Madonna and Corpse (8 page)

“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 metal: 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.

The sign, partly hidden by the vines, consisted of three repetitions of the word “Lumani” cut from a thick plate of steel and bolted to the wall, one atop the other. The vines hung halfway down the doors, an irregular fringe that varied between chest and head high. The tendrils reminded me of kudzu, the fast-growing Tennessee vine that, given half a chance and half a week, could swallow trees, barns, even slow-moving cows. Inside, I heard footsteps approaching the doors, then the rattle of a key in the lock. I suspected I was about to be greeted by an eccentric, crabby old Frenchwoman in bathrobe and slippers.

The left-hand door swung open, and the crabby old Frenchwoman turned out to be a lovely woman, possibly fifty, with wavy brown hair, warm brown eyes, and an even warmer smile. “Ah,
bonjour.
Hello, and welcome to Lumani,” she said. “I am Elisabeth.” An elfin-looking man with sparkling eyes and a short fringe of gray hair rounded a corner and joined her. “And this is my husband, Jean.” The final sound of his name—the
-on
of
zhon
—lodged in her nose rather than emerging through her lips, and I was reminded that French pronunciation was a mystery I would never master. “Please, please to come inside.”

Miranda, Stefan, and I ducked beneath the curtain of vines, followed my hosts down a short driveway, and stepped into a place of enchantment: a huge, enclosed garden courtyard complete with an arbor, hammocks, a gurgling fountain, large plane trees, and an immense metal mobile hanging from a cable rigged to one of the trees.

“What a lovely place!” exclaimed Miranda, turning in a slow circle to take it all in. Jean offered to show us around, while Elisabeth went to pour drinks—wine for everyone else, orange juice for me.

Lumani was like a cozy private gallery. The walls were covered with abstract paintings, and the garden and indoor spaces were full of sculptures, large and small. “The art is beautiful,” I said. “Are the artists local? From Avignon?”

“I made the sculptures,” Jean said shyly; then, with obvious pride, he added, “The paintings are by Elisabeth.”

Elisabeth emerged with the tray of drinks. I’d requested orange juice, but what she’d brought me was a deep red. Was it cranberry? Not my favorite, but I took a polite sip. Surprisingly, it
was
orange juice, freshly squeezed with a hint of pulp, but a richer flavor than regular orange juice—as if even the fruit in Avignon spoke with an exotic accent. “Delicious,” I said.

“
Merci. Oui
, it’s very special,” she said. “
L’orange sanguine
. Do you say ‘bloody orange’?”

Miranda grinned. “Blood orange,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “How appropriate.”

After we finished our drinks, Jean took me upstairs to my room. It was a third-floor aerie—I was practically nesting in one of the plane trees—with a bird’s-eye view of the garden. In the distance, beyond Jean and Elisabeth’s smaller, separate house, sprawled a jumble of tiled rooftops and spiky church spires. One of the spires, silhouetted against the sky a few blocks away, was unlike any I’d seen before: an open iron frame, its cluster of bells completely exposed. It was a bare-bones skeleton of a steeple, I realized; exactly my kind of steeple.

I pointed. “That church steeple—is it being restored?”

He followed my gaze. “Ah,
non
,” he said. “That is the design. It’s built that way for the mistral.”

“The what?”

“The mistral. Strong wind from the northwest. The tower is open so it doesn’t fight against the wind. The wind blows through, instead of pushing it down.” I liked the steeple even more now; its spare skeletal beauty was born of function.

As I leaned on the sill, lingering over the view, I noticed Miranda looking up, waving. “I’m jealous,” she called. “I wish
I
had a room overlooking the Garden of Eden.”

“Come visit anytime,” I said. “Just watch out for snakes. And don’t eat the apples.”

“SORRY, MIRANDA. WHAT?” I HADN’T HEARD THE question. My brain was empty but my mouth was full. Blissfully full.

“I know carbon-14 dating’s pretty good,” she repeated, “but how close can it get? How precisely can it nail the age of the bones?”

“Pretty damn close,” I finally answered. “
Man
, that’s good.”

I was finishing a bowl of lamb stew—my second bowl of lamb stew—at Pace é Salute, a Corsican restaurant near Lumani that Jean and Elisabeth had recommended. Its name translated as “Peace and Good Health,” both of which I regarded as fine things, but neither could compete with the honeyed lamb stew, made with tender chunks of lamb and a rich sauce of honey, garlic, citrus, and savory broth.

Suddenly Miranda’s question triggered a faint memory—faint but recent, something that had occurred as I was preparing to board my flight from Knoxville to Dulles. Was it really possible that only eighteen hours had passed since my secretary, Peggy, had dashed out to the helicopter with my computer and my passport? Reaching into the inner pocket of the jacket I’d been wearing for the past four thousand miles, I pulled out a letter she’d tucked into my passport—a letter marked “Urgent” that had arrived in the morning’s mail. “I’m glad you said that,” I told Miranda. “I would have forgotten this until the next time I went to the dry cleaner’s. And that might’ve been years.”

The envelope was postmarked Charlotte, North Carolina. Smoothing the letter, I scanned it again, because I’d given it only a cursory glance on the plane. “You’re not the only one interested in C-14 dating. So is the Institute for Biblical Science.”

“The Institute for Biblical Science?” Miranda’s eyebrows shot up. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

“Not necessarily,” I said, “though in practice, yeah, science often takes a backseat to the Bible.”

“And they’re writing to ask your advice about C-14 dating? I’m surprised they’re not writing to heap fire and brimstone on you. You’ve taken some fierce swings at creationism from time to time.”

“Not fierce,” I said. “Just factual. Okay, maybe a little fierce, too. I don’t get a lot of fan mail from the fundamentalists.” Putting on my reading glasses—a recent, annoying necessity—I read aloud. “ ‘Dear Dr. Brockton: I’m writing to ask your opinion on the accuracy of carbon-14 dating. Our Institute is initiating a study of artifacts from the Holy Land, and we would very much appreciate your thoughts on the precision and reliability of C-14 dating for establishing the age of artifacts, as well as human and animal bones. I would also appreciate any insights you have on the feasibility of extracting and sequencing genetic material from bone specimens. We would be happy to hire you as a consultant on this project, although—as you might expect—our budget is limited. Please contact me at your earliest opportunity to discuss this exciting project. Best regards, Dr. Adam Newman, Ph.D., Scientific Director, Institute for Biblical Science.’ ”

I folded the letter and reached for the envelope, but Stefan held out his hand. “Permit me?” I handed him the page. He read it quickly, then handed it back with a look of disdain. “Do what you want, but I advise you to stay away from them. Crazies. If you work with them, it will damage your reputation.”