“I’ve had that same thought on a few occasions,” Miranda had answered with a sly grin as we crossed the threshold.
Inside, too, the cathedral was spare and austere: plain wooden benches, unadorned columns and plaster walls, a stone floor inlaid with octagons of white and gray, linked by small squares of red.
The Shroud was housed in a side chapel at the front of the nave, on the left side of the building. In front of the relic was a simple kneeling rail eight or ten feet long, and — between the rail and the Shroud — a wall of glass stretching from floor to ceiling. Within the glassed-in chapel, the Shroud was mounted above a long white altar garnished with woven thorn vines — reminders of the barbed crown placed on Jesus’s head before he was crucified. A black curtain, the width of the chapel, hid the relic completely from view; a poster-size enlargement of the face on the Shroud — a ghostly gray negative, which was more dramatic than the faint, reddish-brown image the cloth actually bore — was suspended above the altar. The poster was a consolation prize, of sorts, for those of us whose pilgrimage to Turin was thwarted by the black curtain.
Still kneeling, I unfolded the two prints I’d brought with me. One was a normal, positive print of the face Joe had made; the other was a negative image, which Miranda had created by Photoshopping Joe’s file. The likeness between the images I held in my hand and the poster behind the glass wall was uncanny, especially when I compared the Photoshopped negative with the poster.
Unfortunately, no one in authority had been astonished by the images we’d brought, because no one in authority was anywhere to be found. Except for one other pilgrim — a stout woman who knelt beside me and cast disapproving glances as we whispered — the only person we’d managed to find in the cathedral was an ancient woman selling Holy Shroud bookmarks, postcards, posters, books, and other mementos at the tiny gift shop at the rear of the nave.
“It’s almost closing time,” I whispered. “Maybe we’ll have better luck in the morning.”
Sssshhhh, came an annoyed hiss from the woman on my left. She was German; I knew this not from the accent of her sssshhhh, but from the wording on the prayer card she’d chosen to kneel before. A Shroud-inspired prayer had been printed in seven different languages and posted on the railing for the convenience of the faithful. Between angry glances our way, the woman at my elbow was muttering the German prayer in a guttural growl.
“They get a zillion requests a year to see the Shroud, touch the Shroud, cut a tiny snippet of the Shroud,” Miranda whispered on. She’d dropped her voice so low it was barely audible; she was all but breathing the words into my ear, and I found the intimacy of the communication both unsettling and exhilarating. “You think your request is special. So does everybody else — the parents of the dying kid, the nun who’s had a vision, the physicist who’s thought of a new way to authenticate the image on the cloth. Everybody thinks they’re special. And everybody is. So the priest or the bishop or whoever has to treat everyone as if no one is special.”
“I know, I know,” I whispered back. “But I thought it was worth a try. I thought maybe…” I shrugged.
“I know what you thought. You thought maybe you could convince him your case was extra special. Especially special.” I couldn’t help laughing — she knew me so well.
Ssshhh!
“Yeah, right,” I conceded. “My specialness and two euros will get me a cup of cappuccino.”
“More like four,” she corrected.
“Four euros? Six bucks? For something I don’t even like?”
“That’s your own fault. It’s never too late to grow, expand your horizons.”
“Yeah, well, show me the Shroud of Turin and I’ll drink all the cappuccino you want.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Tenured, full professor’s word of honor?”
“Word of honor.”
“Prepare to chug some caffeine with your humble pie,” she said, looking mischievous.
SSSSHHHH!!!! The angry shush filled the nave. The German lurched to her feet and stormed out, the accusatory echoes of her clogs ricocheting like gunshots.
Laid out flat in the hallway of the hotel diplomatic, where Miranda and I had booked rooms for the night, the Shroud of Turin ran half the length of the corridor. The tips of the toes practically touched the elevator; the other end of the image stretched to a window overlooking a noisy Turin street. What filled the floor was not, of course, the sacred relic itself; rather, it was a full-length, life-size, high-resolution photographic print of the entire Shroud, all 14.3 feet of it, plus another six inches of border at each end.
The print had arrived rolled like a scroll, tightly packed in a cardboard shipping tube. To flatten it, we’d briefly rerolled it the opposite way, inside out; that had mostly tamed the curl, though we’d had to anchor the corners with our shoes.
On my hands and knees, studying the face, I looked up at Miranda. “Come on, you gotta tell me. Where’d you really get this? It did not ‘miraculously appear’ at the front desk.”
“Sure it did,” she chirped. “Okay, with a little help from Holy Shroud Guild dot org.”
“A Web site?”
She nodded. “A Web site with an online gift shop. Through the miracles of Google, AmEx, and FedEx, I ordered it yesterday morning, right before we left Avignon on this wild-goose chase. I had the image file — a huge file — sent to a blueprint shop here, and I got them to deliver it to the hotel.”
“I take it back,” I marveled. “It did ‘miraculously appear.’ So how much does a full-length, high-res, special-delivery print of the Holy Shroud go for these days?”
“About a week’s pay,” she said. I whistled, but she cut me off. “A week of my pay, not yours. That’s actually dirt cheap, as miracles go.”
I turned my attention once more to the image on the replica of the Shroud. The body apparently had been laid faceup on the linen, with the feet at one end and seven or eight feet of fabric extending beyond the head. That part was then doubled back and folded down over the face, torso, and legs. The front and back images linked at the top of the head — an odd, hinged effect, rather like Siamese twins conjoined at the crown of the skull. Judging by the photo, the Shroud’s linen fabric was a stained and dingy ivory color; the image of the man was a faint reddish brown, with brighter red splotches and trickles here and there — in places consistent with wounds from scourging, crucifixion, and lacerations from a crown of thorns.
The color and faintness of the image surprised me. Most news articles and Web sites about the Shroud showed an eerie black-and-white face, like the large poster hanging in the cathedral. Those versions looked like photographic negatives, because they were negatives: dramatic, high-contrast images in which the linen backdrop appeared dark gray, the eye sockets looked dark gray, the eyelids a lighter shade of gray, and — lightest of all, in the photo-negative versions — the cheekbones, eyebrows, nose, mustache, and beard. The scroll Miranda and I were studying on the hotel floor, on the other hand, was a positive print, one that faithfully reproduced the actual image on the Shroud. In our copy, as in the real McCoy, the highest points were darkest, as if a damp cloth had been pressed onto a face and body coated with reddish-brown dust.
Studying the man’s face, I found myself distracted by his hair. “Hmm,” I said.
“What?”
“Well, I don’t get it. He’s lying on his back, right?”