by Sam Christer
Mitzi is wondering why Tamara changed the text. What was wrong with the original version? She compares the two. The only significant change seems to be the dropping of the first draft’s reference to ‘the type CSIs use to lift fingerprints’. She swings back and forth in her chair, almost in the hope that the motion will dislodge a jammed thought, a clogged intuition.
The cell phone on her desk rings. ‘Mitzi Fallon,’ she says, still staring at the script, still wondering about the changes.
‘It’s me.’
The words make her freeze.
Alfie.
Her heart pounds. She pulls the phone away from her ear and glares at it. He’s still talking as she cuts him off.
Somehow disconnecting the call is not enough. Mitzi makes sure the phone is completely turned off. She knows she’ll have to talk to him. But not now. Not until she’s really sure she’s strong enough.
39
DOWNTOWN, LOS ANGELES
Factory manager John James stands in the open doorway of the machinists’ workroom as the claxon sounds for the eleven o’clock tea break.
‘Wait! Wait!’
He has to shout loudly above the cacophony of chair legs scraping back over the wooden floor. ‘Hold on. You need to hear this before you go.’
The noise dies down to a grumble. The expectant faces of thirty women stare at him. Some are desperate to go to the washroom, others to get coffee, soda or cigarettes.
‘Emma Varley handed in her notice last night and isn’t coming in any more.’
The news raises a couple of whistles and even some bored clapping.
‘It means we have a vacancy for a machinist. If anyone knows someone who needs work, let me know. Applicants need to provide references. That’s it.’
The wave of noise rises again and the exodus resumes. JJ steps to one side and lets the tide of women flow past.
‘Good freakin’ riddance,’ says Jenny Harrison as she approaches him. The thirty-year-old’s brunette hair is tied back in a greasy bun and her face is heavily made-up. ‘Bitch was no good anyway, dragged the rest of us back.’
JJ feels compelled to defend her. ‘Em not being here is a big loss to this company.’
Harrison stops in front of him. ‘Em?’ Her voice crackles with excitement. ‘Was Em teacher’s pet, then?’
JJ says nothing. Inwardly, he’s already scalding himself for the slip of tongue.
‘Aw, you gonna miss her, Mr J?’ Harrison reaches out and grabs the arm of one of her passing cronies. ‘Hey Kim, you think the boss was soft on Blotchy?’
Kim Bass, a platinum blonde, not young but not old either, stares baldly into her manager’s face. ‘He looks embarrassed to me, Jen.’ She chews gum nonchalantly as she looks him over. ‘Yeah, maybe he was. Or maybe he wasn’t soft on her, he was hard on her.’
They erupt with laughter. Hold on to each other as though the joke was so funny they’d collapse if they didn’t.
‘Get out of here!’ JJ waves them through the door. ‘Take your break or get back to work.’
Harrison is too bold to be talked to like that. She’s eaten men twice the size of Fish Face for dinner and spat out their scales and bones before breakfast. She steps close to him, so close her breasts brush him and her cheap perfume makes him cough. ‘We could be your pets, now Mr J. Kim and I here could show you things you never even imagined.’
Bass follows her lead and leans against his shoulder, pressing her body up against him. ‘That’s right, boss. Treat us properly and we’ll really treat you.’
His temper snaps. He jams a hand across the blonde’s mouth. Anger surges through him. Images flash to mind. He has to fight to keep his other hand at his side, use all his willpower not to grab her throat and squeeze the life out of her.
‘Hey!’ Bass pulls away. ‘You just assaulted me.’
‘Get your stuff. You’re both fired. Get out of here.’
Bass no longer has a smart look in her eyes. ‘You can’t do that.’
‘I’ve done it.’ His heart is racing. ‘You’re both fired. Clear your things and get out of here. Now.’
The women look at each other uncertainly.
‘It was just a joke, Mr James.’ Harrison almost sounds apologetic. ‘We’re sorry if we wound you up.’
‘Get out.’
‘Please,’ begs Bass. ‘Dwayne will beat me stupid if I tell him I’ve lost this job.’
JJ couldn’t care less. ‘You’re stupid already. Get your things and leave or I’ll call the cops and have you thrown out.’
They can see he isn’t going to change his mind. Harrison’s face fills with fury. ‘You sexually assaulted her.’ She points at Bass. ‘I saw you. You felt her up.’ She turns to her friend. ‘Didn’t he, Kim? He grabbed at you, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah. You’re a sex maniac. You’ve been pestering me all the time. All the girls have seen ya.’
They see the smug look slip from his face. Poor bastard doesn’t know what to do now. Doesn’t have a clue. Harrison taps him on the cheek as she walks away. ‘We’re takin’ our break now.’ She glances at her wrist. ‘Only we’ll be a bit late coming back, cos you kept us talking for so long.’
40
77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES
Deke Matthews’ office chair creaks ominously as he rocks back and forth, weighing up Mitzi’s unexpected plea to send Karakandez to Turin.
If the beach corpse was only a street bum, he’d say no. He’d send her away with a flea in her ear for even suggesting such a thing. But a Hollywood writer is a different thing. Very different since this morning when he had the mayor riding him hard for progress reports and reminding him that elections are just round the corner.
He rights the chair and gives his verdict. ‘Okay, send him. Only do it cheap. Get him on a parcel plane or bucket airline. Strap him to a flock of pigeons or have him swim. No overtime, no fancy meals.’
‘Thanks, boss.’ She starts to leave.
‘And send him now. Today. Tonight at the latest. I need a result on this Fallon and I need it quick.’
‘You got it.’ She makes for the door.
‘Good. In fact, make it even quicker than quick.’
Mitzi dials Nic as she heads down to her car and out to her next appointment, a catholic scholar and expert on the Shroud.
‘Karakandez.’ There’s a lot of noise on his end of the line.
‘Where are you?’
‘Cruising coffee shops near the studio lot.’ He mimes a thank you to a young assistant he’s just finished interviewing. ‘Thought Tamara might hole up here for brunch – or whatever it is writers have.’
‘Any luck?’
He gazes across the dull faces he’s been showing his badge to. ‘Not so far.’
‘Then get yourself home and pack a case. Admin is booking you on a flight to Turin to go find Craxi.’
‘No way, Mitz. I’ve got one foot out of the door. It’s too late in the day for me to be crossing the Atlantic.’
‘It’s not a request, it’s an instruction – straight from Matthews.’
He doesn’t speak for a minute, just stews on the news. He knows Mitzi has two kids and a drunk to look after at home. There’s no way she can go and there’s no one else senior enough to send. ‘You owe me for this, big time.’
‘Remind me when you’re done sailing the seven seas.’
He ends the call as he heads out of the coffee shop.
Mitzi wishes she wasn’t landing the load on his desk. Not just because he deserves a soft landing as he jumps from the squad, but because if the case isn’t wrapped by the time he leaves, then she’s going to have brief someone new on everything Nic’s been doing.
Just after midday, she parks up and rides an elevator in an ugly concrete tower off West Temple Street. The office she enters is covered in old brown carpet tiles that long ago stopped being wipe-clean like the guarantee promised. A grey metal desk with three drawers and two moulded plastic chairs takes up half the room.
The other half is dominated by a wall-mounted three-foot crucifix with a disturbingly lifelike figure of a bloodied Christ.
Rising from his seat to shake her hand is Father Patrick Majewski of the LA Archdiocese. The ruddy-faced cleric is the distilled product of spirited generations of Irish and Polish grandparents filtered through Gdansk and Belfast. His short but thick white hair fuses into a similarly short but thick white beard.
‘Please sit down,’ he settles back into his chair, ‘I hope you don’t mind – I’m still finishing lunch.’ He gestures at a shallow bowl of watery broth on an old wooden tray on the desk.
‘Not at all. Go ahead. Enjoy.’
‘Would you like some brought for you?’
Mitzi’s seen more appetising dishwater. ‘I’m good, thanks.’
‘Your loss.’ He gives her a benign smile and tucks a white napkin into the top of his black cassock. Each spoonful is slowly savoured. No greedy slurping. Nothing rushed. Not a drop wasted.
After what seems an eternity, the good father places the spoon noiselessly in the bowl, removes the napkin and pats his lips. ‘Absolutely delicious. You missed something of a treat.’
‘I’m told denial is good for the soul, Father.’
‘Not so good for the stomach, though.’ He laughs. ‘Now, you’ve not come here to talk soup. You said on the phone that you want to discuss the sacred Shroud of Turin.’
‘I do.’ She hitches forward on her chair. ‘The Diocese press office said it’s your area of expertise.’
‘It certainly is. I’ve spent my life fascinated by it. I’m told this is in connection with a criminal investigation. May I ask what kind?’
‘The ongoing kind. I don’t want to be rude, but I really can’t say anything more at the moment.’
‘I understand. What exactly do you want to know?’
‘If you believe the Shroud is authentic.’
‘I saw the Sacra Sindone when it was last exhibited in Turin. Just being in its presence made me realise it was our Lord’s.’
‘How so? How could you be so certain?’
His face brightens. ‘As a servant of Christ, I just knew.’
She opens her notebook. ‘Give me a second. I wrote some things down, stuff from the web.’ She flips a page and then another. ‘Here we go – scientists who carbon-dated the cloth insist it can’t be Christ’s because it’s from the Middle Ages. I’m quoting here, “undeniably between 1260 and 1390”.’
‘They’re wrong. They carried out that dating almost thirty years ago. Back then the process wasn’t nearly as accurate as it is now. It was somewhat flawed.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. You’ll find several examples of carbon dating being out by hundreds of years.’
‘Being out by more than a thousand is unlikely, though, isn’t it?’
‘Wrong is wrong, Lieutenant.’ He licks a taste of soup from his front teeth. ‘If in court you presented forensic evidence – DNA, blood-typing, fingerprinting – and that was even fractionally wrong, a judge would throw your case out, wouldn’t he?’
‘I guess he would. But even today the university scientists who tested the Shroud – all big kahunas from Oxford, Arizona and Zurich – they still say it was accurate.’
‘Of course they do. They’re protecting their reputations. Look, X-rays were invented in the nineteenth century, it was an incredible thing, an ability to see inside the human body and cure what was wrong. But those early machines are nowhere near as accurate as the ones we use now – they missed thousands of medical problems and illnesses. Carbon dating is just the same. It’s in its infancy and in this case it’s as innacurate as a nineteenth-century X-ray machine.’
Mitzi’s face says she still isn’t convinced.
‘There are other factors as well – many of them.’
‘Such as?’
‘For a start, they took the samples from the wrong area of the Shroud.’
‘How can there even be a wrong area?’
‘Easily. The cloth is large and old. Fourteen feet six inches by three feet nine inches. Over time it has become worn – damaged by folding, by water staining and, most notably, by a fire at Sainte Chapelle in Alpine Chambéry in France, where it used to be kept. So, over all those centuries, the scorched, stained and frayed fabric has been repaired – fresh weaves integrated into old weaves. The carbon testing, I am afraid, was done on a repaired area, not on the original cloth.’
‘The scientists didn’t pick up any of the old cloth in doing it?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘I’m sorry, I guess I’m just being stupid, but I don’t see how a mistake like that could have happened.’
Now he looks stumped. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, from what I’ve read, it was the Church that determined exactly where the samples should be taken from, not the scientists. And if the Church knew of these patched-up parts, why didn’t they have the samples taken from an area of original cloth?’
Majewski looks annoyed. ‘The Holy Shroud wasn’t patched up. It was expertly repaired using seamless and near invisible weaves of new yarn into old. The Church did not mislead anyone. It simply had not realised beforehand that these areas were those that had been repaired.’
Mitzi is intrigued. ‘You mean, there are no records to prove this repair was carried out in the Middle Ages?’
‘No.’
‘Aw, c’mon.’ She can’t hide her incredulity. ‘This is the most famous religious relic of all time and no one kept a note of what was done to it and when?’
‘If you’d kindly let me finish.’ He glares at her. ‘The lack of documentation is not strange at all. Over two thousand years, things get lost, they get destroyed. It is a sad fact that many records and testimonies that relate to the Shroud, and other important religious relics, have disappeared over the centuries.’
‘In my experience, Father, important records only go missing or get destroyed when people want them to.’
He sounds offended. ‘We are not common tax dodgers, or fraudsters, Lieutenant.’
Mitzi’s unimpressed by his show of indignation, ‘Forgers are forgers. Doesn’t matter if they’re presidents, politicians or priests.’
He lets out a weary sigh. ‘We know from reputable documented reports that after the French fire in 1532, four nuns from the Order of Poor Clare made sizeable repairs. And we can similarly prove further work was carried out in 1694.’
‘I don’t want to upset you, Father, but those sixteenth-and seventeenth-century tags are nothing to do with thirteenth-century work.’
He turns away from her and tugs open the top drawer of his desk. His fingers trip along the top of the hanging green folders inside and stop about halfway along. He plucks out a thick folder. ‘Have you seen any good-quality photographs of the cloth?’
‘Only what’s online.’
‘They’d be low definition.’ He opens the file. ‘Here.’ He hands over a set of prints. ‘These are high-definition prints made with Church approval. The one on the left shows the front of the Shroud, the one on the right, the back.’
Mitzi handles them as she would a deck of crime-scene stills. She takes a quick glance, then goes back to the first to examine each in detail.
He pulls his chair closer and runs his finger down the crossed arms of the corpse in the left-hand picture. ‘This mark on the wrist is where they hammered in one of the iron nails – not, as many thought, in the palm of our Lord, but between the bones under the ridge where the wrist meets the hand.’ The cleric’s finger moves to the torso. ‘These faint criss-cross marks are where the soldiers scourged him with their flagrums—’
‘Flagrums?’
‘Whips, leather tongues embedded and tipped with metal barbs.’
Mitzi clearly sees everything he’s talking about. The incredible detail is compelling.
Majewski can tell she’s being drawn into the mystery – the miracle. ‘It’s hard to explain, isn’t it?’
; ‘It is,’ she concedes, shifting her focus to a new image, a close-up of the head and face. ‘It all looks chillingly real.’ She thinks hard but can’t remember ever seeing or hearing of a corpse transferring its features to any cloth or fabric.
The old priest leans close to his visitor. His breath is warm and still smells of soup. ‘Lieutenant, I have no idea what your investigation is about, but I urge you to run it with the greatest of care.’ He gently touches the photograph on her lap and speaks in the authoritative tone of the confessional booth. ‘Your eyes rest upon the face of Our Lord. Remember, one day His will rest upon you. I pray that He, in His mercy, will judge you then on how you judge Him now.’
41
DOWNTOWN, LOS ANGELES
JJ can’t look at the women as they file out of the factory at the end of the shift. Their noise disgusts him. The whole seething, heaving mass of them turns his stomach. At the heart of their stupid babble, he can hear Harrison and Bass calling him names, taunting him.
He wanders away from the machine room, back down the corridor to his office. It’s like being back at high school. He remembers the bigger, older boys, baiting and brutalising him. He feels the acid-sharp reminder in his stomach.
JJ settles behind his desk, closes his eyes and lowers his head. He knows what is going on. They are evil. Wicked. Sent to test his resolve. Put on earth to stand in his way and to destroy all he stands for, all he has to complete. Well, they won’t. He won’t let them.
There’s a rap on the window in his door. He looks up. Harrison’s face at the glass. Her foul, mocking mouth is open wide. Her right hand making obscene motions. After a few seconds of staring at him she laughs and walks away.
JJ is unable to move. She’s humiliated him again. Harrison and Bass are going to make his life hell. He just knows they are.
He gets up from the desk and heads back out to the floor. He turns off all the machines, then closes the windows, checks the taps are off in the washrooms and the kettles and appliances in the small kitchen area have all been disconnected. After switching off the lights, he returns to his office and opens an old metal filing cabinet buried under a dead computer and a stack of papers in the corner of the room. He sifts through the personnel files until he finds the two he’s looking for – Harrison and Bass.