Lipton shook his head. “Scientific teams have asked for a sample from the image portion and the church has refused. The church’s position is quite understandable. The image itself is the sacred part of the cloth.” He dropped his voice. “There is another theory about the tests.”
“Which is?”
“There are some who claim that the Vatican deliberately set up the tests to cast doubt on the age of the Shroud.”
“Come again?”
“The tests had long been requested … yet it is astonishing that the Vatican would permit scientific tests of the most important religious relic it possesses. The church has a long-standing policy of not doing scientific tests on religious relics. In fact, it generally refuses to even take an official position as to whether a relic is genuine or not. Church policy is that the decision as to whether a relic is really sacred should be made by the faithful themselves, not by tests.”
I could understand that. After all, while you could age date some things, there were no tests for holiness.
Lipton went on. “So it came as a surprise when the church gave permission to have a little piece of the Shroud snipped off and cut into pieces so three radiocarbon labs had the opportunity to do scientific tests—”
“You’re right, it’s ridiculous. They’d never turn over a piece of sacred cloth to scientific labs.”
“But they did, of course. And the labs involved are considered both honest and highly competent. No one suggests that they were in any way part of a cover-up. In fact, based upon the samples they were given, their stated results are no doubt accurate. But again, it’s quite astonishing that the church would even permit the testing.”
A mystery wrapped in a puzzle and buried under enigma. That was my instant reaction to the church permitting scientific tests on its most precious of relics.
“You have my attention,” I told Lipton. “So what’s the answer?”
“A little more background first. A couple of decades ago, a young Russian Orthodox priest in Moscow began giving speeches and sermons about the Shroud. He called the Western Church thieves and demanded it be returned to the East. To Moscow, the Third Rome.”
Nevsky, of course. “Why did Nevsky hire you?” I asked.
“To prove that the Image was the Shroud.”
I bit my lip and thought about it as he ordered more wine.
His explanation as to why Nevsky hired him was simple and direct and sounded like the truth.
If anyone else in the world had said it, I would have just let it pass. But the speaker was Sir Henri Lipton—liar, thief, con artist, art forger, art smuggler, and all of the above.
There was more to it, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to force it out of him. I needed to sit and listen and ask questions until he gave me a small opening that I could suddenly leap through and get to the truth.
I started talking around it. “You’re saying that there are people in the church who wanted the tests to be made on a part of the Shroud that had been environmentally contaminated. There was pressure building to return the Shroud to the East, just as the bones of saints and other relics were being returned—”
“And this way they could cloud the issue as to the age of the Shroud. In essence, the tests ended up establishing nothing, but did take the pressure off of demands from the East. Now that there is mounting doubt about whether the tests accurately dated the cloth, the demands are being sounded again.”
Lipton let out a big sigh. “When you examine the evidence, it does seem to come down to that, doesn’t it, my dear? With the most incriminating fact being that the Vatican even allowed it to be subjected to scientific tests—and then refused to give the scientists the most relevant pieces. Can you appreciate how serious the Vatican would take a claim by Nevsky over the most precious icon in Christendom?”
“That’s what he was really after,” I said, “not to find the Image; he already knew it was the Shroud. I was hired to do exactly what I did—track the Image until it led right back to the Shroud. But he must already know everything I found out. What’s he up to?”
He patted my hand. “My dear, I have told you everything that I know. I am quite as innocent and ignorant about the man’s motives as you are.”
I felt the heat of anger rising from my chest.
He lied so easily and naturally, I wondered if he even realized he was doing it. Not that he would care, of course.
“Will you pardon me, my dear. I need to drop a penny.”
It was an old-fashioned British way of saying he needed to visit the toilet. Despite his lack of honesty and integrity, or perhaps because of it, he was in fact an old-fashioned gentleman. The kind who smiled kindly while he was stabbing you in the back.
40
Lipton was dropping his penny into the urinal when he sensed someone behind him and felt cold steel at the back of his neck.
“Nine millimeter,” a man whispered. “Pulling the trigger will spatter your brains all over the wall.”
The words were spoken in English but Lipton identified the accent as either Russian or Chechen for no other reason than he knew that one of them would be the source of the threat to him.
“Would make a great deal of noise,” Lipton said. “People will hear.”
“Silencer.”
* * *
THE WINE BAR was on the corner of the waterfront and a canal that led back to the Grand Canal. While Maddy waited at a table on the waterfront side, Lipton was led out a side door to the canal.
He was hustled aboard a water taxi where another man was waiting.
Lipton couldn’t tell if the boat’s driver knew he was being kidnapped or was an innocent service provider. He decided the man wasn’t innocent when the driver deliberately refused to meet his eye.
The boat took them to a dock on the mainland. In the company of the two men, he left the boat and was hustled into a limo.
He asked the who and why questions and got no answers, but he started guessing about who might be waiting for him on the other end: Nevsky or his daughter, Karina.
As to the daughter, she could be operating on her own or as Nevsky’s agent. He had no solid evidence that Karina was anything but Nevsky’s loyal servant … except for his instincts: Having a criminal mentality himself, he found it relatively easy to recognize the trait in others.
There was another reason for considering the young woman a threat—from the moment he had been introduced to her, something warned him that she was probably more dangerous than her father, if for no other reason than her father was busy full time being a kingly figure.
Lipton had deliberately not kept in touch with the Russian patriarch because he had only been using Nevsky to finance his plan.
Now a prisoner, he realized it had been ill-advised to have permitted himself to fall out of favor with Nevsky. Any way he looked at it, still having Nevsky’s power and influence behind him was a major plus, even if the source of his abduction was the daughter.
As he went to step into the limo, a man behind him touched him with a stun gun. He let out a gasp and collapsed. The two men got him into the limo and put a towel over his face.
Trying to breathe, he sucked in a substance that had been soaked into the towel. Surprisingly, all the dread and agony of having been kidnapped and given an electric shock disappeared and he felt a rush of euphoria before he went under.
41
After about ten minutes, it occurred to me that Lipton must have dropped more than a penny—he never came back.
And he had left me with the bill.
A door at the back of the bar led down a narrow corridor to the restrooms. Beyond the bathroom doors, the hallway led out to the small canal that ran along the side of the wine bar.
I tapped on the restroom door and yelled Lipton’s name, then cracked it open a bit, wondering if he had tripped on his lying tongue and bumped his head on a urinal. The room was empty.
He hadn’t come back out the front; I would have seen him. There were no window
s in the restroom.
I went down the hallway and out the door. To my left, a narrow passageway ran along the small canal. That canal would end up on the other side of the island at the larger canal that the San Marco piazzetta fronted.
It occurred to me that he might have come out the side door by mistake and gone around the corner to make his way back to the front of the wine bar.
I went around myself, talked to the waiter, but no one had seen Lipton.
I paid the bill and went outside, wondering what the hell was going on. He had left me, literally, if not in mid-sentence, at least in mid-thought. Most important, he hadn’t dropped the other shoe yet. There was no purpose in our meeting if he was going to walk away without hitting me with it.
I went back to the restroom corridor, opened the door, and spoke his name. A man at a urinal turned his head to gawk at me and I quickly closed the door and went down the hallway and out the side door again.
Lacking wings, and Lipton was no angel, there were only two ways he could have left the area without passing back in front of the wine bar: by water or walking up the passageway alongside the small canal.
He could have grabbed a water taxi on the canal, but that just didn’t make any sense.
Fog had turned the passageway dark and gloomy.
I started up the passageway, wondering if he had bumped his head and gone that way in a daze or whatever—nothing was making sense.
I walked a few dozen feet and turned to go back to the wine bar when I saw the two men. They were about where the side door to the wine bar was located. And they were looking in my direction.
I couldn’t see their faces, but something about their size, shape, and clothing struck me as familiar. My paranoia went on fire as the two figures half cloaked by the fog reminded me of the man who tried to kill me in New York.
Lipton had disappeared.
Now it was my turn.
Fear choked me.
Spinning on my heel, I fled up the passageway.
42
Lipton had no idea where he was or how much time had passed before he came to. He was reasonably certain it was the next day because it was daylight outside and he had left Venice at night.
He was embarrassingly naked. Embarrassingly because he knew he looked much better in a three-thousand-dollar suit than bare flesh. Stripped of all fashion coverings, his body resembled the pale, spotted, and flabby underbelly of a milk cow.
His hands were cuffed behind him and each of his legs was cuffed to a chair.
He soon found that he was right about it being a Nevsky who had him grabbed, but was wrong about which one.
“You should have kept in touch, Sir Henri. That was the agreement.”
Karina blew smoke in his face.
He gave a great sigh. “My dear, I don’t believe I have any agreement with you. Please advise your father I wish to speak to him. I’m not accustomed to being abused by anyone … not even young women.”
She leaned down and put her cigarette out on his bare leg.
He stared at it and screeched. “You crazy bitch!”
She laughed as she shook her head. “Oh, no, Sir Henri, you underestimate me. Crazy bitch doesn’t come near to describing just how insane I can be.”
“What do you want from me?”
“In a word … everything. I want to know everything you know.”
“Just ask. Persuasion will not be necessary. You have already convinced me that you are a woman who means business.”
“I’m afraid it’s not going to be that easy. You see, I don’t think I can trust any answers you volunteer … there’s KGB blood in my veins, Sir Henri. As a student of history, you must know that KGB thugs could have given lessons to Inquisition torturers.”
“Please…”
She shook her head. “Mercy is not in my vocabulary. See this little thing?”
She poked his penis.
“We’re going to ask some questions and apply a little pain as we do. But now here’s the bottom line … if I like the answers, when this is all over, you will still have this ugly little appendage. If I don’t—”
“God no!”
“I’m afraid you won’t find God around here. The patriarch no doubt has sold him to Satan along with his own soul.”
She squeezed his little pecker. “Don’t worry … if we cut it off, you can use a straw to pee through. That’s what they used to do in China when men had their dicks cut off so they could become palace eunuchs.”
“Mother of God,” he sobbed.
“She’s not here, either. But there is a woman we need to talk about…”
Turin
Russia’s “CSI” Investigates the Shroud of Turin
Scientists from Russia’s Institute of Criminal Investigation, a division of the Federal Security Services (the Russian version of America’s FBI), performed an analysis of the Shroud of Turin … and concluded it was an image of a man who suffered wounds consistent with crucifixion at the time of Christ.
—DR. ANATOLIY FESENKO, HEAD OF THE INSTITUTE OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, WHO DIRECTED THE RESEARCH
“Our research was complex; it involved overlapping findings in chemistry, physics, mathematics and biology,” the professor explained, “In the beginning we established the possible age of this fabric by remodeling the aging process. Our conclusion showed that the American scientists who had previously calculated the item’s years incorrectly gave it half its actual age. In actuality it is indeed no younger than 2,000 years.”
—PRAVDA ONLINE, SEPTEMBER 13, 2006 (QUOTED MATERIALS TRANSLATED BY NATALIA VYSOTSKAYA)
43
The next morning I had the hotel clerk help me make a plane reservation to Turin. On my way to the airport, I diverted to a nearly six-hour train ride rather than going by plane.
I shook my head at my own machinations. There I go again—leaving a “trail” that I had taken a flight with the idea of being clever and outwitting whoever was expecting me to show up at the airport in Turin. By now, they were probably expecting me anywhere but the airport.
The fact that Lipton had found me so easily last night should have told me that my moving-target evasive-action technique was full of holes, but it made me feel better. Besides, what else was I to do? Make it easy for them?
I had a miserable night. Racing up an alley with killers—real or imagined—on my heels had drained me but left me too revved up to sleep.
The short interlude in Piazza San Marco with the silent swordsman during the carnival had been soul-satisfying, but had only soothed my nerves for a while. We had parted—literally—as soon as the princesses flowed by and the crowd started to disperse.
I never learned his name or even if he owned a tongue—for all I knew, he was a mute. Whatever he was, whoever he was, we had shared a moment of warm ecstasy that I would not easily forget.
Lipton ditching me at the café had left me with free-flowing anxiety and pure fear. My head had buzzed half the night with the big question: What had happened to him?
Why had he done a disappearing act?
I tossed and turned in the wee hours and went over and over in my mind what I had said before he left.
I didn’t say anything that would make him do a disappearing act. I had plenty of evil thoughts about what I would like to see happen to him, but none that I had expressed.
The other issue was whether he had actually disappeared of his own volition.
It didn’t take long for my imagination to have Knights Templar kidnapping him and hauling him off to a medieval dungeon. And kicking open my hotel room door and dragging me out of bed to take me to the same dungeon.
Jesus … my karma needed a real overhaul. I not only couldn’t get Lipton to tell me the truth; I couldn’t even get him to stick around when I was putting up a pretense of still being fooled by him.
Despite my own desire to gouge out Lipton’s eyes and cut off his tongue, I still needed him until I found out what he was up to, and what the rest of the pa
ck I was suspicious of were doing.
At the present, I had a number of candidates who were expecting me to show up in Turin—Lipton, Victorio, Nevsky-Karina, and Yuri, at the minimum.
When I started adding them up, it looked like there would be a parade waiting for me. It evoked a silly memory of a bumper sticker I’d read about in a book about the 1960s. It went something like, “If you’re being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and pretend it’s a parade.”
Of course, the people I was dealing with had no intention of running me out of town … dragging me to a lynching would be more like it.
Unfortunately, the long train ride to Turin gave me too much time to think about my life—besides the part where I was running around Europe trying to avoid being murdered.
I was tired of being alone. That was why I had found the fragile companionship of my mystery swordsman last night so inviting.
It had felt good to be with Yuri. Rolling over at night and feeling someone warm next to me in bed was a sensation I wanted every night. It wasn’t just that being independent lost its pleasure when wolves were at my door—like a criminal who did the crime and should do the time, I didn’t expect anyone to get me out of the mess I had made in my life.
What I needed was an emotional assist, someone to love who’d love me, to share a home and family.
I had thought long and hard about it since we’d come together in Istanbul and now decided it was possible for Yuri and me to build a life together. He might even be eager to get out of frigid Moscow.
But there was something else about Yuri that kept popping up in my thoughts: I didn’t know if I could trust him. Which meant I shouldn’t.
Damn … it was unfortunate that I had so much time to think.
* * *
THE TRAIN RIDE took me from the east side of the Italian boot to the western half, where Turin is a flat sprawling city on the Po River valley of Piedmont.
A region of vineyards that produces fine wines, it’s known as the auto-manufacturing capital of Italy because Fiat is headquartered there. The French border and the Alps were each about an hour away.
The Shroud Page 24