A service elevator opens. Two art restorers appear from downstairs. In the distance, workmen tape drywall seams. Electricians check lights. This many people, from this many departments, working together at short notice, gives the vague feeling of a state of emergency. This must be why Simon called. Ugo seems to have left a lot unfinished.
The deeper we get into the galleries, the more curious I become. On the wall is a billboard-size photo of the scientists who announced the radiocarbon results in 1988. Behind them in the photograph, written on a blackboard, is the official date range established by the carbon tests, punctuated by a snide exclamation mark: 1260–1390! I don’t understand why Ugo would’ve mounted this here, until I see a glass cabinet resembling a jeweler’s case, padded with black satin. Hovering on gold armatures inside it is a row of ancient books, one of them sitting higher than the rest. A Hungarian Mass book, a placard says. It’s opened to a black-ink illustration showing Jesus’ dead body being prepared on its burial sheet.
The burial sheet is strikingly consistent with the Turin Shroud: it has the right dimensions, the right method of wrapping the corpse, the right posture of Jesus’ body with his hands modestly crossed over his genitals. It even gets right a rare detail that Ugo once explained to me: no thumbs are visible. Modern medical examiners have found that a nail piercing a particular nerve near the hand causes the thumbs to retract involuntarily. Almost no painting in Western art gets this correct—but the Shroud and this little drawing both do. Most amazing of all, the cloth in the illustration has four dots in the shape of an L. These are the unexplained “poker holes” in the Holy Shroud, just below Jesus’ elbow. The artist of this book must have studied the Turin Shroud up close. Yet the placard beside the illustrated Mass book says, in modest type:
MANUSCRIPT WRITTEN IN 1192 AD.
1192 AD. Sixty-eight years before the earliest possible radiocarbon date.
Scanning all the placards in the case, I suddenly understand. Ugo is making a point. The giant photo on one side of the gallery is facing off against the manuscripts on the other. We will pit our library against your lab. Your science is young and has no memory, but our Church is ancient and forgets nothing. These books virtually prove that the radiocarbon tests are wrong: every book in this case mentions a relic seemingly identical to the Shroud, and all of these books were written before the earliest possible radiocarbon date.
I stare at the strange, fanciful names of their authors. Ordericus Vitalis. Gervase of Tilbury. These manuscripts are starlight from an extinct universe. Original copies of Latin authors writing in the age of the Crusades. The schism between Catholics and Orthodox is usually dated to 1054, when an angry papal messenger in the Orthodox capital of Constantinople took it upon himself to excommunicate the patriarch. But it would never have happened if Westerners hadn’t already become disconnected from the East and its Christian traditions. The Crusades, decades later, were what reopened the West’s eyes—and the manuscripts I see here, written in the 1100s, capture that exact moment. My rusty Latin is just enough to make out the news trickling in from the Holy Land, the news that again and again seems to have captured the Catholic imagination: there is a city called Edessa, in which is kept an ancient cloth imprinted with a mystical image of Jesus.
I didn’t realize the extent of the evidence Ugo had found. And the Diatessaron is yet to come, probably in the final gallery that lies ahead.
Suddenly Peter’s hand breaks out of my grip. “Simon!” he cries.
I look up to find my brother moving toward us quickly, descending like a bird of prey—blade-thin, with his cassock feathered out behind him.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
His blue eyes swirl with emotion. He sweeps up Peter in one arm and slips the other behind my back, ushering us back outside to the rear entrance to the museums. Then, in a low voice, he says, “Last night Lucio had a visitor at his apartment. A messenger from the Rota who had news about Ugo.”