Madonna and Corpse

by Jefferson Bass

  We started with a detour through the town across the river, Villeneuve-les-Avignon. Villeneuve meant “New Town,” Miranda translated; it was a name that had been accurate once upon a time, but that time was a thousand years gone. During the thirteen hundreds, Villeneuve, which was not so tightly cramped as Avignon, became a wealthy suburb of the papal city, and fifteen cardinals built palaces there, though none, as far as we could see, had survived. What had survived were two monumental structures: a 130-foot tower that once controlled the western end of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge, back when the bridge spanned the entire river; and a massive fortress that encircled the town’s hilltop. Both the tower and the fortress had been built to send a clear message to the uppity people of Avignon: The pope might hold the keys to heaven, but the king’s earthly army could break open the city gates on an hour’s notice, if papal push ever came to sovereign shove.

  From Villeneuve we took narrow country roads, Miranda navigating with the guidebook and a large-scale Michelin map on her lap. As the tires sang on the asphalt, my heart hummed along, and I felt lighter and freer than I had since my arrival. Ten miles or so north of Avignon, Miranda pointed to a ruined fortress on a hilltop. “Châteauneuf-du-Pape,” she announced. “It translates as ‘New Castle of the Pope.’ ”

  “All these ancient places with modern-sounding names,” I commented. “I guess five hundred years from now, people will say the same thing about New York, huh?” I threaded my way up through the village and parked beside the ruins. The structure had been built in the early thirteen hundreds, according to the guidebook, and had survived the ravages of time and the elements for six centuries. Unfortunately, it had not survived the ravages of Hitler’s soldiers. During World War Two, German troops filled the castle with dynamite and blew it up, destroying all but an L-shaped section of wall and tower.

  Clambering along the edge of the ruins, we had a good view of the broad plain below, which was filled as far as the eye could see with vineyards, the neat rows of vines lined with river rocks. “The rocks capture the heat of the sun,” Miranda read, “to keep the vines warm at night.” Both the castle and the vineyards were the legacy of Pope John XXII, the second of the Avignon popes. “He was well known for his love of wine,” she went on, “and also for his sour disposition.” She laughed. “After he drank it, I guess it turned to vinegar in his soul.”

  As we made our way back to the car, I noticed a stone staircase burrowing into the hillside, ending at a door set deep in the foundations of the fortress. I nudged Miranda and nodded down toward the doorway. “Pope John’s wine cellar?”

  “Looks more like Pope John’s dungeon to me.” She was right. The steps were narrow, steep, and crumbling; the arch of the doorway was low; the door itself was recessed a couple of feet into the thick stonework. “Holy heretics, Batman,” she muttered. “This place feels haunted. Let’s get out of here.”

  As the Peugeot clattered and corkscrewed back down through the town, Miranda announced, “I’m starving. How about lunch?”

  “Sure. Can you make it back to Avignon?”

  “I can make it back to that little café we passed two seconds ago. Look, there’s a parking place. On the right. Here, here, here.” I whipped the car into the spot, forgetting to push in the clutch, and we lurched to a stop as the engine stalled. “Smooth, Dr. B.”

  “Thanks. Anybody ever tell you you’re bossy?”

  “Nobody who valued life and limb,” she said, and I laughed.

  The café, La Maisouneta—“Provençal dialect for ‘The Little House,’ I think,” Miranda said—was as humble and homey as La Mirande had been elegant and expensive. The handful of other customers seemed to be locals, not tourists: a rumpled young couple with a toddler crawling beneath the tables; a stocky older woman, her hair in curlers; a middle-aged man in paint-spattered coveralls. The menu was scrawled on a blackboard behind the counter, but most of the dishes on it were unavailable, the hostess informed Miranda. Lunchtime was just ending, and the kitchen had run out of everything except salad and something called reblochon, a traditional local dish consisting of melted white cheese with a potato on the side. “White on white,” I muttered. “Sounds terrific.”

  It was terrific, in fact. The dish had been baked until the top of the cheese was golden brown and crispy, and it was garnished with crunchy bits of salty ham. It was, I decided, nearly as special as my first night’s feast of Corsican lamb stew.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t the food that was special; maybe what was special was stumbling across this hole-in-the-wall café on a steep cobblestone street in an ancient town, sitting across a stained checkerboard tablecloth from Miranda. She was speaking, but I had no idea what she was saying; instead, as I watched her mouth move, I was thinking what a lovely woman she was; I was wishing I weren’t her boss; wishing I were twenty years younger. Suddenly she stopped talking, stared at me, and waved her hands like semaphore flags.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I knew it,” she sighed. “You had that lost-in-space look on your face. Where’d you go?” Hope and terror surged in me—Should I tell her? Has she guessed?—but she shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. So, I was just saying that the Romans crucified thousands of people, but only one set of crucified remains has ever been definitively identified. Found in an ossuary in Jerusalem in 1968. Totally a fluke. One of the heels still had a nail in it; the nail had hit a knot in the wood, and it bent, so when the body was taken down, the nail yanked out a chunk of wood.”

  I chewed on the information while chewing on a bite of cheese-slathered potato. “When did you study up on crucifixion?”

  “Right after Stefan showed me the bones.” I regretted my question; I didn’t want Stefan sharing the café table with us, even figuratively. Luckily, he merited only a passing mention. “It was uncommon to nail people to the cross,” she went on. “Rope was more common.”

  “Rope?”

  “Sure. You just tie the wrists to the crossbar.” She spread her arms wide, her hands slightly above shoulder height, tilting her head sideways and slightly down, though not enough to hide the playful smile on her face. “Asphyxiation’s the cause of death, right, if you’re hanging on a cross by your arms for hours?” I nodded, feeling a bit short of breath myself. Miranda made even crucifixion look miraculously fetching. Get a grip, Brockton, I scolded inwardly.

  “So . . . uh . . .” I struggled to put together a sentence. “Do you think the gouge marks in our bones are fake, then? Made by a medieval-relic forger who didn’t know that nails weren’t generally used in crucifixions?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. But then again, what good’s a fake relic if nobody knows about it? The point of relics—the cynical point, at least—was to attract pilgrims. Not a lot of pilgrims visited the pope’s treasure chamber, I’m thinking. Besides, they’d’ve needed X-ray vision to see it. Makes no sense.” Just then she got a text message. When she read it, she frowned. “Well, crap. Stefan says he needs me to help him test the motion sensor.”

  I suppressed a sigh. He had elbowed his way to the lunch table after all.

  We’d planned to finish our day another twenty miles north, at the city of Orange, whose immense Roman amphitheater was already a millennium old when the cornerstone was laid at the Palace of the Popes. But Miranda felt obliged to help Stefan. And the truth was, my heart wasn’t really in playing tourist. Except for my delight in having Miranda to myself, I was just killing time—drumming my fingers on the stage sets of history—while waiting to hear from Joe Mullins. Waiting to see the face of the man whose bones had been entombed in a wall seven centuries before.

  Would it be the face of a medieval murder victim—or the face of Jesus of Nazareth?

  About the Author

  Jefferson Bass is the writing team of Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility—the Body Farm—a quarter century ago. He is the author or coauthor of
more than two hundred scientific publications, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir about his career at the Body Farm, Death’s Acre. Dr. Bass is also a dedicated teacher, honored as National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. His writings have been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and Popular Science and broadcast on National Public Radio. The coauthor of Death’s Acre, he is also the writer and producer of two highly rated National Geographic documentaries about the Body Farm.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Also By Jefferson Bass

  Fiction

  The Inquisitor’s Key

  The Bone Yard

  The Bone Thief

  Bones of Betrayal

  The Devil’s Bones

  Flesh and Bone

  Carved in Bone

  Nonfiction

  Beyond the Body Farm

  Death’s Acre

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  MADONNA AND CORPSE. Copyright © 2012 by Jefferson Bass, LLC. Excerpt from THE INQUISITOR’S KEY. Copyright © 2012 by Jefferson Bass, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780062219886

  FIRST EDITION

  VERSION 04132012

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