Plan B for the Middle Class by Ron Carlson

Author:Ron Carlson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393245394
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

This is the seventy-first public appearance of the famed Tablecloth of Turin. My name is Leonard Christofferson, and the tablecloth and I have been traveling for almost three months now. I am an insurance investigator by trade from Ann Arbor, Michigan, but I’ve pretty much let that all go. After all, it is my tablecloth, and it is my wish to share it and show it to as many folks as I can.

In the last three months, I’ve met with a lot of skepticism about the authenticity of the cloth, but most people—when they hear the story and see the evidence—come to know as well as I do that this is the tablecloth of the Last Supper, the very cloth depicted in so many famous paintings, including Leonardo da Vinci’s, the very tablecloth over which Christ broke that bread and poured that wine.

I want to say right here: as an insurance investigator, I had many years experience with and exposure to frauds, some of them silly, some of them so well constructed as to seem genuine. We had homicides made to look like drunk driving and a bad curve; we had grand larcenies perpetrated by nephews, nieces, wives, and sons, all in cahoots with the “victim”; we had an insured Learjet go down to the bottom of Lake Michigan which upon salvage turned out to be a junked boxcar, the jet having been sold in Mexico. In my experience as a detective, I learned slowly over the years to trust nothing, nobody. It’s a terrible profession, picking through death cars and the ashes of every dry cleaner’s that burns up. The owner stands there hating you and you don’t trust him, a guy you never met before in your life. The twelve years I worked for Specific Claims in Ann Arbor were hard years on me, and they destroyed my faith in the human race.

And when I went to Italy with the Art Guild and I found, well, I was offered, this piece of white cloth, I saw my chance to turn my life around. I do not now speak nor have I ever spoken Italian, but I could see from the ardor in the man’s eyes that he too had recovered his faith and he wanted me to take care of this sacred emblem in a way that he, working in his brother’s restaurant, could never do. I paid him, left the Art Guild Renaissance trip early, flew back to Ann Arbor, and quit my job, and I have been sharing my good fortune ever since.

Enough about me. Let me show you my tablecloth.

As you can see, it’s a large one: six foot five by twenty-three feet. We have had it all chemically analyzed and I want to share our findings with you tonight. The cloth itself is one piece, constructed of rough linen, approximately fourteen threads per inch, woven on a hand loom in about, we estimate, twenty-nine A.D. X-rays have revealed thirteen place settings, most of them

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