The Shroud

by Harold Robbins

  I didn’t add that I would’ve stoked the flames for an Inquisition dungeon torturer if he wanted to roast Lipton’s own feet over a hot fire. Or tear off pieces of his flesh with red-hot pincers.

  In other words, I wanted him to suffer a slow, miserable death.

  It reminded me of something I once read in a history book on China about torture. They used to impale a person on a fast-growing bamboo that would make its way up his male parts overnight.

  That sounded good to me—bamboo grew very quickly and it had to be excruciatingly painful … not to mention the anticipation.

  I hadn’t said anything aloud, but some of my thoughts must have leaked out onto my face because I suddenly realized he had stopped talking and was staring at me.

  “Yes,” I said, “Venice is the crown jewel of Italy.”

  Not an overwhelmingly brilliant statement on my part, but it was all I could manage while keeping myself from leaping at him and clawing out his eyes with my fingernails.

  As we walked together and he chatted like the old friend he wasn’t, I decided roasting his feet like they did in the good old days of the Inquisition gave pain faster than bamboo. Rapid pain sounded good to me.

  “When I was in Venice last year,” he said, “both the Zattere and Piazza San Marco had half a foot of water to wade through. Had to wear rubber waders just to step out of the hotel.”

  “I suppose it was more pleasant back then, not having the police after you … and all that.”

  My crack didn’t even get a humph out of him.

  I considered waterboarding, that torture technique they used on terrorists. Was that something like drowning a person? I wondered what it would be like to drown Lipton. Holding his head under water as he stared wide-eyed up at me, with bubbles coming out of his mouth, and even if he couldn’t hear me I would mouth the words so he could understand them: You fucked-up my life, you bastard …

  “My favorite thing about Venice,” he said, “is the food. You would think they’d only serve fish, since they are surrounded by water and all that, but I had horse meat last night”—he smacked his lips—“sliced thin. It’s really a quaint old treat from the countryside.”

  I’m sure the horse wasn’t as pleased about being at the dinner table as Lipton. But it gave me an idea. Drawing and quartering was a big thing in medieval times—that’s where you tie a rope from four horses to a person’s four limbs and give the horses a big swat so they charge off in different directions.

  “And of course, the carnival is the best in the world,” Lipton said. “Not as trashy as that one in New Orleans, nor as big and wild as Rio…”

  I agreed with him about the different carnivals, but my mind was still captured by the idea of him being in excruciating pain.

  As we walked, I shut off my mind from his babbling and had a pleasurable thought of cutting him off at the knees. His arms at the—no, no, I wanted to cut off the bastard’s lying, polished tongue. I’d whack off his balls, too … if he had any.

  My favorite fantasy about how to get across to a boss, coworker, lover, or other miscreant who wouldn’t listen that they had wronged me, was to tie them to a railroad track and wait until they could feel the steel tracks beneath them vibrate from an oncoming train … then bend down and tell them that they had to give me their undivided attention and listen very carefully to my grievances or I might not untie them in time …

  I kept my smile frozen and got my homicidal tendencies under control as he jabbered.

  He led me to a bacaro at the corner where the canals met.

  A bacaro, like a coffee bar, was not a sit-down dining restaurant but a place to get a quick drink and snacks called cicchetti, similar to Spanish tapas.

  Just what I needed—another finger-food place. I was hungry for a full meal and would have liked to sit down in a restaurant and have some Venetian specialties—not horse meat. Perhaps gnocchi with fresh baby octopus or black tagliolini with rare mushrooms, maybe later a Bellini at Harry’s Bar—you pay tourist prices but there’s so much history—capped off later by a chocolate gelato … a dining experience I couldn’t afford but for which Lipton would foot the bill.

  What I got was good table wine and an assortment of cicchetti that included deep-fried meatballs, olives, baby artichokes, and creamed codfish on bread.

  We found two stools in a corner where a small shelf served as a table and took our food there.

  I nibbled as Henri talked.

  When I got to the point where I couldn’t listen to his chatter any longer, I took a deep breath to fight back the impulse to stick my fork into his eye, and interrupted him.

  “So tell me, Henri, why did you send me on a wild-goose chase when you knew all the time that the Image was the Shroud?”

  He shook his head. He appeared sad, and I’m sure he really was. A good con artist—and Lipton was very good—was a method actor. Back in the days when I negotiated with him for antiquities, I’d seen him tearful that he had to sell off one of his “babies.”

  Right up to the point when he got the price he wanted.

  “Madison, dear girl, may God strike me down if I tell you a falsehood.”

  We both looked to the heavens. I braced for a lightning strike.

  He gave a deep sigh. “Yes … yes … my dear, I have been unfair to you.”

  You merely tried to murder me, you dirty bastard.

  “The truth is that I did not reveal everything to you. I swear upon my honor as a Knight of the Realm, an honor that I still hold despite my, uh, current difficulties, that the intent was motivated by the desire for truth and the monetary betterment for both of us.”

  Please, God, strike down this lying worm.

  Controlling my voice, I said, “You owe me an explanation, Henri.”

  “And you shall have it.”

  He took a long swig of wine, no doubt to lubricate his lies.

  “I am happy you realize that the Image and the Shroud are the same relic. The evidence is rather overwhelming, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not a very hard conclusion to reach.”

  He wiggled a finger at me. “You’re wrong. The Vatican is not willing to concede that the Image and the Shroud are one and the same.”

  I knew the reason. “Because it would mean that they are illegally holding the most sacred icon in Christendom. And would have to give it back to the Eastern Orthodox Church, since it was stolen from them.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “The Vatican has been denying the connection for eight hundred years.”

  “Which makes no sense, since historical documentation establishes for a certainty that the Image has to be the Shroud.”

  He held up his hand to block my conclusion. “No, not for a certainty. The record has been too clouded for that. Deliberately fogged up, no doubt. What is proven by the historical evidence is that the Image was stolen in Constantinople and brought to Venice. We know that from communications sent to the pope from Constantinople after the rape of the city, both from the pope’s own representative and by a member of the Byzantine royal family. But from Venice, it went where? To the Vatican?”

  I shook my head. “No. That would be the worst possible scenario for the Vatican. If they brought it there, the pope would have had to give it back when the patriarch of Constantinople made the demand following the theft.”

  He raised his finger to the gods in triumph. “Exactly! They would not have brought it to the Vatican. It had to be hidden. Do you know where the Shroud went from Venice?”

  “France?” My guess came from what Father Dimitrios had said.

  “Yes, the French connection. Like the book and movie of that same name about modern drug dealing, there are layers of deceit. According to the Gospel of John, two of the disciples entered the tomb after the Resurrection and found Jesus gone, but the Shroud he had been wrapped in still there. Now fast-forward about thirteen hundred years. The Vatican claims the first appearance of the holy shroud they now display at Turin occurred in 1357 after it s
uddenly surfaced in the small French village of Lirey.”

  He smacked his lips. “Now, my dear, let’s view the matter from another angle. What if we are wrong? What if the Image is not the Shroud? If it’s not the Shroud, then the question becomes, how did the Shroud get from the tomb of Christ in the Holy Land to a village in France more than a thousand years later?”

  “One of the disciples took it to Edessa to safeguard it from the Romans?” I guessed.

  “You see what you did?” He shook his finger at me. “You instantly reverted to the story of the Image of Edessa because there is not one iota of historical evidence of the Turin Shroud having a connection to the Holy Land or anywhere else except for that village in France where it miraculously and suddenly appeared.

  “To get the Shroud to France, we have to go back to the historical accounts where the cloth that Jesus was buried in is taken to Edessa, where it gets hidden in the city walls to protect the city from invaders. Then to the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, where it is stolen by Crusaders as they loot and rape the city.”

  “From there most likely to here in Venice,” I said, “to the doge who instigated the sacking of Constantinople. If not to here, then to somewhere the doge instructed. It wasn’t something that the ruler of Venice or the pope would permit anyone else to possess because it would rank not only as the most valuable holy relic taken in the siege, but in all of the world.”

  “Yes,” he said, “the matter would have been decided by the doge after consulting with the pope.”

  “There’s no evidence connecting the Shroud of Turin to the Holy Land.” I repeated Lipton’s earlier remark because it was a stunner. I had focused so hard on the Image that I had learned little about the Shroud. But that single statement really brought home the Shroud-Image connection to me. Only the Image had a connection to Jesus and the Holy Land.

  And the Image was brought to Italy.

  I asked, “Again, looking at the evidence from the point of view that the Image isn’t the Shroud, if it isn’t, where’s the Image now?”

  “That’s the question of the day. We know it fell into the hands of Western European Christian knights during the attack on Constantinople because it was listed in the booty reported to the pope.”

  “And since the Image has never reappeared, as the Image of Edessa since that time, it’s another point in favor of the Image being the Shroud.”

  “Then you are completely satisfied that the Image and the Shroud are one and the same?” he asked.

  I nodded. “The trail’s a little convoluted, but I can’t see how the Shroud could be anything but the Image. The Image has been described both as a painting and a full-length cloth, but what really convinced me is that historical documents found in the Vatican archives describe the Image not as a small portrait, but as a linen with a full-length impression.”

  “Another piece of evidence,” Lipton said, “is that soon after the sack of the city, a member of the imperial family of Constantinople sent a complaint to the pope in which he mentioned the Image, describing it as the shroud Jesus had been wrapped in.”

  The complaint from the imperial family had also been mentioned by the monk in Istanbul.

  “I know the story,” I said. “Theodore Angelos, a nephew of the emperor, complained to the pope that the greatest treasure taken was not the gold and gems, but the shroud that Jesus had been wrapped in after death.”

  “Your research may not have uncovered this point yet, my dear, but a French knight named Robert de Clari with the Crusader army wrote an eyewitness account of having seen the Shroud in Constantinople before they sacked the city. He, too, described the Image of Edessa as being the shroud Jesus was wrapped in and containing a full-length impression.”

  He clapped his hands together. “So what do we have, my dear? Reasonably solid evidence that the Image was the Shroud of Jesus.”

  “And more of a French connection.”

  “The French connection gets even more solid. It happens that the Crusader knight who described the Shroud before the sack of the city was from northern France. Do you know where that village that the Shroud miraculously appeared about a century later is located?”

  “I imagine northern France would be a good guess.”

  “You imagine correctly. In 1357 a woman suddenly came up with the Shroud and had it displayed at a church in Lirey, in northern France. Through various transactions over the ages, it ended up in Turin as property of the royal family before it was turned back over to the church.”

  I hadn’t heard the story about a French knight actually taking the Shroud out of Constantinople and back to France. “A knight with links back to the Crusaders who attacked the city?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s the implication, but there’s even more to it than that. There is strong evidence that the Knights Templar were involved in the chicanery.”

  That didn’t come as a surprise to me.

  The medieval order of knights were the villains in many historical acts of greed and atrocities. They became the richest and most powerful international organization during the Middle Ages, richer than kings even though officially the actual name of their chivalric order was the Poor Knights of Christ.

  After the order was finally suppressed by a French king who wanted their wealth and dreaded their power, conspiracy theories arose that are still alive today. Tales of hidden treasures made the stories even juicier.

  “How do the Knights Templar fit in?” I asked.

  “The woman who suddenly put the Shroud on display had been the wife of a French knight. The knight’s uncle had been one of the most powerful Knights Templar in France—until he was tortured and burned at the stake by the king.”

  “But not before passing the Shroud to his nephew, I take it. But how did the Shroud get into the hands of the Templars in the first place?”

  “The Templars participated in the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople. It was a time when they were still immensely powerful and important. In fact, the news that the Crusaders had captured Constantinople was carried by a Venetian Knight Templar named Barozzi to the pope. He also took with him icons that had been seized.”

  “Including the Shroud?”

  “That’s what the evidence suggests, though the Templars would not be the type to turn over their most valuable treasure to the pope.”

  It occurred to me again that the pope might not have been eager to accept it, either. “To openly possess the Shroud would have subjected it to a claim by the pope’s counterpart in Constantinople that it be returned.”

  “Exactly. So it would be hidden by the Knights Templar in France to miraculously reappear later.”

  It laid out nicely—a connection from Constantinople to France, with Venice, Knights Templar, and the pope all playing a role. One thing still bothered me. I hadn’t done any research about the Shroud itself, but I knew there was controversy about scientific testing.

  “What about the radiocarbon dating?” I asked. “Didn’t that establish that the Shroud dates back to medieval times, not to the time of Christ?”

  “The validity of the 1988 tests were first questioned and now are rejected by serious researchers into the Shroud’s authenticity.”

  “Why?”

  “Flaws in the method. The Shroud is cloth that has been in existence for two thousand years and openly displayed for at least a thousand years or more. Over the centuries, it has been coated with bacteria, fungi, and dust from being exposed to the atmosphere and to mold from being stored in a damp container. On top of all that, it’s been scorched and polluted by smoke and debris from fires.

  “One of those fires happened nearly five hundred years ago and not only left burn marks, but debris caused by the fire fell onto the Shroud.”

  I knew that environmental factors could affect age dating. It had happened before with Egyptian mummies. Mummies are also wrapped in linen, so the scientific process of age dating the linen the ancients used to wrap mummies in was
likely to be similar to that used to carbon-date the holy linen. The date tests sometimes proved wildly inaccurate because of environmental contamination that occurred after the wrappings were unsealed by tomb looters or archeologists and exposed to the new environment.

  I described a mummy testing problem I had encountered when I worked for the Met. “Researchers discovered that contamination from the environment, after the sarcophagus had been unsealed, had skewed the test results of a mummy by nearly a thousand years. They discovered the error in dating when it turned out that the linen wrapping was age dated a thousand years younger than the mummy itself.”

  Lipton shook his head vigorously. “Amazing. That is exactly what the controversy is over the Shroud. The tests place the making of the linen about a thousand years after the death of Christ. But many researchers claim that contamination over the centuries skewed the age dating.”

  “So the objection to the radiocarbon results is that the testing ended up dating dusts and mites and fire contamination rather than just the cloth itself?”

  “Yes, you could say that. There are also allegations that the test samples weren’t taken from the Shroud itself, but from the cloth it’s attached to or even from a contaminated area.”

  “The cloth has a backing?”

  “Yes, sewn on by nuns in medieval times. Analysis has shown that the material at the part where the piece was snipped is not the same as the material where the image actually appears. The human impression on the linen is about the size of an ordinary man, but the Shroud itself is twice as long and twice as wide as the impression. That would make sense, since a shroud is a cloth that a body is wrapped in.”

  I bit my lower lip. “So the argument is that the piece analyzed was taken either from the backing or from an area of the Shroud itself where repairs were made centuries ago, or an area where contamination had occurred?”

  “To get a piece of the cloth as it was when it was wrapped around the body of Christ, one would need a time machine to go back two thousand years.”

  “You said the cloth wasn’t tested in the area where the actual image of Christ appears?”