The Sword of the Templars

27

They woke up the next morning refreshed but a little disoriented. Holliday opened his eyes to a shelf full of Barbies staring down at him in busty, well-coiffed splendor, and Peggy found herself squeezing into her jeans under the baleful James Dean gaze of Gwyneth Paltrow’s husband, Chris Martin. Once dressed, they met up in the library. Holliday was watching the big plasma TV and drinking coffee.

“There’s coffee in the squeeze pot on the counter, but there’s no milk,” he said. “Madame Allard cleaned out the fridge before they headed out.”

“Are we on the news?” Peggy asked.

“Nothing on TF1 or Canal Plus. Nothing on Sky News or CNN.”

“Maybe they haven’t found the body.”

“Maybe,” said Holliday. “Or maybe the Sыretй just put a clamp on the networks.”

Peggy fetched herself a cup of coffee, then came back into the library and sat down in one of the big leather chairs, her eyes on the television. There was an ad for the French-translated version of The Lost playing.

“Maybe we should have hightailed it out of the city yesterday,” said Peggy. “Maybe we’re trapped. Eventually the Allards are going to come back from their holiday.” Peggy’s expression soured. “I feel a little bit like Goldilocks here.”

“There won’t be any baby bears coming back to taste their porridge for a while,” said Holliday. “They had enough stuff packed into that minivan to last them for a year.” He smiled. “Not to mention the fact that there’s no porridge in the house; the French don’t seem to like canned goods or frozen pizza.”

“I could use another one of those sandwichs jambon,” said Peggy. “I’m famished.”

They locked up the house and went back to La Tourelle. It was nine o’clock, and the streets were jammed with traffic. They sat down at the same table they’d had the day before, and the same sneering waiter appeared with menus. Peggy chose an herb omelet, and Holliday settled on ham and eggs. They both had more coffee. Once again the food was wonderful and the service surly.

“We’ve got to get to La Rochelle,” said Holliday. “But if the police are onto us they’ll have the airport under surveillance and the train stations.”

“We could rent a car,” suggested Peggy.

“If they know who we are then they’ll be monitoring car rental agencies, as well.”

“There has to be some way,” said Peggy. “We can’t stay in the Allards’ place forever.”

They ate their breakfasts and sipped their coffee. The waiter didn’t seem disposed to provide refills. Peggy looked down avenue Foch at the parked cars and the slowly moving traffic.

“Did you notice Madame Allard’s business address by any chance?” Peggy said thoughtfully.

“Avenue Victor Hugo. A low number, I think. Six maybe.”

“That’s only a block from the Arc de Triomphe,” said Peggy.

“So?”

“Think about it,” said Peggy. “The Allards have a minivan. Why?”

“Because they’ve got three kids and a place in the country.”

“Almost guaranteed wherever those kids go to school is nearby. The University of Vincennes is only three or four miles away in Saint-Denis. They probably have a day-care center there for the faculty.”

“I repeat… so?”

“It means Monsieur Allard, the young professor, is probably the one who takes them to school. In the minivan. And I don’t see Dr. Allard, the woman who can afford to have her dental practice next door to the Champs-Йlysйes, taking the Metro to work with the rest of the sweaty petite bourgeoisie.”

“You think they have another car?”

“Almost certainly,” said Peggy. “Her car.”

Holliday looked down the street. There were cars parked on both sides, and there were half a dozen side streets nearby.

“How are we supposed to find it? There are hundreds of cars in the neighborhood.”

“You don’t watch enough television, Doc. I told you before-welcome to the digital age.”

They finished up their breakfasts and went back to the stone house hidden in the courtyard. Peggy found the keys exactly where you’d expect: in a little candy dish on a table beside the door. The keys had an electronic door opener on a Mercedes key ring. Ten minutes later, beeping the door opener every few feet, they found the lady dentist’s car around the corner on rue Cart.

“Now ain’t that something?” said Peggy, staring.

Parked at the curb, deep green and gleaming, was a brand-new Mercedes S Class sedan, eighty thousand dollars on four very expensive wheels. Less than an hour later, stocked up with a polystyrene cooler full of food and drink for the five-hour drive to La Rochelle, they headed out of the city, traveling southwest toward the Bay of Biscay.

They drove to Versailles, then continued south to Chartres and then Tours, navigating the length of the Loire Valley. They stopped just outside Tours for a picnic lunch by the gently flowing River Cher and then drove to Poitiers and finally to La Rochelle, arriving in the port city at three thirty in the afternoon.

The city of La Rochelle was established as a small fishing village in the year A.D. 1000, but the University of La Rochelle was so new it squeaked. Opened in 1993, the campus was ultramodern, and so were the students. The biggest faculty was Mass Communications, and the university was a correspondence school with half a dozen institutions, including SUNY in the United States. The university was located in the southern part of the city, close to the water and within a stone’s throw of Minimes, once a fishing port in its own right and now an immense marina.

Dr. Valerie Duroc’s office was in the Humanities building at the university, on the top floor. The room was austere to the extreme. Metal desk, metal bookcases, metal filing cabinets, and a framed photograph of an anonymous beach with palm trees at sunset that could have been the Seychelles or San Diego.

Duroc was a woman in her sixties who looked like a slightly less emaciated version of Lauren Bacall with a voice to match: throaty smoke over buckwheat honey. She had huge Bette Davis eyes, sculpted cheekbones and gray hair cut in a shaggy pageboy that looked as though she might have done it herself but which probably cost a fortune. She was wearing a wine red silk blouse, a pleated skirt, and Arche sling-back flats. She smoked unfiltered Gitanes Brunes; not quite as foul as Bernheim’s Boyards, but close.

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 Napolйon 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 Sapiniиre, 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: