The Sword of the Templars t-1

by Paul Christopher

  “He’s all we’ve got,” said Holliday finally. “Kellerman’s father knew all the parties involved, and he was close to Himmler. He would have known about the sword, I’m almost certain of that. Lutz Kellerman is the link to it all, not to mention the tattoo on that guy’s wrist.”

  “But so what?” Peggy said. “How does that help us?”

  “What we need to find out is the location, if it still exists, of the right copy of the letter written by Alberic to Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Templars. Without the letter the code on the gold wire is useless, like Braintree told us in Toronto.”

  “D.L.N.M. De laudibus novae militiae,” said Peggy.

  “Your Latin is improving,” smiled Holliday.

  “And the fog is lifting,” answered Peggy.

  Ahead of them, a few hundred yards away across the water, the harbor front of Friedrichshafen appeared through the thinning mist. On the right there was a large, modern-looking marina; a forest of sail-boat masts rose like sharp splinters cutting through the shredding fog.

  There was a heavy stand of trees coming down to the shore on the far left, the twin onion-domed towers of a church rising up through the greenery. In the center was the harbor itself, with the ferry dock and the updated Bauhaus-style glass and steel Medienhaus, the town library, directly behind it. Strung along the old seawall Holliday could see an assortment of older, red-roofed buildings that had survived the bombings. Rising behind it all were the steep, lushly forested hills and valleys of the Bavarian Alps.

  “Postcard time,” said Peggy.

  “We’ll see,” said Holliday. Baghdad had been a Disney location before it turned into a war zone.

  The ferry nosed between the jutting arms of the harbor breakwater and moved toward the docks. People around them began heading down to the main deck and their automobiles. The engines on the ferry reversed in a growling throb, the sound vibrating up through the hull. The fog was quickly disappearing and the sun was shining down on the town. Peggy was right; it was a postcard.

  “We’d better go,” she said. The ferry had almost reached the pier.

  “All right,” nodded Holliday. They turned away from the rail and headed for the companionway stairs behind them. Perhaps now they’d find out why Uncle Henry’s house had been put to the torch and why his friend Derek Carr-Harris had been murdered. First they’d find a cheap hotel in town, and then they’d lay siege to Axel von Kellerman in his castle.

  13

  According to the brochure Holliday and Peggy picked up at their Friedrichshafen hotel, the original Schloss Kellerman had been built in A.D. 1150 by the Grafen von Kellerman-Pinzgau, feudal lords of the area. The castle was destroyed during a peasants’ revolt in 1526 and had lain in ruins ever since.

  The “new” Schloss Kellerman, an exquisite manor house in the Baroque style of the times built at the foot of the hill on which the ruins still stood, had been constructed in 1760 by Count Anton von Цttingen-Kellerman, a reigning Bavarian prince of Pinzgau and a descendant of the original owners.

  The Schloss had been in the possession of the Kellerman family ever since, and as well as still being the family residence it was also a museum and occasional venue for seminars dealing with European Stone Age and Bronze Age studies.

  The Kellerman estate was located four miles north of Friedrichshafen, set at the foot of a steep, heavily wooded hillside and reached by a twisting road that wound between the trees, eventually opening up into a broad meadow, part of which was a planted orchard while the other part had been laid out as a formal ornamental garden complete with animal topiary and a high hedge maze. Beside the maze there was a pea gravel parking lot.

  “Creepy,” said Peggy, climbing out of the Peugeot they’d rented two days before in Zurich.

  The weather was sunny and warm, without a hint of the gloomy fog that had greeted them on their arrival the day before. Holliday locked the car, and he and Peggy walked up the path toward the house.

  The manor was a sprawling series of two-story buildings arranged in an elongated L shape, the red tile roof-lines broken here and there with turrets and towers, all of it done in whitewash over stucco, some of the walls overgrown with ivy. The windows were arched and recessed, outlined in strips of fancy brickwork, and the towers were finished with Lego-like stepped fretwork.

  The lawns surrounding the estate were golf course groomed, the flowerbeds neatly edged with six-inch-high retaining walls, the beds themselves ablaze with flowers and dense with perfectly manicured shrubbery. It was all like a giant dollhouse owned by a dainty princess, an unflawed dream you only saw in Architectural Digest.

  “No littering around here,” commented Peggy. “Someone’s a bit of a neat freak.”

  They went up a broad series of granite steps and reached the main entrance. The capstone in the arch over the open doorway had been carved into an armorial shield: a single upright sword, bound by a twisted ribbon.

  “Isn’t that interesting?” murmured Holliday, looking upward.

  They stepped through the broad entrance and into the manor house. A female uniformed attendant took their money, handing them each a yellow plastic squeeze badge and a pamphlet in return. The pamphlet was trilingual: English, French, and German. They walked down a long entrance hallway, their feet echoing on the black and white tiles of the marble floor.

  A few people were wandering in and out of rooms, all wearing the same expression of bored expectation common to tourists already overburdened with more information than they needed. Judging by the minimal crowds, it didn’t look as though Schloss Kellerman was very high on anyone’s “must-do” list.

  According to the brochure, two large rooms on the left contained models of both Stone Age and Bronze Age villages that had once occupied the grounds of the Schloss, while the smaller room on the right, once the manor’s dining hall, was now given over to relics and artifacts relating to the Kellerman family.

  “I’m still not sure what this is going to accomplish,” said Peggy. “We don’t even know if Kellerman is here.”

  “Recon,” said Holliday quietly. “Getting the lay of the land.” He turned right into the old dining hall.

  The room was immense, ceilings soaring twenty feet overhead, coffered in exotic woods. The plaster squares between the thick crossed beams were inset with sculptured plaster medallions of cupids and angels cavorting around the cables supporting a dozen dangling crystal chandeliers.

  The far wall was set with three tall windows sheeting sunlight into the room and across the dark blue patterned carpeting that lay across the dark oak floor. The nearer wall was hung with portraits of Kellermans long past. Where there were no portraits in oils there were photographs in silver frames, and between all of the hanging art and photographs there were eight full suits of armor, evenly spaced, running the length of the room like knights waiting for their king.

  On the end walls were the broad hearths and wide mantels of matching fireplaces. The fireplaces were both cold and empty, scrubbed clean of any evidence of use. Above them tapestries had been strung. Between the fireplaces, where there once would have been a dining table capable of seating sixty guests or more, there was now a row of glass and wood display cases, each one containing items from a distinct period in the history of the Kellerman family.

  A Viking “bearded” iron broadax blade discovered during a nineteenth-century archaeological dig on the grounds; a chalice and candlesticks used in the family chapel of the original castle; an enameled brooch portraying Christ, once worn by Countess Gertrude, the wife of Count Anton von Цttingen-Kellerman, the builder of the most recent Schloss. An ornate Kleigen thal naval saber presented to a Kellerman who’d joined the German Navy in the 1800s. A Pickelhaube spiked Prussian Army helmet worn by yet another Kellerman general, this one during the First World War.

  Evidence of Kellermans everywhere, but not a sign of SS-Gruppenfьhrer General Lutz Kellerman anywhere at all.

  “So World War Two never happened,” Peggy murm
ured.

  Beside the open doorway leading to the inner hall there was a tall glass case given over to the present-day Kellerman family. There were several scale models of farm machinery manufactured by Kellerman AG, a cutaway model of a patented device for sowing grain, and at least a dozen photographs of Axel Kellerman: Axel at a charity banquet on the arm of a blond television actress, Axel at a child’s hospital bed, Axel with a famous grinning Hollywood star on a film set, Axel wearing scuba tanks and levering himself into a boat in the Caribbean.

  He was tall, athletically slim, and darkly handsome. His face was long and sharp-jawed, his hair black, sweeping back in a widow’s peak. He had a long aristocratic nose, deep-set piercing eyes and a full mouth with lips that were down-drawn and just a little too feminine for such high cheekbones. There was something faintly reminiscent of the vampire about him that was simultaneously both attractive and repellent.

  There was no classic family portrait; no wife, no children. One photograph showed Axel Kellerman in hunting clothes with a shotgun in his hands and an elegant liver-ticked German gun dog at his side. Behind him, slightly out of focus, was the building in which they now stood.

  “He’s written his father out of the family history,” commented Holliday.

  “Schwarzenegger did it-why not Axel Kellerman?” Peggy responded.

  They left the room and crossed in front of a wide, curving staircase that led up to the second floor.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Holliday, turning back toward the main hallway. He folded up the brochure and slid it into the side pocket of his jacket. “From everything I read on the Net he sounds like his old man reincarnated: same political convictions, same military aspirations. I would have expected a place like this to be a shrine.”

  “I guess he figures you can’t have a Nazi past and sell farm machinery at the same time,” said Peggy as they stepped out into the sunlight again. “Your basic ruthless German efficiency.”

  “I still don’t believe it,” repeated Holliday. They walked back down the path toward the parking lot. “It’s a cover-up. The whole place is a stage set. That’s not the real Axel Kellerman. He’s got a Batcave somewhere, I guarantee it.”

  “I wonder where?” Peggy said. Holliday shrugged. He took out the keys and beeped open the car doors.

  “I don’t have the faintest idea,” said Holliday. They climbed into the Peugeot. Peggy did up her seatbelt and smiled.

  “Time for me to show my skills,” she said.

  The Gaststдtte Barin-Bar was an old-fashioned raths keller, or basement bar, in an older building next to the Friedrichshafen railway station and only a short block from the waterfront. Peggy had discovered the place after a brief conversation with the desk clerk at their hotel and a fat tip to an elderly and gloomy-looking baggage handler at the train station.

  The cavernous old restaurant and bar was dimly lit, wood-paneled, and decorated with the mounted heads of stuffed game animals, mostly toothy, glassy-eyed wild boars and blank-faced deer with enormous racks of antlers. There was a pair of bearded mountain goats with curling horns at the far end of the room, and the immense, dusty, and snarling brown she-bear that gave the restaurant its name looked angrily out from over the bar. Holliday smiled; he’d be angry, too, if someone mounted his head over a basement bar. The whole place smelled of beer, cooked cabbage, and frying meat.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and the raths keller was almost empty. A family of Japanese tourists was sitting at a table close to the cellar stairs working their way through plates of fried potatoes and brat wurst, whispering to each other and surreptitiously taking photographs with a shiny little digital camera. A fat man with white hair was crouched at the dimly lit bar, his thick fingers wrapped possessively around a large mug of beer.

  “Nice place,” commented Holliday as they found a table and sat down. “You sure know how to pick ’em, Peg.”

  “You travel around as much as I do you find out the best place for anything-guns, crooks, hookers, information most of all-is at the bar that’s closest to the local train station. Where the old geezers hang out and drink. Tunbridge Wells to Timbuktu, it’s always the same.”

  “There’s a train station in Timbuktu?” Holliday teased.

  Peggy sighed. “You know what I mean,” she said. “If you want information on our friend Kellerman, this is the place to get it.”

  A waitress with teased blond hair dressed in a folksy dirndl came out of the kitchen, spotted Holliday and Peggy, and came over to their table. She didn’t even hesitate, speaking English automatically.

  “Can I get you anything today?” she said pleasantly.

  “Two Augustiner Brдu,” responded Peggy.

  “Anything else, madam?”

  “Rudolph Drabeck?” Peggy asked. It was the name given to her by the old baggage man at the station.

  “What do you want with Rudy?” the waitress asked cautiously.

  Peggy took out a rust-colored fifty euro note and laid it on the table.

  “Local color,” said Peggy.

  “Was?” asked the waitress, frowning.

  “Information only,” explained Peggy.

  The waitress gave them an appraising look, then turned and went to the bar. She said something to the man hunched over his beer. The man turned and looked at Holliday and Peggy. Peggy nodded and picked up the fifty euro note, waving it.

  The white-haired old man picked up his beer mug and crossed the room to their table. A few feet away the Japanese family shrank away from him as he passed. Reaching their table, he took a long pull from his beer mug and waited, his bleary eyes fixed on the money in Peggy’s hand.

  “Ja?” he asked. His voice was scratchy and hoarse, thick with too much booze for too many years.

  “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

  “Sure, of course,” said the man, weaving a little. He made a little snorting sound. “Doesn’t everybody now? I have Russian, too, a little. Italian, some.” He shrugged.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Herr Drabeck?” Holliday offered.

  “Herr Drabeck was my Scheisskopf of a father, the schoolteacher of rotznasigen little children. Call me Rudy,” the old man said sourly. “Everyone else does.” He shrugged again and sat down.

  Holliday studied him briefly. He was short and fat with an untrimmed, gray beard shot through here and there with streaks of black. His hair was unkempt and unwashed, thinning back to the middle of his pink skull. His face was round, the cheeks pouched and sagging, the pale blue eyes vague behind plastic-framed glasses.

  His bulbous nose was broken with booze veins, and he had the flushed, ruddy complexion of someone with uncontrolled high blood pressure. He wore a wrinkled old brown suit, and he’d obviously been wearing it too long. His white shirt had been washed a thousand times, and the collar was permanently gray. At close range he smelled of cigarettes and fried onions. He appeared to be in his eighties, which would have made him twenty or so during the war.

  The waitress appeared again, bringing Peggy and Holliday their beer in tall pilsner glasses.

  “Give him one of these, as well,” said Peggy, lifting her beer glass and nodding toward the old man.

  “Nein,” said Drabeck quickly, speaking to the waitress. “Kulmbacher Eisbock. Ein Masskrug, bitte, und ein Betonbuddel Steinhдger.”

  “Pardon?” Peggy said. Her high school German had been exhausted back at “Sprechen Sie Englisch.”

  “Ein Masskrug is what you call a liter,” explained the waitress, grinning. “Steinhдger is a kind of gin. He wishes a whole bottle.”

  “A whole bottle?”

  “That is what he says,” replied the waitress.

  “Und ein Strammer Max,” added the old man, blinking earnestly.

  Peggy turned to the waitress.

  “He is asking now for a sandwich. Leberkдse-liver cheese, I think you say, with a fried egg on top, sun part up and toasted in the pan.”

  Peggy stared at Drabeck.

  He sh
rugged again and smiled. His teeth were small, yellow, and uneven.

  “All right,” said Peggy. The waitress went away. She turned back to Drabeck. “You’ve lived in Friedrichshafen for a long time?”

  The old man stared at the fifty euro note in front of Peggy on the table. She slid it across to him. He grabbed it and slipped it quickly into the sagging pocket of his jacket. He drained the last of the beer from his mug and set it aside, placing his hands flat on the table. The fingers were long and surprisingly small and delicate. Veins twisted across the skin like worms underneath the wrinkled flesh. The nails were broken and cracked, dark with dirt, thick and yellow.

  “Old hands,” he said.

  Peggy said nothing. The man continued to look mournfully down at his hands. “Old,” he repeated.

  “They look like they might have played the piano once,” ventured Holliday.

  “Violin,” murmured Drabeck. “I once played the violin, in Vienna, a very long time ago. The Wiener Symphoniker, the Vienna Symphony.”

  “You were a violinist?” Peggy said, wondering for a moment where this was leading.

  “I was a boy, very young. I was at the Universitдt fьr Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, the music school in Vienna, yes? I had a job; I was to be with the Symphoniker, my dream since I was very small. Then came the Anschluss, and we were all Nazis whether we liked to be or not; it made no matter.”

  “That would have been 1938, then,” said Holliday. Hitler’s relatively peaceful annexation of Austria.

  “Ja,” said Drabeck. The waitress returned, carrying a tray. On it were an array of bottles, plates, and glasses, including an enormous glass mug of foaming beer as dark and opaque as Guinness. She set it all down in front of the old man.

  His eyes gleamed. He slathered the Strammer Max sandwich with horseradish and dark mustard then took an enormous bite. Egg yolk squirted out of the sides of the sandwich and dripped into his beard. Hand shaking a little, he picked up the big glass mug and quaffed an enormous slug of the black, foaming beer to wash down the food. He sat back in his chair, sighing, his breath coming in hard little puffs as though he’d just been in a footrace.