going to make a positive identification of these bones. But let me warn you, if you continue to quarrel with each other, I’m out of here, and I’m off your dinner list, and if I’m off, then I believe James is off, meaning party over!”
For a moment Shawn and Sana glared at each other. After several minutes, Sana put her head back and laughed. “God, what a couple of children we are.”
“Speak for yourself!” Shawn snapped. He didn’t like the new Sana.
“I am. I think we are beginning to become too similar, like a dog and its master.” Now it was Shawn’s turn to laugh. “So, which one is the dog?”
“That’s easy to tell, the way you’ve been barking lately,” Sana teased, still smiling. She turned to Jack. “He knows better than to invite people to dinner without discussing it with me first. If we’ve talked about it once, we’ve talked about it a dozen times.”
“You always have to have the last word,” Shawn snapped.
Jack stepped between the husband and wife and motioned as if he was calling for a time-out in a basketball game. “Stop!” he said. “Stop taunting each other. You guys are pathetic! Loosen up and let’s get to work.”
“I’m going to Home Depot,” Shawn said abruptly. “Jack, can you lend me a hand?”
“I might need a pair of pliers,” Sana said. “Let me see if one of the eye teeth comes out with ease.” She picked up the skull and pulled on the right eye tooth, which was in remarkably good shape. The tooth came out easily with a slight popping sound. “That was easy. Nope! I don’t need any pliers.”
“What do you need from Home Depot?” Jack asked.
“A bunch of plate-glass sheets,” Shawn said. “And a small sonic humidifier that I can jury-rig to direct a tiny puff of water vapor where I want it to go. I already have several pair of tongs like those used by philatelists in my backpack. Unrolling these scrolls is not going to be easy. The papyrus will flake, so I’ll need to protect it immediately under glass. For all I know, as I said to Alex, the papyri may all come apart in pieces and have to be put together like a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t know what to expect, to be completely truthful.”
“While you boys go to the Home Depot, I’m going to go into the laboratory and get going with my end of the project,” Sana said, brandishing the eye tooth. “The quicker I get it into a sonica tor with the detergent, the quicker I can saw off the crown to get at the pulp.”
“What about tonight?” Jack asked. “Are you two going to behave? Is the dinner party still on or what?”
“Of course it is still on,” Sana said. “I hope our testiness with each other doesn’t make you feel too uncomfortable or unwelcome. We’ll promise to be good. I just don’t like it when Shawn doesn’t discuss the idea with me before he invites people over. It’s not that I don’t enjoy having people over, I do. I actually like to cook and rarely get the chance, so I’m going to enjoy tonight. In fact, as soon as I get my pulp extraction into the incubator to dry overnight, I’m out of here to shop and have some fun preparing what I hope you two and James will enjoy. It will be fun, provided Shawn and James behave.”
“Okay. You’ve put my mind at ease,” Jack said. “But, as far as my coming is concerned, I do need to check in with my wife to see if she minds. We have a new baby, and she’s doing the lion’s share of caregiving.”
“A new baby, how nice,” Sana said, without the excitement most young women would have expressed. Nor did she invite mother and baby. “Surely she won’t begrudge you an evening with your old college buddies.”
“It’s more complicated than you might think,” Jack explained, not wanting to be more specific.
“Well, we’ll understand if you can’t come,” Shawn said. “But we do hope you can. What we’ve found in the ossuary is incredible, and I’m going to enjoy riding His Excellency James.”
“Please don’t overdo it,” Jack said. “He’s really upset about this whole thing and its potential repercussions.”
“He should be,” Shawn said.
“I wouldn’t be so blithe,” Jack warned. “James is married to the Church. If nothing else, he is fearsomely loyal.”
Their mission to Home Depot accomplished, with what seemed like a ton of glass panes in a taxi’s trunk, Jack again tried to encourage Shawn to go easy on James that evening, reminding him that he had a long way to go before he could prove he’d discovered the bones of the Virgin Mary.
“I haven’t proven it,” Shawn agreed, “but it is coming whisker-close, wouldn’t you say, old boy?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” Jack replied.
“Let’s put it this way. If I were to take this story as we know it today, combining Saturninus’s letter with the fact that the ossuary was right where he said he’d put it, and it hadn’t been touched for almost two thousand years—what if I were to take the story, the letter, and the ossuary to Vegas and ask the bookmakers if I had the Virgin Mary in the box. What kind of odds do you think they’d give me?”
“Stop it!” Jack snapped. “This is all ridiculous supposition.”
“So that’s how it is!” Shawn said suddenly. “You’re on James’s side, just like you always were in college. Some things never change.”
“I’m not on anybody’s side. I’m on my side, right in the middle, always trying to keep the peace between you two hard-asses.”
“James was the hard-ass, not me.”
“Excuse me. You’re right. You were the airhead.”
“And you were the asshole. I remember it well,” Shawn said. “And as the asshole, you were almost always on hard-ass’s side, just as I’m beginning to think you’ll be tonight.
I’m warning you that tonight I’m looking for a bit of payback. During all our debates over the years, we’d always get to a point where James would throw down his trump card: faith! How can you debate that? Well, tonight we’ll revisit a couple of those debates, only this time I have facts on my side. It’s going to be entertaining. I can promise you that.”
Suddenly the two old friends sitting in the back of the taxi stared at each other and smiled. Then they laughed.
“Can you believe us?” Shawn questioned.
Jack shook his head. “We’re acting like teenagers.”
“Kids is more like it,” Shawn corrected. “But I’m just blowing off steam. Don’t worry, I’ll go easy on Jamie boy tonight.”
Their taxi pulled up to the OCME DNA building, and Jack ran in to ask the guards for a cart to meet them at the receiving dock. Arriving about the same time, Jack and Shawn unloaded the glass and stacked it on the cart. Jack patted the top of the last stack, somewhat out of breath. “Glass might not look like much when you are looking through it, but I can tell you it’s damn heavy stuff.” Shawn nodded as he ran the back of a hand across a sweaty brow.
“Can I trust that you’ll be able to get this unloaded upstairs?” Jack asked, with his hand still resting on the glass.
“No problem,” Shawn said confidently. “I’ll have Ms. Flirtatious Independence upstairs lend a hand.”
“I wouldn’t take offense at Alex,” Jack said. “He’s just one of those very friendly, outgoing people. He likes everyone, and everyone likes Alex.”
“I don’t have any beef with Alex. My problem is that Sana has been slip-sliding to I don’t know exactly where. You know what I’m saying? Take her hair as we discussed. It was gorgeous long, and I told her not to cut it, so she cuts it. I ask her to do small things around the house, like iron my shirts; she tells me she works as hard as I do. I tell her I shovel the snow and take out the trash. You know what she said then?”
“I have no idea,” Jack said, hoping his tone conveyed that he didn’t know or care.
“She says she wants to trade. I do the ironing; she does the trash and the shoveling. Can you imagine?”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jack said vaguely, refusing to be drawn into a discussion of marital difficulties. “What is your address again?” he asked, to change the subject.
“Forty Morton Street. Do you remember how to get there?”
“Vaguely,” Jack admitted. He took out a small pad and wrote down the address. “Okay.
Unless my wife has other plans, I’ll be there at seven. And what about tomorrow? Are you guys planning to work? If you are and you don’t mind, I’d like to stop in and see how things are going.”
“I’ll let you know what’s up. Sana might like to sleep in. As for me, I’m too psyched, so I’ll be here. Just as soon as I can I’ve got to know what Simon Magus has to say and see if he can redeem himself. I’ve always wondered if he’d just been a whipping boy. The first-century Church had been in such a disarray it needed someone
