Sword of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  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 Öttingen-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-Gruppenführer General Lutz Kellerman anywhere at all.

  “So World War Two never happened,” Peggy murmured.

  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 Gaststätte 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 Bräu,” 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 Steinhäger.”

  “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. “Steinhäger 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. Leberkäse—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 shrugged 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 Universität für 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.

  “What happened then?” Holliday said.

  Drabeck wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his mouth, taking the foam out of his drooping mustache.

  “My Schwuchtl father knew the big cheese here, yes? The boss, Herr von Kellerman, the Count up in his big Schloss there by the ruins. He and my father were together in a . . .” He paused, his bushy eyebrows lowering as he frowned, looking for the right words. “Ein Geheimbund . . .”

  “Secret group?” Holliday said. “Secret society?”

  “Ja, that is it,” nodded Drabeck. He took another bite of the sandwich and more egg yolk dripped. He put the sandwich down and licked his fingers, then took another long swallow of beer.

  “Do you remember the name of the secret society?” Peggy asked.

  “Ja, sure,” said the old man. He took another bite and spoke through the mouthful of food. “Die Thule Gesellschaft. Der Germanenorden.” He swallowed and drank more beer.

  “The Thule Society,” nodded Holliday. “The Teutonic Order of the Holy Grail. They were formed just after World War One.” The Germans had been looking for some groping mythology to make themselves feel more important, much like “The Star-Spangled Banner” being written as a morale booster after the British burned Washington to the ground and captured De troit. Except that the song that became the national anthem was no more than a patriotic song that bound the nation together and boosted an overtaxed country’s sense of itself a little. The urge for Germanic mysticism had given birth to the rise of Adolf Hitler, the seed of his anti-Semitic screed planted in the rise of Aryan fundamentalism, his first converts among members of groups like the Thule Society.

  “Ja,” said Drabeck. “That’s it.” He unscrewed the top from the clay bottle of Steinhäger and poured himself an oily couple of ounces into the inverted cone of the glass brought by the waitress. He drank it off neat and smacked his lips. “Mein Vater, my father, thought it was a sign from the heavens, the symbol of Thule and the . . .” He paused again. “Das Wappen, das schildförmiges,” he struggled.

  Holliday got it.

  “The shield, the coat of arms.”

  “Ja,” said Drabeck, relieved. “The, how you said, coat of arms of the Thule and the family of the Kellermans was so much the same.” He poured another glass of the clear gin and drank it off again, then reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and dug out an inch-long stub of pencil. He picked up a napkin and drew on it quickly. A simple sword in front of a slightly curving swastika. “Thule Gesellschaft,” he said, showing them. He added the sword and ribbon crest they’d seen carved in the stone above the front entrance to Schloss Kellerman. “Das Wappen auf das geschlecht Kellerman, gelt, ja?”

  “The sword again,” said Peggy.

  Drabeck tapped at the drawing with his pencil stub.

  “Ja, der Schwert.” He nodded emphatically.

  “So,” said Holliday slowly. “Your father and Herr Kellerman were in the Thule Society together . . .” He let it dangle.

  Drabeck poked the last of the sandwich into his mouth and chewed reflectively.

  “Kellerman was ein Obergruppenführer, a general in the Schutzstaffel, the SS. He knew people in the Party, so my father also. Little Heini—Himmler, Goebbels, and der Dicke, the Fat One, Göring, he knew all of them, so they had my father become Stellvertreter-Gauleiter . . .”