I assumed that after Venice the Shroud would have made its way to the Vatican before its final resting place in Turin, but I wasn’t sure. I recalled Father Dimitrios saying something about it going to France.
Finding a medieval scholar who already knew the information was the best bet, but I had to be more cautious than I had been in Istanbul—Venice was much smaller than Istanbul, a fraction of the size, and that increased the odds of running into whomever Lipton had hired to lead me astray.
I put on my disguise—sunglasses and a headscarf—and left the hotel to do some research.
35
My first stop was at the Gothic-style Doge museum. It was a short stay, just long enough to be told historical records were at the archives and getting the address for it.
About a ten-minute walk from the museum, the archives was a three-story building that had once housed a prince of trade. The interior of the building had an old and venerable feel to it, like a medieval cathedral. Though it housed the memories of wars and the rise and fall of empires, as I stepped into the hallowed marble entrance, it struck me that it was quiet as a tomb.
The reception desk manned by two clerks was only steps into the entrance. Separated by a wood post railing off to the left was a reading room where three people were scattered around small library tables with their noses deep in documents and books.
I introduced myself to the female clerk as a researcher for the Piedmont Museum in New York—not mentioning that I hadn’t been in the museum’s employment or even good graces for more than a year.
I still had a supply of my old Piedmont business cards and gave her one to help validate my credentials.
Telling the clerk I was researching the relationship between Venice and Constantinople during medieval times, I narrowed my first request to the cargos of ships.
“I’d like to look at the manifests of ships arriving from Constantinople between April 1204 and April 1205.”
She gave me a look of surprise and pointed at a man in a black robe using a microfilm machine on a research table.
“The lay brother is examining those documents right now.”
The man heard us and turned and gave me a look of consternation.
As I started for him, he got up from his chair, gathered up a pad and pencil, and stuffed them into a briefcase as he hurried by me.
“Signore, may I speak to you?”
He rushed by me, not meeting my eyes. He looked scared.
I stood dumbfounded and paralyzed for a moment and then went after him.
My first thought was that he was the “scholar” Lipton had hired to mislead me.
I followed him outside.
As he hurried up the street, I said loudly behind him, “Did Lipton hire you?”
His step broke and he gave me a fleeting look back, but he kept going.
I had the impression he shook his head no.
“He’s dangerous!” I yelled.
He slowly came to a halt like an old truck grinding to a stop.
I hurried up to him.
“I don’t know what you’re doing for him, but he can’t be trusted. He tried to kill me.”
He stared at me for a long moment.
“He is killing me, too. Slowly.”
36
We stood on the street for a moment and stared at each other like two cats in a face-off, moving aside for passersby without taking our eyes off each other.
He had large, watery eyes, pale white skin, and dark red hair. Like the Orthodox monk in Istanbul, he wore a full-length robe. But while the Istanbul monk had been a bear, this lay brother came across as a worried rabbit that had poked its head out of its hole and now wondered what dangers the world held for him.
“My name’s Madison Dupre. I’m an American. From New York.”
“Victorio Ferrera. I’m a Catholic lay brother from Turin.”
He spoke a little English, I spoke a little Italian; we were made for each other.
“I’m in Venice because of Henri Lipton,” I said. “And I’m not happy about it. Apparently, you’re not too happy with him, either.”
I shut up and gave him a moment to fill in the blanks and hear his story before I told him mine, but he first stared at me and then his wet eyes drifted away from the stare-down.
Spontaneous, he was not. Scared, he was.
“I suspect we can help each other,” I said. I gave him a brave smile. “I’ve known Lipton for a long time, but I wasn’t aware that he was a crook until he decided to bring some hell into my life.”
That was more or less truthful under the theory that he was just a bigger crook in a field dominated by art dealers who would never be candidates for sainthood.
I stopped talking and silence descended again. When the silence felt leaden again, I took another tack.
“Why don’t we have an espresso and talk about it.”
I took his arm and started walking.
He came along peacefully rather than making me drag him bodily down the street.
I gave him another smile. “I don’t remember exactly what a lay brother is. A type of priest?”
I actually did know because an uncle of a friend had become one, but I hoped that talking about his profession would get him to open up about other things.
He shook his head. “Brothers of my order are not priests. We have taken religious vows, wear the habit, and perform many duties for the church, but we cannot conduct mass or baptisms, perform marriages, or speak for the dead.”
I had to let go of him as we dodged laughing kids racing down the street, but he continued walking beside me without my twisting his arm.
“Each brother has a reason why he has not taken the vows of a priest, yet wants to still serve God. Some feel they are unworthy, others don’t want to shoulder the added burdens that monks and parish priests bear.”
I didn’t voice it, but in the case of my friend’s uncle, he was not only deeply religious, but he needed shelter from the cruel, hard world.
From his demeanor, I had to wonder whether, besides his strong faith, Brother Ferrera was also using the church as shelter. He struck me as a person one step from his next breakdown … but that could be a result of Lipton “killing him slowly.”
“Brothers originally did manual labor at monasteries,” he said. “They lived in the monastery as the monks did, and they worked in the kitchen, did gardening and farming, chopped wood, any type of chore that freed up the monks so they could devote the time necessary for prayer and meditation.” He shot me a look. “Some brothers still do manual labor, but now others perform many tasks. We have brothers who teach university classes, handle finances for churches, do technical work such as computer programming.”
Quite a mouthful from a guy who had been reluctant to even tell me his name, but he was nervous and the talking seemed to help.
“What type of work do you do for the church?” I asked.
“Various things.”
A vague answer. But it was obviously a touchy subject that had a Lipton connection, so I let it slide—for the time being.
The fact that he was from Turin obviously grabbed my attention. I hadn’t jumped into it because I wanted to desensitize him to speaking with me before I started hitting sensitive areas. But he descended into another bout of silence and I decided it was now or never.
“Are you with the church where the Shroud is stored?” I asked.
Bull’s-eye! He made a mumbled reply, an affirmative one, speaking down to the pavement at our feet as we walked.
My adrenaline spiked.
He was a nervous wreck and it wasn’t hard to imagine Lipton and the Shroud as the cause. He looked ready to run again and I decided to talk about the weather or something else inane.
“Do you know that Venice is my favorite place to visit?” I said. “But I can’t imagine living here. Besides what it would cost, I think I’d probably get moldy from all the dampness.”
No chuckle, not even a grunt for my attempt at li
ghtening up the conversation. Perhaps I should go the other direction—tell him about my experience with death by orgasm.
My own chuckle escaped at the thought and I coughed into my hand to smother it.
“I’m nervous,” he said.
“I don’t blame you, I’m nearly a basket case myself. Lipton has that effect on people.”
Instead of him sallying forth to tell me his problem with Lipton, at the mention of Lipton’s name his jaws got so tight his cheeks wrinkled.
What do you say to a rabbit to keep it from bolting? I decided to try keeping my mouth shut again.
We went back toward the square, going over the Bridge of Straw—so named for grains and fodder once brought ashore at the spot. As we crossed the bridge, I looked up the Rio del Palazzo, the canal that runs between the Doge’s Palace and the old prison. Connecting the two buildings is an architecturally gingerbread, elevated, covered bridge.
“Isn’t there a story about that bridge?” I asked.
He nodded glumly at the bridge. “It was the passageway prisoners were walked across from the court in the Doge’s Palace to the prison on the other side. For many of the prisoners, their next stop would be a hangman.”
I already knew the story, but was again just giving him a chance to talk about something neutral. Lord Bryon called it the Bridge of Sighs after hearing sounds of sorrow from prisoners being led across it.
He led me to a coffee bar and we ordered espresso and sugar. Lots of sugar. I only suggested espresso because it seemed that every Italian male preferred it over lighter drinks. I preferred lattes and cappuccinos but he looked like he needed something stronger.
We stood at the bar and talked—more accurately, I talked, telling him the story of how the man who was responsible for making Starbucks a worldwide coffee phenomena had been inspired by the coffee bars of Italy.
The place was crowded and loud enough that we could have been discussing a terrorist attack intent on sinking the city and no one would have heard.
After the barista served our drinks, I spooned sugar in until the espresso was so thick it hardly poured. It still tasted like warm asphalt to me. The stuff was definitely an acquired taste.
I kept up the small talk because he still looked ready to throw himself into the canal and drink the water.
“Are there any Starbucks coffee shops in Italy?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
He turned away from me and stared aimlessly into the crowd.
Okay … it was time again to put up or shut up—time we started sharing secrets about Lipton.
“Victorio, we need to talk.”
He shook his head and didn’t meet my eye, but he mumbled a yes.
“Are you a lay brother for the church in Turin where the Shroud is kept?”
“I am with that order, yes. But I am also a freelance journalist besides being a lay brother.”
“For magazines?”
“Magazines and newspapers, whoever will buy. I write about church history or projects. It’s not much of a living. I also work for the church itself in my role as a lay brother.”
“Have you written about the Shroud?”
“Many times.” He held up his hand to block another question. “Who are you? What do you have to do with Lipton?”
“I guess you could say I’m one of his victims. I’m a curator—no, excuse me, a former museum curator. I had a nice job, a nice life, and I stepped on a land mine Lipton set out. He conned me into buying a very expensive contraband piece for my museum. It cost me my job and almost my life.”
I gave a sigh as sorrowful as a prisoner crossing the Bridge of Sighs on their way to meet the hangman.
“I thought I’d learned my lesson but he dragged me into something else. I was broke and he was the devil with a fistful of money. You know he’s officially dead, don’t you?”
He nodded. “He’s one of Satan’s disciples. I wish God would strike him down.” He crossed himself.
“Amen to that.” I cleared my throat. It would take God, or at the very least a wood stake driven through the bastard’s heart, to kill him.
“Anyway,” I said, “I was broke and desperate and he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse because I wanted to keep on eating.”
“What work did he want you to do?”
“Research an art item, an antiquity. But after I got into it, I realized it didn’t make sense.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“It was an unnecessary assignment,” I said. “He had me research information at great expense when he could have gotten it himself with little cost or time.”
“I don’t understand. He has you do research he doesn’t really need? What did he have you research?”
“The Image of Edessa.”
I stopped and let that sink in. He reacted by once again looking away into the crowd to avoid my eye.
“You’re familiar with it?” I asked.
“Of course. All servants of God know about the Image. What exactly did he have you research?”
“The history of the Image. He told me that he had a wealthy collector who wanted to track it down and buy it.”
“Buy the Image of Edessa?”
He spoke loudly enough so that people nearby gave us a look. He lowered his voice and leaned closer. “Lipton wanted to buy the Image of Edessa?”
Victorio had about as much shock and indignation in his voice as the Orthodox monk did when the monk described the Crusaders’ rape of Constantinople and indignities to the church, including putting a prostitute on the patriarch’s throne.
“No amount of money on earth could buy it,” he said.
“I quite agree with you—now. But I have to admit that when I set out, I knew almost nothing about religious relics. Besides, I was getting paid to try and find it, with no guarantee I would be successful.”
“Insanity,” he muttered.
I hoped he was referring to my assignment and not my mental state.
“To make a long story short, as I did the research, I began to wonder why I was digging up information that Lipton could’ve gotten easily himself.”
“The history of the Lord’s cloth is well known.”
“I know that now. Lipton had to know it, too, as did his collector. So why was I sent on a wild-goose chase?”
We were speaking a pidgin combination of Italian and English and it took a moment to get across what a wild-goose chase was.
“It’s not possible someone would believe that they could buy the sacred cloth. You are certain the rich collector believed he could buy it?”
“That’s what I was told, but with Lipton, the only time he’s not lying is when his lips aren’t moving. Victorio, I quite agree with you that the situation is insane. But let me assure you that Lipton is anything but stupid. And the collector is no dummy, either. So why was I sent on an absurd search for something obviously unattainable?”
He just stared at me. I didn’t blame him.
“Are you still working for Lipton?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t do work for him if my life depended on it.” A private joke, of course. But why send him running by telling him there had already been two attempts to kill me?
“Have you been fully paid for your work?” he asked.
“Uh … in a way, I suppose.” I was paid for the research, not for being murdered.
“So why are you in Venice still researching?’
I decided to leave out the fact that some nasty people would kill me if I returned to New York without clearing up the matter. But I had to get across how much danger I was in—and the fact that he was probably on the same path.
“As I said, I was doing a lot of work that didn’t seem necessary. I started wondering what was going on. I guess I wondered too loud, because someone pushed me in front of a truck a couple of days ago. I was almost killed. And I’m certain Lipton was behind it.”
He said nothing, but I’m sure he turned a shade paler.
I decided to hit him with the punch line.
“I finally realized that the trail was leading to the Shroud of Turin.”
The reaction I got again was his personal form of avoidance behavior—he looked away.
I waited a moment and then prodded him. “What’s your relationship with Lipton?”
Instead of replying he downed another espresso, no sugar.
He looked ready to bolt. Whatever had gone down between him and Lipton had put the fear of the Lord in him—literally.
“Is the Image of Edessa the Shroud?” I asked.
I knew it was after what Father Dimitrios had told me, but I wanted to hear Victorio’s version of it as a Catholic.
He took his time to answer. “As I’m sure you discovered in your research, there are people who have long claimed that the Image of Edessa is in fact the Shroud.”
His words were very measured. But it was easy to understand why—he didn’t want to make an open statement that could get him into trouble with his superiors in the church.
“Is there evidence of that?”
“Evidence is a word for courtrooms, not churches, but I suppose you can view the sacred cloth’s history as a chain of evidence that extends back two thousand years. The Middle East and Asia Minor, where the Shroud was kept for over a thousand years, have, since the time of Christ, seen thousands of wars that have destroyed cities and entire nations.
“Sometimes whole civilizations. Even the Imperial Library of Constantinople, which would have had the answers to many of the questions we ask about our Lord today, was destroyed.
“One looks at the ancient writings and physical evidence and draws conclusions,” he said. “In the case of the Image, because it was so incredibly sacred and so much in danger of being stolen or destroyed, reports of it were often clouded or even deliberately misleading. You are aware that the Image was a full-length linen cloth, not a painted portrait?”
The Shroud Page 21