The pope turns aside from the screen and directs his gaze toward the Holy Family, propped on the easel. Walking closer, his sausage-fingers clasped behind his back, he leans close, studying the face of the young Jesus. The chatter in the room ceases as his entourage notices his frown. Finally he turns and faces Simone, his eyes narrow and cold. Without speaking, he approaches the painter, circles him, and then stands and stares. Finally he speaks. “Master Simone, how is your soul?”
“My soul? I am more accustomed to being asked about my paintings.”
“I don’t care about your paintings, except for what they illuminate about your soul, Simone Martini. I see a troubled soul in this picture.”
The air in the studio crackles with tension now. “There is much trouble in this world, Your Holiness,” Simone slowly replies.
“But there is none in our Lord,” the pope counters. “This painting is blasphemous. Possibly heretical.” The papal entourage now murmurs its disapproval.
“I mean no blasphemy, Your Holiness. The scriptures teach us that God became flesh and dwelt among us.”
“His Holiness needs no schooling on the scriptures from a painter,” the officious cardinal exclaims.
“No, of course not,” Simone replies. “But surely a mother’s distress would show in Our Lady’s face when her beloved son has been missing for three days? And surely our blameless Lord — even as a youth — would take offense at being chided?”
The pope trains inquisitorial eyes on Martini’s face, gauging whether the artist is mocking him, then turns away. “What other blasphemies are you painting in here, Martini?” Simone makes no answer. The pope peers behind the large wooden screen at the long table, then squeezes through the opening for a closer look. The room falls silent. Suddenly the silence is broken by a gasp and a sharp cry. The pope staggers out from behind the screen, his face ashen, clutching his chest. He tries to speak, but he cannot. He stares at Simone in terror, as if he has seen a ghost: the ghost of a man he tortured and killed years before.
Half carried, half dragged, he is taken to the street and placed in a hastily commandeered cart that clatters to the palace. Three days later, the Inquisitor-turned-pontiff is dead, and a new pope — a great lover of art, a man who will open the papal purse strings like no one before him — is elected, taking the name Clement VI. He hosts a sumptuous coronation banquet to which he invites three thousand high-ranking clerics and nobles. “My predecessors,” he tells his guests, “did not know how to be pope,” and they agree. Avignon’s greatest artistic and cultural boom is about to begin.
But it will begin and end with no further works by Simone Martini. His final sale, the day after Clement’s banquet, is to an eager young cleric from Lirey who is the private chaplain to one of France’s most illustrious knights, Lord Geoffroi de Charny.
The chaplain — part of the pope’s entourage the day His Holiness was stricken — has returned to Simone’s studio, curious to see the work that affected the pope so strongly. Far from being disturbed by the work, the chaplain finds the faint, haunting image quite intriguing…and most promising. Properly presented — not as a new work of art, but as an ancient relic, the actual winding-sheet of our Lord! — the image could inspire profound reverence, attract throngs of pilgrims…and unleash a torrent of donations from the devout.
The shrewd young priest from Lirey buys the shroud from Simone for thirty florins. Thirty pieces of gold.
Prices have gone up since the last time Christ was sold.
CHAPTER 39
I checked the rearview mirror, and sure enough, another car pulled from a parking space and fell in behind me. It looked like the car I’d seen the prior day, and this time I got a good enough look at the grille to tell that it was a black BMW. I even thought I recognized the driver’s large, shaved head from the airport-security photo of Reverend Jonah’s hulking bodyguard. Just as Descartes had predicted, Junior was tailing me to Geneva.
A quarter mile up the street, the wall was punctured by a gate, the Saint Joseph portal. I turned right, through the gate; behind me, a horn blared angrily. Checking the mirror again, I saw that a white panel truck — service vehicles look the same the world over — had run a stop sign and cut in front of the black sedan, tucking in almost on my bumper. When the light at the intersection turned green, I threaded the car through the narrow opening, then turned immediately right onto the three-lane road, Saint Lazarus Boulevard, which ringed the outside of the wall to my right. The road was like a modern-day moat of asphalt, swimming with cars rather than barracudas. Out my left window was the emerald-green Rhône, and as I checked my mirrors for the BMW, I caught a brief glimpse of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge downstream. The banks of the river in this stretch were lined with barges and dredges, as well as old canal boats that had been transformed into luxurious houseboats. A small crane was bolted to the stern of one of these canal boats, and dangling from a cable, hoisted high above the reach of thieves, was an old-fashioned three-speed bicycle, much like the one gathering dust in my garage back home.
A quarter mile upstream the road branched; one lane continued to hug the wall, while the other dived into a tunnel. A road crew was working near the mouth of the tunnel, and a flag-man was motioning cars slowly forward. As I approached, he stepped from the curb and began waving his flag. I braked, but he waved my car through, as well as the white panel truck behind me, before stopping the line of traffic. At the front of the line of stopped cars was the black BMW, and I smiled as I imagined Junior fuming at the delay.
Halfway through the tunnel I slammed the car to a stop, put the gearshift in neutral, and leaped out, leaving the engine running. Behind me, the side door of the white panel truck opened, and out sprang a gray-haired man who could have been my brother, wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt that mirrored my own outfit exactly. My look-alike nodded to me, tucked himself into the Peugeot, slammed the door, and took off. I hopped into the van, and the door slid shut. Inside, I could barely see Descartes in the dimness; he was just finishing a radio transmission, and as he did, I noticed a pair of headlights through the rear windows, rapidly closing the distance with our slow-moving van. “It won’t take him long to catch up with the Peugeot,” Descartes said. “That was très bien fait—very well done. Twenty-three seconds.” In less than half a minute, the switch — taking me out of the Geneva-bound car and putting a double in my place — had bought us a day’s delay. A day and a half in which to find the hidden bones or — failing that — to get the Native American skeleton that was en route from Knoxville. It was, I suddenly realized, another switcheroo: a look-alike, a stand-in — and it was standing in for another fake relic at that.
When we emerged from the tunnel, our driver turned right at the first intersection. The black BMW roared past, its speed and dark windows defeating my efforts to see the driver’s features.
“The decoy — my doppelgänger; the fake me,” I said to Descartes. “Who is he?”
“Just one of our inspectors; a guy who happens to look like you.”
“Lucky him,” I said. “How much danger do you think he’s in?”
“On the way to Geneva, zero. On the way back, maybe more. They might try to ambush him and get the bones.” The inspector shrugged. “He has military experience and tactical training. He’s smart, a good driver, a good shot. He can take care of himself. But risk is part of the job.”