The Swagger Sword

by David S. Brody

  Cam nodded. “I get it, sorry. The family threatened to go public unless the Vatican gave him a prestigious burial spot.”

  “When this went public a few years ago, the Vatican was so embarrassed, they dug up the body and moved it.”

  “It doesn’t prove they were in on the Emmy kidnapping, but it sure is incriminating,” Amanda said. “And if you’re talking about making a deal with gangsters, you can bet Archbishop Marcinkus was at the center of it.”

  “That’s what this article said,” Astarte replied. “That Archbishop Marcinkus ordered the kidnapping.” She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, I should have mentioned that earlier.”

  It made sense, Amanda thought. As head of Vatican Bank, Marcinkus would have done almost anything to keep the bank from being linked to the Mafia. Even kidnap a girl.

  “I’d happily take my chances with a jury,” Cam said. “First the $300,000 in expenses to hide her, then this burial. Not exactly the actions of an innocent actor.’

  Astarte stuffed her phone in her pocket. “I’ll keep looking for more when we get in the car. Where’d you say we’re going?”

  Amanda described the treasure label on the map. “It looks like northern Rhode Island, maybe the town of Cumberland. So we’re heading up there. It’s about an hour away.”

  “I’ve heard of Cumberland,” Astarte said, brightening. “That’s where cumberlandite comes from.”

  “Cumberlandite?”

  “It’s a magnetic rock. Cumberland is the only place you can find it in the whole world. We studied it in science class. People often mistake it for a meteorite because it’s magnetic and really heavy.”

  They walked toward the SUV, Amanda squinting in the bright sunlight, the sound of the ocean calling to her. It would have been a great day for a stroll along the Cliff Walk, but for the fact that someone might take the opportunity to toss them over the rail and onto the rocks below. She bit her lip. “Well, what’s it used for?”

  “They used to make cannons from it during the Revolutionary War. But now they mostly use it for jewelry. It’s called the Stone of Virgo.”

  Amanda and Cam stopped and called out in unison. “Virgo?”

  Astarte took a step back. “What?”

  “Sorry.” Amanda put out a hand to calm things down. “It’s just that the great cathedrals of northern France, called the Notre Dame cathedrals, were built by the Templars to commemorate the constellation Virgo. In fact, they are laid out in a pattern that matches the Virgo constellation—”

  Cam interjected, “The Templars loved to do stuff like that. As above, so below, is one of their key beliefs.”

  Amanda continued. “Virgo has long been associated with the ancient Goddess. So these Notre Dame cathedrals, dedicated to Our Mother, have long been associated with Goddess worship. Much to the chagrin of the Church.”

  Astarte nodded. “With the Templars, it always seems to come back to Goddess worship.”

  “Yes,” Amanda concurred. “It does. That’s the key to understanding them.”

  “And,” Cam added, opening the hatch and tossing his bag in, “maybe the key to understanding this map. If cumberlandite is in fact the stone of the Goddess, then it’s a perfect place for the Templars to use as a hiding place. Again, they loved symbolism and allegory.”

  Amanda said, “At a minimum, it’s an intriguing coincidence.”

  Cam smiled. “You know I don’t believe in coincidences.” He stacked Amanda’s and Astarte’s overnight bags next to his own.

  “Okay then,” Amanda said. “To sum up, we have a treasure map pointing to Cumberland, which is the only place in the world with cumberlandite deposits. Cumberlandite, in turn, is the stone of Virgo, who happens to represent the ancient Goddess and is therefore venerated by the Templars. And the map itself is part of a cache of secret documents describing a medieval Templar trip to America.”

  They got into the vehicle, Cam driving, Astarte in the back behind him and Amanda in the passenger seat. “And don’t forget the map marks the In Hoc stone,” Cam added. “So whoever drew it must have known about that carving. Which not many people do.”

  Amanda chuckled. “This all screams Templar. Secret maps and hidden treasures and Goddess worship. All we need to seal the deal is find a Cistercian Abbey nearby, like we did at Newgrange.”

  They rode in silence for a few seconds, until Astarte leaned forward. “Um, you might want to take a look at this.” She handed her phone to Amanda. “I just did a quick Google search. Turns out there is a Cistercian Abbey in Cumberland. Or at least there used to be.”

  Cam drove, an oldies rock station playing in the background as his mind played connect-the-dots with the dozen or so pieces of evidence they had uncovered over the past week: No matter how he connected them, the picture that emerged centered on Cumberland. He glanced in his rearview mirror, watching Astarte tap at her phone as she read more about the Cistercian Abbey. Amanda alternately studied the traffic behind them in her side view mirror and navigated. The drive from Newport to Cumberland, though spanning the entire north-south length of Rhode Island, was only fifty miles. They should have been able to complete the trip in less than an hour in late morning traffic. But they kept to the back roads, often doubling back, concerned the Pathfinder was being followed or tracked.

  They had considered dumping the vehicle, but they needed some way to get around, and most forms of transportation except walking and hitchhiking left paper trails. Even Lyfts and Ubers and taxis, which could be paid for with cash, risked firsthand accounts from drivers not likely to forget the guy with the pretty wife and exotic-looking daughter. So in the end they kept to side streets, paying cash and avoiding tollbooths.

  “You know,” Amanda said, “I can’t help but think that the person at the center of all this is Archbishop Marcinkus.”

  Cam nodded. “What Astarte found out about him was pretty wild.”

  “I imagine that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “I wonder if Monsignor Marcotte knows anything more Marcinkus. He spent some time at the Vatican when he was younger.” Stopped at a traffic light, Cam found his friend’s number and dialed.

  “Don’t tell him where we are,” Amanda said. “I don’t trust anyone right now.”

  “Agreed.” Cam made small talk for a few seconds. “I know this might be a strange question, but what do you know about Archbishop Marcinkus?”

  Marcotte sucked in some air. “Enough to tell you he was bad news. What are you into, Cameron?”

  “I can’t tell you. At least not now. But I think it’s important. Amanda’s here too, you’re on speaker.”

  The priest sighed. “Very well. I didn’t know him personally, but when I was studying at the Vatican in the early eighties he was like a rock star. Larger than life. President of the Vatican Bank, but more than that. An alpha male. Big guy, nickname was the Gorilla. Did all sorts of things priests weren’t supposed to do. Hung out with Mafia bosses. Corrupt. Drank and smoked. Chased women, visited prostitutes. Now, I personally don’t have a problem with priests marrying, as you know. I think the Church would be a lot healthier if we did. But whoring is another story entirely. I think it was the Times of London that wrote in his obituary that he had a mistress and an illegitimate child. Basically, a narcissist.”

  Amanda sniffed. “Sounds like he should have been a politician.”

  “In many ways he was. He had power, he was ruthless, and he had friends loyal to him. No matter what he did, no matter how outrageous, it didn’t seem to matter. Nobody could touch him. The other Vatican officials were all afraid of him. He had a way of making his enemies disappear. Like I said, he had lots of friends in organized crime.”

  Cam tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. This was all interesting, but it didn’t bring them any closer to the treasure. “When you said he could make people disappear, do you know of any examples?”

  “There was a rich baroness, I think part of the Rothschild family. Some kind of sex scandal involving
Marcinkus, then, poof, she disappeared. Found frozen to death in the mountains.”

  “So a mobster in a clergy collar,” Amanda asked.

  “The word mobster simplifies things too much. Some people swore by him. Said he had a heart of gold, especially when it came to kids. He was also very loyal to those close to him.”

  Cam wondered if the Monsignor could help connect the dots. “What about the Orlandi girl kidnapping? Was Marcinkus involved?”

  Marcotte exhaled. “Many people thought so, yes. But others said no way would he hurt a young girl. Apparently he worked very hard to try to secure her release. But who knows, maybe that was just for show. The abduction happened at about the same time the banking scandal hit. Maybe a coincidence, but it all seemed tied together to me at the time.”

  Cam thanked the priest and hung up. “So, more dirt on Marcinkus.”

  Amanda nodded. “But not much light shed on the treasure mystery.”

  Astarte had been listening to the conversation with one ear, but also jabbing at her phone with the other. “You find out more about that abbey?” Cam asked, eyeing the teenager in the rearview mirror.

  “Some history.” She reported that a group of Cistercian monks had relocated from Nova Scotia in the late 1800s to 500 acres in Cumberland, where they built a sprawling stone mother house. The structure was decimated by fire in the 1950s and the brothers abandoned the property for a sister abbey in western Massachusetts. “It’s now the town library. And there are walking trails all around it.”

  “Well that’s convenient,” said Amanda. “At least we won’t have to break in anywhere.”

  “I’m curious about the Nova Scotia connection,” Cam said. “Do you know where the original abbey was?”

  Astarte tapped at her phone. “A town called Tracadie. Over by Guysborough Harbor.”

  Cam’s eyes shot up. “That’s where Prince Henry Sinclair and his group first landed in 1398. There’s a monument to him. How close is the abbey to the harbor?” If Sinclair and the Templars were transporting treasure, it stood to reason that the later-arriving Cistercian monks might be charged with safeguarding it.

  Astarte tapped again at her phone and showed him the map. “About twenty miles.”

  Cam slapped the steering wheel. “That’s practically nothing. Way too close to be a coincidence.”

  Astarte grinned. “I know, Dad. And you don’t believe in coincidences.”

  Amanda sat in the passenger seat of the Pathfinder, the sun now on her right cheek, which meant they were heading roughly northeast after doubling back a few times.

  “Can I send emails?” Astarte asked.

  “Sure,” Cam replied. “Just don’t tell anyone where we are.”

  “Do you think that’s safe?” Amanda asked. She knew Astarte wanted to reach out to Raja, especially with New Year’s Eve fast approaching. But that didn’t justify recklessness.

  “It’s one thing to bug a phone. But if whoever is chasing us has the ability to trace emails back to a certain location, then they would have tracked us already. The people chasing us are tenacious and ruthless, but I don’t think they’re part of the government.”

  Amanda chewed her lip for a second. “Fair enough. These people seem more thuggish than sophisticated.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, Amanda’s mind racing, sifting through the various clues, trying to piece a series of seemingly random occurrences together into a recognizable pattern. The le tresor map was from the mid-1600s. She tried to place herself in the Colonial era, to think the way they thought and, more importantly, to fear the things they feared. Before she even realized the words were coming out of her mouth, they tumbled forth: “To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

  “What?” Cam replied.

  “Good question,” she mumbled. “Um, George Washington said it. It was in a letter he wrote to the Touro Synagogue.” Touro, in Newport, was the nation’s oldest synagogue. She sensed she was on to something, even though Washington spoke the words a century after the map had been drawn. “He wanted to reassure them that their religious freedom would be honored.” She turned to glance at Astarte. “Did you know Rhode Island was known for its religious freedom? It was founded by Roger Williams, who was kicked out of the Bay Colony—Massachusetts—for advocating religious freedom and separation of church and state. He was lucky the bloody Puritans didn’t hang him for it. Anyway,” she continued, “I was just thinking about this treasure map and the political climate of the times. We’re talking 1657—that’s the date of the letter saying the French Templar descendants were in the Catskills. As I said, Massachusetts was in the firm grip of the Puritans. New York was almost as orthodox, even though it was ruled by the Dutch. The Templars had come here, brought their treasures here, to get away from the overbearing Church. But the Puritans were just as bad, and maybe worse.”

  Cam nodded. “So you think the Templar descendants may have seen Rhode Island as a safe haven?”

  “Perhaps. And perhaps they decided to move their treasures here, out of New York and Massachusetts and other colonies that were turning suppressive and intolerant.”

  “Can you check that 1657 letter again?” Cam asked. “Didn’t it say something about a hundred men?”

  Amanda opened Zena Halpern’s book on her Kindle. “Here it is. It talks about a voyage across the Atlantic, with 24 French noblemen and over 100 of their soldiers and servants. The letter is vague, but it shows a map of Hunter Mountain and refers to the mountains north of New Amsterdam.”

  “That’s a large group to send across the ocean in the 1600s.”

  Amanda concurred. “That’s what got me going on this. Why send over a hundred men to America? It must have been an important mission.”

  Astarte weighed in, “Like finding a treasure.”

  “I think more than a treasure,” Amanda said. “Paying for the voyage itself would have cost a fortune. So it went beyond gold and jewels. Whatever the treasure was, it was a priceless one.”

  “Things like the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail,” Cam said.

  Shrugging, Amanda replied, “Perhaps. But the Templar journals don’t hint at anything so … iconic. Instead they talk about ancient scrolls and secret documents. I think that’s what we’re looking for. Something the Church did not want them to have.” She bit her lip. “I mean, why would the Church care if the Templars found the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail? It would be a good thing, not something that needed to be kept hidden in some cave across the sea.”

  Cam nodded. “Makes sense. Finding the Ark would make them heroes. I get the sense that the Templars were afraid that what they found—and later hid—would make them, well, dead.”

  Even with all the twists and turns, they arrived in Cumberland well before noon. Cam followed a state highway to Monastery Drive, turned onto a tree-lined access road, and parked in front of a sprawling complex consisting of a mishmash of architectural styles. “The monastery was named Petit Clairvaux, after Bernard,” Cam said. He glanced up. “At least there are no lactation scenes decorating the façade.”

  “That might have actually been an improvement,” Amanda said, grimacing. “It’s like some collector gathered examples of architecture throughout the centuries and joined them together at the hip.”

  Cam studied it. “I think what happened is that the fire destroyed swaths of the abbey. But where it didn’t, they preserved the walls. And where it was destroyed, they filled in the gaps over the years.”

  “Too bad,” Amanda said. “The abbey structure itself is grand.” Stone and dark wood, like a country estate. “The modern stuff is, well, less grand.”

  “Yeah,” Cam said, “it’s like hanging the Mona Lisa on the fridge next to a second-grader’s art project.”

  “Hey,” Astarte said. “I worked hard on that stuff.”

  A bright sun shone, and the weather was unusually warm for late December. “Feels like Ireland weather,” Amanda said as they got out of the P
athfinder.

  “Well, hopefully nobody’s going to throw me into a river,” Cam replied.

  They approached an auxiliary building fronting the complex which Cam guessed used to serve as the abbey’s outer entrance. They passed under a stone arch and through a heavy, ten-foot-high, dark wooden door. “Reminds me of that jail in Dublin,” Astarte said.

  Amanda ran a hand over the thick stone walls. “Perhaps there were things within they were trying to keep from escaping.”

  They entered the main library, where an informational brochure and some old photos confirmed that the complex had, indeed, been built around those parts of the abbey that had survived the 1950 fire. A friendly janitor brought them to the basement, but there was nothing to see but an unremarkable foundation. If a treasure had been hidden below the monastery, it was now lost to history.

  Amanda grabbed a map of the trails surrounding the monastery complex. “There’s 500 acres here. Maybe they hid something in the woods nearby.”

  Cam nodded. “Or it was originally in the building, and they moved it into the woods after the fire.”

  Amanda sniffed. “Or there was never any treasure here to begin with, and we’re just chasing our tails.”

  Cam leaned in to Amanda as Astarte examined a photo on the wall. He patted her butt. “I’ve chased tail before, and it led to quite a treasure.” He regretted it even before the words had left his mouth. “Sorry, that was sappy.”

  “You think?” She rolled her eyes, then smiled. “Besides, it wasn’t treasure, it was fool’s gold.”

  “Then I would be that fool.” He kissed her quickly. It was good to have her back, sarcasm and all.

  “Guys, we’re in a library,” Astarte said, rolling her eyes.

  Chuckling, Cam led them outside. “Well, I say we take a look around. I’ve been in planes and cars for the past few days. I could use a hike.”

  “Are we just going to wander?” Astarte asked. “What are we looking for?”

  Cam straightened. “We have one more clue. The poem. It was written in code, but Ruthie translated it. Here’s the first stanza.” He pulled it up on his phone, where he had saved it, and read aloud: