Dani’s grip on my arm tightened. My fingers began to tingle. I stared, wanting to completely disbelieve. Then I thought I saw something. The flesh on the forehead, the edges around the hole turned pink. They were beginning to close.
Bloodstone’s disdain shattered the trance woven by Bernhard’s words and the swirling incense. “Nothing is moving, Bernhard. You were swindled.”
The contempt in Bloodstone’s words pierced the collective hallucination. Gasps became moans. Those who had hugged, broke apart. One ancient gentleman fainted. Others cursed. The incense became nothing more than cloying smoke. It swirled lazily, poisonously sweet, as if it rising from the burned corpse.
The wild fire in Bernhard’s eyes dulled. His expression slackened, as if he could see himself as the rest of us did. He looked ridiculous standing over a carbonized mummy, wishing it to rise from the dead. Any credibility he’d had with his audience evaporated, and their ire was rising.
“No! This will work!” His eyes sharpened again. “We just need blood. A sacrifice.”
Without missing a beat, Bernhard drew the Luger. I pulled Dani to me, twisting so my body shielded her. Bloodstone took a step forward, his right hand rising, palm forward. Bernhard, with hatred sparking anew in his eyes, thrust the pistol at Bloodstone’s hand and stroked the trigger.
The gun went off. A single cartridge ejected. The brass spun up, glittering in the light. Gunsmoke from the chamber mixed with the incense. The pistol’s extractor arm snapped back down, jamming a new bullet into the chamber.
“Don’t.” Bloodstone’s voice sounded small compared to the mechanical click of the gun’s mechanism. From others that single word would have been a plea for mercy. Bloodstone offered a warning.
And even before I wondered why the first bullet had not blown through Bloodstone’s hand, Bernhard stroked the trigger again.
The pistol exploded. Fire and metal jetted back from the chamber, shredding Bernhard’s face. He screamed horribly as the mangled pistol and two fingers fell toward the ground. Bernhard whirled away and slammed into the wall. The Nazi fell, dragging the flag down, draping himself and muting his screams.
Bloodstone turned to face the congregation, his unblemished hand toward them. He closed it into a fist, then pointed toward the door. His voice dropped into a rime-edged whisper that drilled into skulls.
“Leave now, lest your folly become your doom.”
It really didn’t surprise me as the crowd bolted. They’d all been locked into a trance. He’d broken it. He was shot twice at pointblank range and was unhurt. The gun exploded, maiming their champion. Though the audience may have been dumb enough to believe they’d been invited to Adolf Hitler’s resurrection, they weren’t completely stupid. With two strokes of the finger twitching on the floor, Bernhard transformed the Church of Jesus Christ Martyr from a “fringe Christian group” into a “murderous cult.” There wasn’t a single person rushing out that door who saw an upside to being associated with it.
“Connor!” Dani drew tight against me and pointed.
Bernhard had crawled from the cocoon of the Nazi flag and had extended his ruined hand. He caught at corner of the cloak, dragging it from the body. His head came up, his face expectant, his sightless eyes filled with blood. He began to tremble, then his head lolled, and his body went slack.
Bloodstone untangled the cloak’s hem from the man’s grip, then folded it and returned it to the reliquary.
Before sirens began to rise, we sped away in the Jaguar. Dani was shaking to pieces, and I couldn’t blame her. I was trembling, too, but I held it together long enough to get us home. Only Bloodstone didn’t seem to be reacting, and he did offer to drive, but the chances of our making it home in one piece with him behind the wheel were slightly worse than his surviving two pointblank pistol shots.
I ensconced Dani in a guest room and told her everything would be okay. I told her to get some sleep, then went to visit Bloodstone in the office. He stood by my desk listening to the 10 o’clock news. The radio squawked about a murderous Nazi cult whose leader had been found with a burned corpse. They said he’d survive his wounds but would lose his sight. He’d been arrested and was under guard at St. Joseph ’s Hospital.
I turned the radio off before the local sheriff could offer his thoughts on the matter. “What’s more nuts? You telling me not to bring a gun, or you thinking bullets bounce off?”
He shrugged. “You know that the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, during the Boxer Rebellion, practiced spiritual exercises that made them impervious to Imperialist bullets.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t remember that working out too well for them.”
“Perhaps the ones who were shot lacked faith.”
“Sure, and your faith saved you?”
“Do you believe otherwise?”
“Can’t answer. Don’t know what you believe in. What I do know is what happened.”
Bloodstone smiled. “And what would that be?”
“Bernhard did his own bullet reloading. He primed a cartridge, but never added gunpowder. The primer kicked the first bullet into the barrel and it got stuck. The next bullet slammed into the plug. The hot gasses blasted back into Bernhard’s face. The gun exploded.”
“If you know what happened, why question my action?”
“My hindsight doesn’t equal your foresight. No one could have predicted what happened.”
He smiled in that annoying, all-knowing way he has. “Why do you think I told you not to bring your pistol?” Before I could reply, he continued. “Bernhard was right. The cloth in the reliquary was the cloak Jesus had worn. Can you imagine the Prince of Peace allowing violence in His presence?”
A chill ran through me. “But you said he was swindled, so that couldn’t have been the true cloak.”
“He was swindled by the Russians.” Bloodstone shrugged easily. “Do you honestly think-no matter the profit-that any Russian would sell Hitler’s corpse to a Nazi?”
“Good point. Putin probably has the corpse in a box he can check just to make sure he’s still dead.” I shivered. “I just can’t believe…”
Bloodstone laughed. “As a skeptic, you can’t believe the cloak had any power, despite the statistical improbability of the gun’s explosion. I, however, have no doubt about the cloak’s authenticity.”
I smiled quickly. “But if it truly is Jesus’ cloak, why wasn’t Bernhard healed when he touched it?”
“Luke, chapter eight, verses forty-three through forty-eight. The only person healed by touching the cloak was a woman who had been hemorrhaging for a dozen years.” Bloodstone opened his hands. “All other healings were a matter of faith. Bernhard believed in the magic, not in the Christ.”
“Is what you’ve said, true?” Dani stood in the office doorway. “Sorry, I couldn’t sleep.”
Bloodstone nodded toward the box on his desk. “I believe it to be true.”
“Then how did my grandfather get it? Did he steal it from Italy during the war?”
“No. It has been with your family for far longer than that.” Bloodstone smiled slowly. “In his history of the Knights Templar, Stephen Howarth suggests the mysterious ‘Templar Treasure’ was the Shroud of Turin. We know, from radiocarbon dating, this cannot be true. Your grandfather’s cloak, however, may well have been that treasure. The Templars were wiped out without ever surrendering their treasure. Jacques DeMolay, the last Grandmaster, had an aide named Jules de Grange, who was never caught.”
Dani hugged her arms around herself. “De Grange became Granger at Ellis Island.”
I tried to lighten things up. “Sounds like you have the sequel to The Da Vinci Code all ready to go.”
He waved that notion away. “Bernhard sought to profit from the cloak, and you saw what happened to him. The teachings of Christ are not friendly to capitalism.”