“Come on, Dr. B,” she coaxed, “say yes. It’s the chance of a lifetime. And there’s nobody in the world who’s better qualified to examine these bones than you.” I hesitated, but then Miranda gave me a pleading smile and clasped her hands, beseeching, and my resistance crumbled. Oh, what the hell, why not? I thought. You’ve come all this way, and it’s an interesting question. What finally tipped the scales was another thought that hit me out of the blue. And maybe it’s not a bad idea to hang out here till Rocky Stone rounds up those drug runners.
“I’d have to be back in Tennessee in a week,” I said. “Two, at the most.” Miranda beamed and bowed gratefully; Stefan smiled thinly.
“No problem,” he said. “I’m sure Miranda and I can finish everything after you go home.”
Suddenly he froze, holding a finger to his lips for silence and laying his other hand on Miranda’s arm. He turned toward the staircase, listening intently, and I strained to hear what had alarmed him. At first I heard nothing, but then came the faint clatter of metal on metaclass="underline" a padlock rattling as it was inspected and tugged? the upper gate shifting from an exploratory shove? At that moment the room went pitch-black. Miranda gasped, and Stefan gave a low sshh. In the darkness, I felt a hand — Miranda’s hand — clutch mine. Finally, after an intense, interminable silence, I heard the rhythmic thud of footsteps.
Or was it the pounding of my heart?
Footsteps, I hoped, because soon the sound faded away.
“You really think someone was trying to get in?” I asked as we made our way up the dark, uneven stairs by flashlight. “Maybe it was just one of the guards. Turning out the lights because he thought nobody was using them.”
“Guards,” Stefan scoffed. “What guards? There is one guard on duty, at the main gate. His job is to keep tourists from sneaking in without buying tickets.”
“Okay, who has access to this part of the palace?”
“Dozens of people,” he fretted as he reached through the gate and fumbled to open the padlock. “Maintenance workers. Tour guides. Docents. But it’s dark and dirty down here, so everybody avoids it.” Finally I heard the lock click open.
“Almost everybody,” I corrected. “So who knows what’s in the treasure room?”
He shook his head, then pushed the iron grille open. “Nobody, really. Just the three of us. My boss — a petty bureaucrat — knows I found some bones, but he has no idea how important they are. And he’s not inquisitive.”
“Well, somebody’s inquisitive,” I pointed out. “Maybe we need a security camera to find out who. Or maybe we should move the bones someplace more secure.” He frowned, and didn’t reply; instead, he heaved the gate shut with a clang, then snapped the lock back into place.
We’d left the treasure chamber only minutes after we’d heard the furtive sounds above us. Stefan was clearly jumpy, and I was exhausted, so we’d decided to stop for the day and resume in the morning.
“Let me play devil’s advocate about the bones,” I said as we recrossed the cavernous cellar, or dungeon, or whatever it was, by flashlight. “How could that possibly be the skeleton of Jesus?”
“Sshh,” cautioned Stefan.
I lowered my voice to a murmur. “First off, Jesus died at thirty-three,” I went on. “This guy’s way older than that. Come on, you saw the arthritic changes in the vertebrae, Miranda.” We reached the bigger staircase, which would restore us to the world of light and air.
“Maybe he just put a lot of wear and tear on his spine,” she countered. “A carpenter? Back in the days before Black and Decker? That’s heavy lifting, man. Bad for the back. Remember the skeleton from that slave cemetery in Memphis? We know the guy died at forty, plus or minus, but his spine looked sixty.”
“But his cranial sutures didn’t,” I pointed out. “They were still very rugged. This guy’s look like they’ve been sealed and spackled. He’s older than I am; I’d bet my belt sander on it.”
She laughed, but there was no time for a retort because by then we’d reached the top of the staircase, stepped around the velvet cordon, and rejoined the tourists. The maneuver made me feel like one of the costumed characters at Disney World, who cross the Magic Kingdom in underground tunnels, then pop out of concealed openings in the shrubbery when it’s time to work the crowd.
Leaving the palace, we crossed the plaza and headed back through the tunnel to the parking garage. Except for us, the corridor was empty, so I renewed the debate. “Call me Doubting Thomas,” I persisted, “but what about the Resurrection? If these are the bones of Jesus, he didn’t rise from the dead.”
“Ha,” chuckled Stefan. “That would make things interesting for the Church, wouldn’t it? They would have to change the story a little bit.” He sounded gleeful at the prospect. “Maybe the pope hid the bones so he wouldn’t have to explain them.”
“Why not just destroy them?” I asked. “Get rid of the evidence altogether? That’d be a lot safer.”
“Too powerful,” he said. “Imagine, if you are the pope, having the bones of Christ. What a secret to possess! The ultimate knowledge, the ultimate forbidden fruit, you see?” He pressed the button of his keyless remote, and the Fiat beeped a few slots away, its lights flashing in the gloom of the garage.
“I don’t see why the bones of Jesus would pose a huge problem,” Miranda mused. “You could argue that he rose from the dead, lived another twenty or thirty years, and then died of natural causes, right? That still allows for the Resurrection.”
“Could be,” I conceded grudgingly as I folded into the tiny backseat. “But there’s that whole ‘ascended into heaven’ bit, too — isn’t that like the Resurrection, Part B?”
“Hairsplitting,” she said, with a definitive slam of the door. “How many bones can dance on the head of a pin? Come on, let’s get you settled at Lumani, then grab some grub.”
Stefan had leased an apartment near the Palace of the Popes for the summer, and Miranda was staying in a modern, charmless hotel a block from the palace. That hotel was fully booked now, though, as was every other hotel near the palace — a month-long theater festival was about to fill Avignon with throngs of tourists — so they’d been forced to look farther afield for my lodgings. Within the narrow circumference of old Avignon, luckily, no place was terribly far afield.
The Fiat spiraled down through the underground garage and out past the city wall, and Stefan turned onto a road that circled the wall like a moat. To our right were the wall’s stone ramparts; to our left, the green waters of the Rhône. Halfway around the perimeter, we re-entered the old city and doubled back, this time hemmed tightly between the wall’s inner face and the press of densely packed houses, their stone and stucco façades crowding the narrowest sidewalk I’d ever seen. We pulled up in front of a three-story structure that offered only one tiny, round window — scarcely more than a porthole — at street level, though the upper levels each had several large windows. An arched wooden door, painted emerald green, was set into the wall to the left of the porthole, but the door was locked, and didn’t look like a gateway to hospitality, at least not to my bleary eyes. Stefan rapped sharply on the door, waited a bit, and then rapped again, harder. Miranda, meanwhile, wandered farther up the street, stopping at a vine-draped opening in the wall that was secured by a pair of barn-style doors, also emerald green. “I think this is the entrance,” she called. “Here’s a sign, and a doorbell.” She pressed the button, and deep within the building I heard a faint buzz.