Slowly she shakes her head. “Many men look at me. Some with contempt, some with longing. But no one else looks at me the way you do. You study me; you examine me, as if I were a flower or an insect whose parts you wish to catalog. Why?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but he can find no words. If he lies, she will see through it; if he tells the truth, she will hate it. He looks away, fixes his eyes on a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and sighs. “Forgive me, my lady.”
“Sienese.” She says it slowly, musingly, turning it over in her mind as she turns it over in her mouth. She looks down, then she reaches down, taking his right hand in hers, lifting it, examining his rainbow-tipped fingers. “You are a painter. The Sienese painter. Simone of Siena.” He bows slightly in awkward confirmation. “I have seen your frescoes in Siena. They are wonderful. I was glad to hear that you had come to Avignon.” He bows again, more deeply, and when he straightens up, he meets her gaze frankly for the first time. Her eyes continue to bore into him, but there is no anger in them, only curiosity, as well as the glimmer of something else crystallizing in her mind. “Why do you study me with your painter’s eyes, Simone of Siena?” How can he even begin to explain? He does not have to. “Do you paint me, Master Simone?” He hesitates, then nods slowly. She looks away, and when she looks at him again, her expression has changed. “Do you paint me for him — for the poet who puts me on a pedestal?” He nods again. She looks down, and when she looks up, tears are beading at the corners of her eyes: dewdrops on a gray autumn morning. “I did not ask to be his goddess, Master Simone. I do not want to be his goddess. Why do I not have a choice? He has pinned me to the pedestal, in view of everyone, and now, no matter what I do, I cannot get down. With his eloquent and unrelenting insistence, he has made me into what he imagines. I’ve heard a story, Master Simone, about a Greek sculptor long ago who managed to turn a statue into a woman. This poet is transforming me from a woman into a statue.”
“Forgive me,” he says again. “I did not know — did not consider — how his…attentions…might affect you. I should never have accepted the commission. I will destroy the picture this very day.”
“No!” Her eyes widen, and she puts a hand to her throat. “No. Wait.” Her breath is rapid now, her cheeks flushed. “First, you must tell me about this picture. How are you painting me, Master Simone? What scene am I in? What biblical figure do I portray?” The corners of her mouth twitch. “I cannot be the Virgin Mary. Am I the woman caught in the act of adultery?”
The question makes him blush; can she read his nighttime thoughts? “Of course not, my lady,” he says, perhaps a bit too swiftly and loudly.
“Am I Elizabeth, the withered old wife of Abraham, who finally conceives at age ninety?” Her eyes twinkle, and he’s both shocked and delighted by the boldness of her teasing.
“Old and withered? Far from it, my lady. In my painting, you are young and beautiful. In my painting, you are no one but your own true self.”
She smiles. “I knew you were a fine painter, Master Simone. I did not know you were a skilled flatterer, too.”
“No. I have no gift for words. Only my brush can speak, and it says you are lovely and luminous.”
She pinks. “And in this secret picture, what does your brush say that I am wearing?”
“You are wearing your green silk gown with the collar embroidered in gold, the one you were wearing when Petrarch first saw you. The one you were wearing when I first saw you. Pearls — the choker, not the long strand — encircle your neck. Your hair is pinned up, as it is now, but it is the cloisonné comb, not this tortoiseshell, just above your left ear. Your head is turned a little to the right, which is why we can see the comb, but your eyes are looking straight at the viewer. Straight at me.” As he says the words, her eyes are indeed locked on him, just as in the portrait; just as in his imaginings. He continues, “The irises are mostly green — almost emerald at their edges — but flecked with gold, especially near the center, where the iris meets the pupil.” He is leaning closer now, staring at her eyes, talking almost in a whisper, almost to himself. “I wish I could paint the way the pupils pulsate in time with your heartbeat: larger, smaller; larger, smaller. But even at their smallest, they are large. I have never seen pupils so large as yours. They are quite…remarkable.”
Her eyelids close, and her breath whistles slightly across her lips as she breathes in deeply. Then her eyes reopen, glazed for just a moment before they refocus and fix on him again. “I do not wish for you to destroy the picture, Master Simone. I want you to finish it. But I want you to grant me one request in return.”
“What is your request, my lady?”
“I want to see it. When you have finished it — before you give it to him — you must show it to me. Will you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. When? Where? Shall I bring it to your house?”
“By all means — if you wish for both of us to be killed!” She smiles. “Where is your studio, Master Simone?”
“It’s not much of a studio. More of a shed. Right behind the Carmelite church — the one with the open bell tower. Follow the smell of turpentine.”
“When do you expect to finish?”
“I had thought it was finished, my lady, but I was wrong. I need to fix your eyes.”
“Fix them? What’s wrong with them?”
“I have not made them luminous enough.”
She laughs. “See, such a flatterer. The courtiers in Paris should take lessons from you.”
He holds up a hand. “God’s truth, my lady. I had them right, but then I doubted myself. ‘Simone, you fool,’ I told myself, ‘eyes cannot possibly be so green and also so gold.’ So I changed them, made them more ordinary. Now, I must put them back as they were. As they are. As they must be.”
“I will bring my looking glass with me, Master Simone, so I can inspect your repair work,” she says. “When may I see it?”
“Perhaps next Sunday morning? Before Mass? Or after Mass?”
“Instead of Mass,” she says. “I will be there.”
“My lady? I, too, have one request. So that I can be sure I have it right, is it possible for you to wear the green silk gown?”
She bows. “Yes, Master Simone. And the pearl choker. And the cloisonné comb.”
CHAPTER 31
Avignon
The Present
Elisabeth brought Descartes’s coffee and my tea; by now, she and Jean considered the detective to be a regular fixture at breakfast — the rule rather than the exception — and I made a mental note to ask, when I settled my tab at the end of my stay, if they needed to add an item to my bill: “Descartes’s breakfasts, 40 euros.” It no longer startled me to see him tuck a croissant into his pocket; I halfway expected him to start showing up with a Thermos and a lunchbox so he could load up on coffee, fruit, cheese, and baguettes.
This morning Descartes was branching out. He loaded the grain mill with oats, bran, and sunflower seeds, pressed the button, and presto, out came fresh-ground muesli, which he topped with dried cherries and fresh yogurt. He sampled the concoction, smacked his lips, and nodded in approval. “Bon. Healthy, too.” He took a bigger bite. “So, I’ve been looking for connections between the church in Charlotte and the research place that contacted you.”
“The Institute for Biblical Science?”
“Exactement. As we thought, it’s no coincidence. The preacher, this Reverend Jonah, he’s on the board of directors of the institute. And the scientist—”
“Newman, right? Dr. Adam Newman?”
“Oui, Newman. Guess what else he is doing?”
“Uh…calculating the exact moment when the Antichrist will appear?”
“Ha! Maybe that, too. But for sure he’s working on—”
He was interrupted by a phone call — my phone, not his. I glanced at the display. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I felt a surge of dread. The last call I’d gotten from this number had brought word of Rocky Stone’s death in Amsterdam. “Sorry
, Inspector, I need to take this.” He nodded as I answered.
“Doc? It’s Steve Morgan at the TBI. I hope I’m not waking you up.”
“Not at all. I’m just having breakfast with a French detective. But why aren’t you sleeping? Isn’t it two in the morning there?”
“Three,” he said. “I had some news I thought you’d want to hear. We swooped down tonight — us, the DEA, and the FBI — and rounded up the outfit that killed Rocky and his undercover agent. We owed it to Rocky. The guy he had the shoot-out with in Amsterdam—”
“Morales?”
“Yeah, Morales. The feds recovered his cell phone. It was a gold mine: all his contacts. We picked up one of them in Tennessee, two in Atlanta, four in Miami.”
“Is that everybody?”
“No, but good enough for now,” he said. “The top guys are in Colombia; they’re out of reach, at least for now. But we got everybody who had a direct connection to the Sevierville operation. You can quit looking over your shoulder now — at least on this account.”
I drew a deep breath and let it out. “That’s a relief. Have you told Rocky’s wife yet?”
“I’ll go see her at a decent hour. After she’s had a chance to take the kids to school. She’ll be glad we got these guys, but it’ll be tough for her to hear, too. She’s still a wreck.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I’ll go see her and the boys when I get back from France. If you get a chance, tell everybody I said ‘good work.’ I’ll do my part at the trial.”
“Thanks, Doc. Stay safe.”
I laid the phone down and picked up my tea. The sun was bright and the day would get hot, but not for another hour or so, and the warm mug felt good cradled in my hands. I took another breath to reground myself in the garden, in Avignon, in the case at hand. “Sorry, where were we?”
“The Institute for Biblical Science. Newman, the scientist.”
“Oh, right. Can you tell if he’s an actual, for-real scientist? Not some charlatan who bought a Ph.D. online?”
Descartes shrugged. “I don’t know where he got the Ph.D., or how good it is, but he’s a molecular biologist. So he’s trying to make the perfect red cow for Israel, using DNA from the cow that was almost perfect. He—”
“Wait. They’re not just breeding cows, they’re cloning cows?”
“Oui. Cloning. Trying, but they do not succeed yet.”
Alarm bells were tolling like crazy in my head. “And he’s working with this preacher, Reverend Jonah — the guy who wants to switch on the doomsday machine? And these guys want the bones from the Palace of the Popes? Why?” But I already knew the answer, even before I finished the question. “Good God, they’re hoping to get DNA from the bones. They want to clone Jesus. The high-tech Second Coming of Christ.”
“Sure,” said Descartes. “If you can clone a cow, why not Jesus?”
I set down my cup and raised my arms. “Because it’s crazy and impossible,” I sputtered. “There can’t possibly be undamaged DNA in those bones — not nuclear DNA, not the kind you’d need for cloning. Maybe, maybe, there’s mitochondrial DNA, but that’s just little pieces; it’s not the whole set of blueprints.”
“You are sure of this?”
“Very sure. Besides, it’s not unique to individuals. It gets passed down from mother to child, generation after generation. Your mitochondrial DNA is identical to your mother’s, Inspector. And to her mother’s. And her mother’s mother’s.”
Descartes considered this. “Jesus had the same mitochondrial DNA as his mother, oui?”
“Oui, Inspector.”
“So: the same as the Virgin Mary.” He raised his eyebrows. “Another virgin birth, then, n’est-ce pas?”
“But mitochondrial DNA can’t be cloned into a human being,” I practically shouted. “It’s scientifically impossible.”
He shrugged. “All it takes is another miracle, et voilà.”
I wanted to take him by the collar and shake him. “Damn it, Descartes, these aren’t even the bones of Jesus!”
“Ah, you are wrong, Docteur — they are the bones of Jesus. There is scientific proof, remember? The carbon-14 report from Miami. The bones are two thousand years old.”
“That was total bullshit, Inspector. Stefan faked that. You know that.”
“But the preacher, he does not know. He has faith in this report. If we tell him it is bullshit, he won’t believe us. He will say we are controlled by demons.”
Despair clutched at my heart, and I found myself thinking the unthinkable. Is the crazy preacher right about the end of the world? Is it time?
CHAPTER 32
AVIGNON
1335
Is it time? Simone counts the strikes of the bell ringing in the Carmelite church — ten — and realizes with despair that he has another hour to wait. To wait for her.
He sets to work tidying the studio but quickly realizes that it’s hopeless. The place is a mess; it is, after all, a workshop, crammed with brushes, boards, fabric, pigments, solvents, and a thousand other implements and ingredients. He uncovers the small portrait, then covers it again, so he can watch her face as he unveils it. Realizing he has no chair to offer her, he rakes brushes and tools off the worktable, shoves them underneath it, and drapes the rough boards with a clean drop cloth. He paces, then perches restlessly on the table, then paces again. Sixty minutes is an eternity.
Finally the bell begins to toll eleven, the hour of Mass, through the iron latticework of the steeple. By the second peal, he knows that she will not come. She should not come, he realizes — it could compromise her, and he would not wish to add that to her troubles. But then there is a knock at the wooden door, which he has left slightly ajar, and his heart surges when she calls his name.
“Yes! Please come in! I feared you would not come.”
“I feared you would not be here when I did.” Laura de Noves smiles. “What a lot of worry we’ve both wasted, Master Simone.” She is wearing a black shawl around her shoulders and a black scarf over her head; they mute her beauty and the elegance of her dress, but even so, she must surely have been the most striking woman in the streets of Avignon.
“Was it difficult for you to get here?”
“Not very. I only had to poison my husband and strangle my maid.”
Again he is startled and delighted by her humor. He wishes he could spend hours learning her habits of conversation, of mind, of movement. But he knows this will likely be his only chance to indulge his curiosity.
She points a silk-gloved hand at the small covered rectangle on the easel. “Is that it? Is that me?” He nods. “And did you fix my eyes?”
“I think so. I hope so. And did you bring your looking glass?”
“Of course. I said I would, didn’t I?” She pulls a small silver-handled mirror from some inner pocket, some secret fold of the dress.
“I didn’t know if you really meant it.”
“I don’t always keep my promises, Master Simone, but I do try.” She smiles, though the smile has sadness in it. He sees the poignancy in her expression at the same moment he hears the poignant chanting of the Carmelite nuns. She lays the mirror on the worktable, then unties the scarf and folds it, setting it on the table, too, followed by the shawl. Picking the mirror back up, she inspects her hair, adjusts the cloisonné comb in some infinitesimal way Simone can’t detect, and then walks to the easel. “Show me, Master Simone. How did you describe what you’ve painted — my ‘own true self’? Show me my own true self, Master Simone.”
Nervously, as if unveiling his very first painting for the very first time, the grizzled artist takes the cloth by the upper corners and lifts it. As it slides slowly up the picture, the threads catch now and then on the textured paint; the slight rustle of the moving fabric is the only sound in the room. Then he hears her breathe — a quick intake, almost a gasp. He dares to breathe now, too, and risks a glance at her.
He is shocked by what he sees. He’d hoped she would smile, perhaps even laugh o
r clap her hands in delight. Instead, she looks like a mother who has just witnessed the death of her only child. Her eyes are filled with anguish; her right hand flutters across her lips and chin and neck; her left hand, still holding the mirror, drops to her side. She closes her eyes and hangs her head, and her shoulders begin to shake.
“Oh, my lady, I have displeased you. I…don’t know what to say. Forgive me. Oh, forgive me, please.”
“You have deceived me, Master Simone,” she whispers. “This is not…my own…true…self. Perhaps it once was. But not now. I am not that woman now. Perhaps I never was.”
“What do you mean? Tell me, I beg you — I cannot bear this.” Never in all his years of painting has his work inspired such hope followed by such despair, and never in these years has he been brought to tears by a critic. Yet Simone of Siena, Knight of Naples, is crying now, too, and the chanting nuns seem to give voice to his pain. “Where is the fault? What is untrue? How have I disappointed you so badly?”
“You’ve put flesh and blood on your canvas, Master Simone. You should have painted stone instead. Marble, covered with words. I am nothing but stone and verses now. Even my heart has turned to stone. My husband prefers his mistress; the man who claims to love me sings my praises to everyone but me.” She turns away and steps behind the easel so she will not have to see the portrait any longer.
Simone does not speak for some time. Finally he shakes his head. “Oh, poor woman. Oh, foolish man — what has he done to you?”
He takes a step toward her, looks closely at her face. “Perhaps you are right; perhaps I have not portrayed you faithfully. It was difficult to see your features well in the dim light of the church, from so far away. I should take a closer look, in this light.” He is an arm’s length away now — closer than he has ever been to her, except for that brief conversation in the cloistered garden. He reaches out, tucks the stained knuckle of his index finger beneath her chin, and lifts her head slightly. He leans closer, adjusts his hand so that he holds her chin lightly between thumb and index finger, and then turns her head slowly from side to side, scrutinizing the planes and highlights and hollows of her face. “I did my best,” he says at last, “but you are right, I must confess. I did not capture your true self. Here, for instance.” Lifting his other hand, he brings his index finger to a spot just above the right corner of her mouth. “You have a little mole right here.” He grazes it with his fingertip — perhaps he strokes it lightly, or perhaps his finger is simply trembling. “I failed to see this mole. I’m sorry. I should have included it — it punctuates the line of your mouth.”
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