The Sixth Station (41 page)

“Who placed this cloth over Jesus’ face, do you think?”

He looked at me, studying me to see, perhaps, if I could absorb what he was about to say or if I would dismiss him as a kook.

“Mary Magdalene! She was among the last who saw Him in His grave and the first person to whom He appeared after His resurrection—in front of that same tomb. The veil or napkin was then discovered by Peter and John—
in
the tomb. As John reports in his gospel, ‘at a particular place.’”

So that’s why the Magdalene Chalice legend persists in the Languedoc area around Montségur. She brought it
with
her when she settled there with the other Jewish émigrés!

“The Holy Face of Manoppello is the proof—almost a photo—of the face of Jesus at the exact instant of His resurrection from the dead.

“And it matches up exactly with the image on the Shroud, which very few people know.” He then took out his wallet and gave me two transparencies roughly the size of funeral cards—the ones that are given out at wakes and such. He held up the first one.

The Shroud of Turin. I recognized the image. He held up the second, a nearly transparent card on which a face was faintly visible.

“This one, the Shroud of Turin, is an unchanging opaque negative—while the image on the Holy Face is a positive, transparent image with a million different expressions. The Shroud is like a faded negative of a photo.”

I had to ponder for a moment what that meant.
Negative and positive? Same image?

Then he put the Veil transparency on top of the Shroud opaque image. “They match up precisely.” I took his word for it because it was so hard to see in the light of the cathedral.

“Who took these photos?” I knew that no one had photographed the Turin Shroud out of its glass—at least not in modern times.

“A nun who has devoted her life to the study of the images.”

“In Rome?”

“No, Manoppello. Up the mountain above the Monastery of the Volto Santo. But she must have gone back to Germany. No one has seen her in a few years. I understand another nun lives there now.”

He handed me a copy of his book and got up to leave. “It’s something you must see for yourself. Read the book, learn the history. You may even learn enough for your
documentary
for the History Channel,” he teased.

With that he got up to leave. “You may want these,” he said, handing me the cards. “You’re not with the History Channel, are you?”

I shook my head. “Good luck with whatever you’re doing. Next time try telling the truth.”

“How did you know?”

“For one thing, a researcher would have figured out that it’s much easier to go by rail than air to Perugia.”

“Then why did you show up?”

“Curiosity,” he said, clearly expecting, and rightly so, a payoff for time wasted.

“You don’t want to know,” I said. “Trust me, Mr. Badde, you
really
don’t want to know.”

He looked at me, saw that I was telling the truth this time, shook my hand, and quickly disappeared into the impossible crowds in the vastness of the basilica.

I looked at his thick book, with an image of the Manoppello Holy Face on the cover. The subtitle of the book?
The Rediscovery of the True Face of Jesus.
It was sort of the task I’d been assigned—rediscovering the real face—and, I was beginning to believe, the real meaning of God as well.

I walked to a spot where the light was better and held the cards with the images on them up to the light. One—the same image as the face on the book—was barely visible, nearly transparent, while the other, the Shroud, was totally opaque. I put the opaque image behind the transparency, and what I saw floored me.

When the positive transparent Manoppello image was laid on top of the negative opaque Turin Shroud image, they not only matched up perfectly but also formed an almost 3-D image. Every line of each face aligned exactly to the other. These were the completion of one another. How could two separate ancient images residing probably four hundred or five hundred miles apart, neither allegedly containing paint or dye, match up?

Only one explanation: At some time, these two pieces of cloth lay one upon the other and recorded the image of the man they lay upon. The napkin over the face and the Shroud then wrapped around the head and body. Astounding!

The image was that of a young man with a wisp of a beard, wounds on his nose and forehead. His mouth was open, and his teeth were bared in a scream. I put the cards down to catch my breath and held them up again. This time the young man who stared back at me had his mouth closed in a slight smile, and he bore what I can only say was a look of perfect peace. How could that be? These weren’t silly trick hologram cards with faces that change when you move them around. These were two simple transparencies made by a cloistered nun who lived alone in a house in the mountains of Manoppello.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I realized that the image had a hauntingly familiar face. Was it Jesus? It certainly didn’t look remotely like the face of any Jesus I’d ever seen. But I
did
know this man from
somewhere.
But where?

His calm yet imploring brown eyes took hold of me.

What do you want?

I suddenly felt so hopeless—as though I were back in that dream I’d had back at the beginning of my nightmare, in which I was the only one who could figure out the coded message on that wall.

Being so moved by these twin images was surprising, sure, but more surprising still were the tears that began to run down my face. I immediately wiped them away with my hand. They felt sticky. I looked down to see that my fingertips were streaked with blood. I touched my face. No scrapes, no wounds—nothing. I took out Sadowski’s phone and did the unthinkable: turned on the camera so I could see my face. Tears of blood were streaming down my face! Then I did the second unthinkable: I snapped the shutter icon.

Was it
His
blood? My blood? I didn’t know, but I knew that I knew the man in those images. “Who are you? Why do I
know
you?” I cried aloud to the mysterious image in the crowded basilica.

The answer that came to me was as swift and as terrifying as the blood streaming from my eyes. Yes, I did know the man in the Veil.

I had stared into those eyes before. He’d kissed me.

This man is Demiel ben Yusef.

36

If I wasn’t being played, then Jesus was going to be executed. Again.

But was
I,
for whatever reason, the butt of some elaborate hoax? That seemed more far-fetched than the idea that Jesus had been cloned thirty-three years earlier—a time when the technology shouldn’t even have existed. Right? Right.

What I
did
know for sure was that I had to see that cloth in Manoppello for myself. Could it really be an ancient image somehow created without paint or dye? If so, I would have my hands around the biggest story in two centuries—but first I’d have to live to tell it.

Somehow the scent of blood—literally—hanging on this story was stronger than my need to protect myself.

I had to start by finding this cloistered nun whose name I didn’t even get. But how many nuns can live alone in a shack above a monastery on a mountain in a tiny town? My guess was one. If I was lucky. But then again, this was Italy—a land where the unusual is usual, especially when it comes to the secrets of Christianity and the literal veil of secrecy about most things connected to the Vatican.

I searched around my bag and found the mini hand sanitizer from the plane and an old tissue to wipe my face. I was relieved to see the blood had stopped, so I cleaned up as best I could and hurried out of Saint Peter’s.

How, I wondered, had such a thing happened to me in a place where I felt so devoid of actual spirituality? Jewels and treasures, yes; God, no.

I was raised to believe that the Vatican is a temple in honor of the spoils of war, of human wealth, greed, and power—rather than the titular home of the prophet who preached poverty and nonviolence. Demiel ben Yusef wasn’t wrong about all of that.

I sat down at a
pasticceria
to gather my thoughts and get a cappuccino, despite the fact that it was well past breakfast and something no self-respecting Italian would ever drink after 10:00
A.M.

The cappuccino came with a heart elaborately “drawn” on top of the foamy milk with espresso. I smiled up at the waiter, grateful for a tiny bit of civilized normalcy, but the heart made me think of Pantera again, and I fought back the tears. I could only imagine what would happen if I started weeping blood tears outside the Vatican.

It occurred to me that the nun living up in those mountains now might, in fact, be Grethe! It
was
possible that the geneticist/cloner/rogue Catholic nun was not just alive but alive and working behind the scenes.

If so, it meant that so far, of the original people in the Great Experiment, only Pantera had been killed.

The sound on the little TV over the bar was turned up suddenly, and I couldn’t help but look up. It was tuned to the news, and I immediately turned away to avoid again seeing the charred body of Pantera being carried out of his flaming car. But a familiar voice made me look back up after a few minutes.

It was Dona. She was doing a stand-up outside the UN.

“Today was perhaps the most explosive day in the extraordinary tribunal of accused terrorist Demiel ben Yusef,” she said, her perfect blend of Cockney / rich girl carrying easily over the din of the café. She looked more gorgeous than usual, if possible, in a black coat with her knee-high black boots gleaming in the misting NYC rain.

She continued: “The defendant, ben Yusef, sat once more silent and serene as the most damning witness
yet
for the prosecution, former follower and top adviser Yehuda Kerioth, was called to the stand.

“To get ahead of any of today’s testimony, however, last night the veiled woman known only as il Vettore took to the Internet to allege that any testimony we’d hear today from Kerioth would be false.

“She accused ben Yusef’s close friend and follower, Kerioth, of a massive betrayal—the result of his having accepted a plea deal.”

Dona then cut to last night’s video of il Vettore. It was a well-lit, beautifully filmed close-up of a woman’s face—or what you could see of her face—the veil of her light blue cotton burqa covering almost everything but her magnificent bright blue eyes, which were heavily rimmed in black kohl.

Il Vettore claimed, in unaccented, almost-American-sounding English, that Kerioth had cut a deal with the international “powers-that-be” (unnamed), in exchange, as Dona had reported, for turning in ben Yusef and testifying against him. She claimed that in doing so he had received a deal that offered both freedom from prosecution and some thirty
million
dollars in gold and silver bullion.

Il Vettore then alleged, “Who is it that paid so exorbitant a price for the head of the Son of the Son?

“This blood-soaked bargain was brokered by a consortium of world leaders, who this day stand in judgment of Him as they will one day be judged
by
Him!”

Son of the Son? Pantera’s terminology!

Dona came back onscreen. “Neither il Vettore nor any of ben Yusef’s followers have ever named even one leader in the alleged plot against ben Yusef. The prosecution has vehemently denied these claims.

“However, the mysterious il Vettore has become a massively popular figure in her own right. The veiled woman has captured the imagination of people around the world, many of whom have taken to the Internet to even speculate that she is ben Yusef’s wife, calling her ‘the modern Mary Magdalene.’ TV pundits have taken to calling her ‘Mary ben Magdalene.’

“How popular is the blue-eyed woman behind the veil? As of ten
A.M.
this morning, before the start of today’s proceedings, il Vettore’s video had clocked in over nine hundred
million
views!

“As for the trial itself, Kerioth took the stand for the prosecution and called his former leader Demiel ben Yusef, quote, ‘Hitler, Milosevic, Idi Amin, and bin Laden rolled into one.’

“Defense attorney Randall Mohammed grilled Kerioth on the consortium-for-testimony theory, accusing Kerioth of being a turncoat for profit, a man who is now in the pocket of several world organizations, including a DC-based secret right-wing Christian organization called the Face of God Fellowship or Black Robe, a radical breakaway branch of the Fellowship, whose members include senators and many recent U.S. presidents.

“Since this is a World Court slash United Nations tribunal and
not
a trial as we know it, he asked Kerioth if he was familiar with a news story in which Fellowship leader Doug Coe had indicated that a personal commitment to Jesus Christ is comparable to the blind devotion that Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, and Pol Pot demanded from their followers.

“Kerioth denied ever hearing that claim or having ever met any leader of the Fellowship, its radical arm, the Face of God Fellowship, otherwise known as the Black Robes. Mr. Mohammed then asked the most explosive question of the day—an accusation seemingly without basis: If Kerioth had been contacted or
contracted
by any group anywhere in the world, including the Light of God Tabernacle, headed by the Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe, in exchange for revealing the location of ben Yusef’s camp or for testifying against him. Again, Kerioth denied the allegations.

“Finegold then asked him if it was not true that he had knowledge that a so-called consortium of world leaders and secret organizations was in fact actually responsible for the bombings that brought on the quote ‘wanton injustices, executions without trial, and ceaseless and grievous cruelty, which have brought an innocent man to this point.’

“‘No!’ Kerioth countered, jumping from his seat and declaring, ‘I do not know any of those groups. It is Demiel ben Yusef’s Al Okhowa Al Hamima that is responsible.’