years before as the Army Corps of Engineers dammed rivers, creating new reservoirs and flooding Indian burial grounds. The Arikara bones certainly weren’t two thousand years old, or even seven hundred years old — more like two hundred to three hundred — but they had a gray patina that made them look convincingly old, and they bore no dental fillings, orthopedic devices, or other traces of modernity. I’d given Hugh detailed specifications: The skeleton had to be an adult male, roughly five and a half feet tall, and free of obvious skeletal trauma — except for the gouges I instructed Hugh to inflict on the wrists, feet, and lower left ribs to simulate the wounds of Christ, or the wounds of our Jesus Doe. We were performing a bizarre sort of crucifixion — a postmortem, postdecomp crucifixion, surely the only one of its kind ever done. With this counterfeit Christ, I realized, I was joining the ranks of forgers, taking up a new trade: the trade in fake relics. With luck, the decoy skeleton would arrive in thirty-six hours, and while it might not fool a forensic anthropologist, it might fool a crazed televangelist.

It was risky. But we needed time. We needed bones.

And we needed a miracle.

CHAPTER 37

I flipped through the pile of papers on the desk for the third time, but it still wasn’t there. My panic and my blood pressure were skyrocketing. I’d been back at Lumani for only a couple of hours, and already I felt caged and crazy. Descartes had told me to sit tight while he and a search team combed the palace for the bones, but I couldn’t bear the confines of my room any longer. I desperately needed to talk to someone, but Jean and Elisabeth were nowhere to be found, and I couldn’t find the phone number I wanted.

Finally I thought to look under the desk, and sure enough, down by the baseboard, hidden by the desk’s square leg, I found the card with the number scrawled on it. My hands shaking, I dialed it.

“Sorry I missed you,” announced a cheerful Irish voice, “but leave me a wee message and I’ll ring you back.”

I cursed silently; after the beep, my words poured out like water through a collapsing dike. “Father Mike. It’s Bill Brockton. The American anthropologist. We met a few days ago at the library. I don’t know if you’re still in Avignon, but if you are, I’d appreciate a call. Really appreciate a call. I…something terrible has happened, and I don’t know who else to call. I…So if you’re still around, please call me.” After I hung up, I realized I hadn’t left my number, so I called back and left that.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when my phone rang. I stared at the display. The number looked familiar, but I was having trouble placing it; on the third ring, I realized that it was the very number I’d dialed only moments before. “Father Mike, is that you?”

“Hello, lad. Yes, it’s me. And yes, I’m still here. I’d been planning to leave this morning, but I had a drop too much last night and I missed my train. So here I am, at your disposal. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and the serendipitous hangover is one of his most mysterious.” His voice grew serious. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong, lad?”

“I do. But not over the phone. Could we meet somewhere? Talk in person?”

“Of course. There’s a lovely little church two blocks east of the Palace of the Popes. It’s Saint Peter’s, but the Frenchies insist on calling it Saint Pierre.”

“I don’t know, Father Mike. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a church.”

“You didn’t let me finish, did you? Right in front of Saint Pierre’s is a lovely outdoor restaurant with green umbrellas. L’Épicerie. It’s French for ‘grocery,’ or so I’m told. Somewhere nearby, I suppose, is a greengrocer’s called Le Restaurant. Could we meet at L’Épicerie? I’m starving, and to tell you the truth, lad, I could do with a little hair of the dog, too, if you wouldn’t mind terribly.”

“I don’t mind. I don’t even drink, and I’m tempted to have a few. How soon can you be there?”

A young couple was just sitting down at the last of the umbrella-shaded outdoor tables when I arrived at L’Épicerie fifteen minutes later. In the restaurant’s doorway, I noticed Father Mike talking earnestly with the headwaiter. The maître d’ was shaking his head stubbornly, but suddenly he paused and seemed to listen more attentively. He leaned closer; he smiled; finally he nodded. Father Mike smiled, too, and shook the man’s hand, and a moment later the young couple — now the indignant young couple — was being ejected from their table, and the waiter’s profuse apologies did little to smooth their feathers. They glared at Father Mike, who shrugged, smiled sheepishly, and pointed heavenward before taking one of the vacated chairs for himself and offering the other to me.

“That was impressive,” I said. “The power of the collar, or the gift of the gab?”

“Neither, lad,” he grinned. “The allure of the euro. I slipped the bloke a twenty.”

“You’re very worldly, for a priest.”

“I wasn’t always a priest, remember. Besides, I’m just doing what the Lord told us to do.”

“Jesus said something about bribing maître d’s?”

“In a manner of speaking, lad. He said to be as crafty as serpents and as innocent as doves.”

“I’d say you’ve got the first part down cold, Father Mike.”

He laughed, but then his face turned solemn. “But we’ve got more serious things to talk about, haven’t we, now? You’ve gotten more bad news, I’m thinking. Something more about that undercover fellow?”

It took a moment to realize that he wasn’t talking about me. “No, no, it’s not Rocky. Not at all. It’s Miranda.”

“Forgive me for being thick, but who’s this Miranda?”

“She’s my assistant. My graduate assistant. She’s here for the same reason I am — the old bones I mentioned to you. But she’s in terrible danger, Father Mike.”

“What kind of danger?”

“She’s been kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped, is it? Are you sure? I’ll bet she’s just off on a lark with some French lad she’s taken a fancy to.”

“The kidnapper called me, Father Mike. And he let me talk to her. She sounded scared, and he’s threatening to kill her.”

“Dear Lord in Heaven. Have you gone to the police?”

“Yes, of course, but if this guy finds out, he’ll kill her for sure.”

“Well, let’s pray he doesn’t find out, then. How much ransom money is it he’s wanting? Is it a huge lot? Can you get your hands on it?”

“It’s not money. He doesn’t want money.”

There was a silence before he asked the obvious next question. “Then what does he want, Bill Brockton? You don’t have to tell me if it’s too personal. But I’m thinking you want to.”

I considered keeping the secret, but the idea made me angry, I realized: It had been Stefan’s secrecy — his damnable secrecy and lying — that had caused all this trouble in the first place. “The bones.”

“Excuse me? I’m not quite following you, lad.”

“He wants the bones. The goddamned, stupid, sonofabitch bones.”

If he was shocked or offended, he didn’t show it; all he said was, “These must be some mighty important bones, then.”

“Yes. And no. People think they’re important — one guy’s already been killed over these bones — but they’re not as important as Miranda is.”

“Well, then, it’s simple, isn’t it? Just give him the bloody bones.”

“I wish I could. It’s not that simple, Father Mike.”

“Ah, well, then. It usually isn’t, is it? If it were, you wouldn’t be sitting here with me, would you, now? So how can I help you, lad?”

I shook my head. “I don’t even know. Just by listening, I guess. You do a lot of that, right?” He nodded and leaned forward, so I talked. I talked while the waiter brought beer for Father Mike and water for me; I talked while plates heaped with food appeared before us, and empty plates got cleared away. Starting with Miranda’s unexpected invitation and sudden departure to Avignon, I told him almost everything that followed: my own hasty trip; Stefan’s secrecy and paranoia; the facial reconstruction and its uncanny similarity to the Shroud of Turin; the carbon-14 results and the way Stefan had rigged those; finally, the murder of Stefan.

When I described the death scene, the priest gave a soft whistle. “Crucified? You’re not feeding me shite here, are you, lad?”

“No shite. Honest truth. It was terrible.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I’m gobsmacked I didn’t hear about it through the vine. Priests are terrible gossips — much worse than old women. Just shows how out of touch I’ve been while on me holliers.” He took a long pull on his beer — his second beer, or maybe his third; he had a quick elbow, and I wasn’t keeping track. “And you say this Stefan had three different folks on the string, all of ’em wanting to buy the bones? How do you know that?”

“Because the homicide detective found a fax that Stefan sent them. We don’t know if all three were serious bidders. But we do know that one was. Deadly serious.”

“Sounds like a bad business, Bill Brockton. Are the police making any headway tracking these folks down?”

I shook my head in frustration. “Not enough. They think we can rule out two of them. One’s a shady art dealer, a woman who caters to rich buyers who want precious antiquities and don’t care how they’re obtained. The detective thinks she’s a slimeball, but not a killer. And she has a solid alibi for the time of the murder. One is a distant colleague of yours, Father Mike — a curator or something, we don’t know who — at the Vatican Museum.”

He made a face. “Ah, the Vatican Museum — the Holy Father’s lovely little art collection. One of the fringe benefits of the job. Art and altar boys. We have a lot to answer for someday.”

“But the one we’re pretty sure has Miranda is a Protestant fanatic. An end-timer. A preacher who sees himself as one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” The nearby church bell tolled, and I nearly jumped out of my seat. “He calls himself Reverend Jonah Ezekiel. And if I don’t give him the bones in twenty-four hours, he’ll kill her.”

“So just do it. Why not? Because the police are telling you not to? Bugger the police; save the girl’s life. Simple.”

“It’s not simple. We don’t know where the bones are.”

“What’s that?”

“We think Stefan moved them, hid them, just before he was killed. We don’t know where they are.”

“So why did this crazy fellow kidnap the girl?”

I rubbed a hand across my weary eyes. “I let the detective talk me into pretending I had the bones. We were using them as bait. But we were just bluffing.”

“And now this fanatic has called your bluff.” I nodded miserably. “Raised the stakes a bit, too, I’m thinking.”

“God, I didn’t mean to involve Miranda, Father Mike. I thought I could keep her out of it, but I was wrong, and Descartes, the detective, was right. We’re all involved, we’re all implicated. One thing’s for sure — if I can’t find the bones in time, Miranda will die, and I’ll be to blame.”

“Well, then, there’s only one thing to do, isn’t there?” I looked up. “We have to find those bones, haven’t we, lad? And right smartly, too.” He laid a hand on his chest, studying me thoughtfully. “One more thing, lad. I know you’re not a big believer in saints and relics, but would you think about wearing this?” He loosened his collar, reached inside his shirt, and fished out a large silver medallion on a leather cord. He took it off and offered it. “Look, it’s a twofer,” he said. “On this side, Saint Christopher, protector of travelers. On the other”—he flipped it—“Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things.”

“There’s a special saint just for lost things?”

“Sure, lad. There’s a patron saint for pretty much everything, and a prayer to go with it. There’s a fancy prayer to Saint Anthony — you beg him for help, you tell him what you’ve lost, and then you grovel a bit, all polite and pious. But there’s another version, a cheekier version, that I like a lot better. ‘Tony, Tony, look around, something’s lost and must be found.’ Makes him seem like a friendly chap, a helpful bloke, you know?”

I took the medallion from him. The disk was big — it nearly filled my palm — and surprisingly heavy. I hefted it. “Jeez, this thing must weigh half a pound.”

“That’s the metal detector,” he said. “It’s built right in. It beeps when you get close to what you’re looking for.” Seeing my look of puzzled incredulity, he laughed and shook his head. “You’re a trusting soul, Bill Brockton. I like that about you.”

I studied the images of the two saints. “Travelers and lost things. Sounds like it’s custom made for me. Okay, why not? I’ll take all the help I can get.” I slipped the cord over my head and tucked the medallion inside my shirt. The metal felt heavy and warm against my chest; also strangely comforting. “Thank you.” He simply nodded.

As we were finishing up, the bells in the tower of Saint Pierre began to peal. “Ah, five o’clock Mass,” said Father Mike. “I’d best be going in. I’ve been a bit lax this week.” Without looking at me, he added casually, “You’re welcome to come along, if you like. I find the music calms me nerves sometimes. But it’s a good thing you’ve already eaten — the snack they serve is awfully skimpy.” I nearly laughed in spite of myself…and then, to my surprise, I followed him into the church.

Saint Pierre wasn’t big — closer in size to a chapel than a cathedral — but the design was ornate and complex. The doors and windows were framed by high, pointed arches. Above them, flanking the doorway, were two slender towers capped by steep, bristling stone spires.

The wooden doors — two sets of double doors — were immense: tall, thick, and elaborately carved with figures. The panels of the doors themselves featured saints, the Virgin Mary, and an angel. The most striking figure, though, was carved into a pillar that flanked one of the doors. Almost life-size, the figure was a stylized likeness of an American Indian or Aztec chief, complete with headdress. Although construction of the church had begun 150 years before Columbus stumbled upon America, the building wasn’t finished until the 1550s. The doors — a final touch — reflected Europeans’ fascination with the exotic discoveries being made in the New World.

Inside, the high, fluted notes of a pipe organ echoed and faded as we slipped into the cool, dim interior. Father Mike dipped his finger in a basin of holy water just inside the door, then touched his forehead, bowed, and crossed himself before sliding into a pew near the back. I followed, feeling out of place yet glad of the distraction and the man’s easy company.

Behind the priest, high above the altar, a large painting showed Jesus handing Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Above the painting was a huge sunburst, easily ten feet in diameter, carved from wood but covered in gold. At its center was a stained-glass window depicting a dove, its wings spread, its beak stretching straight up, streaking toward heaven like a rocket.

The organ music was replaced by high, pure soprano voices chanting in close harmony. I’d long since stopped believing in angels, but the ethereal music that seemed to emanate from the stones themselves was almost enough to make me reconsider. The service itself alternated between French and Latin, which I couldn’t have followed even if I’d tried. Yet despite being an outsider and a foreigner, on many different levels, I found solace in the sounds and sights and smells of the vaulted stone sanctuary, the gilded altar paintings, the drifting incense, and the ancient rituals.

But spiritual solace wouldn’t help me save Miranda; for that, action was needed. What was it Eckhart had said? “The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.” I waved a slight good-bye to Father Mike and slipped from the pew. He started to rise and follow me, but I laid a hand on his shoulder and shook my head. His kind company and his attentive ear had helped, but now I needed to be alone again.

Pushing open the heavy wooden door, I emerged into the square. The sun had dropped below the rooftops by now, and every table at L’Épicerie was taken. My eye caught a flash of movement three stories overhead, and I looked up to see a cat, its fur the black-and-white hues of priests and nuns, tiptoeing along a ledge three stories above the restaurant. At the end of the ledge, where the wall of the building intersected the church, the cat crouched and then leaped up through an open window: a study in grace, agility, and fearlessness atop a perilous tightrope.

Wafting across the pavement, accompanied by the clanking of silverware and the clinking of wineglasses, came the distinctive scent of seared flesh. Unless I was mistaken, it was lamb.

My mind flashed to the image of the lamb chiseled on the ossuary. What was the story in the New Testament, the parable Jesus told about the shepherd who left his ninety-nine sheep in order to search for one other sheep, which was missing? What was the moral of that story? Something, I dimly recalled, about there being more rejoicing in Heaven when that one lost lamb was found than over the other ninety-nine, the ones that weren’t in danger.

Where was the ossuary? And, far more urgent to me, where was Miranda — and could we save her?

CHAPTER 38

Simone has all but ceased to paint.

Cardinal Orsini, whose portrait Simone painted seven years ago, during the excitement of his arrival at the papal city, has been almost the only one able to pry any work out of him, and that’s only because Simone’s survival — his, and Giovanna’s, and her talentless brother’s, and the brother’s family, too — depends on Cardinal Orsini’s continued generosity. Simone is now putting the final fatigued flourishes on an altar polyptych, a folding wooden screen with eight hinged panels, each the size of a prayer book. Simone has sold the polyptych to Orsini as if it were a new commission, but the truth is, he painted the scenes themselves years ago — ten years ago; how can so much sand have slipped through the glass? — back in Siena, back when he was at his peak, he now realizes. Now Orsini is ill, probably dying, and the urgency of finishing the panels’ decorative borders quickly, before the cardinal’s purse is buried with him, is the only thing driving Simone to take up his brushes, punches, and gold leaf.

There is one other painting on his easel, also sold but not quite finished: a small Holy Family, not even two feet high, showing Mary, Joseph, and a boyish Christ — but such a Christ as has never been painted before. The scene portrays the parents reunited with Jesus after the boy has been missing for three days — days he has spent at the Temple, debating theology with the elders. Joseph scowls, and Mary, her cheeks splotchy with anger, scolds the boy — imagine, scolding the Son of God — while the young Christ stands defiant, arms folded coldly across his chest, a look of stubborn scorn directed at the Blessed Virgin. Simone can’t quite say what has prompted him to paint such an irreverent scene. All he knows is that he feels an odd kinship with the stony-faced boy; having endured endless cajoling and scolding from people who want him to paint this or sketch that, Simone feels the urge to fold his arms across his chest and set his jaw just so.

Giovanna has forgiven his infidelity, perhaps because she sees that he scourges himself more savagely than she ever could. She understands self-inflicted wounds. Her deepest sadness in life is her inability to bear Simone a child, and knowing that another woman has done so is a bitter reminder of her own failure.

Simone still goes to his studio day after day, but he spends most of his hours staring at the ghost portrait on fabric, The Death of Innocence. He’s lengthened his worktable to accommodate most of the strip of linen — nearly fifteen feet of it — and has applied a flat, smooth coat of plaster. Normally at this point he begins to paint, working swiftly so the paint bonds with the damp plaster. Not this time; this time, he needs a surface as dry and smooth as marble. Stopping often to consult the drawings he made by lamplight years before, he sketches the dead man lightly with a charcoal pencil — front and back, joining the images at the top of the head. Once he’s satisfied with the faint sketch, he swaps the pencil for a thick piece of reddish-brown sinopia chalk and begins shading the features — heavily for the prominent ones, lightly for the hollows and recesses. It takes him three days to complete the figure itself, and another day to add the wounds. Finally, carefully, even tenderly — as tenderly as if he were undressing a beautiful woman — he unrolls the linen onto the image he has created. Once again using the rounded end of the wooden pestle, he rubs softly, stroking the linen from every direction to transfer a whisper of pigment from the tabletop to the fabric. The final step is to add the bloodstains — a watery tempera of red vermilion, brighter than the man’s ochre image — to highlight the wounds.

He has just completed the trail of blood on the forehead — a meandering trickle that hints at furrows; a brilliant touch! — when someone knocks at the studio’s door. He ignores it, as he ignores all knocks but Giovanna’s distinctive, birdlike pecking at the wood, but it continues, growing more forceful with each thump-thump-thump. “Simone Martini, open the door,” commands a voice that sounds accustomed to swift and unquestioning obedience.

“Leave me in peace,” he calls out. “I’m working. I must not be disturbed.”

“Open the door, Master Simone, or we will break it down.”

Simone considers ignoring the command, but he lacks the energy to repair the door, so he pulls the bolt and opens it a crack. The commanding voice belongs to one of the papal guards, who pushes his way into the room, sees it empty except for Simone, and makes a beckoning gesture toward the open door. Half a dozen clerics file noiselessly into the room — two canons, a bishop, a pair of red-hatted cardinals, and lastly a monk. The monk is a large, white-robed Cistercian; it is, Simone gradually realizes, none other than Pope Benedict himself: an older, more dour version of the man he saw hiding the bones in the palace wall. Simone nods slightly in acknowledgment; he should, of course, kneel and kiss the pontiff’s ring, but he continues to feel as petulant as the scowling young Christ on his easel.

“Master Simone, you are too stingy with your companionship and with your paints,” says one of the cardinals, whom Simone does not recognize. “Cardinal Orsini — may God restore his health or ease his death — speaks so highly of your polyptych that we must see it.”

“My friend and patron is very kind,” says Simone, “but it is not yet finished, and I would be ashamed to show it.”

“Nonsense, Master Simone,” the cardinal counters. “You are much too modest.” His voice is cheerful on the surface, but there is an undertone of malice: a verbal dagger enfolded within the voice of silk and velvet. His eyes fix upon the drape that covers the altar screen, and there is a sharp glitter in them. “Is this the piece?”

“Your Grace,” Simone begins, but it is too late. With surprising quickness, the cardinal has stepped forward and flung aside the cloth that covers the panels. Simone hears “ahs” and words of admiration. The one cleric who does not seem to be impressed is the pope, but His Holiness is not known for his love of art — a shame, given that his palace has acres of barren walls still crying out for frescoes and tapestries to warm and soften them. Perhaps the next pope, Avignon’s artists pray, will elevate art to its rightful place in the palace.

The pope turns aside from the screen and directs his gaze toward the Holy Family, propped on the easel. Walking closer, his sausage-fingers clasped behind his back, he leans close, studying the face of the young Jesus. The chatter in the room ceases as his entourage notices his frown. Finally he turns and faces Simone, his eyes narrow and cold. Without speaking, he approaches the painter, circles him, and then stands and stares. Finally he speaks. “Master Simone, how is your soul?”

“My soul? I am more accustomed to being asked about my paintings.”

“I don’t care about your paintings, except for what they illuminate about your soul, Simone Martini. I see a troubled soul in this picture.”

The air in the studio crackles with tension now. “There is much trouble in this world, Your Holiness,” Simone slowly replies.

“But there is none in our Lord,” the pope counters. “This painting is blasphemous. Possibly heretical.” The papal entourage now murmurs its disapproval.

“I mean no blasphemy, Your Holiness. The scriptures teach us that God became flesh and dwelt among us.”

“His Holiness needs no schooling on the scriptures from a painter,” the officious cardinal exclaims.

“No, of course not,” Simone replies. “But surely a mother’s distress would show in Our Lady’s face when her beloved son has been missing for three days? And surely our blameless Lord — even as a youth — would take offense at being chided?”

The pope trains inquisitorial eyes on Martini’s face, gauging whether the artist is mocking him, then turns away. “What other blasphemies are you painting in here, Martini?” Simone makes no answer. The pope peers behind the large wooden screen at the long table, then squeezes through the opening for a closer look. The room falls silent. Suddenly the silence is broken by a gasp and a sharp cry. The pope staggers out from behind the screen, his face ashen, clutching his chest. He tries to speak, but he cannot. He stares at Simone in terror, as if he has seen a ghost: the ghost of a man he tortured and killed years before.

Half carried, half dragged, he is taken to the street and placed in a hastily commandeered cart that clatters to the palace. Three days later, the Inquisitor-turned-pontiff is dead, and a new pope — a great lover of art, a man who will open the papal purse strings like no one before him — is elected, taking the name Clement VI. He hosts a sumptuous coronation banquet to which he invites three thousand high-ranking clerics and nobles. “My predecessors,” he tells his guests, “did not know how to be pope,” and they agree. Avignon’s greatest artistic and cultural boom is about to begin.

But it will begin and end with no further works by Simone Martini. His final sale, the day after Clement’s banquet, is to an eager young cleric from Lirey who is the private chaplain to one of France’s most illustrious knights, Lord Geoffroi de Charny.

The chaplain — part of the pope’s entourage the day His Holiness was stricken — has returned to Simone’s studio, curious to see the work that affected the pope so strongly. Far from being disturbed by the work, the chaplain finds the faint, haunting image quite intriguing…and most promising. Properly presented — not as a new work of art, but as an ancient relic, the actual winding-sheet of our Lord! — the image could inspire profound reverence, attract throngs of pilgrims…and unleash a torrent of donations from the devout.

The shrewd young priest from Lirey buys the shroud from Simone for thirty florins. Thirty pieces of gold.

Prices have gone up since the last time Christ was sold.

CHAPTER 39

I checked the rearview mirror, and sure enough, another car pulled from a parking space and fell in behind me. It looked like the car I’d seen the prior day, and this time I got a good enough look at the grille to tell that it was a black BMW. I even thought I recognized the driver’s large, shaved head from the airport-security photo of Reverend Jonah’s hulking bodyguard. Just as Descartes had predicted, Junior was tailing me to Geneva.

A quarter mile up the street, the wall was punctured by a gate, the Saint Joseph portal. I turned right, through the gate; behind me, a horn blared angrily. Checking the mirror again, I saw that a white panel truck — service vehicles look the same the world over — had run a stop sign and cut in front of the black sedan, tucking in almost on my bumper. When the light at the intersection turned green, I threaded the car through the narrow opening, then turned immediately right onto the three-lane road, Saint Lazarus Boulevard, which ringed the outside of the wall to my right. The road was like a modern-day moat of asphalt, swimming with cars rather than barracudas. Out my left window was the emerald-green Rhône, and as I checked my mirrors for the BMW, I caught a brief glimpse of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge downstream. The banks of the river in this stretch were lined with barges and dredges, as well as old canal boats that had been transformed into luxurious houseboats. A small crane was bolted to the stern of one of these canal boats, and dangling from a cable, hoisted high above the reach of thieves, was an old-fashioned three-speed bicycle, much like the one gathering dust in my garage back home.

A quarter mile upstream the road branched; one lane continued to hug the wall, while the other dived into a tunnel. A road crew was working near the mouth of the tunnel, and a flag-man was motioning cars slowly forward. As I approached, he stepped from the curb and began waving his flag. I braked, but he waved my car through, as well as the white panel truck behind me, before stopping the line of traffic. At the front of the line of stopped cars was the black BMW, and I smiled as I imagined Junior fuming at the delay.

Halfway through the tunnel I slammed the car to a stop, put the gearshift in neutral, and leaped out, leaving the engine running. Behind me, the side door of the white panel truck opened, and out sprang a gray-haired man who could have been my brother, wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt that mirrored my own outfit exactly. My look-alike nodded to me, tucked himself into the Peugeot, slammed the door, and took off. I hopped into the van, and the door slid shut. Inside, I could barely see Descartes in the dimness; he was just finishing a radio transmission, and as he did, I noticed a pair of headlights through the rear windows, rapidly closing the distance with our slow-moving van. “It won’t take him long to catch up with the Peugeot,” Descartes said. “That was très bien fait—very well done. Twenty-three seconds.” In less than half a minute, the switch — taking me out of the Geneva-bound car and putting a double in my place — had bought us a day’s delay. A day and a half in which to find the hidden bones or — failing that — to get the Native American skeleton that was en route from Knoxville. It was, I suddenly realized, another switcheroo: a look-alike, a stand-in — and it was standing in for another fake relic at that.

When we emerged from the tunnel, our driver turned right at the first intersection. The black BMW roared past, its speed and dark windows defeating my efforts to see the driver’s features.

“The decoy — my doppelgänger; the fake me,” I said to Descartes. “Who is he?”

“Just one of our inspectors; a guy who happens to look like you.”

“Lucky him,” I said. “How much danger do you think he’s in?”

“On the way to Geneva, zero. On the way back, maybe more. They might try to ambush him and get the bones.” The inspector shrugged. “He has military experience and tactical training. He’s smart, a good driver, a good shot. He can take care of himself. But risk is part of the job.”

The van lurched as the driver doubled back toward Avignon. “You think Junior will fall for it?”

“Let’s hope so.” He waved a finger at my clothes. “He saw you get into the car dressed like this, and he’ll see your double get out of the car dressed like this. So unless something makes him suspicious, he’ll assume it’s you.”

His “unless” dug into me, the way a splinter on a rough wooden railing can snag a passing finger. “What might make him suspicious?”

He shrugged. “If they had someone watching at the other end of the tunnel, maybe they noticed the extra twenty seconds it took for the car to go through. The police, we might notice that kind of thing. Your FBI might notice. But these guys aren’t that good. They’re fanatics, not cops or spies.”

“Fanatics brought down the World Trade towers,” I pointed out. “Never underestimate the power of fanatics.”

“I don’t underestimate their power,” he said. “Just their capabilities. As far as we can tell, only the preacher and the big guy came to France for the bones of Jesus.”

“The bones of not-Jesus,” I corrected.

“True,” he conceded, “but we can’t tell that to them. If they learn the truth, they have no reason to keep mademoiselle alive. We must pray that they continue to have faith in our lies.”

I wasn’t much of a praying man, but there in the back of a lurching van bumping its way back to my hotel, I sent out a request to God, or to the universe: Whatever it takes, truth or lies, help me get Miranda back safely. I thought of Meister Eckhart’s criticism of the hypocrisy of praying Thy will be done but then complaining about the outcome. But I wasn’t praying Thy will be done; I wasn’t that virtuous or pious. I only wanted Miranda back, safe and sound.

The van turned again, entering the old city, and hugged the wall until it reached the tower that faced Lumani. The driver pulled onto the narrow sidewalk and stopped with the van’s side door directly aligned with Lumani’s wooden gate. “Stay here,” Descartes reminded me, “until the decoy gets back from Geneva.”

“Do I have to? This feels like house arrest, and it’s gonna drive me crazy. I’d really rather help you look for the bones.”

“It’s too risky,” he said. “If the preacher sees you, he knows you’re not in that car. Then he kills mademoiselle. Non, you must stay out of sight. We will keep looking for the bones. Now go.” He tapped the van’s driver on the shoulder. The driver got out; luckily, he was skinny as a rail, or he’d never have managed to squeeze through the narrow gap between his door and the wall of the house. Stepping into the street, he checked carefully in both directions, then gave a quick, low whistle. Descartes slid open the van’s side door, and without even having to lean out the opening, I put my key in the lock and opened the wooden gate. Then, in one step, I was inside the sheltering wall, latching the gate behind me. This maneuver took even less than the twenty-three seconds in the tunnel. Très bien fait, I thought. And Please, bring her back.

CHAPTER 40

In a three-mile stretch of tunnel carved through the mountains on the route from Geneva, Switzerland, back to Lyon, France, a black BMW whips to the left and surges forward, rapidly overtaking the old Peugeot that’s chugging up the gradual grade. The German car rockets past the French one as swiftly as Hitler’s tanks darted around France’s Maginot Line back in 1940; it cuts in front and then brakes hard. The hulking bald driver, Junior — a name he hates, even though he, too, uses it for himself — checks his mirror, expecting to see the Peugeot’s hood dip sharply, expecting to hear tires screeching in a panicky, reflexive stop — after all, the gray-haired guy in the piece-of-crap Peugeot is some kind of egghead professor, right? — but instead, the Peugeot darts to the right, wedging itself between the decelerating BMW and the wall of the tunnel.

Metal rasps and shrieks as the Peugeot rakes the entire passenger side of the BMW, clipping the outside mirror at the same moment it rips a warning sign off the right wall of the tunnel. The Peugeot driver’s window is down and suddenly Junior sees what appears to be a pistol in the professor’s hand: a pistol pointed out the open window; a pistol pointed — shit! — at him. Next thing Junior knows, the Beemer’s passenger window is shattering and he’s ducking for his life, and the Beemer is veering wildly to the left, where it slams into a concrete abutment, pushing the radiator back into the engine block and knocking the left front wheel off the frame. The steering-column airbag explodes, punching Junior in the face, breaking his nose, adding injury to insult. He’s not sure which hurts worse, the broken nose or the knowledge that he’s been outmaneuvered and outsmarted by an aging egghead in a piece-of-crap car.

CHAPTER 41

Eight endless, nail-chewing, garden-pacing hours after I’d climbed out of the van — as the afternoon sun was casting long shadows across Lumani’s courtyard — my phone rang. “The preacher’s muscleman just tried to ambush our decoy,” said Descartes. I felt a jolt of fear, and sweat began beading on my forehead and trickling from my armpits. “Shit. What happened? Is our guy okay?”

“It’s okay,” he hurried on. “You got away. The muscleman’s car is wrecked, so that’s good; maybe he’s hurt, maybe not. Our guy didn’t stop — without backup, he couldn’t take the risk, and besides, we didn’t want to blow his cover. But you need to call the preacher right away, so he still thinks it’s you on the highway.”

I forced myself to breathe slowly — once, twice, three times — and then said, “Okay, tell me what happened. And tell me what I need to say.”

“It was in the Chamois Tunnel, about fifty kilometers west of Geneva. An hour after you left the bank. The muscleman passed you in the tunnel and tried to force you to stop. You made a shot—”

“Good God, I shot someone?” I was shocked by the idea that I — even a counterfeit I — might shoot someone.

“We don’t know if you hit him. All we know is that the muscleman’s car ran into the wall in the tunnel. He’s not following you anymore. You should call the preacher now, before he hears from his guy.”

“This is Brockton,” I said when he answered. “That was really stupid, Reverend.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve got a good mind to turn this car around and go dump the bones in Lake Geneva. A spot so deep you’ll never find them, no matter how long you look or how hard you pray.”

“I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about, Brockton.” His words said that, but his panicked undertone told me otherwise.

“You’re lying, Reverend. Either that, or your goon’s spinning out of control as badly as his car did just now.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “What car?”

“Don’t insult my intelligence. The black BMW your bald-headed ape was driving. The one that just crashed into the wall in the Chamois Tunnel.”

Another pause. “There was a wreck in a tunnel? Was anyone hurt? Are you okay?”

“Gee, thanks for your Christian concern, Reverend. I’m just fine, but I don’t know about your muscle-bound friend — call me hard-hearted, but I didn’t stop to play Good Samaritan. Maybe he’s just shaken up, maybe he’s dead — and if he is, frankly, I don’t give a damn. I’m on my way back to Avignon with the bones, and if you actually want them, don’t you dare mess with me again. God forgives, but I don’t.” I hung up the phone and, as Descartes had instructed, I switched it off so Reverend Jonah couldn’t call me back — at least not until we’d made him sweat for a while.

Meanwhile, I was sweating, too. We’d gotten a break and gained an advantage over the end-timers, but I didn’t want to put too much stock in it. If Junior had escaped unhurt and managed to get out of the tunnel and get another car quickly, our advantage might last only a few hours. And then what?

The knock was soft, but it nearly made me jump out of my skin anyway, and I gave a startled yelp of surprise. “Excusez-moi, Docteur,” said Elisabeth’s voice. “Sorry you have fear when I knock.” I yanked open the door, grateful for the distraction, cheered by the warmth in her face, and relieved by the sight of the immense package she cradled in her arms. “This just came for you.”

The FedEx airbill confirmed what I’d expected and hoped: The package was from Knoxville, which meant that it contained the decoy skeleton overnighted by Hugh Berryman. I’d expected the airbill to be attached to one of our standard bone boxes, a foot square by three feet long, but what Elisabeth had lugged up the three flights of stairs was the size of a small footlocker. I thanked her, set the box on the bed, and ripped it open even before she’d started down the stairs. Inside the outer box, I found the long, narrow bone box I’d been expecting, along with a second box, a cube measuring about eighteen inches on each side.

Lifting out the bone box, I set it on the desk and raised the long, hinged lid. Hugh had chosen well. A forensic anthropologist would never mistake this Native American skeleton for the one we’d found in the Palace of the Popes — this skull was broader and flatter, and the front teeth were the shovel-shaped incisors characteristic of Native Americans and Asians — but apart from those differences, it closely resembled our missing man: Meister Eckhart or Jesus Christ or whoever the hell Stefan had been trying to sell for two million dollars. Hugh had also done a good job of simulating the wounds to the wrists and feet and ribs: Besides gouging the bones, he’d dabbed the splintered edges with a mixture of tea and coffee, a stain that mimicked the patina of time, making the fresh trauma look as ancient as the bones themselves.

Satisfied with the decoy skeleton, I turned my attention to the other box, the unexpected one. Taped to the top of it was a card, a pen-and-ink illustration of Don Quixote on horseback, his lance raised, windmills in the background. Underneath were these words in Hugh’s handwriting: “Ephesians 6:11.” Puzzled, I ripped open the box. What I found inside gave me a chill. I opened my computer and Googled the citation. It was a Bible verse from Saint Paul’s letter to the fledgling Christian church at Ephesus. “Put on the whole armour of God,” it read, “that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” Saint Paul, I decided — or maybe it was my own Saint Hugh — was a pretty smart guy.

The pieces of our plan were coming together, though with maddening slowness. The decoy skeleton was the piece I’d been most worried about, and it had arrived on time and in excellent condition. The decoy ossuary should be coming soon — the stonemason had promised to deliver it no later than 10 P.M. And barring unforeseen problems, the decoy Brockton should make it back to Avignon before midnight.

Midnight was just four hours away — hours that I suspected would seem like centuries.

I switched my phone back on — I’d left it off for two hours to keep Reverend Jonah twisting in the wind if he tried to call me again — and sure enough, the phone showed a missed call from his North Carolina cell number. I had a voice mail, too, and the instant the message began playing, I felt the instinctive revulsion that the televangelist’s voice never failed to trigger in me. My revulsion swiftly gave way to panic, though, as his words floated up and their implications sank in. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” he said. “You are not to be trusted. If you try any treachery when we meet, the girl dies. If I even think the police are watching, she dies. If you stall or bargain, she dies. And if the bones are not genuine, she dies.” My heart skipped a beat when he said it. “I have photographs of the teeth,” he went on, and I thought my heart would stop altogether. “Before I came to terms with your friend Stefan, I had him send pictures of them. I’m no big-shot forensic detective, but I swear by the blood of Christ, if the teeth don’t match exactly, the girl will die, and so will you.”

I stared at the phone in my hand, hoping it wasn’t real, hoping this was a nightmare message, hoping that if I stared at the phone hard enough, clenched it tightly enough, I would awaken.

I did not awaken; the message was indeed a nightmare, but it was a waking nightmare. Flinging open the lid of the bone box, I lifted out the cranium and mandible, and grew dizzy with despair. I’d hoped and assumed the preacher wouldn’t be tipped off by the decoy’s shovel-shaped incisors, but I saw now that those were the least of the problem. The real problem was the number of teeth: the decoy had four more teeth than the missing skeleton had. Even a preacher inclined to have faith in miracles was not credulous enough to believe that the skull of Christ had sprouted four new teeth twenty centuries after his crucifixion.

Frantic now, I called Descartes, who was still searching the labyrinthine corridors and crannies of the Palace of the Popes. “You’ve got to find those bones, and find them fast,” I said. I recounted Reverend Jonah’s call, and his threat. “He’s not going to fall for it,” I said. “There’s no way. Even a child could tell that these teeth aren’t the same.”

Descartes was silent. Finally he said, “We’ll keep trying, but we’re running out of places to look. See if you can get more time.”

“How do I do that, Inspector? We were pushing our luck with Geneva. He’s getting suspicious. I’m afraid he’s about to snap.”

“I don’t know. Try to think of something. We have two more towers to search. You probably won’t be able to reach me — the only reason I got this call is because I stepped outside to call my office. I’ll phone you back in an hour.” He hung up, leaving me staring at the phone once more, my blood pressure soaring, my ears ringing, my heart racing. In a fury of frustration, I screamed — a wordless bellow of rage — and kicked savagely at the closest thing to me, the heavy wooden frame of my bed. It hurt — I wondered if I’d broken my big toe — but I didn’t care; I hauled back the other foot and kicked the bed again. The bed scraped across the floorboards…and something clattered to the floor. Crap — had I broken the bed in my anger? Kneeling on the floor, I peered into the darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight, the way Miranda had shown me.

The light glimmered off something made of metal: a bracket? a bolt from the bed? Lying prone, my head pressed against the nightstand, I fished it out. It was a key — an antique-looking silver key with a large oval head and several stubby ribs jutting from the spine. For a moment I thought it was Stefan’s skeleton key to the palace, but it wasn’t, not quite. The palace key had been ornate, practically a work of art, its head cut with intricate scrollwork and filigree; this one, on the other hand, was utterly unadorned — a blue-collar sort of key, more likely to be carried by some medieval janitor than a cardinal or chamberlain. It wasn’t just the head that was simpler; so was the shaft — it had only three pairs of ribs jutting from the spine, not half a dozen. Suddenly it hit me, and I ripped open the desk drawer and rifled through the jumble of papers and receipts until I found the note Miranda had left on my nightstand after spooning up behind me in my bed the night after we’d found Stefan’s body. “A souvenir,” the note said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it’s important.” When I’d awakened that morning and found the message, I’d thought that the note itself was the souvenir — an odd one, I’d thought, but then, Miranda’s mind often worked more obliquely than mine. But the words, I now realized, made more sense if they referred to something else — something that had fallen off the edge of the nightstand, perhaps, and lodged behind the bed…until this moment. Was this a key Stefan had given her? Or had he lost it in her hotel room the night he tried to persuade her to come with him?

Suddenly I felt a chill as I remembered Miranda’s barely intelligible words when Reverend Jonah had let me talk to her. “The key is to get the bones,” she’d said. Twice. My God, she must have meant this key. But what door, what hiding place, did this key unlock? It must not be a door at the palace, because Stefan’s master key — which Descartes and his men had a copy of — was different from this. What else had Miranda said during that important, frustrating, garbled call? She’d clearly been trying to tell me something else important, but much of the message had been mangled by the poor reception. She’d told me not to get greedy like Stefan, and then she’d said something about Stefan being interrupted. But then she’d added something odd, something I hadn’t understood: She’d told me to “be interruptible.” I’d been trying to ask her what that meant when Reverend Jonah had snatched the phone away from her and slapped her. “Be interruptible.” Turning the key over and over in my hands, I stared absently at it and repeated the words slowly, as if they held some magic, some mantra. “Be interruptible. Be interruptible. Interruptible.”

And then, tearing open my door, I raced down the stairs, flung open the wooden gate of the inn, and sprinted through the twisting streets, past the floodlit façade of the Palace of the Popes, beneath the outstretched arms of the cathedral’s gilded virgin and oversized crucifix, and down a zigzag ramp to the northern edge of the city wall, toward the dark waters of the Rhône.

I’d just reached the base of the Bénézet bridge — the bridge of Incorruptible, Interruptible Saint Bénézet — when my phone rang. It was Reverend Jonah. “Now or never, Professor,” he hissed.

“Now,” I said. “Right now, by God. But you have to bring her to me. The bones and I are at Saint Bénézet’s Bridge. Walk up the sidewalk from the south side of the bridge. If I see anyone with you but Miranda, I’ll throw the bones off the bridge and into the river.”

What bones? The rhetorical question posed by Descartes still applied. I didn’t have the bones yet, didn’t know for sure they were here. But they had to be here. There was no other explanation that fit…and no time to look anywhere else.

“And if I see anyone with you, I’ll shoot the girl,” he countered. “If you have any doubt about that, remember what happened to your colleague.”

“What about the Sixth Commandment, Reverend? ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Or did God say you could ignore that one, when he took you up to Heaven for your private sneak preview of the Apocalypse?”

“We’re all sinners, Doctor. Some of us, by the grace of God, are forgiven sinners. That’s the only difference. I’ve sinned many times in my life. I’ll probably sin many more. But I am cleansed and made spotless by the blood of Jesus Christ. By the miracle of grace. And when the trumpet sounds — soon, very soon — I will stand with the righteous. Because I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord! Make straight his path!’ Unworthy as I am, Doctor, I am God’s chosen instrument.”

His words — and his fervent, escalating intensity — filled me with dread, but I knew better than to show fear. “And so am I, Reverend,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster, or could pretend to. Growing up, I’d been surrounded by fundamentalist Protestants — Southern Baptists, Primitive Baptists, even a few snake-handling Holy Rollers. I cast my mind back to that subculture and its language, hoping to speak to the preacher in words that would carry weight with him. “I’m the Lord’s instrument, too. Listen to the Spirit, Reverend, and you’ll know it’s true. I found the bones. I escaped the snares you’ve set for me. And now I charge you — as Jesus charged the woman caught in the act of adultery—‘Go and sin no more.’ Forgiveness requires repentance, Reverend, and repentance isn’t true — it’s a lie — if you’re already plotting the next sin. So bring her to me in ten minutes, and do it with a pure heart. I charge you in the name of Him you serve.”

“Don’t you dare presume—” he began, but I hung up. It was a risk, I knew, but then again, I was playing a high-stakes game of chicken with a madman. Doing anything was a big risk…but doing nothing would be a bigger risk. Seven hundred years after he’d said them, Meister Eckhart’s words still rang true: “The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.” In this case, I felt sure, the price of inaction would be Miranda’s death.

I rang Descartes. The phone rang and rang, then finally rolled to voice mail. Christ, I thought, he’s in the basement of one of those thick stone towers. Those signal-proof towers. After the voice-mail announcement finished — the only part I understood was the name, “René Descartes”—I blurted, “Inspector, it’s Brockton. I know where the bones are. I’m meeting the preacher in ten minutes. Saint Bénézet’s Bridge. Hurry. But whatever you do, don’t spook him, or he’ll kill Miranda.”

A massive wooden door sealed the portal at the base of the tower that anchored the stone bridge to the rocky hillside. The door had an ancient-looking iron lock. By the light of my cell phone, I wiggled the key into place and turned. The lock resisted; I twisted harder, praying I didn’t snap the ribs off the spine of the key. Still it resisted, so I applied more force, and more prayer…and the lock yielded. Hurling my weight against the door, I bulled it open and then raced up the stone stairs and out onto the top of the bridge. Fifty yards ahead was the crumbling little chapel where Bénézet’s incorruptible remains had lain for hundreds of years, until the French Revolution dethroned the dual monarchies of king and church.

At the door of the chapel, I repeated the same sequence: light, key, prayer, force. Again, just as I was expecting the key to snap, the lock turned and the door opened.

The chapel’s interior was pitch-black. The cell phone’s display had offered plenty of light to see a keyhole, but it made a mighty feeble searchlight. On hands and knees, I searched the perimeter of the chapel. I found rat carcasses, pigeon droppings, and a few scraps of paper and plastic that the mistral had whirled through the window openings. But I did not find a stone ossuary.

I did, however, find another door, a small door set into one of the chapel’s side walls. I stood up, found an iron handle, and opened the door. It opened onto a staircase that descended to a lower level: a low-ceilinged chamber that must have been the chapel’s crypt. This must have been where Bénézet’s body had lain until it was spirited away by nuns for safekeeping. Could this be where Stefan had hidden the ossuary — an ironic in-joke by the arrogant archaeologist?

On a simple stone altar in the center of the crypt was Stefan’s last laugh: the ossuary, its inscribed cross and lamb plainly visible even by the faint light of my phone. Without even lifting the lid to make sure the bones were inside, I slid the box off the slab and staggered up the stairs to the top of the bridge.

CHAPTER 42

I reached the edge of the bridge and balanced the ossuary on the narrow round railing just as Reverend Jonah emerged from the tower. Half a step in front of him was Miranda; with his left hand, he clutched her left arm; with his right, he pushed her ahead of him like a shield.

“Let her go, Reverend,” I called. “Let go of her arm and keep walking toward me, with both hands where I can see them.”

He brought his right hand from behind her back, and I saw it held a gun, which he pressed to Miranda’s ribs. “Show me the bones.”

My tongue felt glued to the roof of my mouth, but I knew I had to speak with apparent calmness and strength. “Let go of her first. And put down the gun.”

“No, Doctor.”

“That was our deal, Reverend. I get her; you get the bones.”

“Our deal counts for nothing. My loyalty is to a far higher power than you. Now show me the bones, or by that power, I’ll pull this trigger.”

My mind was screaming, but I couldn’t make out any of the words. “If you shoot her, the bones go into the river. And if you shoot me, the bones go into the river. You’ll notice that they’re balanced rather precariously here on the edge, Reverend. In fact, the only thing keeping them from falling right now is that I’m keeping a tight grip on them. But since you insist, I’ll show you.” I lifted the lid of the ossuary and set it down on the bridge, propping it against the knee-high lower railing. Keeping my eyes on him, I reached into the box and felt for a femur. Grasping it by the femoral head — the “ball” at the upper end of the thighbone — I lifted it from the box. “This is the left femur, Reverend. The left femur of the Son of the Most High. Now let her go.” He shook his head and took a step toward me, pulling Miranda with him. I waved the femur at him warningly. “How will you explain this to your God, Reverend?” With that, I let the bone hang down alongside my leg, then I gave my wrist a quick snap. The bone flipped upward, tumbling end over end as it arced upward toward the far side of the bridge. Still spinning, it dropped below the railing and hit the dark water below with a faint splash.

Reverend Jonah gave a strangled cry and rushed to the railing. Then he whirled and leveled the gun at me. Anything could happen in the next instant, I knew, but at least Miranda was no longer in his grasp, with a gun to her ribs. “You…you…” His voice was shaking, and so was the gun.

“Remember, Reverend, if you shoot me, the rest of the bones fall into the water. And Reverend? This stone box is heavy, and my hand’s getting tired.” To underscore the point, I let the box wobble a bit on the railing. As it tilted farther toward the water, the bones shifted inside, grating slightly as they slid. “You probably know this, Reverend, but if you’re looking for DNA in an old skeleton, the best places are the teeth and the long bones. They encapsulate the DNA better than the smaller bones do; they protect it from bacteria and pollutants and the ravages of time. The best of the long bones for what you hope to do is the femur.” Reaching into the box again, I found the other femur and took it out, just as I had the first. “Unfortunately, by breaking your word, you’ve already lost one femur. It’d be a real shame to lose the other.” I waved the end up and down, as if I were winding up to toss it.

“Don’t,” he gasped.

“Then put the gun down. I’m counting to three — the number of the Holy Trinity, Reverend. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. They’re all watching, all wondering if you’re about to fail them. If these bones go into the river, do you really think they’re going to welcome you with open arms and say, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant?’ Somehow I doubt it, Reverend. But I guess your faith is stronger than mine. One.” I gave the bone an upward snap, but did not release it. “Two.” Another snap. “Three.” I dipped my arm lower this time, so I could put plenty of force in the toss.

“Stop! All right, all right.” He laid the gun on the cobblestones and held out both hands.

“That’s better,” I said. “Miranda, walk away.”

“I’m not going without you,” she said.

“Go on, Miranda. I’ll be right behind you. As soon as you’re off the bridge, I’ll give the bones to the Reverend, and I’ll be with you in sixty seconds. Now go.”

“I can’t, Dr. B.” To my surprise, she was crying. “I can’t leave you here with him.”

“Yes you can. You have to.” Surprised and moved by her vulnerability, I suddenly felt on the verge of coming undone myself. “Don’t be afraid, Miranda. I’ll be fine.” I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I needed her to believe it, at least long enough to walk out of harm’s way. “I love you, Miranda. Now go.”

“I love you, too, Dr. B.” It came out as a whisper, but it bored into me more strongly than if she’d shouted it.

She began to walk, slowly at first, then faster, her heels clopping on the stones. Finally she broke into a run, her clattering footfalls echoing off the rock bluff from which the bridge seemed to grow. When she reached the tower and started down the stairs, I nodded to the preacher. “Okay, Reverend, come get your precious bones. But don’t forget, they’re still hanging in the balance here. It’s not too late for me to let them go if I think you’re trying anything.”

He was ten feet away, walking slowly and stiffly, almost as if he were marching in a slow-motion procession; his eyes were gleaming, his breathing was fast, and his lips were forming whispered words that I couldn’t hear. When he was two steps away, I said, “Stop.” He stopped, swaying slightly as he stood. “Hold out your arms. I’m going to hand this to you. Brace yourself; it’s heavy.”

“Could you set it on the ground? I’ve got a bad back.”

I wanted his hands occupied for a few seconds. “Have faith, Reverend. Remember the words of Isaiah: ‘They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.’ Hold out your arms and get ready to take this, Reverend, because I’m about to lose my grip.”

He took another step, and I swung the ossuary off the rail and into his outstretched arms. As he staggered under the weight, I darted across the bridge to the other side, snatched up the gun he’d laid down, and pointed it at him. “Liar,” he hissed. “Deceiver. Son of Satan.” He squatted and set down the ossuary with a thud.

“Not so, Reverend. I mean you no harm. I just want to make sure I get off this bridge alive.” Keeping the gun and my gaze trained on him, I backed away from him, toward the tower and staircase at the end of the bridge. I’d made it halfway when a scream — Miranda’s scream — split the night.

I turned and ran for the stairs, calling, “Miranda? Miranda!”

At that moment she emerged onto the bridge again, slung over the shoulder of Reverend Jonah’s goon, who appeared like some twisted, evil version of Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child. How had he gotten back on the road so quickly, I wondered, after his crash in the mountain tunnel? Had he flagged down a passing motorist? If so, what had become of the misguided Good Samaritan?

In person, Junior looked far bigger than the security-camera photo had suggested; he was a giant of a man, with a neck the diameter of a tree trunk and arms as thick as live-oak limbs. Miranda was writhing and struggling in his grip, with no more effectiveness than a toddler.

“Vengeance is mine,” crowed Reverend Jonah behind me. “Thus sayeth the Lord.” I turned to face him again. He was walking toward me, a second gun in his hand. He raised it, took aim at me, and I saw a flash from the muzzle, then felt myself flung backward as the fist of God slammed into my chest. I hit the wall of Saint Bénézet’s Chapel with my back and head; my legs gave way and I slid down the rough wall and onto the stones of the bridge. “Vengeance is mine,” I heard Reverend Jonah repeat. “Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory.” My vision was fading as he stepped toward me, but I could see him closing in, leveling the gun at my head. “Prepare to meet thy God.” Dimly I heard a shot, and then another.

Clearly delirious now, I saw the preacher crumple to the stones directly in front of me, followed by Miranda and her burly captor. “Miranda, no,” I groaned. But then, miraculously, Miranda pulled free and staggered to her feet. She stared down at Junior, whose head was lying in a pool of blood. “Dr. B, Dr. B,” she was sobbing. “Oh, dear God, Dr. B.” Behind her, striding toward me, I saw the angel of death coming to claim me. He was dressed in black, but instead of a scythe, he carried a rifle.

“Ah, lad, I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner,” said the angel of death, whose features crystallized into the face of Father Mike.

“Take Miranda,” I gasped. “Get her out of here.”

“Let’s see about you first, lad,” he said. “Hurt bad, are you?”

“Not sure. Hard to breathe. How’d you find me?”

“Saint Anthony,” he said. “Remember? ‘Tony, Tony, look around’?” He took hold of my collar and ripped open the front of my shirt. He looked startled, and then he began to laugh. “I’ll be damned. Maybe there’s something to the hocus-pocus after all.”

“What?” I looked down, expecting to see blood, but there was none. Then I remembered. “Oh, the vest.” The gift Hugh Berryman had sent to accompany the Arikara Indian skeleton was a vest — a Kevlar vest, a bulletproof vest — and the Bible verse Hugh had referenced, Ephesians 6:11, admonished, “Put on the full armour of God.” I’d recognized the vest right away; Hugh wore it whenever he worked a death scene, and I’d often teased him about it. But now I owed my life to it, and I vowed never to make fun of it again.

Before I could explain, Miranda reached to my chest, then held up the medallion Father Mike had given me to wear. The image of Saint Christopher had been obliterated; lodged in its place, at the center of the medallion, was a flattened lead slug. “My God,” Miranda breathed. “Incredible. Absolutely incredible. What are the odds? So you’re not even hurt?”

“Easy for you to say,” I grunted. “Feels like I’ve been kicked by a mule.” But even as I said it, the pain was beginning to ease.

“You’ll have a nasty bruise, I’m thinking,” said Father Mike. “Maybe even a cracked sternum. But all things considered, you’re one mighty lucky fella.” He leaned closer, noticing the vest, inspecting it. “Takin’ no chances, were you, Bill Brockton?” He smiled slightly. “This vest, by the by — it wouldn’t have stopped that slug, lad. It’ll stop a 9-millimeter, but not a .45, which is what the good reverend baptized you with.”

Miranda stared at Father Mike, then looked again at the shattered medallion, turning it this way and that in the faint light. Jutting from one edge of the crater was a splintered bit of something green and gold, an incongruously synthetic material. “This thing has a circuit board in it,” she said slowly. “Is this a tracking device? Have you been following Dr. Brockton?”

He shrugged. “Even Saint Anthony can use a bit of help.”

She eyed him warily. “So who are you, really? You’re clearly not a small-town Irish priest.”

Other things began to crystallize in my mind. “It wasn’t just coincidence that I met you that day in the library, was it? You’d been watching me, looking for an opening.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence, lad. It’s true, I’d had my eye on you.”

“That was you with the binoculars and camera,” Miranda accused. “Watching us, taking pictures, the day we were up here on this bridge? You’ve been after the bones all along.”

“And that whole story about the IRA and your brother,” I added. “That was total bullshit.”

“No, not total. I did lose a brother in the Troubles, but it wasn’t the Brits killed him, it was me. A bomb I was rigging went off prematurely. So the penance part is true — I’ll be doing penance for Jimmy till the day I die.”

“But you’re not really a priest.”

He shrugged. “A priest, no. And if you ask the Holy Father about me, he’ll say he’s never heard of me. But I serve the church. I like to think of meself as a modern-day Knight Templar.”

“So why do you want the bones?” Miranda asked. “Or why does the pope, or whoever the hell is your boss?”

“To cover the church’s arse, Miss. If these are the bones of Christ, it buggers the story about the Resurrection and the ascension into Heaven. You can see the difficulty, can’t you?”

“But they’re not the bones of Christ,” I said. “They’re the bones of Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth-century theologian and preacher. I already told you that.”

“Aye, so you did. You also told me that Eckhart was murdered — crucified, no less — by a cardinal who later became pope.

And that Eckhart, not Christ, is the man on the Holy Shroud. Can’t you see how that would bugger the Holy Father if word got around?”

I felt like such a fool. It was obvious — in the way he carried himself, in the ease with which he handled the weapon — that he was a soldier or cop. Was he one of the pope’s Swiss Guards? Or part of some more secret agency — a Vatican version of the CIA? How could I have mistaken him for a simple village priest?

The rifle was slung loosely over his shoulder. It had a collapsible stock and a large-diameter scope that was designed either for low light or night vision. On top of the scope was a thin, cylindrical gadget that I guessed to be a targeting laser.

I felt an insane urge to laugh at the irony: Miranda and I had just escaped death at the hands of a Protestant fanatic, and now we were about to die at the hands of a Catholic assassin. I looked up at her, expecting to see sadness and fear in her face. Instead I saw stealth, cunning, and concentration. Almost imperceptibly she was edging behind Father Mike, edging toward the gun that had flown from my hand when Reverend Jonah’s bullet had slammed into my chest. She was three feet from it, then two feet from it, and then she was there, directly behind him. I needed to distract Father Mike, or whoever this guy was. “So will you do penance for killing Miranda and me, too? What sort of penance will our deaths require?”

As I asked the question, Miranda reached for the gun. Without even looking, Father Mike swept a leg in a wide, swift arc, knocking her feet out from under her. She landed hard, with a thud and a grunt. She kept trying, though, going for the gun and managing to get a hand on it just as Father Mike’s foot came down on her wrist. She cried out sharply in pain, and I struggled up to lunge for him. I was stopped short by the barrel of the rifle, jabbing into my throat two inches above the top of the Kevlar vest.

“I probably should kill you, lad, but I won’t. If I wanted you dead, I’d’ve let the reverend do the bloody bit. I don’t feel bad about shooting him and his ape — no penance needed for them two — but I don’t need more innocent blood on my hands. It’s asking for trouble, but I’ll be letting you go. I hope you don’t mind if I take a little souvenir with me, though.” He took the pistol from Miranda’s hand, then lifted his boot off her wrist. “Sorry to hurt you, miss. You strike me as a strong-headed lass, so I didn’t figure you’d listen if I just said, ‘Stop.’ I hope I’ve not done any serious harm.”

“I’ve got a bump on my head and maybe a sprained wrist, but I’ll be okay,” Miranda said. “Hurts a bit, but you saved me from the crazies, so if you promise not to kill me, I promise not to hold a grudge.”

He smiled at that — a smile that reminded me of the kind, comforting fellow who’d offered a friendly ear on the staircase at the library a few days and a lifetime ago. Looking at me, he cocked his head at Miranda. “She’s good in a pinch. I’d trust her with me back any day.” He tossed the preacher’s pistol over the railing, and it plunked into the water somewhere in the vicinity of the femur I’d lobbed a few minutes before. “Can I trust you two to sit here quiet-like till you can’t hear me scooter any longer?” I nodded; he turned and looked at Miranda, and she nodded, too. “Fair enough. After that, you can scream bloody hell and sic the coppers on me. If they catch me, it means I’ve lost me knack.”

He walked to the stone box sitting ten feet away, farther out on the bridge, where Reverend Jonah had left it. Lifting the lid from where I’d leaned it against the railing, he fitted it into place, but not before taking a quick look inside. Then he squatted and lifted the box, giving his right shoulder a shrug to keep the gun sling from slipping off.

“Those bones have brought bad luck to everybody that’s tried to latch onto them,” I said. “Are you sure you want them?”

He shrugged, and the box bobbed slightly. “It’s not up to me, lad. I’ve got orders.” He drew even with us, and as he did, he turned toward us. “Good luck to you both. I’d keep wearing that medal, lad — it seems to be working for you.”

He turned away, and suddenly a bright mist of red sprayed from his back. Father Mike sank to his knees and set the ossuary down with a thud, as if taken by a sudden need to pray. Then he pitched forward across the top of it.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit,” gasped Miranda. She ran to him and laid a hand on Father Mike’s shoulder as the life gurgled out of him. “Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

A man stepped from behind the corner of the tower at the end of the bridge and walked slowly toward us. “Hello, Docteur,” he said. “Bonsoir, mademoiselle.” The man was Inspector René Descartes.

“Inspector? How long have you been here?”

“Five minutes, maybe.” He shrugged. “In time to see the preacher and the muscleman die.”

My mind was whirling, spun by a trinity of fear, sadness, and anger. “You didn’t need to shoot the priest, Inspector,” I said. “He wasn’t going to hurt us.”

“But I did,” he said.

I was confused. “Did what?”

“I did need to shoot him.”

“Why?”

“Because he was taking the bones.”

“You could have just told him to put them down. He had his hands full. He was no threat.”

“He was a big threat, Doctor. Or a big problem, at least. Just as you and mademoiselle are.”

“I don’t understand, Inspector.”

“Do you know how much a French police inspector earns, Doctor?”

“No. Not enough, probably.”

“Enough for a one-bedroom apartment and a ten-year-old car and one week at the beach every August,” he said. “Do you know how much I can sell these bones for? Three million U.S. dollars.”

“How? Who’s left to sell them to, Inspector? The crazy Protestant and the commando Catholic are both dead now. The religious market would seem to have dried up rather suddenly.”

“Ah, but you forget the art market,” he said. He smiled ironically. “It seems the art dealer, Madame Kensington, has a very eager and very rich client, one who is happy to have another chance at the bones. It’s a shame that you threw away one of them, but I think the blood on the box — along with the story of the crazy preacher and the soldier priest — will make up for the missing bone. A collector who will pay three million dollars for the bones of Christ is surely the kind of person who appreciates a good story. Imagine that you are a billionaire. Imagine that you have these bones, the most special bones in the world, and that you can take them out and show them off to your most trusted friends. Imagine how attentively they will listen as you tell how much money and how much blood it cost to get them. The story itself is worth a million, yes? Maybe I should raise the price, Doctor; what do you think?”

“I think you’ve forgotten something. A week ago you called Felicia Kensington a piece of shit.”

“Ah, oui, she is a piece of shit. But she’s a gold-plated piece of shit, filled with diamonds.”

“So you’re a faker, a forger, too,” I said. “A counterfeit cop. You just pretend to care about truth and justice.”

He shrugged, then wedged the toe of a boot under Father Mike’s body and tipped him off the top of the ossuary. “Okay, let’s go. My colleagues are slow, but even they will be arriving soon, after this many gunshots. Doctor, will you be so kind as to carry the bones?”

I squatted, then hoisted the box. “Father Mike was letting us go. Are you?”

“Ah, sorry, non, Doctor. The false priest gave you false hope. I give you the sad truth. La triste vérité. If you live, things will be very difficult for me. I wish I didn’t have to kill you, but I do. Don’t take it personally.”

“I take it very personally, Inspector.”

“Quel dommage. Too bad. But do as you wish.”

Just ahead, something bright and orange caught my eye: the safety mesh spanning the gap in the railing. We were almost to the gap, and a desperate idea formed in my mind.

“Inspector, I need to shift my grip; I’m about to drop this, and I doubt that your client will be happy if it gets broken. Let me just set it on the railing for a second.”

“Non. Not on the railing,” he said. “I saw how you balanced it on the railing to trick the preacher.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll set it on the ground,” I said, “but I need to do it now. It’s slipping.” Without waiting for him to give permission — or deny it — I squatted and set down the ossuary, with the thunk of stone on stone. “Whew,” I said, straightening up and bending backward to stretch. I interlaced my fingers, stretched my arms, and pushed my palms outward to crack my knuckles.

“That’s enough,” he said. “Come on.”

“Okay. I’m ready. That helped.” I squatted again and worked my fingers under the ends of the ossuary. “Miranda, can you give me a hand? Just till it’s up?”

“Why don’t you let me carry it awhile?” Miranda squatted on the other side of the box and wedged her fingers under as well. I felt her fingers graze mine on the underside of the box.

“No, I’ll be fine,” I said. “Just help me lift — that’s the hardest part. Remember, lift with your legs, not your back.” I tapped one of her fingers, a gesture I desperately hoped she’d interpret as a signal. Her eyes met mine, and when they did, I rolled mine upward as far as I could, raising my eyebrows at the same time. “Okay, on three,” I said. “One. Two. Three!”

With all the strength I had, I straightened my legs and flung myself backward, shouting “Push!” as I did. Miranda shoved hard on the box, accelerating my backward fall. With my momentum, Miranda’s push, and the ossuary’s weight, I slammed into Descartes with the force of a linebacker. He grunted heavily and tumbled backward, my weight driving us both toward the gap in the railing. I felt momentary resistance as the orange safety mesh snagged us and stretched; we hung like that, suspended over the water, for an agonizing instant — the detective’s arms windmilling for balance, grasping for anything solid — and then, with a crack as sharp as a gunshot, the plastic snapped and we fell: Descartes underneath, my body against his, and the stone box clutched to my chest. We did a backward flip in the air, and the centrifugal force of our spin sent pale bones cartwheeling into the black sky. We fell surrounded by them, as if we were inside some macabre snow globe of mortality.

Descartes hit the water flat on his back, and the double impact — first from hitting the water, then from being slammed by me — forced the air from his lungs like a punch in his gut. I’d braced myself as best I could, taking a deep breath and tensing my stomach muscles against the ossuary’s weight.

The water closed swiftly over us, the momentum of our fall and the weight of the stone box driving us downward. Plunging through the cold blackness, the light fading fast above us, I felt Descartes struggling and clutching and scrabbling at me, as if I were a tree or a ladder he would climb to safety. I also felt the edges of the plastic webbing clawing at my hands and face as the loose ends fluttered and swirled around us.

I had no more than a few seconds of air in my lungs, and I was plunging toward the river bottom, entwined with a drowning man and thirty pounds of stone. In desperation, I slammed my head backward, making solid contact with the inspector’s face. His grip slackened long enough for me to twist free. I still had hold of the ossuary, clutching the edge of one end in my left hand. Let it go, a voice in my head screamed. Let it go. Pull him to the surface.

I ignored that voice. I redoubled my grip on the ossuary, and with my other hand I grabbed a fluttering end of plastic mesh and wrapped it around the box. Then, fumbling for the other end of the mesh, I cinched it around Descartes’s foot. Only then, having trussed him to a stone anchor, did I push myself away and begin a desperate, breathless ascent. I felt his fingers clutch at my legs and then slip away as I kicked upward and he descended.

Only the faintest glimmer of light showed overhead, and as I flailed toward it, running out of air, the light began to dim. My last thought, as my mouth opened and my lungs filled with water, was for Miranda. Keep her safe, I thought — no, I prayed. Then: It is finished. Now.

And then there was blackness.

CHAPTER 43

Sirens wail and tires scream to a stop on the pavement at the base of the bridge. Eight men leap from the caravan of police cars, running toward the stairs, weapons in hand.

One of the officers cries out and points upward, and the others look just in time to see a figure — a young woman — climbing onto the railing of the bridge and scanning the water below for ripples, bubbles, anything. She balances there briefly, arms stretched wide, as if Jesus and Mary, Savior and Virgin, manifested at one and the same time. Then she sees something; she does not hesitate, but hurls herself headfirst, as heedless as a seabird that spies a flash of silver scales in the water. She cleaves the surface with scarcely a splash, and the policemen stand transfixed, staring at the widening circles that are the only evidence of what they have just witnessed. Long moments pass; one man clutches his partner’s arm; another crosses himself.

At last the waters stir. The woman breaches, gasping and coughing and retching in the river. With one arm she pulls for the bank; with the other, she encircles the lifeless body she has harrowed from the depths.

She drags him onto the bank and presses water from his lungs, then — holding the shattered silver medallion he wears around his neck — she covers his mouth with hers and exhales, breathing into him the breath and prayer of life.

The man — Brockton — stirs, and groans, and lives again.