Madonna and Corpse (7 page)

I bent to straighten one corner of the body bag, and as I did, my cell phone began bleating. Fishing the phone from the pocket of the jumpsuit, I glanced at the display. I didn’t recognize the number; it started with 330, an area code I didn’t know, and it looked longer than a phone number should be. I stared dumbly for a moment before I realized why. It was a foreign call, and 33 was the country code—the code, I suddenly remembered, for France.
Miranda!
I flipped open the phone, but in my excitement, I fumbled it, and it fell onto my foot and skittered beneath the body bag. Flinging aside the bag, I rooted for the phone, which had lodged—ironically and absurdly—beside the dead man’s left ear. I had just laid hold of it when it fell silent. “
Damn
it,” I muttered. I punched the “send” button, only to be told by a robotic voice that my call “cannot be completed as dialed,” doubtless because it was an overseas number. “Damn damn
damn
,” I muttered, but just as I finished the third
damn
, the phone rang again, displaying the same number.

This time, I did not drop it. “Hello? Miranda? How are you?”

“Ah, no, sorry, it is not Miranda.” The voice was a man’s, accented in French. “This is Stefan Beauvoir. The archaeologist Miranda is helping. She wanted me to call you.”

My internal alarms began to shriek. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to Miranda? Tell me.”

“The doctor says it is—
merde
, how do you say it?—the rupture of the appendicitis?”

“Miranda’s got a ruptured appendix?”

“
Oui
, yes, a ruptured appendix. She asked me to call and say, please, can you come?”

“Can I come? What, to France?”

“
Oui.
Please, can you come to France? To Avignon?”
Ahveen-YOHN
. I didn’t like the sound of it. “She is having the surgery now, and she will be very grateful if you can come.”

“Doesn’t she want someone from her family?”

“Ah, but it is not possible. I call her mother and her sister. Neither one has a passport. So she thinks next of you, and asks if you can please come quickly.”

“Of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll get on a plane this afternoon.”

“
Bon
, good. You can fly into Avignon, but the flights are better if you come to Lyon or Marseilles. Marseilles is one hour by car.”

Racing down the path and out the gate, I frantically flagged down the TBI chopper, which was quivering on its landing skids, transitioning toward flight. Stone took off his headset, scrambled out of the helicopter, and hurried over to me.

“Doc, is something wrong?”

“Can you guys give me a ride? I need to get someplace fast.”

“Where?”

“France.”

SIXTY SECONDS LATER, WE WERE AIRBORNE AGAIN, this time with me in the right front seat. “Does this thing have turbo?” I asked the pilot. By way of an answer, he rolled the helicopter into a 90-degree bank.

“Holy shit,” I heard Stone squawk from the back.

Skimming low across the river, the chopper hurtled toward Neyland Stadium. “I don’t know where you can land,” I said, scanning the vicinity of the stadium. “The parking lots all look pretty full.”

The pilot grinned. “I think I see a spot that might just be big enough.” Swooping low over the towering scoreboard, we plunged straight into the bowl of the stadium.

“Touchdown,” Stone deadpanned as we thumped into the south end zone.

MY SECRETARY SCARCELY GLANCED UP AS I DASHED past her desk and into my office. “Peggy,” I called out, yanking down the zipper of the greasy, sooty jumpsuit. “I need you to do some airline research for me, please.” Yanking off my boots and the jumpsuit, I tossed them in a corner.

“For that conference in Seattle next month? I booked your tickets last week, remember? Nonrefundable.” Her typing hadn’t even slowed.

“Peggy, stop typing. Listen. I need to fly to France. Marseilles. Like, ten minutes ago.” On the other side of the doorway, her keyboard fell silent. “It’s Miranda,” I went on, pulling on the clothes I’d intended to wear to my meeting with the president. “Ruptured appendix. She’s going in for surgery right now.” Rummaging in my closet, I dug out my “go” bag, a duffel I kept packed and at the ready, and slung it over my shoulder.

“Oh, my Lord,” she gasped. “Poor thing.”

By then I was already headed for the staircase, my shirttail still untucked, my shoes and socks in one hand. “I’m off to the airport,” I yelled over my shoulder. “Call me once you book it.” As the steel fire door slammed shut behind me, I thought I heard her say something else, but by then I was halfway down the steps.

It wasn’t until the helicopter was lifting off from the goal line that I realized what she’d said. The realization came when I saw her dash onto the field, wildly waving her arms, clutching my laptop in one hand and a small blue booklet in the other: my passport.

Twenty-two minutes and thirty-three hundred dollars later, my passport in one hand and my bag in the other, I boarded a United flight for Dulles airport in Washington, D.C. From Dulles, Lufthansa would take me to Frankfurt, Germany, and finally to Marseilles, where Beauvoir had promised to pick me up.

By the time I boarded at Dulles, I felt sure Miranda was out of surgery, but my half-dozen phone calls got no answer or return message. The silence was terrifying.

As the aircraft climbed out of Washington and wheeled toward the Atlantic, the ten-thousand-foot chime sounded, reminding me of the church bell I’d heard tolling a few hours before.
Please
, I prayed, though I could not have said to whom or what I prayed.
Please not for Miranda.

Chapter 2

Marseilles, france
The Present

THE CUSTOMS AGENT DIDN’T BOTHER TO LOOK UP AS he took my passport and reached for the inked stamp. “Is the purpose of your visit business or pleasure, Monsieur Brockton?” His flat tone suggested that he was already profoundly bored with me, even before I spoke.

I hesitated, uncertain how to respond. “Pleasure” didn’t seem to fit the urgent nature of the trip, but if I said “business,” that might open the door to more questions, or to the need for a work visa. “Uh, pleasure,” I finally said. He looked up with a frown, as if he disapproved of pleasure, or of my limited enthusiasm. Then, with a slight sniff, he whacked the stamp down onto the page and flipped my passport back onto the counter.

As I emerged through the glass doors of the international terminal into the outer lobby, I scanned the crowd, searching for the face of a French archaeologist who appeared to be searching for the face of an American anthropologist. What would a French archaeologist look like? Angular and arrogant, sporting a black beret, an unfiltered cigarette, and a pencil mustache? In my anxiety over Miranda, I hadn’t thought to ask Stefan how I’d recognize him, and he’d neither volunteered that information nor inquired about my own appearance.

I was midway through my second scan of the throng when, over the general din of foreign words and exotic accents, I heard a laugh—a familiar female laugh. My head snapped back to the right, to the cluster of faces I’d just rescanned, and there stood Miranda, arms spread wide, grinning broadly and shaking her head as if to say, “Unbelievable! You looked right past me! Twice!” I dropped my bag in astonishment; my hands flew to my chest, over my heart, as relief and happiness flooded me. Miranda was here, and she was all right. In fact, she looked better than all right, she looked fabulous: strong, healthy, excited, even radiant. What she did not look like was someone who’d just gotten out of emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix.

Miranda ran to me and flung her arms around my neck. “Thank you,
thank you
, for dropping everything and racing over here. I am
so glad
to see you!” She squeezed me tightly.

“Be careful,” I said. “You’ll rip out your stitches. Doesn’t that hurt like hell? Why aren’t you still in a hospital bed? How can you look so good so soon after surgery?”

She laughed again, a musical, pealing laugh like carillon bells. “So many questions, so little time! I’m fine. Doesn’t hurt a bit. I don’t actually have stitches.” I pulled back and stared at her, more confused than ever. She laughed again. “You’re the victim of a slight deception. But don’t worry; it’s for a good cause, and you’ll be glad you came.” I shot her a glance—one loaded with questions and blame, which she clearly comprehended—but she just shook her head. “All will be revealed in the fullness of time. After we get to Avignon. Meanwhile, meet Stefan.” She turned toward the line of faces, and a slight, bookish-looking man, forty or so, stepped forward, limping slightly—not one of the French traits I’d imagined. I extended my hand, and he shook it weakly. “Stefan Beauvoir, Bill Brockton.” Suddenly Stefan took me by the shoulders and kissed me on both cheeks. I’d known that cheek kissing was a common French custom, but in my imagination only men and women greeted one another this way; I’d somehow overlooked the fact that men kissed other men. I preferred the American handshake.
Strongly
preferred the American handshake.

Stefan cast a dubious eye on the yellow L.L. Bean duffel I was carrying. “Where is the rest of your baggage?”

“This is it,” I said. “I didn’t have time to pack. Besides, I didn’t think I’d be staying long.” He shrugged and smiled. It was a slight, cryptic smile, as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s but a bit more coy, as if he enjoyed prolonging my suspense.

It was lucky my bag was small, because Stefan’s car—a Fiat Punto—was built for midgets. The engine was proportionately tiny, too. A few miles north of the airport, the car slowed to a crawl as the road angled up a narrow valley between rocky hills. When we finally topped out, we’d left the coastal plain for the rolling farmland of southern Provence.

Miranda kept deflecting my questions, promising to explain everything once we were in Avignon, but with each deflection I found myself growing edgier. Now that my panic about her health had been resolved, I resented being manipulated—tricked and scared into coming—and I hated being kept in the dark. “It’s not a good idea to talk in the car,” Stefan finally interjected when I launched another inquiry. “We might have bugs.”

“He means it might be bugged,” Miranda explained.

“I knew what he meant,” I snapped.

“Ouch,” she said.

“Sorry,” I grumbled. “I’m tired from the trip—I can never sleep on planes. And somebody tried to barbecue me yesterday. So I’m kinda cranky at the moment.”

“
Barbecue
you?” She sounded slightly concerned but mostly amused.

“Barbecue,” I repeated. “What’s the French word?
Flambé?
” I told them the story, and ended by leaning forward, putting my scorched head between the front seats.

Miranda rubbed the stubble. “Wow, that’s crispy. I’d say you just used up another one of your nine lives.”

Stefan took a glance, then looked in the rearview mirror. “Is there any possibility that the barbecue chef—the guy who was shooting at you—followed you to France?”

The thought had not occurred to me before. “Why? Is someone tailing us?” I turned and looked out the rear window and saw half a dozen cars behind us on the busy highway. How would we know if one of them was following us? “I doubt that the guy shooting at me had any idea who I was. And he certainly wouldn’t have any way of connecting me to you, and to Avignon.” But despite my confident words, Stefan’s question had planted a seed of doubt in my mind, and it was already germinating into anxiety.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Miranda said. “And I know you’re exhausted. And of course you have a right to know what’s going on here. Please trust us and be patient a little longer. Relax and enjoy the countryside.”

I tried. But with Stefan’s eyes darting to the mirrors again and again, my jangled nerves refused to settle. “You still seem worried that we’re being followed,” I finally said. “Do you think someone is tailing
you
?”

“Non,”
Stefan said curtly.

“There might have been a car following us in Avignon this morning,” Miranda added. “But Stefan managed to lose it before we got out of the city.”

Stefan held up a hand for silence. The farther we drove, the louder the silence became.

An hour after leaving Marseilles, we crossed the Rhône—a beautiful river, almost as lovely as the Tennessee—and then Stefan abruptly whipped off the highway and onto a two-lane road. As soon as he’d made the turn, he and Miranda checked behind us again, then shared a look of relief at the emptiness of the road. Through tiny villages and past farmhouses and barns, the road followed the river upstream. After a few miles, we turned onto another highway that took us eastward, to another bridge spanning the river. On the far bank stood a low hill ringed by an ancient wall and crowned by tiled rooftops and massive stone towers, all glowing in the golden light of Provence.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Avignon,” Stefan announced. “City of the popes. Once the richest and most powerful city in Europe.”

Chapter 3

Avignon
The Present

STEFAN THREADED THE FIAT THROUGH A PORTAL IN the ancient wall and into the old part of the city, navigating between stone buildings that were already old by the time the
Mayflower
set sail from England. Crooking to the left, the street burrowed into an underground parking garage carved deep beneath the hill. Stefan spiraled up several ramps, parking on the topmost level near a long pedestrian tunnel. Emerging at the end of the tunnel, we blinked and squinted our way into dazzling daylight.

We had surfaced on a large plaza, a couple of hundred feet wide but several times that long. Fronting the plaza, looming above it, was an immense castle, its high stone walls punctuated by even higher towers. “Le Palais des Papes,” Stefan said. “The Palace of the Popes.”

The façade of the palace was easily twice the length of a football field, the stone walls were forty or fifty feet high, and the towers at the corners—one of them within spitting distance of the cathedral—soared high above the walls. With its crenellated battlements, the structure looked designed to withstand a military siege. “
Palace
of the Popes? Looks more like
Fortress
of the Popes.”

“A mighty fortress is our God,” Miranda quipped.

Slightly to the left of the highest, most formidable tower of the palace rose a more graceful, less militant spire, this one topped by a twenty-foot gold statue of a woman wearing a tiara of stars. “Who’s the gilded lady with the stars in her crown?”

“The Virgin Mary, of course,” Stefan said. “That’s Avignon Cathedral. The house of God.”

“How come God’s house is so much smaller than the pope’s palace?”

My question drew a smile from Miranda.

From across the river, the palace had appeared immense but also fanciful—Euro Disney, or maybe PopeLand. Up close, though, it loomed over the square, hulking and intimidating. I didn’t know a lot about Catholicism, but I associated it with saints and stained glass. This, though, was not the architecture of inspiration and aspiration; this was the architecture of subjugation and domination.

We entered the palace by way of an imposing central gate, a portal through which a steady stream of tourists flowed. Once inside, we stepped behind a large display and ducked down a cordoned-off staircase. It led deep into the palace, to a vast chamber whose darkness seemed to clutch at the narrow beam of Stefan’s flashlight.

The beam brought us to an iron grille made of bars thicker than my thumbs, fastened with a hefty padlock. Stefan retrieved a pair of keys from a cord around his neck—keys that made me think of Saint Peter, the heavenly gatekeeper. Leaning against the grille, Stefan wrestled it open on groaning hinges, then motioned us inside and closed the gate behind us. He stooped to the floor and flicked a switch in a long cord that stretched somewhere into the darkness, and a string of dim bulbs, jury-rigged to the damp wall, revealed a crumbling stone staircase that descended through a rough-hewn tunnel.

Reaching awkwardly back through the gate, Stefan replaced the lock and clicked it shut behind us, locking us in, then led us forward. As we edged down the steep, uneven steps, we seemed to be descending not merely into the depths of the papal palace, but through the layers of time itself: one century deep, two centuries, three, four, five, six centuries into the past.

The stairs ended in a short horizontal hallway; at its far end, another padlocked gate of heavy iron guarded the entrance to a cavelike room whose dimensions I couldn’t discern for the darkness. This gate was even heavier than the first, and it took Stefan and Miranda both to tug it open. Inside the chamber, stout stone pillars and Gothic arches supported a low, vaulted ceiling. A lone bulb—the last in the string of lights rigged in the stairway—illuminated a small arc of the rough floor and the nearest pair of columns. Stefan turned to study my face as I surveyed the room. “Probably too far from the dining hall to be the wine cellar,” I said. “Was this a crypt? A dungeon?”

He shook his head and smiled, evidently pleased that I’d guessed wrong. “
La chambre du trésor
,” he answered. “The treasure room.”

“And was the treasure room half empty or half full?” I was joking, but he took it seriously.

“Totally full.
Complètement.
This room was overflowing with gold and silver and jewels. Millions’, maybe billions’ worth.”

“Hmm. I never really thought about the net worth of the pope,” I said.

“The pope did, for sure,” he shot back. “The popes of Avignon were richer and more powerful than any of Europe’s kings or emperors. Charlemagne ruled half of Europe. The popes ruled
all
of Europe.
Tout entier
.”

“But they didn’t exactly rule,” I pointed out. “Not the way Charlemagne did.”

“Non?”
He cocked his head, lifting an eyebrow. “Tell me, how was it different?”

“Well, the popes didn’t have an army.”

“Bool-shit,” he scoffed. “Who were the Crusaders and the Knights Templar if not the pope’s warriors? They were sent to the Middle East to add the Holy Land to the empire of the Holy Father.
L’impérialisme
, plain and simple.”

“You’re putting a mighty cynical spin on the Church,” I said.

“
Mon Dieu
, just look at this place where we are working. The biggest Gothic palace in Europe. The epicenter of money and power.”

I flashed back to the skyline I’d seen as we approached Avignon from across the Rhône. “Okay,” I conceded, “maybe you have a point.”

“Oh, hell, don’t encourage him, Dr. B,” Miranda squawked. “He’ll pontificate all day. Pun intended.”

Ignoring her protest, Stefan resumed. “Go; sell everything you have, and give the money to the poor—that’s what Jesus said. The popes said, ‘Give the money to
us
.’ ”

“I take it you don’t approve,” I said drily.

He shrugged and smiled cynically. “
Au contraire, mon ami.
I approve completely. And gratefully.” He swept his arm in a wide, encompassing arc. “I owe my career to the popes. They and their faithful flocks—pious, hardworking sheep—created the world’s greatest art and architecture. I would be foolish and ungrateful if I did not approve.”

Miranda was right; once he got wound up, it was tough to wind him down, and I was fast approaching my limit. “I’m thinking you didn’t bring me here just to talk about the glory and the greed of the medieval popes,” I said. “So cut to the chase. What the hell is going on here? And why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?”

“Come,” he said, and walked toward the center of the treasure chamber. As I followed him into the darkness, my eyes gradually adjusted, and I saw that a makeshift screen had been rigged between two of the pillars by hanging a blue plastic tarp, a jarring contrast with the ancient stonework. Stefan held one end of the curtain aside for me, and I stepped behind it into the blackness.

Stefan flipped another switch on an electrical cord, and a pair of halogen work lights flashed on. My eyes squinted shut against the blinding glare; when they opened, I saw that part of the room’s back wall had collapsed—a roughly semicircular section, head high and an arm span wide. The stones had been stacked in the corner of the room, the rubble excavated, and the opening shored up with rough timber framing. “I thought you were an archaeologist,” I quipped. “This looks like a job for a stonemason.”

Stefan pointed to the right. Along the side wall was a long table covered by a white sheet. On the white sheet was a complete human skeleton, laid out in anatomical order.

The bones looked old; their color was a cross between gray putty and red-orange caramel, with darker, greasy stains here and there. Wordlessly Stefan offered me a pair of latex gloves. I put them on and picked up the skull, my favorite place to start.

The bones were definitely a man’s—the strong brow ridge above the eyes told me that, as did the big bump at the base of the skull, the external occipital protuberance: small and subtle in women, prominent in men. The nasal opening was broad, but the face itself was comparatively narrow, framed by prominent zygomatics—cheekbones—that gave it an angular, aristocratic appearance.

Cradling the skull upside down in my left palm, I studied the upper teeth and the roof of the mouth. Two molars and a canine tooth were missing, and several others had cavities. The presence of all four wisdom teeth, plus the complete fusion of the sutures—the seams—in the upper palate, confirmed that the man was an adult. Turning the skull right side up, I examined the cranial sutures, the zigzag joints in the top of the skull. In young adults, the sutures are dark and prominent, almost like irregular zipper teeth. This man’s, by contrast, were smooth and fading, almost obliterated. Although cranial sutures can give only a rough indication of age, the smoothness of these suggested that this man was my age, mid-fifties, or older—maybe a decade or more older. The spine seemed to bear this out, too; the vertebrae were beginning to develop the ragged bony fringe known as osteoarthritic lipping, which is one of the skeletal signs of aging. This man’s spine, I realized with an unexpected, ironic smile, probably looked a lot like my own.

It was when I looked at the ribs that I felt a familiar spike of adrenaline, the rush that always came when I got hooked on a forensic case. On the right side of the rib cage, everything was normal, but on the left side, the eleventh and twelfth ribs—the lowermost, “floating” ribs, which attach to the spine but not to the sternum—looked slightly truncated. I picked them up and inspected their distal ends, which curve around the sides of the lower chest but don’t wrap all the way to the front. Normally they’re tipped with cartilage, though these were too old and clean for that. But when I compared them with the matching ribs from the right side, the difference between them was dramatic. The tips of the right ribs were smooth and rounded, but the ends of the left ribs were flat and jagged. The ends of these two ribs appeared to have been sheared off by a sharp blade.

I looked up at Miranda and Stefan. “Unless this guy fell on his own sword, I’d say he was stabbed to death.”

“But wait, there’s more,” Miranda said, eyes shining. “Look at the extremities.”

I scanned the right arm, the one closest to me. I noticed nothing amiss until I got to the distal end of the forearm. Near the wrist both bones, the radius and the ulna, were gouged on their medial surfaces, as if a knife had been forced between them. I felt a slight tingling, which intensified when I inspected the left forearm and found similar gouges there.

“Now the feet,” she said. I almost missed it: more gouge marks, these between the metatarsals, the bones at mid foot.

Wheels were turning in my mind, but they were turning slowly—bogged down partly by fatigue but also by disbelief at what I was seeing, or what it meant. “Okay, so what’s the story? Where’d this guy come from? And why all the secrecy about a skeleton that’s six or seven centuries old?”

She looked at Stefan. “Now?”

He nodded. “
Oui.
Now.”

Miranda stepped forward and lifted the flap of overhanging sheet from the front of the table. Tucked on the floor beneath was a box two feet long by a foot or so square. The box was stone, but it had roughly the same shape as thousands of corrugated cardboard boxes stashed beneath the football stadium in Knoxville—boxes I myself had carefully packed with the bones of the Anthropology Department’s skeletal collection. “A stone ossuary?” She nodded. “The bones were in this ossuary, sealed inside the wall?” She nodded again.

“The wall collapsed,” Stefan explained. “Vibrations from a jackhammer outside. When they saw something inside, that’s when they called me. And that’s when I called Miranda.”

“This was wrapped around the ossuary,” she added, lifting a tangle of crumbling cord from inside the ossuary. Near one end of the cord was an irregular disk of soft gray metal—lead—stamped with what appeared to be tiny likenesses of two men’s heads. I shot a questioning look at her.

Stefan answered. “Those figures are Saint Peter and Saint Paul. That’s a papal seal.”

“You’re saying those bones were put there by one of the popes?” He nodded. “Why would a pope seal up a skeleton and hide it in a wall?” I asked. “Was this a rival? Somebody he killed to get the papal crown?”

“
Non
. Not if the inscription is true.”

“Inscription?”

He pointed, and for the first time I noticed a flat, rectangular panel propped against one end of the ossuary. It was the lid, made of the same pale, soft stone as the box. Miranda hoisted it from the floor and laid it at one end of the table.

Two images were chiseled into the lid—images that sent chills up my middle-aged, incipiently arthritic spine. One was a lamb. The other was a cross.

Suddenly all the secrecy and skittishness made sense. This would be the find of the century—no, this would be the greatest archaeological find of all time—if these were indeed the bones of the Lamb of God, the crucified Christ.

“So,” he said, “perhaps you can understand why we didn’t want to tell you over the phone, or by e-mail. Too big. Too risky. And now that you know, you have a choice. Do you want to stay and help us study it, help us figure out if the inscription is true? Help us figure out if it’s Jesus?” Something about the way he put it—“help us”—hit a nerve. I wrote it off as jet lag, until he added, “You could be third author on our publications.” Third author? That was a role to which only first-year graduate students aspired. And the phrase “our publications” implied a cozy possessiveness on Stefan’s part—not just of the bones, but also of Miranda—that I didn’t like. I opened my mouth to say no, but Miranda didn’t give me time.

“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.