Sword of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  At seven thirty in the morning they were finally allowed into Wanounou’s room. It looked like every other hospital room that Holliday had ever seen. The floors were dark vinyl tile, the walls were cream-colored, and the door was big enough to maneuver a gurney through.

  There was an ominous blue panic button on the wall with white lettering that read simply CODE. There were two beds. The one nearest the door was empty but obviously in use. Wanounou was in the bed by the window, up five floors with a view of bright blue sky. The room smelled like rubbing alcohol and floor wax. People moved quietly up and down the halls carrying bouquets of flowers and peeping in doorways.

  The professor looked like hell. Both eyes were black and swollen three-quarters shut. His lips were swollen and the color of eggplant. He had a plaster skullcap and a plaster bandage on his nose. He had a cast on his left arm and wires and tubes everywhere.

  Machinery clicked and hummed all around the room. Things dripped into him, and things dripped out. The nurse, a skinny thin-faced man named Joseph with some kind of Slavic accent and a thick scar on his chin, told them they had exactly half an hour to visit. He looked like he meant it.

  Wanounou was conscious and a little groggy from assorted medications he’d been given. He gave them a puffy-lipped smile as they stepped up to the bed. Two of his front teeth were broken, their ends jagged. He lisped a little when he talked.

  “I’d kiss you, but it might be too painful,” said Peggy, pulling up one of the visitor’s chairs and sitting down. She extended her hand and let it rest on the professor’s sheet-covered leg. Wanounou’s smile broadened. It looked as though his lips were going to split open. Holliday winced.

  “Feeling better now,” said the professor. “A bit hungry though.”

  “That’s a good sign,” said Peggy.

  “What happened?” Holliday asked.

  “I was working on the scroll. It was about ten thirty or so. Three guys came into the lab. One of them had an attaché case. He took the sections of the scroll, and the other two started beating me. One of them had a piece of pipe with duct tape wrapped around it. The other one just used his fists.”

  Peggy winced.

  “What did they look like?” Holliday asked.

  “Ordinary, but like they went to the gym a lot.”

  “Military?”

  “Maybe. They didn’t have particularly short hair, except the one with the attaché case. He was bald.”

  “Tattoos?” Holliday was thinking about the sword and ribbon symbol he’d seen on the killer’s wrist at Carr-Harris’s summer house.

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Accents?”

  “They didn’t talk much.”

  “Anything?”

  Wanounou thought for a moment. The machinery ticked, dripped, and wheezed.

  “The one with the attaché case.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was a Christian.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He had a little crucifix on a chain around his neck. Gold.”

  That really didn’t mean much these days.

  “Anything else?”

  Wanounou thought again.

  “One thing. Silly.”

  “What?”

  “One of the guys kicking me. Before I passed out.”

  “What?”

  “His boots. Motorcycle boots, you know? The ones with a buckle.”

  “Okay.”

  “They were Rogani Bruno e Franco. I know the brand. Pricey. I’ve always wanted a pair. They make beautiful street shoes, too.”

  “So?”

  “They’re Italian. The only place you can get them is a town called Macerata, near the Adriatic Coast.”

  “Now why would you know a thing like that?” Peggy asked.

  “Fanum Voltumnae,” said Wanounou as though it would mean something to them.

  “ ‘Fanum’ means ‘temple’ or ‘shrine,’ doesn’t it?” Holliday said, his mind skipping back to Mary-Lou Gemmill’s senior Latin class and her threats to deny prom tickets to anyone who couldn’t decline neuter i-stem nouns by the end of class.

  “That’s right,” said Wanounou. “There’s a big archaeological site there. Etruscan. It’s not far from Orvieto, a big gathering center for crusaders shipping out to Jerusalem. I’ve visited the site a number of times.”

  “How far along were you with the scroll before they got to you? Did you manage to read it?”

  “I didn’t even get to clean the pieces.”

  “How many slices?”

  “Nine.”

  “How long do you think the whole scroll was?”

  “Thirty centimeters. I measured the pieces.”

  “About twelve inches.”

  “More or less.”

  “And he took them all?”

  “I guess so. My concentration was elsewhere,” answered Wanounou.

  Peggy gave Holliday a sharp look.

  “Would you like some water?” she said.

  Wanounou nodded.

  There was a carafe and a plastic cup with a flex straw in it on a rolling side table beside the bed. Peggy poured some water into the cup then held the flex straw to the professor’s lips. He drank and then his head dropped back against the crisp linen of the pillow as though even sipping a little bit of water had exhausted him.

  Holliday sighed. Maybe losing the scroll and whatever secret it possessed was an omen. The priest in the Old City alley brought the body count to an even half dozen. And those were the people he knew about. How many other people had died because of the sword and its hidden message? With the scroll gone there was no way to go on. They’d reached the end of the line. It was time to go home.

  “Well, that’s it, I guess,” he said. “We’ve got nowhere else to go with this. We’d better pack up and go.”

  “You’re going to leave it like this?” Wanounou said. “After everything you and Peggy have been through? After everything I’ve been through on your behalf?”

  “You’d make a great Jewish mother,” said Holliday, smiling weakly.

  “I have a Jewish mother; it rubs off,” said Wanounou, trying to smile back. It obviously hurt. He grimaced instead.

  “Without knowing what’s on that scroll I’m stumped.” Holliday shrugged. “Unless a really suspicious customs guy at the airport finds your Italian thieves the scroll is gone forever.”

  “The scroll may be gone,” said Wanounou, “but we might still have the message.”

  “Explain.”

  “X-ray fluorescence. Know anything about it?”

  “Something to do with X-rays?” Peggy ventured.

  “Fluorescent X-rays,” said Holliday.

  “Never mind,” said Wanounou. “It’s a relatively new process they use for all sorts of analysis, including archaeological artifacts. They used it recently to uncover a hidden text under a painted over section of the Archimedes Palimpsest, a copy of some of Archimedes’s theories from about 300 B.C.”

  “And?”

  “The silver the scroll is made of is brittle and thin, extremely fragile. It occurred to me that even the cleaning process might harm whatever images or script was on the silver.” He paused, his voice croaking. Peggy gave him another sip of water. He went on. “So before I put them into the electrolyte bath I took them upstairs to the imaging department and ran the individual slices through the big Philips machine they have up there. I fed the imaging data back down to my computer in the lab. I was just about to check it when the goons came in.”

  “So the data is still in your computer?”

  “It should be,” said the professor.

  Using Wanounou’s key and with the password to his computer written on a slip of paper, Peggy and Holliday let themselves in to the professor’s laboratory later that morning. Except for a dark stain on the floor there was no evidence that anything untoward had happened. There was nothing broken and nothing that looked out of place.

  The vase that had originally contained the silver scroll had been placed on a photographic copy stand waiting to be documented. There was a scattering of rust-colored crumbs on a white plastic tray that had he
ld the laser-sawn strips of the scroll, but the scroll itself was gone.

  Peggy sat down at the computer terminal, booted it up, and entered Wanounou’s password. She entered the name he’d given to the data from the X-ray fluorescence scanner upstairs and then opened it. A screen full of brightly colored, slightly fuzzy images appeared.

  “According to your friend Raffi the X-rays react to particles in the iron gall ink they used back in the Middle Ages,” said Holliday, peering over her shoulder.

  “Why would they use ink on silver?” Peggy asked.

  “As a guide for the engraving tool they used to scratch into the metal,” explained Holliday.

  Peggy looked at the screen.

  “It’s fuzzy,” she said. “Some of the words and letters are missing. And it’s in Latin.” She looked around at Holliday. “Can you read it?”

  Holliday bent closer.

  “ ‘Innocent III, Episcopus, Servus Servorum Dei. Sancti Apostoli Petrus et Paulus: de . . . potestate et auctoritate confidimus ipsi intercedant pro . . . ad Dominum. Precibus et meritis . . . Mariae semper Virgi . . . beati Michaelis Archangeli, beati Ioannis Bapti . . . et sanctorum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli et Sanctorum misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus; et dimissis omni . . . peccatis vestris, perducat vos Iesus Christus ad vitam aeternam.’ ”

  “Easy for you to say,” snorted Peggy. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s an apostolic blessing from Pope Innocent the Third,” replied Holliday. “I think it’s called the Urbi et orbi—blessings to the city and to the world. ‘May the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in whose power and authority we have’—uh, ‘confidence’ would be the best translation, I guess—‘intercede on our behalf to the Lord . . .’ Et cetera, et cetera. Innocent was Pope during the Crusades. He was the one who eventually ordered the Templars to be arrested and killed.”

  “That’s it?” Peggy said. “A blessing?”

  “There’s more,” said Holliday, scanning the text. “Is there any way you can print this out?”

  “Probably,” answered Peggy. She fumbled around with the keyboard and the mouse, then finally found the right command. Somewhere nearby a photo printer began to hum and whirr.

  “Yada, yada, yada . . . ‘May Jesus Christ lead you into everlasting life . . .’ Yada, yada . . . ‘Descend on you and remain with you always . . .’ Here we go. ‘I hereby give you, Rutger von Blum, also known as Roger de Flor, Admiral of Naples and the Holy Order of the Temple, full license and authority to remove these treasures to a place of safety across the sea and out of the hands of the infidel Saladin . . .’ ”

  “Does it say where this place of safety is?” Peggy asked.

  “Not really. All it says is . . . ‘fanum cavernam petrosus quies.’ ”

  “Which means?”

  “Roughly translated: ‘a rocky, holy cave-place of peace and quiet.’ Something like that.”

  “We need to talk to Raffi again.”

  When they returned to the hospital on the far side of the campus, Raffi was sitting up in his bed and half of the tubes and wires were gone. He was eating green Jell-O, sucking it carefully through his bruised and battered lips. They showed him the photo prints of the scroll sections, holding each one of them up in front of his swollen eyes. Holliday gave him the rough Latin translations.

  “It’s a papal bull. A proclamation. A license, like letters patent they used to give to privateers and pirates.”

  “I could never figure out why they called it a bull,” said Peggy. “What do bulls have to do with it?”

  “A bulla is the lead seal they used to attach to the end of them,” explained Raffi.

  “What about this ‘rocky holy cave-place of peace and quiet’?” Holliday asked. “Ring any bells?”

  “Not a one,” said Wanounou. “But I know who you could ask.”

  “Who?”

  “A friend of mine, Maurice Bernheim. He’s a curator at the Musée National de la Marine in Paris. He wrote a book on the history of Mediterranean shipping. If anyone is going to know about this Roger de Flor, it’ll be Maurice.”

  25

  The Musée National de la Marine is located in one wing of the 1930s Palais de Chaillot and looks out across the Champ de Mars. When you see a photograph of Hitler with the Eiffel Tower in the background during his whirlwind visit to Paris after the city fell, the Führer is standing on the terrace of the Marine Museum.

  Maurice Bernheim was in his early forties, bluff and hearty and full of laughter. When he saw Holliday his first comment was about how easily a man with a patch on his eye could be a pirate. Bernheim was comfortably chubby, brown-haired, wore a lovely Pierre Cardin suit and expensive-looking shoes, and smoked a particularly foul-smelling brand of cigarettes known as Boyards. Holliday hadn’t known you could still get them, and the only reason he remembered them at all, other than once choking on one, was because, oddly, they were the only brand of cigarette anyone smoked in the movie Blade Runner. They smelled like old sneakers that had somehow caught fire.

  Bernheim’s office was a lavish room with the same view that Hitler had gotten, French doors leading out to the same terrace, paintings of ships where there were no bookcases, and ships in bottles on the few shelves that had no books. The furniture was expensive, leather and comfortable. Bernheim’s desk was huge, carved, and very old. The carpets on the floor were Isfahan Persian and beautiful. Either Bernheim was independently wealthy or he had a lot of juice in his job.

  “Ah, yes,” said Bernheim, leaning back in his chair. Smoke writhed up from the corn-paper cigarette in the big, cut-glass ashtray, already overflowing with butts from previous brushfires. “The infamous Roger de Flor. I know him well.”

  “Why infamous?” Holliday asked.

  “He was something of a bad boy, you know. An adventurer and a mercenary. Sometimes he would rise up against his employers and take them over. He was like his Templar friends—far too successful. A great sailor by all accounts.”

  “Why did the scroll we found refer to him as Rutger von Blum?” Peggy asked.

  “That was his name,” said Bernheim with a very Gallic shrug. He picked up his cigarette, and it found its way to the corner of his mouth. He sucked, then puffed, excreting a cloud of smoke up toward his high ceiling. “He was born in Italy where his father was royal falconer in Brindisi. Blum means flower in German. De Flor was nothing more than political expediency . . . When in Rome and all that, yes?”

  “How did he connect with the Templars?” Holliday asked.

  “He was a second son, which in those days meant his father didn’t know what to do with him. It was either the priesthood or the sea. When the young Roger came of age he was indentured to a Templar galley of which he later became captain. Like that.” He took a puff of his Boyard. “He eventually built up a fleet of warships and cargo ships for hire. His flagship was the Wanderfalke—the Peregrine Falcon, a caravel. Two hundred tons; quite large for the time.”