The Cloning

  It only took a moment for Marc to conclude that further discussion would serve no useful purpose. He nodded his agreement.

  “Now, give it to me,” Dugan demanded.

  “I don’t have it.”

  The Archbishop blanched. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Don’t tell me it’s been lost.”

  “No, I put it in my safe last night.”

  “Then get a move on, for God’s sake,” Dugan snapped, then turned to Father Reilly. “And you go with him. Don’t let him out of your sight or he may abscond with it.”

  *

  Marc was still fuming as they approached Stephen’s car in the Diocesan parking lot. “The old son of a bitch!”

  “I know you’re disappointed,” Stephen mollified, “but in the long run, it’ll be better this way.”

  “Maybe,” Marc replied convincingly. “Listen, why don’t you just follow me in your car, okay? There’s no point in my driving you back here.”

  “Fine,” Stephen agreed, getting into his sensible Dodge sedan.

  Stephen hopped into his Ferrari parked nearby and waited until Stephen led the way to the exit. Once on the street, Marc pulled in front, leading the way at a moderate speed, but as the stoplight ahead turned amber, Marc gunned the Ferrari and shot through the intersection, leaving the law-abiding Stephen waiting at the red.

  Glancing into his rearview mirror and keeping his foot heavy on the accelerator, Marc could see the Dodge disappearing in the distance. “See you later, sucker!”

  *

  He wasted no time getting to his laboratory in Cambridge, then went directly to his safe, removed the vial, and took it to his worktable. There he carefully removed the hair and placed it under a microscope. Next, he took an extremely delicate scalpel and cut a minuscule fragment from the hair. He placed the new fragment in another container that he returned to his safe. And finally, as a sly smile played around his mouth, he placed the original hair back into its container.

  A few minutes later, a breathless Stephen arrived.

  “What happened to you?” Marc asked with dissembled concern.

  “I thought you meant that you had a safe at your apartment, so I went by there,” Stephen explained. “But when I didn’t see your car, I realized you must have come here.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I haven’t run off with the relic,” Marc said, handing the original vial to his old pal.

  “Thank God. I think the Cardinal would hang me by the nearest lamp post if you did.”

  Marc smiled, suppressing a tiny twinge of guilt.

  *

  The following week was not a pleasant one for Marc. He went through the motions of his routine life, teaching his usual classes, reading his usual journals, pursuing his research. But every night, when his lab assistants were gone, he went to the safe and removed the remaining fragment of hair. He looked at it with conflicted thoughts, not understanding why he was drawn to it so inexorably, yet unable to put it out of his mind.

  Shit, he thought, as he lay awake in his bed, it’s not like I stole the Hope Diamond. It’s just a little souvenir, he rationalized. Still, nothing felt right to him. Under other circumstances, he’d have turned to sex as a diversion; but the idea turned him off, and he avoided contacting any of the women in his life. It was no surprise that he’d heard nothing from Cynthia.

  Even though he made every effort to appear normal at work, his real mood didn’t escape Nora’s maternal eye. She’d worked for Marc too long, knew him too well. Finally on Friday night as she was clearing away the week’s debris from Marc’s desk, she said, “How about a beer?”

  “You buying?” he asked.

  “No, you are,” she retorted, “but I’m listening.”

  They went to Nora’s favorite spot, the old German restaurant and beer hall founded by Jake Wirth in 1868. A few years earlier, the health department had decreed that the floors could no longer be covered with sawdust, but otherwise the place had kept much of its original, down-to-earth character. Before they’d ordered their second round, Marc confessed that he’d kept the fragment. It was a relief to tell somebody, and who better than Nora?

  “So that’s what’s been wrong with you. I knew there was something.”

  “I should have given Dugan the whole damned thing. I don’t know what made me do it.”

  “I don’t know what made you bring it home with you in the first place.”

  “And now I’ve made matters worse,” he said miserably.

  “If he finds out, you’re going to be in hot water.”

  “I’ll be in deep shit, that’s where I’ll be,” Marc corrected her. “Let’s go and get rid of it.”

  *

  Twenty minutes later, they were back on the Harvard campus, in Marc’s lab.

  “Do you really need me for this?” Nora asked tensely as he opened the safe.

  “Don’t you go to mass every Sunday?”

  “You hold that against me?”

  “No. But it seems appropriate that a practicing member of the Church should be the one to get rid of it,” he suggested.

  “What?” she asked, aghast.

  “I’ll let you do the dirty deed.”

  “Like how?”

  “I don’t know. Why not put it in the sink and turn on the water? That should do it.”

  Nora visibly paled. “Just like that?” she snapped her fingers.

  “Why not?” Marc asked.

  Nora moved away from him, then turned back. “No. No way. There has to be some proper way to dispose of it.”

  “Come on, Nora. You’re acting like it’s really Jesus’ hair. We don’t know that for sure.”

  “I’m well aware of that. Still . . . it could be. And . . . no, I just couldn’t.”

  “Okay, if you can’t handle it, I’ll do it,” Marc said.

  “Do what?” she inquired nervously.

  “I’ll cremate it. Is that better?”

  Shaken by the thought, Nora was unwilling to give it her verbal approval. Instead she simply took a deep breath of acquiescence.

  Marc moved to his Bunsen burner and lit it while she crossed herself and closed her eyes. But before he removed the tiny fragment from its glass container, there was a hurried knock on the door and Stephen Reilly rushed in.

  “Oh my God! Marc, I’m glad I found you! Hi, Nora. Wait till you hear this,” he announced breathlessly. “The whole thing’s out of the bag.”

  “What whole thing?” Marc demanded.

  “When Cardinal Lucassi received the hair, he returned it secretly to the reliquary with the shroud, just as he agreed with Dugan, but Italian television somehow got the story and put it on the air. Before the broadcast was over, people started pouring into the cathedral. Droves of them! And now the highways around Turin are completely clogged. They’re flocking to the city by the thousands.”

  “Uh-oh,” Marc uttered.

  “They’ve never attracted so many people before. That tiny piece of hair seems to have more spiritual power than the whole shroud!” Stephen exulted.

  Marc and Nora exchanged a wordless look.

  “Well,” she said, “if it wasn’t part of Christ’s body before, it sure as hell is now.”

  “So it would seem!” the elated Stephen concurred. “It’s a miracle!”

  “Imagine that,” Marc murmured, unobtrusively slipping the little glass vial into his pocket so that Father Reilly didn’t even notice.

  *

  As the sun began to lighten the morning clouds in Turin, Cardinal Lucassi entered his study with Monsignor Monza in attendance. The Cardinal went directly to the tall window and pulled back the heavy velvet curtains. In the piazza below was a mass of humanity, filing quietly through a series of crowd barriers, being guided slowly by the police toward the entrance to the Saint John’s Cathedral.

  “The line didn’t stop all night. A solid stream,” Monza said proudly.

  “Look at them,” the old man replied. “Every condition of mankind. The rich, the poor, the young,
the infirm . . .”

  “The aged, and the babies,” Monza added. “The Carabiniere estimate that two thousand people per hour are moving through the Cathedral.”

  “All because of one tiny fragment of our Lord.”

  “Well . . . of course,” Monza hesitated momentarily, almost reluctant to give voice to his thought, “we have no solid proof that the hair belonged to Him.”

  “Do we need any more proof than all those believing souls down there? Their faith provides all the confirmation we’ll ever require,” Lucassi said, folding his wrinkled hands in a gesture of prayer. “In fact, we wouldn’t dare question its provenance now.”

  “No . . . no, we couldn’t possibly. It’s a true miracle, isn’t it?

  Cardinal Lucassi nodded solemnly, then smiled. “Very clever of you, Monza . . . leaking the news so discreetly.”

  Monza nearly blushed with pride. “Every cloud has a silver lining, as my grandmother used to say.”

  Chuckling quietly, the Cardinal mused, “I’m certain that Cardinal Dugan didn’t have this in mind when he returned the hair.”

  “He’d likely have kept it in Boston,” Monza concurred.

  “Doctor Solovino should be canonized, don’t you think?”

  *

  It was a slow news week, so the media took the ball and ran with it. The next afternoon, Marc found himself facing a phalanx of TV cameras and reporters in his office. They’d even arranged a live simultaneous interview with Cardinal Dugan who could be seen on a small monitor facing Marc.

  A reporter in Dugan’s office asked, “Your Eminence, is it true that you initially suggested Doctor Solovino for the investigation of the shroud?”

  “Actually, a junior member of my staff conceived the idea, but yes . . . I did give it my approval,” the Cardinal admitted gravely. “However, I had no inkling that he’d prove to be such an irresponsible individual. I assumed that a man of his standing in the scientific community would have a modicum of stability. I never dreamed that he’d embarrass the Church . . . indeed, embarrass our nation like this.”

  Marc’s face flushed at this slam, not to mention the outright lie about Stephen, and he shot a glance toward Nora who was standing out of camera range. She gave him a look that warned as clearly as words, “Keep your cool!”

  The reporter continued questioning the Cardinal. “Did you ever consider keeping the relic here in the United States?”

  “No, of course not. It obviously belongs in Turin . . . with the shroud. I was terribly concerned that a member of my diocese had committed this crime—stealing the hair, that is—and I wanted to rectify matters with as little rancor as possible.”

  Marc’s annoyance was growing. He didn’t like being called a thief on television . . . even if it were true. And he didn’t like Dugan covering his own ass at Stephen’s expense.

  The reporter then turned to face the camera and directed his next question to Marc. “Doctor Solovino, there’s been some talk that you brought the sacred relic to this country as an act of patriotism. Is there any accuracy in that?”

  The little red light came on, and Marc knew that he was live on the air. “No, no. I wasn’t thinking that at all. I just wanted to be able to do some research on the hair without a lot of interference, and I knew that if I mentioned it in Turin, I’d regret it.”

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  “It would have been like trying to do some serious work in the middle of a three ring circus.”

  “So, have you been able to do your research here?”

  “No,” Marc continued pointedly, “unfortunately the powers that be sent the hair back to Italy before I had time.”

  “Exactly what sort of research were you planning?”

  Marc glanced at the Cardinal on the monitor. Dugan visibly stiffened, obviously hoping that Marc wouldn’t make matters worse, then wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a white linen handkerchief. As he did so, Marc caught a glimpse of his ring. Fuck him, Marc thought, I’ve got nothing to lose now except my reputation which is pretty well shot. “I wanted to clone it.”

  “Clone it?” the excited reporter pressed.

  “I thought it would be an interesting experiment.”

  “You mean, actually reproduce another human being from the hair . . . another Jesus?”

  “I was considering it,” Marc admitted.

  The room broke into pandemonium.

  “Cardinal Dugan, what’s your reaction to that?”

  For a moment, the Cardinal appeared frozen in horror because, of course, he couldn’t afford to even suggest that the hair wasn’t a true relic of the Son of God. And his earlier threat of arresting Marc was meaningless now. But he quickly pulled himself together and pronounced indignantly, “The very idea is a sacrilege. Clearly the Devil himself has beguiled the Doctor with visions of self-glory. Frankly, I’m not at all sure that Doctor Solovino has the expertise to do a cloning in the first place, but that’s a moot point now, isn’t it?”

  Marc couldn’t remember the rest of the interview. His anger became a palpable pressure in his throat, but he managed not to call the Cardinal all the names that came to mind. Or at least Nora said so after the press conference ended when she commended his self-control. She said that he’d made it clear that the idea of cloning was just a scientific daydream, something that he never seriously meant to pursue.

  *

  Late that night, Nora found him alone in his lab, sitting in front of his Bunsen burner, drinking Scotch from a beaker. The blue flame was the only light in the room.

  “Mind if I come in?” she asked.

  “Be my guest. Pour yourself a drink.”

  “No thanks,” she said, pulling up a stool. After a moment, she continued. “Did you destroy it?”

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t decided . . . yet.”

  “You still want to clone it, don’t you?” she asked point blank.

  In one split second all of Marc’s fury erupted, and with a single sweep of his arm he cleared the lab table of its contents. Glass and metal crashed to the floor, and the burner hung by it’s tubing, the flame still flickering.

  “And why the hell shouldn’t I? That son of a bitch Dugan thinks he’s God Almighty! That’s exactly why the church is in the shape it’s in today . . . bastards like him pontificating about something they can’t begin to understand . . . suggesting I couldn’t pull it off, when he doesn’t know jack shit about it. I could do it!”

  Nora had never seen him expose his emotions so openly, certainly not so powerfully. She moved to him quietly. “If you feel that strongly, you have go for it, Marc.”

  He put his arms around her, and gave her a rib-cracking hug.

  “Thanks, Nora. I’m going to.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Christmas was fast approaching, and the first snow of the season swirled in the quad outside Marc’s lab. After assembling all the necessary equipment, he had completed most of the basic preparations for the cloning, and meanwhile he still managed to teach his regular classes . . . all without calling unnecessary attention to his extra activities. But he spent every free moment in his lab, and expended virtually all his savings on new equipment because obviously he couldn’t charge it to Harvard University without revealing his plans. Only Nora was aware of this.

  “The bill for the new autoclave came too,” she said, placing a stack of bills on the table in front of him.

  “So what’s the bottom line?” he asked.

  “You have less than a thousand left. And a lot of bills haven’t come in yet.”

  “Damn,” he muttered. “Guess I’ll have to sell the Ferrari.”

  “You jest.”

  “Make some calls and see what I can get for it, will you? And after that, try to dig up somebody from the Reader’s Digest who’d like an exclusive.”

  “The Reader’s Digest?” she asked incredulously.

  “They have the largest circulation in
the world, don’t they? I wouldn’t want this story to get lost in the shuffle.”

  “They only summarize material from other publications. They don’t do news stories, do they?”

  “My guess is that they’ll do this one,” he said confidently.

  After a pause to absorb his implication, she warned, “This isn’t like you, Marc. It could backfire on you.”

  “I know. Maybe I’m turning into a gambling man.”

  *

  To his surprise, the magazine paid a generous honorarium to interview him exclusively, so he didn’t have to sell the Ferrari after all. And there in the next issue of the Digest was the interview. As soon as Nora received an advance copy she flipped through the pages to read the article to Mark.

  “‘Doctor Solovino is convinced that he’ll be able to use a single cell from the Hair of Turin to begin the process he calls autogenesis. Asked why he chose to approach the Pope publicly through this magazine, the Doctor explained that his past dealings with the hierarchy of the church lead him to doubt that approval will ever be given if he adheres to the usual channels. He fears that the project will become mired in a morass of ecclesiastical bureaucracy. But if he appeals directly to the Pope, a man of the twenty-first century with a background in science, the new Pope may well see the proposal solely on its own merits . . . “

  A pounding on the door interrupted her, and Cardinal Dugan strode in, his face crimson. He reeked of whiskey.

  “You did this to humiliate me, didn’t you, Solovino? You Italian scum.”

  Marc had anticipated a confrontation with the Cardinal, but not quite this soon and certainly not this blunt.

  “Nora, I don’t think you’ve met His Eminence, David Cardinal Dugan. His relatives came from Ireland,” Marc said with a totally straight face.

  “How do you do?” Nora replied without batting an eye.

  “I’ll do better if you let me talk to this scoundrel alone,” the cleric informed her.