"Oh, God, I don't want to go," said Art Historian Number One, abandoning the dignity of his status as president of five learned societies.
"It's such a gorgeouswell, you know," said Art Historian Number Two, normally a sober and phlegmatic man. "I mean, it's like a dream."
Sam couldn't blame them. Their last moments in the city were smack in the middle of the most famous postcard view in Venice, the Piazzetta with the Ducal Palace on one side, the Marciana on the other, and the tall columns of Saint Theodore and the lion of Saint Mark rising in the middle, while a flotilla of gondolas bobbed gently in the water below the Molo. Another flood of excited tourists meandered beside the garden, buying trinkets at the souvenir stands and taking pictures of each other against the noble spread of the lagoon.
Art Historian Number One bought a shiny pillow stamped with a view of San Marco, Art Historian Number Two a small plastic gondola. Then, regretfully, they stepped into the water taxi. Sam lifted down their baggage and paid the man at the wheel, hoping the enormous sum would look acceptable on the list of conference expenses.
It was over. The splendid Venetian conference in the Biblioteca Marciana dedicated to the manuscripts of Cardinal Bessarion and the printed books of Aldus Manutius was now part of history. Thank God, the conference proceedings would be edited by someone else. The books would remain on exhibition for another six weeks. Sam's work was done.
Slowly and a little painfully, he made his way back to the Marciana. In the entry he had to adjust his dazzled eyes to the darkness. He smiled at Signora Di Stefano, the dragon in her lair, and trudged up the two flights to his office.
"You look tired," said his secretary, looking at him with concern. "Well, no wonder." Signora Pino was an elderly woman, chosen long ago to ward off the jealousy of his late wife, whose ears and eyes had been ever alert for treachery. Now that Sam was a widower he could have hired the prettiest of pretty young girls to ornament his office, but he liked Signora Pino, and her job was secure.
"Yes," said Sam. "I think I'll take the rest of the day off."
"Of course. It's only right. I'll take care of things. Have a good rest. Sogni d'oro! Dreams of gold!"
She watched him go. Povero ragazzo! He looked so thin and stooped. The incessant demands of the conference had worn him out.
But at home there was a surprise. The first package of relics from the Treasury of San Marco was waiting for him.
"There was an armed guard," exclaimed his mother-in-law. "He made me sign for it. He wanted to stay until you came home. I was insulted! Did he think I was going to make off with his precious package? I told him he had another think coming. I asked him what was in it, and, do you know, he wouldn't tell me? I told him you were my son-in-law and that we had no secrets from each other, no secrets whatsoever, but he wouldn't say a word. I insisted that he leave my house, and he made a dreadful scene, but at last I literally pushed him out."
Sam smiled wearily. He could imagine the cowardice of the guard in the face of his bullying mother-in-law.
He went to his study and put the box on his desk. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and the knots in the string had been fastened with sealing wax. And yet the package had a disheveled look, as though someone had tried to undo the wrapping without untying the string. Perhaps his mother-in-law in her wounded pride and everlasting inquisitiveness had tried to unwrap it and failed.
Well, no matter. Sam cut the string, removed the wrapping, and opened the box. The relics from San Marco were in numbered packets, each one enclosed in tissue paper. He set them down carefully on a big piece of drawing paper and gently withdrew one of the relics from its packet. It was a piece of sacred wood. All together there were five fragments supposed to have come from the True Cross and ten pieces of unidentified bone.
Had they ever been looked at critically before? For how many hundreds or even thousands of years had they been objects of veneration? How many tragic appeals had been whispered to them, how many agonized prayers? It struck Sam with sudden force that his irreverent hands, picking up and testing these most sacred of Christian relics, were the hands of an infidel. He had to remind himself that it was high time these pieces of bone and fragments of sacro legno were looked at with a clear and objective eye.
The questions he would put to them were obvious. Were the bones human? And how old were the pieces of wood? Only if they had existed for nearly two thousand years could they have any claim to authenticity.
The determination of age would require carbon dating, and that was beyond his power. But at least he could determine whether or not the pieces of the cross were all from the same kind of tree. Were they oak or pine or cedar of Lebanon? His microscope could at least tell him that. And what if they were from trees that never existed in that part of the world at all? They would be exposed at last as frauds.