Madonna and Corpse

by Jefferson Bass

  “Pretty damn close,” I finally answered. “Man, that’s good.”

  I was finishing a bowl of lamb stew—my second bowl of lamb stew—at Pace é Salute, a Corsican restaurant near Lumani that Jean and Elisabeth had recommended. Its name translated as “Peace and Good Health,” both of which I regarded as fine things, but neither could compete with the honeyed lamb stew, made with tender chunks of lamb and a rich sauce of honey, garlic, citrus, and savory broth.

  Suddenly Miranda’s question triggered a faint memory—faint but recent, something that had occurred as I was preparing to board my flight from Knoxville to Dulles. Was it really possible that only eighteen hours had passed since my secretary, Peggy, had dashed out to the helicopter with my computer and my passport? Reaching into the inner pocket of the jacket I’d been wearing for the past four thousand miles, I pulled out a letter she’d tucked into my passport—a letter marked “Urgent” that had arrived in the morning’s mail. “I’m glad you said that,” I told Miranda. “I would have forgotten this until the next time I went to the dry cleaner’s. And that might’ve been years.”

  The envelope was postmarked Charlotte, North Carolina. Smoothing the letter, I scanned it again, because I’d given it only a cursory glance on the plane. “You’re not the only one interested in C-14 dating. So is the Institute for Biblical Science.”

  “The Institute for Biblical Science?” Miranda’s eyebrows shot up. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said, “though in practice, yeah, science often takes a backseat to the Bible.”

  “And they’re writing to ask your advice about C-14 dating? I’m surprised they’re not writing to heap fire and brimstone on you. You’ve taken some fierce swings at creationism from time to time.”

  “Not fierce,” I said. “Just factual. Okay, maybe a little fierce, too. I don’t get a lot of fan mail from the fundamentalists.” Putting on my reading glasses—a recent, annoying necessity—I read aloud. “ ‘Dear Dr. Brockton: I’m writing to ask your opinion on the accuracy of carbon-14 dating. Our Institute is initiating a study of artifacts from the Holy Land, and we would very much appreciate your thoughts on the precision and reliability of C-14 dating for establishing the age of artifacts, as well as human and animal bones. I would also appreciate any insights you have on the feasibility of extracting and sequencing genetic material from bone specimens. We would be happy to hire you as a consultant on this project, although—as you might expect—our budget is limited. Please contact me at your earliest opportunity to discuss this exciting project. Best regards, Dr. Adam Newman, Ph.D., Scientific Director, Institute for Biblical Science.’ ”

  I folded the letter and reached for the envelope, but Stefan held out his hand. “Permit me?” I handed him the page. He read it quickly, then handed it back with a look of disdain. “Do what you want, but I advise you to stay away from them. Crazies. If you work with them, it will damage your reputation.”

  Miranda leaned forward on her elbows. “What makes you say that?”

  “A colleague of mine did some excavation at Qumran,” he said. “The place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. someone from this place—this so-called institute—didn’t like a journal article she published. They attacked her work, tried to destroy her credibility. They even made threats against her. Very unpleasant.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” I said, stuffing the letter back in my jacket.

  “But we digress,” Miranda reminded me. “C-14?”

  “Oh, right.” I spooned another dollop of sauce from the bowl. “Yum. If—and mind you, this strikes me as a mighty big if—if the bones from the Palace of the Popes are two thousand years old, the C-14 report will say something like ‘two thousand BP plus or minus one hundred.’ That means ‘two thousand years before the present, with a one-hundred-year margin of uncertainty either way.’ Wiggle room, in other words. So the two-thousand-year-old bones could be as old as twenty-one hundred years or as young as nineteen hundred.”

  “Actually,” Stefan said, “we should be able to get closer than a hundred years. If it’s a good sample, an AMS test—accelerator mass spectrometry—can tell us the age plus or minus forty years.”

  “Wowzer,” Miranda marveled. “I’m used to time-since-death estimates of days or weeks, not millennia. How does it do that?” It was one of Miranda’s favorite multipurpose utterances; sometimes it meant “Explain, please,” but sometimes—in response to, say, a 3-D laser hologram or a fiery sunset—it meant simply “That’s amazing!”

  Stefan laid down the Corsican grilled cheese sandwich he’d been nibbling on, and he smiled the smile of a man who loves hearing himself explain things. “The machine, the spectrometer, counts the carbon atoms in the sample,” he said, “and it calculates the ratio of three different isotopes—three different forms of carbon. The ratio of those isotopes is like a signature . . .” He trailed off, frowning, then held up a finger, recalibrating his explanation, and resumed. “Non, the ratio is like a time stamp—the time stamp on an e-mail or a security-camera photo—that we can match to the ratio in the atmosphere at any point in time.”

  “Call me dense,” Miranda persisted, “but how do you know what the ratio in the air was two thousand years ago?”

  “Ah,” he beamed, “because the rings in trees have recorded the ratio in the air, year by year. And we have analyzed tree rings all the way back to ten thousand years ago.”

  “We have?” Miranda arched her eyebrows. “We, you and I? Or we, you and other people?”

  Stefan’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. “We, the scientific community,” he said testily. I dabbed at my mouth with my napkin, hiding my smile. “So when we find which tree ring has the same ratio as the bones, voilà, we know that the man died the same year the tree ring was formed.”

  “I like it,” Miranda said. “An atomic stopwatch. A wood-burning atomic stopwatch. And it’s really that accurate, that reliable?”

  “Oui, sure. You know the Shroud of Turin, the so-called burial cloth of Jesus?” Miranda and I both nodded. “You remember when the fabric from it was carbon-dated?”

  “I remember that,” I said, “but Miranda was probably still in diapers. Wasn’t that, like, twenty years ago?”

  “It was in 1988,” Stefan preened.

  “I’ll have you know I was wearing big-girl pants in 1988,” Miranda said. “But I was too busy watching Sesame Street to tune in to the Vatican News Network.”

  “So,” Stefan began, warming up for another mini-lecture. “Millions of people believe the Shroud of Turin is two thousand years old, oui?” God, I thought, he does love to hear himself talk. Was it just his smugness I objected to? Or was I jealous of him at some level—resentful of his tightness with Miranda, afraid he was taking my place in her esteem? Whatever the reason, I was starting to wish I hadn’t agreed to stay on and help the two of them. “But it was seen for the first time,” he went on, “the first time we can be sure of, anyway, here in France, in 1357. The C-14 samples were cut—”

  “Wait, wait,” Miranda interrupted. “The Shroud of Turin started out as the Shroud of France? No kidding?”

  “No kidding,” he said impatiently. “It was first shown in the village of Lirey, near Paris, in 1357. But the believers say non, the Shroud is much older than 1357. So finally, in 1988, the Vatican allows scientists to make a C-14 test. A small bit of the cloth is cut from one corner”—he made a snipping motion with his fingers—“and pieces are sent to three different laboratories. And voilà, all three labs say the same thing: The Shroud is from the fourteenth century.” He smiled wickedly as he pointed at me. “Ha! From the same century as Bill!” Miranda giggled, and my face flushed.

  I pushed back from the table. “You know what, guys? Ancient relic that I am, I’m really beat,” I said.

  “Oh come on, Dr. B,” Miranda cajoled, looking contrite. “It was a joke. Don’t leave.”

  I waved off any further conversation. “It’s okay. Stay; enjo
y your dessert. I can find my way back from here.”

  That much was true—I had no trouble finding my way back. It was finding my way forward that seemed difficult at the moment.

  Chapter 4

  I PEERED OVER MIRANDA’S SHOULDER AT THE SCREEN of her laptop. “Okay,” I said, “push the button. Let’s see what the verdict is.”

  It was nearly noon, though no speck of sunlight could penetrate the depths of the palace’s subterranean subtreasury. We’d spent the morning taking measurements of the bones, a task that was tedious, time-consuming, and therefore welcome: a convenient excuse to ignore how awkwardly dinner had ended.

  Miranda had keyed dozens of measurements into her laptop, and was running ForDisc, software we’d developed at UT to compare unknown bones with our forensic data bank, which included thousands of skeletons whose sex, race, and stature were known. Might ForDisc shed light on the racial and geographic origin of our John Doe—or Jesus Doe?

  Miranda scrolled the cursor and clicked. “Gee, here’s a shocker,” she said. “It’s a dude.” I laughed; given the robustness of the skull and the narrowness of the pelvis, there’d been no doubt in my mind that the skeleton was male. “Hmm,” she mused. “You measured the stature directly, right?”

  “I did—head to heel—and added a bit to make up for the missing cartilage.”

  “And what’d you get?” “About one hundred sixty-six centimeters; five five.”

  “Hmm,” she repeated. “ForDisc puts him at one hundred seventy-five centimeters—nearly five nine.”

  “That’s odd. Really odd.” Could my tape measure be off—by four full inches? I stepped back and took another look at the skeleton. Suddenly I was struck by how unusual the proportions were—an anomaly I’d registered subconsciously but had failed to appreciate fully. “Look how long of limb and short of trunk he is,” I said to Miranda and Stefan. “This guy was like a human stork.” ForDisc estimated stature by extrapolating from femur and tibia length, and normally that formula was quite accurate. But the formula was fooled by a leggy guy like this—a reminder that it’s the exceptions and outliers that make life interesting and keep science challenging.

  The software was also handicapped by the age—or rather the youth—of its data. ForDisc knew nineteenth- and twentieth-century skeletons well—especially modern white Americans—but ancient bones were terra incognita to it. And so, like us, ForDisc didn’t know if our guy was first century or fourteenth, if he was Palestinian or Parisian.

  “Well, rats,” said Miranda. “I want a ForDisc upgrade. One that has time-travel and crystal-ball features.”

  I was disappointed, too, but Stefan seemed unfazed. “No problem. Let’s get the samples for the C-14 test. That’s the big question anyway: How old are the bones—seven hundred years or two thousand?” He turned to me. “Do you prefer to be a dentist or a bone surgeon? I brought a saw if you want to cut a cross section from the femur.”

  “Dentist,” I said. “Pulling teeth is easier. Besides, it doesn’t fill the air with bone dust. Or with plague spores. What if this guy had the plague—wasn’t there an epidemic here in the fourteenth century?” Miranda nodded. “So shouldn’t we be worried? Shouldn’t we be wearing masks?”

  “Yes, but no,” said Miranda. “It was really bad here. An infected ship anchored at Marseilles in January of 1348, and the rats swam ashore. Plague hit Avignon two weeks later. Within a matter of months, two-thirds of the people were dead—twenty, thirty thousand people. Corpses rotting in the streets, choking the river.”

  “Terrible,” I said. “Must have been terrifying, too.”

  “A lot of people blamed the Jews,” she went on. “All over Europe, Jews were driven from cities. Entire Jewish settlements were massacred. Horrific. But here, the pope at the time of the plague—Clement the Sixth—defended the Jews, said they weren’t to blame. He even offered them refuge.”

  “That took guts,” I said. “The towns people could’ve turned on him.”

  “No kidding,” she agreed. “What’s the old saying? ‘The friend of my scapegoat is my scapegoat’? But plague doesn’t make hibernating time-bomb endospores the way some other bacteria do.”

  “And you know this how?” I pressed.

  “I studied up on the way over last week—journal articles on plague were my in-flight entertainment.” Despite my lingering annoyance about the unpleasant turn the dinner-table conversation had taken, I gave her a grudging half smile for that. “In London,” she added, “a team of scientists is trying to reconstruct the entire DNA sequence of the plague bacterium. They’re getting snippets from known plague victims—bones from a fourteenth-century plague cemetery—but they’re having a hard time piecing the genome together. Bottom line? Plague doesn’t survive for centuries, and this guy’s not contagious.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m convinced. But I’d still rather pull a tooth than butcher a bone.”

  “Let’s send a molar,” Stefan suggested.

  Holding the mandible with my left hand, I gripped one of the eighteen-year molars, a wisdom tooth, pinching it firmly between my right thumb and forefinger. I wiggled it gently and felt a slight grating as the tooth wobbled in the dry socket. Wiggling a bit harder, I began to tug, and with a rasp and a faint crunch, it pulled free of the jaw. “What do you think?” I asked, holding out the tooth for Miranda and Stefan to inspect. “First century or fourteenth?”

  Miranda weighed in first. “I say it’s him. With a capital H: Him.”

  “Jesus? Really?” I pointed toward the fringe of osteoarthritis on the spine. “But he’s ancient,” I reminded her. “My age; maybe older.”

  “Nah, not older,” she shot back. “Just harder working. Wore out his spine.”

  “You surprise me, Miranda. I had you pegged as a doubter.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes I like to play the long shot. Makes life more interesting.”

  I looked at Stefan. “What about you? How do you vote?”

  He shrugged, looking bored. “Oh, of course it would be interesting if Miranda was right, but that’s unlikely. I think probably fourteenth century.” He said it in a monotone, but his eyes flickered, and I wondered if he was more hopeful than he was admitting.

  I reached for the Ziploc bag, but Miranda stopped me before I could drop the molar in. “Wait. No fair. You haven’t said what you think.”

  “Rats. You know how I hate to go out on a limb.” I held up the molar and studied it. It was a dull grayish brown nearly down to the roots; the gum line had receded during the man’s life. A large cavity had burrowed into the center of the tooth’s crown. Could this stained, decaying tooth really be from the man whom millions around the world revered as the Son of God? “It’s clear to me now,” I finally said, “that this guy died six months ago, and that all this is an elaborate hoax to cover up a modern-day murder.” I nearly dropped the tooth when Miranda punched me on the arm, hard. She had a sneaky right cross that way; it wasn’t the first time she’d popped me when she thought I was being insolent.

  “You’re no fun,” she said, but her eyes were smiling—maybe at my silliness, maybe at finding an excuse to punch me—and it felt as if we’d finally gotten out of the minefield of last night’s prickly conversation and back onto safe, comfortable ground again.

  I tipped the tooth into the small bag. Stefan took the bag from me and was about to seal it when I stopped him. “Should we send them two? The lab said ‘one or two teeth,’ didn’t they?”

  “I think one is enough,” he said, “but okay, if you want to send two.” I picked up the mandible again and grasped another molar. “Wait,” he said. I looked up from the jaw. “Not another molar.”

  “Why not?”

  “No reason. Call it a crazy Frenchman’s superstition. This time . . . a canine.”

  “Okay. I mean, oui, monsieur, you’re the boss.” I shifted my grip to a canine, one of the fanglike “dogteeth.” This one was pegged tightly into its socket; the snug fit and the tooth’s tapered shape
made it harder to pull, and I was forced to use pliers. The tooth came free, but the root snapped off in the jaw, giving the tooth an oddly flattened base. I balanced the tooth upright on the table briefly, just for fun, and then slid it into the bag, where it settled against the molar with a slight click.

  “So where’s the C-14 lab?” I asked. “In Paris?”

  “Non, mon ami. Guess again.”

  “Oxford? That’s one of the places that tested the Shroud of Turin, right?”

  “Wrong again. I think you will not guess. We send the teeth to Miami.”

  “Miami? Florida? Why on earth?”

  “Because the world’s biggest C-14 lab is there. Beta Analytic. They have offices in Europe—and Asia and Australia—but they’re just offices. The only lab is in Miami. They have two AMS systems and fifty-two liquid scintillation counters.”

  “What’s a liquid scintillation counter?” Before he could answer, I waved my hand. “Never mind—I don’t need to know. How long does it take? A week? A month?”

  “Pas du tout—not at all! Days. One or two days, after they get the sample. Last year I sent them a goat bone from a first-century site in Turkey. Four days later, voilà, I get the results.”

  “That’s faster than I can grade a batch of test papers,” I said. “Must be expensive.”

  “Not so bad. This will cost eight hundred euros. Twelve hundred U.S. dollars. Sure, it’s a lot. But if these are the bones of Christ, that’s a small price to pay to find out, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Jesus!” Miranda exclaimed, then laughed at her unintended double entendre. “Just imagine—if the Virgin Mary on toast can fetch thirty thousand bucks . . .”

  “Excuse me?” I felt a step behind her in the conversation. “The Virgin Mary? Toast? What are you talking about?”

  “The Sacred Sandwich.” Now I was two steps behind. “Don’t you pay any attention to the world outside the Body Farm?” She rolled her eyes happily; one of her great joys in life was giving me grief. “Some lady in Florida takes a bite out of her grilled cheese sandwich and then she notices the BVM—”