“They love you in their own way.”
“I’m certain they do,” Stephanie said with a smile. The irony was, she believed it. Stephanie reached across and squeezed Thea’s wrist. It felt fragile, as though if she pressed too hard, the bones might break. Stephanie pushed back her chair and stood up. Thea did likewise, and they hugged.
“I’ll call from the Bahamas as soon as I get situated and give you the details about where we’re staying and the number,” Stephanie said. She gave her mother a peck on her cheek before sticking her head back into the living room. The cigarette haze was denser with both men smoking. “Goodbye, you two. I’m on my way.”
Tony looked up. “What’s this? You’re taking off already?”
“She’s going on a trip for a month,” Thea said over Stephanie’s shoulder. “She has to get ready.”
“No!” Tony said. “You can’t go. Not yet! I got to talk with you. I was going to call you, but since you’re here, face-to-face is better.”
“Then you’d better come in here on the double,” Stephanie said. “I really have to be on my way.”
“You’ll wait until we’re finished,” Anthony said. “Tony and I are talking business.”
“It’s okay, Pop,” Tony said. He gave his father’s knee a squeeze as he stood up. “What I have to say to Steph won’t take long.”
Anthony grumbled as he reached for his discarded newspaper.
Tony walked back into the kitchen. He sat down backward on one of the kitchen chairs and motioned for Stephanie to sit in one of the others. Stephanie hesitated for a moment. Tony had become increasingly peremptory since he’d assumed more of his father’s roles, and it was irksome. To avoid making it an issue, Stephanie sat, but as a compromise with herself, she told her brother he’d better be quick. She also told him to put out his cigarette, which he did grudgingly.
“The reason I was going to call you,” Tony began, “is because Mikey Gualario, my accountant, told me that CURE is about to tank. I said that’s impossible, because my kid sister would have told me. But he says he read it in the Globe. What’s the scoop?”
“We’re having financial difficulties,” Stephanie admitted. “It’s a political problem that is holding up our second round of financing.”
“So the Globe wasn’t making this all up?”
“I didn’t read the article, but as I said, we are in rather a bind.”
Tony screwed up his face as if in thought. He nodded a few times. “Well, that’s not such great news. I guess you can understand that I might be concerned about my two-hundred-thousand-dollar loan.”
“Correction! It wasn’t a loan. It was an investment.”
“Wait a minute! You came to me crying that you needed money.”
“Correction again! I said we needed to raise money, and I certainly wasn’t crying.”
“Yeah, well, you said it was a sure thing.”
“I said I thought it was a good investment, because it was based on a brilliant and fully patented, newly discovered procedure that promises to be a boon to medicine. But I said it wasn’t risk-free, and I gave you the prospectus. Did you read it?”
“No, I didn’t read it. I don’t understand that kind of crap. But if the investment was so good, what’s the problem?”
“What’s happened that no one anticipated is the possibility of a congressional ban being enacted on the procedure. But I can assure you we’re working on it, and we think we have it under control. The whole thing has been a bolt out of the blue for all of us, and proof of that is that both Daniel and I have invested every penny we have in the company, including mortgaging Daniel’s condo. I’m sorry that at the moment the investment looks less than rock-solid. I might add, I’m sorry we took your money.”
“You and me both!”
“What’s going to happen about this indictment of yours?”
Tony batted the air as if shooing a fly. “Nothing. It’s a bunch of nonsense. The DA is just trying to drum up publicity to get reelected. But let’s not change the subject. You said you think you have this political problem under control.”
“We believe so.”
“Does this have anything to do with this monthlong trip your going on?”
“It does,” Stephanie said. “But I can’t give you the details.”
“Oh, really?” Tony questioned sarcastically. “I got two hundred K involved here, and you can’t give me the details. There’s something wrong with this picture.”
“If I were to divulge what we’re doing, it would jeopardize its efficacy.”
“Divulge, jeopardize, efficacy!” Tony mimicked derogatorily. “Give me a break! I hope you don’t think I’m going to be satisfied with a handful of ten-dollar words. Not a chance! So where are you going, Washington?”
“She’s going to Nassau,” Thea said suddenly from where she was standing near the stove. “And don’t you be nasty to your own sister. You hear me?”
Tony sat bolt upright with his hands dangling lifelessly at his sides. His lower jaw slowly dropped open in utter amazement. “Nassau!” he yelled. “This is getting crazier and crazier. If CURE’s ready to tank because of a political bombshell, don’t you think you should hang around and do something?”
“That’s why we’re going to Nassau,” Stephanie said.
“Ha!” Tony shouted. “What it sounds like to me is this so-called boyfriend of yours has it in his mind to pull off a scam.”
“That couldn’t be further from the truth. Tony, I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. Hopefully, in a month things will be back on track, and at that time we’ll be happy to consider your money a loan, and we will pay it back with interest.”
“I’ll try to remember not to hold my breath.” Tony sneered. “You say you can’t tell me more, but I can tell you something. That two hundred grand wasn’t all mine.”
“No?” Stephanie questioned. She sensed the unpleasant conversation was about to get worse.
“You painted it as such a sweet deal, I felt I had to share it. Half the money came from the Castigliano brothers.”
“You never told me that!”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Who are the Castigliano brothers?”
“Business partners. And I can tell you something else. They are not going to like hearing about their investment loan going south. They are not accustomed to that. As your brother, I think I should tell you it’s not a good idea to go to the Bahamas.”
“But we have to.”
“You said that, but you’re not telling me why. It forces me to repeat myself: You and your Harvard boyfriend better stay put and mind the store, because it looks like you’re planning on frolicking in the sun with our money while we stooges freeze our asses here in Boston.”
“Tony,” Stephanie said in the calmest, most reassuring tone she could muster. “We’re going to Nassau, and we are going to deal with this unfortunate problem.”
Tony threw his hands up into the air, palms up. “I tried! God knows I tried!”
Thanks to power steering, Tony only needed the index finger of his right hand to turn the steering wheel of his black Cadillac DeVille. With such a balmy evening, he had his window open with his left hand dangling outside, holding his cigarette. The distinctive crunching sound of the car tires on gravel drowned out his radio as he entered the parking area in front of the Castigliano Brothers Plumbing Supply building. It was a gray one-story, flat-roofed cinderblock structure that backed onto mudflats.
Tony came to a stop next to three vehicles similar to his own: All of them were Cadillacs, and all of them were black. He flicked his cigarette into a pile of rusting sinks and killed the engine. As he got out of the car, he was assaulted by the odor of the salt marsh. It wasn’t pleasant. With night rapidly approaching, the wind had shifted to the east.
The building’s façade was in need of paint. In addition to the firm’s name in block letters, there was a smattering of graffiti on the walls. The door was unlocked, and Tony walked in witho
ut knocking, as was his custom. A counter stood in the middle of the room. Behind the counter were rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with plumbing materials. No one was in sight. A radio on the counter was tuned to a station playing music from the fifties.
Tony skirted the counter and walked down the center aisle. At the rear, he opened a second door that led into an office. In contrast to the supply area, this area was relatively plush, with a leather sofa and two desks on a threadbare Oriental carpet. Small, paned windows looked out onto the mudflats that were ringed with cattails and dotted with discarded tires and other debris. There were three men sitting in the room, one at each desk and one on the sofa.
Along with terse greetings, Tony shook hands with the two men at the desks first and then with the man on the sofa before sitting down himself. The men at the desks were the Castigliano brothers. They were twins named Sal and Louie. Tony had known them from the third grade, but by name only and not as friends. In high school they’d been scrawny, pimply kids who’d been teased mercilessly, and as adults they were still gaunt, with cadaverous cheeks and deeply set eyes.
The man on the sofa next to Tony was Gaetano Baresse, who’d grown up in New York City. He was built like Tony, but larger and with heavier features. He normally manned the plumbing supply counter in the outer room. As a side job, he was the twin’s muscle. Most people thought he was around to make up for all the teasing the twins had weathered as schoolkids, but Tony knew better. Gaetano’s strong-arm contribution was an occasional requirement with the twins’ other business activities: some legal, some less so. It was in these business activities that Tony and the twins had become acquainted.
“First off,” Tony said, “I want to thank you all for coming out on a Sunday.”
“No problem,” Sal said. He was sitting to Tony’s left. “I hope you don’t mind that we invited Gaetano.”
“When you called and said there was trouble, we thought he should be included,” Louie added.
“No problem,” Tony said. “I just wish we could have had this get-together a little earlier, which I’ll explain.”
“We did the best we could,” Sal said.
“My cell phone battery was dead,” Gaetano said. “I was at my sister-in-law’s house, playing pool. I was hard to find.”
Tony lit up a cigarette and offered them all around. Everyone took one. Soon they were all smoking.
After taking a few deep drags, Tony put his cigarette down. He needed his hands to gesture while he talked. Thus prepared, he told the Castigliano brothers word for word as he remembered it the conversation he’d had earlier that afternoon with Stephanie. He left nothing out, nor did he mince words. He said it was his opinion and that of his accountant that Stephanie’s company was going belly-up.
While Tony spoke, the twins became progressively agitated. Sal, who had been fiddling with a paper clip by bending it back and forth, snapped it in two. Louie angrily stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette.
“I don’t believe this!” Sal said when Tony concluded.
“Is your sister married to this twerp?” Louie demanded.
“No, they just live together.”
“Well, I tell you, we’re not going to sit around while this bastard enjoys himself in the sun,” Sal said. “No way!”
“We have to let him know we’re not pleased,” Louie said. “He’s either got to get his ass back up here and straighten things out, or else. You got that, Gaetano?”
“Yeah, sure. When?”
Louie looked at Sal. Sal looked at Tony.
“It’s too late today,” Tony said. “Which is why I would have liked to have seen you guys earlier. They’re on their way someplace before they head to Nassau. But my sister will be calling my ma when she’s settled in the Bahamas.”
“You’ll let us know?” Sal questioned.
“Yeah, sure. But the deal is, you leave my sister out of it.”
“Our beef’s not with her,” Louie said. “At least, I don’t think it is.”
“It’s not,” Tony said. “Trust me! I don’t want there to be bad blood between us.”
“Our beef’s with him,” Sal said.
Louie looked at Gaetano. “I guess you’ll be going to Nassau.”
Gaetano cracked the knuckles of his right hand with his left. “Sounds good to me!”
eleven
7:00 A.M., Monday, February 25, 2002
“Stephanie!” Daniel called softly as he gently shook her shoulder. “They are about to serve breakfast. Do you want any, or should I let you sleep until we land?”
Stephanie forcibly opened her eyes, rubbed them, and yawned at the same time. Then she had to blink rapidly a few times before she was able to see. Her eyes were dry from the plane’s parched atmosphere.
“Where are we?” she asked in a husky voice. Her throat was dry as well. She sat up and stretched. Then she leaned over and looked out the window. Although there was a hint of dawn along the horizon, the ground below was still dark. She could see the lights of cities and towns dotting the landscape.
“My guess would be we’re over someplace in France,” Daniel said.
Despite attempts at planning to avoid a last-minute rush, the night before had been an anxious scramble to get out of Daniel’s apartment, get to Logan Airport, and get through security. They’d made the flight with less than ten minutes to spare. Thanks to Butler’s money, they were flying Alitalia’s Magnifica Class and were seated in the first two seats on the left side of the Boeing 767 aircraft.
Stephanie raised the back of her seat from its reclined position. “How come you’re so wide awake? Did you sleep?”
“Not a wink,” Daniel admitted. “I started reading these books of yours about the Shroud of Turin, particularly the one by Ian Wilson. I can see why you got hooked. It’s fascinating stuff.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“I’m not,” Daniel said. “Reading about the shroud has kind of energized me. I’m even more encouraged about treating Butler and using the shroud’s DNA fragments. In fact, it occurred to me that maybe after we finish with Butler, we should go ahead and treat another celebrity someplace offshore with the same DNA source, somebody who doesn’t mind publicity. Once the story of the cure hits the media, no politician would dare interfere, and better yet, the FDA would be forced to alter their protocol for approval of the treatment.”
“Whoa!” Stephanie warned. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to concentrate on Butler for the time being. His cure is not a given by any stretch of the imagination.”
“You don’t think treating another celebrity is a good idea?”
“I need to give it some thought to respond intelligently,” Stephanie said, trying to be diplomatic. “Right now my mind is a bit addled. I need to use the restroom, and then I want some breakfast. I’m starved. When my mind is firing on all cylinders, I want to hear what you have read about the shroud, particularly whether you have a hypothesis of how the image was formed.”
Less than an hour later, they landed at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. Along with a crush of other people arriving at the same time from various international destinations, they got through passport control and then managed to find their way to the gate for their connecting flight to Turin. At a nearby coffee bar, Daniel indulged himself with an Italian espresso that he bolted down like the local patrons. There was no Magnifica Class on this leg, and once they boarded the plane, they found themselves in a tight cabin filled with businessmen. Stephanie was in the middle seat and Daniel on the aisle, halfway down the aircraft’s cabin.
“This is cozy,” Daniel commented. Thanks to his six-foot-one-inch frame, his knees were pressed up against the seat in front of him.
“How are you feeling now? Are you tired?”
“No, and especially not after that jolt of high-test coffee.”
“Then talk to me about the shroud! I really want to hear.” Thanks to the long line waiting to use the restroom on the flight from Boston to Rome
, there hadn’t been time for the subject to come up before they landed.
“Well, first off, I don’t have any theory about how the image was formed. It’s definitely an intriguing mystery, that much I’ll agree, and I was particularly taken by the poetic way Ian Wilson described it as ‘a photographic negative waiting dormant like a time capsule for the moment of photography’s invention.’ But the idea of the image being evidence of the Resurrection as both you and he suggested, I don’t buy. It’s faulty scientific reasoning. You can’t posit an unknown and counterintuitive process of dematerialization to explain an unknown phenomenon.”
“What about black holes?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Black holes have been posited to explain unknown phenomena, and black holes are certainly counterintuitive from our direct scientific experience.”
There was a period of silence, save for the muffled roar of the jet engines mingling with the rustle of morning newspapers and the tapping of laptop keyboards.
“You have a point,” Daniel admitted finally.
“Let’s move on! What else caught your interest?”
“Quite a few things. One that comes to mind is the result of reflectance spectroscopy showing dirt on the images of the feet. It seemed to me to be such an ordinary discovery, until I learned that some of the granules were identified by optical crystallography to be travertine aragonite that had a spectral signature matching limestone samples taken from ancient Jerusalem tombs.”
Stephanie laughed. “Leave it to you to be impressed by one of the more arcane scientific details. I don’t even remember that tidbit.”
“It strains one’s credibility that a fourteenth-century French forger would have gone to such an extent as to obtain and sprinkle such detritus on his supposed creation.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Another fact that caught my attention was that when one looks at the intersection of the habitats of the three Middle-Eastern plants whose pollens are the most prevalent on the shroud, it narrows the shroud’s apparent origin to the twenty miles between Hebron and Jerusalem.”