The Fifth Gospel (55 page)

C
HAPTER
39

D
ON DIEGO ANSWERS
the door to Lucio's apartment. He explains that Lucio's gone. Meeting with Mignatto. I push inside and tell him I'll wait.

The waiting, though, is endless. Diego watches me pace the apartments. Finally he says, “Your uncle told me what happened at the trial today. Is that why you're here?”

I hold myself together. But I can't even look at him.

Diego inspects his hands. Quietly he says, “Come with me.”

He leads me out of Lucio's office and into a room I have almost no memory of. My uncle's bedroom.

“Maybe it's best,” he says, “if you wait for His Eminence in here.”

He closes the door after himself. And it takes me a moment to understand what I'm looking at.

The hospital bed is angled up, surrounded by medical devices and trays of pills. There are three large vases of flowers and a standing wardrobe. And otherwise, in this sprawling bedroom nearly as big as my apartment, there is not a single other thing except what hangs on the walls. Mementos cover every inch of space like icons on the wall of a Greek church. I see a photo of Lucio at his consecration. A newspaper article about a piano concert he gave as a young man. But every other framed object is of
us
.

My mother when she was young. My parents at their wedding. I
cover my mouth, seeing two entire rows of Peter. Beside them are corresponding pictures of me: at baptism; on my name day; being held in my mother's arms. My ordination. Winning my seminary prize for gospel studies. We are half of my uncle's waking world. We, who never seemed to mean anything to him.

The other half is Simon. Two entire walls, floor to ceiling, filled with pictures. A toddler walking through the Vatican gardens, holding Lucio's hand. Riding a tricycle in Lucio's dining room. A baby in his proud uncle's arms. In that picture is something I've never seen before: my uncle truly smiling. Then comes every stage of Simon's priesthood. Academy milestones. Nunciature posts. And, finally, an empty frame containing nothing but a silk skullcap. It is amaranth red. The color of a bishop.

My eyes return to the hospital bed. To the platters of plastic vials and the breathing apparatus. Only when I hear the door open behind me do I turn.

Lucio hobbles in on his cane. He bears no resemblance to the cardinal who tried to save Simon's life from the witness table. He struggles to make it to his bed. Yet he waves Diego away and stops when he's beside me.

“Uncle,” I murmur, “I found his cassock in my apartment. I found the gun case.”

His eyes fall. They seem so tired.

“You knew?” I say.

He doesn't answer.

“For how long?” I ask.

“Two days.”

“He told you? Even though he didn't tell me?”

And yet, seeing everything on these walls, I begin to understand why he might.

Lucio removes his pectoral cross and places it in a small jewelry box by the bed. “Alexander,” he says, “you know better than to think that. Your brother never confides in me. His only family is you.”

He moves the four-legged cane so that he can reach a tube of ointment in a drawer. Each hand struggles to rub the medicine into the withered joints of the other.

“Then how did you know?” I say.

“Would you mind opening that for me?” he says, gesturing at the wardrobe.

It's filled with old cassocks and the smell of mothballs.

“See it there?” he says.

“Which one?”

Then I realize he isn't talking about the cassocks. He's talking about what's behind them.

Propped against the back wall of the wardrobe is a giant photographic enlargement of a page from the Diatessaron. The one Simon took down from Ugo's exhibit.

“When I was in seminary,” Lucio says in a scratchy voice, “I was a gospel man, like you.”

I spread the hangers apart. My arms reach inside and edge the photo out. I feel rigid.

“I don't know what he did with the Diatessaron,” Lucio says. “I could've sold many tickets to an exhibit about that manuscript. But once it disappeared, my fears were confirmed.”

The page is nearly as tall as I am. I prop it against the wall, against the pictures of my own childhood. And almost instantly, I feel as if a glass has shattered inside my heart. Because seeing the ghost of the ancient stains that our restorers removed, I understand.

I scrabble in my pockets for the letter Ugo mailed to Simon.

“If you're looking for a Bible,” Lucio says, “I have one here.” He reaches under his pillow and produces it. “Ignore my notations. I'm sure you'll see it before I did.”

But all I feel is a lancing pain in my chest. “A pen,” I whisper. “Give me a pen.”

He hands me one from the nightstand.

I kneel and unfold the letter across his cold marble floor. Then I do exactly what the Alogi did almost two thousand years ago. In his letter, wherever I see verses from John, I cross out the text.

I hear my voice shaking when I utter those two words.

“A fake?”

Lucio doesn't answer.

But I realize, as I stare at the lines of Greek on the photographic enlargement, that I don't need him to. My heart has gone cold. My body feels brittle.
This
is what Ugo meant.
This
is what he found.

The page of the Diatessaron before me combines the testimony of all four gospels about the end of Jesus' life. About his final moments on the cross. But not his burial. Not the Shroud. Not yet. Ugo spent weeks studying every detail of the burial accounts, only to make his discovery where he didn't expect it.

The damning fact isn't what the gospels say about the cloth. It's what the gospels say about the
wounds
on the cloth.

THERE ARE NINE LINES
of text on this Diatessaron page that stand out. The reason they stand out is that our conservators removed the blot of censorship left by the Alogi but couldn't get it all. A hint of the
ancient stain remains, making these nine lines darker than the ones around them. Thus any passerby can tell they must've come from the only gospel the Alogi objected to: John. And this simple observation is what will doom the Shroud.

The seven lines include John 19:34, the last verse Ugo quoted in his letter. The significance of John 19:34 is hard to see straight-on. But it's much easier to see when approached from the very spot where Ugo was the last time we worked together: the story of Doubting Thomas.

Doubting Thomas is John's creation. No other gospel claims Thomas needed to see and touch Christ's wounds. But there's an oddity about the Thomas story that Ugo had noticed in our final meeting: namely, a very similar story is told by Luke. According to Luke's version, Christ appeared to the frightened disciples after the Resurrection, and in order to prove that He was a resurrected man rather than a terrifying ghost, He showed them His wounds. Ugo realized that a comparison between Luke's story and John's story would reveal the details that John had changed. And the most visible difference was that John had focused the story on Thomas—so that was where Ugo, in turn, focused. Later, though, he must've noticed the much smaller, and yet far more destructive, difference: that the wounds mentioned in Luke are not the same as the wounds mentioned in John.

In Luke's story, Christ shows the disciples His hands and feet. His wounds from the crucifixion. But John adds something more. Something new. He says Thomas put his finger in a lance wound in Christ's side.

Where did the lance wound come from? No other gospel mentions it. Only John himself does—earlier in his own narrative, at a crucial symbolic moment: the moment where the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God are finally fused together. These are the very verses shown on this Diatessaron enlargement, John 19:32–37:

So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the men crucified with Jesus. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust a lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out. An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true; he knows that he is speaking the truth so that you also may believe. For this happened
so that the scripture passage might be fulfilled: “Not a bone of it will be broken.” And again another passage says: “They will look upon him whom they have pierced.”

No other gospel says that either of these two incidents ever happened. So where did John get this?

Not a bone of it will be broken
: this is what the Old Testament says about the Passover lamb.

They will look upon him whom they have pierced
: this is what the Old Testament says about the Good Shepherd.