The Swagger Sword

by David S. Brody

  Amanda and Astarte had each taken a turn digging and now stood watch a few hundred yards down the path, ready to alert him if any hikers wandered his way. The trail map clearly stated that “collecting” was prohibited. The lawyer in him could make the technical argument that he wasn’t actually “collecting”—a term commonly understood to refer to collectors looking for arrowheads or other socalled “collectibles.” But the truth was that he knew he wasn’t supposed to be digging. Yet what choice was there? Were they supposed to just leave the mystery unsolved and the treasure unrecovered?

  He had considered purchasing a metal detecting device along with the shovel, but he knew that without proper training the device’s chirps and beeps would be of little use. So he dug carefully, scraping and pawing lest he damage whatever had been so mysteriously and craftily hidden. Fortunately there had yet to be a deep freeze this winter, so the ground gave way easily to the metal shovel once he got down beyond half a foot. He now had dug almost three feet, standing with one foot at the bottom of the batter’s box-sized hole and the other wedged into the hole’s dirt wall halfway down. How deep should he go? At some point he would need to stop and consider the possibility that they were in the wrong location—it would only take an error of a foot or two to miss the treasure.

  Brushing his brow with the back of his sleeve, he paused and gulped some water. The winter sun had dropped low on the horizon, casting long shadows in the forest; they only had another hour or so of daylight. He didn’t relish the idea of staying out in the woods at night, and the blisters on his hands and the barking from his shoulder muscles and stiff neck made it clear he could not dig indefinitely. But how did one give up and go home when standing only a few feet from a medieval treasure? He pictured himself digging indefinitely, bearded and bedraggled, his remaining existence wasted in devotion to an endless, fruitless pursuit…

  The shovel thudded against something hard and hollow, perhaps freeing him from a Sisyphus-like fate. Heart thumping, Cam dropped the shovel and scratched dirt away with his gloved hands. Probing with his fingers, he encountered a tattered cloth or rag. The smell of oil met his nostrils; perhaps the object had been wrapped in an oily fabric to protect it from the elements. He pushed the fabric aside and ran his hands along the flat top of some kind of box or chest. Knocking on it, he heard a faint ting. A metal box? The Catskill Mountains ancient scrolls written about in the Zena Halpern book had been hidden in clay tubes, as had been the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel. Religious relics like the head of John the Baptist were typically secreted in stone ossuaries. And monetary treasure was, historically, buried in wooden chests. This metal casing obviously hinted at a more modern burial. Working more feverishly now, Cam scooped away the soil and pebbles, ignoring the sweat dripping in his eyes.

  His right index finger slipped underneath a thin loop of some kind. Cam jabbed at it, and it lifted. A handle. Not wanting to break it, he returned to pushing away the dirt around the entire container, eventually revealing a rectangular outline about the size of a fishing tackle box. Odd. He had expected something larger. He stood up and took a deep breath. It would be unfair to yank it from the ground without Amanda and Astarte here to watch. He phoned Amanda. “I found a metal box. I thought you might want to be here when I pulled it out.”

  There was a slight pause. “That’s okay, Cam, you go ahead. Astarte and I will go grab a cup of coffee and wait for you in town.” He was so focused on the treasure that he almost missed the sarcasm in her voice.

  Jogging along the dry edge of the path, Amanda and Astarte followed the trail back to Cam. They had seen only a couple of dog walkers, both following a parallel trail which skirted the woods through an adjacent field, and a husky man in the distance with a pair of binoculars who seemed to be bird-watching.

  The quiet and tranquility of the forest contrasted sharply with the turmoil in Amanda’s gut. Were they truly about to uncover a medieval treasure? And unlock the secrets of the enigmatic Templars? She and Cam had devoted the better part of the last decade to their research, and had made some remarkable discoveries which changed American history. But this had the chance to surpass anything they had found so far.

  Fifty yards from Cam, Amanda tapped Astarte on the hip. “Race you the rest of the way.”

  By way of answer the teenager bolted, catching Amanda off guard. Recovering quickly, she accelerated, stretching her strides in an attempt to overtake her athletic daughter. Amanda was a competitive gymnast as a youth, and continued to work out regularly as an adult, but as hard as she pumped and strode, she was unable to close the gap on Astarte. The girl reach Cam a couple of strides ahead of her. Gasping, Amanda said, “By race, I meant let’s see who can get there slower.”

  Astarte grinned. “Well, that was clearly you then.”

  They turned to Cam, Amanda dropping to one knee next to the pit. She peered in. “I see the box. But it’s not very big.”

  Cam chuckled. “Sorry about that. You want me to dig someplace else and try to find a larger treasure?”

  “No. This’ll do.” She squeezed his shoulder in appreciation for his hard work. “Is it ready to come out?”

  “I think so. The dirt around it is pretty loose now. Can you spread that tarp on the ground next to the hole? If the box breaks, I don’t want to lose anything. If it’s metal, it might have rusted.”

  “Which begs the question,” Amanda replied. “Why bury a metal box in the ground, knowing it might rust?”

  Cam considered the question. “I guess if it were modern, they’d use a plastic container. So it must go back at least fifty years.”

  “That would make sense if the Cistercians buried it. They arrived in the 1890s and left after the fire in 1950.”

  Astarte spread her arms wide in a whatever gesture. “Guys, can we stop talking and, you know, actually take this box out of the ground? And then maybe look at the treasure?”

  Cam nodded. “Okay. Amanda, you take one side.” They reached down and dug their fingers under the dirt beneath the box, pushing remnants of fabric aside. Moving the box gently side to side, they loosened the earth’s grip on it. “Ready, lift.” With a deep breath she lifted, surprised at how light the container was.

  Dirt fell away as they set the box on the sky-blue tarp. The box was not as deep as she expected, more of a cash box than a tackle box. Dark green in color, with splotches of rust where moisture had penetrated the oily rags. Amanda reached over and rubbed soil away from a label on the lid, revealing the words, ‘Walker-Turner Co.’

  “Astarte,” Amanda called, pointing at the label.

  “I’m on it,” Astarte replied as she poked at her phone. “It’s a strong box, made in the 1930s. Worth about twenty bucks on eBay.” She smiled. “We’re rich.”

  Cam fingered a latch on the front of the box. “No key, so hopefully it’s not locked. Ready?”

  Amanda and Astarte nodded. He paused. “Actually, Astarte, you should open it. You figured out the clues.”

  She swallowed. “Okay.” Dropping to her knees, the motion causing the tarp to crunch, she placed both thumbs on the front of the box and forced the lid open, revealing a thick brown cloth folded neatly to fit perfectly within the box. “It looks like a napkin.”

  Amanda bent her face closer and sniffed. “But it’s oiled. To protect whatever is inside.”

  Astarte slowly removed the cloth and set it on the tarp. With a shaking hand, she unfolded it. Breathless, the three of them stared down. An old-style metal key, its teeth simple and cut at rightangles, stared back at them, stamped with the words ‘Citizens Savings Bank.’ Some kind of safe deposit box key.

  Amanda groaned and dropped to a sitting position on the tarp. Instead of a treasure, they had unearthed another bloody mystery.

  The binoculars had come in handy, allowing Brian to spy on his childhood friend from a distance. And saving him from rampaging out of the woods to demand a treasure which had turned out to be no treasure at all. Just a freaking key. Whoever hid this treas
ure either had an incredible level of paranoia or a sick sense of humor. How many clues needed to be solved, how many breadcrumbs followed, before they finally hit pay dirt?

  Daylight fading, Brian lumbered back to the parking area before Thorne and family overtook him. He dropped into the driver’s seat of the rented Chevy Malibu and exhaled. What now? No doubt Thorne would figure out the key clue and follow it to some safe or storage locker. And then what? Another clue? He cracked his window, lit a cigarette, and dialed an international number on his phone. A familiar female voice answered. “I’m here,” she said.

  “And I’m here,” he replied. “In Cumberland fucking Rhode Island, no closer to finding this treasure than I was a week ago.”

  “Tell me,” she commanded.

  He summarized his day. “It looked like an old key, so maybe a safe deposit box or something.”

  “Keep following them.”

  “Not that easy. He knows me. And how am I supposed to explain how I found them, much less why I’m following him?”

  “Keep your distance. At some point he’ll get to the end of the rainbow. Then, well, just take it, take the pot of gold.”

  Just take it. As if it would be that easy. Cam was no slouch, especially if he thought his wife and kid were in danger. “All right. But this is starting to get ugly. It had better all be worth it in the end.”

  The woods had turned dark and windy. Cam glanced up. Pine trees swayed over them like emaciated ghouls, seemingly angry their secreted treasure had been taken from them. He swallowed and picked up the pace, navigating the dimly-lit trail back to the parking lot. “Let’s hurry,” he said to Amanda and Astarte. “It’s getting late.”

  He had double-sealed the key inside a pair of gallon-sized Ziploc bags and stuffed the metal box into his backpack. Alone in the oversized bags, the key seemed even more insignificant than when they had first unfolded the cloth. More to convince himself than the others, he said, “This was a cool find. We’re one step closer to finding the treasure. Whoever hid it went to a lot of trouble. Which tells me it must be pretty valuable.”

  Proving that teenagers had an innate ability to navigate the world with their eyes cast downward, Astarte had been poking at her phone during the walk through the woods. “Until the 1980s,” she reported, “Citizens Bank only had branches in Rhode Island. So we’re lucky. We just need to figure out which branch has the box that fits this key.”

  Cam shook his head, staying left at a fork in the path. “It’s not that easy. You can’t just go in and try your key in every box. You need to have the correct box number.”

  “What if you lose it?” Amanda asked Cam.

  “If you can prove you’re the account holder, with cancelled checks or something, you can get around it with a court order. But we don’t even know who the account holder is for this.”

  “Probably the monastery,” Amanda said.

  “Unless I shave my head into a tonsure, that’s going to be hard for me to pull off. And beyond that, we don’t know which Citizens branch to go to.”

  “It says here the bank headquarters has always been in Providence,” Astarte said. “In 1991 they built a new building. But before that the headquarters was on Westminster Street.”

  “Is there still a branch there?” Cam asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I spent a summer working in a bank in college. They were moving the main branch, and one of the big issues was what to do with the safe deposit boxes. About ten percent of the box owners couldn’t be found. They thought about drilling the boxes, but that seemed like a good way to piss off your customers. Same thing with moving them—people would come back years later and their boxes would be gone. So in the end they just decided to keep the boxes where they were. Maybe Citizens did the same thing.”

  “Well,” Amanda said, “that should be our first stop tomorrow morning.”

  “They’re not open on Saturdays,” Astarte said. “They close at five today.”

  “It’s just after four o’clock,” Cam said. “If we rush, we might make it. We’re going against traffic.”

  They began to jog. Amanda said, “But even if the boxes are there, we still don’t know the box number.”

  Cam smiled, pushing a branch aside for them to pass. “You’re underestimating my charm.”

  Amanda rolled her eyes. “Is that what it’s called?”

  “Well, Mom,” Astarte weighed in. “It seemed to have worked on you.”

  “Yeah,” Cam said. “If I can find the key to your heart, no way is some old safe deposit box going to stop me.”

  “Ugh.” Amanda scooched past Cam on the trail. “We’ve got no bloody chance at finding this treasure.”

  They got lucky, the normal Friday afternoon traffic reduced by people leaving early for the holiday weekend. At 4:45, Cam pulled into a parking lot behind the 19th century Citizens Bank building perched at the point of a triangular block in downtown Providence. He parked in a spot near the entrance reserved for a Senior Vice President. “He’s a banker,” Cam explained. “No way is he still in the office late on New Year’s weekend.” He opened the door and began to get out. Smiling, he added, “But, just in case they tow us, take anything valuable with you.”

  Astarte held up her cell phone. “I’m a teenager. This is my only valuable.”

  They marched between marble pillars and through a revolving door, Cam carrying his briefcase and Amanda her satchel. The cream-colored, arched-ceiling lobby appeared almost church-like in its design, as if to imply that God himself was protecting the deposits. Cam approached a teller. “We would like to access our safe deposit box.”

  She gestured to an antique elevator. “Down one floor.” She glanced at her watch. “I think someone is still down there.”

  Cam felt for the key in his pocket as they crossed the bank lobby. “Okay,” he whispered, “let’s get our story straight. Grandma’s box. All she remembers is it was in the Citizens Bank on Westminster Street in Providence.”

  They exited the elevator to face a dour, sixty-ish woman in a dark blue business suit behind a mahogany desk. Her pencil scratched across a ledger book beneath a green banker’s lamp, the smell of old books filling the heavy air. But for the fact the banker was a woman rather than a man, the calendar could have been rolled back 100 years and little would have changed. Who still used ledger books? When she didn’t look up, Cam leaned in to read her name tag and cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Ms. Difonzo, we’d like to get into our safe deposit box.”

  She completed the series of figures on her ledger line before lifting her eyes. A thin face, her graying hair pulled back in a tight bun. Glancing at her watch, she sighed. “I’ll need your room and box number.”

  “Room?” Cam replied. “I’m sorry, this is my grandmother’s box. All she gave me was the bank location.”

  Ms. Difonzo spoke in a monotone, as if she had explained this a thousand times to ignorant customers before, her eyes focused on some spot behind Cam’s head. “We have six rooms with boxes. Each room is named after one of the New England states—Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.” Cam bit his tongue, resisting pointing out that they knew their states. “I’ll need your room and box number.”

  Cam forced a smile. “Yes. I just said we don’t know the room number.”

  Nodding as if she expected such an answer, the banker opened a drawer and removed a single sheet of paper from a folder. “You’ll need to get a court order. This is a summary of the procedure.” She held it out toward Cam with a bony hand.

  Cam let the paper dangle. The bank, and the courts, would be closed over the long weekend. How long could he and his family stay on the run? He sensed they were at a crossroads, that this mystery needed to be solved now, before their enemies had a chance to regroup. By next week it would be too late.

  He put on his best smile. “Are you certain? There must be another way. The whole family is gathering this weekend, and my grandmother wants to give ou
t some of her jewelry.” He held out his hands. “Please? How else would we have the key if it didn’t belong to our family?” He pushed the old-style key across her desk.

  The clerk set her jaw. “Keys are frequently misplaced. And often stolen. We have these procedures in place for a reason, to protect both the bank and its customers.” She turned in her chair dismissively. “Now, if we are finished here…”

  “Wait,” Cam blurted. He took a deep breath, ready to take a shot in the dark. After all, a one-in-six chance was better than no chance at all. He looked to Amanda for assurance. She nodded, reading his thoughts. “Grandma always told me the family roots were in Vermont, so we’ll go with th—”

  “Maine,” Astarte interjected. “Our box is in the Maine room.”

  Cam’s head whipped around. What?

  The clerk blinked, equally surprised at the girl’s confident declaration. Cam tried to recover. “Yes, Maine. Like she said. Not Vermont.”

  “Maine,” Amanda confirmed.

  Ms. Difonzo exhaled and glanced again at her watch. “Very well. But we close in nine minutes. I will take you to the Maine room. But first I’ll need the name associated with the account.”

  The name? This time Amanda jumped in. “Clairvaux,” she said confidently. Whispering to Cam, she added, “What else could it be? You said that was the name of the monastery.”