by Anne Emery
Monty decided to see what his client had to say about this newest development. MacNair’s eyes fastened on Monty as he took a seat in the law office, wondering no doubt, What now?
“Did Meika ever talk about contacts she still had in Germany?”
The client’s gaze intensified. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know whether she stayed in touch with people over there?”
“Not as far as I know. Clean break from the place was my impression. Why?”
“The police have found a postcard that was sent to her from Berlin.”
“Is that right?”
“Aren’t you curious about what it showed?”
MacNair shrugged. It was of no interest to him.
“It showed the headquarters of the secret police.”
There was no hiding his reaction then; this hit home. A hesitation and then, “Sent by somebody to taunt her? Saying ‘we can still get you’? All these years later? How fucked up is that?”
“The message on the card said something about talent, ‘I wish I had your talent,’ and it was sent to her via the opera singer Fried Habler.”
This took a moment to register, then MacNair snorted with laughter.
“There’s something funny about this?”
“No, no. Well, in a way, yeah. She talked about composing an opera.”
“Oh?”
“About East Germany, what it was like there, her escape, all of that. She was as keen on opera as she was on science. I don’t know if she ever actually worked on it, or just hoped to do it some day but well . . .”
“So, she may have been in touch with someone in the opera world over there.”
“Maybe so.”
“And the Stasi building. If she wrote about the East German regime . . .”
“The picture might have represented one of her themes or the stage setting or, well, I don’t know.”
As much as Monty would like to uncover a German rather than a Canadian angle to Meika Keller’s death, as much as he was an opera buff himself, he was not about to drop everything and jet over to Germany in an effort to find — what? A temperamental diva or a mustachioed tenor going to operatic lengths to avoid being upstaged by a novice composer by the name of Meika Keller? He could, however, speak to Fried Habler to see if there was anything to MacNair’s suggestion. But how could this help him? Monty knew it would almost certainly spell the end of any speculation about a plot conceived behind the wings at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. But now that the suggestion had been aired, he felt he should make a token effort to see if there was something to it.
“I could have a word with Fried Hab—”
“No, no —”
“No? Why not? You just said there might be a connection with opera, so why not talk to Habler to see if she mentioned it to him?”
“I just mean that he wouldn’t know. I doubt that her plan got to the point where she’d tell a world-class opera star about it.”
Monty looked at his client. “But someone in Germany knew about it. Couldn’t hurt to ask, could it?”
Chapter XV
Brennan
Brennan knew it was pointless to brood about all the aggravation that had come his way since his return to Halifax. His drink-induced failure to meet Meika Keller and possibly stave off her death; his shameful hope that her death was murder rather than a possibly preventable suicide; the rift between himself and Monty; and the bloodless coup that had resulted in the takeover of his school by meddlers and moneygrubbers. You’d think after what he had endured in the North of Ireland, anything else would pale in comparison. And well it should. He knew that, but still — to have to sit and listen to a bunch of pointless blather at meetings when he could be doing something useful? Or pleasurable? But he couldn’t avoid the school’s new, and completely superfluous, board of directors forever. So there he was, slouching towards the auditorium of Saint Bernadette’s Choir School on a Monday evening to witness W. Langston Soames conduct one of his endless meetings. This one was close on the heels of the last one because Mr. and Mrs. Soames were flying out the next morning to spend a couple of weeks in an “acquisition” he had made in Florida. And, the meeting notice said, if anyone wanted to join them for a round of golf, a day at the pool, or a night of drinking piña coladas, they were more than welcome, exclamation point. All the parents had been invited to sit in on tonight’s meeting. Brennan was exhausted from lack of sleep the night before, reliving the trauma of his prison cell all over again, seeing Meika Keller’s eyes peering through the high slit of a window in his cell door. And the sight of himself this morning in the bathroom mirror: he looked badly hungover, though for once he wasn’t. He paused in the doorway and recited to himself a verse from Isaiah: “Therefore I have set my face like a flint. And I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near.”
He entered in silence and sat at the back of the room. Once again, Soames was on about “the finances,” how they’d been left to slide. Father Burke had not pushed the parents to pay their fees and he had allowed the admission of too many of the “let’s just say disadvantaged kids” — children whose families could not pay the fees.
“There’s a potential here,” Soames said, “to go beyond the break-even point. This could be a profit-making endeavour, given the number of students from high-income families enrolled here. And I’m confident that we can attract more players, more parents from the higher tax brackets.” It was all Brennan could do to tamp down his hostility to this obsession with the greasy till, rather than with the high quality of the academic and musical education, in which the school excelled. Now the man was on about a “paradigm shift”; he suggested that they “run it up the flagpole” and “dialogue” with somebody or other. Brennan felt his eyes closing. Now there was something about “investment vehicles,” funds being structured some way or other, and section something of the Income Tax Act. Brennan was nodding off. Sleep beckoned like a mirage of a well-stocked bar glistening in a desert.
“Are we boring you with these practical matters, Father?”
He started and opened his eyes. “No, no. Carry on.”
He tuned out the earnest speakers again until the vital subject of education found its way into the discussion. That got his attention. One of the parents was giving out about the material taught at Saint Bernadette’s and rabbiting on about the “business worldview.” Ah, Richard Robertson’s old man. This was not the first time Murdoch Robertson had been pontificating about “business models,” whatever they were, and how they should be incorporated into the curriculum. Brennan shifted in his seat and looked at his watch, wondering how much more of this horseshit he’d have to endure before he could lay his head on his pillow and escape into unconsciousness.
But then he heard Langston Soames say, “And why are we teaching our children, in this day and age, superstitious nonsense about the Shroud of Turin?”
“What?” Brennan asked.
“Oh, you’re awake, are you?”
“What was that about the shroud?”
“I’m questioning why the religion classes at this school are still teaching our kids about this object that was revealed eight years ago as a medieval forgery.”
“So, you think what we are teaching here is pia stercora.”
“What?”
“You think it’s all a load of pious crap. We teach Latin here, too, if you’d care to sit in sometime.”
“I don’t have time for Latin. You have heard of the carbon twelve dating that was done on the shroud in 1988, Father?”
“It was carbon fourteen.”
“Twelve, fourteen, what’s the difference?”
“The number of neutrons. Different isotope. But that’s neither here nor there.”
“Agreed, Father Burke. The testing found that the shroud dates from sometime in the twelve or thirteen hundr
eds, medieval times, not the time of Christ.”
“Yes, that’s what the tests showed.”
“Right, so let’s move on.”
“No. You expressed concern over what we are teaching the students. I am telling you what it is exactly that we are teaching, in case the news hasn’t been fully conveyed to you by your son. So, allow me to fill you in.”
“Are you sure you’re up to this, Father Burke?” That was Robertson again. “You look a little . . . tired.”
Brennan didn’t deign to offer a response. Instead, he gave them an education with respect to the shroud. “There are a number of reasons the test may have given inaccurate results.”
Soames smiled. “Okay, let’s hear them.”
“Strict protocols were established to make sure the test met the high standards expected of science. There were to be several samples taken from the shroud itself, not just one area of the cloth. There were to be comparison samples, control samples, taken from other cloths. Seven C-fourteen labs were to participate. The testing was to be blind, meaning that none of the labs knew which sample they had been given, so no bias could creep in, one way or another. And the labs were not to confer with one another.”
“Sounds good to me,” Murdoch Robertson muttered.
“But these protocols were not followed.”
“What?”
“The protocols were scrapped, for a number of reasons too tedious for us to contemplate here.” The rivalries between groups of scientists and their labs, the potential for commercial advantage and fortunes to be made by the labs that had been part of the world-famous project, all of that would in fact be mother’s milk to some of the people in this room, Brennan knew, but he didn’t waste time explaining. “So, in the end, there was only one test done in one lab, and only one sample taken from the shroud. And it was cut from what may have been the worst possible part of the cloth, the top corner, which would have been handled by hundreds of people, countless times since the fourteenth century. Grasped by fingers in, shall we say, less sanitary times in hot, humid, carbon-dioxide-rich environments. Not to mention the fire in 1532, which scorched the cloth but did not affect the image in the centre of it. But still, effects of a fire on the material. There were cotton fibres mixed in with the linen as well, from repairs. If these were in the test sample, they would give a later date to the fabric. So, there are many reasons why the results may not be reliable.
“But let’s leave aside the carbon test for now and look to history. There was talk of a sacred cloth in Edessa in southern Turkey in the first century. Then in the sixth century, such a cloth was found there. Up until that time, Jesus had been depicted without a beard, looking more like a Roman than a Jewish man in Palestine. That image changed in the sixth century to a look similar to that depicted on the shroud. Then there was what is known as the ‘Hungarian Pray’ manuscript, which dates from 1196 A.D. It depicts an object in the same herringbone tweed material as the shroud, and it shows a number of holes. A close-up view of the shroud shows holes in exactly the same pattern. So, we have historical evidence suggesting that it existed centuries earlier than the carbon fourteen date.”
People had twisted around in their seats and were looking at Brennan with interest.
“There’s more to it, but we’ll leave that for now and move up to the year 1898. In that year, a lawyer and photography enthusiast named Secondo Pia was given the opportunity to take a picture of the shroud. When he developed his picture, he was gobsmacked to see that the image was actually a perfect photographic negative. The image of Christ was much more clear in the negative of his picture — that is, the negative of the negative being a positive. If the shroud is dated in the twelve or thirteen hundreds, here’s what the forger had to do: he had to create a perfect photographic negative five centuries or so before the invention of photography.”
This brought on excited whispers in the room.
“And there are also the archaeological facts about the Roman crucifixions. The nail was hammered in through the side of the heel, not the front of the foot, and through the wrists, not the palms. A medieval forger would have copied the standard image seen over and over in works of art: nails through the man’s palms and the front of his foot. The shroud contains blood patterns — human blood, not paint — consistent with a wound to the side of the heel. And through the wrists, not the hands.
“And that leads us to the evidence of doctors and scientists in the United States. One of them, a doctor and forensic pathologist in Los Angeles, stated that the image is so clear that a pathology exam could be done on it. The angles of the blood flow show that the man’s arms were originally held out, and there were abrasions on the back consistent with a heavy object bearing upon it, for instance, the beam of a cross. Marks on the head and forehead suggest wounds from sharp objects. These marks seem to indicate that it was not a crown of thorns but a cap of thorns covering the entire head. Historical evidence tells us that this was not the normal practice, so it appears that the cap was made especially for Jesus of Nazareth. Presumably, a medieval forger would have shown the better-known image, a crown or circlet around the forehead. One of the most interesting of the medical findings was the injury to the wrists. Not the hands as shown in so much of the art, but the wrists. One of the doctors explained that wounds like this would cause damage to the median nerves, which are used to enable the thumb to move back and forth. With damage to these nerves, the thumb would tuck in to the palms of the hands. Next time you have a chance to look at the image, you’ll notice that the thumbs are not visible. The doctor described the markings on the shroud as ‘clear and medically accurate.’ So, the medieval forger would have to have been an expert in medicine and forensic pathology.
“Now I mustn’t forget the evidence of a scientist from Switzerland, a police investigator who specializes in botany. Plants. He studied the shroud, and in addition to the pollens that reflected the cloth’s time in northern Europe, he also noted pollens that are found only in southern Turkey — where, you will recall, something meeting the description of the shroud was seen in the first and sixth centuries — and other pollens found only in Palestine, in the areas around Jerusalem. How would a medieval forger know all that plant science and be able to go to the Middle East and gather all the appropriate pollens?”
Brennan was on a roll now, his earlier exhaustion forgotten. The parents and board were rapt with attention. He caught the eye of Bishop Cronin, and Cronin gave him a slight nod of the head.
“And now,” Brennan told his audience, “we come to the rocket scientists. Permission was granted for scientific studies of the shroud, and some of the work was done at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California. The scientists there did image enhancement and something called frequency analysis. A medieval forger would have to have painted the image on the cloth with pigments of some kind, made from organic matter. The analyses found no pigments and no signs of brush strokes or other signs of a human hand having done the work. It was also studied at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado by a physicist-cosmologist and a specialist in aerodynamics. They put the image into a machine, an image analyzer. It was called a VP-8 or something like that. And they compared it to a photo of one of the scientists, which was also put into the machine. The face of the physicist was distorted, but the face on the shroud was clear. A camera records differences in light, not distance from the object. The clear image of the face in the shroud could only have been produced if that image had been encoded with information about the distance from the cloth to parts of the face and body. In other words, it was a 3D image. Again, if the carbon dating is accurate, this was produced approximately five centuries before the invention of photography, and it is superior to it. One of the scientists gave voice to the opinion that it would be practically impossible for a forger, never mind one in the middle ages, to have produced an image like this.”
This was met by a stunned silence. Brennan cast his
eyes around the room and allowed them to rest upon Langston Soames. Then he said, “If any of the students told you that we talk about the shroud in class but didn’t relay some of that information to you, you’ve not been getting the whole story.”
One of the mothers put up her hand. “Father, how do these scientists think the image got on the cloth?”
“Scientists have tried to determine how an image could have been transferred to only the very surface of the cloth, without penetrating deeper into the fibres. The image is only forty or so billionths — yes, billionths — of a metre in depth. The theory is that what happened was a very brief flash of energy, lasting a small fraction of a second, powerful enough to imprint the image on the surface but not to destroy the cloth. A very quick burst of radiation.”
There were a few gasps and intakes of breath at this.
“That is as far as scientists can go. Anything beyond that leaves the field of science and enters that of religion. So, let’s hear no more about teaching superstition at this school.”
A group of parents rose to their feet and began to applaud. Everyone else, apart from Mr. and Mrs. Soames and the Robertsons, followed suit. Brennan nodded in recognition and sat down. Good. Maybe Brennan had demonstrated that he wasn’t just a muck savage when it came to academic standards. And he might be able to engineer a counter-coup, a Counter-Reformation so to speak, and return the school to the dignity it had enjoyed before he embarked on that ill-starred trip to Belfast.
Chapter XVI
