Page 66 - Three Adventures

The Nazarene Foreskin

a fact? Proof or disproof is an empirical matter, wouldn’t you agree,
Mr. Reedle?”
Scoop blinked, rolling the good stuff around in his mouth. “I
cannot find fault with that statement, Sir Aldershot,” he said warily.
“Fine. Then let us look at some harder facts. Historical facts.
Veneration of relics, particularly human tissue, has a long tradition in
both East and West. Naturally the value of such objects leads
inevitably to their forgery. The Buddha would have more limbs than
Shiva were all his alleged skeletal parts reassembled from the dozens
of shrines in Asia in which they are zealously guarded. Finding an
authentic knuckle in that haystack of soup bones would be logistically
impossible—were one believed to exist. The praeputium sanctum,
however, presents a potentially simpler search. No more than a
dozen were known by the end of the Middle Ages. The abbeys of
Charroux and Coulombs, the Cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay, churches
in Italy and Spain—the list is not long but I shall not recite it here. I,
with the assistance of Mr. Ofidian and Ms. Schantz, have traced every
one of those foreskins. I will not incriminate anyone present, but the
contents of each reliquary, in every one of those feretories, have been
examined scientifically but unofficially and in some cases without the
complicity of its guardian. None is genuine.”
These people are mad, Scoop privately diagnosed. He wondered if
Manur were in a back room of the apartment, drugged and in chains.
The key to the elevator! Where had Salim put it after their arrival in
the suite?
Silk continued, relentlessly. His eyes, normally wolfish, took on a
lycanthropic cast.
“One reputed foreskin, however, had remained beyond our reach.
In the crypt of a church in Beirut, a crypt long forgotten, sealed by
the construction of a new church on top of its foundations almost a
millennium ago. I waited for my chance. It came when a commander
with whom I have a close relationship, misdirected a shell or two at
Saint Elias and blasted a hole in the flooring. That action
unfortunately occurred before I had, shall we say, expected it, and
provoked the establishment of a cordon around the place. My agents
could not have gained entry. My influence was great enough,
however, to get access granted to scholars and journalists. That was
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