“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Franka,” she said. She looked like she was tempted to drop the dinner platter directly in his lap. “Let the poor girl be.”
“Julianna, it’s all right. She was just telling me a very sad story about attacks on the Church, and I look forward to her defense.”
Domenika decided it was a hopeless cause and changed the subject.
“Mother, you asked me why I have to return to Turin. The reason is that the Holy Father asked me to manage—or, rather, babysit—an obnoxious American and his team of scientists. They are coming from all over the world and are bringing the most advanced scientific equipment with them. Their goal is to prove that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a lie.”
Her father banged his fist on the table once more, this time so hard one of the brass candleholders fell over. It spilled burning hot wax across the tablecloth and onto the top of Domenika’s hand. He quickly reached for her but she calmly wiped a napkin across her skin. She shrugged off his concern.
“What are you saying, Domenika? Are these so-called men of science bringing some ridiculous invention with them that they claim will disprove our faith?”
“Papa, they are bringing many devices,” she said as she relit the fallen candle with a second one from across the table.
“These crazy Americans! These crazy Americans!” he shouted.
“Papa,” she said, laughing for the first time that evening. “What I’m saying is that these scientists have been invited to Turin by the pope himself to examine the Shroud of Christ.”
“What is there to examine? It has been in full sight of the world. We took you there after your first Communion when you were ten years old. Do you remember?”
“Of course I do. I will never forget it.” Believing the temporary exposition of the Shroud twenty years earlier might be their only opportunity to see the holy relic in their lifetimes, her parents had saved their earnings to take the family on a pilgrimage to Turin. They had traveled by train for hours and stood in line an entire day and night to view the relic and receive a blessing.
“So, what is the problem? Are they coming to buy it? Is it the same man who bought the da Vinci notebook? What’s his name?”
“Papa,” she replied patiently, “no one is going to buy it. The scientist’s name is Jon Bondurant, and he is coming to conduct the tests they will perform on the holy relic. I pity him, because if he knew what I know, he would spare himself the trouble. He is wasting his time and is going to suffer incredible embarrassment.”
“What is it you know, Domenika?” her mother asked.
“I cannot tell you. I am under a strict agreement not to discuss it. But I can say to you both that when Dr. Bondurant has finished his task, when all is said and done, it will be a new day for the Church. A new day of faith for all of us. And I am quite sure it will be utterly humiliating both professionally and personally for the man I consider a thorn in the side of the Church.” She couldn’t help allowing a smile as she considered the prospect of his eventual tumble from fame.
Her mother looked at her with concern. “This man you’re speaking of, this Dr. Bondurant,” she said. “It sounds like you have prepared a trap for him, Domenika. Is that the Christian thing to do?”
“He is not a Christian man, Mother,” Domenika said. “Not by any means.”
“ ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,’ Domenika,” her mother said. “This is what we have taught you.”
Domenika turned from her and looked pensively toward the towers of St. Mary’s. Her father strained to get up from the table, staggered slightly, and headed toward the kitchen to pour another glass of vodka.
“I will do my best, Mother.”
“That is wonderful,” her mother said as she reached out and stroked Domenika’s hand. “But there is something else troubling you about this, I can tell. What is it?”
Domenika couldn’t pinpoint why, but her mother was right. She looked forward to her assignment over the next several weeks with nervous excitement, given the secrets the newly discovered book had revealed. She was about to manage an effort for the Church that was going to electrify the world and restore the faith of millions. Still, she felt a strange premonition of dread that made no sense. She wasn’t sure if it was her personal animosity against Bondurant or if it was the vague fear that the hunter could become the hunted. She shook her head at her own fanciful thinking. It was absolutely, without doubt, a risk-free exploration. They had the extraordinary documents to prove it.
She lifted her mother’s outstretched hand and pressed it to her own cheek.
“Mother,” she whispered. “For the first time in my life, I am afraid and I don’t know why.”
CHAPTER 11
Turin, Italy
June 2014
Sup, dawg?” a voice shouted over the static on the cell phone.
Sehgal flinched and held the phone away from his ear. He stood on the corner of a busy intersection in historic Turin when he finally connected with his adopted son, who was also his most junior lab assistant, in Mumbai. He still wasn’t used to Kishan’s oft-used and strange slang.
“Kishan, please. Must you address me that way? Now that I have achieved the Nobel, do you think it could be time for you to stop calling me a canine?” He loved his son, and his son loved him, but Sehgal knew he had spoiled him.
“Don’t let that prize go to your head, dawg,” Kishan taunted affectionately. “You’re the same color as me. You’re black. We’re all representin’.”
Sehgal struggled to hear Kishan over the sound of traffic. Slow-moving red and green trams that created gridlock, and the cars that blared their horns at them mixed with the shouts of street vendors parked nearby.
“As I have said ten thousand times, Kishan, you are not black,” Sehgal said with growing irritation.
“What’s my name? What’s my name, Doc?”
“Kishan. It is Kishan,” Sehgal said, exasperated. “I gave it to you.”
“And what does my name mean? What’s it mean, Doc?”
“All right, all right. It is Hindi for ‘black,’ but you are not African American, as much as you might admire their colorful language.” Others more expert had told Sehgal his son’s homegrown slang was a poor imitation of the real thing in America, but Sehgal hadn’t the heart to tell him. “You are Indian, Kishan. You are Hindi.”
“I’m a dawg. You’re a dawg. What can I do for you, my man?”
Sehgal pulled the cell phone from his ear and pressed it to his chest as though to smother the conversation and start over. He had tolerated Kishan’s antics since he had rescued and adopted the lovable boy years ago from the footpaths of Dharavi, the largest slum in the suburbs of Mumbai. Sehgal knew the area only too well. Located between the city’s two main railways, Dharavi’s million inhabitants—growing by hundreds of indigent families per day—occupied tens of thousands of tiny, illegal huts strewn along Mahim Creek. The small river was used by young and old to urinate, defecate, and even bathe. Its low-lying location, once ideal for fruit orchards now long ago abandoned, was twice cursed. Poor drainage ensured it would be routinely devastated by floods during the rainy season each year.
A close colleague visiting Sehgal from Harvard a decade before had convinced him to ride along on a “reality tour” of Dharavi. The tour was conducted by an outfit on the outskirts of the city that catered to tourists looking to get a glimpse of life in the shantytowns rimming the burgeoning city once known as Bombay. Sehgal had been reluctant to go along because he found it absurd that tourists would pay guides to navigate them through some of the poorest and filthiest living conditions on earth. For him, the conditions for the “prisoners” of Dharavi, occupying the largest slum in the world, were brutal reminders of his own miserable life as a child and the hopelessness he had struggled with each day.
On the tour, they had found twelve-year-old Kishan, standing nearly naked. He was alone atop an enormous hill of trash, picking his way through
a pile in the blistering sun. Sehgal was struck by the energetic way the child was conducting his search, and by his shouts of glee when he found something salvageable. When Sehgal approached the lad, Kishan smiled at him and asked if he wanted to buy a shoe. Not a pair of shoes, but a single beat-up tennis shoe. When Sehgal said yes, the boy grinned with delight. Joy and anticipation lit his face from the inside out, and his dark brown eyes sparkled with pleasure. There was something so compelling about the spirit of the orphan that Sehgal felt an instant bond.
A self-described “workaholic,” Sehgal had been married to his career his entire adult life. But there were aspects of the boy that reminded Sehgal of himself as a child. Sympathy for his plight was only natural. Sehgal too had been rescued from similar circumstances. So with very little effort, he filed to adopt Kishan and succeeded. Until he found the boy, he had had very little use for lasting relationships. Outside of work, he minded Kishan carefully and at close range. He often found the challenges of rearing the boy all alone to be all-consuming and all the family life he could take at any one time. Now, ten years after the adoption, Sehgal felt as close to his son as if he were his biological parent.
The challenges of inserting a scrappy street urchin into a materialistic culture that included a steady dose of American satellite television took its cultural toll on Kishan. This, combined with his incessant playing of one of his prized possessions, a box of old Chris Rock cassette tapes he had found while rummaging in a particularly lucrative pile of debris, helped Kishan to develop his own form of “Hindi Ebonics.” It amused his colleagues in the lab, but often drove Sehgal to distraction.
Kishan’s jargon was popular with his young coworkers, who encouraged him all the more with appreciative laughter. Sehgal had learned this the hard way a few years earlier when he decided, against his better judgment, to take the excitable eighteen-year-old with him to a conference in Chicago sponsored by the New England Journal of Medicine. Sehgal had been invited to present a paper on prehistoric DNA rescue techniques. Kishan had worked tirelessly for him on a project for eight months, and his adopted-son-turned-assistant was thrilled to finally visit America, fulfilling a long-cherished dream of his. Sehgal considered the trip a reward for Kishan’s conscientious effort in the lab, but was nervous about his behavior. Once they arrived in Chicago, they got hopelessly lost on the way from O’Hare Airport to the conference at the University of Chicago. Sehgal made the mistake of asking Kishan to roll down his window and ask directions from two young black men stopped in the car beside them at a traffic signal in Englewood on the South Side.
“Wassup, my gangstas?” Kishan shouted. “Can you brothers from another mother tell us how to get to I-90 East?”
Five minutes of high-speed pursuit, twenty city blocks of sheer terror, and a badly damaged rental car later, they were overjoyed to be stopped by the police, who mercifully ended the chase, impounded their car, and likely saved their lives.
“Kishan, please, listen up,” Sehgal said as he shouted over the noise of a car alarm that blared behind him. “I have been trying to reach you all day. I need your help with something.”
“Talk to me, my brother. Walk and talk. Walk and talk, my man.”
“I need you to prepare the lab for some intensive analysis that will commence in two weeks when I return,” Sehgal shouted. “Do the usual drill. Test-fire everything. Pay particularly close attention to calibration. And check the storeroom to ensure we have all the reagents required for a full-spectrum analysis.”
“You got it, my man. What do we have here? Animal? Vegetable? Mineral? Talk to me.”
Sehgal grew further frustrated and paused before he answered.
“Human; human’s what we got here, I think, Kishan,” he said with a twinge of uncertainty in his voice.
“We talking blood?”
“We talking ‘I don’t know,’ Kishan. There could be blood, hair, skin, tissue. I won’t know that until we retrieve the samples.”
“How old are you talking, Doc?”
“That’s a good question, now, isn’t it, Kishan?”
“My man! This is that test on the big Kahuna? The Jesus death rags, right? The one everybody’s been talkin’ about. King of the Jews, right?”
Sehgal ducked into a quieter alleyway and clucked his tongue in frustration before he answered.
“Kishan. Listen to me carefully. I’m about to get to work here. Just make sure everything is in order for when I return. I want to do a very fast turnaround on these samples. I will personally perform the work.”
“You the man. You the man. You da Nobel man now, Doc.”
“Kishan, one other thing,” Sehgal said as he lowered his voice. “There are going to be some crates with some new lab equipment for an unrelated project arriving next week. They will be coming from the Sisters of Mercy. I need you to simply store the crates in the warehouse, but under no circumstances are you to open them. Do you understand me?”
“You mean the nuns that run that convent down the road? What do they have to do with the King of the Jews? I’m just asking.”
“Kishan, my son. Repeat after me,” Sehgal said. His voice had grown even more irritated.
“Repeat after me.”
“There are some crates coming.”
“There are some crates coming, Doc.”
“I am going to put them in the warehouse unopened.”
“I am going to put them in the warehouse.”
“UNOPENED, Kishan!”
“Unopened, Doc.”
“Thank you, Kishan. I will call you later.”
“You my dawg, Doc. You my dawg.”
PART 2
CHAPTER 12
Turin, Italy
June 2014
Domenika opened and closed her menu for the fifth time and scanned the cozy, bustling restaurant for any sign of Bondurant. A waiter, carrying a tray filled with a brightly colored mix of orange-and-white shellfish atop a plate of steaming pasta, rushed past, leaving an inviting aroma in his wake.
“This is what I mean about Americans,” she complained. “Thirty minutes late! Doesn’t he know we have a schedule to keep?”
The tiny restaurant they had chosen as their meeting place, Trattoria Torrecelli, was a local favorite in Turin, off a narrow alleyway connected to Via San Domenico near the bustling city’s center. With the noisy lunch crowd overflowing, the maître d’ had begun eyeing the table they had occupied a long time without ordering.
Father Parenti fidgeted nervously, trying to cut the tension. He had spent the morning with his dog walking the banks of the Po River, which ran through the sun-washed city. Aldo was his constant companion and generated warm greetings and effusive compliments wherever they went. The two of them wandered the streets like eager sightseers taking in some of the most charming piazzas, museums, and churches outside of Rome. Turin had once served as Italy’s first capital, and it was the home of dozens of gardens and orangeries and some of Italy’s most prestigious universities. In the center of town stood the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the home of the Shroud of Turin.
Parenti’s tiny legs, tired from his morning adventures, dangled a few inches above the brightly checkered tile beneath them. He swung them back and forth like a child enjoying a high chair. The glow that had begun when Cardinal Ponti awarded him the role of “project secretary” for the Shroud investigation several weeks before hadn’t faded. The priest was happy to be out of the Vatican Library and beyond the reach of Father Barsanti.
“We’re done waiting, Father,” Domenika declared as she pushed away from the table.
The maître d’, who hovered nearby, jumped in to assist. He rushed over to gather their menus and reclaim the table. Parenti, distraught over missing an expected meal, reluctantly began to clamber down from his chair. As he did, a tall man in a dark blue suit and open-neck collar came toward them, dodging the red-and-white checked tables in his path. He was hurriedly making his way from the front of the restaurant.
&nb
sp; “Sorry I’m so late,” Bondurant said as he raced to set his valise on the table to stop the maître d’ from repossessing it. He faced Domenika, who had her back toward him as she bent completely over to reach for her purse on the floor. Her rear, prominently elevated, was pointed directly at him. “Ms. Jozef, I presume?”
She quickly turned and rose, tossed her hair back across her shoulder, and gave Bondurant a chilly look.
“Do you know that we have been waiting here for a half hour?” she said.
“For God’s sake!” Bondurant blurted out when he caught a glimpse of her face. He looked as if he had seen a ghost. The diners at the table nearby stopped talking to watch the spectacle. “You’re Ms. Jozef?”
“Yes, for God’s sake, I am.” She couldn’t help but smirk at the irony of his words and his predicament.
“You’re the girl they sent,” he choked out.
“To do a man’s job?” she said, finishing the insult for him. A sly smile replaced the look of rage on her face. She extended her hand and continued. “I am the Vatican’s representative on this project. I believe you were informed of that earlier. And this is my assistant, Father Parenti. Welcome to Turin.”
Bondurant glanced at her again for just a moment. She could see blood rush to his face.
“I’m a . . . I’m a . . . I’m a . . .” he stammered.
She watched as Bondurant pressed hard against the corner of the table to steady himself after the news.
“I know you are not a fan of my work,” Bondurant said as they sat down. “We are obviously not getting off on the right foot again.”
He avoided looking Domenika in the eyes. Clearly troubled, he picked up his menu and stared into it for a long moment and said nothing. Mercifully, a waitress stopped at the table and broke the awkward silence between them.
“Buon giorno. Please, for the table some water?” she asked. She was attractive and barely out of her teens, and her attempt at English was endearing.
The Shroud Conspiracy Page 9
