“It’s not,” Tony said. “Trust me! I don’t want there to be bad blood between us.”
“Our beef’s with him,” Sal said.
Louie looked at Gaetano. “I guess you’ll be going to Nassau.”
Gaetano cracked the knuckles of his right hand with his left. “Sounds good to me!”
eleven
7:00 A.M., Monday, February 25, 2002
“Stephanie!” Daniel called softly as he gently shook her shoulder. “They are about to serve breakfast. Do you want any, or should I let you sleep until we land?”
Stephanie forcibly opened her eyes, rubbed them, and yawned at the same time. Then she had to blink rapidly a few times before she was able to see. Her eyes were dry from the plane’s parched atmosphere.
“Where are we?” she asked in a husky voice. Her throat was dry as well. She sat up and stretched. Then she leaned over and looked out the window. Although there was a hint of dawn along the horizon, the ground below was still dark. She could see the lights of cities and towns dotting the landscape.
“My guess would be we’re over someplace in France,” Daniel said.
Despite attempts at planning to avoid a last-minute rush, the night before had been an anxious scramble to get out of Daniel’s apartment, get to Logan Airport, and get through security. They’d made the flight with less than ten minutes to spare. Thanks to Butler’s money, they were flying Alitalia’s Magnifica Class and were seated in the first two seats on the left side of the Boeing 767 aircraft.
Stephanie raised the back of her seat from its reclined position. “How come you’re so wide awake? Did you sleep?”
“Not a wink,” Daniel admitted. “I started reading these books of yours about the Shroud of Turin, particularly the one by Ian Wilson. I can see why you got hooked. It’s fascinating stuff.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“I’m not,” Daniel said. “Reading about the shroud has kind of energized me. I’m even more encouraged about treating Butler and using the shroud’s DNA fragments. In fact, it occurred to me that maybe after we finish with Butler, we should go ahead and treat another celebrity someplace offshore with the same DNA source, somebody who doesn’t mind publicity. Once the story of the cure hits the media, no politician would dare interfere, and better yet, the FDA would be forced to alter their protocol for approval of the treatment.”
“Whoa!” Stephanie warned. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to concentrate on Butler for the time being. His cure is not a given by any stretch of the imagination.”
“You don’t think treating another celebrity is a good idea?”
“I need to give it some thought to respond intelligently,” Stephanie said, trying to be diplomatic. “Right now my mind is a bit addled. I need to use the restroom, and then I want some breakfast. I’m starved. When my mind is firing on all cylinders, I want to hear what you have read about the shroud, particularly whether you have a hypothesis of how the image was formed.”
Less than an hour later, they landed at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. Along with a crush of other people arriving at the same time from various international destinations, they got through passport control and then managed to find their way to the gate for their connecting flight to Turin. At a nearby coffee bar, Daniel indulged himself with an Italian espresso that he bolted down like the local patrons. There was no Magnifica Class on this leg, and once they boarded the plane, they found themselves in a tight cabin filled with businessmen. Stephanie was in the middle seat and Daniel on the aisle, halfway down the aircraft’s cabin.
“This is cozy,” Daniel commented. Thanks to his six-foot-one-inch frame, his knees were pressed up against the seat in front of him.
“How are you feeling now? Are you tired?”
“No, and especially not after that jolt of high-test coffee.”
“Then talk to me about the shroud! I really want to hear.” Thanks to the long line waiting to use the restroom on the flight from Boston to Rome, there hadn’t been time for the subject to come up before they landed.
“Well, first off, I don’t have any theory about how the image was formed. It’s definitely an intriguing mystery, that much I’ll agree, and I was particularly taken by the poetic way Ian Wilson described it as ‘a photographic negative waiting dormant like a time capsule for the moment of photography’s invention.’ But the idea of the image being evidence of the Resurrection as both you and he suggested, I don’t buy. It’s faulty scientific reasoning. You can’t posit an unknown and counterintuitive process of dematerialization to explain an unknown phenomenon.”
“What about black holes?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Black holes have been posited to explain unknown phenomena, and black holes are certainly counterintuitive from our direct scientific experience.”
There was a period of silence, save for the muffled roar of the jet engines mingling with the rustle of morning newspapers and the tapping of laptop keyboards.
“You have a point,” Daniel admitted finally.
“Let’s move on! What else caught your interest?”
“Quite a few things. One that comes to mind is the result of reflectance spectroscopy showing dirt on the images of the feet. It seemed to me to be such an ordinary discovery, until I learned that some of the granules were identified by optical crystallography to be travertine aragonite that had a spectral signature matching limestone samples taken from ancient Jerusalem tombs.”
Stephanie laughed. “Leave it to you to be impressed by one of the more arcane scientific details. I don’t even remember that tidbit.”
“It strains one’s credibility that a fourteenth-century French forger would have gone to such an extent as to obtain and sprinkle such detritus on his supposed creation.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Another fact that caught my attention was that when one looks at the intersection of the habitats of the three Middle-Eastern plants whose pollens are the most prevalent on the shroud, it narrows the shroud’s apparent origin to the twenty miles between Hebron and Jerusalem.”
“Curious, isn’t it?”
“It’s more than curious,” Daniel said. “Whether the shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ or not is certainly not proved-nor, I might add, can it ever be-but in my mind the artifact came from Jerusalem, and it wrapped a man who had been scourged in the ancient Roman fashion, whose nose had been broken, who had thorn wounds on his head, and who had been crucified and suffered a lance wound to his chest.”
“What did you think of the historical aspect?”
“It was well presented and captivating,” Daniel acknowledged. “After reading it, I’m willing to entertain the idea that the Shroud of Turin and the Edessa Cloth are one and the same. I was particularly taken by the way the shroud’s crease marks have been used to explain how it could have been displayed in Constantinople as merely the head of Jesus, as the Edessa Cloth was generally described, or Jesus’ entire body, front and back, as described by the crusader Robert de Clari. He was the individual who saw it just prior to its disappearance during the sacking of Constantinople in 1204.”
“Which means the carbon-dating results are in error.”
“As troublesome as that sounds to me as a scientist, it seems to be true.”
Hardly had they gotten their orange juices before the seat-belt sign came back on, along with an announcement that the pilots were making their initial approach to Turin’s Caselle Airport. Fifteen minutes later, they landed. As full as the plane was, it took them almost as long as the flight from Rome to get off the plane, walk the length of the concourse, and find the appropriate luggage carousel.
While Daniel waited for their bags to appear, Stephanie noticed a cell phone concession, and she went over to rent one. Before leaving Boston, she had learned that her stateside cell phone would not function in Europe, although it would in Nassau, and to be sure she did not miss any emails from Butler while in Turin, she needed a European cell phone number. As soon as she could, she planned to set it up so Butler’s emails would go to both numbers.