Sword of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  They introduced themselves and dropped Maurice Bernheim’s name and then repeated their story, leaving out the mounting number of bodies, dead policemen in Paris pensions, Axel Kellerman and his father, the appropriation of the Allards’ house in Paris, and the theft of their expensive Mercedes. Edited down that way the story had at least some semblance of normalcy.

  Duroc lit a cigarette with a slim little gold lighter then clicked it closed. She put the lighter down on the blue and white package of Gitanes and let two wandering plumes of smoke escape slowly from the flared nostrils of her patrician nose.

  “I’m afraid the Internet has given currency to rather shoddy mythologies about men like Roger de Flor,” she began. “One can play Google like a piano keyboard and construct entire symphonies of misinformed conspiracy.” Her voice had the mid-Atlantic toneless accent of someone who has spoken English as a second language for a very long time. Holliday was willing to bet that she’d taught at an American university once upon a time.

  “The truth of the matter is that Roger de Flor was nothing more than a German wine merchant. He was no Templar knight, he was no hero, and he was no warrior for God who fetched the Holy Grail from out of Jerusalem. He was a businessman, plain and simple.”

  “But he did exist?”

  “Certainly,” said Duroc. “That much is borne out by the records of the Port de La Rochelle. The archives of my own family bear that out, as well.”

  “Your own family?” Peggy asked, intrigued.

  “The famille Duroc has lived in La Rochelle since the twelfth century,” she said, a hint of pride creeping into her voice. “We are one of the oldest families in Aquitaine.” She blew out more smoke as punctuation.

  Listening to her and looking at her aristocratic face Holliday could see some of the reasons for the French Revolution and the rise of a little Corsican nobody like Napoléon Bonaparte. There was a studied arrogance to the woman that went back for hundreds of years.

  “Originally the name was de la Rochelle, but as the centuries passed it was shortened to Duroc,” the professor continued.

  Holliday couldn’t resist.

  “They were wine merchants like de Flor?”

  “They were hereditary Dukes of Aquitaine,” said Valerie Duroc a little stiffly. “My ancestors include Edward Iron Arm and Richard the Lionheart.”

  “Crusaders presumably.”

  “Indeed. One of my ancestors was William the Pious.”

  “Did they lease ships from de Flor’s merchant fleet?”

  “Of course. By that time de Flor was the largest shipper of wine in France. He even had royal warrants to bring wine to England.”

  “So there is a connection between the two families then.”

  “In a business sense. I doubt if you could transport anything during those times without some connection to Roger de Flor.”

  Duroc glanced at her watch.

  “It’s almost four o’clock,” she said, smiling. “Coffee break time. Would you and Miss Blackstock care to join me?”

  They walked across the virtually deserted campus and through the new developments around Le Lac de la Sole to a restaurant-bar overlooking the Minimes marina called Les Soeurs Dogan. They found a table on the patio and sat down. Duroc lit another cigarette. She ordered a licorice-flavored pastis. Not a coffee break at all. Holliday and Peggy ordered beer.

  They sat in the bright afternoon sun and looked out over the forest of masts in the marina to the ancient stone breakwaters of the vieux port and beyond to the Bay of Biscay and the open sea. Gulls whirled and screeched. A breeze made the taut lines on the sailboats hum, and under it all was the steady heartbeat of the breaking sea.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine this place a thousand years ago, the sailboats gone, the port filled with lateen caravels, multi-oared galleys and tough, stumpy looking little cogs making ready for sea. Some ships bound for England, some to Lisbon, and some to Gibraltar and finally the Holy Land. The man who owned such a fleet would have had a great deal of power. A Duke of Aquitaine who was also a Templar in partnership with such a man would have represented a serious threat to the Catholic Church. Things were beginning to come together.

  “What happened to de Flor?”

  “He was assassinated in Turkey in 1305,” said Duroc, sipping her milky, banana-colored drink.

  “On whose order?”

  “Some say Michael IX Palaiologos, the young emperor of Anatolia. Others credit Pope Clement V.”

  Clement was Bishop of Poitiers, which included La Rochelle, and the man who ordered the arrest and execution of the Templars two years later in 1307—a new broom sweeping clean, and also managing to absolve the almost bankrupt Philip IV, king of France, from his enormous debt to the Templar banks. A circle closed.

  “It sounds like this Pope Clement really didn’t like de Flor,” commented Peggy.

  “By then the Templars had too much power and too much wealth for their own good,” replied Valerie Duroc. “It was the Holy Office of the Inquisition that saw fit to disband them.”

  “As in the Spanish Inquisition?” Peggy asked. “Burning people at the stake, that kind of thing?”

  “Only in part,” answered Duroc. “The Inquisition was much more than that. In effect it was the CIA of the Catholic Church, seeking out not just heretics among the general public but dissenters within the Church itself.” She shook her head. “If there is one thing the Catholic Church abhors it is change.”

  “CIA?” Holliday said. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

  “Not at all,” said Duroc. “The Dominicans, the so-called Hounds of God, actually sent spies to infiltrate other orders. Groups of papal assassins have been known since the time of the Borgias; during the Renaissance religious murder became a fine art. In more modern times there was the institution known as Sodalitium Pianum, the Fellowship of Pius, an organization within the Vatican that sought out officials within the Church teaching the so-called condemned doctrines.

  “In France the group was obscurely called La Sapiničre , the Tree Farm—much like the CIA’s training school in Maryland called ‘The Farm.’ It was such an organization that masterminded the flight of SS officers through the ratlines of Rome and funneled black operation funds out of the Vatican Bank during the 1970s.” Duroc paused. “Oh, no, Monsieur Holliday, the intelligence networks of the Holy See are very much alive.”

  Which explained the murderous priest in Jerusalem, but not why he was there in the first place. What possible secret could the Templar sword contain that would interest the Vatican a thousand years later? Axel Kellerman might be searching for war booty and his father’s legacy, but the Roman Catholic Church had more money than it knew what to do with.

  Not money—power.

  “What about Professor Bernheim’s idea about Saint-Emilion and the cave?” Peggy asked. “Is it worth a look?”

  “Rubbish,” said Valerie Duroc, stubbing out her cigarette. “Saint-Emilion is almost two hundred kilometers from here—a hundred and twenty-five miles. During the Middle Ages that would represent at least a week’s travel. The caves of the hermit St. Emilion have been receiving pilgrims since the eighth century, and the underground galleries have been used to store wine for at least as long. It’s hard to imagine a worse place to hide a treasure.” She laughed.

  “Maurice has a fanciful imagination; he would have made a wonderful lawyer but a very bad scientist. He tends to bend facts to his hypothesis rather than the other way around.” She shook her head again. “No, Monsieur Holliday, I am afraid your search for the mythical treasure of Roger de Flor ends here in La Rochelle.”

  Holliday looked out over the marina and sipped his beer. Valerie Duroc lit another cigarette and leaned back in her chair. Peggy looked depressed. A huge yacht lumbered past them, big diesels throbbing. Two unbelievably beautiful women lounged on the after-deck in their bikinis. The name on the ship’s transom was picked out in black and gold:

  LA ROCHA

  PONTA DELGADA

  “La Rocha,” he murmured to himself.

  “Pardon?” Duroc said.

  “
The name La Rocha.”

  “Portuguese,” replied the French professor. “The same as mine actually. It means ‘The Rock.’ ”

  “Where’s Ponta Delgada?” Holliday asked, watching as the yacht motored out through the breakwater entrance.

  “The island of Săo Miguel in the Azores,” said Duroc. “It’s the main way station for sailboats crossing the Atlantic.”

  “Didn’t the Templars settle in the Azores after they were disbanded?” Holliday asked, vaguely recalling something about it from his reading on the subject.

  “They exiled themselves to Portugal and called themselves the Knights of Christ. The ships Columbus used to cross the Atlantic carried the Catalan Cross on their sails.”

  “Could de Flor have reached the Azores with his fleet, or at least a single ship?”

  “Certainly,” said Duroc. “With ease.”

  28

  They drove the big Mercedes south, following the long azure curve of the Bay of Biscay. They flinched a little every time they saw one of the Gendarmerie Nationale’s blue Subaru chase cars speeding by but traveled without incident into the Basque Country and the rugged coastal mountains of the Pyrénées Atlantiques, crossing the border at Hendaye with barely a ripple. The only visible sign that they had left one country for another was the change in highway signs from blue to black on white.

  Gone were the days of barbed wire and Franco’s bully boys armed with machine guns poking through your luggage; now there were only blue and gold Eurostar welcome signs and the occasional multilingual tourist information kiosk.

  They drove through the wine country of Navarre and west across the plains of old Castile and finally to Salamanca and the old battlefields Holliday had only read about in Bernard Cornwell’s almost addictive Sharpe novels. They crossed the border into Portugal with even less fanfare than there had been crossing into Spain and continued south through the old capital of Coimbra then took the toll route down to Lisbon. The entire trip took two full days, and during that time there wasn’t the slightest indication that they were being pursued by the police or anyone else.

  In Lisbon they booked a flight to the Azores on SATA and flew out of Portela Airport the following day. Holliday had picked up a Bradt guide to the Azores at their hotel the previous afternoon and had been reading it ever since.

  “Of course this whole thing could be a wild-goose chase you know,” said Peggy. The Airbus A310 had reached cruising altitude, and they were heading out over the Atlantic, the European Continent falling away behind them. “Grandpa could have been chasing fireflies.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe the Duroc woman is right; the search ended in La Rochelle.”

  “I don’t think Henry Granger ever chased a firefly in his life,” answered Holliday. “It simply wasn’t in his nature. He was a historian; he gathered facts, checked sources, did his research, developed hypotheses, and constructed theories.”

  “In other words he did it by the book.”

  “That’s right,” nodded Holliday.

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” argued Peggy. “He had the sword for decades, and he kept it hidden. Then all of a sudden he gets in touch with Carr-Harris and goes running off to England.”

  “And then Germany,” added Holliday.

  “Assume that means Kellerman,” said Peggy. “So what got him going after all those years?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t his interest,” said Holliday. “Maybe it was someone else’s interest in him.”

  “Like Broadbent?”

  “The lawyer?” Holliday said. He shrugged. “I think Broadbent’s a latecomer, nothing more than a hired gun. I think Kellerman’s people used him. That story about his father and the sword was completely bogus. He was fishing for information.”

  “So you think Kellerman is behind this?” Peggy asked.

  “It’s either him or this Sodalitium Pianum or whatever Duroc called her Vatican assassins.”

  “You believe her?” Peggy said a little skeptically. “We’re getting into grassy-knoll-people-going-around-with-aluminum-foil-on-their-heads-to-keep-out-the- cosmic-rays territory here, don’t you think?”

  The stewardess came around with a cart loaded down with cheese sandwiches wrapped up in plastic and cans of Fanta Orange. They took one of each. The cheese tasted like something you’d use for an insole. They were a long way from La Tourelle, the little café in Paris.

  “Did you know that Fanta was invented in Nazi Germany by a chemist from Atlanta to replace Coca-Cola?” Holliday said. “They made it from saccharin, scrapings from apple cider presses, and cheese curds.”

  “And that is relevant how?” Peggy asked, frowning at the familiar can in her hand.

  “It just shows how truth really can be stranger than fiction,” he explained. “The Borgias did exist, and some of them really were assassins just like she said.”

  “But really, secret societies, Doc? Come on.”

  “Why not?” Holliday said. “A secret society is really nothing more than a network, like the Mafia is a network, or the Bush family and Skull and Bones at Yale. Put it in the right context, and you’ve got something that Oprah would approve of.”

  “Dead priests in the streets of Jerusalem would never wind up being on her approved list of things to see on your next summer vacation,” said Peggy with a snort.

  “The point is, things like Duroc’s Sodalitium Pianum or La Sapiničre really exist. That priest was sent to kill us, there’s no disputing that. He was an assassin. Even the Portuguese have secret societies—the Carbonária was a military group of Freemasons who were responsible for killing King Carlos I back in the early nineteen hundreds.”

  “Another history lesson, Doc?” Peggy warned.

  “Sorry.” He took a sip of the Fanta, thought about cheese curds and Nazis and put the can down on his seat table.

  “The Azores is a long way to go on the basis of a name you saw on the back of a boat,” said Peggy, staring out the window at a fleet of fluffy white clouds sailing by, all sails set.

  “It’s more than that,” responded Holliday. “I’m doing this the way Uncle Henry would. Make the hypothesis fit the facts, not the other way around. When you get enough facts together to make an overwhelming case then you go from hypothesis to theory, and the only way to prove the theory is by—”

  “Finding the treasure that Roger de Flor took away from Castle Pelerin,” completed Peggy.

  “Which is why we’re going to the Azores,” said Holliday.

  “You have enough facts to prove the hypothesis?” Peggy asked.

  “A lot of suppositions at least.”

  “So suppose away.” Peggy grinned.

  “Suppose you’re a pirate. Where do you bury your treasure?”

  “A desert island.”

  “Not a hermit’s cave in France or a busy port like La Rochelle.”

  “Why not leave it at Castle Pelerin?” Peggy argued.

  “Because like Jerusalem itself, you have no idea of how long it’s going to be before the place is overrun by the godless infidels. Pirates bury treasure to keep it away from prying eyes and sticky fingers.”

  “But maybe it’s all smoke and mirrors,” argued Peggy. “Like I said before, what if the whole idea of a Templar treasure is a myth?”