The Fifth Gospel(24)

            Nogara sighed. “We didn’t realize how much work the Poor Clare nuns had done. We knew they had sewn patches over the holes. We didn’t know—because we couldn’t see—that they had also woven threads into the Shroud to strengthen it. Only under a microscope could they be distinguished. So, inadvertently, we tested a fabric that mixed original linen with repair threads. This American chemist is the first to have discovered the mistake. One of his colleagues has told me that parts of the sample weren’t even linen. The nuns made their repairs with cotton.”

            A cool energy spread through the room. In Nogara’s eyes was a controlled giddiness.

            “Alli,” Simon whispered, “this is it. This is finally it.”

            I fingered the chemistry journal. “The exhibit,” I said, “will be about these scientific tests?”

            Ugo allowed himself a smile. “The tests are only the beginning. If the Shroud is really from 33 AD, then what happened to it for the next thousand years? I’ve spent months digging deeper into the Shroud’s history, trying to answer the biggest mystery of its past: where was it hiding for thirteen centuries before it suddenly appeared in France? And I have some very good news.” He hesitated. “If I may interrupt your meal, I’d like you all to come somewhere with me.”

            From a drawer he collected a thick ring of keys to the column of bolts and chains on the front door. Then he tucked a plastic bag from his refrigerator into his pocket.

            “Where?” Peter asked.

            Ugo winked. “I think you’re going to like it.”



            DARK WAS FALLING AS we followed him through the palace halls to the rear doors of Saint Peter’s. The sampietrini, the janitors of the basilica, were starting to nudge tourists out the exits. But they recognized Ugo and left the four of us alone.

            No matter how many times I’ve entered that church, it has always given me a shiver. When I was a child, my father told me that Saint Peter’s was so tall, three whales could stand head-to-tail inside it, like a circus act on a unicycle, with enough room left for them to wear the Coliseum as a crown. On the floor, the sizes of other famous churches are measured out and engraved in gold letters, like tombstones of little fish in the belly of the leviathan. It is a place made by human hands, but not to human scale.

            Ugo brought us toward the altar beneath Michelangelo’s dome and pointed to the four corners around us. In each corner stood a tower of marble.

            “Do you know what’s inside these piers?” he asked.

            I nodded. The piers—each one of them almost as large as the Arc de Triomphe—were mountains of solid concrete and stone, built to support the immense dome. Inside each one was a narrow channel, a man-size wormhole, rising to a hidden room. On special occasions, the canons of Saint Peter’s would display the extraordinary contents of those rooms.

            Relics.

            Five hundred years ago, when the Renaissance popes set out to rebuild the greatest church in human history, they put four of Christianity’s most hallowed artifacts into the reliquaries of these piers. Then four statues were built, thirty feet high, signaling the relics that lay inside.

            “Saint Andrew,” Ugo said, pointing to the first. “The brother of Saint Peter. The first-called of the apostles. His skull was put in this pier.”

            Ugo pivoted. His finger was now pointing to a statue of a woman carrying a giant cross.

            “Saint Helena,” he said. “The mother of Constantine, the first Christian emperor. She visited Jerusalem and returned with the True Cross. The popes placed wood from that cross in this pier.”

            The third statue was of a woman rushing forward with her arms outstretched. Between her hands was perhaps the most mystical of the basilica relics.