Norman knew a diner off the highway.
“Okay,” Bruce said. It would only take him forty-five minutes out of his way. “You’re buying lunch.”
“Fair enough. Then I won’t feel guilty picking your brain for some legal advice.”
“That foreclosure still moving ahead?”
Norman sighed. “Like a runaway train. I tried to convince them I had a new French partner, showed them the documents you drafted for me. Even showed them the twenty-five grand you gave me, told them it was a down payment.” He chuckled sardonically. “They didn’t laugh in my face, though they might as well have. Turns out they sold the mortgage to some investor, some offshore corporation represented by a big New York City law firm. So my bank isn’t even my bank anymore. What’s that all about?”
“That happens a lot. Banks don’t like to foreclose. First, it’s just a bad look; think about all that advertising money they spend trying to convince customers they’re the ‘friendly bank.’ Plus they don’t want to have to own the real estate if they can avoid it—building a mini golf course is not exactly their core business. So if they get a good offer, they often sell. Banks are, if nothing else, incredibly risk averse.”
“But who would buy it?”
“Usually an investor who wants the property. Or maybe someone who thinks it will go for more than the bank values it at. If someone buys the mortgage from the bank for a million and then the property sells at the auction for two million, the investor gets to keep the difference.”
Norman sighed. “Well, whoever it is, they’re not wasting time. They’ve scheduled the foreclosure for next week already.”
“Sorry to hear it. We can talk more at lunch.” Bruce ended the call.
Mind racing, he refocused on the Just Judges mystery. He turned off his phone; now more than ever he preferred not to be tracked. As the old saying went, it isn’t paranoia if they really are after you. And with this much money at stake, it wasn’t a question of who was after him, but how many.
After returning from breakfast, Amanda curled up with her laptop in her favorite chair overlooking the windswept lake. Cam had left to meet with his attorney regarding the heckler case, which gave her time to dive into the Order of the Golden Fleece and its apparent connection to the Ghent Altarpiece mystery. Or, as Shelby called it, Alterpiece.
As Cam had pointed out, the Duke of Burgundy, who founded the Order in 1430, was one of the most influential monarchs in medieval European history, his vast power exceeded only by his lasting influence on the arts and culture. Known as Philip the Good, he ruled a swath of northern Europe for almost fifty years.
But how ‘good,’ in fact, was he?
She knew he was Jan van Eyck’s benefactor. And a devotee of the Grail legends. And a student of the ancient mysteries. But what about this Golden Fleece stuff? She found an article by historian Philip Coppens, who wrote, “Why the Duke of Burgundy settled on the image of the Golden Fleece has never been fully explained.” He further wrote that the Duke was fascinated by alchemy and even built an alchemy room in his palace. He added, “The story of the Order of the Golden Fleece has been labeled as being of extreme importance to the alchemist’s quest.”
Amanda considered the words. Alchemy. She dug deeper and found that John of Antioch, writing a chronicle of the world in the year 610 AD, opined, “The Golden Fleece was not, as said poetically, a golden fleece, but a book written on sheepskin, expounding a way to produce gold chemically.”
Production of gold, Amanda, knew, was the ultimate goal of the medieval alchemists. The Duke of Burgundy, in fact, was said to have been obsessed with finding the Philosopher’s Stone, a legendary alchemical substance capable of turning base metals like mercury into gold. Amanda smiled to herself. The first of the J.K. Rowling’s books had originally been entitled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when Amanda read it in England in 1997 as an eight-year-old. Harry Potter was hardly unique in his quest: Adventurers had obsessed over finding the mysterious Philosopher’s Stone since the time of the Ancient Greeks.
But why would the Duke of Burgundy, one of the richest men in Christendom, be obsessed with turning metal into gold? It was known, in fact, that he cared little for wealth, having never lacked it. After twenty minutes of digging on the internet, Amanda found her answer: In addition to turning base metals into gold, the Philosopher’s Stone also possessed the extraordinary power to heal illness and prolong life. Prolong life—just like the Holy Grail. Was that why the Duke had named his Order after the Golden Fleece? Because the two quests—one Classical and the other medieval—were really one and the same, both quests to find eternal life?
Amanda sat back, surprised at where her research had taken her. Nothing captured the human imagination more than the ability to defy age. No wonder the Duke of Burgundy had obsessed over it. Amanda’s arm dropped to the table as another thought struck her: Was this what Hitler was after? Was he searching for the Holy Grail not in order to weaponize it, but because he thought it could make him immortal?
Shuddering, she stood to make herself some hot tea.
Bruce normally didn’t bother with lunch—why waste time with three meals when two larger ones would do? But he understood that not everyone shared his work ethic and that, for some people, meals were a highlight of their days. Norman Plansky was one of those people.
Norman hadn’t changed much. Pasty-faced, disheveled, out of shape. But now he had dark circles under his eyes and his hygiene, which was never good, seemed even worse. The smell of cat urine wafted across the table. Bruce tried not to judge—Norman was a good heart, and Bruce knew he was going through a tough stretch. But would it kill him to wash his clothes? He tried not to think of the germs coating his companion’s body.
“You have to try the pastrami,” he gushed, leaning his large head across a booth near the back of the diner. At least he seemed excited about something. “Better than the stuff they serve in the City, I swear. You can try some of mine if you want.”
“I don’t eat beef,” Bruce replied. “It’s not healthy.” As he aged, he had gotten better at this human interaction stuff—in the past he would not even have noticed how Norman’s face had fallen in disappointment. Not that it meant he was going to try Norman’s pastrami.
After ordering, Norman rested his elbows on the table. “You never told me how you know so much about foreclosures.”
“When I was a young lawyer, I handled a few. In fact, more than a few.”
“Any advice on how to delay this one?”
Bruce shook his head. “Not much. Once it ends up on foreclosure track, there’s not much you can do. Especially once an investor buys it. Bankruptcy, maybe?”
“I thought about that. But wouldn’t I have to give them the thirty grand?”
“Good point. You would.”
“Any other ideas?”
“The one thing that they might listen to is a delay that will actually add value to the property. Something that makes them think bidders will bid higher.”
“Well, it’s a longshot, that’s for sure.” He reached down and unzipped a beat-up old vinyl suitcase he had slid into the booth ahead of himself. “These are the artifacts. If I can prove they’re not Native American, maybe that’ll get their attention.”
“Aren’t they arrowheads and stuff like that? What else could they be?”
Norman shrugged. “I read about how the Knights Templar came to the Catskills in the late 1100s.”
“Really?” Bruce played dumb, wanting to learn what Norman knew.
“Yeah. Apparently, they were hiding their treasures from the Church. There’s a couple of books that just came out, based on an old journal.” He explained how artifacts had been recovered on Hunter Mountain, forty miles northeast of the Levana Resort. And how senior Vatican operatives had, in reliance on this journal, searched the Hunter Mountain area. “It seems to me like the Vatican would know if the Templars were here or not. And why bother doing a search unless they really did com
e?” Norman shrugged. “So maybe what I found is a Templar burial ground and has nothing to do with the local tribes.”
Bruce pursed his lips. “Sounds like a longshot, like you said. Forty miles is a long distance, especially back then. But I guess it’s worth a chance.”
Norman handed the artifacts to Bruce one at a time: a stone axe head, a fluted stone arrowhead, some pieces of pottery. “And this one is the best,” he announced. “A metal sword, like I told you about. Could be medieval European, don’t you think?”
“Sure. The Native Americans didn’t have steel swords, did they?”
“They did after first contact. They traded for weapons and tools and whatnot. So the sword could be from a more recent burial, during Colonial times. Or, like I said, it could be Templar.”
Bruce agreed. “Makes sense. No bones?”
Norman shook his head. “They don’t last long in this soil. Too acidic, from the pine trees.”
“So you want me to get all these tested? I’m not sure there’s much they can do with the axe head and arrowhead—you can’t carbon-date rock. But they could do metallurgy on the sword. Maybe test the pottery also.”
Norman nodded. “The sword’s the most important thing.”
“Okay. How you want to pay?”
Norman handed him a signed, blank check. “Just fill in the amount.” He shrugged. “I figure if you were going to steal from me, you’d have done it already.”
As Amanda sipped her tea and nibbled on a turkey wrap, she thought more about the Holy Grail and the Golden Fleece and humankind’s age-old quest to discover the mysteries of our existence. From the beginning of recorded time, there had been those who claimed to know the secrets of the universe—those who conversed with the gods, who found eternal life, who grew to gigantic size, who possessed enormous strength, who harnessed nature to do their bidding, who saw the future, who spoke with the dead, who wielded invincible weaponry, who were destined to rule. The secret societies of the Middle Ages were but a single manifestation of the search for these mystical powers. And who knew? Perhaps these secrets and powers at one point did exist. So much had been lost—during the Dark Ages, during the burning of the library at Alexandria, during the Great Flood, during the destruction of ancient Atlantis. How else to explain Easter Island, the jigsaw-puzzle walls of Sacsayhuaman in Peru, Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey? There was simply no way these sites should have been able to be built based on the technology of their day. And yet, built they were.
Amanda believed it was this quest for ancient knowledge which explained the meteoric rise to power of the Knights Templar. They found something while in Jerusalem in the early 1100s, something they brought back to Europe and leveraged into extraordinary wealth and power. In other words, when it came to the mysteries and secrets of the Just Judges painting, nothing was off the table. The Templars, and later the Duke of Burgundy, could have acquired any number of possible pieces of ancient knowledge. Which, apparently, they then hid in the painting.
Cam walked in the door, interrupting her musings. He leaned in, kissed her, and chomped a bite off her sandwich.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“No. And I’m feeling it,” he said as he peeled a banana. He quickly summarized the meeting with his lawyer. “It’s pretty much like we thought. Legally, I’m in the wrong. But hopefully the DA—and if it gets that far, the judge—will see what really happened. The issue is that violence at youth sporting events is a sensitive subject. The press is going to want to keep sensationalizing it.”
She exhaled. Cam could handle it, but she hated that Astarte was going to be dragged through this. “Okay. Make some lunch. Then I’ll tell you what I’ve been researching.”
While Cam ate, Amanda summarized her Golden Fleece research. By the time he was finished, she had laid out her findings. “The Duke of Burgundy created this whole Order of the Golden Fleece, and commissioned the Ghent Altarpiece painting, and probably even refurbished Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, all as a way to preserve and protect the ancient secrets. I don’t know what they were hiding—the Holy Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone, who knows? But it was important. And they left clues for people like us to find it.”
Cam swallowed his final bite and washed it down with some cranberry juice. Amanda could sense his mind working. “I’m with you, except for one thing: Why would the Duke of Burgundy use a pagan quest, which is what the Golden Fleece search was, as the name of his Order? By all accounts, he was a devout Christian. Even if he were part of the mystery schools, which it sounds like he was, he would still be careful in his public works to appear to be a good Catholic.”
Amanda blinked. “I don’t know why. But he did.”
“Maybe there’s another layer to this that we haven’t looked at yet.”
“Maybe. And maybe it’s your turn to dive down this rabbit hole for a bit and have a look around.” She stood and smiled. “After all, it looks like you’re going to have some time on your hands, given that you won’t be watching softball for a while.”
Katarina spent lunch on Tuesday at her desk with her door closed, surfing the internet. Deidre’s information about the possible hydrogen salt water technology had been a bombshell. Or would be, if they could make the technology actually work. And for that they would need to find these meteorite rocks.
Munching on a salad, she read everything she could find on the Just Judges painting, in particular the materials about it being some kind of treasure map. Which, in the end, was not very much—the painting was a treasure map, but nobody seemed to know more than that. Or, understandably, they weren’t saying. But a casual reference in an art history book caught her eye: The Ghent Altarpiece panels depicted the spires of Jerusalem in the background. And the Just Judges featured the same landscape—though different paintings, the series of panels were connected physically and were tied together by the landscape and horizon. And Deidre’s Israeli paramour said the meteorite rocks were buried in or around Jerusalem. Could the landscape in the Just Judges painting be a clue to their location? Katarina thought more about the central Altarpiece depiction, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb scene. From what she had read, the arrangement of the religious figures in this panel matched how they would be arranged on All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ Day itself was rooted in the pagan holiday of Samhain, which she had celebrated only this past weekend. Had van Eyck drawn attention to the pagan celebration as a nod to the old gods and their followers? More to the point, by focusing on the old gods, was he hinting at a connection to the ancient Atlantis culture, as Himmler and his historians believed? It would be an appropriate clue if, indeed, the painting was meant as a map leading to the rediscovery of an ancient technology first used by the Atlanteans.
She returned to the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb painting. The sun, in fact, sat just above the towers on the skyline. Was that a sign that ‘illumination,’ in the form of understanding, could be found there? Assuming the towers really did depict Jerusalem, how was she to know where in the ancient city to look?
She tossed her plastic fork down. She was a scientist, not an art historian. And she had never even been to Israel. She sensed the answer—information which could change the world—was right at her fingertips. Yet she could not seem to reach out and grab it.
Bruce drove south on Route 87 toward New York City. He had the nagging feeling someone was following him. It wasn’t likely that the Mossad, having taken an interest in him, would abandon their pursuit. He sped up, slowed down, exited the highway, pulled over for gas. But if he had a tail, they were skilled enough to not show themselves.
North of the city, in White Plains, he parked at a commuter rail lot and took the Harlem line toward Grand Central Station. A few stops outside of Manhattan, at Fordham in the Bronx, he jumped from the train just as the doors were closing and sprinted out of the station. He ducked into a convenience store, bought a Yankees hat and sunglasses along with some hand sanitizing wipes, and slipped out the back door
into an alley. Circling the block, he reentered the train station. Nothing. At least not that he could see.
Four stops later he disembarked at Grand Central. He took a bus down Park Avenue to Bleecker Street, then walked a few blocks east, doubling back a few times out of an abundance of caution, into the heart of the Lower East Side. He found the building—a 1920s era brick tenement with cast iron fire escapes zigzagging up the side—and rang the buzzer at a steel door tucked between a nail salon and tobacco shop. “Bruce?”
“It’s me.” He cleaned the grime of the city from his hands with a wipe.
“Come on up. Third floor.”
Mitchell Klein met him in the hallway. Long hair, ponytail, earring in one ear, little round John Lennon glasses, denim vest. He smelled like stale cigarette smoke. Grandma’s money allowed him to hang out in clubs and jam with other middling musicians. Once in a while, he and his buddies played a wedding. And, of course, there was the drug dealing. “Were you followed?”
Bruce shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. Car, train, bus, walk. Careful at every step. But, you know, the Mossad.”
Mitchell peered down the stairway, then led Bruce to a door at the end of the hallway and ushered him in to a sprawling unit comprising half the third floor. Rent-controlled, one of the last in Manhattan. Between grandma’s inheritance and the cheap apartment, Mitchell had hit the double lottery. Yet he still couldn’t get his shit together.
Mitchell closed the door and bolted it. “What happened to your hand?”
“Car door. Wind blew it shut.”
“You want a beer? Or water?”
“No. But I need to use the bathroom.”
A few minutes later, as he turned the water on to wash his hands, Bruce heard the crash of glass and loud voices. That didn’t take long. He swung the door open and rushed out to find two men with automatic weapons pinning Mitchell to the floor and another two with their guns pointed at him. All wore black ski masks. A cold wind blew through the window, the fire escape above the alley visible behind the fluttering shade. “What do you want?” Bruce asked, knowing the answer already.
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