The Fifth Gospel (6 page)

“How?”

“By revealing something about the most famous image in the world. An image so famous that it outdraws Leonardo and Michelangelo combined. An image that outdraws entire
museums
. I'm talking about the image on the Shroud of Turin.”

I was glad Peter couldn't see my reaction.

“Now, I know what's going through your mind,” Nogara said. “We carbon-tested the Shroud. The tests revealed it to be a fake.”

I knew it better than he could possibly imagine.

“Yet even now,” Nogara continued, “when we exhibit the Shroud, it attracts millions of pilgrims. At a recent exhibition it drew two million people in eight weeks. Eight
weeks
. All to see a relic that has allegedly been disproved. Put that in perspective: the Shroud draws five times as many visitors as the most popular museum exhibit in the world. So imagine how many will come once I prove that the radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud was wrong.”

I faltered. “Doctor, you're putting me on.”

“Not at all. My exhibit will show that the Shroud is indeed the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.”

I turned to Simon, waiting for him to say something. But when he kept silent, I couldn't do the same. The carbon-dating had stunned our Church and crushed my father, who'd pinned his hopes on the scientific authentication of the Shroud as a rallying point between Catholics and Orthodox. Father had spent his career trying to make friends across the aisle, and before the announcement of the radiocarbon verdict, he and his assistant Michael Black had coaxed and urged and pleaded with Orthodox priests from around Italy to join them at the press conference in Turin. Risking the displeasure of their bishop, some of those priests came. It would've been a milestone, if it hadn't
been a catastrophe. The radiocarbon tests dated the linen cloth to the Middle Ages.

“Doctor,” I said, “people's hearts were broken sixteen years ago. Please don't put them through that all over again.”

But he was undaunted. He served us plates of food in silence, then rinsed his hands with bottled water and said, “Please, begin eating. I'll return in a moment. It's important that you see this for yourself.”

When he disappeared behind a screen to fetch something, I whispered to Simon, “Is this why you brought me here? To listen to this?”

“Yes.”

“Simon, he's a drunk.”

My brother nodded. “When he blacked out in the desert, it wasn't from heatstroke.”

“Then what am I doing here?”

“He needs your help.”

I ran a hand through my beard. “I know a priest in Trastevere who runs a twelve-step program.”

But Simon tapped his head. “The problem's up here. Ugo's worried that he won't finish his exhibit in time.”

“How can you be helping him with this? You really want to relive what happened to Father back then?”

Every television in our country had been tuned to the news conference when the lab results were announced. That night, the only sound in the Vatican was of children playing in the gardens, because our parents needed time to be alone. The experience wounded my father in a way he would never recover from. Michael Black abandoned him. Phone calls from old friends—from Orthodox friends—dried up. Father's heart attack came two months later.

“Listen to me,” I whispered. “This is not your problem.”

Simon squinted. “My flight to Ankara leaves in four hours. His flight to Urfa isn't until next week. I need you to keep an eye on him until he leaves.”

I waited. There was something more in his eyes.

“Ugo's about to ask you a favor,” he said. “If you don't want to do it for him, then I want you to do it for me.”

I watched Nogara's shadow approach us down the hallway. It paused there, while his body was still out of sight, and like an actor preparing
his entrance onstage, he made the sign of the cross with one hand. In his other hand was something long and thin.

“Have faith,” Simon whispered. “When Ugo tells you what he's found, you're going to believe in him, too.”

NOGARA REENTERED CARRYING A
bolt of fabric. He unspooled it along the clothesline strung across the room, then said, in a reverent tone, “I'm sure this needs no introduction.”

I froze. Before me was an image that had lain undisturbed in my memory for years: two silhouettes, the color of rust, joined together at the tops of their heads, one of a man's front, one of his back. On top of the silhouettes were bloodstains: along the head, from a crown of thorns; on the back, from scourging; and under one rib, from a spear in the side.

“A one-to-one reproduction of the Holy Shroud,” Nogara said, raising a hand to point, but never allowing his fingers to touch the cloth. “Fourteen feet long, four feet wide.”

The image created a strange tension inside me. The ancient tradition of Eastern Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, is that holy icons are portraits of saints and apostles that have been accurately copied and recopied for centuries. Of all these images, the Holy Shroud is king, the image at the heart of our faith.

It is also our greatest relic. The Bible says that the bones of Elisha raised a dead man to life, and that sick people were healed by touching the garments of Jesus, so to this day every Catholic altar and every Orthodox antimension has a relic inside it. Almost none of these can claim to have touched our Lord, and only one—the Shroud—can claim to be his self-portrait. Never has so important a holy object been shunned.

Yet even after the carbon dating, the Church never transferred the Shroud to a museum, never quietly swept it under the rug. The cardinal of Turin said it was no longer correct to call the Shroud a relic, but he didn't order the cloth removed from the cathedral. It took John Paul a decade after the radiocarbon tests to visit it again. When he came, though, he called the Shroud a gift from God and urged scientists to keep studying it. This had been the Shroud's place in our hearts—in my heart—ever since. We had no answer for the radiocarbon tests. But we believed we hadn't heard the last word, and until that word came, we would not abandon the defenseless. We would not forsake the forsaken man.

My inner turmoil increased when I saw that Peter was paying attention now as well. I'd never spoken to him about the Shroud. The complexity of my feelings about it would've been unfair to heap on a child.

“The first thing you must know,” Nogara said, “is how the Shroud covered Jesus' body. It wasn't draped on top of him like a sheet. It was laid
under
him, then back
over
him, in a band. That's why we have a front image and a back image.”

He pointed to gourd-shaped holes cut into the cloth. All of them were in a pattern that matched the folds in the linen. “But the marks I want to focus on are these. The burn marks.”

“Who burned it?” Peter asked.

“A fire broke out,” Ugo said. “In 1532, the Shroud was being kept in a reliquary made of silver. The fire melted part of it. A drop of molten silver landed on the Shroud, burning through every layer of the folded cloth. The damaged linen had to be repaired by Poor Clare nuns. Which brings me to my point.”

Nogara plucked a trade journal from a bookshelf and handed it to me. The cover said
Thermochimica Acta
.

“This coming January,” he continued, “an American chemist from the national laboratory at Los Alamos will publish an article in that scientific journal. A friend at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences sent me an early copy. See for yourself.”

I flipped through the pages. They might as well have been written in Chinese. “Enthalpies of Dilution of Glycine.” “Thermal Studies of Polyesters Containing Silicon or Germanium in the Main Chain.”

“Skip to the end,” Nogara said. “The last article before the index.”

And there it was: “Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin.”

It contained pictures of what looked like worms on microscope slides, and charts I couldn't fathom. At the beginning of the text, though, in the abstract, were two sentences whose gist I understood:

Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the shroud.

“The sample wasn't part of the Shroud?” I said. “How is that possible?”

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.

“Saint Veronica,” Ugo said. “The woman who wiped Jesus' face as he carried the cross toward Golgotha. On that cloth, a mysterious image of his face was left behind. In this pier, the popes placed that cloth.”

At last he turned to the fourth statue. “Saint Longinus. The soldier who pierced Jesus on the cross, wounding him in the side with his lance. In this pier, the popes placed Longinus' lance.”

Nogara turned to face us. “As you may know, only
three
of those relics are still here. In a gesture of goodwill, we gave the skull of Saint
Andrew to the Orthodox Church. But Andrew's head never belonged here anyway. This basilica's relics should tell the most important story in Christianity.” A quiver began to form in Nogara's voice. “The True Cross, the veil, and the spear are all relics of our Lord's death. What belongs in the fourth pier is a relic of His Resurrection. John Paul, when he inherited the Shroud, was going to move it here. But the radiocarbon tests created a climate of doubt in which it was impossible to transfer the Shroud from Turin. Now we're finally going to fix that. My exhibit is going to bring the Shroud home.”