“You say the relic was unearthed in a grave?” Mazzini asked.

“A shopping mall…” Lacaze smiled. “Even in downtown Borée, the construction goes night and day. The bulldozers dug up what must have once been a crypt. We would have completely missed it had not a couple of the sarcophagi split open.”

Ms. Lacaze escorted her important guest into a small elevator and then up to the third floor. “The grave belonged to some long-forgotten duke who died in 1098. We did acid and photo-luminescence tests immediately. Its age looks right. At first we wondered, why would a precious relic from a thousand years earlier, and half the world away, be buried in an eleventh-century grave?”

“And what did you find?” Mazzini asked.

“It seems our duke actually went to fight in the Crusades. We know he sought after relics from the time of Christ.” They finally arrived at her office. “I advise you to take a breath. You are about to behold something truly extraordinary.”

The artifact lay on a plain white sheet on an examiner’s table, as humble as such a precious thing could be.

Mazzini finally removed his sunglasses. He didn’t have to hold his breath. It was completely taken away. My God, this is an atom bomb!

“Look closely. There is an inscription on it.”

The Vatican director bent over it. Yes, it could be. It had all the right markings. There was an inscription. In Latin. He squinted close to read. “Acre, Galilee …” He examined the artifact from [5] end to end. The age fit. The markings. It also corresponded to descriptions in the Bible. Yet how did it come to be buried here? “All this, it does not really prove anything.”

“That’s true, of course.” Renée Lacaze shrugged. “But Docteur… I am from here. My father is from the valley, my father’s father, and his. There have been stories here for hundreds of years, long before this grave tumbled open. Stories every schoolchild in Borée was raised on. That this holy relic was here, in Borée, nine hundred years ago.”